It’s a psychological puzzle how people like Ganna are favoured by circumstances for so long till the tension between dream and reality bursts with a catastrophic bang. On closer inspection, the weakness of their construction is shown from the beginning by their divided motivation: there’s a doubloons of purpose, a having-your-cake-and-eating-it. They want to insure themselves both against failure and against the pricking of conscience by taking the declared purpose and beefing it up, reinforcing it with a remoter one, more impersonal. Instead of thus strengthening the purpose, which is their intention, they divide it, and as they try to keep their options open to all sides, they wreck them both. This was exactly Ganna’s case, when with her irresistible energy she set about not only designing an educational paradise for her children from scratch, but at the same time sought, with a grand speculative coup, to assure the future of her beloved husband against any threat from destiny. In the end, both projects failed, and both became mad.
THE FOUNDING OF THE SCHOOL AND EVERYTHING THAT IS INVOLVED WITH IT
Let’s accompany her on her next steps, which are as bold as they are technically adroit. She finds out that the meadow belongs to a Frau Nussberger, a little old lady, the widow of a vintner. She pays a call on the little old lady and tests the water. Her hope has not deceived her, the meadow can be bought. The price: 120,000. Ganna pretends she is acting on behalf of an interested consortium and begins to negotiate. She feels there is little to be done, but since the property has a 40,000 mortgage on it, the sum she needs to raise is reduced by 40,000. That same day she goes to her friend and admirer, the lawyer Dr Paul, one of the most sought-after lawyers in the city and a very influential fellow. She pitches him her project. He is very favourably impressed and promises to help. First question: how to get hold of the meadow? One thing Ganna knows: old Frau Nussberger needs money. Further conversations with the friendly old lady leave Ganna persuaded that she would be prepared to sell the property for a moderate down payment, so long as the balance was secured. Ganna applies her full charm and force of argument to keep the down payment as low as possible. Relatives turn up, daughters, grandchildren, sons-in-law, the whole Nussberger clan – they all need money, there’s endless back and forth. Finally Ganna manages to get the down payment to just 2,000 crowns. Only where is she going to get them from? From the bank account? Not possible. It’s our iron reserve. A source of funding must be found, some people who are willing to accept the risks for the sake of the enterprise as a whole. One is found. Dr Paul has persuaded a few of his acquaintances to form a board interested in founding a school. One of their number is talked into putting up the advance. How Ganna manages to get the meadow in her name, and not that of the association, is a masterstroke. She tried once to explain it to me, but I couldn’t understand it, these things are too complicated for me. I was astounded that Ganna could manage them so well; she must have a native aptitude for them, I concluded.
Things now start to move. The number of shareholders grows every day. They are all wealthy people. I am amazed at the number of parents there are who want to save their children the trials of a conventional education and offer them freedom, an unorthodox syllabus and modern principles. They must know a thing or two about life, and to them a modest parental contribution that can smooth the way for their unacademic heirs is a reasonable investment.
Much greater, though, is my amazement at Ganna’s indefatigable zeal and evident proficiency. Next to the meadow is a villa with a spacious garden. From the very beginning Ganna has had her tactician’s eye on it. It’s for rent; she rents it; later she means to acquire it for the school. In combination with the meadow, it will provide plenty of scope for the school, especially for boarders. Exciting negotiations are held. Usually in our house. I feel like a man who comes upon some kerfuffle on the street and anxiously asks what it’s all about. Ganna’s announcements are becoming harder and harder to follow. She doesn’t have time for a quiet conversation. Early in the morning she dashes off into the city, and late in the afternoon she turns up exhausted, out of breath, half-starved. Then the writing begins. She writes letters, dozens at a time, and brochures for the printer. Articles for newspapers, pedagogical essays, press releases on behalf of the school board, appeals to the Education Ministry, teaching plans, syllabuses, budgets. I am astounded by her stamina, her mastery, her versatility. Her room has turned into an office. The servants are left to their own devices. The children run wild. By day I flee the house. When I come home at night, the rooms are full of people I’ve never seen before. Lawyers, civil servants, teachers, journalists, enthusiastic ladies, chancres sniffing a job, all of them crammed into our three rooms, munching sandwiches, drinking vast quantities of beer, wine, schnapps and tea, engaged in loud debates and browsing nosily in my books and manuscripts. The telephone is continually manned, usually by Ganna herself. Telegrams rain in, windy pronouncements are read out, and a charter is drawn up for the civil servants to get to work on.
