My First Wife

by Jakob Wassermann

  But then, for some reason, Ganna suddenly breaks off her vengeance, offers to withdraw her suit in return for some ‘conditions’, apologizes for her pitiful desperation. There’s no more to it than that; it’s a fit of weakness, the pyromaniac’s momentary hesitation before tossing the lit match on the dry straw. The Count von Gleichen idyll appears in a new version; she offers to share me with Bettina. (How’s that going to work – it would be like two cats sharing a mouse.) Ganna is to be the lawful wedded wife in Vienna, Bettina is to have the same role in Ebenweiler; their spheres of influence can be kept nicely separate. When this great-souled proposition is again met with baffled silence, she turns to a minister who has been presented to her as an enlightened and philanthropical sort, and asks him to effect a conciliation between us. God only knows what she said to him; the man of God writes me an extraordinarily pompous letter. I think to myself it would be wrong to ignore the words of a priest; but instead of keeping to ten lines (see Stanger-Goldenthal), I fill seven pages with a description of Ganna’s character and my predicament.

  Shaking off her fit of weakness or her crisis of confidence or whatever it was, Ganna swings into action with renewed vim. Who is the enemy most to be dreaded? Why, Hornschuch. So she tackles him first. She bombards him with suggestions to try and tempt him to deal with her. She treats him like a wildcat you throw a hunk of meat to from time to time, so that he doesn’t bite you. She hates him with every fibre of her being, but the category ‘lawyer’ – in any guise – fills her with such superstitious awe that she loses her head and does the most irrational things. She conducts expensive long-distance phone calls with him. In the midst of her usual dealings and agenda, it suddenly occurs to her to travel to Ebendorf, where Hornschuch is now living, the seat of the district court, four miles from Ebenweiler. An amusing little jaunt. To spend six hours on the train, by night if need be, is a breeze to her. The woman has nerves like bell-ropes. The final justification of the journey is threefold. First, she wants to inveigle Hornschuch into her toils and get the better of him; she flatters herself that she will be able to persuade him of the justice of her cause. Second, the proximity of the district court is like a sort of aphrodisiac to her; of course she’s already taken on a local lawyer, the eleventh or twelfth, a political enemy of Hornschuch’s, through whom she hopes to bring down her detested foe. Third, she’s made some useful acquaintances in the bar of the hotel where she’s staying – all sorts of local politicians and small-town dignitaries whom she flatters, stressing her conservative views and involving herself in Party business. On cosy beer evenings she tells anyone who cares to listen – and of course, they’re all dying of curiosity – tear-jerking tales from her tortured marriage, or of how a certain lady up in Ebenweiler has it in for her and is making her life a misery.

  Between Christmas and New Year she tried another ambush on Hornschuch. She implored him to induce me to pay the allowance for Doris that I hadn’t paid her – Ganna – for months now. The fact that I paid out every penny of the money on Doris discretion keeps her from mentioning. When Hornschuch reminded her of the fact, she replied with irrational fury that she was the mother and, if the money were not paid to her, she would see it as not having been paid.

  ‘I understand,’ Hornschuch replied with the smile that Ganna liked to call Mephistophelean, ‘your daughter is a sort of walking promissory note that you can present to the father when you’re short. Good idea!’

  ‘No!’ screamed Ganna, white with fury. ‘What I won’t have is Bettina deciding how much support my child gets from her father. It’s disgraceful.’

  ‘No one’s talking about Bettina here,’ remarked Hornschuch coolly.

  She went on chuntering away to herself, then all at once she was as soft as a sponge that you throw in water, began sobbing and painted such a heart-wrenching picture of her situation that, as he admitted to me, he was speechless for a while. He said perhaps an accommodation could be reached between her and her creditors; to that end, she would have to admit her debts openly, the full extent of them, and above all she needed to get rid of her lawyers. That got him a good reception. She went wild. Conditions? No, Sir, she wasn’t that desperate, nor for a good time yet. See off her lawyers? That was the last thing she would do. And leave herself open to Bettina’s persecution? No, thank you very much. That was one thing she wasn’t going to do. There had been an attempt to have her declared non compos mentis, but thank goodness that had failed. (She gave a cackling laugh and sent Hornschuch a penetrating look like a detective on the point of catching a murderer out.) How failed? asked Hornschuch sympathetically. Yes, she had looked up a famous psychiatrist, who at the end of a twenty-minute conversation had issued her with a splendid certificate of mental health; if Hornschuch cared to see it: voilà! And already she was rummaging through her bag for the piece of paper, which obviously filled her with glee, as a little sub-magician might be at the sight of a licence to practise issued by the great chief magician.

