Homo Faber

  ‘This is a nice flat you’ve got,’ I said.

  I mentioned her husband.

  ‘Piper,’ she said.

  She didn’t need him either, it seemed, not even financially. She had been living for years by her own work (I still haven’t a clear idea of what this consists of, to be frank), not in luxury, but tolerably. I could see that. Her clothes could have stood up even to Ivy’s scrutiny, and apart from an archaic wall-clock with a cracked face, her flat, as I have said, was thoroughly modern.

  ‘And how are things with you?’ she inquired.

  I was wearing someone else’s jacket which they had lent me in the hospital; I felt uncomfortably conscious of it all the time because it didn’t fit me; it was too wide, because I am thin, and at the same time too short with sleeves like a boy’s jacket. I took it off as soon as Hanna went into the kitchen, but my shirt didn’t look nice either, it was blood-stained.

  ‘If you would like a bath,’ said Hanna, ‘before I cook a meal…’

  She was laying the table.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve been sweating.’

  She was touching and at the same time matter-of-fact; she turned the geyser on and explained how to turn it off, and she brought me a clean towel and soap.

  ‘How are your feet?’ she asked.

  As she talked she busied herself with this and that.

  ‘What do you mean, go to a hotel?’ she asked. ‘Of course you can stay here.’

  I felt very unshaven.

  The bath filled-very slowly and steamed, Hanna added cold water, as though I couldn’t have done that myself. I was sitting on a stool, as inactive as a guest, my feet were hurting badly, Hanna opened the little window, in the steam I could only distinguish her movements, which hadn’t changed, not in the least.

  ‘I always thought you were furious with me,’ I said, ‘because of what happened.’

  Hanna was merely surprised.

  ‘Why should I be furious? Because we didn’t marry?’ she said. ‘That would have been a disaster.’

  She positively laughed at me.

  ‘Seriously,’ she said, ‘did you think I was angry with you, Walter, for twenty-one years?’

  My bath was full.

  ‘Why a disaster?’ I asked.

  Apart from this, we never referred to the fact that we once nearly got married. Hanna was right, we had other things to worry about.

  ‘Did you know,’ I asked, ‘that the mortality from snake bites was only three to ten per cent?’

  I was astounded.

  Hanna had no use for statistics, I soon realized that. She let me deliver a whole lecture – in the bathroom – about statistics, and at the end all she said was:

  ‘Your bath is getting cold.’

  I don’t know how long I lay in that bath with my bandaged feet resting on the edge – thinking about statistics, thinking about Joachim, who had hanged himself, thinking about the future, thinking until I shivered, until I didn’t know what I was thinking, it was as though I couldn’t make up my mind to recognize my own thoughts. I saw the flasks and pots, the tubes, all sorts of feminine knick-knacks, I could no longer picture Hanna, neither the Hanna of the old days nor the Hanna of today. I was shivering, but I didn’t fancy putting my bloodstained shirt on again – I didn’t answer when Hanna called me.

  What was the matter with me?

  I didn’t know myself.

  Did I want tea or coffee?

  I was worn out by the events of the day, hence my indecision, which wasn’t like me, and hence the fantastic notions (the bath as a sarcophagus – Etruscan!), a positive delirium of shivering indecision…

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m coming.’

  I hadn’t really intended to see Hanna again; as soon as we reached Athens I meant to go straight to the airport…

  My time was up.

  How I was to return the Citroën Williams had lent me, which was now waiting in Bari, was a mystery to me. I didn’t even know the name of his garage in Paris.

  ‘Yes,’ I called out, ‘I’m coming.’

  But I just lay where I was.

  The Via Appia…

  The mummies in the Vatican…

  My body under the water…

  I’ve no use for suicide, it doesn’t alter the fact that one has been in the world, and what I wished at that moment was that I had never existed at all!

  ‘Walter,’ she asked, ‘are you coming?’

  I hadn’t bolted the bathroom door, and Hanna (I thought) could easily come in and kill me from behind with an axe; I lay with my eyes closed, to avoid seeing my ageing body.

