I'm Not Stiller (17 page)

He passed his ordeal by fire (or rather, he failed to pass it) outside Toledo, where the Fascists had entrenched themselves in the Alcázar. Young Stiller was set to guard a small ferry across the Tajo—owing to the shortage of troops, entirely on his own. For three days nothing happened. But then, when four Franco Spaniards finally appeared on the opposite bank at the break of day, Stiller allowed them to use the ferry without firing, although it would have been easy for him, from his perfect cover, to have shot the four enemies dead on the ferry. He had eight minutes in which to do it. Instead he let them reach his bank waiting for the others to open fire, in other words, ready to be shot. To avoid giving away their presence, the Franco Spaniards did not shoot either, but disarmed young Stiller, threw his Russian gun into the Tajo, tied him up with his own braces and left him lying in the gorse, where he was found two days later by his own side, faint with thirst. When he was called to account, he swore to the commissar that his Russian gun had failed to go off.

As a matter of fact, this little story was the very first thing Julika ever heard from his lips, and she clearly remembered the evening in his studio, the fateful evening after Tchaikovsky's
Nutcracker Suite,
when a rather wild band of artists and art-lovers forcibly carried off the beautiful Julika and, with a few bottles under their arms, made an equally forcible night attack on young Stiller in his studio. It was past midnight, all the taverns in the town were closed; but the light was still burning in the studio occupied by Stiller, who had just got back from Spain. So up they went.

That evening Julika and Stiller saw one another for the first time. In the middle of the high-spirited company, which now filled his studio, Stiller was so still that to begin with Julika imagined his name to be a nickname. Then someone called on him to tell his 'great story of Toledo'. Stiller didn't want to at all. He wasn't shamming; he really didn't want to, and his embarrassment was obvious when a friend, a young architect named Sturzenegger, began to tell it himself. Now, of course, Stiller had to interfere, to fill in the gaps and finish the story. I don't suppose the young ballerina was particularly interested in this tale of a Russian gun that didn't go off; she paid less heed to the tale than to the teller, the young sculptor who kept working his fingers all the time he was talking, twisting a piece of wire this way and that, then threw it away, but still couldn't leave his fingers in peace; she felt somehow sorry for him.

As he spoke, all the life drained out of his face. The story the young sculptor was telling sounded somehow secondhand, not a recollection of his own experience, but a mere anecdote. His lengthy account was followed by an embarrassed and uneasy silence. Stiller put his glass to his lips, and no one uttered a word. Then a pleasant, but pale and soft and extremely unmartial-looking opera singer asked the naive question, 'And why didn't you fire?' The others wanted to know the same thing. All respect for his boldness in stepping out from his hiding-place, all respect for the torment of lying for two days tied up in the blazing sun; but why indeed, the opera singer had spoken for all of them, why hadn't Stiller fired?

The explanation advanced by Stiller also sounded somehow second-hand, worn by repetition: He hated the Fascists, otherwise he wouldn't have volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War; but that early morning on the Tajo, when Stiller first came face to face with the hated foe, he saw the four Fascists as human beings, and he found it impossible to shoot at human beings, he couldn't do it. That was all.

Again there was silence, again the artists and art-lovers puffed at their pipes and shot out clouds of smoke into the studio. The opera singer was satisfied with the reply, highly satisfied; he couldn't have fired either, he thought. Others emptied their glasses without speaking. And simply to talk about something else, the
Nutcracker Suite
for example, wasn't possible either. A stillness spread over the gathering, until his friend, the young architect named Sturzenegger, expressed open-hearted admiration for Stiller. He called it a victory for humanity, a victory of concrete experience over ideological rigidity and so on; he found all sorts of words for it. No one contradicted this flattering interpretation, and Stiller himself, visibly rather ill at ease, had for his part no desire whatever to delve deeper into this story; he was all in favour of more life and gaiety, uncorked the next bottle and made sure in his charming way that everybody had something to drink, including the lovely Julika in the corner, who on this first visit to the studio, looked round with great big beautiful eyes, without drinking much, without saying anything; her contribution, as so often, was her glorious hair with its reddish glow.

Stiller's anecdote, it seems, was always a great success. Later, when she was friendly with Stiller and then married to him, Julika had to listen to it very often. It was one of the duties of a loving wife not to yawn and not to interrupt when her husband came out with his hit number again. It was a hit number, Stiller with his ferry on the Tajo. Only the Communists wrinkled their noses when the victory of humanity over ideology was talked about, but they kept quiet out of friendship for Stiller; at most they asked the listeners how they would feel about a victory of humanity over ideology if it didn't happen to concern Fascists. But such conversations had nothing further to do with Stiller. And anyway, the Communists became rarer and rarer—at least among Stiller's acquaintances.

In all other company Stiller always emerged with honour from his Spanish anecdote. Why did he tell it so often? And in any case, Julika still can't understand why Stiller, her missing husband, suddenly talked about a 'Spanish defeat' on the occasion of their last meeting at Davos. Why defeat? Julika had no explanation for this. Hadn't he demanded of Julika for years that she should find his behaviour in Spain magnificent? And now it was suddenly a defeat, a thing that weighed in the scales as the beginning of all evil, as a curse, an ill omen, by which Stiller also explained the unhappiness of their marriage. Why?

***

Their last meeting was in November. It was desolate enough without Stiller's visit. There was already snow again. Julika lay in her
art nouveau
veranda more muffled up than ever, even her arms were under the camel-hair rugs and she looked like a mummy. She could just move her head sufficiently to look out into the grey mists, where she saw the spectral skeletons of the nearest larches, which reminded her of her X-ray photograph, also a bare skeleton in clouds of grey mist. And this was now her only view. The sky was like lead, and trails of dirty mist were creeping down the hillsides. It was impossible even to guess whereabouts in the sky the sun was. The familiar mountain peaks seemed to have dissolved like a tablet in a glass of water, all that remained was an opaque grey broth. Julika had always thought that only stupid people could be bored, so she couldn't be. But it had nothing to do with stupidity, on the contrary, perhaps this unspeakable tedium, when one really didn't know what to do with the next hour, this hellish taste of eternity, where one couldn't see beyond time, was the most genuine form of suffering of which Julika was ever capable...

Stiller was sitting mutely on the veranda railings looking out into the driving snow. He was unshaven and pale, exhausted by a sleepless night, with a haze of alcohol in front of his mouth, and in addition he smelt of garlic from a distance. 'What did you have to eat?' asked Julika. 'Snails.'—Stiller didn't make the slightest inquiry as to how she was. Moreover he hadn't come from the town, but from Pontresina; Stiller announced this spitefully, as though it was poor Julika who had compelled him for a whole summer to indulge in subterfuges; there was almost a malicious glee in his voice. Stiller had come from Pontresina: that is to say, he came from the other woman.

After this almost sneering opening, he fell silent again, without looking at Julika, lit a cigarette and smoked out into the grey whirl of snow. His lips were trembling. Julika didn't know why. 'How was it in Paris?' asked Julika. His only answer to this was that in Paris (as though it had been a plot on Julika's part) he had dreamed of her. Julika had always hated his habit of relating his dreams, which might mean anything, and naturally it wasn't his dreams in Paris she had asked about, but his real activities. Nevertheless Stiller recounted his dream—in great detail.

'We were in company,' he began, 'and somehow I was beside myself, I don't know why. I wanted to say something but I had no voice, the louder I tried to speak the less sound I made, and it had to be said. It was enough to make one cry. But it had to be said, even if I perished in the attempt. I could see your smile and I yelled; you were smiling just as you are now, like someone who is entirely in the right, and when I yelled in spite of it you walked out, I couldn't stop you, and no doubt the company also thought one really shouldn't yell so; I was behaving in an impossible manner, I knew, I ought to have some sense, they said, and run after you to comfort you, to make amends. I felt how wrong I was, oh, yes, and I went out; I looked for you in the streets and found you in a public park, the Jardin de Luxembourg or something like that, it doesn't matter where; it was spring and you were sitting on the green lawn smiling, I tried to strangle you, yes, with both hands and with all the strength of my life, but in vain, and I knew all the time that people were looking at us, I strangled you into a little ball, but you were too elastic—you merely laughed...'

Julika said nothing, of course. The nurse appeared soon afterwards to inquire whether Frau Julika was really not cold. Julika thanked her in the nicest way; you could see your breath before your mouth, but Julika with her hot water bottles and rugs was really not cold. When the nurse had gone, Stiller said:

'Yesterday we made an end of it—Sibylle and I—yesterday in Pontresina.'

'Who's Sibylle?' asked Julika.

'Now it's all over between us as well, Julika, and for good, you must see that.'

Julika said nothing.

'For good,' he repeated.

The whole thing must have had its comic side: first the way Stiller blamed his Julika, who in reality was lying on this veranda, for having smiled in his Paris dream, and secondly the tone in which he delivered his message made it sound as though this was the first love affair in human history that had come to grief, indeed his attitude suggested that dying in a sanatorium was nothing compared with yesterday's burial at Pontresina of his seven-month love affair; there was a comic side, also to the retrospective frankness of his revelations concerning his love for the lady—whose name turned out to be Sibylle. Julika could read in his face how she was annoying him by blowing snow crystals off her camel-hair rug while he spoke. What could Julika do? What he now told her was pretty much in agreement with what she had feared during the summer, so it was not now too severe a shock for poor Julika. Stiller on the other hand, in his desolation, enjoyed going into quite uncalled-for details as he walked up and down on her
art nouveau
veranda, simply in order cling for as long as possible to his lost summer.

'Yes,' he said at last, 'that's how it is.'

'What now?'

It is not true that Julika displayed a smile of secret glee, or that she smiled at all. Stiller was no doubt dreaming again. On the other hand, no one would have expected poor Julika to burst into tears because there was no longer any 'Sibylle'. What did Stiller expect of her? She blew the snow crystals from the camel-hair rug, nothing else, and she had by no means failed to hear the dry remark he passed before, namely that it was also all over now with Julika, his legal wife, only she didn't see the logical connexion.

But when Stiller tried to explain it, sitting on the railing again and for the most part staring out into the driving snow, as though he were talking to the ghostly larch trees, his vehemence did not spring from this time and place, it did not spring from the presence of his poor Julika; the observations Stiller now made with brutal determination, the more brutal the better, sounded as though they had been conceived in solitude and long bottled up inside him, now they were all trotted out with no living thread running through them, as though under the compulsion of an alien command which Stiller had given himself on his journey to Davos, or perhaps during his meal of snails, a grisly masculine command.

Julika listened, but could not rid herself of the feeling: 'Whoever told you to talk such brutal nonsense, my good Stiller, that's not you speaking!' He was behaving with the brutality of a wretched executioner who, at the instant he sees his victim with his own eyes, dare not soften but has to carry out his orders; that was why Stiller scarcely looked at Julika, but gazed instead out into the snowstorm and at the grey larches. And the more he talked the more clearly did Julika have the feeling: 'It's not like that, my good Stiller, it's all quite different!'

Stiller talked and talked. 'If it hadn't been for that defeat in Spain,' he said, 'if I had met you with the feeling of being a complete and proper man—I should have left you long ago, Julika, probably after our first kiss, and we should both have been spared this whole miserable marriage. That's the bitter thing, you see; we might have known it wouldn't work out. And there was no lack of signals along the whole line, only of the courage to see them. Today I know that fundamentally I never loved you, I was in love with your shyness, your fragility, your muteness, which set me the task of interpreting and expressing you. What a task! I imagined you needed me. And your perpetual tiredness, your autumn-crocus pallor, your sickliness, that was just what I unconsciously needed, someone in need of care and protection to make me feel big and strong. To have an ordinary sweetheart, you see, a healthy, normal girl who wants to be embraced and herself is able to embrace, no, that I was afraid of. I was altogether full of anxiety. I made you my test. And that's why I couldn't leave you. My crazy idea was to make you blossom out, a task no one else had undertaken. To make you blossom out! That was the responsibility I took on myself—and I made you ill, of course, for why should you become well with a husband like that; the fear that you were unhappy with me chained me faster than any kind of happiness you're able to give.'