I didn’t speak, picked up a book, flicked through its pages, and didn’t speak.
‘Let me talk to her about it,’ she went on enthusiastically, ‘if she’s not completely lost her head, she’ll surely see it my way.’
She had it figured like this: Bettina would take on external, representative functions that accorded with her ambition, while she herself kept the reins on the household; in the case of conflicts — but of course there wouldn’t be any, she had the firm resolve to be wise and considerate — in the case of conflicts, then it would be up to me to decide.
Even today I don’t know whether Ganna actually believed in that Gleichen idyll or not. There’s no point in racking my brains over it either, since there is no line to be drawn between her dreams and her doings; her special kind of imagination does without even that dream logic that the most garbled dreams have. Her dream world was perfectly autonomous. The events she moved among were products of waking deliriums. Each day afresh she started out on the fantasy of the ménage à trois, and with the subtlest arguments sought to present its advantages to me. In my impatient refusal she saw the effect of Bettina’s malicious whisperings. As if I’d so much as breathed a syllable of any of this, as if I wouldn’t have prayed for the earth to swallow me up if she ever got to hear of it; as if I hadn’t kept making superhuman efforts to conceal from Bettina what Ganna looked to me to do, so as not to betray the woman I had lived with to the woman I wanted to live with.
Once Ganna finally accepted the hopelessness of her endeavours, she presented things as though her noblest intentions had been undercut. Her logic went: if the two refuse the solution that she, Ganna, so selflessly offered, they must have compelling reasons, reasons that involve hurting Ganna, ruining Ganna. What could be more plausible than the suspicion that Bettina Merck had it in mind to acquire ownership of her house? She had already had that in view when she launched the Klothilde Haar conspiracy. I, so endlessly obliging, was the cat’s-paw in this, because that sophisticated Circe could wrap me round her little finger. Then Bettina will play the sole, exclusive mistress, will lead the life of a princess and send the vanquished Ganna packing. Yes, that’s the way things will be unless she takes timely counter-measures. So clearly could Ganna see the picture of a triumphantly enthroned Bettina in her, or Alexander Herzog’s, house that she would sometimes groan out loud and grind her teeth. When she heard that Bettina had quietly obtained a divorce, this (far from giving her pause as an example that might be followed) only confirmed her in her grim suspicion and she was filled with dread. Reality had slipped away from under her, but then again she didn’t really need it: everything was the way she imagined it in her free-floating fantasy. The house was in danger — the house, a concept that swelled in her mind to dream proportions, the concept of ownership, of rootedness, of security cast in stone.
And commensurately, so her readiness to share her dearest goods, man and house with her blood and ancestral enemy grew in her eyes to heroic proportions; and when she saw how curtly her offers were rebuffed, that gave her a stamp of nobility for all time.
Everything in Ganna’s mind marched to the beat of Ganna’s imagination. It wouldn’t permit any doubts: she was a model wife, an embodiment of kindness, punctuality and good order. Though wreathed in such qualities, she was slandered in my ears, and her ‘enemies’ have dug and dug until I could only think of breaking with her. Those same people who paid Klothilde Haar. Those same people who were able to foil her scheme to make me a millionaire with the meadow. Further, the conviction takes root in Ganna that for the past nineteen years we have lived together like two lovebirds and that no cloud has ever spotted the sky of our bliss. This conviction settles into a myth in her, like certain historical ‘events’ in history books. But since something seems to have happened in this lovebird existence for which Ganna isn’t to blame, someone else must be the guilty party. Hence continual poking around for guilt, questions to establish guilt, investigations of guilt, and no end. Phantasms and fictions come out of thin air. Ancient sayings, ancient deeds are produced in unrecognizable versions. Opinions are distorted, statements twisted, things a million miles apart are forced into a false pattern. An army of the envious, the malicious, the ill-disposed, the liars and intriguers appears over the decades, and surrounded by them a Ganna, like a seraph in the golden ether, keeping watch over her Alexander.
This was unrolled before me day after day, and day after day I was to account for myself, supply proofs, offer evidence. I wonder why I didn’t just go. Why did I not tie up my bundle, and up and leave? Hard to explain. I think there’s something wrong in my make-up. I am not capable of leaving emotional devastation in my wake. Either from softness, or from pity. After all, I have my fair share of selfishness. I am not an easy tolerator, no particularly eager helper, not a good giver; and before I decide on some act of kindness outside the area of my work, I have to get through every possible stage of caution and inertia. What operates here is different. It’s not a singular phenomenon, but present in accretions. First, there’s my sense of the simultaneity of actions, which has its seat in the nerves. The high degree of emotional vulnerability associated with this leads me to relocate myself in different times, in other rooms and beings in my imagination. And in such a way that I can see, hear, taste, touch, smell them, which necessitates further protective measures, which cost me more effort and more thought than any amount of real-life difficulties. At times, at my most desperate times, I remind myself of a surgeon who dithers and dithers over an operation and finally, madly, instead of anaesthetizing his patient, administers the morphine to himself.
But there’s another factor as welclass="underline" there was an ethical imperative in me after all, a higher voice that refused to be silenced. There was this woman; whether she was inadequate or not, whether she had made her own bed or not, whether I, whether Bettina, whether the world as a whole approved of her way of doing things or not — it remained the case that I was tied to her. I had sworn vows to her; I was responsible for her in spite of all my words to the contrary; I had given her three children; she was an unstable, pathless, directionless woman who without me was lost. Could I really just quit her like that and go and start a new life (a new life — that most mindless of all expressions), without tidying up the old one after me? Not least hacking back that tangle of phantasms and fictions? It seemed possible to me. I didn’t know at the time that they had their own terrible autonomy and proliferation, these phantasms and fictions; that gradually, like the djinn in the Arabian story, they would grow to fill up the whole of the sky. I couldn’t get free. I wasn’t cold-blooded enough, not brutal enough. I wanted to save a piece of Ganna for myself. A memory, a stirring of gratitude, a sense of respect.
ON JOY
Week after week passed. For all my heart-constricting effort, an amicable solution was no nearer. I decided I’d had enough and would go to Ebenweiler, where Bettina had been waiting for me every day. I pack up my books, manuscripts, clothes, linen. Ganna watches me in distress; the children ask me barely audible questions. Then the hour of parting comes; Ganna accompanies me to the station. What to say to curtail, to abbreviate the pain of sundering? Ganna talks and talks, her throat is hoarse and dry, her words stumble over each other, she’s worried I may catch cold, afraid of a train crash, everything is so uncertain nowadays; she gives me dietary advice, she talks till the very second the train moves off. I look past her. She breaks into a trot alongside the carriage and waves. I never forgot the scene. It had something of Ganna’s whole being in it.