Bad Characters Page 22

  Rössler had never come to the Haarlass. I knew that I had frightened him away from me when we had gone that first afternoon to the Cafe Sö, but still I did not know why. Twice I had terribly disrupted his stagy calm, once when I asked him where he was to be stationed after his three-months’ leave was over and again when invasively I told him I had seen him look at himself in the mirror in Persis Galt’s drawing room that morning. He did not answer my question and he chose to ignore my other tactlessness by calling for the check.

  On the train from Paris I had made no bones to myself about my intention to have a love affair in Heidelberg, and I was not in the least ashamed that the images of my daydreams were largely derived from scenes in The Student Prince. I did not mean to love. I meant to be “in love” and to be sorry when it was all over; but because I was a levelheaded girl (my rebellion against Daddy was little more than a convention) I did not wish to be a spendthrift: I expected some time to marry. But my plans had gone amiss, for I was in love with Max Rössler and I loved him. I had neither eyes nor ears for any of the German or American youths from the university with whom I drank beer and danced occasionally, who were accessible, who would gladly have helped me carry out my lighthearted project. Daily I expected Max to come to the Haarlass and daily I waited, watching the road from Heidelberg as I sat on a rock on the hillside behind the inn. In my disappointment I gazed through tears that did not fall at the fields where the Benedictines were swinging scythes or sowing the winter wheat. From the paths in the hills behind me I heard fagot gatherers greeting one another and heard the Hitler Jugend singing on their way home from a hike. Sometimes I waited until the light began to fade, the red softening to the smoky flush of a peach which was then overtaken, at evensong, by a green light that lay over the monks’ paradisus. And then when all the light and all my hope were gone, I would return forlornly to the cafe and if I found no one there I knew, I would play a game of solitaire. I did not understand his delay; the days of his furlough were going fast.

  It was delay rather than neglect, I thought, for he was not unconscious of me. I could tell that by the way he sometimes looked at me when I cut the cards for his deal, or implied a toast to me as he lifted his glass. Now and again at the end of an evening he saw Mellie Anderson and me into a cab. Dissatisfied, I looked at him standing there on the steps of the hotel, his carnation as white as his starched shirt, and said to myself that I might as well give up, that anyhow he was not worth it, that he looked like the sort who would come a dime a dozen on the Riviera.

  One night late in October as we all left the Europaischer Hof Persis observed that the night was much too fine for a cab and she suggested that Max and Mellie and I walk home with her to the Neueschloss Strasse and come back then to the town for a cab to the Haarlass. Mellie, as she often did, pleaded a headache and disappeared, making a beeline for the Roter Ochsen where she would spend the rest of the evening wrangling with August Galt and his Nazi friends who refused, laughing like peasants, to believe that she had been a member of the Young Communist League.

  It was a bewitched night, balmy, misty, muting. As we stood chatting a moment before the door of the Galts’ house I looked up at the castle, dematerialized by the river mist, and felt stopped dead by the timelessness not only of Heidelberg but also of this false and enigmatic man, the deathless archetype that figured in the dreams of all masochistic schoolgirls. Tonight he was dressed as a man of action, the lieutenant in uniform, and when, after seeing Persis into her vestibule, he proposed that we walk up to the castle I agreed too readily and gaspingly, sounding like Persis or like Mellie’s parody of Persis, “Oh, an absolutely heavenly idea!” We climbed the steep street in silence; in the stubbornness of his ideals, Max bent his head downward as if I were three inches shorter than I was.

  He asked me if I liked Heidelberg by now and I replied that I did; we brutally ridiculed the Countess; we talked about the weather. When we passed Charlemagne’s dry fountain just inside the castle gate it occurred to me that there were probably ghosts here; I earnestly wanted there to be for I wanted an emotion, and terror would be better than none. And all the same in direct denial of my wants and of my intentions, I said, “I can’t stay long. I have a lecture in the morning at nine.”

