23 我从未埋怨你

Forgive me, forgive me for telling you about it. I do so only this one time, never again,
never. I have said nothing for eleven years, and I will soon be silent for all eternity;
just once I must cry out and say what a high price I paid for my child, the child who
was all my bliss and now lies there with no breath left in his body. I had forgotten
those hours long ago in his smile and voice, in my happiness, but now he is dead the
torment revives, and I had to scream out from my heart just this one time. But I do not
accuse you—only God, only God, who made that torment point-less. I do not blame
you, I swear it, and never did I rise against you in anger. Even in the hour when I was
writhing in labour, when my body burned with shame under the inquisitive eyes of the
students, even in the second when the pain tore my soul apart, I never accused you
before God. I never regretted those nights or my love for you, I always blessed the day
you met me. And if I had to go through the hell of those hours again and knew in
advance what was waiting for me I would do it again, my beloved, I would do it again
a thousand times over!
Our child died yesterday—you never knew him. Never, even in a fleeting encounter
by chance, did your eyes fall on him in passing. I kept myself hidden away from you
for a long time once I had my son; my longing for you had become less painful,
indeed I think I loved you less passionately, or at least I did not suffer from my love so
much now that I had been given the child. I did not want to divide myself between you
and him, so I gave myself not to you, a happy man living without me, but to the son
who needed me, whom I must nourish, whom I could kiss and embrace. I seemed to be
saved from my restless desire for you, saved from my fate by that other self of yours
who was really mine—only occasionally, very occasionally, did my feelings humbly
send my thoughts out to where you lived. I did just one thing: on your birthday I
always sent you a bunch of white roses, exactly the same as the roses you gave me
after our first night of love. Have you ever wondered in these ten or eleven years who
sent them? Did you perhaps remember the woman to whom you once gave such roses?
I don’t know, and I will never know your answer. Merely giving them to you out of
the dark was enough for me, letting my memory of that moment flower again once a
year.
You never knew our poor child—today I blame myself for keeping him from you,
because you would have loved him. You never knew the poor boy, never saw him
smile when he gently opened his eyelids and cast the clear, happy light of his clever,
dark eyes—your eyes!—on me, on the whole world. Oh, he was so cheerful, such a
dear; all the light-hearted nature of your being came out again in him in childish form,
your quick, lively imagination was reborn. He could play with things for hours,
entranced, just as you play with life, and then sit over his books, serious again, his
eyebrows raised. He became more and more like you; the duality of gravity and
playfulness that is so much your own was visibly beginning to develop in him, and the
more like you he grew to be, the more I loved him. He studied hard at school, he could
talk French like a little magpie, his exercise books were the neatest in the class, and he
was so pretty too, so elegant in his black velvet suit or his white sailor jacket.
Wherever he went he was the most elegant of all; when I took him to the Adriatic
seaside resort of Grado, women stopped on the beach to stroke his long, fair hair; in
Semmering, when he tobogganed downhill, everyone turned admiringly to look at
him. He was so good-looking, so tender, so attractive; when he went to be a boarder at
the Theresian Academy last year he wore his uniform and his little sword like an
eighteenth-century pageboy—now he wears nothing but his nightshirt, poor boy, lying
there with pale lips and folded hands