But such thoughts, gloomy as they were, were only clustered in the waiting room; within was my fear of Ganna. And that fear darkened my spirits so much that I didn’t dare confess it openly to Bettina. Ganna oppressed me, like an Alp on my chest. All-present, she filled my days and nights. Maybe what I took to be duty, and even now — even now — ‘mystical union’ was really based on habit, habitual tussling and bickering, dragging loads and paying off debts? Adventurous flight plans shot through my head, how I might get from one woman to the other. Bettina’s demand, that cleansing either-or, in my confusion struck me as a coarse intervention in my life. If she hadn’t been the dearest person in the world to me, to be without whom was something I could no longer imagine, I would probably have mutinied during the early days of my inner schism and, albeit crushed and broken, would have slunk back into my Ganna hell. Yes, if Ganna had been a rational woman, I thought, persuadable, changeable, if she had some access to the world, or the world to her — how wonderful it would be then to live with Bettina, how lightsome and glad one might be, serenity and joy at last. But the mere prospect of having to talk to Ganna was like a burning dread.
Still, I had made up my mind. Once the procrastinator has finally decided to act he tends to move with a somnambulistic clank in the chain of events, so that even a misstep can assist him. And since any author will tend to favour his written word, since a letter makes for a certain soothing of agitated nerves and needs fear no interruption, I sat down and wrote Ganna a long letter. First the contents. The impossibility of letting things go on like this. My emotional condition these past several years, the need for me to get out of my bleakness. Urgent plea to Ganna to help me, and not set her face in opposition. I closed with the solemn assurance that neither Bettina nor I was thinking in terms of a divorce, and that all we purposed was to link ourselves in a free association. This disingenuous attempt at calming Ganna was, as Bettina had predicted, a bad mistake, and the cornerstone of all the wretchedness and horror to come.
A few days later I went to Vienna. As agreed, I stayed with a friend of Bettina’s, Baroness Hebestreit, a young war widow. It wasn’t easy for me to be a guest in the city where my home and my children were. To Ganna, though, it was a kick in the slats.
UNENDING
She didn’t believe it. Yes, she’d read the letter, two times, five times, ten times, but what is a letter. She needed presence. A letter wasn’t presence. A letter is subject to recall or revision. A letter may be written under the influence of others, even under duress (and her certainty about this influence, this duress, turned into an incontrovertible fact in her brain which made it, again, the basis of the coming catastrophe). I had told her in a postscript that I would see her on Tuesday at noon; I was coming down on Monday. Announcing my visit seemed to her nonsensical. What was it supposed to mean? I was going to visit myself in my own house? Absurd. On Monday evening I telephoned her and let her know where I was staying. Now she had her presence: she knew I wasn’t with her. Her last illusions went crashing to the ground.
Once she had got over the initial shock she thought about what to say to her acquaintances, her in-laws, her sisters, her mother, the children, the servants. It was more than a calamity for her; it was a black spot. She had no idea how she could show herself to people, disgraced as she was. Although she comforted herself by saying it would only be for a matter of days, the staggering thing had happened: I had sought shelter for myself with strangers. The strangers would talk about it with other strangers, and with that she was doomed to dishonour.
In order to steal a march on the gossips, she had herself put through on the telephone to various men and women who were all very surprised to learn from her that I had returned from the country sooner than expected and, because of urgent and unforeseen repairs to the house, had gone to stay with Baroness von Hebestreit. Even though she was canny enough to slip in this fact with some other snippet of information, or some question she was asking, as if it were a casual matter, of course the very casualness put her interlocutors on guard. She followed the same method of correcting fate and eliminating reality with the children. They didn’t believe her either. When they heard that I was staying somewhere else in town they looked half-stricken. Probably they had been expecting something of the kind.
In all these undertakings and endeavours I can picture her in front of me, padding round the house in her felt slippers and speaking with lisping voice; how the knowing Ganna hid herself from the imperturbable Ganna, the one heartsore, the other burning with impatience; how she darted, eyes staring, to the telephone whenever it rang; how, after a given time, she paced back and forth in my study incessantly, magicked me back to my desk, drilled through me with her reproachful glances and under her breath muttered her tawdry imprecations that I’d heard so often — that woman … May God punish her … He will punish her children … I’ll destroy her … But there was yet another Ganna, who didn’t indulge herself in such shrewish speeches; her eyes ran with tears, and she wiped them away with her clenched fist. When I opened the door and stepped inside, she threw herself against me with a choked cry.
It’s not possible to record all the discussions I had with Ganna, not even to list them. Among the locations were: the library, the terrace, the garden, Ganna’s bedroom, the street; among the times were: morning, noon, evening and night. All together, they would make up an uninterrupted conversation going over many days. Put on record, they would represent the exhausting and perspectiveless efforts of two people to get something from one another that it wasn’t in the other’s power to give. One seeks to tear a band; the other, seeing belatedly how cracked and holey it is, wants to patch it. One wants to leave the cold hearth; the other claims the fire is still burning, a holy flame, to extinguish which were an act of godlessness. One is coming to terms with the past; the other won’t accept the reckoning and is whimpering for more credit. Conversations as old as the world, as sterile as pebbles, as agonizing as toothache. Here, they were given a new point and terrible amplitude by Ganna’s character and methods.
I had come to her with the best of intentions. In order to persuade her to willingly relinquish our union, I offered all the kindness of which I was capable. I spoke of the nineteen years of our living together and the obligations those years imposed on her; that she must on no account lightly destroy the memory of those years. Ganna agreed, but wondered why I should not be equally bound by such an obligation. I appealed to her understanding of my writing, my work. Indeed, Ganna countered, that was why she must hold me back from a step that would cause my intellectual ruin. ‘How can you say that?’ I burst out. ‘Aren’t you ashamed to be so presumptuous?’ She could trust her feelings, she replied gnomically; never had she erred when it was a matter of my welfare and the course of my life.
She didn’t understand. She didn’t want to understand. We got nowhere.
Never would I take away from her my friendship, I declared, if she showed herself equal to this hour of destiny. She was shaken. She howled. It was so hard, she said, so terribly hard. Of course it was hard, I put in, but she mustn’t deprive me of my right to manage my own life; she must have learned and read enough of me to understand that a man’s ordained path couldn’t be diverted by wantonly digging it up. She agreed, sobbing, but in the same breath reached for the argument that she had to fight for her children. To which I said they were my children too. Then she said: ‘But you don’t care about them when you’re blinded by passion.’ However insulting that was, I mastered myself and replied that the children weren’t going to be taken away from her any more than I was going away from them myself; if only for their sake she had to behave with dignity and humanity — they had already witnessed far too much in the way of quarrels and strife.