I'm Not Stiller

  'Et après?' he smiled. 'We don't even feel sorry for them, you know, it's too stupid. I know from experience. Our comradeship is limited to acting as though we'd heard nothing about it. Swear to me, Julika, that you'll never get up to that silly trick?' Julika swore. 'No,' laughed the sanatorium veteran, 'not under the camel hair rug, my dear, the good Lord wants to see too.' Julika swore on top of the rug. 'Ecco!' he said and added, once more sunk in his paper: 'And you'll see, Julika, that even when somebody dies here it doesn't create much of an impression. Anyone who hopes to impress us that way is dying in vain. The only thing that impresses us here is life! Incidentally, most people die around Christmas, I've noticed—out of pure sentimentality.'

  (He died in late September himself.)

  In August Stiller turned up again, unannounced and altogether in a way that Julika felt must surprise the head physician even more than his long absence. The fact was that Stiller behaved as though his beautiful Julika were being kept on this art nouveau veranda quite wrongly, straight away demanding of the nurse that his wife should go for a walk with him, for an hour at least. The reason: Stiller wanted to talk to Julika. What had happened? The veranda, where he guessed there were ears listening to right and left, didn't seem to him the place even to start. He took offhis cap, but not his American army greatcoat, which he wore in summer and winter, because it was the only coat he had. Julika asked:

  'Well, how are you?'

  Stiller was very much on edge; he twisted his cap in his hands agitatedly, as though the only person in the sanatorium entitled to consideration was himself, who wanted to talk confidentially to his Julika. He ignored her friendly inquiry after his health. When the head physician arrived on his usual round, he immediately reiterated his request that Julika should go for a walk with him. The head physician was somewhat taken aback. Should he say outright in front of the patient that walks were out of the question in her condition? Julika had been waiting months for permission to go for a walk. A downright No, such as Stiller himself deserved, was prohibited by consideration for the already despondent Julika. Really, what was the head physician to say? In an undertone and looking the other way, as though he would rather not have heard the request at all, he agreed to half an hour, or three-quarters of an hour at most, but asked Stiller to wait outside in the corridor, because he wanted to speak to him first...

  For the first time in months Julika went out of the sanatorium, which had become something like a snail's shell to her, strangely perplexed at suddenly being without her veranda. She felt weaker than she had expected. Arm in arm, Stiller giving her some support without actually treating her as an invalid, they walked slowly along the path that Julika had so often seen from her veranda (when she sat up in bed for the purpose). It was such a moving experience for poor Julika that her eyes filled with tears, tears of joy. To have earth under her feet, to be able to grip a fir-cone, to smell resin on her fingers—all this was such a delight for her that Stiller may have felt it; in any case, he did not come out with what was on his mind.

  'What did the head physician say to you?'

  Stiller tried to keep it to himself.

  'Go on, tell me,' she bade him.

  Stiller seemed confused.

  'What did he say to me?' he remarked at last. 'I'm to spare you any excitement. That's all. He was very brief, your head physician. You shouldn't really be going for a walk at all, he said, your condition is much more serious than I seem to think.'

  'So,' she said.

  'Yes.'

  'They never tell me anything.'

  'Yes,' added Stiller, to divert the conversation from the medical information which he probably ought not to have imparted to Julika, and he smiled, not maliciously, but oddly, sadly '—and then of course, he told me you were a fine and wonderful person, frail and very much in need of looking after, a grand person. Everybody finds it necessary to give me instruction. I must be an idiot.'

  'But Stiller!' she laughed.

  'No,' he said, 'perhaps I really am. It's good to see you again. It's so easy for spectres to come into being when people don't see one another. Anyhow, in my case.'

  Julika repeated her question:

  'What do you do with yourself all the time down there?'

  'Oh—nothing special,' he murmured.

  'Have you seen Foxli at all?'

  'No.'

  'Are you still working?'

  Stiller wasn't exactly talkative.

  'Yes—' he repeated, 'that's about all he had to tell me. That you are a superior person who deserves to be treated with great consideration by her husband. And anyhow we must see that you're not excited in any way. It only does you harm, and your condition is pretty serious, Julika, he told me that three times, I believe.'

  And so they walked along arm in arm, a thing Stiller and Julika seldom did, silent, as though everything of importance had already been said, as though the only thing that mattered now was to enjoy this cloudless August day and the celebrated air; they went for that classic walk with pine-cones and almost importunate squirrels which my counsel and Julika showed me recently, really a very pretty walk, partly through woods and partly through meadows. Down below in the town it was frightful, continuously sultry as though before a thunderstorm, but the thunderstorm never came and it remained so hot that everyone sweated; up here one didn't sweat. Stiller enjoyed it. And the meadows were fragrant.

  Meanwhile they were not getting along very fast, because of poor Julika. Stiller took off his brown U.S. army greatcoat, a really practical garment, and sat on a dry, soft carpet of sun-warmed pine-needles. It was simply glorious. Why talk? thought Julika. And they scarcely said a word. To talk about matters of indifference before the important thing had been said proved impossible. Finally Julika asked, 'What is it then? You wanted to talk to me about something.' Somewhere out of the noonday blue echoed the rumble of an invisible fall of stones. Insects were buzzing. The mountains were wrapped in silvery-grey silence. Julika waited in vain for Stiller to speak. Stiller crumbled red earth between his fingers, until Julika—not out of pettiness, heaven knows, but simply for the sake of something to say—drew attention to his rather long nails, which this earth had made dirty, an absolutely innocent remark which the good Stiller, that masculine mimosa, once more took very much amiss, without saying so (it came out later, in a letter). Now he merely dropped the crumbled earth without a word, picked up a dry twig from the ground and cleaned his finger nails, which Julika had not actually requested. At the same time, he asked her a strangely unexpected question, 'Did you ever really love me?' What could Julika reply to that? But Stiller, cleaning one finger nail after the other, insisted on an answer to his odd question, which had come upon Julika out of the blue. 'What's that got to do with your dirty finger nails?' she asked more or less jokingly, and then saw his lips trembling with agitation. 'Did you come here to ask me that?' This tone, they both found, was not happy, not promising, not in keeping with the splendour of the silent wood. Stiller seemed unable to appreciate fully what it meant to poor Julika to see this wood otherwise than from the veranda, to be outside its art nouveau windows at all, to be able to pluck wild flowers with her own hands instead of merely receiving them from her young Jesuit, to be wearing her almost forgotten coat and skirt instead of being wrapped up in camel-hair rugs. Half an hour had already passed. Stiller was smoking, not without having first asked her permission, and Julika was drawing grass stalks through her teeth.

  'How's your—lady?' she asked.

  'Whom do you mean?' he asked.

  'Are you still in love with her?'

  In fact Julika made it as easy as possible for him, but Stiller was an utter coward, not a word about the fact that he was seeing the lady (as it later turned out) almost every day. He merely looked at Julika and said nothing. What did he expect of her? Julika was lying in the warm grass, tired after the short walk, understandably tired, but still propped up on her right elbow in order to see more of the view, a long swaying stalk between
her lips. She could feel Stiller scrutinizing her, her red hair, her slender nose, her now suntanned skin (her usual alabaster pallor probably suits Julika better), and her lips without lipstick, also her bosom, in fact her whole body, which was, after all, the body of a ballerina; Stiller scrutinized her as though he had never seen a woman before. Was he comparing her with the other one? Stiller gave the impression of being very much in love, Julika thought, in love with her, and at the same time desperate. Why?

  Julika asked, 'What's the matter?' Suddenly (Julika still can't help smiling slightly when she thinks of it) Stiller seized hold of her like a Tarzan, which, heaven knows, he wasn't, took her thin face in his rather hard sculptor's hands, kissed her with incomprehensible vehemence, to which she naturally couldn't immediately respond, and pressed her now enfeebled body to him as though he wanted to crush Julika. He actually hurt Julika a great deal. She didn't say so at once. Why did he stare at her so? For a while she put up with it. But what was he about? Julika took care not to smile, but the very fact that she was taking care not to became evident to Stiller.

  'You!' he shouted, you!' he really shouted as though Julika were lying on the opposite side of the valley. He tore the swaying stalk from between her teeth, though it was only a defence against her understandable embarrassment. Julika didn't even know she was still holding the stalk between her teeth. Why was he so indignant about this innocent stalk? His eyes actually began to glisten, to grow watery, and when he noticed that they were filling with tears Stiller buried his head in her lap, clung with both arms to Julika, who suddenly, as was to be expected, saw the open landscape in front of her, the sanatorium some distance away, the familiar little church of Davos village, and the little red railway that came straight out of the wood whistling. How could Julika help seeing all this?

