She had every reason to be angry. After all, she was economizing the soul out of her body, turned every crown over three times before spending it, haggled with market traders over vegetables, wouldn’t buy herself a new pair of shoes until the old ones were falling apart. Fine. But she still shouldn’t have carried on like that. The wrong I thought I had committed suddenly didn’t feel wrong any more. Even though she shortly after apologized to me in tears for her vehemence, a sting remained which drilled itself into my flesh. I had seen a new face to her. It was even there in her charming, innocent smile, the new face.
AT THE CONCERT
In the same way as strands floating in a murky liquid end up coalescing in strange patterns, so the continual strife gradually made Ganna’s life opaque, and her relations with people and things unpredictable. There were recurring scenes which ended up forming a pattern. I bought tickets for an orchestral concert. It starts at seven. You need to allow three-quarters of an hour for the ride into town. At a quarter to six I go to Ganna to tell her to get ready. She is lying dreamily on the terrace; in her right hand a book on mysticism and the Pre-Raphaelites, and in her left the usual pencil. ‘Oh, just a minute,’ she gives back, startled, drops the book on the lead flashing where it remains, to be found sodden with rain the following day, and scuttles into the bedroom. Ten minutes pass, twenty; I’m in hat and coat looking at my watch all the time, then I pluck up courage and go and see what’s keeping Ganna. She’s standing in the bathroom, half-dressed, washing her hair, now, at ten past six. I am furious. Ganna asks me not to rush her, she’s going as fast as she can. She’s the victim of unlucky circumstances. Her best intentions are crossed by bad chances. Everyone tramples around on poor Ganna. Even me. Sighing and groaning and wailing, she’s finished by half past six. Just a quick dash to the nursery, intense farewells with Ferry, some rushed parting instructions (because we do rely on her) to the nursemaid (don’t ask me which number nursemaid), and we’re running to catch the tram. We stand around waiting for the next ten minutes, Ganna with offended expression and pout. No sooner has she taken her seat than she realizes she’s left behind her little purse with her opera glasses and her money. Reproaches. The only reason it happens is because she’s been ‘rushed’. She thinks she doesn’t ‘deserve’ it. When she’s trying ‘so’ hard. She complains and complains. I feel embarrassed in front of the other people in the tram; Ganna is quite unembarrassed in front of the other people in the tram. That’s part of her sense of superiority. Why do I answer back to her? Why don’t I keep my mouth shut? I feel sorry for her, that’s why. She’s tormented. I want to help her get over it. I don’t like it when she complains and whines. Perhaps it’s her magic arts that make me so yielding. Arrived at the concert hall, we are made to wait for a break in the performance. I am still reasoning with her, trying to prove to her that she’s in the wrong, a sure-fire way of confirming her in her self-righteousness. Her anger continues as an empty babbling. Then she’s sitting down in her seat with a rapt expression. Music affects her like strong drink. I’ve understood that she’s about as musical as a piece of driftwood, that she doesn’t have the least understanding of the structure of a composition, the assembly, the interlocking of various motifs, the worth or worthlessness, content or vapidity of the whole. It would be a simple matter to sell her an operetta overture of the better sort as, say, Bruckner, and she would start to gush; but all that doesn’t prevent me from believing in the sincerity of her response, the genuineness of her emotion. Ganna is like a part of me. I can’t behave otherwise than as I do; if I did, it would be the end of me. Of course there are times when the sight of her intoxication offends my modesty and my judgement; then I need only remember with what flaming awe, what passionate support she listens to me, hour after hour, when I read aloud to her from my work, how I feel the sympathetic beat of her blood, and her whole being is enthusiastic assent. I like her drunkenness, then; so must I damn her when in another context she seems merely — disinhibited? But surely then everything would be deception and pretence.
IN COMPANY
I was no longer in touch with my former friends and associates. Either the relationship had come to a natural end, or they had jobs and offices to go to, or they had disappeared into an intellectual underworld. Many of them described me as a cold-hearted user of people. The ones who most especially said it were the ones who had used me almost all up. People are voracious. Give anything of yourself to them, they want to chew your bones; put up a fight, they call you inconstant or feckless. I had a reputation for arrogance. In fact I was excruciatingly shy and still am. But what I couldn’t stand was the complacent ignorance of others with respect to my person and my work, a conceited tolerance, of the sort one might show to a neighbour who has put up a fortress wall round his little handkerchief garden.
Ganna preached worldliness to me. She said I should get down from my ivory tower from time to time. ‘You need to see people and gain fresh impressions,’ she said. I had nothing against going out and seeing people, but unfortunately the ones she had in mind were those who kept salons or gave parties and wanted to collect celebrities. It was her ambition to secure me an appropriate position in the world; but what she thought of as the world was just the financial-cum-artistic circle where she had spent time as a girl. She was proud of being Frau Alexander Herzog and wanted to enjoy her social status. Each and any invitation was an honorific confirmation of the fact. But for the rung of the ladder where she liked to be, she lacked a little discrimination. If she heard her name being whispered behind her, the pleasant sensation tingled into the roots of her hair. When a lawyer or university lecturer kissed her hand, she beamed. When she had a head of section presiding at her dinner table, she was as excited as a young actress being given a plum role. I was perfectly willing to allow all these various gentlemen the credit that Ganna so prodigally lavished on them. I was a little fish. My sense of self was poorly developed. Intellectual attainments have never let me become too full of myself. I thought Ganna, being experienced in the ways of her circle, would do the right thing. I allowed myself to be dragged along. I went solemnly into ‘people’s houses’, as I sometimes sarcastically put it. From time to time I would suggest that really we ought to reciprocate. Ganna insisted that wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t expected from an artist. Since it suited me to believe that, I believed it, and thereby put myself on the same level as a tenor who was only invited because his name appeared in the paper — or even a little lower, because the tenor at least sang for his supper. Offering people hospitality would have been difficult for us; we ate so terribly badly. When Ganna organized a family meal, which was about the most we ever did, there would be strange giggles about the taste and the puzzling identity of a dish or other. Ganna had no idea how bad it was. She didn’t care what was set in front of her. She would launch into a half-cooked potato and a pineapple with the same enthusiastic lack of awareness.