Seventeen hours in the train. In those days all transport was difficult. The carriage is filthy; it jolts and clatters like a post coach, the windows are boarded up, the rain comes in through the roof, the lights don’t work. I stare out into the gloaming; Ganna is running alongside and waving. And at night she’s standing outside the door of the compartment, begging to be let in, in her hoarse, floury voice.
Then Ebenweiler in the sparkling snow. The familiar scene has a new aspect. Its loveliness has turned to majesty. Bettina meets me at the station, her cheeks flushed with cold, her glaucous eyes shining with inexpressible happiness. We ride the sleigh to the house, buried in snow up to its doorknobs. The whole world feels like Christmas.
It had never occurred to me that a peaceable home and its well-ordered running could have something so intoxicatingly pleasant about it. I had never experienced such a thing. With this winter a long period of intensive work began for me, in spite of all the horrors I shall have to report on. In a certain sense, I was sheltered. Partly by the landscape, which struck me in light of a modest genius, always soothing, never arousing; but above all by Bettina’s careful, silent and apparently completely effortless attention to my welfare and my tranquillity. With her and in her company I felt as sheltered as if I’d been inside the mountain on whose flank we were perched. The end of the world and the Ganna war were a thousand years ago. In the intoxication of those early months, it seemed to me we had fused into that coupledom of which I had dreamed for so long as a kind of higher actualization.
Bettina’s two little girls initially kept their reserve towards the new head of household. The way children judge us grown-ups is among the most mysterious things there are anyway. Half-suspicious, half-reserved, they waited to see what would develop. My inexhaustible need for tranquillity, my sensitivity to all noise of voices and forms of disturbance were to them much like what leash and muzzle are to playful puppies. They could surely have held it against me that I was permanently out to curb their exuberance. They did not hold it against me. They also took me reasonably seriously; at any rate I found myself the subject of serious conversations which they had between themselves before going to sleep.
It was a bitter experience for me: in spite of the change in my outer life, I did not feel any more joyful. Or perhaps it would be better to say, joy was unable to reach me. When she came calling, I let her know that I was unavailable. No matter how long she stood outside my door, I didn’t let her in. This proved a disappointment for Bettina, the first in our new life together, and it grew from month to month. Naturally, Bettina asked herself what was the point of her if she couldn’t lift me off the surface of the earth, rootling vole that I was in her eyes. She had hoped to take flight with me. But how can you lift off with someone who does everything in his power to make himself heavy, nothing to lighten himself? She had imagined she might be my lamp, but how can you be a lamp when the one you are to light keeps insidiously blowing you out, because his element is the dark? It was moving to observe: when I was cheerful, when I happened to laugh, then her whole day was rescued; a smile from me and her heart would leap with delight.
But the times I was able to laugh and to smile grew more and more infrequent. Just as well that Bettina had so much of her own amusements, even though her supply occasionally threatened to run out. In a setting where all sued for my favour and begged me for a friendly glance, I became a remote and introspective hermit. And that was the only danger that Bettina had to fear for herself and her life, the lack of light, the absence of blue sky, the chain of days without laughter, without a smile. Then her violin could be nothing to her either, or music; no tunes came into her head and her whole world went silent. In one confidential hour, she told me about it. Not without apprehension. Her clear eyes couldn’t hide their fear. The very fact that I should have needed her to admit this to me shows my extraordinary obtuseness. I saw what it was about. I understood that I must not allow Bettina to wither. That at any price, I had to achieve the capacity for joy. And since it was Ganna who stood between me and joy, whose fault it was that I could no longer laugh or smile, so Ganna would have to be induced to restore to me my cheerfulness, my insouciance, my undaunted courage, whatever the price — because if not, then everything was wasted and I would lose Bettina.
But when a man is sitting on a powder keg, with a burning fuse leading up to its bung, then it’s not such an easy matter to laugh or to smile.
VARIOUS ALARUMS
First of all, there were the letters. Six, eight, ten pages in length. I can only say that a hail of molten lava would have been a refreshing spring shower by comparison. Ganna stretched out her arms 200 miles to reclaim her errant husband. Her words boomed out 200 miles away, demanding support, advice, comfort, in the name of the children, in the name of justice, in the name of undying love. Whatever wasn’t written down screeched, rampaged and wailed between the lines, behind the jagged, foolish, plangent letters. Lamentations, how sad it feels, living in a house from where the man has gone. Did it have to be this way, Alexander? Did I deserve to be thus kicked and trampled underfoot? That Doris was inconsolable without her father. That she was having trouble with Ferry and Elisabeth; how it was impossible for her to control two grown-up children on her own; how could I justify it to my conscience to leave her at such a critical time in her life, and with circumstances so brutal? Dreams, presentiments, horror stories. Little pinpricks: how so-and-so expressed surprise at the behaviour of a man whom he (or she) had hitherto deeply respected; how nice her sisters were being to her, how much sympathy she encountered, how much friendship was extended to her from every side …
Then the house, our lovely house, began to play up. The water mains burst, flooding the hall. The septic tank needs to be moved, the local council refused to connect the house to mains sewerage, the atmosphere was endangering the children’s health. During a storm one of the chimneys had blown over. A stove needs to be installed in Doris’s room, the heating system is inadequate and it’s not possible to get enough coke to burn in it. The builder presented a bill which she can’t possibly pay out of her monthly allowance. Nor can she keep up with the other bills, the deliverymen are driving her to distraction with their demands; what is she going to say to those people? My husband has gone away, she says, he’ll be back soon; but those people refuse to believe her, and sometimes they are downright insolent.
And with that I have come to the question of Ganna’s economy, her whole way with money, which was far and away the most striking aspect of her life and character. As we happened to be living in the middle of the Inflation, that ghostly phenomenon appeared right away in full force.
Indescribable, her rigid horror when the gigantic numbers turned up in her housekeeping book: 200 crowns for a kilo of butter; 50 for a dozen eggs; 500 for a pair of shoes; 2,000 in wages for tutors and domestics. Ganna in the battle with money that was ceasing to be real money, that melted away between her fingers, all the while there seemed to be more and more of it, that thumbed its nose at her with a number and sent her staggering with the lack of value of the number — all that instilled a nameless confusion in her, a total relocation of concepts and a growing panic in her calculations. Another week and the hundreds have become thousands, the thousands have become hundred thousands, and the hundred thousands are millions. When a chicken cost 80,000 crowns, a telegram to me 10,000, the monthly butcher’s bill was more than one and a half million, she broke down under the weight of the figures. It was for her the triumph of bedlam. For her, to whom money and the value of money were holy fixities, solid and etched in bronze, the experience resembled what it must be like for a believer to be given incontrovertible proof (could such exist) that there was no God. She dangled in space. The laws of nature had been suspended. One must imagine that a trauma developed out of this, which partially explains the catastrophic developments that unfolded. First, the view took root in her that such a collapse of all values could never have happened if I had not left her. That gave her a completely delusory satisfaction that my faithlessness, my so-called betrayal of her, was connected with the calamity of the nation and the catastrophe of capitalism.