Stiller lived first in a small pension on Lake Geneva, accompanied by his wife, who was resolved to live with him again. Both of them probably found it difficult to imagine how their life together would work out. For my part I was more than curious. He preferred not to move into our small, primitive but heatable country cottage on the Förch, 'because it's too damned close to Zürich'. Fortunately his home town had decided, after tough opposition inside the council, to give him two thousand francs as an encouragement, a sum which, at that time, was sufficient to keep a married couple going for two or three months. So they lived on this and the hope of further miracles beside Lake Geneva. We found it hard to imagine Stiller at Territet, a district which, to the best of our recollection, consisted of hotels, tennis courts, funicular railways, and chalets with turrets and garden gnomes. But friends had been able to make arrangements on a friendly basis for him there.
When we heard absolutely nothing from them over Christmas we began to feel worried. Then Stiller's first letter arrived at last, still addressed to 'My dear friend and prosecutor' and asking for the loan of an electric cooker. It was winter, and apart from a hot breakfast included in their arrangements, they were living on cold snacks in their hotel bedroom. In this short letter Stiller thanked me 'for everything' with an alarming servility. We felt anxious about the two of them, a possibly attractive but isolated hotel bedroom in a holiday resort out of season appeared to us the most unpromising setting for this couple's renewed encounter with each other.
Eventually, one week-end towards the end of February, my wife and I drove out to Territet and found them both, tanned by the sun, in a really pleasant little room with a small balcony that afforded a little extra space; their piled-up trunks made the room even smaller. Seen from their window, Lake Geneva looked all the larger by contrast. Stiller behaved gaily, a little too gaily; he took his wife by the arm and introduced 'a couple of Swiss inland emigrants'. Any mention of their future was avoided. Downstairs in the dining-room we none of us succeeded in passing beyond a rather laborious conversation. Although the room was practically empty and the whole place had a family atmosphere, Stiller and his wife sat there as awkwardly as though they had never dined off a white tablecloth before. Apart from ourselves there was hardly anyone in the dining-room—an aged Englishman who was partially paralysed, so that a nurse had to cut up his meat for him, and a French marquis reading a book over his soup, outsiders, solitaries, except for a young German couple whose wedding rings, as I noticed immediately, were not of the same gold, two happy but strikingly shy people. A young waiter, a German Swiss, made them blush scarlet with his French. Anyhow, we could see no reason why Stiller and his wife should be so ill at ease.
Unfortunately it rained the whole week-end. Walking was out of the question, and Stiller and his wife fought shy of the empty lounge. So we spent almost the whole time sitting in their small bedroom among the trunks. I cannot remember any particular conversation, but their appearance has stuck in my mind. His wife, elegant even in shabby clothes, kept walking up and down, said practically nothing, listened to other people and smoked incessantly. They looked to us like Russians in Paris, or, as my wife said, like German Jews in New York—people to whom nothing belonged. Frau Julika and my wife were meeting for the first time; apart from conventional politenesses they hardly exchanged a word. Stiller made severed attempts to save the situation with his humour. AH in all it was depressing, an endless afternoon with rain on the window, tea, and a great deal of smoke, really a disappointment—probably for all parties. Their money was running out, it was easy to guess that. It seemed virtually impossible to find work at all in keeping with their abilities, for which there was not much demand. To return to the Paris dancing school, which incidentally did not belong to Frau Julika, but to Monsieur Dmitritch, was presumably out of the question. Stiller laughed about this utterly hopeless outlook. Frau Julika stood waiting for the water in the electric cooker, her slender hands in the pockets of her tailor-made costume, smoking, while Stiller squatted on a trunk, his hands clasped round his updrawn knees. One had the feeling that they must live very much the same when they were alone together, perfectly friendly and therefore rather taciturn, two people in chains who had the good sense to put up with one another. Stiller asked for books.
For a long time we heard nothing of them. I couldn't think of anything to write myself, after our visit even less than before. I felt I ought to write, but I just didn't know what to say. I sent a large parcel of books, including Kierkegaard, but received no reply. For months the Stillers seemed not to exist. We felt that in any case they had probably changed their address. We give little thought to people whose life we cannot visualize, even if we imagine they may need us. I neglected them completely; my wife, for her part, had different reasons for feeling she couldn't write, worthier reasons.