  Since the meeting with Hornschuch had failed, she hired a sleigh and half an hour later reached the Buchegger estate. Our maid knew who she was and didn’t admit her. We were just having tea, Bettina and I, with Doris, who was there for the Christmas holidays. We could hear Ganna ranting and shouting outside. Bettina drummed her fingers on the tablecloth and said: ‘Don’t go out. Please don’t go out.’ But I went out. I had to see the woman off. I shouted at her. What did she think she was doing? What she was doing? She had come for money. She was groaning, howling, gurgling for money. Interspersed with that, a few insults and reproaches. The sleigh stood a few yards off; the coachman on his box was continually shaking his head, which made an oddly profound impression on me. In the hall, the servants stood around in a state of shock. Infected by Ganna’s yelling, I started yelling back. No one in the house had ever heard me yell before. There is only one person in the world capable of making me yell and that is Ganna. I no longer remember how I induced her finally to get back in the sleigh. I stood at the top of the stairs and waited till the horse caparisoned with bells and its head-shaking coachman had disappeared into the darkness. Back in the house, I called Bettina. She had locked herself away in her room. Doris stood in front of the tea table, looking at me with round, frightened, sympathetic eyes. I went to my room and threw myself on my bed.

  But all this was mere skirmishing for Ganna. A little later, she had worked out that I owed her 25,000 schillings. I don’t know where this nice round figure came from. It could as well have been half a million. Doctors’ bills, tailors’ bills, ‘backlogs’ from other years, ‘imprévus’ by the dozen, expenses on the children, a column of figures like a lottery draw. It’s my belief that merely writing down numbers gave her as much satisfaction as actual money. The local district court rejected the case for want of evidence, even though two diligent new lawyers threw themselves into the fray for her. Without stopping to think for a moment about the irrecoverableness of the debt and the frivolousness of her suit, Ganna told herself: if I can’t obtain justice in this country, then perhaps there where, according to my passport and as Alexander Herzog’s wife, I belong. She made for Berlin, found some willing lawyers – three of them – and presented her claim in a splendidly stylish brief. But lo and behold, the 25,000 were become 39,000, a leap explained by the addition of her tax debt. I saw with satisfaction that her charming number-drunkenness didn’t get in the way of a certain residual accuracy in Ganna. At the same time, in Berlin, where she set up a sort of dépendance, and where m’learned friends were charmed down from the trees, she attached her suit to the attack on the divorce. She was, it seemed, in the right place. The uncertainty between the two countries in point of matrimonial law made this entertaining legal adventure possible; it was one of the many breaches where canny lawyers like to wedge their crowbars.

  But she also enjoyed social success in the German metropolis. She got to meet people to whom she could sing her song of woe. Since none of them were acquainted with the facts, she found credit and
sympathy at every turn. Doling out copies of her Psyche Bleeds to all and sundry, she confirmed her role as an ideal wife, who had been sent to the brink of starvation by a cruel husband and his chit. She assiduously visited writers’ cafés, where she could advertise her noble unhappiness. ‘Even the moneylenders start to cry when I tell them of my predicament,’ she once said, to the understanding murmurs of a bookish set at table. It may even have been true. It’s not out of the question that the soul of the contemporary usurer has opposed the trend of petrifaction to which all other souls have been subject, and has humanized itself since the days of Balzac and Dickens. The result of her sentimental journey to the Prussian Olympus, at any rate, was that I received many anonymous letters full of insults and insolent instructions to me to better myself. Plus of course lawyers’ letters, too many to count. They struck me as scouting patrols before the battle, these resolute gentlemen marching out to meet me with fists clenched. One wrote to say simply that if I didn’t pay up 39,000 schillings by a certain date, he would have my royalties confiscated at the publisher’s. I threw the letter away, with two or three hundred others of the same type and import. I had to laugh. My lifestyle and the pyrrhic divorce had set me back so much with my publisher that the tiny hands would find nothing left to confiscate. (What a great word, ‘confiscate’; especially made for the little hands.) But Ganna told her people that by some financial manipulation I had contrived to smuggle money abroad, and hence fabricated my debt to my publisher. A story that made it possible to drag him into court as well. On top of everything else, she was now bandying the bigamy charge about. A few friends who got to hear of it wrote to beg me not to let it come to that. But what else could I do? Whimper for mercy? Run to court and say: protect me from the lawyers, otherwise they’ll eat me alive, arrest that she-devil, otherwise I’ll be done for? Nonsense. The courts would have arrested me first.

