After a long sleep and a hearty breakfast at her parents’ seaside cottage, Gitta awakened with a burning interest in everything around her. Skirts tucked up and barefoot, she ranged through the water, searching diligently for starfish, crabs, mussels — even simple pebbles, wondrously shimmering in the brine, attracted her like jewelry — until the next morning had transformed her treasures, as if they were still mysteriously bound to the sea, into something quite unsightly — which only made her more eager for the magic of the sea. Most magical of all for her was the marvel of the jellyfish, which seemed to reflect the lovely lines and colors of heaven and earth in their infinite intricacies of light blue, crimson, pale green, deep violet, or sun-bright hues. Like someone who goes to the theater or learns of tragic turns of fate, Gitta was caught up in the dramatic fortunes of the seaside jellyfish. There was a day for each kind of sea dweller. Depending on the weather, the starfish, the jellyfish, or even blue mussels lay on the beach. Then, suddenly, giant colonies of jellyfish would cover the sand, by the hundreds of thousands — and, while in the infinite waves they had all lived the same existence, it was only in this close community that they met the most varied range of fates: some drawn mercifully back to the bosom of the sea; some broken up under human tread; others slowly sucked down into the sand, leaving only a rune-like imprint as a mysterious inscription. Gitta could devote hours on end to these creatures marked by fate.

Sometimes, she would lie face down, somewhere by the water, intent upon thinking through her “marriage mistake,” as she called her complex situation. But, after a while, she would find herself propped up on her hands, fascinated by the remarkable leaps of the sand fleas or, at most, baking the finest little cakes out of the moist sand — identical copies of Frau Lüdecke’s.

At the outset, Anneliese had thought it was partly Gitta's heartache that made her turn to these childish pursuits and speak less and less of her marital situation.

The house stood on a hillside, overlooking the town in the valley and the long stretch of mountains beyond. From the country road that climbed through the hill's woods in a wide curve, you stepped right into the middle story, as if it were at ground level — so deeply was the little white house nestled into the slope.

But perched up there it had a freer view out over the terraced garden and across the broad expanse below, gazing down with many bright window-eyes and with boldly protruding bays — extensions of original rooms that had been found too confining. This undeniably made for whimsical architecture, but it gave the house an impression of grace and lightness — almost as if it were just resting there.

From the top floor above the central bay, a balcony jutted far out over the tree-planted, wintry garden, enclosed by a stone wall, old and moss-covered. The balcony door stood wide open, despite the early morning hour, and on the threshold, its backside carefully pointed back into the warm room, sat a small, aged, female dog blinking sleepily at the hungry birds that occasionally flitted by, observing them as a spoiled child of the house might look out at begging street folk. Of course, she herself was the result of the widest range of dog breeds treating themselves to nothing less than an aristocratic love-tryst, as evidenced by her dachshund legs, her pug torso, and her terrier head — a diversity capped off by the piglet-style, curly tail at her other end. But by far the most remarkable thing about the little monster was the fact that its name was Salomo. That astonished everyone except the daughter of the family, who had insisted on that name of masculine and royal wisdom, even after Salomo had come straying her way in a highly pregnant state, whereupon he had given birth to four healthy pinschers.

The birds were carrying on with a tremendous racket. Finches and blue tits, robins and linnets, warblers and others flocked together around the suet that had been put out on the balcony — free hanging to discourage the contending field sparrows — along with a bowl of water, set above a few glowing coals on a potsherd to keep it from freezing.

Balduin soon found himself on his way down to see Branhardt, who apparently had gone straight to the clinic after his consulting trip and would not come home until evening.

After the conversation with his mother that morning, he felt doubly driven to see his father — who thought so much more soberly than she did — who did not expect that every one of his son's high hopes would be realized but would stand by him until his confidence was justified by the young man's actions. Balduin saw both parents as the embodiment of all he so urgently wished to be! Who else on earth could make that possible for him? After all, their life was in his blood — that was the firm, fixed bedrock of his life, though all else might make him confused and unsure. That calming certainty filled his heart as he walked along.

