You may be right, Ganna, you may be right, but please, please stop, won’t you, can’t you see people staring at us? She doesn’t stop, all the way home, over supper there’s a zestful complaining, a simple shudder-inducing lamentation. Sometimes I keep quiet, sometimes I explode; I can’t always control myself, above all I can’t control Ganna at all, everything is twofold, two ways of feeling, two ways of looking, two sorts of speed. Finally I can think of nothing else but to sit down at the piano, open a score and with clumsy fingers approximating the trills, the allegros, knock out a Chopin Prelude or a piece from Schumann’s ‘Carnival’. All at once Ganna is transformed. Lying back in an armchair, she listens wide-eyed like a child praying. What possesses me to show off my dire musical gifts? Is it the way the two speeds give rise to discord and arrhythmia? Because she will then beg forgiveness and embrace me, and kneel at my feet? The difference between us was this: she forgot everything from one hour to the next, the way only angels or demons forget; I forgot none of it, for all eternity. And it grew darker and darker in my heart.
THE MYSTICAL UNION
From the time when Irmgard got engaged to a mining engineer by the name of Loiter, I find the following entries in my diary: ‘For Irmgard I was merely a staging-post in the journey of her desire. Since giving me up, she seems to have given herself up, there is something ever so slightly wizened about her. But if you give yourself up, no God can help you, only the winged soul remains young and full of love, it loves without needing to be loved back, what it has it gives, and its grief comes from fullness, not lack.’ And then again: ‘There is a sadness so extreme, it makes you want to stretch out on the ground and wail; your tongue is sore when you speak; the very air is a crushing weight on your shoulders. And yet everything has merely taken its course. How nice that two people walk freely side by side, when they so clearly belong together. Even in the pain of loss there is a good and bitter taste, and something that so indefinably and lightly oscillated between passion and sibling affection didn’t even shatter. Rather, it leaves a golden memory. My continual nightmares! Never forget last night in the park, our last conversation, the way she stood there, pale and still, and a meteor etched its great parabola across the sky …’
Since the youngest sister Traude has now also married — her husband was a Berlin manufacturer by the name of Heckenast — Irmgard would have felt unhappily alone on the shelf. And so, when Loiter, a nice and clever man, proposed to her, she accepted. My feelings for her had lost none of their original freshness, even though I had already started having relationships with other women. Her image was precious to me. I depended on women. Without the erotic trance, without the magical involvement of the senses, I felt I was only half alive. Irmgard knew it. She never laid a claim to me. The evening cited above, at the end of a long silence, I reached for her hand and pressed it to my lips. She was shocked and gave a little jump. Suddenly, as though talking to herself, she asked:
‘How are things with you and Ganna?’
I replied: ‘Nothing has changed. Nothing can change.’
And she: ‘Did you never think of leaving her?’
I shook my head. I said it had never entered my mind; it would feel, I added, as if I were undertaking something against myself.
‘But you continually deceive her,’ she whispered with something like contempt, ‘and you continue to sleep with her … She has one baby after another … How can you?’
‘You’re right,’ I conceded glumly, ‘but even so … my marriage with Ganna is not in question. Quite apart from the children … There’s something … I can’t explain what it is, it’s a fact, you have to take it as it is.’
‘So the other women, that’s just a pastime?’
‘Nonsense, Irmgard. You know perfectly well that I don’t play with people. Please understand, it’s a mystical union.’
Those were my words. Irmgard replied with a shyly questioning ‘Oh?’ She didn’t believe me. But she had neither the strength nor the need to shake my faith in the ‘mystical union’. Perhaps she didn’t want to be in the company of those who eased my conscience by not questioning the ‘mystical union’. But she was mistaken if she thought such a union didn’t in fact exist. It did. It was put together from guilt and a fear of ghosts. It was steeped in the sense of imminent calamity, because I think I am one of those people who, half-knowingly, half-ignorantly, carry their future destiny around with them in the form of living substance.
GANNA’S TOLERANCE
If I remember correctly, the time of my physical turning-away from Ganna coincided with our leaving the Villa Ohnegroll. The flat had got to be too small for us and we moved into a rented house on the northern edge of Vienna, among the vineyards at the foot of the Kahlenberg. At first, only half of it was vacant; it was November when we moved, and for the next six months once again I had to retreat to the attic to work. I wasn’t too upset about that. I lived and slept under the roof, in a sort of world of my own. The ceiling was so low that I could put out my hand and touch it. Once I had bolted the iron door behind me I was alone and unreachable, with only my creations for company. When I moved down into the Ganna zone at the end of that time I felt much less happy, even though I continued to occupy a remote part of the house. There was an ever increasing unquiet about Ganna. She was embroiled in conflicts with all and sundry. There was endless trouble with the couple who ran the house; either it was about the use of the laundry room or the time the front gate was locked at night, or the tyranny of one of the cooks, or some malicious local gossip. There was always something. I kept having to intercede, tone down, apologise. And when it was fine, the songsters in the local wine bars made an unholy racket. What could I do other than flee the house when I felt uneasy there?
When Ganna gradually came to understand that I was no longer faithful to her, she took it very badly. I was never able to discover just exactly what went on in her innermost recesses. Sometimes I would find her in tears, sometimes there were bitter outbursts, sometimes I thought she was adjusting and had decided to tolerate my escapades, in roughly the way some wives don’t mind when their husbands go out drinking. Since I was usually terribly discreet — to spare her — it comforted her that in most cases she didn’t know the identity of the woman in question. Then she would persuade herself that other people wouldn’t know either. If this game of hide-and-seek couldn’t be kept up, she had a further consolation: she said it was just a question of a ‘concubine’, someone on the side. She, Ganna, remained the lawful spouse. There was no changing that. Also the world had to learn that she, Ganna, so to speak, supervised my amours. As soon as a new female creature entered my circle of acquaintance, and captured my heart and imagination, Ganna sought as a matter of urgency to find out how much danger this rival could pose, or, to put it another way, the degree to which her own claims remained unaffected. Her overall behaviour then developed in a sort of domestic politics. It was quite extraordinary when she explained to her confidantes (often I would be told about this afterwards) that a man like me might become spiritually impoverished without fresh experiences; it was important for his creativity that he wasn’t made to stick fast in his family, and besides he worked so hard that he had to be allowed the occasional diversion. The result, if I had been able to judge it clearly, as I was not, was a dispensation that sanctioned the literary reinvestment of amorous experiences. What was spent on one side of the ledger in terms of passion, time, even money, was earned back — with compound interest — as material for future books. Every movement of the spirit, every exaltation, was converted into subject-matter; then the book is printed and sold, and if it sells well, the expenses are easily covered. That was Ganna’s calculus. ‘You only need to have some insight,’ she said, and all she told me was, for her sake, not to give too much of myself, as though the account-keeping might be affected by erotic waste; ‘all these women are vampires, they want to suck the blood from your veins,’ she warned; and to prove that degenerate women had at all times taken aim at credulous men and got away with it, she would sometimes read me lurid passages from Garret’s Christian Mystics.