by Max Frisch
*
Then I met Hanna again.
(3 June in Athens.)
I recognized her before I was awake. She was talking to the deaconess. I knew where I was and wanted to inquire whether the operation had been carried out – but I was sleeping, completely exhausted, I was terribly thirsty, but I couldn’t say so. And yet I heard her voice speaking Greek. They had brought me tea, but I couldn’t take it; I slept, I heard everything and knew that when I awoke I should face Hanna.
Suddenly there was silence.
I was terrified the child might be dead.
Suddenly I was lying there with my eyes open. I saw the white room, a laboratory, and the lady who stood by the window, believing I was asleep and couldn’t see her. Her grey hair, her petite figure. She was waiting, both hands in the pockets of her jacket, gazing out of the window. There was no one else in the room. A stranger. I couldn’t see her face, only her neck, the back of her head and her short hair. Every now and then she took out her handkerchief to blow her nose and immediately put it away again, or crushed it in her nervous hand. Apart from this she was motionless. She wore glasses, black horn-rimmed glasses. She might have been a lady doctor or barrister or something like that. She was crying. Once she placed her hand under her horn-rimmed spectacles as though to hold her face; for quite a time. Then she needed both hands to unfold the wet handkerchief once more, then she put it away again and waited, gazing out of the window, where there was nothing to be seen but sun-blinds. Her body was lithe, she would have looked positively girlish if it hadn’t been for her grey or white hair. Then she took out her handkerchief again to polish her glasses, so that at last I saw her bare face, which was brown – apart from the blue eyes it might have been the face of an old South American Indian.
I pretended to be asleep.
Hanna with white hair.
Evidently, I really fell asleep again – for half a minute or half an hour, until my head slipped away from the wall so that I jumped – she saw I was awake. She didn’t say a word, but just looked at me. She was sitting with crossed legs, her head in her hands, smoking.
‘How is she?’ I asked.
Hanna went on smoking.
‘We must hope for the best,’ she said. ‘It’s over – we must hope for the best.’
‘She’s alive?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
Not a word of greeting.
‘Dr Eleutheropulos was here just now,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t think it was an adder.’
She poured me a cup of tea.
‘Come,’ she said, ‘drink your tea.’
Quite honestly, it never occurred to me that we hadn’t spoken for twenty years; we talked about the operation that had been performed an hour ago, or we didn’t talk at all. We waited together for a further report from the doctor.
I emptied cup after cup.
‘You know they gave you an injection, too?’ she said.
I hadn’t noticed it.
‘Only ten cubic centimetres, just as a prophylactic,’ she said. ‘Because of the oral mucosa.’
Hanna was altogether very matter-of-fact.
‘How did it happen?’ she asked. ‘Were you at Corinth today?’
I was freezing.
‘Where’s your jacket?’
My jacket was lying beside the sea.
‘How long have you been in Greece?’
I was astounded at Hanna; a man, a friend couldn’t have asked in a more matter-of-fact tone. I tried to answer in the same tone. What was the use of assuring her a hundred times that I couldn’t help it? Hanna didn’t reproach me, she merely asked questions, gazing out of the window. She asked, without looking at me:
‘How far did you go with the child?’
Yet she was very much on edge, as I could see.
‘How do you mean, it wasn’t an adder?’ I asked.
‘Come,’ she said, ‘drink your tea.’
‘How long have you been wearing glasses?’ I asked…
*
I didn’t see the snake, I only heard Sabeth scream. When I got there, she was lying unconscious. I had seen Sabeth fall and had run to her. She was lying on the sand, knocked unconscious by her fall, I imagined, until I saw the bite above her breast, a small wound, three punctures close together. Then I realized what had happened. She was bleeding only slightly. Of course I immediately sucked out the wound, as prescribed, and I knew that a ligature should be applied between the wound and the heart. But how? The bite was above the left breast. I knew that the wound should be immediately excised or cauterized. I shouted for help, but I was already out of breath before I reached the road with the victim in my arms, after trudging through the sand; I was seized with despair when I saw the Ford drive past; I shouted as loud as I could; but the Ford drove past. I stood there out of breath with the victim in my arms, growing heavier every minute, I could scarcely hold her because she was a dead weight. It was the right road, but there wasn’t a vehicle in sight. I got my breath back and went along this road of gravelled tar, first at a run, then slower and slower. I was barefooted. It was midday. I walked on in tears, until at last the cart came along. Up from the sea. Driven by a workman who spoke only Greek, but understood as soon as he saw the wound. I sat on the jolting cart, which was loaded with wet gravel, the girl in my arms just as she was, namely in a bikini and covered in sand. It shook the gravel, so that I had to go on holding the unconscious girl in my arms, and it also shook me. I asked the workman to hurry. The donkey was going no faster than walking pace. It was a rickety cart with crooked, wobbly wheels, a mile was an eternity; I sat facing the way we had come. But there was no sign of a car. I couldn’t understand what the Greek was saying, nor why he stopped by a well; he tied the donkey up and signed to me to wait. I begged him to go on and not lose time; I didn’t know what he had in mind when he left me alone in the gravel cart, alone with the victim, who needed serum. I sucked the wound out again. He had obviously gone to the huts to fetch help. I didn’t know what help he imagined he could get, herbs or superstition or something. He whistled, then he walked on, because there was no reply from the huts. I waited a few minutes, then, without stopping to think, I ran on with the victim in my arms, until I was out of breath again and exhausted, I laid her down on the verge of the road, because there was just no sense in walking any farther; I couldn’t carry her to Athens. Either a motor vehicle would come and pick us up, or it wouldn’t come. When I sucked out the little wound on her breast again, I saw that Sabeth was slowly regaining consciousness: her eyes were wide open, but sightless, she only complained of thirst, her pulse was very slow, then she vomited with an outbreak of sweating. Now I could see the bluish-red swelling round her wound. I ran for water. All around there was nothing but gorse, thistles, olives on waterless land, not a single human being, only a few goats in the shade. I shouted and yelled in vain – it was midday, a deathly silence; I kneeled down beside Sabeth; she wasn’t unconscious, only very drowsy, as though paralysed. Fortunately I caught sight of the lorry in time to run out into the road; it pulled up – a lorry with a bundle of long iron pipes. Its destination was not Athens, but Megara, nevertheless it was going in the right direction. I sat beside the driver, the victim in my arms. The long pipes kept clattering and the pace was murderous – less than twenty miles an hour on the straight! I had left my jacket by the sea and my money in my jacket. When he stopped in Megara I gave the driver, who also only spoke Greek, my Omega watch to drive straight on without unloading his pipes. We lost another quarter of an hour at Eleusis, where he had to stop for petrol. I shall never forget this run. I don’t know whether he was afraid I should demand my Omega watch back if I transferred to a faster vehicle or what; but twice he prevented me from switching over. Once it was a bus, a Pullman, once a limousine, which pulled up when I signalled; my driver spoke to them in Greek, and they drove on. He insisted on being the one to save us, yet he was a wretched driver. On the hill leading to Daphni he almost came to a standstill. Sabeth was aslee
p, and I didn’t know whether she would ever open her eyes again. At last we reached the suburbs of Athens, but we were moving more and more slowly; there were traffic lights and the usual traffic jams, and our lorry with the long pipes projecting at the back was less manoeuvrable than the rest, who didn’t need serum; it was a horrible town, a chaos of tramcars and donkey carts, and of course our driver didn’t know where to find a hospital, he had to ask, and I began to think he would never get to it; I closed my eyes or looked at Sabeth, who was breathing very slowly. (All the hospitals were situated at the other end of Athens.) Our driver, who came from the country, didn’t even know the names of the streets people told him, all I could catch was ‘Leofores, Leofores’; I tried to help, but I couldn’t even read. We should never have found it if it hadn’t been for the little lad who jumped on our running-board and showed us the way.
Then this antechamber.
A whole lot of questions in Greek.
Eventually the deaconess appeared, who understood English, a person of Satanic calm whose main concern was to know all our personal particulars.
*
The doctor who treated the girl reassured us. He understood English and replied in Greek; Hanna translated the important part for me: his explanation as to why it wasn’t an adder (Vipera berus), but a snub-nosed viper (Vipera aspis), and his view that I had done the only possible thing in bringing her straight to hospital. As an expert, he didn’t think much of popular remedies like sucking out the wound, excising or cauterizing it, or ligaturing the affected limb; the only reliable antidote was a serum injection within three to four hours with excision of the wound as a supplementary measure only.
He didn’t know who I was.
I was in a sad state myself – sweaty and dusty like the workman on the gravel cart, with tar on my feet, not to mention my shirt, barefooted and jacketless; the doctor was concerned about my feet, which he left to the deaconess; he spoke only to Hanna, until Hanna introduced me.
‘Mr Faber is a friend of mine.’
I was relieved to hear that the mortality from snake bites (adders and vipers of all kinds) is only three to ten per cent, even in the case of cobra bites it does not exceed fifty per cent, which is out of all proportion to the superstitious fear of snakes that is still so widespread.
Hanna was also somewhat reassured.
She told me I could stay with her.
But I didn’t want to leave the hospital without seeing the girl, if only for a minute; Hanna behaved very strangely (the doctor gave his consent at once) – she wouldn’t let me stay in the sick-room for a minute, as though I was going to steal her daughter from her.
‘Come,’ she said, ‘she’s asleep now.’
Perhaps it was fortunate the girl didn’t recognize us; she was sleeping with her mouth open (a thing she didn’t normally do) and was very pale, her ear looked like marble, she was breathing in slow motion, but regularly, as though contentedly, and at one moment, as I stood by her bedside, she turned her head in my direction. But she was asleep.
‘Come,’ said Hanna, ‘leave her.’
I should have preferred to go to a hotel. Why didn’t I say so? Perhaps Hanna would also have preferred it. We hadn’t even shaken hands. In the taxi, when I realized this, I said:
‘Greetings!’
She smiled, as always at my bad jokes, creasing her forehead between her eyebrows.
She was very like her daughter.
Of course, I said nothing.
‘Where did you meet Elsbeth?’ she asked. ‘On the ship?’
Sabeth had written about an elderly gentleman who had proposed marriage to her on the ship just before it reached Le Havre.
‘Is that right?’ she asked.
Our conversation in the taxi consisted of unanswered questions.
Why did I call her Sabeth? A question in response to my question, Why Elsbeth? In between came her statement, That’s the theatre of Dionysos. Why did I call her Sabeth? Because Elisabeth seemed to me an impossible name. In between, remarks about broken pillars. Why Elisabeth of all names? I should never call a child Elisabeth. In between, traffic lights and the usual hold-ups. Well, that was her name, her father had chosen it, there was nothing to be done about it now. In between, she talked to the driver, who was cursing a pedestrian, in Greek. I got the impression we were going round in a circle, and it made me feel on edge, although we were no longer in any hurry. Then she asked:
‘Did you ever see Joachim again?’
I thought Athens a dreadful city, like something in the Balkans, I couldn’t imagine where people lived here, like a small town, or even a village in parts, Levantine, hordes of people in the middle of the street, then again desolation, ruins, and in between attempts to imitate a metropolis, dreadful; we drew to a halt soon after her question.
‘Here?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’
It was the Institute where Hanna worked, and I had to wait in the taxi, without a cigarette; I tried to read the names over the shops and so on and felt like an illiterate, completely lost.
Then back into town.
Frankly, when Hanna came out of the Institute I didn’t recognize her; otherwise of course I should have opened the door of the taxi for her.
Then her flat.
‘I’ll lead the way,’ she said.
Hanna led the way, a lady with short grey hair and horn-rimmed spectacles, a stranger, but the mother of Sabeth or Elsbeth (my mother-in-law, so to speak!), every now and then I felt surprised that we addressed one another by our first names right away.
‘Come,’ she said, ‘make yourself at home.’
This meeting after twenty years was something I hadn’t reckoned with, nor had Hanna, incidentally she was quite right: to be exact it was twenty-one years.
‘Come,’ she said, ‘sit down.’
My feet were hurting.
Of course I knew that sooner or later she would repeat her question (‘How far did you go with the girl?’), and I could have sworn that, nothing had happened at all – without lying, for I didn’t believe it myself, now that I saw Hanna in front of me.
‘Walter,’ she said, ‘why don’t you sit down?’
I stood out of spite.
Hanna pulled up the sunblinds.
The main thing was that the child was out of danger – I kept telling myself this all the time, whether I was talking about something else or saying nothing, smoking Hanna’s cigarettes; she cleared some books away from the armchair so that I could sit down.
‘Walter,’ she said, ‘are you hungry?’
Hanna as a mother…
I didn’t know what to think.
‘You have a nice view from here,’ I said. ‘So that’s the famous Acropolis?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s Lykabettos.’
She always had this habit, almost a mania, of being absolutely accurate, even over minor details: No, that’s Lykabettos!
I told her so.
‘You haven’t changed!’
‘You don’t think so?’ she asked. ‘Have you changed?’
Her flat. Like a scholar’s (I evidently told her that too; later, in the course of a conversation about men, Hanna quoted my remark about a scholar’s flat as proof that I, too, considered science a masculine monopoly, all intellectual activity in fact); all the walls were covered with books, there was a desk covered with fragments of pottery bearing labels, but apart from this I saw, at first glance, nothing antiquarian, on the contrary, the furniture was thoroughly modern, which surprised me where Hanna was concerned.
‘Hanna,’ I said, ‘how progressive you’ve become!’
She merely smiled.
‘I mean it seriously,’ I said.
‘Still?’ she asked.
There were times when I didn’t understand what she meant.
‘Are you still progressive?’ she asked, and I was glad that at least Hanna was smiling… I could see that the usual pangs of conscience you fe
el when you don’t marry a girl were superfluous. Hanna didn’t need me. She lived without a car of her own, but nevertheless contentedly: without a television set either.