Once she came to a stop.
'Look,' she said, pointing to a bronze figure that was no better for having been bought by the municipality, a type of sculpture which, to be quite honest, does not appeal to me at all; and when I started to walk on Julika took me by the sleeve and pointed to the plinth, on which was engraved in rather large letters, the name A. Stiller. (Fortunately, I made no comment, for as soon as I express any opinion about the work of their missing Stiller, they take it for self-criticism and as a further indication that I am Stiller.)...Another time when Julika felt the irritating need to tug me by the sleeve, I at least saw no sculptures, thank goodness, but swans, a flotilla of natural swans, their white plumage glistening in the sunlight and with down floating on the green water around them. And in the background, from the position in which Julika placed me, I could see the so-called Great Minster. I understood; just like in the photograph album! What she was trying to prove, I don't know. Finally I stopped dead in the middle of the street (inside the pedestrian crossing); it was no use her tugging at my sleeve, exasperated as though by a stubborn mule, when I asked:
'Where can we get whisky in this neighbourhood?'
'We can't stop here.'
The motor-scooters were already whizzing past us to left and right, a taxi hooted at me, then a lorry and trailer thundered by and Julika's face was as white as chalk, although the lights were now with us again. An unknown pedestrian, to whom I had done no harm, shouted expressions of moral indignation at me, as though, in a country that daily boasts of its liberty, there were a law against risking one's own life ... Later, in a garden restaurant under gaily coloured umbrellas, I asked Julika:
'How do you live in Paris, dear?'
I called her 'dear', not because of the bail, God knows, but from a tender impulse, involuntarily. There is always something wonderful about this first touch of intimacy, something like a magic wand over the whole world, which suddenly seems to be floating, something very quiet which nevertheless drowns every other sound. Involuntarily, but then as though dazed by unexpected happiness, so that I was scarcely aware of anything but our little point of contact, I laid my hand on her shoulder. For a blissful minute, until the new 'dear' has become a habit and, as it were, devoid of resonance, you feel that all men are your brothers, including the waiter who brings you the whisky; you have the feeling that there is no more need for disguise in this world, a feeling of peaceful elation. You laugh about your prison. In cases where this 'dear' is a mature and no doubt enterprising woman I feel a natural urge, which in my state of elation, is not a very serious or pressing need, but rather a playful curiosity, to know what other men there are in the life of my 'dear'. No man ever appears in her stories of Paris and of the ballet school, which is presumably not a convent, no François, no André, no Jacques, nothing. A Paris of Amazons—what can that mean? Finally I asked her in a roundabout way:
'Are you very happy in Paris?'
'Happy?' she said. 'What does happy mean?'
It's very curious: for some reason or other Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy can't bear me to think of her as well and happy. She immediately gets back to Davos and the no doubt very terrible time she spent in that lonely veranda with the olive-green art nouveau windows, where Stiller, her missing husband, simply abandoned her. I listened to it all over again. Without doubting the frightfulness of the past, I saw her flourishing present with her strange face lit from below by the reflection from the tablecloth, like a face before the footlights. I longed for her. I waited for her to come out of her past, which she wanted to forgive and in order to forgive had to describe in detail, into the present of our short afternoon.
'My dear Julika,' I said, 'you keep on telling me how terribly your Stiller behaved. Who's disputing it? He made you ill, you say, mortally ill, he deserted you, you might have died; and yet, as I can see, you're looking only for him—do you grudge him his good fortune that you didn't die after all, that you're sitting here looking radiant?'
This was no joke, as I could see for myself. Without looking at me, Julika took from her white Paris handbag a letter yellowed with age, which was obviously intended to refute what I had said. It was a brief note Stiller had sent her while she was in the sanatorium at Davos, I was to read it, really just a crumpled scrap of paper, the leaf from a scribbling pad, ruled in squares, the message scrawled hastily in pencil and looking somehow objectionable, repellent.
'Well?' I asked rather awkwardly.
She hastily struck a match, so hastily that it snapped several times. This little text, the last she received from her missing Stiller, did not seem to her to require any commentary. She smoked.
'Julika,' I said, giving her back the small sheet of crumpled paper, 'I love you.'
She laughed tonelessly, dully, unbelievingly.
'I love you,' I repeated and tried to say something that did not have to do with her or my past, but with our meeting, my feelings at this hour, my hopes for the future; but she didn't hear me. Even when she was silent she didn't hear me, she was only adopting the pose of an attentive listener. Her mind was in Davos, you could see that, and while I was speaking she even began to cry, I also found it sad that two people could sit face to face and yet fail to perceive one another. 'Julika?' I called her by name, and at last she turned her lovely face to me. But instead of seeing me, she saw Stiller. I took hold of her slender hand to wake her up. She made an effort to listen to me. She smiled whenever I protested my love, and possibly she was listening to me, but without hearing what I was trying to say. She only heard what Stiller, if he had been sitting in my chair, would probably have said. It was painful to feel this. Really it was no use going on talking. I looked at her hand lying close beside me, after I had involuntarily released it, and could not help thinking of the terrible dream with the scars. Julika told me to go on. What was the use? I, too, suddenly felt absolutely hopeless. Every conversation between this woman and myself, it seemed, was finished before it began, and any action it might occur to me to take was interpreted in advance, alienated from my present being, because it would in any case appear as an appropriate or inappropriate, an expected or unexpected action on the part of the missing Stiller, never as my action. Never as my action ... When I beckoned to the waiter, she immediately said with tender solicitude:
'You shouldn't drink so much.'
