The Tongue Set Free, page 23
“Of course there were. Otherwise Switzerland wouldn’t exist today. Do you think they would have sworn their oath? It was here, right here, and this fragrance gave them the strength for the oath. Do you believe there were no other peasants who were ever oppressed by their masters? Why Switzerland of all places? Why these inner cantons? Switzerland was born on Rütli Meadow, and now I know where they got their courage.” For the first time, she exposed her doubts about Schiller; she had always spared me so that I wouldn’t get confused. The fragrance made her throw her qualms overboard, and she confided something that had long been troubling her: Schiller’s rotten apples. “I think he was different when he wrote The Brigands, he didn’t need any rotten apples then.”
“What about Don Carlos? And Wallenstein?”
“Yes, yes,” she said, “it’s good that you know it. You’ll find out soon enough that there are writers who borrow their life. Others have it, like Shakespeare.”
I was so indignant at her betrayal of our Vienna evenings, when we had read both of them, Shakespeare and Schiller, that I rather disrespectfully said: “I think you’re drunk from the cyclamens. That’s why you’re saying things that you usually don’t believe.”
She let it go at that, she may have felt that I was partly right, she liked me to draw my own conclusions and not let myself be caught unawares. I also kept a clear head in regard to the hotel life and was never taken in at all by the fine guests, even those who really were fine.
We stayed in the Grand Hotel; one ought to live in a suitable style now and again, at least during holidays, she said. Nor was it all that bad, she went on, getting used to changing circumstances early enough. After all, at school, I had highly diverse classmates. That’s why I liked being there, she said. She hoped I didn’t like it because I learned more easily than the others.
“But that’s what you want! You’d despise me if I were bad at school!”
“That’s not what I mean. I’m not even thinking of that. But you like talking to me and you wouldn’t like to bore me, and so you have to know a lot. I can’t talk to a numbskull after all. I have to take you seriously.”
I realized that. But I still didn’t really grasp the connection with life in a posh hotel. I fully understood that it was linked to her background, to what she called “a good family.” There were bad people in her family, more than one, she often spoke about them quite openly to me. In my presence, her cousin and brother-in-law had yelled at her, calling her a “thief” and accusing her in the lowest way. Wasn’t he from the same family? And what was good about that? He wanted more money than he already had, that was how she had finally explained it. Whenever she talked about her “good family,” I came up against a wall. On this topic, she was absolutely narrow-minded, unshakable, and inaccessible to any argument. At times, I felt such despair about it that I grabbed her violently and shouted: “You are you! You’re a lot more than any family!”
“And you’re impudent. You’re hurting me. Let go!” I let go, but first I added: “You’re more than anybody else in the world! I know you are! I know you are!”
“Some day, you’ll talk differently. I won’t remind you of this.”
But I can’t say that I felt unhappy in the Grand Hotel, so much was going on. We got into conversations, though gradually, with people who were well traveled. When we were in Seelisberg, an old gentleman told us about Siberia; and a few days later, we met a married couple who had navigated the Amazon. The following summer, in Kandersteg, where naturally we stayed in a grand hotel again, a very taciturn Englishman named Mr. Newton sat at the next table and kept reading the same India-paper book. Mother didn’t rest until she found out it was a volume of Dickens, David Copperfield of all things. My heart went out to Mr. Newton, but that made no impact on him. He held his peace for another few weeks, then he took me and two other children of my age on an excursion. We hiked for six hours, but he never emitted more than a syllable—now and then. Upon returning us to our respective parents in the hotel, he observed that this landscape of the Bern highlands couldn’t be compared to Tibet. I gaped at him as though he were Sven Hedin in person, but that was all I ever got out of him.
Here in Kandersteg, Mother had an outburst, which, more than her states of feebleness, more than all our deliberations in Zurich, proved what sinister things were going on inside her. A family from Milan arrived in the hotel: the wife a lovely and opulent lady of Italian society, the husband a Swiss industrialist, who had been living in Milan for a long time. They had their very own painter in tow, Micheletti—“a famous painter,” who could paint only for the family and was always watched by them: a small man who acted as though he wore physical shackles, in bondage to the industrialist for his money, to the woman for her beauty. He admired Mother and, one evening, as they left the dining room, he paid her a compliment. He didn’t dare, of course, tell her that he wanted to paint her portrait, but she was certain he wanted to and she said, as we rode the elevator up to our floor: “He’s going to paint me! I’m going to be immortal!” Then she paced up and down her hotel room and kept repeating: “He’s going to paint me! I’m going to be immortal!” She couldn’t calm down; for a long time (the “children” were already in bed) I remained up with her, she was incapable of sitting, she kept walking back and forth as on a stage, declaiming and singing and not really saying anything, but merely repeating in every possible key: “I’m going to be immortal!”
I tried to calm her down; her excitement surprised and frightened me. “But he didn’t say he wanted to paint you!”
“His eyes told me, his eyes, his eyes! He couldn’t actually articulate it, the woman was standing right next to us, how could he have said so! They watch him, he’s their slave, he’s sold himself to them, he’s sold himself to them for an annuity, everything he paints belongs to them, they force him to paint what they want. Such a great artist and so weak! But he wants to paint me! He’ll find the courage and tell them! He’ll threaten never to paint again! He’ll force the issue. He’ll paint me and I’m going to be immortal!” Then it resumed, the last sentence as a litany. I was ashamed for her and found it wretched, and when my initial terror was past, I grew angry and attacked her in every way, merely to sober her. She never used to speak about painting, it was the one art that barely interested her and that she didn’t understand. So it was all the more shameful to see how important it had suddenly become for her. “But you’ve never seen a single painting by him! Maybe you wouldn’t like what he does. Why, you’ve never even heard his name before. How do you know he’s so famous?”
“They said so themselves, his slavekeepers, they didn’t shrink from saying so: a famous portraitist from Milan, and they’ve got him imprisoned! He always keeps looking at me. He looks over at me from their table. He’s a painter, it’s a higher power, I’ve inspired him and he has to paint me!”
She was looked at by so many people, and never in a cheap or insolent way. It couldn’t mean anything to her for she never spoke about it, I assumed she didn’t notice; she was always absorbed in some thoughts or other. I did notice the stares, I never missed a single one, and perhaps it was jealousy and not just respect that kept me from ever saying a word about it to her. But now she made up for the past in a dreadful way; I was ashamed for her, not because she wanted to be immortal—I understood that, although I had never guessed how intense, nay, how powerful that desire was in her—but the fact that she wanted to place the fulfillment of that desire in the hands of another person, and one who had sold himself to boot, a man whom she herself regarded as an ignoble slave. The fact that it hinged on the cowardice of this creature and on the whim of his masters, the rich family from Milan, who kept him like a dog on a leash and whistled for him in front of everyone when he got into a conversation with anyone else: I found that horrifying, I saw it as a humiliation of my mother, a humiliation that I couldn’t stand; and in my anger, which she kept stoking, I smashed her hope by ruthlessly demonstrating that he paid compliments to every woman he happened to be near when leaving the dining room, and they were always brief compliments, until his masters grabbed his arm and pulled him away.
But she didn’t give in right away; she fought like a lioness for her compliment from Micheletti, refuting what I had just demonstrated, throwing up at me every stare he had ever granted her, she had missed none and forgotten none; in the few days since the arrival of the Milanese, she had, as it turned out, registered nothing else. She had lain in wait for his compliments, making sure that she reached the exit from the dining room at the same time as he, and, though loathing his owner, the lovely society woman, like poison, she admitted that she understood the woman’s motives, she herself would love to be painted by him as often as possible, and he, a somewhat frivolous man, who knew his own character, had entered this slavery willingly, she said, so as not to degenerate, and for the sake of his art, which was more important to him than anything else in the world, and he had done right in doing so. It had been absolutely wise of him, what did people like us know anyway about the temptations of a genius, and all we could do in such a case was to step aside and wait quietly to see whether we appealed to him and might contribute anything to his development. In any case, she was quite positive, she said, that he wanted to paint her and make her immortal.
Since Vienna, since Herr Professor’s visits to tea, I had never felt such hatred for her. Yet it had come so suddenly; it had taken only a remark by the Swiss industrialist from Milan to a group of hotel guests about little Micheletti on the evening of their arrival. The Swiss had pointed to his white spats, shaken his head, and said: “I don’t know why people are making such a fuss over him. Everybody in Milan wants him to paint them, he doesn’t have more than two hands, eh?”
Mother may have felt something of my hatred; she had experienced my loathing in Vienna for several bad weeks, and in spite of her delusion at this point, she felt my antagonism first as disturbing and then as dangerous. She obstinately insisted on the portrait, which she had to believe in; even when I sensed that her strength was waning, she kept repeating the same words. But all at once, pacing through the room, she ominously halted before me and said sarcastically: “You’re not envious of me, are you? Should I tell him he can only paint the two of us together? Are you in such a big hurry? Wouldn’t you rather earn it on your own?”
This accusation was so low and so wrong that I couldn’t retort. It lamed my tongue but not my brain. Since she had finally looked at me amidst her sentences, she could read their effect in my face, she collapsed and broke into vehement laments: “You think I’m crazy. You have your whole life ahead of you. My life is over. Are you an old man that you don’t understand me? Has your Grandfather gotten into you? He’s always hated me. But not your father, not your father. If he were alive, he would protect me from you now.”
She was so exhausted that she burst into tears. I hugged and caressed her, and felt so sorry for her that I granted her the portrait she yearned for. “It will be very beautiful. You have to be alone on it. You all alone. Everyone will admire it. I’ll tell him he has to make you a present of it. But it would be better if it got into a museum.” This suggestion pleased her, and she gradually calmed down. But she felt very weak; I helped her into bed. Her head lay weary and drained on the pillow. She said: “Today I’m the child and you’re the mother,” and she fell asleep.
The next day, she nervously avoided Micheletti’s eyes. Worried, I observed her. Her enthusiasm had vanished, she expected nothing. The painter paid compliments to other women and was dragged off by his keepers. She didn’t notice. After a few days, the Milanese group left the hotel; the woman was dissatisfied with something. When they were gone, Herr Loosli, the hotelier, came to our table and told Mother that he didn’t like such guests. The painter wasn’t all that famous, Herr Loosli had made inquiries. The couple had obviously been looking for commissions for him. The hotelier said he kept a decent house and this wasn’t the right place for adventurers. Mr. Newton, at the next table, glanced up from his India-paper book, nodded, and swallowed a sentence. That was a lot from him and was taken by Herr Loosli and ourselves as disapproval. Mother said to Herr Loosli: “He did not act properly.” The hotelier continued his round, apologizing to the other guests. Everyone seemed relieved that the Milanese were gone.
Part Five
Zurich—Tiefenbrunnen
1919–1921
The Nice Old Maids of the Yalta Villa Dr. Wedekind
I didn’t know the origin of the name Yalta, but it sounded familiar because there was something Turkish about it. The house was out in Tiefenbrunnen, very near the lake, separated from it only by a road and a railway line; the house stood, slightly elevated, in a garden filled with trees. You reached the left side of the villa after a brief ride up; a high poplar stood at each of its four corners, so close that the trees looked as if they were carrying the house. They mellowed the heaviness of the burly structure, they were visible from rather far away, on the lake, and they marked the location of the house.
The front garden was shielded from the road by ivy and evergreen trees; there were enough places to hide in. A mighty yew tree stood closer to the house, with broad branches, as though meant to be climbed; you were up the tree in no time.
