“Tre zecchini – three ducats!” Nathaniel, who had completely forgotten the optician, quickly counted out the asking price. “Fine glass, fine glass – is it not!?” asked Coppola with his repulsive hoarse voice and his crafty smile.

  “Yes, yes, indeed!” Nathaniel replied, greatly vexed. “Adieu, dear friend!” But Coppola cast several strange sidelong looks at Nathaniel and his room before taking his leave. The young man could still hear him laughing out loud on the stairway. “All right,” Nathaniel muttered to himself, “he’s laughing at me because I no doubt paid far too much for the little spyglass – far too much!” As he quietly whispered these words, a deep groan like that of a dying man resounded in the room. Nathaniel was so frightened he stopped breathing. But the sound had emanated from his own throat. “Clara’s quite right,” he said to himself, “to take me for a ridiculous, ghost-haunted idiot; it’s perfectly insane, completely cockamamie of me to let the thought that I paid Coppola too much for the spyglass unnerve me to such a degree – and for no reason at all.”

  Then he sat himself down to finish writing the letter to Clara, but a glance out the window confirmed that Olympia was still seated as before, and then and there, driven by an irresistible urge, he jumped up, grabbed Coppola’s spyglass, and remained glued to the window, riveted by Olympia’s alluring visage, until his friend Siegmund called that it was time to come along to Professor Spallanzani’s lecture. The next day the curtain was pulled shut in that fateful room across the way, and he could not catch sight of Olympia on that day or on the following two days, despite the fact that he seldom left his own window and constantly kept peering over with Coppola’s spyglass. On the third day, even the blinds were pulled closed. Desperately pining and driven by a burning desire, he ran out to her front door. Impressions of Olympia’s lovely figure hung in the air everywhere he looked; she stepped out from behind the bushes and the reflection of her big sparkling eyes beamed out at him from the clear brook. Clara’s image had been totally erased from his heart – he thought of nothing but Olympia and wailed at the top of his lungs, “Oh you, my shining star of love, did you appear before me only to vanish again and leave me in the dark and desperate night?”

  As he was about to return to his room, he became aware of noisy goings-on in Spallanzani’s house. The doors were open, all kinds of devices were being carried in, the windows on the first floor were likewise open wide, busy housemaids swept and dusted the window boxes with large brooms while inside, carpenters and decorators banged and hammered. Stunned, Nathaniel remained standing there in the street; then Siegmund came over to him and said, laughing, “So what do you say about our old Spallanzani now?” Nathaniel assured him that he had nothing to say, since he knew absolutely nothing about the professor, but that he was rather surprised to discover such wild activity and housekeeping frenzy in that ordinarily dark and silent house. Siegmund informed him that Spallanzani was going to throw a big party the next day, including a concert and a ball, and that half the university was invited. The word was that Spallanzani was going to let his daughter Olympia, whom he’d fearfully kept sheltered from view, make her public debut.

  Nathaniel received an invitation, and at the appointed hour, as carriages rolled up and lights shimmered in the elegantly decorated rooms, presented himself at the professor’s house with a fast-beating heart. The party was large and glamorous. Olympia appeared, richly and tastefully attired. Everyone had to admire her finely chiseled face and graceful figure, although the strange stoop of her back and her bone-thin waist appeared to be the consequence of a too tightly tied girdle. There was a measured stiffness in her stance and step that some found displeasing, but that was ascribed to the stress of appearing in society. The concert began, Olympia played the grand piano with great skill and likewise brought off an aria di bravura with a clear, almost bell-like, pitch-perfect voice. Nathaniel was completely captivated; he stood in the last row and could not clearly make out Olympia’s features in the candlelight. Without attracting notice, he therefore pulled out Coppola’s spyglass and gazed through its lens at the lovely Olympia. Oh God! He now understood how ardently she gazed in his direction, how every note only seemed to sound clearly enveloped in a loving look that surged through his burning heart. The artful trills rang out in Nathaniel’s ear like the heavenly hosannas of the spirit transfigured by love. When at last, following the cadenza, the long trill pierced the air all around him, he felt as though suddenly enveloped by her warm embrace. No longer able to control himself, he cried out in rapture and pain: “Olympia!” All heads turned to look at him, some laughing.

