When I walk into the blue salon she’s lying on the sofa, swathed in blankets, looking pale and chilly. On foggy days she’s only a shadow of herself, and this day would be black as pitch, even if it were cloudless. I look mutely down at her; suddenly she says:
‘I’ve decided to speak to Ganna.’
I look at her as if she were mad. Suddenly she pulls herself up into a sitting position.
‘I’m going to ask her up, and I’m going to talk to her,’ she repeats in a high treble which reminds me of Helmut’s little squeaky voice, and which is always a sign with her that she’s nearing the end of her tether.
‘Why? What would be the use,’ I begin.
‘I’ve made a mistake,’ the high voice jingles back. ‘I can’t absolve myself … I thought I didn’t need to notice her … I was lazy, I was bad … It must be possible to get her attention with some human utterance … from woman to woman maybe …’
I stare at her in dismal surprise. ‘Do you really think that will work? You know how I kept … over all those years …’
She interrupts me. ‘At least I have to give it a try. I must be able to tell myself I tried.’
She jots down a couple of lines, and sends the gardener with a note to the inn in Ebendorf where Ganna is staying. A pleasurable shudder goes through Ganna when she reads the invitation to come up to the Buchegger estate. At last! Have the fools come to their senses? Have they seen the error of their ways? Or are they just running scared? She plunges to the telephone to talk to Bettina. She is so terribly excited, it’s hard to understand what she’s saying. She would love to have a conversation, she tootles, but not in the house, oh no, not that, but in some neutral place, to her heart’s content, and of course with her lawyer present. No lawyers, says Bettina with crisp decisiveness, absolutely not; if Ganna has inhibitions about coming to the house, she will meet her on the road and walk with her. Ganna gives in. They agree a time. An hour later – by now it’s a quarter to one – when Bettina sees Ganna on the snow-covered village road, in violation of the agreement, in the company of her lawyer, she stops dead. Her posture expresses such rigid unapproachability that the gentleman decides to bow and turn back. Not without a tasteless remark. Since he’s among the dozen or so lawyers working on Ganna’s legal challenge, he thinks, hat in hand, he owes her a word of apology:
‘I hope, dear Madam, you don’t assume I am working against the happiness of your marriage.’
To which Bettina replies – addressing her words to thin air:
‘I’d kindly ask you to leave the happiness of my marriage out of it.’
And with a gesture invites Ganna to proceed.
Robbed of her legal adviser and hence of her poise, Ganna is suddenly rather piano. Silently she shuffles along beside the striding Bettina. She is wearing a black, crumpled cloche hat and a mottled fur. In her hand she carries the capacious leather bag which goes everywhere with her. It contains all the files and documents she might require, much as a travelling salesman has his samples and price list. Whenever she runs into an acquaintance of any degree, she fills them in with tumbling garrulousness as to the state of her case, pulls out the deed, her bundled writs, the various legal opinions, the official documents relating to the Buchegger estate, comforting letters from her supporters, and waxes so prolix that she no longer remembers where she is, where she’s coming from, where she’s going, or whom she’s talking to.
Bettina, chatting – although chatting is really the last thing she feels like – glances at her from time to time. It’s thirteen years since she’s last seen Ganna; since that teatime meeting of disagreeable memory. Think of everything that happened in between! A whole lifetime. Beautiful things, noble things, pure things, indescribable joys, little Caspar Hauser, who would have imagined it – but also bad things, wretchedness, bitterness and an irreparable loss. Whether the woman walking beside her can guess any of it? Surely not: she doesn’t sense things, she grabs; people like that are purblind. She even walks like a blind person. How wretched she looks. If only it were possible to help her. It can’t feel good to be in her shoes. Someone like that is quite unapproachable, rigidly stuck inside themselves …
As she shows Ganna in, helps her out of her coat, conducts her to the living room and offers her a small snack, which Ganna gobbles down with grateful little exclamations, she keeps looking at her. With the crest of orange-dyed hair under which grey strands peek out as from under a wig, she looks like a peculiar idol. You would hardly notice she’s over fifty. Her form is compact, but a little thickened, her facial expressions and movements vibrate with an eerie force of will. The intensity of her regard is almost frightening. It shows an illimitable desire to dominate.
Eventually, Bettina and Ganna start talking. Suddenly Bettina takes Ganna’s hand – her tiny, freckled, ancient hand, really, just exactly as she’d wanted to take it so many years ago – she takes it and she says:
‘Woman! Woman! What are you doing! You’re destroying everything around you! Take pity on yourself, why don’t you!’
At that Ganna looks at her in shock, her mouth quivers, her eyelids tremble, she cries. She nods – a sort of pagoda – to herself and she cries, cries, cries.
‘I have to,’ she stammers, ‘what else can I do?’
What else can she do! And again Bettina thinks: poor, poor soul, what is she that we are so frightened of her? Suddenly she has so much courage and confidence, she feels she can get anything she wants from Ganna. She chooses her words terribly carefully, so as not to hurt her. She is tender, considerate, sisterly, even though inside she is continually fighting down feelings of nausea and dread; but I mustn’t give in to that, she tells herself, everything is at stake here. Also, she tells herself the woman must have something; there must be something to her to explain how the man lived with her for nineteen years. This something is what she wants to locate and dig up and touch and address herself to: there it is, woman, the thing you owe him: decency, dignity, reasonableness, gratitude – yes, a little gratitude, there it is, hold onto it, can you feel it? And with a mixture of childishness and superiority she proceeds to court Ganna – as an older, experienced friend might. But Ganna turns suspicious right away and, when Bettina talks about giving in, she arches her back with the customary retort: ‘Why should I have to give in? I’ve been giving in all my life.’ And when Bettina talks about my worries, which are hanging over her and me like heavy clouds, Ganna takes it as a bad joke and replies with her cunning I-know-better smile that she had certain information that I was hoarding a large fortune in foreign banks. Bettina claps her hands at this; she has to laugh, she can’t help it, and that gives Ganna pause, and she stammers; something undefined in the regard and expression of the younger woman strikes her as being true – albeit in a dim and washed-out way, and almost fading back into oblivion again, because how can she live with such an inconvenient truth. It’s impossible, she thinks, with a puzzling pout, as if she’d been offended by the contact with truth; perhaps his life is no bed of roses, and she murmurs a couple of mildly sympathetic words. But when Bettina reproaches her for the indignity of mounting a legal challenge to my divorce and our marriage, and says that she is doing herself irreparable damage in the eyes of all decent people, then she gets angry: ‘Now I must draw the line there, Bettina, you’re quite mistaken about that,’ and she rattles off the names of a score of friends who are standing by her, and would be with her through thick and thin. Bettina cuts her off; suddenly she’s the stern judge, slender and upright, stressing moral order, natural trust, without which the whole world would fall apart. At that Ganna is alarmed; she sobs pitifully and says she could do nothing else, people were so mean to her, every single day began and ended in despair, no one had as much goodwill as she did, or loved goodness and nobility as she did, she yearned so deeply for a little happiness and a little respect; what was she to do? What did Bettina want? Drop it, says Bettina, stop fighting! And she takes the sobbing woman in her arms, however difficult it is f
or her, feels her wiry hair, the utterly alien skin, the painfully other smell, the smell of unaired clothes that have lain around in suitcases, the smell of cheap powder and cheap scent, of trains and dirty hotel rooms; she takes her in her arms and talks to her sweetly: ‘But you just keep making things worse for yourself. Everything you try to prevent keeps happening. It crumbles away in your hands and when you reach for it it turns against you, don’t you know that?’ Ganna, dissolved in tears, says through her teeth, yes, she thinks so too, she can see what mistakes she has made. She says it audibly and aloud; it’s the first time in her conscious life that she’s admitted to having made mistakes. Bettina pricks up her ears; she appreciates the gravity of what is happening, she thinks something true has happened, she won’t let her go, she spends fully seven hours closeted with her, from one o’clock till eight at night, and they come to a sort of agreement, which is immediately put into writing and signed by them both. Ganna will be paid a part of the sums she is suing for and where the figures have not simply been plucked out of thin air, in instalments (Bettina itemizes the sums in question); the payments for Doris will go to her as previously; I will reach out my conciliatory hand to her, and we will support her in any way possible and cease to cut her. In return, Ganna promises to withdraw all pending claims, to lift the block on my account and other legal distraints, and expedite the divorce in a German court.
