Bright Magic Read online

  THE BALLERINA AND THE BODY

  WHEN SHE was eleven it was decided that she would be a dancer. With her tendency to contort her limbs, her grimaces, and her strange temperament, she seemed well suited for the job. Her every step ridiculous up until then, she now learned how to compel her elastic ligaments, her too-straight joints; she crept warily, patiently, in and farther in to her toes, her ankles, her knees, rapaciously assailed her thin shoulders and the curve of her slender arms, kept careful watch over the play of her taut body. She succeeded in throwing cold water over the most voluptuous dance.

  At eighteen, she had a slim figure, slight as silk, overlarge dark eyes. A face almost boyish, long and angular. A high clipped voice, with nothing flirtatious, no music; a quick, impatient walk. She was loveless, and looked clear-eyed at her untalented colleagues, bored by their complaints.

  At nineteen, she caught a pallid and lingering disease, so that her face shimmered fantastically pale before her blue-black bob. Her limbs grew heavy, but she continued to perform. When she was alone she stamped her feet, threatened her body, struggled with it. She spoke of her weakness to no one. She gnashed her teeth at the stupid, childish thing she had learned simply to overcome.

  When Ella bit her lips in pain, her mother threw herself onto the sofa and cried for hours. After a week, the old woman reached a decision and told her daughter, looking down at the floor, that she should put an end to this and go to the hospital. Ella answered not a word, only cast a hateful look at the wrinkled, hopeless face before her.

  She went to the hospital the next day. In the carriage she sobbed with rage beneath her blanket. She wanted to spit on her suffering body, she jeered at it bitterly; it disgusted her, this bad flesh whose company she was bound to. Her eyes widened with muted fear when she looked at these limbs now eluding her. How powerless she was, oh how powerless she was. They clattered over the paved courtyard. The hospital gates shut behind her. The dancer saw, with revulsion, doctors and patients. The nurses gently lifted her into bed.

  Now the dancer unlearned to speak. She no longer heard the imperious note in her voice. It all happened without her willing it. But people paid attention to every utterance of her body and treated it with the utmost seriousness. Daily, almost hourly, they asked the dancer about the things of that body and painstakingly wrote out what she said in their files; at first she grew reluctant, then she marveled at it ever more deeply. She soon drifted into dark anxiety, and a sense of teetering over the abyss; a dread of this body overcame her. She did not dare to touch it, even brush against it; she stared at her arms, her breasts; she shuddered when she looked at herself for a long time in the mirror. Her mouth gulped down the medicine she gave it to drink; she went with the bitter drops as they ran down inside and pondered what it would make of them, it, the body, this childish thing, oh, the domineering, the dark. She turned small as a fly; at night, mortal agony stood behind her bed. Her eyes, seeing into the uncanny, grew rigid. The mocking girl with the boyish face was now pious, and prayed with the sisters before nightfall. Her mother was horrified when she came to see her daughter. Her child had never been this timid, this needy. “We are all in God’s hands,” the mother consoled the wasted ruin clinging to her. “Yes,” the dancer whispered, “we are all in God’s hands.”

  The regular bustling around her calmed her back down, and the horror vanished as quickly as it had descended. Dislike of the patients in the ward flared up. And indignation lingered in her sharp features, so people deferred to it—to the rotted, the rotting—and looked away from her as though she were dead. That offended the magisterial dancer. She caged her body, laid it in chains. It was her body now, her property, at her disposal. This was the house where she lived; they should leave her house alone. Every day they struck her chest with hammers and eavesdropped on the chatter of her heart. They drew her heart on her chest so that everyone could see it, dragged into the light what before had lain hidden within. Oh how they despoiled her. With every question they asked, they carried off another piece of her. They rushed in on her with poisons finer than needles and tubes; they knew all her tricks, drove her fully back into her foxhole. The thieves took everything from her, everything, so it came as no surprise to her that she got weaker every day and lay there deathly pale. Now she turned bitter, and defended herself. She lied to the doctors, refused to answer their questions, concealed her pain. And when they wanted to question her again, she stiffened in bed, turned the sisters away, in a sudden burst of hate even laughed in the head-shaking doctors’ faces and twisted her own into a mocking expression.

  But she couldn’t keep up her forced bravado for long. Daily, ceaselessly, the white coats walked through the corridors, tapped at the patients, wrote everything up. Daily and hourly the nurses came bringing sustenance and potions: the dancer tired of them. She tossed the toy right back; hollowly contemptuous, she let it happen. It didn’t matter to her what happened. A childish thing was lying there, making her miserable; why should she fight for it, why should she envy the honors shown it? She rested, limp, in her bed. The body kept lying, a piece of carcass, under her; its pains were of no concern to her. When it stabbed and tormented her at night, she told it, “Calm down until the rounds tomorrow; tell it to the doctors, your doctors, and leave me alone.” They were doing business with another party; the body could take care of dealing with the doctors. “It’s already in the file.” With that she cut short their pestering.

