My Marriage

by Jakob Wassermann

  She lived on the telephone and with her warbled throaty ‘Hallo-o’ talked to the various lawyers, including Dr Chmelius. He was not able to refuse her pleas for money any longer. The conversation was always the same. ‘But Madam, I transferred a substantial sum only last week.’ To which Ganna, with breathtaking argumentation: she had had some unanticipated expenses, some ‘imprevus’, a term she very much favoured, given that her whole life was in the sign of the unexpected, and she refused to allow him to meddle in her finances. But each time she was really stuck she would pack her housekeeping book under her arm and drive in to Chmelius in the city, to show him column by column how carefully and modestly she was keeping house. Like all writing, it was sacrosanct for her, founded in her fetishistic faith in words and figures. The accounts in her book were just as unassailable to her as her passbook with the Reichsbank.

  In the same manner, she treated every one of her missives as a Papal Bull. ‘Did you not get my conciliatory letter of the 16th?’ she might write. ‘I’m waiting for your decision on my very modest proposals. It seems to me, my letters aren’t reaching you. Please wire back to confirm that you have received and read the letter in question.’ And so we had the myth of Bettina intercepting letters. It was a charge that could not be defended. Dr Chmelius was a plant. She could never forgive me for having turned that man into her beadle, she said; that had thoroughly opened her eyes. I mustn’t count on a divorce any more; practically it was impossible and morally it was unhuman. Only if I sent Dr Chmelius packing could there be a chance of resuming negotiations. If I continued to knuckle under to those parties terrorizing me, I had wrecked things with her. My hopes had, in any case, gone down to nil. If Jesus Christ in person had turned up to represent Bettina and me, he wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  There was no peace for her anywhere; not in any house, any room, with any person, in any book, in any bed. She had problems with her gall bladder, her heart, her breathing; she consulted specialists and quacks, used ointments and teas, scooted off to Karlsbad, to the Adriatic, to her sister Traude in Berlin; spent the whole of one day on her feet, claimed to be dying the next; but that illness was another fiction, it was refuge from her ghastly restlessness.

  In the chaos of her affairs, the failure of the film review barely showed. The printer had sued for his outlay. Presumably she had taken on more debt in the effort to partly buy him off. She told Dr Chmelius she hadn’t. But where would all that money have gone? A black hole. Did she have secret acquaintances she spent it on, leeches who sucked it out of her? Was it just the sinister will-to-destruction compounded of things hard to itemize: various impulses of love, hate, jealousy, self-assertion, self-destruction and wish-fulfilment? Dr Chmelius told me he had done the sums and informed her that in the past year more than half my income had gone to her; whereupon she had hissed at him and talked of deception and cheating—she knew from reliable sources that I had earned five times what I claimed. I said:

  ‘I know, I’ve heard that sort of talk, but how can I convince her that she’s wrong? How do you ever persuade someone that you don’t own something when they believe you do?’

  Dr Chmelius replied gloomily: ‘I’m afraid you can’t persuade the lady of anything at all. Except by jumping back into bed with her. Not otherwise.’

  And so the conversations Ganna, seeming willingly, agreed to were all without exception shadow-boxing. In her endless nights of scheming and pondering she came up with three stipulations whose impossibility she surely couldn’t for one moment doubt but which she needed so as to play the innocent afterwards, once the meetings had failed, so that she could say to herself: I have done everything with the best will in the world—the tricksters and the double-crossers are you lot.

  Since these three points are in a certain sense unique ‘sanctions’, let me list them. First, I am to renounce parental authority over my younger daughter. A legal innovation of Ganna’s; no jurisdiction on earth would have ever recognized such a renunciation. Second, for each daughter I had to deposit a substantial sum for a dowry. I had no idea where I was to take such a sum from. The kraal decided it. The kraal’s imperative was: provide for your brood, man; first and foremost your brood, we don’t give a hoot about what happens to you; let the deserter work himself to the bone; let him fail to come to his senses; let him and his mistress fail ever to free themselves from the shackles. Hence: provide, provide until your dying day. And third: Bettina was to sign a fully notarized agreement that she would never stand in the way of my spending part of each year with Ganna. Ganna saw such an arrangement not only as legally binding, and as practicable; she also saw in it a way of dragging her rival into the courts whenever she chose. When Dr Chmelius was presented with these three textbook instances of Ganna’s garrotting methods, he cried out: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in all the years I’ve practised, and I’ve seen some things.’

