My First Wife

The Age of Certainties

TEETHING TROUBLES OF A COUPLE

We travelled the length of Italy, with many stops, from the Tyrolean Alps down to Sicily. We were very happy.

I had never spent more than three days cooped up with another human being, male or female. Just as well I was used to small spaces and didn’t feel constricted. We had agreed to travel on a very modest footing. Ganna thought it was wonderful to have a husband who carried his business around in his head and was able to settle his practical affairs in ten minutes or so at a restaurant table.

The new insouciance may have been a kind of dream; still, it entered my life as something unfamiliar. When a burden borne over many years suddenly slips off, one’s state afterwards is not automatically easier. There is a period of adjustment. Different breathing is required. I had always had all the solitude I required; now I had none, neither by day nor at night. Ganna was always present, wanting to be seen and heard, protected and loved. And to love me back. If it were possible to dig love out of the ground, she would have dug it out, if only to prove to me how inexhaustible her supplies of it were.

But various things happen that are hard to avoid when your world is a room with two beds in it, and the space by the door and in the corners is all taken up with your suitcases. For instance, I’m sitting quietly reading a book. So as not to disturb me, Ganna creeps through the room on tiptoe. But then — oh dear! — there is a chair in her way, which she manages to upset. Crash. Or she knocks over a glass of water. Or a suitcase lid bangs shut. Thousand anxious apologies. She is a little unlucky. If she is unlucky, you have to comfort her. She lives in a permanent state of war with things. She loses her purse; horror. She drops a letter through someone’s front door instead of in the letterbox; a mobile pillar of wailing. She needs comfort. It’s not possible to be angry with her when she warbles up to complete strangers as if they were all her uncles and aunts; she’s just made a mistake; she’s absent-minded. Or when she takes as many books with her on a walk as you would need to pass a university exam. It’s funny. You have to laugh. She sees that you have to laugh and she laughs along. But that doesn’t mean that she does anything differently the next time. She lives in a world of Ideals. She’s like the famous birds who try to peck at Apelles’ famous painted grapes. I try to bring a little order to her being, a little consistency. It’s hard. Ganna’s is not one of those adaptive natures that are geared for experience. Experience is as baffling as, say, pain. I have a sense that I need to mould her. I ought to give her a form, because she has none. It took me a very, very long time to understand that it wasn’t possible to form her. Not that she was too soft or too hard. Soft things and hard things can still be shaped. But something that is in between, that flows, that is jellied, that is forever changing its nature — that cannot be formed.

LITTLE SOUL

In her innocence she thought she just needed to give herself to the man she loved to make him happy. There wasn’t much subtlety about her. She was incapable of giving herself completely, simply because her will was never entirely extinguished. She wanted to be will-less, but that was as far as it went: that was the seed of the calamity. By temperament, she was a force of nature, proof against any civilizatory intentions. All her life she took it for a brutal meddling in her character if anyone tried to rein in or refine the elemental strain in her. The very intention was baffling to her. And the drive, the blood was the only thing to keep in parlous balance her ethereal intellect and her earthiness. I understood intuitively that it would be wrong of me to rob her of its innocence.

Nor was I the man to tame her. I had such profound respect for the thus-and-thus-alone of any living creature that I couldn’t summon up the courage to take the darkest innermost parts of a human and shape them and light them. It’s not possible to be an educator if you have diffidence in your veins. Nor was I masterful in love, not least because my senses in their guilty darkness were unfree. All this requires to be said: it’s the hidden source of all that follows, otherwise no one could understand how things took their subsequent course.

Guilt: the word makes me flinch, but from the very beginning there was guilt in my relationship with Ganna. I never felt any passion for her. I didn’t realize it right away. It took me a while to understand. Once I had understood, I had to fight off Ganna’s sudden surges of passion with secret dread. She misunderstood me. She had to misunderstand me, because otherwise she would have fallen out of the sky. I couldn’t allow that to happen. I had to see that she stayed up there for as long as possible. It wasn’t so terribly hard. She took refuge in fantasy. I was Robert Browning and she was Elizabeth Barrett. The model of a highly intellectual marriage made it possible for her to reinterpret my growing reluctance to give her the much-craved protestations of love as a metaphysical union. I had to admire the tenacity with which she managed to live in a fantasy. My admiration for her was altogether undiminished. I was able to discuss all my plans with her. Within a very short time she had mastered all the technical expressions of a hard-boiled novelist. When news I had from Germany left me in no doubt that my book was not only a critical but also a popular success (though that didn’t lead to any great earnings for me, seeing as I’d changed publishers, and my former publisher was insisting on a large transfer sum and the return of unearned advances), I noticed that she lost the calm and equilibrium that had previously cladded her being like a sort of enamel. It appeared she was no longer so certain of me. I asked her directly if that was so. Reluctantly, she admitted it was. She thought it was her duty to keep the lures of the world and the blandishments of fame away from me. ‘Whatever for?’ I asked in astonishment. ‘What are you afraid of?’ She said she had no guarantees of a future. ‘Do you need guarantees, Ganna?’ Of course, she replied, the present wasn’t enough. ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘you can’t carry me around with you like a kangaroo her joey?’ Yes, she could, that was exactly what she wanted, she replied with her sweetly cunning smile. She wanted security. She hungered for more security. She admitted it. I stroked her hair. I called her little soul, the tenderest endearment the German language has to offer.

BANK ACCOUNT AND ANANGKE

In Taormina we stayed in a hole-in-the-wall dive. There were bedbugs. The mosquitoes ate us alive, there were no nets. At night Ganna burned all sorts of incense, but that only made us choke with the reek and smoke. If we’d had just two lire a day more to spend, we could have lived somewhere human. Ganna didn’t want to know. Keeping to budget was her biggest anxiety. Budget was one of the magic words that turned up on the horizon shortly after we were married, like so many glow-worms in the gathering dark. The concept ‘budget’ was linked to the concept ‘bank account’. ‘Bank account’ was the biggest and mightiest of the glow-worms, and of course another magic word. Her father had dinned it into her never on any account to eat into her capital, not even to use a dime more than we had from the interest. ‘Someone who eats into his capital will stop at nothing,’ had been the Professor’s awful watchword. Ganna was now parroting it. Her father, more revered the further he receded into the distance, was so to speak the high priest of ‘capital’, a revered fetish, and he kept his mighty hand over the mysterious institutions of those tamper-proof investment papers that were the basis of the bank account. So many securities.

Ganna knew of course that the majestically round figure of 80,000 crowns had already been reduced by the sum that had been necessary for the cancellation of my debts. She had come up with a financial plan to make good the missing amount. Following this plan, we were to use not the full four and a half per cent interest of 3,600 crowns, but only 3,000; the rest was to go to the capital, and any further expenses were to be defrayed from my income. I thought the plan was inspired. It called for extreme economies. Every bedbug and mosquito in Signor Pancrazio’s wretched quarters was physical proof of the guarantee system of the head priest and the gilt-edged tabernacle. What touching lengths Ganna went to to prove to me that my ironic contempt for these divine securities was based on folly and ignorance. She spoke nobly of the ethos of self-restraint and the moral duty to twist the sword from the grip of fate, as it stood there menacing the noble-minded. Immersed in her Plato, the pencil in her hand to scribble in the margin of her copy, her girlish brow creased, she pointed to the irresistible force of anangke, before which everyone had to bow. I was impressed. I said she was right. Truth to tell, it wasn’t me who was in charge of the money. Even if the bank account was kept in my name, I submitted to Ganna’s economies without demurring. I was in the position of a man whom pride and self-respect kept from laying a hand on the preserve of others.

A PRIMAL CREATURE?

I undertook to climb Etna and had promised Ganna to be back by the evening of the third day. I got lost in the lava fields, moreover the weather turned and I was compelled to seek shelter in a shepherd’s hut. That delayed my return by six hours. Ganna had been waiting for me in growing impatience. By six o’clock she had alerted Signor Pancrazio and his household. Two hours later, crying, she demanded that the police be notified and a detachment of carabinieri sent out to look for me. At eleven o’clock the pleading of the landlord’s entire family and other German guests was not enough to dissuade her from pulling on her raincoat, and she sobbingly set off down the pitch-black lane, followed by Pancrazio’s two sons, who were eventually able to prevail on her to turn round. When I arrived at around midnight she hurled herself at my chest with a piercing scream, like a madwoman. Pancrazio and his family, shaken by such a display of conjugal fealty, treated her thenceforth with an awed respect of which only Italians are capable. With delightful sapience, a fourteen-year-old girl expressed the supposition that the signora must be expecting. Which soon enough proved to be the case. Two days later, when a south wind flung the yellow dust of the Sahara over the island, shrouding the scene in eerie yellow twilight, Etna spat fire and the frightened populace organized propitiatory processions, Ganna, with wide Sibyl’s eyes, intoned: ‘Now do you understand my fear? I could feel it coming. It was already in me.’ Oppressed, I asked myself how I was to cope with such lack of restraint in future. I really believed there was some connection between her and the dark forces of nature. I wondered how such a primal creature could have slipped out of the sober bosom of the Mevis family.

RETURN

Pregnancy was not on the agenda. We had decided not to have children for another two years. You can’t go gadding about the planet with an infant in tow. It was in Rome that, trembling with happiness, she came to me with the great news. A crowned head could not have been more diligent than Ganna in the business of making an heir. She sent for medical literature from Vienna. She observed a stringent diet of her own devising. She found a German doctor and consulted him for hours on end. She treated the temple of her body with loving care. Inside and outside, she went around on tiptoe. Her one and only thought was of the child. Her only concern was that it should be beautiful, beautiful and important. She was certain she had it within her power. Like a farmer’s wife, she believed in the effect of transferred shock and so she avoided ugly sights. She spent her mornings in the Vatican collections and sat with avid, adhesive eye before the statuary. She bought a postcard of the Neapolitan fresco of Narcissus. She put it up over her bed and gazed at it with hypnotic devotion, before going to sleep and when she woke. She thought nothing was beyond her illimitable will — not even influencing an embryo in the womb. I wasn’t allowed to say anything otherwise she would get angry. Ironic remarks annoyed her. She had no use for irony. She didn’t think she was someone to be smiled at, she thought she was holy. And there was something else as well. The ultimate security she thirsted for — she had it now. Since she didn’t want to have her baby in a foreign city, and she was missing her family, we went back to Vienna in the autumn.

THE YELLOW ROOM

I was dreading it. I feared the claims of family, the utter automatic mindlessness with which I would be reclaimed. I was afraid of a life within walls. When I decided once and for all in favour of the life of the bourgeois and the tax-payer — with a bank account to protect me from every eventuality, newest recruit and pride of the Mevises, Schlemms and Lottelotts — that meant the end of poet’s garret and Samson’s struggle. Fedora and Riemann were right: I had sold myself and betrayed myself. But Ganna was able to talk me out of my worries. She spoke so confidently and enthusiastically of a life of calm domesticity that I complied and went quietly.

After looking for a long time, we finally rented a furnished garden flat far out in the western suburbs, far away too from the Mevises, that was free over the winter. Ganna wasn’t yet ready to find somewhere permanent. The furnishing and equipping would have cost too much money. This postponement in her eyes doubled as an economy. The building faced onto a crooked street of bungalows and banal front gardens. Every twenty minutes a steam tram clattered past. There was a bell fixed to the locomotive that you could hear from a distance, and long after it was gone. The aspect of the lodging that had won Ganna over was a very large room with a glass wall at the back, the front extremity of which was flooded with light, but whose interior was so dark that we needed to keep the gaslights on during the day. This was our room of state where we did our receiving, our living and dining room, my workplace; and on top of all that it was where I slept on a sofa in a recess during the weeks before Ganna’s due date. It was painted lemon yellow and divided in two by a cloth screen, also lemon yellow. On the left-hand wall we had the Dying Gaul and on the right the Thorn Remover, both set up on top of carefully draped crates, both in plaster of Paris; both souvenirs from Rome.

I dwell on it at such length because the room was important to me. We know so little about the influence of different spaces on one’s mood, on thinking, on decisions. An inch more or less in height or breadth and life feels different. I felt as if I was in a suit that was too big for me, bought from some second-hand dealer. I never felt at home in the room. When I woke up in the night and the wintry light dribbled in through chinks in the curtains; then I felt like stepping out into the garden to do something loutish like throwing snowballs at the ridiculous room. Or I wished I could get leprechauns in to do my work for me, because my skull was full of the merry jingle of the tram. It’s not good to be with a busy woman if you’re trying to paint a delicate picture or weave a delicate tapestry. It’s not just one woman either; there are many, as many as the day has hours, that’s how many Gannas there are; and each of them wants to do something different, each one is full of herself, each one is happy, excited, has a plan, a wish; and some of them I don’t even know yet — I would have to be introduced to them.

