I'm Not Stiller (9 page)

So much for the fairy tale.

'Well?' asked my counsel when I had finished telling it and finally lit my cigar. 'What has that to do with our matter? Your case is coming up for trial towards the end of September and you're telling me fairy stories—fairy stories!—is that what I'm supposed to present in youi; defence?'

'What else?'

'Fairy tales,' he complained. 'Instead of just for once telling me a plain and simple truth I can make use of!'

***

P.S. I have asked my counsel to bring me another notebook, because this one will soon be full. I haven't let him read it yet, and his earnest hope that this notebook will enable him, so to speak, to get my life into his brief-case, is gradually beginning to worry me.

***

Zürich could be a charming little town. It stands at the lower end of a delightful lake, whose hilly banks are not disfigured by factories, but by villas, and as we had such pleasant weather for our outing yesterday, a blue September sky with a thin silvery haze, I was really enchanted—not merely to please Frau Julika, whose generous bail makes it possible for me to go for trips like this every week, provided of course that I always return punctually to my prison. In this connexion, I am less bound by my oath, which I had to swear to my counsel to prevent him from coming with us, than by natural consideration for Julika; if I made off she would lose a sum I could never restore to her. Moreover, I'm allowed one or two glasses of whisky! She looks simply magnificent, this woman, I think so every time I see her with her fiery hair in the sunshine, the white Paris hat on top of it and her willowy figure—I'm simply enchanted.

Once, when I caught sight of her reflection in a shop-window again, I couldn't help turning round, taking her by the chin and kissing her.

'Anatol,' she said, 'this is Zürich!'

I am particularly enchanted by the position of their little town, which is embraced on both sides by tranquil hills and natural woods that tempt one to go for country walks, while in the centre there glitters a little green river that reveals the direction in which great oceans lie (as every watercourse does) and therefore always arouses a vital urge, a longing for the world, for seashores. It must be delightful to spend three weeks in Zürich, especially at this time of the year, if one is not in prison. At this time of year, too, as you can hear in the street, there are all sorts of foreigners in thé town. Not for nothing is Zürich's coat of arms blue and white; in the dazzling brightness of its windswept blue ornamented with the white of gulls—a brightness that is said to cause even the residents a great many headaches—this Zürich really has a charm of its own, a
cachet
that is to be sought in the air rather than anywhere else, a radiance that is in the armosphere and stands in curious contrast to the moroseness that marks the faces of those who live here, and something positively festal, something neat and decorative like its coat of arms, something blue and white without many special characteristics. It is, one might perhaps say, a town whose charm lies above all in its countryside; in any case, one can understand the foreigners who get out and take snaps from the quay before going on to Italy, and one can also understand the residents who are proud when people take a lot of snaps. Their narrow lake, about as wide as the Mississippi, gleams like a curved scythe in the green, undulating countryside. Even on workdays it is alive with little sailing boats. In spite of all its bustle there is still something of the spa about this Zürich, this meeting-place of businessmen.

Fortunately the Alps are not so close as on picture postcards; at a seemly distance they crown the undulating foothills, a spray of white névé and bluish clouds.

Perhaps Julika hasn't shown me the right parts of the town, looking back it strikes me that we haven't met a single beggar, and also no cripples. The people are not smartly dressed, but their clothes are made of good material, so that one never has to feel sorry for them, and the streets are clean from morning till evening. We stroll along for nearly an hour, unmolested by beggars, as I have said, and also undisturbed by outstanding works of architecture, which would have interrupted our conversation. The way they try to regulate the modern traffic is not always comprehensible to a foreigner, though the Swiss police take the greatest trouble and look very grave, and above all it would seem that they are more concerned about justice than about the traffic; at every crossing you feel you are undergoing some kind of moral training. The closer you come to the lake, where the foreigners create their own atmosphere, which they take to be the atmosphere of Zürich, the less you make yourself conspicuous if you are gay and laugh in the street; even Julika, I notice, becomes freer in this part of the town, and I can imagine what she is like in Paris. Her mama was Hungarian, but Zürich is her native town, and Julika is angry out of all proportion when the town council of Zürich makes a
faux pas,
when it fails to welcome Charlie Chaplin, for example. She talks about nothing else for half an hour.

