I'm Not Stiller (21 page)

***

'Well,' I say, to Knobel, my warder and listener, as I finally bite off the tip of my Sunday cigar, 'how do you like my story?'

Knobel only stares at me.

'Have you a light?' I ask.

He doesn't even hear that.

'I don't know,' I say after the first few puffs, 'which of the two friends actually began the murderous fight, the more honest probably; anyhow, only one of them came up out of the cavern, the stronger probably. His name is well known, it's even written in metal letters on a tombstone: Jim White. A publication that is sold to tourists nowadays goes into more detail: James Larkin (Jim) White, a young cowboy who first entered the cavern in 1901. All it says about his friend, who is mentioned as his companion, is: a Mexican boy. His name is missing and I don't think this missing person will ever turn up!'

Knobel seems a bit confused.

'—are you Jim White then?' he asks.

'No,' I say, 'no way! But what I've been through myself, you see, was exactly the same—exactly.'

Knobel seems rather disappointed.

***

My second afternoon out on bail with Julika.

The moment I saw her again I received the vivid impression: This isn't she! This woman has nothing to do with the dreary story I have partially recorded during the last few days, nothing at all. There are two different Julikas. It isn't her story at all. And so on.

'You,' she asked me several times, 'what's the matter with you? Why do you look at me like that all the time?'

Today she was more at ease than I. My suggestion that we should hire a sailing boat delighted her. We went along arm in arm. I didn't know what to talk about, and was glad to be able to busy myself with the halyards and the rudder, while Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy, dressed today in a banana-yellow frock—after some anxiety as she jumped into the rocking boat and some concern as to where she could stow her white handbag and her butterfly-like Paris hat without getting them dirty or damaged—sat on the other seat in charming indolence, propped up by her outstretched arms. Julika had only to change seats when I put the boat about. Then she abandoned herself to repose again and her lustrous hair to the wind. How different she was! Out there on the lake, whose hilly shores, packed almost solid with houses and always very close, were lost in an autumnal haze, giving one a certain sense of distance, we were more or less alone together for the first time. Did she realize the fact? Anyhow, we didn't have to reckon with the warder, my good Knobel, appearing at any moment with the ash tray...

Now (back in my cell) I try in vain to see her laughing face; I only know very vividly that whenever it laughs I want to take it in both hands like a gift from heaven that cannot be grasped with the hands, but only believed, and then I have the alert, sober feeling: there is nothing that could not be melted away in this laughter. In a context which I forget, she said:

'The trouble is that when I'm all by myself and think about everything, alone, I can't laugh about it, or if I do it's such an angry and bitter laugh that later on I howl over the very things I laughed about.'

We seized the opportunity of a rather lengthy calm to whip off our clothes and jump into the green water, which was sparkling in the sun but already pretty cold, and then swam round the rudderless, drifting boat, kicking like children. When we were back in the boat, lying dripping wet and with goose flesh in the blessed sunshine, Julika said:

'You're thinner.'

Thinner than who? For the sake of our idyll I did not take her remark as referring to the missing Stiller, but to the still unmentioned gentlemen in Paris, of whom I was less jealous than of her Stiller, funnily enough. Since little steamers were cruising by on all sides, we had to dress before we were quite dry. A change in the direction of the wind, as the rçsult of which I had to sail into the wind almost all the way to the shore, very nearly made me late back to the prison. Julika had to take me there in a taxi...

Now (in the evening on my bed) I can still see the beads of water on her arms and her alabaster brow, and also the antique curls of her wet hair round thé nape of her neck.

***

P.S. In the near future she is going back to Paris for a week, to see her ballet school; I shall miss her.

