Jakob Wassermann - My First Wife

But then, for some reason, Ganna suddenly breaks off her vengeance, offers to withdraw her suit in return for some ‘conditions’, apologizes for her pitiful desperation. There’s no more to it than that; it’s a fit of weakness, the pyromaniac’s momentary hesitation before tossing the lit match on the dry straw. The Count von Gleichen idyll appears in a new version; she offers to share me with Bettina. (How’s that going to work — it would be like two cats sharing a mouse.) Ganna is to be the lawful wedded wife in Vienna, Bettina is to have the same role in Ebenweiler; their spheres of influence can be kept nicely separate. When this great-souled proposition is again met with baffled silence, she turns to a minister who has been presented to her as an enlightened and philanthropical sort, and asks him to effect a conciliation between us. God only knows what she said to him; the man of God writes me an extraordinarily pompous letter. I think to myself it would be wrong to ignore the words of a priest; but instead of keeping to ten lines (see Stanger-Goldenthal), I fill seven pages with a description of Ganna’s character and my predicament.

Shaking off her fit of weakness or her crisis of confidence or whatever it was, Ganna swings into action with renewed vim. Who is the enemy most to be dreaded? Why, Hornschuch. So she tackles him first. She bombards him with suggestions to try and tempt him to deal with her. She treats him like a wildcat you throw a hunk of meat to from time to time, so that he doesn’t bite you. She hates him with every fibre of her being, but the category ‘lawyer’ — in any guise — fills her with such superstitious awe that she loses her head and does the most irrational things. She conducts expensive long-distance phone calls with him. In the midst of her usual dealings and agenda, it suddenly occurs to her to travel to Ebendorf, where Hornschuch is now living, the seat of the district court, four miles from Ebenweiler. An amusing little jaunt. To spend six hours on the train, by night if need be, is a breeze to her. The woman has nerves like bell-ropes. The final justification of the journey is threefold. First, she wants to inveigle Hornschuch into her toils and get the better of him; she flatters herself that she will be able to persuade him of the justice of her cause. Second, the proximity of the district court is like a sort of aphrodisiac to her; of course she’s already taken on a local lawyer, the eleventh or twelfth, a political enemy of Hornschuch’s, through whom she hopes to bring down her detested foe. Third, she’s made some useful acquaintances in the bar of the hotel where she’s staying — all sorts of local politicians and small-town dignitaries whom she flatters, stressing her conservative views and involving herself in Party business. On cosy beer evenings she tells anyone who cares to listen — and of course, they’re all dying of curiosity — tear-jerking tales from her tortured marriage, or of how a certain lady up in Ebenweiler has it in for her and is making her life a misery.

Between Christmas and New Year she tried another ambush on Hornschuch. She implored him to induce me to pay the allowance for Doris that I hadn’t paid her — Ganna — for months now. The fact that I paid out every penny of the money on Doris discretion keeps her from mentioning. When Hornschuch reminded her of the fact, she replied with irrational fury that she was the mother and, if the money were not paid to her, she would see it as not having been paid.

‘I understand,’ Hornschuch replied with the smile that Ganna liked to call Mephistophelean, ‘your daughter is a sort of walking promissory note that you can present to the father when you’re short. Good idea!’

‘No!’ screamed Ganna, white with fury. ‘What I won’t have is Bettina deciding how much support my child gets from her father. It’s disgraceful.’

‘No one’s talking about Bettina here,’ remarked Hornschuch coolly.

She went on chuntering away to herself, then all at once she was as soft as a sponge that you throw in water, began sobbing and painted such a heart-wrenching picture of her situation that, as he admitted to me, he was speechless for a while. He said perhaps an accommodation could be reached between her and her creditors; to that end, she would have to admit her debts openly, the full extent of them, and above all she needed to get rid of her lawyers. That got him a good reception. She went wild. Conditions? No, Sir, she wasn’t that desperate, nor for a good time yet. See off her lawyers? That was the last thing she would do. And leave herself open to Bettina’s persecution? No, thank you very much. That was one thing she wasn’t going to do. There had been an attempt to have her declared non compos mentis, but thank goodness that had failed. (She gave a cackling laugh and sent Hornschuch a penetrating look like a detective on the point of catching a murderer out.) How failed? asked Hornschuch sympathetically. Yes, she had looked up a famous psychiatrist, who at the end of a twenty-minute conversation had issued her with a splendid certificate of mental health; if Hornschuch cared to see it: voilà! And already she was rummaging through her bag for the piece of paper, which obviously filled her with glee, as a little sub-magician might be at the sight of a licence to practise issued by the great chief magician.

Since the meeting with Hornschuch had failed, she hired a sleigh and half an hour later reached the Buchegger estate. Our maid knew who she was and didn’t admit her. We were just having tea, Bettina and I, with Doris, who was there for the Christmas holidays. We could hear Ganna ranting and shouting outside. Bettina drummed her fingers on the tablecloth and said: ‘Don’t go out. Please don’t go out.’ But I went out. I had to see the woman off. I shouted at her. What did she think she was doing? What she was doing? She had come for money. She was groaning, howling, gurgling for money. Interspersed with that, a few insults and reproaches. The sleigh stood a few yards off; the coachman on his box was continually shaking his head, which made an oddly profound impression on me. In the hall, the servants stood around in a state of shock. Infected by Ganna’s yelling, I started yelling back. No one in the house had ever heard me yell before. There is only one person in the world capable of making me yell and that is Ganna. I no longer remember how I induced her finally to get back in the sleigh. I stood at the top of the stairs and waited till the horse caparisoned with bells and its head-shaking coachman had disappeared into the darkness. Back in the house, I called Bettina. She had locked herself away in her room. Doris stood in front of the tea table, looking at me with round, frightened, sympathetic eyes. I went to my room and threw myself on my bed.

But all this was mere skirmishing for Ganna. A little later, she had worked out that I owed her 25,000 schillings. I don’t know where this nice round figure came from. It could as well have been half a million. Doctors’ bills, tailors’ bills, ‘backlogs’ from other years, ‘ imprévus ’ by the dozen, expenses on the children, a column of figures like a lottery draw. It’s my belief that merely writing down numbers gave her as much satisfaction as actual money. The local district court rejected the case for want of evidence, even though two diligent new lawyers threw themselves into the fray for her. Without stopping to think for a moment about the irrecoverableness of the debt and the frivolousness of her suit, Ganna told herself: if I can’t obtain justice in this country, then perhaps there where, according to my passport and as Alexander Herzog’s wife, I belong. She made for Berlin, found some willing lawyers — three of them — and presented her claim in a splendidly stylish brief. But lo and behold, the 25,000 were become 39,000, a leap explained by the addition of her tax debt. I saw with satisfaction that her charming number-drunkenness didn’t get in the way of a certain residual accuracy in Ganna. At the same time, in Berlin, where she set up a sort of dépendance , and where m’learned friends were charmed down from the trees, she attached her suit to the attack on the divorce. She was, it seemed, in the right place. The uncertainty between the two countries in point of matrimonial law made this entertaining legal adventure possible; it was one of the many breaches where canny lawyers like to wedge their crowbars.