FIRST MEETING
An odd habit from which I still suffer compels me to follow each call, each summons, as if I was somehow afraid of hurting or even offending anyone who called out to me in vain. Sometimes there’s nothing behind it but my inertia: you carry on in the direction in which you’ve been pushed. So I accepted unhesitatingly when Frau von Brandeis invited me, even though I had been horribly bored at earlier visits to her house.
I have no clear recollection of the impression Ganna made on me that first evening. I have a picture of a rather garishly clad, fidgety, restless young girl. I am unable to say whether she was well dressed or not. I didn’t have a way of telling. She loved loud colours, and a picturesque framing of little scarves and fluttering bows. Over supper, with a sidelong look at me, she told how she’d almost fainted on the stairs. Her hasty and excitable speech was disagreeable to me, but Frau von Brandeis had prepared me for the degree of excitement she would be plunged into by my presence, so I took a clement view of her excessive vivacity. Two or three times I glanced at her fleetingly. She had a plain face with strained features, freckled complexion and intensely peering blue eyes; the cheekbones were prominent; very attractive though were the sensuous mouth with splendid teeth, and a charming innocent laugh. Her uncommonly small, twitchy hands displayed recurring gestures that had something jagged and assertive about them, which she became aware of at intervals and tried to moderate.
This fairly accurate portrait was probably a composite, based on a number of meetings. To begin with, my interest in Fräulein Ganna Mevis was slight. I was more mindful of my work than of my surroundings. I am said not to have been prepossessing or entertaining myself — hardly a man of the world, then. At that time, when I went out, I wore a knee-length set of tails, with shiny cuffs and elbows and not all that clean either, an ancient garment that was not improved by a picturesquely looped black necktie. The meal over, I adjourned to the smoking room, sat down in an uncomfortable little armchair and soon found myself joined by Ganna. I had expected her. We started talking. Much of what she said astonished me. I forgot her excitability, her electric movements. I thought she was original. There was a mixture of foolishness and acuity in what she said. The charmingly innocent smile sometimes made me smile. I was most moved by the seeker in her, the pleading suit, the groping about her as in a dream. Strange creature, I kept thinking. But by the time I was on my way home I had forgotten about her. And when I remembered her urgent words and looks, the burning devotion that imbued her whole being, I felt a pang of unease.
LETTERS, HINTS, MAGICAL WORDS
The next day, I got a pneumatique from her. Why the rush, I asked myself. There was nothing pressing in it. The letters were just as urgent as her speech. Big, jagged, impetuous characters that resembled a meeting of conspirators. I can’t remember if I wrote back. It seems to me it was only the third or fourth letter that induced me to give her an answer. Because she wrote to me almost every day. Always pneumatiques. A few lines, with obvious attention to style. I thought sardonically: writing letters to a writer is surely an education in itself. And the content? Atmospherics: happy wonderment at the new turn in her life; a plea to me not to forget her; a friendly greeting because it was a nice day; anxious inquiries about my state, because she’d had a bad dream about me. She wasn’t short of things to say.
And what possessed me to answer her? I don’t know. If you feel vastly, boundlessly admired, you drop your guard. Even the most resolute misanthrope has a spot where he falls prey to vanity. And I was anything but a misanthrope. Even after numerous bad experiences, I only started to get suspicious of someone after they’d wrung my neck, metaphorically speaking. Perhaps Ganna had little hope that I would reply, but from the moment I first wrote back she had acquired in perpetuity a right to be answered. And so a man gets ensnared.
I had the bad habit of leaving letters carelessly lying about the place. At that time, I was involved with an actress, a nice, clever woman. One day she picked up one of Ganna’s notes to me, read it in spite of my objections, smiled ironically and said:
‘You’d best beware of her.’
‘Why, what do you mean?’
‘I can’t explain, it’s just a feeling I have. Watch yourself.’
She was the first to warn me. Many years later, I still think about that.
At a private view of the Secession, I ran into Frau von Brandeis. She asked me what I thought of Ganna Mevis. She sang her praises in the loftiest tones. A clever girl; ideal temperament; heart of gold; the family an impeccable collection of bourgeois virtues. She plucked at my sleeve and whispered that anyone who managed to land one of the Mevis girls was made for life; the Professor could afford to give each of his daughters a dowry of 80,000 crowns! I freed myself from the silly gossip, but I have to admit it didn’t do me any good, the number caught in my brain. It’s just the way it is: a man who doesn’t know how he’ll pay the rent at the end of the month can easily fall to calculating that a vast sum like that will keep him modestly in a garret for the next sixty or seventy years. A flip response, nothing more, and yet …
In the meantime I had had a few more meetings with Ganna in neutral places. Complaisance breeds complaisance. But I must confess I liked her better with each further meeting. There was something irresistibly impetuous about her that appealed to my own rather viscid nature. I thought she was an uncommonly harmonious and consistent character. The only thing that bothered me was the continual hyperbole. One day she told me the reflection of the book I was working on was clearly visible in my brow. I replied chilly that I preferred people with dry hands and a dry manner, clamminess was apt to become slippery. She was alarmed — only to give me her rueful and passionate assent. Then that in turn became too much. It was like standing on the pedal while playing a simple folk tune. Another time, on a stroll together, I was thunderstruck when she told me about the book I was writing at the time. As I hadn’t discussed it with anyone, I had every reason to be surprised. It was a story of decline, set in a particular social stratum, and carried by a contemporary Parsifal. ‘Only you can write it,’ she said stirringly, ‘no one else.’ I had the uncomfortable feeling of a housewife finding a cat in her larder. The door was shut, the windows locked, there was no hole in the walls, therefore something inexplicable has taken place. Divination? Maybe. With Ganna it would have seemed possible. It was her way of saying: I am inside your work, it’s my destiny, it belongs to me. Perhaps I was overplaying some vaguer formulation of hers; also the exposé was in the air; conceivably she had drawn some hint of the contents from me, though I can’t remember such a thing. Whatever, Ganna had something of a sorceress about her. I thought she was a white witch, or a strong, energetic and courageous little fairy. And the fact that she asked, with maidenly humility, to be close to me, my scant conversation, my austere instructions — that did me good, because I was not spoiled.