I'm Not Stiller (52 page)

After a time our lady urged that we should continue our walk. The late afternoon, although still just as cloudless, seemed to be part of quite a different day from the morning. I felt as though the morning lay years back in the past. On the way home Stiller talked about almost nothing but Frau Julika. I have never heard her express any regret at not having children; Stiller was convinced that she did regret it and made this regret his own, or the other way round. He spoke without reproach, without self-reproach. No doubt things couldn't have been different, he commented, but his voice was heavy with regret. Finally, as we stood beside the funicular railway, he concluded with the remark: 'It's a pity you never had a chance of really getting to know Julika!' When I answered that there was still plenty of time, Stiller seemed shocked by what he himself had said.

Stiller came back very quickly from his visit that Easter Sunday evening. She was doing fine! he reported. The doctor had asked him not to go in and see her. 'I can come back tomorrow,' said Stiller and immediately dispersed our secret alarm: 'She's doing fine, but she still needs complete rest.' We all understood, and Stiller was very optimistic; there was nothing to prevent him from preparing the
raclette
he had so often promised, from organizing a sociable and jolly evening, making up an open fire, chilling white wine and cutting three pointed sticks with which to toast the cheese over the fire. Of course it was no farmhouse chimneypiece like that shown in his sketch, but rather an over-decorated fake marble fireplace in an equally spurious
art nouveau
style. By German-Swiss standards, at least, our
raclette
was highly successful; we were hungry after our walk. Stiller drank a great deal. Whenever the party seemed on the verge of breaking up, he uncorked another bottle, and we carried on like this to the accompaniment of desultory conversation till eleven o'clock. He wasn't drunk. He drank hurriedly in little sips from the slender Vaudois white-wine glasses and remained more awake than we. But we could see he wasn't listening to anything we said. His eyes seemed close to tears. Even when I tried to talk about Frau Julika, he didn't listen. It was all a great strain. Perhaps if he had been alone with either of us, my wife or me, he would have felt like talking. But there we sat, the three of us, and all we could produce was a rather cheap attempt at gaiety, to which Stiller contributed more than we did. After an hour of relative conviviality, we said good night and went up to our room in the turret. Stiller remained standing in the hall down below—just as after his nightly telephone calls, without any salutation at the end, not even in response to our repeated 'good nights'; I thought it shocking bad manners, a sentimental kind of coercion, the way he stood there without a word until I broke off, either by replacing the receiver or by shutting the door ... Despite our fatigue, my wife and I could not sleep.

Around one o'clock I got up again. The light was out in the hall, but not in the living-room, and I went downstairs just as I was, in pyjamas and bare-foot, hence almost soundlessly. Our friend was sitting in front of the cold fireplace and seemed to have fallen asleep. I went over, intending to cover him up with something. But his eyes were open. 'Why aren't you asleep?' he said, and his voice was thick. Stiller was now very drunk. 'There's no point in drinking any more...' I said. He filled his glass again as though in defiance and looked me up and down. I said all sorts of sensible things. Stiller drained his glass, and as he rose to his feet he staggered visibly. 'Childish,' he said, 'I've drunk too much, I know it's in bad taste, disgusting, childish...' He shook his head and glanced round as though he had lost something, supporting himself on the back of a chair. 'Is she going to die?' he asked, without looking at me. I tried to calm him, but he didn't hear a word I said: he had picked up the fire tongs and didn't know what to do with them. His eyes were swimming in tears, which didn't impress me, in view of his drunkenness. 'Come,' I said, 'let's go to bed.' He looked at me. 'Yesterday afternoon,' he began, 'when I thought she was dying—yesterday afternoon...' I waited in vain; he didn't finish the sentence. Stiller had not reckoned with having someone to talk to, now he was prevented by the knowledge that his speech was thick. 'Too late,' he said laconically. 'What's too late?' I inquired. I was beginning to shiver. 'Everything,' he replied at last. 'Two years, my dear fellow, two years! I've tried, God knows, I've tried—' He belched wine. 'Pardon,' he said and fell silent. Perhaps he was less drunk than I had first thought. He had started to say something, I reminded him: 'You've tried—?' Now he had to sit down again. 'It doesn't matter,' he said.