The school board is convened, the share capital is subscribed; and then the first rebellion breaks out. Ganna has exceeded her authority, or so at least it is claimed. She has violated agreements, apparently, meddled in other people’s areas, put the wrong people in important jobs – for instance appointing a nice-looking young man by the name of Borngräber as headmaster on the strength of a few vacuous recommendations and his own smooth manners. And then it transpires that the fellow is intriguing against her and is making a stink. I try and investigate but fail to get to the bottom of the thing. I am perforce left with Ganna’s version. With one of her typical unabashed clichés, she says: ‘I have given suck to a viper.’ But he’s not the only one to come out of the shrubbery. Every day there are fresh opponents, distractions, false reports, betrayals, conspiracies. Borngräber is forming a cabal. Ganna forms one of her own. Not the best thing for a school being founded. What’s the matter, I think, Ganna wouldn’t harm a fly, why is it that all these people are up in arms against her? I hear all sorts of complaints and accusations. I’m not sure what’s going on, and ask Ganna what this thing or the other is about. Ganna describes the events as if she were the victim of malice and envy, as if people were trying to twist the reins out of her hands. She asks me to get involved. If I put my foot down, she assures me, then no one will dare to rebel against her.
Now, I don’t exactly believe in my authority, but I’ll do anything to try and help her, because I too have the sense that she’s confronted by a wild rabble. She’s unhappy. She has sacrificed herself for a great idea and this is her recompense. It’s easy to see the female Don Quixote again, against the background of hostility. Something needs to happen. I talk to the teachers, to the perfidious Borngräber, to Dr Paul, to a respectable Court Councillor who is the titular chairman of the board and Ganna’s confidant. I get nowhere. I no longer know what’s what in all this turmoil. An embittered confusion of voices surrounds me. I’m not cut out to be a peacemaker, I can’t arbitrate between the warring parties. I am told that Ganna has misinformed me on certain significant matters. When Ganna senses my wavering, she flies off the handle. ‘What am I supposed to do, Ganna,’ I say desperately, ‘it’s like being set upon by a swarm of wasps.’ I visit the non-executive chairman, Imperial Councillor Schönpflug is his name. ‘Frau Herzog’s actions are not quite transparent,’ says this otherwise sympathetic man. I reply bluntly that I couldn’t permit the least doubt of the integrity of my wife. I tell her. She asks me to set down my views in a short memorandum to the board: that will gag her enemies. I can’t deny her this, I wouldn’t get any peace. On the other hand, I am in danger of myself being exposed, and perhaps even, who knows, perpetrating a lie; Ganna is terribly prone to self-deception – it may be that she is less innocent than she thinks she is. I write my deposition, convincingly affirming the integrity of her character and the ethical goodness of her actions. Then I run away, and spend a few weeks in peace in Ebenweiler.
THE TRAGEDY OF THE MALE
Before I relate how the ever
uglier and more distressing business of the school went on and finally ended, I want to talk about my own experiences in the years before the war, and in the first years of the war – two in particular that, each in their own way, had a profound effect on the future. The one was the birth of my daughter Doris, the other the gift of a house – a whole fully furnished house, with grounds – the kind gift of a young couple I had been close friends with for some time. I had told them about my domestic trouble, the difficulty of finding peace and concentration in a rented apartment, and the resulting tendency to fritter away the day and do my work at night. Then, on a generous impulse, they offered me the money to buy a house in the country. I was so stunned I could hardly breathe. I didn’t dare turn it down, but felt I couldn’t accept it either. It was extraordinary; I asked myself if I had any right to avail myself of this favourable smile of fortune, it almost seemed to me it would be betraying my friends to do so. How can you deserve such a sacrifice – albeit those making it don’t see it as such – how thank them, when thanks you can’t give will end up burdening you? I had none of the greedy self-certainty of those geniuses (I didn’t think I was one in any case) who accept support and help from their admirers as a perfectly natural form of tribute. I was too steeped in the bourgeois ethos of deals and contracts. The formulas ‘nowt for nowt’ and ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ were in my blood. It wasn’t easy for me to see myself in any way as (in some higher sense) ‘deserving’ the generosity of these friends.
