I'm Not Stiller (48 page)

***

(Interrupted again!)

***

The judgement of the court as expected: I am (for them) identical with the Anatol Ludwig Stiller, citizen of Zürich, sculptor, last address 11 Steingartengasse, Zürich, married to Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy, at present domiciled in Paris, who disappeared six years, nine months, and twenty-one days ago, and is now condemned to various fines in respect of the box on the ears inflicted on a Swiss customs officer, in repect of all sorts of acts of culpable negligence including failing to apply for permission to leave the country (as a result of which a hundred and seven different reminders have now been addressed to Stiller by various government departments); further, discharge of debts in respect of government tax, military tax, old age, and dependants insurance; further, damages in respect of a Swiss army rifle; plus one third of the legal costs: total 9,361.05 francs, payable within thirty days of the signature of the present judgement. Moreover: after conclusion of these proceedings remand in custody is to continue until possible connexions with the Smyrnov affair have been cleared up in the course of subsequent proceedings, if no appeal is lodged against the present judgement.

I waived the right to a final speech.

I waived the right to appeal.

Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy, as from today's date my legal wife, is now busy trying to console Herr Dr Bohnenblust, the counsel for the defence provided by the court. This man has done really everything he possibly could and deserves my heartfelt gratitude. I had intended to give expression to a kind of gratitude, but then forgot all about it. Herr Direktor Schmitz, the millionaire, was also in court; he has lodged an action for slander as from today's date. As regards the Smyrnov affair I shall very soon disappoint the federal police, who have now taken me over: assuming that the good Theo Hofer, my former comrade in Spain, a Czech, who later lived in the Bronx, New York, as a hairdresser and took me in when I first arrived in America, is still alive, it should be possible to produce my alibi for the relevant date, 18.1.1946, within a few days.

I have just heard Julika coming along the corridor—

My angel, keep me on the alert.

***

P.S. Wilfried Stiller, my brother, has volunteered to assume responsibility for the sum of 9,361.05 Swiss francs. I thank him!

W
E
were sorry that Stiller, after writing the foregoing 'Notes in Prison'—reproduced here unabridged and of course unaltered, with the permission of those of the people involved who are still alive—did not follow them up with 'Notes in Freedom'. Our attempts to persuade him did not shake his resolve for a moment. Stiller felt no urge to continue his notes. Subsequently, we realized ourselves that it was a mistake to try and persuade him. His sudden loss of voice, if one wants to call it that, was in fact an essential, perhaps even the decisive step towards his inner liberation—a liberation which we could observe not only in our friend himself, but even more clearly in those nearest to him and in an almost imperceptibly slow but nevertheless real change in our relationship with him. It became possible to be his friend: Stiller had become free of the morbid impulse to convince.

***

The Smyrnov affair requires no further mention here. Stiller's alibi for the crucial date was irrefutable: long before 18.1.1946 he was in New York, where he stayed for the first few weeks with his Czech friend. Stiller could not prove this until he had given up denying his identity. His indifference towards this suspicion seemed to me genuine from the very first, more genuine than most of what he said and wrote while remanded in custody. On the other hand the authorities, lacking personal knowledge of the man, could not understand why Stiller denied his obvious identity so obstinately, and they felt obliged to examine any possible links with previously unsolved crimes, as indeed was their duty. Among the unsolved crimes which had to be considered were two Zürich murders; about these Stiller knew nothing. In evpry instance an unambiguously negative verdict was quickly reached, and his release took place the same month.

Stiller lived first in a small
pension
on Lake Geneva, accompanied by his wife, who was resolved to live with him again. Both of them probably found it difficult to imagine how their life together would work out. For my part I was more than curious. He preferred not to move into our small, primitive but heatable country cottage on the Förch, 'because it's too damned close to Zürich'. Fortunately his home town had decided, after tough opposition inside the council, to give him two thousand francs as an encouragement, a sum which, at that time, was sufficient to keep a married couple going for two or three months. So they lived on this and the hope of further miracles beside Lake Geneva. We found it hard to imagine Stiller at Territet, a district which, to the best of our recollection, consisted of hotels, tennis courts, funicular railways, and chalets with turrets and garden gnomes. But friends had been able to make arrangements on a friendly basis for him there.

