My Marriage

by Jakob Wassermann

  Perhaps it was just feminine curiosity a little jealous curiosity that prompted Irmgard to ask one day what it was that fascinated me about Ganna. She had thought about it a lot and had no explanation. At first I had no answer either. Then I talked about Ganna as a sort of ordering principle in my life. A sort of what?’ Irmgard asked in bafflement, ‘Ganna creating order, Ganna?’ I could see that I would have trouble convincing Irmgard of that. After a little further thought, I found the way out, and for the first time articulated my sense of Ganna: I said she was a new type, a sort of female Don Quixote. Irmgard shook her head. It was too much for her. She knew Ganna, Ganna was her sister. The parabola from coffin nail to idealistic battler against windmills didn’t make sense to her. Hesitantly she suggested I was being poetical. I denied it.

  A few days later, Ganna went up to Irmgard, plonked herself in front of her and said, in the tone of a policeman undertaking an arrest:

  ‘I forbid you to flirt with my husband.’

  Irmgard replied spiritedly: ‘I didn’t know Alexander was your prisoner.’

  ‘Find a husband of your own and stay away from mine,’ Ganna went on.

  Irmgard told me afterwards, bitterly, that she had sounded like a market stallholder, standing up for her veggies in a public spat.

  ‘Your attempts to take up with him behind my back are unacceptable,’ Ganna shouted.

  She had a particular way of saying the word unacceptable—the ‘x’ in it was painfully lengthened. Irmgard couldn’t help herself, she began to laugh. She pointed to the door.

  ‘If you want a scandal, you can have it at home. Talk to Alexander. I’m not his nanny.’

  After a livid Ganna had left, Irmgard once again couldn’t do anything about it; this time, she wept.

  After she had related the incident to me, she asked me ironically:

  ‘So where does that leave your female Don Quixote now? Can you tell me where you see her noble folly, my dear brother-in-law?’

  I was stuck. I replied:

  ‘One shouldn’t judge Ganna on the basis of single incidents, you need to see her in the round, as the wild nature she is. Her errors, her passions, her mistakes, they are all founded on a splendid unity. What’s wrong with noble folly? You always made fun of her. The ridiculous is very deep in her, where she fights with phantoms. Everything is a phantom to her: people, the world, you, me, she herself. She doesn’t have a clue about reality.’

  Irmgard looked me in the eye with her thoughtful gaze.

  ‘Poor Alexander,’ she whispered.

  ‘What do you mean, poor Alexander?’

  ‘Oh, I was just thinking . . .’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, perhaps you’re the one who doesn’t have a clue about reality.’

  The ‘human’ side

  I note that Ganna is very anxious about something. She is listening out, spying, she looks at me with the sad scrutiny that actors playing forsaken lovers have onstage. To get the better of me, she asks me little trick questions. If I manage to avoid her traps she tries a bigger, rougher calibre.

  ‘Oh, I am the unhappiest woman in the world!’ she cries out to no one in particular, and criss-crosses the room, as though she wanted to knock down the walls.

  ‘You’re seeing ghosts, Ganna, your unhappiness is all in your mind. Irmgard is much too decent to go in for any dubious escapades.’

  ‘Irmgard? She’s the most unscrupulous person there is.’

  ‘But Ganna!’

  ‘What about you? Would you deceive me?’

  ‘I hardly think so, Ganna.’

  She hurls herself at my chest. ‘Really? Will you swear? Will you swear you haven’t got a relationship with her?’

  I have to laugh. It’s so crude, the way she says it, you feel you’ve been punched on the nose; I’m not quite sure why I’m laughing. She holds my hand between hers, examines the palm and says with an expression as though she longed for me to contradict her tough judgement:

  ‘Your love line is withered. Perhaps you haven’t got a heart, Alexander?’

  ‘That could be,’ I replied, ‘but the one you’re looking at is understanding, so far as I know.’

  ‘Oh, is it?’ she says in relief. ‘Thank God for that.’

  Her conclusion is that she perhaps needs to offer me more, be more alluring. She buys a sophisticated scent for a lot of money and douses herself with about a teaspoonful of it (which is certainly too much).

  ‘I’m not sophisticated enough,’ she laments, with an undertone of pride, ‘I have no gifts as a seductress.’

  ‘No, you’re right about that, Ganna,’ I tell her, and take the opportunity to tell her she should stop slouching about the place as she does. She heeds my advice, and for thirty-five crowns buys a fake Japanese kimono that makes her look like Sarastro in The Magic Flute. The slippers she wears with this prize piece are ancient and filthy, and seeing that she also doesn’t pull up her stockings until and unless she’s getting ready to go out, they look like a pair of sausage skins hanging down her legs, where the kimono stops. When she gets wind of my disapproval, she says crossly: ‘All right, the garter ribbons are torn, but surely that’s nothing to do with the human side.’ Of course not, I never said it was. But the ‘human side’ isn’t a reserve fund that you can draw on in exalted hours, and at others licenses the fake kimono, ragged slippers and baggy stockings . . .

  The scream in the night

  At this time, there is the following development with Ganna. If we’ve had a quarrel or difference of opinion in the day, her resentments and rancour, which are intensifying all the time, accumulate in sleep, until she frees herself of them in an eruption. Then she screams. Usually, a single, piercing, terrible scream, which rings through the entire house and wakes up all its inhabitants. By and by this scream becomes a fearsome event for me, something that cuts into and darkens my life. I wake up, when it rings out, as if to the feeling of a skewer being driven through my head, in one ear and out the other. I lean over her in the dark, I talk to her, I try to calm her down. (Later on, when we were no longer sleeping in the same room, I dashed into her room with shudders running down my spine; sometimes I had the suspicion that with that terrible screaming she was trying to force me back into her bed; not consciously; but so as not to be alone any more; so as not to let me forget that she existed in my life; from envy of my sleep; who could tell what it was with her?) She tells me the dream she awoke from. They are often strange dreams, dreams of a hopeless, betrayed, tormented soul; dreams with a quality of primal darkness, something bizarre like everything in her unconscious. For instance she once dreamed of Irmgard, standing before her with red hair and a bloodied mouth; her mouth was bloodied because she was holding Ganna’s heart in her hand, and biting into it every so often, as into a red apple.

  The person I am holding in my arms to comfort is the mother of my children, not a woman, not my wife. Her accumulated pains, complaints and reproaches are poured out over me in a flood. In her fevered eloquence she loses herself in detail, mixes up things that happened yesterday with others that happened long ago, imagined things with others that are true or half-true, and if I manage to refute one charge, she comes at me with another one that I’ve refuted three times already. It’s as if someone, in ignorance of the pattern on the front side of a rug, were picking at loose threads on the back, and with a sore finger. Her brain is a reservoir for all the murky waters that have poured into it for days past, and are now threatening to overflow. Irmgard, always Irmgard. Where I saw her, how long we spent together, what we talked about.

  ‘If you deceive me, Alexander, I don’t know what I’ll do, I think I’ll kill myself.’

  Followed by the accusation that I undermine her authority with the staff.

  ‘But Ganna, you don’t have any authority with the staff.’

  I cancelled her instructions, she says.

  ‘Of course I do, when they don’t make any sense.’

  Hadn’t I calmly s
tood by the day before yesterday and listened to the impertinence from the Mam’selle?

  ‘I couldn’t very well take your side, you treated her like a dog.’

  This drives her wild.

  ‘Well, really, Alexander, really . . .’

  The murky waters continue to spill out of her without cease; staring out into the darkness, I have the feeling my head is about to burst open. Now the subject has come around to money That my pocket money is never enough for me; that the capital is dwindling from year to year like snow in the sun; that that bastard Fürst has yet to repay a penny of what he owes me. Did I want the children to live in penury? And my own coldness, my lack of love.

  ‘But Ganna, Ganna, how can you! Cold, me?!’

  Yes, wherever I could I would ignore her; accepted invitations from my aristo pals and went round to see them without her. Was it that I was ashamed of her?

  ‘Tell me truly, Alexander, are you ashamed of me?’

  My head is reeling. ‘Go to sleep, why don’t you,’ I say, ‘please, enough . . .’

