Listening to the sound of rare words with unclear meanings was one of the secret passions we pursued with a dangerous devotion. We considered them treasures, like the oddly shaped and colored things we collected and kept — potsherds, pebbles, twisted roots — not only because they provided the most vivid models for our imagination, but especially because in their fragmented state they suggested a final form that was all the more perfect; they were, for instance, more barrel or glass or stone or root than the usual objects of their kind. As the relics of an ideal design, they seemed to promise more information about the objects as they were meant to be. Just as an old coin long retired from circulation but of obvious fine alloy flashes unexpectedly in a handful of change, all the more promising the more its once-clear features have become blurry and worn under a patina of long disuse, and just as its value is all the more exciting because it is unknown — so rare words would occasionally pop up in everyday speech, and immediately command the high price set by our hopes for something marvelous and wonderful. And as with the money that — all too seldom — passed through our hands, nothing could compare with the glittering gold ducats and twinkling silver talers of our play chips as symbols of the most lavish wealth, precisely because these could not be tendered or traded, they were money in and of itself, and so there was nothing we craved more than words with meanings we never discovered or had lost due to a misunderstanding or mutilation — or, even better, words that had been freely invented and were thus words in and of themselves, vocabulary that no one took away from us because they were “complete and utter nonsense.” Words like that were capable of harboring more than a single sense. Not that they could be given any arbitrary meaning, but their meaning could be expanded arbitrarily. Their sound alone, the rhythm of their syllables, the body of vowels curving around the framework of the consonants, contained more than just the vague outline of a presumed structure: their foggy, diffused appearance enclosed every shade of the moods they strove to inhabit. Nothing seemed more worthy of contemplation than Lewis Carroll’s “nonsense” lines from “Jabberwocky”:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Enticing and foreboding, conjuring the light and shadow of that fabled forest and the grotesque, fairy-tale-like slaying of a dragon, each and every one of these glimmering words had been made up, none of them was real, and we knew that — but the last thing we wanted to do was deny ourselves the reassurance of their pretend meanings by dismissing them as nonsense. That would have meant abandoning our secret hope that they might be part of some higher language, a special lingo for the initiated, for which there was no key, but which we expected to understand at some miraculous moment, as the apostles understand the language of all people at Pentecost. A language with an undeniable splendor all its own, with a relative absolute value like that of our play money, with no value but its own worth, which could be set as high as we wished.
So ingrained was our habit of trying to force meanings out of words we didn’t know that we often had to endure Miss Rappaport’s reproaches that we were too vain to admit our ignorance. But it was not a matter of childish vanity or childish pride — a pride, incidentally, that is more immediate and therefore purer than later in life — that kept us from admitting this. Nor was it our disappointing experience that the answers to our questions usually proved as unsatisfactory as what Fräulein Iliuţ told us about losing face. Certainly we were reluctant to give up the free rein to play afforded by these inexhaustible possibilities. But even this playful impulse expressed a more deeply rooted unrest. We resisted fixing things unambiguously, because we ourselves were anything but fixed and unambiguous. By the same token, we looked elsewhere for reassurance — to the definite, to the set and certain, fully expecting that things would reveal themselves to us of their own accord. Consequently there was something amiss about the passionate way we listened to a name such as Wälsung, fully in the thrall of adventure, convinced that our urgent desire would compress the sound of the word into some shape, making our wish come true, and that the peasant-knightly traits augured by its sour-apple smell would suddenly appear — whether in the form of gnomelike dwarves or a race of Æsir. The stealth, too, with which we carried on this foolhardy game of enticement and desire also had something wicked about it; we were ready and willing to be terrified, and this made us aware that our evil invocations were as sinful and dangerous as Doctor Faust’s, for we were summoning the spirit of language itself, and that brought us perilously close to falling into the hands of the devil.
But that wasn’t enough to make us want to stop. We did our best to avoid Miss Rappaport’s relentlessly sober explanations, and managed to cheat her out of the richness of the word Sälde. In this way its mystery, which kept the saying over the Feuers’ door in a state of enigmatic ambiguity, reconciled us with the disappointment this house had in store for us. Precisely because it was a house we would have preferred to encounter in a game of our own imagining, in which we wielded powers that could make our boldest wishes come true — to the point of reinventing ourselves — in other words, because it appeared to come from the realm of make-believe, where we felt much more securely rooted than in the actual world, its reality bothered us. Its roof and four walls ought not to have fit so well together. An unfinished construction, or one fallen into ruin, would have been a clear sign that the place came from and belonged to the land of fantasy. But as a home serving the same banal aims as any other, connected to the municipal electrical works and sewage system, it belonged in an embarrassing way to the real world, where it merely seemed odd and bizarre. Only the saying above the door, which we never fully explained, served to dispel this everyday quality like a magical incantation, returning it to our daydreams. And at the same time its dark conjuring, which corresponded to the irrational side of everything that was magic, including the nonsense of all our count-out rhymes and witches’ spells, offered us admittance to the secret essence of all things German — full of wonder, and always a little uncanny.
Sälde selbander—the words seemed to arise from the depths of the German linguistic wellspring, where the old sagas rested in a dusk twilight shimmering with a wine-colored light, like the sunken jewels of the Nibelung hoard — the sagas whose heroes, born of yearning, stood pale as birches in the den with the coiled dragon and the ranks of dwarves. Sadly, that is where most of them perished.
And as these words above the door seemed to be the true entrance to the Feuers’ house, portals to its promise of magic and marvels, they also opened onto a hole as dark and deep as a well shaft, leading to the place where German wondrousness proceeds from the depths of the German demonic genius.
An air of eeriness surrounded the Feuers’ house once we learned he had placed guns in his garden and set them to fire automatically, in order to scare off the countless Jewish peddlers whose favorite domain was the villa district, and who were in fact a genuine nuisance. Whenever Miss Rappaport led us past their garden and we saw Professor Feuer’s swarm of reddish-blond children playing with absolutely no inhibitions among the dangerously positioned, and in our minds all-too-effective, shooting devices, we felt a timid admiration for them. Our governess hated these children, who ranged in years from bloated students of theology sporting the first dueling scars on their cheeks and heavily braided maidens unable to suppress their embarrassment at their all too generous and early-developed bosoms, down to a horde of boys and girls our ages and even younger, and there would undoubtedly have been an infant in the spidery pram that now served as a cart for shrub-fruit, if Frau Feuer hadn’t died a few years earlier “in fulfillment of her maternal duties,” as noted in the obituary.