I'm Not Stiller (29 page)

***

Julika has gone away. Unfortunately when she came to see me before leaving, I was just being interrogated by the psychiatrist, who wouldn't allow the door to be suddenly opened for fear my soul might escape him. Her little good-bye present of cigars touched me precisely because they were the wrong brand again. As far as she is concerned, cigars are simply cigars, and as they are very expensive she's sure I'll like them. I do like them too—because they come from Julika.

***

A visit from an elderly couple, Professor Haefeli and his wife, who, having been informed by my defence counsel appointed by the court that I am Anatol Ludwig Stiller, had requested permission for a personal meeting and now shake hands with me in an entirely personal manner. Then, after an embarrassed silence, they sit down on my plank bed and, in a confidential if shy and to begin with positively anxious tone, embark on what is—to them—a very important conversation they have long wanted to have.

'We have come,' says the elderly professor, 'about an entirely personal matter that has nothing to do with your present situation. You knew our son—'

'Alex talked a lot about you—'

'We were sorry,' says the elderly professor with deliberate gravity, making a perceptible effort to remain matter-of-fact and keep the mother, a white-haired lady, from becoming over-emotional, 'we were very sorry that Alex never brought his friends home. In any case, he spoke of you as his friend. I remember a conversation that will not surprise you, shortly before his death; our son described you as the person closest to him on earth. Frankly, that was the first time I had heard your name—'

To remind me of Alex, the mother, who up to now had been rather silent and gave the impression of being somehow disturbed behind her appearance of solid dignity, hands me a photograph, with a mixture of timidity and importunity. It shows Alex at the age of about twenty-five, in evening dress, horn-rimmed spectacles in his right hand while his left, which is remarkably slender, rests on a black grand piano; he is making a brief, rather inhibited bow. It is a touching picture, if only because you see this embarrassed bow without hearing applause, so that there is something frozen, something stuffed, something pitifully lifeless about it. His face, although it is rather flattened by the flashlight, is unusual, refined like his hand, very much like his mother and somewhat feminine without being soft; one guesses he is homosexual. There is a strange joy in his face that seems not to come from within but from somewhere outside, like the flashlight that has taken him by surprise, from some occurrence we cannot see, which, to his own amazement, convinces him that he has reason to rejoice. Probably it's his first success in the concert hall. You get the feeling you can see the same kind of disturbance you observe in his mother, which makes it difficult to look this otherwise pleasant and doubtless very cultured lady in the eye. She can't tolerate anyone looking at her son with his own eyes. She wants something from the observer. She yearns for approval at any price.

'Alex,' she says, 'valued you highly—'

I have no idea what she is after, what is the point of this visit, which is not easy for the two unhappy parents, what hope it is I'm supposed to fulfil.

'His death,' says the elderly professor, 'is a bitter mystery to us, as you can imagine. It's six years now—'

'And Alex was so gifted!'

'Yes, yes,' says the elderly professor showing a tendency to prevent the mother from speaking by quickly agreeing with her, 'yes, he certainly was—'

'Didn't you think so?' asks the mother.

'As regards his death—' says the father.

'Julika Tschudy thought so too,' declares the mother. 'There's even a letter from your dear wife who, as an artist, greatly respected our Alex, as you know, and I shall always feel grateful to your dear wife for encouraging Alex when he lost faith in himself, and I know that when his work was going badly there was no one whose respect he was more afraid of losing than your wife's. Without her loving encouragement—'

