My First Wife

by Jakob Wassermann

  A financier was once again soon found. He was a man with a printing press. People wanted to get rid of the phoney money so as later to exchange it for real, at extortionate rates of interest, and everyone welcomed opportunities to do so. The fact that Ganna had contributed quite a bit of her own money – which is to say, of mine – was also kept concealed from me. The exploiters and schemers in her set could comfortably pluck her any time they chose. Being quite incapable of seeing through them, she thought of them as selfless philanthropists. More and more she inclined to the opinion that in order to succeed in literature, one had to use one’s connections; and so she took to pestering various important figures, including some who were close to me, and was extremely angry when she was fobbed off with polite evasions. Extreme in everything as she was, her admiration straight away curdled into contempt; and the distinguished man was a louse who a split second before had been held in high esteem. She was editor, proofreader, publisher and manager all rolled into one. She wrote till her fingers were sore, and she walked her legs off. The morning the magazine appeared she hurried from kiosk to kiosk, asked after the sales, exhorted the sellers to greater efforts and suggested ways of enthusing the reading public. If an astonished or pitying glance struck her, reminding her who she was, she quickly blotted it out.

  Very well, then, film review: there was nothing really improper or contemptible about that. Get busy, I thought to myself, get it out of your system, see what happens. But first there were the opaque financial manipulations and transactions which I found very alarming, and which had a sort of whiff of wheeler-dealing and ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ about them. I had a notion of money-laundering and extortionate obligations entered into behind my back, shady deals and corrupt relationships; from time to time I would catch a short-lived rumour; from time to time the ghost of a warning; in a word, it was as though repulsive things were going on behind a thin partition; you listen to it tense and excited, though you don’t fully understand what’s happening.

  What was much worse, though, was the actual publication itself. First there were Ganna’s personal contributions, dashed-down news items and stories of a teeth-grating vulgarity and stupidity; among other things, the maliciously distorted portrait of a woman widely known for her charitable works, for whom – God knows why – Ganna had conceived a personal antagonism. Then there were the wretched, sometimes even scandalous products of the pens of various other male and female scribblers whom Ganna favoured, and to whom she was happy to offer a literary playground and royalties; and finally there were the advertisements, by means of which the whole enterprise was to pay its way, those announcings and toutings familiar from other such periodicals. And all of this appearing under the name of Herzog, by which Ganna was pleased to go – my name. All over the house unsold copies lay around in stacks, and whenever little Doris was bored she would pick one up like a picture book and turn its pages. I saw this myself one day. I ripped it out of her hands. A lead weight lay on my skull; I could feel the slurry splash up to my knees.

  GANNA AND LANGUAGE

  That first winter already I had Doris to stay, as affectionate as ever, full of love and deeply rooted trust. It had taken complicated negotiations with Ganna to obtain this concession, and subsequently whenever I sought to have Doris to stay in the summer and winter holidays, Ganna made difficulties each time. She said it was a risk. She demanded guarantees and set conditions. She tried to persuade me and herself that the little girl would only prosper and remain healthy if she was with her, that there was no substitute for Gannacare, Gannaprotection, Gannalove. At the most, she might allow that I had good intentions; she denied that I had the moral ability. Because I was under the influence of a woman whom Ganna had every reason to distrust. She assured everyone who cared to listen that she couldn’t leave her precious darling, the apple of her eye, to a person living with me in an immoral relationship. The fact that this ‘unethical relationship’ was one she, by her doing, insisted on, she readily forgot. The outcome was constant argy-bargy over the girl; can you understand the shame I felt?

  If Doris happened to be lying in bed with a sniffle, Ganna would announce a grave streptococcal infection with a temperature intended to terrify me 200 miles away. Her intention was to alarm me, to awaken my sluggish conscience so that I didn’t forget about my family while living with the hated woman. I shouldn’t be surprised the children were continually ill, she wrote to me, seeing as I was refusing to give their mother the means to keep them safe. I sat down and demonstrated to her, black on white, that even in the worst months of the Inflation she had enjoyed a respectable middle-class income; I converted the sums into Swiss francs to prove it. Her reply was the righteous flaring-up of a duped woman since, in her version, she had been duped of everything that my life with Bettina was costing me. She wrote that there was no justification in keeping her short, she was aware of no guilt in her, her claims would stand before God and Man.

