WHAT WAS BOUND TO HAPPEN HAPPENS
She persuaded me to visit her at her parents’ house. We agreed on a date and a time, and Ganna made preparations as for a visit from the Prince of Wales. She served notice to her sisters that her tête-à-tête with me was not to be disturbed at any price. Later on, I heard complaints from Irmgard and Traude about the quarantine that Ganna so rigorously imposed. They would have liked very much to meet me and talk to me, but Ganna hadn’t allowed it. When I stepped into the hall, a figure vanished with lightning speed through an open door, but a split second was enough for me to catch the astonished flash of a pair of black eyes. And when, some time later, I was back in the hallway, escorted by Ganna, I caught a glimpse of another fleeing shade and another astonished pair of eyes, this time blue.
I became a regular visitor to the house. Ganna received me with delicious sandwiches and excellent tea. I had determined the episode would end by the time I set out on my next summer wanderings. But in that case I shouldn’t have made Ganna privy to my plans; shouldn’t have told her the names of all the places where I was planning to stay. Not just that either; in my mindless indiscretion, I also told her that I had arranged to meet a few friends at the upper Mondsee in early autumn, and then go to ground in a farmhouse, to finish my book. Hot with joy, she replied how wonderful, her mother had rented a small villa nearby, on the Attersee, where she and her sisters would probably be staying until October, and if she got on a bike it was only half an hour. I was alarmed. My gabbiness annoyed me. But what should I have done? You have to talk about something, and if you have a certain respect for big subjects and questions that — even if you ask them with childish circumspection — are not really answerable because they take you into personal realms, then all that’s left are bald facts. Somehow Ganna always managed to draw me out; tears would spring to her eyes when I turned her down kindly or gave her an evasive reply. She had no one she could trust, she told me animatedly, she was a stranger in the bosom of her family, her sisters were her enemies, her parents didn’t understand her, she was lost if I didn’t give her more of the manna that was the only food for her soul. Such words moved me. I had seen that she was the Cinderella in her brood.
‘Will you promise to write to me?’ she asked with hungry, avid expression.
It was always all or nothing. I wavered. I ducked. She followed up. In the end I agreed.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll see.’
With a strange, predatory movement I will never forget, she seized my hand.
‘Really? You will write to me?’
Suddenly I felt afraid, but the charming, innocent, beatified smile allowed me to think the promise was not dangerous.
SOME RATHER BELATED GLOSSES
And then there were more letters. Express letters. The jagged, indomitable characters marched in. They formed up into words, and the words spoke of everlasting gratitude and obligation and inner kinship and a deep sense of belonging. I was startled. I wondered: are all these things so facile that they can be set down on paper so instantly and glibly? To tell the truth, my eye tended to fly over them. The sound of the big oppressive words loitered in my ear. Sometimes, when I was opening one of her notes, it was as though I had to push away her little hand that reached for me with greedy grasp. That summer I still had a way out, if only I’d been honest with myself about my situation. I wasn’t. I deceived myself instead. Freedom is an inestimable thing; if you allow it to be tricked away from you, it means trouble, you will have to pay and pay until the bloody sweat spurts from your eyes. But then I had lost my mother when I was still a child.
When I look back at myself, it seems to me that a nature like mine can only be judged in its vertiginous dreaminess. All my flaws and good points are anchored there. I was always stood so close to reality — like a man working at a machine, in front of its wheel — and yet I didn’t see it. I exhausted myself in the effort to see it, but the pictures I saw, the experiences I had, were utterly transmuted by the galvanic process that befell them in my imagination. Something light became heavy, something cheerful became murky, warnings found me deaf, even pain and joy were like two puffs of breath on a sheet of glass. I was so deeply caught up in myself, in my Rip Van Winkle-like sleep, that the need to act concussed my entire being, shooing my soul up out of its remote hiding-place, and demanding it set out on a hundred-mile march.
This may explain something. Because when, one September morning, Ganna jumped off her bicycle in front of the isolated farmhouse where I was staying in the attic, and I rushed down to greet her, I didn’t see a flushed, purple face, a sweat-drenched blouse, a wild, almost fevered regard; to see that would have been disagreeable to me and would have repulsed me for a long time. No, I saw a being I had created and imagined. I felt pity. Perhaps it was the transferred pity of writers, when they turn a real-life character into a figure of their imagination and clothe it in the mystery that is the only quality that provokes and sustains them. Poor, tormented creature, I said to myself, and I could feel my heart beating for her. Here was a woman in flight, a lover, stepping up to meet me, a victim, a persecutee begging for shelter, seeking a shoulder to cry on, deeply inflamed, in need of a little tenderness and soothing. Should I have shut myself away, should I have remained aloof and said: begone, there is no room for you in my life? There was room. Of course, the fact that I saw and sensed her the way I did in my self-sacrificial compassion, this single pregnant moment that bore the seed of thirty years — that was also in part Ganna’s doing, her over-powerful will, her dazzling sorcery. But I wasn’t to know that, back then.
ALMOST A CONFESSION
Rowing across the lake with her, strolling together through the autumnal woods, I talked to her about my past. I was now twenty-seven years old, and all I had experienced thus far were hardship and worry. To tell the truth, every single day had been a struggle to get food, to find a bed to sleep in, to put shoes on my feet. I omitted the details, the humiliating wealth of tawdriness. Why spread it out at her feet? I felt too ashamed. It would have sounded somehow accusatory. Perhaps I had a sense as well that she wouldn’t take it the right way, someone like her, grown up in luxury. Moreover I had a dim notion she liked such confessions, as though they reinforced her in a hope I didn’t mean to encourage. But I must have gone beyond what I had it in mind to say, because at times I caught her looking at me like a mother her sick child. I talked a lot about my wanderings and about how it was only in the countryside that I could stand my isolation, which in the city crushed me; all I got from the city was a crust of bread, and sometimes not even that. How did I avoid despair? What kept me going? Where does a perfectly irrational tinge of optimism come from? What sort of inner light shows me the way? Why didn’t I let myself slip into the dark-some river where I was cowering in my fear of mankind? Why do I not curl up and die when my brain can produce only revulsion and dread? Well, you see, Ganna, I will have said, it’s strange, something quite unaccountable happens. Even those moments of wanting to die come with a small flame that causes the heart to flicker into life. Then a friend shows up, whom you’d forgotten all about. Then you meet a girl for the first time, and she looks at you, and smiles at you, even though she knows everything about you. The least happiness is something so exquisitely precious in the lower depths. At such a moment I fell into the love affair for which I gave up three whole years of my life, as into a bottomless well, and that, once it was painfully over, left me as poor in my soul as I always was in my flesh …