I had never seen Stiller in this state and I felt sorry for him in his physical and mental discomfort that was at the same time ridiculous. I didn't know what to do. I felt that my common-sense approach was very shallow, is she going to die?' he asked as though for the first time, his head in his hands; he seemed to be giddy. 'You talked to the doctor yourself,' I replied. 'What did the doctor tell you? Exacdy?' Even when he was sitting down he swayed, without noticing it, nor did he notice that he kept taking hold of the matches by the wrong end; finally he gave it up and sat with an unlit, bent and crushed cigarette in his mouth, it's never too late,' I said, found this a sadly commonplace remark and then couldn't remember what I had really wanted to say. 'Never too late!' he said with a dull laugh. 'Just make a fresh start. And suppose it just can't be done—because it's too late?' All of a sudden Stiller seemed to be much more wide awake. 'Rolf,' he said quite clearly, quite firmly, in spite of his thick voice,'—I can kill a person, but can't bring her back to life again...' And he evidently imagined that explained everything. He reached for the bottle again, but fortunately it was empty and only a few drops trickled out. 'What,' I inquired, 'what can't be done?' He merely shook his head. 'Do you love her, then?' I asked. 'Do you want to—' He shook his head, without having heard me. 'She can't take anything more from me,' he said, 'can't take anything more from me. She says so herself. "Leave me alone," she says, and there you stand. Honest as she is. I don't know what's wrong, Rolf. I never ask. I've ruined that woman...' His fingers were twisting the disintegrating cigarette and trembling, but at least he had started talking. 'I'm driving her mad. I know. I'm always expecting something. A miracle! And then I start trembling the moment I see her. My mistake, maybe. Probably. She hasn't changed much. No desire to change. "Leave me alone," she says, and there you stand. I can't make her out. That's all there is to it. I can't make contact with her. Then I hate her. I perish ifl can't love, and she—' He tore his cigarette in shreds. 'How do you know, Stiller, that she too doesn't—' He shook his head. 'Stiller,' I said, 'you're self-righteous.'—'Isn't she?'—'Her self-righteousness is her own affair,' I commented. He said nothing. 'What do you mean by love?' I asked, but meanwhile Stiller had found another bottle, which nearly filled his glass after all. 'Stop that drinking!' I told him. He drank. 'That's absurd,' he said, 'you're shivering, Rolf, you've got no slippers on ... What do I mean by love?' he mused and tried to drain the empty glass again: 'I can't love on my own, Rolf, I'm not a saint...'

It was really too cold now; I had looked around in vain for a rug or something of the sort, now I crouched down, snatched a newspaper from the low table and bundled it into the fireplace. There were still a few pine logs in the hearth and even a large beech stump. For a while I was occupied...

'What am I to do?' I suddenly heard Stiller at my back. 'What am I to do? What?' He had risen from the chair again and I just caught sight of him drumming with his fists against his forehead. He was chalky white and still unsteady on his legs; but the alcohol seemed to be leaving his brain. His speech was no longer thick. 'Why could I never make contact with that woman? Never. Not for one day, Rolf, not for one hour in all this time. Never! Why was that?' he asked. 'Tell me.'—'What did you expect?'—'Expect?' he asked back. 'Yes,' I repeated, 'what did you expect, Stiller, two years ago, I mean, when you came here? To live with one another. I'm asking you because I don't know. It seems to me you expected a transformation—on her part.'—'On my part, too.'—'Don't be offended,' I said lighting the fire, 'but that makes me think of novels. Transformation? A person realizes he has wronged somebody, and himself as well, and one day he is prepared to make amends for everything—provided the other person is transformed ... Isn't such an expectation a bit cheap, my dear fellow?'—'Like everything about me,' I heard him say. I disregarded this and asked: 'What did you really expect?' Stiller seemed to be thinking it over, I had to busy myself with the fire. 'Everything—except what was humanly possible,' I finally answered myself. 'Even in your letters it sometimes seems to me as though you are not talking about love at all, but about tenderness, about well, yes, about Eros in some form or other. Men of our age need that, Stiller, and I think it's wonderful if one has it ... Only,' I added, 'that's not the point here.'

The fire was now crackling cheerfully, and Stiller was leaving all the talking to me, more than I fancied. But now I had started. 'Things don't go right, you said, and that really surprises you? After so many years experience? And then, you say, you've tried? There are times when one might imagine you think yourself a magician who can change this Frau Julika into her opposite. And all the time, it seems to me, that's the only thing you worry about—It's hard to put into words. Julika has become your whole life, Stiller, that's a fact. Why did you return from Mexico? Simply because you had come to realize that. What a couple you are ... Bring her to life! That's your old nonsense, Stiller, if you don't mind my saying so—your murderous conceit. You your own saviour!' Stiller said nothing. 'Over one point,' I went on after a pause, 'perhaps I understand you only too well. One gives in, one comes back in order to give in, but one never gives in for good and all. For then, who knows, it would be only spineless resignation, no more, a decision to make the best of things prompted by some sort of narrow-minded conventionality ... You tremble, you said, tremble! You tremble because again and again the same surrender is expected of you—Stiller ?' I called him, 'what are you thinking about?'

