But all this was mere skirmishing for Ganna. A little later, she had worked out that I owed her 25,000 schillings. I don’t know where this nice round figure came from. It could as well have been half a million. Doctors’ bills, tailors’ bills, ‘backlogs’ from other years, ‘imprévus’ by the dozen, expenses on the children, a column of figures like a lottery draw. It’s my belief that merely writing down numbers gave her as much satisfaction as actual money. The local district court rejected the case for want of evidence, even though two diligent new lawyers threw themselves into the fray for her. Without stopping to think for a moment about the irrecoverableness of the debt and the frivolousness of her suit, Ganna told herself: if I can’t obtain justice in this country, then perhaps there where, according to my passport and as Alexander Herzog’s wife, I belong. She made for Berlin, found some willing lawyers — three of them — and presented her claim in a splendidly stylish brief. But lo and behold, the 25,000 were become 39,000, a leap explained by the addition of her tax debt. I saw with satisfaction that her charming number-drunkenness didn’t get in the way of a certain residual accuracy in Ganna. At the same time, in Berlin, where she set up a sort of dépendance, and where m’learned friends were charmed down from the trees, she attached her suit to the attack on the divorce. She was, it seemed, in the right place. The uncertainty between the two countries in point of matrimonial law made this entertaining legal adventure possible; it was one of the many breaches where canny lawyers like to wedge their crowbars.
But she also enjoyed social success in the German metropolis. She got to meet people to whom she could sing her song of woe. Since none of them were acquainted with the facts, she found credit and sympathy at every turn. Doling out copies of her Psyche Bleeds to all and sundry, she confirmed her role as an ideal wife, who had been sent to the brink of starvation by a cruel husband and his chit. She assiduously visited writers’ cafés, where she could advertise her noble unhappiness. ‘Even the moneylenders start to cry when I tell them of my predicament,’ she once said, to the understanding murmurs of a bookish set at table. It may even have been true. It’s not out of the question that the soul of the contemporary usurer has opposed the trend of petrifaction to which all other souls have been subject, and has humanized itself since the days of Balzac and Dickens. The result of her sentimental journey to the Prussian Olympus, at any rate, was that I received many anonymous letters full of insults and insolent instructions to me to better myself. Plus of course lawyers’ letters, too many to count. They struck me as scouting patrols before the battle, these resolute gentlemen marching out to meet me with fists clenched. One wrote to say simply that if I didn’t pay up 39,000 schillings by a certain date, he would have my royalties confiscated at the publisher’s. I threw the letter away, with two or three hundred others of the same type and import. I had to laugh. My lifestyle and the pyrrhic divorce had set me back so much with my publisher that the tiny hands would find nothing left to confiscate. (What a great word, ‘confiscate’; especially made for the little hands.) But Ganna told her people that by some financial manipulation I had contrived to smuggle money abroad, and hence fabricated my debt to my publisher. A story that made it possible to drag him into court as well. On top of everything else, she was now bandying the bigamy charge about. A few friends who got to hear of it wrote to beg me not to let it come to that. But what else could I do? Whimper for mercy? Run to court and say: protect me from the lawyers, otherwise they’ll eat me alive, arrest that she-devil, otherwise I’ll be done for? Nonsense. The courts would have arrested me first.
One day I remarked to Hornschuch: ‘Can you explain it to me — excuse the naive question — but all these lawyers, they’re thoughtful, experienced, no doubt honest men; don’t they understand what’s going on and how they’re being misused?’ Hornschuch listened. He raised his eyebrows and looked at me with a sardonic smile on his lips. His way of not giving an answer was uncommonly eloquent.
At that time there were a mere sixteen or seventeen lawyers whom Ganna had retained, some of whom she had already paid off, or hadn’t paid off and was afraid to dismiss. Today, the number is closer to forty; it’s not possible to be exact since I’ve mislaid some of the names in the welter of paper. These people surely had to realize that the support they were giving the woman only served to exacerbate her addiction, not to quench it. What was it that drove them to give their brains, their knowledge, their time to a person who, with morbid determination, sought to twist the rigid paragraphs of the law to suit herself? Presumably they said to themselves: we’ll take in the winnings once the other side can no longer speak and will pay any money to be left in peace. That characterized the jurisdictional uncertainty, the ambiguity of the laws, the deadly rigidity of the process, the remoteness of the ivory-tower judiciary, the via dolorosa of appeals — and on top of everything, helpless and tyrannical, the State, a Chronos devouring his own children.
It accomplished nothing and explained nothing when I or others attempted to come up with a clinical category for Ganna’s case. An army of three and a half dozen lawyers is a one-off. The idea of a mysterious dependency suggested itself to me ever more strongly. It couldn’t but be that, in the atmosphere of confidential talk, expectation, advice, attack, subterfuge, statement and counter-statement, Ganna found a source of erotic satisfaction, a replacement for intimacy with another being; replacement also for the pleasure of tormenting another being, and no less pleasurable if one thinks one is the undeserving sufferer. The time spent in lawyers’ offices, the smell of ink, dust and blotting-paper unquestionably had an aphrodisiac effect on her. With each new lawyer she entered a sort of new marriage, a marriage of torment. When she talked to one of them — in court, in his office, in her house — a strange, saccharine flirtatiousness came out in her, a slavish gratitude that admittedly could at any moment curdle into bickering and quasi-marital dispute. It had become her habit to call her current lawyer first thing every day, to ask perfectly ridiculous questions, to make quite useless dispositions, as if she wanted only to hear his voice, as though to check that he hadn’t been unfaithful to her overnight. The telephone was another source of pleasure. Telephone and telegraph were magical gadgets with which, short of essence and existence as she was, she forced an entry into the time and consciousness of people attached to her, borrowed time and consciousness from them, in order to exist a little herself. How deeply into chaos and old night one is taken when one follows such a soul’s vagaries into its depths!
CONVERSATIONS IN ANOTHER WORLD
One day, Bettina and I had to go to Munich to discuss the legal challenge to our marriage with a lawyer there. Helmut was sitting with us at the breakfast table as we were about to go. He was complaining forthrightly.
‘Why are you going away again?’
I explained that it was necessary.
‘But why do you both have to go, why not just Papa?’ he persisted.
Bettina stroked his hair and said I wanted her to go with me. He thought for a long time, then a roguish expression came into his blue eyes and he said to her: