I'm Not Stiller (14 page)

Naturally these visits at the end of her bed interested her more than Stiller's dutifully regular letters, which, as Julika felt very strongly, illumined nothing, just the opposite. His letters were a voluble concealment. What could Julika have answered? The letters had only one good result; the mere sight of them pacified the head physician and the nurse. The fact was, they found it odd, putting it mildly, very odd that Herr Stiller never visited his wife. Julika had to speak up in his defence. 'My husband will come,' she said frequently. 'About time,' said the head physician, 'otherwise I'll send the gentleman a list of trains, in case he hasn't got a timetable!...'

Everyone was very fond of Frau Julika and during the day, especially when the weather was fine, the time passed almost without strain. The young sanatorium veteran, a student from a Catholic seminary, was really a gift from heaven. Julika would never have believed that so much culture and so much boyishness could be found together. He was the most learned man Julika had ever spoken to, and often enough she felt like an illiterate; but on the other hand like a mature woman; for he was a boy, as I have said. Anyhow, Julika greatly enjoyed his conversation, his knowledge, and his boyishness at the foot of her bed. If you asked him something he didn't know, he was delighted, just like Foxli when you threw a stone or a fir-cone for him to run after. A few days later he would come back knowing where and what you could read on the subject. He gave Julika a general outline of modern physics; it was really exciting; and all with a scientific exactness such as Stiller never had, even when he came straight from a lecture, bursting with enthusiasm, but incapable of explaining to Julika so much as the structure of an atom. Here, for the first time, she understood everything, almost everything.

Or Julika learnt about the Mother of God and the sanctification of woman, things about which—as a Protestant—she hadn't the slightest idea, all of it expounded with a mastery of the subject and carried only so far as the uninformed listener could follow, at least in essentials. Indeed, for the very first time, although her Stiller had once fought in Spain on the Communist side, Julika was objectively and dispassionately instructed as to what the Communist idea really consists of, how much of it stems from Hegel, how much is a misunderstanding of Hegel, what is meant by dialectics, what part of Communism is thoroughly Christian and what anti-Christian. Secularization, transcendence—there seemed to be absolutely nothing this young Jesuit with the narrow face and rather skull-like eye sockets could not think with ease and expound in a concise, unrepetiuve, dispassionate manner, which was amusing, so that Julika often had to laugh, irrespective of whether he was talking about the Mother of God or the absolute speed of light, and his dispassionate way of expressing himself seemed never to force a point of view on her. Stiller was always forcing points of view on her, which he later refuted himself; but while his enthusiasm for them lasted he advanced them in such a way that Julika did not dare to contradict. It was quite different with this young Catholic. Julika felt no desire to contradict. She lay on her veranda and absorbed his words like the air from the nearby wood.

From this daily visitor, it seems, Julika heard the not unknown idea that it is a sign of non-love, that is to say a sin, to form a finished image of one's neighbour or of any person, to say 'You are thus and thus, and that's all there is to it'—an idea which must have touched the lovely Julika very closely. Was it not true that Stiller, her husband, had formed an image of Julika?...

In a word, Julika was not bored, and as long as she looked out into daylight, rain or shine, her illness caused her little suffering.

But her nights were different.

Julika doesn't talk about them much, but it is evident that sometimes in the morning, when the nurse came into the room, the light was still burning and an utterly exhausted Julika, bathed in cold sweat, was found sleeping heavily among wildly disordered bed-clothes. Her temperature chart showed clearly enough how little poor Julika was obeying the pious admonition to avoid excitement at all costs. Julika denied everything when talking to the rather stupid nurse who washed her and brought her fresh bed linen, an electric blanket, or tea before it was due, only so that her first walk, which had been promised weeks ago, should not be again and again postponed. During such awful nights as these Julika may sometimes have seen her Stiller as he stood drying last night's glasses, putting the hair slide of last night's visitor in his pocket so that Julika should not continue to be offended by it, and reacting to the news that Julika was mortally ill by smashing last night's glass against the wall—and by nothing else...

Now Stiller wrote no more letters.

