Everything goes past as though in a film.
The wish to grasp the earth.
Instead, we rise higher and higher.
How thin the zone of life really is, a few hundred yards, then the atmosphere already becomes too thin, too cold, it’s really an oasis that man inhabits, the green floor of the valley, its narrow branches, then the end of the oasis, it is as though the forests have been cut off (at 6,000 feet in this part of the world, at 12,000 feet in Mexico), for a while there are still flocks and herds grazing at the limits of possible life, flowers – I can’t see them, but I know they are there – colourful and sweet-scented, but tiny, insects, then only scree, then snow…
Farther on another reservoir.
Its water: like Pernod, greenish and cloudy, the mirror-white of névé upon it, a rowboat against the bank, a multiple-arch dam, not a soul in sight.
Then the first mist, scudding along.
The crevasses – as green as bottle-glass. Sabeth would have said: as emerald! Our twenty-one points game again. The rocks in the evening light – like gold. I think: like amber, because lustreless and almost transparent, or like bone, because pale and brittle. The shadow of our aeroplane on moraines and glaciers; every time it drops down into the chasms it seems to be lost and swallowed up, but a few seconds later it is adhering to the next wall of rock; for the first instant it looks as though it has been laid on with a builder’s trowel, it doesn’t lie there like a layer of plaster, however, but glides along and drops back into the void on the other side of the ridge. Sabeth would have compared the shadow of our plane to a bat. I can’t think of anything and lose a point. I have something else in mind. A trail in the névé, human footprints, it looks like a row of rivets; Sabeth would have compared it to a necklace, bluish, hanging in a wide loop around a white bosom of névé. What I have in mind is this: supposing I were now standing on that peak, what should I do? It would be too late to climb down; dusk is already falling in the valleys and the shades of evening extend over whole glaciers and bend at right angles down the vertical walls. What should I do? We fly past; we can see the cross marking the peak, it gleams white but very lonely, a light the mountaineer never sees, because he has to go down before he reaches it, a light that has to be paid for with death, but very beautiful, for an instant, then clouds, air pockets, the southern face of the Alps covered with clouds, as was to be expected; the clouds are like gypsum, like cauliflower, like foam with tiny bubbles, I don’t know what Sabeth would have thought of, they change quickly, every now and then there is a hole in the clouds, and we can see down into the depths – a black wood, a stream, the wood like a hedgehog, but only for a second, the clouds drift into one another, the shadows of the higher clouds fall on those below, shadows like curtains, we fly through the pile of cloud heaped up in the sunlight in front of us – as though our plane were going to smash itself against the cloudbanks, a mountain of steam, but rounded and white like Greek marble, granular.
We fly into it.
Since my forced landing in Tamaulipas I have always sat so that I can see the undercarriage when they lower it, anxious to observe whether the runway at the last minute, when the wheels touch it, does not after all change into a desert.
Milan.
A cable to Hanna announcing my arrival.
Where else could I go?
It is extraordinary how an undercarriage, twin tyres with telescopic suspension and lubricating oil on the shining metal, all as it should be, suddenly acts like a demon when it touches the ground, a demon that suddenly turns the runway into desert – a figment of the imagination which I myself did not take seriously; I have never met a demon in my life, apart from the so-called Maxwell’s demon, which, as everyone knows, is not a demon at all.
Rome.
A cable to Williams, giving notice.
I gradually calmed down.
It was night when we continued the flight, and we flew too far north, so that – around midnight – I couldn’t make out the Gulf of Corinth.
Everything as usual.
The exhaust sending out a shower of sparks into the darkness.
The flashing green light on the wing.
Moonlight on the wing.
The red glow in the engine-cowl.
I was intensely interested, as though I was flying for the first time in my life; I saw the undercarriage swing slowly out, the searchlights blazed forth from under the wings, projecting their white radiance into the discs of the propellers, then they went out again; there were lights below us, the streets of Athens, or rather Piraeus, we sank down, then the ground-lights, yellow, the runway, our searchlights again, then the customary gentle bump (without any jerk forward into unconsciousness) with the customary clouds of dust rising behind the undercarriage.
I undo my belt.
Hanna at the airport.
I see her through my window.
Hanna in black.
I have only my briefcase, my Baby Hermes, a coat and a hat, so that the customs are quickly dealt with; I am the first out, but I daren’t even wave. Just before the barrier I simply stood still (says Hanna) and waited for Hanna to come up to me. This was the first time I had seen Hanna in black. She kissed me on the forehead. She recommended the Hotel Estia Emborron.
