My Marriage

by Jakob Wassermann

  But such thoughts, gloomy as they were, were only clustered in the waiting room; within was my fear of Ganna. And that fear darkened my spirits so much that I didn’t dare confess it openly to Bettina. Ganna oppressed me, like an Alp on my chest. All-present, she filled my days and nights. Maybe what I took to be duty, and even now—even now—‘mystical union’ was really based on habit, habitual tussling and bickering, dragging loads and paying off debts? Adventurous flight plans shot through my head, how I might get from one woman to the other. Bettina’s demand, that cleansing either-or, in my confusion struck me as a coarse intervention in my life. If she hadn’t been the dearest person in the world to me, to be without whom was something I could no longer imagine, I would probably have mutinied during the early days of my inner schism and, albeit crushed and broken, would have slunk back into my Ganna hell. Yes, if Ganna had been a rational woman, I thought, persuadable, changeable, if she had some access to the world, or the world to her—how wonderful it would be then to live with Bettina, how lightsome and glad one might be, serenity and joy at last. But the mere prospect of having to talk to Ganna was like a burning dread.

  Still, I had made up my mind. Once the procrastinator has finally decided to act he tends to move with a somnambulistic clank in the chain of events, so that even a misstep can assist him. And since any author will tend to favour his written word, since a letter makes for a certain soothing of agitated nerves and needs fear no interruption, I sat down and wrote Ganna a long letter. First the contents. The impossibility of letting things go on like this. My emotional condition these past several years, the need for me to get out of my bleakness. Urgent plea to Ganna to help me, and not set her face in opposition. I closed with the solemn assurance that neither Bettina nor I was thinking in terms of a divorce, and that all we purposed was to link ourselves in a free association. This disingenuous attempt at calming Ganna was, as Bettina had predicted, a bad mistake, and the cornerstone of all the wretchedness and horror to come.

  A few days later I went to Vienna. As agreed, I stayed with a friend of Bettina’s, Baroness Hebestreit, a young war widow. It wasn’t easy for me to be a guest in the city where my home and my children were. To Ganna, though, it was a kick in the slats.

  Unending

  She didn’t believe it. Yes, she’d read the letter, two times, five times, ten times, but what is a letter. She needed presence. A letter wasn’t presence. A letter is subject to recall or revision. A letter may be written under the influence of others, even under duress (and her certainty about this influence, this duress, turned into an incontrovertible fact in her brain which made it, again, the basis of the coming catastrophe). I had told her in a postscript that I would see her on Tuesday at noon; I was coming down on Monday. Announcing my visit seemed to her nonsensical. What was it supposed to mean? I was going to visit myself in my own house? Absurd. On Monday evening I telephoned her and let her know where I was staying. Now she had her presence: she knew I wasn’t with her. Her last illusions went crashing to the ground.

  Once she had got over the initial shock she thought about what to say to her acquaintances, her in-laws, her sisters, her mother, the children, the servants. It was more than a calamity for her; it was a black spot. She had no idea how she could show herself to people, disgraced as she was. Although she comforted herself by saying it would only be for a matter of days, the staggering thing had happened: I had sought shelter for myself with strangers. The strangers would talk about it with other strangers, and with that she was doomed to dishonour.

  In order to steal a march on the gossips, she had herself put through on the telephone to various men and women who were all very surprised to learn from her that I had returned from the country sooner than expected and, because of urgent and unforeseen repairs to the house, had gone to stay with Baroness von Hebestreit. Even though she was canny enough to slip in this fact with some other snippet of information, or some question she was asking, as if it were a casual matter, of course the very casualness put her interlocutors on guard. She followed the same method of correcting fate and eliminating reality with the children. They didn’t believe her either. When they heard that I was staying somewhere else in town they looked half-stricken. Probably they had been expecting something of the kind.

