'So I suppose!'
'Everything else—'
'Hair-oil gangster!' said the indignant voice. 'I shall bring an action for slander, no matter what it costs. You can tell the prisoner so today.'
A short pause.
'Just one more question, Herr Direktor—'
'Certainly, Herr Staatsanwalt, anything you please.'
'Have you any contact with Jamaica?'
'How do you mean?'
'I'm not trying to find out about your business contacts,' said the public prosecutor. 'Don't misunderstand me, Herr Direktor. All I want to know is: when this Herr Stiller was doing the plaster head of you, did you ever talk about Jamaica?'
'It's possible—'
'Aha.'
'I have a house in Jamaica.'
'Aha.'
'Why?'
I heard the chair being pushed back.
'Once again, very many thanks, Herr Direktor,' said the public prosecutor. 'We are very relieved to see that you haven't been murdered.'
'Murdered?'
'The fact is, our prisoner maintains positively that several years ago he murdered you with his own hands.'
'Me?'
'In Jamaica—yes.'
Now it was Knobel's turn, he was introduced as the warder and asked to relate everything I had told him. He was obviously unsure of himself. His story of the murder was poor, muddled, and lacking in graphic quality.
'In the jungle!' laughed the company director. 'Did you ever hear of such a thing, Herr Staatsanwalt? In the jungle! I've never seen a jungle in Jamaica, these are freaks of fancy, Herr Staatsanwalt, believe me—'
'I believe you.'
'Freaks of fancy.'
Knobel seemed to have lost his nerve: he didn't dare describe the way the blood of the director, who was standing in front of him, mingled with the brown marsh water and how the black zopilote and the well-dressed vulture waited—just the things he should have told them now, when they asked him for more details. Instead, Knobel asked in return:
'Are you Herr Direktor Schmitz, then?'
'Answer my questions,' said the director. 'What does the prisoner claim to have murdered me with?'
'With an Indian dagger.'
'Oh.'
'Yes,' said Knobel, 'into the throat in front and then round to the left.'
'So.'
'Or else round to the right,' said Knobel, losing his grip again. 'I can't remember now.'
'Thank you.'
Then Knobel was told he could go. 'I'm sorry,' said Knobel; and as he went through the antechamber, cap in hand, his ears were lobster red; he didn't deign to glance at me ... I didn't hear how the director felt about this murder, because Knobel had tidily shut the door. Their conversation inside lasted another ten minutes. I was trying to read the newspaper my warder had left behind, a Social Democratic publication I should think, when suddenly the gentleman was standing in the doorway. He said: it's been a pleasure, Herr Staatsanwalt, to explain the true position to you personally. It's not a question of the money here, as I have said, I told him at the time that I was willing to pay half the agreed fee, the full half, I give you my word, but I wasn't going to be blackmailed, and if Herr Stiller wasn't satisfied he could have taken me to court, but he didn't care to, as you see. He had no money for litigationl They always say that, these psychopaths, and when I told him he could sue me for the money if he wanted to, he just called me a gangster. Now really, Herr Staatsanwalt, you wouldn't have put up with that either.'
The gentleman who then put on his overcoat in the antechamber was a thoroughly worthy citizen, but no more striking than any passer-by in the Bahnhofstrasse. Round his neck he wore a simple scarf of plain silk. He covered his bald head with an equally simple hat of plain felt, which when he caught sight of me, he did not raise; instead he clutched at his throat, as though adjusting the scarf. I nodded. I wonder why? He left with the words: 'We shall see one another in Court.' Then I had to go to the public prosecutor. 'There is a type of millionaire,' I said, 'you can't get at in a state where the rule of law prevails, so it's no wonder they keep on being resurrected—'
The smart young lady was quickly got rid of with a job, a letter to be delivered to the Hotel Urban. I thought at once: I wonder whether Julika is back from Paris? Meanwhile the public prosecutor, whom I had hitherto only seen as a guest on my prison bed, invited me to sit down. 'Yes,' he smiled, 'my dear chap—'
He was interrupted by the telephone. He turned a little to one side with the official telephone receiver, as was proper for an unofficial conversation, listened with his hand on his bunch of keys and gazing out of the window, for his part said only that he would not be home for lunch, an on-the-spot investigation he had in the afternoon, and rang off abruptly, obviously bothered by a question he didn't want to have to answer in my presence. Then he turned to me again, not without a trace of embarrassment.
