I'm Not Stiller (51 page)

Things were, understandably, most difficult in relation to Fraujulika, his wife from before; with her he had the greatest temptation to relapse into old fears and destructive perplexities, to be at a less advanced level of development than he really was in relation to other people. A shared past is no small matter; the habituation that springs up whenever our energy is naturally at a low ebb, the habits that present themselves at every stop, can be diabolical. They are like water-weeds to a swimmer—who doesn't know that? On the other hand, I believe, our friend was now aware of the impossibility of flight: it was no use starting a new life by simply leaving the old one behind. Was not Stiller's main concern really to do away with the past in his relationship with this woman, the sterile force that had knit the two of them together, not to flee it but to melt it down in the new living present? Otherwise this new present would never become quite real. That's what it was all about—to realize potentialities or suffer failure, to breathe or suffocate, in this sense to live or die; more accurately, to live or waste away. Naturally, the relationship with a woman, in the sense of marriage, need not always become this ultimate touchstone; in this case it had become so. There are all kinds of touchstones: Stiller had found his. Our hope, as I have already mentioned, was based on our own happy experience that Stiller, at least in his dealings with his friends, had attained a living, fearless, not merely willed but real and natural openness, that the further he penetrated into himself the more he was able to pay heed to people and things outside himself. These he loved or hated. Caux, for example, he hated wholeheartedly and intolerantly, and boundlessly. Stiller remained a man of temperament, a turbulent spirit; there was no gentle universal love in our friend, but more love than ever before in his life, I believe, and it was to be hoped that this love would also reach Frau Julika, who had such need of it.

The winter passed without another meeting. Naturally I waited from letter to letter to hear that the operation was imminent or perhaps even happily over. I interpreted every remark I could not understand ('P.S. How does one behave under a curse?') as meaning that our friend was now also informed. But the very next letter proved me wrong, since he barely replied to my inquiry after Julika's state of health, or said itwas excellent. Meanwhile it was already February. The dreaded operation seemed to have been unnecessary after all, and in my relief I was merely surprised that Frau Julika, knowing my concern, had never written about it. But that was her way. At one point the seven notebooks he had filled in custody arrived. 'Here are my papers' was the only comment Stiller made in his letter. Why he had sent these notebooks, which I never expected to receive, was not clear to me. Did he want them out of the house so as not to be haunted by their ghost? After reading bits of them, I hoped more than ever that Stiller would at last be able to advance to a condition of living reality also in his relationship to Frau Julika, who appeared to me in these papers as having been shockingly misrepresented; at the same time the fear crept over me that time would be too short.

***

The operation took place in March. We were unaware of the fact, my wife and I, when we went to Glion for Easter. Our visit of two or three days, to be combined with a short trip through France, had been arranged long ago. To our surprise, the doors of
MON REPOS
were locked and bolted. For a while, as I walked round the chalet and shouted from every side, I had the feeling that Stiller and his wife were no longer there, no longer in Glion, no longer on the earth, that they had vanished, leaving behind them this nauseating example of architectural bad taste that had never belonged to them. The glass door of the underground chamber was not locked, but there was no one in the pottery. Nevertheless there were signs of recent work here: a once blue, now washed-out apron lay on the table as though flung down in haste, a lump of damp clay stood on the wheel. We decided to wait. It was a rainy day, mist hung over Lake Geneva; we sat in our raincoats on the wet balustrade, doing our best to convince one another that there was nothing to worry about. The wet and hence especially shiny garden gnomes, the house with its ivy and the brick turret, the rusty iron fence, the fake marble tablet bearing the inscription, of which the letters had mostly fallen out, the wet and consequently blackish moss and the cracked fountain—everything was still there and totally unchanged, but in the absence of sunshine extremely lugubrious. We tried to cheer ourselves up by cracking jokes, but with no success. The red funicular railway was empty. After an hour dusk began to fall; the State Railway ran along the floor of the valley with its lights on, the hotels of Montreux were ablaze with light, around us was nothing but grey, and no light went on in our friend's house. Drops of water were dripping from the trees. 'Let's go to a hotel,' I suggested, 'and ring up later.' My wife was undecided. 'Now that we've waited so long...' she suggested. So we smoked one more cigarette. The lights of Montreux, although they did not stand up to the comparison, reminded us of the shimmering Babylon we had once seen at our feet, years ago, from the Rainbow Bar...