  “So?” Was he bored or was he a bore? Both, I concluded, and I agreed now with Mellie, who said he was depthless and stupid.

  We stood on the parapet of Ottosthur looking down on the roof tops dimmed by the mist and I found the Haarlass, its veranda cafe a blurred scar of lights. Rössler said, “Schenck will be marking the Americans’ beer coasters double.” It was true; the head waiter was a thief and a panhandler.

  “I thought you often came to the Haarlass,” I said.

  “I do. I was there last night.”

  I was quite beside myself, as if I had an intolerable pain but could not describe it to the doctor. I did not know whether to be angry that he had come to my pension and had not told me (last night I had spent the evening in my room writing to Daddy and translating my Beowulf) or to be frenzied with the suspicion that he had been there with a girl, or to be insulted that he had so casually told me he had been there at all.

  I finally said, “It is often rather fun in the veranda.”

  He made no reply. He did not speak and he did not look at me; I found him unforgivable. I wondered whether his privacy came from shrewdness or if there was not something else besides, an old confusion or uncertainty. His retirement was not always the same kind and now, standing beside me on the parapet, staring down like a general from a reviewing stand, he withdrew almost perceptibly into some private speculation; he would not have noticed if I had walked away. Embarrassed by our silence, even though he had dictated it, I snatched at straws and caught the memory of having read somewhere of an English princess named Elizabeth who had married into the Palatinate and had spent her entire life here in homesickness. She had had her gardeners plant daphne and hedges of yew to make her think of England.

  I said, “Tell me, do you know anything about the English princess, Elizabeth, who took being here so hard?”

  Instead of answering, he repeated the name Elizabeth with a loving prolongation of the vowels and in a voice of the greatest tenderness. I had taken off my gloves and had laid my hands flat on the chilled stones. He said the name again with as much affectionate direction as if it belonged to me and he embraced me, not suddenly but with so sure an art that it was not until he was about to kiss me that I found my voice, crying out one of those commonplaces that spring to the lips of a girl taken by surprise. My gloves fell to the paving. Max dropped his hands. Indeed, I had been so surprised that I had not realized until I saw the patience of his smile that the whole sequence of these trivial events was based on the coldest cynicism. For he had not thought of conquest any more than now he thought of defeat. He was neither bewildered nor disappointed, neither humiliated nor angry. He restored my fallen gloves—I fancied that he clicked his heels as he handed them to me—and as if this hiatus had not come he said, “I have no information about the English princess at all. I suggest you try a history of the Heidelbergerschloss.”

  I put on my gloves and turned to go. “Wait a minute, Fanny,” he said. A sixth sense prompted me to move a little farther down the parapet. But he stood absolutely still, wearing a look of grief for which I had no preparation. “Listen,” he said, “have you any idea how much I hate Persis Galt?”

  “Hate her? Why hate her? She’s only a goose.”

  “She is also my mistress,” he said. “She has been for five years. For four of them I have hated her.”

  I was smashed. I put my gloved hands to my cheeks and stretched the skin tight over the bones. Max sat down on the floor of the balcony and leaned his back against the breastwork. This was so out of character, it was a gesture so unmilitary, so pitiful and weak that I could not hold back my tears for him and for myself, but I made no sound and I listened to his stale, sad tale.

  At eighteen, five years ago, he
had studied under Herr Professor Galt and several times had been to the house on Neueschloss Strasse where he had been charmed by Persis in her medieval costumes, surrounded by her monks and her priests and bishops from Munich and Berlin. She had had an altogether different style in those days, as bogus as her present one but far less foolish. She had seemed the soul of sympathy and of serenity; Rössler, together with half a dozen other students, was in love with her. He sent her flowers with no card, “certain, of course, that she would know who had sent them. I thought so incessantly of her that it seemed impossible for her not to know.” He lurked in the doorways of houses and shops next to those he had seen her enter, but he had not the courage to speak to her when she came out. “Anyhow, she would not have recognized me. Even then she and Galt made a point of not knowing each other’s friends. I was only one of many supernumeraries who could be told to ring for Erika for more hot water on one of her days.” Then one night he had gone to the Europaischer Hof with Liselotte Schmetzer because her husband was ill and she needed a partner and there, to his astonishment, was Persis Galt in a role he had never dreamed. Earlier he had thought of her as unapproachable; it was her piety and her inviolable position as the wife of his professor that had appealed to his romantic nature and he had never had any intention of making an actual overture to her: the hopelessness of his case was the poetry of it. He had known, he thought, exactly how Dante felt when he watched Beatrice at her prayers. But at the Europaischer Hof, he had discovered that she was an accomplished flirt, less shy than the commonest slut on Semmelstrasse. They had left early when she said she felt faint and could not drive herself home, and they went to his rooms straight off.

  For the first year Max was unable to see, because he was too enraptured, any discrepancy between Frau Galt’s life of devotion and her transgression of the Sixth Commandment. But through growing a year older and through taking Persis for granted as his personal property—of which he began to tire; she was voracious of his time—he saw what she had done, what he had done, what they had done together, and from that time forward the principle of his nature was self-disgust. But he had continued with the affair because he was so deeply enmeshed in it; she had made him grow old too fast; he lived in a kind of connubial sluggishness, convincing himself that by not breaking off he was punishing her in her own terms. He had concluded that she had taken a lover to make up for a lack of talent, a lack of talent which she had deceived herself into thinking was a talent for writing poetry or painting water colors or marrying a Bostonian but was really a lack of talent for being good. In the absence of goodness, she had to have power, and who could be better controlled than an eighteen-year-old weakling? “Because I am a weakling,” he said urgently as if I must believe in the justification for his self-excoriation. “In every way I am the worst possible coward. I am afraid of the sky so I am an aviator; I am afraid of the sight of blood so I am a soldier. I cancel out a phobia with a mania. I am afraid of Persis so I go on with her, on and on and on—”

  “You could leave her,” I said. “You don’t depend on her for money the way her family does. She can’t get your parents to punish you for what she knows about you.”

  “Let me tell you something, Fanny. Sooner or later everyone who crosses that threshold gets blackmailed unless they’re too disabled, in one way or another, for her to bother with.”

  “What’s her hold over you?” I said with terrible spontaneous anxiety.

  “It doesn’t matter. She has one but it doesn’t matter. Let’s go down to the Roter Ochsen.”

  At the foot of the stone steps that took us down the castle hill into the Kornmarkt, Max took my face in his hands, “What are you crying for, for God’s sake?” he said unkindly. “Didn’t you ever hear of adultery before?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about you.”

  “You were thinking about me. You’ve thought about me from the beginning. You’d better not, Fanny, I’m a swindler from being swindled. I am sick, I must die, may the Lord have mercy on my soul.”

  Under the cold searchlight of his eyes I felt like a frangible object that he could take apart or could break or could sell or could take home with him to be used for something or other, altered perhaps, to go with the furniture of his rooms. He took the will out of me as neatly as if he had removed the stone from an apricot, and I received his plausible caresses as gratefully, as obsessively, as if I received the man himself. “I’ve warned you,” he said.

  5

  It was an intolerable love affair, raddled and strangled with our knowledge of its end. If I had a lecture we met at the Stadtgarten in the town where Persis never went; hurrying from the university, I thought only of the small round table at which I would meet him, and it was as if this meeting were the aspiration toward which my whole existence bent and which receded from me to an incommensurable distance once I had recognized it: I ran in dreadful fear that he would not be there.

  Often he went away from Heidelberg for a few days at a time, never saying where nor for what reason or whether he would ever come back, and at these times I went to confession at the monastery, where I chattered like a goose through the wicket to an ancient monk who did not listen because I spoke in English. Hearing the sandaled feet of the friars on the stone stairs somewhere above, I hysterically reiterated Deus te amo to myself as if this were a charm to dispel the effluvium of my own grave. Once after this I went across the river in the ferry and climbed the castle hill, and while I stood debating with my soul in the English garden, I allowed my blue rosary to fall from my hand. Some child would find it, although as it slipped from my fingers, its gilt gauds glittering, I wished it would not be found except by the feet of a salamander running across a lichened rock.