After this pact has been concluded, Bettina calls me into the room. Ganna walks towards me, her arms outstretched, wailing: ‘Alexander, you look awful, what’s the matter with you!’ I ignore it, but catch my reflection in the mirror in passing. ‘We’ve been busy,’ says Bettina, and points to the piece of paper with the two signatures on her desk. I look at Bettina, look at Ganna, say nothing. Then Ganna comes out with a plea. She would like some money. She admits glumly that she can’t even pay her bill at the hotel. Bettina shakes her head. ‘First you must do what you promised, Ganna,’ she says, motioning with her chin at the piece of paper on the desk. Meanwhile, not attending to her piercing admonitory look, I had pulled out my wallet and passed Ganna three notes, a full third of the sum she should only have been paid after fulfilling the points on the agreement. Bettina turned away with a despondent look. She understood the idiotic mistake right away. I might have known: if Ganna has money in her hands, she’ll forget the agreement, signature, promise, oath, the lot. Bettina understood my gesture – what was there about me that she didn’t understand – thus: begone, begone, begone; money, begone, woman, begone; but, she wondered, is it possible to be so thoughtless, so unthinking, so destructive with regard to the nervous resources and humanitarian work of another?
I walk Ganna to the door. She stops on the doorstep and looks at me with big eyes full of reproach and complaint. I bow, take her hand and press it to my lips. Bettina is barely able to disguise her astonishment. What is he doing now, she thinks, why is he kissing her hand? Well, this is too much for her to understand. Again, it’s a case of ‘begone, begone, begone’. It’s a farcical gesture of respect, by which Ganna becomes a stranger to me, a stranger in this house, a stranger in my world. An instinctive act in the form of an empty ceremony that means nothing but the last inner break with Ganna.
THE DEVIL RIDES OVER THE RUINS
The upshot of this turbulent happening was – nothing at all. My account was not unblocked and the distraints not taken off. There was no mention of the German divorce. But surely you don’t think Ganna was responsible for the breach of promise? Please. She washed her hands so assiduously in innocence that the bubbles got everywhere. Did she not give her lawyer in Ebendorf ‘appropriate instructions’? Did he not overweeningly, for ‘certain jurisprudential technicalities’, refuse to carry out her instructions? Are you sure that Hornschuch didn’t offer ‘passive resistance’ for obscure motives of his own? Hornschuch? What did he do? We’re not told. The mere claim is sufficient. Then, in a pedantic memorandum to Bettina: ‘Everyone knows that I am entirely scrupulous in all my dealings. I indignantly reject the claim that I didn’t stick to the terms of our agreement; there can be no doubt that in this, as in every previous instance, it was the other party that is in violation.’ Thus Ganna. And finally, the latest sanction, a veritable somersault of condescension: she can only make up her mind about granting the German divorce at the end of a trial year, once she has been convinced that my offer of peace and friendship is in good faith. The badger slips out of its sett, leaves its little malodorous pile and grins to itself when the dogs bark.
Bettina, though, felt like someone who with mortal daring and the last of her strength has carried a person out of a burning house, only to be spat at by them afterwards. She was unable to get over it. She suffered a strangely Bettina-esque collapse, very quiet, very discreet, but every bit as bad as a serious illness.
