I'm Not Stiller (31 page)

'Stiller,' she said, 'what's all this nonsense?'

I took her remark to refer to the gladioli. But it seems that she was referring to my denial that I was the missing Stiller. She removed her dark glasses, and I saw her bright, calmly affecdonate eyes. Even though she had just borne a child by her husband, the thought of having been loved by this woman was perplexing. Of course, I stuck to my denial. I sat facing her, my left foot crossed over my right knee, both hands clasped round my left knee, gazing out at the old plane trees in the park, while Sibylle sized me up.

'You've grown very silent,' she remarked. 'How is Julika?'

She asked rather a lot of questions.

'Why did you come back?'

It was a curious afternoon, we kept on drinking tea when it was already cold, and the toast and rolls remained untouched. My silence (what was I to say?) drove her to talk. At six o'clock, on the dot, she had to pacify her baby.

***

I can now see their missing Stiller pretty clearly. He seems to be very feminine. He feels he has no will power, and in a certain sense has too much—he employs it in willing not to be himself. His personality is vague; hence his tendency to radicalism. His intelligence is average, but in no way trained; he prefers to rely on hunches and neglects the intelligence; for intelligence sets one before decisions. At times he reproaches himself with cowardice, then he makes decisions which he later cannot keep. He is a moralist, like almost everybody who does not accept himself. He often runs unnecessary risks, or puts himself in mortal danger, to prove that he is a fighter. He has a great deal of imagination. He suffers from the classical inferiority anxiety that comes from making excessive demands on himself, and he mistakes his fundamental sense of shortcoming for depth of character, or even for religious feeling. He is a pleasant person, he possesses charm and doesn't argue. When he can't get his way by charm, he withdraws into his melancholy. He would like to be truthful. In him, the insatiable longing to be truthful is partly due to a special kind of untruthfulness: he is truthful to the point of exhibitionism so that he can use the consciousness of being particularly truthful, more truthful than other people, as a means of skirting round a sore point. He doesn't know just where this point lies, this black hole, that keeps cropping up again, and he is afraid even when it doesn't appear. He lives in anticipation. He likes to leave everything in suspense. He is one of those people who, wherever they are, cannot help thinking how nice it might be somewhere else. He flees the here-and-now, at least inwardly. He doesn't like the summer, or any other state of present fulfilment; he likes autumn, twilight, melancholy; transience is his element. Women very quickly have the feeling that he understands them. He has few men friends. Among men he feels he is not a man. But in his fundamental fear of being inadequate he is really afraid of women too. He conquers more than he can hold, and when his partner has once sensed his limits he completely loses his nerve. He is not willing, not capable of being loved as the person he is, and therefore he involuntarily neglects every woman who truly loves him, for if he took her love really seriously, he would be compelled as a result to accept himself—and that is the last thing he wants.

No sooner is one in this country, than one has bad teeth. And no sooner did I report my toothache than they wanted to take me to Herr Stiller's dentist. As though there weren't any others here! His name, by the way, was quickly traced through an unpaid bill which my counsel carries round in his folder. They phoned him at once. Fortunately (and to the visible regret of my counsel) this dentist turned out to have died recently. They made an appointment with his successor—that is to say, with a man who has never seen Stiller and cannot claim that he recognizes me.

T
HE
missing Stiller's studio—as described by Frau Sibylle, the wife of my public prosecutor—must have been a big, light room, a garret somewhere in the Old Town, a room that looked even larger than it was through the lack of furniture, even of useful furniture on which Sibylle could have put her hat and handbag. Her estimate of thirty by forty-five feet is probably an exaggeration, but how clearly Sibylle remembers this studio in other respects. You walked on old, creaking pinewood planks with holes where the knots had been trodden out; and under a sloping roof, against which she had more than once bumped her head, there must have been something like a kitchen, containing a sink of red terrazzo, a gas cooker, and a cupboard filled with all sorts of odd crockery. There must have been a couch too, for Stiller lived in the studio; also a bookcase, where Sibylle, the daughter of a middle-class family, first saw the
Communist Manifesto
, next to it Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina
, something by the oft-mentioned Karl Marx, then Hölderlin, Hemingway, also Gide, and Sibylle herself from time to time gave Stiller a book, which contributed to the motley character of this library. There were no carpets. On the other hand, Sibylle remembers all five bends in a long stovepipe that appears to have been very romantic. And best of all, one could step boldly out on the parapet (no doubt she had to lift her narrow skirt to do so) which was surrounded by a rusty iron balustrade and covered in moss-grown grit and tar that stuck to her white shoes and was also very romantic—with pigeons cooing in the gutter, with gables all round, with dormer windows and chimneys and party-walls, with cats, with courtyards where people were fiercely beating carpets, with geraniums, with flapping washing and sounds from the cathedral. An easy chair bought in a Salvation Army jumble sale was by then, unfortunately, already beyond use; the upholstery was mouldy and it was better to sit on the garbage pail, which for Sibylle, my prosecutor's wife, evidently also possessed a quite special charm. At all events, one has the impression that in spite of everything she likes to remember that studio. Inside there was a grandfatherly rocking-chair, on which you could let yourself be rocked, which inevitably produced a mood of exhilaration, and everything here possessed for Sibylle, when she came from her tidy household, the magic of the provisional. The rubber tube on the tap was always attached by nothing more than a piece of string, a curtain hung on drawing pins, behind this stood an old trunk with heavy hinges that was now used as a linen press. Wherever you looked in this studio, you had the feeling you could depart at any time and start a completely different life—that is to say, precisely the feeling Sibylle needed just then.

Her first visit took him by surprise.

'I've only dropped in for a moment,' she said and wouldn't have believed herself that she was going to stay till midnight, 'I must just see where you live and work...'

Stiller was unshaven and rather embarrassed about it. He gave her a Cinzano. And while he shaved at the sink behind the curtain, Sibylle looked around at the things hanging on the walls: an African mask, a fragment of a Celtic axe, a portrait of Joseph Stalin (which later disappeared), a famous poster by Toulouse-Lautrec—and two once brightly coloured but now faded
banderillas
from Spain. 'What are these?' she asked. 'They're used in bull-fighting,' he explained briefly, still busy shaving. 'Oh yes,' said Sibylle casually, 'you've been in Spain, Sturzenegger told us a crazy story about you...'

She sat in the rocking-chair and laughed, 'You and a Russian gun.' His silence showed she had offended him, which she naturally regretted. 'Sturzenegger is an idiot,' he said from behind his curtain. 'He hawks that silly story around everywhere.'—'Isn't it true, then?'—'Not the way Sturzenegger tells it, anyhow,' he answered so irritably that Sibylle asked no more questions about the story of the Russian gun. She was trying to change the subject when she said, 'But you were in Spain—' Sibylle was annoyed at herself, anyone would have thought she had come to pump Stiller about Spain...

They had met at an artists' fancy-dress ball, when they did not know one another's names and were therefore free from all sorts of inhibitions; they had exchanged caresses, and that was scarcely three weeks ago, caresses which later, when they met in reality, seemed almost unbelievable, hardly different from secret memories of a dream about which the other knew nothing. After Sturzenegger, his friend, had revealed her name, it had become inevitable that they should meet again, if only out of curiosity to see what the face each one had kissed looked like without a mask. They met over an apéritif; and since they found that they had much more to say to one another without masks, they went for a walk afterwards, and this in turn was hardly a week ago; this walk, it seems, also led to caresses which, now that Sibylle was in his studio, seemed almost unbelievable, very little different from her memory of the fancy-dress ball—like a secret memory of a dream about which the other knew nothing. Hence this embarrassment, this difficulty in keeping up a conversation...

'So this is where you work?' asked Sibylle, and she herself found it a stupid, really quite superfluous question. She wandered about among the pieces of sculpture, resigned with some trepidation to the prospect that Stiller would show her his work. 'You know,' she said, 'that I understand nothing about art?'—'That's good,' he said from behind his curtain and changed the subject himself. 'You'll help yourself, won't you? The Cinzano is there to be drunk.' Sibylle helped herself. She was standing glass in hand in front of a plaster cast, when Stiller, now shaved, stepped out and said, 'That's my wife.' It was a head on a long, columnar neck, more of a vase than a woman, strange, and Sibylle was glad that she wasn't expected to say anything. 'Isn't that terrible for your wife?' she asked nonetheless. 'I should find it terrible if you turned me into art like that!' As a topic of conversation his art was now exhausted, and no other subject suggested itself. Now they stood as though they were only there to taste Cinzano, both of them one degree more stupid than they were in reality—all because of an understandable fear that at the least contact they might relapse into caresses again, without really getting to know one another.

