Stiller tried to laugh. 'You're saying just the same in different words,' I commented, 'only I don't consider it cowardly.'—'A sacrifice, you think? A reciprocal sacrifice, in which both perish!'—'Of course, there are cases where people can separate,' I said, 'where they ought to separate, and if they don't it's cowardice, inertia. How many there are who I wish would separate, the quicker the better; there are certainly episodes, inside or outside marriage, and when they're over you can finish with them. Not every couple become one another's cross! But when it is like that, when we have made it like that, when it isn't an episode, but the central theme of our lives—' Stiller protested: 'Cross!'—'Call it what you like.'—'Why don't you say it frankly?' he asked. 'You don't say it openly in your letters either.'—'What?'—'What you mean: His will be done! God has given, and blessed are they who accept, and dead they who cannot hear, like myself, who cannot love in the name of God, the accursed like myself, who hate because they want to love by their own efforts, for God alone is the love and the power and the glory—that's what you mean, isn't it?' He didn't look at me, but sat with his head resting against the wooden chair-back and the same vague smile on his face once more. 'And lost are the proud,' he went on, 'those with the murderous pride who seek to bring back to life what they have slain, those with the miserly regret, who calculate and lament at a time like this when things take a different course or don't move at all, the deaf and the blind, who hope for mercy at a time like this, the small-minded like myself, those with a childish spite against suffering, yes, let them get drunk, the arrogant who sin against hope, the stubborn, the unbelieving, the greedy, who want to be happy, yes let them get drunk and chatter, those who refuse to be broken in their pride, the unbelieving, those who put their earthly hope in Julika! But blessed are the others, blessed are those who can love in His name, for in God alone ... Is that it?' he asked, is that what you've been trying to say all the time?'—i'm your friend,' I answered, i'm trying to tell you what I think about Julika and you, about your loneliness with each other. That's all.'—'Well, what do you think then?' he asked, his head against the wooden chair-back. 'I've told you.' Stiller seemed unable to remember. 'You love her,' I repeated. 'That's what you think,' he retorted. 'But you expect from your love something like a miracle, my dear chap, and that is probably what you feel hasn't worked out.'—'I love her?'—'Yes,' I asserted, 'whether it suits you or not. You would rather have loved someone else. I know. And she knows too! Perhaps Anya, or whatever her name was, your Polish girl in Spain, or Sibylle upstairs ... Only it's not Julika's fault that she isn't the girl you might have made happy.'—'No,' he said. 'Julika can't help that either.'—'You love without being able to make the creature you love happy. That is your suffering. A real suffering—apart from all our vanity, for one would like to play God Almighty a bit, to take the world out of one's pocket, to conjure life on to the table, hey presto! And then, certainly, we should like to be happy ourselves when we love ... That doesn't always happen!' I said, and as he did not smile, I added: 'That's roughly what I think, and if you ask me what you should do—' His thoughts were elsewhere. 'Since autumn!' he said, and his lips were trembling. 'She has known since autumn. I found out today from the doctor. Since autumn! And there was I whistling away in my underground chamber with no idea at all, no idea at all ... What am I to do!' he exclaimed, vigorously on the defensive against me. 'I can't walk on the water!'—'Who's asking you to?'—'Yesterday afternoon, when I thought she was dying ... Rolf,' he said, 'I wept! And then I asked myself whether—if that might save here—I should be willing to go through it all over again with her, all over again. And I shook my head, I wept, for fourteen years she's been dying day by day, sitting at the table with me...' I felt sorry for Stiller. 'You know she went to the hospital alone?' he asked. 'Without me.'—'Why without you?'—'Her things were all packed. There was another hour to wait. We didn't know what to talk about. Flowers don't help, I know. But I just had to get some. There was nothing she would have liked in Territet. So I went on to Montreux. In forty minutes I was back at the house, in forty minutes—well, she went to the hospital alone.' He forced himself to smile. 'Perhaps you think nothing of it,' he added, 'you with your common sense?'—'What do you think of it?'—'Without me!' he answered, 'Without me! That gave her more of a kick than flowers, you see. To leave this house perhaps for the last time, alone, unescorted, oh yes, that lasts longer than all the flowers in the world!' I didn't accept his explanation. 'Rolf,' he retorted, 'that woman is spiteful. Perhaps I made her spiteful. One day, you can't believe in love any more ... I was too late!'