The elderly professor, having been interrupted by his wife and fallen silent out of politeness, meanwhile lights a cigarette, which he then doesn't smoke, and for a time, while the white› haired lady is the only one to speak, it really seems as though the important thing is to bear witness to the great promise and talent of a young man who has died, in fact it's as though she needs a reference concerning her dead son's abilities as a pianist to present to God. I can understand the elderly professor, who in this direction merely agrees, for his part tormented by other questions. Whenever he thinks I'm not looking, he stares at me in a manner that suggests the missing Stiller was to blame for the fact that one morning, after a ballet rehearsal in the City Theatre, Alex sat down in front of the gas stove. At times the two parents talk at once, understandably upset, since everything is appearing before their eyes again as if it had happened yesterday. As a stranger one has the confusing sense that actually two sons took their own lives, two quite different sons, only united by the fact that one single reason can be found for their suicide. That's what it's all about. I am supposed to know who Alex, their only son, really was. He sat down in front of the gas stove, the way you read about it in newspaper reports and novels, he turned on all the taps, put a raincoat over the gas stove and his head and breathed in the hope that death is simply the end, breathed a bluish stupefaction, perhaps screamed, but screamed without a voice. He fell from the chair, I was told, it was too late to correct his mistake; suddenly he had no more time. Now it's too late. For six years now he has had no time. He can no longer find out who he is, not any more. He begs for redemption. He begs for the real death ... After a while I hand back the photograph, without a word.

'What did you talk about with Alex?' sobs the mother. 'What did you—'

'Keep calm,' says the father.

'Don't remain silent,' beseeches the mother. 'Tell us, in heaven's name, don't remain silent!'

Her sobs prevent her from speaking. When the warder comes to see what's going on, as is his duty, we sign to him mutely to go away; he'll tell Dr Bohnenblust about it, I know. In the presence of my defence counsel I shall say absolutely nothing, that's for sure, sorry though I am for these parents, especially the elderly professor who with some difficulty, because he is rather corpulent, looks for a clean handkerchief in his trouser pocket, eventually finds it and offers it in vain to the white-haired mother, who has both hands over her face.

'You probably don't know about that,' says the mother later in a controlled, or perhaps only exhausted voice, after using the handkerchief which she now keeps crumpling in her fine hands, 'in his farewell note—you can't know that—Alex writes that he had a long discussion with you and you agreed with him, that's what he wrote.'

The father shows me the tear-stained note.

'What did you agree with him about?' sobs the mother afresh. 'For six years—'

It's a short note, actually an affectionate note. It begins: My dear parents. No reason is given for the imminent suicide. Really he is only asking his dear parents to forgive him. With regard to Stiller it says: 'I have had several talks with Stiller; everything he says agrees with my opinion, there's no point. Stiller is really only talking about himself, but everything he says is true of me too.' There follow a few instructions regarding the funeral, in particular the wish that no clergyman should be present and there was to be no music either ... When I hand back the note without a word, the father also asks me:

'Can you remember what you talked about with our Alex that day?'

My explanations, I can hear that myself, sound like excuses. But even so, I can see that they are more reassuring than my silence.

'I hope you didn't misunderstand my wife,' says the elderly professor when I stop speaking. 'We can't say that you are the one—whether or not you are Herr Stiller—we don't reproach anyone for not having been able to save our poor Alex. I, his father, couldn't save him either...'

'And yet,' says the mother weeping silently, 'and yet Alex was such a valuable person—'

'He was arrogant,' says the father.

'How can you—'

'He was arrogant,' says the father.

'Alex?'

'Like you and me and everyone around him,' says the elderly professor turning back to me. 'Alex was a homosexual, as you know; it wasn't easy for him to accept himself. But it isn't easy for any of us, that's true. If he had met someone who didn't merely encourage him with words and expectations, but someone who showed him how we can live with our weaknesses—'

The mother shakes her head.

'That's right,' says the elderly professor, without discussing the white-haired lady's mute contradiction, speaking man to man as it were. 'And I also think that there are all sorts of things wrong with people who need success like oxygen, in order to live. But what did I do about it? I merely made success contemptible, nothing else. The result: the lad was even ashamed of being successful! Instead of learning to tolerate himself the way he is, of loving himself, you know what I mean. Someone would have had to really love him! I was nothing but a good school teacher to him, I fostered his talents wherever I could, but he was left all alone with his weakness. My whole education consisted in separating him from his weakness. Until the silly fellow started trying to do the separating himself—'

The mother begins to cry again.

'Our son came to you,' she laments. 'Why didn't you tell him all that? You talked to him—at that time!'

Silence.

'It's terrible,' says the elderly professor, polishing his pince-nez and revealing quite small, blinking eyes, 'it's terrible to realize that you weren't able to save a person who loved you ... After that conversation I thought Stiller—Alex spoke so warmly of him, didn't he, Berta, as if he were a truly Vital person-'

Soon after this my defence counsel arrived.

***

Julika has written from Paris. The letter was addressed to Herr A. Stiller, c/o Remand Prison, Zurich. And it arrived—unfortunately. It began, 'My dear Anatol'. She had a good journey and in Paris the sun was shining. The letter was signed 'Your Julika'. I slowly tore it into a hundred pieces; but what difference does that make?

***

Today it was perfectly clear once more that we cannot bury the failure in our lives, and so long as I try I shall never get out of the failure, there is no escape. But the bewildering thing is, other people take it for granted that I have no other life to produce, and so they consider what I take upon myself to be my life. But it was never my life. And I know that only in so far as it was never my life can I take it upon myself—as my failure. This means one must be capable of passing without spite through their confusion of identities, playing a part without ever confusing oneself with the part; but for this I must have a fixed point—

***

My public prosecutor admitted he had forgotten the flowers for his wife; to make up, he suggested that I should visit his wife in the nursing home and take her the flowers myself (at his expense). His wife, he thought, would be delighted.

***

Herr Sturzenegger was here. I had been asleep and when I more or less woke up, he was already sitting on my plank bed; he had also—and this must have been what woke me—grasped my right hand with both of his.

'My dear fellow,' he asks, 'how are you?'

I slowly sit up.

'Fine,' I say. 'Who are you?'

He laughs.

'You don't remember me?'

I rub my eyes.

'Willi,' he calls himself and waits for an outburst of friendliness; but. I have to ask him to introduce himself properly; with an undertone of ill-humour he adds: 'Willi Sturzenegger—'

'Ah,' I say, 'I remember you.'

'At last!'

'My public prosecutor told me about you.'

So this is Sturzenegger, a friend of Stiller's, once a young architect full of enthusiasm for consistent modernism, now a man with a career, a man who is cheerfully resigned, a man with both feet on the ground, and since he is a success he is full of hearty comradeship.

'How about you?' he says at once, without mentioning his success, his hand still on my shoulder. 'What have you done, old fellow, to have been put in this State-subsidized apartment?'

As expected, he takes everything very cheerfully, including my request not to mistake me for the missing Stiller.

'Seriously,' he says, 'if there's any way I can help you—'

Once again I feel something uncanny, a mechanism at work in human relations which, whether they are called acquaintanceship or even friendship, immediately takes all the life out of them, all the immediacy. What could a prisoner like myself do with a banknote? But everything functions, like an automatic machine: the name, the supposed name, goes in at the top and the right mode of behaviour comes out at the bottom, ready for use, the stereotype of a human relationship which (so he says) means more to him than almost any other.

'You can believe me,' he says, 'otherwise I wouldn't be sitting here on your plank bed in the middle of my working day.'

For a whole hour we play Sturzenegger and Stiller and the uncanny thing is, it goes splendidly, without a hitch. His jesting and his seriousness are still so attuned to his missing friend, seven years after their last meeting, that I (anyone in my place) can generally guess without difficulty how their Stiller used to behave at this, that or the other point in a conversation, and thus how he would behave today. At times it's spooky; Sturzenegger shakes with laughter, I don't know why. He knows the joke his vanished friend would now unfailingly make and I don't need to make this joke, or even to know it. Herr Sturzenegger is already shaking with laughter. Then he looks like a puppet operated by the invisible strings of habit, not a human being. Afterwards I have almost no idea who this Sturzenegger really is. Since I can do nothing about this, it makes me melancholy even during our jolly conversation. His admonishment not to lose heart, all his friendliness, is a sum of reflexes geared to an absent person who doesn't interest me. At one point I try to tell him so; in vain. It seems he has no antenna for anything else, anything I broadcast on my own wavelength, so to speak, or he doesn't tune in; in any case, there's no reception, only disturbances that make him edgy, so that he leafs through my Bible.