My First Wife

by Jakob Wassermann

  Now I can also understand her growing need to spend time away from the house. She wanted to collect herself, to regroup. She hiked in the mountains on her own; on occasion she travelled to Vienna to shelter with her friend Lotte Waldbauer, or to Salzburg for a couple of days to stay with her old composition teacher. She enjoyed the speed and separation of being in a car; often, after a sleepless night, she would go for a drive and leave a note on my desk saying she’d gone. Then I would miss her, a little as I missed my hat when the tempest had blown it off my head. She went out, she came back, to ‘keep an eye on things’ as she derisively put it, disappeared again, suddenly missed little Caspar Hauser and when she had him in her arms again she might have taken him with her, if it had been possible. She was no longer at peace, no longer felt herself in fortune’s good graces, she felt homeless.

  Yes, I missed her – missed her like my hat. There is a remarkable ignorance in men that makes them think they have a woman when they have a woman. Even the most sensitive of them fall for the crude mistake of the body. Even the most ethereal of them are animals that think the byre and the cave are taboo.

  I have no other excuse than that my eyes and ears were commandeered by the pursuer. Things had come to such a pass that each time there was a letter from her in the post I would feel my temples throb. The notion of having to see her was a nightmare, but sometimes the incredible thing happened and on my visits to town I would go to see her, if only to prevent her from coming to me. I experienced the most terrible form of sleep there is. You lie there shattered, your chest sliced open, suffering unendurable agonies from the unexampled wickedness of fate. And you sleep. And in your sleep you deal with your fate. Resist, justify yourself, get nowhere, talk for nothing, your throat choked with pleas and wails, with rage and astonishment, and you wake up with a shattered head. While I worked, I felt like someone with two loaded revolvers pressed to his head, one on either side. When I left the house I would be frightened for my son. A limitless dread of the Ganna devils. I walked around, waiting to see what she would come up with next, where the next lightning would strike. It had been going on for years now and no end in sight. I fervently wished I could turn back time, so that I would never have met the woman. What right did she have to wreck my life, on whose instructions was it? What sort of being was she that she could overturn any human agreement with impunity and rampage through a world that she saw as hers to despoil, a mad world with mad agreements and mad battles?

  But I am getting a little ahead of myself.

  THREE DECENT PEOPLE

  Thanks to the canny logic that often inheres in events, it was at this time that the tax authorities discovered that Ganna had neglected to pay any tax since her divorce, and demanded immediate back payments. It was a very large amount, almost doubled by the fine slapped onto it. Ganna objected, but in the teeth of the State’s determination to fleece its citizens there is no objection possible. The most she could do was secure a postponement. She ran to several lawyers, but m’learned friends were unable to help either. They tried the usual methods of obtaining further delays, thereby only adding to the costs and interest. If she had still had the money she was supposed, by the terms of the divorce agreement, to have set aside as an emergency fund, then nothing bad would have happened, she would simply have had to use it for that. But there was nothing left of the money. Nor could she load the house with more debt; the mortgage interest payments were eating into her monthly allowance as it was and her other debts were going up all the time.

  In her predicament she quite naturally turned to – me. We had a meeting at which she begged me to take on her tax debt. She claimed one of her lawyers had told her it was the only way of getting the sum asked for down to manageable proportions. She had previously written to me along these same lines; I had taken soundings with Hornschuch, who sensed illegal manipulations and advised me against allowing myself to be lured into a possible legal minefield. But even if there hadn’t been any risks, I still couldn’t have got Ganna out of this pickle; I told her my circumstances had deteriorated so much of late that it was difficult enough for me to meet my existing obligations. She sniggered contemptuously. It was as if I’d asked her to pick up the bill for lunch. Then I made the ill-advised suggestion that I might be able to help her if she renounced her lien on the Buchegger estate; then I would be in the position of being able to borrow money against the property. To hear this, to stare at me with burning eyes and to burst into a long loud shriek were all one and the same for Ganna. She carried on as though the lien were the apple of her eye and I was trying to steal it. In her tantrum I kept hearing the one word: blackmail. My suggestion was blackmail to her. She was prepared for everything, but not that. The fact that I looked to her to abandon her most powerful lever showed her just who she was up against. I was simple-minded enough to stick up for myself. In addition to the lien she also had the deed, I pointed out, and quoted the saying of a lawyer friend of mine who had once said: a deed is like a razor blade, the least movement and you start to bleed. Of course, she retorted, with difficulty keeping the triumph out of her voice, the lien was part and parcel of the deed, and to seek to interfere with it was an attempt on her life. And while she went on frothing at the mouth and babbling about blackmail, I took my hat and left.

