The marriage contract
Between Christmas and New Year’s Day, a few days before the beginning of 1901 and hence of the twentieth century proper, I was summoned by the Mevis family solicitor to his office at a given hour. When I turned up the Professor was already there, the solicitor, an efficient busybody with the face of a lance corporal, greeted me with a little show of ceremony, and on a leather sofa where he had cleared himself a little space free of legal files and law magazines sat the notary, with a Virginia cigar in a corner of his mouth. The last-named handed me a calligraphically perfect document—at that time typewriters were not yet in common use in law offices—and asked me to peruse it. I tried hard to oblige. The dowry was spelled out in figures; but the rights and duties of the respective spouses were described in utterly opaque legalese. There was also something about revocability in the event of a dissolution. I wasn’t familiar with the word. Since I didn’t ask, no one felt called upon to tell me. I was bored. I signed. I thought: the Professor is a man of honour, why shouldn’t I sign? It seemed unreasonable to me to ask questions. Twenty-five years later, I understood what it was I had put my name to. A quarter of a century had to pass before the light went on and I saw I had been duped. In the spirit of family, of course, and loyalty. I could have asked. I could have gone to a lawyer myself. It never occurred to me to do so. It was my first encounter with a notary. A notary, I thought, is the embodiment of the law; this is all above board. I had to pay for thinking so.
Riemann
With surprise and dismay I saw my friends begin to withdraw from me, Fürst and Muschilov as well, though they at least offered excuses when I suggested a meeting. I sensed the reason of course: they disapproved of my marriage, there were all sorts of gossipy rumours about Ganna going the rounds, one man even sent me an indignant letter in which—almost like Fedora—he terminated our friendship and made the absurd remark that I was about to throw my life away. I tossed the letter into the fire. What pained me more was that Eduard Riemann had been avoiding me for some time. I wanted to clear the air, and since I knew he went every evening to a chess club of which I too was a member, I went along there one night quite late, asked him into a room where we were alone together and had it out with him.
‘I know what you hold against me,’ I started violently, ‘our mutual friend Fedora has set you against me. I don’t understand. It’s a conspiracy. What has Ganna done to incur your disfavour? Isn’t it enough if I love her? Do I need your consent?’
‘You’re asking the wrong questions, my dear Alexander,’ he replied with his strangely nasal, droning voice, ‘that’s not the situation. You have a couple of dozen friends, here and elsewhere, who are following your career with very specific expectations. High expectations, too. To them the thought of you selling yourself—I’m sorry to put it so bluntly—is just hard to take.’
‘Me selling myself? Riemann! You’re not serious. Selling myself! Think about what you’re saying!’
‘All right, what are we to think? It doesn’t seem to us that Ganna Mevis is the right woman for you.’
‘How not?’
‘That’s not easily explained. We’re fearful for you. You’re going off on a tangent. You’re in the wrong setting. We’re afraid you’re acting against your better instincts.’
‘Let me tell you, Riemann, there is no price for which I would, as you put it, sell myself. Don’t you know me at all? Do I need to say that?’
‘No, you wouldn’t do it directly.’
‘And how would I do it indirectly?’
‘The forms are often veiled, but the possibilities of self-deception are limitless.’
‘I have honestly and strenuously examined myself.’
‘I believe you. Even so: undo what you’ve done. Go to India, go to Cape Town, go anywhere. If you don’t have the money, I’ll lend you whatever you need. I’ll take the responsibility for settling the matter.’
‘My God! What are you saying! What nonsense! It’s too late for any of that.’
‘I don’t agree.’
‘I . . . I can’t live without Ganna.’
‘That’s a different matter, but I don’t think that’s true either.’
‘What’s this all about, Riemann? I’m not welded onto her. If things go wrong, I can always end it.’
Riemann looked at me with strange, benevolent scepticism. ‘You never were much of a psychologist, Alexander,’ he said. ‘Do you really think you can get free of her?’
