I'm Not Stiller (13 page)

And so on.

I have no wish to play the arbitrator between the beautiful Julika and her lost husband; but since she is always talking about these unhappy times, one naturally tries to guess at connexions, if only to pass the time as one might do a crossword puzzle. What else can I do in my cell?...

A little remark ofjulika's, which must lie far back in the past, is difficult to guess but essential to the completion of the crossword involving the vanished Stiller. She doesn't mention it. A completely innocent remark. A remark of no importance. And yet I can hear that Stiller never got over it, in fact he got over it less and less. The fact that Stiller felt himself to be a stinking fisherman with a crystal fairy must have had something to do with this little, this positively tiny remark, which Julika had long since forgotten. The remark was made during their first night together. Stiller was evidently not only a man of morbid egocentricity and corresponding hypersensitivity, so that he took entirely personally a remark which Julika might possibly have made to any man; on
top
of this he was given to chewing things over, which was often simply unbearable for poor Julika. Years later a
bagatelle
of this kind would suddenly come to mind again. Meanwhile Julika, as she assured me, had long since forgotten that little remark made during the first night. Stiller simply couldn't get over it, he carried these few words like a mark of Cain behind his forehead, and it was no use Julika, tenderest of mortals, stroking his always rather untidy hair back from his brow. Julika was sweet to him. And she had probably only expressed what many girls may feel, amongst other things, when first embraced by a man. Stiller should have understood. And he did understand. What tormented him was clearly the fact that this was all his beloved Julika could say to him after the first embrace. Years later this trifle from the past suddenly rose to the surface again; you could see from his eyes how it was burrowing into him, how his soul was contracting as though to a single point, how this little, innocent and in any case completely dispassionate remark was beginning to echo in his memory, drowning every other sound. And it was just when Julika tried to be particularly affectionate that he was startled afresh by what her lips had once uttered many years ago. Stiller appeared to himself a polluter. He acted as though Julika were disgusted by him, and repulsed her, as I have said, precisely when Julika tried to be particularly affectionate; he withdrew. Stiller appears to have been a strong swimmer; for several years he swam across the lake and back every day, rain or shine, often right on into October; he was doing penance. Julika called this athletic performance his quirk. Stiller needed it in order to feel well. He needed a lake full of water, it seems. He felt terrible when he sweated. And at social gatherings when he was sweating, or felt that he might begin to sweat, he completely ceased to enjoy himself and sat in mute embarrassment, incapable of even following a conversation. At times like these he had such fear in his eyes that Julika was touched.

He frequently imagined he had a rash. It was generally pure imagination. Then again he raved about a lady who had kissed him on his sweaty face at the top of the Piz Palu; this event became for him the Piz Palu—unforgettable, unique, magnificent. His hostility towards the body related, it seems, only to his own. Stiller was enchanted by the children in the lakeside bathing-place, by the children's skin; and the human bodies in the ballet, for example, always delighted him. There was something painful about his enthusiasm, something of the hopeless longing of a cripple. Stiller was already a man in his thirties, but when a woman put her hand (without a glove) on his hand, without immediately withdrawing it again, or stroked the mousy hair back from his forehead not only to make him look tidy, but also to feel his hair, to feel his narrow forehead, he was as edgy as a boy, and on this account particularly attractive to certain women. He was a man with opportunities, as the saying goes, but he didn't believe in his opportunities. And what irritated him most, no doubt, was not the opportunity, but the fear that he was merely being made a fool of; he was suspicious, lacking in confidence, unwilling to believe that a woman who put her hand on his was free from a feeling of disgust. We may assume that at times, not often, but occasionally, after the daily shower perhaps, which made him only temporarily clean, this unhappy man stood in front of the mirror to see what it was that repelled Julika, his crystal fairy—and Stiller could see nothing that he himself did not also find repulsive. Stiller thought men very beautiful, he was always drawing them; women too. Only he himself, Stiller by name, had the misfortune to dwell in a male body which soiled his beloved; Julika, that honest person, had told him so innocently, so impartially and it had only hurt because it was her sole comment...