  Several weeks passed, during which she wriggled piteously. The tightening screw of the tax people took her breath away. Little part-payments gained her brief periods of respite. In order to quiet the rest of her creditors, she had chosen the system of partial consolidation. She paid One out, and agreed to even more oppressive conditions from numbers Two, Three and Four. She took to hocking her allowance and the rent she made on the house for months in advance. The lawyers she had engaged and who ran round the houses for her, and put in applications (there were already three or four of them at this time), didn’t want to do their work gratis either. She put them off by writing IOUs. I asked myself and I asked others how such a thing was possible; IOUs are not legal tender, how long can someone go on issuing IOUs? Till someone who knew explained: if you are in possession of a deed, you can string along one loan after another, since one lender doesn’t need to know about the existence of others, and in this case takes Alexander Herzog Ltd for a flourishing business. Aha, I thought, so a deed isn’t just a razor blade, but also a golden-egg-laying goose; good to know; I wonder what further qualities it will turn out to possess?

  Even though it was a wretched life that Ganna was living, besieged by creditors, constricted by debt, under fire from the tax authorities, she could have taken all these calamities – which she was used to, to which she had fully adjusted – fatalistically in her stride, were it not for the serious threat to her ownership of the house. If there should be a forced sale, through foreclosure of the mortgages, she was lost. At least that was her mantra to herself, and at the thought she gibbered with panic. I had occasion to watch her, and more yet to sense how her relationship with property was taking shape within her. The house that was hers and the lien on the Buchegger estate both gave rise to ferocious feelings of possessiveness in her, puffed up with which she steered confidently over the surging waves of her life. As long as she had those two in her grasp, she felt inured to storm and shipwreck. The house she lived in and the estate that Bettina owned (as for me, I seemed to be a kind of chattel to be pushed here and there) – they were like a treasure found and one still only dreamed of; but one knows where it is to be found and all that is needed to secure it is the knowledge of the correct phrase or formula. An extraordinary serenity came over her at times, when she pictured to herself how eventually she would move into the fairy-tale palace by the lake and watch her rival legging it out through the back door with a hatbox or two.

  Meanwhile, the pressures on her were increasing daily. After Drs Sperling, Wachtel, Greif and Tauber had all tested their teeth on the tough revenue nut without achieving any notable breakthrough, the fifth to be consulted by Ganna, one Dr Storch, was illuminated by a flash of genius. In
the course of a protracted consultation with her he pointed out that, were she still living with me as my wife, she would not be facing any tax demand. Ganna nodded sorrowfully. She didn’t need any learned commentary to remind her of the sorry circumstance. But the lawyer had something else in mind. He had carefully reconsidered the case, he said, and while reading the files he had come upon a small technicality. Technicality? Ganna was positively giddy with excitement; she asked, stammering, what the lawyer – now suddenly transformed before her eyes into a celestial cherub – had in mind with his mysterious remark. With a smile he told her. Everything seemed to suggest that – probably in the haste of the final official dealings – my German nationality had been left out of regard. Pressing her hand to her bosom and breathing hard, Ganna asks what consequences that might have. At the very least it provided grounds for challenging the divorce, replies Dr Storch. At those words, Ganna gives a start – a pleasurable start, admittedly, but a start nonetheless. She reminds the cherub that I had since contracted another marriage. To which the cherub replies that that didn’t change anything. Whereupon Ganna, with the same voluptuous feeling of panic, gave a little scream: that means, oh my God, that means it’s bigamy. Whereupon the cherub, dampening down her exuberance, asks her to be cautious in the use of such terms. For the moment, he saw in this interesting circumstance nothing more than the means to put a little pressure on the tax authorities.