I was in consternation; I felt like fizzing up in rage, but he went on calmly:
‘And one more thing, my friend. Did you ever take a good look at the mother? That woman is disturbed. And that’s putting it mildly. With that in her genes . . . True, it’s a large family . . . but Ganna is on the downward line. Her psychic balance . . . I’m not sure . . . if you had eyes to see . . . ’
The innuendo was painful to me. I pushed the argument away from me. Unfortunately, that’s always been my way with inconvenient arguments.
‘I don’t want to think about it,’ I said, ‘it’s going too far, this is meddling in God’s affairs.’
‘We can’t help ourselves, my friend; that’s His way of setting us in motion.’
I didn’t go to bed that night. First I walked the streets in wind and snow, and then I sat till dawn in a bar on the outskirts of town, among hauliers and market women.
Wedding presents
I stood with Ganna in front of the pushed-together tables where our wedding presents were displayed. There were garish sofa cushions with Secession patterns, eccentrically shaped lamps, twisted bronzes, metal frog and dog candle holders, models of the Stefansdom and the Tomb of the Medicis as paperweights, nymphs with nozzles in their heads as perfume dispensers, Venetian gondolas as desk ornaments, gilded pine cone picture frames. And then there were useful, practical things, books, silver, porcelain, vouchers for linens and furniture. We weren’t going to set up house immediately; we intended to go travelling for a year first. I was delighted with the presents. I had never had such a warehouse full of possessions, real possessions. All of it seemed beautiful and good. I didn’t think it was real, but then what was real to me? Not even my shirt or my pen. The continual nodding association with people who took these fata morgana things for real was incredibly sapping. Not just that either. Sometimes I got the sense that it was killing something within me. I couldn’t say what, but it was certainly killing something. It was no more than logical that they couldn’t help taking true things for illusions; that was their nature. Here, at the present table, behind all this foolish pleasure in things, I was tormented for the first time by the fear that Ganna might have something to do with the little killings that I was supposed to agree to and introduce into my life. What else did the light in her eyes signify, or her jubilation? Certainly she lives with a divided consciousness, half among human beings, half up in the stars. A princess, getting hitched. A fairy-tale creature floating off into new realms of bliss. She no longer recognizes anyone. She mixes up faces and objects, and vice versa. If you wake up in the morning with the feeling that you’re a rose, or a sun-struck cloud, then you can’t speak in a normal way with human beings, then your speech is bound to be a little haywire. Pseudo Gothic, pseudo Baroque, pseudo Renaissance—what did it matter? They were proof of love, proof of victory. ‘Look at this,’ she said tenderly, ‘this is from Auntie Jetta, and this is from Uncle Adalbert, and this is from Court Councillor Pfeifer, isn’t it sweet of her to have thought of us!’ And Ganna’s delight communicated itself to me as though I’d been given a magic potion to drink.
The wedding
And that worked on the day of the wedding as well, which was a snowy day in January. In my memory I have it as a day also of indescribable noise, for hours and hours. Squawking women, hearty male voices, clatter of plates, chairs being dragged, champagne corks popping, smells of meat, sweet and sour tastes on my tongue, incessant opening and closing of doors, and coming and going, dutiful telegrams, hands I
have to shake, dry and moist, bony and fleshy, warm and cold, rough and smooth, supple and stiff. A humiliating and hurtful wedding, because official, formal language presumed to curtail personal freedoms: like reading a convict the prison rules. The image of Ganna, furthermore, done up in white, and seeming to float over the ground, and then sat at the table with the oddly shameful, conniving smile of a conventional bride. An image of her mother, wrapping her arm round my shoulder, pulling me over to a window seat where, surrounded by noise and bustle, with timid wandering eyes and an alarming laugh, she proceeded to tell me strange, unexpected things, a ghost at a party, heard by no one and ignored by all except me. This last was an insistent, drilling sort of impression.