  In all these undertakings and endeavours I can picture her in front of me, padding round the house in her felt slippers and speaking with lisping voice; how the knowing Ganna hid herself from the imperturbable Ganna, the one heartsore, the other burning with impatience; how she darted, eyes staring, to the telephone whenever it rang; how, after a given time, she paced back and forth in my study incessantly, magicked me back to my desk, drilled through me with her reproachful glances and under her breath muttered her tawdry imprecations that I’d heard so often—that woman . . . May God punish her . . . He will punish her children . . . I’ll destroy her . . . But there was yet another Ganna, who didn’t indulge herself in such shrewish speeches; her eyes ran with tears, and she wiped them away with her clenched fist. When I opened the door and stepped inside, she threw herself against me with a choked cry.

  It’s not possible to record all the discussions I had with Ganna, not even to list them. Among the locations were: the library, the terrace, the garden, Ganna’s bedroom, the street; among the times were: morning, noon, evening and night. All together, they would make up an uninterrupted conversation going over many days. Put on record, they would represent the exhausting and perspectiveless efforts of two people to get something from one another that it wasn’t in the other’s power to give. One seeks to tear a band; the other, seeing belatedly how cracked and holey it is, wants to patch it. One wants to leave the cold hearth; the other claims the fire is still burning, a holy flame, to extinguish which were an act of godlessness. One is coming to terms with the past; the other won’t accept the reckoning and is whimpering for more credit. Conversations as old as the world, as sterile as pebbles, as agonizing as toothache. Here, they were given a new point and terrible amplitude by Ganna’s character and methods.

  I had come to her with the best of intentions. In order to persuade her to willingly relinquish our union, I offered all the kindness of which I was capable. I spoke of the nineteen years of our living together and the obligations those years imposed on her; that she must on no account lightly destroy the memory of those years. Ganna agreed, but wondered why I should not be equally bound by such an obligation. I appealed to her understanding of my writing, my work. Indeed, Ganna countered, that was why she must hold me back from a step that would cause my intellectual ruin. ‘How can you say that?’ I burst out. Aren’t you ashamed to be so presumptuous?’ She could trust her feelings, she replied gnomically; never had she erred when it was a matter of my welfare and the course of my life.

  She didn’t understand. She didn’t want to understand. We got nowhere.

  Never would I take away from her my friendship, I declared, if she showed herself equal to this hour of destiny. She was shaken. She howled. It was so hard, she said, so terribly hard. Of course it was hard, I put in, but she mustn’t deprive me of my right to manage my own life; she must have learned and read enough of me to understand that a man’s ordained path couldn’t be diverted by wantonly digging it up. She agreed, sobbing, but in the same breath reached for the argument that she had to fight for her children. To which I said they were my children too. Then she said: ‘But you don’t care about them when you’re blinded by passion.’ However insulting that was, I mastered myself and replied that the children weren’t going to be taken away from her any more than I was going away from them myself; if only for their sake she had to behave with dignity and humanity—they had already witnessed far too much in the way of quarrels and strife.

  ‘You’re to blame, it’s your fault!’ she cried.

  ‘Maybe so,’ I allowed, ‘even though there’s no single responsibility in these things.’

  I put it to her that I wouldn’t easily get over my disappointment with he
r if she stuck to her unworthy perspective; surely she had the potential for good- and great-heartedness in her, she had read the poets, loved painting, loved philosophy; I believed in her, had always believed in her, but what had come of all that? She blinked in despair. She was so all alone in the world, she lamented, as she wrung her tiny, wizened, always-old-looking hands, she didn’t have a soul she could rely on. Solitude would strengthen her, I offered her Jesuitically; I needed her; I had a mission for her; distance would take the edge off the shadows and gild her sufferings. She was moved. She gave me her hand and promised with trembling voice to do all that I said; I didn’t know her; I had no idea of what sacrifices I would find her capable. I kissed her brow with gratitude. What I failed to notice was that my great effort at persuasion succeeded only in persuading her that she must not leave a man who addressed her in such lofty, deeply felt language. ‘What shall I do? Just tell me what to do,’ she whimpered. I: there could surely be no doubt about that. She: she would willingly pour out her heart’s blood for me, but there was one thing that in the name of God I must never ask of her: a divorce. I: she need only to relax her grip, bear the new condition with dignity and not burden me with a responsibility that was strictly speaking hers.