  Dr Storch’s revelation had some point, inasmuch as my divorce from Ganna was only carried out before an Austrian court of law, and not a German. As I had been a resident of Austria for decades, the divorce according to Austrian law was initially held to be perfectly sufficient. Even so, Hornschuch had anticipated that difficulties might come about one day and had insisted that Ganna deposit a letter in the file in which she declared herself ready, whenever it might be asked of her, to agree to the German divorce as well. She had forgotten all about the letter. When we jogged her memory later, she claimed it had been extorted from her.

  But to stick to the sequence of events: Ganna went home from the meeting with Dr Storch with her heart palpitating. She was utterly bewildered by her good fortune. The lawyer’s cautiously advanced point was in her eyes as good as a victory in open court. A legal bit of jiggery-pokery meant the eradication of an irksome fact. A technicality meant: there was no divorce and Ganna remains the lawful Frau Herzog. She dealt with contracts she had no intention of abiding by as with servants she sacked if they stood up to her. Above all, though, she, the doting spouse, thought of the danger to which I was exposed. With a happy shudder, she reflected that by my second marriage I had committed a crime. As she walked out of Storch’s office she could see me in a highly embarrassing pickle, if I still refused to co-operate; by the time she boarded the tram I was practically behind bars. The day before, she had learned that I was expected in the sanatorium where I had to check in two or three times a year for my condition. She knew Bettina would be accompanying me. So much the better, she thought, then we’ll finally get the woman thrown out. She wanted as much as possible to spare me. She would break the news to me in a tête-à-tête, and with enormous restraint. Admittedly, after all that had gone before, she would have to be ready for the chance that I might refuse to see her; but in this case she trusted to the gravity of the news she had for me, seeing as it was about my honour, as she said, and my reputation. She could already hear my weeping pleading and see Bettina grovelling on the ground in front of her …

  The morning my checking-in at the clinic had been reported back to her by whichever of her people did such things, she had me called to the telephone. She was informed the doctor had told me not to go to the phone; any negotiations were out of the question; my condition required extremely careful handling. In that case she had better speak to Bettina, an indignant Ganna replied; the matter she wanted to discuss could not permit of even one hour’s delay, it was a matter of life and death for me. Bettina was told. At that time Bettina was not as inured to Ganna’s ways of procuring conversations as she got to be later. She thought the vulgar commotion might have something in it and she went, reluctantly enough, to the telephone. Ganna was reduced to a stammer. She didn’t want to give away her plan of battle; on the other hand she was incapable of masking her triumph as concern. There had been a catastrophic turn in the tax business, she trumpeted in Bettina’s ear, more or less; we should all consult together; Bettina too should be in on the consultations; and of course the lawyers on both sides; delay was tantamount to suicide. Trying hard to remain restrained, Bettina asked what this was all about. Then – I could imagine her wide staring eyes – it bubbled out of Ganna: the divorce was invalid, my marriage to Bettina was unlawful, one of her sharpest lawyers, an eminent man as well, had broken the awful news to her; we all should quickly get round a table; three decent people; if three decent people sat around a table together to avert a disaster, there could be no doubting a satisfactory outcome; the first step would be to discharge the tax debt; other questions could be settled civilly and constructively. Bettina, dazed by the cascade of words, said: ‘Is that it, Ganna? Thank you, I’ll tell Alexander.’ And, half-irritated, half-amused, she repeated to me all that Ganna had dinned into her. I shrugged. I had no idea of the consequences it would have.

  THIRTY OR FORTY LAWYERS

  When her kindly peace call remained without echo, she poured her moral indignation into a letter. ‘I am beside myself,’ she wrote. I could hear the hollow voice and the accusatory emphasis on the two last words, with a stage pause left between them. What, they don’t respond, the fools, she said to herself disbelievingly, they knock back the hand of friendship? Has anyone ever known the like, to run to their own destruction?