  Stiller sobbed in her lap, sobbed as a returned prisoner of war might sob at the station, sobbed so that she could feel the heat of his face. Julika wondered whether they could be seen from the sanatorium. Stiller had hands like claws, and Julika naturally found it funny, and even embarrassing, that he was clutching at her buttocks. Eventually, as he didn't stop sobbing, she laid her hand on his neck, which was damp with sweat, moved her hand a little further into his dry hair, and waited for Stiller to pull himself together. He didn't pull himself together at all. He didn't want to. He even tried (ridiculous though it sounds) to bite into her lap, to bite like a dog, but because of her thick corduroy skirt he couldn't. 'Come,' said Julika, 'stop it.' Julika still doesn't know what she should have done on the walk at Davos. For the last two minutes she had been watching two unknown walkers coming along the path they had followed, slowly to be sure, but coming closer all the time, and it was embarrassing, quite apart from the fact that Stiller's behaviour seemed to her really rather theatrical—Mortimer or Clavigo or someone like that, Julika wasn't quite sure who it reminded her of—but it was embarrassing anyhow, for now Stiller was lying like a corpse in her corduroy lap, heavy and motionless, without sobbing, his arms by his sides, inert like a gratified man.

  'You!' said Julika kindly. 'People are coming!' The people had come to within a hundred yards of them, Stiller couldn't deny it. He sat up with the rather sleepy face of a diver returning to the surface, without looking round, without even seeing for himself that the people were really coming nearer and nearer. He put both hands over his face, until the people, two old ladies, had walked past and were behind them; then he lowered his hands, let them dangle over his knees, and looked out into the valley, probably feeling a very tragic figure. Anyhow the only thing that occurred to Julika when she looked at him was to stroke his always rather untidy hair back from his forehead and to smile:

  'Yes, yes—you're a poor fellow!...'

  Stiller could say nothing, he just stood up, pulled up his rather slovenly trousers and, after Julika had had to rise to her feet without his helping hand, picked up his crumpled U.S. army greatcoat, gave Julika his arm for support, and took her back to the sanatorium, where he promised to wait in the corridor until Julika had been tucked in again and rolled out on to her veranda. This took sacrcely twenty minutes. But when the nurse looked in the corridor, there was no Herr Stiller. He had simply gone off without saying good-bye...

  This was their last meeting but one.

  ***

  Knobel, my warder, is becoming a nuisance. He waits like a magazine reader for the daily instalments of my life story, and his memory is beginning to worry me.

  'Excuse me, Mr White, that can't be right. First you murdered your wife—'

  'Yes.'

  'Then Director Schmitz—'

  'Yes.'

  'That was in the jungle, you said, in Jamaica. And then came the little mulatto's husband, after which you fled to Mexico—what happened then?' he asked with the soup pail in his hand. 'From Mexico you came here.'

  'Yes.'

  'But what about your other two murders? You told me there were five murders.'

  I spooned up my soup and said:

  'Perhaps there were only three.'

  'Joking apart,' said Knobel and over this point, as it turns out, he has absolutely no sense of humour; he's become a nuisance ... I merely said:

  'There are all sorts of ways of murdering a person or at least his soul, and that's something no police in the world can spot. A word is enough for that, plain speaking at the right moment. A smile is enough. I should like to see the person who cannot be killed by a smile, or by saying nothing. All these murders, of course, take place slowly. Haven't you ever wondered, my dear Knobel, why so many people are interested in a real murder, a visible and demonstrable murder? It's quite obvious: because we generally don't see our daily murders. So it's a relief when there's a bang for once, when blood flows, or when someone dies of real poison, not merely of his wife's silence. That's the magnificent thing about bygone ages, for instance the Renaissance—the fact that the human character revealed itself in deeds; nowadays everything takes place inwardly—and to tell the story of an inward murder, my dear Knobel, takes time, a long time.'

  'How long?' he asked.

  'Hours and days.'

  To this my warder replied:

  'Mr White, I've got next Sunday off.'

  ***

  Despite his silence, therefore, Julika knew about Stiller's summertime affair. Affair is not a very pretty word, perhaps, but why should Julika (when she thought about it) have wrapped it up in romantic phrases? She knew about it, then. What could she, an invalid in a glass-enclosed veranda, do to prevent it? Nothing at all.

  Nothing but put up with it patiently, patiently, patiently...

