Jakob Wassermann - My First Wife

A FEW SNAPSHOTS OF GANNA

But at that time it was still extraordinarily difficult to extricate myself from certain intriguing traits of her personality, her quirky absent-mindedness, her silly little mishaps, her dreaminess. All that had the charm of youth, and was further enhanced by the happiness in which she seemed to float.

She is lying blissfully spread out on the sofa in her hideously untidy bedroom, marking up Goethe’s Italian Journey in pencil. In the nursery the baby is screaming her head off, because we have gone on to have a second child, my daughter Elisabeth; in the living room Ferry is banging around on the piano; in the corridor the cook and the maid are fighting a pitched battle; down in the garden patio, Frau Ohnegroll is yapping away like an unpleasant little dog. None of it reaches Ganna. She can’t hear it. Her spirit is in heaven. Then a glance finds its way out to the rose I brought her the other day. She smiles, gets up and carries the glass with the rose in it to her dressing table. Now she has two roses, because there’s a second one reflected in the mirror …

Or this. It’s May. To Ganna the concept of ‘May’, regardless of the actual weather, is inseparable from ‘sunshine’ and ‘blue sky’. So she goes out in a thin serge dress with a frail-looking parasol, where an icy north wind blows and a shower comes down every fifteen minutes or so. It doesn’t matter. In her imagination it’s ‘May’. She passes a fruit stall and sees the first cherries of the year. How wonderful, she thinks, I’ll buy some cherries for Alexander. She buys a pound of cherries. She is given them in a twist of paper. It has a hole, and while she wanders dreamily home (when she’s alone she doesn’t need to ‘hurry’ and is free to ‘enjoy’ her walk); so, while she’s ‘enjoying’ the illusory May air, one cherry after another escapes through the hole in the paper bag. People stop and turn and watch her, and grin. The pavement behind her is studded with cherries at regular intervals. Finally a woman takes pity on her and tells her. Who could describe her shock! Thank God, there are not that many people out and about; she goes back and picks up the cherries, one after another …

Yes, an eccentric, clumsy, moving creature, Ganna. A Ganna that you’d want to try and protect from wounds and damage. If there weren’t the seam in the surface, the crater from which the dark element bursts forth, of which you never know when it will be and how catastrophic its effect.

FEMALE DON QUIXOTE

I had got to be close to Irmgard. Fleeting conversations had deepened, and then we had gone hiking together — because, unlike Ganna, Irmgard was a splendid walker and tourist. She had, again unlike Ganna, a low opinion of herself and was grateful to me for the lengths I went to to reinforce her sense of self. That was really what she most lacked, even though she had a solid and substantial character; as a woman, though, she had suffered various disappointments that had robbed her of courage. She had a particular sort of beauty. She looked like the statue of an Egyptian princess.

Things between us were such that we could have fallen in love at any moment. It didn’t happen. The thing that stopped it was a sort of magic line drawn by Ganna. Irmgard had creditable old-fashioned notions of marriage and fidelity. Moreover: the husband of her sister — the thought made her shudder. I didn’t dare cross the magic line either. To rouse Ganna’s suspicion was to start an inferno. The suspicion was already lurking. Whenever Irmgard mentioned it she trembled like a child in the dark, and I wasn’t much different. We kept on telling each other about the purity of our feelings and were so reticent that each pressure of our hands, each greeting, was managed with cautious attention; even so, Ganna had her eyes on us. Ganna stood unseen next to us and saw that nothing belonging to her was stolen. Not a look, not a breath, not a smile, not a thought.

Perhaps it was just feminine curiosity, a little jealous curiosity that prompted Irmgard to ask one day what it was that fascinated me about Ganna. She had thought about it a lot and had no explanation. At first I had no answer either. Then I talked about Ganna as a sort of ordering principle in my life. ‘A sort of what?’ Irmgard asked in bafflement, ‘Ganna creating order, Ganna?’ I could see that I would have trouble convincing Irmgard of that. After a little further thought, I found the way out, and for the first time articulated my sense of Ganna: I said she was a new type, a sort of female Don Quixote. Irmgard shook her head. It was too much for her. She knew Ganna, Ganna was her sister. The parabola from coffin nail to idealistic battler against windmills didn’t make sense to her. Hesitantly she suggested I was being poetical. I denied it.

A few days later, Ganna went up to Irmgard, plonked herself in front of her and said, in the tone of a policeman undertaking an arrest:

‘I forbid you to flirt with my husband.’

Irmgard replied spiritedly: ‘I didn’t know Alexander was your prisoner.’

‘Find a husband of your own and stay away from mine,’ Ganna went on.

Irmgard told me afterwards, bitterly, that she had sounded like a market stallholder, standing up for her veggies in a public spat.

‘Your attempts to take up with him behind my back are unacceptable,’ Ganna shouted.

She had a particular way of saying the word unacceptable — the ‘x’ in it was painfully lengthened. Irmgard couldn’t help herself, she began to laugh. She pointed to the door.

‘If you want a scandal, you can have it at home. Talk to Alexander. I’m not his nanny.’

After a livid Ganna had left, Irmgard once again couldn’t do anything about it; this time, she wept.

After she had related the incident to me, she asked me ironically:

‘So where does that leave your female Don Quixote now? Can you tell me where you see her noble folly, my dear brother-in-law?’

I was stuck. I replied:

‘One shouldn’t judge Ganna on the basis of single incidents, you need to see her in the round, as the wild nature she is. Her errors, her passions, her mistakes, they are all founded on a splendid unity. What’s wrong with noble folly? You always made fun of her. The ridiculous is very deep in her, where she fights with phantoms. Everything is a phantom to her: people, the world, you, me, she herself. She doesn’t have a clue about reality.’

Irmgard looked me in the eye with her thoughtful gaze.

‘Poor Alexander,’ she whispered.

‘What do you mean, poor Alexander?’

‘Oh, I was just thinking …’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, perhaps you’re the one who doesn’t have a clue about reality.’

THE ‘HUMAN’ SIDE

I note that Ganna is very anxious about something. She is listening out, spying, she looks at me with the sad scrutiny that actors playing forsaken lovers have onstage. To get the better of me, she asks me little trick questions. If I manage to avoid her traps she tries a bigger, rougher calibre.

‘Oh, I am the unhappiest woman in the world!’ she cries out to no one in particular, and criss-crosses the room, as though she wanted to knock down the walls.

‘You’re seeing ghosts, Ganna, your unhappiness is all in your mind. Irmgard is much too decent to go in for any dubious escapades.’

‘Irmgard? She’s the most unscrupulous person there is.’

‘But Ganna!’

‘What about you? Would you deceive me?’

‘I hardly think so, Ganna.’

She hurls herself at my chest. ‘Really? Will you swear? Will you swear you haven’t got a relationship with her?’

I have to laugh. It’s so crude, the way she says it, you feel you’ve been punched on the nose; I’m not quite sure why I’m laughing. She holds my hand between hers, examines the palm and says with an expression as though she longed for me to contradict her tough judgement: