I'm Not Stiller (11 page)

Then it seems he was charming again. But the outbreaks of petulance became more frequent. Once, when poor Julika refused to cancel her evening performance although she had a high fever, because she knew how much depended upon her part on this particular evening, Stiller did it literally over her head: he took the telephone from above the recumbent Julika and said that unfortunately his wife could not appear that evening, a high-handed action which the dancer could not tolerate. What was Stiller thinking of! Snatching the telephone from her husband, she ordered a taxi so that she could drive to the theatre in spite of his call. There was a row, one of the first in the marriage, and then the taxi arrived. Stiller shouted after her down the staircase: 'Kill yourself if you want to, go on, kill yourself, but don't blame it on me...' At moments like this she was shocked by him; at such moments Stiller seemed to forget whom he had married. Her home background was not wealthy, but it was cultured; her Hungarian mother had moved in the highest society, she was somehow an aristocrat, and her dead father was at least ambassador to Budapest; whereas Stiller (it must be said) came from a lower-middle-class background, in fact he had hardly any background at all; he occasionally spoke of his stepfather, who was in some old age home, but never of his father, and his mother was the daughter of a railwayman.

It is curious and horrible that such things suddenly assume importance between people who love one another, but it is a fact. Naturally Julika never referred to it in words, or almost never. But she felt the difference between them, for example when Stiller shouted down the stairs. It must have been dreadful. He always regretted such outbursts afterwards. Stiller apologized and often thought of nice little ways of making up, either by preparing one of Julika's favourite dishes, which only he could cook, or by giving her a silk scarf because she had just lost the previous one, or by bringing her lilac, which he had stolen over a fence on his way to the theatre to fetch her after the performance; everything always went well again, and it was really and fundamentally an extremely happy marriage—until the other woman appeared on the scene.

That was seven years ago.

Julika suspected nothing. Julika would never have considered such a possibility. As a young wife who loved her husband above all else, it seemed to her out of the question that Stiller could be capable of such a betrayal; it simply never occurred to her. Poor Julika, entirely devoted to her profession and her husband, only noticed it through the fact that Stiller began to pay no more heed to the fever she had now had for years on end; true, he asked her every evening, when she came home from the theatre, how many curtains she had, but always with a slight hint of sarcasm. In the same tone he would ask, 'How's your T.B.?' Or when Julika spoke of the outrageous impertinence of a critic who had completely omitted to mention her, Stiller, her husband, adopted an attitude of positively mean fair-mindedness and told Julika not to take it so much to heart, saying that perhaps the critic's omission was just a slip, no more. In particular, however, Julika was upset because Stiller too now began to place his work above all else, and consequently felt it right to live for days at a time in his studio and once for a whole week, until one morning Julika made up her mind to go and see him in his studio. She found him whistling as he dried glasses, immediately scented the previous evening's visit, but was ashamed to ask. What proof was there in a hair slide on the floor, which Julika picked up without a word and placed on the table? Julika wasn't petty, she took no notice of the two empty bottles of Chateauneuf-du-Pape—not exactly the cheapest of wines—nor of a black hair on his light coloured trousers. Stiller laughed. But it wasn't because of the woman who had been with him the night before that Julika broke down; his hollow, consolatory laugh, the fundamentally sadistic tenderness with which he felt obliged to comfort a jealous woman, were out of place, God knows, and so was the roughness with which he forbade what he called hysterical scenes about a hair-slide; all this was very out of place. For a long time poor Julika sobbed so much she couldn't utter a word. 'Julika?' he asked, as the suspicion dawned on him at last that her sobbing had nothing to do with the silly hair-slide. 'What's the matter, Julika? Do say something.'

Julika had, been to see the doctor.

