Jakob Wassermann - My First Wife

One morning, dressed and ready to go out, I walk into Ganna’s bedroom to say goodbye to her. She is just coming out of the bathroom, swathed in a red and white chequered dressing-gown. No sooner does she catch sight of me than she launches into the usual daily litany. There is to be a meeting at Dr Pauli’s at twelve o’clock, could I not perhaps attend. It would help her a lot. She would be forever grateful to me (or rather, I think to myself, she would never forgive me if I refused).

Of late, I haven’t shown her much in the way of friendliness. It cost me too much. I can’t be friendly if I don’t have it in me to be so. I have become increasingly cold and laconic and irritable. I am angry with myself for my lovelessness. But my heart is blocked. I can’t find a kind word. Not now either. I shrug. The thought of more talks at the lawyer’s office gives me the willies. I couldn’t, I’m afraid, I say. Straight away Ganna turns aggressive. If only I could leave her to rage and walk off. But her tirades are like glue, and I’m stuck fast. When she calls it pathetic, my refusal to support her, the man for whom she is sacrificing herself, I remind her I hadn’t demanded or wished for any such sacrifice, and she was more use to me as a housewife and mother of our children. That earns me a salvo of derision from Ganna’s mouth.

‘That’s the thanks I get! I bleed myself dry for such a man, such a monster, more like! What thanks!’

‘There’s nothing to thank you for,’ I remark with a degree of calm that should have given Ganna pause, but it washes off her, ‘just as I never counted on a life like the one you’re making me.’

Ganna laughs hollowly. ‘What do you mean by that? What life? How do you propose to live? Do you want to starve till you get white hair? Where would you be without me anyway? Ask yourself that.’

‘I don’t know where I’d be without you, all I know is that I can no longer go on with you. Either you put an end to the business with the meadow and just sell it, or I’m going to leave you and get a divorce.’

No sooner has the word fallen than Ganna’s features are contorted. The word is not one that has been spoken before between us. She never thought she would hear it. She feels as sure of me as if I were a part of her, an arm or a leg. She is fundamentally secure, rootedly secure. Perhaps the dread word lies in some buried depths of her unconscious, like an explosive charge in a cellar. She gives a scream. The scream, which is awful, shrill and guttural, lasts fully fifteen or twenty seconds, and while she is screaming she is running around the room like a madwoman. She is certainly oblivious. She is certainly not in possession of her senses. Even so, I have the feeling that the utter loss of self-control is giving her pleasure, the pleasure of abdication, of psychic degeneration, that epileptics are said to have during a fit. While she rips the dressing-gown off with furious movements, she hurls a torrent of abuse at me. In every register of which her voice is capable she shouts the dread word at me: divorce. Inquiring, shouting, squawking, howling, gasping, with fingers hooked like claws and blue flashing eyes. And as I suffer the ghastly outburst showing me a wholly new, unsuspected Ganna in silence, she runs over to the window, stark naked as she is, and leans over the metal rail with her upper body, as though to plummet down the next moment. I am instantly reminded of the scene sixteen years ago, on the balcony by the Mondsee. Basically, she always does the same thing, I think to myself sadly, reaches for the same trick to get the other person in her power, the same words, the same gestures; only I always forget, and I always fall for it. In spite of my tormenting fury I remain relatively cool. I know she won’t do it; anyway there’s not much danger, the window’s about ten or twelve feet over the garden, which at that point is lawn — at the most she could break one or two ribs. But my certainty that she won’t throw herself over gives the situation something darkly ridiculous. At the same time, the rage that has been gathering inside me suddenly bursts out like a jet of boiling steam; it’s years and years since I last felt anything like it; with a single bound I am behind her, I grab her by the bare shoulders, fling her onto the bed and start blindly punching her. I still can’t imagine how it came over me. I’m laying into her like a drunk in a bar fight. Like a drayman. I, Alexander Herzog, am punching a woman. And Ganna is completely quiet. Curious, because she’s so quiet I stop hitting her and rush up to my room, lock the door behind me, drop into my chair, and sit perfectly still and brood about my misfortune.

And what did Ganna do in the meantime? I found out later, by chance. I found a sealed envelope on her desk, inscribed with her big accusing capital letters: My Will and Testament. When I asked her in amazement when and why she composed her will, she tells me with tear-stained face that it was just after I had hit her. I begged her not to bring it up again. But she told me about her despair and how she had sworn to herself to sell the meadow that very day. One day I would surely understand what I had done to her, what I had done to myself … From that moment on, we each had our own private stab-in-the-back story. Ganna never let go of the version that I had gone for her at the very moment she was in the process of making me millions. This figment was Ganna’s prop through all the later blows of fortune she suffered. In that way, she was like all conquered peoples and power-hungry parties; without a scapegoat she had no chance of confronting reality. And scapegoats are everywhere to be found, since without divided responsibility there is no practical action.

Burdened with this moral debt, whose interest payments I with my usual willingness took upon myself, I emerged into a new phase of my life — the one for the sake of which I have set down these confessions.

Every beast is driven to pasture by a blow.

Heraclitus

MY ACQUAINTANCE WITH BETTINA

I first met Bettina Merck in the house of a young couple by the name of Waldbauer, friends of mine, very dear people; he was an art historian. At the time Bettina was just twenty-five — seventeen years younger than I. She had been married for seven years and had two children, both girls. Her husband, who was the same age as she, was the director of a large porcelain factory which he had taken over following the death of his father, in spite of his youth. Bettina’s father had been a popular composer and band leader, hence her musical gift. A friend of Kainz’s and Mahler’s, he was still remembered with fondness, and accounted one of the last in the old Austrian tradition. Some of his melodies had the status of folk songs and lived on long after their creator. I had known him. I distinctly remembered this fine, sensitive man. He had a particular sort of lovable mockery about him; lovableness was one of his prime characteristics. When I talked about him, Bettina’s eyes lit up. She adored her father more than anything.

Something I noticed about her that very first evening was a kind of laughing cheerfulness. Oddly, I reacted to it with hostility, as though I thought it was somehow improper to be so blithe and cheerful, in contradiction to the age and the world. Just like her father, I crabbed at her in thought, always light, always in waltz time. Every passing jest caused her to laugh her pearly laugh. At times the whole room rang with her laugh, which infected the others and spread a sort of sheen. That bothered me as well. I wonder why? As a child I had been prone to fits of gloom, when I saw some other boy eating a piece of bread and butter and I myself was without. When I gradually loosened up and responded to her levity, as much as I could, it was still with the grim reserve of a schoolmaster, anxiously intent on preserving his dignity when confronted with some prize pupil.