My utter indolence does not distress me in the least in this town [he wrote in his journal]. If I were to work even less here, I would still consider myself very useful. There are no working people among the people I come across, with the possible exception of the manufacturers. Not even the businessmen work. It seems to me that the men still have their feet on the ground, the whole of their lower portion is of the earth, but from their hands upwards they no longer live in an earthly atmosphere. Each exists of two halves. In each case the upper half is ashamed of the lower. Each considers his hands as better than his feet. Each leads two lives. Eating, drinking and loving is carried out by the lower, the inferior, parts, professional life by the upper.
When George conducts, he is a different George from the one who sleeps with his little devotees. Yesterday a lady informed me that she had been to the cinema, and had almost decided to keep her face veiled. She went to the cinema only with the lower, inferior part of her body, she watched the film only with a pair of vulgar eyes suited to vulgar purposes, eyes which were at her disposal like an opera-glass or a lorgnette. I slept with a woman who woke me after an hour in order to ask me if my spiritual love for her corresponded to my physical performance. For without the spiritual side she considered herself ‘degraded’. I found that I had to get dressed very quickly, and while I was searching for my collar-stud, which had rolled under the bed, I explained to her that my soul always resided in that part of my body which I was using to carry out a particular activity. Thus, in my feet when I went for a walk, and so on.
‘You are a cynic,’ said the woman.
I felt much better among my stupidest comrades at the Cadet School and later in the regiment. The female auxiliaries, second class, at the base were more sensible than these ladies. The only concession they make to reality is their gymnastic exercises every morning at six o’clock. Only the gymnastics are not called gymnastics, but eurhythmics. Otherwise they would consider themselves degraded at every kneesbend.
My sister-in-law reminds me of Natasha. I would never have fallen in love with Natasha if I had taken the opposite road, from my brother’s house to Russia. Natasha sacrificed to the revolutionary idea, Klara sacrifices partly to culture, partly to the social conscience. But whereas Natasha obviously behaved against her nature, Klara does not have to force herself at all. Nothing comes to her more naturally than this social conscience, which causes her to care for the health of her servants, to treat waiters like war comrades and myself as if we had sucked at the same breast. I sometimes think that she is a creature under a spell, that she might be turned in a healthy direction, that one might make a woman of her. But that is as improbable as a love affair with a vacuum-cleaner, which they push over the carpets every morning in this country.
My brother probably denies my moral justification for living. I have no vocation and earn no money. I even consider myself guilty because I eat his bread and butter. Anyway, I am quite unfitted to hold down a job anywhere unless they were to pay me for getting angry at the world. I am not even in harmony with any of the ruling ideologies.
Some days ago I got to know a woman, a writer and a communist. She has married a Rumanian communist, also a writer, whom I find untalented and stupid but who is crafty enough to conceal his stupidity in his communist convictions and to justify his laziness on political grounds. This couple lives on the support of a capitalist uncle, a banker, and by writing articles for radical magazines. The young woman wears low-heeled shoes and sneers at the society that provides her with a living. She talks to her own daughter like the warden of a reformatory to an inmate who is still a minor, regards her as an ill-tempered offshoot of the family and condones her bad behaviour. She wears an infinitely superior expression, associates with some literary people, is acquainted with a Berlin night-club, and once lived in a working-class district, out of protest and from conviction. After three months her uncle sent her money and she moved to the West. Since then she has become acquainted with the heights and depths of society and has written novels of working-class life. If one addresses her as Madam, one suffers her scorn, and if one calls her Frau Tedescu, she is shocked. She despised me from the outset because I did not remain in Russia. Naturally she is not aware that I fought in the civil war, and would probably never have believed me capable of doing so. Courtesy she considers a bourgeois vulgarity. I have discovered a special way of dealing with her. I firmly clasp her delicate little hand, shake it, call her comrade and talk bluntly of the sexual matters which she discusses in her novels. At times she is near to tears.
The only times when I become tender and melancholy are when I think of Irene. She is not even the Irene, my betrothed, whom I knew when I was still a stupid first lieutenant and her fiancé. It is some unknown woman I love, who lives I know not where.
When George told me he had heard that she was in Paris, I felt hot and cold, I was dazzled, it was like that time in Baku when the lady told me of the ridiculous shop windows of the Rue de la Paix. It is as if I had been seeking Irene all my life and every now and again someone told me he had come across her. But in reality I don’t seek her at all. I don’t even yearn for her. Perhaps she really is something quite different from the rest of the world; and thinking of her is the least residue of my credulity. It’s probably necessary to be a writer to express this accurately.
From time to time I feel that it is necessary for me to seek her out. If I went to Paris I would perhaps run into her. That would take money. But I can’t accept anything from George. That is a ridiculous inhibition. He would probably give it me and rejoice into the bargain that I was leaving him. But, though I may take George’s money for other reasons, I won’t for this one.
And it’s about time that I earned something. In this kind of world it is not important for me to work, but it is necessary for me to have an income. A man without an income is like a man without a name or like a shadow minus its body. One feels like a phantom. This does not contradict what I have written above. I have no pangs of conscience as regards my indolence, it is just that my indolence brings in no money whereas the indolence of everyone else is well remunerated. Only money confers the right to live.
XXII
At that time I was living in Berlin. One day M. said to me: ‘I ran into Irene Hartmann. I greeted her. But she did not recognize me. I turned back, thinking I might have made a mistake, and greeted her again. But she did not recognize me.’
‘You’re sure you weren’t mistaken?’
‘Yes!’ said M.
I thereupon wrote to Franz Tunda.
‘Dear friend,’ I wrote, ‘I am not sure that I understand the reasons for your return. Perhaps you don’t know yourself. But if it is because you want to find Irene, Herr M. came across her in Berlin recently.’
Tunda arrived a few days later.
I liked him enormously.
It takes a long time for men to acquire their particular countenances. It is as if they were born without their faces, their foreheads, their noses or their eyes. They acquire all these with the passage of time, and one must be patient; it takes time before everything is properly assembled. Tunda had only now achieved his countenance. His right eyebrow was higher than the left. This gave him an expression of permanent surprise, of a man arrogantly astonished at the singular circumstances of this world; he had the face of a very aristocratic man compelled to sit at table with ill-mannered persons and observing their conduct with condescending, patient but in no way indulgent curiosity. His glance was at once shrewd and tolerant. He had the look of a man who puts up with much suffering in order to gain experience. He seemed so sagacious that one might almost take him for benevolent. But, in reality, he seemed to me already to possess that degree of sagacity that makes a man truly indifferent.