‘I can see from Alexander how easy it is to fall for such frippery,’ Ganna continues; ‘ever since he met you, he’s become terribly pernickety; he used to be so modest, now all of a sudden he knows where to go and buy ties and he demands — it’s hysterical, really — that his trousers are pressed every week. I could die laughing.’
Bettina doesn’t understand quite why it should be funny, but is agreeable enough to chime in with Ganna’s rather forced laughter. Ganna thinks the moment has come to cut to the chase.
‘Frau Merck,’ she says, and her voice has a palpable edge to it, ‘please don’t suppose you can capture my husband with such blandishments. Oh, no. Better women than you have tried. Please understand — I’m telling you this out of niceness, to put you in the picture, in case you don’t know — my marriage to Alexander is a rocher de bronze. Alexander will never divorce me, not under any circumstances. My mind is perfectly at ease on that score. Don’t deceive yourself. I am not at all worried. All I want is to prevent you from entertaining false hopes.’
Bettina needs a little time to collect herself. Such a thunder-shower of horrors has never, in all the time she can remember, fallen on her. Once again she has the sense she needs to call out: ‘Woman, watch your mouth! Stop and think. You can’t talk to people like that.’ She forces a smile and replies as one might to a raving child:
‘I’m sure you’re right, Ganna. But there’s no need to tell me that. No one intends to take Alexander away.’
Ganna emits a sound like a menacing gurgle. ‘I don’t advise it either,’ she says coarsely, concludingly, and gets to her feet.
Bettina walks her out into the hall and helps her into her coat. She sends her regards to the children. Ganna is moved. She departs with gushing thanks. She has no idea how badly she has behaved. She carries her head high and takes pleasure in her victory. Once she’s alone, Bettina has a fit of vertigo. She pulls open the windows. Her feet are ice-cold, her nails are blue. She is chilled to the marrow. She goes into the bedroom, gets undressed and falls into bed. She feels a deadly wretchedness all day. She tries to forget the awful events. She has to get rid of them. She won’t keep them. When she told me about the visit a week later, she was still shaking, trembling, a-chill.
CIRCE
Since all my previous relationships fizzled out after a year, two at the most, Ganna — though at a greater level of upset than at other times — still waited with reasonable confidence for this one to end too. When the end refused to come, she was completely unhinged. Grim old superstitions awoke in her. Sometimes she expressed, perfectly seriously, the suspicion that Bettina must have slipped me a magic potion. Anyway, the danger of a lasting bond seemed so great to her that she thought of ways and means of freeing me from Bettina’s toils. This was the basis of one of the most durable Ganna fictions, to which she resorted to keep herself afloat a little longer: that in her view I was trapped in a most reluctantly borne erotic dependency in which I was tormented by the longing to free myself from the bands of this heartless Circe, and sink back into the much more dearly beloved Ganna. Only my cruel seductress wouldn’t submit, she made me dozy with her sex potion and robbed me of my manhood to the extent that I even slandered my Ganna to her, which was all the easier as Circe of course had contrived to reinterpret all Ganna’s virtues as vices. But this relatively bland fantasy wasn’t enough for Ganna. By and by she became convinced that Bettina had had a hand in the forced sale of the meadow; and not her alone, but the whole of the ‘Waldbauer set’ had been involved, given that the sole desire of these people and their hangers-on was to slander Ganna and take me away from her, and utterly to destroy her.
This farrago of evident nonsense was proof against all arguments; no evidence, no straightforward appearance of things, no amount of pleading or imploring or head-shaking helped; it grew and grew, linked itself to other conspiracy theories, turning the air I breathed into a dirty soup and blackening the sky over my head.
BETTINA’S AND MY CULPABILITY
I ought really to write far more about Bettina than I have so far, but it’s not easy. My every picture of her straight away moves into such intense close-up that I am unable to make out any outline and am confined to listing, step by step, what changed in me and in my life through her entry into it. I hope that may give a clearer impression of her nature than if I were to cover pages with her qualities, her looks, or her various moods. The actual person with whom you live is bound to be, in a curious way, invisible, in just the same way as you yourself are invisible; all you can do is sense their presence, feel them within you, and in turn expand in them. The word love, compared to that, has little meaning.
It’s clear that, from the very beginning, Bettina’s marriage gave me much to ponder. Without our ever expressly talking about it, it seemed clear to me, and accepted, that in this matter she would not lower herself to half-measures and dishonesties. By and by I was able to make out how things stood between her and Paul. Basically, it was all very straightforward. They had fallen for one another when they were very young, and had got married, almost on a trial basis. They hadn’t fared too badly. Early on there had been a few blameless contretemps, and then they had sealed a compact and were now living harmoniously with and alongside each other. For a little while now, both had had the feeling their relationship was nearing a new status and clarity. They often discussed it, amiably enough, neither wanting to make trouble for the other. Bettina had no money: ‘I went into marriage like a church mouse,’ she once told me, ‘and if I have to, I’ll leave it in exactly the same way.’ Another time she said: ‘Marriage isn’t a form of public welfare: you decide what to do about the children — for their sake, if nothing else — and apart from that, why should I be concerned with the man who doesn’t want me any more, or I him?’ To be light-footed and free, that was all that mattered. Some friends who watched as she span her thread were inclined to describe her as trusting to providence. But that was probably a highfalutin way of putting it. She was, quite simply, not one to feel sorry for herself. She wasn’t afraid of life. She didn’t need a man with money to pay her way. She scorned the idea of security.
Those months in the city were hard for both of us. It was the time the carnage of the Great War was getting going. The belief that people were suffering for a just cause was being eroded from every side, and was soon to collapse altogether. Men dear to me, who had gone out with enthusiasm, returned wrecks in body and soul, useless for any occupation. At the Somme a half-brother of mine died, whom I had loved dearly in his youth. No letter, no farewell, just a silent death. Inflammatory lies from above and below and beyond the frontiers ground up my heart. The rich with their plenty, their bacchanalian orgies, offered a contrast not to be outdone in its brazenness. While they danced and whored the nights away, armies of mothers stood outside the bakers’ and butchers’ shops, patient files of lemurs. Many a time, Bettina and I would find ourselves wandering through unlit suburban streets; we were numbed by the extraordinary weight of misery. Once again, by letter and in person, I asked to be taken into the army; my petition was settled when I fell victim to a chronic gall-bladder colic. But for Bettina’s close participation in my life and work, I wouldn’t have known what to do with myself. ‘Is it permitted for two people to live for each other like us?’ I asked her anxiously. ‘Isn’t it tempting fate? Two wretched humans seeking to put off the end by a moment or two of snatched happiness; as if that were the point, and waking wouldn’t be the worse for it …’ Bettina didn’t bite. In her humility, she didn’t bite. There was a bird of ill omen that used to scream at night in the garden behind her house; she had called him Giglaio, in imitation of his cry, and when she heard him her every drop of blood would freeze. Luckily she had the blessed gift of forgetting bad and ugly things, that was the obverse of her courage; and when the first green shoots would show above the ground, and the sun rose above a certain gable, she would be desperate for spring and slowly climb out of winter, and the darkness and sickness associated with it. Evidently she had her own darkness in her as well. So-called cheerful people often have much darker hours to endure than self-proclaimed pessimists.