But it was not the night. It was day. It was a lead-colored day and Johanna was shaking me violently.
“Put your dress on quickly. I’ve an idea Hans has been listening behind the door all night.”
She seemed electrified. We were both trembling.
“If you won’t admit anything, I’ll make him confess. But I don’t want him to find us in bed together…”
When I was dressed Johanna went stealthily to the door, and then opened it brusquely. There was no one there. I followed her out of the room and watched her open the door of the other bedroom. I looked over Johanna’s shoulder.
Hans was lying there, asleep. His face roseate, his mouth joyous. Even when his eyes were closed they seemed to be laughing.
HE WAS PROFOUNDLY ASLEEP AND SNORING.
LILITH
I am waiting for him. I have waited for him for twenty years. He is coming to-day.
I have almost grown old waiting. Will he be old?
This glass bowl with the glass fish and the glass ship—it has been the sea for me and the ship which carried me away from him after he abandoned me. Why have I loved ships so deeply, why have I always wanted to sail away from this world? Why have I always dreamed of flight, of departure?
To-day this past from which I have struggled to escape strikes me like a whip. But to-day I can bear the lash of it because he is coming and I know that the circle of empty waiting will close.
How well I remember our home near the sea, the villa which was in ruins. I am nine years old. I arrive there with my mother and two brothers. My father is standing behind a window, watching. His face is pale, he does not seem to be happy to see us. I feel that he does not want us, that he does not want me. His anger seems to be directed against all of us, but it touches me more acutely, as if it were directed entirely against me. We are not wanted, why I do not understand. My mother says to him: “It will good for Lilith here.” There is no smile on his face. He does not seem to notice that I am wasted by fever, that I am hungry for a smile.
There is never a smile on his face except when there are visitors, except when there is music and talk. When we are alone in the house there is always war: great explosions of anger, hatred, revolt. War. War at meals, war over our heads when my brothers and I are left in bed at night, war in the room under our feet when we are playing. War. War…
In the closed study, or in the parlor, there was always a mysterious activity. Music, rehearsals, visitors, laughter. I saw my father always in movement, always alert, tense, either passionately gay or passionately angry. When the door opened my father appeared—luminous. incandescent. A vital passage, even when he passed from one room to another. A gust of wind. A mystery. Not a reality like my mother with her healthy red cheeks, her appetite, her frank, natural laughter.
Never any serenity, never any time for caresses, for softness. Tension always. A life ripped by dissension. Even while we were playing the dark fury of their perpetual warring hung over us like a shadow. A constant uneasiness, a continual mystery, blows and threats and curses and recriminations. Never a moment of complete joy. Aware always of the battles that were about to explode.
One day there was a scene of such violence that I was terrified. An immense, irrational terror overwhelmed me. My mother was goading my father to such anger that I thought he would kill her. My father’s face was blue-white. I began to scream. I screamed until they became alarmed. For a few days there was an interval of quiet. A truce. A pretense of peace.
The walls of my father’s library were covered with books. Often I stole into the library and I read the books which I found there, books which I did not understand. Within me there was a well of secret thoughts which I could not express, which perhaps I might have formulated if some one had leaned over them with tenderness. The one person who might have aided me terrified me. My father’s eyes were always cold, critical, unbelieving. He would not believe the drawings I showed him were mine. He thought I had traced them. He did not believe that I had written the poems which were handed to him. He thought I had copied them. He flew into a rage because he could not find the books from which he imagined I had copied my poems and drawings.
He doubted everything about me, even my illnesses. In the train once, going to Berlin where he was to give a concert, I had such an ear ache that I began to weep… “If you don’t stop crying and go to sleep,” he said, “I’ll beat you.” I stuffed my ear under the pillow so that he wouldn’t hear my sobs. I sobbed all the way to Berlin. When we got there they discovered that I had an abscess in my ear.
Another time he was taken down with an attack of appendicitis. My mother was tending him, fussing over him, running about anxiously. He lay there very pale in the big bed. I came from the street where I had been playing and I told my mother that I was in pain. Immediately my father said: “Don’t pay any attention to her, she’s just acting. She’s just imitating me.” But I did have an attack of appendicitis. I had to be taken to the hospital and operated on. My father, on the other hand, had recovered. He was in bed only three days.
Such cruelty! I ask myself—was he really cruel, or was it mere selfishness? Was he just a big child who could not bear to have a rival, even in the person of his own daughter? I do not know. I am waiting for him now. I want to tell him everything. I want to hear what he has to say. I want to hear him say that he loves me. I don’t know why I should love him so much. I can’t believe that he meant to be so cruel. I love him.
Because he was so critical, so severe, so suspicious of me, I became secretive and lying. I would never say what I really thought. I was afraid of him. I lied like an Arab. I lied to elude his stern glances, his cold, menacing blue eyes. I invented another world, a world of make-believe, of illusion, of games, of comedies. I tyrannized over my two brothers. I taught them games, I amused them, acted for them, enchanted them, tortured them. I was a spitfire and they loved me. They never deserted me, even for a moment. They were simple, honest, frank. I complicated everything, even the games we played.
In Berlin, when I was five years old, I ran away from home. I packed a croissant and a dress and I ran away. There was a seven year old boy waiting for me round the corner. His name was Heinrich.
I was a pale, sickly child. The doctor in Berlin had said: “She must live in her native climate. Take her back.” But there was no money for that. My youngest brother had just been born. There was no money in the house—except for books and music, for a fur-lined coat, for the cologne water which my father had to sprinkle over his handkerchiefs, for the silk shirts which he demanded when he went on his concert tours.
At the villa near the sea I lie in bed and weep all night without knowing why. But there is a garden attached to the villa. A beautiful garden in which one can get lost. I sit by the big Gothic window studded with colored stones and I look out through a prismatic-colored stone in the centre of the window; I sit there for hours at a stretch gazing upon this mysterious other world. Colors. Deformations. Trees that are ruby-colored. Orange skies. I get the feeling that there are other worlds, that one might escape from this one which is so full of misery. I think a great deal about this other world.
About my father there is an aureole of fragrance, of immaculateness, of elegance. His clothes are never wrinkled, he wears clean linen every day and the fur collar on his coat is wonderful to caress. Mother is dowdy, busy, bustling, maternal. Mother is never elegant.