My First Wife

The Age of Dissolution

Every beast is driven to pasture by a blow.

Heraclitus

MY ACQUAINTANCE WITH BETTINA

I first met Bettina Merck in the house of a young couple by the name of Waldbauer, friends of mine, very dear people; he was an art historian. At the time Bettina was just twenty-five — seventeen years younger than I. She had been married for seven years and had two children, both girls. Her husband, who was the same age as she, was the director of a large porcelain factory which he had taken over following the death of his father, in spite of his youth. Bettina’s father had been a popular composer and band leader, hence her musical gift. A friend of Kainz’s and Mahler’s, he was still remembered with fondness, and accounted one of the last in the old Austrian tradition. Some of his melodies had the status of folk songs and lived on long after their creator. I had known him. I distinctly remembered this fine, sensitive man. He had a particular sort of lovable mockery about him; lovableness was one of his prime characteristics. When I talked about him, Bettina’s eyes lit up. She adored her father more than anything.

Something I noticed about her that very first evening was a kind of laughing cheerfulness. Oddly, I reacted to it with hostility, as though I thought it was somehow improper to be so blithe and cheerful, in contradiction to the age and the world. Just like her father, I crabbed at her in thought, always light, always in waltz time. Every passing jest caused her to laugh her pearly laugh. At times the whole room rang with her laugh, which infected the others and spread a sort of sheen. That bothered me as well. I wonder why? As a child I had been prone to fits of gloom, when I saw some other boy eating a piece of bread and butter and I myself was without. When I gradually loosened up and responded to her levity, as much as I could, it was still with the grim reserve of a schoolmaster, anxiously intent on preserving his dignity when confronted with some prize pupil.

A couple of days later I ran into her on the tram, and we fell into conversation right away. Again I took her lively cheerfulness as a sort of challenge, because it was in such contrast to me and the people I was used to. I had the absurd feeling she wanted to catch me off guard. It really was an absurd feeling: there was nothing of the sort in her mind. I can remember watching in astonishment when her stop came, and she said goodbye, and I saw her cross the street. It was her dancing walk that caused me to be astonished. Is it lawful to walk like that, I thought, and I wrapped myself in my sour mood as in a fur wrap I had merely cast aside for a few moments, because it was warm.

I don’t remember how it was that shortly afterwards we started meeting and going for walks together. I think I must have suggested it; perhaps I telephoned her. But I can’t say what prompted me to do so. It’s often the way that the origins of earth-shaking developments remain so obscurely trivial that they can’t even be identified afterwards. It was a tone of voice, a look, a movement of the hand, a smile, a casual word; I can’t remember. Nor can I remember if it happened after we had known each other for a short time or for longer, that I gave her the proof of my new novel to read — the book that represented my breakthrough. It was a novel about a town, a provincial town in the middle of Germany, all of a piece, balladesque where the characters were concerned, and, like most of what I have written, sombre in its mood but with plenty of popular touches, which explains its subsequent success. It was my dues to my German background, a sort of physical tribute to the German people — a war book in a certain sense, since I wasn’t permitted to bear arms myself.

As I say, I am unable to recall the circumstances in which I presented it to Bettina, but I have a pretty good recall of what she said about it once she’d read it — not least because it was not at all what I’d expected her to say. I had hoped she would be enthusiastic. With my naive author’s vanity I hadn’t doubted she would be, knowing as I did that she had followed my output to date and openly declared herself to be part of my devoted readership. That had helped overcome my initial resistance to her, I may as well admit, even though it doesn’t say much for my objectivity. Now, though, instead of the enthusiastic endorsement I had hoped for, I encountered a disconcerting dryness. I had yet to meet a woman with such high standards. Accustomed as I was to Ganna’s unbounded admiration, forever expressed in superlatives, I found myself unhappily impressed by Bettina’s brave reservations. She didn’t deny that parts of the book moved her, some of the characters convinced her, but overall it was too heavy for her — not intellectually, but in its feeling and construction, too heavy and — the word gave me pause — too barbaric even. There was of course no comeback to that, but a man wants to justify himself, to explain; and I can still see the strangely firm and alert expression of her blue eyes when I told her what I had intended. She understood me straight away, her intellect really was extraordinary; and what most struck me was her intuitive grasp of rhythm, of the subtlest nuances and harmonies. But she would not be reconciled to the petty bourgeois world I laid out; it was too involved, too full of masks and ghosts, not elevated enough, too fusty in its eroticism, too befogged, too straitened. It was at this time that she came to speak of the opposition between the Austrian and what was now held up as German, and what to her and her friends was neo-German, also of the condescension and criticism with which the Prussians responded to Austrian form, lightness, softness and urbanity: that was more than she could stand. I listened to her, I looked at her, I said to myself: not only is this woman the daughter of an artist, she is an artist in her own right. Yes, she was, through and through, in every fibre of her being, in every breath, with a force and a consequence I had yet to find in a woman. No wonder she soon became my confidante and friend. Our relationship was based on nature and on my spiritual situation.

Now I have something odd to say. For a long time I remained ignorant of the nature of my understanding with Bettina. I couldn’t even have said if I liked her as a woman or not. When I very gradually, in my obtuse way, discovered that I loved her, I saw to my astonishment that I as yet felt no trace of passion for her. And when my love finally took me over, body and soul, heart and spirit, I still believed in some sort of sublime comradeship, without consequences for the future, without entailing any commitment. How could such a thing be? It had never happened to me before. Perhaps it was because there was nothing darkly grasping in her, nothing that wanted to conquer and possess, nothing that insisted on vows and promises; she simply left me in my freedom, and waited calmly and patiently for whatever might be. Perhaps because she wasn’t cramped and addicted and greedy and purposeful, consumed by some splendid notion of what it was that would make and keep her happy. It was this, the lightness and cheerfulness, which I had initially rejected so grimly, that now entered my life, changing all its stresses and emphases. There was always something about the others that hadn’t been right — their corporality or their views or their characters or their preferences or their sense of life — and I had always ended up feeling beached and washed up. Here, not only was everything right, but with each new day it made more sense. It was like finally looking up after decades under a louring grey sky and seeing blue overhead, an almost cloudless blue. Sometimes I would reflect in alarm: will things stay the way they are? Can they? Won’t she absorb the poison of my darkness into herself?

ONE NOVEMBER EVENING

For a long time Bettina refused to come to our house. Since there were people who refused to see anything in me except a man who breakfasted on young virgins, at first it was her self-respect that kept her from running to me dutifully like a little dog that comes when called. That was how she put it mockingly, later, once. Also, I had neglected to ask her husband as well when I invited her, and she took against me for that. Then we had a proper soirée once at which Paul Merck, and the Waldbauers, and some other friends turned up. They only thawed out a little once Ganna, who didn’t feel easy among such people, had withdrawn.

Bettina didn’t like our house. She didn’t talk about it, but I could sense she didn’t. She shivered when she set foot in it. Sometimes I would ask her why, but she would only shake her head. The fact that the rooms didn’t appeal to her, that there was something extravagant about the layout — that seemed clear, in the light of her conservative tastes; but I was afraid that it might be the lady of the house with whom she couldn’t get along. And so it was, she was unable to keep it hidden from me for long: Ganna was for her the strangest creature under the sun, and when I tried to explain to her what great moral and spiritual qualities Ganna in my view had, she would hear me out in silence with a curious, patient expression in her eyes, but without once demurring. She would never have permitted herself to take such a liberty.

And yet I knew her to be an exceptionally acute observer — to the degree that I was sometimes left gawping like a small boy at the speed and certainty of her judgements when she explained some sequence of events, with details of which I had registered precisely none. Nor was she one of those people who dine out on such a gift. She was able to keep her silence until speech became a matter of urgency. Also, she saw and heard many things that she had decided, for one reason or another, not to hear or see. From the choice of what she observed or didn’t observe, registered or allowed to pass, it would be possible to construct a pretty detailed description of her character. For example she knew, as everyone knew, that Ganna didn’t just allow me to deceive her (Bettina called it ‘deceive’, even though there was really no question of deception, in view of my modus vivendi with Ganna), but even used to brag about my adventures, as a way of indicating to anyone who cared to hear that all other women were nothing but provisionally favoured courtesans compared to her. Bettina knew this, and simultaneously tuned it out in her awareness. She did so, as it were, in the name of all women who were offended thus, including even Ganna. It was her view that it was too humiliating to people not simply to ignore the way they chose to lower themselves. I, with the rotten attitude of a libertine I affected at that time, shrugged my shoulders and thought Ganna’s attitude had something to be said for it.

Unluckily (unluckily for me, because I was anxiously set on keeping Ganna high in Bettina’s esteem), the following once happened in Bettina’s presence. Ganna had dinned it into the maid to check that Elisabeth’s piano teacher didn’t end a lesson early, as she had reason to fear she might. When she was told the young lady had left the room eight minutes before the set time, she hurried out into the corridor where Bettina was just slipping into her coat and confronted the trembling piano teacher. ‘I insist on proper time-keeping,’ she barked. ‘I pay you to come on time and leave on time. If that’s too much for you, then you can save yourself the bother.’ I have to say, it was like water off a duck’s back to me, I was much too inured to such scenes. A man deadens; I had heard it too often. But Bettina went pale. ‘I pay you’: to say those words to a fellow human being! She felt giddy. Much, much later, when she recalled the scene to me, she confessed that she felt like seizing Ganna by the wrist and calling: ‘Woman, woman, get a grip on yourself! That’s no way to behave!’ I didn’t really get it. For me it was an outburst, nothing more. Ganna’s just like that, I would comfort myself and others; you have to take the rough with the smooth. And so I failed to see, wouldn’t see, what was brewing.

I say that, and yet I knew all the time that the situation was radically changed from what it had been before. From a certain point on, I could no longer show Ganna the sort of openness that during the worst times of our marriage had kept alive the illusion of an indestructible union, and had preserved Ganna in the faith that she was the presiding female presence in my life. I kept out of her way. I lowered my eyes. I was hurtful and cold. And above all: I neglected my marital obligations entirely. That had never happened before. There had always been some leftover scraps for Ganna: an hour of comfort, a little bribe of affection. Now it was no longer possible. Bettina made it impossible. Not that she had demanded or expected such a thing; not a bit. But her whole being was against it, a way of being in honesty and truth. A way of being that flowed into me as what was right for me and shaped me.

One November evening is caught in my memory like a scene of dread.

It’s late when I get home. I have experienced something wonderful. Bettina has played for me on her violin, the first time in the seven months I’ve known her. An entire Bach suite, ending with the chaconne. It wasn’t masterful; the ultimate per cents of the maestro were lacking; but how much song, how much sweetness, how much force and fire; and how secretly altered my pulse beat and my heart, as though I myself had been playing and had invented the rhythms. An unforgettable hour, which had shown me another Bettina hidden behind the cheerful child of the world.

And now the whitewashed walls of our hall, which is at the same time our dining room, stare at me soberly and the grotesque lamps threaten me with their outraged arms. Quickly in to see little Doris, to cast an eye on the little sleeper, quickly choke down a few bites of something, then on to work. But at the other side of the table sits Ganna, her eyes shining with reproach, her lips quivering, her arms folded, the whole woman a single mute accusation and indignity.

I ought to go. I ought to say goodnight to her and disappear up into my eyrie. My loitering just makes the q. and a. unavoidable.

‘Why are you so late? Where have you been?’

Of course she knows where I’ve been.

‘What’s the matter with you, Alexander? Have you forgotten me? Do I not mean anything to you any more?’

Then more urgent, pleading: ‘You spend all your time with that woman now. You’re practically inseparable, you and her. Complete strangers are talking about it.’

Still I don’t say anything. I stalk around and stare into the corners. Ganna continues:

‘You know I’ve nothing against you satisfying your urges? Have I ever shown myself ungenerous? But just because I am, I’m now being tortured to death.’

My silence provokes her. She wrings her hands.

‘Alexander, how can you! A man like you! That woman can do what she likes with you. Have you no pity?’

Another evening’s going to go to waste, I think; if I go out now and say a friendly goodnight, then she’ll be content, she has such an oddly selective memory. But I can’t. I can’t walk out and abort the brewing scene before it can get properly started. What stops me is fear. Naked fear. Let me explain, as best I can. Ganna has the frightful gift of unsettling my imagination. No one else has such an effect on me. That explains her hold on me, which, far from weakening, is getting ever stronger. She knows it too. She knows I’m incapable of leaving her alone to brood in solitude. If I am within hailing distance then it’s still possible that, in spite of the ‘selective memory’, she will manage to produce a catastrophe. That’s what the voice inside me tells me, even if I can’t say what manner of catastrophe it will be. After all, it would be enough if she smashes a mirror and wakes the maids in the attic with her shouting; it’s not out of the question that she will do herself a mischief. Everything is possible. From one instant to the next she will quite deliberately turn off her consciousness — it’s really quite extraordinary — and then be responsible for nothing she does. Once, in Ebenweiler, she ran out into a storm following an argument, up the mountain, and I had to get up a search party of hunters and farmers. Once something like that happens, it means the end of any chance of working for several weeks; the ability to do work is always somehow the first to go. That’s what I dread. What I’m thinking is this: hold things together at all costs, until the work in progress is done; after that my hands will be free and we can sort it out. Of course I’m deluding myself here. Because seeing as I plunge from book to book, like someone swimming for his life in the ocean, from wave to wave, it’s impossible to see when I could be able to ‘sort it out’. Still, this is how the notion came to be established in my brain that my presence is the only thing that will prevent Ganna from mounting a successful coup against my existence. (In a certain sense, this notion turned out to be perfectly correct.) At the same time, I know that my mere presence is sufficient to give Ganna the courage to go wild. What’s the way out of this dilemma? What reasonable man would leave a woman alone at a painful juncture, when he knows that her life feels dire and she will collapse into a bundle of misery? And so I turn myself into the object, the victim, of her emotional excesses. To avoid the theoretical worst, I accept what is truly unbearable. It’s like a sulphur cloud. Ganna pours out wild tirades against Bettina. I lose my calm. I shout at her. Which is exactly what she wants, to wrest me out of my equanimity — that’s her satisfaction and vengeance. The words fly back and forth like so many poison darts. The door opens silently. Elisabeth, startled awake, is standing in the doorway in her nightdress. In deep, half-asleep confusion she looks at her father and mother. The look of those child’s eyes! It condemns me for ever. I pick her up and carry her back to bed, with silent caressings. When I return to Ganna she is sitting there in tears. She at least is able to cry. I cannot.

GANNA DEFENDS THE FORTRESS BY MOUNTING AN ATTACK

There’s no mistaking it: a beaten dog doesn’t suffer worse than Ganna. Her world is askew. Her world is me. She can’t understand what’s happened. It’s as though the heart has slowly been cut out of her breast. At night she lies there sleepless, thinking about everything, her tear-dimmed eyes are incapable of seeing anything. She is pondering what she may have done wrong. Because, try as she may, she can see no fault in herself. She has always done her duty, she thinks, her intentions were always of the best. She thinks, if life is too much for two weak arms like hers, then one should have pity on her. My supposed ‘pitilessness’ skews her take on everything. An evil charm has taken me over, otherwise I could not have been able to forget her love and the fact that there is no other woman in the world who is so endlessly obedient to me. It remains her unshakeable conviction that I will never leave her — after all, haven’t I said so often enough, in so many words — she tells me with an alarming flaring of her eyes, but then why do I not take her by the hand and lead her out of the labyrinth of her great sorrow? And she builds herself a little hope. I am just setting a test for her, she thinks; I am testing her craft for buoyancy. Surely it doesn’t need such an extreme test, not such a heartbreaking one, she says with the charmingly innocent smile that her face still, on rare occasions, breaks into; I need only indicate to her now and again that she would be my Ganna again, once she has passed the test, take her for a walk again as she yearns to be taken, say something sweet and affectionate to her, as in former times. She is continually perplexed at the wrong-headedness of men. They could have it so easy with women, but they go about it so badly. But this philosophical musing about ‘men’s’ foolishness does nothing to alter the fact that her breast is burning with woe, and I am standing there like St Sebastian, shot full of arrows …

Then why this sudden agitation, this panic, this dread of losing me, after so many years of benign indifference to my infidelities, as she termed them? It hasn’t escaped her attention that everything is different with other women. So she finds herself confronted by a conundrum. What can be so special about this Bettina Merck, she asks herself — sometimes she asks me as well. She studies her. She wants to be fair to her. But she fails to see the attraction. To her, Bettina is neither beautiful nor intelligent. If only she were at least intelligent. Nor is she even in the first flush of her youth. Evidently (thus Ganna full of woe) she avails herself of cunning amatory arts; I in my simplicity and straightforwardness fail to see through them; she is endlessly subtle; subtlety is the thing; I wish I could learn to be it, but I am too honest for that; besides, she’s an unscrupulous man-chaser who doesn’t care what the world thinks of her. Or she bores, like this: she’s the lucky one, a wealthy background; husband away at work all day; nothing to worry about except how to do herself up, and what instructions to give her cosmetician and her hairdresser; whereas I, worked to the bone, with no time to think of myself. Didn’t I always say so: I should be hard, unscrupulous, stop at nothing, deny the heart or soul in my body — with a man hungry for experience and sensation it never fails …

I repeat these litanies of thought because I heard them not only in occasional remarks and suggestions, but because they were familiar to me from the deepest insights one can have into human nature. The interesting thing about them is the perpetual division, the sharp alternations between light and shade, understanding and doltishness, fear and loathing, foolishness and impetuosity, suspicion and self-doubt. If her thinking had been less scatty, her emotion less erratic, then it would never have knocked her over. But her inner distractedness extended even to her pain, so at disconnected moments that were drifting like pieces of cork on an agitated sea, she was capable of being good and cheerful. Admittedly, the intervals when she was permitted to sit there half-extinguished and dream, and paint herself a rosy future, grew ever fewer and further between. Blow after blow was delivered to her psyche; life bared its teeth at her. It cut her to the quick when she learned that I had read part of my new work to Bettina and her friends. The fact that I hadn’t asked her to come, even once, aroused the bitterest envy she had ever felt, worse than any physical jealousy. She felt rejected and snubbed. But it was unfortunately the case with me that I didn’t want Ganna as an audience, because my friends didn’t want her. Ganna was unbelievably alien to them. She didn’t follow the rules, she didn’t know the routine, she was jarring. Nothing was said, but it was abundantly clear to me. I suffered for Ganna, with Ganna. There was nothing to be done. And then Ganna and Bettina in the same room, and me in the middle, even only as a voice — that would have been a lethal discord. To ease Ganna if only a little bit, I took refuge in a lie: her reactions and her judgement were so important to me, I claimed, that I had to be alone with her, I needed the immediate and undisturbed connection. Even though she didn’t altogether believe me, she did half-believe me, and maybe that got her over the worst, for a little while at least. But since it could only be for a while, in a deeper sense my lie was more cruel and traitorous than the most unsparing truth could have been.

If Ganna had been only a very little more sensible, if she had known a little more restraint and self-discipline, then it would not have been quite so hard for me to inculcate my friends with a little understanding for her baroque, volatile and unconventional ways; though there were other, more destructive traits of hers I was still in awkward denial of myself. But Ganna will do everything to make herself detested or, more, feared. Such tiny hands, and what is there they can’t uproot; such tiny feet, and what can’t they trample! One day she dashes over to the telephone, asks to be put through to Paul Merck, and tells him she has heard his two daughters have chickenpox and that in these circumstances our doctor thought any association between our respective families was unadvisable. And she closed with these incredible words: ‘Mr Merck, kindly keep your wife from seeing my husband until there is no longer any risk of infection.’ Paul Merck, who was a gentleman, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Forgive me,’ he stammered back, ‘I’m not in the way of telling my wife what she can and can’t do.’ He put aside the earpiece like something red-hot, so Bettina told me later, picked up a thick periodical and in his rage tore it into little scraps — something an athlete would have had trouble doing.

Cold shivers ran down my spine when I got to hear about this, and the next time I was with Paul Merck I went to great lengths to come up with some extenuating circumstances for Ganna.

Indeed, I went further; I spoke about Ganna’s eccentricity, her feminine genius, her rare spiritual and human depth, and talked myself into such a lather that both Paul Merck and Bettina were reduced to looking at me in silent astonishment. In the end, Merck was unable to suppress a sceptically amused smile, but that only heightened my advocatory zeal. In Bettina’s face not a muscle moved, there was no trace of doubt, or curiosity or sympathy. I might have been talking about some woman in New Zealand.

In the meantime, Ganna had decided to approach Bettina directly. She’s a sensible woman, was Ganna’s thought; perhaps she’ll understand my position. It did feel like going straight into the lion’s den but, convinced as she was of her superiority, she thought success was pretty certain, and so she had herself announced one day at Bettina’s house. Bettina approached the meeting with trepidation but gave no sign of it, greeting Ganna with the politeness with which she received any visitors to her house. She told me about the conversation later, but it was many months before she included certain details she wanted to spare me, under the depressing first impression.

A daintily laid table, tea prepared in accordance with a tested recipe, a plate of freshly cut sandwiches — the times would have allowed or expected nothing less, but in Ganna’s eyes it is a feast. She is starving. She looks wretched, tired and tormented. Her dress is at least three years old and fits her badly. Bettina feels a profound sympathy for her, prevails on her to have something to eat, keeps refilling her cup. Ganna eats and drinks. Her eyes scan the room. She appraises the tasteful furnishings with a woebegone demeanour.

‘Yes, you have good taste all right,’ she says sadly to herself, ‘there’s no denying that. But it all takes time.’

Gently Bettina indicates that she doesn’t think it’s a mistake to have time, or to take time.

‘No, but it leads one to have too strong a sense of one’s own interests,’ Ganna delivers the pedantic and well-prepared counter.

That depended on the nature of those interests, Bettina observes coolly. Ganna laughs, a little shrilly.

‘Well, as far as yours are concerned, I would imagine they are largely confined to your person,’ she says. Bettina is astounded to be offered so much insight into her nature so quickly.

‘I can see from Alexander how easy it is to fall for such frippery,’ Ganna continues; ‘ever since he met you, he’s become terribly pernickety; he used to be so modest, now all of a sudden he knows where to go and buy ties and he demands — it’s hysterical, really — that his trousers are pressed every week. I could die laughing.’

Bettina doesn’t understand quite why it should be funny, but is agreeable enough to chime in with Ganna’s rather forced laughter. Ganna thinks the moment has come to cut to the chase.

‘Frau Merck,’ she says, and her voice has a palpable edge to it, ‘please don’t suppose you can capture my husband with such blandishments. Oh, no. Better women than you have tried. Please understand — I’m telling you this out of niceness, to put you in the picture, in case you don’t know — my marriage to Alexander is a rocher de bronze. Alexander will never divorce me, not under any circumstances. My mind is perfectly at ease on that score. Don’t deceive yourself. I am not at all worried. All I want is to prevent you from entertaining false hopes.’

Bettina needs a little time to collect herself. Such a thunder-shower of horrors has never, in all the time she can remember, fallen on her. Once again she has the sense she needs to call out: ‘Woman, watch your mouth! Stop and think. You can’t talk to people like that.’ She forces a smile and replies as one might to a raving child:

‘I’m sure you’re right, Ganna. But there’s no need to tell me that. No one intends to take Alexander away.’

Ganna emits a sound like a menacing gurgle. ‘I don’t advise it either,’ she says coarsely, concludingly, and gets to her feet.

Bettina walks her out into the hall and helps her into her coat. She sends her regards to the children. Ganna is moved. She departs with gushing thanks. She has no idea how badly she has behaved. She carries her head high and takes pleasure in her victory. Once she’s alone, Bettina has a fit of vertigo. She pulls open the windows. Her feet are ice-cold, her nails are blue. She is chilled to the marrow. She goes into the bedroom, gets undressed and falls into bed. She feels a deadly wretchedness all day. She tries to forget the awful events. She has to get rid of them. She won’t keep them. When she told me about the visit a week later, she was still shaking, trembling, a-chill.

CIRCE

Since all my previous relationships fizzled out after a year, two at the most, Ganna — though at a greater level of upset than at other times — still waited with reasonable confidence for this one to end too. When the end refused to come, she was completely unhinged. Grim old superstitions awoke in her. Sometimes she expressed, perfectly seriously, the suspicion that Bettina must have slipped me a magic potion. Anyway, the danger of a lasting bond seemed so great to her that she thought of ways and means of freeing me from Bettina’s toils. This was the basis of one of the most durable Ganna fictions, to which she resorted to keep herself afloat a little longer: that in her view I was trapped in a most reluctantly borne erotic dependency in which I was tormented by the longing to free myself from the bands of this heartless Circe, and sink back into the much more dearly beloved Ganna. Only my cruel seductress wouldn’t submit, she made me dozy with her sex potion and robbed me of my manhood to the extent that I even slandered my Ganna to her, which was all the easier as Circe of course had contrived to reinterpret all Ganna’s virtues as vices. But this relatively bland fantasy wasn’t enough for Ganna. By and by she became convinced that Bettina had had a hand in the forced sale of the meadow; and not her alone, but the whole of the ‘Waldbauer set’ had been involved, given that the sole desire of these people and their hangers-on was to slander Ganna and take me away from her, and utterly to destroy her.

This farrago of evident nonsense was proof against all arguments; no evidence, no straightforward appearance of things, no amount of pleading or imploring or head-shaking helped; it grew and grew, linked itself to other conspiracy theories, turning the air I breathed into a dirty soup and blackening the sky over my head.

BETTINA’S AND MY CULPABILITY

I ought really to write far more about Bettina than I have so far, but it’s not easy. My every picture of her straight away moves into such intense close-up that I am unable to make out any outline and am confined to listing, step by step, what changed in me and in my life through her entry into it. I hope that may give a clearer impression of her nature than if I were to cover pages with her qualities, her looks, or her various moods. The actual person with whom you live is bound to be, in a curious way, invisible, in just the same way as you yourself are invisible; all you can do is sense their presence, feel them within you, and in turn expand in them. The word love, compared to that, has little meaning.

It’s clear that, from the very beginning, Bettina’s marriage gave me much to ponder. Without our ever expressly talking about it, it seemed clear to me, and accepted, that in this matter she would not lower herself to half-measures and dishonesties. By and by I was able to make out how things stood between her and Paul. Basically, it was all very straightforward. They had fallen for one another when they were very young, and had got married, almost on a trial basis. They hadn’t fared too badly. Early on there had been a few blameless contretemps, and then they had sealed a compact and were now living harmoniously with and alongside each other. For a little while now, both had had the feeling their relationship was nearing a new status and clarity. They often discussed it, amiably enough, neither wanting to make trouble for the other. Bettina had no money: ‘I went into marriage like a church mouse,’ she once told me, ‘and if I have to, I’ll leave it in exactly the same way.’ Another time she said: ‘Marriage isn’t a form of public welfare: you decide what to do about the children — for their sake, if nothing else — and apart from that, why should I be concerned with the man who doesn’t want me any more, or I him?’ To be light-footed and free, that was all that mattered. Some friends who watched as she span her thread were inclined to describe her as trusting to providence. But that was probably a highfalutin way of putting it. She was, quite simply, not one to feel sorry for herself. She wasn’t afraid of life. She didn’t need a man with money to pay her way. She scorned the idea of security.