***

A dream:

I'm wearing Stiller's battledress tunic, together with helmet and rifle. I hear a command: 'Battery, at ten-shun! Shoulder arms! By the left, quick march!' It is hot and the ground is very stony and bumpy. War has broken out. I know quite clearly in my dream that the date is 3.9.1939. But I don't feel that it is the past, any more than you feel it is the past when you are sitting in a dream at your school desk. I hear a voice behind me, screeching with exasperation. Someone wasn't marching in step. Why doesn't the man step forward? We stand stiffly at attention. A captain's face is white with rage. 'You there,' he shouts, pointing to me and I can actually hear myself calling out, 'Gunner Stiller'. It's funny, even in the dream I don't feel myself to be 'Gunner Stiller', but I call straight out in the landscape, 'Gunner Stiller'. The captain's lips tremble. There are very special positions for people like me in wartime—understand? And when things started humming he'd deal with me (Gunner Stiller) without much ceremony—understand? I stand stiffly to attention, with rifle at the shoulder, and have understood that the Swiss captain, who has a perfect right to do so, hates Stiller for some reason and, thanks to the obedience we have just sworn to the fatherland, can kill me: without much ceremony—with a command...

***

P.S. When I mentioned this dream casually to my counsel, he was visibly indignant. We talked about the army. It wasn't enough for him that, for the sake of peace (peace between my counsel and me), I accepted it as a necessary evil. The army seems to be sacred, even in Switzerland, and my counsel could not tolerate someone dreaming badly about it. In reality, he asserted, no Swiss officer could ever utter such an unseemly, such a positively criminal threat. 'I guarantee that,' he said with the pride of a Swiss officer, a major I think, 'I guarantee that,' he said several times.

***

Answered Herr Wilfried Stiller, brother of the missing man—unfortunately again forgot to make a copy—roughly as follows: 'Your cordial letter to your missing brother moved me deeply, dear Herr Stiller, it reminded me 6f my mother, so that I too shed tears, and I apologize for not having replied to it sooner. My life is one single act of neglect. I am not annoyed that you do not ask me about it, on the contrary, I am grateful to you for this, as for your brotherly invitation; it reminds me of my brother and of the fact that I also neglected my brother. We rarely had a quarrel, and never a long or important one, for we never had anything important to do with one another, it seems to me; we used to go on walking tours together, simply because we were brothers, and spend peaceful nights under canvas and hours round the camp-fire without speaking a word. Why did I also neglect my brother? Friends have to understand one another in order to be friends; brothers are brothers in any case, and in the last resort, you're quite right, it doesn't matter who I am as long as I am a real brother. In this sense...

***

The latest news: the American passport, with which I have been halfway round the world, is a forgery. Didn't I tell my counsel so weeks ago? I can't communicate, it seems. Every word is false and true, that is the nature of words, and anyone who wants to believe all or nothing[[[mdash.gif]]]

***

My public prosecutor (who returned from Pontresina yesterday) isn't interested in Mexico, but he's very interested in New York, and whenever he talks about it he slips into a very unofficial and familiar tone. He said:

'My wife was very fond of New York.'

'Really?' I said.

'She lived on Riverside Drive.'

'Did she?' I said.

'You know where that is?'

'Of course,' I said.

'Near Hundred and Eighth Street.'

'Oh,' I said, 'that's almost next door to Columbia University—'

'That's right,' he said.

'A very beautiful district,' I said, 'looking out over the Hudson, I know[[[mdash.gif]]]'

And so on.

To begin with, it seemed as though all he was trying to do during these chats was to test whether I really knew New York, whether I had really lived in New York. I passed this test long ago. Times Square and Fifth Avenue, the Rockefeller Center, Broadway, Central Park and Battery, these are the sort of places my public prosecutor saw for himself during his week in New York about five years ago.

'Do you know the Rainbow Bar?' he asked.

I nodded and let him give vent to his enthusiasm, for I like men who can be enthusiastic; I didn't correct him, didn't tell him that the Rainbow Bar, where my public prosecutor obviously spent an unforgettable evening, is not the highest bar in Manhattan, that the Empire State Building is taller; I didn't interrupt him. I could see that for my public prosecutor it was a highlight of his life; in the Rainbow Bar he met his wife after being separated from her for years. Then I asked in my turn:

'Do you also know the Bowery?'

'Where's that?' he asked.

'Third Avenue.'

'No.'

