Tales of Mystery and Truth Page 5

  By the next June, not even the hot mineral baths could cool Goethe’s desire. When Ulrike arrived, he was beside himself with joy to see she still wore the garnet around her neck. She came full of acquired knowledge about gemstones, and appeared eager to match wits with Goethe. Their attachment deepened through the long walks of endless summer days, and she spoke to him with excitement in her voice. Did he know the garnet was believed to fulfill the wishes of sweethearts? Did he know the garnet was reported to aid in the connection of our conscious mind and our unconscious? Did he know the garnet was thought to give light to the dark undiscovered portion of our souls? Did he know the garnet was used by healers to help open and purify passages to the heart? All Goethe had known for sure was that the garnet was Ulrike’s birthstone, and it was a symbol of his love.

  When they saw each other again the following year, Goethe thought she had become the loveliest of the loveliest. Somehow he managed to follow his daily routines when not around Ulrike. In Marienbad, however, everything turned to her. With Ulrike beside him, he saw things in sharper focus. The spa had become like a festival site, a place outside everyday life. The steam, the landscape, the luxury, and the intemperance combined to heighten and intensify every experience for Goethe. In Marienbad, they both crossed some invisible threshold into an existence where everything was possible and nothing was denied.

  This burning infatuation led Goethe to consult the local doctor as to whether marriage might be detrimental to his health. Still in his vigor, Goethe hoped to take Ulrike with him back to the court of Weimar, where she would lead an aristocratic life as his wife. He dispatched a message to Karl August, asking the Grand Duke to propose marriage to Ulrike on his behalf. Though Karl August painted life at court in colors more luminescent than garnet, and used all his ducal influence, Goethe’s proposal was rejected. Amalie von Levetzov told her old friend that the difference in age between him and her daughter was too great. Although the future would present Ulrike with proposals from another fifteen suitors, she would remain single until her death.

  The relationship ended, though not without progeny. Goethe left for Weimar with passion unrequited and uncontained. During the return trip, he composed a sensitive and searing poem of suffering. The Marienbader Elegy became part of his Trilogie der Leidenschaft, but at the moment of composition it was a complaint to the gods for abandoning him when he had been in his most passionate condition.

  * * *

  One day, as Charles de Sainte-Maure, duc de Montausier was returning from a tour of service in Saxe-Weimar, he was ambushed by fate. He rode to the gate of his ancestral home where arrived at the same moment a message that his brother had died. What affected him most about this news was that his brother’s death left him, Montausier, the foremost aspirant for the hand of Mademoiselle Julie-Lucine d’Angennes, the chief attraction at the Hotel de Rambouillet. She was said to be surrounded with an atmosphere of perpetual sunshine. With amiable temper, ready wit, and gracious manners she did win without effort the love of men and women alike.

  At her mother’s eminent salon, Julie was the soul of the serious conversations, as well as of the amusements that relieved them. Often the Precieuses indulged in practical jokes and surprises, and not a week passed without a grand mythological fete. They would drape themselves as antique gods and goddesses, and assume some nom de parnasse, by which they would address one another. These courtly dames and plumed cavaliers would discuss dreams of disillusioned lovers, recite romances of the troubadors, and enact Arcadian fantasies, making love in pastoral fashion, with pipe and lute. Montausier, though, longed for something much more, and for seven devoted years, he tried and failed to penetrate the gay heart of Julie.

  Informed by a dream of his dead brother, Montausier conceived of a gallant gift: a collection of verse, composed by nineteen of the salon members, to celebrate the charms of Julie. Like a fine bouquet, this was wrapped and delivered to Julie on her fete day in 1641, along with a quarto by Montausier’s own hand, containing the madrigals alone, without illustration. Four years later, as crowning proof of his love, the Huguenot Montausier converted to Catholicism, and through the earnest entreaty of her family, “the incomparable Julie” yielded to Montausier’s persevering suit and became his wife. So, much adoration did finally touch the most capricious and obdurate of hearts.

  Julie had kept two books in her personal library. La Guirlande she cherished, not because it was a gift from her long-suffering husband, but because in it she could read of her own endless allure. L’Histoire de Gustave Adolphe provided her with an ideal hero to which her affinity for Montausier would never compare, and proving Montausier’s religious conversion meant less to Julie than to her family. “The incomparable Julie,” once become lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie, even encouraged and abetted King Louis’ passion for Louise de la Vallière. Pure as the bloom of the orange tree Julie surely was not.

  The unique gift of La Guirlande, meant as a tribute to the graces of Julie-Lucine d’Angennes, instead proved a grand memorial to Montausier’s patient and enduring devotion. Though he never left her, the charms of Julie seemed to have wilted fast as flowers once Montausier had won her.

  The Freedom of Pavko Krizova

  Once upon another time, the extraordinary sound of music brought a young man called Pavko Krizova to his window. He had slept late that day, it being a Saturday and the chores such as queuing all morning for bread able to be put off until the following day. With any luck the light snow that had already begun to coat Barungrad would by then be replaced by a low-slung sun that would help dispel the despair. Of course it meant he would spend most of this day hungry, but that was not new to him. Sleep helped him ignore it. And as long as there was enough food to keep Milada fed, that was enough for him. But now this music in the streets had awakened him too early. And he could not simply ignore it, like the hunger, and roll over and curl tightly against Milada and forget for a while longer the world around them. This was a sound he had never heard before. This was music, not like the regimental dirges and oppressive hymns of the Regime, but light and joyous. This was music that drew everyone to their windows. This was music that rose to the sky and made him want to sing. Indeed, he quickly recognized the voices that followed the approach of the drums and cymbals and something he thought must be, despite its improbability, a clarinet.

  “We are free, Friends!”

  “Jakupovic is dead!”

  “We are free!”

  Pavko stood at his window and watched the flag-waving procession in the street below make its celebratory way towards the Lebenbrucke. Young people danced and shouted and ran about as if they had all lost their logic and their moral compass. The noise was unlike anything he had heard before, a happy din that seemed to feed on itself, happier for its complete opposition to the numbed silence of oppression, which had preceded it for so many years. The people exercised their newfound voices like babies. Pavko had never known this sound, and it frightened him.

  One of the first things the Regime did after it came to power was shutter all the asylums and turn the people into the streets. They seemed to have learned a lesson of history that they needn’t kill those helpless people, but simply withdraw the government safety net and they would die on their own. But as Pavko stared into the streets, he felt he could not tell the lunatics apart from everyone else. Freedom had apparently made them all insane. And looking across into other windows in other buildings he saw people just like himself, staring down at the frenzied mob in silent fear. Where once he had seen resignation in the faces of these older people, now he saw misery.

  The implications kept Pavko silent. He was trying to understand what this all meant. He knew his life was changing, would be changed by the change of living going on all around him, sweeping him into its current. But he kept himself firmly on the banks, safe in his flat until he could determine where the current would take him, where the people would drop the silt of this newfound freedom it carried, what body of water they would
empty into.

  Now he searched the crowds for Milada, who had not been content to stand aside with him, but had eagerly jumped into the river below. He thought he could just see her head, appearing and then disappearing in the crowd at the end of the street before it turned east behind the buildings. His heart ached. He wanted to be with her, to experience this moment with her, to share her joy. He didn’t care for the rest of his country, he cared only for what this freedom meant to Milada.

  She had dreamed so long of freedom, and now she finally had it she would take full advantage. She sought only to be herself. She wanted to stay out late into the night and early morning and not have to explain herself to an authority. She wanted to express herself without fear. She wanted to be able to seek her own truths, to make her own discoveries, to decide for herself what was acceptable and what not. She wanted a direct experience of everything.

  He wanted her to be there, in the window with him, sharing his trepidation, for he knew the risks of freedom. He had read reports from other countries of an increase in crime with the rise of freedom. Under the various autocratic governments people had been too fearful of punishment to commit random crimes. What crime did exist in those regimes was sanctioned by the government itself. But with freedom came the ease of random crime, of opportunist crime, where a man might, for example, steal an old woman’s purse, because he believes there will be no unhappy consequences for himself. He can dispose of the evidence, he can have a friend provide an alibi, he can get a lawyer to represent him in a court, and the chances were good he could get away without punishment. But the autocrats needed no proof, no court, no procedure. They would come to his flat in the middle of the night and take him away.

  To Pavko, freedom was a child that would test its parents. He knew it would improve, mature into liberty after suffering its growing pains. He had dreamed so long of freedom, but now he feared the free future more than the proscribed past.

  * * *

  For days Pavko did not eat or drink. He did not go out or invite in. He did not speak to any one, because without Milada there was no one left in the world. His father tried to talk him into another endless game of cards, but all his interests had suddenly died. He existed solely in waiting for Milada to return.

  Pavko believed first that she would spend a night in a hotel, or in some private place, just to have a drink and a shower and reflect. When she did not return the next day, he had to reassess his beliefs.

  What Pavko suspected most was that it had been the Regime that had kept he and Milada together. They had both shared only one thing in common, and that was a dream of freedom. Now the dream had come, he feared Milada had found no more reason to stay with him.

  He began to replay those last days before she left, hunting for hints, looking for explanations. At first he could recognize nothing unusual. But as days passed, he began to suspect every little hesitation, every momentary separation, of influencing her leaving. He felt betrayed, and desired nothing more than to avenge himself with the first woman he met on the street.

  But then he thought perhaps this was a test. Were they, or perhaps was God, testing his faith, his trust, his ability to remain true to Milada in the absence of any moral imperative?

