I'm Not Stiller

  At this he packed his brief-case.

  'As a free Swiss—' he said and seemed to be offended again. 'Why are you laughing?'

  Free! Free! Free! In vain I tried to make him tell me, free from what? And above all, free for what? He simply told me he was free, and I too, sitting on the bed and shaking my head, would be free, if only I had the sense to be their missing Stiller. With his hand on the latch, ready to step out intp his freedom, he said in a tone of mild concern:

  'Why are you shaking your head?'

  One ought to be able to think. And one ought to be able to express oneself in such a way that they have nothing left but their truth. I merely see that even their civil liberty, of which they are so proud, as though it were human freedom pure and simple, is really pretty worthless; and I can deduce that their whole country, as a State among States, enjoys just as little freedom as any small power among great powers; it is only thanks to their unimportance (the fact that today they lie outside history) that they can delude themselves they are independent, and also thanks to their commercial good sense, which forces them to be polite to the mighty for the sake of trade, and anyone who has no complaint to make against the mighty, because he lives so well on them, will always imagine himself free and independent. But what has all this to do with freedom? I see their faces: Are they free? And their gait, their ugly gait: Is that the gait of free people? And their fear, their fear of the future, their fear of one day being poor, their fear of life, their fear of dying without life insurance, and finally their fear that the world might change, their absolutely panic fear of spiritual audacity—no, they are no freer than I am, as I sit here on my bed knowing that the step into freedom (of which no ancestor can relieve us) is always a tremendous step, a step with which we leave behind everything that has previously seemed like solid ground, and a step that no one can hinder once I have the strength to take it. For it is the step into faith, everything else is not freedom, but empty chatter. But for this very reason, perhaps my counsel is right once more: Why should I say this before the assembled Press? Why offend people? In the last resort it is my own business whether I ever become free, free of them as well—a very lonely business.

  Again and again I observe that I can talk to my public prosecutor, my accuser, better than to my so-called defending counsel. This leads to confidences that are not without danger. Today he showed me a photograph of Sibylle, his wife, who always sends her good wishes. We spoke for a long time about marriage—of course, quite generally. My public prosecutor considers marriage certain experiences have manifestly given him cause to doubt it quite possible, though difficult. Naturally he means a real, living marriage. Among the prerequisites he numbers: the knowledge on both sides that we have no claim to our partner's love; lifelong readiness for living experience, even if it endangers the marriage, in other words an ever open door for the unexpected, not for little adventures, but for the risk—the moment two partners feel sure of each other, they have generally already lost each other. Further, equal rights for man and woman; renunciation of the view that sexual fidelity is enough, and equally of the other view that without sexual fidelity there is no marriage at all; the most far-reaching and honest, but not reckless, frankness over difficulties of this kind. It also seems important to him that both should face their environment courageously—a couple has already ceased to be a couple when one or both of the partners conspires with those around them to put pressure on the other; further, the courage to be able to think, without reproach, that our partner might be happier without us; further, the fairness never to persuade the partner, verbally or otherwise cause him to believe, that his withdrawal from the marriage would kill us, and so on ... All this, as I have said, he put in general terms while I was looking at the photograph of his wife, a face that was not at all general, a unique face, lively, lovable in the highest degree, much more enthralling than his words, though the latter were perfectly true, as he referred to his unspoken experience with this face. Then I returned the photograph.

  'Yes,' said my public prosecutor, 'what were we actually talking about?'

  'You were saying that your wife is expecting a baby.'

  'Yes,' he said, 'we're very happy about it.'

  'Let's hope all goes well.'

  'Yes,' he said, 'let's hope so.'

  ***

  Jean-Louis Dmitritch is the pianist in her dancing school, half Russian and very sensitive, a gentleman between forty and fifty, unmarried, gifted—and Julika is delighted with this jewel, she says, and calls him her right-hand man in Paris. Perhaps I shouldn't have asked. Perhaps Julika now imagines I'm jealous.

  My friend and prosecutor asked me whether I knew Anna Karenina. Then, whether I knew Effi Briest. Finally whether I could not visualize a quite different attitude from the one adopted by the deserted husband in this masterpiece. A more generous attitude, he meant—and then he began to tell a story...