After about half a year, in the late summer, came the elated letter in which Stiller announced: 'As a reward from God for all the months I spent in the remand prison, we have just found, rented, and moved into the house of our dreams, une ferme vaudoise!' We breathed a sigh of relief. It really seemed to be a godsend. A fabulously low rent suggested an equally fabulous state of dilapidation, but our friend did not tire of singing the praises of his ferme vaudoise in lengthy descriptions. Anyhow, he seemed to be thoroughly happy. We had to imagine a capacious house, originally a Vaudois farm-house, perhaps even a winegrower's house, Stiller wasn't sure about that; attached to it were a vineyard, a wine-press of venerable age, an airy barn that made an ample studio, and an avenue of plane-trees that gave the whole estate a manorial touch. In other letters they were not planes, but elms. In subsequent letters the barn vanished altogether. Instead other joys made their appearance: Stiller suddenly wrote about the old well in the courtyard, whose wrought ironwork he drew for us, about the beehive or the rose garden. He described all this with affectionate good-humour as rather overgrown, rather rusty, rather dried up, and everything was smothered in dark ivy. At times our imagination was severely strained, especially as we knew the district round Glion. We could only suppose that our happy friend was exaggerating a bit. Sketches by his hand showed a steep tiled roof with ends as well as sides inclined, as is usual in the Vaud, a broad terrace with fruit trees all round and in the background the mountains of Savoy; the avenue with the eighty elms was missing. My wife took the liberty of inquiring about this. A special sketch—as a sketch so charming that we hung it up in a passepartout—showed the interior with a great farmhouse chimney and Frau Julika kneeling in front of it making up the fire; on the edge of the sheet was a cordial invitation to a raclette.
'When are you coming?' every letter soon began. At the end of the letter he wrote: 'I must impress on you once again that you can't come here with the car. Nobody will be able to tell you the way. Just garage your car at Montreux. I'll come and fetch you; otherwise you will never find my ferme vaudoist?
Winter came and we did not see Stiller. He hadn't the money to come to Zurich, and no desire, even if we had invited him. Spring also went by without a meeting. Today this surprises me. Stiller wrote to us quite often; Frau Julika appeared in his letters fairly frequently. We knew that she had worked for a time as shop assistant in a grocery. But on the important point, their married life together, his letters gave not the slightest hint. Instead he devoted two or three pages to descriptions of sunsets. Fundamentally he said nothing at all; to me it was always as though his letters had reached me in a bottle carried by the waves from some distant outpost, and I had no right to break his silence as in a legal interrogation, either by a direct or leading question or by putting a provocative misconstruction on what he had said. He did his best to write in a humorous vein.
suppose you don't believe that I have found the house of my dreams,' he wrote again. 'Why don't you come? I admit we see Chillon Castle and the Dents du Midi, and that when the west wind is blowing you can hear the State Railway, loudspeakers from an international regatta, and the jingle-jangle of dance or
chestras playing for the visitors to our spa, and I don't deny that you can see from here a few Montreux hotels, the whole lot in fact, but we are simply above them, inwardly above them as well, you know. You'll see! The cellar—I haven't told you about this before—is full of empty barrels, if you shout into them your flesh creeps at the sound of your own voice, and if you keep quite still you can hear the mice in the beams, perhaps rats too, anyhow it's a sign that the beams are genuine, and that's the point, you see, everything here is genuine, even the swallows under my roof that I have spent a whole week patching up to the perpetual horror of Julika, who was afraid I might fall off. And yet I am now caution personified, I cling to life as never before, you see I always have the feeling death is on my heels—that's quite natural, you know, a sign of life. Seriously, I have rarely felt like this: I almost always look forward to the next morning and only hope the following day will be like the one that has just gone by, for the present suffices me to an extent that is often astounding. And then I'm going to fit up a workshop, I can't spend all my time reading your Kierkegaard and similar heavy stuff, I've got to tie up vines, pull up weeds, and then buy glass-paper, artificial fertilizer, snail powder—as you can see, it is a case of retour á la nature. By the way, will you tell your wife they're not planes, but elms, unfortunately diseased like almost all elms nowadays, nobody can explain why; elms don't like our times and when they have to be felled it cuts us to the quick, even if they belong to our neighbours. Will you see them before they go? I'm already waiting for you in spirit on the platform at Montreux; then I shall lead you up a rather steep and stony vieux sentier flanked by vine-clad walls that is as hot as an oven in summer, but more airy in autumn, overgrown with moss for decades and only used today by woodcutters and le minage Stiller (pronounced Stillair). But why should I describe this countryside to you? You can read about it in your, and now also my, beloved Ramuz. When are you coming at last? I beg you, come before the old walls tumble down, the moss covers my feet, and ivy grows out of our eyes.'
When we received letters like this we always recalled with a smile Stiller's former jeers at country life as 'sentimental escapism'; now he seemed to be feeling better in his feme vaudoise than ever before. We were particularly relieved to hear that Frau Stiller had found a satisfactory part-time job: she was teaching eurhythmies in a Montreux girls' school. And Stiller himself had started working. On my wife's birthday she received a whole consignment of pottery—bowls and jugs and plates, most useful things. Stiller had never breathed a word about this. Now he wrote in connexion with his present:
'Here in Glion, you must know, in case you ever come, I've been a potter from birth. I'm making a lot of money now. And once I've got my own kiln things will really start humming. And when I'm tired of making money I shall go up to Caux, which is quite near here, ten minutes on the little railway. But I haven't reached that point yet; I'm not doing my own firing yet. For preference I sell my wares to Americans with good taste. I've got a notice on my garden gate saying "Swiss Pottery", in English. Americans who know something about pottery are frequently astonished to find almost the same decorative patterns in Switzerland that they have seen with their own eyes among the Indians around Los Alamos, Arizona, and especially in the Indian Museum at Santa Fe.'
Stiller never lost his delight in mischievous pranks. He needed a certain measure of disguise in order to feel at ease with people. After my wife had visited Stiller in Glion on her way to the South of France with the children, I asked her about his ferme vaudoise; she merely laughed loudly. I must see it for myselfl In reality things were probably not so fabulous as in his letters. Frau Stiller had once more to go 'intp the mountains'. It was during this period of solitude that he kept ringing me up in the evening. His calls were often a nuisance, coming just when we had company. As a rule Stiller had been drinking; he began talking about Kierkegaard and pretended to be in urgent need of elucidation from me. He made these calls from a tavern—his own telephone had been cut off because he hadn't paid the bill. I was never an expert on Kierkegaard; I sent him the book following a conversation about melancholy as a symptom of the aesthetic attitude to life. When he rang me I hadn't got the book handy, and nor had Stiller. Above all, it was obvious that he had scarcely read Kierkegaard yet, so there must have been something else on his mind. He used to hang on for a quarter of an hour or more, halfan hour sometimes, probably just to listen to a voice. In the background I could hear sounds from the tavern, the clink of glasses being rinsed, the clank of a pin-table. I could scarcely make out what he was saying. He must often have thought me a miserly skinflint and cursed me in his heart. I knew his economic position and tried to bring these expensive conversations to an end. I probably wasn't sufficiently capable of putting myself in his place. His jokes did not deceive me as to the degree of his loneliness, his longing for a friend. It was precisely because I was so clearly aware of this that I felt so helpless. All too often I simply couldn't provide what he expected, for I hadn't got it, and consequently he was doing me an injustice with his sudden question: 'Are you mean?' Then he would continue: 'Say something for heaven's sake, I don't care what, but say something!' And he regularly concluded with the words: 'If you ever come to Glion, though I don't believe now that you ever will—!' and fell silent, without replacing his receiver. Then I would say good-bye several times but continue to hear the clink of glasses being rinsed and a French waitress calling out the orders. Stiller waited for me to ring off without saying good-bye himself. We feared these nightly calls. Sometimes we just didn't pick up the receiver; then he would go on ringing until two in the morning.
