I''m Not Stiller

  The children's performance at the circus (says Sibylle) was anything but a distraction for her; on the contrary, this was where she reached her decision—for Paris, for Stiller, for the risk. By daylight, thought Sibylle, these circuses look much shabbier, downright pathetic; the dilapidation behind the showy façade is visible everywhere; this makes the light under the tent with the sun shining on it all the lovelier, a light like amber, and on top of this the stands filled with a motley crowd of children and the buzz of their voices, and then the brass band, the stench of beasts, and every now and then a roar as though from the jungle. Sibylle found it magnificent. In Paris, she thought, there would be some kind of a job she could do, any sort of job, that was part of the risk. Sibylle was not afraid. The clown who opened the performance evidently took the children for stupid adults, his success was meagre, and little Hannes, at the circus for the first time, stared at the silly man without smiling, only glad when he stumbled, and didn't want him to come back. Sibylle was to tell the clown not to come back. But then came the leaping tigers! The crack of a whip and hoarse growling—Sibylle was fascinated, and for a few minutes she even forgot Paris, while Hannes sucked a sweet and asked why the nasty animals had to keep jumping through the hoop. He couldn't see any proper point in it. The seals, on the other hand, enchanted him, and on top of all the decisions she had to make, Sibylle now had to decide whether she wouldn't like to be a seal. While the horses were waltzing Hannes wanted to go home. Now Sibylle could easily have gone to Stiller. She didn't do so. Not yet. And then, as the lives of seven men hung from the smiling teeth of a girl on the trapeze, Hannes spotted down below through the stands a scruffy-looking man in boots, who was dressing up all kinds of dogs in quaint little jackets, black dress suits, and white bridal veils, and the dogs could scarcely wait. After this, Sibylle had to take little Hannes on her knees, so that he shouldn't fall down between the scaffolding. By this time, it seems, she had made up her mind. And yet all her attention was on the daring act on the glittering trapeze. She would manage somehow, she thought. Suddenly the children all round yelled their approval with a single voice: the silvery trapeze lady had just left her celestial swing with a salto mortale, bounced up and down in the net, and just look, she hadn't broken her neck, and the orchestra blared out Verdi. Interval. Hannes wanted to go outside like all the other children, but Sibylle sat as though spellbound: A person in fancy dress, who obviously earned her living like this, was selling chocolates, and this was doubtless the biggest attraction of the afternoon for Sibylle: an independent woman—

  Just before seven o'clock, after bringing Hannes safely home, she came to Stiller, who was whistling in his studio like a reed-sparrow, the trunk with the hinges pulled out and already packed. Of course, he was quite serious about the trip to Paris. Why had Sibylle come without her luggage? Now it turned out that Stiller had to go to Paris 'anyway', not today, not tomorrow, but soon—on account of a bronze that could only be cast in Paris and was absolutely indispensable for the forthcoming exhibition, as the curator agreed. What about Julika? He had such a magnificent pretext for going to Paris, and Julika had no excuse to excite herself and send her temperature curve up on account of this trip. Sibylle understood. She said simply:

  'No.'

  Stiller was offended.

  'I'm going—'

  'Yes,' she said. 'Do.'

  He thought her strange. For months they had been talking and dreaming of Paris, and now—

  'Do that,' said Sibylle. 'Go to Paris.'

  Stiller went (he had to, anyway) in the hope that Sibylle would regret her passing mood and follow him. Sibylle was no longer interested in his hopes. The following day over coffee, she said to Rolf, 'I'm not going to Paris.' Rolf made an effort not to lose his remarkable composure in his joy. Then she said, 'But I'm going for a week to my friend at St Gallen.' And now, would you believe it, the cup was shattered against the wall. When Sibylle was alone, she took the telephone book on her knee, crushed her cigarette in the ashtray, looked up the number of the doctor, the only one who could be considered for the purpose, immediately dialled the number and waited without hearing the pulsing of her heart. She was only astonished by her calmness. It bad to be, and the quicker the better.

  ***

  Rolf naturally didn't believe in the girl friend at St Gallen for a moment. He felt tricked and fooled, and as far as he was concerned that was the end. The unfortunate meeting in his office—after her discharge from the nursing home—looked quite different through his wife's eyes from the way Rolf, my public prosecutor, described it; the stubborn silence was not of her making (Sibylle assured me) but of his.