  She had no control over words. What transpired in her was a strange alchemy, an inflammation remote from thought. Associations were thrown up randomly in her limitless self-indulgence. I saw Ganna over the years growing, and with her grew and swelled the word, the self-indulgent and random word. She didn’t discriminate between good and evil, she couldn’t tell the difference between a bridge and an abyss. Lyrical paean and toxic brew, plea and threat, truth and contrivance, emotion and business, affection and embitterment – it was all one hopeless inextricable tangle. Overheated style, ice-cold calculation. In a typical run of four consecutive sentences, the first one would be self-pity, the second accusation, the third a demand for money and the fourth a declaration of love. While taking the high ground as the representative of an ethical world order, she haggled for a rise in her monthly payments. At the same time as she scribbled enthusiastic lines about my oeuvre, she used the children as pawns and demanded, both directly and indirectly, material compensation for agreeing to let them stay with me; above all, more frequent meetings with me for the purposes of ‘friendly discussions’ and the repetition of my vow that I wasn’t seeking a divorce. It was to such a storm that I had to stand and expose myself. Ganna and Ganna’s language kept me breathless like a drunken binge of nocturnal housebreakers.

  A FEW MINIATURES ALONG THE WAY

  We go out into the star-spangled night, Bettina and I. Below us the lake glitters; the heavens are like a curtain pricked with innumerable needle-holes, with gold and blue fires burning behind it. The Milky Way is a baffling curve of silver grains. Above us lies a delicate veil of mist. The silence is so powerful that it feels like a blissful transmutation of death. Ganna’s din, Ganna’s language, has gone away, as though a steel gate has been shut on it. We stand there arm in arm, as though lost in prayer …

  There are mornings when we sleigh downhill over the fresh snow on the slopes, as on a ghostly carpet, surrounded by the dark forests, the crystalline air full of the laughter and chatter of Bettina’s daughters, who will soon be off to their father in the city, to school. Then we walk across the frozen lake, which creaks so menacingly at night; now it sighs like a Stone Age creature in its death-throes. Ox-drawn wooden sleighs run silently across the smooth expanse; with a swish like tearing paper, the curling stones of peasants run over the swept surface.

  In the first days of spring, it’s as though Nature is angrily pulling off a dress that has grown too tight for her. The waters plunge down the stone runnels created over millennia, above avalanches thunder, heather and hepatica peer shyly out among the grass and mosses, everything is an irrepressible growing and burgeoning; March smells differently from February; we hike into the woods, we wander in the neighbouring valleys as though conducting tours of inspection of our realm, and sometimes Bettina seizes my hand and asks, thrusting her face against mine from below: ‘Are you happy? Tell me that you’re as happy as you can be!’ I look at her and nod at her in gratitude. Would the other thing have been bearable, otherwise? Life would have broken apart like a piece o
f rusty metal …

  IN CURSED CIRCLES

  For years, divorce loomed at the back of things as the silently desired conclusion; by and by it became a simple necessity. There is a call to order which comes from society, irrespective of personal freedoms. No pretence was permitted, no contrived, lofty standing-above-it-all; I could feel the growing insistence within me of a demand that connected my sense of honour as a man and my responsibility to the community with that other, still more urgent feeling that included my undischarged debt to Bettina, which in introspective hours I thought of as my inner reparations, or the interest payable on joy.

