I'm Not Stiller (33 page)

'To cut a long story short,' he said eventually, 'there we were in this rocky little valley, and I had to guard prisoners. I don't suppose they trusted me to do anything else. Out in front they were fighting for the glorious Alcázar, and there I was in this hot little valley guarding prisoners, in small groups. Fortunately I had Anya at that time—' Stiller filled his glass with chianti again. 'Who was Anya?' she asked, and once more they did not come to the ferry over the Tajo, but this time the digression interested her a great deal more directly. 'Anya?' he said. 'She was my first love. A Polish girl. She was our doctor, a medical student, I mean she worked as a doctor...' Stiller drank from the glass in his hand holding in his left a cigarette that had long since gone out; sitting like this he told her a few things about this Polish girl, describing her as a person who had always impressed him, not by her beauty, but by all sorts of other things—a clear mind and at the same time plenty of temperament, a trace of Tartar blood, a born fighter, and at the same time a person with a sense of humour, a rarity among revolutionaries, as Stiller explained, the daughter of educated parents, the first Communist in her family, a Good Samaritan who seemed herself to be invulnerable, moreover with an exceptional gift for languages, an interpreter in Spanish, Russian, French, English, Italian, and German, all of which she spoke with the same accent but with faultless grammar and a considerable vocabulary, and in addition an entrancing dancer—'that was Anya,' he broke off. 'She used to call me her German dreamer.' To judge by his expression, this was still a bitter pill for Stiller, one which he had not yet digested after ten years. 'Did she love you?' asked Sibylle. 'Not me alone,' answered Stiller, and suddenly jumped:

'What's happened to your cofTee?'—'Forgotten!' she laughed. 'Because you got so angry about our Switzerland!' Stiller apologized. 'Never mind,' she said. 'I don't want any coffee.'—'You're not drinking any wine either,' said Stiller. 'What would you like?'—'To hear your story about the Russian gun,' she replied, and Stiller, who had already got up to make the coffee, shrugged his shoulders. 'There's not much to tell,' he said. 'My Russian gun was faultless, of course, I only had to press the trigger...'

There followed the final digression, an impartial and quite superfluous description of the tactical position, which Sibylle couldn't follow anyhow. '- well, there it is,' he broke off, 'Sturzenegger has told you the rest.'

It was now eleven o'clock, Sibylle could hear the hour striking on the cathedral clock, with which she had become quite familiar. She didn't understand why this story was such a burden to Stiller; she only felt (so she says) that this hour was to him a confession, a confession which not Sibylle, but Stiller himself, had sought. 'I don't understand,' said Sibylle at last; but Stiller immediately interrupted her, '—why I didn't shoot?' That wasn't what Sibylle had meant. He laughed, 'Because I'm a failure. Quite simply, I'm not a man.'—'Because you didn't fire, that day on the Tajo?'—'It was treachery,' said Stiller with impatient emphasis. 'There's nothing to explain. I had a job to do, I'd even volunteered for it, I had orders to guard the ferry, perfectly clear orders. What more do you want? It wasn't I that was in the balance, but thousands of others, a cause. I had to fire. What was I in Spain for? It was treachery,' he concluded. 'They should really have put me up against the wall.'—'I don't know about that,' commented Sibylle. 'What did Anya, your Polish girl, have to say?' Stiller didn't answer this question at once, but explained how he had later talked his way out of the difficulty by telling the commissar the lie about the gun not going off. 'What did Anya have to say?' he now smiled, twisting a cigarette until there was almost no tobacco left in the wrapping, and shrugging his shoulders, 'Nothing. She looked after me until I was well enough to go home. She despised me.'—'I thought you said she loved you?'—'It was treachery,' insisted Stiller. 'Love makes no difference to that. It was a failure.' Sibylle let him talk, let him repeat himself first in different words and then in the same words, until he refilled his glass and drank. 'Have you never talked to anyone about it?' she asked. 'Not even to your wife?' Stiller briefly shook his head. 'Why not?' she went on to ask. 'Are you ashamed to talk to her about it?' Stiller evaded the question, 'Probably a woman can't understand what it means. I was a coward.'

The bottle was now empty, a litre bottle of chianti: Stiller didn't give the impression of being drunk, he seemed to be used to drinking. Was his drinking also somehow connected with this Tajo affair? Of course Sibylle couldn't simply take him in her arms; Stiller would have felt himself misunderstood as all men do when their seriousness is countered by a different seriousness, indeed, Stiller seemed already to be aware that Sibylle was permitting herself thoughts of her own, and he reiterated with apodictic melancholy, 'It was a failure.'—'And you imagined,' smiled Sibylle, 'that you were never going to fail in your life?' She had to make her meaning clearer: 'You're ashamed of being as you are. Who demanded of you that you should be a fighter, a warrior, someone who can shoot? You feel you didn't prove yourself there in Spain. Who's denying it? But perhaps you were trying to prove yourself someone you just aren't—' Stiller wouldn't swallow this. 'I told you already,' he remarked, 'probably a woman can't understand a thing like that.' And Sibylle thought, perhaps better than you like. But she only laughed, 'You men, why do you always try to be so grand? I don't want to hurt your feelings, but—' Involuntarily she took hold of his hands, a gesture which Stiller apparently misunderstood—anyhow, he looked at her with covert contempt, it seemed to her, not in an unfriendly way, but Stiller didn't take her seriously: he took her for a person in love expecting caresses and nothing else. She was a burden to him, a burden. He stroked her hair, the misunderstood man weighed down by tragedy, and now Sibylle, as though frozen by his tender condescension, couldn't utter a word. Stiller (she says) fancied himself in the role of a man with a wound; he didn't want to get over it. He took refuge behind it. He didn't want to be loved. He was afraid of it.

'Now you know,' he said, clearing the glasses away, 'why I didn't shoot. What's the point of this story? I'm not a man. I've dreamt about it for years: I want to shoot, but the gun doesn't go off—I don't need to tell you what that means, it's a typical impotence dream.' This remark, which he made while standing in the kitchen recess, upset Sibylle and she stood up. She was sorry she had come to his studio. She felt a sadness, which she concealed, and at the same time she was sorry for Stiller. Why didn't he want to be loved, really loved? There was nothing left for her but to play the part Stiller forced upon her and chatter with uncomprehending, inquisitive gaiety, until Stiller had to leave the room for a moment.

She hoped she would never see Stiller again.

When he came back from the landing, accompanied by the inevitable swishing of water, Sibylle had already combed her hair and her lips were freshly rouged. She had already put her hat on too. Stiller was completely dumbfounded. 'Are you leaving?' he asked. 'It's almost midnight,' she said, picking up her gloves. Stiller didn't reply. 'You silly fellow!' she exclaimed suddenly. 'Why?' he asked from the sink, where he was washing his hands. Neither of them knew what to say next, and Stiller went on drying his hands. 'Come,' said Sibylle, 'let's go away'—'Where to?'—'Away from here,' she said. 'I've got the car downstairs, I hope nobody's noticed, but I think I forgot to lock it.' Stiller smiled as though over an ingenuous girl. The meaning of his decision could not be seen in his face; anyway, he opened the little window of the kitchen to let the smoke out of the studio, and without a word took his brown coat from the nail, banged the pockets as one does to see whether one has the front-door key; then he looked at Sibylle, uncertain in his turn what she really had in mind, and switched off the light...

***

The next day was not easy for Sibylle, or easy in a perplexing way. Some country inn by night, where there were no
banderillas
on the wall, but instead probably a text from the Bible or some other saying embroidered in cross-stitch—'Faithful and true', or 'Honesty is the best policy', or whatever people do embroider on these things—in short, a country inn by night that may have smelt of dried pears and where cocks crowed outside the little window early in the morning, and on the other hand her familiar home with little Hannes, who hadn't died of his sore throat; both were such wonderful worlds, and the bewildering thing was that she could go from one to the other without any bridge. Around midday she rang up to find out whether Stiller really existed. And then, we may imagine, she went downstairs and out into the garden...

It was spring, there was a lot to be done, digging, planting, raking, hoeing, and the ground was as dry as in summer. Sibylle took out the lawn-spray, set it up in the little meadow and let it patter on the budding shrubs. A neighbour told her this was bad for the buds, so Sibylle dragged the spray off somewhere else where its swishing would do no harm, but she had to have the swish of water and her respected neighbour, who also knew better about the weather forecast, could jump in the lake if she didn't understand. She should mind her own business, anyway.