  I record the facts:

  Sibylle had to wait for nearly an hour in his antechamber, until the secretary came, 'Will you step this way please?' After a handshake, after a moment in the doorway when Sibylle felt she would sink into the floor if his hands did not bear her up, she walked past Rolf (that is true) straight to the window, as though she had come to see the view. 'So this is your office?' she said in a tone as though nothing had happened. 'Magnificent.' It was pure embarrassment. 'Yes,' he replied, 'this is my office.' He looked her up and down as though she had returned from a lovers' trip. 'I want to talk to you,' said Sibylle categorically. Rolf motioned her into the lounge-chair like a client and offered her a cigarette from a large box on the desk, official cigarettes, so to speak. 'Thank you,' said Sibylle and inquired, 'How are you?' And Rolf, without altering the intonation, simply echoed, 'How are you?'

  So they sat facing one another and smoking, Rolf behind his big desk, while Sibylle felt as though she were in an open field. Did he want to hear at all how much she felt she owed him? He didn't even ask ironically, What was it like at St Gallen? 'You must forgive me,' said Rolf, 'in half an hour I've got a case.' And of course Sibylle didn't utter a word. Why didn't he ask her straight out where she had been? Or quite simply, Why are you lying? Instead he merely announced: 'The move is finished. Fortunately we had fine weather...' His report of the move was completely matter-of-fact, without a hint of reproach for Sibylle's absence. 'For the moment I've just had your things put in the room,' he explained. 'I don't know how you want to arrange your room, or even whether—' Unfortunately they were interrupted by the telephone. (From the nursing home Sibylle had gone first to their old home. The echo of her footsteps in the empty rooms, the faded wallpaper with the darker rectangles due to the now vanished pictures, the dilapidation everywhere, the impossibility of believing that she had lived between these walls for six years, and all this after her easy, secret, necessary loss, which had nevertheless cried out to heaven through all her narcosis, all this was horrible, and Sibylle had wept, as though she saw in this empty and dilapidated, unspeakably shabby home that was no longer a home the graphic symbol of her whole life. She had tried to phone Rolf, but in vain; the telephone had already been disconnected. Then she went to the new house to see the lady's room—an utter muddle, a furniture warehouse, the epitome of meaninglessness, a heap of pictures and mirrors, books, hat boxes, vases and shoes, sewing things, faultless goods, but goods, nothing but goods, a heap to set on fire. Hannes had left her no peace, and when he wanted to show her Daddy's new room Sibylle had stopped still in the doorway. Then she had come here...)

  At last the telephone was dealt with, Rolf replaced the receiver and seemed to be recalling the interrupted conversation. But then he said: 'Someone rang up from Paris, a certain Herr Stiller, your lover I suppose—' Sibylle only looked at him. 'I imagine,' he added, 'that you met the gentleman in Paris after all...' This last straw wasn't even necessary, Sibylle had already picked up her handbag and involuntarily risen to her feet. 'Where are you going?' was all he asked. 'To the mountains,' answered Sibylle shortly, thinking with presence of mind of a poster she had seen on the way, 'to Pontresina.' And Rolf, that dunderhead for whom it wasn't yet enough of a farce, actually accompanied her to the door. 'Do as you please,' he said, picking up the glove she had dropped. 'Thank you,' said Sibylle and
she could really have gone now, indeed, she didn't know herself why she went over to the window again instead of out through the door.

  'I think it's ridiculous,' she remarked, 'completely ridiculous, the way we are behaving, childish...' Rolf said nothing. 'You're wrong,' she said and had to go on speaking somehow,'—you've no right to treat me like this. Did you think I would come and ask your forgiveness? We were never a marriage, Rolf, not even before. Never. That's the point. At bottom it was never anything for you but an affair, no more, you never believed in marriage—' Rolf smiled. Sibylle was surprised herself at her speech, at her accusing tone. It was not at all what she had really intended to say. 'Rolf!' she said, sitting down on the edge of a chair without putting down her handbag, ready to go the moment she felt she was in the way. 'I didn't come to reproach you. Only—' Rolf waited. 'I don't know,' she said to herself, 'what's to happen now.'

  Rolf stood and said nothing. Why doesn't he help me out, she thought, forgetting that there was a great deal which he simply couldn't know, that he had no idea where Sibylle had come from and what had happened. 'I never thought,' went on Sibylle, 'that we should come to this. I imagined something different by marriage. You and your lectures! I thought you were speaking from experience...' She looked at him. I don't know,' he said, 'what you want.' Sibylle really had to collect her thoughts. 'I'm not complaining, Rolf, I've no right to. It just happened like that. You're free, I'm free, and yet everything is so wretched ... What do I want?' She asked back, 'Don't you know?' A rather mocking smile, may be, even a contemptuous smile came on to her face, the sort of expression with which one does look at a person who is shamming. For so much blindness, it seemed to her, could only be a sham. What was the point of this comedy?

  Then suddenly Sibylle wanted to throw herself on to his breast, but remained standing a few paces away from her husband, as though she could not get through the look in his eyes. 'Do you hate me?' she asked with a faint, involuntary laugh. When a person with whom we are intimate hates us for the first time it seems almost like bluff, but it was his real face, there was no getting away from it, and her laughter froze. He hated her. He looked quite different, too. Sibylle no longer recognized him; he was only outwardly like himself.

  '...Lover!' she went on somewhere in her own thoughts. 'I wasn't looking for a lover, you know that very well.'—'What then?'—'I don't need "a man", any man. That's your theory. You weren't just "a man" for me. Why did you marry at all? For you it's just "a woman", an affair with "a woman", any woman. That's why I say you're a bachelor, a married bachelor. Go on, smile! Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece ofhumbug. I've behaved stupidly, I know. It hurt me when you fell in love somewhere, that's true, and perhaps I was petty. Latitude in marriage—what does that mean. I don't want latitude, I want to be more than just "a woman" to my husband. Why can't you understand that? My father isn't just "a man" to me. And Hannes isn't just "a child", whom we happen to love because we feel like it ... Oh Rolf,' she interrupted herself, 'that's all nonsense!'—'You mean,' concluded Rolf, 'that we've never been married?'—'Yes.'—'And that consequently there's no reason why you should tell me where you've been these last few days,' he said, lighting himself a fresh cigarette. 'I don't understand why you came to me at all.'—'When you talk like that, I don't understand either,' said Sibylle. 'I came to have a real talk with you. You've got no time now, I know. You never have time when it doesn't suit you. And then I really come at the stupidest moments.'

  Rolf smoked. 'What did you really want to talk to me about?'—'I'm naive, you're right. I'm still naive. Only I don't care about your superior smile any more,' she said. 'Somehow I find you simply stupid.' She specified: 'It's only that you can express yourself better than I can, that's why I always let you talk. Did you think I regarded you as the only man in the whole world I could love? I realized that you felt so certain of me, Rolf, but in a quite different sense ... Do you remember my British officer in Cairo?' she interpolated. 'You never took him seriously, I know. He had a lot of things you haven't got, Rolf, things that I miss. And yet it would never have occurred to me, in fact the idea would have seemed absurd, that I should travel on with another man instead of you. I wonder why? I don't know where I got my ideas about marriage from, but I still have them—even now ... Perhaps it would be best,' she concluded after a moment's thought, 'if we got a divorce.' As she said this she gazed out of the window and did not see his expression; anyhow, he said nothing. 'Think it over,' she said. 'I never imagined it would be possible for us to divorce. I approved of all the divorces among our acquaintances. I always thought that in these cases it had never been a marriage at all. They were just affairs, legalized to satisfy bourgeois taste, but invalid from the outset. Why should they stay together? That would have seemed to me like putting up a scarecrow and then being afraid to go into your own garden. They just weren't marriages, but only "bourgeois" affairs. You always called me "bourgeois" when my feelings didn't suit you, but now I think you are much more "bourgeois" than I am, seriously. Why else did you legalize our affair, if you didn't believe in marriage? Just because we were expecting a child...'

  Rolf let her talk. 'I know,' smiled Sibylle, 'you like to be composed. Whether I want to go to Paris or to Pontresina, you're always composed. And you think it's your magnanimity. Isn't that so? Your magnanimity is supposed to coerce me. Fundamentally, I often think, you only want my obedience. So as to have your freedom! That's all. You're waiting for my "lover" to leave me, as you leave your women, and then there'll be no one but you; that's all your love, all your composure, all your magnanimity amounts to ... Oh, Rolf,' she repeated, 'that's all nonsense.'—'And where do you see sense?' asked Rolf, but the telephone rang again and he had to go over to the desk. 'I don't know,' said Sibylle, 'why I tell you all this—'

