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 ge
t 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?
My First Wife Page 9