I'm Not Stiller (10 page)

'Let's go.'

On the stroke of six I was back in prison.

***

P.S. That's the trouble: I have no words for reality. I've been lying on my bed without sleeping, hearing the clock strike one hour after another, trying to decide what to do. Shall I give in? I've only to tell a lie, a single word, a so-called admission, and I shall be 'free'; in my case, that means condemned to play a part that has nothing to do with me. On the other hand, how can anyone prove who they really are? I can't. Do I know myself who I am? That is the terrifying discovery I have made while under arrest: I have no words for my reality.

***

The little Jew, with whom I had allied myself for purposes of back-soaping, was not at the showers today. When I remarked that I didn't grudge him his freedom, they merely raised their eyebrows. He was an intelligent man, and the rumour that he has committed suicide keeps occupying my mind. Of course, we are a group often, and if we hadn't soaped one another's backs I should probably never have noticed he had gone. It's not that I miss him, either. (I always found the back-soaping somehow embarrassing.) What is on my mind is the
fact
that it is always the intelligent people who can't wait for death, and when I think of his eyes that were not only intelligent but also full of the knowledge of mysteries, it seems incredible that this man did not know what was waiting for him. Now I even imagine that he was the only one to whom I could have communicated my experience—the otherwise almost incommunicable meeting with my angel.

***

Once more I have the familiar feeling of having to fly, of standing on a window sill (in a burning house?) with no possibility of escape unless I am suddenly able to fly. At the same time I know for sure that it is no use flinging myself into the street, suicide is an illusion. This means that I must fly in the confidence that the void itself will bear me up, that is to say a leap without wings, a leap into nothingness, into an unlived life, into guilt by omission, into emptiness as the only reality which belongs to me, which can bear me up...

M
Y
counsel has read the notes I have made so far. He wasn't even angry, but merely shook his head. He couldn't defend me with that, he said, and didn't even put it in his brief-case.

Nevertheless, I continue to keep the records.

(With his much appreciated cigar in my mouth.)

***

The relationship between the beautiful Julika and the missing Stiller began with Tchaikovsky's
Nutcracker Suite
(to the young dancer's mortification, Stiller, who was still very young and felt obliged somehow to impress the lovely Julika, described this music as soap-bubble magic, impotent virtuosity, illuminated lemonade, sentimental rubbish for the elderly, and so on), arid to judge by Julika's most recent intimations a
Mutcracker Suite
hung over all the years of their marriage. Julika was in the ballet at the time. On an old photograph, which she showed me casually the day before yesterday, she appears as a page or a prince, blissfully happy in a costume that suits her down to the ground; one could gaze for hours at the ephebe-like charm she displays in this photograph. At that time, unlike today, her large, exceptionally beautiful, and apparently frank eyes contained a strange shyness, something like a veil of secret fear, either fear of her own sex, from which her delightful disguise could protect her only part of the time, or fear of the man who might be waiting somewhere behind the scenes for the removal of her silvery disguise. Julika was then twenty-three. Any reasonably experienced man—which Stiller obviously was not—would immediately have recognized in this fascinating little person a case of extreme frigidity, or at least have guessed it at the first contact, and adjusted his expectations accordingly. At this time a great future was predicted for Julika in the ballet. How many men, reputable citizens of Zürich, people of importance, Julika could have married on the spot, if this strange and hence fascinating girl had not put art (ballet) above everything, so that she regarded every activity outside art as an unwelcome distraction.

Dancing was her life. She kept the gentlemen at a distance with a giggling laugh, which discouraged many of them and made all serious conversation impossible; and whether they would believe it or not, the lovely Julika lived like a nun at this period, though surrounded by rumours that made her out a vamp; but at this, too, Julika only giggled.