  This last thing I should not have said; with that I gave her a recipe by which she slowly poisoned me. She had always been a loyal friend to me, she said, beginning again; there was nothing petty about her, not a bone in her body; others were, she wasn’t; and that other woman who made her suffer for no reason—

  ‘For no reason, Ganna? Now you’re tearing down everything we’ve just laboriously built up!’

  ‘Because you’re thinking of a divorce,’ she breathed, ‘and divorce would be the death of me.’

  I caught her burning eye. In my foolishness, I thought the moment had come for me to remind her of the oath she had sworn to me on the lakeshore nineteen years before.

  ‘You swore by God to let me go if I asked; don’t you remember, Ganna?’

  ‘Of course, of course I do,’ she said, gulping.

  ‘Well, then, was that a meaningless vow?’

  She cast her eyes down. She knew perfectly well that a vow given by an inexperienced girl couldn’t really matter, but at the same time she understood that, morally, it couldn’t be denied.

  ‘If you’re fair, you’ll have to admit that I kept my word,’ she said at last, with her martyr’s upward look (she had avoided the word ‘vow’ I noted), ‘or have you any complaints about the freedom you’ve been given, you Don Juan, you.’ And stroked my hand in a motherly sort of way.

  It was unending. Ganna couldn’t get enough of the dispute. It was pleasure, pain, spur, hope. She talked the lungs out of her body. To secure an extension of the debate, she would appear to give ground at crucial moments only, an hour later, to take back all her concessions. When I left she would accompany me, often for long distances, tried to keep pace with me, to disarm my old complaint that she was too slow, and breathlessly blabbed out her reasons, false reasons, promises, complaints and litanies of my sins in ever new versions. She couldn’t understand what I saw in Bettina. Bettina was just a woman, and—quite honestly—no better than Ganna. Couldn’t I tell her what it was about her that had turned my head; perhaps she might be able to offer me the same thing; maybe there was some trick to it; she would try and learn it; she was willing to take instruction. Every night I fell into bed like a dead man.

  The counter-image

  Bettina had gone back to the city a week after me, to wind up her household. One evening I called on her in her apartment and found her in the half-cleared dining room in her furs. The weather had turned cold, and she had run out of wood and coal. Her children were already in Ebenweiler in the Wrabetz villa. I kept my own coat on. There was no need to tell her what was currently going on in my life. She knew it anyway. She could tell from looking at me. I asked after Paul. She said he had left. ‘Where to?’ I asked. ‘To the factory,’ she replied. I noted a brittleness in her, like an over-wound violin string, jingling. She had accompanied him to the station, she added; the train had left at half past five. Then she abruptly asked if I was cold. ‘Yes, I am,’ I said. She ran out of the room and came back with four pairs of cobbler’s lasts, which she took out of already packed pairs of boots. Kneeling down, she set light to a small pile of paper and put the lasts on it. Since they were made of hard wood they produced some heat after a while, and I praised Bettina for her skill. ‘Once we burn the table and chairs it’ll be quite cosy in here,’ I said. She smiled vaguely. I eyed her uncertainly. I wondered if she had had a falling-out with her husband and asked her how things stood with him.

  ‘How things stand? They don’t,’ she said.

  ‘How do you mean, they don’t? What did he say?’

  She didn’t reply immediately; she got out a whole lot of empty boxes and crates, and fed them to the failing fire. Suddenly she said, with a strangely squeaky treble:

  ‘As of twelve o’clock today we are divorced.’

  Bright tears sprang from her eyes and ran down towards her mouth. I stared at her. So, it is possible, I thought, real people can do it.

  ‘What about the children?’ I asked.

  ‘He left them with me. Of course.’

  I stared at her and shook my head in wonderment and envy.

  The succession of fictions and phantasms

  One sleepless night, Ganna had a saving idea. Early the next morning she sent a messenger with a note to me where I was staying. She told me to come right away; she had something to tell me that would remove all our difficulties at a stroke. What was it? I couldn’t believe my ears. A ménage à trois. She meant it. She was besotted with the idea.

  ‘Oh, come on, Ganna,’ I said glumly, ‘that’s childish. What world are you living in? That’s not a serious suggestion.’

  She was offended and perplexed.

  ‘Why not?’ she retorted. ‘Think of Count von Gleichen.’

  References to fairy tales wouldn’t get us anywhere, I interrupted her in annoyance.

  ‘Fairy tales? I don’t see that at all. It’s just an example. Aren’t we modern people?’

  ‘If by that you mean an unappetizing combination of feelings and a ridiculous situation, then: no.’

  Bitterly, she called me a bourgeois who didn’t have the courage to try out in his life what he was happy to promulgate in his books. I couldn’t remember exactly having set Count von Gleichen up on a pedestal, but that’s what Ganna seemed to think.

  She persisted with her plan. While she stalked up and down excitedly, still unmade-up, in a grey woollen jacket whose sleeves went down to her knuckles, she talked wildly into space:

  ‘With goodwill, everything is possible; everyone has to make concessions in a case like ours; why should one person get everything he wants? My rights antedate hers; Bettina needs to learn to suppress her egoism; we have enough room in the house, God knows.’

  I didn’t speak, picked up a book, flicked through its pages, and didn’t speak.

  ‘Let me talk to her about it,’ she went on enthusiastically, ‘if she’s not completely lost her head, she’ll surely see it my way.’

  She had it figured like this: Bettina would take on external, representative functions that accorded with her ambition, while she herself kept the reins on the household; in the case of conflicts—but of course there wouldn’t be any, she had the firm resolve to be wise and considerate—in the case of conflicts, then it would be up to me to decide.

  Even today I don’t know whether Ganna actually believed in that Gleichen idyll or not. There’s no point in racking my brains over it either, since there is no line to be drawn between her dreams and her doings; her special kind of imagination does without even that dream logic that the most garbled dreams have. Her dream world was perfectly autonomous. The events she moved among were products of waking deliriums. Each day afresh she started out on the fantasy of the ménage à trois, and with the subtlest arguments sought to present
its advantages to me. In my impatient refusal she saw the effect of Bettina’s malicious whisperings. As if I’d so much as breathed a syllable of any of this, as if I wouldn’t have prayed for the earth to swallow me up if she ever got to hear of it; as if I hadn’t kept making superhuman efforts to conceal from Bettina what Ganna looked to me to do, so as not to betray the woman I had lived with to the woman I wanted to live with.

  Once Ganna finally accepted the hopelessness of her endeavours, she presented things as though her noblest intentions had been undercut. Her logic went: if the two refuse the solution that she, Ganna, so selflessly offered, they must have compelling reasons, reasons that involve hurting Ganna, ruining Ganna. What could be more plausible than the suspicion that Bettina Merck had it in mind to acquire ownership of her house? She had already had that in view when she launched the Klothilde Haar conspiracy. I, so endlessly obliging, was the cat’s-paw in this, because that sophisticated Circe could wrap me round her little finger. Then Bettina will play the sole, exclusive mistress, will lead the life of a princess and send the vanquished Ganna packing. Yes, that’s the way things will be unless she takes timely counter-measures. So clearly could Ganna see the picture of a triumphantly enthroned Bettina in her, or Alexander Herzog’s, house that she would sometimes groan out loud and grind her teeth. When she heard that Bettina had quietly obtained a divorce, this (far from giving her pause as an example that might be followed) only confirmed her in her grim suspicion and she was filled with dread. Reality had slipped away from under her, but then again she didn’t really need it: everything was the way she imagined it in her free-floating fantasy. The house was in danger—the house, a concept that swelled in her mind to dream proportions, the concept of ownership, of rootedness, of security cast in stone.