HOW DOES GANNA TAKE IT?
These words, or similar, I will have spoken to Ganna; of course I no longer remember them exactly. What about her? To begin with, she was stunned. Here I must make mention of something odd. Ever since the first days of our acquaintance, she had kept a notebook about me. It was full of thoughts and reflections about my uninteresting person, complicated interpretations of my being, and pages and pages on the moral character of my work. I only heard about it years later, and I won’t deny that I laughed heartily when she showed me the volume. Typical Ganna, I said to myself; falling in love and writing a thesis about it at the same time. But at the point when I came up with such a response, I was already more critical of her. It was a fact with Ganna that her notions of life came out of books, and they stood to reality like a painted tiger to the beast that lays your shoulder open with a swipe of its paw. Still, my talking had stirred her up, and I had the feeling too that I wasn’t as inaccessible to her as I had been previously. Her emotion was unmistakable. It dawned on her that she had something to offer me, which she hoped I wouldn’t be able to dismiss out of hand. My surroundings, my life, were bound to let her know that my situation basically hadn’t improved since. I was living off expectation, off faith in an inner source, off the charity of friends and the carefully measured generosity of my publisher. I had no financial security. My entire existence was speculative, was a matter of plans and schemes. My face was etched with worry. The melancholy that from time to time would overwhelm me couldn’t be plucked from my eyes. In Ganna’s hot head that may have given rise to some serious questions. What did she have money for? Why had the Lottelotts worked so hard to amass their fortune? Let her have it. It’s in her gift to help the person she loves. And not just help him, she can restore him to his correct, sovereign height. She is jubilant, she has the key to this man on whose behalf she is prepared to go out and conquer the whole world. I didn’t misunderstand the shining eyes and the speaking looks. But patience, Ganna, patience: do you propose to take what you call your wealth, today or tomorrow, and merely drop it at his feet, unconditionally and impulsively and without regard to yourself, and without reference to any of the usual contracts and obligations? It would be a splendid impulse, whether it were possible or not. Or is some forfeit not required — in fact, wouldn’t the person, the future, the whole man from head to toe have to serve as your collateral? Speak!
It’s true, this question was never spoken out loud; it only hovered uncertainly over our conversations. But it seemed to me that Ganna didn’t understand its deeper implications. Why should the man not furnish the security, the pledge, she clearly was saying to herself, since all his difficulties would be resolved at a stroke, all his darknesses dispelled? If he only declares himself willing, then she will make him deliriously happy, then she will guard him like the apple of her eye, then she will be his slave, his exchequer. His muse, the guardian of his fame, the proclaimer of his greatness. All for him, say her shining eyes and her imploring looks; her dreams, her ambition, her gifts, her life, all for him.
But really I was still clueless.
BECAUSE IT’S NEW
Until one day she came out with it. Without preamble and with the same courage with which she plonked herself on her bicycle and pedalled off, even though she’d never properly learned how to. I was stunned. For the longest time, I wasn’t sure what exactly she meant. She took care not to be explicit. She was nervous. But she kept going back and starting over again. Each time it was a shade more graspable, with more eloquent descriptions of the practical possibilities, more excited dwelling on the splendid prospects for my life and work that she was able to predict with visionary fire. When I think back on it today I have to smile, because by instinct she was doing exactly what a shopkeeper does, feigning reluctance to show his most precious stock, and only putting it out on the counter once he’s worn the customer down with his patter. When I finally caught her drift, I had no idea what I could decently say. Nothing like this had occurred to me, not remotely. It was like someone suggesting I might like to move to the moon. I laughed. I treated the whole thing as an extravagant joke. I said that where marriage was concerned, I might just be the least suitable man in the whole of Europe.
In the way of these things, her arguments started getting to me after a while. If I was aghast the first day, by the second I was just annoyed, and by the third a little impatient. I couldn’t always avoid her stuttering suit, her fiery offer, her willingness to make herself useful that caused her to tremble like a fever. Not always. After all, she had proved to me — though not ultimate proof — that she didn’t hold anything back. It couldn’t possibly be calculation. Her tenderness was gushing. Her desire to please me, to anticipate my every wish, was nigh on obsessive. I regularly felt ashamed. If I’d only guessed that my shame was an unconsciously erected barrier, perhaps I would have behaved differently. I thought she was funny in her wildness and her muddle-headed dreaminess; funny but lovable. You can find a woman lovable without loving her; that’s a dangerous grey area. When I gave her my hand, she could sit there charmed as though that moment was a singing eternity, then she would lean over and press her lips to my fingers with a reverence that sometimes made me say: oh, don’t do that, don’t bother. It hadn’t happened to me before. The woman I loved before, the first time, boundlessly, to the point of folly and even crime — yes, crime — had coolly endured my passion, and shamelessly cheated and exploited me. The wound I received from her had continued to fester. What a tonic to receive, for once, instead of always giving, thanklessly giving, and being mocked for it.
WILL YOU HAVE ME OR NOT?
For the moment I let things take their course. I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no. Yes would have turned my life upside down. Think of a solar system where a pert comet suspends the law of gravity. And no … no was tricky. Not that I wasn’t hungry for some of the fleshpots of Egypt. I wouldn’t deny that I was tired. Tired of the unpaid bills, the sheepish faces of my acquaintances when I tried to pump them for a loan, the holes in my socks that no one darned, the frayed cuffs of my shirts and the daily humiliations I had to take from people who despised nothing so much as poverty. It would have been nice to have no more experience of bitterness and offence, to go to bed at night without racking my brain about how I was going to pay for the privilege. It would have been nice to be freed from worries. Ganna wasn’t wrong when she argued that all these tormenting details would slowly wipe me out. But just for that, it didn’t occur to me to squinny at the groaning tables of the rich, and their nicely stocked wine cellars, and their jealously guarded safes.
It was one of my most disastrous qualities that, faced with a self-willed person, I would lose out because the phenomenon of willpower in and of itself would put me into such a state of amazement that I could generally only come to the decision my opposite number had made for me. I would tell myself I had done my bit, and was glad that there was no more back-and-forth. And Ganna decided for me. During those days her eyes had the sort of tunnel vision of athletes so set on victory they can see nothing but the finishing-tape. What was she so afraid of, why was she in such a hurry? I tried to calm her down. She thanked me exorbitantly, but it looked as though, inside, she was hurt and sore. I sensed how very much she was at the mercy of her drives, and if I wasn’t to stand in front of her as a poor bungler, I had to try and spring her from her jail. And, in so doing, I was clamped in chains myself.