  Death of her father, insanity of her mother

  In summer 1905, Professor Mevis died of a coronary. Ganna’s grief was dramatic. Thus far, she had been so spoiled by fate that she hadn’t had to think about death at all. How could death suddenly intrude, and bring down the sacred paterfamilias? She embarked on a programme of idolatry towards the departed. She collected relics, pictures of him, sayings of his. She wove legends. She planned to write his life story. She claimed—to the annoyance of the sisters—to be his favourite; she believed it too, implicitly.

  But the man himself was no longer there, the man with the iron fist. The one the mere mention of whose name had made her sit up. The dealing in images and idols was her last respect to him. Now, she need fear no other man.

  Shortly after the Professor passed away, Frau Mevis needed to be institutionalized for a couple of months. The ancient hulk had given way to the pressure of the waters. The removal of the spiritual straitjacket had liberated the illness. Ganna would go and visit her mother once or twice a week. Every time, she pleaded with me to go with her. One day I went. We were taken to a room with barred windows. The madwoman sat in an armchair, furiously shredding a newspaper. She always needed to have something to destroy—letters, a book, an item of clothing. Sometimes she smeared the walls with filth.

  She seemed to take no pleasure in our having come. With hectic shining eyes and hoarse voice, she complained that she was being unlawfully detained; she had written to the Emperor to let him know. Ganna addressed her tenderly; I couldn’t manage to get a word out. Much as I’d sympathized with the old lady in quieter days, I found her repulsive now, really hateful in her illness. The sick spirit doesn’t excite sympathy like the sick body, but fear and revulsion. The thought that some of the blood of this disturbed person was flowing in the veins of my children was appalling. ‘Is he always so quiet, your beloved, or have you done something to him?’ She turned to her daughter with a hideous grimace. Ganna took it as a cue to launch into a paean of praise of me and our marriage. Thereupon the sick woman started to rave about my latest book in embarrassingly hyperbolic terms and to assure me that all the denizens of the establishment had read it with enthusiasm. It was more than I could stand to hear. ‘Let’s go, Ganna,’ I urged. As we stepped through the gate I mumbled goodbye and ran off.

  Two speeds

  There is a lot to this. It reaches into the nerve endings, the mood, the sexual embrace. It’s most clearly visible, of course, in walk and stride patterns. ‘Can’t we go for a walk,’ begs Ganna, ‘forget your appointments, go on, please.’ I consent. But the gladly begun enterprise ends in strife and disagreement. She’s not up to any physical exertion but won’t admit it, and accuses me of tiring her out on purpose, so as to prove her unsuitability. I bite back a reply to the ugly accusation—I can’t always take issue with her, this Ganna dialectic can drive you mad. To go for a walk with her—fine. But I go off the idea as soon as I witness her preparations. She’s not ready in time. I prefer to be unencumbered, she lugs around everything she deems indispensable: a book, a heavy overcoat, a blanket to put on the ground, an umbrella in case it rains, even if the heavens are cloudless, a bag of provisions, notebook, salves and ointments, loose leaves of paper and a straw hat whose elastic she loops round her wrist. She can’t carry it all, I have to help her. She wants to march, she wants to enthuse. I hate raving about scenery; she’s in transports over every green or brown hill. In her delight she links arms with me, but as that compels me to fall in with her stride, which means setting one foot ponderously in front of the other like an invalid, I break free and hurry on ahead. (I walk fast, just as I breathe fast and eat fast and, yes, live fast; how could we ever fall in step like two of a kind? It’s a physical impossibility.) Then Ganna’s bitterness breaks out of her. A woman who has given birth to two babies and breast-fed them both for eight months deserves respect and not uncouth behaviour like mine, the long face, the merciless hurrying and geeing-up. She’s right; I am not sparing enough of her; I let her sense her physical weakness; I am not courtly; it’s all true. If only she hadn’t said the thing about bearing the children, though. To her the bearing and feeding of children is what victorious battles are to a general—praiseworthy deeds for which she deserves a medal, as if children come into this world by some secret ruse of man, and woman, the innocent victim, needs to pay all her life for that vicious breach of trust. Once Ganna has taken a dialectical fortress, she doesn’t stop. What has she done, she rhetorically asks the sky, what has she done to end up living with such a beastly egoist, she who is so absurdly modest, she who—God is her witness—has long ago given up wanting anything for herself, who sits around at home for days on end all alone while he diverts himself in all sorts of ways . . .

