I'm Not Stiller (44 page)

They stop at some peasant inn. A child with plaits serves them. Behind a row of low windows full of shoots and a tangle of plants and sun slanting into the stillness of the wooden room and gleaming on their waiting plates, they feel how far they have roamed; they enjoy the well-earned meal—bacon with bread, peasant bread, that breaks up into moist and delicious hunks. A fly is buzzing against the window pane. The moment is enveloped and borne aloft by the clouds of a happiness that is close to sorrow, a strange, an alert sense of existence, an unexpected community of sentiment, that was lying in wait for them in this workaday peasant room, the knowledge that they have met one another. No question is yet raised as to what will come of it; there prevails only the complete sense of how much is possible in a lifetime...

That is spring here, and in summer the hens cackle under the wooden tables, the vine leaves overhead are green and dense, the sky whitish, the lake like dull lead, bees hum round the edge of the wood, the blue haze above the motionless stalks in the tall meadows is alive with darting butterflies, the mountains are lost in the glare of the sun, and now (almost before I have emptied my glass) it is already autumn again and once more all this: baskets full of leaves, the dampness of mist and suddenly it is midday, a midday as at this moment, with gold in the air and time passing like an invisible gesture over the hillsides and apples falling with a thud. If you walk through the woods now there is a smell of mushrooms. Here it smells of new wine. Wasps buzz round the sweetness of fermentation, returning again and again, and the summer sun comes back to us once more in the fruits that have reached their brief hour of ripeness, the sweetness of remembered days; people sit in their gardens and feel the cool of shadow on their skin, and the gardens suddenly appear surprisingly wide, vacant but serene, a bluish spaciousness fills the empty treetops, and once more the red glow of dying foliage climbs up the walls of the houses, the last leaves go up in flames. Who notices the passing of the years and all that happens? All things are one, space filled with existence, nothing comes back to us, everything is repeated, the span of our existence is but an instant and the day comes when we no longer count the autumns, all living things are like the stillness over the ripening slopes, the grapes of parting hang on the vines of our lives. Pass on! Once more on days like these the lake beckons; your skin tingles if you swim now, you feel the warmth of your own blood, you swim as though in glass, you swim above the shadowy deeps of cold, and the glittering waves splinter on the shore; far out a sail sweeps along in front of silvery clouds, a moth on a sparkling web, canvas steeped in the shimmering rays of the sun against a background of faint and hazy shores. There are moments when time seems to be standing still, dizzy with happiness; God gazes upon himself and the whole world holds its breath, before it crumbles into the ashes of twilight...

At one point my public prosecutor said to me:

'That's Herrliberg down there, you know, and that place you can see in the distance is Thalwil.'

Then the peasant girl took our plates away and asked if we had enjoyed the meal, and after she had brought the box of cigars we were once more alone. Of course, I had felt long ago that my prosecutor and friend had something on his mind. Had I prevented him from coming out with it? When our cigars were alight, the moment had arrived. Our glasses were empty, the black coffee hadn't been brought yet, the wasps had disappeared and in some little country church a clock struck.

'I'm glad,' he said, 'I'm really glad that we have got to know one another at last. But that's not what I want to talk about now. At two o'clock we have to be back in town for an on-the-spot hearing, don't be alarmed, an on-the-spot hearing in the studio—1 can understand,' he immediately added, 'your looking at me as though I had behaved like an underhand persecutor, a hypocrite who came uttering friendly words and carrying a straitjacket, I quite understand your fear of that dusty studio down there—altogether, my dear Stiller, perhaps I understand you better than you think.'

My inquiry as to the purpose of this on-the-spot hearing went unanswered. if you will permit me,' he said, 'I should like to give you a piece of advice.'

His cigar had gone out.

'Look,' he said at last, after lighting his cigar for the second time, 'I'm not only talking to you because Sibylle has asked me to. Sibylle wants to spare you any unnecessary suffering, and I think she's right: the court will not understand you at all, Stiller. The court will quite simply treat you as a convicted swindler, a figure of fun; the court is used to swindles, as you may imagine, but only to swindles that bring some advantage, a fortune or a title or the like, in short you will be condemned to some punishment. I don't know what, or maybe they will dispense with the punishment, but not the shrugs, the headshakes, and the sneers. What will you gain by that?'

