I'm Not Stiller (43 page)

That roughly is what I shall say to Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy, so long as she—she at least!—does not take me for the missing Stiller, and the rest my counsel can settle to his own satisfaction, I shall no longer care about that.

***

In view of the imminent final hearing, my counsel was very brief. He informed me that his defence (in case I really didn't decide to make a confession beforehand) was fixed and settled, already typed out. Further, my counsel had also received a picture postcard (also the Place de la Concorde?) with the message that 'we' could expect her tomorrow or the next day.

All I did was nod.

***

If I could pray, I should have to pray that all hope of escaping from myself should be taken from me. My occasional attempts to pray come to grief through the very fact that I hope to be somehow transformed by praying, to escape from my powerlessness, and as soon as I find that this is not the case I lose all hope of being on the road. By the road, I mean in the last resort nothing but the hope of escaping from myself. This hope is my prison. I know that, but my knowledge does not burst my prison asunder, it merely shows me my prison, my powerlessness, my insignificance. I am not hopeless enough, or, as believers say, submissive enough. I can hear them say: Submit and you will be free, your prison will be burst asunder, as soon as you are willing to go out from it an insignificant and powerless man.

***

They want to drive me crazy, merely so that they can make a citizen of me and have everything in order; they shrink from nothing now. Since yesterday there is not a single person who has not shamelessly betrayed me, with the exception of my public prosecutor. It was a bitter day. I will record the facts:

1. The Morning.

Around ten I was called to the public prosecutor. After eleven I was still sitting in the antechamber along with Knobel, who also had no idea what was going on. Knobel was worried that he might be in for a reprimand—because of the cervelat he had slipped me, for instance—and I was disappointed by the way the good Knobel reacted to the mere thought of a reprimand; he was afraid of losing his job. Of course he didn't say so, but felt obliged to drop the cordial tone that was usual between us as we sat in this antechamber. Knobel read a newspaper, to create an impression of independence, with an expression of ill-humour, as though churlishness provided some sort of guarantee that one was not crawling to one's superior. In Germany they click their heels, in the East they rub their hands together, in Switzerland they light a cigar and strain after a pose of surly equality as though nothing could happen in this country to a man who behaved correctly. When a smart young lady came and said, 'The public prosecutor will see you now,' Knobel made no attempt to hurry: The public prosecutor is only human, we're all taxpayers! All the same, he forgot his pince-nez. Oddly enough (on purpose?) they left the doors open; without being able to see anyone, I heard the following conversation:

'I wasn't going to pay a fee for that!'

'By the way,' said the public prosecutor, 'don't be upset by the fact that the documents of the case are full of references to a hair-oil gangster. As you've seen for yourself, the phrase is put in inverted commas. It's an expression used by our prisoner—'

'So I suppose!'

'Everything else—'

'Hair-oil gangster!' said the indignant voice. 'I shall bring an action for slander, no matter what it costs. You can tell the prisoner so today.'

A short pause.

'Just one more question, Herr Direktor—'

'Certainly, Herr Staatsanwalt, anything you please.'

'Have you any contact with Jamaica?'

'How do you mean?'

'I'm not trying to find out about your business contacts,' said the public prosecutor. 'Don't misunderstand me, Herr Direktor. All I want to know is: when this Herr Stiller was doing the plaster head of you, did you ever talk about Jamaica?'

'It's possible—'

'Aha.'

'I have a house in Jamaica.'

'Aha.'

'Why?'

I heard the chair being pushed back.

'Once again, very many thanks, Herr Direktor,' said the public prosecutor. 'We are very relieved to see that you haven't been murdered.'

'Murdered?'

'The fact is, our prisoner maintains positively that several years ago he murdered you with his own hands.'

'Me?'

'In Jamaica—yes.'

Now it was Knobel's turn, he was introduced as the warder and asked to relate everything I had told him. He was obviously unsure of himself. His story of the murder was poor, muddled, and lacking in graphic quality.

'In the jungle!' laughed the company director. 'Did you ever hear of such a thing, Herr Staatsanwalt? In the jungle! I've never seen a jungle in Jamaica, these are freaks of fancy, Herr Staatsanwalt, believe me—'

'I believe you.'

'Freaks of fancy.'

