I'm Not Stiller (24 page)

'A country's greatness,' he says, 'is not to be measured by its area nor by the number of its inhabitants; our country's greatness lies in the greatness of its spirit.'

This is quite true, and what irritates me into contradicting him is only the unquestioning, self-satisfied assumption that the Swiss do not lack spiritual greatness. I become argumentative, you can't do justice to the self-righteous, I ask for manifestations of this spiritual greatness and bow before a storm of historical personages which my counsel lets loose on me every time this subject crops up. But when I point out that I didn't ask for historical, but only for contemporary manifestations of Swiss spiritual greatness, my counsel becomes thoroughly personal.

'Your hatred of Switzerland is pathological!'

'What do you mean, hatred?'

'You're trying to pretend you're not Swiss and therefore not Stiller,' he said. 'But you won't fool me; your hatred of Switzerland certainly doesn't prove you're not Swiss. On the contrary,' he shouts, because I laugh, 'it gives you away.'

My counsel is mistaken: it's not Switzerland I hate, but untruthfulness. That, though it may often come to the same thing in the end, is fundamentally different. It may be that as a prisoner I am particularly sensitive to their slogan of freedom. What the devil do they make of their legendary freedom? Whenever it becomes in the least costly they are as submissive as any bootlicking German. The truth is, who can afford to have a wife and children, a family with dependants, as is right and proper, and at the same time a free opinion in anything but minor matters? For that you need money, so much money that you don't need commissions or clients or social goodwill. But anyone who has piled up so much money that he can really afford a free opinion is generally in agreement with prevailing conditions anyhow. So where is their glorious freedom, which they hang up on the wall like a desiccated laurel wreath? Where is it in their everyday existence? My counsel shakes his head.

If you talk like that before the court,' he says quite hopelessly, 'before the assembled Press[[[mdash.gif]]]'

There we have it.

'You'll only do yourself harm,' he says.

Probably the sort of freedom that people here claim to possess cannot exist at all; there are only degrees of bondage, and I willingly admit that theirs is a comparatively mild form of bondage. I am very grateful to them for this, but I am not on that account obliged to like their national untruthfulness. I know he gives another name to this untruthfulness in its most dangerous form—when it is bound up with a flag and the claim to be sacred and inviolable: he calls it patriotism. It's stupid of me to get so excited that I take the whole thing seriously. You can't talk to these Swiss about freedom, simply because they can't bear to have freedom questioned, to have it regarded not as a Swiss monopoly, but as a problem. They are altogether frightened of any open question; they think just so far as they have the answer in their pockets all the time, a practical answer, an answer that is useful to them. Which means they don't think at all—they merely justify themselves. Under no circumstances dare they cast doubt upon themselves. Isn't this the very hallmark of spiritual bondage? They can imagine France or Great Britain perishing; but not Switzerland; God would never allow that, unless he turned Communist, for Switzerland is innocence. Incidentally, I have noticed how frequently my counsel justifies Switzerland by pointing to the misdeeds of the Russians, but prefers to say nothing about Hitler's; I have observed how flattered he is as a Swiss by the terrible fact that elsewhere there are concentration camps. What is he actually trying to prove by this as regards his own country? Once I ventured to say:

'You were lucky, Herr Doktor, that Hitler threatened your sovereignty and hence your trade; that stopped you from developing towards Fascism yourselves. But surely you don't believe that the Swiss bourgeoisie, alone in the world, would show no tendency towards Fascism if it happened to be good for trade instead of harmful? The test will come, Herr Doktor, make no mistake about that; I shall be interested to see what happens.'

At this he packed his brief-case.

'As a free Swiss—' he said and seemed to be offended again. 'Why are you laughing?'

Free! Free! Free! In vain I tried to make him tell me, free from what? And above all, free for what? He simply told me he was free, and I too, sitting on the bed and shaking my head, would be free, if only I had the sense to be their missing Stiller. With his hand on the latch, ready to step out intp his freedom, he said in a tone of mild concern:

'Why are you shaking your head?'