  My public prosecutor seemed very much preoccupied by the fact that he himself found great difficulty in taking this more generous attitude, which he could imagine a deserted husband adopting. I listened to him the whole afternoon. Somewhat bewildered by his own frankness (he didn't really want to be frank, but felt increasingly compelled to be precise in order to dispel all sorts of misunderstandings and keep to the concrete example within his own experience) he asked from time to time, 'Can you understand that?' It was a story like a thousand others, and therefore easy to understand. I could also understand his need to see that missing Stiller whom his wife, as I heard, had loved to the very limit of the (for him) bearable.

  ***

  Knobel, my warder, has been behaving rather oddly for some time, he's always in a hurry to leave my cell. It didn't escape my notice. Today he said straight out:

  'Herr Stiller[[[mdash.gif]]]'

  I just looked at him.

  'Heavens above,' he said, turning away in shame like a traitor, 'I was the only one who believed you[[[mdash.gif]]]'

  Julika has convinced them all.

  'Herr Stiller,' he said. 'I can't help it being like that, heavens above, I don't blame you for having told me all that rubbish, but I can't help it[[[mdash.gif]]]'

  I ate and said nothing.

  FOURTH NOTEBOOK

  I CAN'T get out of my head the little story about the flesh-pink cloth in Genoa, which my friend and prosecutor told me yesterday. I see him—we'll call him Rolf- in the night train which he boarded blindly, not caring where it was going, as glad as a fugitive that any train was still leaving at midnight. He thought it might be easier to bear while moving, and then he wanted at all costs to avoid meeting his wife again, after having stood up quite well to the first shock. It may be, too, that he expected to gain some advantage from crossing the frontier. The further the better! So he was sitting in the night train, a gentleman without any luggage, alone in his second-class compartment. The train stopped at daybreak at Milan, in an empty station. An Italian railwayman tapped the wheels with a hammer; otherwise the whole world seemed to be sleeping like Sibylle, who now, having told her husband, had nothing more to worry about. Puerile plans for revenge passed through his head; the wait in this station made him all the more aware of his lack of any goal. Suddenly a cock crowed somewhere, quickly followed by a second and a third; finally a whole goods train of fowls waiting here for the morning market was crowing. And then, when at last the wheels turned again, Rolf slept in spite of everything, only occasionally waking to the consciousness that one looks stupid with one's mouth open; yet he was just as alone in his compartment as ever. He did everything in his power to sleep, for the longer he slept the greater the chance that when he woke up it would all turn out to have been nothing but a bad dream.

  In Genoa the sun was already shining. Rolf stood in front of the station arcade, so tired he would have liked just to sit down on the steps like the beggars, a gentleman with no luggage, but with a superfluous overcoat on his arm, rather unshaven too; he stared at the hooting traffic, the rattling and tinkling tramcar
s in the shady canyons of the narrow streets, the crowds of people, all of whom seemed to have a goal—so this was Genoa. He had already lit a cigarette. What next? He noticed that someone was slipping along between the arcades watching him, probably a money-changer, and he strolled away. In a cheap bar, surrounded by porters and taxi-drivers and therefore solicited from all sides, while a scruffy individual washed down the stone floor between his far too perfect shoes, he drank black coffee and observed his total lack of any feeling.

  'Whether we get a divorce, or what we're going to do about it,' she had said, 'I don't know myself yet. For the moment all I want is for you to leave me in peace,'

  Another thing his wife had said was:

  'You don't have to give me my freedom. What do you mean by that? I can take freedom for myself, if I need it.'

