Steppenwolf Read Free Page B

always trim and immaculately well tended, and they had already made a favourable impression on me too.
    ‘You see,’ Haller continued, ‘this little patio with the araucaria has such a fantastic smell, I often can’t pass by without stopping for a while. Of course there is a good smell to your aunt’s home too, and she keeps everything as tidy and clean as one could wish, but this spot with the araucaria is so spick and span, so well dusted, polished and washed down, so immaculately clean that it is positively radiant. I just have to take a deep breath and fill my nostrils with it every time. Can’t you sense it too? The way the smell of floor polish and a faint after-scent of turpentine together with the mahogany, the moistened leaves of the plants and everything combine to produce a fragrance that is the ultimate in bourgeois cleanliness, a superlative example in miniature of meticulous care, conscientiousness and attention to detail. I don’t know who lives there, but there must be a paradise of
cleanliness and dust-free bourgeois existence behind that glass door, an Eden of order and painstaking devotion to little routines and chores that is touching.’
    Since I remained silent, he went on: ‘Please don’t think I’m being ironic. The last thing I would want to do is pour scorn on this orderly bourgeois way of life. It’s true, of course, that I myself live in a different world, not this one, and it may well be that I couldn’t survive for even one day in a flat like that with itsaraucaria plants. Yet even though I’m an old Steppenwolf, inclined to snap at people, I am the son of a mother, and my mother too was a respectable housewife who grew plants and saw to it that the living room, the stairs, the furniture and the curtains were presentable. She always did her utmost to make her home and life as neat, clean and tidy as was humanly possible. That’s what this whiff of turpentine, that’s what the araucaria reminds me of, and that’s the reason why every now and then I’m to be found sitting here, gazing into
this little garden of order and rejoicing at the fact that such things still exist.’
    He wanted to stand up but, finding it a struggle, didn’t object to my giving him a bit of a helping hand. I still didn’t break my silence, but I was under some sort of spell that this peculiar man was now and then able to cast on people, just as he had previously on my aunt. We made our way slowly up the stairs together and then, standing outside his door, the key already in his hand, he looked me full in the face again and in a very friendly manner said: ‘You’re just back from work? Well you see, that’s something I have no knowledge of, living a bit apart as I do, a bit on the margin of things. But I believe you also take an interest in books and the like. Your aunt once told me you had been to grammar school and were good at Greek. As it happens, just this morning I found a sentence in Novalis. Can I show you it? I’m sure you’ll be delighted with it too.’
    Taking me with him into his room, where there was a strong smell of tobacco, he drew out a book from one of the piles and leafed through it, searching.
    ‘This is good too, very good,’ he said. ‘Just listen to this sentence: “One ought to take pride in pain – all pain is a reminder of our exalted rank.” Marvellous! Eighty years before Nietzsche! Only that’s not the saying I had in mind – wait a bit – now I’ve got it. Here you are: “Most people have no desire to swim untilthey are able to.” 5 Isn’t that a laugh? Of course they don’t want to swim! After all, they were born to live on dry land, not in water. Nor, of course, do they want to think. They weren’t made to think, but to live! It’s true, and anyone who makes thinking his priority may well go far as a thinker, but when all’s said and done he has just mistaken water for dry land, and one of these days he’ll drown.’
    He had now captured my interest