'What is your advice?' I asked.

'Stiller,' he said, 'speaking as a friend: spare us the necessity next Friday of publicly condemning you to be yourself, and above all spare yourself this ordeal. A legal judgement will only make it more difficult for you henceforth to bear the name of the missing man, and that you are at least outwardly none other than the missing man is something we need no longer seriously discuss. Admit it of your own free will! That's my advice, Stiller, advice given out of sincere friendship, I believe.'

Then the black coffee arrived.

'Fräulein,' said the public prosecutor, 'make up the bill please.'

'Everything together?'

'Yes,' said the public prosecutor, 'please.'

Then came my reply:

'I can't admit what isn't true.'

But the peasant girl, evidently misconstruing our silence, did not go at once, but stood around on the gravel chatting about the weather and then about the dog, while we sipped taciturnly at our hot coffee; only when the public prosecutor asked for the bill again did she leave us in peace.

'You can't admit,' reiterated the public prosecutor, 'what isn't true—'

'No,' I said.

'How do you mean, it isn't true?'

'Mr Public Prosecutor—,' I began.

'Don't address me as your public pi isecutor,' he interrupted as I groped for words. 'I should like you to think of me as a friend, if you can. Call me Rolf.'

'Thanks,' I said.

'I suppose,' he smiled, 'that must have been how you spoke of me in the old days—'

Now my cigar had gone out, too.

'I'm happy,' I said, after lighting my cigar a second time, 'that you offer me your friendship. I have no friends here. But if you are serious about not wanting to be my public prosecutor, and I believe it with all my heart—Rolf ... why, then I can expect of you what one must expect of a friend: that you will believe what I cannot explain, let alone prove. Nothing else matters now. If you are my friend, then you must accept my angel as part of the bargain.'

'What do you mean by that?'

'You must be able to believe that I am not the person people take me for and for whom you, as a public prosecutor, take me—I'm not Stiller,' I said, God knows not for the first time, but for the first time with the hope that someone would hear it. 'I'm not Stiller, seriously, and I can't confess what my angel has forbidden me to confess.'

I shouldn't have said that.

'Angel—?' he asked. 'What do you mean by that?'

I didn't answer. Then came the bill, which the public prosecutor paid, and as our peasant girl once more did not go, it was we who went. Our footsteps crunched in the gravel. In the open car, before the public prosecutor started up, we looked out once again over the noonday landscape, over the brown ploughed land with flapping crows, the vineyards and woods, the autumnal lake, and all the time I knew that my prosecutor and friend was waiting for the answer. As he started the engine I said:

'That's something one can't talk about.'

'The angel, you mean?'

'Yes,' I said, 'as soon as I try to describe it, it leaves me, then I can't see it any more myself. It's very odd: the more exactly I can picture it, the nearer I come to being able to describe it, the less I believe in it and everything I have experienced.'

We drove into town along the shore of the lake.

***

3. The Afternoon

At about a quarter past two, in other words late, because it was almost impossible to find a parking space in the Old Town, we arrived at 'the house', which differed from other houses in this narrow street solely by the fact that in front of it stood Knobel, my warder, in mufti. We were the first. Addressing himself exclusively to my public prosecutor, Knobel said: 'I've got the keys.' In a dark, rather musty passage stood bicycles, a rather antiquated pram, and garbage pails. Knobel was not carrying the keys in his coat pocket, but took them out of a rather rusty letter-box bearing the name A. Stiller. There was no indication of profession. From a backyard came a noise like a tinsmith's workshop, or perhaps a plumber's; I saw moss-grown cobblestones and the long, already bare branches of a plane tree on which the sun probably shone only at midday in the summer, and also a waterless little fountain of sandstone, likewise overgrown with moss; there was a certain idyllic quality about it all. I also saw bundles of iron pipes, short and long; one of these bundles of pipes still bore the little red tag that had been attached when it was brought here by lorry. Then Rolf, my friend, who seemed to be paying his first visit to this house, remarked: I think we'll go straight up—'

