Jakob Wassermann - My First Wife

There followed a hasty departure, drawing deep breaths of freezing air, the drive to the station in a bumping carriage, alone with Ganna, who was now Ganna Herzog.

TEETHING TROUBLES OF A COUPLE

We travelled the length of Italy, with many stops, from the Tyrolean Alps down to Sicily. We were very happy.

I had never spent more than three days cooped up with another human being, male or female. Just as well I was used to small spaces and didn’t feel constricted. We had agreed to travel on a very modest footing. Ganna thought it was wonderful to have a husband who carried his business around in his head and was able to settle his practical affairs in ten minutes or so at a restaurant table.

The new insouciance may have been a kind of dream; still, it entered my life as something unfamiliar. When a burden borne over many years suddenly slips off, one’s state afterwards is not automatically easier. There is a period of adjustment. Different breathing is required. I had always had all the solitude I required; now I had none, neither by day nor at night. Ganna was always present, wanting to be seen and heard, protected and loved. And to love me back. If it were possible to dig love out of the ground, she would have dug it out, if only to prove to me how inexhaustible her supplies of it were.

But various things happen that are hard to avoid when your world is a room with two beds in it, and the space by the door and in the corners is all taken up with your suitcases. For instance, I’m sitting quietly reading a book. So as not to disturb me, Ganna creeps through the room on tiptoe. But then — oh dear! — there is a chair in her way, which she manages to upset. Crash. Or she knocks over a glass of water. Or a suitcase lid bangs shut. Thousand anxious apologies. She is a little unlucky. If she is unlucky, you have to comfort her. She lives in a permanent state of war with things. She loses her purse; horror. She drops a letter through someone’s front door instead of in the letterbox; a mobile pillar of wailing. She needs comfort. It’s not possible to be angry with her when she warbles up to complete strangers as if they were all her uncles and aunts; she’s just made a mistake; she’s absent-minded. Or when she takes as many books with her on a walk as you would need to pass a university exam. It’s funny. You have to laugh. She sees that you have to laugh and she laughs along. But that doesn’t mean that she does anything differently the next time. She lives in a world of Ideals. She’s like the famous birds who try to peck at Apelles’ famous painted grapes. I try to bring a little order to her being, a little consistency. It’s hard. Ganna’s is not one of those adaptive natures that are geared for experience. Experience is as baffling as, say, pain. I have a sense that I need to mould her. I ought to give her a form, because she has none. It took me a very, very long time to understand that it wasn’t possible to form her. Not that she was too soft or too hard. Soft things and hard things can still be shaped. But something that is in between, that flows, that is jellied, that is forever changing its nature — that cannot be formed.

LITTLE SOUL

In her innocence she thought she just needed to give herself to the man she loved to make him happy. There wasn’t much subtlety about her. She was incapable of giving herself completely, simply because her will was never entirely extinguished. She wanted to be will-less, but that was as far as it went: that was the seed of the calamity. By temperament, she was a force of nature, proof against any civilizatory intentions. All her life she took it for a brutal meddling in her character if anyone tried to rein in or refine the elemental strain in her. The very intention was baffling to her. And the drive, the blood was the only thing to keep in parlous balance her ethereal intellect and her earthiness. I understood intuitively that it would be wrong of me to rob her of its innocence.

Nor was I the man to tame her. I had such profound respect for the thus-and-thus-alone of any living creature that I couldn’t summon up the courage to take the darkest innermost parts of a human and shape them and light them. It’s not possible to be an educator if you have diffidence in your veins. Nor was I masterful in love, not least because my senses in their guilty darkness were unfree. All this requires to be said: it’s the hidden source of all that follows, otherwise no one could understand how things took their subsequent course.

Guilt: the word makes me flinch, but from the very beginning there was guilt in my relationship with Ganna. I never felt any passion for her. I didn’t realize it right away. It took me a while to understand. Once I had understood, I had to fight off Ganna’s sudden surges of passion with secret dread. She misunderstood me. She had to misunderstand me, because otherwise she would have fallen out of the sky. I couldn’t allow that to happen. I had to see that she stayed up there for as long as possible. It wasn’t so terribly hard. She took refuge in fantasy. I was Robert Browning and she was Elizabeth Barrett. The model of a highly intellectual marriage made it possible for her to reinterpret my growing reluctance to give her the much-craved protestations of love as a metaphysical union. I had to admire the tenacity with which she managed to live in a fantasy. My admiration for her was altogether undiminished. I was able to discuss all my plans with her. Within a very short time she had mastered all the technical expressions of a hard-boiled novelist. When news I had from Germany left me in no doubt that my book was not only a critical but also a popular success (though that didn’t lead to any great earnings for me, seeing as I’d changed publishers, and my former publisher was insisting on a large transfer sum and the return of unearned advances), I noticed that she lost the calm and equilibrium that had previously cladded her being like a sort of enamel. It appeared she was no longer so certain of me. I asked her directly if that was so. Reluctantly, she admitted it was. She thought it was her duty to keep the lures of the world and the blandishments of fame away from me. ‘Whatever for?’ I asked in astonishment. ‘What are you afraid of?’ She said she had no guarantees of a future. ‘Do you need guarantees, Ganna?’ Of course, she replied, the present wasn’t enough. ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘you can’t carry me around with you like a kangaroo her joey?’ Yes, she could, that was exactly what she wanted, she replied with her sweetly cunning smile. She wanted security. She hungered for more security. She admitted it. I stroked her hair. I called her little soul, the tenderest endearment the German language has to offer.

BANK ACCOUNT AND ANANGKE

In Taormina we stayed in a hole-in-the-wall dive. There were bedbugs. The mosquitoes ate us alive, there were no nets. At night Ganna burned all sorts of incense, but that only made us choke with the reek and smoke. If we’d had just two lire a day more to spend, we could have lived somewhere human. Ganna didn’t want to know. Keeping to budget was her biggest anxiety. Budget was one of the magic words that turned up on the horizon shortly after we were married, like so many glow-worms in the gathering dark. The concept ‘budget’ was linked to the concept ‘bank account’. ‘Bank account’ was the biggest and mightiest of the glow-worms, and of course another magic word. Her father had dinned it into her never on any account to eat into her capital, not even to use a dime more than we had from the interest. ‘Someone who eats into his capital will stop at nothing,’ had been the Professor’s awful watchword. Ganna was now parroting it. Her father, more revered the further he receded into the distance, was so to speak the high priest of ‘capital’, a revered fetish, and he kept his mighty hand over the mysterious institutions of those tamper-proof investment papers that were the basis of the bank account. So many securities.