At the beginning of summer we were able to free ourselves from our melancholy existence in the city. It had become a regular thing with us that we would spend the weeks from early June to mid-September in Ebenweiler. Ganna would arrive with the children in July, after the end of the school year, but the weeks Bettina and I had the place to ourselves were the happiest of the year. There, in the valley that had become home to us, we were allowed to forget the world in flames. We weren’t mocking the war; rather it became subsumed in nature. When the guns’ thunder boomed up to us out of the south, it sounded like God’s anger about a humanity that vandalized His creation; the glaciated peaks were like bolted green gates at which human dying stopped. Everything belonged to the two of us, the forests, the lakes, the bridges, the white footpaths. There were starlit evenings when the trembling firmament sprinkled golden flakes on the bed of our love, and rainy nights that seemed they must quench all the flaring hatred of the world. I wandered back and forth, between Bettina’s house and mine, at all hours of night and day, in the evening when the cows were watered, in the morning when the farmer sharpened his sickle; the day was called Bettina, the night was called Bettina, Bettina was the whole of life.
But when Ganna is there, that all needs to be paid for. She arrives with endless boxes and cases, bags and bundles; each child has to have its own personal toys, she packs books for any whim she may have, there is enough there for five years of solitary confinement. I reproach her for bringing so much clobber, for the inundation. But that has the opposite effect: why should she have to do without, she asks feistily; where are her ball-gowns and her hats and her fourteen pairs of shoes, would I have the kindness to point them out to her? Is she to do without her deckchair? Her Schopenhauer? Behold the man set on putting his wife on the equivalent of bread and water!
I had often beseeched her to stay away from Ebenweiler. Didn’t she have her lovely house on the edge of the city, couldn’t she just send me the children on their own, with their governess? She dismissed the idea haughtily. She refused to be displaced. She was the lawful wife. ‘Do you want me to make it even easier for you and your mistress,’ she hissed, ‘so that people might think I’d given you over? No, I’m not going to do that person such a kindness. What you are doing to me cries out to high heaven in any case!’
That first summer, Bettina had taken a farmer’s cottage a quarter of an hour away. It had been poorly thought out, taking somewhere within such easy range for Ganna. But she fell in love with the place, and not until the fourth summer did she decide to move to another house at the far end of the valley. For too long we failed to see our mistake in choosing as a refuge a place where I had had many years of business connections and was so to speak a public figure. But the landscape was more precious to me than any other; I owed it, in addition to my physical base, everything that nature in the form of atmosphere, water, stone and vegetation can give a sensitive and creative man; I could think of no other refuge and, had I done so, Ganna would have followed us there anyway. It was here, if anywhere, on the basis of my acquaintance with the locals, that we could hope to escape the otherwise unavoidable anathema and be a free couple.
Ganna accepted the advantage that was offered her. The fact that Bettina and I were flouting the bourgeois order represented a triumph for her. Her martyred expression appealed to the sympathy of others. If she had been a little less assiduous in creating a following, a Ganna party, then she would have had even more followers. Inevitably, there were circles in which Bettina was vilified. Cold glances brushed her; tongues wagged behind her turned back; slanders flung up in the air like rubbish when a wind strikes it. Every second or third day some bossy missive of Ganna’s, some peremptory note, was delivered to her. She ignored them. She refused to dignify them with her attention. With hasty stride she walked on, her ankle spattered by a little filth. What did it matter? The local ladies didn’t invite her to their jours and cut her when they meet; doesn’t bother her. She barely notices. Sometimes she feels a little jab; a person has their pride, they know who they are, but it’s soon overcome. The sight of a flower bed, half an hour on the violin are enough to cause her to forget it altogether. She is not the sort to lower her eyes in front of people. She has no comprehension of meanness, no ear for gossip. A timid acquaintance feels obliged to counsel her to be careful; surely there was no need for her to appear in public with me so much. She replies: ‘Why not? How else are we going to get people used to us?’
It remained the place where we were vulnerable. We should have been more discreet, more considerate, more thoughtful. We shouldn’t have rubbed Ganna’s nose in our happiness. That only stung and provoked her. We made ourselves guilty, incurred an obligation that in later years was called in, in full, and with usurious rates of interest. If Ganna still had any sense then of womanly dignity, we choked it mindlessly, and in the intoxication of being-there-for-each-other we didn’t listen to the voice of reason. Of course, I had long since despaired of Ganna, thoroughly and comprehensively despaired, I should long ago have given up the idea of making her any sort of helpmeet; isn’t that how things had been for fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years now; and shouldn’t I, either by determination or by kindness, with every conceivable sacrifice have cleared things up instead of — through weakness and timidity and a conscientiousness born of cowardice — dragging myself along at the side of a woman to whom I had nothing more to give — or she me — or to become. And Bettina in her loftiness, her aversion to everything murky, divided, difficult or grim, shut her eyes and walked wilfully past. Yes, it took boldness, it took strength, there was a noble stubbornness to it, but it accomplished nothing and didn’t help. It merely sowed more destruction.
The way individuals live together. The truth of each individual is only the truth of his own narrow perspective. The entirety of mankind and of human qualities is always seen through a prism, where its colours are broken. Observation is so utterly different from experience; there is no hope of fusing their contradictions, as the I and the not-I have been foes from the world’s beginning.
THE CASE OF KLOTHILDE HAAR
No question, it was the Klothilde Haar episode that finally killed off whatever hope there was of my achieving peace with Ganna. The months leading up to summer 1919 that I spent with her were sheer nightmare.
While the Dual Monarchy was collapsing and being torn to shreds; while Germany was racked by revolutions and contorting itself into cramps; while the charnel smell wafting over from the battlefields was poisoning the cities and the influenza epidemic seemed set to mow down whatever was left of youth and life; while hunger drove desperate men to crime and disappointment turned former willing sacrifices to bandits; while a new world came into being in the east and the old one killed itself off in the west with paper deals: while all these other things were going on elsewhere, Ganna in her little domestic state was turning things on their heads, piling discord upon discord, and making the lives of her loved ones into a private inferno, for the sole reason that she had the crazy obsession that Klothilde Haar was my and Bettina’s creature, paid and instructed to supplant her, Ganna, in every way.