An Indian couple, probably attending a congress, look most attractive, There are a lot of congresses here, there is altogether something international about the place with its large, dusty coaches crowded with German leather shorts, and every waitress speaks American. A touch of universality forms part of the essence of this little town, which, as I have said, is very pleasant for the foreigner; it is provincial without being dull. It is provincial with concerts by Furtwängler, guest performances by Jean-Louis Barrault, exhibitions from Rembrandt to Picasso, dramatic art by German
émigrés,
and Thomas Mann's new home, but also with all sorts of great men of its own who achieve things in the world outside, until their fame also gradually flatters their own country, which is incapable of bestowing fame itself precisely because it is provincial, in other words outside history. But what do I care about all that? For the foreigner it is a pleasure to stroll about this little town, especially when he has money, and, as I said, it might have been a delightful afternoon—ifjulika had not slipped back into her fixed idea that I am her lost husband.

Once she came to a stop.

'Look,' she said, pointing to a bronze figure that was no better for having been bought by the municipality, a type of sculpture which, to be quite honest, does not appeal to me at all; and when I started to walk on Julika took me by the sleeve and pointed to the plinth, on which was engraved in rather large letters, the name A. Stiller. (Fortunately, I made no comment, for as soon as I express any opinion about the work of their missing Stiller, they take it for self-criticism and as a further indication that I am Stiller.)...Another time when Julika felt the irritating need to tug me by the sleeve, I at least saw no sculptures, thank goodness, but swans, a flotilla of natural swans, their white plumage glistening in the sunlight and with down floating on the green water around them. And in the background, from the position in which Julika placed me, I could see the so-called Great Minster. I understood; just like in the photograph album! What she was trying to prove, I don't know. Finally I stopped dead in the middle of the street (inside the pedestrian crossing); it was no use her tugging at my sleeve, exasperated as though by a stubborn mule, when I asked:

'Where can we get whisky in this neighbourhood?'

'We can't stop here.'

The motor-scooters were already whizzing past us to left and right, a taxi hooted at me, then a lorry and trailer thundered by and Julika's face was as white as chalk, although the lights were now with us again. An unknown pedestrian, to whom I had done no harm, shouted expressions of moral indignation at me, as though, in a country that daily boasts of its liberty, there were a law against risking one's own life ... Later, in a garden restaurant under gaily coloured umbrellas, I asked Julika:

'How do you live in Paris, dear?'

I called her 'dear', not because of the bail, God knows, but from a tender impulse, involuntarily. There is always something wonderful about this first touch of intimacy, something like a magic wand over the whole world, which suddenly seems to be floating, something very quiet which nevertheless drowns every other sound. Involuntarily, but then as though dazed by unexpected happiness, so that I was scarcely aware of anything but our little point of contact, I laid my hand on her shoulder. For a blissful minute, until the new 'dear' has become a habit and, as it were, devoid of resonance, you feel that all men are your brothers, including the waiter who brings you the whisky; you have the feeling that there is no more need for disguise in this world, a feeling of peaceful elation. You laugh about your prison. In cases where this 'dear' is a mature and no doubt enterprising woman I feel a natural urge, which in my state of elation, is not a very serious or pressing need, but rather a playful curiosity, to know what other men there are in the life of my 'dear'. No man ever appears in her stories of Paris and of the ballet school, which is presumably not a convent, no François, no André, no Jacques, nothing. A Paris of Amazons—what can that mean? Finally I asked her in a roundabout way:

'Are you very happy in Paris?'

'Happy?' she said. 'What does happy mean?'