Those months in the city were hard for both of us. It was the time the carnage of the Great War was getting going. The belief that people were suffering for a just cause was being eroded from every side, and was soon to collapse altogether. Men dear to me, who had gone out with enthusiasm, returned wrecks in body and soul, useless for any occupation. At the Somme a half-brother of mine died, whom I had loved dearly in his youth. No letter, no farewell, just a silent death. Inflammatory lies from above and below and beyond the frontiers ground up my heart. The rich with their plenty, their bacchanalian orgies, offered a contrast not to be outdone in its brazenness. While they danced and whored the nights away, armies of mothers stood outside the bakers’ and butchers’ shops, patient files of lemurs. Many a time, Bettina and I would find ourselves wandering through unlit suburban streets; we were numbed by the extraordinary weight of misery. Once again, by letter and in person, I asked to be taken into the army; my petition was settled when I fell victim to a chronic gall-bladder colic. But for Bettina’s close participation in my life and work, I wouldn’t have known what to do with myself. ‘Is it permitted for two people to live for each other like us?’ I asked her anxiously. ‘Isn’t it tempting fate? Two wretched humans seeking to put off the end by a moment or two of snatched happiness; as if that were the point, and waking wouldn’t be the worse for it …’ Bettina didn’t bite. In her humility, she didn’t bite. There was a bird of ill omen that used to scream at night in the garden behind her house; she had called him Giglaio, in imitation of his cry, and when she heard him her every drop of blood would freeze. Luckily she had the blessed gift of forgetting bad and ugly things, that was the obverse of her courage; and when the first green shoots would show above the ground, and the sun rose above a certain gable, she would be desperate for spring and slowly climb out of winter, and the darkness and sickness associated with it. Evidently she had her own darkness in her as well. So-called cheerful people often have much darker hours to endure than self-proclaimed pessimists.

At the beginning of summer we were able to free ourselves from our melancholy existence in the city. It had become a regular thing with us that we would spend the weeks from early June to mid-September in Ebenweiler. Ganna would arrive with the children in July, after the end of the school year, but the weeks Bettina and I had the place to ourselves were the happiest of the year. There, in the valley that had become home to us, we were allowed to forget the world in flames. We weren’t mocking the war; rather it became subsumed in nature. When the guns’ thunder boomed up to us out of the south, it sounded like God’s anger about a humanity that vandalized His creation; the glaciated peaks were like bolted green gates at which human dying stopped. Everything belonged to the two of us, the forests, the lakes, the bridges, the white footpaths. There were starlit evenings when the trembling firmament sprinkled golden flakes on the bed of our love, and rainy nights that seemed they must quench all the flaring hatred of the world. I wandered back and forth, between Bettina’s house and mine, at all hours of night and day, in the evening when the cows were watered, in the morning when the farmer sharpened his sickle; the day was called Bettina, the night was called Bettina, Bettina was the whole of life.

But when Ganna is there, that all needs to be paid for. She arrives with endless boxes and cases, bags and bundles; each child has to have its own personal toys, she packs books for any whim she may have, there is enough there for five years of solitary confinement. I reproach her for bringing so much clobber, for the inundation. But that has the opposite effect: why should she have to do without, she asks feistily; where are her ball-gowns and her hats and her fourteen pairs of shoes, would I have the kindness to point them out to her? Is she to do without her deckchair? Her Schopenhauer? Behold the man set on putting his wife on the equivalent of bread and water!

I had often beseeched her to stay away from Ebenweiler. Didn’t she have her lovely house on the edge of the city, couldn’t she just send me the children on their own, with their governess? She dismissed the idea haughtily. She refused to be displaced. She was the lawful wife. ‘Do you want me to make it even easier for you and your mistress,’ she hissed, ‘so that people might think I’d given you over? No, I’m not going to do that person such a kindness. What you are doing to me cries out to high heaven in any case!’

That first summer, Bettina had taken a farmer’s cottage a quarter of an hour away. It had been poorly thought out, taking somewhere within such easy range for Ganna. But she fell in love with the place, and not until the fourth summer did she decide to move to another house at the far end of the valley. For too long we failed to see our mistake in choosing as a refuge a place where I had had many years of business connections and was so to speak a public figure. But the landscape was more precious to me than any other; I owed it, in addition to my physical base, everything that nature in the form of atmosphere, water, stone and vegetation can give a sensitive and creative man; I could think of no other refuge and, had I done so, Ganna would have followed us there anyway. It was here, if anywhere, on the basis of my acquaintance with the locals, that we could hope to escape the otherwise unavoidable anathema and be a free couple.

Ganna accepted the advantage that was offered her. The fact that Bettina and I were flouting the bourgeois order represented a triumph for her. Her martyred expression appealed to the sympathy of others. If she had been a little less assiduous in creating a following, a Ganna party, then she would have had even more followers. Inevitably, there were circles in which Bettina was vilified. Cold glances brushed her; tongues wagged behind her turned back; slanders flung up in the air like rubbish when a wind strikes it. Every second or third day some bossy missive of Ganna’s, some peremptory note, was delivered to her. She ignored them. She refused to dignify them with her attention. With hasty stride she walked on, her ankle spattered by a little filth. What did it matter? The local ladies didn’t invite her to their jours and cut her when they meet; doesn’t bother her. She barely notices. Sometimes she feels a little jab; a person has their pride, they know who they are, but it’s soon overcome. The sight of a flower bed, half an hour on the violin are enough to cause her to forget it altogether. She is not the sort to lower her eyes in front of people. She has no comprehension of meanness, no ear for gossip. A timid acquaintance feels obliged to counsel her to be careful; surely there was no need for her to appear in public with me so much. She replies: ‘Why not? How else are we going to get people used to us?’

It remained the place where we were vulnerable. We should have been more discreet, more considerate, more thoughtful. We shouldn’t have rubbed Ganna’s nose in our happiness. That only stung and provoked her. We made ourselves guilty, incurred an obligation that in later years was called in, in full, and with usurious rates of interest. If Ganna still had any sense then of womanly dignity, we choked it mindlessly, and in the intoxication of being-there-for-each-other we didn’t listen to the voice of reason. Of course, I had long since despaired of Ganna, thoroughly and comprehensively despaired, I should long ago have given up the idea of making her any sort of helpmeet; isn’t that how things had been for fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years now; and shouldn’t I, either by determination or by kindness, with every conceivable sacrifice have cleared things up instead of — through weakness and timidity and a conscientiousness born of cowardice — dragging myself along at the side of a woman to whom I had nothing more to give — or she me — or to become. And Bettina in her loftiness, her aversion to everything murky, divided, difficult or grim, shut her eyes and walked wilfully past. Yes, it took boldness, it took strength, there was a noble stubbornness to it, but it accomplished nothing and didn’t help. It merely sowed more destruction.

The way individuals live together. The truth of each individual is only the truth of his own narrow perspective. The entirety of mankind and of human qualities is always seen through a prism, where its colours are broken. Observation is so utterly different from experience; there is no hope of fusing their contradictions, as the I and the not-I have been foes from the world’s beginning.

THE CASE OF KLOTHILDE HAAR

No question, it was the Klothilde Haar episode that finally killed off whatever hope there was of my achieving peace with Ganna. The months leading up to summer 1919 that I spent with her were sheer nightmare.

While the Dual Monarchy was collapsing and being torn to shreds; while Germany was racked by revolutions and contorting itself into cramps; while the charnel smell wafting over from the battlefields was poisoning the cities and the influenza epidemic seemed set to mow down whatever was left of youth and life; while hunger drove desperate men to crime and disappointment turned former willing sacrifices to bandits; while a new world came into being in the east and the old one killed itself off in the west with paper deals: while all these other things were going on elsewhere, Ganna in her little domestic state was turning things on their heads, piling discord upon discord, and making the lives of her loved ones into a private inferno, for the sole reason that she had the crazy obsession that Klothilde Haar was my and Bettina’s creature, paid and instructed to supplant her, Ganna, in every way.

Mlle Haar had joined our household shortly after Doris’s birth. She was a woman in her mid-thirties, a chilly, morose creature, neither very industrious nor especially trustworthy. But at the outset, Ganna had been unable to find sufficient praise for her qualities, mainly because Mlle Haar absolutely doted on the baby. I have to say such passions are not unusual among carers; it doesn’t mean they have a scrap of affection for any living being.

Circumstances forced me to take a hand in the household; the difficulties were such that Ganna could not deal with them on her own. I had made the mistake of ignoring Ganna’s objections and according certain freedoms to Mlle Haar. For instance I had given her the keys to the larder and negotiated with her over the supplies of flour, sugar, rice and fat that she had purchased on my instructions. I could no longer stand to see the children going without proper sustenance; Ganna seemed to be quite incapable of laying in provisions — the acquisition of a kilo of butter was entirely beyond her in her unworldliness.

Once it turned out that Mlle Haar had connections to the black market, and offered to use them on our behalf, I grasped the opportunity with both hands and paid the asking price. This was enough to enrage Ganna because to her, in her lack of wants verging on asceticism, any expenditure on food and drink that went beyond the satisfying of basic hunger and thirst struck her as superfluous, if not criminal. In addition, the man who liaised between Mlle Haar and the black marketeers was himself her lover, a fellow by the name of Wüst, who had been in a reserve posting for every day of the war until it ended and now, like so many others, was looking to make a living. In the evening, under cover of darkness, he would lug into the house whatever he had managed to wangle in the course of the day; and then Mlle Haar would present me with the bill, an inflated one to be sure, barely sweetened by her unpleasant crooked smile.

The intercession and covert wheeling and dealing of Wüst had a poisonous effect on Ganna. She hurled foul accusations at Haar. Who for her part was not short of a word or two in reply. In the end, she threatened to sue Ganna for defamation. I told Ganna: ‘You mustn’t allow that to happen.’ She replied that a common thief like that would hardly go to law; why would she anyway, and lose out on the fat spoils I had, with my typical spinelessness, let her get away with. Haar, who always listened at every door, took sadistic pleasure in such scenes. She had conceived such a ferocious hatred for Ganna that it gave her another reason to cling onto her job, so as to relish the torments of her enemy. I in turn could not bring myself to send her packing, because at that time of the cessation of all idea of service I would have had no easy job in finding another nanny to look after the baby, whatever the rest of her qualities were. In addition, I was thrilled to have someone in the house who cooked properly and kept the household ticking over on a reasonable basis.

Distressing rows between Ganna and Haar became more frequent. Even at night they would suddenly begin; the screeching reached as far as my desk, forcing me to plug my ears with cotton wool. When Herr Wüst slunk into the house in the gloaming, heavily laden, Ganna would be lurking in wait for him and welcome him with insults. One day, when I was out of the house, the fellow had the nerve to lay hands on her; Ferry rushed over in defence of his mother; he was very strong; he knocked him over, tightened his hands round the man’s throat, they rolled around on the floor, and in the meantime Ganna called the police. Mlle Haar refused to leave the house without a written declaration of honour from Ganna. Ganna claimed Mlle Haar had stolen a crate of eggs. Mlle Haar complained to me; I told Ganna that, to the best of my recall, the eggs had been eaten. Ganna foamed with rage. Never in the history of the world had there been anything like this, she wailed, her own husband in alliance with the servants and their pimps — this was worse than anything I normally and daily did to her. But she knew, anyway, the heart of the conspiracy was Lady Merck, who had expressly taken on Haar and her fancy man to wreck her, Ganna’s, life; it was clear as day, the sparrows were shouting it from the rooftops. ‘Ganna,’ I appealed, shaking her. ‘Ganna!’ I drew her next door. ‘Ganna! Wake up! You can’t be serious!’ She looked at me blankly and replied: no, no, she was quite serious, she had evidence. ‘Evidence? What kind of evidence? Evidence for nonsense like that?’ She stayed mute and truculent.

The Haar business had got around the neighbourhood. One night a stone was thrown through Ganna’s window; another time the front door was smeared with excrement. Once, I was passing through a cluster of men; when I was past them, a high voice called out: ‘Chuck it in her face, the bitch!’ I locked the door behind me and the cry seemed to fill the hall, the stairway, the rooms; and when I sat down at my desk I saw it written on an empty sheet of white paper: ‘Chuck it in her face, the bitch!’

POETRY

I didn’t mention any of this to Bettina. I couldn’t bring myself to. Shame sealed my lips. To condemn Ganna was tantamount to condemning myself. But nor can I claim that Bettina knew nothing about it. What did she need gossip for? My silence was as transparent to her as tissue paper. I’m not the sort of man who can keep a secret. My moods, my experiences, even my thoughts are in plain view. Friends have often made fun of my futile attempts at discretion. And Bettina sensed what was happening in my life before I had even crossed the threshold. She didn’t need to ask me any questions. There was no point. What she wanted was to help me get over my depression and anxiety. It wasn’t her view that two people who love each other should spend all their time wailing and moaning. Better to ease it away. At that time, nothing so terrible could happen to her that it quite clouded over her sky; there was always a ray of sunshine somewhere. If you pulled yourself together, remained true to your better nature, didn’t give yourself airs, then the powers could be reconciled. With violin in hand, it might even be possible to secure some improvements from them; enough to live by for a while to come.

