I'm Not Stiller (45 page)

My public prosecutor, I noticed, also kept his hands in his pockets to avoid touching anything. He was looking at the two bookcases. To call what the missing man left behind a library would be an exaggeration. Alongside a small volume of Plato and one or two things by Hegel stood names which today have been forgotten even by second-hand book-sellers; Brecht rubbed shoulders with Hamsun, then Gorki, Nietzsche, and a great many paperbacks, some of which contained opera texts; Count Keyserling was also there, but with the black imprint of a public library; then there were all sorts of art books, especially modern ones and an anthology of Swiss poetry;
Mein Kampf
was flanked by André Gide and supported on the other side by a White Paper on the Spanish Civil War; there were various volumes in the Insel series, though not a single complete set of anything, isolated volumes like
Westöstlicher Divan
and
Faust
and
Gespräche mit Eckermann, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Der Zauberberg
, the only work by Thomas Mann, the
Iliad,
Dante's
Commedia
, Erich Kästner,
Mozarts Reise nach Prag,
also Mörike's poems,
Till Eulenspiegel,
then again Marcel Proust, but not the whole of
La Recherche, Huttens Letzte Tage
, of Gottfried Keller's works only the Diaries and Letters, a book by C. G. Jung,
The Black Spider,
something by Arp and suddenly Strindberg's
Dream Play,
some early Hesse, too, Chekov, Pirandello, all in German translation, Lawrence's Mexican story,
The Woman Who Rode Away,
a good deal by a Swiss called Albin Zollinger, of Dostoyevsky only
The House of the Dead,
Garcia Lorca's first poems in Spanish,
Petite Prose
by Claudel and
Das Kapital
, the latter supported by Hölderlin; a few thrillers, Lichtenberg, Tagore, Ringelnatz, Schopenhauer, again with the black imprint of a public library, Hemingway (on bullfighting) next door to Georg Trakl; piles of periodicals ready to fall apart, a Spanish-German dictionary with a very tattered cover, the
Communist Manifesto,
a book on Gandhi, and so on. Anyhow, it would be a difficult job to make a spiritual warrant of arrest out of this lot, especially as no one knew which of these books the missing man had read, which of those he had read he had understood or simply not understood or misunderstood in a way that was valuable to him, and my prosecutor and friend had the look of a man who cannot quite find what he wants. For a moment, when in spite of the dust he pulled out a single India-paper volume with a crimson leather back, I thought: Perhaps he is looking for books out of his own library. But he put the leather-bound volume back on the shelf and instead turned the pages of
Anna ¡Carmina...

Apart from the bookcases, the main article of furniture in the studio was a broad and long table of ordinary planks, like a bench, on trestles with the name of a plaster-caster stencilled on them and also smeared with plaster. Some good fairy seemed to have tidied the place up, all the ashtrays had been emptied and so had the garbage pail in the kitchen recess under the sloping roof. On the wall, as Frau Sibylle had described them, I found two gaily coloured but faded
banderillas
from Spain, an African mask of very dubious authenticity, all sorts of photographs so faded as to be unrecognizable, the fine fragment of a Celtic axe, and a poster by Toulouse-Lautrec, also completely faded. At one point the public prosecutor said:

'Why are they taking such a long time?'

'Don't know,' said Knobel. 'I pressed the button.'

I didn't meddle in their on-the-spot investigation, which didn't seem to be going too well; I was here in the role of prisoner, so I just looked out of the window during their worried confabulation.

'Do you think they have lost their way?'

'How could they?' said Knobel. 'The lady knows her way around here, she was the one who showed me everything.'

Now I knew whom I had to expect. I lit a cigarette and couldn't believe that Julika, if she loved me, would lend herself to this farce. I was waiting eagerly to see what would happen, but I felt confident and certain of victory; in the last resort everything depended upon Julika, upon Julika alone...