I GET POCKET MONEY

Baby clothes need buying. The rent needs paying. The servants need paying. I need a new suit for the winter. Ganna needs a coat. The interest isn’t enough, we need — Ganna’s nightmare — to attack the capital. We need to sell some of the tamper-proofed securities. Ganna’s horror. The holy awe of money in the bank has by now infected me. There is nothing more odious than money and the spirit of money. On the first of the month I toddle along to the bank to take out the money we need for the household. I feel like a thief doing it. The cashier at the desk, a gaunt man with gold-rimmed spectacles, is old Mevis’s viceroy on earth; he is certain to subject me to a thorough cross-questioning. A man who attacks his capital will stop at nothing. Ganna’s tiny hands clutch the bank account like a legal scroll. The cashier lets the notes flutter over the marble till, the capital swishes. I count them shyly, and when I pack them away in my wallet I feel I have outwitted the man at the till and am about to leg it. I leave with the footfall of a fraud. I have no peace till I have handed the money into Ganna’s safe keeping, every last penny of it. Ganna notes it down, Ganna calculates, Ganna doles out my pocket money. Yes, my pocket money, as if I’d been a boarding school pupil. It seems perfectly natural to me. What would a man need money for if he has board and lodgings? I have a good mind to say that to the man at the counter when I next visit. It may make him take a milder view of me.

NOT EVERYTHING IS AS IT SHOULD BE

‘Can’t we eat soon?’ comes my dejected question as the grandfather clock strikes two in the yellow barn. ‘In a minute, Alexander,’ Ganna breathes back anxiously, one of the many Gannas, ‘in a minute.’ And then see what the messy ‘maid of all work’ dishes up! Things that deny their nature. Meat that looks like charcoal. Cakes that look like book bindings. Soups of which all that can be said in their favour is that they are steaming. All of it produced by gigantic effort, with Ganna’s endless trouble. Ganna’s trouble is a chapter on its own. Imagine a great surge of energy followed by nothing, nothing at all, that disappears without trace. An almost scientific thoroughness, the most serious commitment, and the result more or less as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to a fly on a windowpane. It’s all precisely calculated, it’s a radical procedure, but the windowpane suffers, as anyone could have predicted except Ganna. Ganna doesn’t understand. With her apron tied on she stands by the stove, stirs the batter in the pan, and open on the sideboard are Hölderlin’s poems, which she sneaks a look at. When the batter at the bottom of the pan is charred, she can’t help herself and scolds the maid. I see the real problem and tell her: ‘But Ganna, it’s not possible to read Hölderlin and cook pancakes at one and the same time. You have to decide which one you’re doing.’ Ganna concedes that, but it’s difficult for her, she’s so riven by the claims of utility and the spirit. You could say she sweats with effort. In her desire to please me nothing is too much trouble, no inconvenience is too great. But everything falls down because of the excess of fuss. Whenever she tries to see that I am left in peace for my work, she manages to knock over the metaphorical chair. The little domestic devils have it in for her. Her burning ambition melts everything she reaches out for. It’s interesting, even at times breathtaking, but it’s not what one could call a peaceful existence. It feels like being on board a ship that keeps being clumsily steered into the teeth of the gale.

And then there are the servants. The first maid stayed for six days, the second lasted just two, the third fourteen, and none of her successors was with us for longer than three weeks. Ganna is at a loss to explain it; I too am puzzled. Only gradually I come to understand. I discover that under Ganna’s regime any flaw in a human being turns into a vice. It’s quite something. If a girl comes into our house with a sweet tooth, she leaves it as a thief. An untidy girl becomes a whirlwind. Since Ganna doesn’t have a clue about how you make a bed or polish a doorknob, her orders are heard with quiet derision. She hasn’t the least idea how long it takes to do anything. Either she demands the impossible, or else she’s diddled. She doesn’t understand common people or their speech. Her somewhat pretentious idiom leaves people in the dark and they are suspicious of her. First of all she’s sugar-sweet and then without any sort of transition she can become crude. The bourgeois conceit of the Mevis girls and her own literary education keep her from viewing people working for her as beings like herself. Sometimes she would like to, but it’s more than she can do. At the slightest difference of opinion she flies off the handle and her eyes throw sparks. In the early days I am able to calm her down, but later her rage will turn on me, too. I am forced to leave her to it, otherwise the domestic strife just gets too exhausting.

There was one girl called Resi who managed to twist Ganna round her little finger, by the simple expedient of flattering her mercilessly; one night she plundered the linen cupboard and vanished. There was a Kathy, who had a string of lovers, and if Ganna ever caught one in her kitchen there would be a terrible yelling match on both sides. There was a Pepi, who was picked up by the police on suspicion of arson. There was a Hannah, who turned out to be in the advanced stages of syphilis; when we let her go her fellow sneaked into the house at night and threatened me with a revolver. There were temps who were as dirty and uncouth as if we’d got them from a holding cell. There were kitchen maids who made off with flour, rice and preserves under their skirts. It smells of burned milk all morning. Girls come, girls go. Ganna spends hours at domestic agencies. Come the evening she’s beaming: she’s come up with a ‘pearl’. A couple of days later the pearl turns out to be just a rotten pea. Ganna feels discouraged, and I need to comfort her. Every now and again one of the sisters turns up, to show some solidarity. With a little admixture of Schadenfreude, admittedly. They are pessimistic about the future. Ganna might know about books, their expressions say, but she doesn’t have a clue about life.

THE HERMITAGE

When Ganna started having her contractions, I fled. I know it’s a shameful confession to make, but I had had too much of home. I spent the afternoon with the big cats in Schönbrunn. Something cold and slick had got hold of me. I had heard Ganna’s screams. Even her screams were louder and wilder than other women’s. Her nature put up one hell of a fight against the pain. What, I, Ganna, am expected to suffer?! I, a Mevis, Alexander Herzog’s wife, am expected to suffer?! Nothing helped, she had to suffer. I suffered with her, but I couldn’t stand to witness it. Not out of the usual male cowardice and guilt, but because it wasn’t through passion that I had brought her suffering.

When I got home, there was something dark and hairy in the swaddling bands. It was a son — Ganna had been right. (I couldn’t see any resemblance to Narcissus, though.) In a pristine bed, her russet hair tied up under a blue cloth, Ganna with a blissful exhausted smile held out its little hand to me. I was deeply moved. ‘Don’t you think he’s beautiful?’ she asked. ‘Yes, very nice,’ I replied, and probably I looked a bit foolish as I said so. When the baby was put to her bosom, her eyes welled up. It was as though this particular show had never happened before, no woman had ever given birth before, or breast-fed her baby. Well, I said to myself, there are some people who experience life in a particularly primal way. We called the hairy amphibian Ferdinand, Ferry for short. He did turn out to be an uncommonly attractive child; here too Ganna managed to get her way.

I asked myself more and more why it was that I always submitted to this will. It’s not that I am will-less myself; and weak-willed only inasmuch as my nature is opposed to pointless exertions. So, once it was spring and we had to leave the flat with the yellow room, I moved with her to somewhere at the back of beyond. The new place was an inn called the Hermitage, since (and deservedly) disappeared off the surface of the earth. It was a grim and sad abode, much worse than Signor Pancrazio’s hole in the wall. It reminded me of the murderous inn in fairy tales, where the offed guests were interred in the cellar. It had one advantage: it was cheap. That was what decided Ganna. But she was also fed up with her sisters’ condescension and even more with the hellish dealings with the servants. So, it was up sticks for the romantic ruin. Ganna said it was high time she returned to her higher calling. I agreed with her. I thought it was high time too. I didn’t know exactly what she had in mind, but I let that go.

I worked in a gloomy cell that got wet when it rained, and when it was fine I heard the trippers carousing in the beer garden; and all the time I had Ganna’s squabbling with the nursemaid to distract me. What was it all for, I would ask myself periodically, to be living like an outlaw? A bank account, I thought, is obviously intended to be a type of conserve, like foie gras; not something anyone eats fresh. As for the nursemaid, Oprcek by name, she was a confirmed lunatic. She put the boy to sleep by singing him obscene ditties, and when Ganna quarrelled with her she would curtsey to her with a giggle, hoick her skirts up round her knees and mutter Czech oaths under her breath.

I remember one particular night when I was woken by my son’s piercing wail. Ganna flutters and flusters round the room, and makes up some camomile tea by the light of a candle. The Oprcek woman holds the pillow with the infant on it in her upraised arms and performs a sort of Negro minstrel dance with her hideous singing. Ganna begs me to call a doctor. It’s a long way to the nearest doctor, but my tiredness is no match for Ganna’s fears. I pull on some clothes and go out into the night. And while I walk down into the village, I am taken by a vague and bitter yearning that has me reeling through the stormy, rainy night … I never forgot that time.

THE NEW FACE

In autumn we finally settled. We moved into the upper storey of an imposing villa on the edge of the 13th district. Furniture, crockery, curtains and lamps needed to be bought. The bank account was ransacked. Ganna spent sleepless nights.

The house belonged to an old couple by the name of Ohnegroll.* Never was a name less deserved. The man was deceitful and malignant, and his wife was a termagant. Brightly coloured ceramic gnomes stood around in the flower beds in woolly hats. I had such a fury against these gnomes, it was as though they were the ones who had made off with my money. An attic room was my study, where I sometimes slept. From there I had a view over a moth-eaten meadow, where a carousel went round in the daytime, to hurdy-gurdy accompaniment. But in the evenings and at night it was eerily quiet, and I worked all through the winter undisturbed.

When spring came I felt restless. Ganna didn’t want to leave the baby, so I got in touch with Konrad Fürst and we headed south. In Ferrara my companion ran out of money; by the time we got home, he owed me 700 crowns. Barely a week later, Fürst met me in a café and begged me almost in tears to let him have another 1,000; it was a gambling debt, he had given his word of honour and if he didn’t have the money by morning he would have no option but to shoot himself. I responded coolly that I didn’t think it was his place to get into all this honorious behaviour; if he was in trouble, then I’d help him out, but I didn’t think it was advisable for us to see each other for a while. It was a discreet sort of break with him. Fürst’s fatuous lifestyle and his megalomania had got on my nerves more and more.

As I was expecting a sizeable payment from my publisher, I thought I’d be able to plug the hole in the bank account before Ganna found out about it. Unfortunately the payment was delayed, and I was forced to tell Ganna what had happened. I was prepared for an outburst of rage, but not for the torrent of bitterness and indignation that followed. To begin with, she just looked at me speechlessly. ‘Well, really, Alexander,’ she stammered with blue lips, and then a second time, ‘Really, Alexander …’ like someone whose ideals are crumbing away before their very eyes. With stomping strides and tiny feet she walked up and down, yanked the tablecloth off the table, thrust the chairs out of her way with her knees, ground her little teeth, pressed her tiny hands to her temples and chuntered away to herself: some friend; nasty piece of work; outrageous, taking advantage of someone’s kind-heartedness when he has children of his own to feed; well, she wasn’t going to stand for it; she was going to write a letter to the slick con-trickster, and one that he wouldn’t stick on his mirror …

She had every reason to be angry. After all, she was economizing the soul out of her body, turned every crown over three times before spending it, haggled with market traders over vegetables, wouldn’t buy herself a new pair of shoes until the old ones were falling apart. Fine. But she still shouldn’t have carried on like that. The wrong I thought I had committed suddenly didn’t feel wrong any more. Even though she shortly after apologized to me in tears for her vehemence, a sting remained which drilled itself into my flesh. I had seen a new face to her. It was even there in her charming, innocent smile, the new face.