  Ate

  In the course of the proceedings which the printer of the film review had brought against Ganna, there was a falling-out between her and Dr Schönlein. I never found out the exact cause; I only learned that certain scenes had taken place in Schönlein’s office, and that one day the lawyer threw in his power of attorney. She complained bitterly to Dr Pauli, who sought to calm her and, seeing as Dr Grieshacker had long since given up representing her, suggested she take her case to Dr Stanger-Goldenthal, a known tiger at the Bar and a specialist in divorce cases. This was exactly the man for Ganna. Thus far, if I may so put it, she had not yet found the lawyer of her dreams. Now, Dr Stanger-Goldenthal filled the vacancy to a nicety. He knew at a glance what Ganna wanted from him. He sniffed a great cause. It is in the nature of the law that it keeps those who have recourse to it in suspense, until they have lost their fortune, their life and their belief in right and justice. All this, admittedly, applies more to me than to Ganna. She had already shown herself to be insensitive to evil; whatever she had had by way of mind, dignity, pride and heart had already drowned in that circle. ‘Just leave it to me, Madam,’ said Dr Stanger-Goldenthal, once he had read the file, ‘we’ll get everything to come out nicely.’ From his expressions Ganna saw that she had nothing to fear. She sensed a twin soul. A great weight fell from her bosom. The reverence with which she used to speak about this man in the early days had something cultish about it.

  Dr Chmelius was dismayed by her choice. He made no secret of his worry from me; he had had a few brushes with Herr Stanger-Goldenthal himself. He even tried to warn Ganna against employing him. But Ganna smiled slyly, in the manner of someone who has the philosopher’s stone and is being told that its possession will cost them dearly. Dr Chmelius went as far as he could; he went to Dr Pauli to discuss the case with him. Since he put a written record of their conversation in the file, I am able to reproduce it in its essentials.

  ‘It will not have escaped you,’ he began, ‘that Madam Ganna by her inscrutable and unpredictable behaviour is tormenting my client, is harming his ability to work and thereby, as the saying goes, is killing the hen that lays the golden eggs.’

  ‘And yet the only person who can secure a divorce from Ganna Herzog is Alexander Herzog,’ replied Dr Pauli.

  ‘Maybe in two or three years,’ Dr Chmelius quipped back, ‘maybe . . .’

  ‘The mistake is,’ Dr Pauli replied, ‘that the other side claims it wasn’t a happy marriage. That upsets and provokes the wife.’

  ‘Why would Herr Herzog wish to end a happy marriage?’

  ‘External influences. It’s perfectly clear.’

  ‘My dear colleague; I do hope you haven’t allowed yourself to be influenced by a fanatic.’

  ‘And what if I have? Isn’t a fanatic an ideal match for a poet? Madam Ganna has shown me countless letters of his. Love letters. The genuine article. She has shown me printed and handwritten dedications in his books that pay honest tribute to her qualities as a companion and colleague. I don’t think you have a leg to stand on.’

  ‘Is it for us to judge the moral position
s of our clients, Herr Pauli? You know as well as I do that the past can be tricked up to look more seductive than it was.’

  ‘But there can be no doubt that the Herzogs’ marriage would not have been set at risk without the intervention of Frau Merck.’

  ‘Of course not. That’s just the way things happen in this world. It’s destiny. Let’s face facts.’

  ‘Ganna’s hurt and loyalty are facts as well. They demand respect, especially if your name happens to be Alexander Herzog.’

  ‘Very good. So what should he do?’

  ‘Go back to her.’

  ‘Back to prison? Back to his cell?’

  ‘Oh, come. We’re all of us prisoners and convicts. Aren’t you?’

  ‘And the woman he loves?’

  ‘At his age, you don’t put your name and reputation and the future of three children at risk over an affair.’

  ‘I don’t see what his reputation has to do with it.’

  ‘A man like Alexander Herzog has another reputation, in addition to his bourgeois one. Doesn’t he know the meaning of dishonour? Does he mean to explode bourgeois order, and tread on the toes of the Weltgeist?’

