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 trac
e. 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 o
nes 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 …
My First Wife Page 6