AT THE CONCERT

In the same way as strands floating in a murky liquid end up coalescing in strange patterns, so the continual strife gradually made Ganna’s life opaque, and her relations with people and things unpredictable. There were recurring scenes which ended up forming a pattern. I bought tickets for an orchestral concert. It starts at seven. You need to allow three-quarters of an hour for the ride into town. At a quarter to six I go to Ganna to tell her to get ready. She is lying dreamily on the terrace; in her right hand a book on mysticism and the Pre-Raphaelites, and in her left the usual pencil. ‘Oh, just a minute,’ she gives back, startled, drops the book on the lead flashing where it remains, to be found sodden with rain the following day, and scuttles into the bedroom. Ten minutes pass, twenty; I’m in hat and coat looking at my watch all the time, then I pluck up courage and go and see what’s keeping Ganna. She’s standing in the bathroom, half-dressed, washing her hair, now, at ten past six. I am furious. Ganna asks me not to rush her, she’s going as fast as she can. She’s the victim of unlucky circumstances. Her best intentions are crossed by bad chances. Everyone tramples around on poor Ganna. Even me. Sighing and groaning and wailing, she’s finished by half past six. Just a quick dash to the nursery, intense farewells with Ferry, some rushed parting instructions (because we do rely on her) to the nursemaid (don’t ask me which number nursemaid), and we’re running to catch the tram. We stand around waiting for the next ten minutes, Ganna with offended expression and pout. No sooner has she taken her seat than she realizes she’s left behind her little purse with her opera glasses and her money. Reproaches. The only reason it happens is because she’s been ‘rushed’. She thinks she doesn’t ‘deserve’ it. When she’s trying ‘so’ hard. She complains and complains. I feel embarrassed in front of the other people in the tram; Ganna is quite unembarrassed in front of the other people in the tram. That’s part of her sense of superiority. Why do I answer back to her? Why don’t I keep my mouth shut? I feel sorry for her, that’s why. She’s tormented. I want to help her get over it. I don’t like it when she complains and whines. Perhaps it’s her magic arts that make me so yielding. Arrived at the concert hall, we are made to wait for a break in the performance. I am still reasoning with her, trying to prove to her that she’s in the wrong, a sure-fire way of confirming her in her self-righteousness. Her anger continues as an empty babbling. Then she’s sitting down in her seat with a rapt expression. Music affects her like strong drink. I’ve understood that she’s about as musical as a piece of driftwood, that she doesn’t have the least understanding of the structure of a composition, the assembly, the interlocking of various motifs, the worth or worthlessness, content or vapidity of the whole. It would be a simple matter to sell her an operetta overture of the better sort as, say, Bruckner, and she would start to gush; but all that doesn’t prevent me from believing in the sincerity of her response, the genuineness of her emotion. Ganna is like a part of me. I can’t behave otherwise than as I do; if I did, it would be the end of me. Of course there are times when the sight of her intoxication offends my modesty and my judgement; then I need only remember with what flaming awe, what passionate support she listens to me, hour after hour, when I read aloud to her from my work, how I feel the sympathetic beat of her blood, and her whole being is enthusiastic assent. I like her drunkenness, then; so must I damn her when in another context she seems merely — disinhibited? But surely then everything would be deception and pretence.

IN COMPANY

I was no longer in touch with my former friends and associates. Either the relationship had come to a natural end, or they had jobs and offices to go to, or they had disappeared into an intellectual underworld. Many of them described me as a cold-hearted user of people. The ones who most especially said it were the ones who had used me almost all up. People are voracious. Give anything of yourself to them, they want to chew your bones; put up a fight, they call you inconstant or feckless. I had a reputation for arrogance. In fact I was excruciatingly shy and still am. But what I couldn’t stand was the complacent ignorance of others with respect to my person and my work, a conceited tolerance, of the sort one might show to a neighbour who has put up a fortress wall round his little handkerchief garden.

Ganna preached worldliness to me. She said I should get down from my ivory tower from time to time. ‘You need to see people and gain fresh impressions,’ she said. I had nothing against going out and seeing people, but unfortunately the ones she had in mind were those who kept salons or gave parties and wanted to collect celebrities. It was her ambition to secure me an appropriate position in the world; but what she thought of as the world was just the financial-cum-artistic circle where she had spent time as a girl. She was proud of being Frau Alexander Herzog and wanted to enjoy her social status. Each and any invitation was an honorific confirmation of the fact. But for the rung of the ladder where she liked to be, she lacked a little discrimination. If she heard her name being whispered behind her, the pleasant sensation tingled into the roots of her hair. When a lawyer or university lecturer kissed her hand, she beamed. When she had a head of section presiding at her dinner table, she was as excited as a young actress being given a plum role. I was perfectly willing to allow all these various gentlemen the credit that Ganna so prodigally lavished on them. I was a little fish. My sense of self was poorly developed. Intellectual attainments have never let me become too full of myself. I thought Ganna, being experienced in the ways of her circle, would do the right thing. I allowed myself to be dragged along. I went solemnly into ‘people’s houses’, as I sometimes sarcastically put it. From time to time I would suggest that really we ought to reciprocate. Ganna insisted that wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t expected from an artist. Since it suited me to believe that, I believed it, and thereby put myself on the same level as a tenor who was only invited because his name appeared in the paper — or even a little lower, because the tenor at least sang for his supper. Offering people hospitality would have been difficult for us; we ate so terribly badly. When Ganna organized a family meal, which was about the most we ever did, there would be strange giggles about the taste and the puzzling identity of a dish or other. Ganna had no idea how bad it was. She didn’t care what was set in front of her. She would launch into a half-cooked potato and a pineapple with the same enthusiastic lack of awareness.

That evening we were guests of the bank director Bugatto, who at the time was a big wheel in the world of high finance. I can remember a whole series of unpleasant feelings besieging me, and I see Ganna in her element. She is forming a circle. A wreath of professors, doctors, lawyers, town councillors, manufacturers and some of their ladies surrounds her. She makes bold assertions and tries to back them up. They are shallow paradoxes, things she has got out of books, but she craves the attention; she pulls it off. Such an original mind, people say. I am happy for her; it means she will be in a good mood for days to come. I like it when her good qualities are recognized. I have an easier time with her. The only embarrassing thing is her way of referring to ‘my husband’ all the time. I hate that possessive.

I get unbearably bored. The sitting around; the stupid questions and answers, the vulgar gossip. And Ganna’s ingratiating chit-chat — I can no longer deny that she is making an exhibition of herself; her warbling, her giddiness, her provincial coquettishness: I suffer, it pains me, can’t she feel my shame, my ambivalent position, her own exaggeration, her prostration before this portfolio of pearls, dresses, investments and titles? No, she doesn’t. She rises like yeast. She blooms. Two or three times I approach her and suggest going home. Mutely she implores me for leave to stay. She is having such a wonderful time. On the way home she asks me what I had against them. They had all been so charming to her, only I with my bad mood had spoiled the lovely evening.

She doesn’t get it, what am I to do? She carries on digging around and complaining until I lose my patience and say something intemperate and find myself in the wrong. Ganna has been waiting for just that. She exploits her advantage to the full. She says I quite systematically go about making enemies, and that I therefore have no business complaining or being surprised at my lack of readers. A poisonous observation, which isn’t any the less hurtful because it crudely conflates two separate categories. Riposte, counter, Ganna takes nothing back. It goes on and on, to the point that at two in the morning the Ohnegrolls bang a broom handle against their ceiling to get some quiet. Ganna ignores them. She sinks her teeth into every word of mine. This is no more warbling and fluting like there was in the plush halls of the dignitaries and the rentiers; this is anger and a vicious style of argumentation that will stoop to any rhetorical trick to force the opponent to his knees. The crazy thing is that I practically am on my knees. That always used to astonish me. When I think about it today I can’t help believing that sensuality is somewhere involved, the blind urge that contains something of the desire to batter, and to stun.

HOTHOUSE OF EMOTIONS

With horror I recollect the day little Ferry fell ill. At the least sign of fever Ganna would be beside herself. First, the nanny was subjected to harsh questioning. If she was guilty of some mistake in the care or feeding of the baby, the storm would break over her head and she would be dismissed on the spot. (When the temperature went down she was quietly reinstated.) In such instances, Ganna’s brain would assemble all conceivable illnesses and they would race through her imagination in a terrifying rout. Every hyperbole was justified by the imagined danger. But the danger can be avoided if you recognize the cause early enough. A human being, Ganna likes to say, has everything in his own hands, happiness and unhappiness, life and death. If he sticks to the advice of doctors and the prescriptions of science, then not much can happen to him. The biggest threat are germs. The fight against germs, the way she sees it, is like hunting fleas. You’re immune if you learn the doctors’ and professors’ trick of taming and dressing these wicked little creatures. Since Ganna is capable of saying in almost every instance where and how a certain illness was caught, there is always blame involved. If she feels a rheumatic twinge, she will remember weeks later that I talked her out of wearing her fur when on a certain day — I’ve forgotten all about it — we went to visit Auntie Claire. Ganna doesn’t let nature get away with anything. She believes in doctors the way a devout Catholic believes in Holy Communion. At the slightest suggestion of a symptom the doctor is sent for, a specialist even, for whatever it is. Any and every doctor in her eyes is a sort of all-powerful bourgeois God. But there’s trouble for this Godhead if he doesn’t bring about an instant cure. Then we get blaspheming and the daughter of the heathen kraal will send for a fresh god.

I often struggled against it. I lectured her, warned her, implored her. In vain. These are emotional excesses, I would say to myself then, she exists in a sort of emotional hothouse. The day-to-day is humdrum; emotions will eat it up. Emotion becomes the measure and mirror of the world. To impede Ganna and change the direction of her affect is as hopeless as it would be to ask a storm to kindly take itself off somewhere else. I began to be afraid of her lack of moderation. Since my strength was invested elsewhere, I didn’t have it to draw on when I needed it with her. Sometimes I simply shut my eyes when I saw things that depressed or alarmed me to see. I tried to see the whole Ganna experience as my destiny in life. The more reality weighed on me, the more the picture I had made of Ganna took the weight from me. It was of brass, not readily destroyed. A demonic person, I told myself. That was the first flash of the insight that later, much later, came over me like a brand. Demonic; not a word one can do all that much with. An excuse word, a false coin. It’s a facile explanation for the inexplicable, a charge of spiritual inadequacy or unrighteousness laid against the door of an unknown power. At that time, Ganna hadn’t gone off the rails. I could still have got her in my power if I’d been careful, if I’d been alert, if I’d been tougher.

A FEW SNAPSHOTS OF GANNA

But at that time it was still extraordinarily difficult to extricate myself from certain intriguing traits of her personality, her quirky absent-mindedness, her silly little mishaps, her dreaminess. All that had the charm of youth, and was further enhanced by the happiness in which she seemed to float.

She is lying blissfully spread out on the sofa in her hideously untidy bedroom, marking up Goethe’s Italian Journey in pencil. In the nursery the baby is screaming her head off, because we have gone on to have a second child, my daughter Elisabeth; in the living room Ferry is banging around on the piano; in the corridor the cook and the maid are fighting a pitched battle; down in the garden patio, Frau Ohnegroll is yapping away like an unpleasant little dog. None of it reaches Ganna. She can’t hear it. Her spirit is in heaven. Then a glance finds its way out to the rose I brought her the other day. She smiles, gets up and carries the glass with the rose in it to her dressing table. Now she has two roses, because there’s a second one reflected in the mirror …

Or this. It’s May. To Ganna the concept of ‘May’, regardless of the actual weather, is inseparable from ‘sunshine’ and ‘blue sky’. So she goes out in a thin serge dress with a frail-looking parasol, where an icy north wind blows and a shower comes down every fifteen minutes or so. It doesn’t matter. In her imagination it’s ‘May’. She passes a fruit stall and sees the first cherries of the year. How wonderful, she thinks, I’ll buy some cherries for Alexander. She buys a pound of cherries. She is given them in a twist of paper. It has a hole, and while she wanders dreamily home (when she’s alone she doesn’t need to ‘hurry’ and is free to ‘enjoy’ her walk); so, while she’s ‘enjoying’ the illusory May air, one cherry after another escapes through the hole in the paper bag. People stop and turn and watch her, and grin. The pavement behind her is studded with cherries at regular intervals. Finally a woman takes pity on her and tells her. Who could describe her shock! Thank God, there are not that many people out and about; she goes back and picks up the cherries, one after another …

Yes, an eccentric, clumsy, moving creature, Ganna. A Ganna that you’d want to try and protect from wounds and damage. If there weren’t the seam in the surface, the crater from which the dark element bursts forth, of which you never know when it will be and how catastrophic its effect.

FEMALE DON QUIXOTE

I had got to be close to Irmgard. Fleeting conversations had deepened, and then we had gone hiking together — because, unlike Ganna, Irmgard was a splendid walker and tourist. She had, again unlike Ganna, a low opinion of herself and was grateful to me for the lengths I went to to reinforce her sense of self. That was really what she most lacked, even though she had a solid and substantial character; as a woman, though, she had suffered various disappointments that had robbed her of courage. She had a particular sort of beauty. She looked like the statue of an Egyptian princess.