  One day I remarked to Hornschuch: ‘Can you explain it to me – excuse the naive question – but all these lawyers, they’re thoughtful, experienced, no doubt honest men; don’t they understand what’s going on and how they’re being misused?’ Hornschuch listened. He raised his eyebrows and looked at me with a sardonic smile on his lips. His way of not giving an answer was uncommonly eloquent.

  At that time there were a mere sixteen or seventeen lawyers whom Ganna had retained, some of whom she had already paid off, or hadn’t paid off and was afraid to dismiss. Today, the number is closer to forty; it’s not possible to be exact since I’ve mislaid some of the names in the welter of paper. These people surely had to realize that the support they were giving the woman only served to exacerbate her addiction, not to quench it. What was it that drove them to give their brains, their knowledge, their time to a person who, with morbid determination, sought to twist the rigid paragraphs of the law to suit herself? Presumably they said to themselves: we’ll take in the winnings once the other side can no longer speak and will pay any money to be left in peace. That characterized the jurisdictional uncertainty, the ambiguity of the laws, the deadly rigidity of the process, the remoteness of the ivory-tower judiciary, the via dolorosa of appeals – and on top of everything, helpless and tyrannical, the State, a Chronos devouring his own children.

  It accomplished nothing and explained nothing when I or others attempted to come up with a clinical category for Ganna’s case. An army of three and a half dozen lawyers is a one-off. The idea of a mysterious dependency suggested itself to me ever more strongly. It couldn’t but be that, in the atmosphere of confidential talk, expectation, advice, attack, subterfuge, statement and counter-statement, Ganna found a source of erotic satisfaction, a replacement for intimacy with another being; replacement also for the pleasure of tormenting another being, and no less pleasurable if one thinks one is the undeserving sufferer. The time spent in lawyers’ offices, the smell of ink, dust and blotting-paper unquestionably had an aphrodisiac effect on her. With each new lawyer she entered a sort of new marriage, a marriage of torment. When she talked to one of them – in court, in his office, in her house – a strange, saccharine flirtatiousness came out in her, a slavish gratitude that admittedly could at any moment curdle into bickering and quasi-marital dispute. It had become her habit to call her current lawyer first thing every day, to ask perfectly ridiculous questions, to make quite useless dispositions, as if she wanted only to hear his voice, as though to check that he hadn’t been unfaithful to her overnight. The telephone was another source of pleasure. Telephone and telegraph were magical gadgets with which, short of essence and existence as she was, she forced an entry into the time and consciousness of people attached to her, borrowed time and consciousness from them, in order to exist a little herself. How deeply into chaos and old night one is taken when one follows such a soul’s vagaries into its depths!

  CONVERSATIONS IN ANOTHER WORLD

  One day, Bettina and I had to go to Munich to discuss the legal challenge to our marriage with a lawyer there. Helmut was sitting with us at the breakfast table as we were about to go. He was complaining forthrightly.

  ‘Why are you going away again?’

  I explained that it was necessary.

  ‘But why do you both have to go, why not just Papa?’ he persisted.

  Bettina stroked his hair and said I wanted her to go with me. He thought for a long time, then a roguish expression came into his blue eyes and he said to her:

  ‘I think I know why.’

  ‘Why’s that then, darling?’ I asked him.

  To which he, full of pride: ‘It’s like with the animals.’

  Bettina and I looked at each other in surprise.

  ‘What do you mean, Helmut?’

  And he, the twinkle still in his eyes: ‘Safety.’

