My First Wife

Mirror of Youth

SIX SISTERS

She had five sisters — four older, one younger. The six Mevis girls were known all over the city. Whenever they appeared together, they were like a sealed phalanx, from the classically beautiful Lydia to the graceful Traude. Their father and commander-in-chief, Professor Gottfried Mevis, shining beacon of the law faculty, a striking-looking man, was their Barbarossa. Six daughters and no sons — that was some freak of nature. Ribald commentators predicted a whole tribe of grandchildren. Frau Mevis, given name Alice, née Lottelott — one of the Düsseldorf Lottelotts, of Lottelott & Grünert, Consolidated Steel — had inherited a large fortune. The family, respected and envied, lived comfortably in a spacious villa.

DUCKLING

No question: where physical attributes were concerned, Ganna lagged some way behind her sisters. She had become aware of the fact very early, to her chagrin. Mirrors proclaimed it, the expressions and reactions of others confirmed it; she was the ugly duckling among five swans. Therefore it was her task to clear a path for herself through the five arrogant swans. Nor was that enough; Ganna wanted to outdo them. She was endlessly ambitious. She dreamed of a glorious future. Hers weren’t the usual banal girlish dreams, they were scenarios and imaginings of an unusual definition. She felt chosen, even though she couldn’t have said in what way.

Even as a child, she had been hard to manage. I have heard tell that she was repeatedly the subject of scenes and commotions. In her tenth year, Professor Mevis took to giving her twice-weekly prophylactic beatings, to get her out of the habit of lying. A barbarous measure, which failed to achieve its purpose, and only caused Ganna unnecessary suffering. Because surely these childish lies of hers were only self-protective fantasies. Beatings only made her more wilful, and drove the badness further into her. When she was beaten, she would scream like a banshee. Sometimes she would throw herself to the ground and thrash about with her arms and legs. That would only provoke the Professor further. Once, her mother sent for the doctor, because Ganna wouldn’t calm down. Irmgard, her next-older sister, shrugged her shoulders and said it was play-acting, Ganna was putting on an ‘epileptic fit’; she had seen another girl at school have one a few days before.

So I was told. Also that on another occasion the Professor had lost his temper with her, and in his rage — which, like all tyrants, he enjoyed — shouted the words in her face: ‘You’re the nail in my coffin!’ Whereupon Ganna is said to have fallen to her knees and raised her arms to him imploringly. A number of the sisters were listening at the door, with gleeful expressions. Ever since, when they were among themselves, they referred to Ganna as the coffin nail. All of which goes to show that a duckling has no easy time of it among swans. Swans are cruel and snobbish birds.

She thinks she’s better than us, said the sisters, and from time to time they would rise up and make common cause against her. Ganna refuses to do any chores, so she’s responsible for all domestic mishaps. She is so highly strung that she often breaks things, therefore she gets the blame for anything and everything that breaks in the house. A carton of expensive laid paper goes missing; the bathtub overflows; a china vase is found in pieces on the carpet; little stick-figures have been scratched in the cream gloss on a door: who is the culprit? Ganna. Look at her standing there, said the sisters, refusing to defend herself, eyes lowered like a good girl, every inch a martyr; it’s no good, Ganna, we’ve seen through you!

THEY WANT YOU TO LIE

Punctuality was enjoined in the Mevis household. The paternal rule decreed that lunch was on the dot of one. Time and again, there they all were sitting at table: Lydia, Berta, Justine, Irmgard, Traude, the Professor, Frau Mevis, their old nurse, Frau Kümmelmann — only Ganna’s chair was unoccupied. Ganna’s deeply ingrained objection to time-keeping was another of the family traditions. Professor Mevis pretends not to notice Ganna’s absence, but his brow is twitching ominously. Frau Mevis keeps looking anxiously at the door; she’s suffering agonies. Finally a creature bursts into the room in a mad rush, her face puce, her eyes wide with dread, her hair a tangled mess; and while the wrathful father, strangling his red beard in his fist, glowers at her, the sisters, five models of virtue, titter quietly to themselves, because there can be no doubt that Ganna is about to tell one of her famous stories that don’t have a shred of truth in them, however masterfully she tells them. Poor Ganna. Don’t you feel sorry for her. She stutters, she stumbles over her words, poor mite, she’s so moving in her plight one should take her and pet her a bit; eight pairs of eyes are levelled at her, not one of them kind, not one of them encouraging, and there is nothing masterly about the story either — quite the contrary, her excuse gets snarled up in itself, and in the end she falls silent and starts eating her soup. Having witnessed similar scenes myself later, I can be fairly sure that they will have passed off in this way.

At any rate, Ganna comes to see that it is necessary to lie in order to save one’s skin. It’s what they expect. Really, they made her do it. Lying becomes an indispensable weapon for Ganna, like the black liquid into which the cuttlefish disappears. The plain truth doesn’t work on them, you don’t get your peace that way, you have to make things up. Experience becomes a sort of semi-scandalous adventure, and by and by her spirit is no longer content in a rather colourless reality.

SEVERAL OF THE SWANS LEAVE THEIR HOME POND

Round about 1895, when Ganna was seventeen, her older sisters started marrying. One after the other, as though by some contagion, they fell in love, became engaged, married, started a home, and from that time forth were only ever seen at the side of their swains, with whom they behaved with unseemly displays of intimacy. The experience of three weddings in next to no time was decidedly difficult for Ganna. It was the combination of love and settling down, of dowry and secret and blatant necking that offended her idealistic sense. At least that’s what I assume to have been the case. She did not trouble to hide her contempt: the noble swans had soiled their plumage. I remember reading a passage in one of the diaries she kept as a girl. There she protested: I could never give myself to a man who wasn’t my intellectual equal. Once, when Lydia’s consort, who was a professional seducer, attempted a tender advance on Ganna, she bit him on the thumb so hard that he had to wear a rubber fingerstall for days afterwards. ‘Satanic little minx,’ he would say furiously, when her name came up later.

The three most stainless of the swans had cleared the field, but there were still two left, who were more irksome, being closer to her in age. Also, the married ones continued to show off their exemplary lives and characters in the face of Ganna’s loneliness, in which enterprise they had the support of their contented, beaming husbands, who had every reason to be proud of so much honour, intelligence and domestic virtue.

GANNA LIVES IN A WORLD OF HER OWN

She did not know the meaning of obedience. Whatever she wasn’t allowed to have, she would purloin for herself secretly. She was full of cunning. If asking isn’t enough, and a person is driven to plead for something, it will tend to make them devious. She even used her absent-mindedness as a way of securing small advantages for herself. If you can make people laugh, they will be more lenient in their judgement of you. I know fools who are so diligent in their folly that they can quite comfortably live by it. The confusion that Ganna wrought kept her family and friends continually amused. Misplaced letters, garbled names, forgotten appointments, muddled dates and places, forsaken umbrellas, lost gloves, attempts to leave by the wrong door, inappropriate replies, pointless errands: it was one continual comedy of errors. ‘Have you heard the latest about Ganna Mevis?’ was a standing question in her circle. And some story would follow about how she had gone out into the woods one summer morning with her hairbrush wedged under her arm, firmly convinced she had Beyond Good and Evil with her. Priceless, people said, and they laughed till they cried. It was all very innocent, very adorable. And the most delightful thing of all was that Ganna herself could laugh at her innumerable slips, with a winning laugh that even made up for the coarse indiscretions she was often guilty of in her absent-mindedness. She lived in a world of her own that seemed to have been designed especially for her.

HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER

Professor Mevis didn’t lose too much sleep over matters of upbringing. If shouting didn’t work, there was always violence. Ganna annoyed him. The spirit of rebellion with which she was imbued turned him against her. ‘If only we were rid of her,’ he said to his wife, ‘if only she were safely married off.’ Whereupon Frau Mevis would shake her head in a worried way. It was her view that with Ganna’s rather indifferent attractions, there was little chance of him finding a suitable man to do him such a service. She told me so once, much later, laughing.

Nevertheless, the Professor sometimes was of the view that she was more flesh of his flesh and spirit of his spirit than the other girls, who were more réussies. The well-set figure, the stubborn brow, the bold expression; that in addition to her insistence on entitlement, actual or notional; her wilfulness and hot-headedness: it was as though Nature had had half a mind to make a son of her and only decided otherwise at the very last moment. None of the others could match her for toughness and strength. All that spoke for her. And there was something else too. Often, when he thought he was about to burst with rage and impatience, she would strike him as so irresistibly droll that he had to run to the nearest room to keep her from noticing his hilarity, and his own authority from being impaired.

