Jakob Wassermann - My First Wife

It’s true, this question was never spoken out loud; it only hovered uncertainly over our conversations. But it seemed to me that Ganna didn’t understand its deeper implications. Why should the man not furnish the security, the pledge, she clearly was saying to herself, since all his difficulties would be resolved at a stroke, all his darknesses dispelled? If he only declares himself willing, then she will make him deliriously happy, then she will guard him like the apple of her eye, then she will be his slave, his exchequer. His muse, the guardian of his fame, the proclaimer of his greatness. All for him, say her shining eyes and her imploring looks; her dreams, her ambition, her gifts, her life, all for him.

But really I was still clueless.

BECAUSE IT’S NEW

Until one day she came out with it. Without preamble and with the same courage with which she plonked herself on her bicycle and pedalled off, even though she’d never properly learned how to. I was stunned. For the longest time, I wasn’t sure what exactly she meant. She took care not to be explicit. She was nervous. But she kept going back and starting over again. Each time it was a shade more graspable, with more eloquent descriptions of the practical possibilities, more excited dwelling on the splendid prospects for my life and work that she was able to predict with visionary fire. When I think back on it today I have to smile, because by instinct she was doing exactly what a shopkeeper does, feigning reluctance to show his most precious stock, and only putting it out on the counter once he’s worn the customer down with his patter. When I finally caught her drift, I had no idea what I could decently say. Nothing like this had occurred to me, not remotely. It was like someone suggesting I might like to move to the moon. I laughed. I treated the whole thing as an extravagant joke. I said that where marriage was concerned, I might just be the least suitable man in the whole of Europe.

In the way of these things, her arguments started getting to me after a while. If I was aghast the first day, by the second I was just annoyed, and by the third a little impatient. I couldn’t always avoid her stuttering suit, her fiery offer, her willingness to make herself useful that caused her to tremble like a fever. Not always. After all, she had proved to me — though not ultimate proof — that she didn’t hold anything back. It couldn’t possibly be calculation. Her tenderness was gushing. Her desire to please me, to anticipate my every wish, was nigh on obsessive. I regularly felt ashamed. If I’d only guessed that my shame was an unconsciously erected barrier, perhaps I would have behaved differently. I thought she was funny in her wildness and her muddle-headed dreaminess; funny but lovable. You can find a woman lovable without loving her; that’s a dangerous grey area. When I gave her my hand, she could sit there charmed as though that moment was a singing eternity, then she would lean over and press her lips to my fingers with a reverence that sometimes made me say: oh, don’t do that, don’t bother. It hadn’t happened to me before. The woman I loved before, the first time, boundlessly, to the point of folly and even crime — yes, crime — had coolly endured my passion, and shamelessly cheated and exploited me. The wound I received from her had continued to fester. What a tonic to receive, for once, instead of always giving, thanklessly giving, and being mocked for it.

WILL YOU HAVE ME OR NOT?

For the moment I let things take their course. I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no. Yes would have turned my life upside down. Think of a solar system where a pert comet suspends the law of gravity. And no … no was tricky. Not that I wasn’t hungry for some of the fleshpots of Egypt. I wouldn’t deny that I was tired. Tired of the unpaid bills, the sheepish faces of my acquaintances when I tried to pump them for a loan, the holes in my socks that no one darned, the frayed cuffs of my shirts and the daily humiliations I had to take from people who despised nothing so much as poverty. It would have been nice to have no more experience of bitterness and offence, to go to bed at night without racking my brain about how I was going to pay for the privilege. It would have been nice to be freed from worries. Ganna wasn’t wrong when she argued that all these tormenting details would slowly wipe me out. But just for that, it didn’t occur to me to squinny at the groaning tables of the rich, and their nicely stocked wine cellars, and their jealously guarded safes.

It was one of my most disastrous qualities that, faced with a self-willed person, I would lose out because the phenomenon of willpower in and of itself would put me into such a state of amazement that I could generally only come to the decision my opposite number had made for me. I would tell myself I had done my bit, and was glad that there was no more back-and-forth. And Ganna decided for me. During those days her eyes had the sort of tunnel vision of athletes so set on victory they can see nothing but the finishing-tape. What was she so afraid of, why was she in such a hurry? I tried to calm her down. She thanked me exorbitantly, but it looked as though, inside, she was hurt and sore. I sensed how very much she was at the mercy of her drives, and if I wasn’t to stand in front of her as a poor bungler, I had to try and spring her from her jail. And, in so doing, I was clamped in chains myself.

One rainy afternoon she turned up on her bicycle again, panting and exhausted, flung herself at me, clasped my shoulders in her hands and stared at me as though she was on her way to the scaffold within the hour. I asked her in alarm what the matter was, but she merely closed her eyes and shook her head. Then she broke away, ran out to the little balcony, leaped onto the balustrade, turned round to me and, with a hysterical jingle in her voice, said:

‘If you don’t take me, I’m going to jump into the lake; I swear I will. Either you’re going to marry me, or I’ll jump.’

‘Ganna!’ I appealed. The house was on the lake. The water smacked against its western walls. A jump from twenty feet was no laughing matter. She was certainly capable of it. ‘Ganna!’ I called out again. She looked at me, half-blissful, half-fanatic, and spread her arms out. I caught her by the ankle and said reluctantly:

‘Please don’t, Ganna.’

And she: ‘Will you have me or not?’

I didn’t know whether to laugh or be cross. ‘All right, I will, I will,’ I said hurriedly, if only to put an end to the upsetting scene, but even as I said it I had the feeling I had swallowed poison. She jumped back, dropped to her knees in front of me and covered my hand with kisses.

Later, much later, I thought about that episode a lot. In one way, I thought, it wasn’t all that unlike a stick-up with a revolver. Hands up or I shoot. Whether the gun was loaded or not was immaterial. It wasn’t always possible to tell. Bad if it was, worse somehow if it wasn’t. But at the time it all happened, I didn’t have a clue. The notion that it might be a trick didn’t occur to me. Trick was too coarse a word for what it was, too. I saw a woman in the grip of elemental feeling. I can’t say whether it was vanity with me, or pity, but I said to myself I mustn’t push her away from me, I might destroy her for good. I thought I couldn’t be responsible if she came to some harm. I admired her bravery, her resolve, her bold all-or-nothing. And strangely enough, my blurted yes hung on a sensual appeal. As I clutched her slender ankle, I had the feeling I was holding her whole shaking, burning body in my arms. She seemed so frail to me, so delicate. Frailty and delicacy in women has always moved me and inflamed my blood. Hitherto, I had tended to duck my head under the storm of her feeling.