My First Wife

by Jakob Wassermann

  At the same time, she wrote me a letter in which she expressed her pleasure at the splendid acquisition in the most gushing terms. If there was the least drop of wormwood in her joy, then it was over the fact that she had been told the wonderful news by strangers and had asked herself sadly what she could have done to lose my trust. What had made her especially glad was the fact that I had got together such a huge sum of money; that allowed her to conclude that I was in more than easy circumstances, and the laments and fears I had brought to her, thank God, lacked any real cause. But she wasn’t upset with me about this little dishonesty on my part; all she cared about was that I should be happy and flourishing.

  I made haste to correct Ganna’s misunderstanding. She didn’t believe me. I referred her to the property register, to put an end to the malicious false reports on the purchase. She didn’t believe what she saw there. She preferred her fantasies of my vast wealth and a rosy fog of money hocus-pocus. The fact of my wealth gave her claims such an air of entitlement that she fell for her own golden mania, like a woodworm in the hole it has itself tunnelled.

  But I didn’t really care if she took me for a successful gold-digger who was cheating her of her just deserts. Enough of the scheming, the cards held to the chest, the black arts of lawyers. She must be made to understand the inevitability of what was happening. It was make or break time, I said to myself, as I sat down in the train on my way to see her.

  My news that Bettina was expecting hit her like a bolt from the blue. She looked at me in utter disbelief.

  ‘A baby,’ she whispered, ‘she’s having your baby! I can’t quite believe it yet. I promise to look after it as if it were one of my own. I promise. Do you believe me?’

  She wept with emotion. I indicated that her looking after it didn’t really come into things.

  ‘You know what this means,’ I said.

  She nodded enthusiastically. She assured me she would go to see Dr Stanger-Goldenthal this very day; she would call him immediately; then we would sit down together and talk everything over amicably and in peace, no terror, no duress; she would prove to me that she was still the old Ganna … What would I say to a nice bowl of soup in the meantime? No, I said, please not, please no soup …

  Her large blue eyes were humid with tears; she was overcome by the notion of herself as devoted self-sacrificial spouse and friend; stripping away all reality, she fled into the sweet interval of being different. And I believed her.

  STANGER-GOLDENTHAL

  She kept her impulsively given word, inasmuch as she went to see Dr Stanger-Goldenthal that same day, to inform him of the new development. But it wasn’t, as she had promised me, to instruct him to prepare for the divorce. Hardly. Her showing me goodwill was enough. The idea that ‘goodwill’ needed to be followed by action was baffling and a little repugnant to her.

  I told Dr Chmelius:

  ‘Thank God, Ganna has changed her mind. I think you can go ahead and prepare for the next stage.’

  Dr Chmelius, no little surprised, made report of this to Dr Stanger.

  ‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ Stanger replied to the still greater bewilderment of Dr Chmelius. ‘Your client must have misinformed you.’

  ‘I’m afraid you took her at her word again,’ Chmelius said to me.

  I went to see Ganna.

  ‘Your lawyer insists you haven’t given him any new instructions.’

  ‘That’s a wicked lie,’ yelled Ganna. ‘I talked and talked to him till he promised me – and we shook hands on it. Everything will be sorted out in three days.’

  I believed her. Obviously, it was Dr Stanger who was responsible for the delay. I asked Dr Chmelius for leave to write to Dr Stanger myself. He had no objection. I sat down and wrote Dr Stanger-Goldenthal one of the most straightforward letters that can ever have been written, a letter of a kind that you write to a human being, not to a lawyer for the other side. It was a minor epic, the story – filling many pages – of my marriage, and the presentation of the grounds that made it impossible for me to remain with Ganna.

  His reply was highly ironic. ‘Let us assume for the moment,’ he wrote, ‘that the complaints you level at your wife are justified. This begs the question: were you really lord and master in this union, as the law and the wider organization of society expects? I leave the yea or nay to your conscience. Your exquisitely written, logically constructed memorandum I view not as a legal weapon but as a human document. [That finally proved to me that the two were utterly antithetical.] The weight of the moral responsibility for the discord in your marriage is yours. If my client expressly requests a divorce, I will execute her wish. If she decides against a divorce, then I will support her to the best of my ability in the legal battle that may be expected to ensue.’

  I was in consternation. What was the fellow on about? Ganna said she was in agreement. It couldn’t be that, at this vital juncture, she would slip back into her old duplicitousness. I read her the passage in Dr Stanger’s letter, where he said everything had been left up to her. She was clearly embarrassed, gabbled a bit, played the doe-eyed innocent; but inside she was shaking with fury and later she went on to make a ghastly scene with Dr Stanger, in which she set things out as though he had gone over her head and given me a binding agreement. That was bound to rile the man up against me, and he wrote to me crudely: ‘Sir, it is not right that you tell my client things about me that are half-truths at best. Such things confuse my client. She thinks I am in favour of a divorce. I am against a divorce. She must have the freedom to act. She must not feel any pressure, not even, or especially not, from her legal adviser.’

