THE TRAGEDY OF THE MALE
Before I relate how the ever uglier and more distressing business of the school went on and finally ended, I want to talk about my own experiences in the years before the war, and in the first years of the war — two in particular that, each in their own way, had a profound effect on the future. The one was the birth of my daughter Doris, the other the gift of a house — a whole fully furnished house, with grounds — the kind gift of a young couple I had been close friends with for some time. I had told them about my domestic trouble, the difficulty of finding peace and concentration in a rented apartment, and the resulting tendency to fritter away the day and do my work at night. Then, on a generous impulse, they offered me the money to buy a house in the country. I was so stunned I could hardly breathe. I didn’t dare turn it down, but felt I couldn’t accept it either. It was extraordinary; I asked myself if I had any right to avail myself of this favourable smile of fortune, it almost seemed to me it would be betraying my friends to do so. How can you deserve such a sacrifice — albeit those making it don’t see it as such — how thank them, when thanks you can’t give will end up burdening you? I had none of the greedy self-certainty of those geniuses (I didn’t think I was one in any case) who accept support and help from their admirers as a perfectly natural form of tribute. I was too steeped in the bourgeois ethos of deals and contracts. The formulas ‘nowt for nowt’ and ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ were in my blood. It wasn’t easy for me to see myself in any way as (in some higher sense) ‘deserving’ the generosity of these friends.
Ganna, however, had no such scruples. She thought it was absolutely to be expected that people would seek to spoil me a little. They were only giving me back what they had already had from me in plenty, she said, with eyes wide. ‘Come off it,’ I said, petulantly, ‘there must be a couple of thousand like me. Ninety per cent of us will probably die in a ditch. You’re doing pretty well if you have enough to eat and a bed to sleep in at night. What’s so special about me? What have I done to deserve a luxury villa? We have no right to such security, it seems to me.’ Ganna vehemently disagreed. She was too obviously the child of a well-provided and self-righteous era where mind and work had their value just as stocks and shares did. It raised my worth immeasurably in her eyes, although she seemed not to be aware of the fact that it was her husband who had been given the house. Nothing like this had happened since the days of the Medicis. She trumpeted her and my good fortune to all and sundry, and when I asked her to be a little discreet, she looked at me uncomprehendingly. But it gave us a neutral territory where our shared interests could get to work on a common project. Ganna needed to be kept busy, she was like a stove needing fuel. She could do twenty things at once, and each of them with verve and enthusiasm. And when we discussed the house together, looked for a piece of land, spoke to the architect, studied the plans, bought furniture and lamps and other things, the besetting passivity I fell into whenever I was with her left me, and I could at least be dragged along. And, so that she didn’t see I was only allowing myself to be dragged along, I would stroke her tiny hand which was feeding me sugar lumps, so that I for my part wouldn’t notice how she was dragging me along. Marriage offers the weaker party plenty of opportunity to show no character.
It took no particular cleverness or endeavour on Ganna’s part to induce me to have my new possession — this house, the workplace and refuge intended for me personally — registered in her name as well. One day we went along to the land registry office and Ganna was legally made co-owner of the villa. I gave the matter no thought whatsoever. I didn’t think that I was thereby relinquishing the one and only thing that was entirely mine. I didn’t reflect that I was establishing Ganna in a feeling of ownership and entitlement that — beyond the actual name on the deeds — signified in some magical sense a transfer of body and soul.
But I was only superficially engaged with all this. In hindsight, these years came to seem like a trek along a dark, overhung path, with rare moments of rest or looking up. I could sense that tremendous things were imminent. The black cloud, still invisible below the horizon, was already projecting electric waves, and I was continually nervous, like a bird before a storm. There was an awful magic being wrought over the land and over the people, I felt ill at ease when I walked at night, as I often had occasion to, through the streets of German cities; I suffered from my second sight like a sleeper dreaming his house is on fire. It seemed to me another world was claiming me than the one in which I had thus far been content to be. What I had achieved seemed negligible, inadequate; it spoke to too few people, it existed in outmoded forms. I had a sense of others, waiting, but I didn’t know anything about them. I was still far from my limits, and far from myself; if I failed to break through my crust, then I would find myself crushed by it.
My senses too were aflame. Ravenous appetite alternated with satiety. No woman was enough for me; none gave me what I was dimly seeking: a sense of who I was, some final easement of the blood. I went from one to another, and it was often as though I had to break them open like a husk or shell with unknown contents, peeling them like a fruit which I then discarded. It wasn’t Don Juan-ishness, nor was it sheer lechery either. There might have been something in it of the misunderstanding that takes the living being and half-angrily, half-playfully exchanges it for an imaginary one, and contents itself with that because it can’t perfect the other. Perhaps it was something to do with the tragedy of the male who sets off towards the glacial region of symbols and en route forgets himself with warm-blooded nymphs.
By the time the baby was born, we were already living in our new house.
THE TRUTH BEGINS TO DAWN
Only then did events with the school board take on the shape of the catastrophe that deeply affected both Ganna’s life and mine. The main cause of the trouble was that Ganna stubbornly refused to make over the meadow to the company. The stockholders described it as intolerable that the extensive land for the project, on which the newly built school was standing, should remain in separate ownership, and that the owner, herself a member of the board, should charge a substantial rent for it. In the course of stormy meetings, Ganna was upbraided for the immoral and unbusinesslike nature of the situation. It made her look bad, it was said, that she laid claim both to the idealism of the project and the lion’s share of the profits. That is very much the way of it: people who have disappointed expectations of money are extremely hard on those who, while on the side of the angels, also want to turn a profit. That’s wrong, they say, there are businessmen and there are priests, you can’t be both at once. The other side’s lawyers even contested Ganna’s title. Their claim was that Ganna had managed to acquire the title by some underhand method, and they sought to expose it.