by Thomas Mann
Must I say now, or repeat, that with all this correctness things were by no means correct, that they rested on self-will, not to say on a lie, and were not only more and more challenged from without, but for the sharper eye, the eye sharpened by sympathy, were crumbling within, they gave no happiness, neither were they truly believed in or willed? All this good fortune and good taste always seemed to me a conscious denial and whitewashing of the problem. It was in strange contradiction to Inez’s cult of suffering, and in my opinion the woman was too shrewd not to see that the ideal little bourgeois brood which she had wilfully made of her children was the expression and over-all correction of the fact that she did not love them, but saw in them the fruits of a connection she had entered into with a bad conscience as a woman and in which she lived with physical repulsion.
Good God, it was certainly no intoxicating bliss for a woman to go to bed with Helmut Institoris! So much I understand of feminine dreams and demands; and I always had to imagine that Inez had merely tolerated receiving her children from him, out of a sense of duty and so to speak with her head turned away. For they were his, the looks of all three left no doubt of that, the likeness with him being much stronger than that with the mother, possibly because her psychological participation when she conceived them had been so slight. And I would in no way impugn the masculine honour of the little man. He was certainly a whole man, even in a manikin edition, and through him Inez learned desire—a hapless desire, a shallow soil whereon her passion was to spring up and grow rank.
I have said that Institoris, when he began to woo the maiden Inez, had actually done so for another. And so it was now too: as a husband he was only the awakener of errant longings, of a half-experience of joy at bottom only frustrating, which demanded fulfilment, confirmation, satisfaction, and made the pain she suffered on Rudi Schwerdtfeger’s account, which she had so strangely revealed to me, flare up into passion. It is quite clear: when she was the object of courtship she began distressfully to think of him; as disillusioned wife she fell in love with him, in full consciousness and with utter abandonment to feeling and desire. And there can be no doubt that the young man could not avoid responding to this feeling towards him, coming as it did from a suffering and spiritually superior being. I had almost said it would have been “still finer” if he had not listened to it—and I could hear her sister’s “Hop, man, hop, what’s the matter with you—jump up!” Again, I am not writing a novel, and I do not claim the writer’s omniscient eye, penetrating into the dramatic development of an affair hidden from all the rest of the world. But so much is certain: that Rudolf, driven into a corner, quite involuntarily and with a “What shall I do?” obeyed that haughty command, and I can very well imagine how his passion for flirtation, in the beginning a harmless amusement, betrayed him into situations more and more exciting and enflaming, ending in a liaison, which without this tendency of his to play with fire, he could have avoided.
In other words, under cover of the bourgeois propriety she had so nostalgically longed for as a refuge, Inez Institoris lived in adultery with a man in years, a youth in mental constitution and behaviour, a ladies’ pet who made her suffer and doubt, just as a frivolous woman will cause anguish to a serious and loving man. In his arms then, her senses, aroused by an unloving marriage, found satisfaction. She lived thus for years, from a time which if I am right was not long after her marriage up to the end of the decade; and when she no longer so lived, it was because he whom she sought with all her strength to hold escaped her. It was she who, while playing the part of exemplary housewife and mother, managed the affair, manipulated and concealed the daily artifices and the double life, which naturally gnawed at her nerves and terrified her by threatening the precarious loveliness of her looks: for instance, it deepened the two furrows between her blond brows until she looked almost maniacal. And then, despite all the caution, cunning, and self-control used to hide such devious ways from society’s eyes, the will to do so is never, on either side, quite clear or consistent. As for the man, of course it must flatter him if his good fortune is at least suspected; while for the woman it is a point of secret sexual pride to have it guessed that she need not content herself with the caresses, by nobody very highly rated, of her husband. So I scarcely deceive myself when I assume that knowledge of Inez Institoris’s side-slip was fairly widespread in her Munich circle, although I have never, except with Adrian Leverkühn, exchanged a word with anybody on the subject. Yes, I would go so far as to reckon with the possibility that Helmut himself knew the truth: a certain admixture of cultured decency, deprecating and regretful toleration, and—love of peace, speaks for the supposition, and it does happen far from seldom that society takes the spouse for the only blind one, while he thinks that except for himself no one knows anything. This is the comment of an elderly man who has observed life.
