It’s in the nature of hell that it affords ever deeper degrees of torment and dread; you think it can’t get any worse, but you’re only in some antechamber of limbo, some zone of moderate awfulness; and that was my position when Ferry and Elisabeth were removed from the school and put in an ordinary state school instead. Whether it was punishment or a voluntary withdrawal wasn’t vouchsafed to me. Ganna claimed it was an act of revenge and I had to believe her; I had no desire to go looking for the truth, I didn’t want to create yet more conflict. The heads of the state schools had little good to say about the private school, and Ganna’s bewilderment was great when the various gymnasiums refused mid-semester to admit Ferry; and her shock was even greater when it was put down to the insufficient preparedness of the boy. Anxiety darkened my mood. I felt accountable for my son, but how could I stand up for him at the court of destiny, when his mother robbed me of all responsibility and remonstrated passionately with the judge against whose verdict there was no appeal? The thing she had tried to save him from now came to pass, with a vengeance: intellectual insecurity, academic caprice. I didn’t have the time to win back from her what she claimed from me and the world as hers of right. No, I didn’t have either the time or the energy to fight with her and persuade her to change course. I thought – maybe foolishly, maybe vaingloriously – that God had given me my days for some other purpose than that anyway. Ganna’s world was a world of limitless freedom, and for her to help herself from it equally limitlessly was the only way to happiness that she knew, even though whatever happiness resulted wasn’t what she wanted. I can remember hours when I argued with her as though my soul’s salvation depended on it, tried to break her rigid purpose, tried to make her milder, gentler, more insightful. But it was like trying to draw a face on a sheet of water. Once, in a strange fit of contrition, she said to me: ‘For you I would have to be a saint, but I can’t become holy without a mortal sin.’ I have never been able to forget those painful and terrible words. An abyss opened, at the bottom of which I glimpsed a Ganna fighting with ghostly shadows.
And what about me? What was I? A man being crushed in the fist of destiny. The war was tearing at me, tearing me in two the way a storm breaks a sheet of ice on a frozen lake; it broke me and I flooded and flooded, and the quiet dreamer and worker, the hibernal dreamer, the frozen dreamer, became a waker with the experiences of many, the sufferings of many in his bosom. Sleep and peace fled from me, and I stepped out of my rocky fastness; I tried to help, I tried to serve, I was looking for a soul, and if I hadn’t happened to find it finally in Bettina Merck, then despair would have choked me.
Ganna remained oblivious to all this. There was never a conversation about these things, no chance of a serious debate, as she was completely taken up with her business. There was something eerie about the way the global catastrophe seemed not to touch her. Her involvement in the events that shook all five continents was that of a little girl who was surprised to see the sky reddened by distant fires. She didn’t quite believe that the news that reached her ears was based on actual events. Her shock had something feigned, it was as though there was some conspirative agreement between people who didn’t concern her; all the while the true, the palpable, the Ganna world, the Ganna nursery world had nothing to do with these bruited, alleged doings.
I had volunteered in the first few weeks of the war. No man of heart and upstanding character at that time gave any thought to the rights and wrongs of the war, nor did anyone know what war actually was, or what it meant. We were parts of a whole and the whole was, or appeared to be, a living organism, a people, a fatherland, a place of being and becoming. I made up an excuse to Ganna, travelled into Vienna overnight and went to the consulate. The Consul, who knew me, initially wanted to pack me off home because they were so overrun with volunteers, but I insisted on being examined. The doctor found a cardiac neurosis. I went home desperately disappointed to Ebenweiler and told Ganna what I’d done. She was aghast with shock.
‘What are you playing at, Alexander,’ she cried, ‘a father of young children, a family to support, you’re not serious?’
Then it was my turn to be shocked; I think it was on that day that it occurred to me that the female Don Quixote was only a decoy.
‘And what’s the matter with your heart?’ she moaned, when I told her what the doctor had said. ‘You see, it’s because you don’t look after yourself. You smoke too much, you don’t sleep enough, you should listen to me.’
‘Oh no, Ganna,’ I said, ‘it’s not that. Living means using up your heart. That’s the point. I will have got too upset about too many things. Has it never occurred to you that getting upset is worse for me than smoking and not sleeping?’
That hurt her. She wanted to know what had upset me, as though it could be anything I might put my finger on. I was unable to give her a detailed instance; what difference would it have made if I had, she would have tried to talk it away and another argument would have started. Still, she kept boring in on me, and finally she asked me if I thought she was a good wife to me.
‘Have you got any grounds for complaint? Tell me, aren’t I a good wife to you?’
‘Yes, Ganna, you are,’ I said, ‘you’re a good wife to me.’
Then she wanted me to swear that I really meant it.
‘What’s the point of that, Ganna, don’t be childish,’ I replied, and more than ever I had the sense of her hopeless trusting in forms of words, believing in hollowed-out notions and being in love with an image of herself that bore no relation to the living being.
GANNA MAKES HER WILL
By now, things have got to the point where the consortium or board or whatever the group of directors called themselves have started to demand the meadow back from Ganna. She can name a price for it, she is told, but within reason. It’s not easy for Ganna to think of a number, seeing as the exploitation of the meadow is the subject of all her dreams, and she wants to make me happy by it (though I don’t seem very happy about it). With a strange unaccountable tenderness she clings onto the piece of property in her mind; ‘my little meadow’ she says, and smiles just as blissfully as when giving our little Doris her breast. How can such a thing be, what makes someone like that tick? I can’t explain it to myself.
The pressure on her from all sides is too much; she loses her nerve. Tossed back and forth between opposition and weakness, tenacity and fear, bitterness and speculative greed, she is unable to make her mind up. She asks everyone who crosses her path for an opinion – her sisters, her brothers-in-law, the servants, the suppliers, the gardener. But if one doesn’t coincide with her own secret wishes she becomes unpleasant, and launches into lengthy discussions of her view and praise of the meadow.
She calls a general meeting. People talk, quarrel, shout, and at the end Ganna promises to make her decision public the next day. The next day she communicates the price to the board in writing. No sooner has she posted the registered letter than she takes fright and asks for it back. ‘They’d be laughing all the way to the bank,’ she says to me, ‘I should ask for three times as much, they’re all well-off people and I mustn’t allow them to bully me.’ I warn her. I don’t know what’s going on, but this seems to me to be playing a dangerous game. More negotiations, more ranting and screaming, followed by an abrupt walkout. The brothers-in-law are with me in exhorting her to moderation. Dr Paul describes the offer made to her as decent and acceptable; she resists it with all her might, claims she is being cheated. The inappropriateness of her demand is proved to her; she seems to accept it, only an hour later to be back with her old standpoint. She runs from pillar to post, scolds those who disagree with her, wastes people’s time, describes the intrigues being used to intimidate her, comes up with vast sums she is being cheated of by the pressure of the antagonists, asks every Tom, Dick and Harry: ‘Should I do it, should I not, at this price, at that price, on this condition, on that condition? Will I regret it, won’t I regret it? Is it not a crime against my husband and my children
if I let that gang walk away with my lovely meadow?’ She thinks about nothing else. She lives like a fugitive. She neglects herself, her domestic duties, me, the children. She no longer appears at mealtimes. Sometimes she can be found sitting on a bench in the public park, eating an apple. Sometimes having a nap in an Automat, listening to a scratchy gramophone record all dewy-eyed as if it were the Philharmonic.
Her indecisiveness, her anger, her restlessness, her wheeling and dealing, her tangled arguments, all the trash of a commercial dispute fought out with repulsive methods – she brings them all to me and dumps them on my lap. I am to ‘have the last word’. I decline; the last word would only be the penultimate one anyway. Every evening till far into the night the same song with the same exhausting refrain that it was all for my sake, that this whole struggle was all for me and only for me. ‘If you accept that, then I’ll stop,’ she says. ‘Do you accept that, do you accept that?’ Echolalia and nothing but. What am I to say? She won’t stop anyway, never mind how much I accept.
I can’t stand the endless rhetoric of it any more; the canny lawyerly presentations; the suspicions of people who are either acting in good faith, or who have nothing more dastardly in mind than Ganna herself, namely to make some money. I am nauseated by the disagreeable mixing of profit motive and high-mindedness. The story of the meadow is already making waves. To know that my name is being used in connection with it pains me. Old Councillor Schönpflug approaches me once in the club and begs me to keep Ganna from further folly, which might end up in a court case and not just a civil one at that. It’s horrible, it’s humiliating, I must try and bring it to an end.
One morning, dressed and ready to go out, I walk into Ganna’s bedroom to say goodbye to her. She is just coming out of the bathroom, swathed in a red and white chequered dressing-gown. No sooner does she catch sight of me than she launches into the usual daily litany. There is to be a meeting at Dr Pauli’s at twelve o’clock, could I not perhaps attend. It would help her a lot. She would be forever grateful to me (or rather, I think to myself, she would never forgive me if I refused).
Of late, I haven’t shown her much in the way of friendliness. It cost me too much. I can’t be friendly if I don’t have it in me to be so. I have become increasingly cold and laconic and irritable. I am angry with myself for my lovelessness. But my heart is blocked. I can’t find a kind word. Not now either. I shrug. The thought of more talks at the lawyer’s office gives me the willies. I couldn’t, I’m afraid, I say. Straight away Ganna turns aggressive. If only I could leave her to rage and walk off. But her tirades are like glue, and I’m stuck fast. When she calls it pathetic, my refusal to support her, the man for whom she is sacrificing herself, I remind her I hadn’t demanded or wished for any such sacrifice, and she was more use to me as a housewife and mother of our children. That earns me a salvo of derision from Ganna’s mouth.
‘That’s the thanks I get! I bleed myself dry for such a man, such a monster, more like! What thanks!’
‘There’s nothing to thank you for,’ I remark with a degree of calm that should have given Ganna pause, but it washes off her, ‘just as I never counted on a life like the one you’re making me.’
Ganna laughs hollowly. ‘What do you mean by that? What life? How do you propose to live? Do you want to starve till you get white hair? Where would you be without me anyway? Ask yourself that.’
‘I don’t know where I’d be without you, all I know is that I can no longer go on with you. Either you put an end to the business with the meadow and just sell it, or I’m going to leave you and get a divorce.’
No sooner has the word fallen than Ganna’s features are contorted. The word is not one that has been spoken before between us. She never thought she would hear it. She feels as sure of me as if I were a part of her, an arm or a leg. She is fundamentally secure, rootedly secure. Perhaps the dread word lies in some buried depths of her unconscious, like an explosive charge in a cellar. She gives a scream. The scream, which is awful, shrill and guttural, lasts fully fifteen or twenty seconds, and while she is screaming she is running around the room like a madwoman. She is certainly oblivious. She is certainly not in possession of her senses. Even so, I have the feeling that the utter loss of self-control is giving her pleasure, the pleasure of abdication, of psychic degeneration, that epileptics are said to have during a fit. While she rips the dressing-gown off with furious movements, she hurls a torrent of abuse at me. In every register of which her voice is capable she shouts the dread word at me: divorce. Inquiring, shouting, squawking, howling, gasping, with fingers hooked like claws and blue flashing eyes. And as I suffer the ghastly outburst showing me a wholly new, unsuspected Ganna in silence, she runs over to the window, stark naked as she is, and leans over the metal rail with her upper body, as though to plummet down the next moment. I am instantly reminded of the scene sixteen years ago, on the balcony by the Mondsee. Basically, she always does the same thing, I think to myself sadly, reaches for the same trick to get the other person in her power, the same words, the same gestures; only I always forget, and I always fall for it. In spite of my tormenting fury I remain relatively cool. I know she won’t do it; anyway there’s not much danger, the window’s about ten or twelve feet over the garden, which at that point is lawn – at the most she could break one or two ribs. But my certainty that she won’t throw herself over gives the situation something darkly ridiculous. At the same time, the rage that has been gathering inside me suddenly bursts out like a jet of boiling steam; it’s years and years since I last felt anything like it; with a single bound I am behind her, I grab her by the bare shoulders, fling her onto the bed and start blindly punching her. I still can’t imagine how it came over me. I’m laying into her like a drunk in a bar fight. Like a drayman. I, Alexander Herzog, am punching a woman. And Ganna is completely quiet. Curious, because she’s so quiet I stop hitting her and rush up to my room, lock the door behind me, drop into my chair, and sit perfectly still and brood about my misfortune.
And what did Ganna do in the meantime? I found out later, by chance. I found a sealed envelope on her desk, inscribed with her big accusing capital letters: My Will and Testament. When I asked her in amazement when and why she composed her will, she tells me with tear-stained face that it was just after I had hit her. I begged her not to bring it up again. But she told me about her despair and how she had sworn to herself to sell the meadow that very day. One day I would surely understand what I had done to her, what I had done to myself … From that moment on, we each had our own private stab-in-the-back story. Ganna never let go of the version that I had gone for her at the very moment she was in the process of making me millions. This figment was Ganna’s prop through all the later blows of fortune she suffered. In that way, she was like all conquered peoples and power-hungry parties; without a scapegoat she had no chance of confronting reality. And scapegoats are everywhere to be found, since without divided responsibility there is no practical action.
Burdened with this moral debt, whose interest payments I with my usual willingness took upon myself, I emerged into a new phase of my life – the one for the sake of which I have set down these confessions.
The Age of Dissolution
Every beast is driven to pasture by a blow.
Heraclitus
MY ACQUAINTANCE WITH BETTINA
I first met Bettina Merck in the house of a young couple by the name of Waldbauer, friends of mine, very dear people; he was an art historian. At the time Bettina was just twenty-five – seventeen years younger than I. She had been married for seven years and had two children, both girls. Her husband, who was the same age as she, was the director of a large porcelain factory which he had taken over following the death of his father, in spite of his youth. Bettina’s father had been a popular composer and band leader, hence her musical gift. A friend of Kainz’s and Mahler’s, he was still remembered with fondness, and accounted one of the last in the old Austrian tradition. Some of his melodies had the status of folk songs a
nd lived on long after their creator. I had known him. I distinctly remembered this fine, sensitive man. He had a particular sort of lovable mockery about him; lovableness was one of his prime characteristics. When I talked about him, Bettina’s eyes lit up. She adored her father more than anything.
Something I noticed about her that very first evening was a kind of laughing cheerfulness. Oddly, I reacted to it with hostility, as though I thought it was somehow improper to be so blithe and cheerful, in contradiction to the age and the world. Just like her father, I crabbed at her in thought, always light, always in waltz time. Every passing jest caused her to laugh her pearly laugh. At times the whole room rang with her laugh, which infected the others and spread a sort of sheen. That bothered me as well. I wonder why? As a child I had been prone to fits of gloom, when I saw some other boy eating a piece of bread and butter and I myself was without. When I gradually loosened up and responded to her levity, as much as I could, it was still with the grim reserve of a schoolmaster, anxiously intent on preserving his dignity when confronted with some prize pupil.
My First Wife Page 11