I'm Not Stiller (41 page)

'Now she's been lying over there four years already,' said Wilfried. 'Anything rather than be buried in the town, anything rather than lie alongside people she had never seen while she was alive, she didn't like the idea of that—'

Once the taverner came, addressed Wilfried by name, and then shook my hand too. Wilfried talks to people without the least trace of disguise. I can't do that. Why not? And then, when we were alone together again, I had to tell him about Julika—how she was getting on in Paris. Julika came here from Paris for the funeral with her red hair. Wilfried had not met her again since. Wilfried was wearing a knitted waistcoat. He was very interested in California; Wilfried once wanted to go and farm in Argentina, but couldn't because of his mother, so I talked about California, without thinking or seeing California; I saw rather the grave with the evergreens and polished travertine, without thinking or seeing my mother, and for Wilfried everything was fine.

His brother, the missing man, must always have been rather odd. He didn't say so, didn't even hint it. Wilfried is not ambiguous, not subtle, not inquisitive; he is a man of natural existence, not a man of expression. Even when I keep silent, I feel like a chatterbox beside him. Wilfried drank little and probably even that was only for my benefit, yet he found the wine good, which I for my part found touching, for it was a mediocre wine, with no body, really tasting only of cask. And all this was very normal, very strange, a conversation with many pauses, so that you could hear the cat purring, and when Wilfried once more repeated his invitation to go and stay with him and his wife I noticed I was very close to tears; and yet the whole time I had felt empty of all feeling. He was a brother, which I wasn't, and it didn't even worry him that I wasn't.

Was I also hungry? Wilfried didn't try to convince me of anything, and there was something disarming about this. And he wasn't afraid of silence, whereas I resumed the conversation about modern farms in California, a subject on which Wilfried was far better informed than I, through his reading. We made one amusing discovery: the illustrated paper that contained the article about the dancer Julika and her vanished husband also carried a long report on modern methods of pest control, which set Wilfried laughing when I referred to it in conversation; even over this matter, the paper didn't have the facts right. This amused me.

Whenever anything we discussed (military service, for example) brought to light the fact that Wilfried was five years younger than I, it irritated me. I saw him as a small boy sees men, as ageless but under all circumstances superior. It also irritated me that this man, for his part, was not irritated by even the oddest diversity of our natures, but immediately took it for granted that my life, though incomprehensible to him, was certain to be perfectly all right in my own eyes; and somehow, by not poking his nose into my affairs, he maintained a respectful distance, which every time I observed it made me feel ashamed and unsure of myself. But he was perfectly serious about this respect. I didn't dare order any more wine, any different wine, although I knew quite well that Wilfried would have raised no objection—after all, it was a special day that deserved a little celebration.

Of his children, I heard that they had got over the mumps one after the other; there was nothing left now but measles. When Wilfried, after first hanging his jacket over the back of the chair, ate bread and cheese to fortify himself for the long journey in the not exactly comfortable jeep, I wondered whether I should not, even unasked, declare myself—but I didn't know how, nor actually why either ... Wilfried took it as a matter of course that we were brothers, and after standing under a black umbrella in front of a grave were about to part again.

Just before five I was back in Zürich.

Now (as I write these notes) I am sitting in a bar. Alone in the town! It is like a dream to me; and yet my immediate environment, a pack offreshly dolled-up Zürich tarts waiting for the first job of the evening, is anything but dreamlike. Nobody claims to know me. Supposing I don't return to my cell at six? Wilfried drove me to Bellevue; he still had a long journey in front of him and tomorrow another hard day's work, on the other hand I had another hour's parole provided Wilfried stayed with me. He shook hands.

'Yes,' I said,'—and supposing I make a getaway?'

He laughed, his hand already on the brake.

'That's up to you,' he commented, his jeep jerked and he was away ... What should I have explained to him? There are many people to whom I am. closer, in understanding much closer, than to this man; as a friend he is out of the question. He has his own friends, who are completely strange to me, and I don't think it would occur to him to number me among his friends. And yet he is the only person who can take it for granted that I am the missing Stiller, that is to say fundamentally misunderstand me, without my caring. What does understand mean anyway? Friends must understand one another to remain friends; brothers are always brothers. Why was I never his brother? Today's meeting has set my mind in turmoil. How do I stand in this world?

