I'm Not Stiller

  'What do you mean by that?'

  'You must be able to believe that I am not the person people take me for and for whom you, as a public prosecutor, take me—I'm not Stiller,' I said, God knows not for the first time, but for the first time with the hope that someone would hear it. 'I'm not Stiller, seriously, and I can't confess what my angel has forbidden me to confess.'

  I shouldn't have said that.

  'Angel—?' he asked. 'What do you mean by that?'

  I didn't answer. Then came the bill, which the public prosecutor paid, and as our peasant girl once more did not go, it was we who went. Our footsteps crunched in the gravel. In the open car, before the public prosecutor started up, we looked out once again over the noonday landscape, over the brown ploughed land with flapping crows, the vineyards and woods, the autumnal lake, and all the time I knew that my prosecutor and friend was waiting for the answer. As he started the engine I said:

  'That's something one can't talk about.'

  'The angel, you mean?'

  'Yes,' I said, 'as soon as I try to describe it, it leaves me, then I can't see it any more myself. It's very odd: the more exactly I can picture it, the nearer I come to being able to describe it, the less I believe in it and everything I have experienced.'

  We drove into town along the shore of the lake.

  ***

  3. The Afternoon

  At about a quarter past two, in other words late, because it was almost impossible to find a parking space in the Old Town, we arrived at 'the house', which differed from other houses in this narrow street solely by the fact that in front of it stood Knobel, my warder, in mufti. We were the first. Addressing himself exclusively to my public prosecutor, Knobel said: 'I've got the keys.' In a dark, rather musty passage stood bicycles, a rather antiquated pram, and garbage pails. Knobel was not carrying the keys in his coat pocket, but took them out of a rather rusty letter-box bearing the name A. Stiller. There was no indication of profession. From a backyard came a noise like a tinsmith's workshop, or perhaps a plumber's; I saw moss-grown cobblestones and the long, already bare branches of a plane tree on which the sun probably shone only at midday in the summer, and also a waterless little fountain of sandstone, likewise overgrown with moss; there was a certain idyllic quality about it all. I also saw bundles of iron pipes, short and long; one of these bundles of pipes still bore the little red tag that had been attached when it was brought here by lorry. Then Rolf, my friend, who seemed to be paying his first visit to this house, remarked: I think we'll go straight up—'

  Since I made no attempt to lead the way, Knobel pointed to the one and only staircase of old and tread-worn walnut, an aristocratic staircase, broad and not at all steep, flanked by banisters with worm-eaten volutes. On the fourth floor, where it smelt of sauerkraut, these stairs came to an end. Knobel informed the Herr Staatsanwalt that this was not the top; opened a partition and invited us to mount a narrow and suddenly very steep staircase of deal. They kept me in the middle all the time, either by chance or design. The taciturn gravity of the whole proceedings, especially on the part of Knobel, who had cut me dead since the morning, was funny; but even my friend and prosecutor was mute in a way that suggested we were approaching the scene of a tragedy with an unknown number of corpses.

  'Yes—' he said, when we reached the top, once more half to me and half to Knobel, 'I hope the others will soon be here...'

  There were three doors here, the first was fitted with a padlock, the second bore a humorous sign indicating a lavatory, the third led into the missing man's studio. Knobel unlocked the door; as an official on duty he went in first, while the public prosecutor said to me, 'After you.' To avoid giving the impression that I felt in any way at home here, I took advantage of his politeness, and I also noticed that at this moment Rolf, my friend, was feeling far more uncomfortable than I, more edgy than I had ever known him. No sooner were we inside the studio than he asked me:

  'Where's the wardrobe?'

  Knobel pointed to a nail on the blue door.

  'Yes,' said the public prosecutor, immediately rubbing his hands together, '—open a window, Knobel, the air in here is ghastly.'

  I felt sorry for my friend; as I knew, this studio had once assumed a certain importance in his own life, a disproportionate importance, as he now very well knew; but that is the infamy of these outside hearings—they are intended to overwhelm the prisoner with long-buried memories by suddenly placing him in a familiar environment. Fortunately I didn't have time to utter any well-meant remark, for at that very moment the bell rang, and we were both glad of it. Knobel looked for the press-button that opened the door downstairs and found it. I still didn't know who was actually attending this idiotic investigation, presumably my counsel, possibly also Julika, I thought, and I didn't even take my coat off: I had no intention of making myself at home here. The good Knobel obviously hadn't pressed hard enough, for at that moment he bell rang again. The public prosecutor exclaimed:

  'Why don't you press it?'

