I'm Not Stiller (40 page)

***

P.S. Perhaps—I wonder—one ought to defend oneself every time one is taken for somebody else, and I shouldn't have allowed any receptionist to book my appointment in the name of Herr Stiller—a labour of Sisyphus. Then again I believe it is quite enough if Julika, and she alone, doesn't take me for somebody else.

***

Mexico—

I can't help thinking (I don't know what makes me do so) of the Day of the Dead as I saw it on Janitzio, of the Indian mothers crouching all night long over the graves, everyone in their gala clothes, carefully combed as though for a wedding, although apparently nothing happens; the cemetery is a terrace overlooking the black sea and overhung by steep crags, a cemetery without a single tombstone or any other sign—everyone in the village knows where his dead lie, where he himself will one day lie. Candles are set up, three or seven or twenty, according to the number of dead souls, and alongside them the plates containing all kinds of foods and covered with a clean cloth, but the main thing is a strange object constructed with all the loving care of a Christmas present—a frame of bamboo on which are set the cakes and flowers, the fruits, the bright-coloured sweetmeats. The dead are supposed to feed all night long on the scent of these foodstuffs, for the scent is the essence of things: this is the significance of the ceremony. Only women and children perform these nocturnal rites in the cemetery; the men pray in the church. The women, whose actions remain quite matter-of-fact and sober, settle down as though for a long rest, throwing a shawl over their heads so that woman and child, both under the same shawl, look like a single creature. The candles, lined up in rows between the living and the dead, flicker in the cold night wind, hour after hour, while the moon rises above the sombre mountains and sinks again in a lazy arc.

Nothing else happens. Every now and then the clanging of a bell is carried over by the wind, or the wailing sound of a dog howling at the moon; otherwise nothing. Nobody weeps, there is little talking, only what is essential is said, but then not in whispers as is the way in our cemeteries; there is no question of any special atmosphere here. The silence, to which even the children submit, as they gaze for hours on end into the candles or into the empty night over the sea, is not reverence, not depth of emotion as we understand it, neither in a good nor in a bad sense. It is simply silence. In face of the fact of life and death there is nothing whatever to be said. A few even sleep, while their dead, father or husband or son, feed soundlessly on the scent, on the essence of things. The last-comers arrive towards midnight; no one will leave the graves until dawn. The dead souls flicker in thousands. A shivering child, who is coughing very ominously, as though anxious to join the dead, is allowed to sample the sweetmeats already, although the food still belongs to the dead. On the whole, they are strangely patient. And it is cold, it is the night of the first of November. A little girl, whose mother is dozing, plays with a candle, making warm drops of wax fall on her hand until the candle goes out, and then relighting it. Every breath of wind is heavily laden with scent; the women pluck to pieces yellow flowers and scatter them in the direction of the dead—much as one prepares vegetables, not negligently, but without unnecessary gestures, with emphasis, with solemnity, without any dramatic expression to indicate that some symbolic significance is intended. The whole ceremony is not intended at all, but simply performed. And it is as though the silence grew yet more silent. The moon has gone down, the cold is cutting. Nothing happens. The women do not kneel, but sit on the ground, so that the soul of the dead may rise into their wombs. That is all, until day breaks, a night of silent patience, a surrender to the inescapable process of death and growth—

***

A conversation with the public prosecutor, my friend, about Stiller.

'The overwhelming majority of human lives are ruined by the
fact that people make excessive demands on themselves,' he said and explained what he meant like this: 'Our consciousness has changed a great deal in the course of a few centuries, our emotional life much less. Hence there is a discrepancy between the level of our intellect and that of our emotions. Most of us have a parcel of flesh-pink cloth—namely, our feelings—that from our intellectual level we should like to ignore. There are two ways out of the difficulty that lead nowhere: either we kill our primitive and therefore unworthy feelings, as far as we can, at the risk of killing our emotional life altogether, or we simply give our unworthy feelings another name. We lie about them, disguise them as something else. We label them to satisfy the wishes of our consciousness. The more adroit our consciousness, the better-read, the more numerous and nobler-looking are our back-doors, the cleverer our self-deception. You can entertain yourself like that for a lifetime, excellently in fact, only you never reach life that way; it leads inescapably to loss of contact with your own personality. For example, we can easily call our lack of the courage to go down on our knees good breeding, our fear of self-realization unselfishness and so on. Most of us know only too well what we ought to feel in this, that, or the other situation, or, as the case may be, must not feel, but even with the best will in the world we have great difficulty in finding out what we actually do feel. That is a bad state of affairs. A sarcastic attitude towards all emotion is its classical symptom ... Excessive demands on oneself are inevitably linked with the wrong kind of bad conscience. One man blames himself for not being a genius, another blames himself for not being a saint in spite of his good upbringing, and Stiller blamed himself for not being the sort who could fight in Spain ... It is extraordinary what we mistake for conscience, once we have begun making excessive demands upon ourselves and so losing touch with our own personalities. The famous inner voice is often enough no more than the coquettish voice of a pseudo-ego that does not allow me to finally give up trying, to recognize myself, and attempts with all the wiles of vanity, if necessary even with false voices from heaven, to bind me to my fatal habit of making excessive demands upon myself. We can see our defeats, but we do not understand them as signals, as the outcome of misdirected endeavour, of endeavour directed away from our self. Curiously enough the direction taken by our vanity is not, as it appears to be, the direction towards our self, but away from our self.'

We then discussed the well known line: Him I love who craves the impossible. Without being able to recall just where this line occurs in
Faust,
Part Two, we agreed that it could only have been uttered by a demonic figure; for it is an invitation to neurosis and has nothing to do with any real endeavour (it doesn't refer to endeavour, anyhow, but to craving) that presupposes humility in the face of our limited potentialities.

'I don't see Stiller as an exception,' said my public prosecutor. 'I see some of my acquaintances and myself in him, although the demands we make on ourselves are of different kinds ... Many know themselves, only a few also manage to accept themselves. How much self-knowledge is limited to presenting other people with a more precise and exact description of our weaknesses—a form of coquetry. But even genuine self-knowledge, which remains mute and is chiefly expressed in behaviour, is not enough; it is a first step, indispensable and laborious, but not sufficient in itself. Self-knowledge in the form of lifelong melancholy, of amused indulgence towards our early resignation is very common, and people of this kind may sometimes be very pleasant table companions; but what is it like for them? They have given up a false role, and that is certainly something, but it doesn't yet take them back into life ... It is not true that self-acceptance automatically comes with age. It is true that when we are older our earlier aims seem more dubious and it is easier, cheaper, more painless to smile at our youthful ambition; but this is not the same as self-acceptance. In a certain respect, even, it becomes more difficult as we get older. More and more people to whom we look up admiringly are younger than ourselves, our allotted span grows shorter and shorter, resignation becomes easier and easier in view of our nonetheless honourable career, easier still for those who have had no career at all and can console themselves with the ill-will of their environment, cheering themselves with the thought of their unrecognized genius ... To accept oneself calls for an extremely positive attitude towards life ... The demand that we shall love our neighbour as ourselves contains as an axiom the demand that we shall love ourselves, shall accept ourselves as we were created. But even self-acceptance alone is not enough. As long as I try to convince those around me that I am none other than myself, I am necessarily afraid ofbeing misconstrued, and this very fear keeps me a prisoner ... Without the certitude that there is an absolute reality, I cannot imagine, of course,' said my public prosecutor, 'that we can ever succeed in becoming free.'

***

P.S. Absolute authority? Absolute reality? Why doesn't he say 'God'? It seems to me that he consciously takes care to avoid this word. Only when he is talking to me?

***

P.S. I am always hoping that precisely by recognizing myself as a negligible and unimportant man I shall cease to be a negligible and unimportant man. Fundamentally, to be quite honest, I am forever hoping that God (if I meet Him half-way) will make me a different, namely a richer, deeper, more valuable, more important personality—and it is precisely this, in all probability, which prevents God from setting me on the path to a real existence, that is to say from making it possible for me to experience existence. My
conditio sine qua non
is that he shall revoke me, his creature.

***

Julika is still in Paris.

***

The mother's grave. It is just like all graves in this country: neatly enclosed by a granite border, every grave a little too short so that you're afraid of treading on the dead people's feet, gravel paths in between, evergreens round the edge, in the centre of the grave an earthenware vase containing a few withered asters, behind the headstone a rusty tin for watering flowers. But today it was raining. We stood together under the umbrella, and the church clock struck three. The headstone was a bit queer, a typical piece of tombstone art, some kind of allegory. Here and there a small cypress towered above this grey Manhattan of tombstones. Once Wilfried asked:

'How do you like the stone, by the way?'