Little Hannes hadn't forgotten the promises she gave him yesterday to buy cane and blue tissue paper and make him a kite; she regretted her omission and promised to go into town tomorrow, and to make up for having forgotten, she also promised to take him to the circus, when it came, and today he was allowed to go with Sibylle to meet Daddy at the airport. Altogether, Sibylle had an urge to see everyone happy, including Carola, the Italian maid, who was given the day off—the family could have a meal in town. What a wonderful spring day! Even the neighbour agreed about that. The forsythia was ablaze with yellow, the magnolia was beginning to blossom, and on top of this the lawn-spray conjured up a little private rainbow. And then, after four hours of valiant labour in the garden, Sibylle took another shower before once more changing her clothes.

They reached the airport much too early. Hannes got a bowl of ice cream for his disappearing sore throat, but on no account was he allowed to take off his jacket, for fear the silly sore throat should come back again. There were aeroplanes everywhere. They could have flown straight to Athens, Paris, or even New York. Sibylle had no doubt that Rolf would see it in her face at the first glance. In any case, he was the person closest to her, the only one in whom she could, or wanted to, confide.

The plane was forty minutes late, time enough for Sibylle to say in imagination everything that was never said in reality. For the moment the echoing loudspeaker announced the landing of the plane from London, and a crowd of unknown people descended from it and were shepherded towards the customs by a stewardess, and Sibylle, looking down from the terrace with little Hannes's hand in hers, saw Rolf gaze round, catch sight of his family, and wave to them with a newspaper—at this moment Sibylle suddenly went mute inside, in fact she didn't even wave. She didn't realize it, but Rolf swore later that she didn't even wave, didn't even nod. She suddenly felt: What's it to him? And as she waited and waited for him to go through the customs, she even experienced a slight feeling of anger at the way Rolf took it for granted she would be there to meet him at the end of every journey. Somehow Sibylle needed this armour of anger now, A wave with a newspaper, yes, but not a trace of delighted surprise; he simply considered it his right to find a waiting wife at the airport. This annoyed Sibylle so much that when he came out of the customs shed and kissed her, she gave him both cheeks, but not her mouth...

'What's new?'—his usual question. On her way to the car she felt a trifle weak at the knees after all. During supper in town, in order to have some news to give him, she talked about young Sturzenegger, their architect, and his fantastic luck in getting a commission in Canada or somewhere. Furthermore, young Sturzenegger had recommended a film they ought not to miss, and today was the last performance. As a rule Rolf was always very cheerful and gay after his trips, as though he came straight from the fountainhead of life. Now, overshadowed by her gaiety, he actually complained of feeling tired, spoke of heavy squalls over the Channel, and wanted to go home, acting as though he came not from London, but from the front, a hero with a right to be coddled at home. Sibylle was also a trifle surprised, without letting it show, to discover how differently she regarded Rolf—not without love, but without the fear that he was hiding something, and free from the illusion that she couldn't live without him, not without warm and sincere affection either, but the affection was mixed with compassion so that it contained an element of condescension which Sibylle did not want, but suddenly it was there, a subtle change in the tone of her voice that was more evident to her than to him. In order to show that his fatigue was not her fatigue, she proposed that she should go to the recommended film alone. Rolf raised no objection. She dropped the idea—not because of a bad conscience, which she did not have even now that she was face to face with him, but rather out of a motherly feeling. In the car, which Sibylle drove, it was not Rolf who put his hand on her arm, but the other way round, even though Sibylle was at the wheel.

He said, 'You look magnificent.' She said, 'Yes, I feel fine.' And she thought with relief that now he knew everything. She probably looked at him a few times, finding it hard to believe that a man could take it so calmly. It was almost funny. It must have been a difficult moment (for Sibylle) when Rolf, the father of her child, put his luggage in the hall and hung up his coat with the intention of staying the night here. A monstrous idea! Sibylle thought she was going to burst into tears; he didn't notice that either, but talked about the frantic impoverishment of the British Empire. Little Hannes had already said his prayers and been put to bed; Sibylle no longer had any convincing reason for running away from the frantic impoverishment of the British Empire. She wouldn't have revoked anything, anything at all, even if she could; but how was she to get through this evening, when his blindness, which Sibylle could not understand, made it so easy to remain silent, and yet impossible?