  'I am pressing,' said Knobel, 'I am pressing.'

  Meanwhile I took a look around, my hands in my trouser pockets under my open coat and my hat on my head—after all it wasn't a dwelling in which anyone dwelt. There was a lot of art standing about. Apart from the thick dust on every sill, every spatula, every easel, every stand, every piece of furniture—so that for this reason alone one felt unwilling to touch anything—it was just such a studio as I had imagined from Frau Sibylle's descriptions, rather topsy-turvy, like a workshop that was lived in, half proletarian, half romantic; a stovepipe running right across the room demonstrated with an inescapable gesture that convention had no place here, and yet it was precisely the stovepipe you find in every Paris studio, the conventional symbol of a certain bohemianism. I should worry! For the rest, it was a large, and to that extent agreeable room, a kind of garret with rough deal planks that creaked softly when we walked on them, and plenty of light on a sunny autumn day like today. Below a sloping roof exactly as Frau Sibylle had remembered it, stood an old gas cooker, its enamel scarred with rust, a terrazzo sink and a crooked cupboard containing crockery, on the top shelf of which—obviously intended as a joke—was displayed stolen crockery bearing various inscriptions: Hôtel des Alpes, Bodega Granada, Kronenhalle Ziirich, and so on. The rubber tube on the tap, once no doubt red, now a grey and mildewed rubber dummy, was still attached with string; it was dripping and I wondered whether it had been dripping like that for six years, a passing idea that somehow irritated me, reminding me of the dripping in the Carlsbad caves. On a nail hung a dishcloth spotted with blackish mould like a leper, and naturally enough there was no lack of spider's webs, for example on the telephone, which stood next to the couch and presumably no longer rang, having fallen silent under the burden of unpaid bills. The couch was broad, big enough for two, also covered in dust, so that nobody sat on it, which gave this piece of furniture an obtrusive importance, as though it were standing in a museum with a notice saying Do Not Touch, like King Philip's bed in the Escoriai.

  My public prosecutor, I noticed, also kept his hands in his pockets to avoid touching anything. He was looking at the two bookcases. To call what the missing man left behind a library would be an exaggeration. Alongside a small volume of Plato and one or two things by Hegel stood names which today have been forgotten even by second-hand book-sellers; Brecht rubbed shoulders with Hamsun, then Gorki, Nietzsche, and a great many paperbacks, some of which contained opera texts; Count Keyserling was also there, but with the black imprint of a public library; then there were all sorts of art books, especially modern ones and an anthology of Swiss poetry; Mein Kampf was flanked by André Gide and supported on the other side by a White Paper on the Spanish Civil War; there were various volumes in the Insel series, though not a single complete set of anything, isolated volumes like Westöstlicher Divan and Faust and Gespräche mit Eckermann, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Der Zauberberg, the only work by Thomas Mann, the Iliad, Dante's Commedia, Erich Kästner, Moza
rts Reise nach Prag, also Mörike's poems, Till Eulenspiegel, then again Marcel Proust, but not the whole of La Recherche, Huttens Letzte Tage, of Gottfried Keller's works only the Diaries and Letters, a book by C. G. Jung, The Black Spider, something by Arp and suddenly Strindberg's Dream Play, some early Hesse, too, Chekov, Pirandello, all in German translation, Lawrence's Mexican story, The Woman Who Rode Away, a good deal by a Swiss called Albin Zollinger, of Dostoyevsky only The House of the Dead, Garcia Lorca's first poems in Spanish, Petite Prose by Claudel and Das Kapital, the latter supported by Hölderlin; a few thrillers, Lichtenberg, Tagore, Ringelnatz, Schopenhauer, again with the black imprint of a public library, Hemingway (on bullfighting) next door to Georg Trakl; piles of periodicals ready to fall apart, a Spanish-German dictionary with a very tattered cover, the Communist Manifesto, a book on Gandhi, and so on. Anyhow, it would be a difficult job to make a spiritual warrant of arrest out of this lot, especially as no one knew which of these books the missing man had read, which of those he had read he had understood or simply not understood or misunderstood in a way that was valuable to him, and my prosecutor and friend had the look of a man who cannot quite find what he wants. For a moment, when in spite of the dust he pulled out a single India-paper volume with a crimson leather back, I thought: Perhaps he is looking for books out of his own library. But he put the leather-bound volume back on the shelf and instead turned the pages of Anna ¡Carmina...