Then the speeches. The brothers-in-law, showing off their culture and their reading; the friends of the house, who had taken pains to be droll; a colleague of the Professor’s from the philosophy department, who in a thunderous voice, as for the opening of a monument, praised Ganna’s virtues; a military man, an actual general—I had never yet shared a meal with a general—who toasted ‘the splendid and promising young groom’ and expressed the wish that he might ‘continue to walk the paths of science and art’. All in all, when I think about it today, it was a concentrated parody of the social mores of the epoch. Life of a comfortable middle class condensed into a matinee performance, with musical accompaniment from a mildly soused four-piece band. But I didn’t at all feel myself to be a dispassionate observer. No, I was in play, I was active and engaged. When at last the six daughters and the established sons-in-law plus half a dozen assorted grandchildren filed past the Professor’s chair to kiss him on the forehead after his pithy concluding speech; when he then got to his feet, towering in their midst, the kingly patriarch and all-powerful overlord of the kraal, so that one imagined the future of the clan assured well into the next century, by which time his person would have become mythical and emblematic; and when Ganna, overcome by the greatness of the historical moment, sank against his chest and, sobbing, thanked him for everything he had given her, then I myself was moved, and looked at the red-bearded patriarch as if to my own patron.
There followed a hasty departure, drawing deep breaths of freezing air, the drive to the station in a bumping carriage, alone with Ganna, who was now Ganna Herzog.
THE AGE OF CERTAINTIES
Teething troubles of a couple
We travelled the length of Italy, with many stops, from the Tyrolean Alps down to Sicily. We were very happy.
I had never spent more than three days cooped up with another human being, male or female. Just as well I was used to small spaces and didn’t feel constricted. We had agreed to travel on a very modest footing. Ganna thought it was wonderful to have a husband who carried his business around in his head and was able to settle his practical affairs in ten minutes or so at a restaurant table.
The new insouciance may have been a kind of dream; still, it entered my life as something unfamiliar. When a burden borne over many years suddenly slips off, one’s state afterwards is not automatically easier. There is a period of adjustment. Different breathing is required. I had always had all the solitude I required; now I had none, neither by day nor at night. Ganna was always present, wanting to be seen and heard, protected and loved. And to love me back. If it were possible to dig love out of the ground, she would have dug it out, if only to prove to me how inexhaustible her supplies of it were.
But various things happen that are hard to avoid when your world is a room with two beds in it, and the space by the door and in the corners is all taken up with your suitcases. For instance, I’m sitting quietly reading a book. So as not to disturb me, Ganna creeps through the room on tiptoe. But then—oh dear!—there is a chair in her way, which she manages to upset. Crash. Or she knocks over a glass of water. Or a suitcase lid bangs shut. Thousand anxious apologies. She is a little unlucky. If she is unlucky, you have to comfort her. She lives in a permanent state of war with things. She loses her purse; horror. She drops a letter through someone’s front door instead of in the letterbox; a mobile pillar of wailing. She needs comfort. It’s not possible to be angry with her when she warbles up to complete strangers as if they were all her uncles and aunts; she’s just made a mistake; she’s absent-minded. Or when she takes as many books with her on a walk as you would need to pass a university exam. It’s funny. You have to laugh. She sees that you have to laugh and she laughs along. But that doesn’t mean that she does anything differently the next time. She lives in a world of Ideals. She’s like the famous birds who try to peck at Apelles’ famous painted grapes. I try to bring a little order to her being, a little consistency. It’s hard. Ganna’s is not one of those adaptive natures that are geared for experience. Experience is as baffling as, say, pain. I have a sense that I need to mould her. I ought to give her a form, because she has none. It took me a very, very long time to understand that it wasn’t possible to form her. Not that she was too soft or too hard. Soft things and hard things can still be shaped. But something that is in between, that flows, that is jellied, that is forever changing its nature—that cannot be formed.