I can’t express how much it meant to me, this belief in a way out, in destiny, in the victory of goodwill over life’s glooms and travails. I watched her in astonishment and not a little envy. Everywhere were people who were well disposed to her and others whom she did everything to help: a poor seamstress for whom she found work; a friend who had returned from the war ill and infirm, and whom she tended and fed. She was always on her way somewhere or other to do something helpful and purposeful — not like a do-gooder, that wasn’t her at all, but more like someone who sees it as a challenge, almost a game, quietly to iron out some of the little kinks in fate. And for all that, I know no one who was as regularly and maliciously misunderstood, with her bonny blitheness and her honesty. It often gave me pause. Perhaps it was because she was too quick with words, too certain of her judgement and fearlessly coming forth with her own brave truths. Of course that was bound to upset a lot of people. It’s a good thing to have someone you can think about without being at loggerheads with them. An inexhaustible wealth of perspectives, when she would talk to me about her day, material for conversations deep into the night.

At that time I wrote a whole string of sonnets for her.

THE DECISION

And then, in the autumn, the great convulsion in my life began.

It was a mild day in October. We were returning from a hike in the mountains and sat down on a bench not far from the main village street, glad of the isolation that, along with the autumn, had returned to our beloved valley. We spent a long time gazing silently across the meadows, where the evening fogs were boiling up, when Bettina asked me whether I had given any thought to what would come of us during the winter ahead. I looked at her in consternation. It wasn’t immediately clear to me what she meant. ‘Well, what should be any different?’ I asked. She lowered her eyes. She said if that was my answer, then I might as well forget her question. I realized then that this wasn’t a trivial question popped at a peradventure, and now I did know what she was getting at. I had a bad conscience. I stammered a few scraps of phrases: I could understand … I’d often thought about it, of late … Then I fell silent. Bettina felt her way cautiously forward. Did I think it was right for us to carry on living with blindfolded eyes? … Was it proper that I went back to Ganna again, as I had every previous year?

‘Do you think it’s good? I’m not sure,’ she said.

‘What? What aren’t you sure of, Bettina?’

She plucked up all her courage. ‘I’m not sure I can do it. I’m afraid I can’t go on,’ she whispered.

I stared at the ground. My lips formed the words that were even now unthinkable:

‘Leave Ganna? Is that what you mean?’

Bettina had never explicitly raised the issue, but over the past few days I had had a sense that she was waiting for some initiative from me to relieve her. Only she couldn’t force herself to prompt me. Even now the yearning, the inner necessity for a decision were contained only in her agitated features, her expressive eyes. I had the feeling: now of all times, I mustn’t fail, everything is at stake.

‘What about the children?’ I asked. She laid her hand on mine.

‘The children, yes. It’s hard, I know. But I can tell myself, you’ve seen two grow up under your care …’

‘Doris needs me, Bettina.’

‘Of course she does. Well, you won’t lose her, will you? I’m sure she’ll want to spend as much time with us as possible.’

I heard only half of what she was saying, and that half with trepidation. I reproached myself for having let the children down. What is there more destructive than the presence of a mother taut as a wire, harassed, contradictory, at war with herself and mankind, ignorant of people? All the inner alarms are tripped, tenderness becomes a burden, punishment arbitrary, self-will fails to encounter the opposition it secretly hoped for, the kernel of the personality shrivels and, with some dim sense of its imperilment, conceals itself behind protective layers that don’t allow it to develop, but merely indurate it. And now I’m to leave them altogether, when the only thing shielding them from the worst was my presence?

Bettina said softly:

‘I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I’m just making a suggestion. The past four years have helped both of us to mature. It no longer feels right to me, to have our relationship as a sort of open secret. It’s no longer true and it’s no longer defensible.’

‘Of course I agree with you, Bettina. But Ganna will never agree to a divorce, never.’

‘This isn’t about a divorce,’ Bettina replied gently, ‘it’s about an act of cleansing, my darling. At least, for now.’

‘What?’ I asked in astonishment, ‘you could … you would agree … in front of everyone …?’

She smiled. The cat was out of the bag.

‘Even if I stop short of the official legal step,’ I insisted, ‘do you have any idea of what we’re letting ourselves in for?’

She nodded. She knew.

‘And where would we live? There? Not possible. She would … No, you don’t really have any idea …’

She had thought about it all. She detailed her plan to me. We would stay in Ebenweiler. We would keep out of sight. There was an old Court Councillor, Wrabetz, who owned a spacious and comfortable villa which she would let out to us for an affordable rent for the winter months. In spring, admittedly, we would have to move out to a farmhouse, and in autumn return to the villa. She explained it all to me with calm certainty, the way you lead a child’s thinking, while all the time indicating to me that she knew herself to be led entirely by me.

My glance erred between two visions, the one blissful, the other hopelessly grim. I felt paralysed. My years came over me to warn me. Forty-six years and the whole of my life; to turn them upside down, I said to myself, so radically that not one stone would be left on another. Instinctively I looked for counter arguments. I pointed out to her shyly that she wasn’t at liberty either. She made one of her astonishing gestures that made all speech unnecessary; in this case, it meant I will be free on the day I have to be free for you. That slayed me. I said I would write to Ganna, this very day. She seemed to approve, but I could tell right away that she didn’t approve. I asked her what objections she might have to such a course. She said her objection was obvious: I needed to speak to Ganna. Definitely, I conceded, but it was better if she was prepared; that would take the edge off her shock. Above all, she needed to see it in black and white that divorce was at issue. Bettina didn’t understand my anxiety.

‘Aren’t you in charge of your own life?’ she asked. ‘Who has a stronger claim than you?’

‘All the same. It’ll be ghastly.’

Bettina said it was wrong — yes, positively dangerous — to awaken any false hopes in Ganna; I mustn’t make any more promises. She kept saying ‘in my view’ when she was talking of the solution to a problem, but I had long since discovered that this view of hers was almost invariably the correct one to take, and in fact the only solution. If for no other reason than that I would have to see Ganna, to prepare the needful next steps in my house, she enjoined me (and with that it was also settled where I would stay during my time in the city) to stay not in a hotel but with a mutual friend, for the sake of appearances. This plunged me into a new round of terrors. It was so brusque, so precipitate and final in its consequences. (As if it could have been anything other than final!) If a true Alexander-Bettina axis was to be created, then it wasn’t possible for me to return to my former home, to resume living there as Ganna’s husband. Otherwise Ganna would never have believed that I was serious. I said:

‘You’re right, Bettina. You’re completely right. There’s no more putting this off.’

In spite of that, I continued to fight the idea privately. I didn’t have the courage to follow her advice and beard Ganna without a preparatory letter. I was in favour of a gradual approach. I was no Gordian like my namesake. What Bettina had in mind was something terribly simple: to make me happy, to be happy with me, to take some of the weight off my shoulders. Strangely, though, I felt wrong-footed. I had never seriously contemplated detaching my life from Ganna’s. It didn’t matter that it had felt to me like a failed life for some time now, and that I even understood it to be such. It must have been my innate antipathy to action that kept me from taking a clear decision. There are two types of human beings, the doers and the procrastinators, and I am a typical case of the latter. Associated with that is a certain phlegmatism that, while it isn’t absolutely identical with spinelessness, does tend to be associated with certain other negative qualities, such as attachment to comfort and habit. Novelty has an alarming quality for us. Please, no changes, no new battles in my day-to-day life, we say to ourselves, the old ones are bad enough. A philistine loyalty to things can also play a part; the house that has become a haven; the bed one has become attached to; the old brown desk with its ink-spattered green baize and its dozen or so familiar knick-knacks. Some relationships that are even stronger. Take my daughter, little Doris, who was so attached to me that her whole world seemed to revolve around me. How to break it to the four-year-old that her father was moving to a different house to be with a different woman? Might it not cost me the love of my little princess? Might she not forget all about me? Wouldn’t it become a trauma for her?

But such thoughts, gloomy as they were, were only clustered in the waiting room; within was my fear of Ganna. And that fear darkened my spirits so much that I didn’t dare confess it openly to Bettina. Ganna oppressed me, like an Alp on my chest. All-present, she filled my days and nights. Maybe what I took to be duty, and even now — even now — ‘mystical union’ was really based on habit, habitual tussling and bickering, dragging loads and paying off debts? Adventurous flight plans shot through my head, how I might get from one woman to the other. Bettina’s demand, that cleansing either-or, in my confusion struck me as a coarse intervention in my life. If she hadn’t been the dearest person in the world to me, to be without whom was something I could no longer imagine, I would probably have mutinied during the early days of my inner schism and, albeit crushed and broken, would have slunk back into my Ganna hell. Yes, if Ganna had been a rational woman, I thought, persuadable, changeable, if she had some access to the world, or the world to her — how wonderful it would be then to live with Bettina, how lightsome and glad one might be, serenity and joy at last. But the mere prospect of having to talk to Ganna was like a burning dread.

Still, I had made up my mind. Once the procrastinator has finally decided to act he tends to move with a somnambulistic clank in the chain of events, so that even a misstep can assist him. And since any author will tend to favour his written word, since a letter makes for a certain soothing of agitated nerves and needs fear no interruption, I sat down and wrote Ganna a long letter. First the contents. The impossibility of letting things go on like this. My emotional condition these past several years, the need for me to get out of my bleakness. Urgent plea to Ganna to help me, and not set her face in opposition. I closed with the solemn assurance that neither Bettina nor I was thinking in terms of a divorce, and that all we purposed was to link ourselves in a free association. This disingenuous attempt at calming Ganna was, as Bettina had predicted, a bad mistake, and the cornerstone of all the wretchedness and horror to come.

A few days later I went to Vienna. As agreed, I stayed with a friend of Bettina’s, Baroness Hebestreit, a young war widow. It wasn’t easy for me to be a guest in the city where my home and my children were. To Ganna, though, it was a kick in the slats.

UNENDING

She didn’t believe it. Yes, she’d read the letter, two times, five times, ten times, but what is a letter. She needed presence. A letter wasn’t presence. A letter is subject to recall or revision. A letter may be written under the influence of others, even under duress (and her certainty about this influence, this duress, turned into an incontrovertible fact in her brain which made it, again, the basis of the coming catastrophe). I had told her in a postscript that I would see her on Tuesday at noon; I was coming down on Monday. Announcing my visit seemed to her nonsensical. What was it supposed to mean? I was going to visit myself in my own house? Absurd. On Monday evening I telephoned her and let her know where I was staying. Now she had her presence: she knew I wasn’t with her. Her last illusions went crashing to the ground.

Once she had got over the initial shock she thought about what to say to her acquaintances, her in-laws, her sisters, her mother, the children, the servants. It was more than a calamity for her; it was a black spot. She had no idea how she could show herself to people, disgraced as she was. Although she comforted herself by saying it would only be for a matter of days, the staggering thing had happened: I had sought shelter for myself with strangers. The strangers would talk about it with other strangers, and with that she was doomed to dishonour.

In order to steal a march on the gossips, she had herself put through on the telephone to various men and women who were all very surprised to learn from her that I had returned from the country sooner than expected and, because of urgent and unforeseen repairs to the house, had gone to stay with Baroness von Hebestreit. Even though she was canny enough to slip in this fact with some other snippet of information, or some question she was asking, as if it were a casual matter, of course the very casualness put her interlocutors on guard. She followed the same method of correcting fate and eliminating reality with the children. They didn’t believe her either. When they heard that I was staying somewhere else in town they looked half-stricken. Probably they had been expecting something of the kind.

In all these undertakings and endeavours I can picture her in front of me, padding round the house in her felt slippers and speaking with lisping voice; how the knowing Ganna hid herself from the imperturbable Ganna, the one heartsore, the other burning with impatience; how she darted, eyes staring, to the telephone whenever it rang; how, after a given time, she paced back and forth in my study incessantly, magicked me back to my desk, drilled through me with her reproachful glances and under her breath muttered her tawdry imprecations that I’d heard so often — that woman … May God punish her … He will punish her children … I’ll destroy her … But there was yet another Ganna, who didn’t indulge herself in such shrewish speeches; her eyes ran with tears, and she wiped them away with her clenched fist. When I opened the door and stepped inside, she threw herself against me with a choked cry.

It’s not possible to record all the discussions I had with Ganna, not even to list them. Among the locations were: the library, the terrace, the garden, Ganna’s bedroom, the street; among the times were: morning, noon, evening and night. All together, they would make up an uninterrupted conversation going over many days. Put on record, they would represent the exhausting and perspectiveless efforts of two people to get something from one another that it wasn’t in the other’s power to give. One seeks to tear a band; the other, seeing belatedly how cracked and holey it is, wants to patch it. One wants to leave the cold hearth; the other claims the fire is still burning, a holy flame, to extinguish which were an act of godlessness. One is coming to terms with the past; the other won’t accept the reckoning and is whimpering for more credit. Conversations as old as the world, as sterile as pebbles, as agonizing as toothache. Here, they were given a new point and terrible amplitude by Ganna’s character and methods.

I had come to her with the best of intentions. In order to persuade her to willingly relinquish our union, I offered all the kindness of which I was capable. I spoke of the nineteen years of our living together and the obligations those years imposed on her; that she must on no account lightly destroy the memory of those years. Ganna agreed, but wondered why I should not be equally bound by such an obligation. I appealed to her understanding of my writing, my work. Indeed, Ganna countered, that was why she must hold me back from a step that would cause my intellectual ruin. ‘How can you say that?’ I burst out. ‘Aren’t you ashamed to be so presumptuous?’ She could trust her feelings, she replied gnomically; never had she erred when it was a matter of my welfare and the course of my life.

She didn’t understand. She didn’t want to understand. We got nowhere.