In short, Stiller really did have a quirk, and poor Julika, for her part an exceptionally sensitive being, shy by nature and given to maidenly restraint in her speech, defenceless against arguments that simply misconstrued her true nature, must have had a hard time with her neurotic husband. Other people evidently thought so too, thought that Stiller misconstrued her true nature, and there was no lack of friends who warned Stiller, but received no thanks for their pains. Stiller couldn't tolerate their advice. 'Oh,' he said, after one such conversation, 'devil take people who interfere in a marriage just because they think they mean well, and they imagine meaning well is enough even if they know less than a fraction about the affair in which they mean well.' And that disposed of the most friendly counsel: Stiller always knew better. People told him that Julika not only loved him, but loved him more than he deserved, and the most Stiller answered was, 'I'm glad you told me.' But in reality it never occurred to him to take any of their advice to heart. His suspicion that Julika stirred up their mutual friends against him was unjust, like so much in his attitude towards this woman, who, I believe, was far too bashful to confide in a third party. People could see with their own eyes. And this was something Stiller couldn't stand.

For a long time they had been acquainted with à very pleasant married couple; he was a veterinary surgeon, she a well-known children's specialist; two people full of culture in a vital sense, full of heart and intelligence, friends to whom Stiller owed a great deal, not only a number of excellent dinners, but stimulus of all kinds, introduction into Zürich society, and once even a commission. Stiller liked them enormously, this children's specialist and this veterinary surgeon, until the wife, who occasionally had a
tête-à-tête
with Julika, once said in a
tite-à-tite
with Stiller what she really thought, namely that Frau Julika was a quite wonderful person, such a fine and profoundly decent being as she, the children's specialist, had never met in her life. Stiller immediately interrupted: 'And why do you tell me that?' She answered jokingly: 'To be frank, Stiller, I often wonder what this Julika has done to deserve you for a husband,' and she smiled, to make itquite clear thatshe was joking. Stiller's response was chilly. 'Seriously,' she added—and really meant it in the most friendly spirit—'I hope you'll realize before it's too late, before you're an old man, Stiller—I hope you'll realize what a wonderful wife you have, what a grand person she is. Quite seriously, Stiller, I hope so with all my heart, for your sake.'

But Stiller, it seems, couldn't bear seriousness either; they were in a restaurant at the time; Stiller beckoned the waiter; and while his friend, the children's specialist, went on talking about Julika, he paid, without contributing a word to the subject. And then his only reply was never to have time when this splendid couple, the children's specialist and the veterinary surgeon, invited them over—the cheapest kind of reply. Julika quite rightly defended herself, and took to inviting the children's specialist and the veterinary surgeon over to them; when Stiller came home in the evening and heard from the passage the voices in the flat, he wanted to turn round and leave again. With great difficulty Julika managed to prevent this piece of rudeness; Stiller stayed to dinner, but then he 'had' to go back to his studio. He simply made off.

At times it really bordered on persecution mania. No doubt Stiller tried to be nice, to her friends, but of course they felt that he was on the defensive and tense. And the good Stiller was surprised that a vacuum began to form round him. Nobody likes visiting a married couple in a state of crisis, it's in the air, even if you know nothing about it, and the visitor has the feeling of being present at an armistice, he feels himself somehow misused, employed for a purpose; conversation becomes dangerous, jokes suddenly begin to fly that are somewhat too sharp, that carry a touch of poison, the visitor notices more than the hosts intend to give away; a visit to a married couple in crisis is as jolly as a minefield, and if nothing blows up it smells all the time of hot self-control. And although you can quite believe it when the hosts say it was the nicest evening they've spent for a long time, your tongue isn't exactly hanging out for the next invitation; obstacles involuntarily pile up, in fact you hardly have a free evening. You don't break with a married couple in crisis, certainly not. You just see one another less often, and consequently you forget the couple when you are sending out invitations yourself, involuntarily, unintentionally.

That's what happens; Stiller had no reason to be surprised, considering the way he behaved towards all well-meaning people. Fortunately, one can only say, Julika at least had her friends in the ballet, and above all the work itself. On the stage, in the flood of the footlights, she was set free from everything, another person, a happy person, happiness incarnate. Stiller even stopped coming to rehearsals. He took refuge in his work. And it did no good when her friend's husband, the veterinary surgeon, came into his studio one morning to talk to Stiller man to man, without reproaching him, of course. One sentence was enough: 'You know Stiller, I think you're doing your wife a great wrong.' Stiller replied: 'Sure!' in a tone of pure mockery. 'What else did you expect?' he said. 'Have you ever known me do anything but wrong?' The veterinary surgeon tried everything, but Stiller just left him standing, cleaned his spatula and said good-bye without accompanying his visitor to the door.

11 was really a kind of persecution mania, the way he regarded anyone with whom Julika became friendly as his own secret enemy. What could Julika do? She was sorry for Stiller. He was simply making himself lonely. She tried everything. She treated it as a joke when Stiller posed as the misunderstood husband, and often, when he was brooding, as inactive as a paralytic, so sulky and silent you could have died of boredom, unsociable, joyless, indifferent, the very reverse of a man who could make a woman happy, Julika put her hand on his shoulder for a moment and smiled:

'Yes, yes—you're a poor fellow!...'

***

Her summer at Davos, her life in the
art nouveau
veranda, where you smelt hay and saw squirrels, was certainly not easy. Julika went through the same phases that most of the new arrivals seem to pass through: after an initial horror, after two or three nights when she made up her mind to run away at once, after the ghastly feeling that every time she was wrapped up in a rug and rolled out on to the veranda she was being prepared for death, Julika unexpectedly grew accustomed to this new everyday life, even enjoying the fact that there was now nothing she had to do, nothing at all. Rest was the only thing asked of her. Julika enjoyed being alive as she had not done for a long time. Davos wasn't so terrible at all, it was a valley much like other valleys, green, peaceful, a bit dull perhaps, a valley with steep woods and flat meadows and here and there a stony rivulet, a landscape, nothing more. Death did not stalk about in the guise of a bony reaper, no, only the grass was mowed, the scent of hay drifted up, and of resin from the nearby wood, somewhere or other they were scattering manure, and in the larches in front of her veranda a mischievous squirrel was doing gymnastics.

During the day, perhaps, it was like being on holiday. A neighbour who used to sit on the end of her bed every day for a quarter of an hour, one who was saved, who could go for walks and brought her wild flowers, a young man, younger than Julika, but a veteran of the sanatorium, who used to give a helping hand to newcomers, seems to have cheered Julika up considerably. It was he who brought her books, different from any books Stiller had ever brought, a new world. And what a world! Julika read Plato, the Death of Socrates—difficult, but the young sanatorium veteran helped her without any trace of didacticism, cheerfully casual like those people who pick things up extremely quickly and never imagine we can't understand something, because our brains aren't up to it. He was enchanting with his narrow, always rather shrewd face and big eyes, but they were not in the least in love. For her part Julika probably told him about the ballet, and the young sanatorium veteran, who wore suits that had belonged to those who had died, told her a bit about all the people whom Julika heard coughing without ever catching sight of them, no life stories, just tittle-tattle, no indiscretions. Julika was delighted; at the beginning she had been rather put off by his 'frivolous' tone, until she realized that a sharp wit does not rule out deep feeling, but is merely another form of deep feeling, a cleaner, chaster form perhaps.

In short, Julika enjoyed these quarters of an hour and missed the young sanatorium veteran profoundly when he failed to appear one day. What was wrong? Nothing at all; a visit from his family, nothing more. The next day he came back and gave Julika an explanation of an X-ray photograph. His own? He didn't answer this question, showed her what is called a 'shadow', and gradually led Julika to find a skeleton like this beautiful, to look at it as a drawing, to be enchanted by the transparency of the heart, which was not to be seen, and fascinated by the mysterious clouds between ribs and spine; if you looked at it long enough it was positively seething with forms, all of them lost in a dreamlike twilight. Finally, when the rascal revealed that it was she personally, Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy, illumined by the X-rays, she was no longer shocked. How did he get hold of it? Stole it yesterday, while waiting for the doctor; mischievous pranks were called for in the sanatorium, but per haps elsewhere too. Julika couldn't help thinking of Stiller.