I'm Not Stiller (12 page)

I'm sure Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy would flare up if I told her I am generally suspicious of women in art; it would be no use assuring her that this did not imply any contempt for women, nor, on the other hand, any contempt for art. The missing Stiller (I have little interest otherwise in being in agreement with the missing man) may unconsciously have felt the same thing; only it seems that he made a reproach, a reproach concealed in tenderness, of the fact that Julika never experienced voluptuousness with him, a reproach against Julika and an equally silly reproach against himself. As though every woman were made to be man's consort in this sense as well! As I have mentioned, it was a striking and typical characteristic of this man that he felt obliged to apologize all the time; he obviously took it as a defeat for his virility if the beautiful ballerina, perhaps only rather more honest than other girls, did not melt at his kiss. Her coldness was alarming, may be, but genuine. She did not act cold in order to provoke him, on the contrary, Julika was more inclined to give way in order to avoid all provocation; but she soon found that when she gave way she very quickly felt disgust, that solitary disgust which she had at all costs to conceal. She didn't want to hurt him. She didn't want to lose him. She preferred Stiller to any other man. Yet it went absolutely against the grain to sham the blissful and abandoned swoon which man in his vanity almost always believes however badly it is acted, the appearance of utter surrender which he must see in order to believe in a woman's love and above all in his masculinity. Oh, it was horrible! Compared with this it was a comfort to be on the stage, to feel thousands of strange eyes on her body, eyes of so many different kinds, the eyes of schoolboys and respectable married men, eyes that took in anything rather than her skill as a dancer; as a matter of fact this worried Julika less than when Stiller, her husband, laid his roughened sculptor's hands on her body. Her helpless excuse that she was tired annoyed him often enough. Stiller considered himself tenderness incarnate, but he could not understand that someone might be tired. Stiller took everything personally....

Somehow Julika was almost relieved when the theatre doctor first told her that her lung was slightly affected and she must take care of herself. The dusty air on the stage was not at all good for Julika, but unavoidable in her profession, so she had to take all the more care of herself off the stage. That's what the doctor said. So it wasn't a caprice on the part of the lovely Julika, it was plain common-sense, when she asked for indulgence, consideration, and plenty of rest. It was a question of her health. Julika was a delicate, an exceptionally delicate creature; Stiller loved her none the less for that. Only, as I have said, he had to have some understanding.

Stiller had less and less, it seems, less and less understanding for his wife. His egocentricity went so far that he even took personally her fatigue, which was due to her state of health; he used to stalk out of the flat without a word, slamming the doors behind him—simply because Julika had said she was tired—and come home late at night reeking of the tavern, his stinking breath a positive insult. Or he would say, 'I'd like to see you one day when you're not tired!', and his voice was full of reproach, full of animosity. What could Julika do? He never said, 'You're simply not a woman,' but Julika was perfectly well aware that he compared her with other women. Stiller drove her to desperation, she had no other means of proving the contrary to herself, to him, and to the world in general than by indulging in the most blatant flirtation, something she had never done before in her life. Stiller drove her to it. Stiller found the way Julika encouraged every passing male to pay court to her—preferably men from whom fate soon parted her—in bad taste. Julika enjoyed hearing praise of her beauty combined with praise of her art; anything else was going too far. Stiller was by no means jealous, only shocked, when Julika said good-bye with kisses, kisses here and kisses there, for preference inside a restaurant or in the street outside the restaurant door. All he said was, 'Are you sure you've kissed everyone?' He treated it as a childish game. On another occasion he was furious. It was after a dance: Julika, a graceful Bacchante, sat on the knees of one man after another and could not stop playing the 'wild woman'; Stiller was waiting with her coat and told her, as he put it in his vulgar way, that it made him sick.

They must have been very intelligent and amusing gentlemen who paid court to Julika, not without wit and charm, which on her side she matched with her beauty; Stiller always maintained that they were all more or less homosexual, and his smile when Julika asked how you could tell a thing like that understandably offended her. It was this smile as much as anything that drove poor Julika further and further, further than she had any natural urge to go, and finally into the arms of a young publicity expert renowned for his virility who also had a charming little house near Ascona. Stiller probably never dreamed that Julika would dare; he knew quite well that the publicity expert, an acquaintance of his, had been in love with the ballerina for a long time, and something impelled him to introduce them to each other. Did he want to put Julika to the test and find out whether she was a woman? Anyhow, when it came to the point, the good Stiller almost went out of his mind; he took veronal, so as to sleep for days on end, and locked himself in his studio. Now it was Julika who found his actions in bad taste. He was probably afraid that the right man had now come along, and without knowing in the least what was happening Stiller threw down his weapons. In his pitiable letters he saw Julika, his ballerina, already with a pram, a mama by the Lago Maggiore.

The fuss he made must have been all the more burdensome for Julika because the affair itself, it seems, was shortlived, a week at Ascona perhaps. The young publicity expert was very hard-working, he flew about all over the place, while Julika, of course, still had her rehearsals. Stiller asked every other day why Julika didn't go to Ascona; while he asked he always looked at her as though she owed him an answer to some question, but what it was Julika quite genuinely had no idea. What did Stiller want to know? As far as Julika was concerned the matter was not worth talking about, quite apart from the fact that she was a reserved and shy being with no urge to put things into words, and anyway she thought that surely Stiller could see it was all over. Stiller didn't see this, it appears, or at any rate not for sure. In his eyes the publicity expert remained the great man who was able to make Julika happy; of this Stiller was certain from the first moment of terror on, blind to the fact that his Julika remained absolutely unchanged. He no doubt thought she was dissembling, concealing her happiness to spare his feelings, yet Julika, after all he had done to her, had not the slightest desire to spare his feelings. For months Stiller lived as though lying in wait; once he went so far as to search her handbag for some clue, a letter, a ticket to Ascona, an entry in her diary. But the only entries in her diary referred to rehearsals, the hairdresser, the dentist. It is easy to imagine what a burden it must have been to Julika that Stiller was still preoccupied by this business, if only in his thoughts; in particular what a burden it must have been that—without reproach, it is true—but with the look of a man who is being persecuted, Stiller was forever waiting for something, for a redeeming word. What was Julika to say to him. Once, when Stiller asked her openly what the publicity expert had meant to her, she said to him: 'You brought me to despair, Stiller, let's say no more about it, I've come back, but you mustn't drive me to despair...' In any case, Julika was not conscious of any fault that Stiller was not guilty of many times over, and so it was really up to him to see that she, who had come back to him, was happy with him.

For a few months everything went splendidly.

Stiller, who had evidently heard by some roundabout route that the publicity expert had longsince acquired a new girl friend, waited for Julika outside the theatre, cooked his Valencia rice, and was not offended when Julika, tired after the rehearsal, could eat little or none of it; he entered into her terrible row with a producer and sided with her; he took care of her, as the doctor had ordered, or at least tried to—for a few months. Then, it seems, he relapsed into his self-centred outlook and expected Julika to give all her attention to him. Once again he left the flat without a word, slammed the doors and got drunk, for instance because Julika was too tired to take an interest in sculpture for hours on end. The next day she allowed herself the remark that his drinking cost a lot of money. Stiller took it ill when she said nothing, and he took it ill when she spoke. And how could Julika be affectionate to a man who at bottom, as she could feel, was seething with resentment?

One day, in the very middle of breakfast, Stiller asked why she had told them at the ballet that his new overcoat, an American army greatcoat, had been bought with her money. Julika didn't understand his question. 'Why do you tell everyone in the ballet about it?' he asked, trembling with rage and making a mountain out of a molehill. 'What does it matter?' she asked. Stiller tore the newspaper out of her hand, and spent half an hour explaining to her what, in his opinion, it mattered. His explanation was infamous. Julika burst into tears, and when Stiller did not stop she cried, 'Get out, please get out.' Stiller didn't go, although he must have seen how much his infamous explanation had upset her. 'Then I'm going!' said Julika, but Stiller didn't let her go. 'I never want to see you again,' she cried in her affliction. 'That was a rotten thing to say, a dirty rotten thing to say!' Incidentally this seems to have been the only time, almost the only time, that Julika in her indignation expressed herself so forcibly. Did Stiller realize how unjustly he had behaved towards this woman? It never occurred to him to apologize. And the rift remained open. Now that she had learnt what an infamous construction Stiller was ready to put on the slightest thing, it henceforth cost Julika an effort to say anything at all. And the silence proliferated, a silence that was worse than quarrelling. Stiller seemed to have no idea how deeply he had wounded Julika; he interpreted her acts and omissions as best suited his self-centred outlook, stubbornly incapable of learning.

Then there was something else.

At that time Julika had a dog, a fox terrier, of the sort that goes with childless couples. He was called Foxie or, in the language of this country—which, by the way, is an extremely pleasant language, not exactly melodious perhaps, but down-to-earth and, when you listen to it closely, not unmusical—Foxli. She loved him, naturally, otherwise they needn't have had him at all; that's the nice thing about dogs, you either love them or you needn't have them. Stiller could never understand how anyone could love Foxli, and he was scarcely able to read the measage in Foxli's soulful eyes. He sneered at Julika's motherly patience, when they arrived late wherever they went with Foxli, who ran sniffing from tree to tree. He referred to the dog sarcastically as the Sacred Beast. Everyone knew that Julika would arrive late and nobody took it amiss, Foxli was too amusing. In restaurants, thanks to the beauty of his mistress, whom no reasonably cultivated waiter dared gainsay, Foxli was allowed to sit on an upholstered chair just like Stiller. That Stiller could never get used to this was his own affair, his own pig-headedness. Why should Julika, who never ate much anyhow, leave half her excellent
filet mignon
? In any case—though no one mentioned it—Julika paid most of the bill and Stiller had his wine to make up for it. He said nothing, but Julika often felt obliged to stand up for Foxli. And Foxli felt just the same. Foxli was on her side. The fact that they formed a majority may have angered Stiller; Julika and Foxli, both of them admired on every hand, outvoted him on every decisive issue. Not that Stiller ever struck her sweet little doggie—I should hope not! But Stiller didn't like him; he acted as though Foxli didn't exist. No sooner was he in the hall of their flat, with Foxli jumping up and down in a cordial welcome, than Stiller busied himself with his mail, nothing but his mail, as though every letter came from a Maecenas with an offer of money.

Once someone said, 'Oh, Julika, isn't he a sweet little thing,' to which Stiller replied, 'Yes, very sweet, we'll make jam of him
before
long.' Stiller was simply jealous of her dog; he didn't admit it, but evolved a fresh theory, that had nothing whatever to do with the real live Foxli, and kept on talking about Julika's (not Foxli's) psychic life, about which he understood absolutely nothing.

Why, for instance, would Stiller never allow Foxli into his studio? And then he wondered why his wife did not come into his studio for months on end—once for almost a whole year—and was disappointed that she took so little interest in his creative work. Julika just didn't know where she could tie Foxli up without having to worry about him—or was she to let Foxli run about the unfamiliar streets, just to give Stiller another opportunity of showing her that his creative work, as he always complained, was making no progress? Stiller really seems to have been the quintessence of hypersensitivity. The fact that for years he had been coming to her ballet rehearsals, where he was allowed to sketch, was only to his own advantage. But what benefit, speaking objectively, could Julika derive from standing about in his dusty studio, where he worked for years on more or less the same undertaking, and perhaps catching a cold?

In his egocentricity Stiller was simply closed to all such considerations. What did he expect of Julika? His mortification, however politely he kept it to himself, was a burden for poor Julika. The fact that she, the ballerina, never spoke a word during the countless discussions about sculpture that Stiller and his companions often carried on until late at night saddened him; he interpreted it as lack of interest, never thinking that it was simply natural modesty on the part of Julika, who knew nothing about sculpture, quite apart from her whole reserved and shy attitude. When his companions had gone at last, he became rude as well. 'At least you could have made us some gruel,' he said morosely, 'at least you could have done that.' Julika had no intention of becoming his servant. And from the day when the other woman made her appearance his capacity for understanding ran completely dry. Believe it or not, Stiller was indignant because on her veranda it was not he, but Foxli, that Julika missed; and he was honestly surprised because the sick and abandoned Julika did not write him any affectionate letters from Davos, none at all, in fact, except for a note asking Stiller to get her something in the town; Julika simply couldn't write! And later, during the summer, when he himself stopped writing for weeks at a time, he did not shrink in his obtuseness from the cheap excuse that Julika never wrote to him either...