I'm Not Stiller (16 page)

Julika felt very lonely.

A hitherto unknown and bewildering longing for her husband, the more she felt her slender body burning like tinder, a desire that from dreams at least could not be banished, and added to this the perpetual knowledge that in these same nights Stiller was deceiving her—all this compelled poor Julika to write letters which could never be sent, no, not under any circumstances. Strictly speaking, it was not of Stiller she dreamed, but of head physicians, baker's boys, and men whom she had never seen. The young sanatorium veteran treated Julika like a nun, not even like a nun, but like a neuter being, even if he sat every day on the end of her narrow bed, so that her feet felt his warmth. Not even the most restrained act of tenderness escaped him. When Julika asked him to, he straightened her pillows without so much as touching her by mistake. On the other hand he talked to Julika about Eros with just the same light-hearted objectivity as about Communism, or Thomas Aquinas, or Einstein, or Bernanos, he spoke in exactly the same way about Eros—with an openness that is only possible when there is no possibility of translating words into deeds. Julika didn't know what to say. So this was the tone in which the young man spoke of the singular phenomenon of Eros, to which, to Julika's surprise, he attached enormous importance. Yet he never did more than touch her hand in greeting or parting. Was Julika a leper? And yet this same man, for all his staggering knowledge, was not above flirting with a person who beat mattresses in the meadow opposite, flirting in the most shameless fashion. Julika couldn't understand him.

Altogether, there arose shortly before his death a painful estrangement, to which Julika does not like to refer. The young sanatorium veteran had gone rather too far with the remark that it was time Julika stopped seeing her own behaviour towards her husband, and towards people in general, as only a reaction, never regarding herself as the initiator, in other words it was time she stopped wallowing in infantile innocence. That was too much! Moreover Julika didn't quite understand what he meant. He had to explain, though reluctantly.

'Well,' he smiled. 'I have the feeling, my dear and respected Julika, that you don't want to grow up, you don't want to be responsible for your own life, and that's a pity.'

'What do you mean by that?' she asked.

'Anyone who is always seeing himself as a victim, it seems to me, never gets wise to himself, and that's not healthy. Cause and effect are never divided between two people, certainly not between a husband and wife, even though it may sometimes look like it, Julika, because the wife apparently doesn't act. It just strikes me that you explain everything you do or don't do by something your husband has or has not done. That, if you will forgive my saying so, is infantile. Why do I say that? You know perfectly well, Julika, that it isn't like that and never has been in the history of the world, and you mustn't lead me by the nose simply because I'm younger than you, really only a boy. In the long run this way of looking at life is tedious for you too, Julika.'

After this she kept teasing him, calling him 'The Sage', and he didn't like it. He stayed away for two or three days, just because Julika had told him not to meddle in matters which at his age, clever as he was, he simply didn't know by experience matters concerning marriage, for example, and in particular marriage with Stiller, whom he didn't even know by sight—in short she told him to stick to his Fathers of the Church and the theory of relativity, and so (says Julika) no real contact developed out of this acquaintance either. To be sure, the young man kept on coming to see her, sat on the end of her bed, and chatted wittily, recklessly, more and more extravagantly the near drew his death, which he certainly did not expect during that mild September.

Julika simply couldn't believe her ears when the furniture was moved as quietly as possible out of the next room. They had thoughtfully given Julika a sleeping pill, which she had spat out. A whole night long they fumigated the room. Julika was flabbergasted. This was not how she had expected death to be here, so casual and invisible, so silent, so indulgently sudden and unannounced, so unfair, so like the chance extinction of a bedside lamp just when one is reading. And in fact people simply never spoke of him again. The nurse and the head physician just ignored Julika's repeated questions, as though her young neighbour, the young Jesuit with the big eyes and the always rather shrewd face, had been guilty of some indecency. Everything else went on as before, the little railway whistled in the valley, newspapers arrived. A few days later, while Julika was lying as usual in her silent veranda, somehow still waiting for his daily visit, she heard the dry cough of her new neighbour. It was a blue September day. She shuddered.

***

As far as Landquart, the station where she had to change, everything went off as though Julika were on an ordinary journey, not in flight; nobody stopped Julika, nobody stared at her, or at least no more than people always did stare at her because of her beautiful hair. A short halt at Klosters, about mid way, seemed to her endless, as any four-minute wait before a closed barrier is bound to seem like eternity to a fugitive. Julika hid behind a newspaper, but she was terrified every time anyone passed through her second-class compartment. The little train remained stationary; whyever were they stopping so long? Julika couldn't understand why no one recognized her, no one tapped her on the shoulder and said, 'What's all this about, my dear Julika, what's all this about?' Uninitiated in the mysteries of the railway system, Julika could only suppose that this long halt was due to a call from the sanatorium and that they were searching for her, going from carriage to carriage looking for the unfortunate fugitive. Julika pulled her hanging coat down over her face, as people do who want to sleep in a train. Someone sat opposite her, a gentleman; she could see by his shoes. Her head physician? In her mind's eye she could already see his compassionate smile, his friendly but inexorable, 'Frau Julika, Frau Julika, we'd better drop this little scheme.'

At last, when the little train started to move off, Julika had to find out who it was that had caught her; she pushed her overcoat camouflage a little to one side, as though she urgently needed to look at the scenery. It was a German gentleman, who, the moment he saw Julika's red hair, politely took his cigar out of his mouth and inquired whether his smoke was inconveniencing her. Did he think Julika was a lung patient? 'Oh, not at all, not at all,' said Julika with rather gauche overemphasis, 'please don't mind me.' Stupidly enough she had taken a seat in a smoker. Julika, the fugitive, couldn't even indulge in the sort of pleasant light conversation which the German gentleman, without any effort, just started quite naturally, no, she could already hear in imagination the pointless, but in such conversations inevitable, inquiries: 'Do you live in Zürich? Are you coming home from your holiday? Do you live at Davos?' Julika brought the conversation to an end by turning away towards the window in repugnance, as though this German gentleman had looked shamelessly down her bosom. Yet in reality he had merely referred to the rather mild October. Now thank God, he picked up his book again, but continued to smoke his still almost complete cigar—
Marmorklippen
by Ernst Jünger, a book the deceased young Jesuit had never recommended to her,
Marmorklippen,
a word that irritated Julika when she heard it recently—and his smoke was horrible. Julika asked if she might open the window a little, oh no, not because of the smoke, just so that she could get a better view of the scenery. Julika leaned out of the window, her flaming hair streaming in the wind, and felt short of breath, as even a healthy person might have done. Above all, however, she saw a dark-coloured Citroen, just like the head physician's, following the little train at a pretty breakneck speed; it was left behind owing to bends in the road while the little train shot through a short tunnel, caught up again, drew closer and closer, stopped at a lowered barrier, sped on and caught up again. The head physician?

Julika withdrew her flaming red hair from the landscape and the German gentleman had to shut the window at once. The dark Citroen was just overtaking the little train; at Landquart, thought Julika, her head physician would be standing on the platform, he would take her bit of luggage from her and smile: 'Frau Julika, Frau Julika, we'd better drop this little scheme, my Citroen is over here.'

But there was no one waiting at Landquart, not even a porter. The
Marmorklippen
gentleman, his politeness unimpaired by Julika's attitude of repugnance, carried her luggage across the little square and asked, 'Do you live in Zürich?' Thereupon Julika took a porter after all.

Then, on the spur of the moment, Julika went into a call-box—perhaps merely for the sensation of entering a call-box as any free person can do anywhere—and tried to ring Stiller, but in vain; no one lifted the receiver. So it simply isn't true that Julika was planning to take him by surprise. During the whole of this journey, strangely enough, it never occurred to Julika for a second that the other woman was still there. She tried a second and then a third time to ring Stiller; likewise in vain.

