Yes, an eccentric, clumsy, moving creature, Ganna. A Ganna that you’d want to try and protect from wounds and damage. If there weren’t the seam in the surface, the crater from which the dark element bursts forth, of which you never know when it will be and how catastrophic its effect.
FEMALE DON QUIXOTE
I had got to be close to Irmgard. Fleeting conversations had deepened, and then we had gone hiking together — because, unlike Ganna, Irmgard was a splendid walker and tourist. She had, again unlike Ganna, a low opinion of herself and was grateful to me for the lengths I went to to reinforce her sense of self. That was really what she most lacked, even though she had a solid and substantial character; as a woman, though, she had suffered various disappointments that had robbed her of courage. She had a particular sort of beauty. She looked like the statue of an Egyptian princess.
Things between us were such that we could have fallen in love at any moment. It didn’t happen. The thing that stopped it was a sort of magic line drawn by Ganna. Irmgard had creditable old-fashioned notions of marriage and fidelity. Moreover: the husband of her sister — the thought made her shudder. I didn’t dare cross the magic line either. To rouse Ganna’s suspicion was to start an inferno. The suspicion was already lurking. Whenever Irmgard mentioned it she trembled like a child in the dark, and I wasn’t much different. We kept on telling each other about the purity of our feelings and were so reticent that each pressure of our hands, each greeting, was managed with cautious attention; even so, Ganna had her eyes on us. Ganna stood unseen next to us and saw that nothing belonging to her was stolen. Not a look, not a breath, not a smile, not a thought.
Perhaps it was just feminine curiosity, a little jealous curiosity that prompted Irmgard to ask one day what it was that fascinated me about Ganna. She had thought about it a lot and had no explanation. At first I had no answer either. Then I talked about Ganna as a sort of ordering principle in my life. ‘A sort of what?’ Irmgard asked in bafflement, ‘Ganna creating order, Ganna?’ I could see that I would have trouble convincing Irmgard of that. After a little further thought, I found the way out, and for the first time articulated my sense of Ganna: I said she was a new type, a sort of female Don Quixote. Irmgard shook her head. It was too much for her. She knew Ganna, Ganna was her sister. The parabola from coffin nail to idealistic battler against windmills didn’t make sense to her. Hesitantly she suggested I was being poetical. I denied it.
A few days later, Ganna went up to Irmgard, plonked herself in front of her and said, in the tone of a policeman undertaking an arrest:
‘I forbid you to flirt with my husband.’
Irmgard replied spiritedly: ‘I didn’t know Alexander was your prisoner.’
‘Find a husband of your own and stay away from mine,’ Ganna went on.
Irmgard told me afterwards, bitterly, that she had sounded like a market stallholder, standing up for her veggies in a public spat.
‘Your attempts to take up with him behind my back are unacceptable,’ Ganna shouted.
She had a particular way of saying the word unacceptable — the ‘x’ in it was painfully lengthened. Irmgard couldn’t help herself, she began to laugh. She pointed to the door.
‘If you want a scandal, you can have it at home. Talk to Alexander. I’m not his nanny.’
After a livid Ganna had left, Irmgard once again couldn’t do anything about it; this time, she wept.
After she had related the incident to me, she asked me ironically:
‘So where does that leave your female Don Quixote now? Can you tell me where you see her noble folly, my dear brother-in-law?’
I was stuck. I replied:
‘One shouldn’t judge Ganna on the basis of single incidents, you need to see her in the round, as the wild nature she is. Her errors, her passions, her mistakes, they are all founded on a splendid unity. What’s wrong with noble folly? You always made fun of her. The ridiculous is very deep in her, where she fights with phantoms. Everything is a phantom to her: people, the world, you, me, she herself. She doesn’t have a clue about reality.’
Irmgard looked me in the eye with her thoughtful gaze.
‘Poor Alexander,’ she whispered.
‘What do you mean, poor Alexander?’
‘Oh, I was just thinking …’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, perhaps you’re the one who doesn’t have a clue about reality.’
THE ‘HUMAN’ SIDE
I note that Ganna is very anxious about something. She is listening out, spying, she looks at me with the sad scrutiny that actors playing forsaken lovers have onstage. To get the better of me, she asks me little trick questions. If I manage to avoid her traps she tries a bigger, rougher calibre.
‘Oh, I am the unhappiest woman in the world!’ she cries out to no one in particular, and criss-crosses the room, as though she wanted to knock down the walls.
‘You’re seeing ghosts, Ganna, your unhappiness is all in your mind. Irmgard is much too decent to go in for any dubious escapades.’
‘Irmgard? She’s the most unscrupulous person there is.’
‘But Ganna!’
‘What about you? Would you deceive me?’
‘I hardly think so, Ganna.’
She hurls herself at my chest. ‘Really? Will you swear? Will you swear you haven’t got a relationship with her?’
I have to laugh. It’s so crude, the way she says it, you feel you’ve been punched on the nose; I’m not quite sure why I’m laughing. She holds my hand between hers, examines the palm and says with an expression as though she longed for me to contradict her tough judgement:
‘Your love line is withered. Perhaps you haven’t got a heart, Alexander?’
‘That could be,’ I replied, ‘but the one you’re looking at is understanding, so far as I know.’
‘Oh, is it?’ she says in relief. ‘Thank God for that.’
Her conclusion is that she perhaps needs to offer me more, be more alluring. She buys a sophisticated scent for a lot of money and douses herself with about a teaspoonful of it (which is certainly too much).
‘I’m not sophisticated enough,’ she laments, with an undertone of pride, ‘I have no gifts as a seductress.’
‘No, you’re right about that, Ganna,’ I tell her, and take the opportunity to tell her she should stop slouching about the place as she does. She heeds my advice, and for thirty-five crowns buys a fake Japanese kimono that makes her look like Sarastro in The Magic Flute. The slippers she wears with this prize piece are ancient and filthy, and seeing that she also doesn’t pull up her stockings until and unless she’s getting ready to go out, they look like a pair of sausage skins hanging down her legs, where the kimono stops. When she gets wind of my disapproval, she says crossly: ‘All right, the garter ribbons are torn, but surely that’s nothing to do with the human side.’ Of course not, I never said it was. But the ‘human side’ isn’t a reserve fund that you can draw on in exalted hours, and at others licenses the fake kimono, ragged slippers and baggy stockings …
THE SCREAM IN THE NIGHT
At this time, there is the following development with Ganna. If we’ve had a quarrel or difference of opinion in the day, her resentments and rancour, which are intensifying all the time, accumulate in sleep, until she frees herself of them in an eruption. Then she screams. Usually, a single, piercing, terrible scream, which rings through the entire house and wakes up all its inhabitants. By and by this scream becomes a fearsome event for me, something that cuts into and darkens my life. I wake up, when it rings out, as if to the feeling of a skewer being driven through my head, in one ear and out the other. I lean over her in the dark, I talk to her, I try to calm her down. (Later on, when we were no longer sleeping in the same room, I dashed into her room with shudders running down my spine; sometimes I had the suspicion that with that terrible screaming she was trying to force me back into her bed; not consciously; but so as not to be alone any more; so as not to let me forget that she existed in my life; from envy of my sleep; who could tell what it was with her?) She tells me the dream she awoke from. They are often strange dreams, dreams of a hopeless, betrayed, tormented soul; dreams with a quality of primal darkness, something bizarre like everything in her unconscious. For instance she once dreamed of Irmgard, standing before her with red hair and a bloodied mouth; her mouth was bloodied because she was holding Ganna’s heart in her hand, and biting into it every so often, as into a red apple.