Today nothing but tea, the whole examination business all over again, afterwards I felt done in. Tomorrow the operation at last.
Up to the present I have been to her grave only once, since they kept me here straight away (I only asked for an examination); a hot grave, flowers wither in half a day.
6 P.M.
They have taken my Baby Hermes away.
7.30 P.M.
Hanna has been here again.
Midnight.
I haven’t slept for a minute and don’t want to. I know everything. Tomorrow they are going to open me up and find out what they already know; that there is nothing they can do. They will sew me up and when I come to, they will tell me the operation has been carried out. I shall believe them, although I know everything. I shan’t admit that the pains have come back worse than ever. They argue like this: if I knew I had cancer of the stomach I should put a bullet through my brains. I cling to this life as never before, and if it was only another year, a miserable year, a quarter of a year, two months (that would be September and October), I should hope, although I know I am lost. But I am not alone, Hanna is my friend, and I am not alone.
2.40 A.M.
Wrote a letter to Hanna.
4.00 A.M.
Arrangements in case of death; all written evidence such as reports, letters, loose-leaf notebooks, are to be destroyed, none of it is true. To be alive: to be in the light. Driving donkeys around somewhere (like that old man in Corinth) – that’s all our job amounts to! The main thing is to stand up to the light, to joy (like our child) in the knowledge that I shall be extinguished in the light over gorse, asphalt and sea, to stand up to time, or rather to eternity in the instant. To be eternal means to have existed.
4.15 A.M.
Hanna too no longer has a home, she only told me today (yesterday!). She is now living in a boarding house. My cable from Caracas didn’t even reach her. It must have been around this time that Hanna embarked on a ship. Her first idea was to spend a year on the islands, where she has Greek acquaintances from the time of the excavations (Delos); living is supposed to be very cheap in the islands. In Mykonos you can buy a house for two hundred dollars, thinks Hanna, in Amorgos for one hundred dollars. She is not working at the Institute any more, as I have been thinking all the time. Hanna tried to let her flat with the contents, but was unable to do so quickly enough; so she sold everything and gave away many of her books. She simply couldn’t stand it in Athens any longer, she said. When she went aboard ship she thought of Paris, perhaps also of London; the future was altogether uncertain, for it’s not so easy, thinks Hanna, to find a new job at her age, as a secretary, for instance, Hanna never thought for a moment of asking me for help; that’s why she didn’t write to
me. Fundamentally, Hanna had only one aim: to get away from Greece. She left the city without saying good-bye to her friends here, apart from the director of the Institute, whom she greatly esteems. She spent the last hours before her departure out by the grave; she had to be on board by 2 P.M. sailing at 3 P.M., but for some reason sailing was delayed almost an hour. All of a sudden (says Hanna) it struck her as senseless and she left the ship with her hand luggage. For the three big trunks in the hold, it was too late; the trunks sailed on to Naples and are expected back shortly. At first she lived in the Hotel Estia Emborron, but this was too expensive for her in the long run; she called back at the Institute, where her former assistant had meanwhile taken over her job with a three-year contract; this could not be altered now, because her successor had waited long enough and had no intention of voluntarily returning to his old job. The director was apparently very nice about it all, but the Institute hadn’t the money to employ two people for one job. All they could give her was the prospect of occasional freelance work and recommendations abroad. But Hanna wasn’t to stay in Athens. I don’t know whether Hanna expected me here or whether she wanted to leave Athens so as not to see me again. It was pure chance that she received my cable from Rome in time; when it arrived, she just happened to have come to the empty flat to give the key to the caretaker. Hanna’s present job consists in conducting visitors round the museum in the morning, the Acropolis in the afternoon and Sounion in the evening. In particular she conducts parties that do everything in one day, organized by Mediterranean travel agencies.
6 A.M.
Wrote another letter to Hanna.
