A MEADOW APPEARS ON THE HORIZON
At that time, it was the fashion for the wives of the bourgeoisie to parade their devotion to their children. So-called toughening measures, hygienic principles, pedagogic instruction — all that was bandied about with a solemn seriousness, talked about in meetings and pursued in the most modern way. One might have supposed the offspring of these well-off ladies, who could afford any extravagance, would grow to be a morally and physically perfect race of beings, equipped to transform the prospects of human society. Unless I’ve missed it, this has not proved to be the case.
Ganna was resolutely against sending her children to an ordinary school. They were home-taught, which, over time, turned out to be an expensive business. Every classroom, according to Ganna, was a toxic dump, rife with infectious diseases, an inferno of germs, as she put it. Further, she was dead set against conventional methods of teaching and child-rearing. She favoured special treatment, respect for the individual, holistic development of the personality. Splendid — but where were the institutions where such things were promulgated? I was suspicious of the theories of the latest wave of pedagogues, whose child-worship laid the foundation for the brutalise of a later era.
I put it to Ganna that children needed to be taught to exist in a community; that they would turn into selfish anti-social brats if they were not made acquainted with self-sacrifice, adversity and shocks; where would they end up if not with the millions of others, what remorse and revenge were lying in wait for them when the day of reckoning and levelling finally arrived? I was wasting my breath. To a spirit like Ganna’s the state of the world in which she moved must seem unalterable, since she herself harboured no possibilities of change either. She embarked on lengthy fantasies on the cruelty of schoolmasters, who had no interest in knowledge and understanding, but only in censorship and morals. Weren’t the newspapers full of the recent spate of suicides among schoolchildren? No, she wasn’t going to allow the little innocents to be routinely poisoned. ‘Your schools are prisons,’ she exclaimed with the expression of a fanatical preacher, ‘I’d rather be drawn and quartered than condemn my children to a convict existence like that.’ My children! Ganna, Ganna! My house, my husband, my children: that was all that counted, with ‘your’ lying on the ground like a dead dog.
What did she have in mind? Ferry was almost ten, his case was becoming urgent, he couldn’t go on being kept apart from his contemporaries like a prince; nor could Elisabeth. They were living in a hothouse as it was. They needed to burst through the glass walls. It seemed to me I was fighting an undeclared war with Ganna over the souls of the children. It wasn’t love and affection that had started it, but what I term the atmospheric effect of a human being, the silent and pervasive influence of a protective presence. No one has yet established how the blood of father and mother become mingled to inheritance and destiny; nor was it even certain that parentage counted for more than principles. Ganna’s cosseting of the children was a serious threat to their welfare. But was I sufficiently different to be able to decide? It’s impossible to give a young human enough love, I would sometimes weakly say, as though love can be a universal remedy against unhappiness and suffering; as if I didn’t know perfectly well that we feel the cold much more when our warm coat is taken away from us than if we had never had it.
One fine day Ganna dawdles with her usual demonstrative slowness through the narrow lanes of our part of town and comes across a fenced-off meadow, a waving piece of green ground, like a flag, going uphill. She stops. An idea comes to her: this is where the children will go to school. A visionary moment. She sees it all unfold before her: pretty wooden buildings, long verandas, airy dormitories for boarders, assembly room, library, tennis courts, gymnasium; all of it palpably there, within reach. Why shouldn’t she build such an ideal establishment by her own plans? Who could get in the way? In the end, it’s only a question of money.
Within the next few minutes the following thoughts come to her fertile mind, as she stands there rooted to the spot, smitten with the meadow. She will be able to borrow money, that’s what financiers are there for. They will get a share of the business; repayment depends on how profitable the idea ultimately turns out to be. It will be set up as a joint-stock company. An educational company. Such a lovely meadow in such a lovely location must be worth a fortune. Perhaps it will be possible to acquire it for not very much. In a few years it will have appreciated so much that she will run the entire business off it, in the unlikely event that it doesn’t pay for itself anyway. Pupils will come flocking there from all over Austria and Germany. They will advertise. They will acquire charitable status — what does she have so many connections for? It will be a gold mine. She will reserve the meadow for herself. It will remain her personal property. Assuming it costs 60,000 or 70,000 crowns, then in ten years’ time, when the district comes to be developed, it will be worth half a million at least. With half a million, she will be able to secure independence for me and an old age free from worries. And in the meantime it will be just heaven for the children.