I'm Not Stiller (26 page)

On the fourth day, at last, there was a telegram. With the typical collapse of the man who has been saved, who is at first completely overcome by the relaxation of tension, he sat for a while before opening it, wearily calm with relief, whatever his wife might have written. But it wasn't from his wife at all: his secretary merely had to know when he was coming back. That was enough. He laughed. It affected him (so he says) like a very cold shower. He stuffed the telegram into the waste-paper basket and resolved without further reflection to take the next train. Only he hadn't got the twenty thousand lire with which to pay the hotel bill.

What was he to do? He must see how and where he could sell his security, the American gent's suiting cloth, and as quickly as possible. The best train went at noon. At all costs not another night train! It was about ten in the morning when Rolf went out through the vestibule of his hotel, feeling rather embarrassed, because the parcel under his arm was very tattered, and determined despite his inhibitions to find a clothes shop—not too high-class of course—and try his talent as a salesman. It was very hot again; but he kept his tie on in order to make a better impression. He gathered from the half insolent, half pitying way in which he was turned away from the first shop, that he would do better to find an even poorer district. It was already striking eleven o'clock when he entered the fourth shop, where at least he was not immediately shown the door, but allowed for the first time to untie his parcel. He was lucky, there were no customers in this shop. A corner of his American gents' suiting was enough: the owner of the shop, a pale dandy with a thin moustache, laughed in his face. Rolf didn't want to make a profit, but just to recover some of the money he had lost, so that he could pay his hotel bill; he was cheap, perhaps too cheap, to judge by the treatment he received. The dandy with the thin moustache went on reading his paper as though Rolf were no longer there. In this shop, for the first time, he didn't talk about a unique opportunity, but about his actual situation. The man behind the counter just turned away and yawned into his rustling paper, without showing the slighest interest even of a purely human kind, without even showing any sign of a sympathy that would have cost him nothing, till Rolf went away of his own accord with his parcel under his arm.

He felt rather dejected even without imagining his wife's expression of happy superiority. In fact, to judge by the corner, it was a pretty lousy piece of cloth, rough, anything but wool, no question of half and half, and on top of that a pattern such as he (my public prosecutor) wouldn't have worn at any price, a loud, vulgar pattern—and pink!

He sat down on the steps of an old church, surrounded by cooing pigeons with rings of blue, green, and violet iridescence round their necks, and considered—or tried to consider—what was to be done under the circumstances. Behind him stood a delightful baroque façade—Sibylle understood more about these things than he did. Now there was nothing to prevent him from taking off his tie and rolling up his cuffs (which were probably pretty dirty anyway) under his coatsleeves. He was glad at least his wife couldn't see him—the rest of mankind could stare if it wanted to. Up above, in the baroque façade—the sun was shining on the upper volutes and their glaring ochre yellow stood out against the noonday blue of the sky—it struck twelve. His train left in two hours. His gold watch also had to be put out of sight, that was it, before he went to the old-clothes-men in the back streets round the harbour, where the goods hung on the peeling walls—shirts, trousers, socks, hats. He was no longer concerned (so he says) about the lire, but about his bare self-confidence, which he was carrying around under his arm in the shape of an increasingly tattered parcel. Why hadn't he gone to these old-clothes-men in the first place!

He felt more confident than at any other time that morning, positively exhilarated by the thought of what a story this would be to tell at parties. He whistled, or rather he heard himself whistling, although he was well aware that he did not feel at all easy. It was a back alley near the port, a district where fist law prevailed. For fear of being beaten up as a swindler, here where there were no police, he undid his parcel for the first time in a side-alley to make sure there was really enough of the material for a gentleman's suit. Yes, it was quite long enough. So Rolf rolled the cursed material up again, which was no easy matter if it was not to touch the pavement and so stink of urine. Then he approached an old-clothes-man and opened the conversation by asking the way to the station, offered him a cigarette, chatted good-humouredly, and referred in a casual way to a piece of suiting he had bought yesterday to have made up by an Italian tailor, but you know the way it is, he'd just received a telegram and had to leave in a hurry, then he cursed the customs who wouldn't let a piece of cloth through—
a
long and stupid story which he thought crafty, positively oriental. But his own suit with the unmistakable traces of trouser-creases, his all too faultless shoes, not to mention the golden seal ring, which had naturally been carefully noted, were not calculated to arouse comradely trust in this neighbourhood. There was nothing to stop him unpacking his wares in the open, however. A few women with babies at the breast and glances which Rolf did not consider impartial, followed the transaction with suspicious curiosity. The secondhand-clothes dealer, an old man with brown teeth and garlicky breath, felt the cloth very fully, which gave Rolf a faint hope—so faint that he dared not quote a price, but asked how much the dealer would give for it.'
Niente
.' Rolf would have been satisfied with a thousand lire, a thousand lire for his self-confidence. In order to get at least that much, he said two thousand was his rock-bottom price. 'No.' One thousand then? 'No.' Very well, how much?
'Niente.'
The women with the babies grinned and walked off. Rolf rolled the cloth up again. For the seal ring, however, said the old-clothes-man, he would give thirty thousand. Rolf laughed. For the faultless shoes the old-clothes-man, without having to feel them, offered seven thousand lire, as though he (my public prosecutor) could walk home bare-foot. He was spared nothing in this city of Genoa!

Finally there was only one thing left for it: to give the parcel away. As quickly as possible. For instance to a young man standing beside an advertisement pillar playing a mouth-organ, obviously out of work, his empty cap lying on the pavement. At the last moment, however, when Rolf noticed his black wooden leg, he couldn't do it. Forward once more. A young ragamuffin begging for cigarettes, and an old grandfather with a pram held together with wire didn't seem the right people either. To give away a piece of material one would under no circumstances wear oneself wasn't so easy, and Rolf wandered in all directions through a neighbourhood whose poverty was anything but picturesque. It's always a shock to see the ragged condition in which the majority of all mankind lives. Rolf came to a halt. He felt how bourgeois was his desire to be fair, to find the person who most deserved his gift; he made up his mind to turn down the next street and present the first person he met with the material for a gent's suit. The first person he met was a young woman shuffling along in her slippers. Forward once more. The next was a whistling policeman, and then the street came to an end. In a small square with a tree they were playing football. Rolf was only in the way and through standing in the goalkeeper's line of vision the obvious cause of one side shooting into its own goal, as the result of which a violent quarrel broke out between the youthful teams. Forward once more. He was utterly exhausted again. His train left in forty minutes. But where could he get rid of his gift? A drunken man staggered out of a noisy tavern, but he was too truculent, too dangerous to be given it. Of course Rolf could simply have thrown his parcel down in the street—but that would have been capitulating. Later, he circled for some time round a blind beggar with outstretched hand. That wouldn't do either he thought.

In the last resort he could pay his hotel bill by post later on—besides, his overcoat was still at the hotel. But of course it wasn't a question of whether he could pay his hotel bill at all. It was a question of how he was to rid himself of this parcel. What real reason was there why he shouldn't throw it away? Rolf tried. Nothing could be easier, he thought, than to lose a parcel; nevertheless, his temples were pulsing when, pushed by his common sense, he put the project into execution. He dropped it in the crowd in front of a red traffic light, squeezed across the street in the general crush and thought he was saved—for just then the policeman blew his whistle, the traffic changed and the street behind him was temporarily blocked. To have his hands free at last gave him a feeling of relief, a new
joie de vivre,
as though nothing had happened to Sibylle either.

Rolf lit a cigarette, without looking back to see what had happened to the nightmare parcel, and he didn't need to, for a poorly dressed but attractive young woman pulled at his sleeve and handed back to the absent-minded gentleman the parcel which she had picked up. Rolf dared not deny that it was his, this shabby parcel with its dirty paper and cheap string that scarcely held the pink cloth together any more. Was he condemned to carry this pink cloth through the rest ofhis earthly-life? Ten minutes before the train left, he was still standing helplessly with the parcel under his arm—five minutes before it left. He put off the capitulation (as he calls it) until the last minute. The carriage doors were already shut when Rolf stepped on to the footboard, and the train was just starting. As though the empty seats were not for him, not for defaulters and deserted husbands, Rolf stoodoutside in thecorridor as far as Milan. What would Sibyllesay to him? Naturally hestill grossly overestimated her need to concern herself with him. After Milan he was not alone in the corridor: a Swiss got into conversation with him, talkative as most people are when they run into a fellow-countryman abroad. Fortunately they soon reached the frontier.

After the train left Chiasso he sat in the dining-car, staring out of the window all the time, so that no one passing along the train should recognize him. It never struck him how noticeable he was gazing out of the window all the time, regardless of whether the train was passing through a tunnel or not. With the active imagination that accompanies self-pity, Rolf, more than ever before on a journey, was gazing into the past, and as he looked back he could remember no happiness without Sibylle, not a single significant hour without Sibylle. Everything else was chaff, not worth a thought. Rather suddenly Sibylle had become the whole meaning and content ofhis life, and now this meaning had passed over to another man, had been transferred to a fancy-dress pierrot, or a Genoese with jet black hair, or a young architect, or whatever it was, had simply been transferred. From Goschenen on, rain splashed diagonally across the window-panes.

The best thing, thought Rolf, would be not to let her notice anything: his detachment should annihilate her. Rolf had only to remember her shameless face and the detachment came of its own accord, in response to her face that was not only happy and estranged by happiness, but scornful, insolent, arrogant, triumphant over him, and it would have been the last straw if he, Rolf, with his theories, had started reproaching her: she would have laughed out loud and her contempt would have been plain to see. Detachment seemed to him now the only reply, detachment that was free from indignation, free from accusation and complaint, but a detachment that would bring this hussy to her knees. He had made up his mind to this and his home-town lake was already in sight. In preparation for the future with his hussy, Rolf even began whistling in the restaurant-car, but he stopped, of course, the moment he heard himself, and called urgently for the bill, as though this would get him to Zürich quicker.

But suppose there wasn't any future at all? Suppose Sibylle no longer lived with Rolf at all, but with the other man? In other words, if Rolf was left alone in the house, alone with his detachment? He was sitting like this as the train entered the station, with his hand on the glass and still afraid that someone might pull him by the sleeve and hand him the tattered parcel containing the flesh-pink material again[[[mdash.gif]]]

***

Shortly after midnight yesterday, Sibylle (my prosecutor's wife) gave birth to a girl weighing almost seven pounds. He was speechless with joy. I asked him to send flowers, which I would pay for later. He will probably forget.

***

To continue my notes:

When Rolf came back from Genoa and got out at the central station, without overcoat and therefore conspicuous, so that Sibylle could not miss him if she was waiting for him at the station—though he told himself she could not possibly be waiting for him at the station: she knew nothing of his arrival, and Rolf didn't imagine she would come to meet every international train on the off chance. Just for safety's sake, because it would have been too stupid to miss one another, he looked about among the waiting people. In Zürich it was raining. He had to look into his purse, standing under a penthouse, to see whether he could afford to beckon a taxi as usual. And then, when this taxi stopped outside their flat, it was worse than he had expected. The uncertainty as to whose home it was, his or hers, made him hesitate to get out. As he turned up the collar of his jacket ready to run through the rain, he looked up at their flat, and all the humiliations of the journey were nothing compared with this moment when he saw there was no light in the window. It was late, but a long way off midnight. Perhaps she was already asleep. Anyhow, Rolf didn't get out, despite the taxi-driver's pressing inquiry as to whether they had come to the wrong address. Rolf also felt too unshaven to appear before a wife who now loved someone else. Had he forgotten the fact that Sibylle loved someone else? Now, after a chaos of feelings of all kinds, which, although they had tormented him, had kept his mind distracted, the whole thing had once more acquired the bleak actuality of a grave; and Rolf could not face being told by their Italian maid that the
Signora
had gone away for a few days. For now anything was possible. Perhaps there was a note lying in the flat: 'Probably back on Monday. All the best, Sibylle. Please don't forget to pay the rent.' Or perhaps only: 'Please don't forget to pay the rent. Best wishes, Sibylle.'