  Hanna was making a phone call.

  Why couldn’t things go on without me?

  Later, as the evening passed, I once more talked as though nothing had happened. Without pretence; nothing had happened really, the main thing was that Sabeth’s life had been saved. Thanks to serum. I asked Hanna why she didn’t believe in statistics, instead of in fate and so forth.

  ‘You and your statistics!’ she said. ‘If I had a hundred daughters, and all of them had been bitten by a viper, there would be some sense in it. Then I should only lose three to ten daughters. Amazingly few! You’re quite right.’

  And she laughed.

  ‘I’ve only got one child,’ she said.

  I didn’t contradict, nevertheless we almost quarrelled, suddenly our nerves gave way. It began with a remark on my part.

  ‘Hanna,’ I said, ‘you’re behaving like a hen.’

  It just slipped out.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘but it’s true.’

  Only later did I realize what had annoyed me. When I came out of the bathroom Hanna was on the telephone, she had rung the hospital while I was in the bath – she was talking to Elsbeth.

  I heard everything, without wishing to.

  Not a word about me.

  She was talking as though there was only Hanna, the mother who had trembled for her child and was now happy that the girl was gradually feeling better and could actually talk, they were speaking German, until I came into the room, then Hanna switched over to Greek. I couldn’t understand a word. Then she hung up.

  ‘How is she?’ I inquired.

  Hanna was greatly relieved.

  ‘Did you tell her I was here?’ I asked.

  Hanna took a cigarette.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  Hanna was acting very strangely, and I simply didn’t believe that the girl hadn’t asked after me; at least I had a right, it seemed to me, to know everything that had been said.

  ‘Come,’ said Hanna, ‘let’s have something to eat.’

  What infuriated me was her smile, as though I hadn’t the right to know everything.

  ‘Come,’ said Hanna, ‘sit down.’

  But I didn’t sit down.

  ‘Why are you offended when I talk to my child?’ she said. ‘Why?’

  She was really acting (as I suppose all women do, no matter how intellectual they are) like a hen taking her chick under her wing; hence my remark to this effect; one word led to another, Hanna was furious at my remark, more crudely a woman than I had ever seen her. Her everlasting argument:

  ‘She’s my child, not your child.’

  Hence my question:

  ‘Is it true that Joachim is her father?’

  No answer to this.

  ‘Leave me alone!’ she said. ‘What do you want of me? I haven’t seen Elsbeth for half a year, suddenly there’s this call from the hospital, I go there and find her unconscious – and I don’t know what has happened.’

  I took it all back.

  ‘You,’ she said, ‘what reason have you to talk to my daughter? What do you want with her anyway? What have you been doing with her?’

  I could see she was trembling.

  Hanna was anything but an old woman, but naturally I saw her withered skin, her lacrimal sacs, the crow’s feet on her temples, they didn’t disturb me, but I saw them. Her age suited her very well, I thought, especially
in her face, apart from the skin under her chin, which reminded me of the skin of lizards. I took it all back.

  I could well understand that Hanna was attached to her child, that she had counted the days until the child came home, and that it isn’t easy for a mother when her child first journeys out into the world.

  ‘She’s no longer a child,’ she said, ‘it was I who sent her on this trip, one day she will have to live her own life, I quite realize that one day she won’t come back…’

  I let Hanna talk.

  ‘That’s the way things are,’ she said, ‘we can’t keep life in our arms, Walter, you can’t either.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Then why do you try?’ she asked.

  I couldn’t always understand what Hanna meant.

  ‘Life goes with the children,’ she said.

  I had inquired about her work.

  ‘That’s the way things are,’ she said. ‘We can’t marry again through our children.’

  No answer to my question.

  ‘Walter,’ she said, ‘how old are you now?’

  Then came her statement that she hadn’t a hundred daughters, but only one (as I knew), and her daughter had only one life (as I also knew) like every human being; she, Hanna, also had only one life, a life that was ruined, and I too (did I realize that?) had only one life.

  ‘Hanna,’ I said, ‘we know that.’