  Apart from the bookcases, the main article of furniture in the studio was a broad and long table of ordinary planks, like a bench, on trestles with the name of a plaster-caster stencilled on them and also smeared with plaster. Some good fairy seemed to have tidied the place up, all the ashtrays had been emptied and so had the garbage pail in the kitchen recess under the sloping roof. On the wall, as Frau Sibylle had described them, I found two gaily coloured but faded banderillas from Spain, an African mask of very dubious authenticity, all sorts of photographs so faded as to be unrecognizable, the fine fragment of a Celtic axe, and a poster by Toulouse-Lautrec, also completely faded. At one point the public prosecutor said:

  'Why are they taking such a long time?'

  'Don't know,' said Knobel. 'I pressed the button.'

  I didn't meddle in their on-the-spot investigation, which didn't seem to be going too well; I was here in the role of prisoner, so I just looked out of the window during their worried confabulation.

  'Do you think they have lost their way?'

  'How could they?' said Knobel. 'The lady knows her way around here, she was the one who showed me everything.'

  Now I knew whom I had to expect. I lit a cigarette and couldn't believe that Julika, if she loved me, would lend herself to this farce. I was waiting eagerly to see what would happen, but I felt confident and certain of victory; in the last resort everything depended upon Julika, upon Julika alone...

  As regards my own part in this performance, I couldn't imagine any place where I should feel more of a stranger than here. A few works in clay, which the vanished Stiller had left behind, were wrapped in brown sacking to prevent the clay from drying; but since this sacking had not been wetted for years, it was probable that the clay had completely dried out and was only held together by the sacking. I didn't touch it, naturally. All that was needed to complete this on-the-spot hearing was to unroll these strips of sacking, and everything would crumble into dust like a mummy. My friend and prosecutor could not escape the same impression and was likewise reminded of mummies, such as you see in ethnological museums where, with good reason, they are put behind glass. In particular, he scrutinized the plaster head of the company director whom he had met in the flesh that morning, but he refrained from any expression of opinion. One or two of the things had actually been cast in bronze, which in my opinion was more than they were worth; bronze, a metal of some durability after all, took away the spurious charm that came from their unfinished look and created a feeling of expectancy which more or less counterbalanced their weaknesses; what remained in bronze was not enough to constitute a grown man's testimony. No wonder Stiller (who must have seen this for himself at some point) made off! A single glance round this dusty studio and one couldn't help thinking: How much labour, oh, how much dogged perseverance, how much sweat and grind, and yet one doesn't even feel an urge to raise one's hat to the result. It was rather sad, no more—and I was glad the bell rang again.

  The public prosecutor grew somewhat irascible and told Knobel to go downstairs and let in the lady and the gentleman, who, there seemed every reason to suppose, were unable to open the front door—and be quick about it. My warder, understandably offended, since he had pressed the button as hard as he could, went to the door and found himself face to face with the old hawker who had been serving the other floors and was now standing outside our studio, an open suitcase on his trembling arm. This, of course, was something we had none of us reckoned with, but nor had the hawker reckoned with us. 'No!' said Knobel angrily, in the tone in which he himself had just been addressed, 'nothing.' Naturally, the hawker had no idea that we were not the occupants of this garret, that there had been no life here for the last six years; he insisted on his right at least to show his wares, most useful wares, as Knobel did not venture to deny. Since we were three gentlemen he particularly recommended razor blades, shaving soap, styptics, and so forth. Knobel tried to cut him short, so that the Herr Staatsanwalt should not get angry again; on the other hand the hawker couldn't understand how the three of us could live here without a single toothbrush, without fly paper, without toilet paper, and without shoe polish, without anything, but particularly withour razor blades. Knobel couldn't get rid of the little old man. As though he had actually come to doubt our masculinity, the hawker pushed everything he had so far shown us back into his case and tried saucepan brushes, sewing things, elastic garters, best-quality pine-needle oil, and finally even hair slides, an article that is for ever getting lost and is always wanted again. Knobel kept saying, That's enough, that's enough!' but without the slightest success. Finally my public prosecutor intervened and with a superior air bought something or other, possibly razor blades, and once more we were alone, but still without the other participants in this on-the-spot investigation, who evidently (it was striking 2.45) hadn't even rung the front door bell yet.

  'I've got to be in court by 3.30,' said Rolf, adding rather inconsequently: 'This is a fine studio—?' I nodded vigorously. 'And very good light.' Then Knobel, in order not to be as superfluous as he had been just before with the hawker, made himself important or useful with his knowledge of the lie of the land by saying, not to me, but to the public prosecutor: 'This leads out on to the parapet.' And since we had no urge to go out on to the parapet: 'There's still some mail here, Herr Staatsanwalt, the mail since last Saturday—'

  'Mail?'

  'Printed matter,' said Knobel and read out: 'Old age and dependants insurance, but Herr Dr Bohnenblust already has the whole pile of unpaid contributions. And this letter is for Herr Stiller personally—'

  Since I had no intention of reading their vanished Stiller's letters, my friend and prosecutor took the liberty of slitting open the envelope. To judge by his expression it was of no importance. Only considerations of tidiness prevented him from throwing it in the wastepaper basket. 'An anonymous patriot abuses you,' he said laconically. 'People take it very much amiss that you don't grasp the opportunity of being Swiss as a boon—and therefore unconditionally.'

  Later, since the people we were waiting for still didn't ring the bell, we stepped out on to the parapet after all; like everything else here, it tallied exactly with the Frau Staatsanwalt's recollections. Fragments of tiles smashed by a hailstorm lay around, proving that they were in nobody's way. The weeds on the roughcast roof were probably higher than ever; a few stalks of autumnal yellow swayed in the wind. My friend and prosecutor seemed also to be finding everything much as he had expected; he looked at the rotten frame of an armchair with no fabric covering that still lay in the corner, and we stood wi
thout a word, Rolf and I, while someone beat a mattress on the parapet opposite. I was well aware how Rolf, my new friend, must be noticing all these irrelevant details. He had no eye for the splendid view over gables and skylights and chimneys and party walls, a view that even contained a wedge of the lake that glittered under the hazy autumn light when a steamboat set its lazy waves in motion ~ a really delightful view, it seemed to me. He was smoking rather nervously. Why did we have to come to this place where there were so many things to cause him pain, irrelevant details that were not meant like that at all and nevertheless assumed for him, Sibylle's husband, a distressing significance, whether it was this mattress that was just being beaten in front of our eyes, or the elastic garters the hawker had offered him, the best quality pine-needle oil for the bath, or the hair slides that are forever getting lost and are always wanted again; why, I mean, did we have to look at this place which his wife and he had inwardly overcome long ago? I could see from his lips that it was costing him more than he had anticipated, and to no purpose. I don't know what he was thinking about during those two or three minutes during which he smoked his cigarette down to the tip; but it was futile, no doubt about it, there are tests which are completely off the mark, like this one. The rotten frame of an armchair, on which his wife may never have sat, because the fabric was already missing seven years ago, was all at once sufficient to cast fresh doubt on their love after years of certainty, to appear to show in one minute that they had made no progress in six or seven years, and to conjure up mental images of agonizing precision, images of the past, which in any case, whether accurate or inaccurate, could only leave a bad taste in the mouth. Or did my friend expect of himself that he should be able to bear these torments, which only the inert physical surroundings reawakened in him, without distress? It was futile. What had all this stuff here, even if it were not rotten, to do with his living Sibylle, with his relationship to her? There is a disgust that can never come to an end, a disgust that is the inevitable punishment for harbouring mental images that have nothing to do with us—or so I believe. Why did he inflict this on himself? It is possible to overcome jealousy, to overcome it from within and in relation to one's partner, to overcome it as a whole, as he had succeeded in doing; but it is nonsense to imagine that one must also be able to swallow the individual fragments without turning a hair. His smile was rather strained. Didn't he know, my friend and prosecutor, who had accompanied so many people to the scene of the crime, didn't he know that there is often something diabolical about inert objects? Naturally, I didn't know what to say to him on this parapet. It was such an unnecessary humiliation, and for the first time I realized what false reactions can be evoked by an on-the-spot investigation, when a person is confronted with inert objects, as if there existed a truth outside time ... As he said nothing, I asked rather abruptly: