This may explain something. Because when, one September morning, Ganna jumped off her bicycle in front of the isolated farmhouse where I was staying in the attic, and I rushed down to greet her, I didn’t see a flushed, purple face, a sweat-drenched blouse, a wild, almost fevered regard; to see that would have been disagreeable to me and would have repulsed me for a long time. No, I saw a being I had created and imagined. I felt pity. Perhaps it was the transferred pity of writers, when they turn a real-life character into a figure of their imagination and clothe it in the mystery that is the only quality that provokes and sustains them. Poor, tormented creature, I said to myself, and I could feel my heart beating for her. Here was a woman in flight, a lover, stepping up to meet me, a victim, a persecutee begging for shelter, seeking a shoulder to cry on, deeply inflamed, in need of a little tenderness and soothing. Should I have shut myself away, should I have remained aloof and said: begone, there is no room for you in my life? There was room. Of course, the fact that I saw and sensed her the way I did in my self-sacrificial compassion, this single pregnant moment that bore the seed of thirty years – that was also in part Ganna’s doing, her over-powerful will, her dazzling sorcery. But I wasn’t to know that, back then.
ALMOST A CONFESSION
Rowing across the lake with her, strolling together through the autumnal woods, I talked to her about my past. I was now twenty-seven years old, and all I had experienced thus far were hardship and worry. To tell the truth, every single day had been a struggle to get food, to find a bed to sleep in, to put shoes on my feet. I omitted the details, the humiliating wealth of tawdriness. Why spread it out at her feet? I felt too ashamed. It would have sounded somehow accusatory. Perhaps I had a sense as well that she wouldn’t take it the right way, someone like her, grown up in luxury. Moreover I had a dim notion she liked such confessions, as though they reinforced her in a hope I didn’t mean to encourage. But I must have gone beyond what I had it in mind to say, because at times I caught her looking at me like a mother her sick child. I talked a lot about my wanderings and about how it was only in the countryside that I could stand my isolation, which in the city crushed me; all I got from the city was a crust of bread, and sometimes not even that. How did I avoid despair? What kept me going? Where does a perfectly irrational tinge of optimism come from? What sort of inner light shows me the way? Why didn’t I let myself slip into the dark-some river where I was cowering in my fear of mankind? Why do I not curl up and die when my brain can produce only revulsion and dread? Well, you see, Ganna, I will have said, it’s strange, something quite unaccountable happens. Even those moments of wanting to die come with a small flame that causes the heart to flicker into life. Then a friend shows up, whom you’d forgotten all about. Then you meet a girl for the first time, and she looks at you, and smiles at you, even though she knows everything about you. The least happiness is something so exquisitely precious in the lower depths. At such a moment I fell into the love affair for which I gave up three whole years of my life, as into a bottomless well, and that, once it was painfully over, left me as poor in my soul as I always was in my flesh …
HOW DOES GANNA TAKE IT?
These words, or similar, I will have spoken to Ganna; of course I no longer remember them exactly. What about her? To begin with, she was stunned. Here I must make mention of something odd. Ever since the first days of our acquaintance, she had kept a notebook about me. It was full of thoughts and reflections about my uninteresting person, complicated interpretations of my being, and pages and pages on the moral character of my work. I only heard about it years later, and I won’t deny that I laughed heartily when she showed me the volume. Typical Ganna, I said to myself; falling in love and writing a thesis about it at the same time. But at the point when I came up with such a response, I was already more critical of her. It was a fact with Ganna that her notions of life came out of books, and they stood to reality like a painted tiger to the beast that lays your shoulder open with a swipe of its paw. Still, my talking had stirred her up, and I had the feeling too that I wasn’t as inaccessible to her as I had been previously. Her emotion was unmistakable. It dawned on her that she had something to offer me, which she hoped I wouldn’t be able to dismiss out of hand. My surroundings, my life, were bound to let her know that my situation basically hadn’t improved since. I was living off expectation, off faith in an inner source, off the charity of friends and the carefully measured generosity of my publisher. I had no financial security. My entire existence was speculative, was a matter of plans and schemes. My face was etched with worry. The melancholy that from time to time would overwhelm me couldn’t be plucked from my eyes. In Ganna’s hot head that may have given rise to some serious questions. What did she have money for? Why had the Lottelotts worked so hard to amass their fortune? Let her have it. It’s in her gift to help the person she loves. And not just help him, she can restore him to his correct, sovereign height. She is jubilant, she has the key to this man on whose behalf she is prepared to go out and conquer the whole world. I didn’t misunderstand the shining eyes and the speaking looks. But patience, Ganna, patience: do you propose to take what you call your wealth, today or tomorrow, and merely drop it at his feet, unconditionally and impulsively and without regard to yourself, and without reference to any of the usual contracts and obligations? It would be a splendid impulse, whether it were possible or not. Or is some forfeit not required – in fact, wouldn’t the person, the future, the whole man from head to toe have to serve as your collateral? Speak!