Never would I take away from her my friendship, I declared, if she showed herself equal to this hour of destiny. She was shaken. She howled. It was so hard, she said, so terribly hard. Of course it was hard, I put in, but she mustn’t deprive me of my right to manage my own life; she must have learned and read enough of me to understand that a man’s ordained path couldn’t be diverted by wantonly digging it up. She agreed, sobbing, but in the same breath reached for the argument that she had to fight for her children. To which I said they were my children too. Then she said: ‘But you don’t care about them when you’re blinded by passion.’ However insulting that was, I mastered myself and replied that the children weren’t going to be taken away from her any more than I was going away from them myself; if only for their sake she had to behave with dignity and humanity — they had already witnessed far too much in the way of quarrels and strife.

‘You’re to blame, it’s your fault!’ she cried.

‘Maybe so,’ I allowed, ‘even though there’s no single responsibility in these things.’

I put it to her that I wouldn’t easily get over my disappointment with her if she stuck to her unworthy perspective; surely she had the potential for good- and great-heartedness in her, she had read the poets, loved painting, loved philosophy; I believed in her, had always believed in her, but what had come of all that? She blinked in despair. She was so all alone in the world, she lamented, as she wrung her tiny, wizened, always-old-looking hands, she didn’t have a soul she could rely on. Solitude would strengthen her, I offered her Jesuitically; I needed her; I had a mission for her; distance would take the edge off the shadows and gild her sufferings. She was moved. She gave me her hand and promised with trembling voice to do all that I said; I didn’t know her; I had no idea of what sacrifices I would find her capable. I kissed her brow with gratitude. What I failed to notice was that my great effort at persuasion succeeded only in persuading her that she must not leave a man who addressed her in such lofty, deeply felt language. ‘What shall I do? Just tell me what to do,’ she whimpered. I: there could surely be no doubt about that. She: she would willingly pour out her heart’s blood for me, but there was one thing that in the name of God I must never ask of her: a divorce. I: she need only to relax her grip, bear the new condition with dignity and not burden me with a responsibility that was strictly speaking hers.

This last thing I should not have said; with that I gave her a recipe by which she slowly poisoned me. She had always been a loyal friend to me, she said, beginning again; there was nothing petty about her, not a bone in her body; others were, she wasn’t; and that other woman who made her suffer for no reason –

‘For no reason, Ganna? Now you’re tearing down everything we’ve just laboriously built up!’

‘Because you’re thinking of a divorce,’ she breathed, ‘and divorce would be the death of me.’

I caught her burning eye. In my foolishness, I thought the moment had come for me to remind her of the oath she had sworn to me on the lakeshore nineteen years before.

‘You swore by God to let me go if I asked; don’t you remember, Ganna?’

‘Of course, of course I do,’ she said, gulping.

‘Well, then, was that a meaningless vow?’

She cast her eyes down. She knew perfectly well that a vow given by an inexperienced girl couldn’t really matter, but at the same time she understood that, morally, it couldn’t be denied.

‘If you’re fair, you’ll have to admit that I kept my word,’ she said at last, with her martyr’s upward look (she had avoided the word ‘vow’ I noted), ‘or have you any complaints about the freedom you’ve been given, you Don Juan, you.’ And stroked my hand in a motherly sort of way.

It was unending. Ganna couldn’t get enough of the dispute. It was pleasure, pain, spur, hope. She talked the lungs out of her body. To secure an extension of the debate, she would appear to give ground at crucial moments only, an hour later, to take back all her concessions. When I left she would accompany me, often for long distances, tried to keep pace with me, to disarm my old complaint that she was too slow, and breathlessly blabbed out her reasons, false reasons, promises, complaints and litanies of my sins in ever new versions. She couldn’t understand what I saw in Bettina. Bettina was just a woman, and — quite honestly — no better than Ganna. Couldn’t I tell her what it was about her that had turned my head; perhaps she might be able to offer me the same thing; maybe there was some trick to it; she would try and learn it; she was willing to take instruction. Every night I fell into bed like a dead man.

THE COUNTER-IMAGE

Bettina had gone back to the city a week after me, to wind up her household. One evening I called on her in her apartment and found her in the half-cleared dining room in her furs. The weather had turned cold, and she had run out of wood and coal. Her children were already in Ebenweiler in the Wrabetz villa. I kept my own coat on. There was no need to tell her what was currently going on in my life. She knew it anyway. She could tell from looking at me. I asked after Paul. She said he had left. ‘Where to?’ I asked. ‘To the factory,’ she replied. I noted a brittleness in her, like an over-wound violin string, jingling. She had accompanied him to the station, she added; the train had left at half past five. Then she abruptly asked if I was cold. ‘Yes, I am,’ I said. She ran out of the room and came back with four pairs of cobbler’s lasts, which she took out of already packed pairs of boots. Kneeling down, she set light to a small pile of paper and put the lasts on it. Since they were made of hard wood they produced some heat after a while, and I praised Bettina for her skill. ‘Once we burn the table and chairs it’ll be quite cosy in here,’ I said. She smiled vaguely. I eyed her uncertainly. I wondered if she had had a falling-out with her husband and asked her how things stood with him.

‘How things stand? They don’t,’ she said.

‘How do you mean, they don’t? What did he say?’

She didn’t reply immediately; she got out a whole lot of empty boxes and crates, and fed them to the failing fire. Suddenly she said, with a strangely squeaky treble:

‘As of twelve o’clock today we are divorced.’

Bright tears sprang from her eyes and ran down towards her mouth. I stared at her. So, it is possible, I thought, real people can do it.

‘What about the children?’ I asked.

‘He left them with me. Of course.’

I stared at her and shook my head in wonderment and envy.

THE SUCCESSION OF FICTIONS AND PHANTASMS

One sleepless night, Ganna had a saving idea. Early the next morning she sent a messenger with a note to me where I was staying. She told me to come right away; she had something to tell me that would remove all our difficulties at a stroke. What was it? I couldn’t believe my ears. A ménage à trois. She meant it. She was besotted with the idea.

‘Oh, come on, Ganna,’ I said glumly, ‘that’s childish. What world are you living in? That’s not a serious suggestion.’

She was offended and perplexed.

‘Why not?’ she retorted. ‘Think of Count von Gleichen.’

References to fairy tales wouldn’t get us anywhere, I interrupted her in annoyance.

‘Fairy tales? I don’t see that at all. It’s just an example. Aren’t we modern people?’

‘If by that you mean an unappetizing combination of feelings and a ridiculous situation, then: no.’

Bitterly, she called me a bourgeois who didn’t have the courage to try out in his life what he was happy to promulgate in his books. I couldn’t remember exactly having set Count von Gleichen up on a pedestal, but that’s what Ganna seemed to think.

She persisted with her plan. While she stalked up and down excitedly, still unmade-up, in a grey woollen jacket whose sleeves went down to her knuckles, she talked wildly into space:

‘With goodwill, everything is possible; everyone has to make concessions in a case like ours; why should one person get everything he wants? My rights antedate hers; Bettina needs to learn to suppress her egoism; we have enough room in the house, God knows.’

I didn’t speak, picked up a book, flicked through its pages, and didn’t speak.

‘Let me talk to her about it,’ she went on enthusiastically, ‘if she’s not completely lost her head, she’ll surely see it my way.’

She had it figured like this: Bettina would take on external, representative functions that accorded with her ambition, while she herself kept the reins on the household; in the case of conflicts — but of course there wouldn’t be any, she had the firm resolve to be wise and considerate — in the case of conflicts, then it would be up to me to decide.

Even today I don’t know whether Ganna actually believed in that Gleichen idyll or not. There’s no point in racking my brains over it either, since there is no line to be drawn between her dreams and her doings; her special kind of imagination does without even that dream logic that the most garbled dreams have. Her dream world was perfectly autonomous. The events she moved among were products of waking deliriums. Each day afresh she started out on the fantasy of the ménage à trois, and with the subtlest arguments sought to present its advantages to me. In my impatient refusal she saw the effect of Bettina’s malicious whisperings. As if I’d so much as breathed a syllable of any of this, as if I wouldn’t have prayed for the earth to swallow me up if she ever got to hear of it; as if I hadn’t kept making superhuman efforts to conceal from Bettina what Ganna looked to me to do, so as not to betray the woman I had lived with to the woman I wanted to live with.

Once Ganna finally accepted the hopelessness of her endeavours, she presented things as though her noblest intentions had been undercut. Her logic went: if the two refuse the solution that she, Ganna, so selflessly offered, they must have compelling reasons, reasons that involve hurting Ganna, ruining Ganna. What could be more plausible than the suspicion that Bettina Merck had it in mind to acquire ownership of her house? She had already had that in view when she launched the Klothilde Haar conspiracy. I, so endlessly obliging, was the cat’s-paw in this, because that sophisticated Circe could wrap me round her little finger. Then Bettina will play the sole, exclusive mistress, will lead the life of a princess and send the vanquished Ganna packing. Yes, that’s the way things will be unless she takes timely counter-measures. So clearly could Ganna see the picture of a triumphantly enthroned Bettina in her, or Alexander Herzog’s, house that she would sometimes groan out loud and grind her teeth. When she heard that Bettina had quietly obtained a divorce, this (far from giving her pause as an example that might be followed) only confirmed her in her grim suspicion and she was filled with dread. Reality had slipped away from under her, but then again she didn’t really need it: everything was the way she imagined it in her free-floating fantasy. The house was in danger — the house, a concept that swelled in her mind to dream proportions, the concept of ownership, of rootedness, of security cast in stone.

And commensurately, so her readiness to share her dearest goods, man and house with her blood and ancestral enemy grew in her eyes to heroic proportions; and when she saw how curtly her offers were rebuffed, that gave her a stamp of nobility for all time.

Everything in Ganna’s mind marched to the beat of Ganna’s imagination. It wouldn’t permit any doubts: she was a model wife, an embodiment of kindness, punctuality and good order. Though wreathed in such qualities, she was slandered in my ears, and her ‘enemies’ have dug and dug until I could only think of breaking with her. Those same people who paid Klothilde Haar. Those same people who were able to foil her scheme to make me a millionaire with the meadow. Further, the conviction takes root in Ganna that for the past nineteen years we have lived together like two lovebirds and that no cloud has ever spotted the sky of our bliss. This conviction settles into a myth in her, like certain historical ‘events’ in history books. But since something seems to have happened in this lovebird existence for which Ganna isn’t to blame, someone else must be the guilty party. Hence continual poking around for guilt, questions to establish guilt, investigations of guilt, and no end. Phantasms and fictions come out of thin air. Ancient sayings, ancient deeds are produced in unrecognizable versions. Opinions are distorted, statements twisted, things a million miles apart are forced into a false pattern. An army of the envious, the malicious, the ill-disposed, the liars and intriguers appears over the decades, and surrounded by them a Ganna, like a seraph in the golden ether, keeping watch over her Alexander.

This was unrolled before me day after day, and day after day I was to account for myself, supply proofs, offer evidence. I wonder why I didn’t just go. Why did I not tie up my bundle, and up and leave? Hard to explain. I think there’s something wrong in my make-up. I am not capable of leaving emotional devastation in my wake. Either from softness, or from pity. After all, I have my fair share of selfishness. I am not an easy tolerator, no particularly eager helper, not a good giver; and before I decide on some act of kindness outside the area of my work, I have to get through every possible stage of caution and inertia. What operates here is different. It’s not a singular phenomenon, but present in accretions. First, there’s my sense of the simultaneity of actions, which has its seat in the nerves. The high degree of emotional vulnerability associated with this leads me to relocate myself in different times, in other rooms and beings in my imagination. And in such a way that I can see, hear, taste, touch, smell them, which necessitates further protective measures, which cost me more effort and more thought than any amount of real-life difficulties. At times, at my most desperate times, I remind myself of a surgeon who dithers and dithers over an operation and finally, madly, instead of anaesthetizing his patient, administers the morphine to himself.

But there’s another factor as well: there was an ethical imperative in me after all, a higher voice that refused to be silenced. There was this woman; whether she was inadequate or not, whether she had made her own bed or not, whether I, whether Bettina, whether the world as a whole approved of her way of doing things or not — it remained the case that I was tied to her. I had sworn vows to her; I was responsible for her in spite of all my words to the contrary; I had given her three children; she was an unstable, pathless, directionless woman who without me was lost. Could I really just quit her like that and go and start a new life (a new life — that most mindless of all expressions), without tidying up the old one after me? Not least hacking back that tangle of phantasms and fictions? It seemed possible to me. I didn’t know at the time that they had their own terrible autonomy and proliferation, these phantasms and fictions; that gradually, like the djinn in the Arabian story, they would grow to fill up the whole of the sky. I couldn’t get free. I wasn’t cold-blooded enough, not brutal enough. I wanted to save a piece of Ganna for myself. A memory, a stirring of gratitude, a sense of respect.

ON JOY

Week after week passed. For all my heart-constricting effort, an amicable solution was no nearer. I decided I’d had enough and would go to Ebenweiler, where Bettina had been waiting for me every day. I pack up my books, manuscripts, clothes, linen. Ganna watches me in distress; the children ask me barely audible questions. Then the hour of parting comes; Ganna accompanies me to the station. What to say to curtail, to abbreviate the pain of sundering? Ganna talks and talks, her throat is hoarse and dry, her words stumble over each other, she’s worried I may catch cold, afraid of a train crash, everything is so uncertain nowadays; she gives me dietary advice, she talks till the very second the train moves off. I look past her. She breaks into a trot alongside the carriage and waves. I never forgot the scene. It had something of Ganna’s whole being in it.