  She often felt a smiling sympathy for this dumb sick little child that lay in her bed. She calmly and conscientiously reported what was oppressing it. Indifferently, slightly ironically, she watched the doctors and ironically confirmed the unsuccess of their efforts. A sense of suspense, of hilarity, came over her again, and a wild, churning schadenfreude at the misfortune of the doctors and the deterioration of the body. Pressing her mouth into the pillow as she laughed, she had regained her old derision and her coldness.

  When soldiers marched past the hospital at midday, with their loud marching music, the dancer sat up precipitously in bed, with shining eyes, lips pressed tight, doubled over. After a while, a sharp if soft voice called the nurse over to the bed. The dancer wanted to embroider something, and requested silk and linen. She quickly dashed off a strange picture on the white fabric with a pencil. Three figures: a round, shapeless body on two legs, with no arms or head, nothing but a two-legged fat ball. Next to him towered a tall meek man with giant glasses, stroking the body with a thermometer. But while he was busy in all seriousness with the body, a little girl on the other side of him, hopping barefoot, thumbed her nose at him with her left hand and stabbed a sharp pair of scissors into the body from below with her right, so that the body drained out in a thick spurt like a barrel.

  The dancer crudely embroidered the picture in red thread, laughing merrily to herself.

  She wanted to dance again, to dance.

  As before, when she had thrown cold water over everything voluptuous in the dance, when her taut body had wavered like a flame, she wanted to feel her will again. She wanted to dance a waltz, a wonderful sweet waltz, with the one who had become her master, with the body. With a movement of her will she could take him by the hand once more, this body, the slothful beast, and fling it down, fling it around, and it was no longer her master. A triumphant hate churned up from inside her—it didn’t go to the right and she to the left, but she, they, leapt together. She wanted to roll him on the ground, that hobbling dwarfish barrel, trundle it head over heels, stuff sand in its maw.

  She cried, with a voice that quite suddenly had turned hoarse, for the doctor. Doubled over, she looked him in the face from below while he stared in amazement at the embroidery, then said up at him, in a calm voice, “You . . . You idiot . . . You idiot, you pussy.” And, throwing off the blanket, stabbed herself in the left breast with the sewing scissors. A shrill scream hung somewhere in the corner of the ward. Even in death, the ballerina had a cold contemptuous look about her mouth.

  ASTRALIA
>
  HERR GÖTTING, Adolf Götting, independent scholar, residing at 15 Albrechtstrasse, 4R, in a room at Frau Schülke’s. He sits on a couch in his room and warms himself with the lamp. A beaten-down little man with shriveled, yellowish face, inflamed eyes, and a quick soft voice. His fingers play with the fringe of the brown wool blanket lying across his thin legs.

  With abrupt movements of the hand, the little man is instructing his wife, a pale pleasant thing sitting with hands folded on a chair across from him, that practice is the basis of culture and that he knows what he is talking about. Too, the apple must has had a pleasant effect on his stomach and various respective mucous membranes and will probably soon be converted in his intestines to wine. The power that life has to transform things is without measure, he said. He knows what he is talking about.

  The wilted wife gently breathes a word about the damp autumn air, about the overexcitements of a meeting, about so much drinking.

  Meanwhile the catarrhal little man slowly lifts, with spread fingers, the wool blanket off of his legs and puts it next to him on the couch. Shuffling with bent legs he walks to the window, creaks it open, and looks out into the night sky.

  His voice sounds patient and pious.

  “I should not consult you, Elfriede. You do not know what you’re saying. It’s a new moon today. You understand what I mean.”

  He says it—“It’s a new moon today”—with utter simplicity, no pathos.

  “The inner state, the inner state. If we keep it ready, we have done all. Today is a new moon. I will prevail over everything from the inside out. Just as I have already prevailed over other hardships. And the apple must”—all at once a joy, a celebration, rings out in his voice—“don’t you see? It oils the inner state, makes it nimble, and then it can leap freely, into the air, where it is free. It can leap up. Or in the fields, or into the potatoes—it doesn’t matter. And there’s something else, Elfriede: It can chirp, the inner state. It can warble for every ear, chirp, sing, be believed.”

  The light flickers, the lamp smokes.

  But when the pale distressed woman looks into the light, the little man sighs.

  The gentle creature wafts over to the little man and ties a brown stocking, darned in black, around his neck.

  “Dress warm, my dear Adolf. Put on your truss, too; it’s lying on your bed. Oh, all this staying out so late. No.”

  The puffy loving nonentity lets the little man press her hands then vanishes from the room.

