My First Wife

by Jakob Wassermann

  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 wi
th 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.