And commensurately, so her readiness to share her dearest goods, man and house with her blood and ancestral enemy grew in her eyes to heroic proportions; and when she saw how curtly her offers were rebuffed, that gave her a stamp of nobility for all time.
Everything in Ganna’s mind marched to the beat of Ganna’s imagination. It wouldn’t permit any doubts: she was a model wife, an embodiment of kindness, punctuality and good order. Though wreathed in such qualities, she was slandered in my ears, and her ‘enemies’ have dug and dug until I could only think of breaking with her. Those same people who paid Klothilde Haar. Those same people who were able to foil her scheme to make me a millionaire with the meadow. Further, the conviction takes root in Ganna that for the past nineteen years we have lived together like two lovebirds and that no cloud has ever spotted the sky of our bliss. This conviction settles into a myth in her, like certain historical ‘events’ in history books. But since something seems to have happened in this lovebird existence for which Ganna isn’t to blame, someone else must be the guilty party. Hence continual poking around for guilt, questions to establish guilt, investigations of guilt, and no end. Phantasms and fictions come out of thin air. Ancient sayings, ancient deeds are produced in unrecognizable versions. Opinions are distorted, statements twisted, things a million miles apart are forced into a false pattern. An army of the envious, the malicious, the ill-disposed, the liars and intriguers appears over the decades, and surrounded by them a Ganna, like a seraph in the golden ether, keeping watch over her Alexander.
This was unrolled before me day after day, and day after day I was to account for myself, supply proofs, offer evidence. I wonder why I didn’t just go. Why did I not tie up my bundle, and up and leave? Hard to explain. I think there’s something wrong in my make-up. I am not capable of leaving emotional devastation in my wake. Either from softness, or from pity. After all, I have my fair share of selfishness. I am not an easy tolerator, no particularly eager helper, not a good giver; and before I decide on some act of kindness outside the area of my work, I have to get through every possible stage of caution and inertia. What operates here is different. It’s not a singular phenomenon, but present in accretions. First, there’s my sense of the simultaneity of actions, which has its seat in the nerves. The high degree of emotional vulnerability associated with this leads me to relocate myself in different times, in other rooms and beings in my imagination. And in such a way that I can see, hear, taste, touch, smell them, which necessitates further protective measures, which cost me more effort and more thought than any amount of real-life difficulties. At times, at my most desperate times, I remind myself of a surgeon who dithers and dithers over an operation and finally, madly, instead of anaesthetizing his patient, administers the morphine to himself.
But there’s another factor as well: there was an ethical imperative in me after all, a higher voice that refused to be silenced. There was this woman; whether she was inadequate or not, whether she had made her own bed or not, whether I, whether Bettina, whether the world as a whole approved of her way of doing things or not – it remained the case that I was tied to her. I had sworn vows to her; I was responsible for her in spite of all my words to the contrary; I had given her three children; she was an unstable, pathless, directionless woman who without me was lost. Could I really just quit her like that and go and start a new life (a new life – that most mindless of all expressions), without tidying up the old one after me? Not least hacking back that tangle of phantasms and fictions? It seemed possible to me. I didn’t know at the time that they had their own terrible autonomy and proliferation, these phantasms and fictions; that gradually, like the djinn in the Arabian story, they would grow to fill up the whole of the sky. I couldn’t get free. I wasn’t cold-blooded enough, not brutal enough. I wanted to save a piece of Ganna for myself. A memory, a stirring of gratitude, a sense of respect.
ON JOY
Week after week passed. For all my heart-constricting effort, an amicable solution was no nearer. I decided I’d had enough and would go to Ebenweiler, where Bettina had been waiting for me every day. I pack up my books, manuscripts, clothes, linen. Ganna watches me in distress; the children ask me barely audible questions. Then the hour of parting comes; Ganna accompanies me to the station. What to say to curtail, to abbreviate the pain of sundering? Ganna talks and talks, her throat is hoarse and dry, her words stumble over each other, she’s worried I may catch cold, afraid of a train crash, everything is so uncertain nowadays; she gives me dietary advice, she talks till the very second the train moves off. I look past her. She breaks into a trot alongside the carriage and waves. I never forgot the scene. It had something of Ganna’s whole being in it.