  That was what the fight with Ganna was first about. If the loader could be induced to take the harness off the panting beast and unstrap its burden, then it would be able to breathe and walk again. Ganna’s first condition was that she could only consent to a divorce if she was certain of my friendship. Very well, I said, all right; that’s self-evident really. Albeit, there is one difficulty: how can one be certain of friendship according to Ganna’s definition? By signature. By deed and seal. I am to certificate it. I am to commit myself to it solemnly for all time. I am stupid enough to try and talk her out of it. Instead of saying yes and amen to all and signing on the dotted line – which would have the automatic effect that she would drop this demand and insist on something else, harder to give – I make an honest attempt to persuade her of the foolishness of a documentarily attested friendship, to teach her that friendship needed to be earned and worked for, and couldn’t be signed like a lease agreement. She doesn’t see it. All she hears is my refusal, which she takes as proof of my bad attitude. She was being softened up; this was a tactic for softening her up. ‘You’ll drive me over the edge with your tactics,’ she fulminates, shaking with rage. She refers me to my solemn promise of October 1919. I admit I wrote that unsympathetic letter. Then bitterness wells up in her and she screams that I would never have set my knife to her breast in this way were it not that I was under the instructions of my hypnotic mistress. I have to smile when I hear of Bettina and her ‘instructions’. Ganna misunderstands my smile and claims I swore to Bettina that I would get a divorce; what Bettina was doing for me in return was of course something no one knew; but she would show Lady Merck that she had miscalculated and would bite her teeth out in granite.

  But it wasn’t Ganna’s intention to fob me off with any final ‘no’. She wanted to deal. She wanted to keep everything in play. That was her way of compelling my attendance. Of course, to be fair, as deeply fair as only God can be, one would have to ask oneself whether love wasn’t part of what was driving her to this – a frightening love admittedly, dipped in darkness, but still love, whichever way one wanted to define it, however damaged the loving heart might be. I, naturally, could feel only the terror and the darkness; but she was suffering as much as I was, or at least at the time I still believed that, and I was indulgent and patient with her because suffering does disarm the beholder. She was still victim to the delusion that I was angry on her account when I got angry; and when I shoved her away she took it the other way; as a sign that she was still in play, was still a partner. And so she ran rings round me with her promises, she repudiated our agreements of the day before, and took things I had said a thousand times and made them appear nonsensical. If she wired me – come over, we can sort everything out together – and our talks once again went nowhere, then it wasn’t sabotage on her part but lack of goodwill on mine. ‘I’m not quite ready,’ she said to me in August, ‘can you give me another three months?’ So I gave her three months more. In November it was: ‘I can’t commit myself. No one nowadays can commit themselves to anything. Circumstances are just too volatile. In March I’ll do whatever you want; I give you my word.’ Then in March:

  ‘I want to test your proposal seriously. But there’s one thing I can tell you right now: you can’t keep two women on what you earn. It’s my duty to save you from financial ruin.’

  ‘No excuses, Ganna. We can, we must find some basis of agreement.’

  ‘I have been deceived too often. You can’t force me to commit a crime against my children!’

  ‘I’m not about to leave my children in the lurch. You ought to know that.’

  ‘Maybe you wouldn’t, but what about your mistress? I’d need to have commitments of a completely different order from those you are able to offer me now.’

  ‘What commitments are you after, Ganna? What more can I do than mortgage myself to you body and soul?’

  In vain. With tenacity and fury Ganna clings onto her promised seventy kilos of live weight. Whatever new thing she brings up is a hallucination. Behind hallucination and mirage a sober and brazen legal mind points and gesticulates. I don’t want to know, I’m not supposed to know about her. All I see is the burbling sleepwalker, the unhappily entrammelled one, the tormented tormentrix, the endlessly isolated woman, Ganna whom I must buy off, whom I must compensate for my offence against morality. Ganna the frightened mother, the disappointed consort, the abused bride, the failure in the face of reality – that Ganna is obscured from me by the raving Ganna, by Ganna the legal eagle. I’m starting to hallucinate as well. I’m going round in cursed circles.

