Jakob Wassermann - My First Wife

Bettina, though, felt like someone who with mortal daring and the last of her strength has carried a person out of a burning house, only to be spat at by them afterwards. She was unable to get over it. She suffered a strangely Bettina-esque collapse, very quiet, very discreet, but every bit as bad as a serious illness.

In sum: fourteen court orders, twenty-two payment orders, eleven forced sales, three official valuations of the Buchegger estate, four suits for defamation, two suits before the wardship authorities, five temporary injunctions, distraint of my car, forced sale of my desk, fifty-seven lawyers’ letters in the space of six weeks, the blocking of my account with my publisher since I am unable to pay Ganna’s monthly allowance any more and my earnings have dwindled to next to nothing; Ganna goes to court against my publisher; Ganna in Berlin, Ganna in Munich, Ganna in the district capital, Ganna in Ebendorf, always unexpected wherever she goes, as though she travelled everywhere by aeroplane; always with sword drawn, always gurgling in the fists of usurers; offers of conciliation, financial plans; yelling I had better make it up to her, or else …

Not one stone was left standing on another.

Ganna’s legal bills alone amount to a fortune. When I think that these monstrous amounts are there to pay for her mercenaries in her war against me, that the money I scrape together month after month literally by the sweat of my brow all goes to the avenging fury to keep her army of lawyers together, then the whole world has turned into a grisly farce, a dance of death starring forty law offices and their entire staffs of typists and stenographers, legal drafters and researchers. When I turn to Ferry and ask him to try and make his mother see sense before it’s too late, he drives up from Milan where he works as an engineer in an automobile factory and implores her by all that’s holy to desist from her lunacy. She goes wild. She accuses him, her own son, of being in Bettina’s employ. When news of it reaches my ears, it makes me feel as though the devil is shaking my living soul out of my body.

But a wonderful thing has also happened since then. From a certain vantage point, it was a big experience for me. It began with Bettina saying to me one day: ‘You know, you’re not up to this. It’s killing you. Take a look at yourself. From now on, I’m going to take the whole matter in hand myself.’ Such resolutions, with her, were the outcome of lengthy and mature reflection. They were always followed up. Once she had taken a decision, she saw it through with implacable consequence. Her force of will has something shining and compelling about it. A busy nature through and through; only facts command her respect; at bottom her spirit doesn’t like dreamers; and I have often noted to my surprise that, while seeming to dream, she was actually thinking — and not in any loose sense of the word, but with philosophical stringency and in strict chains of logic. Suddenly the feeling had come over her that, in spite of her better self, she had led a pampered princess’s life for years of balmy ease, a life on the sidelines; she flushed red with shame. From one moment to the next she changed. That was her gift; that was the miraculous thing about her before which I stood awestruck and uncomprehending. To anyone who lives entirely in contemplation, transformation in action is a mystery. From one moment to the next she dropped everything as if it had never existed — her music, her violin, her books, her correspondence with friends, her pretty things — everything that made life tolerable in the wild uplands, as she had called it in brief fits of irritation. Yes, even little Caspar Hauser was forced to get by on his own; and without holding anything back, without allowing herself any pleasures or distractions, she gave herself over to this one thing. She went to work radically. She studied the contracts, the documents, the relevant laws and ordinances. She sat closeted with Hornschuch for hours, whole days at a time. She replied to the writs and the lawyers’ letters, dealt with the courts, with the tax authorities, oversaw the finances and reformed our whole household, as to whose sloppiness her eyes had finally been opened, with the strictness of a paid cost-cutter. Day and night she was on duty, to protect me from ambushes and sudden attacks. Every attack from Ganna she warded off with an adroitness and care as though she had been in jurisprudence for decades. Her clear intellect, her intuitive understanding of real life always showed her the one and only way that could be followed. There was no danger she was afraid of, she shunned no strain, she didn’t try to keep her time, her sleep, her health; the moral courage that filled her to the fingertips seemed to give her an almost masculine appetite for struggle. She went to Vienna to deal with persons of influence whose support might be important; she went to Berlin to take on a lawyer and to put my publisher in the picture as to what really was going on; and however speedily and instantaneously she made up her mind, still she never neglected to tell me what she was doing and to obtain my consent, so that the Ganna corner — suddenly alarmed — weren’t able to claim that she was running my affairs by herself, without my knowledge and approval. She weighed up everything in her mind, she caught the tiniest advantage; with nervous vigilance she did everything to take the wind out of the enemy’s sails. The whole woman was fight and flame. It was a spectacle the like of which I had never seen nor hoped to see.

And yet it had a frightening, even an alarming aspect too. Bettina was tied to me in a different way from the Ganna world. In the spirit of the anti-Ganna, I could say. She was the absolutely sane human being. The person destiny gave me so that I could share in truth and reality, instead of perishing in lies and illusion. That was the purpose of everything we’d gone through, if an existence like mine could ever be crowned by anything like a purpose. And now — was it a trick of fate, was it a higher testing, whose outcome still hung in the balance — now the anti-Ganna was being drawn into Ganna’s orbit, was being asked — against her inner nature — to fight with Ganna’s weapons, to confront her, to shadow her in her darknesses and thickets. Could that all be to the good? Was it good of itself? ‘My Diana, tenderly rapt,’ I had once written about Bettina; but would I not end up becoming the murderer of my tender goddess? True, Diana is the huntress, but her hunting-ground is not populated by phantoms, she doesn’t hunt nightmares, she doesn’t suffer her course to be set by Ganna ghosts — if she did, she would herself become the quarry.

And then, as if events were only waiting to confirm these endlessly frightened thoughts, I started to see Bettina’s slow physical collapse. She became sensitive, irritable, prone to sudden fevers; she lost weight; sometimes she gave the impression some unknown toxin had been administered to her. Her mainspring was broken. In my service. Through my fault. In a certain sense, through my fault. So Ganna was the stronger after all. The nightmare had bewitched my Diana on her campaign and made her lame. From the dreadful moment I first saw it, just three weeks ago now, I had only one concern, which was how to lead Bettina back out of the poisoned land. But when I talked to her about it, she laughed at me. The courage that inspirited her was like a glass bell, melodious, uncontaminated, ringing pure.

Yesterday, 26 June, I received for the fourth time a summons to give the oath of disclosure which Ganna was trying to extort from me. I content myself with recording what happened. It was all to do with the alleged hidden fortune I am supposed to have tucked away somewhere. On previous occasions, I had objected to swearing such an oath. Once, taking Bettina’s advice, I had gone away; another time I brought a doctor’s letter. I have never sworn an oath in my life. It struck me as monstrous, a violation of honour, of sense, of all human feeling, that I was to use the name of God to assure Ganna that I did not own the treasures that she, in really the most literal way, wanted to squeeze out of me. I admit I was foolish enough to be afraid of it, as of an attempt on my life. Bettina shook her head over me. She said: ‘What’s the matter, what’s so frightful about it? You don’t have anything to hide. It’s just an empty formality.’ I answered that it was much more than a formality; it was an act of duress, in which the spoken word became fact; and by swearing it you gave yourself utterly into the hands of someone like Ganna. She would never drop her suspicion; every single day, every time I spent a banknote, she and her associates would sniff it; she would nail me to the sworn oath every bit as much as to my signature on the marriage contract thirty years before. Bettina said: ‘Perhaps you’re right. Then the only other possibility is that you go away somewhere. Go away.’