A Man in Love Read online

  He had to sit down at his desk. This Ulrike, Contresse Ulrike, belongs in his novel, in the very much behind-schedule second version of Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years. Hersilie is the figure he can enrich through the Contresse. But not a word about it to Ulrike. However much you’d like to let it slip that she’s going to be in your novel, control yourself! You must never tell a source she’s a source, because then she would cease to be one.

  He couldn’t go to bed. He wasn’t ready for the self-abandonment known as sleep. If he could hope to dream of her, then yes, gladly. But as things stood? Exchange a wakefulness in which he could think uninterruptedly of her, imagine her, for a condition of slumber in which she probably wouldn’t occur at all? Not yet.

  Walk up and down. Stop at each window. Look across the street. Which window does she sleep behind? Last year he, too, had lodged in the Klebelsberg house, which was called a palais as well as a hotel. Apart from the fact that the young widow Levetzow was the mistress of Count Klebelsberg, Ulrike’s grandfather Broesigke had a permanent landlord’s right to the palace. This year Grand Duke Carl August was also planning to take the waters in Marienbad, and since he was an old friend of the Broesigke, Klebelsberg, and Levetzow families, he simply had to stay in their house, on the second floor to be precise, in the prince’s suite where Goethe had stayed the year before. It would soon be fifty years that Carl August had been Goethe’s sovereign, Goethe’s employer, and Goethe’s friend. Goethe could have stayed in the Klebelsberg Palace again, but he decided instead on the Golden Grape across the street. And after what had just happened, he wondered what wise instinct had told him to do so. Being under the same roof now, but separated by walls and stories, he would have to invent some kind of noise that could reach her to announce that he was there and unable to breathe if she did not learn, sense, hear that he was there. There for her alone. She has a small face but a nose one would not call little. And plum-pit-shaped eyes that change color but always shine. He had already taken that fact home with him in the preceding years: those never weary, never dull, always shining blue and green eyes. Mostly, however, they aren’t blue or green, but blue-green. He had to turn to her mouth. Her lips were no mountain range, but a full and harmoniously shaped upper lip that could rely on the modest services of the lower lip. Almost a bit lonely, this mouth in the lower half of her face. The nose keeps to itself. Just a hint, almost imperceptible, of a bend. It simply has no intention of running dully, boringly straight. Those who don’t look closely think it’s pointy. In reality, it ends in a point that is, in the final analysis, rounded. It ends, as a nose must, above her lonely, beautiful mouth: by pointing the way to it without infringing on its space. This face has a grandiose unobtrusiveness, contains the entire Ulrike. Now he regrets having always drawn landscapes and never people. To be sure, this Ulrike-face is the first face in the life gallery of faces he would have liked to draw. It is a landscape in the light. If he weren’t a draftsman but a painter, he would have called it an unearthly, shining light. One could paint it, but not draw it.

  He had to stand before the large mirror in the dressing room, lamps flanking it on both sides.

  The proprietor of the Golden Grape was known in town as a lighting fanatic. He never missed a trade fair where he might come across a new kind of lamp. That piece of information could have been what made the choice of this hotel pleasant for the privy councilor. He clasped his hands behind his back, producing a practiced, stately appearance. He felt compelled to walk into the study and fetch from a drawer the Viennese journal sent him by a certain Herr Braun von Braunthal, a twenty-one-year-old poet, because in it he had described a visit to Goethe in Weimar. Goethe laughed every time he read the part of the report—and it was the only part he did read—that concerned his appearance.

