I had arrived too early and Hans was out. Andre opened the door to me. I stood in the middle of the room without moving at first, breathing this air in which he lived, the only climate in which I myself could live.
I looked at the photograph of Johanna tacked on his wall. The fevered profile, taut even in the photograph, so alive that I shivered a little, expecting the face to turn towards me with that slight twitching of the lips and the occasional tic of the eyelids. I half expected her to open her mouth and pour forth that eddying voice with the spinning phrases which gave one vertigo. There was in her portrait the imperious fever of her rhythm, like her wide, crunching walk. Looking at the taut, fevered mask of Johanna, I dreaded the malice behind her pretense; I remembered the hatred which Hans had ascribed to Johanna, the fierce possessiveness of the woman.
My eyes turned instinctively to his desk which was littered with notes. I read them over slowly… Johanna… Johanna’s life in the cellar on Sullivan Street… Johanna selling cigarettes and candy… Johanna’s cock and bull stories… Johanna’s drunken orgies with Hildred… Johanna’s extravagances… Johanna’s fear of humiliation… Johanna the female Stavrogin… Johanna’s bracelets… Johanna’s cat’s eyerings… Johanna this, Johanna that…
Johanna had made the world rock for him and that had been her great gift to him. The moment when the world rocks and mouths join, and the earth spins like a mad top, when the dreams rise like pyramids… And now Hans was erecting pyramids of notes. Johanna had shed her hair on his pages, her perfume, her torn dresses, her shadow as she dressed, her tears, her nail lacquer, her painted eyelashes, her broken bracelets. The notes were stained and brimming with her presence.
A volume of Proust was open on the desk. It was marked with Johanna’s name, with references to Johanna’s lies, Johanna’s friends. The last page on the typewriter was a description of Johanna’s jealousies, the scenes she created, the brusque reconciliations. Johanna. Johanna.
I picked a book out of his bookcase. Johanna’s name in the margin. I looked at the maps on the walls, the large maps Hans made of his future novels. “Life with Johanna on Sullivan Street.” A list of incidents, of the friends who surrounded them, of the quarrels and the despairs and the separations.
My joy crumbled. He loves no one but her.
But Hans came in then, and without looking at his desk, or at the photograph, or at the open book, he turned wholly to me, with all his ideas, his plans, his love.
“Roll up your sleeves,” he said, “there’s work to do. This description of Johanna is giving me trouble. Read it. Tell me how it strikes you.”
If only Johanna would die. If she would die. She does not love him as I do.
“The worst of lies,” I said to Hans, “is that they create solitude. I know Johanna must have been lonely at times. When you treat life and men like a play, and you can never speak or be what you really are, you get lonely.”
“You speak feelingly about it. I have no doubt you’re experienced in that pretending too. Now tell me, why do you think Johanna so often repeated that I would never know the greatest secret of her life, even when I was absolutely sure of her love for the other woman?”
“There was another secret…”
“You believe all that about the drugs?”
If she would only die! But then she would only live more vividly as a legend…
“I enjoy Johanna best when she is not here,” said Hans, “for then I can peacefully write and think about her. When she is here I feel choked and crushed. With you I shall call it the Golden Age between Wars. It is in time of peace that art is born.”
Slipping his hands through my hair, gently, he began to talk about Johanna. I knew that he was noting things in his mind, noting and thinking of his work. I knew too that it had fallen to my destiny to nourish the creator and love him in order to give him the strength to write about her, and that it might befall another woman to nourish Hans while he would be writing about me. In a flash I saw it all in a strange cycle of life and creation, life sustaining the creation, which was always concerned with the more distant experience, with the past.
“How is one to recognize a lie?” said Hans.
“By its dissonant tone. It is like a false note.”
“You have too musical an ear.”
“I have studied my own lies, I have trained my ear. For example, I am sure that both Johanna and I invent personages… I have often thought to myself: ‘I must keep silent.’ I must let this man look at my face and allow his dream of me to take form. I must give his imagination time to invent. While he is looking at me, if I say nothing, he is forced to interpret me by the color of my skin, the wave of my hair, the color of my dress, the shape of my neck, the few rare gestures I make. I feel him building an image. I see the image take form in his eyes. It lies in his eyes like a reflection in a river. I don’t want to open my mouth and speak. If I say what I want to say he may think I am just an ordinary woman. The image of me which he has been weaving like a spider web and which is trembling on the edge of his eyes like reflections of houses in a river may suddenly sink. I may see his eyes waver for a second and then turn into the glassy brilliance of reality and disillusion. Or even if I should smile—my smile may not conform to that intensely desired image he has been carrying about. I would like to answer people’s impossible wishes. I have tired myself desiring impossible things. I have so often sat and watched a beautiful face, beautiful while impassive, because its stone-like stillness allowed my fancy to create its meaning. And I have seen so often the disintegration of my fancy at the mere appearance of a smile. I have so often sat behind a face dreaming and desiring ardently that this face should answer my craving. I have experienced so often the demolition of a whole universe by a few words. I have been so fearful of those words, of hearing the voice, of seeing the face move, so fearful that my image, my dream, should be swept away. If the man spoke first and said: ‘You seem to me like a Hindu woman, so childlike and secretive,’ I can be that also. I can be all things. Whatever you want can become a game for me. I can play the role of the child-like secretive Hindu woman. If the man says: ‘You seem perverse to me,’ then I gather together all my knowledge of perversion, all I have read or seen on the stage and I play it all with such earnestness that finally I come to believe it myself.”
“You and Johanna…”
“I am sure that we have both played like this. It makes life difficult. People feel a certain falseness and then they seek to discover the reality, our reality. This reality we evade with al our cunning. And all this contributed to Johanna’s tenseness and her fear of being discovered. We want to be loved without being known. We are like porcupines with silver spikes. We imagine that our true selves cannot bear the light of common every-day simplicity. I am sure that as soon as she felt that the other’s image of her was in danger through something she said or did, she rushed to destroy the effect, to deny it, saying it was a jest or a game, mystifying and eluding any final judgment.”
“False mysteries.”
“Look at the pounds of notes her false mysteries have inspired. Let me read your last pages.”
When I had read them I said: “You’re the only man I would scrub floors for!”
“We could be very happy together. You would fall behind in your writing!”
“Good! I fall behind in my writing. I become the wife of a genius.”
“To-day, if there were a choice to be made between you and Johanna, I would surrender Johanna.”