His good mood diminished as he approached the clinic area. He had always been exceptionally sensitive to certain impressions, and his father's quarters did nothing to help, not only by their close proximity to the clinics themselves, but because they deliberately lacked anything that could have imparted a comforting touch of the personal — intended, perhaps, to express his father's principle that comfort was to await him at home, with his family —?

While Balduin was waiting, they were starting to serve breakfast. Branhardt had indeed gone from the railway station to the clinic, where he was still busy. If only he’d come —!

A son's love, when it involves such need, such dependency, loses all the poetry of free feelings, Balduin thought. How much better it was for Gitta, in the natural simplicity of her child's love.

Already his sense of himself was losing its poetry, like an unwatered flower left too long in the sun. With each passing minute, his mood wilted away, his original impatience now strangely pierced by a stinging fear.

The awareness he had impressed upon himself so forcefully on the way to town — that he depended on his father — suddenly entangled him in the misconception that he was a confined, imprisoned person who clearly would rather be free but was now fidgeting about like a fly caught in the finest of cobwebs.

The small addition with a wooden veranda, above the “trunk room,” was next to Branhardt's study, separated from it by a double door and fitted with large, multi-paned sash windows that let in the sunshine from all sides and afforded a lovely view of the hills across the valley. Plants spent the winter there on boards and benches, and there was a small iron stove for them. Beside it, a door opened out onto the roofed veranda — just big enough for one comfortable armchair — from which a wooden stairway dropped steeply into the garden.

Anneliese thought this should be Balduin's domain during the day, and since they were expecting his return tomorrow, she was getting it ready for him. She had the plants and most of the racks removed and his books placed on the main shelf. She went over the pale-green oil paint of the walls with a moist cloth, covered the old garden table with dark-green baize, drew some polka-dot muslin along the lower windowpanes, and then brought in a few wicker chairs kept on the balcony in the summer. That left no room for a bed.

Yet, as she worked at making the room pleasant and comfortable, she quietly wished this were not necessary. She admitted to herself how much she longed for a son who would stand by her, cheerful and strong, in the bloom of manhood — his father's youthful mirror, and one day, the “support in old age” one routinely wishes for.

Was it natural that she had to be so anxious about shielding him from disturbances? That she was already worried that his bedroom next to theirs was too close to the stairway and all the comings and goings? It was also too close to the guest room, for which a visitor had just announced herself: Renate, a friend of Anneliese since childhood, who was rather lively in manner and generally expected more consideration than she was inclined to show.

As fresh as Anneliese's heart had been when she began her work, such reflections had tired her by the time she went upstairs to dust herself off and remove her apron.

With a red ribbon around his neck, right about where he was no longer a terrier but not yet a pug, Salomo rode along to the station, with people staring in wonder as he went by — which put him in a happy mood. He liked red ribbons; and, besides, Gitta wanted to see him looking festive when she arrived.

At the last minute, Anneliese saw Branhardt coming to the train — even though it was at a time when normally he could hardly get free — and even though Salomo's show of emotion made it seem almost impossible to greet Gitta in human fashion.

She returned home as fashionably svelte as when she had left, but also, despite her slim, still childlike figure, in the same good health, so refreshing to Branhardt's doctorly eye. He had just time enough to wait for the baggage and pack his wife, daughter, and Salomo into a hansom cab — but at the last moment he jumped in with them.

That was ill advised, since every move took him farther away from the clinics. But then — as Anneliese often noted — something about Gitta made people careless.

And she didn't have to say anything of interest to do that. When she was three or four years old, he had listened to her just as tolerantly while she read to him, her tone serious but with the newspaper held upside-down — and later, too, when she would confide in him about truly pointless matters.

Anneliese sometimes said she had not known that dubious side of him until she bore him this daughter.

At home, up in Gitta's room, next to her parents’ bedroom, Anneliese noticed the one thing about her daughter that had changed, when she took off her hat to reveal that, yet again — as so many times before — her hair was cut differently. The girl's dark-blonde hair, nothing less than luxuriant and with a slight wave, was remarkably amenable to all experiments.