  Dr Pauli paced back and forth in agitation and laughed a little nervous laugh. Dr Chmelius was at a loss for words. He had tried to come to an understanding with a fellow lawyer and left speechless and baffled, leaving a man who had agreed to represent the other party, and whom he basically couldn’t understand. At that point the grizzled old sceptic remembered something, and he smirked to himself when he told me that Dr Pauli’s own marriage had been singularly unhappy and that his wife, whom he still loved, had left him for another man. The position he took towards me, therefore, for all his professionalism, was nothing but a perfidious act of gender retaliation.

  A week later, Dr Pauli suffered a stroke and died. He was sincerely mourned by many people. Ganna was stunned by the death of her friend. She lay in bed for three days straight. It was during these days of grief that she found the time and opportunity to write a lengthy memorandum, incorporating all the unsettled questions between us. She sent it to Dr Stanger-Goldenthal for him to rephrase in legalese, which Ganna at that stage had not mastered, as she would later. It was nevertheless a piece of writing of considerable lawyerly and argumentative skill. Her lawyer congratulated her on it. When he had finished polishing it up, giving it the requisite qualities of ambiguity and opacity, it was ready for Dr Chmelius and me to bite our teeth out on.

  Not a single chink of light. A hopeless tangle of proposals, measures, discussions, euphemisms, accusations, conjectures, cunning distortions, coarseness and hair-splitting. The lawyers inundate each other with letters, inundate their clients with letters, inundate each other with more letters. Typewriters clatter, telegraphs click, telephones bleat, messengers run—each of the parties involved is raking it in, all except the one that has to pay for such endeavour, the costs of the materials and the nervous strain with his own dearly acquired money, his tranquillity, his blood and his life, and who gets nothing in return except—more paper.

  And always at the back of everything—Ganna, unmoved, immovable and brazen, the deceptive Perhaps always on her lips, the rigid No in her heart, the goddess of discord like the grim Ate, misconceived daughter of Zeus. Undaunted and indefatigable, she shores up her mad world, which has so surprisingly many points of contact with the real world and at the same time bears the stigma of doom.

  Little Caspar Hauser

  I am now coming to a phase of my life that, externally, bore all the hallmarks of success and fulfilment, but within it concealed all the more the seeds of destruction. I just managed to stagger through it for a long time in my dazzlement. In 1923, the Buchegger manor in Ebenweiler dropped into my lap—almost literally into my lap, because not even in my dreams had I contemplated the acquisition of such a manor. Each time I walked past it, as I had now for over a quarter of a century, I had felt a yearning for it as for a fairy-tale palace; this would be a good place, I thought, here I could do good work. The estate was (or I suppose I should say: is) situated on the lakefront, the spacious house in the middle of a large parkland. The last Count Buchegger had sold it following the end of the Monarchy to a Dutch gentleman who no longer had any use for it, seeing as he hadn’t managed to settle in the area; and when he learned that I had been looking for permanent accommodation for years now, he offered it to me, in some patron’s access of generosity, for half what he had paid for it.

  The continual toing and froing with all our things between the Wrabetz villa and a nearby farmhouse, and then back again, had become rather wearing. It gave our lives a quality of vagabondage. But how was I to raise even the generously reduced sum the Dutchman wanted? Further, a permanent base that kept the severe winters at bay would entail considerable rebuilding. Luckily, there was a superabundance of furniture, silver, linens and all sorts of household items, which by themselves were worth half the purchase price; but even though the Dutch gentleman was happy with a modest down payment, the estimate for upgrading the house was beyond anything I could contemplate. I had no savings. I lived, as I had always done, from hand to mouth. We had substantial outgoings; to cover them I needed considerable earnings. Thus far, I had been lucky. But how things were going to go on—that remained unclear from month to month. It was rather an adventurous existence, not one based on solid facts.

  It seems that certain events recur in some lives. While I was hesitating between desire and sensible refusal, a friend who had come into money offered to help. When I doubtfully set the thing out before him, and showed him the house, he was mad keen on the acquisition and in a handsome gesture offered me the capital for down payment and building work. The repayment rates were so easy and the time so generous that I saw no grounds for any worry, only occasion for thanks. Once again, as years previously, the kindness and nobility of a friend had afforded me shelter.

  A German architect appeared on the scene and assembled a team of masons, carpenters, roofers, electricians, glaziers, heating engineers and painters. Materials and tools arrived by the wagonload; for four months walls were knocked down, others set up, windows were put in, balconies erected, traverses and pipes laid; there was hammering, digging, clearing, plastering, varnishing, painting; and by the time October came round, and Bettina and I moved into our new house, like a couple of children who are allowed to go up on a stage where a fairy play is about to be performed, Bettina was in her fourth month.

  I mustn’t keep back the fact that Bettina was rather apprehensive as regards our new circumstances. Such an expansive life made her uneasy. She warned me. Her sense of the world didn’t permit her to be taken in by appearances. She kept presenting me with the problems: in addition to existing burdens, further indebtedness for many decades; the help that was needed to run such a house; the upkeep of the fabric of the building; modernizing it. She was afraid that in the long run I wouldn’t be able to afford it. One had to plan for bad times; there were always lean years after the fat. I mustn’t make myself into a wage-labourer, nor enslave myself to property.

  I laughed at her. I was all too sure of my resources. Once I had been out of the Ganna tempest for a while, I felt certain destiny couldn’t touch me. Bettina was set at ease by my unshakeable self-confidence, even though she still worried about the future. She was often depressed, and then she would flee to me, the way an animal might seek out its nest at the approach of a foe.

  ‘I’ll manage it,’ I said; ‘after all, if the worst comes to the worst, we can always flog the place.’

  I added that to me it was a comforting idea that she and the child she was expecting would have a refuge and a piece of property in the event of my death. Bettina smiled.

  ‘If we’re talking about your death,’ she replied, ‘do you really think . . . Can you see me as a chatelaine? Look at my fingers.’

  In surprise I looked down at her hand, which she held out to me.

  ‘These fingers are no good at keeping hold of things,’ she said.
‘Once it was prophesied that I would never be in debt, but nor would I have anything to call my own either.’

  For all her fears, it was a happy thought for her that our baby would have a place it wouldn’t have to leave at six-monthly intervals. A fortress sure, in a world out for aggression. She herself didn’t need any fortress. She could look after herself. But the little person who was on the way (she was convinced from the outset that it would be a boy) would need to be given shelter, like a little Caspar Hauser. And if—as Ganna wished—it were his lot to grow up without his father’s name, then there was a double need to put some protective space between him and Ganna’s world bristling with laws. Suddenly, she was no longer afraid. Early on in her pregnancy she had sometimes most unusual for her—cried with fear. That was when she wrote her ‘Song of an Unborn Child’, one of her loveliest compositions; when she played it to me the first time I still had no idea of her condition.

  That same evening, she was lying in bed, I was sitting reading by the lamp; she called me over and asked me to sit with her. She took my hand and broke the news to me. Hesitantly, half-audibly; she couldn’t predict, after all, how I would react to news of such a disruption.

  I was shocked. Straight away I realized a new situation had been created in which I must show no weakness. Our little Caspar Hauser wanted his place in the world. Our eyes met, and we gazed at each other deeply and earnestly. I clearly saw the flecks of grey in Bettina’s blue irises. I knelt down beside the bed and kissed her hands, first one, then the other, many times . . .

  Interval of being different

  I can only guess what Ganna felt when she heard about the purchase of the Buchegger estate. What later transpired suggests such a confused mixture of rage, bitterness, agitation, sympathy and murky hope that any attempt to describe it would be doomed from the start. At first she felt humiliated and duped. Her agents had run to her with the information that I had paid half the purchase price, or perhaps more, in cash; and since every rumour that circulated about me, even the least well founded, not only turned into an axiom with her, but by and by passed through every form of exaggeration and distortion, to the point of the nonsensical—yes, the ridiculous—so the sum I was said to have shelled out, not batting an eyelid, swelled into the fantastical. Naturally she will have said to herself: he saves and economizes on me, but he has a fortune to lavish on ‘that woman’. That it was Bettina who wanted the palatial house for herself, and that I had been driven to buy it for her by her subtle tricks—that was an established fact from the start, which only the malicious unbeliever would dare to question.