  Our food got cold.

  Hanna was smoking. Instead of eating.

  ‘You’re a man,’ she said. ‘I’m a woman – that makes a difference, Walter.’

  ‘I should hope so!’ I laughed.

  ‘I shall never have any more children…’

  She said this twice in the course of the evening.

  ‘My work?’ she said. ‘You can see for yourself, patching up fragments. That is supposed to have been a vase. From Crete. I stick the past together.’

  I didn’t consider Hanna’s life ruined at all. On the contrary. I didn’t know her second husband, this Piper, whom she had met after emigrating; Hanna hardly ever mentioned him, although (and this still surprises me) she bore his name: Dr Hanna Piper. Yet Hanna has always done what she thought best, and for a woman that says a great deal, I think. She led her life according to her own wishes. She didn’t actually tell me why things hadn’t worked out with Joachim. She called him a good fellow. Not a trace of reproach; at most she thought us all queer, men as a whole. Perhaps Hanna expected too much, where men were concerned, though I think she loved men. If there were any reproaches, they were self-reproaches; if Hanna could or had to live again, she would love men quite differently. She found it natural that men (she said) were mentally restricted, and only regretted her own stupidity in thinking each of them (I don’t know how many there had been) an exception. Yet Hanna, to my mind, is anything but stupid. But she thought herself so. She thought it stupid of a woman to want to be understood by a man; the man (said Hanna) wants the woman to be a mystery, so that he can be inspired and excited by his own incomprehension. The man hears only himself, according to Hanna, therefore the life of a woman who wants to be understood by a man must inevitably be ruined. According to Hanna. The man sees himself as master of the world and the woman only as his mirror. The master is not compelled to learn the language of the oppressed; the woman is compelled, though it does her no good, to learn the language of the master, she merely learns a language that always puts her in the wrong. Hanna regretted having become a Ph.D. As long as God is a man, not a couple, the life of a woman, according to Hanna, is bound to remain as it is now, namely wretched, with woman as the proletarian of Creation, however smartly dressed. I thought her odd, a woman of fifty, philosophizing like a teenager, a woman who looked as elegant as Hanna, positively attractive, and on top of this a personage, that was obvious, a lady of her standing – I couldn’t help thinking, for example, of how they had treated Hanna at the hospital, a foreigner who had only been living in Athens for three years, and yet they treated her like a professor, a Nobel Prize winner! I felt sorry for her.

  ‘Walter, you’re not eating anything.’

  I took hold of her arm.

  ‘You proletarian of creation!’

  Hanna refused to smile, she waited for me to let go of her arm.

  ‘Where,’ she asked, ‘did you go in Rome?’

  I gave her a report.

  The way she looked at me…

  You might have thought I was a ghost, the way Hanna looked at me as I reported on Rome, a freak with a trunk and claws, a monster that drank tea.

  I shall never forget that look.

  She didn’t utter a word.

  I started talking again, because silence was impossible, about the mortality figures for snake bite and about statistics in general.

  It was as though Hanna was deaf.

  I didn’t dare look into her eyes – every time I thought for as much as a second (I couldn’t think of it for longer) that I had embraced Sabeth, or that Hanna, who was sitting in front of me, was her mother, the mother of my mistress, who was herself my mistress.

  I don’t know what I talked about.

  Her hand (I was, so to speak, talking only to her hand) was remarkable: as small as a child’s hand, older than the rest of Hanna, tense and slack, ugly, really not a hand at all, but something maimed, soft and bony and flabby, wax with freckles, not really ugly, on the contrary, something sweet, but something alien, something horrible, something sad, something blind, I talked and talked, I fell silent. I tried to picture Sabeth’s hand, but without success, I could only see what was lying beside the ash-tray on the table, human flesh with veins under the skin, which looked like crumpled tissue-paper, so crinkled and at the same time glistening.

  I was dead tired myself.

  ‘She’s really still a child,’ said Hanna, ‘ – or do you think she has already been with a man?’

  I looked into Hanna’s eyes.

