Manicheism in a novel

I looked back at my life and to the meetings with him. I experienced the enormous power of that man, negative power, lack of will to tolerate the positive sides of other people. A destructiveness, yet with an old initiation as its foundation, but then as a kind of 'stolen secrets', not with an arduous pursued morality. He had always been my opponent, not the greatest though a satellite - but a direct one.  Still I couldn't see him as a lost person, his power could possibly be transformed to a positive strength... He was no mediocre type, he was a very special man with great abilities. Our first encounter, even then, had been a duel: I had been far quicker; through my presence he was totally confused and I had hit him, without knowing it, with my strongest weapon. I had penetrated him, right through his armour, and gone into his heart of badness. He had been bleeding ever since... He didn't know that I would be his doctor here. On Monday I would visit him.

I opened the door of his room and saw a man, distorted by pain. Scrawny, rigid, but still chic and charming. He saw me, widened his hard blue eyes - flabbergasted - and really threw himself into my arms. I embraced him, felt his bones and his coldness. Fully permeated by the illness he was, into his very bones. I felt the boring pains in his skeleton, felt death in his nearness.
'Has God sent an angel to this sinner?' Gerrit said, with a mocking tone. 'Is this mercy?'
'I am only here for two weeks, Gerrit. As I saw your name in the files, I asked if I could be your doctor. I have read the file...'
'There is nothing much to treat anymore. I hope that you can kill the pain a bit. I was rather hopeless there, back home in The Hague, they pump all kinds of rubbish into your body, ‘chemical dumping’ it is. Here it will be better, for certain. Besides, I don't want to decline in the midst of the people who know me. Here I can find a worthy death.'
‘How are you coming to terms with death, Gerrit?’
'Well... I haven’t forgotten your tormenting images of Hell, in Italy. I don't believe in them, and yet... I can feel the reality. Well, of course that isn't possible - but actually it is!'
'You don't want to believe in them, I can understand that. You'd better try to reach a settlement, before you have to face the judge.'
He sighed deeply. We were sitting in the chairs by the window.
‘So you are as religious as before. How is it possible!'
'I live more in the reality than in any belief. True idealism is founded on insight into reality that is more than what we just see and hear'
He sniggered, sneering.
'Ah yes!. This will be a lovely time again with you - the last period of my life. Terminal care by a fine preacher.'
'I am your friend, Gerrit.'
He nodded; he accepted that.
'Yes', he said, 'you are. And you are the only one...'

I took away a deep impression with me while leaving his room. We had talked for about an hour, and my mind was full of sorrow. Compassion, but at the same time there was an enormous antipathy for so much cold hardness. With the loss of fat and muscles the last bit of goodness and warmth seemed to be being dissolved. A complete breakdown he seemed to be, hatred and freezing coldness all over. Hard sneering, irony. The small, small light of goodness that had been there, once, seemed to have vanished totally. He himself felt it as a blazing fire in which he was being consumed. But I only perceived freezing coldness...

 

Quote from the novel Celestial Rose

Manicheism in a novel by Mieke Mosmuller