It’s true, this question was never spoken out loud; it only hovered uncertainly over our conversations. But it seemed to me that Ganna didn’t understand its deeper implications. Why should the man not furnish the security, the pledge, she clearly was saying to herself, since all his difficulties would be resolved at a stroke, all his darknesses dispelled? If he only declares himself willing, then she will make him deliriously happy, then she will guard him like the apple of her eye, then she will be his slave, his exchequer. His muse, the guardian of his fame, the proclaimer of his greatness. All for him, say her shining eyes and her imploring looks; her dreams, her ambition, her gifts, her life, all for him.
But really I was still clueless.
BECAUSE IT’S NEW
Until one day she came out with it. Without preamble and with the same courage with which she plonked herself on her bicycle and pedalled off, even though she’d never properly learned how to. I was stunned. For the longest time, I wasn’t sure what exactly she meant. She took care not to be explicit. She was nervous. But she kept going back and starting over again. Each time it was a shade more graspable, with more eloquent descriptions of the practical possibilities, more excited dwelling on the splendid prospects for my life and work that she was able to predict with visionary fire. When I think back on it today I have to smile, because by instinct she was doing exactly what a shopkeeper does, feigning reluctance to show his most precious stock, and only putting it out on the counter once he’s worn the customer down with his patter. When I finally caught her drift, I had no idea what I could decently say. Nothing like this had occurred to me, not remotely. It was like someone suggesting I might like to move to the moon. I laughed. I treated the whole thing as an extravagant joke. I said that where marriage was concerned, I might just be the least suitable man in the whole of Europe.
In the way of these things, her arguments started getting to me after a while. If I was aghast the first day, by the second I was just annoyed, and by the third a little impatient. I couldn’t always avoid her stuttering suit, her fiery offer, her willingness to make herself useful that caused her to tremble like a fever. Not always. After all, she had proved to me – though not ultimate proof – that she didn’t hold anything back. It couldn’t possibly be calculation. Her tenderness was gushing. Her desire to please me, to anticipate my every wish, was nigh on obsessive. I regularly felt ashamed. If I’d only guessed that my shame was an unconsciously erected barrier, perhaps I would have behaved di
fferently. I thought she was funny in her wildness and her muddle-headed dreaminess; funny but lovable. You can find a woman lovable without loving her; that’s a dangerous grey area. When I gave her my hand, she could sit there charmed as though that moment was a singing eternity, then she would lean over and press her lips to my fingers with a reverence that sometimes made me say: oh, don’t do that, don’t bother. It hadn’t happened to me before. The woman I loved before, the first time, boundlessly, to the point of folly and even crime – yes, crime – had coolly endured my passion, and shamelessly cheated and exploited me. The wound I received from her had continued to fester. What a tonic to receive, for once, instead of always giving, thanklessly giving, and being mocked for it.
WILL YOU HAVE ME OR NOT?