  It was this remark in particular, it seems, which so infuriated the husband that in the broad daylight of Genoa he talked aloud to himself and walked along without really knowing where he was. It didn't matter anyway. Somewhere among warehouses, railway lines, and tar barrels. Yes, there were even moments when he loudly cursed his wife beyond the Alps, with words that did him all the more good the more vulgar they were. He used expressions (so he says) of such crude, unvarnished obscenity as he had never before heard from his own lips. When someone unexpectedly addressed him he was completely taken aback. He hadn't the slightest wish to see the sights of Genoa. Never in his life had he felt so defenceless—as though anyone could read his jumbled thoughts. At this moment he was incapable of saying No to a boatman, and let himself in for a trip round the harbour. The sea turned out to be grey lead flecked with iridescent patches of oil. Rolf sat on a seat covered with worn cushions, as tense as Rodin's Thinker and quite unable to take in the running commentary provided by the Italian oarsman sitting behind him, which was included in the price. Hot galley water spurted from the side of a ship. At one point they rowed over a sunken merchantman; its seaweed-covered iron plates rose threateningly up out of the filthy depths. Riveting hammers echoed in the distance. For Rolf, of course, it was all like a film, in colour and even with smells, but a film—visible but unreal. From time to time there was a thin siren-wail, carried away by the wind and split up into echoes, impossible to tell where it came from or what it meant, since none of the great steamships actually put out to sea. It was hot. Trails of bluish stench hung over the harbour water. Only a large fishing vessel chugged by, and the buoys, whose mildewed chains faded away into the murky depths, rocked hideously. They rowed on past wharves and jetties, everything, whether of wood or stone, was smothered in greasy black grime. At least time was passing. Here and there the belly of a dead fish or sailor's washing flashed white; the sound of singing came up out of a cabin; everything a trip round the harbour could offer was there, even a grey battleship with mantled guns and mountains of coal with white seagulls on top of them. In the distance the city of Genoa rose in tiers up the hillside, almost real again...

  Sibylle had also said: 'I'd rather you didn't ask me any more questions now. He's a man, that's all I'll tell you, and he's very different from you. I can't say any more. Perhaps I really love him, I don't know yet. All I ask now is that you should leave me in peace.'

  ...Rolf finished his trip round the harbour with the look of a man who has been hit on the head by a falling plank, and paid what the rogue demanded of him. Wine was now his only wish, a great deal of wine. The story about the cloth—of course my public prosecutor told it far more graphically than I can—began outside the restaurant, when an American sailor asked him the way to a certain street. How was Rolf to know? But the sailor trotted along beside him. His American sounded genuine, and therefore almost incomprehensible to Rolf. But this much he did grasp: At two o'clock, in other words pretty soon, the sailor had to leave port—there actually was a ship lying with steam up—and the parcel was a present for a wartime Italian comrade. Rolf had his own troubles, God knows, but the despondent sailor clung to him like a leech with his extremely confused story and the parcel tied with string, which, since he could not find his wartime Italian comrade, he now had to sell before his ship, which was indisputably under steam, left port; for there was no sense in taking this magnificent piece of cloth back to America with him.

  Rolf wasn't interested. To rid himself of the fellow and get to his wine, he beckoned to a passer-by, a youngish and quite ordinary-looking Genoese, who might perhaps know the street the sailor was looking for, or want the cloth. And so bastal Only the Genoese, visibly annoyed at being delayed in his purposeful walk, knew no American and the sailor no Italian. Rolf had to act as interpreter. It didn't suit him at all; that wasn't what he had travelled through the whole night to Genoa for, and naturally the suspicion that he had fallen for some sort of racket also crossed his mind. But where was the catch? His Italian was just as inadequate as his American, and since the young Genoese had no more desire for cloth than Rolf and was very reluctant to have anything more to do with the matter at all, there seemed no prospect that the two of them would ever strike a bargain. Rolf had already started walking away twice, but he had been fetched back by the excited sailor, who was simply lost without an interpreter. After a great deal of haggling (while this was going on, Rolf at least forgot his wife), the Genoese led them with a wink—a sign that one is willing to engage in an illegal transaction—through ever narrower alleyways full of steps and children, through crooked chasms filled with multi-coloured washing and hullabaloo, until in the half-light of a passageway between two houses he was ready to inspect the cloth that was for sale.

  Rolf smoked a cigarette, temporarily relieved of his duties as interpreter; no words were exchanged at this stage. The Genoese, a less sympathetic character than the sailor because of his air of contemptuous superiority, pulled two or three threads out of the parcel, licked them and held them up against the dim light of shady backyards, while the sailor kept glancing at his watch. It wasn't wool, he said. Anyway, not pure wool—half and half, perhaps. Rolf returned to his interpreting, toning down the Genoese's remarks a trifle. All right, thirty thousand lire, that was his last word!