  Now more than ever, thought poor Julika at times, there was nothing left for her but her art, and she gazed at the cover of a Swiss illustrated paper (recently sent by her friends) bearing a picture of beautiful Julika, the dancer, Julika all by herself. It seems to have been a spectacular photograph, almost reminiscent of Degas with the magical lights flitting in the ballerina's gauze skirt. It had been taken the previous winter and Julika had given up all hope that the photograph, which had been so much trouble to take, would ever appear. But now, at the end of August, it had been printed to coincide with the opening of the new season. The picture showed Julika from the back view, her left leg swung up, her face in luminous profile; the fluid and yet definite poise of the arms with the hands emerging from the ends like buds—everything was faultless. The caption underneath was rather silly, as usual, but at least not an outright distortion of fact, which Julika thought was quite an achievement for this paper. Incidentally it was a periodical of some importance; Julika gave a slight shudder when she read the number that had been printed. There were so many Julikas now, Julika on the newspaper kiosk, Julika in the train, Julika in the privacy of the home, Julika in the café, Julika in the overcoat pockets of well-dressed gentlemen, Julika beside the soup plate, Julika everywhere, Julika in a tent on some beach, Julika in the halls of all the best hotels, but above all Julika on the newspaper kiosk, on all the kiosks
in the country, and some abroad as well, for a whole week: then later, Julika in dentists' waiting rooms, but also in the New York Public Library, available for the asking, and Julika here and there in a lonely room over the bed. Julika was not proud, oh no, just dumbfounded every time she picked up the rather cheap paper this magazine was printed on, but above all glad it was such a spectacular photograph and that her pose was quite faultless from the dancing point of view.