  Rolf picked up the receiver: it was the secretary, ringing through to remind him, as instructed, about the sitting, a so-called summing-up for the jury. 'I won't keep you any longer,' said Sibylle, watching him fill his brief-case with papers. 'Are you angry with me?' she asked. 'Why don't you answer?' Rolf hunted for his ballpoint pen on the desk, then in his pocket, then on the desk again. 'I see,' he said, 'you're disappointed that I didn't forbid you anything—' His smile showed that he was making an effort to find the whole thing humorous. 'No,' said Sibylle, 'you're really not in a position to forbid me anything, Rolf, that's the miserable thing about it, from the beginning you merely had an affair with me, to be exact, and therefore no right to prevent me from having another affair—' Meanwhile Rolf had found his ballpoint, and there was no further reason why they shouldn't say good-bye. Rolfs hand was on the door-handle; if it had really been her Rolf, she would have thrown her arms round his neck and wept. It wasn't Rolf, it was a mask that seemed to her ridiculous. 'You must do what you think right,' he said once more, opening the door, ushering her through the antechamber and politely accompanying her to the lift—

  So now she had to go to Pontresina.

  Pontresina greeted her with a shower of rain and a feeling of shock, as though she had not imagined for an instant that she would really arrive at Pontresina. Pontresina consisted in the fact that the train simply went no further; worse still—at this time of day there was no train back. Sibylle felt trapped. Apart from herself, only two local people had got out. She abandoned herself to some porter in a green apron, who had loaded her trunk and her skis on to a sledge; Sibylle followed through the mushy snow. The crazy poster—it might as well have been a poster of Capri or a North Sea spa—had naturally referred to February or March, not November. True, the porter asserted that there was good snow higher up. What was Sibylle to do in the snow? What was she to do in this old-fashioned first-class hotel? For half an hour, without taking off her fur coat, which now represented, as it were, her last habitation, she sat on the bed listening to a loud-speaker blaring Danubian waltzes over an empty skating rink lit by spotlights. Later she went down into the bar, ordered a whisky,
and sought refuge in a flirtation with a gentleman who happened to be French and therefore witty...

  ***

  A confrontation with Wilfried Stiller, Dip. Agric., has been fixed for Friday week: 'possibly accompanied by a joint visit to his mother's grave', as I learn from my copy of the instructions.

  ***

  The end seems to have been very unpleasant, and her leave-taking from Stiller—however clearly we can see that something is at an end, the leave-taking still has to be performed—unfortunately (says Sibylle) was not accomplished without profound mortification, not without humiliating even herself.

  I record the facts:

  Sibylle, at that time passionately keen on sports, romped in Pontresina and was only glad that Stiller, now back from Paris, hadn't the money to come after her. Instead he pestered her with so many phone calls that the concierge in her hotel, who soon realized how unwanted these calls were, wore a grimace of sympathy every time he came to announce 'Zürich'. The only half-conscious hope that it might be Rolf prevented her from simply pretending not to be there. Also the concierge went a little too far for her liking with his shameless discretion: 'I'm afraid not,' she heard him say, 'Frau Doktor has just gone out, yes, this very minute,' as she stood in the hall, watching the expression of this noble ponce, who was undoubtedly banking on an extra tip for special services. She went straight into the booth and rang Stiller. But Stiller, it seems, had taken leave of his senses. He was furious, because he had had to beg her address from Carola, the Italian maid, and now he mounted his high horse. What was Sibylle to say to him? There was snow, yes, pretty good snow, no, today the sun was shining as well, oh yes, there was a very nice crowd at the hotel, and then she chatted about the terrific progress she had made in the ski-ing school, about Rücklage and Vorlage, about swinging from the hips and so on. Sibylle prattled like a bobbysoxer: about a 'heavenly' dancer, yes, yes, the Frenchman, about the 'crazy' atmosphere, her room was 'sweet', the skating rink was 'gorgeous', oh no, the Frenchman wasn't the only one who wanted to marry her, as a matter of fact they all did, a 'jolly bunch' really, and the ski-ing instructor, a Grison, was an 'absolute darling'. From time to time, while Stiller said nothing, the voice came through with, Three minutes are up, will you please insert the sum indicated. Three minutes are up, will you please—' and Sibylle inserted the money, as though the conversation was not yet childish enough. The devil had got into her, and this was a thoroughly agreeable feeling, she found, at any rate a feeling that suppressed many other feelings, and there was nothing of which Sibylle was so afraid as of her real feelings...