But it wasn’t Ganna’s intention to fob me off with any final ‘no’. She wanted to deal. She wanted to keep everything in play. That was her way of compelling my attendance. Of course, to be fair, as deeply fair as only God can be, one would have to ask oneself whether love wasn’t part of what was driving her to this — a frightening love admittedly, dipped in darkness, but still love, whichever way one wanted to define it, however damaged the loving heart might be. I, naturally, could feel only the terror and the darkness; but she was suffering as much as I was, or at least at the time I still believed that, and I was indulgent and patient with her because suffering does disarm the beholder. She was still victim to the delusion that I was angry on her account when I got angry; and when I shoved her away she took it the other way; as a sign that she was still in play, was still a partner. And so she ran rings round me with her promises, she repudiated our agreements of the day before, and took things I had said a thousand times and made them appear nonsensical. If she wired me — come over, we can sort everything out together — and our talks once again went nowhere, then it wasn’t sabotage on her part but lack of goodwill on mine. ‘I’m not quite ready,’ she said to me in August, ‘can you give me another three months?’ So I gave her three months more. In November it was: ‘I can’t commit myself. No one nowadays can commit themselves to anything. Circumstances are just too volatile. In March I’ll do whatever you want; I give you my word.’ Then in March:
‘I want to test your proposal seriously. But there’s one thing I can tell you right now: you can’t keep two women on what you earn. It’s my duty to save you from financial ruin.’
‘No excuses, Ganna. We can, we must find some basis of agreement.’
‘I have been deceived too often. You can’t force me to commit a crime against my children!’
‘I’m not about to leave my children in the lurch. You ought to know that.’
‘Maybe you wouldn’t, but what about your mistress? I’d need to have commitments of a completely different order from those you are able to offer me now.’
‘What commitments are you after, Ganna? What more can I do than mortgage myself to you body and soul?’
In vain. With tenacity and fury Ganna clings onto her promised seventy kilos of live weight. Whatever new thing she brings up is a hallucination. Behind hallucination and mirage a sober and brazen legal mind points and gesticulates. I don’t want to know, I’m not supposed to know about her. All I see is the burbling sleepwalker, the unhappily entrammelled one, the tormented tormentrix, the endlessly isolated woman, Ganna whom I must buy off, whom I must compensate for my offence against morality. Ganna the frightened mother, the disappointed consort, the abused bride, the failure in the face of reality — that Ganna is obscured from me by the raving Ganna, by Ganna the legal eagle. I’m starting to hallucinate as well. I’m going round in cursed circles.
M’LEARNED FRIENDS TAKE A HAND
My friends advised me to get a lawyer. They were worried for me. They noticed my irritability. I was past fifty; possibly I was no longer equal to the strain. One Dr Chmelius was recommended. I knew him from various social occasions and I remembered him as an affable fellow. It turned out he was the man who had got Bettina’s divorce put through so quickly. Bettina had never talked about him, never so much as mentioned his name. She didn’t like lawyers. She didn’t think they could ever do anything worthwhile. In the course of my life to date, I had never yet had dealings with a lawyer. That was about to change.
Initially, Dr Chmelius was supposed to be Ganna’s financial adviser, and supervise her money arrangements, since her demands and expenses were growing exponentially and I was unable to influence them. Ganna, though, declined to accept Dr Chmelius as an adviser; she found out that Bettina had been his client four years previously and quickly put a conspiratorial construction on the plan. She claimed he was working for Bettina and acting under psychological pressure from her. Dr Chmelius was a subtle jurist and a gentleman, and perhaps therefore overly hesitant. Even so, each one of his polite and respectful letters drove Ganna to white heat. What was the man playing at? Telling her, Ganna, what to do; giving her, Ganna, advice; daring even to speak and write of divorce; outrageous!
Immediately she set up her own man, Dr Pauli, in opposition to him. Pauli was fond of her and wanted to defend her rights; but he had far too much on his hands and, for all his admiration for her energy, her initiative, her resourcefulness, he found conferences with her too taxing for him. He couldn’t meet her and listen to her, as she demanded, twice a day, and he got upset when she completely changed her instructions to him from one meeting to the next. Therefore he passed the file on to a friend and colleague, one Dr Grieshacker. He in turn soon found himself under attack from Ganna and passed the thing on to his partner, one Dr Schönlein. The result was that the case of Ganna Herzog was being pursued, steered and trundled back and forth — putting on weight as it went — by all three men at once.
It put on weight, nothing else. No one knew what Ganna actually wanted. She herself least of all. Did she want a divorce? No. Did she not want a divorce? Everything indicated that, but she was loath to say so. What are we going to so much trouble for, the lawyers asked themselves. Ganna acted more or less like the owner of a farm that has been threatened with nocturnal attack, who has posted security guards round the premises. Dr Pauli wanted her not to be served the standard running bills; he knew the strain she was under and was able to persuade his colleagues to exercise forbearance too. A noble gesture; what he didn’t anticipate was that it was also a ruinous one. Because of it, Ganna got into the habit of spending time with her lawyers and changing them the way a man might change his socks. Since she had no understanding of work, and no respect for it, she looked to everyone she had entrusted with her affairs to be exclusively busy with them and treated them all like insubordinate juniors if her unique prerogative was denied her. And however pleased she was that her financial predicament received consideration, so, equally, she was unable to rid herself of the secret suspicion that anyone who was working for her for little or nothing was doing bad work. Caught in this schism, she was ever more dissatisfied, excitable, disputatious, confused, bewildered. Humanity, where she was concerned, was divided into two camps: there were her supporters and her opponents. And in the middle stood those lightsome guides to fortune and triumph, the lawyers. Of course that was only true of those lawyers she had taken on; those of the other side were the dregs of mankind.
She lived on the telephone and with her warbled throaty ‘Hallo-o’ talked to the various lawyers, including Dr Chmelius. He was not able to refuse her pleas for money any longer. The conversation was always the same. ‘But Madam, I transferred a substantial sum only last week.’ To which Ganna, with breathtaking argumentation: she had had some unanticipated expenses, some ‘imprévus’, a term she very much favoured, given that her whole life was in the sign of the unexpected, and she refused to allow him to meddle in her finances. But each time she was really stuck she would pack her housekeeping book under her arm and drive in to Chmelius in the city, to show him column by column how carefully and modestly she was keeping house. Like all writing, it was sacrosanct for her, founded in her fetishistic faith in words and figures. The accounts in her book were just as unassailable to her as her passbook with the Reichsbank.