Little soul
In her innocence she thought she just needed to give herself to the man she loved to make him happy. There wasn’t much subtlety about her. She was incapable of giving herself completely simply because her will was never entirely extinguished. She wanted to be will-less, but that was as far as it went: that was the seed of the calamity. By temperament, she was a force of nature, proof against any civilizatory intentions. All her life she took it for a brutal meddling in her character if anyone tried to rein in or refine the elemental strain in her. The very intention was baffling to her. And the drive, the blood was the only thing to keep in parlous balance her ethereal intellect and her earthiness. I understood intuitively that it would be wrong of me to rob her of its innocence.
Nor was I the man to tame her. I had such profound respect for the thus-and-thus-alone of any living creature that I couldn’t summon up the courage to take the darkest innermost parts of a human and shape them and light them. It’s not possible to be an educator if you have diffidence in your veins. Nor was I masterful in love, not least because my senses in their guilty darkness were unfree. All this requires to be said: it’s the hidden source of all that follows, otherwise no one could understand how things took their subsequent course.
Guilt: the word makes me flinch, but from the very beginning there was guilt in my relationship with Ganna. I never felt any passion for her. I didn’t realize it right away. It took me a while to understand. Once I had understood, I had to fight off Ganna’s sudden surges of passion with secret dread. She misunderstood me. She had to misunderstand me, because otherwise she would have fallen out of the sky. I couldn’t allow that to happen. I had to see that she stayed up there for as long as possible. It wasn’t so terribly hard. She took refuge in fantasy. I was Robert Browning and she was Elizabeth Barrett. The model of a highly intellectual marriage made it possible for her to reinterpret my growing reluctance to give her the much-craved protestations of love as a metaphysical union. I had to admire the tenacity with which she managed to live in a fantasy. My admiration for her was altogether undiminished. I was able to discuss all my plans with her. Within a very short time she had mastered all the technical expressions of a hard-boiled novelist. When news I had from Germany left me in no doubt that my book was not only a critical but also a popular success (though that didn’t lead to any great earnings for me, seeing as I’d changed publishers, and my former publisher was insisting on a large transfer sum and the return of unearned advances), I noticed that she lost the calm and equilibrium that had previously cladded her being like a sort of enamel. It appeared she was no longer so certain of me. I asked her directly if that was so. Reluctantly, she admitted it was. She thought it was her duty to keep the lures of the world and the blandishments of fame away from me. ‘Whatever for?’ I asked in astonishment. ‘What are you afraid of?’ She said she had no guarantees of a futu
re. ‘Do you need guarantees, Ganna?’ Of course, she replied, the present wasn’t enough. ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘you can’t carry me around with you like a kangaroo her joey?’ Yes, she could, that was exactly what she wanted, she replied with her sweetly cunning smile. She wanted security. She hungered for more security. She admitted it. I stroked her hair. I called her little soul, the tenderest endearment the German language has to offer.
Bank account and anangke
In Taormina we stayed in a hole-in-the-wall dive. There were bedbugs. The mosquitoes ate us alive, there were no nets. At night Ganna burned all sorts of incense, but that only made us choke with the reek and smoke. If we’d had just two lire a day more to spend, we could have lived somewhere human. Ganna didn’t want to know. Keeping to budget was her biggest anxiety. Budget was one of the magic words that turned up on the horizon shortly after we were married, like so many glow-worms in the gathering dark. The concept ‘budget’ was linked to the concept ‘bank account’. ‘Bank account’ was the biggest and mightiest of the glow-worms, and of course another magic word. Her father had dinned it into her never on any account to eat into her capital, not even to use a dime more than we had from the interest. ‘Someone who eats into his capital will stop at nothing,’ had been the Professor’s awful watchword. Ganna was now parroting it. Her father, more revered the further he receded into the distance, was so to speak the high priest of ‘capital’, a revered fetish, and he kept his mighty hand over the mysterious institutions of those tamper-proof investment papers that were the basis of the bank account. So many securities.
My Marriage Page 5