  Now nothing made sense to me any more. The walls and the buildings were spinning around me. I conferred again with Dr Chmelius and reached the acme of folly when I expressed to him the wish to meet Dr Stanger-Goldenthal in person in his office; a personal conversation, I blethered, would clear up all the misunderstandings. I believed in talking and in clearing the air; I believed there had been a misunderstanding. I believed in the effectiveness of my person and its truth; it’s as if someone being mugged made great play of the fact that he has studied Greek. Dr Chmelius shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘Try it. It can’t hurt.’ Seeing me so put upon, he wanted to leave every avenue open, even the least likely; he himself was out of ideas.

  Dr Stanger let me know it would be an honour to receive me. Our conversation went on for an hour and a half. The man wore an invisible gown. He was berobed in the full dignity of a champion of the ethical idea of marriage. A consummate actor. I had the sense I was stepping on air and speaking clouds. For the most part it was he who did the talking. With emphasis, dignity and from the elevation of his legal pedestal. I felt giddy, and then a little sick. When he saw me out, with many assurances of esteem, I knew that I had suffered a defeat and a humiliation.

  Dr Chmelius now thought it right to inquire politely of Ganna whether she had come to a decision and, if so, what it was. We got back the twining phrases of Ganna: the assurance she had given me remained in force, but she couldn’t permit herself to be cajoled or bullied, as there were a series of upcoming birthdays in the family and her family piety forbade her from taking on anything so distressing as the modalities of a separation; moreover, her heart was giving her trouble and on doctor’s orders she was to avoid excitement. I, for whom time was breaking up into shards because I was so impatient, was smoothly put off until January. It was now September. She gave me her ‘sacred’ word of honour that by January she and Dr Stanger-Goldenthal would have drawn up the final deed; at that time I must allow myself four weeks to talk everything through with her lovingly; if I managed to fulfil that essential condition, then all obstacles would have been overcome. The daily attrition of those meaningless and perspectiveless conversations with Ganna and the lawyers had exhausted my strength; I wanted to go home to Bettina; what was I supposed to do, give Ganna a new heart? Myself a better head? I returned to Ebenweiler with a head like a beehive and nothing accomplished,
and duly told my apparently credulous and not terribly interested consort that Ganna would agree to a divorce in January.

  Then, when I appeared on the battlefield in January, Dr Chmelius really did hand me the Stanger-Goldenthal-composed, Ganna-inspired ‘final’ deed. Without a word of commentary. With face set in grim expressionlessness. I read the document carefully, folded it up and returned it to the lawyer without a word. I had the feeling I had landed among horse thieves.

  Must I really list what that piece of paper looked to me for? I’m afraid it’s beyond me. My pen jibs. Before long I will have to talk, in any case, about the thumbscrews and leg-irons which were applied to me when I resolved to make an end to this disgraceful process, whatever the cost, and which (in my psychologically easily understandable blindness) struck me as acceptable and even comparatively humane – certainly compared to the murderous sequence of paragraphs that Dr Stanger and his obstinate amanuensis caused to march before my staring eyes. For the first time I could see my situation with complete clarity and received such a horrifying picture of Ganna’s true being that for a while I felt turned to stone, like those individuals in mythology who behold the face of the Gorgon. But no, that wasn’t it; there was no true being and no false being, there was only an illusory zone in between, something abyssal and cloven, shadowy and derelict, and in its proposed coherence arbitrary and illogical. Hence no Gorgon either. The Gorgon may be harsh and severe, but she is infinitely preferable. She offers solid outlines and fixed positions, not the ghastly unpredictability that gives the outstretched hand a sensation of dipping into some slimy brown primal soup.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, turning to Dr Chmelius, ‘what am I supposed to live on if I manage to pay off this mountain of obligations in their entirety? How does she think I can do it?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ replied Chmelius drily, ‘let’s ask her.’

  ‘The way things are,’ I resumed, ‘she confiscates not only all my goods and chattels, but beyond that she asks for gifts that bleed me dry. It’s as if you knock someone out, and chop him up and eat the pieces. Have you ever known anything like it?’

  ‘Would you care to see my files?’ Chmelius asked me mockingly.

  ‘But I have to get to the end, I have to!’

  ‘Very well. Then in God’s name sign this Treaty of Versailles. But count me out.’

  ‘Is there no judge, no law, no mercy that can free me?’

  ‘Only in your dreams.’

  I left, feeling utterly distraught.

  WHAT IS BETTINA WAITING FOR?

  The remaining two years it took while the divorce was finalized were a grisly, sickening tussle. It was about money and money and more money, and about files and deals, and guarantees and security; and when I thought a final settlement must be close, everything turned out to be flim-flam and fake. The peaceful Buchegger estate was no good; Bettina’s courage and her mastery of the day-to-day of living, no good; immersion in work achieved nothing; conversations with friends, nothing; even the little new person, Helmut, the son we had prayed for from heaven, born at his allotted time, and solace and balm to our souls from the very first hour, nothing.

  My depression remained in place and deepened. My shame at my helplessness was like a canker in my flesh, like prussic acid in my vitals. And Bettina watched and watched. I didn’t know what she was going through; there was something, but I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that joy was no longer an issue, nor were laughter and smiles; there was something else, I couldn’t say what. She let Ganna’s letters rain down, and the writs snowed down, and she watched. They were bad winters in those years …

  On one occasion, when I was in Berlin, I suffered a breakdown. An organic malady had snuck up on me. The doctor who saw me recommended rest and taking it easy. But how could I rest and take it easy while a raving Ganna ripped through my world, and I was forced to look like a toy in the hands of an evil hobgoblin to my beloved companion, while the innocent eyes of my youngest child gazed up at me and asked: where is my birthright? While those obtained, I could neither rest nor die.

  HORNSCHUCH

  For all my liking for Dr Chmelius I could no longer blind myself to the fact that this overburdened man was lacking in dynamism. He could feel it himself; on several occasions he had made the friendly suggestion that I relieve him of his brief, if there was someone else I would prefer. Then a young lawyer was enthusiastically recommended to me, one Hornschuch, who had moved into our area and within a short time had built up a large practice among the local farmers. He had served on the Front for four years and people said he had displayed exemplary courage as an officer. When the war was over, he felt no inclination to return to the city and the circles he had formerly frequented; a passion for solitude unusual in a man in his prime, bursting with energy, had prompted him to go into voluntary exile and live by his own lights and following his own rough-hewn and unconventional methods.

  In his service of justice he now displayed exactly the same cheerful positive attitude that he had previously shown in the army. Almost all the cases he took on involved some striking injustice that his clients had suffered. He saw it as his duty to shed light on public maladministration, and to jolly along the snail’s pace of bureaucracy by his forthright and occasionally dangerously eccentric campaigns. It was no surprise that he was not the authorities’ favourite. But everything I heard about him made sense to me, and so one day I went along to see him. He lived and worked out of a tiny house about an hour away. There was no sign on the door, no office; it was a civilian receiving a visitor. He was a boyish-looking man with Tartar features and a stubborn expression in his blue eyes. Silently and almost impassively he listened to me. Then he said: ‘I’ll take a look at the papers. Perhaps colleague Chmelius will be kind enough to have them sent to me.’

  Which duly happened. For a couple of weeks I didn’t hear from Hornschuch; he didn’t write, didn’t call. Then, one afternoon in late autumn, he had himself announced and the following conversation took place between us:

  ‘Having traded my colleague Chmelius for your humble servant,’ he began, ‘you should try and see that the other party dispenses with Dr Stanger-Goldenthal. One good turn deserves another.’

  ‘And how am I supposed to do that?’

  ‘Very simple. Who do you think will end up paying for the services of the double-barrelled one?’

  ‘Presumably I will.’

  ‘And do you have much hope that his bill will be moderated by his appreciation of your work?’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Do you want to proceed on that assumption?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then you tell him: I will pay you, but only within reason and not until after the divorce is concluded.’

  ‘Won’t he laugh at me?’

  ‘Never mind that. Let him laugh, and I’ll see to the rest.’

  ‘You mean, he needs to see that delay isn’t in his interest?’

  ‘Exactly. Either he will compel his client to take an irreversible step, or else he will give up representing her.’

  ‘That’s a possibility. But then Ganna will just go to someone else, and who knows whether we’ll be any better off.’

  ‘You should leave that to me, Sir. Allow me to operate as your brain for a while.’

  ‘So tell me what will happen.’

  ‘Since, as you rightly predict, Mme Ganna will not take the irreversible step, you will ask my colleague at the appropriate time for the bill, while pointing out to him that he will have to talk to his client about the size of the sum. He will not be gentle with her once that’s on the table, you may be sure of that. He will take her by the throat and then, if she wants to breathe, she will have to accept a lawyer of our choosing.’

  Columbus and the egg. That, more or less, is precisely what happened. I had often appealed to Ganna to give up an adviser who used all his cunning and experience to stir things up between us
instead of calming them, to tangle the threads instead of combing them out, but she believed in Dr Stanger-Goldenthal as in the Bible – no, what am I saying, more than she had ever believed in the Bible. When two individuals, whose pleasure and art it is to fish in troubled waters and intone abracadabras, join forces, their relationship will be closer than most real friendships, just as bonds between thieves – ‘thick as thieves’ – tend to be firmer than those between honest men. But when Ganna was suddenly presented with the bill for her entente cordiale, when the vast sum showed her how much she was paying for personal and legal support, that every telephone call was rated as highly as dinner at Sacher’s, that a single one of the delightful and stimulating conferences swallowed more money than she spent in a week – she screamed blue murder about villainy and extortion. There was only one comfort that remained to her: that she could tell herself and persuade me that it was all for my sake that she had broken off relations with her star lawyer. There followed a brief interregnum, a time of no lawyers; to her it felt like a time of no drugs to a morphinist. Disturbed and bitter, she wrote to me: ‘There, now you’ve achieved what you wanted to with your tactics, and I’m to be put under pressure of an inadequate lawyer.’ And when I brought up Hornschuch, and suggested using him as our mutual counsel, the name sounded like the rumble of thunder from a black storm cloud. An unknown; she didn’t know the first thing about him, and yet she already hated him with the consuming hatred of the maniac, whom fear of the unknown drives to the most desperate and dangerous pre-emptive efforts.