'Why are you interested in that?' asked Stiller. 'That story about the Russian gun?' It interested Sibylle no more and no less than anything else out of his unknown past. It was Stiller, it seems, who couldn't get away from Spain, from the faded colourfulness of the
banderillas
with their sharp barbs. To avoid having to relate the story of the Russian gun, which was manifestly painful to him, Stiller now began describing a Spanish bullfight in great detail, putting down his Cinzano to free his hands. He did not take the two crossed
banderillas
down from the wall, however: he seemed to be afraid of them. 'Yes, yes,' said Sibylle every now and then, 'I understand—' Stiller seemed to be fascinated by bull-fighting, and enthusiasm, thought Sibylle, suited him admirably, better than any mask. 'And now,' explained Stiller, 'now comes the matador.' In Sibylle's eyes the bull was dead long ago. 'Why only now?' she asked. 'When the bull's dead?' She hadn't been paying attention, at least not to the bullfight, but only to his face; Stiller had to begin the whole description again. 'Watch out!' said Stiller,'—I'm the bull.'

He stood in the middle of the studio, and Sibylle had to rise from the rocking-chair to play the part of the torero. She laughed at their respective roles. Sibylle had absolutely no desire to kill a bull. Stiller found this casting of roles perfectly in order. There was no need for Sibylle even to take her hat off, on the contrary, a torero cannot look too elegant. First of all, then, the bull comes into the arena, and Sibylle had to imagine the dazzling brightness of the sunlit sand all round, the arena is divided between life and death, light and shadow, and all round are stands filled with people, as colourful as a flowerbed and buzzing with voices that now fall silent as Sibylle, the torero, comes a little closer. Really there are several toreros who irritate the bull with their red cloths, but Stiller had to be content with Sibylle. The bull, as black as pitch, stands in the centre like a gigantic funnel, and the combat begins playfully, almost like a ballet; the waving cloths are not very red, but bleached by the sun and more of a pink; still, the bull doesn't quite know what to do and defends himself only casually, jabbing his horns into the void and pulling up sharp in his charge, so that the dust rises in clouds. Up to now it has all been teasing, a flirtation, and they could perfectly well stop, the black bull is uninjured and still capable of pulling a plough across some Andalusian field.

Sibylle was horrified when he told her about the picadors who now come along on their broken-down nags and jab their spears into the bull's neck to rouse him into a fighting fury. Sibylle involuntarily took off her hat; the fountain of pulsing crimson blood that was now streaming and gleaming across the panting bull's black hide made her quite nervous. Sibylle assured Stiller she could never watch a real bullfight. But this made no difference to Stiller, veteran of the Spanish war, and now the wounded bull attacked; when the broken-down nag was drawn out of the arena with its belly slit open by the bull's horns and a garland of entrails dragging behind it, Sibylle had to sit down.

'Stop it!' she cried with both hands over her face. But now, said Stiller, comes the incomparably beautiful and elegant phase with those gaily coloured
banderillas
about which Sibylle had inquired, and as Sibylle remained seated on the couch, Stiller had to change roles and leave the bull to her imagination, so that he could demonstrate the use of these
banderillas.
But, as I said, Stiller did not take the darts from the wall, he seemed afraid of them, as though he had personally experienced the lot of the bull. He made the demonstration without properties—both arms, raised, as gracefully as possible, the body stretched and on the very tips of the toes to gain height, the stomach drawn in to. avoid being slit open by the sharp horns of the charging bull, and then—now Sibylle had to watch closely—then in with the two gaily coloured darts like a flash of lightning, into the neck not just into the bull, but exactly in the neck, with grace and precision. Sibylle found difficulty in sharing his admiration; he kept saying, 'That really is something!' and wouldn't let the matter rest until she had acknowledged, at least with a nod, that grace in the face of mortal danger was indeed an achievement.