One ought to be able to think. And one ought to be able to express oneself in such a way that they have nothing left but their truth. I merely see that even their civil liberty, of which they are so proud, as though it were human freedom pure and simple, is really pretty worthless; and I can deduce that their whole country, as a State among States, enjoys just as little freedom as any small power among great powers; it is only thanks to their unimportance (the fact that today they lie outside history) that they can delude themselves they are independent, and also thanks to their commercial good sense, which forces them to be polite to the mighty for the sake of trade, and anyone who has no complaint to make against the mighty, because he lives so well on them, will always imagine himself free and independent. But what has all this to do with freedom? I see their faces: Are they free? And their gait, their ugly gait: Is that the gait of free people? And their fear, their fear of the future, their fear of one day being poor, their fear of life, their fear of dying without life insurance, and finally their fear that the world might change, their absolutely panic fear of spiritual audacity—no, they are no freer than I am, as I sit here on my bed knowing that the step into freedom (of which no ancestor can relieve us) is always a tremendous step, a step with which we leave behind everything that has previously seemed like solid ground, and a step that no one can hinder once I have the strength to take it. For it is the step into faith, everything else is not freedom, but empty chatter. But for this very reason, perhaps my counsel is right once more: Why should I say this before the assembled Press? Why offend people? In the last resort it is my own business whether I ever become free, free of them as well—a very lonely business.

Again and again I observe that I can talk to my public prosecutor, my accuser, better than to my so-called defending counsel. This leads to confidences that are not without danger. Today he showed me a photograph of Sibylle, his wife, who always sends her good wishes. We spoke for a long time about marriage—of course, quite generally. My public prosecutor considers marriage certain experiences have manifestly given him cause to doubt it quite possible, though difficult. Naturally he means a real, living marriage. Among the prerequisites he numbers: the knowledge on both sides that we have no claim to our partner's love; lifelong readiness for living experience, even if it endangers the marriage, in other words an ever open door for the unexpected, not for little adventures, but for the risk—the moment two partners feel sure of each other, they have generally already lost each other. Further, equal rights for man and woman; renunciation of the view that sexual fidelity is enough, and equally of the other view that without sexual fidelity there is no marriage at all; the most far-reaching and honest, but not reckless, frankness over difficulties of this kind. It also seems important to him that both should face their environment courageously—a couple has already ceased to be a couple when one or both of the partners conspires with those around them to put pressure on the other; further, the courage to be able to think, without reproach, that our partner might be happier without us; further, the fairness never to persuade the partner, verbally or otherwise cause him to believe, that his withdrawal from the marriage would kill us, and so on ... All this, as I have said, he put in general terms while I was looking at the photograph of his wife, a face that was not at all general, a unique face, lively, lovable in the highest degree, much more enthralling than his words, though the latter were perfectly true, as he referred to his unspoken experience with this face. Then I returned the photograph.

'Yes,' said my public prosecutor, 'what were we actually talking about?'

'You were saying that your wife is expecting a baby.'

'Yes,' he said, 'we're very happy about it.'

'Let's hope all goes well.'

'Yes,' he said, 'let's hope so.'

***

Jean-Louis Dmitritch is the pianist in her dancing school, half Russian and very sensitive, a gentleman between forty and fifty, unmarried, gifted—and Julika is delighted with this jewel, she says, and calls him her right-hand man in Paris. Perhaps I shouldn't have asked. Perhaps Julika now imagines I'm jealous.

 

My friend and prosecutor asked me whether I knew
Anna Karenina.
Then, whether I knew
Effi Briest.
Finally whether I could not visualize a quite different attitude from the one adopted by the deserted husband in this masterpiece. A more generous attitude, he meant—and then he began to tell a story...

My public prosecutor seemed very much preoccupied by the fact that he himself found great difficulty in taking this more generous attitude, which he could imagine a deserted husband adopting. I listened to him the whole afternoon. Somewhat bewildered by his own frankness (he didn't really want to be frank, but felt increasingly compelled to be precise in order to dispel all sorts of misunderstandings and keep to the concrete example within his own experience) he asked from time to time, 'Can you understand that?' It was a story like a thousand others, and therefore easy to understand. I could also understand his need to see that missing Stiller whom his wife, as I heard, had loved to the very limit of the (for him) bearable.

***

Knobel, my warder, has been behaving rather oddly for some time, he's always in a hurry to leave my cell. It didn't escape my notice. Today he said straight out:

'Herr Stiller[[[mdash.gif]]]'

I just looked at him.

'Heavens above,' he said, turning away in shame like a traitor, 'I was the only one who believed you[[[mdash.gif]]]'

Julika has convinced them all.