The Bowery, originally a Dutch name, is a district into which even the police no longer venture, fields of the lost, though right in the middle of Manhattan; you go round the marble corner of a palatial law-court and after a hundred paces you are in the fields of the lost, of drunkards, failures, degenerates of all kinds, people on whom life itself has passed judgement. There's no need even to put them in prison; no one who has landed in the Bowery ever gets out again. In summer they lie in the gutter and on the pavement; you have to move like a knight on the chessboard in order to get along. In winter they crouch round the iron stoves of the doss-house, dosing, quarrelling, snoring, telling the same stories over and over again, or fighting, and it reeks of booze, petrol, and unwashed feet.

Once I saw a figure I shall never forget. It was three o'clock at night, as I was going home from Blacky as usual; it was a short-cut for me, and there would be nobody in the street at this time of night, I thought, especially not in this frightful cold. The old-fashioned overhead railway rumbled past up above, its windows filled with warm light; in the street filthy litter was being whirled round by the wind and dogs were snuffling about. When I saw him coming I hid behind one of the iron pillars of the overhead railway. On his head he wore a black bowler like diplomats, bridegrooms, and gangsters; his face was smeared with blood. In addition to the hat he wore a tie, a whitish shirt, and a black jacket but that was all; the lower half of his body was stark naked. On his thin, greyish-purple old man's legs he had sock-suspenders and shoes. He was obviously drunk. He swore, fell down, and crawled along the icy roadway; a car sped past with its headlights blazing, thank God without running over him. At last he found his trousers, tried to shin up a streetlamp and climb into his trousers, slipped, and lay once more full length in the roadway. Of course I wondered whether to go to his assistance, but I was afraid of becoming entangled in something that would get me into difficulties. Meanwhile the old man had succeeded in sticking his left leg into his trousers; I wished him luck and was about to move off. From somewhere or other I heard voices, though I could see no one, voices full of scorn and hate that were no doubt directed at this unfortunate. I immediately retired into the concealing shadow of my iron pillar; up above rumbled the overhead railway. When he tried to get his second leg into the trousers he slipped again, and once more stark naked he lay where he was, rattling in his throat. His black bowler rolled along in the wind. He made no movement of defence when a dog sniffed at him.

My limbs were shaking and I decided to retreat from pillar to pillar. People passed by on the other side who didn't go to his assistance either. You never know what you may be letting yourself in for! In the end the Good Samaritan has to prove he's not the murderer, with an alibi and so on. I couldn't do that to Blacky. One block further, and I could get into the overhead railway; in twenty minutes I could be home, where I was sure Blacky was already ringing up to say good night. I could just see him in the distance as a dark heap on the ground, about the only thing the savage wind wasn't whirling along. All of a sudden there was a chap standing next to me, with his hand on my shoulder; a stubbly beard, a bald patch, red fishes' eyes—not at all an unsympathetic face, incidentally; he asked for a cigarette. And a light. With that he was satisfied, left me and walked down the avenue, saw the dark bundle in the roadway, stepped over to it, as I hadn't dared, and walked on. Up above the overhead railway rumbled again. Finally I also dared, and went back to the drunken man, who was no longer moving. He lay on his belly, blue with cold, and his colourless hair was also matted with blood. I saw the wound on the back of his head. I shook him, I raised his arm; he was dead. I was so horrified by his face that I ran away, and I didn't report the matter to the police, although it was my own father.

'Your father?'

My public prosecutor was smiling. He didn't believe me, it seemed, any more than he had believed that I murdered my wife. He asked, as though he hadn't heard properly:

'Your father?'

'My stepfather,' I said. 'All the same—'

But even then, when he can't believe me, my public prosecutor is a great deal nicer than my counsel; he doesn't become indignant if our conceptions of truth don't always agree.

He tapped himself a cigarette and said:

'Of course, my wife didn't get to know districts like that.'

He's always talking about his wife.

'Do you know Fire Island?'

'Yes,' I asked, 'why?'

'It's supposed to be very pretty, according to my wife, all the country round New York in fact.'

'Very pretty.'

'Unfortunately my wife didn't have a car of her own,' he declared, 'but she often used to drive out—with friends, as far as I know.'