I had volunteered in the first few weeks of the war. No man of heart and upstanding character at that time gave any thought to the rights and wrongs of the war, nor did anyone know what war actually was, or what it meant. We were parts of a whole and the whole was, or appeared to be, a living organism, a people, a fatherland, a place of being and becoming. I made up an excuse to Ganna, travelled into Vienna overnight and went to the consulate. The Consul, who knew me, initially wanted to pack me off home because they were so overrun with volunteers, but I insisted on being examined. The doctor found a cardiac neurosis. I went home desperately disappointed to Ebenweiler and told Ganna what I’d done. She was aghast with shock.
‘What are you playing at, Alexander,’ she cried, ‘a father of young children, a family to support, you’re not serious?’
Then it was my turn to be shocked; I think it was on that day that it occurred to me that the female Don Quixote was only a decoy.
‘And what’s the matter with your heart?’ she moaned, when I told her what the doctor had said. ‘You see, it’s because you don’t look after yourself. You smoke too much, you don’t sleep enough, you should listen to me.’
‘Oh no, Ganna,’ I said, ‘it’s not that. Living means using up your heart. That’s the point. I will have got too upset about too many things. Has it never occurred to you that getting upset is worse for me than smoking and not sleeping?’
That hurt her. She wanted to know what had upset me, as though it could be anything I might put my finger on. I was unable to give her a detailed instance; what difference would it have made if I had, she would have tried to talk it away and another argument would have started. Still, she kept boring in on me, and finally she asked me if I thought she was a good wife to me.
‘Have you got any grounds for complaint? Tell me, aren’t I a good wife to you?’
‘Yes, Ganna, you are,’ I said, ‘you’re a good wife to me.’
Then she wanted me to swear that I really meant it.
‘What’s the point of that, Ganna, don’t be childish,’ I replied, and more than ever I had the sense of her hopeless trusting in forms of words, believing in hollowed-out notions and being in love with an image of herself that bore no relation to the living being.
GANNA MAKES HER WILL
By now, things have got to the point where the consortium or board or whatever the group of directors called themselves have started to demand the meadow back from Ganna. She can name a price for it, she is told, but within reason. It’s not easy for Ganna to think of a number, seeing as the exploitation of the meadow is the subject of all her dreams, and she wants to make me happy by it (though I don’t seem very happy about it). With a strange unaccountable tenderness she clings onto the piece of property in her mind; ‘my little meadow’ she says, and smiles just as blissfully as when giving our little Doris her breast. How can such a thing be, what makes someone like that tick? I can’t explain it to myself.
The pressure on her from all sides is too much; she loses her nerve. Tossed back and forth between opposition and weakness, tenacity and fear, bitterness and speculative greed, she is unable to make her mind up. She asks everyone who crosses her path for an opinion — her sisters, her brothers-in-law, the servants, the suppliers, the gardener. But if one doesn’t coincide with her own secret wishes she becomes unpleasant, and launches into lengthy discussions of her view and praise of the meadow.
She calls a general meeting. People talk, quarrel, shout, and at the end Ganna promises to make her decision public the next day. The next day she communicates the price to the board in writing. No sooner has she posted the registered letter than she takes fright and asks for it back. ‘They’d be laughing all the way to the bank,’ she says to me, ‘I should ask for three times as much, they’re all well-off people and I mustn’t allow them to bully me.’ I warn her. I don’t know what’s going on, but this seems to me to be playing a dangerous game. More negotiations, more ranting and screaming, followed by an abrupt walkout. The brothers-in-law are with me in exhorting her to moderation. Dr Paul describes the offer made to her as decent and acceptable; she resists it with all her might, claims she is being cheated. The inappropriateness of her demand is proved to her; she seems to accept it, only an hour later to be back with her old standpoint. She runs from pillar to post, scolds those who disagree with her, wastes people’s time, describes the intrigues being used to intimidate her, comes up with vast sums she is being cheated of by the pressure of the antagonists, asks every Tom, Dick and Harry: ‘Should I do it, should I not, at this price, at that price, on this condition, on that condition? Will I regret it, won’t I regret it? Is it not a crime against my husband and my children if I let that gang walk away with my lovely meadow?’ She thinks about nothing else. She lives like a fugitive. She neglects herself, her domestic duties, me, the children. She no longer appears at mealtimes. Sometimes she can be found sitting on a bench in the public park, eating an apple. Sometimes having a nap in an Automat, listening to a scratchy gramophone record all dewy-eyed as if it were the Philharmonic.
Her indecisiveness, her anger, her restlessness, her wheeling and dealing, her tangled arguments, all the trash of a commercial dispute fought out with repulsive methods — she brings them all to me and dumps them on my lap. I am to ‘have the last word’. I decline; the last word would only be the penultimate one anyway. Every evening till far into the night the same song with the same exhausting refrain that it was all for my sake, that this whole struggle was all for me and only for me. ‘If you accept that, then I’ll stop,’ she says. ‘Do you accept that, do you accept that?’ Echolalia and nothing but. What am I to say? She won’t stop anyway, never mind how much I accept.
I can’t stand the endless rhetoric of it any more; the canny lawyerly presentations; the suspicions of people who are either acting in good faith, or who have nothing more dastardly in mind than Ganna herself, namely to make some money. I am nauseated by the disagreeable mixing of profit motive and high-mindedness. The story of the meadow is already making waves. To know that my name is being used in connection with it pains me. Old Councillor Schönpflug approaches me once in the club and begs me to keep Ganna from further folly, which might end up in a court case and not just a civil one at that. It’s horrible, it’s humiliating, I must try and bring it to an end.
One morning, dressed and ready to go out, I walk into Ganna’s bedroom to say goodbye to her. She is just coming out of the bathroom, swathed in a red and white chequered dressing-gown. No sooner does she catch sight of me than she launches into the usual daily litany. There is to be a meeting at Dr Pauli’s at twelve o’clock, could I not perhaps attend. It would help her a lot. She would be forever grateful to me (or rather, I think to myself, she would never forgive me if I refused).
Of late, I haven’t shown her much in the way of friendliness. It cost me too much. I can’t be friendly if I don’t have it in me to be so. I have become increasingly cold and laconic and irritable. I am angry with myself for my lovelessness. But my heart is blocked. I can’t find a kind word. Not now either. I shrug. The thought of more talks at the lawyer’s office gives me the willies. I couldn’t, I’m afraid, I say. Straight away Ganna turns aggressive. If only I could leave her to rage and walk off. But her tirades are like glue, and I’m stuck fast. When she calls it pathetic, my refusal to support her, the man for whom she is sacrificing herself, I remind her I hadn’t demanded or wished for any such sacrifice, and she was more use to me as a housewife and mother of our children. That earns me a salvo of derision from Ganna’s mouth.