  When it came at last to paying, the Genoese unfortunately had only ten thousand lire on him, the rest was at home of course, while the sailor couldn't wait a minute longer. What now? Perhaps the interpreter could help out. Now they had come to the point, Rolf knew this in spite of all his abstraction; and despite his suspicions he put his hand into his not particularly well-filled wallet—not out of pity for the supposed sailor, but (so he says) merely out of a fear of seeming narrow-minded. The sailor, half grateful and half angry at having been beaten down so far, bundled together the thirty thousand lire, of which twenty thousand were Rolf's, and hurried off with a curt farewell. It was one-thirty! Notwithstanding the objectionable way in which he had behaved towards the sailor, the Genoese acted like a gentleman as far as Rolf was concerned. He refused to take the cloth, insisting that Rolf should keep it until he had the lire. As security—he could feel Rolf's distrust. Again they passed through the back streets of poverty, Rolf with the parcel tied with string under his arm, until the Genoese—too offended to speak as they were walking along—finally said, 'Mia casa, attenda qui, vengo subito."

  Rolf saw a dilapidated Renaissance gateway; he had no idea where he was—somewhere in Genoa. In the nearby harbour a ship's siren droned dully. Overcome by the noonday heat even in this shady alley with its damp and mouldy walls, by the silence, for it was far from the traffic, his fatigue after the night in the train—and that wasn't all: twenty-four hours ago Rolf had still been in London taking part in an international conference of lawyers, and then (yesterday) the rather bumpy flight, the supper with his strangely elated wife, then the closed door of her bedroom, then its opening, and so on—then daybreak at Milan with crowing cocks (all this in twenty-four hours—it was rather much) and now to find himself in this back street of mildewed poverty where slops trickled down the walls—and back came the knowledge that a fact does not cease to
be a fact because you forget it for a time, no, it kept returning again and again, her face full of happiness with another man, it wasn't a bad dream, but more real than this Genoa with its alleys and children and these tangible walls, and on top of it this heat that made you tear off your tie, and this parcel that Rolf had to carry—overcome by it all Rolf simply couldn't help falling into a heavy sleep, in spite of the danger that the Genoese might do the dirty on him...

  It was almost four o'clock when Rolf, my public prosecutor, woke up again sitting with his back to a wall and on his knees the damned parcel that had served him as a pillow. Naturally there was no trace of the Genoese waking him up with lire. Children were playing in a courtyard, mothers were shouting, 'Ettore, Ettore,' and in between, a tone higher, 'Giuseppina, Giuseppina,' and there below in the alley-way sat a strange gentleman with gold wrist-watch waiting in vain for his twenty thousand lire. Rolf stood up. On closer inspection, the rather mossy Renaissance gateway, through which the Genoese had disappeared, did not lead to a house at all, but simply to the next street. And there stood Rolf as though only now grasping for the first time the fact that Sibylle was in another man's arms. And during the haggling over the cloth, he had half-consciously looked at this young Genoese from time to time and asked himself whether Sibylle could have loved hair like his, ears like his, lips like his, hands like his; anyone might be the other man. Rolf only knew, 'He's very different from you,' and this might apply to several million men. As he stood in front of the empty Renaissance gateway, Rolf was really almost glad not to see the slick young Genoese again. But he had lost pretty well all his ready cash. Worse still, it was a discomfiture, just when he would have liked to cut a dash because of his wife; the blow to his pride was incomparably more serious than the loss of twenty thousand lire, irreparable. He dared not look at the parcel tied with string and supposed to contains gent's suiting cloth, which was his security. In any case he could only go to a cheap hotel, where the fact that this bundle was his sole luggage would not arouse too much comment. He stood in a hotel room with flowered wallpaper, bathed in sweat and at a loss what to do next in this city of Genoa. He threw the parcel into the wardrobe, picked up the jug, filled the basin and tried to wash without soap, without a toothbrush, without a sponge[[[mdash.gif]]]