One naturally wonders whether nobody (if poor Julika couldn't write herself) ever told this Stiller in confidence what his wife, and after all she was his wife, whom, in spite of the other woman, he still loved sufficiently to want her to miss him, was going through up there in Davos. But that was just it, Stiller wasn't willing to be told anything in confidence; the few friends who had once tried to do so gave it up as a bad job, and the new friends Stiller had made since knew as little about Julika's awful nights as Stiller himself...

Who did know? Poor Julika unbosomed herself to nobody. One person seems to have known about them, however, and that was the young sanatorium veteran. And this too he talked about in the same light-hearted tone as about his Fathers of the Church, about the absolute speed oflight (which is not doubled when two rays of light are speeding towards one another), and about the classical law of the addition and subtraction of velocity, which just does not apply to light, or about Buddhism. He was once again sitting on the foot of her bed, full of knowledge, and the exhausted Julika was making an effort to listen to him. He had just read in a paper an aphorism of Professor Scherrer, Zürich, which delighted him, namely: Mass is energy in a blocked account. 'Isn't that witty?' he asked. 'Yes,' said Julika. 'It is indeed,' he then continued without any change of tone and still turning the pages of his newspaper, '- during the day people play chess and read, and during the night they cry, you're not the only one in the place, Julika, you mustn't think that. It's the same with everyone here. At the beginning, for the first few weeks or months, you're amazed how pretty it is here with the hay and the pinewoods and the squirrels and so on, but then horror comes over you just the same. You sob into your pillow without really knowing why, it only does harm, you know your fevered body will fall to pieces like tinder. And then, sooner or later, every one of us here thinks of breaking out. Especially in the night, when we're alone; our heads seethe with the craziest plans, each one becomes his own Napoleon, his own Hitler, neither of them got to Russia, and we don't even get down into the valley, Julika, four hours by the little train, change at Landquart, there's nothing to it. A few try every year, they secretly pack their toothbrushes, tell the nurse they've got to go to the toilet, and set off in the little train for the valley; they get so far or so far, depending on luck and the weather, then they have their breakdown and imagine they're suffocating, and come back here in the ambulance without a word.

'Et après?'
he smiled. 'We don't even feel sorry for them, you know, it's too stupid. I know from experience. Our comradeship is limited to acting as though we'd heard nothing about it. Swear to me, Julika, that you'll never get up to that silly trick?' Julika swore. 'No,' laughed the sanatorium veteran, 'not under the camel hair rug, my dear, the good Lord wants to see too.' Julika swore on top of the rug. '
Ecco!
' he said and added, once more sunk in his paper: 'And you'll see, Julika, that even when somebody dies here it doesn't create much of an impression. Anyone who hopes to impress us that way is dying in vain. The only thing that impresses us here is life! Incidentally, most people die around Christmas, I've noticed—out of pure sentimentality.'

(He died in late September himself.)

In August Stiller turned up again, unannounced and altogether in a way that Julika felt must surprise the head physician even more than his long absence. The fact was that Stiller behaved as though his beautiful Julika were being kept on this
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veranda quite wrongly, straight away demanding of the nurse that his wife should go for a walk with him, for an hour at least. The reason: Stiller wanted to talk to Julika. What had happened? The veranda, where he guessed there were ears listening to right and left, didn't seem to him the place even to start. He took offhis cap, but not his American army greatcoat, which he wore in summer and winter, because it was the only coat he had. Julika asked:

'Well, how are you?'

Stiller was very much on edge; he twisted his cap in his hands agitatedly, as though the only person in the sanatorium entitled to consideration was himself, who wanted to talk confidentially to his Julika. He ignored her friendly inquiry after his health. When the head physician arrived on his usual round, he immediately reiterated his request that Julika should go for a walk with him. The head physician was somewhat taken aback. Should he say outright in front of the patient that walks were out of the question in her condition? Julika had been waiting months for permission to go for a walk. A downright No, such as Stiller himself deserved, was prohibited by consideration for the already despondent Julika. Really, what was the head physician to say? In an undertone and looking the other way, as though he would rather not have heard the request at all, he agreed to half an hour, or three-quarters of an hour at most, but asked Stiller to wait outside in the corridor, because he wanted to speak to him first...