Seventeen hours in the train. In those days all transport was difficult. The carriage is filthy; it jolts and clatters like a post coach, the windows are boarded up, the rain comes in through the roof, the lights don’t work. I stare out into the gloaming; Ganna is running alongside and waving. And at night she’s standing outside the door of the compartment, begging to be let in, in her hoarse, floury voice.
Then Ebenweiler in the sparkling snow. The familiar scene has a new aspect. Its loveliness has turned to majesty. Bettina meets me at the station, her cheeks flushed with cold, her glaucous eyes shining with inexpressible happiness. We ride the sleigh to the house, buried in snow up to its doorknobs. The whole world feels like Christmas.
It had never occurred to me that a peaceable home and its well-ordered running could have something so intoxicatingly pleasant about it. I had never experienced such a thing. With this winter a long period of intensive work began for me, in spite of all the horrors I shall have to report on. In a certain sense, I was sheltered. Partly by the landscape, which struck me in light of a modest genius, always soothing, never arousing; but above all by Bettina’s careful, silent and apparently completely effortless attention to my welfare and my tranquillity. With her and in her company I felt as sheltered as if I’d been inside the mountain on whose flank we were perched. The end of the world and the Ganna war were a thousand years ago. In the intoxication of those early months, it seemed to me we had fused into that coupledom of which I had dreamed for so long as a kind of higher actualization.
Bettina’s two little girls initially kept their reserve towards the new head of household. The way children judge us grown-ups is among the most mysterious things there are anyway. Half-suspicious, half-reserved, they waited to see what would develop. My inexhaustible need for tranquillity, my sensitivity to all noise of voices and forms of disturbance were to them much like what leash and muzzle are to playful puppies. They could surely have held it against me that I was permanently out to curb their exuberance. They did not hold it against me. They also took me reasonably seriously; at any rate I found myself the subject of serious conversations which they had between themselves before going to sleep.
It was a bitter experience for me: in spite of the change in my outer life, I did not feel any more joyful. Or perhaps it would be better to say, joy was unable to reach me. When she came calling, I let her know that I was unavailable. No matter how long she stood outside my door, I didn’t let her in. This proved a disappointment for Bettina, the first in our new life together, and it grew from month to month. Naturally, Bettina asked herself what was the point of her if she couldn’t lift me off the surface of the earth, rootling vole that I was in her eyes. She had hoped to take flight with me. But how can you lift off with someone who does everything in his power to make himself heavy, nothing to lighten himself? She had imagined she might be my lamp, but how can you be a lamp when the one you are to light keeps insidiously blowing you out, because his element is the dark? It was moving to observe: when I was cheerful, when I happened to laugh, then her whole day was rescued; a smile from me and her heart would leap with delight.
But the times I was able to laugh and to smile grew more and more infrequent. Just as well that Bettina had so much of her own amusements, even though her supply occasionall
y threatened to run out. In a setting where all sued for my favour and begged me for a friendly glance, I became a remote and introspective hermit. And that was the only danger that Bettina had to fear for herself and her life, the lack of light, the absence of blue sky, the chain of days without laughter, without a smile. Then her violin could be nothing to her either, or music; no tunes came into her head and her whole world went silent. In one confidential hour, she told me about it. Not without apprehension. Her clear eyes couldn’t hide their fear. The very fact that I should have needed her to admit this to me shows my extraordinary obtuseness. I saw what it was about. I understood that I must not allow Bettina to wither. That at any price, I had to achieve the capacity for joy. And since it was Ganna who stood between me and joy, whose fault it was that I could no longer laugh or smile, so Ganna would have to be induced to restore to me my cheerfulness, my insouciance, my undaunted courage, whatever the price – because if not, then everything was wasted and I would lose Bettina.