  For me in that moment, however, it was not the banal shell of a civilized man; as he paused a second at the door and his eyes fell on me, Goethe really seemed like a statue of Zeus carved from Parian marble. That head! That figure! That demeanor! Beauty, nobility, majesty! Already an old man of seventy-three, hair white as new-fallen snow cascading in waves about his sturdy neck, his noble features still strong, the muscles still firm, the high, rounded forehead smooth and pure as if of alabaster, lips with the expression of untroubled self-confidence, simultaneous dignity and gentleness, the lifted chin expressing strength, and finally the eyes, splendid, sky-reflecting, miniature mountain lakes of pure blue! Of all the likenesses of him I have ever seen, not a single one matched this admirable totality of greatness, beauty, and power. With the utmost artistic effort, one might very well recreate such a unity in a statue—as has been done—but never in a painted picture; no more than one would be able to paint Monte Rosa or Mont Blanc transfigured by the rays of the setting sun. Thus Goethe appeared, and my spirit revered him. How lucky I considered myself, being a still insignificant and as yet unformed young man; for I knew very well that he sometimes refused to receive important, experienced men, and I could see from his casual attire that he was either making an exception or not going to too much trouble for me. He turned his gaze upon me like a regal boa constrictor upon a doe. Except that he didn’t crush me to death, but walked slowly to the divan—the “west-eastern divan”—inviting me with a gentle gesture to follow him and then (oh joy!) to sit down beside him. He began the conversation with a mild earnestness, and it coursed through all my limbs like a benevolent electric charge when the lordly old poet gently took my hand, a hand trembling with rapture and veneration, enclosed it softly in both of his, looked into my eyes, and said …

  With conflicting feelings, he returned the magazine to the drawer, walked back to the mirror, smiled a little, and saw the gap where one of his front teeth was missing, missing for thirteen years. He still hadn’t gotten used to it. He had, however, disciplined his mouth so that the gap never appeared in the presence of other people. He hoped. He had assigned his daughter-in-law Ottilie to pay attention and report to him whenever some excess of high spirits allowed the gap to be seen. In his opinion, Ottilie always delivered her reports with somewhat too obvious satisfaction. He didn’t conceal the gap from himself when he was alone. Now, for instance. As if he had known ahead of time or feared what was happening now, in his recently published story “The Man of Fifty,” he had written that with such a gap, it was quite humiliating to court a young woman.

  He went into the bedroom, lay down as he was on the bed, and ran through the figures in his books, looking for a sentence to express what now dominated him. There was such a sentence. Fairly quickly he summoned it up from memory. While still quite young, his Wilhelm Meister had thought: So it’s all for naught.

  Chapter Two

  IF HE, SEVENTY-FOUR, were to marry her, nineteen, then she, nineteen, would be the stepmother of his son August, thirty-four, and his daughter-in-law Ottilie, twenty-seven. He found himself preoccupied with such calculations while sitting at a breakfast table spread with everything one could wish for, procured by Stadelmann from the catering house.

  Today he was sending Stadelmann—whom he had taught how to identify rocks during the past two years—to the Wolfsberg to break out some augite. A feldspar macle would be extremely welcome as well, he told him. To his secretary John, he said he wouldn’t need him for dictation till eleven. The reason was that Dr. Rehbein, medicus to the Weimar court and also Goethe’s personal physician (who had spent many hours at Christiane’s deathbed as well!), had sent word of his arrival. Within the past year, Dr. Rehbein’s own wife, his third, had died, too. Dr. Rehbein was probably the most beloved man in Weimar.

  When Goethe appeared in the room where he received guests, Dr. Rehbein was waiting and rushed up to greet him. He barely gave Goethe the chance to boast how healthy he felt here—completely free of last winter’s miserable shortness of breath—he was so bubbling over with his own news: He intends to get engaged. He simply has to. If he doesn’t propose at once, he will lose Catherina—yes, Catty von Gravenegg, thirty years his junior. Since
he had to get here before the Duke in any case, there is nothing for it but to celebrate the engagement here in Marienbad. But it’s impossible to imagine doing that without the presence of the Herr Privy Councilor. He apologizes for his unseemly haste. “But—Catty …You understand.” He cannot pretend to act as His Highness’s spa physician here. It’s not allowed in any case, since the local doctors have that monopoly. All right, so he’s just a spa guest in the entourage of His Highness, et cetera. But to spend weeks here promenading, seeing and being seen, while Catty rattled around Munich—it’s unhealthy. So she’s coming here and there’s going to be an engagement. But he must confess how much it pains him to have just read in “The Man of Fifty” that a surgeon is the most venerable man in the whole world.

  Goethe amplified: “He frees one from a genuine malady.” Then he gently embraced Dr. Rehbein and said, almost whispering into his ear, that the praise for the surgeon was necessary to the action of his journeyman novel, of which “The Man of Fifty” constituted a part. And although it was published two years ago, that novel was anything but finished. Every day he was beset by characters and sentences begging to be included. And Wilhelm, the hero of the Journeyman Years, is meant to become a physician, a surgeon, once he has studied and sampled everything the world has to offer. And why? Because for the Wilhelm he had spent his life describing, the author wanted a profession tailor-made for his body and inscribed in his soul, one through which he could do the most good for mankind. “To be of use, Herr Doctor. From the useful through the true to the beautiful. That’s the direction we all want to go, Herr Doctor.” And he could have plausibly added that Dr. Rehbein himself was a prime example. When someone like him, a physician, can stand here at fifty, so truly hale and handsome, he’s neglected nothing, made no mistakes. There followed a long handshake.

  The doctor had left with the privy councilor’s cordial acceptance of the invitation to the engagement party. Goethe sat and thought: thirty years his junior. It wasn’t envy that he was feeling. He considered the visit a confirmation. Well, yes, some envy, too. For what is envy but a form of admiration condemned to misfortune? There cannot be enough fifty-year-olds getting engaged to twenty-year-olds! Let there be an outbreak, an epidemic of engagements. If only so that with his own enormous number—seventy-four minus nineteen equals fifty-five—he doesn’t look quite so absurd.

  He saw what an invigorating effect Dr. Rehbein’s visit had from the fact that at the door and as casually as possible, he had asked the physician—who would just now be crossing the street and entering the Klebelsberg palais—to give his best to all the Levetzows, especially Ulrike, and tell her that this afternoon he could fulfill the wish she had expressed yesterday. At any time. He could tell that his courier, Dr. Rehbein, did not quite know how the message was to be understood, i.e., how he should deliver it, so Goethe added in a tone of extreme unimportance, “One has to educate children when they request it.” Then he held on to the curtain and watched as Dr. Rehbein crossed the street and disappeared into the Klebelsberg palais.

  His secretary John was informed that when the mail came, he should bring it into the study only if Fräulein von Levetzow had arrived and taken a seat. Perhaps Ulrike had forgotten that yesterday she’d said, “But who is he?” If she had forgotten, if it was nothing but an empty phrase, then everything was and is an empty phrase and he is nothing but an illusionist. Perhaps there’s no such thing as her gaze; perhaps with her nineteen years she’s the calmest, most composed, least moveable person in her family.

  He had to emit a brief cry, a negation of the internal conversation that had just happened to him. And once more, a brief cry. And because it was his habit not only to allow to happen everything that happened to him, but also to make himself aware that it was happening, he allowed the conversation with himself to continue: When I let out a cry—a little cry, not too loud—then always such that only I hear my cry. I really do not want anyone else to hear me crying out. And besides, he didn’t have to cry out yet, only sit and wait. If she doesn’t come, he will sit here and never move again, a man frozen in waiting. He was surprised that the pain caused by waiting did not enable some kind of movement—walking up and down, perhaps. He wanted to demonstrate it to himself. That was his condition: Ulrike, or nothing. Just think of it: Last year, in that very family circle, he himself, sitting here right now (he who no longer knows how to draw a breath without Ulrike’s encouragement) had trumpeted his wish to have another son, who could then marry Ulrike. He himself would like to train Ulrike to be the perfect match for his son. He no longer knew that person who had talked so big, with such paternalistic mendacity. For it was already dishonest even back then. Not morally dishonest, but an outbreak of weakness, of cowardice. He could never say something like that again. But Ulrike hadn’t yet been Ulrike, either; she was still asleep in her girlhood. But now … but she still wore no jewelry. Her neck, her earlobes, bare. Hadn’t she worn any last summer, either, or the summer before? Perhaps because the weather had been so bad. But now, in this stupendous summer! Did she want to differentiate herself from all the women festooned with jewelry?

  Here she came. An almost colorless green dress whose many little buttons precisely traced her figure. The neck trimmed with lace. Her hair always a little looser than all the other women. He had no trouble standing up. She greeted him almost jauntily. It wasn’t the mood he was in. At least, he couldn’t maintain that tone. But once she was sitting on the sofa, in one of the sofa corners with her arm on the big yellow cushion, he was able to walk back and forth and speak as though to several people. Soon his secretary John came in and handed him the tray piled high with mail.

  “Ah, here’s the mail,” he said. “Ach, no, my dear John, one can’t read any boring letters when one has such a visitor. But don’t leave. I want to show my visitor how things go around here. Oh, just a moment, here’s something urgent. You see,” he said to Ulrike, “we’re so well coordinated, my faithful John and I, that he puts the only letter that can’t wait on top of the pile. It’s urgent, because His Royal Highness will be leaving Weimar in a week so a reply has to go out today. If you please, John.” He turned to Ulrike. “May I?”

  “You must,” she said.

  He paced back and forth in front of Ulrike, dictating: “Our most gracious Royal Highness has deigned to disclose to the undersigned that His Majesty has the intention of delighting Herr Lenz, our excellent Councilor of Mines, on the occasion of his imminent jubilee with a number of princely gifts, of which the following is a preliminary list. The celebration will consist of a banquet. My unpresumptuous suggestion would be: As pièce-de-résistance we present the erupting Vesuvius, under which the medal intended for the honoree could be placed.” He paused and asked Ulrike, “Do you understand?”

  Ulrike asked what unpresumptuous suggestions were.

  That was a polite circumlocution for not wanting to make unauthorized assumptions.

  “And what does that mean?” asked Ulrike.

  “My suggestion is meant only as a suggestion. The grand duke must decide. You see, Councilor of Mines Lenz is a passionate Neptunist and for his jubilee he’ll be served a volcano-shaped cake for dessert, at the bottom of which he’ll discover the medal he’s to be awarded. To be sure, the grand duke will take my suggestion into account when he decides.”

  Ulrike: “But only unpresumptuously.”

  Goethe: “Exactly.”

  Ulrike: “A wonderful word. I’m going to ask Mother not to wear her bright blue dress again today. My unpresumptuous suggestion would be the light beige one.”

  Goethe: “And she will obey.”

  Ulrike: “So, unpresumptuous is a kind of command.”

  Goethe: “The most polite kind of urgent wish.”

  Ulrike: “But even more important: It’s a compliment. The recipient feels included. I give him credit for understanding exactly what I mean. It flatters him. Herr Privy Councilor is very subtle.”

  “That will be all for today, John.�
�

  John left. Goethe sat down on the sofa next to Ulrike and said he would like to call everything he ever says to her unpresumptuous. It will give him the courage to say more than he ought to. “May I unpresumptuously make you a Royal High-ness for a moment?”

  “My education has been in a postrevolutionary boarding school,” said Ulrike. “Her Royal Highness is all ears.”

  Goethe jumped up and began to pace back and forth, declaiming, “There would be one more devoutly modest request. Would Her Highness favor me with continuing benevolence, think of me in the most generous light, and in the near future graciously grant me the opportunity to address her on a large variety of subjects?”

  He stopped in front of her, would gladly have sunk to his knees but knew he might have trouble getting up again. She extended her hand to be kissed. He held her hand an unconscionably long time, but touched it only slightly with his lips. Almost not at all.