Stiller arrived without coat or hat and apologized for not having pinned a note on the door—he had actually forgotten all about us. He had just come from the Val Mont Hospital; Frau Julika had been operated on that morning. He addressed his not very clear explanations primarily to my wife, who sat on the balustrade as though paralysed, her hands in the pockets of her raincoat. It was now raining as well. Stiller, full of timid trust in the doctor's statement, reported that the operation had been successful, very successful indeed, as successful as it possibly could be. I wasn't sure whether he understood what the operation meant, whether he was merely minimizing it to us so as not to have to bear our horror too. Frau Julika hadn't recognized him and wasn't able to speak. A great deal now hung on this night, he explained, clinging to the doctor's permission for another visit to his wife next morning at nine o'clock as though it were an objective consolation.

'What are we standing here in the rain for?' he exclaimed. 'Let's go indoors, I'm glad you've come.' Indoors, in the light, he was deathly pale, busied himself with our cases, and insisted on cooking up a proper supper. My wife was no doubt right not to attempt to dissuade him, but actually to encourage him by saying she just felt like something hot to eat. 'Yes, that'll be nice, won't it?' he said. She also did very little to assist him; action was now the only thing that could possibly help our friend to relax. 'You know,' he declared to me, 'this operation is very common.' To hear him, one would have thought that people with two whole lungs were quite an exception. He cooked and prepared and laid the table in the kitchen, without taking off his jacket; if he had been wearing an overcoat, he wouldn't have taken that off either. It was as though he had only dropped in for a moment; and yet it was another fourteen hours before his morning visit to the nearby hospital. 'You know,' he said to me, 'it happened quite suddenly; it had to be done, the quicker the better.'

He cooked us a magnificent rice dish; of course we only ate to keep each other's courage up. We all smoked one or more cigarettes with the meal. My wife did the washing up, while Stiller dried; then she went to bed early. She had driven our car, and Stiller believed her when she said she was tired. Alone with me, from about nine o'clock on, he seemed to have no desire to speak of the crucial matter or of Frau Julika at all. We discovered that we had both played chess and wanted to find out whether we could still manage it. I couldn't remember where the castles and bishops went. He showed me. Even Stiller had forgotten which way round the board was supposed to go, whether there should be a white or a black square on the right-hand side. But we played. It was a kind of vigil. We played until four in the morning, when the darkness outside the window slowly turned to grey. A fine Easter day seemed to be breaking; the sky was starry. Stiller took it as a sign.

Frau Julika survived the night, all things considered she got through it excellently in fact, and our friend came back from the hospital like a man reprieved; we breathed a sigh of relief. On top of that it was a sunny morning and Easter; Stiller suggested we should go for a walk with him. 'She recognized me!' he said. I have never seen our friend so happy. We strolled along the riverside promenade to Chillon, my wife in between us. Stiller was very talkative in an absent-minded way, all sorts of things occurred to him in confusion—his brother's last visit, jokes, then he talked enthusiastically about new friends in Lausanne, about a book-seller and his girl-friend, the world was full of nice people. At intervals he fell very silent, and also deaf. On the sun-warmed stones of the railway embankment we watched the wriggling love-play of two lizards. I asked our friend what he had against Chillon Castle, which he had always referred to scornfully in his letters, not against the hackneyed little pictures on chocolates and musical boxes, but against the reality before our eyes. He had nothing against it, and we found Chillon Castle with its walls lit by the morning sunshine very beautiful. Stiller didn't even notice that I had been teasing him a little about his former disparagement of every thing to do with this country. (As regards this disparagement, which vexed me when I first read his notebooks—probably unjustly, since he never expressed himself in these terms to me—it is clear that once our friend accepted himself he had no further reason for playing the foreigner; he accepted the fact of being Swiss.) It was a hazy blue March day, the nearby Valais mountains appeared quite thin and light and silvery grey. 'How are your children?' he inquired. Rather ostentatiously, he always addressed me, never my wife, although she was walking between us. We lunched at the Hotel du Port, Villeneuve—fish washed down with wine from the nearby slopes. As was natural, at the back of his mind he was thinking almost incessantly of Frau Julika. I believe that from the hotel you can see the Val Mont Hospital. Between the soup and the main course, he rang up. 'She's sleeping,' he reported. Only Stiller remained completely clear in the head after the exquisite, but not exactly light white wine. Stiller had been drinking pretty regularly during the last few years.