Things between us were such that we could have fallen in love at any moment. It didn’t happen. The thing that stopped it was a sort of magic line drawn by Ganna. Irmgard had creditable old-fashioned notions of marriage and fidelity. Moreover: the husband of her sister — the thought made her shudder. I didn’t dare cross the magic line either. To rouse Ganna’s suspicion was to start an inferno. The suspicion was already lurking. Whenever Irmgard mentioned it she trembled like a child in the dark, and I wasn’t much different. We kept on telling each other about the purity of our feelings and were so reticent that each pressure of our hands, each greeting, was managed with cautious attention; even so, Ganna had her eyes on us. Ganna stood unseen next to us and saw that nothing belonging to her was stolen. Not a look, not a breath, not a smile, not a thought.

Perhaps it was just feminine curiosity, a little jealous curiosity that prompted Irmgard to ask one day what it was that fascinated me about Ganna. She had thought about it a lot and had no explanation. At first I had no answer either. Then I talked about Ganna as a sort of ordering principle in my life. ‘A sort of what?’ Irmgard asked in bafflement, ‘Ganna creating order, Ganna?’ I could see that I would have trouble convincing Irmgard of that. After a little further thought, I found the way out, and for the first time articulated my sense of Ganna: I said she was a new type, a sort of female Don Quixote. Irmgard shook her head. It was too much for her. She knew Ganna, Ganna was her sister. The parabola from coffin nail to idealistic battler against windmills didn’t make sense to her. Hesitantly she suggested I was being poetical. I denied it.

A few days later, Ganna went up to Irmgard, plonked herself in front of her and said, in the tone of a policeman undertaking an arrest:

‘I forbid you to flirt with my husband.’

Irmgard replied spiritedly: ‘I didn’t know Alexander was your prisoner.’

‘Find a husband of your own and stay away from mine,’ Ganna went on.

Irmgard told me afterwards, bitterly, that she had sounded like a market stallholder, standing up for her veggies in a public spat.

‘Your attempts to take up with him behind my back are unacceptable,’ Ganna shouted.

She had a particular way of saying the word unacceptable — the ‘x’ in it was painfully lengthened. Irmgard couldn’t help herself, she began to laugh. She pointed to the door.

‘If you want a scandal, you can have it at home. Talk to Alexander. I’m not his nanny.’

After a livid Ganna had left, Irmgard once again couldn’t do anything about it; this time, she wept.

After she had related the incident to me, she asked me ironically:

‘So where does that leave your female Don Quixote now? Can you tell me where you see her noble folly, my dear brother-in-law?’

I was stuck. I replied:

‘One shouldn’t judge Ganna on the basis of single incidents, you need to see her in the round, as the wild nature she is. Her errors, her passions, her mistakes, they are all founded on a splendid unity. What’s wrong with noble folly? You always made fun of her. The ridiculous is very deep in her, where she fights with phantoms. Everything is a phantom to her: people, the world, you, me, she herself. She doesn’t have a clue about reality.’

Irmgard looked me in the eye with her thoughtful gaze.

‘Poor Alexander,’ she whispered.

‘What do you mean, poor Alexander?’

‘Oh, I was just thinking …’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, perhaps you’re the one who doesn’t have a clue about reality.’

THE ‘HUMAN’ SIDE

I note that Ganna is very anxious about something. She is listening out, spying, she looks at me with the sad scrutiny that actors playing forsaken lovers have onstage. To get the better of me, she asks me little trick questions. If I manage to avoid her traps she tries a bigger, rougher calibre.

‘Oh, I am the unhappiest woman in the world!’ she cries out to no one in particular, and criss-crosses the room, as though she wanted to knock down the walls.

‘You’re seeing ghosts, Ganna, your unhappiness is all in your mind. Irmgard is much too decent to go in for any dubious escapades.’

‘Irmgard? She’s the most unscrupulous person there is.’

‘But Ganna!’

‘What about you? Would you deceive me?’

‘I hardly think so, Ganna.’

She hurls herself at my chest. ‘Really? Will you swear? Will you swear you haven’t got a relationship with her?’

I have to laugh. It’s so crude, the way she says it, you feel you’ve been punched on the nose; I’m not quite sure why I’m laughing. She holds my hand between hers, examines the palm and says with an expression as though she longed for me to contradict her tough judgement:

‘Your love line is withered. Perhaps you haven’t got a heart, Alexander?’

‘That could be,’ I replied, ‘but the one you’re looking at is understanding, so far as I know.’

‘Oh, is it?’ she says in relief. ‘Thank God for that.’

Her conclusion is that she perhaps needs to offer me more, be more alluring. She buys a sophisticated scent for a lot of money and douses herself with about a teaspoonful of it (which is certainly too much).

‘I’m not sophisticated enough,’ she laments, with an undertone of pride, ‘I have no gifts as a seductress.’

‘No, you’re right about that, Ganna,’ I tell her, and take the opportunity to tell her she should stop slouching about the place as she does. She heeds my advice, and for thirty-five crowns buys a fake Japanese kimono that makes her look like Sarastro in The Magic Flute. The slippers she wears with this prize piece are ancient and filthy, and seeing that she also doesn’t pull up her stockings until and unless she’s getting ready to go out, they look like a pair of sausage skins hanging down her legs, where the kimono stops. When she gets wind of my disapproval, she says crossly: ‘All right, the garter ribbons are torn, but surely that’s nothing to do with the human side.’ Of course not, I never said it was. But the ‘human side’ isn’t a reserve fund that you can draw on in exalted hours, and at others licenses the fake kimono, ragged slippers and baggy stockings …

THE SCREAM IN THE NIGHT

At this time, there is the following development with Ganna. If we’ve had a quarrel or difference of opinion in the day, her resentments and rancour, which are intensifying all the time, accumulate in sleep, until she frees herself of them in an eruption. Then she screams. Usually, a single, piercing, terrible scream, which rings through the entire house and wakes up all its inhabitants. By and by this scream becomes a fearsome event for me, something that cuts into and darkens my life. I wake up, when it rings out, as if to the feeling of a skewer being driven through my head, in one ear and out the other. I lean over her in the dark, I talk to her, I try to calm her down. (Later on, when we were no longer sleeping in the same room, I dashed into her room with shudders running down my spine; sometimes I had the suspicion that with that terrible screaming she was trying to force me back into her bed; not consciously; but so as not to be alone any more; so as not to let me forget that she existed in my life; from envy of my sleep; who could tell what it was with her?) She tells me the dream she awoke from. They are often strange dreams, dreams of a hopeless, betrayed, tormented soul; dreams with a quality of primal darkness, something bizarre like everything in her unconscious. For instance she once dreamed of Irmgard, standing before her with red hair and a bloodied mouth; her mouth was bloodied because she was holding Ganna’s heart in her hand, and biting into it every so often, as into a red apple.

The person I am holding in my arms to comfort is the mother of my children, not a woman, not my wife. Her accumulated pains, complaints and reproaches are poured out over me in a flood. In her fevered eloquence she loses herself in detail, mixes up things that happened yesterday with others that happened long ago, imagined things with others that are true or half-true, and if I manage to refute one charge, she comes at me with another one that I’ve refuted three times already. It’s as if someone, in ignorance of the pattern on the front side of a rug, were picking at loose threads on the back, and with a sore finger. Her brain is a reservoir for all the murky waters that have poured into it for days past, and are now threatening to overflow. Irmgard, always Irmgard. Where I saw her, how long we spent together, what we talked about.

‘If you deceive me, Alexander, I don’t know what I’ll do, I think I’ll kill myself.’

Followed by the accusation that I undermine her authority with the staff.

‘But Ganna, you don’t have any authority with the staff.’

I cancelled her instructions, she says.

‘Of course I do, when they don’t make any sense.’

Hadn’t I calmly stood by the day before yesterday and listened to the impertinence from the Mam’selle?

‘I couldn’t very well take your side, you treated her like a dog.’

This drives her wild.

‘Well, really, Alexander, really …’

The murky waters continue to spill out of her without cease; staring out into the darkness, I have the feeling my head is about to burst open. Now the subject has come around to money. That my pocket money is never enough for me; that the capital is dwindling from year to year like snow in the sun; that that bastard Fürst has yet to repay a penny of what he owes me. Did I want the children to live in penury? And my own coldness, my lack of love.

‘But Ganna, Ganna, how can you! Cold, me?!’

Yes, wherever I could I would ignore her; accepted invitations from my aristo pals and went round to see them without her. Was it that I was ashamed of her?

‘Tell me truly, Alexander, are you ashamed of me?’

My head is reeling. ‘Go to sleep, why don’t you,’ I say, ‘please, enough …’

DEATH OF HER FATHER, INSANITY OF HER MOTHER

In summer 1905, Professor Mevis died of a coronary. Ganna’s grief was dramatic. Thus far, she had been so spoiled by fate that she hadn’t had to think about death at all. How could death suddenly intrude, and bring down the sacred paterfamilias? She embarked on a programme of idolatry towards the departed. She collected relics, pictures of him, sayings of his. She wove legends. She planned to write his life story. She claimed — to the annoyance of the sisters — to be his favourite; she believed it too, implicitly.

But the man himself was no longer there, the man with the iron fist. The one the mere mention of whose name had made her sit up. The dealing in images and idols was her last respect to him. Now, she need fear no other man.

Shortly after the Professor passed away, Frau Mevis needed to be institutionalized for a couple of months. The ancient hulk had given way to the pressure of the waters. The removal of the spiritual straitjacket had liberated the illness. Ganna would go and visit her mother once or twice a week. Every time, she pleaded with me to go with her. One day I went. We were taken to a room with barred windows. The madwoman sat in an armchair, furiously shredding a newspaper. She always needed to have something to destroy — letters, a book, an item of clothing. Sometimes she smeared the walls with filth.

She seemed to take no pleasure in our having come. With hectic shining eyes and hoarse voice, she complained that she was being unlawfully detained; she had written to the Emperor to let him know. Ganna addressed her tenderly; I couldn’t manage to get a word out. Much as I’d sympathised with the old lady in quieter days, I found her repulsive now, really hateful in her illness. The sick spirit doesn’t excite sympathy like the sick body, but fear and revulsion. The thought that some of the blood of this disturbed person was flowing in the veins of my children was appalling. ‘Is he always so quiet, your beloved, or have you done something to him?’ She turned to her daughter with a hideous grimace. Ganna took it as a cue to launch into a paean of praise of me and our marriage. Thereupon the sick woman started to rave about my latest book in embarrassingly hyperbolic terms and to assure me that all the denizens of the establishment had read it with enthusiasm. It was more than I could stand to hear. ‘Let’s go, Ganna,’ I urged. As we stepped through the gate I mumbled goodbye and ran off.

TWO SPEEDS

There is a lot to this. It reaches into the nerve endings, the mood, the sexual embrace. It’s most clearly visible, of course, in walk and stride patterns. ‘Can’t we go for a walk,’ begs Ganna, ‘forget your appointments, go on, please.’ I consent. But the gladly begun enterprise ends in strife and disagreement. She’s not up to any physical exertion but won’t admit it, and accuses me of tiring her out on purpose, so as to prove her unsuitability. I bite back a reply to the ugly accusation — I can’t always take issue with her, this Ganna dialectic can drive you mad. To go for a walk with her — fine. But I go off the idea as soon as I witness her preparations. She’s not ready in time. I prefer to be unencumbered, she lugs around everything she deems indispensable: a book, a heavy overcoat, a blanket to put on the ground, an umbrella in case it rains, even if the heavens are cloudless, a bag of provisions, notebook, salves and ointments, loose leaves of paper and a straw hat whose elastic she loops round her wrist. She can’t carry it all, I have to help her. She wants to march, she wants to enthuse. I hate raving about scenery; she’s in transports over every green or brown hill. In her delight she links arms with me, but as that compels me to fall in with her stride, which means setting one foot ponderously in front of the other like an invalid, I break free and hurry on ahead. (I walk fast, just as I breathe fast and eat fast and, yes, live fast; how could we ever fall in step like two of a kind? It’s a physical impossibility.) Then Ganna’s bitterness breaks out of her. A woman who has given birth to two babies and breast-fed them both for eight months deserves respect and not uncouth behaviour like mine, the long face, the merciless hurrying and geeing-up. She’s right; I am not sparing enough of her; I let her sense her physical weakness; I am not courtly; it’s all true. If only she hadn’t said the thing about bearing the children, though. To her the bearing and feeding of children is what victorious battles are to a general — praiseworthy deeds for which she deserves a medal, as if children come into this world by some secret ruse of man, and woman, the innocent victim, needs to pay all her life for that vicious breach of trust. Once Ganna has taken a dialectical fortress, she doesn’t stop. What has she done, she rhetorically asks the sky, what has she done to end up living with such a beastly egoist, she who is so absurdly modest, she who — God is her witness — has long ago given up wanting anything for herself, who sits around at home for days on end all alone while he diverts himself in all sorts of ways …

You may be right, Ganna, you may be right, but please, please stop, won’t you, can’t you see people staring at us? She doesn’t stop, all the way home, over supper there’s a zestful complaining, a simple shudder-inducing lamentation. Sometimes I keep quiet, sometimes I explode; I can’t always control myself, above all I can’t control Ganna at all, everything is twofold, two ways of feeling, two ways of looking, two sorts of speed. Finally I can think of nothing else but to sit down at the piano, open a score and with clumsy fingers approximating the trills, the allegros, knock out a Chopin Prelude or a piece from Schumann’s ‘Carnival’. All at once Ganna is transformed. Lying back in an armchair, she listens wide-eyed like a child praying. What possesses me to show off my dire musical gifts? Is it the way the two speeds give rise to discord and arrhythmia? Because she will then beg forgiveness and embrace me, and kneel at my feet? The difference between us was this: she forgot everything from one hour to the next, the way only angels or demons forget; I forgot none of it, for all eternity. And it grew darker and darker in my heart.