  M’LEARNED FRIENDS TAKE A HAND

  My friends advised me to get a lawyer. They were worried for me. They noticed my irritability. I was past fifty; possibly I was no longer equal to the strain. One Dr Chmelius was recommended. I knew him from various social occasions and I remembered him as an affable fellow. It turned out he was the man who had got Bettina’s divorce put through so quickly. Bettina had never talked about him, never so much as mentioned his name. She didn’t like lawyers. She didn’t think they could ever do anything worthwhile. In the course of my life to date, I had never yet had dealings with a lawyer. That was about to change.

  Initially, Dr Chmelius was supposed to be Ganna’s financial adviser, and supervise her money arrangements, since her demands and expenses were growing exponentially and I was unable to influence them. Ganna, though, declined to accept Dr Chmelius as an adviser; she found out that Bettina had been his client four years previously and quickly put a conspiratorial construction on the plan. She claimed he was working for Bettina and acting under psychological pressure from her. Dr Chmelius was a subtle jurist and a gentleman, and perhaps therefore overly hesitant. Even so, each one of his polite and respectful letters drove Ganna to white heat. What was the man playing at? Telling her, Ganna, what to do; giving her, Ganna, advice; daring even to speak and write of divorce; outrageous!

  Immediately she set up her own man, Dr Pauli, in opposition to him. Pauli was fond of her and wanted to defend her rights; but he had far too much on his hands and, for all his admiration for her energy, her initiative, her resourcefulness, he found conferences with her too taxing for him. He couldn’t meet her and listen to her, as she demanded, twice a day, and he got upset when she completely changed her instructions to him from one meeting to the next. Therefore he passed the file on to a friend and colleague, one Dr Grieshacker. He in turn soon found himself under attack from Ganna and passed the thing on to his partner, one Dr Schönlein. The result was that the case of Ganna Herzog was being pursued, steered and trundled back and forth – putting on weight as it went – by all three men at once.

  It put on weight, nothing else. No one knew what Ganna actually wanted. She herself least of all. Did she want a divorce? No. Did she not want a divorce? Everything indicated that, but she was loath to say so. What are we going to so much trouble for, the lawyers asked themselves. Ganna acted more or less like the owner of a farm that has been threatened with nocturnal attack, who has posted security guards round the premises. Dr Pauli wanted her not to be served the standard running bills; he knew the strain she was under and was able to persuade his colleagues to exercise forbearance too. A noble gesture; what he didn’t anticipate was that it was also a ruinous one. Because of it, Ganna got into the habit of spending time with her lawyers and changing them the way a man might change hi
s socks. Since she had no understanding of work, and no respect for it, she looked to everyone she had entrusted with her affairs to be exclusively busy with them and treated them all like insubordinate juniors if her unique prerogative was denied her. And however pleased she was that her financial predicament received consideration, so, equally, she was unable to rid herself of the secret suspicion that anyone who was working for her for little or nothing was doing bad work. Caught in this schism, she was ever more dissatisfied, excitable, disputatious, confused, bewildered. Humanity, where she was concerned, was divided into two camps: there were her supporters and her opponents. And in the middle stood those lightsome guides to fortune and triumph, the lawyers. Of course that was only true of those lawyers she had taken on; those of the other side were the dregs of mankind.

  She lived on the telephone and with her warbled throaty ‘Hallo-o’ talked to the various lawyers, including Dr Chmelius. He was not able to refuse her pleas for money any longer. The conversation was always the same. ‘But Madam, I transferred a substantial sum only last week.’ To which Ganna, with breathtaking argumentation: she had had some unanticipated expenses, some ‘imprévus’, a term she very much favoured, given that her whole life was in the sign of the unexpected, and she refused to allow him to meddle in her finances. But each time she was really stuck she would pack her housekeeping book under her arm and drive in to Chmelius in the city, to show him column by column how carefully and modestly she was keeping house. Like all writing, it was sacrosanct for her, founded in her fetishistic faith in words and figures. The accounts in her book were just as unassailable to her as her passbook with the Reichsbank.