  The cathedral organist twisted his face into an even dourer grimace than before and merely remarked: “Now, now!” The concert came to an end, and the ball began. Only to dance with her— with her! That was now the object of Nathaniel’s deepest desire, all that he strove for; but how would he get up the gumption to ask her, the queen of the evening, for a dance? And yet – he himself had no idea how it happened – he found himself standing right there beside Olympia just as the music was starting up, and she had not yet been invited to dance. Hardly able to stammer a few words, he reached for her hand. It was ice cold, and he felt a terrible deathly frost surge through him. He looked into her eyes that greeted his gaze with love and longing, and at that very moment it was as if the pulse began to beat in her cold hand and the lifeblood began to glow warm within. As love’s longing welled up, glowing hotter and hotter in Nathaniel’s breast, he wrapped his arm around lovely Olympia and led her down the rows of dancers.

  He had always thought himself to be a good dancer, able to hold to the beat, but from the altogether precise rhythmic steadiness of Olympia’s step that often caused him to falter, he soon fathomed the failing of his sense of time. And yet he no longer wanted to dance with any other woman in the world, and felt like he would have killed on the spot anyone else who dared approach her to ask for a dance. But this happened only twice and, to his amazement, Olympia always remained seated until the next dance, when he did not hesitate to reach for her hand and pull her up again and again.

  Had Nathaniel had eyes for anything but the lovely Olympia, countless tussles and tangles would have been unavoidable; for it was clear that the quiet, carefully muffled laughter that sounded here and there from the groups of young people was directed at the lovely Olympia, whom they followed with the strangest looks – it was hard to say why. Fired up by the dance and all the wine he’d drunk, Nathaniel shed his innate shyness. He sat beside Olympia, his hand in hers, and spoke with passion of his love for her in words that neither he nor she understood. But she perhaps grasped their meaning, for she peered without flinching right in his eyes and sighed again and again: “Oh, oh, oh!” Whereupon Nathaniel replied: “Oh you beautiful, heavenly woman! You ray of hope from the promised land of love! You deep spirit in which my entire being is mirrored,” and more of the same. In response, Olympia kept sighing the same “Oh, oh!”

  Professor Spallanzani walked several times past the blissful pair and smiled with a strange look of satisfaction. And though Nathaniel’s spirit hovered elsewhere in another world, all of a sudden it seemed to him as if it grew curiously dark down here below in Professor Spallanzani’s house. He looked around and noticed with a start that the last two lights in the empty hall were burning down to the wick and threatened at any moment to go out. Music and dance had stopped long ago. “Time to part, time to part,” he cried in a wild and desperate voice, then kissed Olympia’s hand, and leaned forward to kiss her on the mouth with his burning lips— but her lips were ice cold! And just as when he’d first touched Olympia’s cold hand he had felt a shudder run through him, the legend of the dead bride suddenly flashed through his mind. But Olympia pressed him tightly to her, and in that kiss her lips seemed to come alive with warmth. Professor Spallanzani paced slowly through the empty hall, his steps muffled and, ringed by dancing shadows, his figure appeared terrifying and ghostlike.

  “Do you love me— Do you love me, Olympia? Just that one word! Do you love me?” whispered Nathaniel.

  But standing up, Olympia only sighed: “Oh, oh!”

  “Oh yes, my precious, my beautiful star of love,” said Nathaniel, “you rose in the firmament of my heart and will forevermore light up and transfigure the darkness within!”

  “Oh, oh!” Olympia responded, walking away. Nathaniel followed her until they stood before the professor.

  “You chatted up my daughter in a right spritely manner,” said the professor with a smile. “Well then, my dear Herr Nathaniel, if conversing with the simple-minded girl gives you pleasure, you’re welcome to visit whenever you like.”

  Starry-eyed Nathaniel staggered off, with all of heaven’s splendor bursting from his heart.

  Spallanzani’s party was the talk of the town in the days that followed. Despite the professor’s great pains to make it a splendid occasion, the chatterboxes found all sorts of unseemly and strange goings-on to dwell on. They saved their sharpest barbs for the stiff and silent Olympia who, her lovely exterior notwithstanding, was saddled by the wagging tongues with a lot of completely nonsensical notions as to her sanity – and this was bandied about as the reason that Spallanzani kept her hidden for so long. Needless to say, Nathaniel was not pleased to learn of this, but he said nothing; what was the point, he reasoned, in proving to these dullards that it was their own nonsense that kept them from recognizing Olympia’s profound and beautiful spirit!