When we heard absolutely nothing from them over Christmas we began to feel worried. Then Stiller's first letter arrived at last, still addressed to 'My dear friend and prosecutor' and asking for the loan of an electric cooker. It was winter, and apart
from
a hot breakfast included in their arrangements, they were living on cold snacks in their hotel bedroom. In this short letter Stiller thanked me 'for everything' with an alarming servility. We felt anxious about the two of them, a possibly attractive but isolated hotel bedroom in a holiday resort out of season appeared to us the most unpromising setting for this couple's renewed encounter with each other.

Eventually, one week-end towards the end of February, my wife and I drove out to Territet and found them both, tanned by the sun, in a really pleasant little room with a small balcony that afforded a little extra space; their piled-up trunks made the room even smaller. Seen from their window, Lake Geneva looked all the larger by contrast. Stiller behaved gaily, a little too gaily; he took his wife by the arm and introduced 'a couple of Swiss inland emigrants'. Any mention of their future was avoided. Downstairs in the dining-room we none of us succeeded in passing beyond a rather laborious conversation. Although the room was practically empty and the whole place had a family atmosphere, Stiller and his wife sat there as awkwardly as though they had never dined off a white tablecloth before. Apart from ourselves there was hardly anyone in the dining-room—an aged Englishman who was partially paralysed, so that a nurse had to cut up his meat for him, and a French marquis reading a book over his soup, outsiders, solitaries, except for a young German couple whose wedding rings, as I noticed immediately, were not of the same gold, two happy but strikingly shy people. A young waiter, a German Swiss, made them blush scarlet with his French. Anyhow, we could see no reason why Stiller and his wife should be so ill at ease.

Unfortunately it rained the whole week-end. Walking was out of the question, and Stiller and his wife fought shy of the empty lounge. So we spent almost the whole time sitting in their small bedroom among the trunks. I cannot remember any particular conversation, but their appearance has stuck in my mind. His wife, elegant even in shabby clothes, kept walking up and down, said practically nothing, listened to other people and smoked incessantly. They looked to us like Russians in Paris, or, as my wife said, like German Jews in New York—people to whom nothing belonged. Frau Julika and my wife were meeting for the first time; apart from conventional politenesses they hardly exchanged a word. Stiller made severed attempts to save the situation with his humour. AH in all it was depressing, an endless afternoon with rain on the window, tea, and a great deal of smoke, really a disappointment—probably for all parties. Their money was running out, it was easy to guess that. It seemed virtually impossible to find work at all in keeping with their abilities, for which there was not much demand. To return to the Paris dancing school, which incidentally did not belong to Frau Julika, but to Monsieur Dmitritch, was presumably out of the question. Stiller laughed about this utterly hopeless outlook. Frau Julika stood waiting for the water in the electric cooker, her slender hands in the pockets of her tailor-made costume, smoking, while Stiller squatted on a trunk, his hands clasped round his updrawn knees. One had the feeling that they must live very much the same when they were alone together, perfectly friendly and therefore rather taciturn, two people in chains who had the good sense to put up with one another. Stiller asked for books.

For a long time we heard nothing of them. I couldn't think of anything to write myself, after our visit even less than before. I felt I ought to write, but I just didn't know what to say. I sent a large parcel of books, including Kierkegaard, but received no reply. For months the Stillers seemed not to exist. We felt that in any case they had probably changed their address. We give little thought to people whose life we cannot visualize, even if we imagine they may need us. I neglected them completely; my wife, for her part, had different reasons for feeling she couldn't write, worthier reasons.

