I have no other excuse than that my eyes and ears were commandeered by the pursuer. Things had come to such a pass that each time there was a letter from her in the post I would feel my temples throb. The notion of having to see her was a nightmare, but sometimes the incredible thing happened and on my visits to town I would go to see her, if only to prevent her from coming to me. I experienced the most terrible form of sleep there is. You lie there shattered, your chest sliced open, suffering unendurable agonies from the unexampled wickedness of fate. And you sleep. And in your sleep you deal with your fate. Resist, justify yourself, get nowhere, talk for nothing, your throat choked with pleas and wails, with rage and astonishment, and you wake up with a shattered head. While I worked, I felt like someone with two loaded revolvers pressed to his head, one on either side. When I left the house I would be frightened for my son. A limitless dread of the Ganna devils. I walked around, waiting to see what she would come up with next, where the next lightning would strike. It had been going on for years now and no end in sight. I fervently wished I could turn back time, so that I would never have met the woman. What right did she have to wreck my life, on whose instructions was it? What sort of being was she that she could overturn any human agreement with impunity and rampage through a world that she saw as hers to despoil, a mad world with mad agreements and mad battles?
But I am getting a little ahead of myself.
THREE DECENT PEOPLE
Thanks to the canny logic that often inheres in events, it was at this time that the tax authorities discovered that Ganna had neglected to pay any tax since her divorce, and demanded immediate back payments. It was a very large amount, almost doubled by the fine slapped onto it. Ganna objected, but in the teeth of the State’s determination to fleece its citizens there is no objection possible. The most she could do was secure a postponement. She ran to several lawyers, but m’learned friends were unable to help either. They tried the usual methods of obtaining further delays, thereby only adding to the costs and interest. If she had still had the money she was supposed, by the terms of the divorce agreement, to have set aside as an emergency fund, then nothing bad would have happened, she would simply have had to use it for that. But there was nothing left of the money. Nor could she load the house with more debt; the mortgage interest payments were eating into her monthly allowance as it was and her other debts were going up all the time.
In her predicament she quite naturally turned to — me. We had a meeting at which she begged me to take on her tax debt. She claimed one of her lawyers had told her it was the only way of getting the sum asked for down to manageable proportions. She had previously written to me along these same lines; I had taken soundings with Hornschuch, who sensed illegal manipulations and advised me against allowing myself to be lured into a possible legal minefield. But even if there hadn’t been any risks, I still couldn’t have got Ganna out of this pickle; I told her my circumstances had deteriorated so much of late that it was difficult enough for me to meet my existing obligations. She sniggered contemptuously. It was as if I’d asked her to pick up the bill for lunch. Then I made the ill-advised suggestion that I might be able to help her if she renounced her lien on the Buchegger estate; then I would be in the position of being able to borrow money against the property. To hear this, to stare at me with burning eyes and to burst into a long loud shriek were all one and the same for Ganna. She carried on as though the lien were the apple of her eye and I was trying to steal it. In her tantrum I kept hearing the one word: blackmail. My suggestion was blackmail to her. She was prepared for everything, but not that. The fact that I looked to her to abandon her most powerful lever showed her just who she was up against. I was simple-minded enough to stick up for myself. In addition to the lien she also had the deed, I pointed out, and quoted the saying of a lawyer friend of mine who had once said: a deed is like a razor blade, the least movement and you start to bleed. Of course, she retorted, with difficulty keeping the triumph out of her voice, the lien was part and parcel of the deed, and to seek to interfere with it was an attempt on her life. And while she went on frothing at the mouth and babbling about blackmail, I took my hat and left.
Several weeks passed, during which she wriggled piteously. The tightening screw of the tax people took her breath away. Little part-payments gained her brief periods of respite. In order to quiet the rest of her creditors, she had chosen the system of partial consolidation. She paid One out, and agreed to even more oppressive conditions from numbers Two, Three and Four. She took to hocking her allowance and the rent she made on the house for months in advance. The lawyers she had engaged and who ran round the houses for her, and put in applications (there were already three or four of them at this time), didn’t want to do their work gratis either. She put them off by writing IOUs. I asked myself and I asked others how such a thing was possible; IOUs are not legal tender, how long can someone go on issuing IOUs? Till someone who knew explained: if you are in possession of a deed, you can string along one loan after another, since one lender doesn’t need to know about the existence of others, and in this case takes Alexander Herzog Ltd for a flourishing business. Aha, I thought, so a deed isn’t just a razor blade, but also a golden-egg-laying goose; good to know; I wonder what further qualities it will turn out to possess?
Even though it was a wretched life that Ganna was living, besieged by creditors, constricted by debt, under fire from the tax authorities, she could have taken all these calamities — which she was used to, to which she had fully adjusted — fatalistically in her stride, were it not for the serious threat to her ownership of the house. If there should be a forced sale, through foreclosure of the mortgages, she was lost. At least that was her mantra to herself, and at the thought she gibbered with panic. I had occasion to watch her, and more yet to sense how her relationship with property was taking shape within her. The house that was hers and the lien on the Buchegger estate both gave rise to ferocious feelings of possessiveness in her, puffed up with which she steered confidently over the surging waves of her life. As long as she had those two in her grasp, she felt inured to storm and shipwreck. The house she lived in and the estate that Bettina owned (as for me, I seemed to be a kind of chattel to be pushed here and there) — they were like a treasure found and one still only dreamed of; but one knows where it is to be found and all that is needed to secure it is the knowledge of the correct phrase or formula. An extraordinary serenity came over her at times, when she pictured to herself how eventually she would move into the fairy-tale palace by the lake and watch her rival legging it out through the back door with a hatbox or two.
Meanwhile, the pressures on her were increasing daily. After Drs Sperling, Wachtel, Greif and Tauber had all tested their teeth on the tough revenue nut without achieving any notable breakthrough, the fifth to be consulted by Ganna, one Dr Storch, was illuminated by a flash of genius. In the course of a protracted consultation with her he pointed out that, were she still living with me as my wife, she would not be facing any tax demand. Ganna nodded sorrowfully. She didn’t need any learned commentary to remind her of the sorry circumstance. But the lawyer had something else in mind. He had carefully reconsidered the case, he said, and while reading the files he had come upon a small technicality. Technicality? Ganna was positively giddy with excitement; she asked, stammering, what the lawyer — now suddenly transformed before her eyes into a celestial cherub — had in mind with his mysterious remark. With a smile he told her. Everything seemed to suggest that — probably in the haste of the final official dealings — my German nationality had been left out of regard. Pressing her hand to her bosom and breathing hard, Ganna asks what consequences that might have. At the very least it provided grounds for challenging the divorce, replies Dr Storch. At those words, Ganna gives a start — a pleasurable start, admittedly, but a start nonetheless. She reminds the cherub that I had since contracted another marriage. To which the cherub replies that that didn’t change anything. Whereupon Ganna, with the same voluptuous feeling of panic, gave a little scream: that means, oh my God, that means it’s bigamy. Whereupon the cherub, dampening down her exuberance, asks her to be cautious in the use of such terms. For the moment, he saw in this interesting circumstance nothing more than the means to put a little pressure on the tax authorities.