'Sibylle sends her good wishes.'
'Thank you,' I said. 'How is she?'
'Thank you, he said, 'she's glad to be home again.'
Then—after the last smile had vanished from his face and a silence of unconcealed embarrassment had lasted long enough, a silence that seemed to imply it was now settled that I was the missing Stiller and therefore the former lover of his wife, who was now glad to be back home, and after he had put away his bunch of keys—he uttered his not very original remark:
'Life's a funny thing.'
I couldn't think of anything either.
'If it's all right with you, Stiller, let us have lunch together. We've got until two o'clock—I suggest,' he said as he stood up, 'that we drive a little way out into the country.'
***
2. Lunch.
A rather taciturn drive through fields and woods. Everything very autumnal. The sun was still just hot enough to sit out of doors, at least round midday. We sat in a rather quaint open-air restaurant which nevertheless had a wide and delightful view; above our heads there were vine leaves and in front of us a few straggling vines between which we looked out on the lake sparkling under a hazy light; everything was as though beneath a veil of blue smoke, including the brown ploughed fields and the woods with their dying leaves glowing. Here and there ladders still leaned against the trees and baskets stood down below. Wasps even came at our campari. The mountains towering up above the autumnal haze were as clear as glass and somehow unreal; their snow gleamed dazzling white from behind the spectral branches of leafless fruit trees, like a monstrance behind a black rood-screen. it's beautiful here,' I said, 'very beautiful.'
'Didn't you know this place?'
The food was excellent.
'What shall we drink?' asked my prosecutor and friend. 'They have a very good Maienfelder here, I believe.'
'That'll do fine,' I said, 'fine.'
I couldn't help looking again and again at the landscape, which fell away to the lake in a magnificently broad sweep. The autumn mist blotted out the pettiness of the housing development, which was neither town nor village; there remained the hills covered with trees, the gentle hollows filled with ploughed fields and bogs, a landscape that preoccupied me precisely because it did not in the least surprise me. I knew it. Did I love it?
'I've heard,' said my public prosecutor, 'that our friends were rather disappointed the other day. They found you cold.'
'Perhaps I am.'
'Why?'
I shrugged my shoulders. I felt about them as I did about this landscape, which in fact, like almost every landscape, is worthy of affection. It must be my fault ... Once more everything was there, the wasps in the bottle, the shadows on the gravel, the golden stillness of transience, everything as though spellbound, the cackling hens in the meadow, the brown and over-ripe pears littering the roadway, the asters leaning over an iron railing, their centres bloody stars that ran towards the edges, the bluish light under the trees. It was as though everything were bidding itself good-bye; the whispering foliage of a poplar, the metallic bloom on the fallen fruit, the smok
e rising from the fields where they were burning weeds, the lake glittering behind a grille of vines. Soon the sun would be turning rusty in the haze of mid afternoon, the time of walking home without an overcoat, hands in trouser pockets, the damp leaves that no longer rusde, the farmsteads with their wine presses, the dripping barrels in the dusk, the red lanterns of a lakeside landing-place in the mist...
