I'm Not Stiller (54 page)

'You don't think,' he asked, 'that Julika is going to die?' At this I said something imprudent: 'As long as your telephone doesn't ring, Stiller, there's no reason to fear anything of the sort.' Once it was said it was said, and I could not take back the senseless remark that had given his fear a physical object to which it could attach itself. Stiller looked at the black telephone. So I went on speaking, 'You must be prepared for that,' I said. 'One day Julika, too, will die. Sooner or later. Like the rest of us. You must be prepared for that now.' Stiller smoked and said nothing. I had no idea what he was thinking. At last he threw his cigarette into the fireplace, or at least close to it, ready to bring the conversation to a final close. I was freezing: the fire was going out and there was no more wood. 'It was probably a good thing,' I said, descending to clichés again, 'for us to have had this talk—' Stiller nodded without conviction and continued to sit on the clothes press, supported on his outspread arms; he seemed to be waiting for strength. 'The truth is, I'm at exactly the point where I ought to have begun two years ago,' he remarked, 'not a step further. Only another two yean have been lost—I don't want to bore you, Rolf, but...' He saw that I was shivering. 'Rolf,' he said, 'everything would have been all right. Without a miracle, believe me, we should have got on all right, the two of us, just as we are—not then, but now; I mean two years ago. Now for the first time, here and now...' Stiller didn't want to cry, he fought against it and stood up. This morning in the hospital,' he said,'—no, that was yesterday—' Tears streamed all over his face, which was in no way that of a man in tears; he tried to say something. 'Everything would have been all right—' he repeated, but got no further. 'Then it will be all right!' I said. 'It will be all right!'

What happened next was strange; for a time we both acted as though Stiller was not crying at all. He stood somewhere in the room, his hands in his trouser pockets, unable to speak. I saw his back, not his face, knew that Stiller was crying and because he was crying could hear nothing, and talked about his 'notebooks', simply to avoid being a mute spectator.'—anyhow, you know the essential point,' I said among other things, 'you know that nothing is settled by putting a bullet in your temple, for example. How one learns that is something that cannot be described. But you know it, unimaginable as it is. Perhaps you have a queer idea of what it means to believe; perhaps you think one is certain when one believes, so to speak wise and saved and so on. You feel yourself to be anything but certain, so you simply don't believe you're a believer. Isn't that so? You can't picture God, so you tell yourself you have never experienced Him...' Stiller seemed glad I was talking. 'As far as I know your life,' I said, 'you have again and again thrown everything away because you were uncertain. You are not truth. You are a man and you have often been willing to give up an untruth, to be uncertain. What else does that mean, Stiller, but that you believe in a truth? And in a truth that we cannot change and cannot even kill—a truth that is life.'

The grandfather clock out in the hall began to clank as it always did before striking the hour; it was three o'clock. 'I got an odd impression from your notebooks,' I went on, for the sake of something else to say. 'You kept trying to accept yourself without accepting anything like God. And now this proves an impossibility. He is the power which can help you really to accept yourself. You've learnt all that. And yet you say you can't pray; you write it too. You cling to your powerlessness, which you take for your personality, and yet you know your powerlessness so well—and all this as though out of spite because you are not power. Isn't that so?' Of course Stiller didn't answer. 'You feel it must compel you, otherwise it's not genuine. You don't want to kid yourself. You're annoyed because you have to beg for belief; then you're afraid God might simply be your own invention...'

I went on talking for a long time before finally coming to a stop. As I have said, I did not expect Stiller to listen: I only talked to avoid being a mute spectator of his weeping. His thoughts were elsewhere. 'Her face,' said Stiller, 'that isn't her face at all, it never was—!' He was unable to express himself any further. Stiller was now crying as I have rarely seen a man cry. And all the time he stood there with his hands in his trouser pockets. I didn't leave the room; my presence no longer carried any weight ... During those minutes I made a great effort to recall her face, but only saw it as it was last autumn, when it was no longer a face at all; I saw her sobbing with her mouth wide open and rigid, her equally rigid fists in her lap, the dumb trembling of a blind body filled with the fear of death; but I didn't want to be reminded of that now. I resolved to go to the hospital myself the following morning, to see Frau Julika, if only for a moment.

'Say something,' begged Stiller when, finally exhausted by his crying, he became aware of my presence again. 'I've said all I can say to you: Julika hasn't died,' I repeated, 'and you love her.' At this Stiller looked at me as though I had uttered a revelation. His legs were still unsteady, his eyes watery, but his head was sober, I believe. He made some complimentary remark about our friendship, about my kindness in staying up with him again almost a whole night, and rubbed his waxen forehead. 'If you've got a headache,' I said, 'I have some Sari-done tablets upstairs.' His thoughts were already elsewhere again. 'You're right,' he repeated several times, 'I shall see her at nine o'clock tomorrow—' At last we stood in the doorway, I myself utterly exhausted, and Stiller put out the chandelier with its watery light. 'Pray for me that she shall not die!' I heard him say, and suddenly we were in darkness: Stiller had forgotten to switch the hall light on first. 'I love her—' I heard him say. At last Stiller found the hall switch, and we shook hands and said good night. Stiller went out into the garden. 'I must have some air,' he said, 'I've certainly had too much to drink,' He was very calm.

The following morning, Easter Monday, my wife and I came downstairs at about nine o'clock. Our breakfast was standing ready on the table by the open window—coffee under the cosy and places laid with everything complete for two people. Neither salt cellar nor ashtray were missing. The soft-boiled eggs, one of them with '3 mins' written on it to show it was especially lightly boiled for Sibylle, as well as the toast under the table napkin, were still warm; our friend must have heard us washing and couldn't have been long out of the house. My wife had heard the crash during the night, but knew only that we had stayed up late talking. Naturally we assumed Stiller was already at the hospital. Our long conversation during the night seemed almost like a dream, lacking any true connexion with daylight reality, as we sat down at the table with the sun glinting on the knives and spoons and the exquisite view out over the forget-me-not-blue Lake Geneva to the snow-covered Savoy Alps. On the assumption that another satisfied client would come out of the hospital, we decided to drive on in the course of the day via Chfcbres, Yverdon, Murten, or Neuenburg and spend a day's holiday on our own on St Peter's Island in Lake Biel. The weather was absolutely glorious. A magnolia was already in full blossom in a neighbouring garden, forsythia was hanging over the fences in sheafs of brilliant yellow, the blood-red funicular railway came down empty between green slopes covered in cowslips and went up full of trippers. It was a world painted in colours of positively childish brilliance, such as are only appropriate to an Easter day; the birds were twittering so loud they were really noisy, and a white pleasure steamer was chugging across the lake to Chillon Castle, somewhere in the distance a brass band was playing Sunday music, the State Railway rumbled by.

Stiller came in while we were still comfortably breakfasting. Our immediate but rather anxious question, how's it going? naturally referred to Frau Julika; our friend had not come from the hospital, however, but from his underground chamber. Stiller hadn't slept a wink; he had probably spent the rest of the night in the garden and the early morning in his pottery. Of course he looked pale and exhausted. Why he hadn't gone to the hospital at nine o'clock I don't know; he was still unshaven too. Was he afraid? With apparent optimism, as though Frau Julika was on the point of being discharged from the hospital, he talked about something else. He hadn't even telephoned. He asked me to call at the hospital and tell his wife he would come around eleven o'clock. Not one of his excuses would hold water. He had to shave! Then again we heard that some V.I.P. who was passing that way had asked to see his pottery and was arriving at about ten—which was true, but not an adequate excuse. Perhaps Stiller felt ashamed to stand beside the sick-bed stinking of liquor. He kept his distance from my wife too, in a way that couldn't be overlooked. 'I stink,' he said. A real or fancied odour of wine was no reason for not at least ringing the hospital, but Stiller didn't want to. I couldn't force him.

In the end my wife and I drove to the nearby Val Mont Hospital, where my wife waited in the car; it was bound to be only a short visit, if a visit from someone not a relative was allowed at all. I felt a real desire at least to see Frau Julika before we drove on. The moment I announced myself I knew what had happened. I had to wait another anxious quarter of an hour in a sunny corridor with flower vases standing in front of the doors and silent nurses hurrying this way and that, before the young doctor informed me of her decease. At my urgent request he promised that Herr Stiller should not be notified over the telephone. Death had supervened half an hour earlier, and it had obviously come as a surprise to the doctor. My other wish, to see Frau Stiller, was at first refused. But in the end my face (I was probably crying) was sufficient to make the doctor change his mind—or was it my identity papers? Anyhow, the matron was told to take me to the dead woman.

'Her hair is red, very red in fact, in keeping with the new fashion, not like rose-hip jam, however, but more like dry minium powder. Very curious. And with it a very fine complexion—alabaster with freckles. Also very curious, but beautiful. And her eyes? I should say they are glittering, somehow watery, even when she is not crying, bluish-green like the edges of colourless window-glass. Unfortunately her eyebrows have been plucked to a thin line, which gives her face a graceful hardness, but also a slightly masklike appearance, as though perpetually miming surprise. Her nose looks very aristocratic, especially from the side; there is a great deal of involuntary expression in the nostrils. Her lips are rather thin for my taste, not without sensuality, but they must first be aroused. Her loose hair is gloriously silky and as light as gossamer. Her front teeth are splendid, not without fillings, but otherwise gleaming like mother of pearl. I looked at her as though she were an object; as though she were just any unknown woman...' That was exactly how she lay on the deathbed, and I suddenly had the monstrous feeling that from the very beginning Stiller had only seen her as a dead woman; for the first time, too, I felt the deep unqualified consciousness of his sin, a consciousness no human word would obliterate.

The only thing left was to bring the heavy tidings to my friend. A few words were enough; Stiller already knew. Although almost an hour had passed since I left the hospital, they had not telephoned; but he knew the moment he saw me, and I believe Stiller uttered my news himself; I won't say 'calmly', for it was the terrifying calm of someone whose mind is wandering. I waited a long time to drive Stiller to the hospital. He went up to his room, to fetch his coat, so he said. We heard nothing, no footsteps, no sobs, only the noise of the birds outside, and after a time my wife was manifestly afraid our friend might have done something to himself. I didn't believe this for an instant, but as he still didn't come I went upstairs and knocked at his door. There was no answer, so I went in. Stiller was standing in the middle of the room, his hands in his trouser pockets as so often. 'I'm coming,' he said. I drove him to the hospital and waited outside in the car. The picture of the dead woman was so much stronger than anything I could see with open eyes—the picture of a being who was dead and had never been recognized by anyone while she was alive, least of all by the one who had striven for her with his human love. After a quarter of an hour Stiller came back and sat down beside me in the car, 'She is beautiful,' he said. I had my leave extended and remained in Glion for a few days, after my wife had left, to relieve him of all sorts of things that have to be done after a death. Moreover, I had the feeling that Stiller needed me, although there were no further conversations between us. The medical report did not interest him and there was little else to say; the decision had been reached. The evening after the little funeral in an alien cemetery, when I had to leave him, Stiller was working in his underground chamber, or at least trying to. He accompanied me to the little iron gate with the funny notice-board, his thoughts elsewhere, so that I had to shake hands with him two or three times. We saw one another now and then; he made no more late-night telephone calls and his letters were uncommunicative. Stiller remained in Glion and lived alone.