For the moment I let things take their course. I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no. Yes would have turned my life upside down. Think of a solar system where a pert comet suspends the law of gravity. And no … no was tricky. Not that I wasn’t hungry for some of the fleshpots of Egypt. I wouldn’t deny that I was tired. Tired of the unpaid bills, the sheepish faces of my acquaintances when I tried to pump them for a loan, the holes in my socks that no one darned, the frayed cuffs of my shirts and the daily humiliations I had to take from people who despised nothing so much as poverty. It would have been nice to have no more experience of bitterness and offence, to go to bed at night without racking my brain about how I was going to pay for the privilege. It would have been nice to be freed from worries. Ganna wasn’t wrong when she argued that all these tormenting details would slowly wipe me out. But just for that, it didn’t occur to me to squinny at the groaning tables of the rich, and their nicely stocked wine cellars, and their jealously guarded safes.
It was one of my most disastrous qualities that, faced with a self-willed person, I would lose out because the phenomenon of willpower in and of itself would put me into such a state of amazement that I could generally only come to the decision my opposite number had made for me. I would tell myself I had done my bit, and was glad that there was no more back-and-forth. And Ganna decided for me. During those days her eyes had the sort of tunnel vision of athletes so set on victory they can see nothing but the finishing-tape. What was she so afraid of, why was she in such a hurry? I tried to calm her down. She thanked me exorbitantly, but it looked as though, inside, she was hurt and sore. I sensed how very much she was at the mercy of her drives, and if I wasn’t to stand in front of her as a poor bungler, I had to try and spring her from her jail. And, in so doing, I was clamped in chains myself.
One rainy afternoon she turned up on her bicycle again, panting and exhausted, flung herself at me, clasped my shoulders in her hands and stared at me as though she was on her way to the scaffold within the hour. I asked her in alarm what the matter was, but she merely closed her eyes and shook her head. Then she broke away, ran out to the little balcony, leaped onto the balustrade, turned round to me and, with a hysterical jingle in her voice, said:
‘If you don’t take me, I’m going to jump into the lake; I swear I will. Either you’re going to marry me, or I’ll jump.’
‘Ganna!’ I appealed. The house was on the lake. The water smacked against its western walls. A jump from twenty feet was no laughing matter. She was certainly capable of it. ‘Ganna!’ I called out again. She looked at me, half-blissful, half-fanatic, and spread her arms out. I caught her by the ankle and said reluctantly:
‘Please don’t, Ganna.’
And she: ‘Will you have me or not?’
I didn’t know whether to laugh or be cross. ‘All right, I will, I will,’ I said hurriedly, if only to put an end to the upsetting scene, but even as I said it I had the feeling I had swallowed poison. She jumped back, dropped to her knees in front of me and covered my hand with kisses.
Later, much later, I thought about that episode a lot. In one way, I thought, it wasn’t all that unlike a stick-up with a revolver. Hands up or I shoot. Whether the gun was loaded or not was immaterial. It wasn’t always possible to tell. Bad if it was, worse somehow if it wasn’t. But at the time it all happened, I didn’t have a clue. The notion that it might be a trick didn’t occur to me. Trick was too coarse a word for what it was, too. I saw a woman in the grip of elemental feeling. I can’t say whether it was vanity with me, or pity, but I said to myself I mustn’t push her away from me, I might destroy her for good. I thought I couldn’t be responsible if she came to some harm. I admired her bravery, her resolve, her bold all-or-nothing. And strangely enough, my blurted yes hung on a sensual appeal. As I clutched her slender ankle, I had the feeling I was holding her whole shaking, burning body in my arms. She seemed so frail to me, so delicate. Frailty and delicacy in women has always moved me and inflamed my blood. Hitherto, I had tended to duck my head under the storm of her feeling.
I don’t know if it might have been wiser not to say the thing about the revolver. In her inner confusion, she couldn’t distinguish between what was admissible and what went beyond. She was in the grip of passion, blind, animal passion. The stone tumbling down over a precipice doesn’t think about whether it’s going to strike some poor walker down below. And her passion, her dumb momentum, was like a force of nature to me.