For the first time in months Julika went out of the sanatorium, which had become something like a snail's shell to her, strangely perplexed at suddenly being without her veranda. She felt weaker than she had expected. Arm in arm, Stiller giving her some support without actually treating her as an invalid, they walked slowly along the path that Julika had so often seen from her veranda (when she sat up in bed for the purpose). It was such a moving experience for poor Julika that her eyes filled with tears, tears of joy. To have earth under her feet, to be able to grip a fir-cone, to smell resin on her fingers—all this was such a delight for her that Stiller may have felt it; in any case, he did not come out with what was on his mind.

'What did the head physician say to you?'

Stiller tried to keep it to himself.

'Go on, tell me,' she bade him.

Stiller seemed confused.

'What did he say to me?' he remarked at last. 'I'm to spare you any excitement. That's all. He was very brief, your head physician. You shouldn't really be going for a walk at all, he said, your condition is much more serious than I seem to think.'

'So,' she said.

'Yes.'

'They never tell me anything.'

'Yes,' added Stiller, to divert the conversation from the medical information which he probably ought not to have imparted to Julika, and he smiled, not maliciously, but oddly, sadly '—and then of course, he told me you were a fine and wonderful person, frail and very much in need of looking after, a grand person. Everybody finds it necessary to give me instruction. I must be an idiot.'

'But Stiller!' she laughed.

'No,' he said, 'perhaps I really am. It's good to see you again. It's so easy for spectres to come into being when people don't see one another. Anyhow, in my case.'

Julika repeated her question:

'What do you do with yourself all the time down there?'

'Oh—nothing special,' he murmured.

'Have you seen Foxli at all?'

'No.'

'Are you still working?'

Stiller wasn't exactly talkative.

'Yes—' he repeated, 'that's about all he had to tell me. That you are a superior person who deserves to be treated with great consideration by her husband. And anyhow we must see that you're not excited in any way. It only does you harm, and your condition is pretty serious, Julika, he told me that three times, I believe.'

And so they walked along arm in arm, a thing Stiller and Julika seldom did, silent, as though everything of importance had already been said, as though the only thing that mattered now was to enjoy this cloudless August day and the celebrated air; they went for that classic walk with pine-cones and almost importunate squirrels which my counsel and Julika showed me recently, really a very pretty walk, partly through woods and partly through meadows. Down below in the town it was frightful, continuously sultry as though before a thunderstorm, but the thunderstorm never came and it remained so hot that everyone sweated; up here one didn't sweat. Stiller enjoyed it. And the meadows were fragrant.

Meanwhile they were not getting along very fast, because of poor Julika. Stiller took off his brown U.S. army greatcoat, a really practical garment, and sat on a dry, soft carpet of sun-warmed pine-needles. It was simply glorious. Why talk? thought Julika. And they scarcely said a word. To talk about matters of indifference before the important thing had been said proved impossible. Finally Julika asked, 'What is it then? You wanted to talk to me about something.' Somewhere out of the noonday blue echoed the rumble of an invisible fall of stones. Insects were buzzing. The mountains were wrapped in silvery-grey silence. Julika waited in vain for Stiller to speak. Stiller crumbled red earth between his fingers, until Julika—not out of pettiness, heaven knows, but simply for the sake of something to say—drew attention to his rather long nails, which this earth had made dirty, an absolutely innocent remark which the good Stiller, that masculine mimosa, once more took very much amiss, without saying so (it came out later, in a letter). Now he merely dropped the crumbled earth without a word, picked up a dry twig from the ground and cleaned his finger nails, which Julika had not actually requested. At the same time, he asked her a strangely unexpected question, 'Did you ever really love me?' What could Julika reply to that? But Stiller, cleaning one finger nail after the other, insisted on an answer to his odd question, which had come upon Julika out of the blue. 'What's that got to do with your dirty finger nails?' she asked more or less jokingly, and then saw his lips trembling with agitation. 'Did you come here to ask me that?' This tone, they both found, was not happy, not promising, not in keeping with the splendour of the silent wood. Stiller seemed unable to appreciate fully what it meant to poor Julika to see this wood otherwise than from the veranda, to be outside its
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windows at all, to be able to pluck wild flowers with her own hands instead of merely receiving them from her young Jesuit, to be wearing her almost forgotten coat and skirt instead of being wrapped up in camel-hair rugs. Half an hour had already passed. Stiller was smoking, not without having first asked her permission, and Julika was drawing grass stalks through her teeth.