But when a man is sitting on a powder keg, with a burning fuse leading up to its bung, then it’s not such an easy matter to laugh or to smile.
VARIOUS ALARUMS
First of all, there were the letters. Six, eight, ten pages in length. I can only say that a hail of molten lava would have been a refreshing spring shower by comparison. Ganna stretched out her arms 200 miles to reclaim her errant husband. Her words boomed out 200 miles away, demanding support, advice, comfort, in the name of the children, in the name of justice, in the name of undying love. Whatever wasn’t written down screeched, rampaged and wailed between the lines, behind the jagged, foolish, plangent letters. Lamentations, how sad it feels, living in a house from where the man has gone. Did it have to be this way, Alexander? Did I deserve to be thus kicked and trampled underfoot? That Doris was inconsolable without her father. That she was having trouble with Ferry and Elisabeth; how it was impossible for her to control two grown-up children on her own; how could I justify it to my conscience to leave her at such a critical time in her life, and with circumstances so brutal? Dreams, presentiments, horror stories. Little pinpricks: how so-and-so expressed surprise at the behaviour of a man whom he (or she) had hitherto deeply respected; how nice her sisters were being to her, how much sympathy she encountered, how much friendship was extended to her from every side …
Then the house, our lovely house, began to play up. The water mains burst, flooding the hall. The septic tank needs to be moved, the local council refused to connect the house to mains sewerage, the atmosphere was endangering the children’s health. During a storm one of the chimneys had blown over. A stove needs to be installed in Doris’s room, the heating system is inadequate and it’s not possible to get enough coke to burn in it. The builder presented a bill which she can’t possibly pay out of her monthly allowance. Nor can she keep up with the other bills, the deliverymen are driving her to distraction with their demands; what is she going to say to those people? My husband has gone away, she says, he’ll be back soon; but those people refuse to believe her, and sometimes they are downright insolent.
And with that I have come to the question of Ganna’s economy, her whole way with money, which was far and away the most striking aspect of her life and character. As we happened to be living in the middle of the Inflation, that ghostly phenomenon appeared right away in full force.
Indescribable, her rigid horror when the gigantic numbers turned up in her housekeeping book: 200 crowns for a kilo of butter; 50 for a dozen eggs; 500 for a pair of shoes; 2,000 in wages for tutors and domestics. Ganna in the battle with money that was ceasing to be real money, that melted away between her fingers, all the while there seemed to be more and more of it, that thumbed its nose at her with a number and sent her staggering with the lack of value of the number – all that instilled a nameless confusion in her, a total relocation of concepts and a growing panic in her calculations. Another week and the hundreds have become thousands, the thousands have become hundred thousands, and the hundred thousands are millions. When a chicken cost 80,000 crowns, a telegram to me 10,000, the monthly butcher’s bill was more than one and a half million, she broke down under the weight of the figures. It was for her the triumph of bedlam. For her, to whom money and the value of money were holy fixities, solid and etched in bronze, the experience resembled what it must be like for a believer to be given incontrovertible proof (could such exist) that there was no God. She dangled in space. The laws of nature had been suspended. One must imagine that a trauma developed out of this, which partially explains the catastrophic developments that unfolded. First, the view took root in her that such a collapse of all values could never have happened if I had not left her. That gave her a completely delusory satisfaction that my faithlessness, my so-called betrayal of her, was connected with the calamity of the nation and the catastrophe of capitalism.
It shone through in every one of her letters. Each one came larded with figures and statistics. No sum of money could ever be enough. Others managed to look after themselves, kept reserves, stuck to their budgets; Ganna was always knocked flat by the exigencies of the moment. She had no sense of time, only of the moment. It was her mystery, the way she didn’t live from moment to moment but in an unbroken chain of milliseconds without soul and sense, which was why behind her breathless busyness and industry there was something like a continual tragic fade into nothingness.
Under the pressure of desperation, the old faith in magic awoke in her. She knew a few bank managers and paid calls on them. Bank managers, in her eyes, were magicians; they did magic with money. They were bound to know, too, about a witches’ sabbath. She got tips from them. She sent me hieroglyphic dispatches with the names of bonds and certificates I was supposed to buy. She then had the illusion of having given me some decisive help, and was convinced I was raking in millions thanks to her. To that came the next, perfectly unshakeable conviction that Bettina and I were enjoying ‘the high life’ while she, the spurned Ganna-Genoveva, was condemned to a life of penury.
The confusion of numbers in Ganna’s letters buzzed round me like a swarm of horseflies. I would have thrown money at her, if only I’d had it to throw. What did I care about money; what did Bettina care about money; even less. I did what I could. I fitted the sums to the situation. By now, the collapse of the German currency had turned my earnings into ridiculous elephantine sums with tiny real purchasing power. I could hardly count all the zeroes, but the net income was far less than the average of the past few years. Without a few sums from abroad, I would have been unable to pay our way. Of the shadow money, I transferred as much as I was able to Ganna. Meanwhile, what yesterday was still sufficient, was insufficient today. When inflation finally ground to a halt, such great holes had been torn in her finances that Ganna was unable to plug them. Her shrill cries for help rang out in the silence of my study. I scraped together everything I could possibly spare. I wasn’t counting; I stopped thinking about my actual household. But no sum was enough for Ganna. She crossed every line that was drawn in front of her. Every instruction struck her as wicked. She swore I was accruing fortunes and was keeping them from her, to live it up with Bettina. Whenever she got a biggish sum in her hands, a stupid optimism straight away came over her, as though she couldn’t possibly get through it; then, when it was gone, and much sooner than expected, she didn’t know what to do; she sat miserably in front of her red book, checking through the receipts, going through all her pockets and desk drawers, insisting she had been robbed; and the upshot of everything was another screed to me.
Her engagement with these vast figures, once she had grown used to them a little, gave her a strange, exciting pastime like solving puzzles or doing jigsaws. The millions and billions gave her morbidly speculative mind the satisfactions of infinity for which it was always athirst. They suggested astrology and magic. What did the true value matter; the appearance was there with its sweet alchemy of name and number. While prices climbed into the unaffordable, and figures into the unsayable, the ho
pe sprang up in her that (even though in another part of her dream world I was a secret Croesus) I couldn’t continue to afford to pay for two women and two households, and would therefore be compelled to return to the bosom of my family. This wasn’t a wish or an occasional fantasy, but a solid conviction; she would talk about my return as of a fixed event, and as though the time of ordeals, of abandonment and disgrace would then be for ever at an end.
INTELLECTUAL MORASS
She didn’t accept fate. The core of her being was rebellion. It was reported to me how, shortly before the death of her mother, which happened at this time, she had had an altercation with the eighty-year-old woman in which Ganna had been extremely forceful, because her mother had upbraided her for her want of humility: ‘Humility,’ she is reported to have come back, ‘where does humility get you in this world? Where did your humility get you, Mother?’ With the death of her mother, Ganna broke with the last memories of breeding and restraint. She was just forty-four.
One day she said to herself: I don’t want to be financially dependent on this heartless man any more (she meant me). Since the whole world was plunging into enterprises of one sort or another, and the crazy money seemed to be lying around on the street, she looked around, had discussions with all sorts of seeming friends and experienced chancers and decided to start a film review. The cinema was at the centre of interest, and as far as its intellect was concerned, there was an evident match between Ganna’s being and the silver screen. Both, if you will, were in the business of dazzling. Ganna was always drawn to anything that sparkled, all sorts of hocus-pocus, star-gazing, Mazdaznan, chiromancy. They afforded her a rich field for self-promotion and self-abnegation; the whole of creation was a cheat pleasing to the eye of the Lord.
My First Wife Page 16