  ‘I wish her that,’ she said, ‘I wish her that.’

  Suddenly she cleared the table.

  I helped.

  Regarding statistics: Hanna wasn’t interested, because she believed in fate, I could see that straight away, although Hanna never expressly said so. All women have a tendency to superstition, but Hanna is highly educated; for this reason I was surprised. She talked about myths as we talk about the theory of heat, as though she were speaking of a physical law confirmed by daily experience, and hence in a positively casual tone. Without astonishment. Oedipus and the sphinx, portrayed in childlike fashion on a broken vase, Athene, the Erinyes or Eumenides or whatever they’re called, were to her mind facts; there was nothing to prevent her from dragging them into a serious conversation. Quite apart from my ignorance of mythology and belles-lettres in general, I didn’t want to argue; we had sufficient practical worries.

  By 5 June I had to be in Paris.

  By 7 June in New York.

  By 10 June (at the latest) in Venezuela.

  Hanna worked in an Archaeological Institute, gods were part of her job, I had to keep reminding myself of this; no doubt we too, without being aware of it, have a déformation professionelle. I had to smile when Hanna talked like that.

  ‘You and your gods!’

  She dropped the subject at once.

  ‘I wouldn’t leave,’ I said, ‘if it weren’t quite certain that the child is out of danger, believe me.’

  Hanna understood perfectly, it seemed, she washed the dishes while I spoke briefly of my professional obligations, and I did the drying up – just like twenty years ago, I thought, or twenty-one as the case might be.

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Don’t you think so?’ I said.

  I don’t know how Hanna managed to make it twenty-one years. But I accepted her figure, so that she shouldn’t keep correcting me.

  ‘This is a nice kitchen,’ I said.

  Suddenly she repeated her question:

  ‘Did you ever see Joachim again?’

  Some time, obviously, I h
ad to tell her that Joachim was no longer alive, but not just this evening, I thought, not just on the first evening.

  I talked about something or other.

  Our suppers in the old days in her room!

  ‘Do you remember Frau Oppikofer?’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘It just came back to me,’ I said. ‘The way she always used to knock on the door with her broomstick, if I was still in your room after ten o’clock.’

  The dishes were washed and dried.

  ‘Walter,’ she asked. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  Memories are funny things.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘after twenty years one can laugh about it…’

  Hanna put water to boil.

  ‘Walter,’ she asked, ‘will you have some coffee?’

  She didn’t want to hear any memories.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘please.’

  I couldn’t see why her life was ruined. On the contrary. I always think it’s wonderful when someone lives pretty much the way he once took it into his head to live. I admired her. Frankly, I had never imagined that anyone could earn money by philology and history of art. Moreover, you couldn’t even say. Hanna was unwomanly. Having a job suited her. Even when she was married to Joachim, apparently, she always worked, translations and suchlike, and certainly after emigrating. In Paris, after her divorce from Joachim, she worked for a publisher. When the Germans arrived, she fled to England and supported her child out of her own earnings. Joachim was a doctor in Russia and therefore unable to send her any money. Hanna worked for the German Service of the B.B.C. She is still a British citizen. Herr Piper owes her his life, it seems to me; Hanna got him out of some camp by marrying him (if I’ve got the story right), without stopping to think, because of her old love for Communists. Herr Piper proved a disappointment, because he wasn’t a Communist, but an opportunist. As Hanna put it, ready to follow the party line to the point of treachery and now quite willing to approve of concentration camps again. Hanna only laughed, ‘Men!’ He was willing to serve under any flag, as long as he could make his films. In June 1953 Hanna left him. He simply didn’t notice that he was proclaiming today what he had recanted yesterday, or vice versa; what he had lost was a spontaneous relationship to reality. Hanna didn’t like talking about him, yet she told me all the more the less it interested me. Hanna thought this Piper’s attitude to life sad, but typical of certain men – stone-blind, according to Hanna, lacking any contact. He used to have a sense of humour; now he only laughed at the West. Hanna uttered no reproaches; really she was only laughing at herself, at her love for men.