I'm Not Stiller

  Rolf could not get over his amazement. The ferries over the Hudson reflected in the water, the garlands of the bridges, the stars above a flood of neon lemonade, of sweetness, of sickliness, that attained the level of the grandiose, vanilla and raspberry, interspersed with the purple pallor of autumn crocuses, the green of glaciers, a green such as occurs in retorts, interspersed with the milk of dandelions, frippery and visions, yes, and beauty, oh, a fairy-like beauty, a kaleidoscope out of the kindergarten, a mosaic of coloured fragments, but mobile, yet at the same time lifeless and cold as glass, then again the Bengal lights of a stage Witches' Sabbath, a heavenly rainbow that has fallen into a thousand splinters and been scattered over the earth, an orgy of discord, of harmony, an orgy of the everyday, technological and mercantile above all; you immediately think of the Arabian Nights, of carpets, but carpets that glow, of worthless gems, of a child's firework that has fallen on the ground and continues to flicker; you have seen it all before, perhaps behind closed eyes in a fever; here and there it is also red, not red like blood, thinner, red like the light reflected in a glass of red wine when the sun shines in, red and also yellow like honey, thinner, yellow like whisky, greenish yellow like sulphur and certain fungi, strange, but all of it possessing a beauty which, if it were to become sound, would be the song of the sirens; yes, that's about how it is, sensual and lifeless at the same time, intelligent and stupid and powerful, an edifice of human beings or termites, symphony and lemonade, you have to have seen it to imagine it, but to have seen it with your eyes, notmerely with your judgement, seen it as one who is confused, benumbed, astounded, blissful, unbelieving, carried away, a stranger on earth, not merely a stranger in America; you can smile at it, shout for joy over it, weep over it. And far out to the east rises the bronze moon, a hammered disk, a silent gong...

  But the most bewildering thing for Rolf was naturally Sibylle, his wife, who was at home here. They drank their martinis—rather mute—occasionally looking at one another, smiling almost with a touch of scorn as they realized that there was really no need to have an Atlantic between them. Rolf scarcely dared to take hold of her arm that lay so close to him; his tenderness stayed in his eyes, Sibylle, too, felt that the world, big as it was, held no one who could be closer to her than Rolf, her husband; she didn't deny it. Nevertheless, she asked for twenty-four hours in which to think it over.

  SEVENTH NOTEBOOK

  WENT to the dentist today.

  They are trifles and the terrible thing is that you don't defend yourself against trifles. You get tired of it. At the very outset, the white-overalled receptionist came into the waiting room and said, 'This way please, Herr Stiller.' Was I to bawl at her in front of all the other patients? She couldn't help it, this nice little person—I was booked as Herr Stiller. So I followed her without a murmur. I owe all this to my defence counsel. They hung the white cloth round my neck, gave me a fresh glass, filled it with tepid water, all in the friendliest fashion, and the young dentist—the successor of the deceased dentist to whom the vanished Stiller owes an outstanding account—soaped his hands. He couldn't help it either: as far as the patient's name was concerned, he had to rely entirely on his receptionist, especially as he didn't know the inherited clientele yet.

  'Herr Stiller,' he said, 'you've got toothache?'

  I was just rinsing my mouth, nodded with reference to the toothache, and before I could rectify the mistake he had already found with his probe the spot where all discussion ended for me. The young man was very painstaking.

  'Look,' he said, showing me with his little mirror, 'a crown like that, for example, left upper six—can you see?—I don't want to say anything against my predecessor, but one just can't do a crown like that.'

  He misunderstood the expression in my eyes, thinking I wanted to stand up for his predecessor. With my mouth full of cotton wool and matrix bands and saliva ejectors, so that I couldn't contradict, I listened to his no doubt very interesting exposition of the new advances in dental surgery. Although the young man had taken over his uncle's practice and clients, he had no intention of also taking over the mistakes of the generation that had just passed away; and my mouth seemed to contain very little else but mistakes. Only with helpless glances could I beg the young man not to regard my crown as the work of his deceased uncle, nor my teeth as those of the missing Stiller. He called out:

  'Fraulein—give me Herr Stiller's X-rays again.'