As regards my own part in this performance, I couldn't imagine any place where I should feel more of a stranger than here. A few works in clay, which the vanished Stiller had left behind, were wrapped in brown sacking to prevent the clay from drying; but since this sacking had not been wetted for years, it was probable that the clay had completely dried out and was only held together by the sacking. I didn't touch it, naturally. All that was needed to complete this on-the-spot hearing was to unroll these strips of sacking, and everything would crumble into dust like a mummy. My friend and prosecutor could not escape the same impression and was likewise reminded of mummies, such as you see in ethnological museums where, with good reason, they are put behind glass. In particular, he scrutinized the plaster head of the company director whom he had met in the flesh that morning, but he refrained from any expression of opinion. One or two of the things had actually been cast in bronze, which in my opinion was more than they were worth; bronze, a metal of some durability after all, took away the spurious charm that came from their unfinished look and created a feeling of expectancy which more or less counterbalanced their weaknesses; what remained in bronze was not enough to constitute a grown man's testimony. No wonder Stiller (who must have seen this for himself at some point) made off! A single glance round this dusty studio and one couldn't help thinking: How much labour, oh, how much dogged perseverance, how much sweat and grind, and yet one doesn't even feel an urge to raise one's hat to the result. It was rather sad, no more—and I was glad the bell rang again.

The public prosecutor grew somewhat irascible and told Knobel to go downstairs and let in the lady and the gentleman, who, there seemed every reason to suppose, were unable to open the front door—and be quick about it. My warder, understandably offended, since he had pressed the button as hard as he could, went to the door and found himself face to face with the old hawker who had been serving the other floors and was now standing outside our studio, an open suitcase on his trembling arm. This, of course, was something we had none of us reckoned with, but nor had the hawker reckoned with us. 'No!' said Knobel angrily, in the tone in which he himself had just been addressed, 'nothing.' Naturally, the hawker had no idea that we were not the occupants of this garret, that there had been no life here for the last six years; he insisted on his right at least to show his wares, most useful wares, as Knobel did not venture to deny. Since we were three gentlemen he particularly recommended razor blades, shaving soap, styptics, and so forth. Knobel tried to cut him short, so that the Herr Staatsanwalt should not get angry again; on the other hand the hawker couldn't understand how the three of us could live here without a single toothbrush, without fly paper, without toilet paper, and without shoe polish, without anything, but particularly withour razor blades. Knobel couldn't get rid of the little old man. As though he had actually come to doubt our masculinity, the hawker pushed everything he had so far shown us back into his case and tried saucepan brushes, sewing things, elastic garters, best-quality pine-needle oil, and finally even hair slides, an article that is for ever getting lost and is always wanted again. Knobel kept saying, That's enough, that's enough!' but without the slightest success. Finally my public prosecutor intervened and with a superior air bought something or other, possibly razor blades, and once more we were alone, but still without the other participants in this on-the-spot investigation, who evidently (it was striking 2.45) hadn't even rung the front door bell yet.

'I've got to be in court by 3.30,' said Rolf, adding rather inconsequently: 'This is a fine studio—?' I nodded vigorously. 'And very good light.' Then Knobel, in order not to be as superfluous as he had been just before with the hawker, made himself important or useful with his knowledge of the lie of the land by saying, not to me, but to the public prosecutor: 'This leads out on to the parapet.' And since we had no urge to go out on to the parapet: 'There's still some mail here, Herr Staatsanwalt, the mail since last Saturday—'

'Mail?'

'Printed matter,' said Knobel and read out: 'Old age and dependants insurance, but Herr Dr Bohnenblust already has the whole pile of unpaid contributions. And this letter is for Herr Stiller personally—'

Since I had no intention of reading their vanished Stiller's letters, my friend and prosecutor took the liberty of slitting open the envelope. To judge by his expression it was of no importance. Only considerations of tidiness prevented him from throwing it in the wastepaper basket. 'An anonymous patriot abuses you,' he said laconically. 'People take it very much amiss that you don't grasp the opportunity of being Swiss as a boon—and therefore unconditionally.'

