Her resentment rose as she talked, like a fever. It burned her eyes, her face. There was such a deep-reaching misunderstanding between them, like a wide chasm. Impossible to render any justice, yet justice was what Johanna demanded. She was begging to be judged, absolved.
She was pleading:
“You don’t know, when we first married, what an interest Hans had in evil. It was then I began to invent for him, to create situations, or at least to exaggerate them. I felt that he wanted that.”
I wanted to ask: “Did you never lie before you met Hans?” I knew that no one begins to lie at a certain hour of one’s life. I knew that I lied to-day to Johanna because I had also lied when I was a child—about the games I played which I insisted were real and should be believed by my parents and my brothers. I knew that I lied to-day to Johanna because it had always seemed to me that life must be embroidered on, colored and invented. I knew that when I lied about myself it was not so much because it was expected of me, but because I fancied that my inventions might be more interesting than the truth. From the beginning Johanna too must have taken her fancies seriously. That was the origin of her pretenses. And then some one had come who expected lies, who delighted in unreality, and Johanna had answered this demand. And within her, as within all, there wept and whined a child who was tired of inventions, and who wanted to be loved for her true self, for an unadorned, undramatized self.
I knew that if I asked Johanna to-day: “What were you before you met Hans? What were you when you were ten years old?” Johanna would not answer that she had been an “extra” in a dance hall, nor that her mother had kept a boarding house. Johanna would pause before answering and consider what might come closest to my image of her. I knew that Johanna would not say what she was, or what she thought, but whatever conformed to what she fancied I expected her to be and to think. I knew that to unravel the twistedness of Johanna’s life would take years of gentle and sharp detection. The whole pattern of Johanna’s life would have to be turned inside out. I would have to take Johanna like a fruit and peel the rind of flesh to find the core. Everything which composed the external Johanna was a concealment of her, not an expression. I would have to divest her of her costumes, of her talk, of her facial masks—and then what would I find? Probably a child, a child whining because it was lost and lonely, for lies have that power that they create solitude more effectively than anything else. They disguise the soul. They disguise and conceal and deform, and create enormous distances between the self and the appearance. And everyone is deluded by the appearance. Even love is offered to a reflection, to the appearance.
If I were to unmask you, Johanna, I should only be revealing myself! You are the face of my unmasked self. A thousand times I will unmask you, Johanna, because it is only you and I who know the inexhaustibility of women’s masks. And the last will fall only when we are dust. We see the face beneath the mask, you mine, I yours, because it is the same face. I am your words, Johanna, and you are my acts. You have acted for me. And you have my face, the face of my feelings. I am the bitterness in your words, the softness you are forbidden to betray. The need of mystery you bear like a curse; men have cursed you by enslaving you to your own mystery. I am free because I am able to dispense with mystery.
Johanna was begging to be seen as a martyr to Hans’ work, as the woman who acted always sublimely, as the woman who loved only beauty. See only the beauty in me, only the beauty.
“But I see you all, I e your lies too, I see you exactly as you are, and I love you,” I said.
“You have swallowed Hans’ stories,” said Johanna bitterly. “You also think me a liar.”
“I’ve spent this whole year trying to make Hans understand you, through me. I have trusted him.”
“Well, then you have failed as much as he has. He only pretends to understand in order afterwards to turn round and destroy. He is like a spy who enters your secret life only to report on it later, to expose it.”
“You should not fear exposure,” I said gently.
“Yes, because he only exposes the ugly, the ridiculous.”
I could not deny that Hans was a caricaturist, but only when he was angry, out of revenge.
“But I never did anything to deserve his vengefulness!”
“You betrayed him, Johanna.”
Johanna denied this swiftly, denied it vigorously. She intimated that she could skirt all life, all situations and remain unscathed and faithful. This statement made me angry.
“Don’t say that to me,” I said. “Don’t you dare say that to me. I am a woman, Johanna. I know it is not true. I know that women like us, even when we don’t want to give anything, cannot let a man go without some gift. You can call it pity, if you wish to embellish it. We are not women who take without giving back something. We forget it is ourselves they want. And you know this want touches us, all want touches us, because we are so hungry ourselves, because we are so voracious for love.”
Again all of Johanna’s being seemed to escape before my directness in a panic. Behind the mask a thousand smiles, behind the eyelids ageless deceptions. A deception so ingrained that I knew she would never transcend it.
And I knew that if I wanted Johanna to tell me the truth it was only to answer one question, one vital question which was life and death to me. I knew that Johanna sensed this question lurking behind our talk and our confidences, that she was on her guard against it, that it lay between us like a dagger, which neither of us wanted to pick up. I knew that what I wanted to ask was: “Do you love Hans? Have you returned to stay with Hans? Who is it you abandoned Hans for, and will you hurt him again?”
Johanna knew I wanted toknow this. And so our phrases, even when begun with impulsiveness, would end abruptly and unexpectedly whenever we felt ourselves approaching the core of our anxiety. To elude the ultimate question we crowded the atmosphere with smaller ones. We unearthed the past to evade the present and the future. We watched each other with love and fear. I knew that if I urged Johanna to openness Johanna could say: “It is you who are the liar, the deceiver. It is not for me that you helped Hans, that you served him as I once served him. Such things are only doneched each for love.”
My image ofHans up to now so clear became blurred. Because now that Johanna was living with Hans he was again fighting windmills, exhausting himself in blind, petty rages. She was inflicting venomous wounds, undermining his confidence, attacking his book—because he hadn’t given what she considered a true portrait of herself!
I was tormented with anxiety because I could do nothing for him, noteven see him for a moment. Johanna was watchful and tense, like an animal on a scent.
We sat together at cafés, our knees touching, looking at each other lucidly at first, and then surrendering toour own power over each other as to a consoling drug. We postponed the bitter war, eluded the moment of revelation. I felt like a puppet who was being torn apart. I could no longer keep clear and separate my image of Hans and Johanna. They were drawing me into their own tangle as into a whirlpool. I felt myself being drawn into their war, being forced to admit, to confess my allegiance. Johanna wanted the absolute, the choice, the decisive open choice. She was always insisting: “Whom do you believe, Hans or me?” Always working feverishly to divide us. It was always the ridiculous aspect of Hans, the caricature of him which she revealed to me, knowing well that a defeated Hans would hurt me, knowing well that a raging, frantic Hans was the supreme antithesis to the Hans I had been living with.