***

'You still deny it?' asked my counsel, the moment I was back in prison. 'You still deny it?'

'Yes,' I said, 'I still deny it—'

'That's ridiculous,' said my counsel.

'It's ridiculous,' I said, 'but if I were to admit what you want me to admit, Herr Doktor, that would be even more ridiculous.'

'I don't understand you,' said my counsel.

'I know that,' I said. 'That's why I have to deny everything you say about me, Herr Doktor—'

***

Yes—who is going to read what I have written in these notebooks? And yet I believe that no one writes without the idea that somebody is going to read what he writes, if this somebody is only the writer himself. Then I ask myself, Can one write without playing a part? One tries to be a stranger to oneself. My reality does not lie in the part I play, but in the unconscious decision as to what kind of part I assign myself. At times I have the feeling that one emerges from what has been written as a snake emerges from its skin. That's it; you cannot write yourself down, you can only cast your skin. But who is going to be interested in this dead skin? The ever-recurring question whether the reader is ever able to read anything other than himself is superfluous: writing is not communication with readers, not even communication with oneself, but communication with the inexpressible. The more exactly one succeeds in expressing oneself, the more clearly appears the inexpressible force, that is to say the reality, that oppresses and moves the writer. We possess language in order to become mute. He who is silent is not mute. He who is silent hasn't even an inkling who he is not.

***

Why doesn't Julika write?

***

Friends! Now they come in flocks, today no less than five—all at the same time. They all find me unchanged, almost unchanged, and address me familiarly. And the fact that I don't utter a word doesn't in the least prevent them from knowing me, oh yes, there's nothing better than an old friendship. One of them, an actor, just wouldn't let go of my hand; his eyes were full of profound emotion, and when he stopped talking he oozed deep understanding for Stiller. With a squeeze of the hand, a further intensification of the pressure, and another shake of my crushed hand, which he had clasped in both of his, I let him say to me that which cannot be expressed in words. For my part, I merely said, 'Take a seat, gentlemen.' And one of them, I observed as time passed, considered himself my benefactor, because he hadn't taken the missing Stiller to court for the years of unpaid rent, as he would have been fully entitled to do. It appeared that my embarrassment was a sufficient expression of gratitude for him.

They are all of them very pleasant people, although on this visit, gathered together as probably never happens under natural circumstances, they were rather like a funeral party at the crematorium. The fact was that, apart from their connexion with the missing Stiller, a connexion with such various origins, they really had nothing in common with one another. Each of them had perhaps heard of the others in the past through Stiller, whose absence was now painfully evident. We should have got to know one another
tête-à-tête.
One of them, I learnt after a time, had in the meantime become a professor, a fine brain who must have had a lot of trouble with the missing Stiller, so vague in mind and temperament and so full of muddle-headed radicalism. That he had come at all, this young professor, who naturally had other friends than Stiller, was an act of true loyalty. His circumspection, the tender consideration with which he treated me, enabled me to guess how sensitive the missing Stiller must have been; and as a matter of fact I, too, felt inferior, felt the extent of my ignorance, relapsed into a kind of timid esteem and hence into a tone that must inevitably have reminded him of his vanished friend. He didn't want this tone or this silence of timid esteem; but it seemed as though he were used to it, and the stranger my behaviour, the more certainly he must have seen in me the vanished Stiller, who had often enough struck him as strange and with whom he had kept faith, in spite of everything, more out of a desire for fair play than out of friendship, which never bore fruit with Stiller.

Why did it make me sad? They were all the sort of men one would like to have for one's friends. Why wasn't it possible? Incidentally, they were by no means agreed as to who Stiller was; and yet they acted as though they took me for one and the same person. A lively graphic artist already described the celebration that was to take place after my release, and the fifth, a compositor by trade, seemed to be a Communist who regarded the other four as arrant reactionaries and blamed me for talking to them, to judge by his expression. He was particularly annoyed with me over the friendly tone in which the property owner described the Sleeping-Beauty condition of Stiller's deserted studio; and at times, while they were talking, I seriously wondered what kind of person I must be to correspond, even in broad outline only, to the memories and expectations of these five visitors—something like a five-headed monster, I thought, and every one of them would have cut off my other four heads as not genuine, as superfluous, in order to produce the true Stiller.

The actor, I observed, had become a Catholic and looked down, not without respect, not without understanding, upon the compositor, the Communist, whose views he had no difficulty in guessing, since they reminded him of the first intellectual adventures of his own youth. Apart from the Communist, it was obvious that none of them had stood still. The young professor assured me that, although he still valued the classics above all else, he no longer regarded modern art as purely decadent, and the graphic artist, manifestly converted by a considerable degree of success, had shaken off all pessimism concerning contemporary culture, pointed to the high level of Swiss graphic art and for his part, speaking frankly, had no need of either Communism or Catholicism in order to see his task in the world. The property owner, on the other hand, an antique dealer by profession, was more than ever attached to tradition, the more local the better, not a word against the European Defence Community, but for that very reason it was the antiquarian's duty to foster the sense of difference, for example the difference between the inhabitants of Basle and those of Zürich; for what were Europe's fraternal armies to defend if not the prerogative of being different, even over very short distances?

As I have said, they were the pleasantest of people. Afterwards, I asked myself why I couldn't really feel myself their friend. I have offended them, without saying anything. My cell grows lonelier after every visit.

***

Dreamed of Julika. Almost exactly the same again: She is sitting in a boulevard café among a crowd of people, trying to write to me, her pencil held to her lips like a schoolgirl in difficulties. I try to go to her, but am arrested by three foreign (German) soldiers and know that Julika has betrayed me. Our eyes meet. The men in helmets drag me away, I want to curse Julika, but her mute gaze beseeches me not to believe what she has written, she was forced to write it, I forced her. When I ask if I am going to be shot, the three soldiers laugh. One of them says: No, we crucify now. After feeling very frightened I find myself working in a camp. We have to pin photographs to trees with drawing pins, that's what they call 'crucifying', nothing else. I 'crucify' Julika, the ballerina...

***

It is hard not to tire in the face of the world, in the face of its majority, in the face of its superiority, which there is no denying. It is difficult, alone and without witnesses, to know what one believes one has learnt in a solitary hour, difficult to carry a knowledge that can never be proved nor even uttered. I know I am not the missing Stiller. And I never was. I swear it, even if I do not know who else I am. Perhaps I am no one. And even if they can prove to me in black and white that of all people who are registered as having been born, only one is at present missing, Stiller, and that I am not in this world at all if I refuse to be Stiller, I shall still refuse. Why don't they give up trying? My behaviour is ludicrous, I know, my position is becoming untenable. But I am not the man they are looking for, and this certainty, the only one I possess, I shall not relinquish.

***

Julika is still in Paris.

***

That's not true. I cannot be alone, strictly speaking, and there has hardly been an hour in my life when I was able to be alone. Most of the time, strictly speaking, there was a woman present. It began with my dear, good mother. I just managed to scrape through my school-leaving certificate and I was glad on my mother's account, because my step-father couldn't say, 'Well, what about your precious son now?' Later I entered on my period of patriotic punishment with a federal blanket under my arm and spent nearly a whole summer in barracks, but I wasn't alone, because all the time I felt sorry for my mother, who was terribly upset by the whole thing. A host of hours, more hours than go to make a human life one would have thought, are on call in my memory, hours which I thought solitary—evenings in hotel rooms with a hubbub rising from foreign streets or a view into a courtyard, nights spent on railway stations, spring days in a public park filled with prams and a foreign language, then again afternoons in my usual pub, wanderings in rain and forest and in the certainty that I should never again speak to some person for whom I yearned, partings of all kinds, quick, clean, and straightforward partings, but also pitiable, whimpering, dragged-out, cowardly partings—a host of hours, as I said, and yet I was never alone, strictly speaking, not for an hour. I always found some inner escape route, a tender or tormented recollection, a passionate conversation with an invisible person who generally didn't exist at all, but whom I invented in order not to be alone, or the hope of a magnificent encounter at the next street-corner or the next street-corner but one. Is that solitude?