That evening we were guests of the bank director Bugatto, who at the time was a big wheel in the world of high finance. I can remember a whole series of unpleasant feelings besieging me, and I see Ganna in her element. She is forming a circle. A wreath of professors, doctors, lawyers, town councillors, manufacturers and some of their ladies surrounds her. She makes bold assertions and tries to back them up. They are shallow paradoxes, things she has got out of books, but she craves the attention; she pulls it off. Such an original mind, people say. I am happy for her; it means she will be in a good mood for days to come. I like it when her good qualities are recognized. I have an easier time with her. The only embarrassing thing is her way of referring to ‘my husband’ all the time. I hate that possessive.
I get unbearably bored. The sitting around; the stupid questions and answers, the vulgar gossip. And Ganna’s ingratiating chit-chat — I can no longer deny that she is making an exhibition of herself; her warbling, her giddiness, her provincial coquettishness: I suffer, it pains me, can’t she feel my shame, my ambivalent position, her own exaggeration, her prostration before this portfolio of pearls, dresses, investments and titles? No, she doesn’t. She rises like yeast. She blooms. Two or three times I approach her and suggest going home. Mutely she implores me for leave to stay. She is having such a wonderful time. On the way home she asks me what I had against them. They had all been so charming to her, only I with my bad mood had spoiled the lovely evening.
She doesn’t get it, what am I to do? She carries on digging around and complaining until I lose my patience and say something intemperate and find myself in the wrong. Ganna has been waiting for just that. She exploits her advantage to the full. She says I quite systematically go about making enemies, and that I therefore have no business complaining or being surprised at my lack of readers. A poisonous observation, which isn’t any the less hurtful because it crudely conflates two separate categories. Riposte, counter, Ganna takes nothing back. It goes on and on, to the point that at two in the morning the Ohnegrolls bang a broom handle against their ceiling to get some quiet. Ganna ignores them. She sinks her teeth into every word of mine. This is no more warbling and fluting like there was in the plush halls of the dignitaries and the rentiers; this is anger and a vicious style of argumentation that will stoop to any rhetorical trick to force the opponent to his knees. The crazy thing is that I practically am on my knees. That always used to astonish me. When I think about it today I can’t help believing that sensuality is somewhere involved, the blind urge that contains something of the desire to batter, and to stun.
HOTHOUSE OF EMOTIONS
With horror I recollect the day little Ferry fell ill. At the least sign of fever Ganna would be beside herself. First, the nanny was subjected to harsh questioning. If she was guilty of some mistake in the care or feeding of the baby, the storm would break over her head and she would be dismissed on the spot. (When the temperature went down she was quietly reinstated.) In such instances, Ganna’s brain would assemble all conceivable illnesses and they would race through her imagination in a terrifying rout. Every hyperbole was justified by the imagined danger. But the danger can be avoided if you recognize the cause early enough. A human being, Ganna likes to say, has everything in his own hands, happiness and unhappiness, life and death. If he sticks to the advice of doctors and the prescriptions of science, then not much can happen to him. The biggest threat are germs. The fight against germs, the way she sees it, is like hunting fleas. You’re immune if you learn the doctors’ and professors’ trick of taming and dressing these wicked little creatures. Since Ganna is capable of saying in almost every instance where and how a certain illness was caught, there is always blame involved. If she feels a rheumatic twinge, she will remember weeks later that I talked her out of wearing her fur when on a certain day — I’ve forgotten all about it — we went to visit Auntie Claire. Ganna doesn’t let nature get away with anything. She believes in doctors the way a devout Catholic believes in Holy Communion. At the slightest suggestion of a symptom the doctor is sent for, a specialist even, for whatever it is. Any and every doctor in her eyes is a sort of all-powerful bourgeois God. But there’s trouble for this Godhead if he doesn’t bring about an instant cure. Then we get blaspheming and the daughter of the heathen kraal will send for a fresh god.
I often struggled against it. I lectured her, warned her, implored her. In vain. These are emotional excesses, I would say to myself then, she exists in a sort of emotional hothouse. The day-to-day is humdrum; emotions will eat it up. Emotion becomes the measure and mirror of the world. To impede Ganna and change the direction of her affect is as hopeless as it would be to ask a storm to kindly take itself off somewhere else. I began to be afraid of her lack of moderation. Since my strength was invested elsewhere, I didn’t have it to draw on when I needed it with her. Sometimes I simply shut my eyes when I saw things that depressed or alarmed me to see. I tried to see the whole Ganna experience as my destiny in life. The more reality weighed on me, the more the picture I had made of Ganna took the weight from me. It was of brass, not readily destroyed. A demonic person, I told myself. That was the first flash of the insight that later, much later, came over me like a brand. Demonic; not a word one can do all that much with. An excuse word, a false coin. It’s a facile explanation for the inexplicable, a charge of spiritual inadequacy or unrighteousness laid against the door of an unknown power. At that time, Ganna hadn’t gone off the rails. I could still have got her in my power if I’d been careful, if I’d been alert, if I’d been tougher.
A FEW SNAPSHOTS OF GANNA
But at that time it was still extraordinarily difficult to extricate myself from certain intriguing traits of her personality, her quirky absent-mindedness, her silly little mishaps, her dreaminess. All that had the charm of youth, and was further enhanced by the happiness in which she seemed to float.
She is lying blissfully spread out on the sofa in her hideously untidy bedroom, marking up Goethe’s Italian Journey in pencil. In the nursery the baby is screaming her head off, because we have gone on to have a second child, my daughter Elisabeth; in the living room Ferry is banging around on the piano; in the corridor the cook and the maid are fighting a pitched battle; down in the garden patio, Frau Ohnegroll is yapping away like an unpleasant little dog. None of it reaches Ganna. She can’t hear it. Her spirit is in heaven. Then a glance finds its way out to the rose I brought her the other day. She smiles, gets up and carries the glass with the rose in it to her dressing table. Now she has two roses, because there’s a second one reflected in the mirror …
Or this. It’s May. To Ganna the concept of ‘May’, regardless of the actual weather, is inseparable from ‘sunshine’ and ‘blue sky’. So she goes out in a thin serge dress with a frail-looking parasol, where an icy north wind blows and a shower comes down every fifteen minutes or so. It doesn’t matter. In her imagination it’s ‘May’. She passes a fruit stall and sees the first cherries of the year. How wonderful, she thinks, I’ll buy some cherries for Alexander. She buys a pound of cherries. She is given them in a twist of paper. It has a hole, and while she wanders dreamily home (when she’s alone she doesn’t need to ‘hurry’ and is free to ‘enjoy’ her walk); so, while she’s ‘enjoying’ the illusory May air, one cherry after another escapes through the hole in the paper bag. People stop and turn and watch her, and grin. The pavement behind her is studded with cherries at regular intervals. Finally a woman takes pity on her and tells her. Who could describe her shock! Thank God, there are not that many people out and about; she goes back and picks up the cherries, one after another …