I'm Not Stiller (39 page)

She liked life in America very much (she says) without being thrilled by it; she enjoyed its strangeness. Yet she had never seen the true America, the West. Sibylle planned to travel across to the opposite coast, to see Arizona, Texas, the flowers in California; but she was an employee, and that meant she could live, live well even, just so long as she sat in front of her typewriter and typed: in return she had the freedom of her week-ends, which covered a radius of no less than a hundred miles. She loved New York. During the first few weeks it seemed to her that nothing was easier than associating with Americans. They were all so open, so easy-going; she made more friendships, or so it seemed, than at any time in her life. She also enjoyed being so unmolested as a woman, indeed, it was as though on landing in America she had ceased to be a woman; in spite of all the sympathy people showed her they treated her as though she were completely neuter. After her recent experience this was a boon, of course, at least at first. And even later (so she says) she had no desire for a man, certainly not for an American man. She had 'friends', in the American sense; most of them had cars, and that was not unimportant, especially in summer, when it was so hot in New York. In time, however, this lack of any atmosphere, such as exists even in Switzerland, began to irritate her. It was not easy to say what was really lacking. Everyone praised her new spring dress, her look of good health, her son; compared with Switzerland in particular, it was simply delightful how lavish people were with praise. But suddenly Sibylle wondered whether they so much as saw what they were praising at all. It was remarkable to discover (she says) how wonderful and great was the diversity of erotic play; Sibylle had never realized it so clearly as here, where this diversity doesn't exist. When she left a restaurant, when she left a subway, when she left a social gathering, she never had the feeling of being missed by a man in that enchanting way which somehow uplifts both parties, without their making an effort to see one another again. Never, in the street, did she encounter that quick glance of purposeless delight, never in conversation was there any hint of the exciting realization that people are divided into two sexes. Everything remained on a comradely level and as far as it went very nice; but a tension was missing, a wealth of subtle radiations, a playful artistry, a magic, a threat, the exciting possibility of living complications. It was flat, not unintelligent, heavens alive, the place was seething with cultured people; but it was lifeless, somehow without charm, naive. Then Sibylle felt like a woman under a cap of invisibility: seen by no one, no, not seen, they heard what she said and found it amusing, interesting, may be, but it was a meeting in a vacuum chamber. It was funny: they talked about 'sex problems' with such premature candour, with the enlightened frankness of eunuchs who don't know what they are talking about. Nobody here seemed to see any difference between sex and eroticism. And when they took their exuberant deficiency for health, no, it wasn't always funny, it was tedious. What had New York not got to offer! It was a shame to be bored here. The concerts alone! But life itself, everyday existence, shopping, lunch at the drugstore, travelling by bus, waiting at a station, the hustle and bustle that makes up nine-tenths of our life, was so immensely practical, so intensely lustreless.

Sibylle often went into the Italian quarter, to buy vegetables she said; in reality she went to see, hungry for something worth seeing. Or did the fault lie with Sibylle? After about half a year she had the bitter feeling that she had disappointed everyone. She had a little book full of addresses, but she no longer dared ring anybody up. How had she disappointed all these friendly friends? She didn't know and nobody told her. She was seriously depressed by it. Meanwhile, and this perplexed Sibylle even more, she had forfeited nothing; if she met one of her friends by chance, they said Hallo Sibylle! just like the first time, and there was no trace of disappointment on the other side. Apparently all these frank and easy-going people did not expect anything else from a human relationship; there was no need for this friendly relationship to go on growing. That was the saddest thing for Sibylle: after twenty minutes you have got as far with these people as after half a year, as after many years, nothing more is added. Friendship stops at sincere good wishes for the other's well-being. People have friends simply to make life pleasant, and then there are psychiatrists, like motor mechanics for the inner life, if a person has defects and cannot patch himself up. Anyhow, you shouldn't burden your friends with a gloomy face; in fact they have nothing else to give than a quite general and non-committal optimism. It was better to lie in the sun in the little roof garden. And yet, in spite of all the trouble Sibylle had with this carefree lack of content that characterizes the vast majority of Americans, she was far from the idea of returning to Switzerland...