THE MYSTICAL UNION

From the time when Irmgard got engaged to a mining engineer by the name of Loiter, I find the following entries in my diary: ‘For Irmgard I was merely a staging-post in the journey of her desire. Since giving me up, she seems to have given herself up, there is something ever so slightly wizened about her. But if you give yourself up, no God can help you, only the winged soul remains young and full of love, it loves without needing to be loved back, what it has it gives, and its grief comes from fullness, not lack.’ And then again: ‘There is a sadness so extreme, it makes you want to stretch out on the ground and wail; your tongue is sore when you speak; the very air is a crushing weight on your shoulders. And yet everything has merely taken its course. How nice that two people walk freely side by side, when they so clearly belong together. Even in the pain of loss there is a good and bitter taste, and something that so indefinably and lightly oscillated between passion and sibling affection didn’t even shatter. Rather, it leaves a golden memory. My continual nightmares! Never forget last night in the park, our last conversation, the way she stood there, pale and still, and a meteor etched its great parabola across the sky …’

Since the youngest sister Traude has now also married — her husband was a Berlin manufacturer by the name of Heckenast — Irmgard would have felt unhappily alone on the shelf. And so, when Loiter, a nice and clever man, proposed to her, she accepted. My feelings for her had lost none of their original freshness, even though I had already started having relationships with other women. Her image was precious to me. I depended on women. Without the erotic trance, without the magical involvement of the senses, I felt I was only half alive. Irmgard knew it. She never laid a claim to me. The evening cited above, at the end of a long silence, I reached for her hand and pressed it to my lips. She was shocked and gave a little jump. Suddenly, as though talking to herself, she asked:

‘How are things with you and Ganna?’

I replied: ‘Nothing has changed. Nothing can change.’

And she: ‘Did you never think of leaving her?’

I shook my head. I said it had never entered my mind; it would feel, I added, as if I were undertaking something against myself.

‘But you continually deceive her,’ she whispered with something like contempt, ‘and you continue to sleep with her … She has one baby after another … How can you?’

‘You’re right,’ I conceded glumly, ‘but even so … my marriage with Ganna is not in question. Quite apart from the children … There’s something … I can’t explain what it is, it’s a fact, you have to take it as it is.’

‘So the other women, that’s just a pastime?’

‘Nonsense, Irmgard. You know perfectly well that I don’t play with people. Please understand, it’s a mystical union.’

Those were my words. Irmgard replied with a shyly questioning ‘Oh?’ She didn’t believe me. But she had neither the strength nor the need to shake my faith in the ‘mystical union’. Perhaps she didn’t want to be in the company of those who eased my conscience by not questioning the ‘mystical union’. But she was mistaken if she thought such a union didn’t in fact exist. It did. It was put together from guilt and a fear of ghosts. It was steeped in the sense of imminent calamity, because I think I am one of those people who, half-knowingly, half-ignorantly, carry their future destiny around with them in the form of living substance.

GANNA’S TOLERANCE

If I remember correctly, the time of my physical turning-away from Ganna coincided with our leaving the Villa Ohnegroll. The flat had got to be too small for us and we moved into a rented house on the northern edge of Vienna, among the vineyards at the foot of the Kahlenberg. At first, only half of it was vacant; it was November when we moved, and for the next six months once again I had to retreat to the attic to work. I wasn’t too upset about that. I lived and slept under the roof, in a sort of world of my own. The ceiling was so low that I could put out my hand and touch it. Once I had bolted the iron door behind me I was alone and unreachable, with only my creations for company. When I moved down into the Ganna zone at the end of that time I felt much less happy, even though I continued to occupy a remote part of the house. There was an ever increasing unquiet about Ganna. She was embroiled in conflicts with all and sundry. There was endless trouble with the couple who ran the house; either it was about the use of the laundry room or the time the front gate was locked at night, or the tyranny of one of the cooks, or some malicious local gossip. There was always something. I kept having to intercede, tone down, apologise. And when it was fine, the songsters in the local wine bars made an unholy racket. What could I do other than flee the house when I felt uneasy there?

When Ganna gradually came to understand that I was no longer faithful to her, she took it very badly. I was never able to discover just exactly what went on in her innermost recesses. Sometimes I would find her in tears, sometimes there were bitter outbursts, sometimes I thought she was adjusting and had decided to tolerate my escapades, in roughly the way some wives don’t mind when their husbands go out drinking. Since I was usually terribly discreet — to spare her — it comforted her that in most cases she didn’t know the identity of the woman in question. Then she would persuade herself that other people wouldn’t know either. If this game of hide-and-seek couldn’t be kept up, she had a further consolation: she said it was just a question of a ‘concubine’, someone on the side. She, Ganna, remained the lawful spouse. There was no changing that. Also the world had to learn that she, Ganna, so to speak, supervised my amours. As soon as a new female creature entered my circle of acquaintance, and captured my heart and imagination, Ganna sought as a matter of urgency to find out how much danger this rival could pose, or, to put it another way, the degree to which her own claims remained unaffected. Her overall behaviour then developed in a sort of domestic politics. It was quite extraordinary when she explained to her confidantes (often I would be told about this afterwards) that a man like me might become spiritually impoverished without fresh experiences; it was important for his creativity that he wasn’t made to stick fast in his family, and besides he worked so hard that he had to be allowed the occasional diversion. The result, if I had been able to judge it clearly, as I was not, was a dispensation that sanctioned the literary reinvestment of amorous experiences. What was spent on one side of the ledger in terms of passion, time, even money, was earned back — with compound interest — as material for future books. Every movement of the spirit, every exaltation, was converted into subject-matter; then the book is printed and sold, and if it sells well, the expenses are easily covered. That was Ganna’s calculus. ‘You only need to have some insight,’ she said, and all she told me was, for her sake, not to give too much of myself, as though the account-keeping might be affected by erotic waste; ‘all these women are vampires, they want to suck the blood from your veins,’ she warned; and to prove that degenerate women had at all times taken aim at credulous men and got away with it, she would sometimes read me lurid passages from Garret’s Christian Mystics.

THE ETHICAL IMPERATIVE

Whether Ganna crossly gave in to the inevitable or turned a blind eye depended on who my current friend might be. Thus, the beautiful Belgian Yvonne enjoyed her particular favour because on the few times she visited me she had behaved with respect and forbearance. Something Yvonne had said was reported to Ganna, to her delight, perhaps because she didn’t understand it properly. ‘I would never dare to try and take this woman’s husband away from her,’ she said; ‘that would give rise to the most awful calamity.’ Yvonne couldn’t have known how prophetic her words were. She said to me once, she thought Ganna was the most disturbing person she had ever met. On occasion she would recoil from my embrace in dread, just as if Ganna’s tiny fist had choked her windpipe. When I suggested going away with her somewhere, for as long as she liked, she trembled and wheezed in panic: ‘For pity’s sake, no. You must stay with her. You’d still be with her anyway, so far as I was concerned.’ That was an instance where Ganna could be sure of her ground. Her sister Justine told me mockingly one day that Ganna had told her with a half-subtle half-smile: ‘Imagine, he’s involved with a Belgian countess.’ Even the slightly slow Justine was rather nauseated by this peculiar boast, while I was dismayed and a little outraged by it.

If my friends shake their heads reading this, no one will understand their surprise and disapproval better than I. I can hear them asking: how could you stand it? Were you blind to the terrible danger beside you, behind you? When you pushed the woman into ever deeper suffering and insecurity, how could you square that with your sense of truth and decency? Because she was suffering, no matter how she tried to get around it with her indestructible optimism. The whole relationship was based on a lie; there was something mouldy in your life … How could you carry on like that?

It’s all not true. You mustn’t confuse the picture I’m painting here with my perspective at that time of my life. It’s difficult enough to exclude the experiences of the next twenty years, and frame the truth of those days in such a way that I might have recognized then. Fate deals with us like a thriller writer. Blow by blow and step by step it discloses its truth, which was kept concealed from us until the inevitable surprise denouement — a reflection on the skilful way the author has manipulated our judgement and sense of probability.

I have an unshakeable faith in Ganna. Even though I was increasingly drawn to other women, and was never able to resist sensual temptation, I did remain connected to her in a way that was mysterious even to myself; and this connection, which in her was like a force of nature, was an iron law that governed my existence. Impossible to shake it, impossible to break it. Everything else was just a temporary aberration. This I would insist on to her, and these repeated solemn insistences strengthened her feeling of security and made her tyrannical. But never mind how boldly she overstepped the boundaries that were drawn for her — and her boldness, her brazenness, increased year on year — it didn’t change anything in my inner trust, my admiration for her truly exceptional character, my belief in her intellectual and spiritual comradeship; and the less so as I often wasn’t aware of her overstepping, or didn’t register them as such. For example, it happened that without my prior knowledge she published a long article on me and my work in a German weekly, quite a clever and readable discussion, albeit studded with the modish critical terms of the day. Some of my friends pointed out to me the dubiousness of such an enterprise; a writer’s wife shouldn’t put herself forward as an interpreter of his ideas, they contended. I disagreed. The essay was well written, I claimed (which it wasn’t), and how could you tell a man’s wife not to write a dignified and objective essay on her husband’s oeuvre? I wasn’t all that convinced by my argument, but I couldn’t very well leave Ganna in the lurch.

My friends were still more astonished when my book The Seven Dances of Death, on which I had worked for four full years, appeared with a fulsome dedication to Ganna, combining my thanks to my helper and exegete and my love for the wife and companion. This glorification of Ganna in excesses was done with an honest heart. I have never written a single line in which I suppressed the truth, have never been able to prettify a feeling. It was my gift to her, freely given; and yet, such gifts may be compelled by discreet means, even if it’s no more than the constant mute expectation of some sort of atonement. Also: the Ganna in my life and the Ganna in my imagination were two completely different creatures. They were fused together by my gratitude, or what I called gratitude, a dark, fluent sense of indebtedness and obligation. That was on top of everything else, and it never ceased tormenting me. Baffling to me why, if I had any sort of debt to discharge or thanks to convey, I should have done so day in day out, year in year out, with my whole person. It was as if a long-since acquitted prisoner doesn’t stop supplying proof of his innocence to the prosecutor. This tormented state of soul led to my raising marriage to a sort of ethical postulate, completely cut off from reality; I idealised Ganna in a sort of lofty vacuum and from a distance, from my many trips, wrote her the most humble, yearning letters. I was hymning a perfectly unreal connection to her, and forgetting that the earthling Alexander Herzog had no terra firm underfoot. I exalted Ganna to a principle, an idea, she and the children together, three hearts beating within mine, to whom I had to remain of service till the end of my time. And Ganna knew that. She built on it. The ground on which she built struck her as solid enough for the heaviest load.