That is autumn here, and I can also see the spring. I see a rather young couple: they are tramping across country and the fields, sodden with melted snow, squelch under their feet, dark and soft like a wet sponge; the Föhn blows above their heads and the sun gives warmth; they pick their route entirely by the inviting accidents of the terrain and always at a comradely distance from one another; all around is the smell of scattered manure, springs gurgle and comb the grass of the sloping banks, and the leafless woods stand with patches of March sky between their trunks; two steaming brown farm-horses are pulling a plough over a gently sloping hillside; in black clods, the earth gapes hungrily after the light. A strange reunion after years apart! Young as they are, they are talking about the ages of man, and they already know that at every age, apart from childhood, time is rather horrifying; and yet every age is beautiful the less we deny or dream away what belongs to it, for death itself, which will one day be our lot, cannot be denied, or dreamed away, or postponed. How much the young man talks about the two conditions of his life, work and expiation, as he calls it; and work—that is the joy, the fever, the excitement, so that you cannot sleep for jubilation, a cry that rings out across hours and days, so that you feel like running away from yourself—that is work, the elation that wins people without wishing to, that puts no one under an obligation, ties no one and advances no one, that is not calculating and avaricious, but behaves like the angel who has no hands for taking; work is a grandiose fervour of the heart in which all human contacts are purely incidental, an extra, a cheerful squandering from excess of joy; later, of course, it always turns out to be the finest sort of contact that is possible between human beings, unattainable as soon as it becomes a goal, a need, an urgent objective. Again and again there comes this sudden outbreak of depression that does not develop because people stay away, on the contrary—people only stay away because depression is about to break out, they can scent weeks ahead, as a dog can scent an earthquake, that everything which has been built up will once more be reduced to rubble and smothered in ashes, smothered in melancholy like a flock of black birds flapping their wings over the scenes of past joy, the shadow of fear—that is the expiation, the after-pangs of doubt, the horror of uncreative solitude.
How the young man likes talking, and how beautiful the young woman finds it, nevertheless! The silver-edged clouds melt before the sun and little woods rise like islands out of a metallic glitter; they wander through a reedy marsh and as she jumps across a murmuring rill her shoe sticks in the clinging morass; the young woman balances like a tight-rope walker with one stockinged foot in the air, so that the young man has to hold her. They kiss for the first time. Behind the copses there are lakes of coolness with snow still lying in the shady patches between the red-barked willows. As they are leaving a wood they stand still, arm in arm; the lake lies before them again like a flashing scythe, and over the Alps froth the silent breakers of the clouds, a mass of luminous foam.
They stop at some peasant inn. A child with plaits serves them. Behind a row of low windows full of shoots and a tangle of plants and sun slanting into the stillness of the wooden room and gleaming on their waiting plates, they feel how far they have roamed; they enjoy the well-earned meal—bacon with bread, peasant bread, that breaks up into moist and delicious hunks. A fly is buzzing against the window pane. The moment is enveloped and borne aloft by the clouds of a happiness that is close to sorrow, a strange, an alert sense of existence, an unexpected community of sentiment, that was lying in wait for them in this workaday peasant room, the knowledge that they have met one another. No question is yet raised as to what will come of it; there prevails only the complete sense of how much is possible in a lifetime...
That is spring here, and in summer the hens cackle under the wooden tables, the vine leaves overhead are green and dense, the sky whitish, the lake like dull lead, bees hum round the edge of the wood, the blue haze above the motionless stalks in the tall meadows is alive with darting butterflies, the mountains are lost in the glare of the sun, and now (almost before I have emptied my glass) it is already autumn again and once more all this: baskets full of leaves, the dampness of mist and suddenly it is midday, a midday as at this moment, with gold in the air and time passing like an invisible gesture over the hillsides and apples falling with a thud. If you walk through the woods now there is a smell of mushrooms. Here it smells of new wine. Wasps buzz round the sweetness of fermentation, returning again and again, and the summer sun comes back to us once more in the fruits that have reached their brief hour of ripeness, the sweetness of remembered days; people sit in their gardens and feel the cool of shadow on their skin, and the gardens suddenly appear surprisingly wide, vacant but serene, a bluish spaciousness fills the empty treetops, and once more the red glow of dying foliage climbs up the walls of the houses, the last leaves go up in flames. Who notices the passing of the years and all that happens? All things are one, space filled with existence, nothing comes back to us, everything is repeated, the span of our existence is but an instant and the day comes when we no longer count the autumns, all living things are like the stillness over the ripening slopes, the grapes of parting hang on the vines of our lives. Pass on! Once more on days like these the lake beckons; your skin tingles if you swim now, you feel the warmth of your own blood, you swim as though in glass, you swim above the shadowy deeps of cold, and the glittering waves splinter on the shore; far out a sail sweeps along in front of silvery clouds, a moth on a sparkling web, canvas steeped in the shimmering rays of the sun against a background of faint and hazy shores. There are moments when time seems to be standing still, dizzy with happiness; God gazes upon himself and the whole world holds its breath, before it crumbles into the ashes of twilight...
