Mlle Haar had joined our household shortly after Doris’s birth. She was a woman in her mid-thirties, a chilly, morose creature, neither very industrious nor especially trustworthy. But at the outset, Ganna had been unable to find sufficient praise for her qualities, mainly because Mlle Haar absolutely doted on the baby. I have to say such passions are not unusual among carers; it doesn’t mean they have a scrap of affection for any living being.
Circumstances forced me to take a hand in the household; the difficulties were such that Ganna could not deal with them on her own. I had made the mistake of ignoring Ganna’s objections and according certain freedoms to Mlle Haar. For instance I had given her the keys to the larder and negotiated with her over the supplies of flour, sugar, rice and fat that she had purchased on my instructions. I could no longer stand to see the children going without proper sustenance; Ganna seemed to be quite incapable of laying in provisions — the acquisition of a kilo of butter was entirely beyond her in her unworldliness.
Once it turned out that Mlle Haar had connections to the black market, and offered to use them on our behalf, I grasped the opportunity with both hands and paid the asking price. This was enough to enrage Ganna because to her, in her lack of wants verging on asceticism, any expenditure on food and drink that went beyond the satisfying of basic hunger and thirst struck her as superfluous, if not criminal. In addition, the man who liaised between Mlle Haar and the black marketeers was himself her lover, a fellow by the name of Wüst, who had been in a reserve posting for every day of the war until it ended and now, like so many others, was looking to make a living. In the evening, under cover of darkness, he would lug into the house whatever he had managed to wangle in the course of the day; and then Mlle Haar would present me with the bill, an inflated one to be sure, barely sweetened by her unpleasant crooked smile.
The intercession and covert wheeling and dealing of Wüst had a poisonous effect on Ganna. She hurled foul accusations at Haar. Who for her part was not short of a word or two in reply. In the end, she threatened to sue Ganna for defamation. I told Ganna: ‘You mustn’t allow that to happen.’ She replied that a common thief like that would hardly go to law; why would she anyway, and lose out on the fat spoils I had, with my typical spinelessness, let her get away with. Haar, who always listened at every door, took sadistic pleasure in such scenes. She had conceived such a ferocious hatred for Ganna that it gave her another reason to cling onto her job, so as to relish the torments of her enemy. I in turn could not bring myself to send her packing, because at that time of the cessation of all idea of service I would have had no easy job in finding another nanny to look after the baby, whatever the rest of her qualities were. In addition, I was thrilled to have someone in the house who cooked properly and kept the household ticking over on a reasonable basis.
Distressing rows between Ganna and Haar became more frequent. Even at night they would suddenly begin; the screeching reached as far as my desk, forcing me to plug my ears with cotton wool. When Herr Wüst slunk into the house in the gloaming, heavily laden, Ganna would be lurking in wait for him and welcome him with insults. One day, when I was out of the house, the fellow had the nerve to lay hands on her; Ferry rushed over in defence of his mother; he was very strong; he knocked him over, tightened his hands round the man’s throat, they rolled around on the floor, and in the meantime Ganna called the police. Mlle Haar refused to leave the house without a written declaration of honour from Ganna. Ganna claimed Mlle Haar had stolen a crate of eggs. Mlle Haar complained to me; I told Ganna that, to the best of my recall, the eggs had been eaten. Ganna foamed with rage. Never in the history of the world had there been anything like this, she wailed, her own husband in alliance with the servants and their pimps — this was worse than anything I normally and daily did to her. But she knew, anyway, the heart of the conspiracy was Lady Merck, who had expressly taken on Haar and her fancy man to wreck her, Ganna’s, life; it was clear as day, the sparrows were shouting it from the rooftops. ‘Ganna,’ I appealed, shaking her. ‘Ganna!’ I drew her next door. ‘Ganna! Wake up! You can’t be serious!’ She looked at me blankly and replied: no, no, she was quite serious, she had evidence. ‘Evidence? What kind of evidence? Evidence for nonsense like that?’ She stayed mute and truculent.
The Haar business had got around the neighbourhood. One night a stone was thrown through Ganna’s window; another time the front door was smeared with excrement. Once, I was passing through a cluster of men; when I was past them, a high voice called out: ‘Chuck it in her face, the bitch!’ I locked the door behind me and the cry seemed to fill the hall, the stairway, the rooms; and when I sat down at my desk I saw it written on an empty sheet of white paper: ‘Chuck it in her face, the bitch!’
POETRY
I didn’t mention any of this to Bettina. I couldn’t bring myself to. Shame sealed my lips. To condemn Ganna was tantamount to condemning myself. But nor can I claim that Bettina knew nothing about it. What did she need gossip for? My silence was as transparent to her as tissue paper. I’m not the sort of man who can keep a secret. My moods, my experiences, even my thoughts are in plain view. Friends have often made fun of my futile attempts at discretion. And Bettina sensed what was happening in my life before I had even crossed the threshold. She didn’t need to ask me any questions. There was no point. What she wanted was to help me get over my depression and anxiety. It wasn’t her view that two people who love each other should spend all their time wailing and moaning. Better to ease it away. At that time, nothing so terrible could happen to her that it quite clouded over her sky; there was always a ray of sunshine somewhere. If you pulled yourself together, remained true to your better nature, didn’t give yourself airs, then the powers could be reconciled. With violin in hand, it might even be possible to secure some improvements from them; enough to live by for a while to come.
I can’t express how much it meant to me, this belief in a way out, in destiny, in the victory of goodwill over life’s glooms and travails. I watched her in astonishment and not a little envy. Everywhere were people who were well disposed to her and others whom she did everything to help: a poor seamstress for whom she found work; a friend who had returned from the war ill and infirm, and whom she tended and fed. She was always on her way somewhere or other to do something helpful and purposeful — not like a do-gooder, that wasn’t her at all, but more like someone who sees it as a challenge, almost a game, quietly to iron out some of the little kinks in fate. And for all that, I know no one who was as regularly and maliciously misunderstood, with her bonny blitheness and her honesty. It often gave me pause. Perhaps it was because she was too quick with words, too certain of her judgement and fearlessly coming forth with her own brave truths. Of course that was bound to upset a lot of people. It’s a good thing to have someone you can think about without being at loggerheads with them. An inexhaustible wealth of perspectives, when she would talk to me about her day, material for conversations deep into the night.
At that time I wrote a whole string of sonnets for her.
THE DECISION
And then, in the autumn, the great convulsion in my life began.
It was a mild day in October. We were returning from a hike in the mountains and sat down on a bench not far from the main village street, glad of the isolation that, along with the autumn, had returned to our beloved valley. We spent a long time gazing silently across the meadows, where the evening fogs were boiling up, when Bettina asked me whether I had given any thought to what would come of us during the winter ahead. I looked at her in consternation. It wasn’t immediately clear to me what she meant. ‘Well, what should be any different?’ I asked. She lowered her eyes. She said if that was my answer, then I might as well forget her question. I realized then that this wasn’t a trivial question popped at a peradventure, and now I did know what she was getting at. I had a bad conscience. I stammered a few scraps of phrases: I could understand … I’d often thought about it, of late … Then I fell silent. Bettina felt her way cautiously forward. Did I think it was right for us to carry on living with blindfolded eyes? … Was it proper that I went back to Ganna again, as I had every previous year?