WHAT HER FATHER MEANS TO HER

She for her part feared him. He was the black curse and cloud overhanging her youth. Fear was allied to profound respect. Basically, his iron hand felt like happiness to her. In childhood she was more aware of this than in subsequent years. Perhaps it was an instance of that mysterious instinct that shields the kernel of the spirit till it is eventually subsumed by will and necessity. But even as a growing girl she would sometimes feel the dark threats emanating from her own character; she required this master, this powerful fist, to keep everything within her from collapsing in unruliness. She had a dream once of a flaming whip rushing down from the heavens. The mortal fear with which she tried to evade the lash helped her across an abyss she would otherwise certainly have fallen into. Regardless of the continual uprisings against his authority, the many trivial deceptions she regularly practised on him, she acknowledged his power unconditionally, and with her whole body. However much the physical chastisements outraged and upset her — she underwent them into her eighteenth year — a mysterious little pleasure did quiver in her when he beat her. He alone had the licence to do that. In all the world, he alone was in the right against her. When his great voice boomed through the house so that everyone flinched, then, underlying her own fear, there was a strange feeling in her of satisfaction, something that hailed the master, how good that the master is there. His fits of rage seemed to her to be splendid elemental events, as impressive as a spouting geyser or a forest fire. Can qualities be used up? Is there only so much submissiveness in one’s heart that it might trickle away or evaporate if not resupplied? Never again, I think I am right in claiming, in no other association or relationship, did Ganna encounter a being whose presence and influence compelled her to the feeling: how good that the master is here, my master. And that was the ruin of her.

FOOLISHNESS OF LITERATURE

I come now to a delicate subject. At that time, the educated classes were pleased to take an interest in writing and in literature. It was a part of the bon ton to discuss the ‘modern movement’, to have read Germinal or The Kreutzer Sonata, and to have witnessed the latest theatrical scandal/sensation, although it was mauvais to overdo it and to take an excessive interest in such things. It was good to know the names of certain works and their authors, you had to be able to keep up your end of a conversation; though beyond that it had no more significance than knowing the names of the dishes on a menu. Young people liked to talk about ‘life’ without actually confronting it; while they feigned an enthusiasm for art, their real effort was to secure some vain ascendancy by parroting views they picked up in the papers, or had heard from some impeccable authority. A man who worked in one of the professions was only expected to show a limited interest in literature, otherwise people would stop taking him seriously. That left the field open for women. And, since they were the ones who determined taste and set fashions, they made their contribution to a fairly comprehensive debasement, because, just like the men, they gravitated quite naturally to the second- and third-rate; first-class things they ignored. It was the age of paste diamonds and shallow minds.

But with Ganna, things were slightly different.

SHE WRITES HER OWN WORLD

She was convinced she was marching at the head of the true cognoscenti, right in the van, where the new world would heave into sight, where the youngest, tenderest reputations were just beginning to sprout, before they could be ferried into immortality by doting hands. And it’s true, there was something smitten about her. She was capable of being enthused by a work of literature. She roughly understood the categories. She despised mediocrity. Once a fortnight she gathered faithful young male and female friends about her who were of the same persuasion, and then she would rapturously share her finds with them, but also read excitedly and blushingly what she herself had penned. Her otherwise clear and piercing voice would sound dark and hoarse, as if she had powdered her throat with flour. When it got about that a critic for a major newspaper had said of her philosophical essays that they bore the stamp of an unmistakable if undisciplined genius, her acolytes cheered, though she herself with modesty and agitation tried to mute the acclaim. These literary sessions took place in the small drawing room at the Mevises’. They had something of an occult character. None of her sisters was allowed to enter the room; Ganna, like a priestess protecting the godhead from profane disturbances, took steps. If an outsider had violated the presence, she would have pierced him with a look. Everyone in the house knew it, and they let her get on with it.

It wasn’t a pastime, not something frivolous or pretentious. It wasn’t possible to say at the time how far and how deep it went. For Ganna it was the ‘higher reality’, an expression of ridicule in the circles in which she moved. But was this ‘higher reality’ real? Was it a force for purity and nobility? Hard to say. Normally it’s the case — and this casts an odd light on human nature — that a love of literature disguises a vacant inner space, so that where you might expect to find principles or high-mindedness, often you only meet with gush. If the enthusiasm is real, then a pact is made with it, and the ethical implications are quietly avoided. Whether this was the case with Ganna was, as I say, not yet ascertainable at the time. One day she was bound to reach the parting of the ways. In those early years she was still unsteady, still groping, looking for her law, looking above all for a mirror. People couldn’t be a mirror for her, nor could the real world; it was only in books that she encountered a being like herself — so she thought — a trusting being full of earnestness and passion. She was delighted by the likeness, yes, that was her own poem, her own creation, she fell in love with it, and in her eyes it made her truthful and good.

It is therefore almost inevitable that a writer, a certifiable writer, would come to hold the meaning of the universe for Ganna, to save her from the repellent superficiality of the Mevis empire, the tarn with the five exemplary swans. She dreamed of the role and the mission of an Aspasia. But to be an Aspasia, you needed a Pericles and an Athens. Even to be a Rahel Varnhagen, you still needed a Goethe. But where was there a Pericles, or a Goethe, in the humdrum world of 1898? Well, that’s what dreams are there for, for changing phantasms into reality.

YOURS TRULY

In May of that self-same year, it so happened that I left Munich for Vienna. I had just published a novel called The Treasure Seekers and the book had not gone entirely unnoticed. Some experts were even pleased to praise it at over its worth, and call its author a shining new beacon of light on the horizon, a rather tawdry form of words that was much in vogue at the time. Perhaps they were impressed by the darkness of the material and the seemingly inspired chaos of the narrative; today I can only say I am surprised by the many friendly voices and respectful opinions this unripe product of a twenty-five-year-old tyro managed to garner.

It remained a so-called succès d’estime. My grim financial situation was unaffected. I left Munich in a hurry, firstly to get away from creditors, secondly because a love affair had stirred up so much gossip and odium towards me that my closest friends deserted me and respectable citizens crossed themselves on the pavement when I was pointed out to them. I knew hardly anyone in Vienna, half a dozen admirers, that was all, and admirers are only useful to you so long as you don’t need their help. I had no idea what I was going to live on, since I had only random earnings, and arrogantly rejected the idea of employment. Luckily, I met rich people here and there, who not only had some sympathy for me, but who also had a degree of snobbishness about them; they allowed me from time to time to borrow money from them.

In a quiet part of town behind the Votivkirche, on Lackierstraße 8, I rented an enormous room for myself, furnished, it would appear, from a junk shop, and rather negligently at that. I slept through my days and spent the nights with professional colleagues either in cafés, or else (it being summer) in the Prater, home at the time of a curious institution called Venice-in-Vienna, a ridiculous aping of Venice’s bridges and canals. I walked home in the wee hours, singing loudly to myself in the deserted streets, or, like a drunken student, running the end of my cane clatteringly along the metal shutters of the shops.

Then one day I had enough of the city, and I picked up my rucksack and went a-roving: over the Moravian plain, into the mountains in the south, into the Bohemian Forest, along the Danube, always on Shanks’s pony, rarely with more than ten crowns in my pocket, enjoying my own company or that of some comrade I found myself with. For instance, there was a young man by the name of Konrad Fürst, who had joined forces with me early on in my Viennese time out of a kind of fealty; he had writerly ambitions, though he was a pretty superficial fellow who liked best to play the cavalier, and had little going on upstairs but womanizing. I was impressed and somewhat surprised that he agreed to go on the road with me, and put it down to his admiration. I have always been vulnerable to such an approach. Then there was another man, David Muschilov, a red-haired Jew, who wrote theatre and exhibition reviews for the papers, and took himself for a witty writer, and oh-so incorruptible. He was by no means as incorruptible as he thought, and his wit soon got on my nerves. I have always been chary of witty people. But they were good companions, both of them, and I won’t forget them; they had faith in me, and were happy to share their bread and their money with me, and were always up for pranks of one sort or another.

Overall, then, I was content with the change in my circumstances, and in the more relaxed atmosphere, and among the friendlier Austrians I felt myself reborn. When autumn came and put an end to my gipsy existence I returned to my uncomfortable quarters, which the landlady had let me keep in return for a small deposit, hired — on top of the sorry furniture I had — an old pianino with brown keys and, to the dismay of sensitive ears, would bang away on it for hours on end. Then, all of a sudden, I felt in the mood for another prose work. I had supposed my little rivulet had run dry, but now when I came home at night from the society of my motley friends, I would stay up and write for two hours each night and give myself over to my creations.