Ganna, however, had no such scruples. She thought it was absolutely to be expected that people would seek to spoil me a little. They were only giving me back what they had already had from me in plenty, she said, with eyes wide. ‘Come off it,’ I said, petulantly, ‘there must be a couple of thousand like me. Ninety per cent of us will probably die in a ditch. You’re doing pretty well if you have enough to eat and a bed to sleep in at night. What’s so special about me? What have I done to deserve a luxury villa? We have no right to such security, it seems to me.’ Ganna vehemently disagreed. She was too obviously the child of a well-provided and self-righteous era where mind and work had their value just as stocks and shares did. It raised my worth immeasurably in her eyes, although she seemed not to be aware of the fact that it was her husband who had been given the house. Nothing like this had happened since the days of the Medicis. She trumpeted her and my good fortune to all and sundry, and when I asked her to be a little discreet, she looked at me uncomprehendingly. But it gave us a neutral territory where our shared interests could get to work on a common project. Ganna needed to be kept busy, she was like a stove needing fuel. She could do twenty things at once, and each of them with verve and enthusiasm. And when we discussed the house together, looked for a piece of land, spoke to the architect, studied the plans, bought furniture and lamps and other things, the besetting passivity I fell into whenever I was with her left me, and I could at least be dragged along. And, so that she didn’t see I was only allowing myself to be dragged along, I would stroke her tiny hand which was feeding me sugar lumps, so that I for my part wouldn’t notice how she was dragging me along. Marriage offers the weaker party plenty of opportunity to show no character.
It took no particular cleverness or endeavour on Ganna’s part to induce me to have my new possession – this house, the workplace and refuge intended for me personally – registered in her name as well. One day we went along to the land registry office and Ganna was legally made co-owner of the villa. I gave the matter no thought whatsoever. I didn’t think that I was thereby relinquishing the one and only thing that was entirely mine. I didn’t reflect that I was establishing Ganna in a feeling of ownership and entitlement that – beyond the actual name on the deeds – signified in some magical sense a transfer of body and soul.
But I was only superficially engaged with all this. In hindsight, these years came to seem like a trek along a dark, overhung path, with rare moments of rest or looking up. I could sense that tremendous things were imminent. The black cloud, still invisible below the horizon, was already projecting electric waves, and I was continually nervous, like a bird before a storm. There was an awful magic being wrought over the land and over the people, I felt ill at ease when I walked at night, as I often had occasion to, through the streets of German cities; I suffered from my second sight like a sleeper dreaming his house is on fire. It seemed to me another world was claiming me than the one in which I had thus far been content to be. What I had achieved seemed negligible, inadequate; it spoke to too few people, it existed in outmoded forms. I had a sense of others, waiting, but I didn’t know anything about them. I was still far from my limits, and far from myself; if I failed to break through my crust, then I would find myself crushed by it.
My senses too were aflame. Ravenous appetite alternated with satiety. No woman was enough for me; none gave me what I was dimly seeking: a sense of who I was, some final easement of the blood. I went from one to another, and it was often as though I had to break them open like a husk or shell with unknown contents, peeling them like a fruit which I then discarded. It wasn’t Don Juan-ishness, nor was it sheer lechery either. There might have been something in it of the misunderstanding that takes the living being and half-angrily, half-playfully exchanges it for an imaginary one, and contents itself with that because it can’t perfect the other. Perhaps it was something to do with the tragedy of the male who sets off towards the glacial region of symbols and en route forgets himself with warm-blooded nymphs.
By the time the baby was born, we were already living in our new house.