THE CAPITAL MELTS AWAY

Ganna can’t sleep for worry: the once-sizeable dowry is now a tenth of what it was. The slimmed-down bank account is like a fire banked up with the last remnants of wood, lighting a criminally irresponsible way of life, a frivolous trust in princely earnings to come, the speculative existence of a lottery player. The money from my books is not insubstantial, but it doesn’t begin to stack up against our expenses. The hopes I pin on them are always far in excess of what happens. There is no prospect of my earning back the spent dowry money, as Ganna had tried to reassure herself at the beginning of our prodigality. The result is, I see her hunched over bills and receipts like a desperate treasury official, and with wrinkled brow filling in line after line of the enormous ledger she bought herself. In addition to sizeable sums for rent, wages, travel, insurance, food and clothing, there are endless small and trifling amounts for soap, thread, tram tickets, beggars, postage stamps, new soles; every penny is written down. ‘Ganna,’ I say, ‘you’re making so much work for yourself, why not keep the small sums separate?’ But no, she doesn’t want to do that. Her pedantic exactitude has a reason: Ganna has no overall view, and she hides this defect by stringing together details. She must keep a thousand trivial things in her mind; and if she gets confused, as is almost inevitable, isn’t that pardonable in a woman who never goes to bed without a volume of Nietzsche or Novellas, and must try to see that the daily round doesn’t keep her thoughts from taking wing? Unfortunately, she loses the bearing she owes me and herself too. She bawls me out like a servant if I happen to spend money unthinkingly. The menacing spectre of the future is straight away there. The wolf is at the door. At the time I had a friend in Berlin I was very fond of, a gifted man of immense humanity. He was very hard-up. I helped him out from time to time, albeit with very small sums. Ganna resents even those. She can’t ‘accept it’. There are other people, better off, better able to afford ‘such a luxury’, in her view. Charity, she claims, begins at home. Blood is thicker than water. The 1,700 crowns that the wretched Fürst still owes would be enough to take the children to the seaside for the summer, which is something ‘they badly need’. I deny that the children need a beach holiday; they are in excellent health. ‘I see,’ Ganna flashes back in fury, ‘and didn’t Dr Blab think Elisabeth had a tendency to bronchial catarrh?’ I venture to object that the sum she spends on unnecessary doctors’ visits would fund not only a trip to Biarritz, but also half a dozen Parisian gowns, so that she would no longer have to go around in picturesque drapes of her own devising. At that Ganna yelps like a wounded she-wolf. ‘You’re attacking my simple style? You want me to buy Paris fashions? Do you take me for Audition or what? And not go to the doctor, when my children are ill? You would just sit there and watch the poor things suffer, wouldn’t you?’ What can I say? That I would indeed ‘sit and watch the poor things suffer’, because I have more trust in nature than I do in Dr Blab and Dr Grin? Ganna acknowledges no facts or experiences; all there are for her are momentary satisfactions of her instincts, inner short-circuits that wreck the whole of her internal lighting system. When she holds out the household accounts book to me in her extended hands like a book of laws, or recites the crushing litany of my economic sins, all at once I am no longer a creative person any more, no Pericles on the arm of his Aspasia; then I am the unscrupulous exhauster of her dowry, the sacred capital that the tribal chieftain Mevis in wise forethought set aside for her and her children in years to come. With passionate garrulousness she boasts about saving at least 100 crowns a month by having found a supplier of cheap fruit and vegetables, but overlooks the fact that such savings are used up perhaps three times over by the folly and indiscipline of her staff. But I am not allowed to say that. She would go wild. I don’t know what to do. Oh, Ganna, I often think, what can I do to help you find peace, and to help you see things more clearly? There was little prospect of either, and the following events buried my faint hopes once and for all. Ganna was now thirty-two, and if people in general are past changing at that age, then she, by constitution and genetic make-up, was even more so.

A MEADOW APPEARS ON THE HORIZON

At that time, it was the fashion for the wives of the bourgeoisie to parade their devotion to their children. So-called toughening measures, hygienic principles, pedagogic instruction — all that was bandied about with a solemn seriousness, talked about in meetings and pursued in the most modern way. One might have supposed the offspring of these well-off ladies, who could afford any extravagance, would grow to be a morally and physically perfect race of beings, equipped to transform the prospects of human society. Unless I’ve missed it, this has not proved to be the case.

Ganna was resolutely against sending her children to an ordinary school. They were home-taught, which, over time, turned out to be an expensive business. Every classroom, according to Ganna, was a toxic dump, rife with infectious diseases, an inferno of germs, as she put it. Further, she was dead set against conventional methods of teaching and child-rearing. She favoured special treatment, respect for the individual, holistic development of the personality. Splendid — but where were the institutions where such things were promulgated? I was suspicious of the theories of the latest wave of pedagogues, whose child-worship laid the foundation for the brutalise of a later era.

I put it to Ganna that children needed to be taught to exist in a community; that they would turn into selfish anti-social brats if they were not made acquainted with self-sacrifice, adversity and shocks; where would they end up if not with the millions of others, what remorse and revenge were lying in wait for them when the day of reckoning and levelling finally arrived? I was wasting my breath. To a spirit like Ganna’s the state of the world in which she moved must seem unalterable, since she herself harboured no possibilities of change either. She embarked on lengthy fantasies on the cruelty of schoolmasters, who had no interest in knowledge and understanding, but only in censorship and morals. Weren’t the newspapers full of the recent spate of suicides among schoolchildren? No, she wasn’t going to allow the little innocents to be routinely poisoned. ‘Your schools are prisons,’ she exclaimed with the expression of a fanatical preacher, ‘I’d rather be drawn and quartered than condemn my children to a convict existence like that.’ My children! Ganna, Ganna! My house, my husband, my children: that was all that counted, with ‘your’ lying on the ground like a dead dog.

What did she have in mind? Ferry was almost ten, his case was becoming urgent, he couldn’t go on being kept apart from his contemporaries like a prince; nor could Elisabeth. They were living in a hothouse as it was. They needed to burst through the glass walls. It seemed to me I was fighting an undeclared war with Ganna over the souls of the children. It wasn’t love and affection that had started it, but what I term the atmospheric effect of a human being, the silent and pervasive influence of a protective presence. No one has yet established how the blood of father and mother become mingled to inheritance and destiny; nor was it even certain that parentage counted for more than principles. Ganna’s cosseting of the children was a serious threat to their welfare. But was I sufficiently different to be able to decide? It’s impossible to give a young human enough love, I would sometimes weakly say, as though love can be a universal remedy against unhappiness and suffering; as if I didn’t know perfectly well that we feel the cold much more when our warm coat is taken away from us than if we had never had it.

One fine day Ganna dawdles with her usual demonstrative slowness through the narrow lanes of our part of town and comes across a fenced-off meadow, a waving piece of green ground, like a flag, going uphill. She stops. An idea comes to her: this is where the children will go to school. A visionary moment. She sees it all unfold before her: pretty wooden buildings, long verandas, airy dormitories for boarders, assembly room, library, tennis courts, gymnasium; all of it palpably there, within reach. Why shouldn’t she build such an ideal establishment by her own plans? Who could get in the way? In the end, it’s only a question of money.

Within the next few minutes the following thoughts come to her fertile mind, as she stands there rooted to the spot, smitten with the meadow. She will be able to borrow money, that’s what financiers are there for. They will get a share of the business; repayment depends on how profitable the idea ultimately turns out to be. It will be set up as a joint-stock company. An educational company. Such a lovely meadow in such a lovely location must be worth a fortune. Perhaps it will be possible to acquire it for not very much. In a few years it will have appreciated so much that she will run the entire business off it, in the unlikely event that it doesn’t pay for itself anyway. Pupils will come flocking there from all over Austria and Germany. They will advertise. They will acquire charitable status — what does she have so many connections for? It will be a gold mine. She will reserve the meadow for herself. It will remain her personal property. Assuming it costs 60,000 or 70,000 crowns, then in ten years’ time, when the district comes to be developed, it will be worth half a million at least. With half a million, she will be able to secure independence for me and an old age free from worries. And in the meantime it will be just heaven for the children.

There is no problem anywhere that Ganna can see.

Isn’t it just like the character in the fairy tale who builds castles in the air, converting a cartload of pottery into fabulous riches, till an unfortunate accident leaves everything a heap of shards?

It’s a psychological puzzle how people like Ganna are favoured by circumstances for so long till the tension between dream and reality bursts with a catastrophic bang. On closer inspection, the weakness of their construction is shown from the beginning by their divided motivation: there’s a doubloons of purpose, a having-your-cake-and-eating-it. They want to insure themselves both against failure and against the pricking of conscience by taking the declared purpose and beefing it up, reinforcing it with a remoter one, more impersonal. Instead of thus strengthening the purpose, which is their intention, they divide it, and as they try to keep their options open to all sides, they wreck them both. This was exactly Ganna’s case, when with her irresistible energy she set about not only designing an educational paradise for her children from scratch, but at the same time sought, with a grand speculative coup, to assure the future of her beloved husband against any threat from destiny. In the end, both projects failed, and both became mad.

THE FOUNDING OF THE SCHOOL AND EVERYTHING THAT IS INVOLVED WITH IT

Let’s accompany her on her next steps, which are as bold as they are technically adroit. She finds out that the meadow belongs to a Frau Nussberger, a little old lady, the widow of a vintner. She pays a call on the little old lady and tests the water. Her hope has not deceived her, the meadow can be bought. The price: 120,000. Ganna pretends she is acting on behalf of an interested consortium and begins to negotiate. She feels there is little to be done, but since the property has a 40,000 mortgage on it, the sum she needs to raise is reduced by 40,000. That same day she goes to her friend and admirer, the lawyer Dr Paul, one of the most sought-after lawyers in the city and a very influential fellow. She pitches him her project. He is very favourably impressed and promises to help. First question: how to get hold of the meadow? One thing Ganna knows: old Frau Nussberger needs money. Further conversations with the friendly old lady leave Ganna persuaded that she would be prepared to sell the property for a moderate down payment, so long as the balance was secured. Ganna applies her full charm and force of argument to keep the down payment as low as possible. Relatives turn up, daughters, grandchildren, sons-in-law, the whole Nussberger clan — they all need money, there’s endless back and forth. Finally Ganna manages to get the down payment to just 2,000 crowns. Only where is she going to get them from? From the bank account? Not possible. It’s our iron reserve. A source of funding must be found, some people who are willing to accept the risks for the sake of the enterprise as a whole. One is found. Dr Paul has persuaded a few of his acquaintances to form a board interested in founding a school. One of their number is talked into putting up the advance. How Ganna manages to get the meadow in her name, and not that of the association, is a masterstroke. She tried once to explain it to me, but I couldn’t understand it, these things are too complicated for me. I was astounded that Ganna could manage them so well; she must have a native aptitude for them, I concluded.

Things now start to move. The number of shareholders grows every day. They are all wealthy people. I am amazed at the number of parents there are who want to save their children the trials of a conventional education and offer them freedom, an unorthodox syllabus and modern principles. They must know a thing or two about life, and to them a modest parental contribution that can smooth the way for their unacademic heirs is a reasonable investment.

Much greater, though, is my amazement at Ganna’s indefatigable zeal and evident proficiency. Next to the meadow is a villa with a spacious garden. From the very beginning Ganna has had her tactician’s eye on it. It’s for rent; she rents it; later she means to acquire it for the school. In combination with the meadow, it will provide plenty of scope for the school, especially for boarders. Exciting negotiations are held. Usually in our house. I feel like a man who comes upon some kerfuffle on the street and anxiously asks what it’s all about. Ganna’s announcements are becoming harder and harder to follow. She doesn’t have time for a quiet conversation. Early in the morning she dashes off into the city, and late in the afternoon she turns up exhausted, out of breath, half-starved. Then the writing begins. She writes letters, dozens at a time, and brochures for the printer. Articles for newspapers, pedagogical essays, press releases on behalf of the school board, appeals to the Education Ministry, teaching plans, syllabuses, budgets. I am astounded by her stamina, her mastery, her versatility. Her room has turned into an office. The servants are left to their own devices. The children run wild. By day I flee the house. When I come home at night, the rooms are full of people I’ve never seen before. Lawyers, civil servants, teachers, journalists, enthusiastic ladies, chancres sniffing a job, all of them crammed into our three rooms, munching sandwiches, drinking vast quantities of beer, wine, schnapps and tea, engaged in loud debates and browsing nosily in my books and manuscripts. The telephone is continually manned, usually by Ganna herself. Telegrams rain in, windy pronouncements are read out, and a charter is drawn up for the civil servants to get to work on.