The only sign here that it was Easter, once the morning bells of the churches had fallen silent, was an excessive quantity of traffic on the main road. We wandered into the Rhône delta, rather dazzled by the sun and muzzy from the wine. Fishing nets were hanging up to dry. Fishing skiffs lay bottom up on the riverbank waiting for a fresh coat of paint; others were floating in a canal surrounded by swans. 'On a working day you're quite alone here,' said Stiller, but even today there weren't many people about. Our path led through sparse woodland beside the reed beds. There were clumps of alders, birches, beeches, and here and there an oak; all the trees were still bare and so we could see a great deal of airy blue at the time. The ground was covered with the grey autumn leaves of the previous year, not yet hidden by any green growth, and in places the earth was almost black, a bog. I recollect this walk as one of the most enjoyable I ever went for. On the right, away over the dun-coloured reeds, we could see Lake Geneva; on the left the other blue of the equally broad, flat valley of the Rhône enclosed by precipitous mountains. Unusually large flocks of birds were gathering on a distant high-tension cable; we could not make out the species, but in any case they were gathering for their great flight northwards. Two lads in blue track trousers and stripped to the waist were burning reeds on a pile that gave off bright, transparent flames. The smoke recalled autumn, yet it was March and the birds were twittering. I regretted now that my head was heavy with wine, for a long time I walked along as though under a veil, and Stiller kept asking questions. He inquired about my work and my views on education. We found an utterly deserted spot on the riverbank, though it was really quite noisy: a hum of distant trains came to us over the water, we kept hearing the signals from a railway station, and all the time gurgling, rustling, whispering sounds came from among the reeds, birds cried and beat the smooth water with their wings as they they took off. The sun made us very warm, the soil, on the other hand, proved damp and cold. Stiller tore up the dry reeds in bundles to make a comfortable place for my wife to sit. He did not stop even when I offered him one of his favourite cigars, and finally it became a veritable nest; my wife gave his work the praise it deserved, lowered herself on to the dry reeds, and shut her eyes against the sun. Stiller stroked her brow with his hand. At moments like this, which were rare, I became very conscious of the past; then the present shared by the three of us astounded me, seeming impossible, or at least unexpected. So we smoked our cigars.

Unfortunately the obtrusive hotel up at Caux was again visible from here, and Stiller couldn't help launching out on the subject once more. His standpoint: 'They work miracles up there, no doubt about it, they produce Christianity not with the poor, but with the rich, where it apparently pays better, and they really manage to fix it so that one of those bandits, after he's collected sufficient swag, repents and spends two, three, four, or nine million for the peace of his soul, or at least so that a better ideology can quickly be opposed to Communism; he only keeps one single million for himself so that he shan't be a burden to the community in his old age. I can't stand that sort of Christianity. Seven millions are better than nothing, they say, and it's all given back in such a voluntary and human way, you know, so that the workers of the world, if they have any tact at all, can never take action against a bandit, for the possibility that one of these capitalist bandits may suddenly repent and improve the world from the centre outwards has been proved once and for all in that hotel up there—so please, if you want a better world, no revolutions please!'

My wife had meanwhile fallen asleep, and to avoid waking her by our voices Stiller and I walked down to the riverbank, where we discussed flints and other geological matters about which we knew practically nothing. Then we tried playing ducks and drakes, as we used to when we were boys, making flat stones bounce over the surface of the water. We took off our Sunday jackets and had a little competition. For a time everything seemed forgotten, we could see the Val Mont Hospital, but we knew that poor Frau Julika was, so to speak doing fine. We were really fascinated by our game.