After a correspondence that had gradually died away, after a mutual silence that threatened to become final, Rolf, her husband, rang her one afternoon at her office. 'Where are you speaking from?' she asked. 'Here,' answered Rolf, 'at La Guar-dia. I've just landed. How can I meet you?' He had to wait till five o'clock, since Sibylle couldn't simply walk out, and in the end it was getting on for six when Sibylle, the secretary, appeared in the agreed hotel lobby on Times Square. 'How are you?' they asked one another. 'Fine, thank you,' they both replied. Sibylle led him across Times Square. 'How long are you staying here?' she asked; but naturally they could scarcely talk in the crush. She took Rolf, the bewildered newcomer, up the Rockefeller Tower to show him something of New York right away. 'Are you in New York on business?' she asked and then corrected herself: 'I mean professionally?' They were sitting in the famous Rainbow Bar and had to order something. 'No,' said Rolf, i'm here on your account. On our account...'

They found one another pretty much unchanged, only a little older. Sibylle showed him the latest snap of Hannes. 'He's no kid any more, no, he's a regular guy already!' Rolf cut her short after a bit. 'I've come,' he said, 'to ask you—I mean, either we must get a divorce or we must live together. But once and for all.' They didn't ask one another anything else. 'In which direction do you live?' inquired Rolf, and Sibylle showed him the district, pointing out the play of lights, the incredibly colourful dusk over Manhattan; but not everybody finds the woman of his life again as he is looking at it...

'Babylon,' exclaimed Rolf, who had to look down again and again at this net of shimmering strings of beads, this skein of light, this endless flowerbed of electric blossoms. One is astonished that in these depths down below, whose sounds are no longer audible, in this labyrinth of rectangular windows threaded by gleaming canals, which is repeated over and over again with no change, a person does not get lost every minute; that this never-ending movement from one place to another does not stop for a moment, or pile up into a hopeless chaos. Here and there it is dammed up into a pond filled with a white-hot glow—Times Square, for instance. The skyscrapers tower black all round, vertical, yet spread out from one another by perspective like a cluster of crystals, larger and smaller crystals, thicker and thinner. At times trails of brightly coloured mist drift past, as though one were sitting on a mountain top, and for a while there is no more New York: the Atlantic has engulfed it. Then it is there again, half order as though on a chessboard, half confusion as though the Milky Way had fallen down from the sky. Sibylle pointed out the districts whose names she knew: Brooklyn behind a curtain of bridges, Staten Island, Harlem. Later everything became even more colourful; the skyscrapers no longer rose like black towers before the yellow dusk, now it was as though the night had swallowed up their bodies, and what remained were the lights in them, the hundreds of thousands of electric light bulbs, a screen of whitish and yellowish windows, nothing else, thus they hovered above the bright haze that was roughly the colour of apricots, and in the streets, as though in canyons, ran streams of glittering quicksilver.

Rolf could not get over his amazement. The ferries over the Hudson reflected in the water, the garlands of the bridges, the stars above a flood of neon lemonade, of sweetness, of sickliness, that attained the level of the grandiose, vanilla and raspberry, interspersed with the purple pallor of autumn crocuses, the green of glaciers, a green such as occurs in retorts, interspersed with the milk of dandelions, frippery and visions, yes, and beauty, oh, a fairy-like beauty, a kaleidoscope out of the kindergarten, a mosaic of coloured fragments, but mobile, yet at the same time lifeless and cold as glass, then again the Bengal lights of a stage Witches' Sabbath, a heavenly rainbow that has fallen into a thousand splinters and been scattered over the earth, an orgy of discord, of harmony, an orgy of the everyday, technological and mercantile above all; you immediately think of the Arabian Nights, of carpets, but carpets that glow, of worthless gems, of a child's firework that has fallen on the ground and continues to flicker; you have seen it all before, perhaps behind closed eyes in a fever; here and there it is also red, not red like blood, thinner, red like the light reflected in a glass of red wine when the sun shines in, red and also yellow like honey, thinner, yellow like whisky, greenish yellow like sulphur and certain fungi, strange, but all of it possessing a beauty which, if it were to become sound, would be the song of the sirens; yes, that's about how it is, sensual and lifeless at the same time, intelligent and stupid and powerful, an edifice of human beings or termites, symphony and lemonade, you have to have seen it to imagine it, but to have seen it with your eyes, notmerely with your judgement, seen it as one who is confused, benumbed, astounded, blissful, unbelieving, carried away, a stranger on earth, not merely a stranger in America; you can smile at it, shout for joy over it, weep over it. And far out to the east rises the bronze moon, a hammered disk, a silent gong...

But the most bewildering thing for Rolf was naturally Sibylle, his wife, who was at home here. They drank their martinis—rather mute—occasionally looking at one another, smiling almost with a touch of scorn as they realized that there was really no need to have an Atlantic between them. Rolf scarcely dared to take hold of her arm that lay so close to him; his tenderness stayed in his eyes, Sibylle, too, felt that the world, big as it was, held no one who could be closer to her than Rolf, her husband; she didn't deny it. Nevertheless, she asked for twenty-four hours in which to think it over.

W
ENT
to the dentist today.

They are trifles and the terrible thing is that you don't defend yourself against trifles. You get tired of it. At the very outset, the white-overalled receptionist came into the waiting room and said, 'This way please, Herr Stiller.' Was I to bawl at her in front of all the other patients? She couldn't help it, this nice little person—I was booked as Herr Stiller. So I followed her without a murmur. I owe all this to my defence counsel. They hung the white cloth round my neck, gave me a fresh glass, filled it with tepid water, all in the friendliest fashion, and the young dentist—the successor of the deceased dentist to whom the vanished Stiller owes an outstanding account—soaped his hands. He couldn't help it either: as far as the patient's name was concerned, he had to rely entirely on his receptionist, especially as he didn't know the inherited clientele yet.

'Herr Stiller,' he said, 'you've got toothache?'

I was just rinsing my mouth, nodded with reference to the toothache, and before I could rectify the mistake he had already found with his probe the spot where all discussion ended for me. The young man was very painstaking.

'Look,' he said, showing me with his little mirror, 'a crown like that, for example, left upper six—can you see?—I don't want to say anything against my predecessor, but one just can't do a crown like that.'

He misunderstood the expression in my eyes, thinking I wanted to stand up for his predecessor. With my mouth full of cotton wool and matrix bands and saliva ejectors, so that I couldn't contradict, I listened to his no doubt very interesting exposition of the new advances in dental surgery. Although the young man had taken over his uncle's practice and clients, he had no intention of also taking over the mistakes of the generation that had just passed away; and my mouth seemed to contain very little else but mistakes. Only with helpless glances could I beg the young man not to regard my crown as the work of his deceased uncle, nor my teeth as those of the missing Stiller. He called out:

'Fraulein—give me Herr Stiller's X-rays again.'

All this, as I have said, I owed to my defending counsel. Nobody believes me; every time the probe touched a certain spot, a few involuntary tears welled up from my eyes, and I couldn't think why he had to keep on probing this spot. At last he said.

'Yes, yes—it's alive.'

The fact was, judging from the old X-rays which they had found in his predecessor's file, the young dentist simply couldn't understand how my left lower four could possibly be still alive, though in my opinion it was quite sensitive enough even if on the X-ray (they showed me Stiller's left lower four) it looked exactly like a dead root.

'Curious,' he murmured, 'curious.'

Then he rang through to the receptionist.

'Are those really Herr Stiller's X-rays?' he asked. 'Are you quite sure?'

'The name is on them—'

His professional conscience left him no peace: he made another tooth-by-tooth comparison, which showed that Stiller, the vanished patient of his deceased uncle must, for instance, have had a perfect right upper eight, while in my case there was a gap. What had I done with my (Stiller's) right upper eight? I shrugged my shoulders. I wasn't going to submit to an interrogation with a mouthful of cotton wool and matrix bands and saliva ejectors, Finally the X-rays disappeared and the young dentist reached for the drill. After an hour and a half, when at last I had no more clamps in my mouth and was allowed to rinse it, I naturally had no further wish to resume discussion of the old X-rays. I merely asked for Saridone. Knobel was sitting in the waiting room. The grey prison van was standing under an avenue of acacias. The drivers had been told to park it somewhere out of sight. But since the avenue belonged to a school, whose playground it bordered, and since the main break was just in progress, Knobel and I were naturally surrounded by all the children in the school when we returned to the van. A little fellow asked me shyly if I was the thief. A girl shouted in rapturous excitement, 'Teacher, a criminal!' I waved, as well as I could from behind the little barred window. Only the teachers didn't wave back.