At these words, to be frank, I winced and had to control myself. What was this lady thinking of? First, I had no intention of ordering another drink. And what if I had? She seemed to think she could treat me in the same way as her vanished Stiller, and for a moment I felt like drinking another whisky out of pure spite. I didn't do so. For spite is the opposite of real independence. I smiled. I felt sorry for her. I realized that her whole behaviour did not relate to me, but to a phantom, and once confused with her phantom (for the man she was looking for probably never existed) one was simply defenceless; she could not perceive me. What a pity! I thought.
'Don't take it amiss,' she said, 'but you really shouldn't drink so much. I'm saying it for your own good.'
Unfortunately the waiter was a long time coming.
'I didn't intend to order anything,' I said with rather tired rebelliousness—and Julika laughed, so that I added almost with irritation, 'you're wrong, my love, I really didn't mean to order anything, I meant to pay—but unfortunately I have no money.'
In the meantime, however, as though she never expected anything else, Julika had already slipped her red morocco-leather purse under my elbow, so that I could pay (as she must often have done with Stiller). What could I do? I paid. Then I gave her back the red morocco purse, pulled myself together and said:
'Let's go.'
On the stroke of six I was back in prison.
***
P.S. That's the trouble: I have no words for reality. I've been lying on my bed without sleeping, hearing the clock strike one hour after another, trying to decide what to do. Shall I give in? I've only to tell a lie, a single word, a so-called admission, a
nd I shall be 'free'; in my case, that means condemned to play a part that has nothing to do with me. On the other hand, how can anyone prove who they really are? I can't. Do I know myself who I am? That is the terrifying discovery I have made while under arrest: I have no words for my reality.
***
The little Jew, with whom I had allied myself for purposes of back-soaping, was not at the showers today. When I remarked that I didn't grudge him his freedom, they merely raised their eyebrows. He was an intelligent man, and the rumour that he has committed suicide keeps occupying my mind. Of course, we are a group often, and if we hadn't soaped one another's backs I should probably never have noticed he had gone. It's not that I miss him, either. (I always found the back-soaping somehow embarrassing.) What is on my mind is the fact that it is always the intelligent people who can't wait for death, and when I think of his eyes that were not only intelligent but also full of the knowledge of mysteries, it seems incredible that this man did not know what was waiting for him. Now I even imagine that he was the only one to whom I could have communicated my experience—the otherwise almost incommunicable meeting with my angel.
***
Once more I have the familiar feeling of having to fly, of standing on a window sill (in a burning house?) with no possibility of escape unless I am suddenly able to fly. At the same time I know for sure that it is no use flinging myself into the street, suicide is an illusion. This means that I must fly in the confidence that the void itself will bear me up, that is to say a leap without wings, a leap into nothingness, into an unlived life, into guilt by omission, into emptiness as the only reality which belongs to me, which can bear me up...
SECOND NOTEBOOK
MY counsel has read the notes I have made so far. He wasn't even angry, but merely shook his head. He couldn't defend me with that, he said, and didn't even put it in his brief-case.
Nevertheless, I continue to keep the records.
(With his much appreciated cigar in my mouth.)
***
The relationship between the beautiful Julika and the missing Stiller began with Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite (to the young dancer's mortification, Stiller, who was still very young and felt obliged somehow to impress the lovely Julika, described this music as soap-bubble magic, impotent virtuosity, illuminated lemonade, sentimental rubbish for the elderly, and so on), arid to judge by Julika's most recent intimations a Mutcracker Suite hung over all the years of their marriage. Julika was in the ballet at the time. On an old photograph, which she showed me casually the day before yesterday, she appears as a page or a prince, blissfully happy in a costume that suits her down to the ground; one could gaze for hours at the ephebe-like charm she displays in this photograph. At that time, unlike today, her large, exceptionally beautiful, and apparently frank eyes contained a strange shyness, something like a veil of secret fear, either fear of her own sex, from which her delightful disguise could protect her only part of the time, or fear of the man who might be waiting somewhere behind the scenes for the removal of her silvery disguise. Julika was then twenty-three. Any reasonably experienced man—which Stiller obviously was not—would immediately have recognized in this fascinating little person a case of extreme frigidity, or at least have guessed it at the first contact, and adjusted his expectations accordingly. At this time a great future was predicted for Julika in the ballet. How many men, reputable citizens of Zürich, people of importance, Julika could have married on the spot, if this strange and hence fascinating girl had not put art (ballet) above everything, so that she regarded every activity outside art as an unwelcome distraction.