The school board is convened, the share capital is subscribed; and then the first rebellion breaks out. Ganna has exceeded her authority, or so at least it is claimed. She has violated agreements, apparently, meddled in other people’s areas, put the wrong people in important jobs — for instance appointing a nice-looking young man by the name of Borngräber as headmaster on the strength of a few vacuous recommendations and his own smooth manners. And then it transpires that the fellow is intriguing against her and is making a stink. I try and investigate but fail to get to the bottom of the thing. I am perforce left with Ganna’s version. With one of her typical unabashed clichés, she says: ‘I have given suck to a viper.’ But he’s not the only one to come out of the shrubbery. Every day there are fresh opponents, distractions, false reports, betrayals, conspiracies. Borngräber is forming a cabal. Ganna forms one of her own. Not the best thing for a school being founded. What’s the matter, I think, Ganna wouldn’t harm a fly, why is it that all these people are up in arms against her? I hear all sorts of complaints and accusations. I’m not sure what’s going on, and ask Ganna what this thing or the other is about. Ganna describes the events as if she were the victim of malice and envy, as if people were trying to twist the reins out of her hands. She asks me to get involved. If I put my foot down, she assures me, then no one will dare to rebel against her.

Now, I don’t exactly believe in my authority, but I’ll do anything to try and help her, because I too have the sense that she’s confronted by a wild rabble. She’s unhappy. She has sacrificed herself for a great idea and this is her recompense. It’s easy to see the female Don Quixote again, against the background of hostility. Something needs to happen. I talk to the teachers, to the perfidious Borngräber, to Dr Paul, to a respectable Court Councillor who is the titular chairman of the board and Ganna’s confidant. I get nowhere. I no longer know what’s what in all this turmoil. An embittered confusion of voices surrounds me. I’m not cut out to be a peacemaker, I can’t arbitrate between the warring parties. I am told that Ganna has misinformed me on certain significant matters. When Ganna senses my wavering, she flies off the handle. ‘What am I supposed to do, Ganna,’ I say desperately, ‘it’s like being set upon by a swarm of wasps.’ I visit the non-executive chairman, Imperial Councillor Schönpflug is his name. ‘Frau Herzog’s actions are not quite transparent,’ says this otherwise sympathetic man. I reply bluntly that I couldn’t permit the least doubt of the integrity of my wife. I tell her. She asks me to set down my views in a short memorandum to the board: that will gag her enemies. I can’t deny her this, I wouldn’t get any peace. On the other hand, I am in danger of myself being exposed, and perhaps even, who knows, perpetrating a lie; Ganna is terribly prone to self-deception — it may be that she is less innocent than she thinks she is. I write my deposition, convincingly affirming the integrity of her character and the ethical goodness of her actions. Then I run away, and spend a few weeks in peace in Ebenweiler.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE MALE

Before I relate how the ever uglier and more distressing business of the school went on and finally ended, I want to talk about my own experiences in the years before the war, and in the first years of the war — two in particular that, each in their own way, had a profound effect on the future. The one was the birth of my daughter Doris, the other the gift of a house — a whole fully furnished house, with grounds — the kind gift of a young couple I had been close friends with for some time. I had told them about my domestic trouble, the difficulty of finding peace and concentration in a rented apartment, and the resulting tendency to fritter away the day and do my work at night. Then, on a generous impulse, they offered me the money to buy a house in the country. I was so stunned I could hardly breathe. I didn’t dare turn it down, but felt I couldn’t accept it either. It was extraordinary; I asked myself if I had any right to avail myself of this favourable smile of fortune, it almost seemed to me it would be betraying my friends to do so. How can you deserve such a sacrifice — albeit those making it don’t see it as such — how thank them, when thanks you can’t give will end up burdening you? I had none of the greedy self-certainty of those geniuses (I didn’t think I was one in any case) who accept support and help from their admirers as a perfectly natural form of tribute. I was too steeped in the bourgeois ethos of deals and contracts. The formulas ‘nowt for nowt’ and ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ were in my blood. It wasn’t easy for me to see myself in any way as (in some higher sense) ‘deserving’ the generosity of these friends.

Ganna, however, had no such scruples. She thought it was absolutely to be expected that people would seek to spoil me a little. They were only giving me back what they had already had from me in plenty, she said, with eyes wide. ‘Come off it,’ I said, petulantly, ‘there must be a couple of thousand like me. Ninety per cent of us will probably die in a ditch. You’re doing pretty well if you have enough to eat and a bed to sleep in at night. What’s so special about me? What have I done to deserve a luxury villa? We have no right to such security, it seems to me.’ Ganna vehemently disagreed. She was too obviously the child of a well-provided and self-righteous era where mind and work had their value just as stocks and shares did. It raised my worth immeasurably in her eyes, although she seemed not to be aware of the fact that it was her husband who had been given the house. Nothing like this had happened since the days of the Medicis. She trumpeted her and my good fortune to all and sundry, and when I asked her to be a little discreet, she looked at me uncomprehendingly. But it gave us a neutral territory where our shared interests could get to work on a common project. Ganna needed to be kept busy, she was like a stove needing fuel. She could do twenty things at once, and each of them with verve and enthusiasm. And when we discussed the house together, looked for a piece of land, spoke to the architect, studied the plans, bought furniture and lamps and other things, the besetting passivity I fell into whenever I was with her left me, and I could at least be dragged along. And, so that she didn’t see I was only allowing myself to be dragged along, I would stroke her tiny hand which was feeding me sugar lumps, so that I for my part wouldn’t notice how she was dragging me along. Marriage offers the weaker party plenty of opportunity to show no character.

It took no particular cleverness or endeavour on Ganna’s part to induce me to have my new possession — this house, the workplace and refuge intended for me personally — registered in her name as well. One day we went along to the land registry office and Ganna was legally made co-owner of the villa. I gave the matter no thought whatsoever. I didn’t think that I was thereby relinquishing the one and only thing that was entirely mine. I didn’t reflect that I was establishing Ganna in a feeling of ownership and entitlement that — beyond the actual name on the deeds — signified in some magical sense a transfer of body and soul.

But I was only superficially engaged with all this. In hindsight, these years came to seem like a trek along a dark, overhung path, with rare moments of rest or looking up. I could sense that tremendous things were imminent. The black cloud, still invisible below the horizon, was already projecting electric waves, and I was continually nervous, like a bird before a storm. There was an awful magic being wrought over the land and over the people, I felt ill at ease when I walked at night, as I often had occasion to, through the streets of German cities; I suffered from my second sight like a sleeper dreaming his house is on fire. It seemed to me another world was claiming me than the one in which I had thus far been content to be. What I had achieved seemed negligible, inadequate; it spoke to too few people, it existed in outmoded forms. I had a sense of others, waiting, but I didn’t know anything about them. I was still far from my limits, and far from myself; if I failed to break through my crust, then I would find myself crushed by it.

My senses too were aflame. Ravenous appetite alternated with satiety. No woman was enough for me; none gave me what I was dimly seeking: a sense of who I was, some final easement of the blood. I went from one to another, and it was often as though I had to break them open like a husk or shell with unknown contents, peeling them like a fruit which I then discarded. It wasn’t Don Juan-ishness, nor was it sheer lechery either. There might have been something in it of the misunderstanding that takes the living being and half-angrily, half-playfully exchanges it for an imaginary one, and contents itself with that because it can’t perfect the other. Perhaps it was something to do with the tragedy of the male who sets off towards the glacial region of symbols and en route forgets himself with warm-blooded nymphs.

By the time the baby was born, we were already living in our new house.

THE TRUTH BEGINS TO DAWN

Only then did events with the school board take on the shape of the catastrophe that deeply affected both Ganna’s life and mine. The main cause of the trouble was that Ganna stubbornly refused to make over the meadow to the company. The stockholders described it as intolerable that the extensive land for the project, on which the newly built school was standing, should remain in separate ownership, and that the owner, herself a member of the board, should charge a substantial rent for it. In the course of stormy meetings, Ganna was upbraided for the immoral and unbusinesslike nature of the situation. It made her look bad, it was said, that she laid claim both to the idealism of the project and the lion’s share of the profits. That is very much the way of it: people who have disappointed expectations of money are extremely hard on those who, while on the side of the angels, also want to turn a profit. That’s wrong, they say, there are businessmen and there are priests, you can’t be both at once. The other side’s lawyers even contested Ganna’s title. Their claim was that Ganna had managed to acquire the title by some underhand method, and they sought to expose it.

Ganna is left reeling. The world is darkening on her. She swears sacred oaths that she would rather die than give up her meadow; she won’t give up a square foot of it, no, not so much as a blade of grass. Inevitably, the children, for whose sake this venture was started, become aware of their mother’s unpopularity. The advantage that Ganna sought to gain for them is lost. But neither can I find that they are disadvantaged and emotionally damaged by all this, as Ganna weepingly claims. They needed to learn to take the rough with the smooth, I opine with a calmness that drives Ganna into a fury. ‘How can you stick up for those criminals?’ she hisses at me. ‘That just shows what a weakling you are. The whole world knows that you abandon your wife at the earliest opportunity. Well, God will punish you for it.’ Those speeches! I really haven’t abandoned her, and why is she coming with her divine punishment? What does she know of God, she who only ever uses His name in vain. Her god is Ganna Herzog’s special constable, who will launch his thunderbolts the moment his dear Ganna is hurt by a bad person.

She goes up to the teachers and gives them all a piece of her mind. It fails to improve matters. Ferry goes on strike; we’ve reached the stage where the children are paying for Ganna’s misdeeds. The quality of the teaching, which Ganna once praised to the skies, is suddenly wretched. The same teachers who only recently were paragons, so many Fröbels and Pestalozzis, are now held in contempt. She sticks at nothing in her campaign against the headmaster Borngräber, with whom she was certainly once half in love. She conspires with handymen and charwomen. Day after day she hangs around with people in whom the name Herzog inspires no respect. She tussles with them. Like anyone with a political mission, she is surrounded by provocateurs and flatterers. I worry that she won’t come out of this smelling of roses.

The establishment is crumbling. She comes home in the evening shattered from her campaigns. She gulps down the warmed-up leftovers of lunch, not tasting anything, not knowing what she’s eating. She runs into the nursery, where she opens the floodgates of her dammed-up tenderness, because, with her maternal care limited to this brief interval, she tries to make up for constancy by intensity of feeling, and remains sternly unaware of anything that might show her idols in any other light than in her immediate passion. But then all it needs is for one of the children to test her patience, or not play along with her latest whim, and she starts to yell crazily at the shocked — a moment ago babied — creature, and if I try and intervene (it’s one of Ganna’s abiding characteristics that she can’t stand any contradiction, not from anyone, in any matter), then she will foam with rage. If the telephone shrills she shuffles out into the corridor in her down-at-heel slippers, and I hear her dull ‘Hallo-o’ which drives me wild with nervousness, ten times an evening, twenty — a real huntsman’s sound, it sounds like the jungle with its grim long-drawn-out ‘o-o’. It’s very evident if the person at the other end is someone who wants something from her, or if it’s someone she wants something from; if it’s the former her voice is cutting, mordant, bossy, and if it’s the latter it’s sweet, beseeching, submissive. After her supper she comes into my room and combs her hair, an activity that seems to take her for ever, during which she dreams and builds castles in the air, and chews over old wrongs she’s suffered. The comb drives crackling through her chestnut hair, her wide-open blue eyes stare fixedly into space. What they’re so fixed on is anyone’s guess, not even she herself knows; but the bottomless pain etched into her features moves me. And when I think she’s on her way to bed, so that her tortured soul will finally have some peace, she will remember something and hurry across to the desk, to compose some long screed or epistle which the next day will turn out to be perfectly meaningless and superfluous.