6.45 A.M.
I don’t know why Joachim hanged himself; Hanna keeps asking me. How should I know? She keeps coming back to it, although I know less about Joachim than Hanna does. She says: ‘When the child was there, she never reminded me of you, she was my child, mine alone.’ With reference to Joachim: ‘I loved him just because he was not the father of my child, and during the first few years everything was so simple.’ Hanna thinks our child would never have been born if we hadn’t parted when we did. Hanna is convinced of this. Hanna made up her mind before I even reached Baghdad, apparently; she wanted a child, the whole thing took her by surprise, and only when I had disappeared did she discover that she wanted a child (says Hanna) without a father, not our child, but her child. She was alone and happy to be pregnant, and when she went to Joachim to let herself be talked round, Hanna had already made up her mind to have the child; she didn’t mind Joachim thinking he had led her to reach a crucial decision in her life, nor his falling in love with her, which soon afterwards led to marriage. My unfortunate remark in her flat earlier on, ‘You’re behaving like a hen,’ made a considerable impression on Hanna, because, as she confessed, Joachim once used exactly the same words, Joachim provided for the child without interfering in its upbringing; it wasn’t his child, nor mine either, it was a fatherless child, hers and hers alone, a child that did not concern any man, which suited Joachim all right, at least during the earliest years, as long as it was a baby, which in any case belongs to the mother, and Joachim welcomed it because it made Hanna happy. My name was never mentioned, says Hanna. Joachim had no reason to feel jealous, and he wasn’t jealous so far as I was concerned; he saw that I wasn’t the father in the eyes of the world, which didn’t know anything about it, and most certainly not in the eyes of Hanna, who simply forgot me (as Hanna repeatedly assures me) without any reproach. Things became more difficult between Joachim and Hanna when questions of upbringing arose more frequently: less because of differences of opinion, which were few, than because Joachim simply couldn’t bear the way Hanna considered herself, in everything related to children, the one and only authority. Hanna admitted that Joachim was easy to get on with, allergic only in this one respect.
He evidently hoped more and more for a child, a child of theirs, which would give him the status of a father; he thought that then everything would fall into place; Elsbeth considered him her Papa; she loved him, but Joachim distrusted her, says Hanna, and felt himself superfluous. There were all sorts of sensible reasons for not bringing any more children into the world, especially for a German half-Jewess; Hanna still keeps insisting on these reasons, as though I disputed them. Joachim didn’t believe her reasons. His suspicion: ‘You don’t want a father in the home!’ He thought Hanna only wanted children if the father afterwards disappeared. One thing I didn’t know: Joachim had been making plans to emigrate since 1935; he was determined not to let anything part him from Hanna. Hanna never thought of separation either; she wanted to go with Joachim to Canada or Australia, she trained as laboratory assistant, so that she could help him in whatever part of the world he went to. But it never got that far. When Joachim learned that Hanna had had herself sterilized he took the drastic step of volunteering for the Wehrmacht (although to the annoyance of his clan, he had been able to claim exemption). Hanna has never forgotten him. Although she did not live without men during the ensuing years, she sacrificed her whole life to her child. She worked in Paris, later in London, East Berlin, Athens. She fled with her child. Where there was no German-language school, she taught her child herself and, at the age of forty, took up the violin again, so that she could accompany her child. Nothing was too much for Hanna, where the child was concerned. She cared for her child in a cellar, when the Wehrmacht came to Paris, and ventured out in the street to fetch medicines. Hanna didn’t spoil her child; Hanna is too intelligent for that, to my mind, even if (during the last few days) she keeps on describing herself as an idiot. Why did I say that? She keeps asking. Why did I say ‘Your child’, instead of ‘Our child’? Was I reproaching her or was the expression merely prompted by cowardice? I don’t understand her question. Did I realize at the time how right I was? And why did I say the other day: ‘You’re behaving like a hen?’ I have withdrawn and recanted this remark several times, now that I know all that Hanna has done; but it is Hanna who can’t forget it. Can I forgive her?! She wept, she went down on her knees, when the deaconess might have come in at any moment, when Hanna kissed my hand I could no longer recognize her. All I can understand is why, after everything that has happened, Hanna will never leave Athens, never leave the grave of our child. We shall both remain here, I think. I can understand, too, why she gave up her flat with the empty rooms; Hanna found it hard enough to let the girl go away by herself, if only for half a year. Hanna always knew her child would leave her one day; but even Hanna could not foresee that on this journey Sabeth would meet her father, who would destroy everything…
8.45 A.M.
They’re coming.
My work on this book was assisted by a grant from the Pro-Helvetia foundation. I wish to conclude it by expressing my thanks to this foundation for its aid.
M.F.
Zurich, August 1957
Max Frisch, Homo Faber
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