What was much worse, though, was the actual publication itself. First there were Ganna’s personal contributions, dashed-down news items and stories of a teeth-grating vulgarity and stupidity; among other things, the maliciously distorted portrait of a woman widely known for her charitable works, for whom — God knows why — Ganna had conceived a personal antagonism. Then there were the wretched, sometimes even scandalous products of the pens of various other male and female scribblers whom Ganna favoured, and to whom she was happy to offer a literary playground and royalties; and finally there were the advertisements, by means of which the whole enterprise was to pay its way, those announcings and toutings familiar from other such periodicals. And all of this appearing under the name of Herzog, by which Ganna was pleased to go — my name. All over the house unsold copies lay around in stacks, and whenever little Doris was bored she would pick one up like a picture book and turn its pages. I saw this myself one day. I ripped it out of her hands. A lead weight lay on my skull; I could feel the slurry splash up to my knees.
GANNA AND LANGUAGE
That first winter already I had Doris to stay, as affectionate as ever, full of love and deeply rooted trust. It had taken complicated negotiations with Ganna to obtain this concession, and subsequently whenever I sought to have Doris to stay in the summer and winter holidays, Ganna made difficulties each time. She said it was a risk. She demanded guarantees and set conditions. She tried to persuade me and herself that the little girl would only prosper and remain healthy if she was with her, that there was no substitute for Gannacare, Gannaprotection, Gannalove. At the most, she might allow that I had good intentions; she denied that I had the moral ability. Because I was under the influence of a woman whom Ganna had every reason to distrust. She assured everyone who cared to listen that she couldn’t leave her precious darling, the apple of her eye, to a person living with me in an immoral relationship. The fact that this ‘unethical relationship’ was one she, by her doing, insisted on, she readily forgot. The outcome was constant argy-bargy over the girl; can you understand the shame I felt?
If Doris happened to be lying in bed with a sniffle, Ganna would announce a grave streptococcal infection with a temperature intended to terrify me 200 miles away. Her intention was to alarm me, to awaken my sluggish conscience so that I didn’t forget about my family while living with the hated woman. I shouldn’t be surprised the children were continually ill, she wrote to me, seeing as I was refusing to give their mother the means to keep them safe. I sat down and demonstrated to her, black on white, that even in the worst months of the Inflation she had enjoyed a respectable middle-class income; I converted the sums into Swiss francs to prove it. Her reply was the righteous flaring-up of a duped woman since, in her version, she had been duped of everything that my life with Bettina was costing me. She wrote that there was no justification in keeping her short, she was aware of no guilt in her, her claims would stand before God and Man.
She had no control over words. What transpired in her was a strange alchemy, an inflammation remote from thought. Associations were thrown up randomly in her limitless self-indulgence. I saw Ganna over the years growing, and with her grew and swelled the word, the self-indulgent and random word. She didn’t discriminate between good and evil, she couldn’t tell the difference between a bridge and an abyss. Lyrical paean and toxic brew, plea and threat, truth and contrivance, emotion and business, affection and embitterment — it was all one hopeless inextricable tangle. Overheated style, ice-cold calculation. In a typical run of four consecutive sentences, the first one would be self-pity, the second accusation, the third a demand for money and the fourth a declaration of love. While taking the high ground as the representative of an ethical world order, she haggled for a rise in her monthly payments. At the same time as she scribbled enthusiastic lines about my oeuvre, she used the children as pawns and demanded, both directly and indirectly, material compensation for agreeing to let them stay with me; above all, more frequent meetings with me for the purposes of ‘friendly discussions’ and the repetition of my vow that I wasn’t seeking a divorce. It was to such a storm that I had to stand and expose myself. Ganna and Ganna’s language kept me breathless like a drunken binge of nocturnal housebreakers.
A FEW MINIATURES ALONG THE WAY
We go out into the star-spangled night, Bettina and I. Below us the lake glitters; the heavens are like a curtain pricked with innumerable needle-holes, with gold and blue fires burning behind it. The Milky Way is a baffling curve of silver grains. Above us lies a delicate veil of mist. The silence is so powerful that it feels like a blissful transmutation of death. Ganna’s din, Ganna’s language, has gone away, as though a steel gate has been shut on it. We stand there arm in arm, as though lost in prayer …
There are mornings when we sleigh downhill over the fresh snow on the slopes, as on a ghostly carpet, surrounded by the dark forests, the crystalline air full of the laughter and chatter of Bettina’s daughters, who will soon be off to their father in the city, to school. Then we walk across the frozen lake, which creaks so menacingly at night; now it sighs like a Stone Age creature in its death-throes. Ox-drawn wooden sleighs run silently across the smooth expanse; with a swish like tearing paper, the curling stones of peasants run over the swept surface.
In the first days of spring, it’s as though Nature is angrily pulling off a dress that has grown too tight for her. The waters plunge down the stone runnels created over millennia, above avalanches thunder, heather and hepatica peer shyly out among the grass and mosses, everything is an irrepressible growing and burgeoning; March smells differently from February; we hike into the woods, we wander in the neighbouring valleys as though conducting tours of inspection of our realm, and sometimes Bettina seizes my hand and asks, thrusting her face against mine from below: ‘Are you happy? Tell me that you’re as happy as you can be!’ I look at her and nod at her in gratitude. Would the other thing have been bearable, otherwise? Life would have broken apart like a piece of rusty metal …
IN CURSED CIRCLES
For years, divorce loomed at the back of things as the silently desired conclusion; by and by it became a simple necessity. There is a call to order which comes from society, irrespective of personal freedoms. No pretence was permitted, no contrived, lofty standing-above-it-all; I could feel the growing insistence within me of a demand that connected my sense of honour as a man and my responsibility to the community with that other, still more urgent feeling that included my undischarged debt to Bettina, which in introspective hours I thought of as my inner reparations, or the interest payable on joy.
That was what the fight with Ganna was first about. If the loader could be induced to take the harness off the panting beast and unstrap its burden, then it would be able to breathe and walk again. Ganna’s first condition was that she could only consent to a divorce if she was certain of my friendship. Very well, I said, all right; that’s self-evident really. Albeit, there is one difficulty: how can one be certain of friendship according to Ganna’s definition? By signature. By deed and seal. I am to certificate it. I am to commit myself to it solemnly for all time. I am stupid enough to try and talk her out of it. Instead of saying yes and amen to all and signing on the dotted line — which would have the automatic effect that she would drop this demand and insist on something else, harder to give — I make an honest attempt to persuade her of the foolishness of a documentarily attested friendship, to teach her that friendship needed to be earned and worked for, and couldn’t be signed like a lease agreement. She doesn’t see it. All she hears is my refusal, which she takes as proof of my bad attitude. She was being softened up; this was a tactic for softening her up. ‘You’ll drive me over the edge with your tactics,’ she fulminates, shaking with rage. She refers me to my solemn promise of October 1919. I admit I wrote that unsympathetic letter. Then bitterness wells up in her and she screams that I would never have set my knife to her breast in this way were it not that I was under the instructions of my hypnotic mistress. I have to smile when I hear of Bettina and her ‘instructions’. Ganna misunderstands my smile and claims I swore to Bettina that I would get a divorce; what Bettina was doing for me in return was of course something no one knew; but she would show Lady Merck that she had miscalculated and would bite her teeth out in granite.