Knobel seemed to have lost his nerve: he didn't dare describe the way the blood of the director, who was standing in front of him, mingled with the brown marsh water and how the black
zopilote
and the well-dressed vulture waited—just the things he should have told them now, when they asked him for more details. Instead, Knobel asked in return:

'Are you Herr Direktor Schmitz, then?'

'Answer my questions,' said the director. 'What does the prisoner claim to have murdered me with?'

'With an Indian dagger.'

'Oh.'

'Yes,' said Knobel, 'into the throat in front and then round to the left.'

'So.'

'Or else round to the right,' said Knobel, losing his grip again. 'I can't remember now.'

'Thank you.'

Then Knobel was told he could go. 'I'm sorry,' said Knobel; and as he went through the antechamber, cap in hand, his ears were lobster red; he didn't deign to glance at me ... I didn't hear how the director felt about this murder, because Knobel had tidily shut the door. Their conversation inside lasted another ten minutes. I was trying to read the newspaper my warder had left behind, a Social Democratic publication I should think, when suddenly the gentleman was standing in the doorway. He said: it's been a pleasure, Herr Staatsanwalt, to explain the true position to you personally. It's not a question of the money here, as I have said, I told him at the time that I was willing to pay half the agreed fee, the full half, I give you my word, but I wasn't going to be blackmailed, and if Herr Stiller wasn't satisfied he could have taken me to court, but he didn't care to, as you see. He had no money for litigationl They always say that, these psychopaths, and when I told him he could sue me for the money if he wanted to, he just called me a gangster. Now really, Herr Staatsanwalt, you wouldn't have put up with that either.'

The gentleman who then put on his overcoat in the antechamber was a thoroughly worthy citizen, but no more striking than any passer-by in the Bahnhofstrasse. Round his neck he wore a simple scarf of plain silk. He covered his bald head with an equally simple hat of plain felt, which when he caught sight of me, he did not raise; instead he clutched at his throat, as though adjusting the scarf. I nodded. I wonder why? He left with the words: 'We shall see one another in Court.' Then I had to go to the public prosecutor. 'There is a type of millionaire,' I said, 'you can't get at in a state where the rule of law prevails, so it's no wonder they keep on being resurrected—'

The smart young lady was quickly got rid of with a job, a letter to be delivered to the Hotel Urban. I thought at once: I wonder whether Julika is back from Paris? Meanwhile the public prosecutor, whom I had hitherto only seen as a guest on my prison bed, invited me to sit down. 'Yes,' he smiled, 'my dear chap—'

He was interrupted by the telephone. He turned a little to one side with the official telephone receiver, as was proper for an unofficial conversation, listened with his hand on his bunch of keys and gazing out of the window, for his part said only that he would not be home for lunch, an on-the-spot investigation he had in the afternoon, and rang off abruptly, obviously bothered by a question he didn't want to have to answer in my presence. Then he turned to me again, not without a trace of embarrassment.

'Sibylle sends her good wishes.'

'Thank you,' I said. 'How is she?'

'Thank you, he said, 'she's glad to be home again.'

Then—after the last smile had vanished from his face and a silence of unconcealed embarrassment had lasted long enough, a silence that seemed to imply it was now settled that I was the missing Stiller and therefore the former lover of his wife, who was now glad to be back home, and after he had put away his bunch of keys—he uttered his not very original remark:

'Life's a funny thing.'

I couldn't think of anything either.

'If it's all right with you, Stiller, let us have lunch together. We've got until two o'clock—I suggest,' he said as he stood up, 'that we drive a little way out into the country.'

***

2. Lunch.

A rather taciturn drive through fields and woods. Everything very autumnal. The sun was still just hot enough to sit out of doors, at least round midday. We sat in a rather quaint open-air restaurant which nevertheless had a wide and delightful view; above our heads there were vine leaves and in front of us a few straggling vines between which we looked out on the lake sparkling under a hazy light; everything was as though beneath a veil of blue smoke, including the brown ploughed fields and the woods with their dying leaves glowing. Here and there ladders still leaned against the trees and baskets stood down below. Wasps even came at our campari. The mountains towering up above the autumnal haze were as clear as glass and somehow unreal; their snow gleamed dazzling white from behind the spectral branches of leafless fruit trees, like a monstrance behind a black rood-screen. it's beautiful here,' I said, 'very beautiful.'