  The fact that she was beautiful, in fact very beautiful, did not escape Julika. When, yes, when would she ever be able to dance again? She lay back with her eyes closed, trying to picture the Julika in the Degas tutu stepping out into the modest area of the empty stage, surrounded by darkness with the dust whirling in the streams of bluish light from the spotlights, which carry her, Julika, as it were above all earthly gravity, remove her from all human pressures, and then, oh yes, and then, when the first curtain has swished its way to the side and Julika is already on her points, when the second curtain, the heavy one, has rustled through its eight seconds, to open the gate, the gate to that other darkness full of lit-up faces in the first rows, and then, when the orchestra, which has been playing for a long time already, echoes like surf at her feet, now rings out at full strength, ah, this music is like a magic circle, a magic circle around Julika, whom everyone can see but not grasp, and then she sees the footlights begin to glow, and the lights up in the so-called bridge, they dazzle Julika so that she can no longer recognize anything in this world, only feels her space, her waiting space, which otherwise she never feels anywhere, bliss, an unutterable bliss, so that she gulps with trepidation, and then she turns her head (exactly as on that front cover) and knows that now the gleam of her eyes will be seen right up in the gods, and then, yes then, her first steps, as though all music now existed only in her body, the busy string players whose hair falls over their eyes as they ply the bow, the wind players with their putti cheeks, the famous conductor with his coat-tails like crows' wings and his eyes on Julika, only on Julika, the hearty lads on the double-basses who are now sawing like lumberjacks, the nice fellow on the tympani, a bundle of nerves filled with obedient attentiveness, who finally gets the chance to make his bim-bam, heavens above, they're all producing notes, this billowing of themes, this surge that ebbs again, but the music is in Julika, it lives in her body, is born from her body: corporeal, visible. And yet, in her imagination Julika never really got beyond the first few steps. Strange! A squirrel on the larch by her veranda, just one squirrel dropping the empty cones, an almost imperceptible sound, or the familiar whistle from the train down in the valley, or once the creaking of a peasant cart going down a steep road with its brakes on, or merely someone coughing slightly on the veranda below, the hearty laughter of a baker's boy who had just delivered the fresh bread and had jumped back onto his bicycle before riding off into the forest whistling a tune, anything was enough to interrupt Julika's daydream of the ballet. Even though she had so much free time and no other task prevented her from beginning her intoxicating imaginings all over again from the beginning, with the floods of blue light from the spots, Julika, for some unknown reason, never managed to get beyond the first few steps. And yet she naturally knew a whole series of ballets off by heart, step by step. In vain she resorted again to the stupid illustrated magazine, hardly able to believe that she was this weightless creature, a creature whom Julika, if it had not been a picture on paper, would have liked to embrace, to put her arms around, as the good Stiller had recently put his arms around her. She shed tears which rightly tasted to Julika, since she attributed them to the interruption of her career, rather sentimental. She was more often overwhelmed by a nostalgia for music. When finally she was allowed to switch on the little magic box of black bakelite which the young Jesuit had got for her, and when she heard the very music she wanted, softly of course, but clear and with quite a good tone, music to which Julika had danced time and again, behold, it was nothing but music and she took just as much pleasure in listening to music that would never be considered for a ballet. Quite simply: dancing, even if it was a long time before she would admit it, had suddenly become for Julika something from a past period of her life, exquisite, but no longer possible for her, inwardly no longer possible. It frightened her. Hadn't Stiller, who was rather envious of her success, been right in regarding her dancing as a substitute? Julika didn't think so, not even now. It would come back, she knew. But now she didn't want to listen to ballet music thank you, she preferred any other records the young Jesuit could get hold of. He even knew about music! But Julika was concerned about her inner alienation from ballet. Did it come from the human disappointment in theatre people which Julika had experienced that summer? The fact that not one of them came to visit her in her veranda-prison up there? Only six months ago, it was hardly credible, they had worn out their over-emotional arms greeting Julika, friends whose overflowing hearts made them call out at the top of their voices from a distance of only ten yards: Julika, darling, how are you? Even though they had already seen each other that morning. Strange people indeed; Stiller had never been able to get on with them. But Stiller was unjust. These people were not to be judged by their human loyalty; their cordiality—was limited to the emotions of the moment. They really did love Julika, all of them, the ladies of the ballet a little less, perhaps, because they were envious of Julika's incomparable hair, but really all the gentlemen, the singers too, even a few gentlemen from the administration, and then the famous conductors, who often used to visit Julika in her stuffy dressing-room, unfit for human habitation, kiss her hand, take a wobbly chair and predict a career abroad—well, where were they all? Once a card came for her, greetings from a very gay gathering after a first night that had been an unprecedented success even without Julika, bearing a few brief lines assuring Julika that they missed her terribly, a joke card signed with names running in all directions, a whole bunch of friends. And then, to be sure, a few letters came, written during rehearsal and therefore short and disconnected, gossip about colleagues, all very nice. And no doubt if Julika could have come out from under the covers and gone to see them, jubilation would have run from dressing-room to dressing-room, Julika would have been smothered in kisses, embraced like the winner of a tour de Suisse at the winning post, greeted with endless handshakes from people gazing deep into her eyes, yes, and here and there with expressions of deep feeling: I'm not just being sentimental when I tell you how much I've missed you all these months, I really mean that, I often used to think about the old times and say to myself Julika's up there all alone, poor kid, heavens above, I often used to think of you, believe me, a guy like you, but I don't have to tell you all that now you're here with us again! And then another kiss, an embrace like that between Orestes and Electra. And Julika would have believed it all and quite rightly. Stiller had never understood these people. Fundamentally Stiller was still a bourgeois, Spanish civil war or no Spanish civil war. You can only get along with theatre people if you work with them and as long as you're working with them, then you're one heart and one soul, yes, then there are moments of primitive Christianity such as are only to be found behind the scenes before a first night, for instance; you think it's a community that will go on for ever, that's how it seems. She wouldn't have needed an attack of tuberculosis to be forgotten by these warm-hearted people in three months; it's enough not to dance for a while, to come along one fine day with other interests, to be interested in the Fathers of the Church, for example, or the absolute speed of light, it's enough not to look upon their first night as a major event in the history of mankind and you're already an outsider, oh, you wouldn't be thrown out of their dressing-rooms, certainly not, for they're almost all really nice people as long as their nerves don't happen to be playing them up, but they're people with no interest in people who don't talk about the theatre, you could tell them you've got no lungs left, absolutely none, and they would apparently listen, silently busy, while looking in the mirror and wiping the makeup out of their eye sockets, an
d finally, throwing away the cottonwool, they would ask: Did you see the show tonight? They're actors, they don't want to be anything else, performers, they can't be anything else thanks to their talent. Was Julika so very different? She felt with sadness that it was, so to speak, only her own self that was now leaving her in the lurch ... Once one of them had come, a colleague from the ballet; he stood on the veranda for twenty minutes repeating all kinds of funny stories, events from the last festival performances which meant about as much to Julika as the chariot races of antiquity. He too grasped Julika's hands and gazed at her as though they were characters in a tragedy, but his feelings were quite genuine, no doubt about that. He had had a burst tyre and had to take his Volkswagen to a garage (didn't Julika know he had a Volkswagen now?), that's why he had stopped off in Davos, and as he had to be in town that same day he unfortunately didn't have much time, too bad, too bad, but he thought Julika was looking fine, better than ever. The damned dusty air in the theatre, too bad the administration did nothing about it. Well, you know what the administration is like! He said goodbye, already ten minutes late, with a bright expression of confidence that Julika would be well in no time and filled with equally bright anticipation of being able to tell aH her colleagues that Julika sent them all her best wishes. Julika sank back onto her pillows. No sooner was her warm-hearted colleague with the Volkswagen outside than he whistled to attract her attention and waved; Julika waved too. But at that moment, she could still remember very clearly, she felt as though she were saying goodbye to a whole world, which really wasn't a world, to her own world with the bluish light streaming from the spots which was no longer capable of bearing her, Julika, above the earth's gravity...