It’s in the nature of hell that it affords ever deeper degrees of torment and dread; you think it can’t get any worse, but you’re only in some antechamber of limbo, some zone of moderate awfulness; and that was my position when Ferry and Elisabeth were removed from the school and put in an ordinary state school instead. Whether it was punishment or a voluntary withdrawal wasn’t vouchsafed to me. Ganna claimed it was an act of revenge and I had to believe her; I had no desire to go looking for the truth, I didn’t want to create yet more conflict. The heads of the state schools had little good to say about the private school, and Ganna’s bewilderment was great when the various gymnasiums refused mid-semester to admit Ferry; and her shock was even greater when it was put down to the insufficient preparedness of the boy. Anxiety darkened my mood. I felt accountable for my son, but how could I stand up for him at the court of destiny, when his mother robbed me of all responsibility and remonstrated passionately with the judge against whose verdict there was no appeal? The thing she had tried to save him from now came to pass, with a vengeance: intellectual insecurity, academic caprice. I didn’t have the time to win back from her what she claimed from me and the world as hers of right. No, I didn’t have either the time or the energy to fight with her and persuade her to change course. I thought — maybe foolishly, maybe vaingloriously — that God had given me my days for some other purpose than that anyway. Ganna’s world was a world of limitless freedom, and for her to help herself from it equally limitlessly was the only way to happiness that she knew, even though whatever happiness resulted wasn’t what she wanted. I can remember hours when I argued with her as though my soul’s salvation depended on it, tried to break her rigid purpose, tried to make her milder, gentler, more insightful. But it was like trying to draw a face on a sheet of water. Once, in a strange fit of contrition, she said to me: ‘For you I would have to be a saint, but I can’t become holy without a mortal sin.’ I have never been able to forget those painful and terrible words. An abyss opened, at the bottom of which I glimpsed a Ganna fighting with ghostly shadows.

And what about me? What was I? A man being crushed in the fist of destiny. The war was tearing at me, tearing me in two the way a storm breaks a sheet of ice on a frozen lake; it broke me and I flooded and flooded, and the quiet dreamer and worker, the hibernal dreamer, the frozen dreamer, became a waker with the experiences of many, the sufferings of many in his bosom. Sleep and peace fled from me, and I stepped out of my rocky fastness; I tried to help, I tried to serve, I was looking for a soul, and if I hadn’t happened to find it finally in Bettina Merck, then despair would have choked me.

Ganna remained oblivious to all this. There was never a conversation about these things, no chance of a serious debate, as she was completely taken up with her business. There was something eerie about the way the global catastrophe seemed not to touch her. Her involvement in the events that shook all five continents was that of a little girl who was surprised to see the sky reddened by distant fires. She didn’t quite believe that the news that reached her ears was based on actual events. Her shock had something feigned, it was as though there was some conspirative agreement between people who didn’t concern her; all the while the true, the palpable, the Ganna world, the Ganna nursery world had nothing to do with these bruited, alleged doings.

I had volunteered in the first few weeks of the war. No man of heart and upstanding character at that time gave any thought to the rights and wrongs of the war, nor did anyone know what war actually was, or what it meant. We were parts of a whole and the whole was, or appeared to be, a living organism, a people, a fatherland, a place of being and becoming. I made up an excuse to Ganna, travelled into Vienna overnight and went to the consulate. The Consul, who knew me, initially wanted to pack me off home because they were so overrun with volunteers, but I insisted on being examined. The doctor found a cardiac neurosis. I went home desperately disappointed to Ebenweiler and told Ganna what I’d done. She was aghast with shock.

‘What are you playing at, Alexander,’ she cried, ‘a father of young children, a family to support, you’re not serious?’

Then it was my turn to be shocked; I think it was on that day that it occurred to me that the female Don Quixote was only a decoy.

‘And what’s the matter with your heart?’ she moaned, when I told her what the doctor had said. ‘You see, it’s because you don’t look after yourself. You smoke too much, you don’t sleep enough, you should listen to me.’

‘Oh no, Ganna,’ I said, ‘it’s not that. Living means using up your heart. That’s the point. I will have got too upset about too many things. Has it never occurred to you that getting upset is worse for me than smoking and not sleeping?’

That hurt her. She wanted to know what had upset me, as though it could be anything I might put my finger on. I was unable to give her a detailed instance; what difference would it have made if I had, she would have tried to talk it away and another argument would have started. Still, she kept boring in on me, and finally she asked me if I thought she was a good wife to me.

‘Have you got any grounds for complaint? Tell me, aren’t I a good wife to you?’

‘Yes, Ganna, you are,’ I said, ‘you’re a good wife to me.’

Then she wanted me to swear that I really meant it.

‘What’s the point of that, Ganna, don’t be childish,’ I replied, and more than ever I had the sense of her hopeless trusting in forms of words, believing in hollowed-out notions and being in love with an image of herself that bore no relation to the living being.

GANNA MAKES HER WILL

By now, things have got to the point where the consortium or board or whatever the group of directors called themselves have started to demand the meadow back from Ganna. She can name a price for it, she is told, but within reason. It’s not easy for Ganna to think of a number, seeing as the exploitation of the meadow is the subject of all her dreams, and she wants to make me happy by it (though I don’t seem very happy about it). With a strange unaccountable tenderness she clings onto the piece of property in her mind; ‘my little meadow’ she says, and smiles just as blissfully as when giving our little Doris her breast. How can such a thing be, what makes someone like that tick? I can’t explain it to myself.

The pressure on her from all sides is too much; she loses her nerve. Tossed back and forth between opposition and weakness, tenacity and fear, bitterness and speculative greed, she is unable to make her mind up. She asks everyone who crosses her path for an opinion — her sisters, her brothers-in-law, the servants, the suppliers, the gardener. But if one doesn’t coincide with her own secret wishes she becomes unpleasant, and launches into lengthy discussions of her view and praise of the meadow.

She calls a general meeting. People talk, quarrel, shout, and at the end Ganna promises to make her decision public the next day. The next day she communicates the price to the board in writing. No sooner has she posted the registered letter than she takes fright and asks for it back. ‘They’d be laughing all the way to the bank,’ she says to me, ‘I should ask for three times as much, they’re all well-off people and I mustn’t allow them to bully me.’ I warn her. I don’t know what’s going on, but this seems to me to be playing a dangerous game. More negotiations, more ranting and screaming, followed by an abrupt walkout. The brothers-in-law are with me in exhorting her to moderation. Dr Paul describes the offer made to her as decent and acceptable; she resists it with all her might, claims she is being cheated. The inappropriateness of her demand is proved to her; she seems to accept it, only an hour later to be back with her old standpoint. She runs from pillar to post, scolds those who disagree with her, wastes people’s time, describes the intrigues being used to intimidate her, comes up with vast sums she is being cheated of by the pressure of the antagonists, asks every Tom, Dick and Harry: ‘Should I do it, should I not, at this price, at that price, on this condition, on that condition? Will I regret it, won’t I regret it? Is it not a crime against my husband and my children if I let that gang walk away with my lovely meadow?’ She thinks about nothing else. She lives like a fugitive. She neglects herself, her domestic duties, me, the children. She no longer appears at mealtimes. Sometimes she can be found sitting on a bench in the public park, eating an apple. Sometimes having a nap in an Automat, listening to a scratchy gramophone record all dewy-eyed as if it were the Philharmonic.

Her indecisiveness, her anger, her restlessness, her wheeling and dealing, her tangled arguments, all the trash of a commercial dispute fought out with repulsive methods — she brings them all to me and dumps them on my lap. I am to ‘have the last word’. I decline; the last word would only be the penultimate one anyway. Every evening till far into the night the same song with the same exhausting refrain that it was all for my sake, that this whole struggle was all for me and only for me. ‘If you accept that, then I’ll stop,’ she says. ‘Do you accept that, do you accept that?’ Echolalia and nothing but. What am I to say? She won’t stop anyway, never mind how much I accept.

I can’t stand the endless rhetoric of it any more; the canny lawyerly presentations; the suspicions of people who are either acting in good faith, or who have nothing more dastardly in mind than Ganna herself, namely to make some money. I am nauseated by the disagreeable mixing of profit motive and high-mindedness. The story of the meadow is already making waves. To know that my name is being used in connection with it pains me. Old Councillor Schönpflug approaches me once in the club and begs me to keep Ganna from further folly, which might end up in a court case and not just a civil one at that. It’s horrible, it’s humiliating, I must try and bring it to an end.

One morning, dressed and ready to go out, I walk into Ganna’s bedroom to say goodbye to her. She is just coming out of the bathroom, swathed in a red and white chequered dressing-gown. No sooner does she catch sight of me than she launches into the usual daily litany. There is to be a meeting at Dr Pauli’s at twelve o’clock, could I not perhaps attend. It would help her a lot. She would be forever grateful to me (or rather, I think to myself, she would never forgive me if I refused).

Of late, I haven’t shown her much in the way of friendliness. It cost me too much. I can’t be friendly if I don’t have it in me to be so. I have become increasingly cold and laconic and irritable. I am angry with myself for my lovelessness. But my heart is blocked. I can’t find a kind word. Not now either. I shrug. The thought of more talks at the lawyer’s office gives me the willies. I couldn’t, I’m afraid, I say. Straight away Ganna turns aggressive. If only I could leave her to rage and walk off. But her tirades are like glue, and I’m stuck fast. When she calls it pathetic, my refusal to support her, the man for whom she is sacrificing herself, I remind her I hadn’t demanded or wished for any such sacrifice, and she was more use to me as a housewife and mother of our children. That earns me a salvo of derision from Ganna’s mouth.

‘That’s the thanks I get! I bleed myself dry for such a man, such a monster, more like! What thanks!’

‘There’s nothing to thank you for,’ I remark with a degree of calm that should have given Ganna pause, but it washes off her, ‘just as I never counted on a life like the one you’re making me.’

Ganna laughs hollowly. ‘What do you mean by that? What life? How do you propose to live? Do you want to starve till you get white hair? Where would you be without me anyway? Ask yourself that.’

‘I don’t know where I’d be without you, all I know is that I can no longer go on with you. Either you put an end to the business with the meadow and just sell it, or I’m going to leave you and get a divorce.’

No sooner has the word fallen than Ganna’s features are contorted. The word is not one that has been spoken before between us. She never thought she would hear it. She feels as sure of me as if I were a part of her, an arm or a leg. She is fundamentally secure, rootedly secure. Perhaps the dread word lies in some buried depths of her unconscious, like an explosive charge in a cellar. She gives a scream. The scream, which is awful, shrill and guttural, lasts fully fifteen or twenty seconds, and while she is screaming she is running around the room like a madwoman. She is certainly oblivious. She is certainly not in possession of her senses. Even so, I have the feeling that the utter loss of self-control is giving her pleasure, the pleasure of abdication, of psychic degeneration, that epileptics are said to have during a fit. While she rips the dressing-gown off with furious movements, she hurls a torrent of abuse at me. In every register of which her voice is capable she shouts the dread word at me: divorce. Inquiring, shouting, squawking, howling, gasping, with fingers hooked like claws and blue flashing eyes. And as I suffer the ghastly outburst showing me a wholly new, unsuspected Ganna in silence, she runs over to the window, stark naked as she is, and leans over the metal rail with her upper body, as though to plummet down the next moment. I am instantly reminded of the scene sixteen years ago, on the balcony by the Mondsee. Basically, she always does the same thing, I think to myself sadly, reaches for the same trick to get the other person in her power, the same words, the same gestures; only I always forget, and I always fall for it. In spite of my tormenting fury I remain relatively cool. I know she won’t do it; anyway there’s not much danger, the window’s about ten or twelve feet over the garden, which at that point is lawn — at the most she could break one or two ribs. But my certainty that she won’t throw herself over gives the situation something darkly ridiculous. At the same time, the rage that has been gathering inside me suddenly bursts out like a jet of boiling steam; it’s years and years since I last felt anything like it; with a single bound I am behind her, I grab her by the bare shoulders, fling her onto the bed and start blindly punching her. I still can’t imagine how it came over me. I’m laying into her like a drunk in a bar fight. Like a drayman. I, Alexander Herzog, am punching a woman. And Ganna is completely quiet. Curious, because she’s so quiet I stop hitting her and rush up to my room, lock the door behind me, drop into my chair, and sit perfectly still and brood about my misfortune.

And what did Ganna do in the meantime? I found out later, by chance. I found a sealed envelope on her desk, inscribed with her big accusing capital letters: My Will and Testament. When I asked her in amazement when and why she composed her will, she tells me with tear-stained face that it was just after I had hit her. I begged her not to bring it up again. But she told me about her despair and how she had sworn to herself to sell the meadow that very day. One day I would surely understand what I had done to her, what I had done to myself … From that moment on, we each had our own private stab-in-the-back story. Ganna never let go of the version that I had gone for her at the very moment she was in the process of making me millions. This figment was Ganna’s prop through all the later blows of fortune she suffered. In that way, she was like all conquered peoples and power-hungry parties; without a scapegoat she had no chance of confronting reality. And scapegoats are everywhere to be found, since without divided responsibility there is no practical action.

Burdened with this moral debt, whose interest payments I with my usual willingness took upon myself, I emerged into a new phase of my life — the one for the sake of which I have set down these confessions.