'Didn't you know this place?'

The food was excellent.

'What shall we drink?' asked my prosecutor and friend. 'They have a very good Maienfelder here, I believe.'

'That'll do fine,' I said, 'fine.'

I couldn't help looking again and again at the landscape, which fell away to the lake in a magnificently broad sweep. The autumn mist blotted out the pettiness of the housing development, which was neither town nor village; there remained the hills covered with trees, the gentle hollows filled with ploughed fields and bogs, a landscape that preoccupied me precisely because it did not in the least surprise me. I knew it. Did I love it?

'I've heard,' said my public prosecutor, 'that our friends were rather disappointed the other day. They found you cold.'

'Perhaps I am.'

'Why?'

I shrugged my shoulders. I felt about them as I did about this landscape, which in fact, like almost every landscape, is worthy of affection. It must be my fault ... Once more everything was there, the wasps in the bottle, the shadows on the gravel, the golden stillness of transience, everything as though spellbound, the cackling hens in the meadow, the brown and over-ripe pears littering the roadway, the asters leaning over an iron railing, their centres bloody stars that ran towards the edges, the bluish light under the trees. It was as though everything were bidding itself good-bye; the whispering foliage of a poplar, the metallic bloom on the fallen fruit, the smoke rising from the fields where they were burning weeds, the lake glittering behind a grille of vines. Soon the sun would be turning rusty in the haze of mid afternoon, the time of walking home without an overcoat, hands in trouser pockets, the damp leaves that no longer rusde, the farmsteads with their wine presses, the dripping barrels in the dusk, the red lanterns of a lakeside landing-place in the mist...

That is autumn here, and I can also see the spring. I see a rather young couple: they are tramping across country and the fields, sodden with melted snow, squelch under their feet, dark and soft like a wet sponge; the
Föhn
blows above their heads and the sun gives warmth; they pick their route entirely by the inviting accidents of the terrain and always at a comradely distance from one another; all around is the smell of scattered manure, springs gurgle and comb the grass of the sloping banks, and the leafless woods stand with patches of March sky between their trunks; two steaming brown farm-horses are pulling a plough over a gently sloping hillside; in black clods, the earth gapes hungrily after the light. A strange reunion after years apart! Young as they are, they are talking about the ages of man, and they already know that at every age, apart from childhood, time is rather horrifying; and yet every age is beautiful the less we deny or dream away what belongs to it, for death itself, which will one day be our lot, cannot be denied, or dreamed away, or postponed. How much the young man talks about the two conditions of his life, work and expiation, as he calls it; and work—that is the joy, the fever, the excitement, so that you cannot sleep for jubilation, a cry that rings out across hours and days, so that you feel like running away from yourself—that is work, the elation that wins people without wishing to, that puts no one under an obligation, ties no one and advances no one, that is not calculating and avaricious, but behaves like the angel who has no hands for taking; work is a grandiose fervour of the heart in which all human contacts are purely incidental, an extra, a cheerful squandering from excess of joy; later, of course, it always turns out to be the finest sort of contact that is possible between human beings, unattainable as soon as it becomes a goal, a need, an urgent objective. Again and again there comes this sudden outbreak of depression that does not develop because people stay away, on the contrary—people only stay away because depression is about to break out, they can scent weeks ahead, as a dog can scent an earthquake, that everything which has been built up will once more be reduced to rubble and smothered in ashes, smothered in melancholy like a flock of black birds flapping their wings over the scenes of past joy, the shadow of fear—that is the expiation, the after-pangs of doubt, the horror of uncreative solitude.

How the young man likes talking, and how beautiful the young woman finds it, nevertheless! The silver-edged clouds melt before the sun and little woods rise like islands out of a metallic glitter; they wander through a reedy marsh and as she jumps across a murmuring rill her shoe sticks in the clinging morass; the young woman balances like a tight-rope walker with one stockinged foot in the air, so that the young man has to hold her. They kiss for the first time. Behind the copses there are lakes of coolness with snow still lying in the shady patches between the red-barked willows. As they are leaving a wood they stand still, arm in arm; the lake lies before them again like a flashing scythe, and over the Alps froth the silent breakers of the clouds, a mass of luminous foam.