'Have you?' he asked. She tried to get a grip on herself. 'Well?' he asked. Stiller sat beside her on the couch, still holding the glass and the drying-up cloth, while the despairing Julika, shaken by a fresh bout of sobbing, clawed at the cushion with both hands so that it tore. Julika had never wept like this. And Stiller, it seems, was simply helpless; he put down the drying-up cloth so that he could stroke her hair with his free hand, as though her life could be saved by his affectation of tenderness. He seemed put out by the fact that Julika had been to the doctor; it disturbed his merry whistling. Julika tore the cushion, and Stiller merely asked, 'What did the doctor say?' His sympathy (and Julika still thinks so today) was of a horrible kind—his affectionate thoughtfulness, his friendly concern, and all this with last night's glass in his hand. To begin with, her stammered revelation, interrupted again and again by choking sobs, that she must go as quickly as possible to Davos elicited from him only a dry question, 'How long have you known?'—'For almost a week,' she replied, imagining that Stiller would realize the full horror of that week, '-for a week!' Instead he merely asked, 'Why didn't you tell me before?' Stiller was behaving outrageously. 'Is it true?' he went so far as to ask. 'Is it true?...' At first Julika laughed, then she jumped up and looked at him, and saw the manner in which Stiller was looking at her: as though it might be nothing more than a feint on her part, a cheap exaggeration, designed to spoil his recollection of the night before.

She shouted, 'Go, go, get out of my sight,' Stiller shook his head. 'Go away! Get out!'—'Julika,' he said, 'this is my studio.' His calmness was a bitter mockery, an inhuman attitude Julika would never have believed possible; while Julika was telling him that she might die, Stiller actually smiled. He smiled. And poor Julika, who had borne the affliction of the medical report alone for nearly a week, could scarcely believe her eyes and ears; Stiller began to dry the previous night's glass again, as though this glass were the most pressing, the most fragile thing, the true object of his concern; and then, adopting an affectionate tone, he wanted to know, not the terrors Julika had suffered, but what the doctor had told her, exactly, without embellishment, word for word. 'I've told you. I have to go to Davos immediately, straight into the sanatorium,' she said, 'otherwise it will be too late.'

It seemed to take some time for Stiller to grasp the full significance of this announcement. What was passing through his head, he did not reveal. He merely bit his underlip and went as limp as an empty sack, growing somehow smaller, and looked at Julika with eyes that were suddenly quite helpless. Hadn't he always wanted Julika to have another X-ray? Now she had done as he wished, that was all. Why did he stare at her so? It was her left lung. It seems the doctor had only spoken to her in consoling, human terms, without going into medical details. He mentioned cases of complete recovery he had seen himself. Humanly speaking, the doctor had been magnificent. Not that he made any wild promises; he took Julika too seriously as a personality for that. All
the
same, faced with her utter panic, he considered it quite possible that the beautiful Julika might one day return to the ballet. No promises, of course. The only thing he could promise, as a conscientious doctor, was her early death if she did not go into a sanatorium right away. Julika was now about twenty-seven or twenty-eight. She already knew the name of her sanatorium, its pretty position at the edge of a wood, as well as the approximate cost of treatment, most of which would have to be borne by the Health Service. If Stiller, her husband, had ever made inquiries and told her that this sort of thing could be paid by the Health Service, Julika would have gone into a sanatorium long ago and probably have been cured by now. Stiller did not deny his negligence. To her surprise, Julika saw that her innocent remark had visibly touched and distressed him; Stiller seemed on the verge of tears. Had Julika now got to console him too?

She put her arms round his shoulders, which was a lot for Julika with her shy ways, especially as there were all sorts of other things to be done now. Ravel's
Waltz
and Da Falla's
Three-Cornered Hat
, two heavenly ballets, would be her last premières; the following day, Thursday the such-and-such, Stiller was to take her to Davos. Julika showed him her little calendar, where the date was already marked with a cross. What was it that didn't suit him? Stiller got up from the couch without really looking at her little calendar, flunghis dry glass into the kitchen recess, where it smashed in pieces, stuck a cigarette between his pale, thin lips, and then stood as mute as a statue in front of the big studio window, with both hands in his pockets and his back to Julika, as though it were her fault that she had to go to Davos. In fact, as though she had upset his calculations with her understandable despair, and that was all there was toit.