  You may be right, Ganna, you may be right, but please, please stop, won’t you, can’t you see people staring at us? She doesn’t stop, all the way home, over supper there’s a zestful complaining, a simple shudder-inducing lamentation. Sometimes I keep quiet, sometimes I explode; I can’t always control myself, above all I can’t control Ganna at all, everything is twofold, two ways of feeling, two ways of looking, two sorts of speed. Finally I can think of nothing else but to sit down at the piano, open a score and with clumsy fingers approximating the trills, the allegros, knock out a Chopin Prelude or a piece from Schumann’s ‘Carnival’. All at once Ganna is transformed. Lying back in an armchair, she listens wide-eyed like a child praying. What possesses me to show off my dire musical gifts? Is it the way the two speeds give rise to discord and arrhythmia? Because she will then beg forgiveness and embrace me, and kneel at my feet? The difference between us was this: she forgot everything from one hour to the next, the way only angels or demons forget; I forgot none of it, for all eternity. And it grew darker and darker in my heart.

  The mystical union

  From the time when Irmgard got engaged to a mining engineer by the name of Leitner, I find the following entries in my diary: ‘For Irmgard I was merely a staging-post in the journey of her desire. Since giving me up, she seems to have given herself up, there is something ever so slightly wizened about her. But if you give yourself up, no God can help you, only the winged soul remains young and full of love, it loves without needing to be loved back, what it has it gives, and its grief comes from fullness, not lack.’ And then again: ‘There is a sadness so extreme, it makes you want to stretch out on the ground and wail; your tongue is sore when you speak; the very air is a crushing weight on your shoulders. And yet everything has merely taken its course. How nice that two people walk freely side by side, when they so clearly belong together. Even in the pain of loss there is a good and bitter taste, and something that so indefinably and lightly oscillated between passion and sibling affection didn’t even shatter. Rather, it leaves a golden memory. My continual nightmares! Never forget last night in the park, our last conversation, the way she stood there, pale and still, and a meteor etched its great pa
rabola across the sky . . .’

  Since the youngest sister Traude has now also married—her husband was a Berlin manufacturer by the name of Heckenast—Irmgard would have felt unhappily alone on the shelf. And so, when Leitner, a nice and clever man, proposed to her, she accepted. My feelings for her had lost none of their original freshness, even though I had already started having relationships with other women. Her image was precious to me. I depended on women. Without the erotic trance, without the magical involvement of the senses, I felt I was only half alive. Irmgard knew it. She never laid a claim to me. The evening cited above, at the end of a long silence, I reached for her hand and pressed it to my lips. She was shocked and gave a little jump. Suddenly, as though talking to herself, she asked:

  ‘How are things with you and Ganna?’

  I replied: ‘Nothing has changed. Nothing can change.’

  And she: ‘Did you never think of leaving her?’

  I shook my head. I said it had never entered my mind; it would feel, I added, as if I were undertaking something against myself.

  ‘But you continually deceive her,’ she whispered with something like contempt, ‘and you continue to sleep with her . . . She has one baby after another . . . How can you?’

  ‘You’re right,’ I conceded glumly, ‘but even so . . . my marriage with Ganna is not in question. Quite apart from the children . . . There’s something . . . I can’t explain what it is, it’s a fact, you have to take it as it is.’

  ‘So the other women, that’s just a pastime?’

  ‘Nonsense, Irmgard. You know perfectly well that I don’t play with people. Please understand, it’s a mystical union.’

  Those were my words. Irmgard replied with a shyly questioning ‘Oh?’ She didn’t believe me. But she had neither the strength nor the need to shake my faith in the ‘mystical union’. Perhaps she didn’t want to be in the company of those who eased my conscience by not questioning the ‘mystical union’. But she was mistaken if she thought such a union didn’t in fact exist. It did. It was put together from guilt and a fear of ghosts. It was steeped in the sense of imminent calamity, because I think I am one of those people who, half-knowingly, half-ignorantly, carry their future destiny around with them in the form of living substance.