The German gentlemen was now rather offended, he kept to the far end of the platform, where he sat on a bench with crossed legs reading his
Marmorklippen
—now, at last, without a cigar. Unfortunately the Zurich-Paris-Calais train was a bit late, otherwise Julika would probably have managed to board it.

It began (she told me) without a cough, simply with a growing feeling of being short of breath; she tried to persuade herself that this might merely be due to excitement, the natural excitement of a fugitive, to joyful anticipation, and natural disappointment that Stiller was not in the studio and not in the flat. She breathed deeply, slowly, calmly. She had sent her porter to buy some magazines, in particular the Swiss illustrated paper, as though despite everything there was a fairy-tale possibility that Julika was still dancing on the cover, and had to sit down on her little suit-case. Nobody noticed that Julika felt giddy, Julika thought she was suffocating, but just heard the chugging of the approaching Zurich-Paris-Calais train, she even saw the board with these names on, but after that nothing. At this moment people were naturally busy with their own journeys, they stormed the nearest footboards with cases in both hands and acted as though this were the train to life, while the platform was certain death. Julika remained on the platform...

Three hours later, after a journey in the ambulance, she lay in her white bed again, shivering in spite of all the hot water bottles, glad not to have to say a word. The nurse did not say a word either, she carried out the head physician's instructions, but you could see from her face that it hadn't been a dream, this journey down to Landquart, but an entirely real act of madness. And it was clear to the head physician why the unhappy woman had committed this act of madness. His displeasure was not directed against the patient, naturally, not even against the stupid nurses who hadn't noticed the flight for hours; the head physician tried to telephone Stiller. Without success. Later he sent a telegram asking Herr Stiller to come at once to Davos. And no sooner had poor Julika regained consciousness than she had to keep defending her husband. He didn't even answer the telegram. Julika had to give the addresses of his friends, of Sturzenegger for example. When it turned out that Stiller was on a visit to Paris, without having said a word to his wife, it made an odd impression in the sanatorium, a painful impression; people were highly indignant, and although they didn't talk about it to the poor patient, Julika could see it in their faces.

Stiller in Paris! Everyone else was all the kinder to her, and Julika, the unhappy Julika, received presents from all sides—flowers, sweets, even a brooch, signs of a heartfelt solidarity running from veranda to veranda. She couldn't help thinking of the young sanatorium veteran, who had predicted a universal silence of contempt in a case like this; it turned out that he had been wrong not only with his impertinent assertion that Julika had an infantile attitude to the world, but also over this point. On the contrary, how sweet everyone was! And only he himself, the young sanatorium veteran, remained silent...

Her condition was calamitous.

And then, yes, then, came Stiller's monstrous letter from Paris, the note which Frau Julika Stiiler-Tschudy recently took out of her handbag and showed me, a note hastily scribbled in pencil, seven or eight lines, not a word of sympathy, no, the whole thing in an icy and heartless tone, as though Julika had only carried out her ill-fated flight in order to collapse at Landquart, and as though Julika was only ill at all in order to give Stiller a bad conscience, mortally ill, so that only injections kept her alive. The note was simply grotesque; for there was not a trace of bad conscience to be seen in these lines, merciful heaven, every word in the note was imbued with shameless egocentricity and a cynical self-righteousness.

(Unfortunately I haven't got Stiller's letter here.)

Injections kept Julika alive, as I have said, and nearly three full weeks passed before Stiller really appeared on her veranda, where he talked exclusively about himself, about his defeat in Spain, that's to say about an event which had taken place ten years ago, and even now not a word of comfort, not even an inquiry about her condition, which was calamitous, not a glance at her temperature chart, no, Stiller, merely talked about himself: as though he were the patient, he Stiller, the healthy one!

 

Here we must go back a little.

Stiller, as we know, took part in the Spanish Civil War, while still a very young man, as a volunteer in the International Brigade. It is not clear what impelled him to this militant gesture. Probably many factors were combined—a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time, also an understandable desire to see the world, a desire to subordinate his personal interests to some higher historical force, a desire for action; perhaps too, at least in part, it was flight from himself.