Later, since the people we were waiting for still didn't ring the bell, we stepped out on to the parapet after all; like everything else here, it tallied exactly with the Frau Staatsanwalt's recollections. Fragments of tiles smashed by a hailstorm lay around, proving that they were in nobody's way. The weeds on the roughcast roof were probably higher than ever; a few stalks of autumnal yellow swayed in the wind. My friend and prosecutor seemed also to be finding everything much as he had expected; he looked at the rotten frame of an armchair with no fabric covering that still lay in the corner, and we stood without a word, Rolf and I, while someone beat a mattress on the parapet opposite. I was well aware how Rolf, my new friend, must be noticing all these irrelevant details. He had no eye for the splendid view over gables and skylights and chimneys and party walls, a view that even contained a wedge of the lake that glittered under the hazy autumn light when a steamboat set its lazy waves in motion ~ a really delightful view, it seemed to me. He was smoking rather nervously. Why did we have to come to this place where there were so many things to cause him pain, irrelevant details that were not meant like that at all and nevertheless assumed for him, Sibylle's husband, a distressing significance, whether it was this mattress that was just being beaten in front of our eyes, or the elastic garters the hawker had offered him, the best quality pine-needle oil for the bath, or the hair slides that are forever getting lost and are always wanted again; why, I mean, did we have to look at this place which his wife and he had inwardly overcome long ago? I could see from his lips that it was costing him more than he had anticipated, and to no purpose. I don't know what he was thinking about during those two or three minutes during which he smoked his cigarette down to the tip; but it was futile, no doubt about it, there are tests which are completely off the mark, like this one. The rotten frame of an armchair, on which his wife may never have sat, because the fabric was already missing seven years ago, was all at once sufficient to cast fresh doubt on their love after years of certainty, to appear to show in one minute that they had made no progress in six or seven years, and to conjure up mental images of agonizing precision, images of the past, which in any case, whether accurate or inaccurate, could only leave a bad taste in the mouth. Or did my friend expect of himself that he should be able to bear these torments, which only the inert physical surroundings reawakened in him, without distress? It was futile. What had all this stuff here, even if it were not rotten, to do with his living Sibylle, with his relationship to her? There is a disgust that can never come to an end, a disgust that is the inevitable punishment for harbouring mental images that have nothing to do with us—or so I believe. Why did he inflict this on himself? It is possible to overcome jealousy, to overcome it from within and in relation to one's partner, to overcome it as a whole, as he had succeeded in doing; but it is nonsense to imagine that one must also be able to swallow the individual fragments without turning a hair. His smile was rather strained. Didn't he know, my friend and prosecutor, who had accompanied so many people to the scene of the crime, didn't he know that there is often something diabolical about inert objects? Naturally, I didn't know what to say to him on this parapet. It was such an unnecessary humiliation, and for the first time I realized what false reactions can be evoked by an on-the-spot investigation, when a person is confronted with inert objects, as if there existed a truth outside time ... As he said nothing, I asked rather abruptly:

'How old is your wife now, by the way?'

'Sibylle-?'

'Hannes must be nearly ready to go to grammar school,' I went on chattily, 'and now this little one, that must be wonderful for your wife, and a girl too—!'

'Yes,' he said, 'it's wonderful.'

'For you too—'

'Yes,' he said, 'it is.'

The good Knobel, who, as a petty official, was not yet used to being so inactive while on duty, left us no peace and warned us about the rusty balustrade it would be better not to touch. So we didn't touch it. Pigeons were cooing on the roof. We could also see the blue ridge of hills where we had been at midday.

'It was glorious up there,' I said, 'in that open-air restaurant—'

'Wasn't it?'

'Of course I don't mean an angel with wings,' I said, recalling the question he had asked up there. 'Not an artist's angel like you see in sculptures and the theatre. It may be that the people who first invented this image of the angel had experienced something like I experienced, that is to say something incommunicable. All I really know is that I experienced something—'

To my distress (it made me feel as though I'd been gagged) the bells of the nearby cathedral began to ring just at that moment. I couldn't see what it was for—a wedding perhaps or a final departure; anyhow, there was a ghastly booming. A swarm of pigeons whirred off over our heads. At this close range we didn't hear any notes at all, only a metallic tremor in the air, the noise of clappers that seemed as though it would burst our ear drums. We left the parapet, and when we stepped back into the studio to escape from some of the din they were already there—Julika and my defence counsel, who was just helping her off with her new Paris coat. Although we shut the window, conversation was out of the question. Julika was more attractive than ever. We greeted each other with a kiss. The fact that Julika was wearing her glorious hair rather more blonde again, more unobtrusive, as was appropriate for Zürich, did not escape me; it made me more convinced than ever that she had finally said good-bye to Paris and Monsieur Dmitritch. I was rather strangely affected, I must admit, by the little dog that Julika had brought here just because she did not intend to return to Paris; it was another fox terrier. I stood there stroking it, since the frightful din of the bells made speech impossible. Everyone lit a cigarette. Julika fetched ashtrays with the air of a hostess and invited us with a gesture to sit down. But everything was far too dusty.