  He was lost in thought for a while, and then:

  ‘Isn’t that right, Mama, the three of us are a proper family, you and Papa and me, we all belong together?’

  ‘Yes, little Helmut, of course we do.’

  ‘Was I there when you got to know each other?’

  ‘No, darling.’

  ‘Was God there, then?’

  ‘Oh, yes, He was.’

  ‘Did He laugh, then?’

  ‘Why do you think He would have laughed?’

  ‘Because He was looking forward to me, maybe?’

  At that point the cat, which had been stalking around the table with tail up, jumped into his lap. He looked at it tenderly and asked, to indicate his human superiority, with a cooing voice:

  ‘Have you got eyes? Have you really got eyes?’

  ‘He makes it impossible to say goodbye,’ Bettina said to me afterwards.

  TWO WOMEN

  Even before the eventful January day I am coming to, I had had the feeling there was something going on with Bettina. But I didn’t have the courage to ask her. For some time now we had been living in a strange silence, side by side, almost like two convicts who have been cellmates for too long. What was alarming was that this was so unlike Bettina. On the day in question, Hornschuch had already rung in at nine to say that Ganna was back in Ebenweiler. She had hurried down from Berlin to attend a hearing at the district court. What was at issue was the suspended money for Doris, also the monthly allowance for the girl for the summer, during which time she had been staying with me in my house. By the letter of the deed I was in the wrong; in my own lay opinion I was being required to pay twice over, along the lines of the kraal’s principle of ‘revocability’ – and ‘revocability’ in my present circumstances was more than I could afford.

  In pursuance of her claim, Ganna had obtained a temporary injunction with the court, freezing my bank account in the little local branch in Ebendorf. It didn’t much matter, I didn’t have any great sums there, I had sufficient cash for the time being; I would just have to see about getting the next advance. Still, it was disagreeable; and it gave ill-disposed people more ammunition for their gossip, and sooner or later we would need to refinance the household anyway.

  At nine o’clock Horns
chuch had put us in the picture. Thereafter, it was blow upon blow, like the fifth act of a melodrama. At nine twenty, the court usher turns up with a summons. At nine forty-five, Ganna’s Ebendorf lawyer invites Bettina and me by telephone to an ‘amicable’ discussion. At ten past ten a telegram from a Berlin lawyer with a demand to attend an all-day hearing on the such-and-such. At half past ten, a wild telephone call from Ganna: if we turned down the ‘amicable’ meeting, then all bets were off and nothing could avert the approaching calamity. I’d heard that sort of bombast before. Three minutes past eleven: express letter from a lawyer in Vienna, to the effect that Ganna Herzog had made over her allowance for the months of February and March to him. Eleven fifteen: a messenger with a note from Ganna repeating her phoned ultimatum, but in a form and using expressions that cause Bettina, now suddenly up on the brazen intricacies of the Ganna method, to shudder. The letter was addressed to her; she was the first to read it. She understands, full of repugnance, the knife-jabbing either-or in Ganna’s letter, but the claws have never come so close to her as now. She wants clarity, and calls Hornschuch. This is no harmless chit-chat, he tells her; Ganna is talking openly down in the village, wherever she meets her saloon bar friends, not only about the bigamous relationship in which I am allegedly living, but also about the ‘wangled’ leave to marry Bettina. What she meant by that was the expedited permission to remarry which I obtained from the consulate – an utterly lawful procedure, but which to Ganna’s criminally fouled brain lets it appear as though Bettina and I had obtained permission by false information and forged papers; a wonderful opportunity to squeeze off a coup de grâce in our direction. Bettina, who that morning is not feeling her best and brightest, is scared by the possible consequences: the malicious tittle-tattle, the confrontation with envy, jealousy and the burning embers of hatred. Hornschuch tries to ease her mind. She reads out one or two particularly informative sentences from Ganna’s squib. When she hears his reply: ‘Excellent: people will draw their conclusions from that,’ she all but slams down the receiver. ‘No,’ she cries disbelievingly into the mouthpiece. ‘They won’t draw the right conclusions at all. You forget that the woman’s name is Herzog.’ Pause. Thereupon Hornschuch again, drawling: ‘All right, then. Whatever you say.’