At one point my public prosecutor said to me:
'That's Herrliberg down there, you know, and that place you can see in the distance is Thalwil.'
Then the peasant girl took our plates away and asked if we had enjoyed the meal, and after she had brought the box of cigars we were once more alone. Of course, I had felt long ago that my prosecutor and friend had something on his mind. Had I prevented him from coming out with it? When our cigars were alight, the moment had arrived. Our glasses were empty, the black coffee hadn't been brought yet, the wasps had disappeared and in some little country church a clock struck.
'I'm glad,' he said, 'I'm really glad that we have got to know one another at last. But that's not what I want to talk about now. At two o'clock we have to be back in town for an on-the-spot hearing, don't be alarmed, an on-the-spot hearing in the studio—1 can understand,' he immediately added, 'your looking at me as though I had behaved like an underhand persecutor, a hypocrite who came uttering friendly words and carrying a straitjacket, I quite understand your fear of that dusty studio down there—altogether, my dear Stiller, perhaps I understand you better than you think.'
My inquiry as to the purpose of this on-the-spot hearing went unanswered. if you will permit me,' he said, 'I should like to give you a piece of advice.'
His cigar had gone out.
'Look,' he said at last, after lighting his cigar for the second time, 'I'm not only talking to you because Sibylle has asked me to. Sibylle wants to spare you any unnecessary suffering, and I think she's right: the court will not understand you at all, Stiller. The court will quite simply treat you as a convicted swindler, a figure of fun; the court is used to swindles, as you may imagine, but only to swindles that bring some advantage, a fortune or a title or the like, in short you will be condemned to some punishment. I don't know what, or maybe they will dispense with the punishment, but not the shrugs,
the headshakes, and the sneers. What will you gain by that?'
'What is your advice?' I asked.
'Stiller,' he said, 'speaking as a friend: spare us the necessity next Friday of publicly condemning you to be yourself, and above all spare yourself this ordeal. A legal judgement will only make it more difficult for you henceforth to bear the name of the missing man, and that you are at least outwardly none other than the missing man is something we need no longer seriously discuss. Admit it of your own free will! That's my advice, Stiller, advice given out of sincere friendship, I believe.'
Then the black coffee arrived.
'Fräulein,' said the public prosecutor, 'make up the bill please.'
'Everything together?'
'Yes,' said the public prosecutor, 'please.'
Then came my reply:
'I can't admit what isn't true.'
But the peasant girl, evidently misconstruing our silence, did not go at once, but stood around on the gravel chatting about the weather and then about the dog, while we sipped taciturnly at our hot coffee; only when the public prosecutor asked for the bill again did she leave us in peace.
'You can't admit,' reiterated the public prosecutor, 'what isn't true—'
'No,' I said.
'How do you mean, it isn't true?'
'Mr Public Prosecutor—,' I began.
'Don't address me as your public pi isecutor,' he interrupted as I groped for words. 'I should like you to think of me as a friend, if you can. Call me Rolf.'
'Thanks,' I said.
'I suppose,' he smiled, 'that must have been how you spoke of me in the old days—'
Now my cigar had gone out, too.
'I'm happy,' I said, after lighting my cigar a second time, 'that you offer me your friendship. I have no friends here. But if you are serious about not wanting to be my public prosecutor, and I believe it with all my heart—Rolf ... why, then I can expect of you what one must expect of a friend: that you will believe what I cannot explain, let alone prove. Nothing else matters now. If you are my friend, then you must accept my angel as part of the bargain.'