Stiller had risen to his feet. He looked as though he would fall down any minute, I didn't know what kept him upright at all. 'Have a white brandy,' he said, 'and then we'll go to bed.' But he couldn't find the glasses, which I could see on a tray lower down, and seemed to forget what he had meant to do. He just stood there, the brandy bottle in his hand, lost in silent thoughts. 'There is no one who is more of a stranger to me than that woman,' he said. 'I don't want to bore you, Rolf, but I must just say this: I shall be grateful, I shan't wait for a miracle. I shan't wait for some other Julika, I shall be grateful for every day if she comes back to this house again—now, yes, now, when I can't sleep, can't stay awake Yor fear it's all too late, now—Rolf!' he said, but he was so weak that he had to sit down on the nearby window sill in order to continue; he spoke like a frightened child after a nightmare: 'What will happen when she is sitting there again? She there and I here? Suppose everything is just the same as it was? Exactly the same? She there and I here—' He sat, still holding the brandy bottle in his hand, and looked at the room, at the two empty armchairs. 'What then?' he asked himself, and a few moments later he addressed the same question to me: 'What then, my dear chap, what then? Am I to dissolve in smoke, so as not to be a nuisance to her? Or what? Shall I fast until she gives a sign, and show her that one can die ofhunger waiting? Or what?'—'Stiller,' I replied, 'things won't be as they were before. Things won't be the same for you, even if Julika never changes. Yesterday afternoon you thought she was dying—' As soon as he realized what I was leading up to, he broke in. 'I know what you mean,' he said. He showed me he was feeling sick, to stop me from talking, so I said no more. 'How many revelations I've already had, how many decisions I have reached!' he said. 'But what will happen when she is sitting here again? I'm gradually getting to know myself. I'm weak'—'Once you know you're weak,' I commented, 'that is already a big step forward. Perhaps you have only just found out. Since yesterday afternoon, when you thought she was dying. Often you hate her, you say? Because she, too, is weak and poor? She can't give you what you need. Quite true. And her love is so necessary to you. More so than any other. There are things which are very necessary, Stiller, and yet we can't manage to do them. Why should Julika be able to manage it? Do you idolize her—still—or do you love her?' Stiller let me talk. 'Yes, yes,' he said, 'but speaking practically, when she's there and I'm here, what am I to do? Quite practically?' He looked at me. 'You see, Rolf, even you can't answer that!' he said, and it seemed to satisfy him. 'You've gone a long way,' I said, 'I sometimes have the impression that one more step is all you need.'—'And we'll be sitting here in the middle of a wedding, you mean?'—'And you will no longer expect Julika to be able to absolve you from your life or the other way round. You know what that means in practical terms.'—'No.'—'There'll be no change,' I said, 'you will live together, you with your work in the underground chamber down there, she with her one lung, God willing. The only difference will be that you won't go on tormenting yourselves day after day with this crazy notion that we can change people, somebody else or ourselves, with this presumptuous despair ... Quite practically—you will learn to pray for one another.' Stiller had risen to his feet. 'Yes,' I concluded, 'that's really all I can say to you on the subject.' Stiller put the brandy bottle down on the little table, and we looked at each other; the vague smile he had worn before did not reappear. 'One has to know how to pray!' was all he
said, and there followed a lengthy silence...
Later, much later, I often wondered how I ought to have behaved that night, unexpectedly confronted with a task that went beyond the powers of a friendship. When Stiller left the room to relieve himself at last, I stood there helpless. I felt my lack of any official status, for whatever I might have said remained merely my personal opinion. At best I could do no more than offer friendly resistance whenever my friend, who was being tested, tried to evade the test...
I poured myself out a glass of white brandy, and when Stiller returned about ten minutes later—unfortunately not without bumping into a piece of furniture in the dark hall and causing a clatter—he found me with the empty glass in my hand. 'How do you feel?' I asked. Stiller only nodded. He had emptied his stomach, and obviously also washed his face, which was green with inflamed eyes. 'What time is it?' he inquired afresh, sitting down on the clothes press and supporting himself on his outspread arms. 'You're right,' he said, 'this idiotic drinking—!' Stiller seemed to want to forget our unfinished conversation. It seemed that in order to go upstairs to bed all we needed was an appropriate phrase, an optimistic cliché—Tomorrow is another day, or something like that. The clock struck half past two. Of course we both thought of time in the hospital. There time was important, not here. I involuntarily visualized the sick-room, the night nurse sitting by the white bed taking her pulse—let's hope she doesn't have to ring the doctor—and for the first time I felt afraid. I saw the telephone on the clothes press, which might ring at any moment, and felt that the worst was possible. I remembered the doctor's refusal to let Stiller pay Julika an evening visit. 'What are you thinking about?' asked Stiller, and I had to say something. 'All you have to do now is to be sensible, Stiller, not to see ghosts. You love her. You have begun to love her, and Julika isn't dead, everything is still possible...' I felt slightly ashamed, but this was just the sort of hackneyed phrase that seemed to pacify Stiller. 'Have you got another cigarette?' he asked to avoid going to bed and being alone. I was in pyjamas: I had no cigarettes. 'I'm sure your wife won't have been able to sleep,' remarked Stiller, 'I loved your wife—I still love her,' he added to get everything straight, 'but you know that.' His silences grew longer and longer. 'Leave them,' he muttered, as I pushed the empty bottles a little to one side, so that Stiller shouldn't fall over them and make a fresh clatter. 'Or do you think I've never loved at all?' he asked uncertainly. 'Never loved at all?' His face was now visibly disintegrating with fatigue, if only I weren't so damned wide awake!' he expostulated and looked as though he were on the point of vomiting. 'You must rest,' I said. 'You'll see her at nine tomorrow morning—' His cigarettes, the blue Gauloises, were lying on the carpet by the chair. 'Thanks,' said Stiller when I offered him his own packet, and put a Gauloise in his mouth; but he took it out again, in spite of the lighted match I held out to him. 'I shall see her at nine tomorrow!...' Then he smoked as though the smoke were a food.
'You don't think,' he asked, 'that Julika is going to die?' At this I said something imprudent: 'As long as your telephone doesn't ring, Stiller, there's no reason to fear anything of the sort.' Once it was said it was said, and I could not take back the senseless remark that had given his fear a physical object to which it could attach itself. Stiller looked at the black telephone. So I went on speaking, 'You must be prepared for that,' I said. 'One day Julika, too, will die. Sooner or later. Like the rest of us. You must be prepared for that now.' Stiller smoked and said nothing. I had no idea what he was thinking. At last he threw his cigarette into the fireplace, or at least close to it, ready to bring the conversation to a final close. I was freezing: the fire was going out and there was no more wood. 'It was probably a good thing,' I said, descending to clichés again, 'for us to have had this talk—' Stiller nodded without conviction and continued to sit on the clothes press, supported on his outspread arms; he seemed to be waiting for strength. 'The truth is, I'm at exactly the point where I ought to have begun two years ago,' he remarked, 'not a step further. Only another two yean have been lost—I don't want to bore you, Rolf, but...' He saw that I was shivering. 'Rolf,' he said, 'everything would have been all right. Without a miracle, believe me, we should have got on all right, the two of us, just as we are—not then, but now; I mean two years ago. Now for the first time, here and now...' Stiller didn't want to cry, he fought against it and stood up. This morning in the hospital,' he said,'—no, that was yesterday—' Tears streamed all over his face, which was in no way that of a man in tears; he tried to say something. 'Everything would have been all right—' he repeated, but got no further. 'Then it will be all right!' I said. 'It will be all right!'
What happened next was strange; for a time we both acted as though Stiller was not crying at all. He stood somewhere in the room, his hands in his trouser pockets, unable to speak. I saw his back, not his face, knew that Stiller was crying and because he was crying could hear nothing, and talked about his 'notebooks', simply to avoid being a mute spectator.'—anyhow, you know the essential point,' I said among other things, 'you know that nothing is settled by putting a bullet in your temple, for example. How one learns that is something that cannot be described. But you know it, unimaginable as it is. Perhaps you have a queer idea of what it means to believe; perhaps you think one is certain when one believes, so to speak wise and saved and so on. You feel yourself to be anything but certain, so you simply don't believe you're a believer. Isn't that so? You can't picture God, so you tell yourself you have never experienced Him...' Stiller seemed glad I was talking. 'As far as I know your life,' I said, 'you have again and again thrown everything away because you were uncertain. You are not truth. You are a man and you have often been willing to give up an untruth, to be uncertain. What else does that mean, Stiller, but that you believe in a truth? And in a truth that we cannot change and cannot even kill—a truth that is life.'
The grandfather clock out in the hall began to clank as it always did before striking the hour; it was three o'clock. 'I got an odd impression from your notebooks,' I went on, for the sake of something else to say. 'You kept trying to accept yourself without accepting anything like God. And now this proves an impossibility. He is the power which can help you really to accept yourself. You've learnt all that. And yet you say you can't pray; you write it too. You cling to your powerlessness, which you take for your personality, and yet you know your powerlessness so well—and all this as though out of spite because you are not power. Isn't that so?' Of course Stiller didn't answer. 'You feel it must compel you, otherwise it's not genuine. You don't want to kid yourself. You're annoyed because you have to beg for belief; then you're afraid God might simply be your own invention...'
I went on talking for a long time before finally coming to a stop. As I have said, I did not expect Stiller to listen: I only talked to avoid being a mute spectator of his weeping. His thoughts were elsewhere. 'Her face,' said Stiller, 'that isn't her face at all, it never was—!' He was unable to express himself any further. Stiller was now crying as I have rarely seen a man cry. And all the time he stood there with his hands in his trouser pockets. I didn't leave the room; my presence no longer carried any weight ... During those minutes I made a great effort to recall her face, but only saw it as it was last autumn, when it was no longer a face at all; I saw her sobbing with her mouth wide open and rigid, her equally rigid fists in her lap, the dumb trembling of a blind body filled with the fear of death; but I didn't want to be reminded of that now. I resolved to go to the hospital myself the following morning, to see Frau Julika, if only for a moment.
'Say something,' begged Stiller when, finally exhausted by his crying, he became aware of my presence again. 'I've said all I can say to you: Julika hasn't died,' I repeated, 'and you love her.' At this Stiller looked at me as though I had uttered a revelation. His legs were still unsteady, his eyes watery, but his head was sober, I believe. He made some complimentary remark about our friendship, about my kindness in staying up with him again almost a whole night, and ru
bbed his waxen forehead. 'If you've got a headache,' I said, 'I have some Sari-done tablets upstairs.' His thoughts were already elsewhere again. 'You're right,' he repeated several times, 'I shall see her at nine o'clock tomorrow—' At last we stood in the doorway, I myself utterly exhausted, and Stiller put out the chandelier with its watery light. 'Pray for me that she shall not die!' I heard him say, and suddenly we were in darkness: Stiller had forgotten to switch the hall light on first. 'I love her—' I heard him say. At last Stiller found the hall switch, and we shook hands and said good night. Stiller went out into the garden. 'I must have some air,' he said, 'I've certainly had too much to drink,' He was very calm.
The following morning, Easter Monday, my wife and I came downstairs at about nine o'clock. Our breakfast was standing ready on the table by the open window—coffee under the cosy and places laid with everything complete for two people. Neither salt cellar nor ashtray were missing. The soft-boiled eggs, one of them with '3 mins' written on it to show it was especially lightly boiled for Sibylle, as well as the toast under the table napkin, were still warm; our friend must have heard us washing and couldn't have been long out of the house. My wife had heard the crash during the night, but knew only that we had stayed up late talking. Naturally we assumed Stiller was already at the hospital. Our long conversation during the night seemed almost like a dream, lacking any true connexion with daylight reality, as we sat down at the table with the sun glinting on the knives and spoons and the exquisite view out over the forget-me-not-blue Lake Geneva to the snow-covered Savoy Alps. On the assumption that another satisfied client would come out of the hospital, we decided to drive on in the course of the day via Chfcbres, Yverdon, Murten, or Neuenburg and spend a day's holiday on our own on St Peter's Island in Lake Biel. The weather was absolutely glorious. A magnolia was already in full blossom in a neighbouring garden, forsythia was hanging over the fences in sheafs of brilliant yellow, the blood-red funicular railway came down empty between green slopes covered in cowslips and went up full of trippers. It was a world painted in colours of positively childish brilliance, such as are only appropriate to an Easter day; the birds were twittering so loud they were really noisy, and a white pleasure steamer was chugging across the lake to Chillon Castle, somewhere in the distance a brass band was playing Sunday music, the State Railway rumbled by.