As she unpacked, Gitta chatted with her “mama” while moving about her room. Its floor was covered with dropcloths, rather unaesthetically, to protect a belatedly applied coat of varnish.

And now the last weeks of the holidays approached, and they were different from the bright beginning. In the narrow space of the fisherman’s cottage, each lived through them, but so entirely alone.

Only for Gitta did those days, right to the end, reveal a life of splendor of which she had never dared dream.

She had no doubts at all: even the stupor of the first days at the shore could mean nothing less than that her whole soul had escaped into the sea, and her poor body had to stand by and watch, as it moved farther from her with each wave. Yet that didn't matter, for it was as if the sea knew everything that had ever lived within her. As if it returned to her, in enhanced form, what she had lost to it — particle by particle, her soul was coming back to her from the infinity into which it had disappeared. — “Are you singing for me? Are you singing me?” she asked, astonished and timid, as the waves, hastening to the shore out of the vast boundlessness, came roiling and foaming round her feet. But whatever they said to her, she could never hold fast to its song; it surged back into the tide — it remained the sea’s. When Gitta recalled how only a short time ago she had been so caught up with invented tales and even created the worst scandal over them, all that seemed far away and ludicrous. A thing of ink and paper, completed out on the heath, that now lay buried in her suitcase. It seemed to her like some fossilized thing in the ocean, ancient and quite unremarkable. Never could she forget how, sand-grain small, it had sunk into the immeasurable vastness.

In comparison, wasn't something else sand-grain small, namely what had driven her into love — and away from it? She did not know. Only that she was no longer carrying any of that around with her, not even in her suitcase. So perhaps it was not the same soul that had disappeared into the sea and now returned to her.

For eight days the upstairs guest room had been harboring a guest. Renate, Anneliese's friend since girlhood — her parents’ country estate had neighbored Anneliese's family home — was on her way from her residence in the capital to the southern part of the country, where she was to give some public lectures. She had studied library science and was often engaged by private archives or libraries in need of order. She was also responsible for several specialized studies in history, which had helped her earn a doctorate with a notable dissertation. Despite that, she was less a scholar than an expert in organization, and her talents were not restricted to putting wayward books back in order. Just as she had been able, even as a young woman, to sustain a charitable society on the international stage, she was later skilled at bringing an idea persuasively to bear among the most diverse groups of people and eliciting their support, and her public lectures, happily aided by her aristocratic bearing, often created a sensation.

Branhardt, who approved of all that was clever and competent, also marveled at the vitality of this almost morbidly delicate woman — on whom, as he put it, “a husband would be wasted.” But Anneliese was aware of how remarkable all this truly was, for she alone knew of Renate's tired nerves, her legacy from an ancient, dying lineage — knew her struggle against herself with “what remained of that squandered strength.” She alone could see Renate's “manliness,” which earned her both friends and enemies, as her heroism.

Sometimes they enjoyed music together. As little girls, they had begun piano lessons with the same teacher. Although lacking any notable talent for playing, Renate understood and loved music above all else, and never did she visit, even for a single day, without Anneliese’s having to offer up a treasure.

Then Renate would stretch her diminutive figure out in one of the armchairs, with a second one pushed under her feet and her hands clasped behind her head, which, since a bout of typhus, was adorned by a short, sparse crop of ash-blonde curls.

Lou Andreas-Salomé rose to prominence in the German-speaking world as a novelist and critic in the decades preceding the First World War. In 1882, at the age of twenty-one, she befriended Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas helped inspire her first novel, published in 1885, and in 1894 she wrote the first psychological study of his writings. In 1897 she entered into a close relationship with Rainer Maria Rilke, which, despite a break of several years, continued until the poet's death in 1926. After turning to the study of psychotherapy with Sigmund Freud in 1912, Andreas-Salomé would come to be called “the world’s first female psychoanalyst” (Popova).

In each case, Andreas-Salomé met these men before they were widely known and admired. Nietzsche had yet to author his Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) when they first interacted, and he later commented that he could not have written the work if he had never known her. Rilke was a twenty-one-year-old art student— still with the first name René—when they met, and he would later acknowledge her influence on his ensuing works. She began her studies with Freud only a decade after he had published his ground-breaking book on the interpretation of dreams, drawn to his new ideas by the interest in psychology so evident in her own previously published fiction and criticism.

Nonetheless, critics in the decades after her death tended to view Andreas-Salomé as a mere adjunct to the lives of her illustrious friends, ignoring or even disparaging her own intellectual and literary achievements. Even in the critical discourse, she was often rendered an object of fascinated male desire, whether muse or seductive femme fatale, or deprecated as a dilettantish disciple exploiting those luminary mentors.

In the 1980s, scholarship began to focus on the scope and independent merit of Andreas-Salomé's extensive writings. This first English translation of the last and arguably the most mature of her novels aims to contribute to this ongoing reassessment of the author beyond the German-speaking world, as a writer and thinker whose skillfully crafted and compelling narrative texts made significant literary contributions to modern feminism and to the principles of women's emancipation.

In the days that followed, Anneliese was often at the small house in Villenstraße — on the flimsy pretense of “showing her daughter the ropes,” although Gitta quite unexpectedly revealed talents for domestic organization that neither Markus nor her mother would ever have expected. It went little noticed that Balduin had “gone private” more than ever, almost always leaving or returning to his secluded quarters by the back stairs. He truly enjoyed the stillness of the house as never before, its emptiness all around him. He was separated from the only sounds, a short distance away, by the padded double door of his father's study. Yet when he knew Branhardt was at home, that's where his attention was strangely drawn. As Balduin sat writing, he listened intently, straining to hear his father's familiar tread next door — the usual scraping of his chair — the dry cough after all his smoking that seemed to say to his pipe: “Now that's enough of you!” It seemed as though these things that caught his ear created an atmosphere around him, into which he bent deep, as though into a second room. He wrote more quickly and more animatedly — with an expression as if he were not only listening but also watching: as if, like theater curtains, the double door parted, until before him — on a stage before him, as it were — the entire interior of a human solitude were revealed, unnoticed by the person himself.

From day to day, however, Balduin tended to avoid his father, and so it was already high summer when Branhardt, encountering his son one day under the fruit trees, the scene of their great discussion, stopped beside him with one short question:

“You’re not going down to your lectures anymore, then?”

Balduin had been expecting that question for so long, working out the tone of voice he would answer in — perhaps too long, so he had lost some of the natural satisfaction with which he might have spontaneously exclaimed: “If you knew where I was coming from — and how I’m coming, how rich, how successful I’ve been, you wouldn't even ask whether I go down there!”

Without hesitation, he replied:

“No. Because now I know what I may choose.

Branhardt and Markus Mandelstein first became acquainted through female monkeys. Some results Markus Mandelstein had achieved with his six monkeys were of direct scientific interest to Branhardt and led to several discussions. Only once had a medical case brought the two together — a very sad one involving a lawyer's family in whose home Markus was also a frequent guest. The wife, no longer young, was facing her first confinement under dangerous conditions that appeared to confront those involved with the necessity of giving up the child to save the mother. At any rate, so it seemed to the non-specialist Markus. But Branhardt believed they did not have to give up hope of the mother’s survival if she carried the child — desired for years and surely her last — to term.

If there were anything at all in the world for which Markus might have envied Branhardt, it was the confident resolve with which he spoke of the case — not only to the anxious woman and her worried husband, but even to himself — and in that way instilled so much faith. Markus took great pains not to lack this tone, even though as a physician he had practiced it for some time, and with his exceptional self-control he often succeeded with a sufficiently virtuosic performance. Yet, in response to this situation, he forced himself to come up with such masterfully subtle nuances of the assuring tone as eluded even Branhardt.

The outcome proved Branhardt right. But a few days later, quite unforeseen complications arose from something else entirely, and, after a true masterpiece of surgical intervention on Branhardt's part, incomparable treatment marked by the greatest medical devotion, the suffering new mother died a gentle and painless death. That day, Markus saw tears in Branhardt's eyes, which were surely not given to shedding them — he saw him sharing the pain of the others with a tenderness that came upon those poor people like the most human form of consolation — and made Markus appear wooden and lifeless in comparison, unable to give expression to the empathy that crippled and inhibited him. When, in his helplessness, he came to the funeral with an almost artlessly beautiful wreath, he envied Branhardt again and more profoundly than before.

Then came the last Sunday of Renate's stay at the hillside house. The midday meal was early, in good bourgeois fashion, and the restful holiday atmosphere allowed them so much time together that Renate finally had to smoke her after-dinner cigar in front of everyone.

Branhardt assured her she needn't feel bad on his account, since there was no way a harmless cigar could make her appear more emancipated to him than she already did. She protested in vain: her bit of independent living an emancipation! It was merely a much-needed way of restoring her will. That was like branding someone a mermaid for taking a cold-water cure. It was the same with her short hair, a result not of her convictions about women's rights but of her stay at the hospital.

With feigned melancholy, Branhardt reminisced about the long braids and ladylike flowing skirts of her first visits. He also mentioned the domestic skills she had revealed when she arrived unexpectedly at the crucial moment before Balduin's birth. Renate found she looked splendid in Anneliese's long housecoats and even claimed she could cook, if need be. Oddly enough, everything turned out to be beefsteak, nearly raw in the English style, with an egg. Those middays together — with little Gitta in her wicker pram next to the table and all their thoughts with Anneliese and the newborn — brought Branhardt and Renate very close.

She was aware that, since then, he had acquired a bit of prejudice against her, perhaps because he tacitly believed her “emancipation” entailed certain female issues, rumors of which had occasionally reached him. He struck Renate as one of those men who are far more tolerant in theory than in practice and who become less so if such a person comes closer to them or theirs. She had to content herself with his very indirect flattery. In any case, she had no doubt that, in the majority of cases, Branhardt would have a very energetic response to the gentle Liese-question, “What are weeds?”

After dinner Gitta hurried into town to catch her train to Hasling, planning to stop first to pick up Anna Leutwein, the pharmacist's daughter, a school friend of hers and Gertrud’s.

Once past the last train station, where the Branhardts had stayed overnight, the landscape became as desolate as the sea. All the changes of time and man receded before the reign of what forever resists them. As before, scrubby flatlands stretched out on all sides, covered with sedge, so that the narrow canals set in dead-straight lines were lost to sight and only a few deep-blue gentians, growing here and there on their edges, imparted a touch of beauty. Little brown goats, also scrubby as ever, were grazing. They looked wooden in outline, as though carved by a clumsy hand, and even their jumping and bleating were so automaton- like that they scarcely seemed separate from the landscape itself.

Farther still, over the dune ridges, green shimmered, narrow strips of beach grass, planted year after year and stalk by stalk into the rippling ground in the hope their tiny blades would hold back the still tinier grains of drifting sand. And, at last, beyond the lifeboat station, whose foghorn, now as ever, blared out its warning over the deceptively gentle shoreline — beyond which terraced reefs lay in wait for ships, the Branhardts arrived at the farthest point of land, the last barrier that stands between the North Sea and the Baltic. That spectacle seemed to have lost some of its grandeur, much as, in the eyes of adults, childhood scenes appear smaller. For back in those stormy days of early spring, the two seas had thundered together with far greater force than now in high summer. It had been breathtaking to stand before them — clothes fluttering in the wind, and holding fast to each other's hands, as if they might fly off into infinity. It roared into their blood, and it roared through their days and nights, until their two lives embraced each other and flowed into each another as never before, freed of all human barriers.

They encountered a second change where they had stayed — in this case the opposite: a giant hotel, no less, was under construction where their small cottage had been, with a restaurant already set up next door.