  “Do me a favor, brother,” Siegmund said to him one day, “tell me how in Heaven a smart guy like you ever fell for the wax face of that wooden doll?”

  Nathaniel was about to explode in anger, but then he pulled himself together and calmly responded, “Why don’t you tell me, brother Siegmund, how a guy with an eye for beauty could be blind to Olympia’s heavenly charms? But then again, it’s just as well fate didn’t make you a rival; for one of us would have had to fall in blood.”

  Realizing how things stood with his friend, Siegmund backed off, and after observing that in matters of beauty and love all is in the eye of the beholder, he added: “Still, it’s funny that so many of us feel pretty much the same way about Olympia. She seemed to us – don’t take it badly, brother! – strangely stiff and soulless. Her figure’s regular, just like her face, it’s true! She might well be considered beautiful, if her gaze were not so devoid of life, so totally lacking – you might say – the power of sight. Her step is strangely measured, every movement seems prescribed by clockwork gears and cogs. Her playing and singing has the unpleasantly precise soulless rhythm of a singing machine, which is true of her dance step too. This Olympia seemed completely weird to us, we didn’t know how to make sense of her. It was as if she were only pretending to be a living being, and yet she unquestionably has her own way about her.”

  Nathaniel refused to give in to the bitter feelings that welled up in his heart at Siegmund’s words; he checked his mood and simply replied, dead serious, “Olympia may indeed seem weird to you cold, prosaic types. The poetic temperament only reveals itself to like-minded souls! Her loving look fell on me alone, lighting up my senses and thoughts. Only in Olympia’s love can I find myself again. You people think ill of her because she doesn’t babble banalities like all the other shallow souls. It’s true, she speaks little; but those few words are as vivid as hieroglyphs, revealing an inner world replete with love and a profound intellectual grasp of the eternal beyond. But you people just don’t understand, all these words are lost on you.”

  “Beware, my brother,” said Siegmund very softly, almost sadly, “it seems to me you’re headed in a dangerous direction. You can count on me, if all else— no, I dare not say anymore!” Nathaniel suddenly realized that the cold, prosaic Siegmund was being very sincere with him, and so he took and shook the proffered hand with all his heart.

  Nathaniel had completely forgotten that there was a Clara in this world whom he once loved; his mother, Lothar— everyone had slipped from his consciousness. He lived only for Olympia, beside whom he sat for hours every day, holding forth about his love, about life flushed with sympathy, about their psychic affinity – and Olympia listened to it all with deep devotion. From the depths of his desk drawers Nathaniel fetched everything he had ever written. Poems, fantasies, visions, novels, stories, to which all sorts of high-flying sonnets, stanzas, canzoni were added daily, and all of it he tirelessly read to Olympia for hours on end. But he had never had such a lovely listener. She did not embroider and knit, she did not peer out the window, she fed no birds, she played with no lapdogs, nor any cuddly cats, she practiced no paper cutting, nor did anything else with her hands, she held back no furtive yawns with a quiet forced cough – in short, for hours and hours she peered with a fixed and steady gaze into the eye of her beloved without fidgeting or budging, and her gaze grew ever livelier and more intense. Only when Nathaniel finally stood up and kissed her on the hand, and even on the mouth, did she respond: “Oh, oh!” Followed with, “Good night, my dear!”

  “Oh, you beautiful, oh, you profound spirit,” Nathaniel cried when he reached his room, “only you, you alone completely understand me.” He experienced an inner bliss when he considered what a wondrous harmony manifested itself ever more each day between his and Olympia’s spirits; it seemed to him as if Olympia had grasped his works, his poetic gift, from the depths of her soul, indeed that her voice came from the bottom of her innermost self. That must be true, he thought, for Olympia never uttered any more words than those already noted above. But in his most lucid moments, such as in the morning upon waking, when Nathaniel really thought about Olympia’s total passivity and laconic manner, he shrugged it off. “What are words— words! Her heavenly gaze says more than any hollow language. Can any child of heaven fit herself into the narrow compass of a pathetic earthly need?”

  Professor Spallanzani seemed to be absolutely delighted by the relationship between his daughter and Nathaniel, and he gave them all sorts of unequivocal signs of his approval. When Nathaniel finally dared to allude to a future bond with Olympia, a smile spread over the professor’s face, and he replied that he would leave it to his daughter to decide of her own free will. Emboldened by these words, with burning desire in his heart, Nathaniel decided to implore Olympia the very next day to declare clearly in plain words what her dear loving look had long since told him, that she wished to be his forevermore. He searched for the ring that his mother gave him when he left home, to give to Olympia as a symbol of his commitment to their budding, blossoming life together. While looking for it, he happened on Clara’s and Lothar’s letters; indifferent, he flung them aside, found the ring, stuffed it in his pocket, and ran over to see Olympia.

  Already from the front stoop, and from the vestibule, he heard a strange din that appeared to come from Spallanzani’s study. A stamping of feet, a clatter, a shoving, a pounding on the door, interspersed with coarse words and hurled imprecations.

  “Let go! Let me go! You wretch! You cursed creature! Did I put my life and limb on the line for that?”

  “Ha ha ha ha! That was not our arrangement— it was me, me who made the eyes!”

  “And I the mechanical clockwork!”

  “Poor devil with your clockwork, you filthy cur of a simple-minded clockmaker!”

  “Get out! Satan! Stop!”

  “Organ-grinder!”

  “Devilish beast! Stop— get out— let go!”

  They were the voices of Spallanzani and that disgusting Coppelius that screeched and raged. Nathaniel burst in, gripped by an unspeakable terror. The professor held a female figure by the shoulders, the Italian Coppola held her by the feet, and they tugged and tore her here and there, furiously fighting for possession. Nathaniel recoiled in profound horror when he recognized the figure as Olympia. Flaring up in a wild fit of anger, he was about to tear his beloved out of their struggling grip— but at that very moment, Coppola yanked the figure free of the professor’s hands with a mighty burst of strength and, pivoting, swung her in his direction, managing to land Nathaniel such a stunning blow that it made him tumble backward over the work table, toppling and knocking down the vials, retorts, bottles, and measuring glasses which all smashed in a thousand pieces on the floor. Then Coppola flung the figure over his shoulder and raced with a repulsive shrill laughter down the steps, so that the ugly dangling feet of the figure banged with a wooden thud and thump on the steps. Stunned, Nathaniel stood up. He had seen all too clearly that Olympia’s deathly pallid wax face had no eyes, but black hollows in their stead; she was a lifeless doll.

  Spallanzani thrashed around on the floor; glass shards had cut up his head, chest, and arms, and blood spurted as though from a fountain. But he pulled himself together. “After him, after him! What are you waiting for? Coppelius— Coppelius has robbed me of my finest automaton. Twenty years’ work, life and limb invested— the clockwork, speech, step— all mine. The eyes— the eyes robbed from you. Cursed hellhound! After him! Fetch me back Olympia – there are her eyes!”

  Nathaniel spotted a pair of bloody eyes peering at him from the floor. Spallanzani grasped them with his uninjured hand and flung them at him so that they struck him on the breast. Then madness grabbed him with its burning claws and bored its way into his heart of hearts, tearing his thinking and feeling to shreds.

  “Hopla, hoopla, hopla! Ring of fire, ring of fire! Spin around, ring of fire! Merrily, merrily! Wooden doll, hopla, lovely little wooden doll, turn, turn!”

  And with that, Nathaniel flung himself at the professor and pressed his fingers to his throat. He would have strangled him if several people, roused by the racket, hadn’t stormed in and torn the raging Nathaniel from the professor’s neck, managing to revive the old man and thereby saved his life. As strong as he was, Siegmund was not able to restrain the madman, who kept on screaming in a terrifying voice, “Wooden doll, turn, turn!” and lashing about him with balled fists. Finally, it took the combined strength of many men to overpower him, fling him to the floor and tie him up. His words dissolved in a terrible beastly bellowing, and in this pitiful state, still raving in a ghastly frenzy, he was taken to the madhouse.

 

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