  All this, as I have said, I owed to my defending counsel. Nobody believes me; every time the probe touched a certain spot, a few involuntary tears welled up from my eyes, and I couldn't think why he had to keep on probing this spot. At last he said.

  'Yes, yes—it's alive.'

  The fact was, judging from the old X-rays which they had found in his predecessor's file, the young dentist simply couldn't understand how my left lower four could possibly be still alive, though in my opinion it was quite sensitive enough even if on the X-ray (they showed me Stiller's left lower four) it looked exactly like a dead root.

  'Curious,' he murmured, 'curious.'

  Then he rang through to the receptionist.

  'Are those really Herr Stiller's X-rays?' he asked. 'Are you quite sure?'

  'The name is on them—'

  His professional conscience left him no peace: he made another tooth-by-tooth comparison, which showed that Stiller, the vanished patient of his deceased uncle must, for instance, have had a perfect right upper eight, while in my case there was a gap. What had I done with my (Stiller's) right upper eight? I shrugged my shoulders. I wasn't going to submit to an interrogation with a mouthful of cotton wool and matrix bands and saliva ejectors, Finally the X-rays disappeared and the young dentist reached for the drill. After an hour and a half, when at last I had no more clamps in my mouth and was allowed to rinse it, I naturally had no further wish to resume discussion of the old X-rays. I merely asked for Saridone. Knobel was sitting in the waiting room. The grey prison van was standing under an avenue of acacias. The drivers had been told to park it somewhere out of sight. But since the avenue belonged to a school, whose playground it bordered, and since the main break was just in progress, Knobel and I were naturally surrounded by all the children in the school when we returned to the van. A little fellow asked me shyly if I was the thief. A girl shouted in rapturous excitement, 'Teacher, a criminal!' I waved, as well as I could from behind the little barred window. Only the teachers didn't wave back.

  ***

  P.S. Perhaps—I wonder—one ought to defend oneself every time one is taken for somebody else, and I shouldn't have allowed any receptionist to book my appointment in the name of Herr Stiller—a labour of Sisyphus. Then again I believe it is quite enough if Julika, and she alone, doesn't take me for somebody else.

  ***

  Mexico—

  I can't help thinking (I don't know what makes me do so) of the Day of the Dead as I saw it on Janitzio, of the Indian mothers crouching all night long over the graves, everyone in their gala clothes, carefully combed as though for a wedding, although apparently nothing happens; the cemetery is a terrace overlooking the black sea and overhung by steep crags, a cemetery without a single tombstone or any other sign—everyone in the village knows where his dead lie, where he himself will one day lie. Candles are set up, three or seven or twenty, according to the number of dead souls, and alongside them the plates containing all kinds of foods and covered with a clean cloth, but the main thing is a strange object constructed with all the loving care of a Christmas present—a frame of bamboo on which are set the cakes and flowers, the fruits, the bright-coloured sweetmeats. The dead are supposed to feed all night long on the scent of these foodstuffs, for the scent is the essence of things: this is the significance of the ceremony. Only women and children perform these nocturnal rites in the cemetery; the men pray in the church. The women, whose actions remain quite matter-of-fact and sober, settle down as though for a long rest, throwing a shawl over their heads so that woman and child, both under the same shaw
l, look like a single creature. The candles, lined up in rows between the living and the dead, flicker in the cold night wind, hour after hour, while the moon rises above the sombre mountains and sinks again in a lazy arc.

  Nothing else happens. Every now and then the clanging of a bell is carried over by the wind, or the wailing sound of a dog howling at the moon; otherwise nothing. Nobody weeps, there is little talking, only what is essential is said, but then not in whispers as is the way in our cemeteries; there is no question of any special atmosphere here. The silence, to which even the children submit, as they gaze for hours on end into the candles or into the empty night over the sea, is not reverence, not depth of emotion as we understand it, neither in a good nor in a bad sense. It is simply silence. In face of the fact of life and death there is nothing whatever to be said. A few even sleep, while their dead, father or husband or son, feed soundlessly on the scent, on the essence of things. The last-comers arrive towards midnight; no one will leave the graves until dawn. The dead souls flicker in thousands. A shivering child, who is coughing very ominously, as though anxious to join the dead, is allowed to sample the sweetmeats already, although the food still belongs to the dead. On the whole, they are strangely patient. And it is cold, it is the night of the first of November. A little girl, whose mother is dozing, plays with a candle, making warm drops of wax fall on her hand until the candle goes out, and then relighting it. Every breath of wind is heavily laden with scent; the women pluck to pieces yellow flowers and scatter them in the direction of the dead—much as one prepares vegetables, not negligently, but without unnecessary gestures, with emphasis, with solemnity, without any dramatic expression to indicate that some symbolic significance is intended. The whole ceremony is not intended at all, but simply performed. And it is as though the silence grew yet more silent. The moon has gone down, the cold is cutting. Nothing happens. The women do not kneel, but sit on the ground, so that the soul of the dead may rise into their wombs. That is all, until day breaks, a night of silent patience, a surrender to the inescapable process of death and growth—

  ***

  A conversation with the public prosecutor, my friend, about Stiller.

  'The overwhelming majority of human lives are ruined by the fact that people make excessive demands on themselves,' he said and explained what he meant like this: 'Our consciousness has changed a great deal in the course of a few centuries, our emotional life much less. Hence there is a discrepancy between the level of our intellect and that of our emotions. Most of us have a parcel of flesh-pink cloth—namely, our feelings—that from our intellectual level we should like to ignore. There are two ways out of the difficulty that lead nowhere: either we kill our primitive and therefore unworthy feelings, as far as we can, at the risk of killing our emotional life altogether, or we simply give our unworthy feelings another name. We lie about them, disguise them as something else. We label them to satisfy the wishes of our consciousness. The more adroit our consciousness, the better-read, the more numerous and nobler-looking are our back-doors, the cleverer our self-deception. You can entertain yourself like that for a lifetime, excellently in fact, only you never reach life that way; it leads inescapably to loss of contact with your own personality. For example, we can easily call our lack of the courage to go down on our knees good breeding, our fear of self-realization unselfishness and so on. Most of us know only too well what we ought to feel in this, that, or the other situation, or, as the case may be, must not feel, but even with the best will in the world we have great difficulty in finding out what we actually do feel. That is a bad state of affairs. A sarcastic attitude towards all emotion is its classical symptom ... Excessive demands on oneself are inevitably linked with the wrong kind of bad conscience. One man blames himself for not being a genius, another blames himself for not being a saint in spite of his good upbringing, and Stiller blamed himself for not being the sort who could fight in Spain ... It is extraordinary what we mistake for conscience, once we have begun making excessive demands upon ourselves and so losing touch with our own personalities. The famous inner voice is often enough no more than the coquettish voice of a pseudo-ego that does not allow me to finally give up trying, to recognize myself, and attempts with all the wiles of vanity, if necessary even with false voices from heaven, to bind me to my fatal habit of making excessive demands upon myself. We can see our defeats, but we do not understand them as signals, as the outcome of misdirected endeavour, of endeavour directed away from our self. Curiously enough the direction taken by our vanity is not, as it appears to be, the direction towards our self, but away from our self.'

  We then discussed the well known line: Him I love who craves the impossible. Without being able to recall just where this line occurs in Faust, Part Two, we agreed that it could only have been uttered by a demonic figure; for it is an invitation to neurosis and has nothing to do with any real endeavour (it doesn't refer to endeavour, anyhow, but to craving) that presupposes humility in the face of our limited potentialities.

  'I don't see Stiller as an exception,' said my public prosecutor. 'I see some of my acquaintances and myself in him, although the demands we make on ourselves are of different kinds ... Many know themselves, only a few also manage to accept themselves. How much self-knowledge is limited to presenting other people with a more precise and exact description of our weaknesses—a form of coquetry. But even genuine self-knowledge, which remains mute and is chiefly expressed in behaviour, is not enough; it is a first step, indispensable and laborious, but not sufficient in itself. Self-knowledge in the form of lifelong melancholy, of amused indulgence towards our early resignation is very common, and people of this kind may sometimes be very pleasant table companions; but what is it like for them? They have given up a false role, and that is certainly something, but it doesn't yet take them back into life ... It is not true that self-acceptance automatically comes with age. It is true that when we are older our earlier aims seem more dubious and it is easier, cheaper, more painless to smile at our youthful ambition; but this is not the same as self-acceptance. In a certain respect, even, it becomes more difficult as we get older. More and more people to whom we look up admiringly are younger than ourselves, our allotted span grows shorter and shorter, resignation becomes easier and easier in view of our nonetheless honourable career, easier still for those who have had no career at all and can console themselves with the ill-will of their environment, cheering themselves with the thought of their unrecognized genius ... To accept oneself calls for an extremely positive attitude towards life ... The demand that we shall love our neighbour as ourselves contains as an axiom the demand that we shall love ourselves, shall accept ourselves as we were created. But even self-acceptance alone is not enough. As long as I try to convince those around me that I am none other than myself, I am necessarily afraid ofbeing misconstrued, and this very fear keeps me a prisoner ... Without the certitude that there is an absolute reality, I cannot imagine, of course,' said my public prosecutor, 'that we can ever succeed in becoming free.'

  ***

  P.S. Absolute authority? Absolute reality? Why doesn't he say 'God'? It seems to me that he consciously takes care to avoid this word. Only when he is talking to me?

  ***

  P.S. I am always hoping that precisely by recognizing myself as a negligible and unimportant man I shall cease to be a negligible and unimportant man. Fundamentally, to be quite honest, I am forever hoping that God (if I meet Him half-way) will make me a different, namely a richer, deeper, more valuable, more important personality—and it is precisely this, in all probability, which prevents God from setting me on the path to a real existence, that is to say from making it possible for me to experience existence. My conditio sine qua non is that he shall revoke me, his creature.

  ***

  Julika is still in Paris.

  ***

  The mother's grave. It is just like all graves in this country: neatly enclosed by a granite border, every grave a little too short so that you're afraid o
f treading on the dead people's feet, gravel paths in between, evergreens round the edge, in the centre of the grave an earthenware vase containing a few withered asters, behind the headstone a rusty tin for watering flowers. But today it was raining. We stood together under the umbrella, and the church clock struck three. The headstone was a bit queer, a typical piece of tombstone art, some kind of allegory. Here and there a small cypress towered above this grey Manhattan of tombstones. Once Wilfried asked:

  'How do you like the stone, by the way?'

  'Yes,' I said...

  One would expect Wilfried to possess an umbrella. I've never had an umbrella of my own in my life, but now I was glad of an umbrella. It was a country cemetery, an insignificant church dating from the nineteenth century, situated on a hilltop and surrounded by ancient elms. In good weather one would no doubt have a pretty, quiet, wide view out over the lake towards the mountains. Today everything was grey, a dripping autumn day with mist hanging round the woods. We stood there for a long time, while the rain drummed on the black umbrella, both of us without speaking and without making a gesture, like any two Protestants. The inscription read: Here rests in God. Others had other inscriptions, Rest in peace, or else some vague lyric. The headstone, travertine, was slightly polished. The rain dripped audibly from the umbrella on to brown leaves. In the next row but one there was a fresh grave, a mound of loamy earth with wreaths on top of it. Then the church clock struck again. It was cold, wet, grey...