  She won’t allow herself to be accused of not having done what was humanly possible to avert the catastrophe from Bettina and me. In this spirit she writes a second letter to me, one of her masterly, Tartuffian, technical-ethical epistles. I don’t reply, even though the bearer is standing by waiting. She instructs Dr Storch to clarify me as to the legal position. I throw his letter in the waste-paper basket. Immediately afterwards she has a falling-out with the ex-cherub, for reasons I can’t divulge, and forms a new compact with one Dr Kranich, who also assails me with a lengthy screed, in which the tax matter and the divorce are cannily entwined. Dr Kranich is a onetime Socialist, as she has me informed by one of her agents, and she hopes his – albeit no longer current – political views will commend him to me. I don’t reply.

  She goes to the sanatorium. She is not admitted. She yells at the porter, she insults the nurse, she complains to the director. Still she is not admitted. Now she really thinks she has done everything to save me from disaster. A seventh lawyer, Dr Schwalbe (no one can tell me why yet another one), communicates to Hornschuch about the impending test of the validity of the divorce. Hornschuch’s apparent sangfroid excites Ganna’s fury. She senses some peril must lie behind it, the man is an obstacle, she needs to get him out of the way first. She composes a twenty-three-page foolscap screed against him and has it delivered to the Bar association. She accuses him of dereliction of duty and of acting without instruction; to force her to agree to the divorce, he had without my orders and without my knowledge determined that her allowance be stopped. Blackmail again, hallo, hallo, is anyone home? Blackmail, are you there? No, I’m here. Hornschuch is compelled to take her to court for defamation. I am asked to appear as a witness, and of course I can’t avoid saying the accusations were frivolous and baseless. My appearance impresses the judge; I get a little carried away with myself; I paint a picture of the unending persecution I suffer at the hands of the woman; basically I make myself into a sort of knight of the sorrowful countenance. Ganna is sentenced to a hefty fine, that’s it. Since she doesn’t have a penny that doesn’t come from me, that doesn’t come from my work, it means that I now have a fine to pay as well. Once sentence has been passed, Ganna comes up to me, pulls a pear out of her handbag and whispers dramatically: ‘An Alexander pear … your
favourite …’ What was it the last time? ‘I’m giving you a divorce for your birthday …’ Always the same breathy pathos in the intervals of delusion.

  In her grim compulsion to unmask and destroy the ‘plot’ between Hornschuch and Bettina, Ganna instructs an eighth lawyer, Dr Fischlein, to bring charges against Bettina, who, in company and before witnesses, had apparently accused her, Ganna, of being a liar. Another farrago of nonsense, product of hateful dreams; Bettina would never even say Ganna’s name in public. But Ganna doesn’t let facts get in her way, this is wash day, the lawyers are so many washerwomen, everything goes. The unreasonable couple (Bettina and I) won’t be persuaded that all is lost, she says to herself; very well, they have only themselves to blame, my conscience is clear; and finally, with the assistance of a ninth lawyer, Dr Pelikan, she ignites the principal bomb: the legal questioning of the divorce, simultaneously challenging the legality of my marriage to Bettina. Hornschuch counters with a demand that she ‘show cause’, which goes as far as the administrative court and plunges Ganna into deep disquiet, because everything she has undertaken against Bettina and me strikes her as lawful, and pleasing unto the eyes of God and man – whereas everything that is undertaken against her is a criminal violation, as she tells the world with her shrill cry. There is nothing for it; I have to go to Vienna to make preparations and pick up a legal opinion from a legal eagle that both divorce and remarriage were perfectly lawful. It costs time, it costs money, it costs nerves, it costs concentration. It does me in. I can no longer speak about anything else. Running into friends in town, I talk to them blurtingly and incomprehensibly about horrible things I am drowning in. I sit at a table in my hotel room for hours, laying patiences.