THE EFFECT OF A BOOK

Oddly it was through her father that Ganna first got to know about The Treasure Seekers. One of Professor Mevis’s colleagues had pressed my book into his hand, and told him this was something he absolutely had to read. The Professor growled back that he didn’t read novels, but agreed to take the book anyway. Reluctantly he started to read it, was captured in spite of himself, and when he had finished it he was forced to admit that it ‘had something’. So he said to me afterwards. A crime story was professionally interesting to him as a lawyer; admittedly, that was just the frame for a deeper narrative that was inaccessible to him. He had no feeling for the artistic qualities the book certainly possessed; the impassioned diction and the grim atmosphere of the whole were disagreeable to him. Even so he is supposed to have remarked to the colleague who recommended the book to him: ‘Not bad; someone worth keeping an eye on.’ Quite some praise from a constitutional lawyer.

Ganna happened to walk into the room and saw the book on the table. She had heard about it, of course, it had been on her list for a long time. She picked it up; it was seven at night, and by three in the morning she had finished it. Gobbled it up. Avidly, the way you guzzle an elixir, for fear of losing a single drop. What was it about it that so got to her? Why was she compelled to imbibe it so hungrily? I often asked myself that, later. After all, it was incredibly remote to her, it must surely have alienated her, been more off-putting than attractive to her — if beguiling, then only in a technical way, accessible only to one who had dwelt in a similar state himself. Whichever, her sense of the book was indelible and unquestionably genuine. She often talked about it afterwards, and it is not impossible that each time she slightly overstated her initial response, in roughly the way a lottery winner might, when describing the prophetic twitch in his fingers. Certainly, some sixth sense was involved, some sense of affinity. Shortly afterwards she came across my picture in a publisher’s catalogue. She cut it out and pinned it up on the wall next to her bookcase. As she did so, she claimed (and others of her literary set confirmed it) she swore not to rest until she had met me in person. The picture, I have to say, was rather flattering. It’s gone missing since, but unless I’m mistaken it made me look every inch a robber chief.

A GO-BETWEEN IS FOUND

Things developed as follows. In the summer of 1899, Ganna learned from one of her friends that I had been living in Vienna for more than a year. He is intensely private, though, she was told, and it’s not easy to get to meet him. Ganna had rather overblown ideas about writers, and her first notion was of a sort of court, surrounding some heir to the throne. When people in a better position to know broke it to her that I was a poor wretch, she ignored them. She hated to be disturbed in her fantasizing. She would have written to me had she not supposed my flat was awash with such letters, like a post office. If her letter remained unanswered, that would mean she had no chance of getting to me. She researched my circle and sought the acquaintance of individuals who had been named to her. She told me once she had no doubt she would be singed by a ring of fire that surrounded me. She heard more and more about me, met people who knew people whom I saw on a daily basis. She envied these people, she was jealous of them. In the first letters I got from her there was a lot about that. One day — by now it was the middle of winter — she happened to visit an old friend of her mother’s, one Frau von Brandeis. This lady kept a salon, as the expression goes, albeit in a rather modest way. I had taken a few meals there. Ganna’s mouth always spilled what was in her heart, and so she confessed to the old bluestocking what she so devoutly wished for. Frau von Brandeis said: ‘Well, if that’s all it is, help is at hand. I’ll ask him round. Can you come to supper on Tuesday?’ She told me herself that Ganna in her happy shock changed colour and silently kissed her hand.

FIRST MEETING

An odd habit from which I still suffer compels me to follow each call, each summons, as if I was somehow afraid of hurting or even offending anyone who called out to me in vain. Sometimes there’s nothing behind it but my inertia: you carry on in the direction in which you’ve been pushed. So I accepted unhesitatingly when Frau von Brandeis invited me, even though I had been horribly bored at earlier visits to her house.

I have no clear recollection of the impression Ganna made on me that first evening. I have a picture of a rather garishly clad, fidgety, restless young girl. I am unable to say whether she was well dressed or not. I didn’t have a way of telling. She loved loud colours, and a picturesque framing of little scarves and fluttering bows. Over supper, with a sidelong look at me, she told how she’d almost fainted on the stairs. Her hasty and excitable speech was disagreeable to me, but Frau von Brandeis had prepared me for the degree of excitement she would be plunged into by my presence, so I took a clement view of her excessive vivacity. Two or three times I glanced at her fleetingly. She had a plain face with strained features, freckled complexion and intensely peering blue eyes; the cheekbones were prominent; very attractive though were the sensuous mouth with splendid teeth, and a charming innocent laugh. Her uncommonly small, twitchy hands displayed recurring gestures that had something jagged and assertive about them, which she became aware of at intervals and tried to moderate.

This fairly accurate portrait was probably a composite, based on a number of meetings. To begin with, my interest in Fräulein Ganna Mevis was slight. I was more mindful of my work than of my surroundings. I am said not to have been prepossessing or entertaining myself — hardly a man of the world, then. At that time, when I went out, I wore a knee-length set of tails, with shiny cuffs and elbows and not all that clean either, an ancient garment that was not improved by a picturesquely looped black necktie. The meal over, I adjourned to the smoking room, sat down in an uncomfortable little armchair and soon found myself joined by Ganna. I had expected her. We started talking. Much of what she said astonished me. I forgot her excitability, her electric movements. I thought she was original. There was a mixture of foolishness and acuity in what she said. The charmingly innocent smile sometimes made me smile. I was most moved by the seeker in her, the pleading suit, the groping about her as in a dream. Strange creature, I kept thinking. But by the time I was on my way home I had forgotten about her. And when I remembered her urgent words and looks, the burning devotion that imbued her whole being, I felt a pang of unease.

LETTERS, HINTS, MAGICAL WORDS

The next day, I got a pneumatique from her. Why the rush, I asked myself. There was nothing pressing in it. The letters were just as urgent as her speech. Big, jagged, impetuous characters that resembled a meeting of conspirators. I can’t remember if I wrote back. It seems to me it was only the third or fourth letter that induced me to give her an answer. Because she wrote to me almost every day. Always pneumatiques. A few lines, with obvious attention to style. I thought sardonically: writing letters to a writer is surely an education in itself. And the content? Atmospherics: happy wonderment at the new turn in her life; a plea to me not to forget her; a friendly greeting because it was a nice day; anxious inquiries about my state, because she’d had a bad dream about me. She wasn’t short of things to say.

And what possessed me to answer her? I don’t know. If you feel vastly, boundlessly admired, you drop your guard. Even the most resolute misanthrope has a spot where he falls prey to vanity. And I was anything but a misanthrope. Even after numerous bad experiences, I only started to get suspicious of someone after they’d wrung my neck, metaphorically speaking. Perhaps Ganna had little hope that I would reply, but from the moment I first wrote back she had acquired in perpetuity a right to be answered. And so a man gets ensnared.

I had the bad habit of leaving letters carelessly lying about the place. At that time, I was involved with an actress, a nice, clever woman. One day she picked up one of Ganna’s notes to me, read it in spite of my objections, smiled ironically and said:

‘You’d best beware of her.’

‘Why, what do you mean?’

‘I can’t explain, it’s just a feeling I have. Watch yourself.’

She was the first to warn me. Many years later, I still think about that.

At a private view of the Secession, I ran into Frau von Brandeis. She asked me what I thought of Ganna Mevis. She sang her praises in the loftiest tones. A clever girl; ideal temperament; heart of gold; the family an impeccable collection of bourgeois virtues. She plucked at my sleeve and whispered that anyone who managed to land one of the Mevis girls was made for life; the Professor could afford to give each of his daughters a dowry of 80,000 crowns! I freed myself from the silly gossip, but I have to admit it didn’t do me any good, the number caught in my brain. It’s just the way it is: a man who doesn’t know how he’ll pay the rent at the end of the month can easily fall to calculating that a vast sum like that will keep him modestly in a garret for the next sixty or seventy years. A flip response, nothing more, and yet …

In the meantime I had had a few more meetings with Ganna in neutral places. Complaisance breeds complaisance. But I must confess I liked her better with each further meeting. There was something irresistibly impetuous about her that appealed to my own rather viscid nature. I thought she was an uncommonly harmonious and consistent character. The only thing that bothered me was the continual hyperbole. One day she told me the reflection of the book I was working on was clearly visible in my brow. I replied chilly that I preferred people with dry hands and a dry manner, clamminess was apt to become slippery. She was alarmed — only to give me her rueful and passionate assent. Then that in turn became too much. It was like standing on the pedal while playing a simple folk tune. Another time, on a stroll together, I was thunderstruck when she told me about the book I was writing at the time. As I hadn’t discussed it with anyone, I had every reason to be surprised. It was a story of decline, set in a particular social stratum, and carried by a contemporary Parsifal. ‘Only you can write it,’ she said stirringly, ‘no one else.’ I had the uncomfortable feeling of a housewife finding a cat in her larder. The door was shut, the windows locked, there was no hole in the walls, therefore something inexplicable has taken place. Divination? Maybe. With Ganna it would have seemed possible. It was her way of saying: I am inside your work, it’s my destiny, it belongs to me. Perhaps I was overplaying some vaguer formulation of hers; also the exposé was in the air; conceivably she had drawn some hint of the contents from me, though I can’t remember such a thing. Whatever, Ganna had something of a sorceress about her. I thought she was a white witch, or a strong, energetic and courageous little fairy. And the fact that she asked, with maidenly humility, to be close to me, my scant conversation, my austere instructions — that did me good, because I was not spoiled.

WHAT WAS BOUND TO HAPPEN HAPPENS

She persuaded me to visit her at her parents’ house. We agreed on a date and a time, and Ganna made preparations as for a visit from the Prince of Wales. She served notice to her sisters that her tête-à-tête with me was not to be disturbed at any price. Later on, I heard complaints from Irmgard and Traude about the quarantine that Ganna so rigorously imposed. They would have liked very much to meet me and talk to me, but Ganna hadn’t allowed it. When I stepped into the hall, a figure vanished with lightning speed through an open door, but a split second was enough for me to catch the astonished flash of a pair of black eyes. And when, some time later, I was back in the hallway, escorted by Ganna, I caught a glimpse of another fleeing shade and another astonished pair of eyes, this time blue.

I became a regular visitor to the house. Ganna received me with delicious sandwiches and excellent tea. I had determined the episode would end by the time I set out on my next summer wanderings. But in that case I shouldn’t have made Ganna privy to my plans; shouldn’t have told her the names of all the places where I was planning to stay. Not just that either; in my mindless indiscretion, I also told her that I had arranged to meet a few friends at the upper Mondsee in early autumn, and then go to ground in a farmhouse, to finish my book. Hot with joy, she replied how wonderful, her mother had rented a small villa nearby, on the Attersee, where she and her sisters would probably be staying until October, and if she got on a bike it was only half an hour. I was alarmed. My gabbiness annoyed me. But what should I have done? You have to talk about something, and if you have a certain respect for big subjects and questions that — even if you ask them with childish circumspection — are not really answerable because they take you into personal realms, then all that’s left are bald facts. Somehow Ganna always managed to draw me out; tears would spring to her eyes when I turned her down kindly or gave her an evasive reply. She had no one she could trust, she told me animatedly, she was a stranger in the bosom of her family, her sisters were her enemies, her parents didn’t understand her, she was lost if I didn’t give her more of the manna that was the only food for her soul. Such words moved me. I had seen that she was the Cinderella in her brood.

‘Will you promise to write to me?’ she asked with hungry, avid expression.

It was always all or nothing. I wavered. I ducked. She followed up. In the end I agreed.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll see.’

With a strange, predatory movement I will never forget, she seized my hand.

‘Really? You will write to me?’

Suddenly I felt afraid, but the charming, innocent, beatified smile allowed me to think the promise was not dangerous.

SOME RATHER BELATED GLOSSES

And then there were more letters. Express letters. The jagged, indomitable characters marched in. They formed up into words, and the words spoke of everlasting gratitude and obligation and inner kinship and a deep sense of belonging. I was startled. I wondered: are all these things so facile that they can be set down on paper so instantly and glibly? To tell the truth, my eye tended to fly over them. The sound of the big oppressive words loitered in my ear. Sometimes, when I was opening one of her notes, it was as though I had to push away her little hand that reached for me with greedy grasp. That summer I still had a way out, if only I’d been honest with myself about my situation. I wasn’t. I deceived myself instead. Freedom is an inestimable thing; if you allow it to be tricked away from you, it means trouble, you will have to pay and pay until the bloody sweat spurts from your eyes. But then I had lost my mother when I was still a child.

When I look back at myself, it seems to me that a nature like mine can only be judged in its vertiginous dreaminess. All my flaws and good points are anchored there. I was always stood so close to reality — like a man working at a machine, in front of its wheel — and yet I didn’t see it. I exhausted myself in the effort to see it, but the pictures I saw, the experiences I had, were utterly transmuted by the galvanic process that befell them in my imagination. Something light became heavy, something cheerful became murky, warnings found me deaf, even pain and joy were like two puffs of breath on a sheet of glass. I was so deeply caught up in myself, in my Rip Van Winkle-like sleep, that the need to act concussed my entire being, shooing my soul up out of its remote hiding-place, and demanding it set out on a hundred-mile march.

This may explain something. Because when, one September morning, Ganna jumped off her bicycle in front of the isolated farmhouse where I was staying in the attic, and I rushed down to greet her, I didn’t see a flushed, purple face, a sweat-drenched blouse, a wild, almost fevered regard; to see that would have been disagreeable to me and would have repulsed me for a long time. No, I saw a being I had created and imagined. I felt pity. Perhaps it was the transferred pity of writers, when they turn a real-life character into a figure of their imagination and clothe it in the mystery that is the only quality that provokes and sustains them. Poor, tormented creature, I said to myself, and I could feel my heart beating for her. Here was a woman in flight, a lover, stepping up to meet me, a victim, a persecutee begging for shelter, seeking a shoulder to cry on, deeply inflamed, in need of a little tenderness and soothing. Should I have shut myself away, should I have remained aloof and said: begone, there is no room for you in my life? There was room. Of course, the fact that I saw and sensed her the way I did in my self-sacrificial compassion, this single pregnant moment that bore the seed of thirty years — that was also in part Ganna’s doing, her over-powerful will, her dazzling sorcery. But I wasn’t to know that, back then.

ALMOST A CONFESSION

Rowing across the lake with her, strolling together through the autumnal woods, I talked to her about my past. I was now twenty-seven years old, and all I had experienced thus far were hardship and worry. To tell the truth, every single day had been a struggle to get food, to find a bed to sleep in, to put shoes on my feet. I omitted the details, the humiliating wealth of tawdriness. Why spread it out at her feet? I felt too ashamed. It would have sounded somehow accusatory. Perhaps I had a sense as well that she wouldn’t take it the right way, someone like her, grown up in luxury. Moreover I had a dim notion she liked such confessions, as though they reinforced her in a hope I didn’t mean to encourage. But I must have gone beyond what I had it in mind to say, because at times I caught her looking at me like a mother her sick child. I talked a lot about my wanderings and about how it was only in the countryside that I could stand my isolation, which in the city crushed me; all I got from the city was a crust of bread, and sometimes not even that. How did I avoid despair? What kept me going? Where does a perfectly irrational tinge of optimism come from? What sort of inner light shows me the way? Why didn’t I let myself slip into the dark-some river where I was cowering in my fear of mankind? Why do I not curl up and die when my brain can produce only revulsion and dread? Well, you see, Ganna, I will have said, it’s strange, something quite unaccountable happens. Even those moments of wanting to die come with a small flame that causes the heart to flicker into life. Then a friend shows up, whom you’d forgotten all about. Then you meet a girl for the first time, and she looks at you, and smiles at you, even though she knows everything about you. The least happiness is something so exquisitely precious in the lower depths. At such a moment I fell into the love affair for which I gave up three whole years of my life, as into a bottomless well, and that, once it was painfully over, left me as poor in my soul as I always was in my flesh …

HOW DOES GANNA TAKE IT?

These words, or similar, I will have spoken to Ganna; of course I no longer remember them exactly. What about her? To begin with, she was stunned. Here I must make mention of something odd. Ever since the first days of our acquaintance, she had kept a notebook about me. It was full of thoughts and reflections about my uninteresting person, complicated interpretations of my being, and pages and pages on the moral character of my work. I only heard about it years later, and I won’t deny that I laughed heartily when she showed me the volume. Typical Ganna, I said to myself; falling in love and writing a thesis about it at the same time. But at the point when I came up with such a response, I was already more critical of her. It was a fact with Ganna that her notions of life came out of books, and they stood to reality like a painted tiger to the beast that lays your shoulder open with a swipe of its paw. Still, my talking had stirred her up, and I had the feeling too that I wasn’t as inaccessible to her as I had been previously. Her emotion was unmistakable. It dawned on her that she had something to offer me, which she hoped I wouldn’t be able to dismiss out of hand. My surroundings, my life, were bound to let her know that my situation basically hadn’t improved since. I was living off expectation, off faith in an inner source, off the charity of friends and the carefully measured generosity of my publisher. I had no financial security. My entire existence was speculative, was a matter of plans and schemes. My face was etched with worry. The melancholy that from time to time would overwhelm me couldn’t be plucked from my eyes. In Ganna’s hot head that may have given rise to some serious questions. What did she have money for? Why had the Lottelotts worked so hard to amass their fortune? Let her have it. It’s in her gift to help the person she loves. And not just help him, she can restore him to his correct, sovereign height. She is jubilant, she has the key to this man on whose behalf she is prepared to go out and conquer the whole world. I didn’t misunderstand the shining eyes and the speaking looks. But patience, Ganna, patience: do you propose to take what you call your wealth, today or tomorrow, and merely drop it at his feet, unconditionally and impulsively and without regard to yourself, and without reference to any of the usual contracts and obligations? It would be a splendid impulse, whether it were possible or not. Or is some forfeit not required — in fact, wouldn’t the person, the future, the whole man from head to toe have to serve as your collateral? Speak!

It’s true, this question was never spoken out loud; it only hovered uncertainly over our conversations. But it seemed to me that Ganna didn’t understand its deeper implications. Why should the man not furnish the security, the pledge, she clearly was saying to herself, since all his difficulties would be resolved at a stroke, all his darknesses dispelled? If he only declares himself willing, then she will make him deliriously happy, then she will guard him like the apple of her eye, then she will be his slave, his exchequer. His muse, the guardian of his fame, the proclaimer of his greatness. All for him, say her shining eyes and her imploring looks; her dreams, her ambition, her gifts, her life, all for him.

But really I was still clueless.

BECAUSE IT’S NEW

Until one day she came out with it. Without preamble and with the same courage with which she plonked herself on her bicycle and pedalled off, even though she’d never properly learned how to. I was stunned. For the longest time, I wasn’t sure what exactly she meant. She took care not to be explicit. She was nervous. But she kept going back and starting over again. Each time it was a shade more graspable, with more eloquent descriptions of the practical possibilities, more excited dwelling on the splendid prospects for my life and work that she was able to predict with visionary fire. When I think back on it today I have to smile, because by instinct she was doing exactly what a shopkeeper does, feigning reluctance to show his most precious stock, and only putting it out on the counter once he’s worn the customer down with his patter. When I finally caught her drift, I had no idea what I could decently say. Nothing like this had occurred to me, not remotely. It was like someone suggesting I might like to move to the moon. I laughed. I treated the whole thing as an extravagant joke. I said that where marriage was concerned, I might just be the least suitable man in the whole of Europe.

In the way of these things, her arguments started getting to me after a while. If I was aghast the first day, by the second I was just annoyed, and by the third a little impatient. I couldn’t always avoid her stuttering suit, her fiery offer, her willingness to make herself useful that caused her to tremble like a fever. Not always. After all, she had proved to me — though not ultimate proof — that she didn’t hold anything back. It couldn’t possibly be calculation. Her tenderness was gushing. Her desire to please me, to anticipate my every wish, was nigh on obsessive. I regularly felt ashamed. If I’d only guessed that my shame was an unconsciously erected barrier, perhaps I would have behaved differently. I thought she was funny in her wildness and her muddle-headed dreaminess; funny but lovable. You can find a woman lovable without loving her; that’s a dangerous grey area. When I gave her my hand, she could sit there charmed as though that moment was a singing eternity, then she would lean over and press her lips to my fingers with a reverence that sometimes made me say: oh, don’t do that, don’t bother. It hadn’t happened to me before. The woman I loved before, the first time, boundlessly, to the point of folly and even crime — yes, crime — had coolly endured my passion, and shamelessly cheated and exploited me. The wound I received from her had continued to fester. What a tonic to receive, for once, instead of always giving, thanklessly giving, and being mocked for it.

WILL YOU HAVE ME OR NOT?

For the moment I let things take their course. I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no. Yes would have turned my life upside down. Think of a solar system where a pert comet suspends the law of gravity. And no … no was tricky. Not that I wasn’t hungry for some of the fleshpots of Egypt. I wouldn’t deny that I was tired. Tired of the unpaid bills, the sheepish faces of my acquaintances when I tried to pump them for a loan, the holes in my socks that no one darned, the frayed cuffs of my shirts and the daily humiliations I had to take from people who despised nothing so much as poverty. It would have been nice to have no more experience of bitterness and offence, to go to bed at night without racking my brain about how I was going to pay for the privilege. It would have been nice to be freed from worries. Ganna wasn’t wrong when she argued that all these tormenting details would slowly wipe me out. But just for that, it didn’t occur to me to squinny at the groaning tables of the rich, and their nicely stocked wine cellars, and their jealously guarded safes.

It was one of my most disastrous qualities that, faced with a self-willed person, I would lose out because the phenomenon of willpower in and of itself would put me into such a state of amazement that I could generally only come to the decision my opposite number had made for me. I would tell myself I had done my bit, and was glad that there was no more back-and-forth. And Ganna decided for me. During those days her eyes had the sort of tunnel vision of athletes so set on victory they can see nothing but the finishing-tape. What was she so afraid of, why was she in such a hurry? I tried to calm her down. She thanked me exorbitantly, but it looked as though, inside, she was hurt and sore. I sensed how very much she was at the mercy of her drives, and if I wasn’t to stand in front of her as a poor bungler, I had to try and spring her from her jail. And, in so doing, I was clamped in chains myself.

One rainy afternoon she turned up on her bicycle again, panting and exhausted, flung herself at me, clasped my shoulders in her hands and stared at me as though she was on her way to the scaffold within the hour. I asked her in alarm what the matter was, but she merely closed her eyes and shook her head. Then she broke away, ran out to the little balcony, leaped onto the balustrade, turned round to me and, with a hysterical jingle in her voice, said:

‘If you don’t take me, I’m going to jump into the lake; I swear I will. Either you’re going to marry me, or I’ll jump.’

‘Ganna!’ I appealed. The house was on the lake. The water smacked against its western walls. A jump from twenty feet was no laughing matter. She was certainly capable of it. ‘Ganna!’ I called out again. She looked at me, half-blissful, half-fanatic, and spread her arms out. I caught her by the ankle and said reluctantly:

‘Please don’t, Ganna.’

And she: ‘Will you have me or not?’

I didn’t know whether to laugh or be cross. ‘All right, I will, I will,’ I said hurriedly, if only to put an end to the upsetting scene, but even as I said it I had the feeling I had swallowed poison. She jumped back, dropped to her knees in front of me and covered my hand with kisses.

Later, much later, I thought about that episode a lot. In one way, I thought, it wasn’t all that unlike a stick-up with a revolver. Hands up or I shoot. Whether the gun was loaded or not was immaterial. It wasn’t always possible to tell. Bad if it was, worse somehow if it wasn’t. But at the time it all happened, I didn’t have a clue. The notion that it might be a trick didn’t occur to me. Trick was too coarse a word for what it was, too. I saw a woman in the grip of elemental feeling. I can’t say whether it was vanity with me, or pity, but I said to myself I mustn’t push her away from me, I might destroy her for good. I thought I couldn’t be responsible if she came to some harm. I admired her bravery, her resolve, her bold all-or-nothing. And strangely enough, my blurted yes hung on a sensual appeal. As I clutched her slender ankle, I had the feeling I was holding her whole shaking, burning body in my arms. She seemed so frail to me, so delicate. Frailty and delicacy in women has always moved me and inflamed my blood. Hitherto, I had tended to duck my head under the storm of her feeling.

I don’t know if it might have been wiser not to say the thing about the revolver. In her inner confusion, she couldn’t distinguish between what was admissible and what went beyond. She was in the grip of passion, blind, animal passion. The stone tumbling down over a precipice doesn’t think about whether it’s going to strike some poor walker down below. And her passion, her dumb momentum, was like a force of nature to me.

FEDORA

There had been a little group of us there, which, because the season was advanced, had begun to dwindle. Now only my friend Fedora Remikov was left, a young pianist from Moscow, and, with her, Dr Eduard Riemann, an exceptionally clever and well-read man of my own age — philosopher, scholar, well-off playboy. I liked him more and more; rarely have I met a clearer head and a more unimpeachable spirit. Those two, who were close, had noticed my distrait and unhappy mood, and as they had seen me several times in Ganna’s company, they thought she might have something to do with it. Fedora put it to me directly. I avoided the question, but one day I asked her whether I might introduce Ganna to her. I wanted to get her opinion. I wanted to know what impression Ganna would make on such a pure and unpartisan being. We arranged to have tea together. Riemann was to be present as well. The experiment went pretty badly wrong. Ganna was terribly excited. She had the feeling she was to be examined by my friends. When she appeared, her demeanour was like that of a defendant in court. In the effort to show her best, she cramped up. Fedora sensed the strain she was under and looked at her sympathetically. Conversation happened to turn to the then much-read book The Rembrandt German and a discussion developed between Ganna and Eduard Riemann, who had no great admiration for the work; if I remember correctly, he described it as a set of glib paradoxes to please a bourgeois readership. Ganna argued with him. Unfortunately, she was too vehement. She was no match for Riemann’s knowledge and superior logic, but she was unwilling to face it, and talked like a teenaged philosopher. Riemann bounced good-humouredly back and forth on his chair. His replies were gentle but devastating. Fedora stayed out of it. When her eyes met mine, there was a questioning look in them. I admired Ganna’s pluck, her reading and her ability to think on her feet. The disapproval of my friends upset me. It was as if I were being misunderstood, as if adverse circumstances kept Ganna from showing herself in her true light, and I identified with her.

Ganna had sensed that she was not making the hoped-for impression on Fedora and Riemann, and so she sought to do better. She shouldn’t have bothered. God knows what made her think she had to gain a supporter in Fedora. That was already proof of her bad instincts. She always behaved as though she could force people to like her. She brought Fedora little bunches of flowers, and sent her notes with vehement declarations of undying love. To begin with, she had thought there was more between Fedora and me than mere friendship. When Fedora straightened her out with a few cool words, in more or less the way you correct something misreported in a newspaper, Ganna threw herself at her and kissed her. An unpardonable mistake. Shortly afterwards, on the eve of Ganna’s departure for Vienna, when Ganna had come to say goodbye, it was Fedora’s turn to make a mistake. She was foolish enough to counsel Ganna against marriage with me, and tried to talk her into giving up the idea.

She said: ‘If not for your sake, then for his.’

Ganna replied with flashing eyes: ‘What do you think you’re playing at, Fedora? How can you talk like that? Alexander and I belong together for ever and ever.’

Fedora told me about it a few days later, with a cold chuckle. I can still see her, leaning against the grand piano, with her white handkerchief by her mouth. Because she suffered from morbid obesity, and was prone to asthma attacks while playing, she was in the habit of keeping a handkerchief impregnated with some solvent to her mouth. In spite of her fatness, she was an attractive person; on top of the outsize body there was a real Bellini head with clever, piercing eyes. She asked me what would happen now, how things stood between Ganna and me. I said Ganna was going to talk to her father. She wanted to know whether this step had my approval. And when I said it did, then whether my conscience was clear. I became impatient, and accused her of being unfair to Ganna, and of failing to understand her magnanimous nature, and of being peevish and feminine herself. She shrugged her shoulders and replied quietly: ‘These are subtle matters, my friend, incredibly subtle matters …’

The next morning I got a note from her. I kept it for years and years, until I finally lost it during the move to Ebenweiler. She was worried about me, she wrote. I ought to consider very carefully the step I was contemplating. I should examine my reasons, wait, not hurry anything, she begged me. ‘You must love your future,’ she went on, ‘you must love it the way a woman cherishes her unborn child. You are carrying a huge responsibility. You are taking an extraordinary risk. You must respect what fate has in store for you. I am very concerned. It is the bitterest of disappointments when a friend fails to keep what he promised to friendship, because he promised it also to the world. If you have already tied the knot, then that to me is a form of betrayal, and I don’t want to see you again.’

The sentences stuck in my memory. But they didn’t have the effect that Fedora meant them to have. I was cold inside. I looked for reasons that were nothing to do with Fedora’s blameless nature. I put myself completely and not without anger on Ganna’s side. It appeared to me that it wasn’t enough to return her love; no, I also had to be her knight and protector. The next day, I heard Fedora and Riemann had left.

GANNA SWEARS

There’s something I’ve forgotten to tell, although it has no particular importance. Only at the time it had a certain significance for me, who was so short of worldly wisdom. The last evening before our separation, we were sitting by the lake. After a long silence I turned to her and said:

‘Well, all right, Ganna. We’ll do it your way. But on one condition. You must solemnly swear to release me if I should ever ask to be released.’

Ganna, the innocent child, the offended and mistreated child, answered reproachfully:

‘Oh, Alexander, how could you think I would ever refuse! I wouldn’t be worthy of you if I was like that!’

She looked at me with her maidenly eyes and hand upraised, and swore to God. I was eased.

Believe it or not, I was eased. What a failure to understand the word, and the effect of the passage of time, and the meaning of God’s name in a philosophically enlightened soul like Ganna’s! It was a beginner’s error. Would a man in love have required such assurance, and would a woman, wanting to keep him, not have given it by the sun and moon and God and all his angels? The passing years make a mockery of the gravest oath, and memory is an eager bawd.

Then, when she was gone, I thought of her very tenderly. There were moments in which I took my feeling for love, but then I would say to myself: love is a ball of mercury, the pursuit of which costs half a lifetime; if you try to pick it up, it breaks apart, you never get all of it. Comradeship appealed to me. Harmony of two souls, I tried to convince myself, makes love dispensable. It can’t be a sin to obtain love, not if you’re able to pay something for it. And what I was able to pay was in the form of tenderness, tender understanding, tender guidance, tender confidence. That was the way to go. I was convinced it was right. I didn’t notice that I was losing myself in emotional casuistry.

ASTONISHMENT IN THE MEVIS HOUSEHOLD

Ganna had promised me she wouldn’t talk about our engagement, but she couldn’t control herself, and after three days everyone knew — her sisters, her mother, her relatives, her acquaintances. Frau Mevis made no secret of her grave doubts. Today I see things differently from thirty years ago; lots of things that were absurd looked all right to me. It was one of the tasteless absurdities of the time that in rich middle-class homes they would speak of misalliances, as if in the upper reaches of the aristocracy. The only person who was kept in the dark was the Professor. Frau Mevis trembled night and day. If he should withhold his consent, hideous scenes were bound to result, and she would be the one to get the blame. She bore some responsibility: she had failed to keep Ganna properly chaperoned. Her fear of her husband, which she had had from the beginning of their marriage, had by and by eroded her personality. She was under as much pressure as a sunken ship, under the water. It’s only a matter of time till the hulk breaks into pieces. The more alert of her daughters had long observed the symptoms of mental illness in her. It was the illness suffered by maybe four-fifths of the women in bourgeois society, the illness of nothing to do, empty representation and constant pregnancies. The day Ganna went to her father to make her confession, and everything inexplicably passed off without éclat, the old lady heaved a deep sigh of relief. ‘I thought he was going to kill her,’ she said to Irmgard and Traude; ‘an author; a man who is nothing and owns nothing. Truth be told, I don’t understand my husband.’ Irmgard reported it to me later.

How the Professor received his daughter’s news calmly and without ire is something for which I have no explanation. For sure, he had read my book. He won’t have taken me for quite such a hopeless and feckless individual as his wife did. But a writer of books with whom one might pass the time of day and an official son-in-law, those are two completely different human categories. Later, with deafening laughter, he assured me he hadn’t believed a single word of what Ganna said to him; he was firmly convinced the fantastical creature was the victim of delusions, and he had first decided to wait to see whether I would turn up at all. ‘Well, and then you turned up,’ he crowed, and whacked me on the shoulder, making all my bones hurt. That gave him away. I could tell how delighted he was to be rid of Ganna. The other girls couldn’t get over their surprise. They said: ‘She’s turned Alexander Herzog’s head, she’s turned Papa’s head, she must have worked some magic.’ In the swans’ terms, working magic was what I felt to be Ganna’s dark Pythian power.

CELEBRATION

I noted down the salient points of my conversation with the Professor in my diary at the time.

‘So you want to marry my daughter?’ he began, once I was sitting opposite him.

‘I don’t really want to,’ I said, ‘Ganna does.’ He looked at me in astonishment.

‘All right,’ he conceded, ‘then let’s just say you have nothing against the idea in principle.’

‘No, in principle.’

‘Then we can move on to the practical side of the question. I assume you are able to provide for a wife.’

‘I’m afraid I must destroy your illusions there, Professor. I can’t even provide for myself.’

‘Admirable honesty. But surely that’s not an abiding inability?’

‘You’re wrong. I see no change in prospect.’

‘Why is that? You are a well-known and much-admired writer.’

‘But I still have no means.’

‘Then what do you live on now?’

‘Tick.’

‘How high are your debts?’

‘Around about 3,000 marks.’

‘That’s not so bad. You’re still young. One day you will become successful.’

‘Possibly so, but that would worry me.’

‘Why so?’

‘It would be a sign that I had compromised. With taste. With the fashion of the day. I don’t want to make any compromises.’

‘An admirable stance. But then how do you envisage a life with my daughter?’

‘To be frank, Professor, I wouldn’t be able to entertain the idea if I hadn’t known she was well-off.’

The Professor laughed in his rackety way. ‘You mean to say that I’m well-off?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘You’re not afraid of the truth, are you?’

‘That’s my job, Professor. I don’t care about money. I don’t care about a certain standard of living. I want a life with Ganna. It’s my belief that we’re a good fit. But I would have to renounce her if it means I have to work for a living, in the bourgeois sense. Ganna understands that I must be free in that regard. Nor have I come to you to ask for Ganna’s hand in marriage, as the expression goes, though that’s maybe how it appears. I wanted to tell you frankly about my circumstances, because Ganna is utterly convinced that she will only be happy with me.’

‘All right, that’s Ganna. What about you?’

‘I am extremely fond of Ganna. I have very high expectations of her. But for me marriage is not essential.’

‘I understand. But you don’t mean to tell me that you don’t see yourself ever — even many years hence — attaining an income that accords with your gifts?’

‘I don’t think it’s very likely. Not impossible. There are a few instances. The intransigence of a writer is sometimes not an obstacle. But we live in barbaric times, Professor.’

‘I see. I didn’t know that. I had the sense we were living in the lap of a happy, blooming civilization.’

‘I’m afraid that’s an illusion.’

The Professor got up. ‘The interest on the capital sum I am giving my daughter should keep you both from starving. But that’s all.’

‘That’s all we need.’

The Professor extended his hand to me and said warmly: ‘In that case, we seem to be agreed. Welcome to the family.’

That same day he had a brief conversation with Ganna, at the end of which she left the room, laughing and crying with happiness.

NEGRO VILLAGE

Every family is its own hoover. Greedily it sucks into itself the stranger who has been enlisted into it and, inhibited by shyness, tries to resist. After I had met my five future sisters-in-law, my three brothers-in-law, all the various uncles and aunts, the grandchildren, the friends of the house, it took me a long time to sort them all out and remember their various names and titles. It was like a play with a large cast, where you have to keep the programme open on your lap to check who is onstage at any given moment. I forgot that I had a role myself. I had trouble with all this fraternization. I saw no good reason why I should suddenly be on ‘Du’ terms with people I didn’t know from Adam. The automatism with which it was expected that I should astonished me. I learned numerous new customs. Most of what I did or said turned out to be in breach of these. They were supposed to be something sacred, but in the first days and weeks I thought they were more like the customs in a Negro village, and sometimes I had the feeling I was visiting such a village. The whole bustle intimidated me. The meals, the family days, the joint undertakings, the conversations were as noisy as they were arduous. Gradually, I became desensitized. Getting accustomed to something is generally thought of as a blessing, but myself, I’m not sure if it isn’t rather a dulling of the senses and a blunting of the nerves. I was in their eyes a rough-edged individual and they enthusiastically went about filing me down. Eagerly and even a little flattered, they took me into the sacred ring of the family, but at the same time they were a little afraid of my stranger’s ways and accommodated me in a sort of invisible cage, like an exotic beast that is shown to the public for money, no matter how tame it actually is and how little thought it has of running away.

These are all posthumous thoughts and I could add even more to them, were I not afraid that the roughness of my judgement today would contrast too much with the feelings and behaviour I had at the time. Because soon enough I completely belonged and was entirely theirs. In my new bod’s naivety I allowed myself to be ensnared and filled full of their interests, woven into their relations, taught to like their tastes and actually to believe that their bustling Negro village was the whole world. I was thrilled with them. The luxury in which I was allowed to participate fogged my vision. Each of the magnificent villas where I was introduced seemed palatial to me. Every bank manager I met looked to me a man of limitless power. The tedium of their society somehow escaped me; the faces with the dull tension of people blowing soap bubbles with a straw and vying with one another who can make the biggest and gaudiest, escaped me. The fact that they were completely undiscriminating; that all their business dealings were somehow inconsequential; that they stuck together externally like burrs, while within there was no cohesion: I didn’t see it, and if I did then I still allowed myself to be lulled to sleep by their lullabies. I didn’t yet understand the law of the kraal, the mysterious power of the kraal, even though I was caught in its clutches. It was the same in every family: sisters, brothers, in-laws and their trail, nephews and nieces, more of them with each year — their weal and woe were the weal and woe of the kraal, the world outside was hostile, suspect and basically unknown. What was I so fascinated with? If you throw a lasso round the neck of a wild mustang, it starts to tremble and stands perfectly still. But was that really my situation? Was I not more of a deserter, a turncoat? I didn’t account for myself. I can honestly say I didn’t know. Of course, I was never entirely sure of myself either. This secret uncertainty will have been why I introduced my friend Riemann into the Mevis circle. The occasion was easy enough: I had promised Ganna, her sisters and one of the brothers-in-law I especially liked that I would read them a few chapters from my new book. And so I did, and it seemed to me I could have no complaints about not being properly understood and appreciated. Or was it just Ganna’s passionate rapture that blinded me to the effect on the others? Were they not a little like grown-ups listening indulgently to the breathless rigmarole of a small boy playing cowboys and Indians? Or like people watching the angels and devils projected by a laterna magica? Admittedly, there was one soul present in whom the seed unexpectedly took root: in Irmgard’s. But that too I didn’t know until years later.

GUSH

Ganna, meanwhile, was quite transformed. No more rebelliousness, no more tantrums, no more coffin nail. An obedient daughter, a loving sister. When her father came home in the evening she would run to his bedroom, pick up his fleece-lined slippers, kneel down at his feet and unlace his boots. In the morning she would stay in the kitchen, a place she’d previously shunned, the theatre of the anti-spirit, and try to learn what can be magicked up with flour, oil, green leaves, sugar and spices. It wasn’t interesting, she was certainly never going to learn, she wouldn’t even learn how to boil an egg; but it had to be done, it was the custom, those in the know insisted it was part of a good marriage. Under the influence of the literature of the day, as a faithful disciple of Nietzsche and Stirner, she had deeply despised family and family traditions. Now, though, the happiness that she carried in her breast like a sun gilded the least member of the household, the lowest servant. Even the old Kümmelmann woman, with whom she had lived in enmity ever since she had been able to think, enjoyed new-found respect from her. ‘What have you done to our Ganna?’ the sisters and the mother would ask me. ‘She’s unrecognizable.’ When I was told stories of how disobedient, how difficult she had always been, of the mad pranks she would perform, I would assume an expression of disbelief, because I knew no other Ganna than the one I saw, my gentle, dreamy, smiling, mild and tender fiancée.

There was one thing that struck me as odd. How could it be that her brain, thus far crammed full of poetry, of famous names and idealism and ambition, now suddenly became a repository of twenty or thirty birthdays, deathdays, honorific days and family anniversaries? That overnight she found in herself a mawkish piety for the most distant of relations and would pay calls on obscure, long-lost cousins, twice removed, or on various mothers of various in-laws? The swans said: she is putting her happiness on display, she wants to show off with her Alexander Herzog. A malicious interpretation. Perhaps it was to make amends for past neglect. She had seemed to be a cheeky minx and an enfant terrible for so long that she was now compelled to try and make a good impression.

I don’t know why this new trait bothered me. To me there was something cramped and driven about it, a bad mixture of piety and politicking. It got on my nerves. But I didn’t have the courage to tell her. When she felt that I was displeased by something, she would lapse into despair and quiz me for so long until I chose to deny everything, so as not to see her woeful eyes any more. On one occasion, though, I was unable to repress my irritation. In a little lane in the old part of the city lived an ancient couple by the name of Schlemm, who in some hard-to-trace way were connected to a defunct branch of the Westphalian Lottelotts; there were other Lottelotts as well, but they hailed from Cologne. These Schlemms were incredibly dull; he was deaf and somewhat imbecile, she as chattersome as an old hen. Ganna was courting them, agreeing with everything they said, patting their wrinkled hands, calling them Uncle and Auntie, raving about their wise serenity and their terrific characterful faces. One day I let her talk me into going round to see them. She said the dear old folks had only one wish left in this life, and that was to see me before they died. That was some line she’d got from somewhere. Well, I went with her, what was the big deal? It was like a puppet theatre, where all the puppets were talking gobbledygook. It was only half an hour but it went on for ever. But what tormented me was Ganna’s absurd teariness. I just couldn’t understand it. Where was the reason, the cause? Two soulless silly bags of bones, and all that emotion? ‘I feel so sorry for them,’ she justified herself later, when I was unable to repress my anger; ‘Uncle has a bad liver and Auntie has been tending him for the past forty-three years.’ She sent me a melting look from her big blue eyes and I felt a little scared, I don’t know what of.

THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT

Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, a few days before the beginning of 1901 and hence of the twentieth century proper, I was summoned by the Mevis family solicitor to his office at a given hour. When I turned up the Professor was already there, the solicitor, an efficient busybody with the face of a lance corporal, greeted me with a little show of ceremony, and on a leather sofa where he had cleared himself a little space free of legal files and law magazines sat the notary, with a Virginia cigar in a corner of his mouth. The last-named handed me a calligraphically perfect document — at that time typewriters were not yet in common use in law offices — and asked me to peruse it. I tried hard to oblige. The dowry was spelled out in figures; but the rights and duties of the respective spouses were described in utterly opaque legalese. There was also something about revocability in the event of a dissolution. I wasn’t familiar with the word. Since I didn’t ask, no one felt called upon to tell me. I was bored. I signed. I thought: the Professor is a man of honour, why shouldn’t I sign? It seemed unreasonable to me to ask questions. Twenty-five years later, I understood what it was I had put my name to. A quarter of a century had to pass before the light went on and I saw I had been duped. In the spirit of family, of course, and loyalty. I could have asked. I could have gone to a lawyer myself. It never occurred to me to do so. It was my first encounter with a notary. A notary, I thought, is the embodiment of the law; this is all above board. I had to pay for thinking so.

RIEMANN

With surprise and dismay I saw my friends begin to withdraw from me, Fürst and Muschilov as well, though they at least offered excuses when I suggested a meeting. I sensed the reason of course: they disapproved of my marriage, there were all sorts of gossipy rumours about Ganna going the rounds, one man even sent me an indignant letter in which — almost like Fedora — he terminated our friendship and made the absurd remark that I was about to throw my life away. I tossed the letter into the fire. What pained me more was that Eduard Riemann had been avoiding me for some time. I wanted to clear the air, and since I knew he went every evening to a chess club of which I too was a member, I went along there one night quite late, asked him into a room where we were alone together and had it out with him.

‘I know what you hold against me,’ I started violently, ‘our mutual friend Fedora has set you against me. I don’t understand. It’s a conspiracy. What has Ganna done to incur your disfavour? Isn’t it enough if I love her? Do I need your consent?’

‘You’re asking the wrong questions, my dear Alexander,’ he replied with his strangely nasal, droning voice, ‘that’s not the situation. You have a couple of dozen friends, here and elsewhere, who are following your career with very specific expectations. High expectations, too. To them the thought of you selling yourself — I’m sorry to put it so bluntly — is just hard to take.’

‘Me selling myself? Riemann! You’re not serious. Selling myself! Think about what you’re saying!’

‘All right, what are we to think? It doesn’t seem to us that Ganna Mevis is the right woman for you.’

‘How not?’

‘That’s not easily explained. We’re fearful for you. You’re going off on a tangent. You’re in the wrong setting. We’re afraid you’re acting against your better instincts.’

‘Let me tell you, Riemann, there is no price for which I would, as you put it, sell myself. Don’t you know me at all? Do I need to say that?’

‘No, you wouldn’t do it directly.’

‘And how would I do it indirectly?’

‘The forms are often veiled, but the possibilities of self-deception are limitless.’

‘I have honestly and strenuously examined myself.’

‘I believe you. Even so: undo what you’ve done. Go to India, go to Cape Town, go anywhere. If you don’t have the money, I’ll lend you whatever you need. I’ll take the responsibility for settling the matter.’

‘My God! What are you saying! What nonsense! It’s too late for any of that.’

‘I don’t agree.’

‘I … I can’t live without Ganna.’

‘That’s a different matter, but I don’t think that’s true either.’

‘What’s this all about, Riemann? I’m not welded onto her. If things go wrong, I can always end it.’

Riemann looked at me with strange, benevolent scepticism. ‘You never were much of a psychologist, Alexander,’ he said. ‘Do you really think you can get free of her?’

I was in consternation; I felt like fizzing up in rage, but he went on calmly:

‘And one more thing, my friend. Did you ever take a good look at the mother? That woman is disturbed. And that’s putting it mildly. With that in her genes … True, it’s a large family … but Ganna is on the downward line. Her psychic balance … I’m not sure … if you had eyes to see …’

The innuendo was painful to me. I pushed the argument away from me. Unfortunately, that’s always been my way with inconvenient arguments.

‘I don’t want to think about it,’ I said, ‘it’s going too far, this is meddling in God’s affairs.’

‘We can’t help ourselves, my friend; that’s His way of setting us in motion.’

I didn’t go to bed that night. First I walked the streets in wind and snow, and then I sat till dawn in a bar on the outskirts of town, among hauliers and market women.

WEDDING PRESENTS

I stood with Ganna in front of the pushed-together tables where our wedding presents were displayed. There were garish sofa cushions with Secession patterns, eccentrically shaped lamps, twisted bronzes, metal frog and dog candle holders, models of the Stefansdom and the Tomb of the Medicis as paperweights, nymphs with nozzles in their heads as perfume dispensers, Venetian gondolas as desk ornaments, gilded pine cone picture frames. And then there were useful, practical things, books, silver, porcelain, vouchers for linens and furniture. We weren’t going to set up house immediately; we intended to go travelling for a year first. I was delighted with the presents. I had never had such a warehouse full of possessions, real possessions. All of it seemed beautiful and good. I didn’t think it was real, but then what was real to me? Not even my shirt or my pen. The continual nodding association with people who took these fata morgana things for real was incredibly sapping. Not just that either. Sometimes I got the sense that it was killing something within me. I couldn’t say what, but it was certainly killing something. It was no more than logical that they couldn’t help taking true things for illusions; that was their nature. Here, at the present table, behind all this foolish pleasure in things, I was tormented for the first time by the fear that Ganna might have something to do with the little killings that I was supposed to agree to and introduce into my life. What else did the light in her eyes signify, or her jubilation? Certainly she lives with a divided consciousness, half among human beings, half up in the stars. A princess, getting hitched. A fairy-tale creature floating off into new realms of bliss. She no longer recognizes anyone. She mixes up faces and objects, and vice versa. If you wake up in the morning with the feeling that you’re a rose, or a sunstruck cloud, then you can’t speak in a normal way with human beings, then your speech is bound to be a little haywire. Pseudo Gothic, pseudo Baroque, pseudo Renaissance — what did it matter? They were proof of love, proof of victory. ‘Look at this,’ she said tenderly, ‘this is from Auntie Jetta, and this is from Uncle Adalbert, and this is from Court Councillor Pfeifer, isn’t it sweet of her to have thought of us!’ And Ganna’s delight communicated itself to me as though I’d been given a magic potion to drink.

THE WEDDING

And that worked on the day of the wedding as well, which was a snowy day in January. In my memory I have it as a day also of indescribable noise, for hours and hours. Squawking women, false male voices, clatter of plates, chairs being dragged, champagne corks popping, smells of meat, sweet and sour tastes on my tongue, incessant opening and closing of doors, and coming and going, dutiful telegrams, hands I have to shake, dry and moist, bony and fleshy, warm and cold, rough and smooth, supple and stiff. A humiliating and hurtful wedding, because official, formal language presumed to curtail personal freedoms: like reading a convict the prison rules. The image of Ganna, furthermore, done up in white, and seeming to float over the ground, and then sat at the table with the oddly shameful, conniving smile of a conventional bride. An image of her mother, wrapping her arm round my shoulder, pulling me over to a window seat where, surrounded by noise and bustle, with timid wandering eyes and an alarming laugh, she proceeded to tell me strange, unexpected things, a ghost at a party, heard by no one and ignored by all except me. This last was an insistent, drilling sort of impression.

Then the speeches. The brothers-in-law, showing off their culture and their reading; the friends of the house, who had taken pains to be droll; a colleague of the Professor’s from the philosophy department, who in a thunderous voice, as for the opening of a monument, praised Ganna’s virtues; a military man, an actual general — I had never yet shared a meal with a general — who toasted ‘the splendid and promising young groom’ and expressed the wish that he might ‘continue to walk the paths of science and art’. All in all, when I think about it today, it was a concentrated parody of the social mores of the epoch. Life of a comfortable middle class condensed into a matinee performance, with musical accompaniment from a mildly soused four-piece band. But I didn’t at all feel myself to be a dispassionate observer. No, I was in play, I was active and engaged. When at last the six daughters and the established sons-in-law plus half a dozen assorted grandchildren filed past the Professor’s chair to kiss him on the forehead after his pithy concluding speech; when he then got to his feet, towering in their midst, the kingly patriarch and all-powerful overlord of the kraal, so that one imagined the future of the clan assured well into the next century, by which time his person would have become mythical and emblematic; and when Ganna, overcome by the greatness of the historical moment, sank against his chest and, sobbing, thanked him for everything he had given her, then I myself was moved, and looked at the red-bearded patriarch as if to my own patron.

There followed a hasty departure, drawing deep breaths of freezing air, the drive to the station in a bumping carriage, alone with Ganna, who was now Ganna Herzog.