I walk Ganna to the door. She stops on the doorstep and looks at me with big eyes full of reproach and complaint. I bow, take her hand and press it to my lips. Bettina is barely able to disguise her astonishment. What is he doing now, she thinks, why is he kissing her hand? Well, this is too much for her to understand. Again, it’s a case of ‘begone, begone, begone’. It’s a farcical gesture of respect, by which Ganna becomes a stranger to me, a stranger in this house, a stranger in my world. An instinctive act in the form of an empty ceremony that means nothing but the last inner break with Ganna.
THE DEVIL RIDES OVER THE RUINS
The upshot of this turbulent happening was — nothing at all. My account was not unblocked and the distraints not taken off. There was no mention of the German divorce. But surely you don’t think Ganna was responsible for the breach of promise? Please. She washed her hands so assiduously in innocence that the bubbles got everywhere. Did she not give her lawyer in Ebendorf ‘appropriate instructions’? Did he not overweeningly, for ‘certain jurisprudential technicalities’, refuse to carry out her instructions? Are you sure that Hornschuch didn’t offer ‘passive resistance’ for obscure motives of his own? Hornschuch? What did he do? We’re not told. The mere claim is sufficient. Then, in a pedantic memorandum to Bettina: ‘Everyone knows that I am entirely scrupulous in all my dealings. I indignantly reject the claim that I didn’t stick to the terms of our agreement; there can be no doubt that in this, as in every previous instance, it was the other party that is in violation.’ Thus Ganna. And finally, the latest sanction, a veritable somersault of condescension: she can only make up her mind about granting the German divorce at the end of a trial year, once she has been convinced that my offer of peace and friendship is in good faith. The badger slips out of its sett, leaves its little malodorous pile and grins to itself when the dogs bark.
Bettina, though, felt like someone who with mortal daring and the last of her strength has carried a person out of a burning house, only to be spat at by them afterwards. She was unable to get over it. She suffered a strangely Bettina-esque collapse, very quiet, very discreet, but every bit as bad as a serious illness.
In sum: fourteen court orders, twenty-two payment orders, eleven forced sales, three official valuations of the Buchegger estate, four suits for defamation, two suits before the wardship authorities, five temporary injunctions, distraint of my car, forced sale of my desk, fifty-seven lawyers’ letters in the space of six weeks, the blocking of my account with my publisher since I am unable to pay Ganna’s monthly allowance any more and my earnings have dwindled to next to nothing; Ganna goes to court against my publisher; Ganna in Berlin, Ganna in Munich, Ganna in the district capital, Ganna in Ebendorf, always unexpected wherever she goes, as though she travelled everywhere by aeroplane; always with sword drawn, always gurgling in the fists of usurers; offers of conciliation, financial plans; yelling I had better make it up to her, or else …
Not one stone was left standing on another.
Ganna’s legal bills alone amount to a fortune. When I think that these monstrous amounts are there to pay for her mercenaries in her war against me, that the money I scrape together month after month literally by the sweat of my brow all goes to the avenging fury to keep her army of lawyers together, then the whole world has turned into a grisly farce, a dance of death starring forty law offices and their entire staffs of typists and stenographers, legal drafters and researchers. When I turn to Ferry and ask him to try and make his mother see sense before it’s too late, he drives up from Milan where he works as an engineer in an automobile factory and implores her by all that’s holy to desist from her lunacy. She goes wild. She accuses him, her own son, of being in Bettina’s employ. When news of it reaches my ears, it makes me feel as though the devil is shaking my living soul out of my body.
But a wonderful thing has also happened since then. From a certain vantage point, it was a big experience for me. It began with Bettina saying to me one day: ‘You know, you’re not up to this. It’s killing you. Take a look at yourself. From now on, I’m going to take the whole matter in hand myself.’ Such resolutions, with her, were the outcome of lengthy and mature reflection. They were always followed up. Once she had taken a decision, she saw it through with implacable consequence. Her force of will has something shining and compelling about it. A busy nature through and through; only facts command her respect; at bottom her spirit doesn’t like dreamers; and I have often noted to my surprise that, while seeming to dream, she was actually thinking — and not in any loose sense of the word, but with philosophical stringency and in strict chains of logic. Suddenly the feeling had come over her that, in spite of her better self, she had led a pampered princess’s life for years of balmy ease, a life on the sidelines; she flushed red with shame. From one moment to the next she changed. That was her gift; that was the miraculous thing about her before which I stood awestruck and uncomprehending. To anyone who lives entirely in contemplation, transformation in action is a mystery. From one moment to the next she dropped everything as if it had never existed — her music, her violin, her books, her correspondence with friends, her pretty things — everything that made life tolerable in the wild uplands, as she had called it in brief fits of irritation. Yes, even little Caspar Hauser was forced to get by on his own; and without holding anything back, without allowing herself any pleasures or distractions, she gave herself over to this one thing. She went to work radically. She studied the contracts, the documents, the relevant laws and ordinances. She sat closeted with Hornschuch for hours, whole days at a time. She replied to the writs and the lawyers’ letters, dealt with the courts, with the tax authorities, oversaw the finances and reformed our whole household, as to whose sloppiness her eyes had finally been opened, with the strictness of a paid cost-cutter. Day and night she was on duty, to protect me from ambushes and sudden attacks. Every attack from Ganna she warded off with an adroitness and care as though she had been in jurisprudence for decades. Her clear intellect, her intuitive understanding of real life always showed her the one and only way that could be followed. There was no danger she was afraid of, she shunned no strain, she didn’t try to keep her time, her sleep, her health; the moral courage that filled her to the fingertips seemed to give her an almost masculine appetite for struggle. She went to Vienna to deal with persons of influence whose support might be important; she went to Berlin to take on a lawyer and to put my publisher in the picture as to what really was going on; and however speedily and instantaneously she made up her mind, still she never neglected to tell me what she was doing and to obtain my consent, so that the Ganna corner — suddenly alarmed — weren’t able to claim that she was running my affairs by herself, without my knowledge and approval. She weighed up everything in her mind, she caught the tiniest advantage; with nervous vigilance she did everything to take the wind out of the enemy’s sails. The whole woman was fight and flame. It was a spectacle the like of which I had never seen nor hoped to see.
And yet it had a frightening, even an alarming aspect too. Bettina was tied to me in a different way from the Ganna world. In the spirit of the anti-Ganna, I could say. She was the absolutely sane human being. The person destiny gave me so that I could share in truth and reality, instead of perishing in lies and illusion. That was the purpose of everything we’d gone through, if an existence like mine could ever be crowned by anything like a purpose. And now — was it a trick of fate, was it a higher testing, whose outcome still hung in the balance — now the anti-Ganna was being drawn into Ganna’s orbit, was being asked — against her inner nature — to fight with Ganna’s weapons, to confront her, to shadow her in her darknesses and thickets. Could that all be to the good? Was it good of itself? ‘My Diana, tenderly rapt,’ I had once written about Bettina; but would I not end up becoming the murderer of my tender goddess? True, Diana is the huntress, but her hunting-ground is not populated by phantoms, she doesn’t hunt nightmares, she doesn’t suffer her course to be set by Ganna ghosts — if she did, she would herself become the quarry.