The sentences stuck in my memory. But they didn’t have the effect that Fedora meant them to have. I was cold inside. I looked for reasons that were nothing to do with Fedora’s blameless nature. I put myself completely and not without anger on Ganna’s side. It appeared to me that it wasn’t enough to return her love; no, I also had to be her knight and protector. The next day, I heard Fedora and Riemann had left.
GANNA SWEARS
There’s something I’ve forgotten to tell, although it has no particular importance. Only at the time it had a certain significance for me, who was so short of worldly wisdom. The last evening before our separation, we were sitting by the lake. After a long silence I turned to her and said:
‘Well, all right, Ganna. We’ll do it your way. But on one condition. You must solemnly swear to release me if I should ever ask to be released.’
Ganna, the innocent child, the offended and mistreated child, answered reproachfully:
‘Oh, Alexander, how could you think I would ever refuse! I wouldn’t be worthy of you if I was like that!’
She looked at me with her maidenly eyes and hand upraised, and swore to God. I was eased.
Believe it or not, I was eased. What a failure to understand the word, and the effect of the passage of time, and the meaning of God’s name in a philosophically enlightened soul like Ganna’s! It was a beginner’s error. Would a man in love have required such assurance, and would a woman, wanting to keep him, not have given it by the sun and moon and God and all his angels? The passing years make a mockery of the gravest oath, and memory is an eager bawd.
Then, when she was gone, I thought of her very tenderly. There were moments in which I took my feeling for love, but then I would say to myself: love is a ball of mercury, the pursuit of which costs half a lifetime; if you try to pick it up, it breaks apart, you never get all of it. Comradeship appealed to me. Harmony of two souls, I tried to convince myself, makes love dispensable. It can’t be a sin to obtain love, not if you’re able to pay something for it. And what I was able to pay was in the form of tenderness, tender understanding, tender guidance, tender confidence. That was the way to go. I was convinced it was right. I didn’t notice that I was losing myself in emotional casuistry.
ASTONISHMENT IN THE MEVIS HOUSEHOLD
Ganna had promised me she wouldn’t talk about our engagement, but she couldn’t control herself, and after three days everyone knew — her sisters, her mother, her relatives, her acquaintances. Frau Mevis made no secret of her grave doubts. Today I see things differently from thirty years ago; lots of things that were absurd looked all right to me. It was one of the tasteless absurdities of the time that in rich middle-class homes they would speak of misalliances, as if in the upper reaches of the aristocracy. The only person who was kept in the dark was the Professor. Frau Mevis trembled night and day. If he should withhold his consent, hideous scenes were bound to result, and she would be the one to get the blame. She bore some responsibility: she had failed to keep Ganna properly chaperoned. Her fear of her husband, which she had had from the beginning of their marriage, had by and by eroded her personality. She was under as much pressure as a sunken ship, under the water. It’s only a matter of time till the hulk breaks into pieces. The more alert of her daughters had long observed the symptoms of mental illness in her. It was the illness suffered by maybe four-fifths of the women in bourgeois society, the illness of nothing to do, empty representation and constant pregnancies. The day Ganna went to her father to make her confession, and everything inexplicably passed off without éclat, the old lady heaved a deep sigh of relief. ‘I thought he was going to kill her,’ she said to Irmgard and Traude; ‘an author; a man who is nothing and owns nothing. Truth be told, I don’t understand my husband.’ Irmgard reported it to me later.
How the Professor received his daughter’s news calmly and without ire is something for which I have no explanation. For sure, he had read my book. He won’t have taken me for quite such a hopeless and feckless individual as his wife did. But a writer of books with whom one might pass the time of day and an official son-in-law, those are two completely different human categories. Later, with deafening laughter, he assured me he hadn’t believed a single word of what Ganna said to him; he was firmly convinced the fantastical creature was the victim of delusions, and he had first decided to wait to see whether I would turn up at all. ‘Well, and then you turned up,’ he crowed, and whacked me on the shoulder, making all my bones hurt. That gave him away. I could tell how delighted he was to be rid of Ganna. The other girls couldn’t get over their surprise. They said: ‘She’s turned Alexander Herzog’s head, she’s turned Papa’s head, she must have worked some magic.’ In the swans’ terms, working magic was what I felt to be Ganna’s dark Pythian power.
CELEBRATION
I noted down the salient points of my conversation with the Professor in my diary at the time.
‘So you want to marry my daughter?’ he began, once I was sitting opposite him.
‘I don’t really want to,’ I said, ‘Ganna does.’ He looked at me in astonishment.
‘All right,’ he conceded, ‘then let’s just say you have nothing against the idea in principle.’
‘No, in principle.’
‘Then we can move on to the practical side of the question. I assume you are able to provide for a wife.’
‘I’m afraid I must destroy your illusions there, Professor. I can’t even provide for myself.’
‘Admirable honesty. But surely that’s not an abiding inability?’
‘You’re wrong. I see no change in prospect.’
‘Why is that? You are a well-known and much-admired writer.’
‘But I still have no means.’
‘Then what do you live on now?’
‘Tick.’
‘How high are your debts?’
‘Around about 3,000 marks.’
‘That’s not so bad. You’re still young. One day you will become successful.’
‘Possibly so, but that would worry me.’
‘Why so?’
‘It would be a sign that I had compromised. With taste. With the fashion of the day. I don’t want to make any compromises.’
‘An admirable stance. But then how do you envisage a life with my daughter?’
‘To be frank, Professor, I wouldn’t be able to entertain the idea if I hadn’t known she was well-off.’
The Professor laughed in his rackety way. ‘You mean to say that I’m well-off?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘You’re not afraid of the truth, are you?’
‘That’s my job, Professor. I don’t care about money. I don’t care about a certain standard of living. I want a life with Ganna. It’s my belief that we’re a good fit. But I would have to renounce her if it means I have to work for a living, in the bourgeois sense. Ganna understands that I must be free in that regard. Nor have I come to you to ask for Ganna’s hand in marriage, as the expression goes, though that’s maybe how it appears. I wanted to tell you frankly about my circumstances, because Ganna is utterly convinced that she will only be happy with me.’
‘All right, that’s Ganna. What about you?’
‘I am extremely fond of Ganna. I have very high expectations of her. But for me marriage is not essential.’
‘I understand. But you don’t mean to tell me that you don’t see yourself ever — even many years hence — attaining an income that accords with your gifts?’