I'm Not Stiller (22 page)

'One has to do that,' I said.

'Did you have your own car?'

'I?' I laughed. 'No.'

Somehow this statement seemed to please him, to relieve him, to cheer him up and free him from some idea which I couldn't quite guess. In summer New York is unbearable, no question, and anyone who can do so gets out as soon as he's free. For instance, on Sundays hundreds of thousands of cars drive out over Washington Bridge, three abreast, an army of city-dwellers urgently seeking nature. And yet nature has been there on both sides for a long time; lakes go past, forests with green undergrowth, forests that haven't been combed but grow wild, and then again open fields without a single house, a sight for sore eyes, yes, it's a perfect paradise; only everyone drives by. In this conveyor-belt of glittering cars, all keeping to the prescribed speed of forty or sixty miles an hour, you can't simply stop to smell a pine cone. Only if you have a breakdown can you drive onto the grass shoulder, then you have to so as not to wreck the conveyor-belt, and anyone who comes off the freeway when he hasn't broken down is fined. So you drive on, drive on! The roads are perfect, of course, in easy curves they cross the broad, gently rolling countryside full of green emptiness, oh, if only you could get out of the car everything would be as natural as in the dreams of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Of course, there are exits, carefully planned, so that you can branch off without fear of death, without a crossing, without sounding your horn and curve round in an arabesque onto a secondary road leading to an inhabited area, an industrial complex, an airport. But we want to get into simple nature! After two or three hours I start to get anxious. But since everyone is driving, car by car, one has to assume that there are destinations that will eventually make all this driving worthwhile. As I've said: nature is near enough to touch the whole time, but not to be touched, not to be entered; it glides past like a Technicolor film with forests and lakes and reeds. Beside us is a Nash with its radio blaring: a baseball commentary. We try to speed up in order to change neighbours and we finally succeed; now we have a Ford alongside and hear Beethoven's Seventh, which isn't what we're looking for at the moment either; I'd simply like to know where all this driving is actually leading to. Is it conceivable that they're going to drive like this all Sunday? It is conceivable. After aboui three hours, simply in order to be able to get out, we drive into a so-called picnic camp. We pay a modest entrance fee to get into nature, consisting of an idyllic lake, a large meadow in which they're playing baseball, a forest full of magnificent trees, and in addition there's a gleaming parking lot with hammocks in between, little picnic tables, loudspeakers and ovens, all included in the entrance price. In one car I see a young lady reading a magazine:
How to Enjoy Life.
And she isn't the only one who prefers to stay in the comfortable car. The camp is very big; after a while we find a rather steeper slope where there are no cars and also no people; for where your car won't go there's no point in going. Everywhere you see things that justify the entrance price: there are garbage bins in the forest, drinking fountains, swings for children; the nurse is included. A hut selling coca-cola and a latrine, disguised as a romantic log cabin, answer a general need. There's a first aid station, in case someone cuts his finger, and a telephone so you can keep constantly in touch with the city, and a model gas station, everything is there, right in the middle of otherwise untouched nature, a wide stretch of untrodden country. We try to tread this country; it's possible but not easy, because there's simply no path for walkers and you have to be rather lucky to find a narrow side road, where you can park your car on the verge. A pair of lovers, their arms around one another as they contemplate a natural lake dotted with water-lilies, are not sitting on the bank but in their car, as is usual; their radio is on so low that very soon we no longer hear it. No sooner have you walked a few steps than you find yourself in the silence of the primeval forest with butterflies fluttering all around, and it's quite possible that you are the first person ever to set foot in this place; on the banks of the lake there isn't a single landing-stage, no hut, no trace of human handiwork, for miles one single fisherman. As soon as he sees us he comes over, chats, and sits down beside us to continue fishing, in order not to be alone. Around four in the afternoon it starts again, the same stream of cars as in the morning, only in the opposite direction and very much slower: New York is gathering in its millions, traffic jams are inevitable. It's hot, people wait and sweat, wait and try to edge a car's length forward; then off they go again, at a walking pace, then at a good speed, then another traffic jam. You can see a line of four or five hundred cars gleaming in the heat, and helicopters circle the area, come down above the halted columns to announce over the loudspeaker which roads are less blocked. This goes on for four or five hours, until we are back in New York, pretty exhausted naturally, glad of the shower even if it doesn't do much good, glad of a clean shirt, glad of a cool cinema; even around midnight it's like going into a bakery, and the ocean hangs its damp mantle over the twinkling city. To sleep with the window open is out of the question. The hum of the traffic and the squeal of tyres doesn't stop until you take a sleeping powder. The traffic goes on day and night...

'I know,' says the public prosecutor after my conscientious description, 'I know, it was just like that when my wife was there.'

'That's right, isn't it?'

'Summer in New York, my wife tells me, is terrible.'

'That's what everyone says.'

'Simply terrible.'

'And yet it's a fascinating city,' I say in conclusion, 'a fascinating city!'

'No,' I confirmed, 'I didn't have my own car, the whole of that summer I drove poor old Dick's car, while he was ill.'

He didn't seem to like this either, and I could feel that he was rather interested in my week-end trips.

Then he came out with his question:

'Whom did you take out with you on these trips? I don't suppose you went by yourself?'

'No.'

'May I ask—'

'Mr Public Prosecutor,' I said, 'it wasn't your wife.'

He smiled and looked at me.

'Word of honour,' I said.

These are strange interrogations.

***

Wilfried has answered:

 

Dear Sir,

Your letter of yesterday came as a great shock to me, as you may well imagine, since Herr Dr Bohnenblust, who came here to fetch a photograph album of my brother's for his file, assured me that you were definitely my brother and that your release was only a matter of days, provided you, or as the case may be, my brother, had nothing to do with the Smyrnov affair, I told Herr Dr Bohnenblust at once that as far as I knew my brother had not been politically active since his return from Spain, and in any case was certainly not a political agent. I apologize for the inappropriate letter I wrote you previously. As regards my visit, which you asked
me
to drop for the present because of possible misinterpretation, I must unfortunately let you know that I have been officially requested in writing by the examining magistrate to come for a meeting with you, but I suppose you have been informed of this. I am sure you will understand our first excitement and forgive my over-hastiness. At the same time I should like to thank you for your short, but in spite of my misunderstanding, so understanding letter, which it was probably not easy for you to write. I hope you will not think me impertinent if I repeat our invitation to come and live with us after your release, even if you are not my brother.

With kindest regards both to you and to Herr Dr Bohnenblust and good wishes for the solution of your present problems,

Wilfried Stiller, Dip. Agric.

***

Julika knows nothing about any Smyrnov affair, nothing precise. It seems to have been a political affair, which a few years ago raised a great deal of dust, as the saying goes, so much that in the end the general public couldn't see what had happened at all...

Unfortunately it rained today.

We passed my afternoon out on bail in her hotel. In any case Julika had left something in her hotel, an extremely urgent letter to Paris, and naturally I accompanied her. When the concierge, with a look that couldn't have been more equivocal, tried to make me wait in the vestibule, Julika said without a blush, 'The gentleman is my husband.' At this the concierge blushed and personally conducted me to the lift as though I were an honest man. I regarded it as a white lie, and hence with approbation. In the lift, alone with Julika, I expressly congratulated her on her quick-witted rejoinder; but later, when we were in her room, I said nothing more about it, which was probably a mistake. Does Julika really love me? It would be the last straw if I started getting jealous! The person in Paris, to whom Julika writes such urgent and such very thick letters, is called Dmitritch, doubtlessone of the old Franco-Russian
émigrés,
Jean-Louis Dmitritch. She didn't tell me: I saw it on the envelope which she put underneath her white handbag as we entered, so as not to forget it a second time, and which I looked at secretly, while Julika was giving her hair a thorough combing in front of the mirror, after which she powdered her face and put on rouge.

***

Dreamed about the uniform again.

***

A walk in the prison yard, whose square reminds me of the cloisters of old monasteries. Is there anyone who doesn't wish at rimes that he could become a monk? Somewhere in Siberia or Peru, it makes no odds, the same sun shines on us everywhere, and the fact that it makes no odds is freedom; I know. And then again the square of the prison yard with the autumn branches, the cooing pigeons, and particularly the idle figure which I contribute, reminds me of the garden courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which is certainly larger and decorated with pieces of sculpture, but also enclosed by façades and party-walls. Was I freer then than now? I could go where I liked, and yet it was a ghastly period; it really isn't true that I yearn for those times or for any period in my past life.

***

P.S. Julika: Either the vanished Stiller was simply mistaken when he compared this woman to a cold sea-beast, or else it was his fault that Julika was not a woman. Or else Julika has been through some experience since Stiller vanished that has fundamentally changed her. What?

***

P.S. Perhaps he is an agent, this Jean-Louis Dmitritch, or the caretaker of her dancing school, a general factotum of seventy-seven, and her recent letter was so thick because it contained forms Julika had to sign—or what shall I say?—or he's a ladies' tailor, this Monsieur Dmitritch, or a subtenant, whose Agreement she was terminating, or her doctor, her lawyer—there are thousands of possibilities...

***

My friend the public prosecutor is a gift from heaven. His smile takes the place of whisky for me. It is an almost imperceptible smile, which frees his interlocutor from a great deal of fuss and bother, and lets him be. How rare such a smile is. Such a kindly smile—very precise in its knowledge and by no means vague, yet not
scornful
[[[mdash.gif]]] blossoms only where a person has once wept and admits to himself that he has wept.

***

Of course Herr Dr Bohnenblust, the defending counsel provided for me by the State, is right: If I tell him a hundred times what a fire in a Californian redwood sawmill looks like, how the American Negress makes up, or how colourful New York appears during an evening snowstorm accompanied by lightning (it does happen), or how to land without papers at Brooklyn harbour, it doesn't prove that I've been there. We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes—or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers. One need never have left this little town to have Hitler's voice still ringing in one's ears, to have seen the Shah of Persia from a distance of three yards, and to know how the monsoon howls over the Himalayas or what it looks like six hundred fathoms beneath the sea. Anyone can know these things nowadays. Does it mean I have ever been to the bottom of the sea? Or even (like the Swiss) almost up Mount Everest?

And it's just the same with the inner life of man. Anyone can know about it nowadays. How the devil am I to prove to my counsel that I don't know my murderous impulses through C. G. Jung, jealousy through Marcel Proust, Spain through Hemingway, Paris through Ernst Jiinger, Switzerland through Mark Twain, Mexico through Graham Greene, my fear of death through Bernanos, inability ever to reach my destination through Kafka, and all sorts of other things through Thomas Mann? It's true, you need never have read these authorities, you can absorb them through your friends who also live all their experiences second-hand.

What an age! It means nothing any more to have seen swordfish, to have loved a mulatto girl, it could all have happened during a matinée performance of a documentary film; and as for having thoughts—good heavens, it's already a rarity in this age to meet a mind that's moulded on one particular model, it's a sign of personality if someone sees the world with Heidegger and only with Heidegger; the rest of us swim in a cocktail containing pretty well everything and mixed in the most elegant manner by Eliot; we know our way about everywhere and, as I have said, not even our accounts of the visible world mean anything; there's no
terra incognita
nowadays (except Russia). So what's the point of telling all these stories? It doesn't mean you've been there. My counsel is right. And yet[[[mdash.gif]]]

I swear:

There was a mulatto named Florence, a docker's daughter, I saw her every day and occasionally talked to her over the fence, a fence made of tar barrels and overgrown with brambles that kept us well apart. There was Florence with her gazelle-like walk. I dreamt about her, certainly, the wildest dreams; but nevertheless she was there next morning in the flesh. There was a tapping of high-heeled shoes on the wooden porch, and I immediately looked out through the holes in the curtains of my shingle hut hoping to see Florence; I was generally too late. But then I waited until she came out again with a bucket, emptied the frothy contents against my fence, and nodded; for at this moment I rushed impetuously out into the garden. She said, 'Hallo', and I said, 'Hallo.' And I daren't describe her white smile in her brown face. People are familiar with this smile too from documentary films, from the newspapers, and even from a variety show in this very town, I know, and her singular voice can be heard on gramophone records, almost her voice ... Then, as I 'happened' to be in the garden, Florence would ask, 'How's your cat?' The fact was that once, months ago, I had asked Florence after my hated cat, the agile beast which I once shut up in a refrigerator because of its reproachful spitting; I have referred to the incident already. Of course Florence knew nothing about this refrigerator intermezzo, but she must have guessed at my inner conflict with this black cat (she was grey, her name was Little Grey, but at night outside my window she was black) and thought I ought to show her (the cat) more love. But it was Florence I loved and the cat was perfectly well aware of the fact. So was Florence, in all probability ... When Florence was not at home and I could not hear her singular voice, I used to go round the district from bar to bar looking for her. Once I actually found her.