When, in depicting an Easter celebration in the Bukovina or a ball in Vienna of the thirties, he used some decorative detail that his (present, third, Italian) wife recognized as usurped, it did not matter when she broke in: “You got that from my Aunt Olga!” Why not? He had a rightful claim to such details, for they belonged truly to his world, a world he shared with Aunt Olga, a world that had sunk into oblivion anyway: Imperial Russia and the folkloric gaudiness of the shepherd of the Carpathians both had long since passed into the twilight of myth and fairy tale. So if he was describing an Easter festival in a village in the Carpathians a half century ago (which had created a much larger historical distance than several earlier full centuries), then it was proper if this description took in something of the gold of Resurrection Masses and the floweriness of the spring mood at Tsarskoye Selo; the Opernball in Vienna 1937 (the first and only one he had attended) resembled a rout in an English peer’s house in 1911 that Aunt Olga had described to him. Details were metaphors anyhow — on the one hand ermine, diadems, braided uniforms, on the other embroidered blouses and lambskins, crocuses and primroses. After all, his aim was not to color in the preciousness of his personal background but rather to enhance the hallowed mood of an exotic religious act; here in a chapel, there in a ballroom. He borrowed a little pigment for his palette and, shoulder-shrugging, ignored anyone who regarded this as sheer embellishment or even flim-flam. Such a reaction struck him as not only seriously philistine but also quite simply stupid.
And that was it. That was one more thing — among several — that he could not forgive his former, second, Jewish wife. Already the previous, first, East Prussian wife had soon discerned his habit of incorporating other people’s memories into his own when they were suitable and colorful enough; but she had held her tongue, just as she had held her tongue about everything, especially about her contempt for him: for she had loved him and been disappointed; and to avoid sharing the guilt of this disappointment, she had to keep his defects in mind. But the second, Jewish wife (whom he viewed as a mere intermezzo between the first, East Prussian, and the third, Italian wife: the marriage had not even lasted a year, had been entered into only because she was pregnant and refused to abort the chance product; two days before the delivery, they had finally gone to the justice of the peace, an utterly ridiculous, disgraceful act; then they had spent another four years fighting over the divorce and the unfortunate child) — his Jewish wife attacked him from the very start for his heedless outlook on biographical property, and she was so rabid about it that he was offended. At first, he could not understand the vehemence with which she championed authenticity, documentary truth for every autobiographical detail. (“Even at the expense of vividness?” he had once asked her ironically, and she had answered fanatically, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”) This trait of hers clashed with her passion for art, her fanatical devotion to art, any kind of art: she would tiptoe up to a Pollock drip painting as worshipfully as to Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s; she would listen to an atonal tone poem with her forehead lowered as devoutly as to a symphony of Beethoven’s; she would follow a play of Beckett’s with the same breathless suspense as a deadly performance of Schiller’s Wallenstein; a poem of T. S. Eliot’s would throw her into the same ecstasies as the Bolshoi’s Swan Lake; and in between, she devoured any number of novels, Grass as greedily as Canetti, Bellow as ardently as Muriel Spark. “You get drunk on the stuff the way other people get drunk on beer,” he would say, to bait her, and she promptly fell for it and gave him, the lowbrow, a lecture on the novel from La Princesse de Clèves to Robbe-Grillet; and he listened to the end in order to say, “You consume all this: it is your drogue. I invent myself in my own novels: that’s my way of escaping an unbearable reality. And as for what you tell me about the necessity of identifying with the hero or, more recently, the antihero, I manage to do that effortlessly: I am my own protagonist from the very start.”
He had loved her and been disappointed, and to avoid sharing the guilt of this disappointment, he had to keep her defects in mind: she was quite simply stupid. That was it. Beautiful and stupid. And a pseudointellectual in the bargain. He hated the Beckmesserish nitpicking, the fundamentalism, the blind obedience to rules in her “intellectual interests.” Needless to say, one of these interests was depth psychology; she had mastered its rules the way a convent schoolgirl learns catechism. Only her belief was more ardent, and never for a moment did she hesitate to form an everlasting judgment by means of the Freudian grid. He would not even listen to what she had to say about his loose relationship to “Truth”: “Leave me in peace. I’m my own best lunatic-keeper. And you can’t expect too much of me: a child of sleepwalkers — growing up in a dreamed world, sometimes nightmarish — I was predestined to lose every kind of reality by all the things that happened around me before and certainly during my lifetime; realities like the Viennese Opernball and Treblinka are incompatible with what you mean by ‘Truth’—they can only happen in a surrealistic dimension; you of all people ought to see that, as a Jew — but you are the most goyish Jew I know. Still, I’m not going to let you talk me into a psychosis like yours by abandoning my need for delusions and hallucinations about myself, even though that need is certainly libidinous in origin — I was a master masturbator before I met you to do the job — and marked by trauma, like meeting with idiots who believe in reality.”
His bile was in proportion to his disappointment, for he had loved her very much; there had been moments when he had knelt before her, for instance, when she told him about how she had been forced to hide during the war; this had not been possible in her small Thuringian home town, everyone knew her there, knew her background, her parents were already running around with the yellow star; and she would not have succeeded in going underground in one of the bigger cities, even if she had managed to cope with the problems of police registration and the necessary food-rationing card: she was too striking, too beautiful — people turned around to look at her in the street: she was splendidly tall and voluptuous, dazzling in the freedom of her laughter, in the radiance of her gray eyes, in the lush fall of her rust-red curls … wheedling a doctor to certify her as tubercular, she withdrew to a tiny sanatorium high up in the Allgäu mountains, the head doctor was in on the secret, for a few weeks she could rest from her pillar-to-post dashing from hideout to hideout — but only for a few weeks: one morning, she looked out of the window and saw a city of tents in the meadow, it was teeming with SS men, who had pitched camp there … panicking, she dashed down a back stairway, hoping to flee through the kitchen and the service entrance into the open, out to the forest, the mountains — but she was caught by a giant in a black uniform, the Kommandant of the echelon, he clutched her hand in an iron grip, pulled her out to his men, ordered them to fall in in a square, had a table placed in the center, lifted her upon it, and shouted, “Men. So you can see what a German girl should look like!”
he had worshiped her when she told him this — at such moments, he was ready to make any sacrifice for her. He understood how important it was to her for him to be “genuine” and “true.” But was what she meant indeed the truth of such reality?
When she finally overcame her resistance to marrying him (for the sake of the child whom she had not had the courage to abort), she had instantly done a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn: had expected the utmost spiritual rapport from their marriage, a total mutual devotion, an exclusive, unconditional dedication on both sides; the least misunder-standing, perhaps due simply to hearing something wrong, the slightest divergence in opinion, whether about the moral justification of the United States in the Korean War or the choice of curtain material, brought pain to her eyes as though he had hit her; once, she wept an entire day because he had failed to switch on the same evening radio concert when they were separated for two days—“But you promised me, and I thought of you at every note, I believed I could feel what you were feeling ….”—she set store by being able to trust him blindly, by relying on him no matter what; after what she had gone through during the twelve horrible years of her youth, now she could settle only for the absolute.