Since I made no attempt to lead the way, Knobel pointed to the one and only staircase of old and tread-worn walnut, an aristocratic staircase, broad and not at all steep, flanked by banisters with worm-eaten volutes. On the fourth floor, where it smelt of sauerkraut, these stairs came to an end. Knobel informed the Herr Staatsanwalt that this was not the top; opened a partition and invited us to mount a narrow and suddenly very steep staircase of deal. They kept me in the middle all the time, either by chance or design. The taciturn gravity of the whole proceedings, especially on the part of Knobel, who had cut me dead since the morning, was funny; but even my friend and prosecutor was mute in a way that suggested we were approaching the scene of a tragedy with an unknown number of corpses.

'Yes—' he said, when we reached the top, once more half to me and half to Knobel, 'I hope the others will soon be here...'

There were three doors here, the first was fitted with a padlock, the second bore a humorous sign indicating a lavatory, the third led into the missing man's studio. Knobel unlocked the door; as an official on duty he went in first, while the public prosecutor said to me, 'After you.' To avoid giving the impression that I felt in any way at home here, I took advantage of his politeness, and I also noticed that at this moment Rolf, my friend, was feeling far more uncomfortable than I, more edgy than I had ever known him. No sooner were we inside the studio than he asked me:

'Where's the wardrobe?'

Knobel pointed to a nail on the blue door.

'Yes,' said the public prosecutor, immediately rubbing his hands together, '—open a window, Knobel, the air in here is ghastly.'

I felt sorry for my friend; as I knew, this studio had once assumed a certain importance in his own life, a disproportionate importance, as he now very well knew; but that is the infamy of these outside hearings—they are intended to overwhelm the prisoner with long-buried memories by suddenly placing him in a familiar environment. Fortunately I didn't have time to utter any well-meant remark, for at that very moment the bell rang, and we were both glad of it. Knobel looked for the press-button that opened the door downstairs and found it. I still didn't know who was actually attending this idiotic investigation, presumably my counsel, possibly also Julika, I thought, and I didn't even take my coat off: I had no intention of making myself at home here. The good Knobel obviously hadn't pressed hard enough, for at that moment he bell rang again. The public prosecutor exclaimed:

'Why don't you press it?'

'I am pressing,' said Knobel, 'I am pressing.'

Meanwhile I took a look around, my hands in my trouser pockets under my open coat and my hat on my head—after all it wasn't a dwelling in which anyone dwelt. There was a lot of art standing about. Apart from the thick dust on every sill, every spatula, every easel, every stand, every piece of furniture—so that for this reason alone one felt unwilling to touch anything—it was just such a studio as I had imagined from Frau Sibylle's descriptions, rather topsy-turvy, like a workshop that was lived in, half proletarian, half romantic; a stovepipe running right across the room demonstrated with an inescapable gesture that convention had no place here, and yet it was precisely the stovepipe you find in every Paris studio, the conventional symbol of a certain bohemianism. I should worry! For the rest, it was a large, and to that extent agreeable room, a kind of garret with rough deal planks that creaked softly when we walked on them, and plenty of light on a sunny autumn day like today. Below a sloping roof exactly as Frau Sibylle had remembered it, stood an old gas cooker, its enamel scarred with rust, a terrazzo sink and a crooked cupboard containing crockery, on the top shelf of which—obviously intended as a joke—was displayed stolen crockery bearing various inscriptions: Hôtel des Alpes, Bodega Granada, Kronenhalle Ziirich, and so on. The rubber tube on the tap, once no doubt red, now a grey and mildewed rubber dummy, was still attached with string; it was dripping and I wondered whether it had been dripping like that for six years, a passing idea that somehow irritated me, reminding me of the dripping in the Carlsbad caves. On a nail hung a dishcloth spotted with blackish mould like a leper, and naturally enough there was no lack of spider's webs, for example on the telephone, which stood next to the couch and presumably no longer rang, having fallen silent under the burden of unpaid bills. The couch was broad, big enough for two, also covered in dust, so that nobody sat on it, which gave this piece of furniture an obtrusive importance, as though it were standing in a museum with a notice saying Do Not Touch, like King Philip's bed in the Escoriai.