Gabriel Jeroschewitz, October 25th, 2025, dedicated to Hermann Hesse. Abridged
Mirror of Two Moons
I met him during what I call my season of unmaking. The city was rain-slick and gray, an orchestra pit of damp umbrellas and burned-out dreams, and I was renting a narrow room above a shuttered cinema. The landlord, a retired organist, never asked questions; he only sold silence. I encountered the stranger who would later sign his letters there, The Wolf of the Mirror.
One evening, he appeared in the stairwell, carrying a suitcase that looked older than us. The hall light caught a glint on his spectacles, and I remember thinking he had the stare of a man who had once loved music and then betrayed it. He moved in next door, and we exchanged only the brief nod of the desperately polite for weeks—until the night I found him drunk beneath the flickering marquee.
“I suppose,” he said, lifting his glass in mock salute, “ that you’ve come to watch me disappear.”
He told me later that his name was Henry, though he preferred Harry. Fifty, perhaps more. He was a scholar of forgotten manuscripts and a heretic of every current fashion. He spoke with the measured fever of someone who long ago had thought himself damned.
“Do you ever feel,” he asked me, “that you consist of two creatures chained back to back? One howls for purity, the other for pleasure. Both despise the other’s scent.”
I didn’t answer. In those days, my own life was a hollow instrument. I had just divorced a woman whose laughter I still heard in my dreams, and I was writing—what, I cannot say; words that turned to ash each morning. So perhaps I stayed near Harry because his ruin echoed mine.
He lived between extremes: by day, he studied mystical philosophers; by night, he prowled the jazz clubs like a man seeking a bullet. I often saw him watching himself in the cinema lobby mirror, and the reflection never matched his movement. “A trick of the light,” he would mutter, but I saw the tremor in his hands.
Then came she.
She entered our world one stormy afternoon, a young woman with the smile of a predator disguised as an angel. Her name was Hermione—yes, I recall it with precision, for when she spoke it, Harry flinched as though recognizing an omen. She was unlike the pale ghosts who haunted those bars: her laughter carried not cruelty but an understanding beyond pity.
That first night, she told me, ” Your friend wears despair like a tailored coat. I could teach him to take it off.”
And she did—slowly, artfully.
Under her guidance, Harry learned to dance again. I would watch the two of them in that smoky club, the air thick with trumpet and gin, and see a transformation beginning. He, the scholar of solitude, moved like a man tasting existence for the first time. She led him from the cage of intellect into the wild of sensation. Yet behind each shared smile flickered tragedy, as if they knew the lesson would come at a price.
I, the observer, was drawn into their orbit unwillingly. They fascinated me—the philosopher and the siren—two comets crossing paths before inevitable extinction. Over a cigarette, Hermione told me, “He calls himself half-wolf, half-man. But it isn’t true. There are hundreds in him. He just hasn’t opened all the doors.”
I asked, “And you—what are you to him?”
“His mirror,” she replied. “And a mirror must break when its purpose is done.”
I began to fear what that meant.
The metamorphosis reached its crescendo one night when she invited us to a masquerade whispered about only among the city’s restless and damned—a secret gathering known simply as The Theatre of Mirrors. The building was an abandoned hotel at the river’s edge, its ballroom lit by crimson lanterns and the shimmer of broken glass. Masks everywhere, laughter edged with hysteria. The air smelled of jasmine and danger.
When we arrived, Hermione pressed a card into Harry’s hand. On it, in calligraphy that seemed alive, were the words:
“For madmen only.”
She kissed him on the cheek and vanished into the crowd.
Harry turned to me. “If I do not return,” he murmured, “remember that I loved her. Or what she represented.”
And then he stepped through an archway draped in mirrors. I followed far enough to glimpse what lay beyond—though what I saw might have been hallucination or revelation.
Corridors of shifting reflections. Countless versions of himself, laughing, arguing, weeping. In one mirror, he was a child clutching a violin; in another, an aged monk reciting prayers to a god of dust. Everywhere his face multiplied, fractured, until I could no longer tell which image was mine.
And then, from the center of that kaleidoscope, I saw him kneel before Hermione. She was radiant, terrible. Words passed between them, but none reached me. Only when he took her hands did the mirrors craze and shatter, scattering light like blood.
The next instant, the room was empty.
He returned at dawn, face pale as moonstone. We climbed the stairs in silence. At the top, he said, very softly, “I killed her.”
I tried to speak, but he raised a trembling hand. “Not in body,” he said. “In dream—or truth. It’s the same. She told me to learn laughter, and I answered with despair. But the theatre showed me… more. I am not two creatures; I am ten thousand shards. Each can dance if I let them.”
He paused, and a strange serenity passed over him. “Do you hear it? Mozart laughing behind the walls. He forgives us all our discord.”
Then he locked himself in his room.
Later that day, the landlord found the door ajar. The suitcase was gone. On the table lay a notebook filled with what looked like a treatise—a manuscript without a conclusion. The final page ended mid-sentence.
I read only the first line: To whoever finds these words—learn to laugh at yourself before the mirror does it for you.
He was never seen again.
Years have passed since that winter, yet sometimes, when the city rain whispers against my window, I hear faint jazz from the street below. I imagine him somewhere between the wolf and the man, perhaps smiling at his tragic comedy.
As for Hermione—whether she was real or born of his longing—I cannot say. But her lesson endures. We are not divided beasts, not clean halves struggling for dominance. We are orchestras of contradiction, and every dissonance is part of the music.
I am older now, lonelier perhaps, but when I catch my reflection in the glass, I sometimes notice a second smile flicker beside mine—brief, knowing, irreverent. Maybe it is only the wolf learning to laugh.
Or perhaps it is Harry, reminding me that salvation begins where tragedy learns to dance.