'Why don't you say something?' she asked. 'Sorry,' he said, referring to the glass, which must have startled Julika; but that wasn't what concerned her. 'What are you thinking about all the time?' Stiller went to the cupboard, filled two glasses with the last dregs and offered Julika a sort of consolation which she not unkindly, but firmly, declined. There were times when she found his way of trying to make amends with a friendly gesture, with gin or stolen lilac, intolerable. It seemed to her that Stiller fancied himself in these warmhearted gestures, seeing himself at a very cheap price as a solicitious friend, a reliable protector, a wonderful husband—and yet in all these years it had never occurred to her Stiller to find out whether the Health Service would pay for the sanatorium. 'No thank you,' she said, 'not for me.'—'Why not?'—'Alcohol won't help.' Stiller tilted his glass. 'No,' he said at last, emptying Julika's glass too at one gulp. 'No, of course it's not your fault, Julika, that you have to go into a sanatorium, there's no question of that, of course it's my fault.'—'I never said that.'—'It's all my fault,' he went on obstinately. 'You've nothing to worry about, my dear, you're going to Davos, you poor thing, and I'm staying here in town, I the healthy one—my bad conscience will be your soft pillow.' So saying he gave a nasty laugh. 'What do you mean by that?' asked Julika. 'You're always coming out with these proverbs.' Stiller picked up the empty gin bottle, shook his head as though over himself, but seemed quite composed, and hurled the gin bottle into the kitchen recess, so that splinters of glass spurted in all directions. This behaviour was something Julika has not forgotten to this day, the expression of an unrestrained egocen- tricity, as I fully agree, on the part of the missing man.

***

Stiller is reported to have once told a group of friends when he was slightly drunk: 'I've got a wonderful wife, I'm delighted every time I see her again, and whenever she's there I feel like a greasy, sweaty, stinking fisherman with a crystal water-fairy.' And this was shortly after his marriage ... One gets the impression that there was something about this woman which the vanished Stiller, fascinated as he was by Julika, had simply not taken into account, had probably not even noticed, and this was her frigidity. Julika herself seems not to have known that such a thing existed, not merely as a pathological, but as a natural, phenomenon. Does she know now? Recently she was rather taken aback when I casually mentioned the scientific theory that in the whole of nature no female, except the human woman, experiences the so-called orgasm. We didn't discuss it any further. The beautiful Julika probably suffered in the most solitary manner, really suffered, from the fact that male sensuality always rather disgusted her, although that was naturally no reason for imagining herself a half creature, an unsuccessful female and even for thinking herself an artist.

So much about this woman, especially when she speaks of her lost Stiller, seems to be a touchingly obdurate self-deception, indeed one is half inclined to doubt her tuberculosis, in spite of her medical certificate and the devastating effect this illness had on her life. Why couldn't Julika talk to anyone? Perhaps there are only a few women who experience without deception the overwhelming intoxication of the senses which they expect from their encounters with men, which they feel bound to expect because of the fuss made about it in novels, written by men; on top of this come the vain lies that women tell each other, and perhaps the lovely Julika was merely rather more honest and at the same time shocked, so that she kept her thoughts to herself, dressed up as a prince or a page, and crept into a thicket of solitary misery where her husband could not follow her. It is not surprising, therefore, that she esteemed ballet and everything to do with ballet, even the mediocre sort of ballet usually performed in municipal theatres, above everything, and in any case above Stiller. A few unsuccessful ventures into lesbianism seem not to have altered the situation; ballet remained the only outlet for her sensuality. Other women spare themselves the ballet by becoming mothers instead, by tolerating their husbands as necessary procreators and then disregarding them and being happy with their children, whom they prize above all else exactly as a ballet dancer prizes ballet; they can talk about nothing but their children, even when they appear to be talking about other children, and relinquish themselves, apparently, the better to be able to pet themselves in their children, calling it mother love, self-sacrificing devotion, and even child education. Of course, it's pure narcissism. One might say that in the lovely Julika this narcissism of the frigid at least had the advantage of causing no harm to living human beings, but only to art, only to Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, not to mention Ravel and Stravinsky; her narcissism did not take as its victim a child who would have been dependent on her as its one and only mother.