Seventeen hours in the train. In those days all transport was difficult. The carriage is filthy; it jolts and clatters like a post coach, the windows are boarded up, the rain comes in through the roof, the lights don’t work. I stare out into the gloaming; Ganna is running alongside and waving. And at night she’s standing outside the door of the compartment, begging to be let in, in her hoarse, floury voice.

Then Ebenweiler in the sparkling snow. The familiar scene has a new aspect. Its loveliness has turned to majesty. Bettina meets me at the station, her cheeks flushed with cold, her glaucous eyes shining with inexpressible happiness. We ride the sleigh to the house, buried in snow up to its doorknobs. The whole world feels like Christmas.

It had never occurred to me that a peaceable home and its well-ordered running could have something so intoxicatingly pleasant about it. I had never experienced such a thing. With this winter a long period of intensive work began for me, in spite of all the horrors I shall have to report on. In a certain sense, I was sheltered. Partly by the landscape, which struck me in light of a modest genius, always soothing, never arousing; but above all by Bettina’s careful, silent and apparently completely effortless attention to my welfare and my tranquillity. With her and in her company I felt as sheltered as if I’d been inside the mountain on whose flank we were perched. The end of the world and the Ganna war were a thousand years ago. In the intoxication of those early months, it seemed to me we had fused into that coupledom of which I had dreamed for so long as a kind of higher actualization.

Bettina’s two little girls initially kept their reserve towards the new head of household. The way children judge us grown-ups is among the most mysterious things there are anyway. Half-suspicious, half-reserved, they waited to see what would develop. My inexhaustible need for tranquillity, my sensitivity to all noise of voices and forms of disturbance were to them much like what leash and muzzle are to playful puppies. They could surely have held it against me that I was permanently out to curb their exuberance. They did not hold it against me. They also took me reasonably seriously; at any rate I found myself the subject of serious conversations which they had between themselves before going to sleep.

It was a bitter experience for me: in spite of the change in my outer life, I did not feel any more joyful. Or perhaps it would be better to say, joy was unable to reach me. When she came calling, I let her know that I was unavailable. No matter how long she stood outside my door, I didn’t let her in. This proved a disappointment for Bettina, the first in our new life together, and it grew from month to month. Naturally, Bettina asked herself what was the point of her if she couldn’t lift me off the surface of the earth, rootling vole that I was in her eyes. She had hoped to take flight with me. But how can you lift off with someone who does everything in his power to make himself heavy, nothing to lighten himself? She had imagined she might be my lamp, but how can you be a lamp when the one you are to light keeps insidiously blowing you out, because his element is the dark? It was moving to observe: when I was cheerful, when I happened to laugh, then her whole day was rescued; a smile from me and her heart would leap with delight.

But the times I was able to laugh and to smile grew more and more infrequent. Just as well that Bettina had so much of her own amusements, even though her supply occasionally threatened to run out. In a setting where all sued for my favour and begged me for a friendly glance, I became a remote and introspective hermit. And that was the only danger that Bettina had to fear for herself and her life, the lack of light, the absence of blue sky, the chain of days without laughter, without a smile. Then her violin could be nothing to her either, or music; no tunes came into her head and her whole world went silent. In one confidential hour, she told me about it. Not without apprehension. Her clear eyes couldn’t hide their fear. The very fact that I should have needed her to admit this to me shows my extraordinary obtuseness. I saw what it was about. I understood that I must not allow Bettina to wither. That at any price, I had to achieve the capacity for joy. And since it was Ganna who stood between me and joy, whose fault it was that I could no longer laugh or smile, so Ganna would have to be induced to restore to me my cheerfulness, my insouciance, my undaunted courage, whatever the price — because if not, then everything was wasted and I would lose Bettina.

But when a man is sitting on a powder keg, with a burning fuse leading up to its bung, then it’s not such an easy matter to laugh or to smile.

VARIOUS ALARUMS

First of all, there were the letters. Six, eight, ten pages in length. I can only say that a hail of molten lava would have been a refreshing spring shower by comparison. Ganna stretched out her arms 200 miles to reclaim her errant husband. Her words boomed out 200 miles away, demanding support, advice, comfort, in the name of the children, in the name of justice, in the name of undying love. Whatever wasn’t written down screeched, rampaged and wailed between the lines, behind the jagged, foolish, plangent letters. Lamentations, how sad it feels, living in a house from where the man has gone. Did it have to be this way, Alexander? Did I deserve to be thus kicked and trampled underfoot? That Doris was inconsolable without her father. That she was having trouble with Ferry and Elisabeth; how it was impossible for her to control two grown-up children on her own; how could I justify it to my conscience to leave her at such a critical time in her life, and with circumstances so brutal? Dreams, presentiments, horror stories. Little pinpricks: how so-and-so expressed surprise at the behaviour of a man whom he (or she) had hitherto deeply respected; how nice her sisters were being to her, how much sympathy she encountered, how much friendship was extended to her from every side …

Then the house, our lovely house, began to play up. The water mains burst, flooding the hall. The septic tank needs to be moved, the local council refused to connect the house to mains sewerage, the atmosphere was endangering the children’s health. During a storm one of the chimneys had blown over. A stove needs to be installed in Doris’s room, the heating system is inadequate and it’s not possible to get enough coke to burn in it. The builder presented a bill which she can’t possibly pay out of her monthly allowance. Nor can she keep up with the other bills, the deliverymen are driving her to distraction with their demands; what is she going to say to those people? My husband has gone away, she says, he’ll be back soon; but those people refuse to believe her, and sometimes they are downright insolent.

And with that I have come to the question of Ganna’s economy, her whole way with money, which was far and away the most striking aspect of her life and character. As we happened to be living in the middle of the Inflation, that ghostly phenomenon appeared right away in full force.

Indescribable, her rigid horror when the gigantic numbers turned up in her housekeeping book: 200 crowns for a kilo of butter; 50 for a dozen eggs; 500 for a pair of shoes; 2,000 in wages for tutors and domestics. Ganna in the battle with money that was ceasing to be real money, that melted away between her fingers, all the while there seemed to be more and more of it, that thumbed its nose at her with a number and sent her staggering with the lack of value of the number — all that instilled a nameless confusion in her, a total relocation of concepts and a growing panic in her calculations. Another week and the hundreds have become thousands, the thousands have become hundred thousands, and the hundred thousands are millions. When a chicken cost 80,000 crowns, a telegram to me 10,000, the monthly butcher’s bill was more than one and a half million, she broke down under the weight of the figures. It was for her the triumph of bedlam. For her, to whom money and the value of money were holy fixities, solid and etched in bronze, the experience resembled what it must be like for a believer to be given incontrovertible proof (could such exist) that there was no God. She dangled in space. The laws of nature had been suspended. One must imagine that a trauma developed out of this, which partially explains the catastrophic developments that unfolded. First, the view took root in her that such a collapse of all values could never have happened if I had not left her. That gave her a completely delusory satisfaction that my faithlessness, my so-called betrayal of her, was connected with the calamity of the nation and the catastrophe of capitalism.

It shone through in every one of her letters. Each one came larded with figures and statistics. No sum of money could ever be enough. Others managed to look after themselves, kept reserves, stuck to their budgets; Ganna was always knocked flat by the exigencies of the moment. She had no sense of time, only of the moment. It was her mystery, the way she didn’t live from moment to moment but in an unbroken chain of milliseconds without soul and sense, which was why behind her breathless busyness and industry there was something like a continual tragic fade into nothingness.

Under the pressure of desperation, the old faith in magic awoke in her. She knew a few bank managers and paid calls on them. Bank managers, in her eyes, were magicians; they did magic with money. They were bound to know, too, about a witches’ sabbath. She got tips from them. She sent me hieroglyphic dispatches with the names of bonds and certificates I was supposed to buy. She then had the illusion of having given me some decisive help, and was convinced I was raking in millions thanks to her. To that came the next, perfectly unshakeable conviction that Bettina and I were enjoying ‘the high life’ while she, the spurned Ganna-Genoveva, was condemned to a life of penury.

The confusion of numbers in Ganna’s letters buzzed round me like a swarm of horseflies. I would have thrown money at her, if only I’d had it to throw. What did I care about money; what did Bettina care about money; even less. I did what I could. I fitted the sums to the situation. By now, the collapse of the German currency had turned my earnings into ridiculous elephantine sums with tiny real purchasing power. I could hardly count all the zeroes, but the net income was far less than the average of the past few years. Without a few sums from abroad, I would have been unable to pay our way. Of the shadow money, I transferred as much as I was able to Ganna. Meanwhile, what yesterday was still sufficient, was insufficient today. When inflation finally ground to a halt, such great holes had been torn in her finances that Ganna was unable to plug them. Her shrill cries for help rang out in the silence of my study. I scraped together everything I could possibly spare. I wasn’t counting; I stopped thinking about my actual household. But no sum was enough for Ganna. She crossed every line that was drawn in front of her. Every instruction struck her as wicked. She swore I was accruing fortunes and was keeping them from her, to live it up with Bettina. Whenever she got a biggish sum in her hands, a stupid optimism straight away came over her, as though she couldn’t possibly get through it; then, when it was gone, and much sooner than expected, she didn’t know what to do; she sat miserably in front of her red book, checking through the receipts, going through all her pockets and desk drawers, insisting she had been robbed; and the upshot of everything was another screed to me.

Her engagement with these vast figures, once she had grown used to them a little, gave her a strange, exciting pastime like solving puzzles or doing jigsaws. The millions and billions gave her morbidly speculative mind the satisfactions of infinity for which it was always athirst. They suggested astrology and magic. What did the true value matter; the appearance was there with its sweet alchemy of name and number. While prices climbed into the unaffordable, and figures into the unsayable, the hope sprang up in her that (even though in another part of her dream world I was a secret Croesus) I couldn’t continue to afford to pay for two women and two households, and would therefore be compelled to return to the bosom of my family. This wasn’t a wish or an occasional fantasy, but a solid conviction; she would talk about my return as of a fixed event, and as though the time of ordeals, of abandonment and disgrace would then be for ever at an end.

INTELLECTUAL MORASS

She didn’t accept fate. The core of her being was rebellion. It was reported to me how, shortly before the death of her mother, which happened at this time, she had had an altercation with the eighty-year-old woman in which Ganna had been extremely forceful, because her mother had upbraided her for her want of humility: ‘Humility,’ she is reported to have come back, ‘where does humility get you in this world? Where did your humility get you, Mother?’ With the death of her mother, Ganna broke with the last memories of breeding and restraint. She was just forty-four.

One day she said to herself: I don’t want to be financially dependent on this heartless man any more (she meant me). Since the whole world was plunging into enterprises of one sort or another, and the crazy money seemed to be lying around on the street, she looked around, had discussions with all sorts of seeming friends and experienced chancers and decided to start a film review. The cinema was at the centre of interest, and as far as its intellect was concerned, there was an evident match between Ganna’s being and the silver screen. Both, if you will, were in the business of dazzling. Ganna was always drawn to anything that sparkled, all sorts of hocus-pocus, star-gazing, Mazdaznan, chiromancy. They afforded her a rich field for self-promotion and self-abnegation; the whole of creation was a cheat pleasing to the eye of the Lord.

A financier was once again soon found. He was a man with a printing press. People wanted to get rid of the phoney money so as later to exchange it for real, at extortionate rates of interest, and everyone welcomed opportunities to do so. The fact that Ganna had contributed quite a bit of her own money — which is to say, of mine — was also kept concealed from me. The exploiters and schemers in her set could comfortably pluck her any time they chose. Being quite incapable of seeing through them, she thought of them as selfless philanthropists. More and more she inclined to the opinion that in order to succeed in literature, one had to use one’s connections; and so she took to pestering various important figures, including some who were close to me, and was extremely angry when she was fobbed off with polite evasions. Extreme in everything as she was, her admiration straight away curdled into contempt; and the distinguished man was a louse who a split second before had been held in high esteem. She was editor, proofreader, publisher and manager all rolled into one. She wrote till her fingers were sore, and she walked her legs off. The morning the magazine appeared she hurried from kiosk to kiosk, asked after the sales, exhorted the sellers to greater efforts and suggested ways of enthusing the reading public. If an astonished or pitying glance struck her, reminding her who she was, she quickly blotted it out.

Very well, then, film review: there was nothing really improper or contemptible about that. Get busy, I thought to myself, get it out of your system, see what happens. But first there were the opaque financial manipulations and transactions which I found very alarming, and which had a sort of whiff of wheeler-dealing and ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ about them. I had a notion of money-laundering and extortionate obligations entered into behind my back, shady deals and corrupt relationships; from time to time I would catch a short-lived rumour; from time to time the ghost of a warning; in a word, it was as though repulsive things were going on behind a thin partition; you listen to it tense and excited, though you don’t fully understand what’s happening.

What was much worse, though, was the actual publication itself. First there were Ganna’s personal contributions, dashed-down news items and stories of a teeth-grating vulgarity and stupidity; among other things, the maliciously distorted portrait of a woman widely known for her charitable works, for whom — God knows why — Ganna had conceived a personal antagonism. Then there were the wretched, sometimes even scandalous products of the pens of various other male and female scribblers whom Ganna favoured, and to whom she was happy to offer a literary playground and royalties; and finally there were the advertisements, by means of which the whole enterprise was to pay its way, those announcings and toutings familiar from other such periodicals. And all of this appearing under the name of Herzog, by which Ganna was pleased to go — my name. All over the house unsold copies lay around in stacks, and whenever little Doris was bored she would pick one up like a picture book and turn its pages. I saw this myself one day. I ripped it out of her hands. A lead weight lay on my skull; I could feel the slurry splash up to my knees.

GANNA AND LANGUAGE

That first winter already I had Doris to stay, as affectionate as ever, full of love and deeply rooted trust. It had taken complicated negotiations with Ganna to obtain this concession, and subsequently whenever I sought to have Doris to stay in the summer and winter holidays, Ganna made difficulties each time. She said it was a risk. She demanded guarantees and set conditions. She tried to persuade me and herself that the little girl would only prosper and remain healthy if she was with her, that there was no substitute for Gannacare, Gannaprotection, Gannalove. At the most, she might allow that I had good intentions; she denied that I had the moral ability. Because I was under the influence of a woman whom Ganna had every reason to distrust. She assured everyone who cared to listen that she couldn’t leave her precious darling, the apple of her eye, to a person living with me in an immoral relationship. The fact that this ‘unethical relationship’ was one she, by her doing, insisted on, she readily forgot. The outcome was constant argy-bargy over the girl; can you understand the shame I felt?

If Doris happened to be lying in bed with a sniffle, Ganna would announce a grave streptococcal infection with a temperature intended to terrify me 200 miles away. Her intention was to alarm me, to awaken my sluggish conscience so that I didn’t forget about my family while living with the hated woman. I shouldn’t be surprised the children were continually ill, she wrote to me, seeing as I was refusing to give their mother the means to keep them safe. I sat down and demonstrated to her, black on white, that even in the worst months of the Inflation she had enjoyed a respectable middle-class income; I converted the sums into Swiss francs to prove it. Her reply was the righteous flaring-up of a duped woman since, in her version, she had been duped of everything that my life with Bettina was costing me. She wrote that there was no justification in keeping her short, she was aware of no guilt in her, her claims would stand before God and Man.

She had no control over words. What transpired in her was a strange alchemy, an inflammation remote from thought. Associations were thrown up randomly in her limitless self-indulgence. I saw Ganna over the years growing, and with her grew and swelled the word, the self-indulgent and random word. She didn’t discriminate between good and evil, she couldn’t tell the difference between a bridge and an abyss. Lyrical paean and toxic brew, plea and threat, truth and contrivance, emotion and business, affection and embitterment — it was all one hopeless inextricable tangle. Overheated style, ice-cold calculation. In a typical run of four consecutive sentences, the first one would be self-pity, the second accusation, the third a demand for money and the fourth a declaration of love. While taking the high ground as the representative of an ethical world order, she haggled for a rise in her monthly payments. At the same time as she scribbled enthusiastic lines about my oeuvre, she used the children as pawns and demanded, both directly and indirectly, material compensation for agreeing to let them stay with me; above all, more frequent meetings with me for the purposes of ‘friendly discussions’ and the repetition of my vow that I wasn’t seeking a divorce. It was to such a storm that I had to stand and expose myself. Ganna and Ganna’s language kept me breathless like a drunken binge of nocturnal housebreakers.

A FEW MINIATURES ALONG THE WAY

We go out into the star-spangled night, Bettina and I. Below us the lake glitters; the heavens are like a curtain pricked with innumerable needle-holes, with gold and blue fires burning behind it. The Milky Way is a baffling curve of silver grains. Above us lies a delicate veil of mist. The silence is so powerful that it feels like a blissful transmutation of death. Ganna’s din, Ganna’s language, has gone away, as though a steel gate has been shut on it. We stand there arm in arm, as though lost in prayer …

There are mornings when we sleigh downhill over the fresh snow on the slopes, as on a ghostly carpet, surrounded by the dark forests, the crystalline air full of the laughter and chatter of Bettina’s daughters, who will soon be off to their father in the city, to school. Then we walk across the frozen lake, which creaks so menacingly at night; now it sighs like a Stone Age creature in its death-throes. Ox-drawn wooden sleighs run silently across the smooth expanse; with a swish like tearing paper, the curling stones of peasants run over the swept surface.

In the first days of spring, it’s as though Nature is angrily pulling off a dress that has grown too tight for her. The waters plunge down the stone runnels created over millennia, above avalanches thunder, heather and hepatica peer shyly out among the grass and mosses, everything is an irrepressible growing and burgeoning; March smells differently from February; we hike into the woods, we wander in the neighbouring valleys as though conducting tours of inspection of our realm, and sometimes Bettina seizes my hand and asks, thrusting her face against mine from below: ‘Are you happy? Tell me that you’re as happy as you can be!’ I look at her and nod at her in gratitude. Would the other thing have been bearable, otherwise? Life would have broken apart like a piece of rusty metal …

IN CURSED CIRCLES

For years, divorce loomed at the back of things as the silently desired conclusion; by and by it became a simple necessity. There is a call to order which comes from society, irrespective of personal freedoms. No pretence was permitted, no contrived, lofty standing-above-it-all; I could feel the growing insistence within me of a demand that connected my sense of honour as a man and my responsibility to the community with that other, still more urgent feeling that included my undischarged debt to Bettina, which in introspective hours I thought of as my inner reparations, or the interest payable on joy.

That was what the fight with Ganna was first about. If the loader could be induced to take the harness off the panting beast and unstrap its burden, then it would be able to breathe and walk again. Ganna’s first condition was that she could only consent to a divorce if she was certain of my friendship. Very well, I said, all right; that’s self-evident really. Albeit, there is one difficulty: how can one be certain of friendship according to Ganna’s definition? By signature. By deed and seal. I am to certificate it. I am to commit myself to it solemnly for all time. I am stupid enough to try and talk her out of it. Instead of saying yes and amen to all and signing on the dotted line — which would have the automatic effect that she would drop this demand and insist on something else, harder to give — I make an honest attempt to persuade her of the foolishness of a documentarily attested friendship, to teach her that friendship needed to be earned and worked for, and couldn’t be signed like a lease agreement. She doesn’t see it. All she hears is my refusal, which she takes as proof of my bad attitude. She was being softened up; this was a tactic for softening her up. ‘You’ll drive me over the edge with your tactics,’ she fulminates, shaking with rage. She refers me to my solemn promise of October 1919. I admit I wrote that unsympathetic letter. Then bitterness wells up in her and she screams that I would never have set my knife to her breast in this way were it not that I was under the instructions of my hypnotic mistress. I have to smile when I hear of Bettina and her ‘instructions’. Ganna misunderstands my smile and claims I swore to Bettina that I would get a divorce; what Bettina was doing for me in return was of course something no one knew; but she would show Lady Merck that she had miscalculated and would bite her teeth out in granite.

But it wasn’t Ganna’s intention to fob me off with any final ‘no’. She wanted to deal. She wanted to keep everything in play. That was her way of compelling my attendance. Of course, to be fair, as deeply fair as only God can be, one would have to ask oneself whether love wasn’t part of what was driving her to this — a frightening love admittedly, dipped in darkness, but still love, whichever way one wanted to define it, however damaged the loving heart might be. I, naturally, could feel only the terror and the darkness; but she was suffering as much as I was, or at least at the time I still believed that, and I was indulgent and patient with her because suffering does disarm the beholder. She was still victim to the delusion that I was angry on her account when I got angry; and when I shoved her away she took it the other way; as a sign that she was still in play, was still a partner. And so she ran rings round me with her promises, she repudiated our agreements of the day before, and took things I had said a thousand times and made them appear nonsensical. If she wired me — come over, we can sort everything out together — and our talks once again went nowhere, then it wasn’t sabotage on her part but lack of goodwill on mine. ‘I’m not quite ready,’ she said to me in August, ‘can you give me another three months?’ So I gave her three months more. In November it was: ‘I can’t commit myself. No one nowadays can commit themselves to anything. Circumstances are just too volatile. In March I’ll do whatever you want; I give you my word.’ Then in March:

‘I want to test your proposal seriously. But there’s one thing I can tell you right now: you can’t keep two women on what you earn. It’s my duty to save you from financial ruin.’

‘No excuses, Ganna. We can, we must find some basis of agreement.’

‘I have been deceived too often. You can’t force me to commit a crime against my children!’

‘I’m not about to leave my children in the lurch. You ought to know that.’

‘Maybe you wouldn’t, but what about your mistress? I’d need to have commitments of a completely different order from those you are able to offer me now.’

‘What commitments are you after, Ganna? What more can I do than mortgage myself to you body and soul?’

In vain. With tenacity and fury Ganna clings onto her promised seventy kilos of live weight. Whatever new thing she brings up is a hallucination. Behind hallucination and mirage a sober and brazen legal mind points and gesticulates. I don’t want to know, I’m not supposed to know about her. All I see is the burbling sleepwalker, the unhappily entrammelled one, the tormented tormentrix, the endlessly isolated woman, Ganna whom I must buy off, whom I must compensate for my offence against morality. Ganna the frightened mother, the disappointed consort, the abused bride, the failure in the face of reality — that Ganna is obscured from me by the raving Ganna, by Ganna the legal eagle. I’m starting to hallucinate as well. I’m going round in cursed circles.

M’LEARNED FRIENDS TAKE A HAND

My friends advised me to get a lawyer. They were worried for me. They noticed my irritability. I was past fifty; possibly I was no longer equal to the strain. One Dr Chmelius was recommended. I knew him from various social occasions and I remembered him as an affable fellow. It turned out he was the man who had got Bettina’s divorce put through so quickly. Bettina had never talked about him, never so much as mentioned his name. She didn’t like lawyers. She didn’t think they could ever do anything worthwhile. In the course of my life to date, I had never yet had dealings with a lawyer. That was about to change.

Initially, Dr Chmelius was supposed to be Ganna’s financial adviser, and supervise her money arrangements, since her demands and expenses were growing exponentially and I was unable to influence them. Ganna, though, declined to accept Dr Chmelius as an adviser; she found out that Bettina had been his client four years previously and quickly put a conspiratorial construction on the plan. She claimed he was working for Bettina and acting under psychological pressure from her. Dr Chmelius was a subtle jurist and a gentleman, and perhaps therefore overly hesitant. Even so, each one of his polite and respectful letters drove Ganna to white heat. What was the man playing at? Telling her, Ganna, what to do; giving her, Ganna, advice; daring even to speak and write of divorce; outrageous!

Immediately she set up her own man, Dr Pauli, in opposition to him. Pauli was fond of her and wanted to defend her rights; but he had far too much on his hands and, for all his admiration for her energy, her initiative, her resourcefulness, he found conferences with her too taxing for him. He couldn’t meet her and listen to her, as she demanded, twice a day, and he got upset when she completely changed her instructions to him from one meeting to the next. Therefore he passed the file on to a friend and colleague, one Dr Grieshacker. He in turn soon found himself under attack from Ganna and passed the thing on to his partner, one Dr Schönlein. The result was that the case of Ganna Herzog was being pursued, steered and trundled back and forth — putting on weight as it went — by all three men at once.

It put on weight, nothing else. No one knew what Ganna actually wanted. She herself least of all. Did she want a divorce? No. Did she not want a divorce? Everything indicated that, but she was loath to say so. What are we going to so much trouble for, the lawyers asked themselves. Ganna acted more or less like the owner of a farm that has been threatened with nocturnal attack, who has posted security guards round the premises. Dr Pauli wanted her not to be served the standard running bills; he knew the strain she was under and was able to persuade his colleagues to exercise forbearance too. A noble gesture; what he didn’t anticipate was that it was also a ruinous one. Because of it, Ganna got into the habit of spending time with her lawyers and changing them the way a man might change his socks. Since she had no understanding of work, and no respect for it, she looked to everyone she had entrusted with her affairs to be exclusively busy with them and treated them all like insubordinate juniors if her unique prerogative was denied her. And however pleased she was that her financial predicament received consideration, so, equally, she was unable to rid herself of the secret suspicion that anyone who was working for her for little or nothing was doing bad work. Caught in this schism, she was ever more dissatisfied, excitable, disputatious, confused, bewildered. Humanity, where she was concerned, was divided into two camps: there were her supporters and her opponents. And in the middle stood those lightsome guides to fortune and triumph, the lawyers. Of course that was only true of those lawyers she had taken on; those of the other side were the dregs of mankind.

She lived on the telephone and with her warbled throaty ‘Hallo-o’ talked to the various lawyers, including Dr Chmelius. He was not able to refuse her pleas for money any longer. The conversation was always the same. ‘But Madam, I transferred a substantial sum only last week.’ To which Ganna, with breathtaking argumentation: she had had some unanticipated expenses, some ‘imprévus’, a term she very much favoured, given that her whole life was in the sign of the unexpected, and she refused to allow him to meddle in her finances. But each time she was really stuck she would pack her housekeeping book under her arm and drive in to Chmelius in the city, to show him column by column how carefully and modestly she was keeping house. Like all writing, it was sacrosanct for her, founded in her fetishistic faith in words and figures. The accounts in her book were just as unassailable to her as her passbook with the Reichsbank.

In the same manner, she treated every one of her missives as a Papal Bull. ‘Did you not get my conciliatory letter of the 16th?’ she might write. ‘I’m waiting for your decision on my very modest proposals. It seems to me, my letters aren’t reaching you. Please wire back to confirm that you have received and read the letter in question.’ And so we had the myth of Bettina intercepting letters. It was a charge that could not be defended. Dr Chmelius was a plant. She could never forgive me for having turned that man into her beadle, she said; that had thoroughly opened her eyes. I mustn’t count on a divorce any more; practically it was impossible and morally it was unhuman. Only if I sent Dr Chmelius packing could there be a chance of resuming negotiations. If I continued to knuckle under to those parties terrorizing me, I had wrecked things with her. My hopes had, in any case, gone down to nil. If Jesus Christ in person had turned up to represent Bettina and me, he wouldn’t have stood a chance.

There was no peace for her anywhere; not in any house, any room, with any person, in any book, in any bed. She had problems with her gall bladder, her heart, her breathing; she consulted specialists and quacks, used ointments and teas, scooted off to Karlsbad, to the Adriatic, to her sister Traude in Berlin; spent the whole of one day on her feet, claimed to be dying the next; but that illness was another fiction, it was refuge from her ghastly restlessness.

In the chaos of her affairs, the failure of the film review barely showed. The printer had sued for his outlay. Presumably she had taken on more debt in the effort to partly buy him off. She told Dr Chmelius she hadn’t. But where would all that money have gone? A black hole. Did she have secret acquaintances she spent it on, leeches who sucked it out of her? Was it just the sinister will-to-destruction compounded of things hard to itemize: various impulses of love, hate, jealousy, self-assertion, self-destruction and wish-fulfilment? Dr Chmelius told me he had done the sums and informed her that in the past year more than half my income had gone to her; whereupon she had hissed at him and talked of deception and cheating — she knew from reliable sources that I had earned five times what I claimed. I said:

‘I know, I’ve heard that sort of talk, but how can I convince her that she’s wrong? How do you ever persuade someone that you don’t own something when they believe you do?’

Dr Chmelius replied gloomily: ‘I’m afraid you can’t persuade the lady of anything at all. Except by jumping back into bed with her. Not otherwise.’

And so the conversations Ganna, seeming willingly, agreed to were all without exception shadow-boxing. In her endless nights of scheming and pondering she came up with three stipulations whose impossibility she surely couldn’t for one moment doubt but which she needed so as to play the innocent afterwards, once the meetings had failed, so that she could say to herself: I have done everything with the best will in the world — the tricksters and the double-crossers are you lot.

Since these three points are in a certain sense unique ‘sanctions’, let me list them. First, I am to renounce parental authority over my younger daughter. A legal innovation of Ganna’s; no jurisdiction on earth would have ever recognized such a renunciation. Second, for each daughter I had to deposit a substantial sum for a dowry. I had no idea where I was to take such a sum from. The kraal decided it. The kraal’s imperative was: provide for your brood, man; first and foremost your brood, we don’t give a hoot about what happens to you; let the deserter work himself to the bone; let him fail to come to his senses; let him and his mistress fail ever to free themselves from the shackles. Hence: provide, provide until your dying day. And third: Bettina was to sign a fully notarized agreement that she would never stand in the way of my spending part of each year with Ganna. Ganna saw such an arrangement not only as legally binding, and as practicable; she also saw in it a way of dragging her rival into the courts whenever she chose. When Dr Chmelius was presented with these three textbook instances of Ganna’s garrotting methods, he cried out: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in all the years I’ve practised, and I’ve seen some things.’

ATE

In the course of the proceedings which the printer of the film review had brought against Ganna, there was a falling-out between her and Dr Schönlein. I never found out the exact cause; I only learned that certain scenes had taken place in Schönlein’s office, and that one day the lawyer threw in his power of attorney. She complained bitterly to Dr Pauli, who sought to calm her and, seeing as Dr Grieshacker had long since given up representing her, suggested she take her case to Dr Stanger-Goldenthal, a known tiger at the Bar and a specialist in divorce cases. This was exactly the man for Ganna. Thus far, if I may so put it, she had not yet found the lawyer of her dreams. Now, Dr Stanger-Goldenthal filled the vacancy to a nicety. He knew at a glance what Ganna wanted from him. He sniffed a great cause. It is in the nature of the law that it keeps those who have recourse to it in suspense, until they have lost their fortune, their life and their belief in right and justice. All this, admittedly, applies more to me than to Ganna. She had already shown herself to be insensitive to evil; whatever she had had by way of mind, dignity, pride and heart had already drowned in that circle. ‘Just leave it to me, Madam,’ said Dr Stanger-Goldenthal, once he had read the file, ‘we’ll get everything to come out nicely.’ From his expressions Ganna saw that she had nothing to fear. She sensed a twin soul. A great weight fell from her bosom. The reverence with which she used to speak about this man in the early days had something cultish about it.

Dr Chmelius was dismayed by her choice. He made no secret of his worry from me; he had had a few brushes with Herr Stanger-Goldenthal himself. He even tried to warn Ganna against employing him. But Ganna smiled slyly, in the manner of someone who has the philosopher’s stone and is being told that its possession will cost them dearly. Dr Chmelius went as far as he could; he went to Dr Pauli to discuss the case with him. Since he put a written record of their conversation in the file, I am able to reproduce it in its essentials.

‘It will not have escaped you,’ he began, ‘that Madam Ganna by her inscrutable and unpredictable behaviour is tormenting my client, is harming his ability to work and thereby, as the saying goes, is killing the hen that lays the golden eggs.’

‘And yet the only person who can secure a divorce from Ganna Herzog is Alexander Herzog,’ replied Dr Pauli.

‘Maybe in two or three years,’ Dr Chmelius quipped back, ‘maybe …’

‘The mistake is,’ Dr Pauli replied, ‘that the other side claims it wasn’t a happy marriage. That upsets and provokes the wife.’

‘Why would Herr Herzog wish to end a happy marriage?’

‘External influences. It’s perfectly clear.’

‘My dear colleague; I do hope you haven’t allowed yourself to be influenced by a fanatic.’

‘And what if I have? Isn’t a fanatic an ideal match for a poet? Madam Ganna has shown me countless letters of his. Love letters. The genuine article. She has shown me printed and handwritten dedications in his books that pay honest tribute to her qualities as a companion and colleague. I don’t think you have a leg to stand on.’

‘Is it for us to judge the moral positions of our clients, Herr Pauli? You know as well as I do that the past can be tricked up to look more seductive than it was.’

‘But there can be no doubt that the Herzogs’ marriage would not have been set at risk without the intervention of Frau Merck.’

‘Of course not. That’s just the way things happen in this world. It’s destiny. Let’s face facts.’

‘Ganna’s hurt and loyalty are facts as well. They demand respect, especially if your name happens to be Alexander Herzog.’

‘Very good. So what should he do?’

‘Go back to her.’

‘Back to prison? Back to his cell?’

‘Oh, come. We’re all of us prisoners and convicts. Aren’t you?’

‘And the woman he loves?’

‘At his age, you don’t put your name and reputation and the future of three children at risk over an affair.’

‘I don’t see what his reputation has to do with it.’

‘A man like Alexander Herzog has another reputation, in addition to his bourgeois one. Doesn’t he know the meaning of dishonour? Does he mean to explode bourgeois order, and tread on the toes of the Weltgeist?’

Dr Pauli paced back and forth in agitation and laughed a little nervous laugh. Dr Chmelius was at a loss for words. He had tried to come to an understanding with a fellow lawyer and left speechless and baffled, leaving a man who had agreed to represent the other party, and whom he basically couldn’t understand. At that point the grizzled old sceptic remembered something, and he smirked to himself when he told me that Dr Pauli’s own marriage had been singularly unhappy and that his wife, whom he still loved, had left him for another man. The position he took towards me, therefore, for all his professionalism, was nothing but a perfidious act of gender retaliation.

A week later, Dr Pauli suffered a stroke and died. He was sincerely mourned by many people. Ganna was stunned by the death of her friend. She lay in bed for three days straight. It was during these days of grief that she found the time and opportunity to write a lengthy memorandum, incorporating all the unsettled questions between us. She sent it to Dr Stanger-Goldenthal for him to rephrase in legalese, which Ganna at that stage had not mastered, as she would later. It was nevertheless a piece of writing of considerable lawyerly and argumentative skill. Her lawyer congratulated her on it. When he had finished polishing it up, giving it the requisite qualities of ambiguity and opacity, it was ready for Dr Chmelius and me to bite our teeth out on.

Not a single chink of light. A hopeless tangle of proposals, measures, discussions, euphemisms, accusations, conjectures, cunning distortions, coarseness and hair-splitting. The lawyers inundate each other with letters, inundate their clients with letters, inundate each other with more letters. Typewriters clatter, telegraphs click, telephones bleat, messengers run — each of the parties involved is raking it in, all except the one that has to pay for such endeavour, the costs of the materials and the nervous strain with his own dearly acquired money, his tranquillity, his blood and his life, and who gets nothing in return except — more paper.

And always at the back of everything — Ganna, unmoved, immovable and brazen, the deceptive Perhaps always on her lips, the rigid No in her heart, the goddess of discord like the grim Ate, misconceived daughter of Zeus. Undaunted and indefatigable, she shores up her mad world, which has so surprisingly many points of contact with the real world and at the same time bears the stigma of doom.

LITTLE CASPAR HAUSER

I am now coming to a phase of my life that, externally, bore all the hallmarks of success and fulfilment, but within it concealed all the more the seeds of destruction. I just managed to stagger through it for a long time in my dazzlement. In 1923, the Buchegger manor in Ebenweiler dropped into my lap — almost literally into my lap, because not even in my dreams had I contemplated the acquisition of such a manor. Each time I walked past it, as I had now for over a quarter of a century, I had felt a yearning for it as for a fairy-tale palace; this would be a good place, I thought, here I could do good work. The estate was (or I suppose I should say: is) situated on the lakefront, the spacious house in the middle of a large parkland. The last Count Buchegger had sold it following the end of the Monarchy to a Dutch gentleman who no longer had any use for it, seeing as he hadn’t managed to settle in the area; and when he learned that I had been looking for permanent accommodation for years now, he offered it to me, in some patron’s access of generosity, for half what he had paid for it.

The continual toing and froing with all our things between the Wrabetz villa and a nearby farmhouse, and then back again, had become rather wearing. It gave our lives a quality of vagabondage. But how was I to raise even the generously reduced sum the Dutchman wanted? Further, a permanent base that kept the severe winters at bay would entail considerable rebuilding. Luckily, there was a superabundance of furniture, silver, linens and all sorts of household items, which by themselves were worth half the purchase price; but even though the Dutch gentleman was happy with a modest down payment, the estimate for upgrading the house was beyond anything I could contemplate. I had no savings. I lived, as I had always done, from hand to mouth. We had substantial outgoings; to cover them I needed considerable earnings. Thus far, I had been lucky. But how things were going to go on — that remained unclear from month to month. It was rather an adventurous existence, not one based on solid facts.

It seems that certain events recur in some lives. While I was hesitating between desire and sensible refusal, a friend who had come into money offered to help. When I doubtfully set the thing out before him, and showed him the house, he was mad keen on the acquisition and in a handsome gesture offered me the capital for down payment and building work. The repayment rates were so easy and the time so generous that I saw no grounds for any worry, only occasion for thanks. Once again, as years previously, the kindness and nobility of a friend had afforded me shelter.

A German architect appeared on the scene and assembled a team of masons, carpenters, roofers, electricians, glaziers, heating engineers and painters. Materials and tools arrived by the wagonload; for four months walls were knocked down, others set up, windows were put in, balconies erected, traverses and pipes laid; there was hammering, digging, clearing, plastering, varnishing, painting; and by the time October came round, and Bettina and I moved into our new house, like a couple of children who are allowed to go up on a stage where a fairy play is about to be performed, Bettina was in her fourth month.

I mustn’t keep back the fact that Bettina was rather apprehensive as regards our new circumstances. Such an expansive life made her uneasy. She warned me. Her sense of the world didn’t permit her to be taken in by appearances. She kept presenting me with the problems: in addition to existing burdens, further indebtedness for many decades; the help that was needed to run such a house; the upkeep of the fabric of the building; modernizing it. She was afraid that in the long run I wouldn’t be able to afford it. One had to plan for bad times; there were always lean years after the fat. I mustn’t make myself into a wage-labourer, nor enslave myself to property.

I laughed at her. I was all too sure of my resources. Once I had been out of the Ganna tempest for a while, I felt certain destiny couldn’t touch me. Bettina was set at ease by my unshakeable self-confidence, even though she still worried about the future. She was often depressed, and then she would flee to me, the way an animal might seek out its nest at the approach of a foe.

‘I’ll manage it,’ I said; ‘after all, if the worst comes to the worst, we can always flog the place.’

I added that to me it was a comforting idea that she and the child she was expecting would have a refuge and a piece of property in the event of my death. Bettina smiled.

‘If we’re talking about your death,’ she replied, ‘do you really think … Can you see me as a chatelaine? Look at my fingers.’

In surprise I looked down at her hand, which she held out to me.

‘These fingers are no good at keeping hold of things,’ she said. ‘Once it was prophesied that I would never be in debt, but nor would I have anything to call my own either.’

For all her fears, it was a happy thought for her that our baby would have a place it wouldn’t have to leave at six-monthly intervals. A fortress sure, in a world out for aggression. She herself didn’t need any fortress. She could look after herself. But the little person who was on the way (she was convinced from the outset that it would be a boy) would need to be given shelter, like a little Caspar Hauser. And if — as Ganna wished — it were his lot to grow up without his father’s name, then there was a double need to put some protective space between him and Ganna’s world bristling with laws. Suddenly, she was no longer afraid. Early on in her pregnancy she had sometimes — most unusual for her — cried with fear. That was when she wrote her ‘Song of an Unborn Child’, one of her loveliest compositions; when she played it to me the first time I still had no idea of her condition.

That same evening, she was lying in bed, I was sitting reading by the lamp; she called me over and asked me to sit with her. She took my hand and broke the news to me. Hesitantly, half-audibly; she couldn’t predict, after all, how I would react to news of such a disruption.

I was shocked. Straight away I realized a new situation had been created in which I must show no weakness. Our little Caspar Hauser wanted his place in the world. Our eyes met, and we gazed at each other deeply and earnestly. I clearly saw the flecks of grey in Bettina’s blue irises. I knelt down beside the bed and kissed her hands, first one, then the other, many times …