It's very curious: for some reason or other Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy can't bear me to think of her as well and happy. She immediately gets back to Davos and the no doubt very terrible time she spent in that lonely veranda with the olive-green
art nouveau
windows, where Stiller, her missing husband, simply abandoned her. I listened to it all over again. Without doubting the frightfulness of the past, I saw her flourishing present with her strange face lit from below by the reflection from the tablecloth, like a face before the footlights. I longed for her. I waited for her to come out of her past, which she wanted to forgive and in order to forgive had to describe in detail, into the present of our short afternoon.

'My dear Julika,' I said, 'you keep on telling me how terribly your Stiller behaved. Who's disputing it? He made you ill, you say, mortally ill, he deserted you, you might have died; and yet, as I can see, you're looking only for him—do you grudge him his good fortune that you didn't die after all, that you're sitting here looking radiant?'

This was no joke, as I could see for myself. Without looking at me, Julika took from her white Paris handbag a letter yellowed with age, which was obviously intended to refute what I had said. It was a brief note Stiller had sent her while she was in the sanatorium at Davos, I was to read it, really just a crumpled scrap of paper, the leaf from a scribbling pad, ruled in squares, the message scrawled hastily in pencil and looking somehow objectionable, repellent.

'Well?' I asked rather awkwardly.

She hastily struck a match, so hastily that it snapped several times. This little text, the last she received from her missing Stiller, did not seem to her to require any commentary. She smoked.

'Julika,' I said, giving her back the small sheet of crumpled paper, 'I love you.'

She laughed tonelessly, dully, unbelievingly.

'I love you,' I repeated and tried to say something that did not have to do with her or my past, but with our meeting, my feelings at this hour, my hopes for the future; but she didn't hear me. Even when she was silent she didn't hear me, she was only adopting the pose of an attentive listener. Her mind was in Davos, you could see that, and while I was speaking she even began to cry, I also found it sad that two people could sit face to face and yet fail to perceive one another. 'Julika?' I called her by name, and at last she turned her lovely face to me. But instead of seeing me, she saw Stiller. I took hold of her slender hand to wake her up. She made an effort to listen to me. She smiled whenever I protested my love, and possibly she was listening to me, but without hearing what I was trying to say. She only heard what Stiller, if he had been sitting in my chair, would probably have said. It was painful to feel this. Really it was no use going on talking. I looked at her hand lying close beside me, after I had involuntarily released it, and could not help thinking of the terrible dream with the scars. Julika told me to go on. What was the use? I, too, suddenly felt absolutely hopeless. Every conversation between this woman and myself, it seemed, was finished before it began, and any action it might occur to me to take was interpreted in advance, alienated from my present being, because it would in any case appear as an appropriate or inappropriate, an expected or unexpected action on the part of the missing Stiller, never as my action. Never as my action ... When I beckoned to the waiter, she immediately said with tender solicitude:

'You shouldn't drink so much.'

At these words, to be frank, I winced and had to control myself. What was this lady thinking of? First, I had no intention of ordering another drink. And what if I had? She seemed to think she could treat me in the same way as her vanished Stiller, and for a moment I felt like drinking another whisky out of pure spite. I didn't do so. For spite is the opposite of real independence. I smiled. I felt sorry for her. I realized that her whole behaviour did not relate to me, but to a phantom, and once confused with her phantom (for the man she was looking for probably never existed) one was simply defenceless; she could not perceive me. What a pity! I thought.

'Don't take it amiss,' she said, 'but you really shouldn't drink so much. I'm saying it for your own good.'

Unfortunately the waiter was a long time coming.

'I didn't intend to order anything,' I said with rather tired rebelliousness—and Julika laughed, so that I added almost with irritation, 'you're wrong, my love, I really didn't mean to order anything, I meant to pay—but unfortunately I have no money.'

In the meantime, however, as though she never expected anything else, Julika had already slipped her red morocco-leather purse under my elbow, so that I could pay (as she must often have done with Stiller). What could I do? I paid. Then I gave her back the red morocco purse, pulled myself together and said: