The Play of the Eyes, page 21
The imposing building halfway up Himmelstrasse had been planned as an academy of art but had never served that purpose. Construction had barely been completed when Delug died, and the struggle to keep the property intact devolved on his sister. Six large apartments, three in each wing, were laid out for rental purposes, but there were also outbuildings and modest basement rooms. The garden, which extended on three sides, was subdivided here and there by beautiful stairways and adorned with sculptures, which were meant to look like time-scarred antiquities. As to their value as works of art, opinions may have varied, but the garden as a whole, copied from an Italian model, was most attractive. As it was surrounded by vineyards, it did not seem out of place, and precisely because it was an imitation it had the charm of the artificial. From a small lateral terrace reached by way of weather-beaten, moss-covered steps, one had a view extending from the houses of Vienna over the seemingly endless Danube plain.
All in all a delightful place, but the most delightful thing about it was its situation halfway between the Grinzing terminus of the No. 38 streetcar and the woods farther up the hill. You could climb the second half of Himmelstrasse, past more modest villas, to Am Himmel, above Sievering, not far from which the woods began. Or if you weren’t in the mood for woods, you could take the relatively narrow road leading in a wide arc to Kobenzl; there again you had a wide view of the plain, but near at hand you could look across vineyards to the proud Academy building, where we had the good fortune to be living.
Diagonally across from the Academy, a little farther down on Himmelstrasse, lived Ernst Benedikt, who until recently had been owner and publisher of the Neue Freie Presse. I had long known of him as a character in Die Fackel, though I had heard more about his father, Moritz Benedikt, who was one of Die Fackel’s prime monsters. We had already moved into our new lodgings when I found out about this; it was too late to back down, but I can still feel the shudder that ran through me when Anna, who had come to look at the studio we had said so much about, showed me the Benedikt house. We were standing on the garden terrace; I wanted to show her the view of the plain, she had a liking for open space, but to my surprise she pointed at a house not far away and said: “That’s the Benedikts’ house.” She hadn’t been there very often. She didn’t take it very seriously. The power of the Neue Freie Presse had indeed been great, but that of Anna’s mother was now greater. She may have known that thanks to Die Fackel the name of Benedikt had taken on a diabolical quality over the years, but to her it meant nothing; nothing was more alien to her than satire, and it is certain that she never read a whole sentence, let alone a page, of Die Fackel. She said “the Benedikts’ house” as if the Benedikts were just anybody, and she was not a little astonished when in response to her harmless remark I showed every sign of horror and asked to know more about that ghoulish family.
“Is it really the Benedikts?” I asked more than once. “Right next door to us!”
“You don’t have to look at them,” she said.
I turned away in consternation and went back indoors. Anything rather than the view of that accursed house.
“He’s uninteresting,” said Anna. “He has four daughters and he plays the violin, not badly by the way. He has a mouth like a tadpole and a rather foolish way of speaking. He talks much too much. But no one listens. He’s always trying to show how well informed he is on every possible subject, but he’s just boring.”
“And he publishes the Neue Freie Presse?”
“No, he’s sold it. He has nothing to do with it anymore.”
“What does he do now?”
“He writes. About history. The publisher didn’t want any of his stuff. The readers said it was no good.”
I asked more questions, but to no purpose. I was only talking to hide my excitement, but it was too great to hide. I felt as a believer must have felt in olden times when he heard that a heretic was living next door, an abominable creature all contact with whom was to be dreaded, and a moment later he’s told that it’s not a heretic, or anything else that endangers the hope of salvation, but a harmless, rather foolish individual, whom no one takes seriously.
I was too upset about this neighbor to let the figure whom Karl Kraus had built up over the years be taken from me at once. But I kept asking questions because I didn’t want Anna to notice that this diabolical neighbor frightened me in some way. She noticed it, though, but she didn’t make fun of me, she never really made fun of anyone. She thought mockery unaesthetic as well as indiscreet, and after what she had been through with her mother she had a special horror of it. But she must have thought it unworthy of me to waste more than a passing thought on this neighbor, and she may also have been eager to calm me down and change the subject, for we usually found more interesting and important things to talk about.
I adjusted to the situation in my usual way. I cast an interdict on the Benedikt house and from then on I didn’t see it. I couldn’t have seen it anyway from the window of the room where I wrote and where I kept my books, which looked out on the front yard and on Himmelstrasse. The Benedikt house was farther down and its number was 55. It couldn’t be seen from any room in our apartment, not even from the unoccupied ones. To see the interdicted house you had to go out to the garden terrace, where I had taken Anna. I had taken her exclamation as a threat and from then on I stayed away from the terrace. Besides, it was rather out of the way and there were plenty of other things to show visitors in the large and varied garden. And when I went down to the village, usually to take the streetcar, I automatically turned my face to the left until No. 55 was behind me.
It was early September when we moved in and for a good four months, until well into the winter, this protection was adequate. At the back of my mind I had an exact picture of the Benedikt house. I knew the open veranda on the second floor, looking out on the street, the location of the windows, the type of roof, the steps leading to the front door. I don’t believe I had so accurate a mental image of any other house in the vicinity; though always a poor draftsman, I could have drawn a picture of it, but I never looked in that direction. I always looked toward the houses on the other side of the street. When and on what occasion I had formed my accurate picture of that house—before setting foot in it—will always be a mystery to me. I needed my image of it in order to cast an interdict on it.
I had told Veza about it during Anna’s visit, and she laughed at me for being so upset. She had been no less addicted to Die Fackel but only as long as she was sitting in the hall facing Karl Kraus, not a moment longer. After that, she read what she felt like reading, undeterred by his anathemas, she made the acquaintance of people, saw them through her own eyes, as though Karl Kraus had never said a word against them. In the present juncture she didn’t give a thought to our pestiferous neighbor, in fact she seemed pleased at the presence of four young girls, the Benedikt daughters. She was curious about them, as she would have been about any other young girls, made fun of me for being so upset, and asked if they were pretty—a question to which Anna could give no definite answer—and asked Anna which of them I was likely to fall in love with. Anna said she thought it unlikely that I would fall for any of them, they were silly little geese, you couldn’t even talk with them. They took after their amiable, rather simple mother, not their idiotic father. But Veza didn’t keep up her joking too long. Once she had established her independence, she made it clear that she would stand by me, and when I had pronounced my interdict on the house, she promised to help me and not to complicate matters for me with her girlish curiosity.
I myself wasted no thought on trying to figure out how these girls might look. Since they were born of the Neue Freie Presse, it went without saying that they were corrupt to the core.
* * *
On the way down Himmelstrasse to the village, I often saw the same people coming up at the same hour. I had an advantage over them, because they were slowed by the climb and I was moving faster than they were; they seemed to offer themselves to my inspection, while I hurried past them with a superior air. But sometimes a young girl coming up the hill passed me in great haste, and then I would slow down. Open light-colored coat, loose pitch-black hair, breathing heavily, dark eyes directed at a goal unknown to me, very young, perhaps seventeen. If her breathing hadn’t been so loud, she’d have been as beautiful as a dark fish. There was something Oriental in her features (but she was too tall and too heavily built for a Japanese girl of her age). She ran furiously, almost blindly; I hesitated, fearing that she would run into me, but one glance from her sufficed to avoid a collision. That glance, which could mean nothing but flight, escape, hit me hard. She radiated tempestuous life. She seemed so young that I would have been ashamed to look after her, so I never found out where she was running to, but she must have belonged in one of the houses farther up Himmelstrasse.
She only appeared at the noon hour, and I can’t imagine what she had to do in the village at that time of day. After a few encounters with the dark-haired girl’s intriguing haste, I found myself almost daily on the street. It never dawned on me that I was there on her account, though I was careful not to arrive at the corner of Strassergasse too soon, because that was where she came from and I would not be going that way. Thus I didn’t take a single step out of my way because of her, I wasn’t going out of my way for her, because I was going my way, it was her own passionate will that made her come running along; if I went this way almost every day at the same hour, it had nothing to do with her.
Her name? Any name would have disappointed me unless it had been Oriental. At that time I was seeing a good deal of Japanese color woodcuts. They fascinated me, as did the Kabuki theater, which I had seen during a week of guest performances at the Volksoper. I was especially fond of Sharaku’s woodcuts of Kabuki actors, because on seven successive evenings I had had occasion to appreciate the effectiveness of Kabuki plays. But in these plays the female roles were played by men, and I’m sure there was no one resembling my daily apparition in any of Sharaku’s woodcuts. But since the impetuousness that overwhelmed me in the girl rushing up the hill was common to them all, I now believe it was for the sake of this fascinating breathlessness that I made my way to the village at that particular time of day. It was then—about one o’clock—that the performance began, and I was its punctual audience. I was not tempted to look behind the scenes, I had no desire to find out anything, but I wouldn’t have missed that entrance, that one scene, for the world.
Winter was coming on, and as the weather grew colder, the scenes became more dramatic, for the girl literally steamed. Her coat was more open than ever, she seemed to be in even more of a hurry, her violent bursts of breath became clouds in the cold air. The air was colder, more steam escaped from her open mouth; as she passed close to me, I could hear her panting.
When her time approached, I stopped work, laid my pencil down, jumped up and left the apartment unobserved through a door that led directly from my room to the vestibule. I went down the broad stairway with the low steps, crossed the front yard, looked up at my windows on the second floor as if I were still up there, and then I was on the street. I was always in some fear that my Kabuki figure, my Oriental girl, might have passed, but she never had, I had time to avoid the sight of No. 55 by looking to the left in obedience to the interdict I had cast upon it. Then, invariably, between No. 55 and Strassergasse, the wild girl would come running toward me, giving off waves of excitement. I absorbed as much of it as I could; any more would have lasted me beyond the next day. I used to inquire about many of the people in the vicinity. About the hill climber I did not. Boisterous and outgoing as she seemed, to me she remained a mystery.
The Final Version
Veza and I had married while we were still living on Ferdinandstrasse, a year and a half before moving to Grinzing. I had kept our marriage secret from my mother in Paris; later she may have suspected the implications of the new Himmelstrasse address, but nothing was said. When my brother Georg, from whom it could not be kept a secret, found out, he, who knew my mother best, had kept it secret. She had finally heard about it along with the book, which came as a big surprise to her, and while she was talking about the book, talking in a conciliatory vein most unusual for her, she had glossed over our marriage as a nonessential part of the overall news picture. I began to hope that the worst between us was over, that she would now be ready to forget the years during which (to protect Veza and spare my mother) I had concealed from her the seriousness and permanence of my relationship with Veza.
In her high-handed way she had shown me recognition. The book, she said, was just as if she had written it, it could have been by her, I had made no mistake in wanting to write, I had done right to put everything else aside. What could chemistry mean to a writer? Bother chemistry; I had fought resolutely against it, shown my strength even in opposition to her. With this book I had justified my ambition. This was the kind of thing she wrote me, but then when I saw her in Paris and tried to defend myself against this new submissiveness, which I had never met with in her and found hard to bear, more and more followed.
Suddenly she started talking about my father and about his death, which had changed our whole existence. For the first time I learned what ever since then—more than twenty-three years had elapsed—she had concealed under frequently changing versions.
While taking the cure in Reichenhall, she had met a doctor who spoke her language, whose every word had its hard contours. She felt challenged to give answers and found within herself daring, unexpected drives. He introduced her to Strindberg, whose devoted reader she had been ever since, for he thought as ill of women as she did. To this doctor she confided that her ideal, her “saint,” was Coriolanus, and he had not found this odd, but admired her for it. He didn’t ask how she as a woman could choose such a model, but, moved by her pride and beauty, avowed his tender feelings for her. She adored listening to him, but she did not give in to his pleas. She allowed him to say what he wished, but she said nothing relating to him. He had no place in her conversation, she talked about the books he gave her to read and about the people whom he as a physician knew. She marveled at the things he said to her but made no concessions. He persisted in urging her to leave my father and to marry him. He was entranced by her German, she spoke German, he said, like no one else, the English language would never mean as much to her. Twice she asked my father to let her prolong her cure, which was doing her good, and he consented. She blossomed in Reichenhall, but she knew quite well what was doing her so much good: the doctor’s words. When she asked for a third extension, my father refused and insisted on her coming straight home.
She came. Not for a moment had she thought of giving in to the doctor. And not for a moment did she hesitate to tell my father everything. She was with him again, her triumph was his. She brought herself and what had happened to her and laid it—those were her very words—at my father’s feet. She repeated the doctor’s words of admiration and couldn’t understand my father’s mounting agitation. He wanted to know more and more, he wanted to know everything; when there was nothing more to know, he kept on asking. He wanted a confession and she had none to make. He didn’t believe her. How could the doctor have proposed marriage to a married woman with three children if nothing had happened? She saw nothing surprising because she knew how it had all developed from their conversations.
She regretted nothing, she retracted nothing, she told him over and over again how much good the doctor had done her; her health was restored, that’s what she had gone there for, and she was glad to be home again. But my father asked her strange questions:
“Did he examine you?”
“But he was my doctor!”
“Did he talk German to you?”
“Of course. What would you have him speak?”
He asked if the doctor knew French. She said she thought so, they had talked about French books. Why hadn’t they spoken French together? This question of my father’s she had never understood. What could have given him the idea that a doctor in Reichenhall should speak any other language than German to her, whose language was German?
I was amazed at her failure to realize what she had done. Her infidelity had consisted in speaking German, the intimate language between her and my father, with a man who was courting her. All the important events of their love life, their engagement, their marriage, their liberation from my grandfather’s tyranny, had taken place in German. Possibly she had lost sight of this because in Manchester her husband had taken so much trouble to learn English. But he was well aware that she had reverted passionately to German, and he had no doubt of what this must have led to. He refused to speak to her until she confessed; for a whole night he kept silent and again in the morning he maintained his silence, convinced that she had been unfaithful to him.
I hadn’t the heart to tell her that she was guilty in spite of her innocence, because she had listened to words she should never have allowed, spoken in this language. She had carried on these conversations for weeks and, as she owned to me, she had even concealed one detail—Coriolanus—from my father.
