What annoyed him most—and this was mostly due to dissatisfaction with his work—was when he heard about what people imagined he was like, for example that he was always careening through the waves with a trident. Meanwhile he was sitting down here in the depths of the ocean constantly going through the books. The only interruption to this monotony were occasional visits to Jupiter, visits, by the way, from which he usually returned in a fury. So he’d hardly seen anything of the seas, only ever briefly on the hurried ascent to Olympus, and never really travelled around them. He would say that he was waiting for the end of the world; at that point there would surely be a quiet moment before it was all over in which, after finishing off the last of the accounts, he’d have time for a quick look around.
THE VERDICT
A story for Ms Felice B.
IT WAS A SUNDAY MORNING at the height of spring. Georg Bendemann, a young businessman, was sitting in his room on the first floor of one of those low, straight-forwardly built houses that run in a long line beside the river, differing from each other only in their height or colour. He’d just finished writing a letter to a childhood friend and folded it shut with whimsical attentiveness, then, resting his elbows on the desk, he looked out of the window at the river, the bridge and the pale green hills on the other bank.
He was thinking about how this friend, dissatisfied with the way his life was going at home, had all but fled to Russia several years ago. These days he ran a business in St Petersburg, which had got off to a very good start but now seemed to have been stagnating for some time, something the friend complained about on his increasingly rare visits. He was fruitlessly working himself into the ground in a far-off country, his foreign-looking beard only patchily covering his familiar face, which was developing a yellowish tinge that hinted at some emerging illness. From what he said, he didn’t have any real connections out there among the expatriate community, nor much social contact with Russian families, and so was preparing himself for permanent bachelorhood.
What could you write to a man like that, who had obviously made the wrong choices, someone you could sympathize with but not help? Should you maybe advise him to come home, to move his life back here, to take up all his old friendships again—there was no reason he couldn’t—and in general to put his trust in the fact that his friends would help him? But doing that would be tantamount to saying—and the more gently it was put, the more hurtful it would be—that all his efforts so far had failed, that he should finally let it go, that now he had to come back and let himself be stared at by everybody who knew he’d come back for good, that his friends had known better than him what to do with their lives and that actually he was just an overgrown child who should concentrate on imitating those who’d made a success of staying where they were. And was is it even certain that all the pain he’d have to go through would be worth it? Perhaps they wouldn’t even be able to convince him to come back—he said himself that he didn’t understand his home country any more—and in that case he’d stay abroad despite everything, embittered by his friends’ advice and alienated even further from them. Whereas if he did take the suggestion to come back and then ended up downtrodden at home—of course not on purpose, but just because it turned out like that—if he couldn’t get on with his friends or get by without them, found himself humiliated, friendless and more truly displaced than before, wouldn’t it be much better for him if he’d stayed abroad? Could you really expect, given all these considerations, that he’d be able to make a go of things back here?
That was why, if you wanted to keep up a correspondence with him, you couldn’t give him any actual news, the kind you would unthinkingly write to even your most distant acquaintance. His friend hadn’t been home for more than three years, offering the unconvincing explanation that it was because of the uncertain political situation in Russia, which apparently wouldn’t permit a small businessman to leave the country for a few weeks even while hundreds of thousands of Russians were traipsing around all over the world. For Georg, however, a lot had changed in those three years. The death of Georg’s mother, which had happened about two years ago and prompted Georg and his father to move back in together, was something he’d told his friend, who’d expressed his condolences in a letter so dry that it could only be because the sorrow of something like that becomes completely unimaginable from far away. Since that time, Georg had thrown himself more purposefully into the family business, as he had into everything else. Perhaps it was because, while his mother was alive, his father’s insistence on managing things at work had held Georg back from really taking it on as his own; perhaps it was because his father, although he did still come to the office, had now become more withdrawn; perhaps, and in fact very probably, certain far happier events had had an important role to play, but in any case, the business had made unexpected strides in these past two years, they’d had to double the staff, turnover had gone up fivefold and even greater gains were there for the taking.
The friend had no idea about this altered state of affairs. Previously, maybe the last time had been in that condolence letter, he’d tried to persuade Georg to emigrate to Russia and written at length about the opportunities there were for Georg’s line of business in St Petersburg. The numbers he’d mentioned were vanishingly small compared with the level that Georg’s business had already reached. But Georg hadn’t wanted to tell his friend about his commercial successes at the time, and to do so retrospectively really would seem bizarre.
So Georg limited himself to writing about the meaningless happenings that drift randomly into your mind if you sit and think on a quiet Sunday. All he wanted was to avoid disturbing the image of home that his friend must have created and come to terms with during his long absence. That’s how Georg ended up telling his friend about some completely uninteresting person getting engaged to an equally uninteresting girl three times in three different letters sent quite far apart, eventually piquing his friend’s interest in this strange affair.
But Georg would far rather write about things like that than admit that he himself had got engaged to a Miss Frieda Brandenfeld, a girl from a well-to-do family, about a month earlier. He often spoke to his fiancée about this friend and the unusual written relationship he had with him. “So that means he won’t come to our wedding,” she said, “even though I’ve got the right to meet all your friends.”
“I don’t want to put him out,” said Georg. “Don’t get me wrong, he would probably come if we asked him, but he’d feel pressured into it and annoyed, maybe jealous of me and certainly unhappy, and afterwards he’d have to go back to Russia by himself, feeling like he’d never be able to put that unhappiness aside, let alone overcome it. By himself—do you remember how that felt?”
“But might he not hear about our wedding from someone else?”
“I can’t guarantee that he won’t but, given the way he lives, it’s unlikely.”
“If that’s what your friends are like, Georg, you shouldn’t have got engaged in the first place.”
“Well, that’s both our fault, but now we’re here I wouldn’t have it any other way.” And when she, breathing quickly under his kisses, said, “But actually it does bother me,” he thought that it might be harmless after all to tell his friend everything. ‘This is who I am and he has to take me as I am,’ he said to himself. ‘I can’t take a pair of scissors to myself and cut out a person who’d be better suited to being his friend.’