It was over eighteen months since we had last met, when finally I alighted at Montreux one sunny October day. I didn't recognize him at once on the platform; my own discarded suit gave him a positively bourgeois appearance, and strange to say Stiller did ndt take a single step towards me. Our greeting was a trifle strained. With his steep and stony vieux sentier in mind I had only brought an attaché case; Stiller wanted to carry it, but I wouldn't let him. To look at, Stiller was miraculously unchanged, his thin hair slightly greyer and slightly more thin, his bald patch more extensive. My old suit was too short for him, especially at the sleeves, which gave him a boyish look. Stiller immediately asked after my wife and then inquired very heartily about the children, whom he had seen. After a few paces, conversation was no longer the least bit difficult. The fact that I had allowed eighteen months to pass without seeing him was due partly to pressure of work, but partly to other reasons. I realized that now. I had felt slightly afraid of this reunion: our friendship sprang from the time when he was remanded in custody, and it might now have proved, against our wishes, out of date, a recollection instead of a present reality.
Before leaving Montreux Stiller bought wine, St Saphorin, 'to support local industry'. He forced two bottles into his coat pockets and held the third against his neck like a hand grenade. Then we set off. In fact, and almost to my surprise, there was a vieux sentitr to Glion. Stony and steep, as described, it led upwards between vine-clad walls. As we advanced we began to feel our age; rather out of breath we stood still and looked at Chillon Castle, below us Territet with its hotels, tennis courts, funicular railways, and chalets, but beyond it the great blue Lake Geneva. It was almost like being by the Mediterranean. Once you can forget the shoddy-looking chalets, this landscape has a liberating breadth that is unusual in our country. Whereabouts on this vandalized hillside a ferme vaudoise could possibly be concealed was a puzzle to me. And we must be almost at Glion. Our conversation dealt with wine-growing, then with the concept of culture, of leisure as a prerequisite for culture and with the nobility of enjoyment, with the fundamental difference between potatoes and vines, the spiritual serenity of all districts devoted to viticulture, the connexion between luxury and human dignity and so forth—I did not fail to see the little sign on the iron garden gate bearing the inscription 'Swiss Pottery' in English. Stiller pushed the rusty little gate open with his foot, and witho
ut interrupting the conversation led me along a moss-grown path, past all sorts of garden gnomes, to his dream-house.
One glance at the universal dilapidation showed why the rent was so low. Vases of cast iron liberally decorated with arabesques, some of them damaged, a sandstone Aphrodite or Artemis with a broken arm, a little jungle that was doubtless supposed to be the rose garden, lots ofsteps everywhere, crooked, flanked on both sides by banisters, some of them crumbling away, revealing that they were all only cement, a moss-grown fountain, an old kennel, weed-grown terraces—this must have been the garden, populated by a considerable number of jolly garden gnomes of brightly painted pottery, some broken, some undamaged. I still thought this was no more than the path leading to his own estate. Stiller talked and talked, unperturbed by the nauseating surroundings, with which he was familiar. The house itself, a chalet, was fortunately smothered by ivy, only the upper part emerged in all its fake antiquity—a brickbuilt turret with cute little loopholes. In addition there was a wooden façade covered in scroll-work that looked as though it had been made with a fretsaw, and elsewhere blocks of tufa. Everything was united under a roof with enormous eaves. And the whole place was not large, but tiny, like a toy; I couldn't believe my eyes. It was a Swiss chalet distantly related to a Scottish castle.
Stiller now pulled the two bottles out of his jacket pockets, hauled a key from his trousers, and announced that Frau Julika would be back from her girls' school in about an hour.
So there we were. As on so many chalets of this kind, there was a fake marble tablet bearing in gilt letters, some of which had already turned black, the inscription MON REPOS. The interior held no more surprises. A wooden bear stood ready to receive umbrellas and above it was a badly tarnished mirror. It was a sunny afternoon and on the ceilings of all the rooms the light reflected off Lake Geneva flickered over grey stucco or bare lath and plaster. A greenish light, like that of an aquarium, Altered in through a veranda with art nouveau leaded windows. You could hear the State Railway about as loudly as it must sound in a line-keeper's cottage, and the greased cable of a funicular railway hummed close by.