Behind the house, a few stone steps led up to an old tennis court; it was no longer maintained, the ground was uneven and rough, it was suitable for anything but tennis playing and served for all public activities. An apple tree next to the stone steps was a miracle of fruitfulness; when I moved in, it was so overladen with apples that it had to be multiply supported. If you ran up the steps, apples plopped on the ground. To the left, a small adjacent house with a trellis-covered wall was rented to a cellist and his wife; you could hear him practicing from the tennis court.
The real orchard only began in back of the court. It was plentiful and bounteous, but next to the one apple tree, which always stuck in your eye because of its location, the orchard didn’t actually stand out.
From the driveway you entered the house through a huge hall, sober as a cleared-out schoolroom. At a long table, there were usually a few young girls sitting over homework and letters. The Yalta Villa had been a girls’ boarding school for years. A short time ago, it had been turned into a boarding house; the inhabitants were still young girls from every country on earth, but they were no longer taught in the house. They attended outside institutions, but ate together and were watched over by the ladies.
The long dining room on the lower floor, which always smelled fusty, was no less bare than the hall. I slept in a tiny garret on the third floor; it was narrow and meagerly furnished. Through the trees of the garden I could glimpse the lake.
Tiefenbrunnen’s railroad depot was nearby; from Seefeldstrasse, where the house was located, a footbridge led over the tracks to the depot. At certain times of the year, the sun was just rising when I stood on the footbridge; even though I was late and in a hurry, I never failed to halt and pay tribute to the sun. Then I raced down the wooden steps to the depot, leapt into the train, and rode one station through the tunnel, to Stadelhofen. On Rämistrasse, I ran up to the canton school, but kept stopping wherever there was something to see, and I always came late to school.
I went home on foot, along Zollikerstrasse, which lay higher; I usually walked with a schoolmate who also lived in Tiefenbrunnen. We were absorbed in weighty conversations; I was sorry when we arrived and had to part company. I never spoke to him about the women and young girls I lived with, I was afraid he might despise me for so much femininity.
Trudi Gladosch, the Brazilian girl, had been living at the Yalta for six years; she was a pianist and attended the conservatory and she was a fixture in the house. It was hard to enter without hearing her practice. Her room was upstairs and she practiced at least six hours a day, often longer. You got so used to it that you missed the sound when it stopped. In wintertime, she was always wrapped in several sweaters, for she was terribly cold. She suffered from the climate, never growing accustomed to it. There was no vacation for her ever; Rio de Janiero, where her parents lived, was too far away, she hadn’t been home in six years. She missed it, but only because of the sun. She never spoke about her parents, mentioning them at most when a letter came from home, and that was seldom the case, once or twice a year. The name Gladosch was Czech, her father had migrated from Bohemia to Brazil not all that long ago; she herself had been born in Brazil. Her voice was high, somewhat croaking; we liked to talk, there was nothing we didn’t talk about. She had a way of getting excited that charmed me. We shared many noble opinions, we were of one and the same mind in scorning all venality; but I insisted I knew more than Trudi though she was five years my senior, and when she, coming from a savage land, as it were, championed the cause of the feelings against knowledge and I defended the necessity of knowledge too, which she regarded as harmful and corruptive, we were invariably at daggers drawn. This led to out-and-out fisticuffs; I tried to force her down with my hands, whereby I stretched out my arms to keep her from getting too close, for, especially during our arguments, she emitted a powerful smell, which I couldn’t bear. She may not even have known how horribly she smelled, and the unphysical manner of our fighting was something she may have explained with my timidity about her being older. In the summer, she wore what she called her merida dress, a white, shirtlike creation with a round neckline; when she bent over, you could see her breasts, which I noticed, but which meant nothing to me, and it was only when I spotted a gigantic furuncle on her breast one day that I suddenly felt something like an ardent pity for her, as though she were a leper and an outcast. She was an outcast, for her family hadn’t paid her board for years and kept putting Fräulein Mina off till the following year. Trudi felt she was living on a sort of charity, and for this reason she had an especially intimate relation with Caesar, the old St. Bernard, who usually just slept and smelled bad. I soon realized, with some embarrassment, that Trudi and Caesar smelled alike.