  He hated the new Republic. Milada was as much a child of the revolution as anyone he had ever met, and despite his love for her, he hated her for it. Her leaving was a victory of nihilism over him. She had made her choice, and he was faced with the decision to either follow her into the sort of debased existence he saw all around him, or try to forget her and all he had ever believed in and find another living.

  Pavko tried to fool himself into waiting with faith in her devotion. He entertained the belief that each passing day brought him closer to the day she would return. He hoped she would return, they would be reunited, because he refused to believe she would leave at the first note of music without any explanation. He began to think the failure must somehow have lain with him.

  He did not know how many days and weeks passed before he began to think she might never come back. This determined passage of time insisted he entertain the possibility of their eternal separation. He began to suspect she was hiding, both from him and herself. Could this loving, which he believed defined his life, merely have been a prelude to something else? Suddenly he could see beyond the borders of his passion, into the abyss of forever.

  His imagined solitude began to affect a real consequence. Pavko needed to look away from the void, which held such fascinations for those mired in despondency. He needed to solve the riddle of her leaving. He needed to forge through the uncharted hinterlands of solitude a road that would lead her back.

  * * *

  How long was the time since she had left? He did not know. There was no way for him to tell. He only knew there was no life. Freedom had come, and he felt more oppressed than before. Under the Regime men could always dream of freedom, of a better life, of the things they would do. Indeed, the Regime worked hard to monitor the dreams of its people, knowing well that as long as people kept dreaming of freedom, they would not actively pursue it. Without Milada, Pavko had no more dreams. He could only wait for inevitable death.

  What he saw on the streets was people running madly about. What was really loose on the streets was dreams. Each person was a different dream, running amuck, looking for a hold in its newfound freedom.

  He had always gone to bed and enjoyed the same dream every night. It was a dream he shared with Milada. They would dream together of a life together in a land of freedom. Their shared dream was their promised land, their Eden to which they were permitted to return by virtue of their pure and devoted love for one another.

  How could he sleep now? Every night he lay awake in bed, staring at the blank ceiling. Part of Milada’s dream had been to have a mirror on the ceiling, so when they were both lying beside one another, their bodies sharing their warmth, their dreams touching, she could look up and see them, cherish the image, burn it into her mind forever. Now it seemed to Pavko that all along she had a reason to keep for herself, hidden in her heart, the image of them together, the memory. And now she was gone, separated from him without that image to keep, the secret vault of her heart empty. And Pavko was left staring up at the reflection of his blank life.

  He no longer dreamed. She was his only dream, and now she was gone. Freedom had come to the land and had stolen his life.

  Where did she go? When would she be back? How did one recapture a dream? Could he convince himself, or obsess himself, into dreaming about one particular thing? But he knew it would be impossible. Not only was she and his dream gone; he no longer even slept.

  He spent his empty days in search of her. All he found was confusion. Once the celebrations had ended and the statues were pulled down and destroyed, the last figures of the Regime were either transformed into directors of corporations or they slipped into hiding. All that remained behind was a vague sense of emptiness, of purposelessness. No one seemed to be in charge, and without the strength of leadership, a country—free or not—would not grow, would not survive. It would fall apart at the seams, each individual carrying his or her own piece away in a different direction.

  Gone forever was the poverty, the long lines, the water shortages. Under the Regime the steaming coffee and ripe banana he enjoyed immensely were unattainable to anyone outside the government. Now coffee and bananas were available at nearly every corner, but they were unaffordable. The intimate relations that he enjoyed with Milada, scheduled for every third week by the government, now could be had with anyone on demand. Young women strolled through the streets wearing almost nothing and without a hint of scandal. All around him he saw a denial of ideals and a numbing of moral imperatives.

  Finally one day he realized she was gone for good. Perhaps she was dead, trampled in the stampede of joy. Perhaps she truly had been only a dream, meant to get him through his dreary life. He certainly had no concrete evidence she had ever existed. There were clothes he recalled she ha
d worn, but he could well have purchased those himself. What he did not have was a photograph, a painting, a letter, a recording—nothing to show him she had been real. Only memories; or perhaps only fleeting dreams. If this were so, then, could the Regime have been so bad? If she had been only a dream inspired by life under General Jakupovic, was he not sad to see freedom come?

  Something of this was true, for he encountered small groups of people dedicated to uncovering and resurrecting those old dream files. They swept through the headquarters of the Regime, they searched the homes of the generals and high officials. Of course they knew all the best hiding places, because for years the people had used them to hide things for themselves. Yet nothing was discovered. Even the secret black market of dreams had disbanded without the Regime to give them reason and purpose. And so, to Pavko’s utter surprise, in place of their dreams of freedom, a new dream began to take shape: nostalgia.

  Once life had seemed worth living. Now life was horrible, tragic, empty. He was merely a pile of rubble, the pitiful monument of his life pulled down and destroyed in the wake of freedom.