THE YELLOW ROOM
I was dreading it. I feared the claims of family, the utter automatic mindlessness with which I would be reclaimed. I was afraid of a life within walls. When I decided once and for all in favour of the life of the bourgeois and the tax-payer — with a bank account to protect me from every eventuality, newest recruit and pride of the Mevises, Schlemms and Lottelotts — that meant the end of poet’s garret and Samson’s struggle. Fedora and Riemann were right: I had sold myself and betrayed myself. But Ganna was able to talk me out of my worries. She spoke so confidently and enthusiastically of a life of calm domesticity that I complied and went quietly.
After looking for a long time, we finally rented a furnished garden flat far out in the western suburbs, far away too from the Mevises, that was free over the winter. Ganna wasn’t yet ready to find somewhere permanent. The furnishing and equipping would have cost too much money. This postponement in her eyes doubled as an economy. The building faced onto a crooked street of bungalows and banal front gardens. Every twenty minutes a steam tram clattered past. There was a bell fixed to the locomotive that you could hear from a distance, and long after it was gone. The aspect of the lodging that had won Ganna over was a very large room with a glass wall at the back, the front extremity of which was flooded with light, but whose interior was so dark that we needed to keep the gaslights on during the day. This was our room of state where we did our receiving, our living and dining room, my workplace; and on top of all that it was where I slept on a sofa in a recess during the weeks before Ganna’s due date. It was painted lemon yellow and divided in two by a cloth screen, also lemon yellow. On the left-hand wall we had the Dying Gaul and on the right the Thorn Remover, both set up on top of carefully draped crates, both in plaster of Paris; both souvenirs from Rome.
I dwell on it at such length because the room was important to me. We know so little about the influence of different spaces on one’s mood, on thinking, on decisions. An inch more or less in height or breadth and life feels different. I felt as if I was in a suit that was too big for me, bought from some second-hand dealer. I never felt at home in the room. When I woke up in the night and the wintry light dribbled in through chinks in the curtains; then I felt like stepping out into the garden to do something loutish like throwing snowballs at the ridiculous room. Or I wished I could get leprechauns in to do my work for me, because my skull was full of the merry jingle of the tram. It’s not good to be with a busy woman if you’re trying to paint a delicate picture or weave a delicate tapestry. It’s not just one woman either; there are many, as many as the day has hours, that’s how many Gannas there are; and each of them wants to do something different, each one is full of herself, each one is happy, excited, has a plan, a wish; and some of them I don’t even know yet — I would have to be introduced to them.
I GET POCKET MONEY
Baby clothes need buying. The rent needs paying. The servants need paying. I need a new suit for the winter. Ganna needs a coat. The interest isn’t enough, we need — Ganna’s nightmare — to attack the capital. We need to sell some of the tamper-proofed securities. Ganna’s horror. The holy awe of money in the bank has by now infected me. There is nothing more odious than money and the spirit of money. On the first of the month I toddle along to the bank to take out the money we need for the household. I feel like a thief doing it. The cashier at the desk, a gaunt man with gold-rimmed spectacles, is old Mevis’s viceroy on earth; he is certain to subject me to a thorough cross-questioning. A man who attacks his capital will stop at nothing. Ganna’s tiny hands clutch the bank account like a legal scroll. The cashier lets the notes flutter over the marble till, the capital swishes. I count them shyly, and when I pack them away in my wallet I feel I have outwitted the man at the till and am about to leg it. I leave with the footfall of a fraud. I have no peace till I have handed the money into Ganna’s safe keeping, every last penny of it. Ganna notes it down, Ganna calculates, Ganna doles out my pocket money. Yes, my pocket money, as if I’d been a boarding school pupil. It seems perfectly natural to me. What would a man need money for if he has board and lodgings? I have a good mind to say that to the man at the counter when I next visit. It may make him take a milder view of me.
NOT EVERYTHING IS AS IT SHOULD BE
‘Can’t we eat soon?’ comes my dejected question as the grandfather clock strikes two in the yellow barn. ‘In a minute, Alexander,’ Ganna breathes back anxiously, one of the many Gannas, ‘in a minute.’ And then see what the messy ‘maid of all work’ dishes up! Things that deny their nature. Meat that looks like charcoal. Cakes that look like book bindings. Soups of which all that can be said in their favour is that they are steaming. All of it produced by gigantic effort, with Ganna’s endless trouble. Ganna’s trouble is a chapter on its own. Imagine a great surge of energy followed by nothing, nothing at all, that disappears without trace. An almost scientific thoroughness, the most serious commitment, and the result more or less as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to a fly on a windowpane. It’s all precisely calculated, it’s a radical procedure, but the windowpane suffers, as anyone could have predicted except Ganna. Ganna doesn’t understand. With her apron tied on she stands by the stove, stirs the batter in the pan, and open on the sideboard are Hölderlin’s poems, which she sneaks a look at. When the batter at the bottom of the pan is charred, she can’t help herself and scolds the maid. I see the real problem and tell her: ‘But Ganna, it’s not possible to read Hölderlin and cook pancakes at one and the same time. You have to decide which one you’re doing.’ Ganna concedes that, but it’s difficult for her, she’s so riven by the claims of utility and the spirit. You could say she sweats with effort. In her desire to please me nothing is too much trouble, no inconvenience is too great. But everything falls down because of the excess of fuss. Whenever she tries to see that I am left in peace for my work, she manages to knock over the metaphorical chair. The little domestic devils have it in for her. Her burning ambition melts everything she reaches out for. It’s interesting, even at times breathtaking, but it’s not what one could call a peaceful existence. It feels like being on board a ship that keeps being clumsily steered into the teeth of the gale.
And then there are the servants. The first maid stayed for six days, the second lasted just two, the third fourteen, and none of her successors was with us for longer than three weeks. Ganna is at a loss to explain it; I too am puzzled. Only gradually I come to understand. I discover that under Ganna’s regime any flaw in a human being turns into a vice. It’s quite something. If a girl comes into our house with a sweet tooth, she leaves it as a thief. An untidy girl becomes a whirlwind. Since Ganna doesn’t have a clue about how you make a bed or polish a doorknob, her orders are heard with quiet derision. She hasn’t the least idea how long it takes to do anything. Either she demands the impossible, or else she’s diddled. She doesn’t understand common people or their speech. Her somewhat pretentious idiom leaves people in the dark and they are suspicious of her. First of all she’s sugar-sweet and then without any sort of transition she can become crude. The bourgeois conceit of the Mevis girls and her own literary education keep her from viewing people working for her as beings like herself. Sometimes she would like to, but it’s more than she can do. At the slightest difference of opinion she flies off the handle and her eyes throw sparks. In the early days I am able to calm her down, but later her rage will turn on me, too. I am forced to leave her to it, otherwise the domestic strife just gets too exhausting.