It shone through in every one of her letters. Each one came larded with figures and statistics. No sum of money could ever be enough. Others managed to look after themselves, kept reserves, stuck to their budgets; Ganna was always knocked flat by the exigencies of the moment. She had no sense of time, only of the moment. It was her mystery, the way she didn’t live from moment to moment but in an unbroken chain of milliseconds without soul and sense, which was why behind her breathless busyness and industry there was something like a continual tragic fade into nothingness.
Under the pressure of desperation, the old faith in magic awoke in her. She knew a few bank managers and paid calls on them. Bank managers, in her eyes, were magicians; they did magic with money. They were bound to know, too, about a witches’ sabbath. She got tips from them. She sent me hieroglyphic dispatches with the names of bonds and certificates I was supposed to buy. She then had the illusion of having given me some decisive help, and was convinced I was raking in millions thanks to her. To that came the next, perfectly unshakeable conviction that Bettina and I were enjoying ‘the high life’ while she, the spurned Ganna-Genoveva, was condemned to a life of penury.
The confusion of numbers in Ganna’s letters buzzed round me like a swarm of horseflies. I would have thrown money at her, if only I’d had it to throw. What did I care about money; what did Bettina care about money; even less. I did what I could. I fitted the sums to the situation. By now, the collapse of the German currency had turned my earnings into ridiculous elephantine sums with tiny real purchasing power. I could hardly count all the zeroes, but the net income was far less than the average of the past few years. Without a few sums from abroad, I would have been unable to pay our way. Of the shadow money, I transferred as much as I was able to Ganna. Meanwhile, what yesterday was still sufficient, was insufficient today. When inflation finally ground to a halt, such great holes had been torn in her finances that Ganna was unable to plug them. Her shrill cries for help rang out in the silence of my study. I scraped together everything I could possibly spare. I wasn’t counting; I stopped thinking about my actual household. But no sum was enough for Ganna. She crossed every line that was drawn in front of her. Every instruction struck her as wicked. She swore I was accruing fortunes and was keeping them from her, to live it up with Bettina. Whenever she got a biggish sum in her hands, a stupid optimism straight away came over her, as though she couldn’t possibly get through it; then, when it was gone, and much sooner than expected, she didn’t know what to do; she sat miserably in front of her red book, checking through the receipts, going through all her pockets and desk drawers, insisting she had been robbed; and the upshot of everything was another screed to me.
Her engagement with these vast figures, once she had grown used to them a little, gave her a strange, exciting pastime like solving puzzles or doing jigsaws. The millions and billions gave her morbidly speculative mind the satisfactions of infinity for which it was always athirst. They suggested astrology and magic. What did the true value matter; the appearance was there with its sweet alchemy of name and number. While prices climbed into the unaffordable, and figures into the unsayable, the hope sprang up in her that (even though in another part of her dream world I was a secret Croesus) I couldn’t continue to afford to pay for two women and two households, and would therefore be compelled to return to the bosom of my family. This wasn’t a wish or an occasional fantasy, but a solid conviction; she would talk about my return as of a fixed event, and as though the time of ordeals, of abandonment and disgrace would then be for ever at an end.
INTELLECTUAL MORASS
She didn’t accept fate. The core of her being was rebellion. It was reported to me how, shortly before the death of her mother, which happened at this time, she had had an altercation with the eighty-year-old woman in which Ganna had been extremely forceful, because her mother had upbraided her for her want of humility: ‘Humility,’ she is reported to have come back, ‘where does humility get you in this world? Where did your humility get you, Mother?’ With the death of her mother, Ganna broke with the last memories of breeding and restraint. She was just forty-four.
One day she said to herself: I don’t want to be financially dependent on this heartless man any more (she meant me). Since the whole world was plunging into enterprises of one sort or another, and the crazy money seemed to be lying around on the street, she looked around, had discussions with all sorts of seeming friends and experienced chancers and decided to start a film review. The cinema was at the centre of interest, and as far as its intellect was concerned, there was an evident match between Ganna’s being and the silver screen. Both, if you will, were in the business of dazzling. Ganna was always drawn to anything that sparkled, all sorts of hocus-pocus, star-gazing, Mazdaznan, chiromancy. They afforded her a rich field for self-promotion and self-abnegation; the whole of creation was a cheat pleasing to the eye of the Lord.
A financier was once again soon found. He was a man with a printing press. People wanted to get rid of the phoney money so as later to exchange it for real, at extortionate rates of interest, and everyone welcomed opportunities to do so. The fact that Ganna had contributed quite a bit of her own money — which is to say, of mine — was also kept concealed from me. The exploiters and schemers in her set could comfortably pluck her any time they chose. Being quite incapable of seeing through them, she thought of them as selfless philanthropists. More and more she inclined to the opinion that in order to succeed in literature, one had to use one’s connections; and so she took to pestering various important figures, including some who were close to me, and was extremely angry when she was fobbed off with polite evasions. Extreme in everything as she was, her admiration straight away curdled into contempt; and the distinguished man was a louse who a split second before had been held in high esteem. She was editor, proofreader, publisher and manager all rolled into one. She wrote till her fingers were sore, and she walked her legs off. The morning the magazine appeared she hurried from kiosk to kiosk, asked after the sales, exhorted the sellers to greater efforts and suggested ways of enthusing the reading public. If an astonished or pitying glance struck her, reminding her who she was, she quickly blotted it out.
Very well, then, film review: there was nothing really improper or contemptible about that. Get busy, I thought to myself, get it out of your system, see what happens. But first there were the opaque financial manipulations and transactions which I found very alarming, and which had a sort of whiff of wheeler-dealing and ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ about them. I had a notion of money-laundering and extortionate obligations entered into behind my back, shady deals and corrupt relationships; from time to time I would catch a short-lived rumour; from time to time the ghost of a warning; in a word, it was as though repulsive things were going on behind a thin partition; you listen to it tense and excited, though you don’t fully understand what’s happening.