The Stranger at the Cemetery (Chapter One)

Gustav Aschenbach — or von Aschenbach, as he had been officially called since his fiftieth birthday — had set out alone from his flat in the Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich, on a spring afternoon of the year 19—, a year that for months had shown so threatening a face to our continent, for a fairly long walk. Overwrought by the difficult and dangerous work of the morning, which demanded of him at that very moment the utmost care, prudence, penetration and precision of will, the writer had been unable even after lunch to stop the inner running-on of the productive machinery in him, that motus animi continuus in which, according to Cicero, eloquence consists; and he had not found the refreshing sleep he needed more and more as his strength wore away. So, after tea, he had gone out, hoping that the air and movement would restore him and give him a fruitful evening.

He walked in the English Garden, and back along the Ungererstrasse, and stopped at the tram stop by the North Cemetery to wait for a tram home. No one was about. Across the way stood the mortuary chapel, in a Byzantine style, its façade decorated with Greek crosses and bright painted figures, and with gilded inscriptions about the life to come — They are entering into the dwelling-place of God — and Let everlasting light shine upon them. And in the portico, between the two apocalyptic beasts that guarded the steps, stood a man.

He was not very tall, thin, beardless, strikingly snub-nosed; he was red-haired, with a milky, freckled skin; he was clearly not from Bavaria, for the broad, straight-brimmed bast hat he wore gave him a foreign, far-travelled look. He had a pack strapped on his back, a yellowish suit of what seemed to be loden, a grey raincoat over his left arm, and in his right hand an iron-tipped stick, on which he leaned, his legs crossed. His head was raised, so that his Adam's apple stood out on his thin neck; he looked out into the distance with colourless, red-lashed eyes, between which stood two strong vertical furrows; and his lips seemed too short, drawn back from his teeth, which showed white and long, bared to the gums. He looked, Aschenbach thought, both domineering and wild; and he was staring straight at Aschenbach — so aggressively that Aschenbach turned away, embarrassed, and walked on.

But something had happened to him. He was seized by a sudden, surprising restlessness, a longing to travel, so strong that it seemed a vision. He saw, in his mind, a landscape: a tropical swamp under a heavy sky, wet, luxuriant, monstrous, a kind of primeval wilderness of islands, morasses and muddy channels; hairy palm trunks; strange birds; and between the knotted stems of a bamboo thicket, the glowing eyes of a crouching tiger. His heart beat with fear and with an inexplicable desire. Then the vision faded. He resolved, sensibly, to take a little holiday in the south — not too far, not to the tigers; a few weeks somewhere pleasant, to rest. When he looked back to the chapel, the stranger had gone.