Jakob Wassermann - My First Wife

Ganna knew of course that the majestically round figure of 80,000 crowns had already been reduced by the sum that had been necessary for the cancellation of my debts. She had come up with a financial plan to make good the missing amount. Following this plan, we were to use not the full four and a half per cent interest of 3,600 crowns, but only 3,000; the rest was to go to the capital, and any further expenses were to be defrayed from my income. I thought the plan was inspired. It called for extreme economies. Every bedbug and mosquito in Signor Pancrazio’s wretched quarters was physical proof of the guarantee system of the head priest and the gilt-edged tabernacle. What touching lengths Ganna went to to prove to me that my ironic contempt for these divine securities was based on folly and ignorance. She spoke nobly of the ethos of self-restraint and the moral duty to twist the sword from the grip of fate, as it stood there menacing the noble-minded. Immersed in her Plato, the pencil in her hand to scribble in the margin of her copy, her girlish brow creased, she pointed to the irresistible force of anangke, before which everyone had to bow. I was impressed. I said she was right. Truth to tell, it wasn’t me who was in charge of the money. Even if the bank account was kept in my name, I submitted to Ganna’s economies without demurring. I was in the position of a man whom pride and self-respect kept from laying a hand on the preserve of others.

A PRIMAL CREATURE?

I undertook to climb Etna and had promised Ganna to be back by the evening of the third day. I got lost in the lava fields, moreover the weather turned and I was compelled to seek shelter in a shepherd’s hut. That delayed my return by six hours. Ganna had been waiting for me in growing impatience. By six o’clock she had alerted Signor Pancrazio and his household. Two hours later, crying, she demanded that the police be notified and a detachment of carabinieri sent out to look for me. At eleven o’clock the pleading of the landlord’s entire family and other German guests was not enough to dissuade her from pulling on her raincoat, and she sobbingly set off down the pitch-black lane, followed by Pancrazio’s two sons, who were eventually able to prevail on her to turn round. When I arrived at around midnight she hurled herself at my chest with a piercing scream, like a madwoman. Pancrazio and his family, shaken by such a display of conjugal fealty, treated her thenceforth with an awed respect of which only Italians are capable. With delightful sapience, a fourteen-year-old girl expressed the supposition that the signora must be expecting. Which soon enough proved to be the case. Two days later, when a south wind flung the yellow dust of the Sahara over the island, shrouding the scene in eerie yellow twilight, Etna spat fire and the frightened populace organized propitiatory processions, Ganna, with wide Sibyl’s eyes, intoned: ‘Now do you understand my fear? I could feel it coming. It was already in me.’ Oppressed, I asked myself how I was to cope with such lack of restraint in future. I really believed there was some connection between her and the dark forces of nature. I wondered how such a primal creature could have slipped out of the sober bosom of the Mevis family.

RETURN

Pregnancy was not on the agenda. We had decided not to have children for another two years. You can’t go gadding about the planet with an infant in tow. It was in Rome that, trembling with happiness, she came to me with the great news. A crowned head could not have been more diligent than Ganna in the business of making an heir. She sent for medical literature from Vienna. She observed a stringent diet of her own devising. She found a German doctor and consulted him for hours on end. She treated the temple of her body with loving care. Inside and outside, she went around on tiptoe. Her one and only thought was of the child. Her only concern was that it should be beautiful, beautiful and important. She was certain she had it within her power. Like a farmer’s wife, she believed in the effect of transferred shock and so she avoided ugly sights. She spent her mornings in the Vatican collections and sat with avid, adhesive eye before the statuary. She bought a postcard of the Neapolitan fresco of Narcissus. She put it up over her bed and gazed at it with hypnotic devotion, before going to sleep and when she woke. She thought nothing was beyond her illimitable will — not even influencing an embryo in the womb. I wasn’t allowed to say anything otherwise she would get angry. Ironic remarks annoyed her. She had no use for irony. She didn’t think she was someone to be smiled at, she thought she was holy. And there was something else as well. The ultimate security she thirsted for — she had it now. Since she didn’t want to have her baby in a foreign city, and she was missing her family, we went back to Vienna in the autumn.

THE YELLOW ROOM

I was dreading it. I feared the claims of family, the utter automatic mindlessness with which I would be reclaimed. I was afraid of a life within walls. When I decided once and for all in favour of the life of the bourgeois and the tax-payer — with a bank account to protect me from every eventuality, newest recruit and pride of the Mevises, Schlemms and Lottelotts — that meant the end of poet’s garret and Samson’s struggle. Fedora and Riemann were right: I had sold myself and betrayed myself. But Ganna was able to talk me out of my worries. She spoke so confidently and enthusiastically of a life of calm domesticity that I complied and went quietly.

After looking for a long time, we finally rented a furnished garden flat far out in the western suburbs, far away too from the Mevises, that was free over the winter. Ganna wasn’t yet ready to find somewhere permanent. The furnishing and equipping would have cost too much money. This postponement in her eyes doubled as an economy. The building faced onto a crooked street of bungalows and banal front gardens. Every twenty minutes a steam tram clattered past. There was a bell fixed to the locomotive that you could hear from a distance, and long after it was gone. The aspect of the lodging that had won Ganna over was a very large room with a glass wall at the back, the front extremity of which was flooded with light, but whose interior was so dark that we needed to keep the gaslights on during the day. This was our room of state where we did our receiving, our living and dining room, my workplace; and on top of all that it was where I slept on a sofa in a recess during the weeks before Ganna’s due date. It was painted lemon yellow and divided in two by a cloth screen, also lemon yellow. On the left-hand wall we had the Dying Gaul and on the right the Thorn Remover, both set up on top of carefully draped crates, both in plaster of Paris; both souvenirs from Rome.

I dwell on it at such length because the room was important to me. We know so little about the influence of different spaces on one’s mood, on thinking, on decisions. An inch more or less in height or breadth and life feels different. I felt as if I was in a suit that was too big for me, bought from some second-hand dealer. I never felt at home in the room. When I woke up in the night and the wintry light dribbled in through chinks in the curtains; then I felt like stepping out into the garden to do something loutish like throwing snowballs at the ridiculous room. Or I wished I could get leprechauns in to do my work for me, because my skull was full of the merry jingle of the tram. It’s not good to be with a busy woman if you’re trying to paint a delicate picture or weave a delicate tapestry. It’s not just one woman either; there are many, as many as the day has hours, that’s how many Gannas there are; and each of them wants to do something different, each one is full of herself, each one is happy, excited, has a plan, a wish; and some of them I don’t even know yet — I would have to be introduced to them.