FEDORA
There had been a little group of us there, which, because the season was advanced, had begun to dwindle. Now only my friend Fedora Remikov was left, a young pianist from Moscow, and, with her, Dr Eduard Riemann, an exceptionally clever and well-read man of my own age – philosopher, scholar, well-off playboy. I liked him more and more; rarely have I met a clearer head and a more unimpeachable spirit. Those two, who were close, had noticed my distrait and unhappy mood, and as they had seen me several times in Ganna’s company, they thought she might have something to do with it. Fedora put it to me directly. I avoided the question, but one day I asked her whether I might introduce Ganna to her. I wanted to get her opinion. I wanted to know what impression Ganna would make on such a pure and unpartisan being. We arranged to have tea together. Riemann was to be present as well. The experiment went pretty badly wrong. Ganna was terribly excited. She had the feeling she was to be examined by my friends. When she appeared, her demeanour was like that of a defendant in court. In the effort to show her best, she cramped up. Fedora sensed the strain she was under and looked at her sympathetically. Conversation happened to turn to the then much-read book The Rembrandt German and a discussion developed between Ganna and Eduard Riemann, who had no great admiration for the work; if I remember correctly, he described it as a set of glib paradoxes to please a bourgeois readership. Ganna argued with him. Unfortunately, she was too vehement. She was no match for Riemann’s knowledge and superior logic, but she was unwilling to face it, and talked like a teenaged philosopher. Riemann bounced good-humouredly back and forth on his chair. His replies were gentle but devastating. Fedora stayed out of it. When her eyes met mine, there was a questioning look in them. I admired Ganna’s pluck, her reading and her ability to think on her feet. The disapproval of my friends upset me. It was as if I were being misunderstood, as if adverse circumstances kept Ganna from showing herself in her true light, and I identified with her.
Ganna had sensed that she was not making the hoped-for impression on Fedora and Riemann, and so she sought to do better. She shouldn’t have bothered. God knows what made her think she had to gain a supporter in Fedora. That was already proof of her bad instincts. She always behaved as though she could force people to like her. She brought Fedora little bunches of flowers, and sent her notes with vehement declarations of undying love. To begin with, she had thought there was more between Fedora and me than mere friendship. When Fedora straightened her out with a few cool words, in more or less the way you correct something misreported in a newspaper, Ganna threw herself at her and kissed her. An unpardonable mistake. Shortly afterwards, on the eve of Ganna’s departure for Vienna, when Ganna had come to say goodbye, it was Fedora’s turn to make a mistake. She was foolish enough to counsel Ganna against marriag
e with me, and tried to talk her into giving up the idea.
She said: ‘If not for your sake, then for his.’
Ganna replied with flashing eyes: ‘What do you think you’re playing at, Fedora? How can you talk like that? Alexander and I belong together for ever and ever.’
Fedora told me about it a few days later, with a cold chuckle. I can still see her, leaning against the grand piano, with her white handkerchief by her mouth. Because she suffered from morbid obesity, and was prone to asthma attacks while playing, she was in the habit of keeping a handkerchief impregnated with some solvent to her mouth. In spite of her fatness, she was an attractive person; on top of the outsize body there was a real Bellini head with clever, piercing eyes. She asked me what would happen now, how things stood between Ganna and me. I said Ganna was going to talk to her father. She wanted to know whether this step had my approval. And when I said it did, then whether my conscience was clear. I became impatient, and accused her of being unfair to Ganna, and of failing to understand her magnanimous nature, and of being peevish and feminine herself. She shrugged her shoulders and replied quietly: ‘These are subtle matters, my friend, incredibly subtle matters …’
The next morning I got a note from her. I kept it for years and years, until I finally lost it during the move to Ebenweiler. She was worried about me, she wrote. I ought to consider very carefully the step I was contemplating. I should examine my reasons, wait, not hurry anything, she begged me. ‘You must love your future,’ she went on, ‘you must love it the way a woman cherishes her unborn child. You are carrying a huge responsibility. You are taking an extraordinary risk. You must respect what fate has in store for you. I am very concerned. It is the bitterest of disappointments when a friend fails to keep what he promised to friendship, because he promised it also to the world. If you have already tied the knot, then that to me is a form of betrayal, and I don’t want to see you again.’
My First Wife Page 3