'Herr Stiller,' he said. 'I can't help it being like that, heavens above, I don't blame you for having told me all that rubbish, but I can't help it[[[mdash.gif]]]'

I ate and said nothing.

I
CAN'T
get out of my head the little story about the flesh-pink cloth in Genoa, which my friend and prosecutor told me yesterday. I see him—we'll call him Rolf- in the night train which he boarded blindly, not caring where it was going, as glad as a fugitive that any train was still leaving at midnight. He thought it might be easier to bear while moving, and then he wanted at all costs to avoid meeting his wife again, after having stood up quite well to the first shock. It may be, too, that he expected to gain some advantage from crossing the frontier. The further the better! So he was sitting in the night train, a gentleman without any luggage, alone in his second-class compartment. The train stopped at daybreak at Milan, in an empty station. An Italian railwayman tapped the wheels with a hammer; otherwise the whole world seemed to be sleeping like Sibylle, who now, having told her husband, had nothing more to worry about. Puerile plans for revenge passed through his head; the wait in this station made him all the more aware of his lack of any goal. Suddenly a cock crowed somewhere, quickly followed by a second and a third; finally a whole goods train of fowls waiting here for the morning market was crowing. And then, when at last the wheels turned again, Rolf slept in spite of everything, only occasionally waking to the consciousness that one looks stupid with one's mouth open; yet he was just as alone in his compartment as ever. He did everything in his power to sleep, for the longer he slept the greater the chance that when he woke up it would all turn out to have been nothing but a bad dream.

In Genoa the sun was already shining. Rolf stood in front of the station arcade, so tired he would have liked just to sit down on the steps like the beggars, a gentleman with no luggage, but with a superfluous overcoat on his arm, rather unshaven too; he stared at the hooting traffic, the rattling and tinkling tramcars in the shady canyons of the narrow streets, the crowds of people, all of whom seemed to have a goal—so this was Genoa. He had already lit a cigarette. What next? He noticed that someone was slipping along between the arcades watching him, probably a money-changer, and he strolled away. In a cheap bar, surrounded by porters and taxi-drivers and therefore solicited from all sides, while a scruffy individual washed down the stone floor between his far too perfect shoes, he drank black coffee and observed his total lack of any feeling.

'Whether we get a divorce, or what we're going to do about it,' she had said, 'I don't know myself yet. For the moment all I want is for you to leave me in peace,'

Another thing his wife had said was:

'You don't have to give me my freedom. What do you mean by that? I can take freedom for myself, if I need it.'

It was this remark in particular, it seems, which so infuriated the husband that in the broad daylight of Genoa he talked aloud to himself and walked along without really knowing where he was. It didn't matter anyway. Somewhere among warehouses, railway lines, and tar barrels. Yes, there were even moments when he loudly cursed his wife beyond the Alps, with words that did him all the more good the more vulgar they were. He used expressions (so he says) of such crude, unvarnished obscenity as he had never before heard from his own lips. When someone unexpectedly addressed him he was completely taken aback. He hadn't the slightest wish to see the sights of Genoa. Never in his life had he felt so defenceless—as though anyone could read his jumbled thoughts. At this moment he was incapable of saying No to a boatman, and let himself in for a trip round the harbour. The sea turned out to be grey lead flecked with iridescent patches of oil. Rolf sat on a seat covered with worn cushions, as tense as Rodin's Thinker and quite unable to take in the running commentary provided by the Italian oarsman sitting behind him, which was included in the price. Hot galley water spurted from the side of a ship. At one point they rowed over a sunken merchantman; its seaweed-covered iron plates rose threateningly up out of the filthy depths. Riveting hammers echoed in the distance. For Rolf, of course, it was all like a film, in colour and even with smells, but a film—visible but unreal. From time to time there was a thin siren-wail, carried away by the wind and split up into echoes, impossible to tell where it came from or what it meant, since none of the great steamships actually put out to sea. It was hot. Trails of bluish stench hung over the harbour water. Only a large fishing vessel chugged by, and the buoys, whose mildewed chains faded away into the murky depths, rocked hideously. They rowed on past wharves and jetties, everything, whether of wood or stone, was smothered in greasy black grime. At least time was passing. Here and there the belly of a dead fish or sailor's washing flashed white; the sound of singing came up out of a cabin; everything a trip round the harbour could offer was there, even a grey battleship with mantled guns and mountains of coal with white seagulls on top of them. In the distance the city of Genoa rose in tiers up the hillside, almost real again...