  Almost immediately Max and I had become inseparable, forcing ourselves through our obsessiveness to ignore all the admonitions we heard and saw. Often I was naïve enough to think it was unsafe only because he was an aviator and there might be a war, but most of the time I knew better than that, I knew that it would have ended with a smash at any time and for any woman. There was no pleasure in it, I suffered perpetually, it was monstrous to live through, but I could not have escaped it, not possibly. We were restive, continually seeking diversion, hiding continually from Persis. We went walking for hours through the blue mist of the forests or we took the tram to Neckar-Gemünd and went on from there into the hills. We sought out shabby Bierstuben in Handschusheim. On Persis Galt’s days at home and on bridge nights at the Europaischer Hof we were wild with impatience and frantic with deceit but we stayed until the end. Moving, or when we were surrounded by others, our stubborn hope stayed alive until Max’s misery suddenly rose between us and nothing was any more of any use. There was something in him, some prehistoric wound, that made me walk within this love (but it was not love; it was another thing, I don’t know what) on tiptoe, thinking only of the split second next to come. I dared not disturb the sleeper whom I often saw in his large, cold eyes, for I did not know his identity although I sometimes thought I almost knew.

  The week in Naples had been almost like a week any other two lovers might have spent together and once, as we drank rank Italian beer at a quayside bar, he even asked me to marry him, but the quixotic idéa could not be entertained even in fun and he laughed in his thorough and bitter knowledge of himself—his knowledge, not mine, for he would not share it with me. This had been the last week of his leave and he got off the train at Karlsruhe, where he was to be on maneuvers.

  The day I got back August Galt and Mellie Anderson and I walked up to Ziegelhausen. On the way August told us he had a bad hang-over acquired the night before at a farewell party for two aviators who were leaving for maneuvers. He was burdened with photographic gear and he asked us, when we got to the village, to pose for a picture. His reason had behind it a lengthy and fuzzy logic; he had no photograph of the aviators, Rüdiger and Barth, but he would remember whenever he looked at our picture why we had been in Ziegelhausen on that particular day. “Why should you
care,” Mellie asked him, “if they’re only going on maneuvers?” He pretended not to hear her, for she was suggesting that perhaps they were on their way to the war in Spain. Just as August snapped the shutter the town crier wheeled slowly by on his bicycle. As if it were a lamentation, this archaic man with his silver bell intoned the announcement that cards for the potato ration would be issued on the next day. Mellie and I, breaking our pose, turned to each other in astonishment. The butter ration, inaugurated a month or so before with fanfare and a slogan, had not seemed extraordinary—but potatoes—that sine qua non of every German table!

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said August as if he had only now heard Mellie. “How many times do I have to tell you that Franco is in this thing alone? Are you deaf?”

  At this time Persis Galt was blessedly preoccupied with a new project. She was gathering about herself a group who were to prepare themselves for becoming Benedictine oblates, the idea having come to her when Mellie’s mother wrote that she was becoming one. Once every two weeks she summoned them all to dine with her at the Europaischer Hof and after the consommé and the pheasant, the artichokes, the Nesselrode and the Mosel and the brandy, they all recited compline. Mellie and I were obliged to attend these dinner parties because Persis, busy as she was, never forgot that she was our proprietor and gave us to understand that she and our parents were in close, indeed it might be said, in quotidian correspondence. She took us to the high mass at Stift Neuburg where none of us received; she brought us books of sermons and lives of saints and meditations, mawkish verses by ungifted nuns; and she behaved, in general, as if the house were on fire and there was no time to waste. At the same time Daddy was writing me endless letters of instruction and questions. He told me that he planned to come to Heidelberg in January; he expected me to come to Paris at Christmas.