Dancing was her life. She kept the gentlemen at a distance with a giggling laugh, which discouraged many of them and made all serious conversation impossible; and whether they would believe it or not, the lovely Julika lived like a nun at this period, though surrounded by rumours that made her out a vamp; but at this, too, Julika only giggled.
Why didn't people let her be as she was? She never left the theatre without a bouquet of fresh flowers or without a slight but genuine fear that her closest admirer, the donor of these flowers, a student perhaps or a gentleman with a shiny car, was waiting outside. Julika was afraid of cars. Fortunately, they generally didn't recognize Julika as she swept past with her beautiful red hair hidden under a schoolgirlish woollen cap, a very ordinary-looking girl once she no longer stood in the glare of the spotlight. Like a marine creature whose glorious colours are only visible under water, Julika's elfin beauty showed only when she was dancing; afterwards she was tired. Understandably: when she danced she gave her last ounce of energy. She had a right to be tired, and Julika told every waiting admirer she was tired. But Stiller always believed that Julika was only tired for him. What did he get out of it when he persuaded Julika to take a glass of wine or, since Julika did not drink wine, a cup of tea? Stiller talked a great deal on these occasions, it seems, like someone who feels it is entirely up to him to keep the conversation going; Julika was tired and said nothing. At that time Stiller talked a great deal about Spain; he had just come back from the Spanish Civil War and had already been condemned by the Swiss military court. Julika did not feel sorry for him because of his impending imprisonment, which he referred to with rather ostentatious pride, but for some other reason which she did not understand herself. She had only to smile and Stiller was afraid she was laughing at him and put his hands over his forehead or his mouth; and when she refused to walk arm in arm with him on the way home he was abashed and spent a long time outside the door of her house apologizing for his forwardness, which he too found objectionable. This made Julika like him better than anyone else.
Stiller was the first, or at any rate one of the few, who ever received a letter from Julika, a few lines in which she confirmed that she had been very tired and intimated that they might see one another again. She knew how much this young man desired her and also that Stiller would on no account take her by force; he was lacking in some quality without which such an action was impossible, and this made her like him all the more. And she liked the fact that this man, who had just been in Spain on some front or other, a man of slim yet powerful build and a head taller than Julika, did not expect the least apology on her part when she had kept him waiting outside the theatre for nearly an hour, but, on the contrary, apologized for his own importunity and was already afraid of being a nuisance again.
Julika liked all this very much, as I have said; at any rate, she always spoke very kindly of Stiller when she recalled these early times. It was March, and they were going for their first country walk, which was much too long for the delicate Julika, too exhausting and also too dirty; the ground was still very wet, although the warm sun was shining, and once her left shoe stuck in the mire when Stiller led her across the middle of a field, and he had to take hold of her to save her from treading in the mud with her stockinged foot; it was then that Stiller kissed her for the first time. Julika is firmly convinced that she kissed him too. Stiller soon stopped, not wanting to be a nuisance to Julika, but nevertheless he was extremely gay during the rest of the walk, breaking off willow rods like a boy and striking his open overcoat with them as he went along. Julika felt as though he were a brother. And she liked that too. He didn't mind the fact that even in the country Julika talked about nothing but the ballet, and in particular about the people connected with ballets, conductors, theatrical designers, hairdressers, ballet-masters—that was her world. Other admirers had reproached her with having nothing in her head but gossip. But not Stiller. He made a great effort to listen, occasionally pointing out a particularly beautiful view, which did not distract Julika's attention from her subject; then Stiller felt ashamed of knowing so little about the art of the ballet.
They ate bread and bacon in a simple peasant inn of the sort that obviously appealed to Stiller, and Julika enjoyed the sense that for the first time she had met a man of whom she did not feel afraid. Once again he talked about his Spanish war. A few days after this walk he had to report
somewhere, with a woollen rug under his arm, to serve his few months inside.
For a long time they did not see one another. During this period Julika wrote several letters, in which, in keeping with her own shy way, she did not put her love for him into words; but Stiller, being a man of sensibility, could not fail to realize what the beautiful Julika, in keeping with her own shy way, perhaps felt without being able to put it into words—at all events, Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy still appeals to those letters as unmistakable proof of how deeply and with what tender abandon she loved the missing Stiller.
They married a year later.
Looking at these two people from the outside, one has the impression that Julika and the vanished Stiller were suited to one another in an unfortunate manner. They needed each other because of their fear. Whether rightly or wrongly, the beautiful Julika harboured a secret fear that she was not a woman. And Stiller too, it seems, was at that time perpetually afraid of being somehow inadequate; one is struck by the frequency with which this man felt he had to apologize. Julika has no idea of the cause of his anxiety. In fact, Julika never mentions the word anxiety when she is talking about her wretched marriage with the vanished Stiller; but almost everything she says points to the fact that she felt she could only hold Stiller through his bad conscience, through his fear of failure. She obviously didn't credit herself with being able to satisfy a real, free man, so that he would stay with her. One gets the impression that Stiller, too, clung to her weakness; another woman, a healthy woman, would have demanded strength from him or cast him aside. Julika couldn't cast him aside—she lived by having a husband whom she could continually forgive.