  Herr Götting, Adolf Götting, independent scholar, residing at 15 Albrechtstrasse, 4R, in a room at Frau Schülke’s. Author of a history of the major errors in human conduct from the Fall of Man to the present, Schultze & Velhagen Publishers, Berlin, 1903, three hundred and seventy quarto pages, hardcover, four marks, member of numerous religious societies. Founded the Free Brotherhood of Astralia, currently at work on The Inner Life and Its Physical Manifestation. Now he is walking on the city ramparts in blackest darkness, heavy fog. He is going for a walk, because he is a thinker. He knows that he is a thinker; his wife doesn’t.

  The beaten-down little man walks beneath the black elm trees and presses his handkerchief to his mouth and nose. He is no mere dilettante, he is more than a thinker, he is a herald, a seer, biding his time. He walks content, happy, with a certain longing; with his little eyes he plucks thoughts down from the trees, like apples. The years are long past when something bitter and black used to creep here by the elm trees, reaching out its hands. They were quiet when he talked, but before long they started to snigger and nudge each other. And the stares, and squeaks, and suppressed laughter, as the little mandrake monotonously sang out his teachings, his repentant sanctimonious windbaggery, waving his long arms around, and suddenly broke off and listened stiffly into the noise. Then he hid away at home and brooded on people’s behavior. The weakened little mandrake could hate his fellow man then, he threatened and cursed, but soon was shocked by his thirst for revenge and wept in despair because the power had after all not been granted him.

  One day, though, a miracle will take place, that is why he skulks longingly beneath the elms in the stormy night. Then they will believe and not mock. One petrified night of fear it became a certainty for him. From the inside out it will seize him, touch him, if his inner state has piled up high enough; it will transform him, he himself does not know quite how. His arms will no longer be long and skinny like a monkey’s; his voice will no longer grate. A halo will appear over his head.

  “Hello, God’s blessing be with you and all good spirits.” The little brotherhood, respectable men thin and fat, stands up to greet their leader in the low tavern on the ramparts.

  They drink apple must from wooden mugs and praise the immortal soul. One after the other speaks. All goods must be shared in common, and the killing of animals is murder, and if humanity does not turn inward soon and take stock, the end of the world is near.

  They drink apple must. They hold the prayers, bound in blue, in plump dirty hands, and sing “I know my Redeemer lives,” and he is near, the sole of his foot already stands upon the earth.

  They smoke from long black pipes with skulls on them, puffing vigorously.

  A beaten-down little man with shriveled, yellow face, inflamed eyes, and a quick soft voice stands up at one corner of the table, cheeks red.

  He cries out into the excited clinking of glasses: that the Prophet is nigh, that the awaited one will cast down the unbelievers, peoples and kings and brothers. He must come soon. The sweet drink makes the little man blissfully happy. The future has prepared itself in silence, he says, like a child in a pregnant woman; who knows in what sorrow. He assures the brothers that it is so. The great war will break out, in which people will destroy one another; already the tension on earth cannot grow any greater, already the world is bristling with weapons and only the peaceful are superfluous. The Savior is standing already in the clouds, ready to complete his work, in the clouds that are his own words.

  They drink apple must. They open the little door of the tavern to the new-moon night.

  Suddenly all fall silent.

  One stands up, speaking incoherent words.

  They are scared.

  Secret things are taking place—

  The next morning, a wizened thing with skinny legs scrapes out the tavern door.

  At first it staggers, and its hands seek, grab for every handhold, post, tree, garden fence. Then it walks straight and firm. Its head sunk on its left shoulder; nostrils swollen; watery, fixed, half-open eyes. It walks half naked: in shirtsleeves, with no boots, no hat. It flings its legs far forward with every step, arms pressed together over chest. When the people up on the elm alley stop and look—a little milkmaid with her tin canister and two street sweepers, sleepy white faces—the wizened thing recoils.

  They are looking at it. It has to walk straight, yes, walk in a straight line.

  It sings out a song. . . .

  It slowly wends its way, barefoot, blissful, tipsy, suffering, borne on a heavy dark cloud. It stands in the clouds, the clouds that are his own words.

  A hot shudder suddenly passes over the little man. What if it had happened, the unbelievable thing, the transformation, overnight!

  The two street sweepers had stared at him. He straightens up, raises his head, then lets it fall again. It was the holy night of a new moon. And for something to emanate from him: an awe, a glow, from his brow, from his hair. To captivate people, vanquish them. It can’t be possible.

  Humming, quietly singing and dreaming, the creature walks on.

  Down below in the narrow streets, the barbers, the clerks, the bakers are bumping and jostling; they converge and whisper. Herr Götting suddenly hears a mean-spirited laugh right out in the open, like none he has ever heard. And now he is deeply appalled in a happy horror: It has happened, the miracle has taken place, the Lord has brought it to pass. Let them curse and spew! Let them! And he has firm ground under his feet, he is not dreaming, he breathes the cool morning air.
He is standing with the soles of both feet on the earth.

  As he turns onto the main street, where the shops are just opening, gangs of schoolboys run after him, push and shove, roar loud, jump nervously away.