THE TRUTH BEGINS TO DAWN
Only then did events with the school board take on the shape of the catastrophe that deeply affected both Ganna’s life and mine. The main cause of the trouble was that Ganna stubbornly refused to make over the meadow to the company. The stockholders described it as intolerable that the extensive land for the project, on which the newly built school was standing, should remain in separate ownership, and that the owner, herself a member of the board, should charge a substantial rent for it. In the course of stormy meetings, Ganna was upbraided for the immoral and unbusinesslike nature of the situation. It made her look bad, it was said, that she laid claim both to the idealism of the project and the lion’s share of the profits. That is very much the way of it: people who have disappointed expectations of money are extremely hard on those who, while on the side of the angels, also want to turn a profit. That’s wrong, they say, there are businessmen and there are priests, you can’t be both at once. The other side’s lawyers even contested Ganna’s title. Their claim was that Ganna had managed to acquire the title by some underhand method, and they sought to expose it.
Ganna is left reeling. The world is darkening on her. She swears sacred oaths that she would rather die than give up her meadow; she won’t give up a square foot of it, no, not so much as a blade of grass. Inevitably, the children, for whose sake this venture was started, become aware of their mother’s unpopularity. The advantage that Ganna sought to gain for them is lost. But neither can I find that they are disadvantaged and emotionally damaged by all this, as Ganna weepingly claims. They needed to learn to take the rough with the smooth, I opine with a calmness that drives Ganna into a fury. ‘How can you stick up for those criminals?’ she hisses at me. ‘That just shows what a weakling you are. The whole world knows that you abandon your wife at the earliest opportunity. Well, God will punish you for it.’ Those speeches! I really haven’t abandoned her, and why is she coming with her divine punishment? What does she know of God, she who only ever uses His name in vain. Her god is Ganna Herzog’s special constable, who will launch his thunderbolts the moment his dear Ganna is hurt by a bad person.
She goes up to the teachers and gives them all a piece of her mind. It fails to improve matters. Ferry goes on strike; we’ve reached the stage where the children are paying for Ganna’s misdeeds. The quality of the teaching, which Ganna once praised to the skies, is suddenly wretched. The same teachers who
only recently were paragons, so many Fröbels and Pestalozzis, are now held in contempt. She sticks at nothing in her campaign against the headmaster Borngräber, with whom she was certainly once half in love. She conspires with handymen and charwomen. Day after day she hangs around with people in whom the name Herzog inspires no respect. She tussles with them. Like anyone with a political mission, she is surrounded by provocateurs and flatterers. I worry that she won’t come out of this smelling of roses.
The establishment is crumbling. She comes home in the evening shattered from her campaigns. She gulps down the warmed-up leftovers of lunch, not tasting anything, not knowing what she’s eating. She runs into the nursery, where she opens the floodgates of her dammed-up tenderness, because, with her maternal care limited to this brief interval, she tries to make up for constancy by intensity of feeling, and remains sternly unaware of anything that might show her idols in any other light than in her immediate passion. But then all it needs is for one of the children to test her patience, or not play along with her latest whim, and she starts to yell crazily at the shocked – a moment ago babied – creature, and if I try and intervene (it’s one of Ganna’s abiding characteristics that she can’t stand any contradiction, not from anyone, in any matter), then she will foam with rage. If the telephone shrills she shuffles out into the corridor in her down-at-heel slippers, and I hear her dull ‘Hallo-o’ which drives me wild with nervousness, ten times an evening, twenty – a real huntsman’s sound, it sounds like the jungle with its grim long-drawn-out ‘o-o’. It’s very evident if the person at the other end is someone who wants something from her, or if it’s someone she wants something from; if it’s the former her voice is cutting, mordant, bossy, and if it’s the latter it’s sweet, beseeching, submissive. After her supper she comes into my room and combs her hair, an activity that seems to take her for ever, during which she dreams and builds castles in the air, and chews over old wrongs she’s suffered. The comb drives crackling through her chestnut hair, her wide-open blue eyes stare fixedly into space. What they’re so fixed on is anyone’s guess, not even she herself knows; but the bottomless pain etched into her features moves me. And when I think she’s on her way to bed, so that her tortured soul will finally have some peace, she will remember something and hurry across to the desk, to compose some long screed or epistle which the next day will turn out to be perfectly meaningless and superfluous.
My First Wife Page 10