'Yes,' I said...

One would expect Wilfried to possess an umbrella. I've never had an umbrella of my own in my life, but now I was glad of an umbrella. It was a country cemetery, an insignificant church dating from the nineteenth century, situated on a hilltop and surrounded by ancient elms. In good weather one would no doubt have a pretty, quiet, wide view out over the lake towards the mountains. Today everything was grey, a dripping autumn day with mist hanging round the woods. We stood there for a long time, while the rain drummed on the black umbrella, both of us without speaking and without making a gesture, like any two Protestants. The inscription read: Here rests in God. Others had other inscriptions, Rest in peace, or else some vague lyric. The headstone, travertine, was slightly polished. The rain dripped audibly from the umbrella on to brown leaves. In the next row but one there was a fresh grave, a mound of loamy earth with wreaths on top of it. Then the church clock struck again. It was cold, wet, grey...

Afterwards we went to a tavern.

Wilfried Stiller, younger than I, is a hefty fellow with a tanned, rough, and taut skin. You can see at once that he spends a lot of time in the sun and air. His black hair is cropped short like a peasant's or a soldier's. He brought me over in a jeep that belongs not to him personally, but to the Agricultural Cooperative. He is manager of the fruit section...

Naturally we talked about our mothers, while Wilfried smoked cigars all the time (except in the cemetery), the same brand as the inspector at the police station when I first arrived. Apparently his mother was extremely strict, mine not in the least. When Wilfried told me how his mother shut him up for a whole day in the cellar, because he had been pinching jam and she wanted to give him a lasting distaste for the place, I could laugh with the man who survived that day in a dark cellar with undiminished good health; but that wasn't my mother. She could never have brought herself to be so strict. His mother used to say: 'Now pull yourself together, if you want to be a proper boy!' My mother used to say: 'Leave the lad in peace will you!' My mother was convinced that I should cope with life all right. I can remember listening at the keyhole as my mother told a group of friends all the witty and clever remarks I had made during the past week, enjoying a great success with them.

Nothing like that ever happened to Wilfried; his mother was worried that Wilfried would never achieve anything worthwhile, and the healthy man sitting opposite me at the varnished tavern table smoking a cigar, rather rough but cordial in his dullness, admitted himself that he was not a gifted child: he hadn't even learnt to play the piano. My mother, I know, saved on charwomen and washerwomen and did the cleaning and washing herself, so that she could pay for my flute lessons every month; for I was considered gifted.

Both mothers were funny! Wilfried told me that his mother, who was naturally just as respectable as mine, loved raw liver above everything else, far more than sweets. Now, no one could give her a packet of raw liver for her birthday or mother's day, so she had to buy her tit-bits for herself. And so she did. Once, when a football had been kicked into some bushes and Wilfried went to look for it, he found his mother in the most hidden corner of a public park, eating raw liver; the good woman was frightened to death, and obliged to keep Wilfried at bay with any excuse she could think of, until he believed anything of his mother—except that she had been eating raw liver!

When Wilfried recalled incidents like this, it might have been my mother too, and we laughed together. Then again he described a mother whom I did not know at all, a clear-thinking and incorruptible woman whom you couldn't hoax, a practical woman who accustomed Wilfried at an early age to the idea that he would never be able to marry a proper woman if he didn't earn plenty of money. My mother wasn't like that at all. She enjoyed it when I hoaxed her, and as regards the future she attached more importance to my inner qualities, convinced that I could marry anyone I liked, any woman whatever with the exception of my fond mother herself, which when I was young I regretted; my mother's worry was rather whether the person I should one day bring home would really be worthy of me. Once, I remember, I tried to spit cherry stones on to our old neighbour as he sat reading the newspaper in his little garden; my mother was so furious at his outrageous suspicion, that I swore black and blue I hadn't done it, so as not to show her up in front of the old gentleman. My stepfather used to say that my mother and I stuck together like burrs. Wilfried had his own father. And my mother, I know, would never have cried in front of teachers; she would have denied everything or demanded a little understanding on the part of the teachers. I was a delicate child. When my mother, God knows how, paid the police fine, I brought her a whole lot of cowslips; that was when my mother cried, not before. His mother didn't expect any cowslips, but told Wilfried to apologize personally to the teacher he had been rude to. It's funny how different mothers can be!...