Stiller was standing; I was sitting on the stool, my bare feet stretched out to the warming fire; he said nothing. 'You don't imagine,' I said, 'that with a different, perhaps more open woman—Sibylle, for example—one can get over everything one has in oneself? Or do you imagine that?' As I turned round I only saw his face from below; he was staring over my head into the fire. 'You let me go on telling you a whole lot of stuff you already know,' I finished off.

Stiller wasn't asleep, he was standing with his hands-in his trouser pockets, and his eyes were open, awake, but empty, expressionless. 'Stiller,' I said, 'you love her!' He seemed to hear nothing at all. 'Tell me,' I said to him, 'if you want to be alone.' In the warmth streaming out from the glowing embers I suddenly felt my fatigue again and had to suppress a yawn. 'What's the time?' asked Stiller. It was getting on for two o'clock.'- She waited, you see, and I didn't wait. For her! From our first walk onwards. For her—for some sign, for some utterance, for help, for friends, for anything, for a single sign in all these years! I humiliated her, you see, and she didn't humiliate me!...Isn't that so?' he asked. 'Who says so?' I countered. Now he gazed at me with piercing eyes. 'Rolf,' he declared, 'she wants to die!' He only nodded: 'That's the way it is.' He was deaf to everything I produced for the next five to ten minutes by way of contradiction; he only spoke to murmur 'Pardon' when he belched wine!—'You'll keep on until one day it will really be too late, Stiller,' I said. 'Are you going to continue bickering even when she's in the hospital?'—'I know I'm being ridiculous,' he said. 'You've gone a long way, Stiller, you mustn't make yourself ridiculous. What you said just now, you don't believe yourself. Who ever dies to please or spite someone else? You overestimate your importance. I mean your importance to her. She doesn't need you as you would like to be needed ... Stiller,' I called, as he began to sink into himself once more, feigning drunkenness, 'why are you suddenly afraid she is going to die?'—'I overestimate my importance?'—'Yes,' I replied. 'This woman never made you her purpose in life. Only you made something of the sort of her, I think, from the beginning. As I've told you already, you set yourself up as her saviour, you wanted to be the one who gave her life and joy. You! That's the way you loved her, I'm sure, to the point of bleeding to death. You wanted her to be your creation. And now you're afraid she might die on you. She didn't become what you expected. An unfinished life's work!...'

Stiller walked over to the window and opened it. 'Are you feeling sick?' I asked. 'Why don't you sit down?' He turned his back to me and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. 'Just go on talking,' he begged. 'I'll get you some water,' I said, putting down the fire tongs ready to stand up. 'Did she write you many letters?' 'Only one,' I replied. 'Why?' He wiped his forehead again. 'Doesn't matter,' he said, dismissing the subject. 'I don't imagine, Stiller, that I understand your wife, that I understand her better than you do. We're almost complete strangers, your wife and I, we've scarcely talked to one another. Her letter was very short, anyhow.' He nodded sadly: 'You understand her. Yes, yes. It's lucky for her.' And then: 'I feel lousy, you must forgive me.' Nevertheless, Stiller didn't go out and relieve himself, as I had expected. He was like wax, and every time I saw his eyes I knew that there was actually only one question for him: Is she going to die? He made an effort to think about something else. And to that extent, he was glad someone was talking. 'Weren't you going to say something?' he asked. But I could no longer remember at what point our conversation had been interrupted.

Now I remarked casually: 'By the way ... I've read your papers.'—'Burn them!'—'What do you hope to gain by burning them?' I replied. 'That's what you wrote them for ... You've striven for this woman, as the saying goes. I understand her perhaps over one single point. Who would ever think of asking his saviour how he was himself? In all those years, you see, she got used to the idea that you didn't want to be a poor, weak man, but her saviour.' Stiller smiled. 'Why don't you say it straight out?' I didn't know what he meant, his vague smile baffled me. When I looked at him he was shaking in every limb; he had the shivers, it's nothing,' he said, 'just this idiotic drinking!' At this I steered him over to the only chair with a high back against which he could rest his head, and shut the window. 'Wouldn't it be better,' I asked, 'if I were to take you up to bed?' He shook his head. I placed the beech stump in the glowing embers. 'What can I do?' he asked from under the hands that supported his face. 'I can't be born again, Rolf. I don't want to, either ... What have I done wrong? Tell me. I don't know. What have I done? Tell me, I'm an idiot. Tell me!'—'I've read your papers,' I repeated. 'In them you know quite a lot.' He took his hands away from his face, if knowing would do it!' he said and sat for a long time unspeaking, his hands dangling, his elbows resting on his knees. 'Do you remember last autumn,' he asked, 'the evening the three of us spent together? It was nothing special. But everything went smoothly.