In sum: fourteen court orders, twenty-two payment orders, eleven forced sales, three official valuations of the Buchegger estate, four suits for defamation, two suits before the wardship authorities, five temporary injunctions, distraint of my car, forced sale of my desk, fifty-seven lawyers’ letters in the space of six weeks, the blocking of my account with my publisher since I am unable to pay Ganna’s monthly allowance any more and my earnings have dwindled to next to nothing; Ganna goes to court against my publisher; Ganna in Berlin, Ganna in Munich, Ganna in the district capital, Ganna in Ebendorf, always unexpected wherever she goes, as though she travelled everywhere by aeroplane; always with sword drawn, always gurgling in the fists of usurers; offers of conciliation, financial plans; yelling I had better make it up to her, or else …
Not one stone was left standing on another.
Ganna’s legal bills alone amount to a fortune. When I think that these monstrous amounts are there to pay for her mercenaries in her war against me, that the money I scrape together month after month literally by the sweat of my brow all goes to the avenging fury to keep her army of lawyers together, then the whole world has turned into a grisly farce, a dance of death starring forty law offices and their entire staffs of typists and stenographers, legal drafters and researchers. When I turn to Ferry and ask him to try and make his mother see sense before it’s too late, he drives up from Milan where he works as an engineer in an automobile factory and implores her by all that’s holy to desist from her lunacy. She goes wild. She accuses him, her own son, of being in Bettina’s employ. When news of it reaches my ears, it makes me feel as though the devil is shaking my living soul out of my body.
But a wonderful thing has also happened since then. From a certain vantage point, it was a big experience for me. It began with Bettina saying to me one day: ‘You know, you’re not up to this. It’s killing you. Take a look at yourself. From now on, I’m going to take the whole matter in hand myself.’ Such resolutions, with her, were the outcome of lengthy and mature reflection. They were always followed up. Once she had taken a decision, she saw it through with implacable consequence. Her force of will has something shining and compelling about it. A busy nature through and through; only facts command her respect; at bottom her spirit doesn’t like dreamers; and I have often noted to my surprise that, while seeming to dream, she was actually thinking – and not in any loose sense of the word, but with philosophical stringency and in strict chains of logic. Suddenly the feeling had come over her that, in spite of her better self, she had led a pampered princess’s life for years of balmy ease, a life on the sidelines; she flushed red with shame. From one moment to the next she changed. That was her gift; that was the miraculous thing about her before which I stood awestruck and uncomprehending. To anyone who lives entirely in contemplation, transformation in action is a mystery. From one moment to the next she dropped everything as if it had never existed – her music, her violin, her books, her correspondence with friends, her pretty things – everything that made life tolerable in the wild uplands, as she had called it in brief fits of irritation. Yes, even little Caspar Hauser was forced to get by on his own; and without holding anything back, without allow
ing herself any pleasures or distractions, she gave herself over to this one thing. She went to work radically. She studied the contracts, the documents, the relevant laws and ordinances. She sat closeted with Hornschuch for hours, whole days at a time. She replied to the writs and the lawyers’ letters, dealt with the courts, with the tax authorities, oversaw the finances and reformed our whole household, as to whose sloppiness her eyes had finally been opened, with the strictness of a paid cost-cutter. Day and night she was on duty, to protect me from ambushes and sudden attacks. Every attack from Ganna she warded off with an adroitness and care as though she had been in jurisprudence for decades. Her clear intellect, her intuitive understanding of real life always showed her the one and only way that could be followed. There was no danger she was afraid of, she shunned no strain, she didn’t try to keep her time, her sleep, her health; the moral courage that filled her to the fingertips seemed to give her an almost masculine appetite for struggle. She went to Vienna to deal with persons of influence whose support might be important; she went to Berlin to take on a lawyer and to put my publisher in the picture as to what really was going on; and however speedily and instantaneously she made up her mind, still she never neglected to tell me what she was doing and to obtain my consent, so that the Ganna corner – suddenly alarmed – weren’t able to claim that she was running my affairs by herself, without my knowledge and approval. She weighed up everything in her mind, she caught the tiniest advantage; with nervous vigilance she did everything to take the wind out of the enemy’s sails. The whole woman was fight and flame. It was a spectacle the like of which I had never seen nor hoped to see.
My First Wife Page 25