After about half a year, in the late summer, came the elated letter in which Stiller announced: 'As a reward from God for all the months I spent in the remand prison, we have just found, rented, and moved into the house of our dreams,
une ferme vaudoise!'
We breathed a sigh of relief. It really seemed to be a godsend. A fabulously low rent suggested an equally fabulous state of dilapidation, but our friend did not tire of singing the praises of his
ferme vaudoise
in lengthy descriptions. Anyhow, he seemed to be thoroughly happy. We had to imagine a capacious house, originally a Vaudois farm-house, perhaps even a winegrower's house, Stiller wasn't sure about that; attached to it were a vineyard, a wine-press of venerable age, an airy barn that made an ample studio, and an avenue of plane-trees that gave the whole estate a manorial touch. In other letters they were not planes, but elms. In subsequent letters the barn vanished altogether. Instead other joys made their appearance: Stiller suddenly wrote about the old well in the courtyard, whose wrought ironwork he drew for us, about the beehive or the rose garden. He described all this with affectionate good-humour as rather overgrown, rather rusty, rather dried up, and everything was smothered in dark ivy. At times our imagination was severely strained, especially as we knew the district round Glion. We could only suppose that our happy friend was exaggerating a bit. Sketches by his hand showed a steep tiled roof with ends as well as sides inclined, as is usual in the Vaud, a broad terrace with fruit trees all round and in the background the mountains of Savoy; the avenue with the eighty elms was missing. My wife took the liberty of inquiring about this. A special sketch—as a sketch so charming that we hung it up in a passepartout—showed the interior with a great farmhouse chimney and Frau Julika kneeling in front of it making up the fire; on the edge of the sheet was a cordial invitation to a
raclette.

'When are you coming?' every letter
soon
began. At the end of the letter he wrote: 'I must impress on you once again that you can't come here with the car. Nobody will be able to tell you the way. Just garage your car at Montreux. I'll come and fetch you; otherwise you will never find my
ferme vaudoist?

Winter came and we did not see Stiller. He hadn't the money to come to Zurich, and no desire, even if we had invited him. Spring also went by without a meeting. Today this surprises me. Stiller wrote to us quite often; Frau Julika appeared in his letters fairly frequently. We knew that she had worked for a time as shop assistant in a grocery. But on the important point, their married life together, his letters gave not the slightest hint. Instead he devoted two or three pages to descriptions of sunsets. Fundamentally he said nothing at all; to me it was always as though his letters had reached me in a bottle carried by the waves from some distant outpost, and I had no right to break his silence as in a legal interrogation, either by a direct or leading question or by putting a provocative misconstruction on what he had said. He did his best to write in a humorous vein.

suppose you don't believe that I have found the house of my dreams,' he wrote again. 'Why don't you come? I admit we see Chillon Castle and the Dents du Midi, and that when the west wind is blowing you can hear the State Railway, loudspeakers from an international regatta, and the jingle-jangle of dance orchestras playing for the visitors to our spa, and I don't deny that you can see from here a few Montreux hotels, the whole lot in fact, but we are simply above them, inwardly above them as well, you know. You'll see! The cellar—I haven't told you about this before—is full of empty barrels, if you shout into them your flesh creeps at the sound of your own voice, and if you keep quite still you can hear the mice in the beams, perhaps rats too, anyhow it's a sign that the beams are genuine, and that's the point, you see, everything here is genuine, even the swallows under my roof that I have spent a whole week patching up to the perpetual horror of Julika, who was afraid I might fall off. And yet I am now caution personified, I cling to life as never before, you see I always have the feeling death is on my heels—that's quite natural, you know, a sign of life. Seriously, I have rarely felt like this: I almost always look forward to the next morning and only hope the following day will be like the one that has just gone by, for the present suffices me to an extent that is often astounding. And then I'm going to fit up a workshop, I can't spend all my time reading your Kierkegaard and similar heavy stuff, I've got to tie up vines, pull up weeds, and then buy glass-paper, artificial fertilizer, snail powder—as you can see, it is a case of
retour á la nature.
By the way, will you tell your wife they're not planes, but elms, unfortunately diseased like almost all elms nowadays, nobody can explain why; elms don't like our times and when they have to be felled it cuts us to the quick, even if they belong to our neighbours. Will you see them before they go? I'm already waiting for you in spirit on the platform at Montreux; then I shall lead you up a rather steep and stony
vieux sentier
flanked by vine-clad walls that is as hot as an oven in
summer,
but more airy in autumn, overgrown with moss for decades and only used today by woodcutters and
le minage
Stiller (pronounced Stillair). But why should I describe this countryside to you? You can read about it in your, and now also my, beloved Ramuz. When are you coming at last? I beg you, come before the old walls tumble down, the moss covers my feet, and ivy grows out of our eyes.'