Why didn't people let her be as she was? She never left the theatre without a bouquet of fresh flowers or without a slight but genuine fear that her closest admirer, the donor of these flowers, a student perhaps or a gentleman with a shiny car, was waiting outside. Julika was afraid of cars. Fortunately, they generally didn't recognize Julika as she swept past with her beautiful red hair hidden under a schoolgirlish woollen cap, a very ordinary-looking girl once she no longer stood in the glare of the spotlight. Like a marine creature whose glorious colours are only visible under water, Julika's elfin beauty showed only when she was dancing; afterwards she was tired. Understandably: when she danced she gave her last ounce of energy. She had a right to be tired, and Julika told every waiting admirer she was tired. But Stiller always believed that Julika was only tired for him. What did he get out of it when he persuaded Julika to take a glass of wine or, since Julika did not drink wine, a cup of tea? Stiller talked a great deal on these occasions, it seems, like someone who feels it is entirely up to him to keep the conversation going; Julika was tired and said nothing. At that time Stiller talked a great deal about Spain; he had just come back from the Spanish Civil War and had already been condemned by the Swiss military court. Julika did not feel sorry for him because of his impending imprisonment, which he referred to with rather ostentatious pride, but for some other reason which she did not understand herself. She had only to smile and Stiller was afraid she was laughing at him and put his hands over his forehead or his mouth; and when she refused to walk arm in arm with him on the way home he was abashed and spent a long time outside the door of her house apologizing for his forwardness, which he too found objectionable. This made Julika like him better than anyone else.

Stiller was the first, or at any rate one of the few, who ever received a letter from Julika, a few lines in which she confirmed that she had been very tired and intimated that they might see one another again. She knew how much this young man desired her and also that Stiller would on no account take her by force; he was lacking in some quality without which such an action was impossible, and this made her like him all the more. And she liked the fact that this man, who had just been in Spain on some front or other, a man of slim yet powerful build and a head taller than Julika, did not expect the least apology on her part when she had kept him waiting outside the theatre for nearly an hour, but, on the contrary, apologized for his own importunity and was already afraid of being a nuisance again.

Julika liked all this very much, as I have said; at any rate, she always spoke very kindly of Stiller when she recalled these early times. It was March, and they were going for their first country walk, which was much too long for the delicate Julika, too exhausting and also too dirty; the ground was still very wet, although the warm sun was shining, and once her left shoe stuck in the mire when Stiller led her across the middle of a field, and he had to take hold of her to save her from treading in the mud with her stockinged foot; it was then that Stiller kissed her for the first time. Julika is firmly convinced that she kissed him too. Stiller soon stopped, not wanting to be a nuisance to Julika, but nevertheless he was extremely gay during the rest of the walk, breaking off willow rods like a boy and striking his open overcoat with them as he went along. Julika felt as though he were a brother. And she liked that too. He didn't mind the fact that even in the country Julika talked about nothing but the ballet, and in particular about the people connected with ballets, conductors, theatrical designers, hairdressers, ballet-masters—that was her world. Other admirers had reproached her with having nothing in her head but gossip. But not Stiller. He made a great effort to listen, occasionally pointing out a particularly beautiful view, which did not distract Julika's attention from her subject; then Stiller felt ashamed of knowing so little about the art of the ballet.

They ate bread and bacon in a simple peasant inn of the sort that obviously appealed to Stiller, and Julika enjoyed the sense that for the first time she had met a man of whom she did not feel afraid. Once again he talked about his Spanish war. A few days after this walk he had to report somewhere, with a woollen rug under his arm, to serve his few months inside.

For a long time they did not see one another. During this period Julika wrote several letters, in which, in keeping with her own shy way, she did not put her love for him into words; but Stiller, being a man of sensibility, could not fail to realize what the beautiful Julika, in keeping with her own shy way, perhaps felt without being able to put it into words—at all events, Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy still appeals to those letters as unmistakable proof of how deeply and with what tender abandon she loved the missing Stiller.

They married a year later.

Looking at these two people from the outside, one has the impression that Julika and the vanished Stiller were suited to one another in an unfortunate manner. They needed each other because of their fear. Whether rightly or wrongly, the beautiful Julika harboured a secret fear that she was not a woman. And Stiller too, it seems, was at that time perpetually afraid of being somehow inadequate; one is struck by the frequency with which this man felt he had to apologize. Julika has no idea of the cause of his anxiety. In fact, Julika never mentions the word anxiety when she is talking about her wretched marriage with the vanished Stiller; but almost everything she says points to the fact that she felt she could only hold Stiller through his bad conscience, through his fear of failure. She obviously didn't credit herself with being able to satisfy a real, free man, so that he would stay with her. One gets the
impression that
Stiller, too, clung to her weakness; another woman, a healthy woman, would have demanded strength from him or cast him aside. Julika couldn't cast him aside—she lived by having a husband whom she could continually forgive.

***

But I want to try and record in these notebooks nothing but what Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy herself told me or my counsel about her marriage; I am particularly anxious to be fair to her, for one thing so that she shall stop thinking I am her husband.

Several years before, the theatre doctor had detected a mild attack of tuberculosis, but really only a mild attack; nevertheless, he always said Julika ought without fail to spend the summer in the mountains. This was good advice but it needed money to put into effect, and Stiller, her husband, at that time earned nothing at all with his sculpture, almost nothing, anyway not enough to enable his poor wife to stop working. Julika never reproached him for not earning as much as a company director. Julika even went so far as not to tell him what the doctor had advised, out of consideration, to avoid making him feel that he earned too little. All Julika asked was that he should also have some consideration for her. During these early years their marriage is supposed to have been wonderful. Julika earned six hundred and twenty francs a month in the ballet, and when Stiller was lucky and sold a figure, for a public fountain or the like, they were well off—Julika was satisfied with very little. She was too much of an artist seriously to ask a man she loved to betray his talent in order to look after his wife better; if she said anything of the sort it was only in jest. As to how talented her vanished Stiller really was opinions differed, and there were some people who did not consider him an artist at all. Of course Julika believed in him. Anyhow he worked unremittingly.

Julika's success as a dancer, against which Stiller could set no succes of his own, troubled him and probably contributed to the fact that he was rather shy and unsociable; in every gathering people crowded round Julika, he was greeted as her husband. In view of their earnings at that time children were out of the question; it would have meant a year's loss of work for Julika. Not that Stiller felt any overwhelming desire to be a father; it was merely that he had twinges of conscience about the fact that Julika had to go without children on his account, and he kept wondering whether it might not have been very important for Julika of all people to have a child. Why Julika of all people? Stiller thought that a child might have fulfilled Julika as a woman in a way that he was unable to do. This was an idea he could not be talked out of, and he was always bringing up the subject of the child. What did he want of Julika? She could see that somehow Stiller did not take her seriously as an artist, perhaps out of unconscious jealousy over her success; anyway, Julika was upset by his never-ending references to the child. Wasn't she sufficiently fulfilled already? He only stopped talking about it when Julika told him flatly that he was insulting her as an artist, but especially when she asked him, 'Why have a child by a mother with T.B.?' After this the child was buried for ever. Instead he was always talking about her tuberculosis, admonishing her at appropriate and inappropriate moments to go and see the doctor again. Poor Julika didn't even dare to cough, so much did his admonitions get on her nerves. What did he want with her now? Stiller was sweet, but obstinately convinced that Julika was not living her life to the full. Julika was certainly no companion for endless walks, no comrade for nights of drinking with his friends; she needed looking after, God knows, but at that time Julika was really quite satisfied with her life. Why wasn't Stiller?

When the weather changed during a rehearsal, Stiller used to wait at the stage door with her warm coat, not forgetting her umbrella and scarf; his concern for her sadly precarious health was really touching, only his perpetual attempts to make her go to the doctor depressed Julika. She felt them to be a covert repudiation of his tender solicitude, even as a sign that he did not love her, and this made her stubborn. She felt she was being sent, pushed, forced to the doctor solely to salve his conscience, to free his masculine egoism from the need to be considerate; she waxed indignant as soon as Stiller asked if she had been to the doctor yet. It may have been very silly of Julika, but it was understandable; she had always been a sensitive creature. For years, therefore, she danced at the risk of collapsing on the stage; everyone admired Julika for her will-power, the producer, the whole ballet company, the whole orchestra; only Stiller did not. He called it idiotic. Probably for no other reason than the fear of not being taken seriously, he had outbursts of vulgar rudeness that were only silenced by her sobs. Everything about her was now wrong; he nagged at Julika for not taking some dirty plates out with her when she got up from the table to go into the kitchen, and obstinately maintained that she could live on half her energy if she had a little sense, if she would learn a little from him. What could Julika answer? His pettiness only made her sad. Fancy a man of intellect, such as Stiller claimed to be, talking for a mortal hour about the fact that Julika did not take any of the dirty plates with her when she went into the kitchen to fetch something! Julika put her hands to her head. He could practically evolve a philosophy out of a thing like that, while Julika was so tired from rehearsals and housework she could have dropped.