I had not the impression that Inez troubled herself overmuch about what people knew. She did her best to prevent their knowing, but that was more to preserve the convenances; whoever actually must know, let them, so long as they left her alone. Passion is too much taken up with itself to be able to conceive that anyone would be seriously against it. At least, it is so in matters of love, where feeling claims for itself every right in the world and, however forbidden and scandalous, quite involuntarily reckons on understanding. How could Inez, if she considered herself otherwise quite unperceived, have taken my own knowledge so completely for granted? But she did so, as good as regardless, except that no name was mentioned, in an evening conversation which we had—it would be in the autumn of 1916—and which obviously was of moment to her. At that time, unlike Adrian, who when he had spent the evening in Munich used to stick to his eleven-o’clock train back to Pfeiffering, I had rented a room in Schwabing, Hohenzollernstrasse, not far behind the Siegesthor, in order to be independent and on occasion to have a roof over my head in the city. So when as a near friend I was asked to the Institorises’ for the evening meal, I could readily accept the invitation given by Inez at table and seconded by her husband to keep her company after supper, when Helmut, who was to play cards at the Allotria Club, should have left the house. He went out shortly after nine, wishing us a pleasant evening. Then the mistress of the house and her guest sat alone in the family living-room. It was furnished with cushioned wicker chairs, and a bust of Inez, in alabaster, made by an artist friend, stood on a pedestal: very like, very piquant, considerably under life-size, but an uncommonly speaking likeness, with the heavy hair, the veiled glance, the delicate, outstretched neck, the mouth pursed in a disdainful sort of mischief.
And again I was the confidant, the “good” man, rousing no emotion, in contrast to the world of the irresistible, which was incorporated for Inez in the youth about whom she longed to talk to me. She said it herself: the things happening and having happened, the joy, the love and suffering, did not come into their own if they remained wordless, were only enjoyed and suffered. They were not satisfied in night and silence. The more secret they were, the more they required a third party, the intimate friend, the good man, to whom and with whom one could talk about them—and that was I. I saw it and took my role upon myself.
For a while after Helmut left, as it were while he was within hearing, we spoke of indifferent things. Then suddenly, almost abruptly, she said: “Serenus, do you blame me, do you despise and condemn me?”
It would have been silly to pretend I did not understand.
“By no means. Inez.” I replied. “God forbid! I have always been told: ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay.’ I know He includes the punishment in the sin and saturates it therewith so that one cannot be distinguished from the other and happiness and punishment are the same. You must suffer very much. Would I sit here if I were constituted a moral judge over you? That I fear for you I do not deny. But I would have kept that to myself if not for your question whether I blame you.”
“What is suffering, what fear and humiliating danger,” said she, “in comparison with the one sweet, in
dispensable triumph, without which one would not live: to hold to its better self that frivolous, evasive, worldly, torturing, irresponsible charmingness, which yet has true human value; to drive its flippancy to serious feeling, to possess the elusive, and at last, at last, not only once but for confirmation and reassurance never often enough, to see it in the state that suits its worth, the state of devotion, of deep suspiring passion!”
I do not say the woman used exactly these words, but she expressed herself in very like ones. She was well read, accustomed to articulate her inner life in speech; as a girl she had even attempted verse. What she said had a cultured precision and something of the boldness that always arises when language tries seriously to achieve feeling and life, to make them first truly live, to exhaust them in it. This is no everyday effort, but a product of emotion, and in so far feeling and mind are related, but also in so far mind gets its thrilling effect. As she went on speaking, seldom listening, with half an ear, to what I threw in, her words, I must frankly say, were soaked in a sensual bliss that makes me scruple to report them directly. Sympathy, discretion, human reverence prevent me, and also, maybe, a philistine reluctance to impose anything so painful upon the reader. She repeated herself often in a compulsive effort to express in better terms what she had already said without in her opinion doing it justice. And always there was this curious equation of worthiness with sensual passion, this fixed and strangely drunken idea that inward worthiness could only fulfil itself, realize itself, in fleshly desire, which obviously was something of like value with “worth”; that it was at once the highest and the most indispensable happiness to keep them together. I cannot describe the glowing, albeit melancholy and insecure, unsatisfied notes in her voice as she spoke of this mixture of the two conceptions worth and desire; how much desire appeared as the profoundly serious element, sternly opposed to the hated “society” one, “society” where true worth in play and coquetry betrayed itself; which was the inhuman, treacherous element of its exterior surface amiability; and which one must take from it, tear from it, to have it alone, utterly alone, alone in the most final sense of the word. The disciplining of lovableness till it became love: that was what it amounted to; but at the same time there was more abstruse matter, about something wherein thought and sense mystically melted into one; the idea that the contradiction between the frivolity of society and the melancholy untrustworthiness of life in general was resolved in his embrace, the suffering it caused most sweetly avenged.
Of what I said myself I scarcely know by now any details, except one question intended of course to point out her erotic overestimation of the object of her love and to inquire how it was possible: I remember I delicately hinted that the being to whom she devoted it was not after all actually so vital, glorious, or consummately desirable; that the military examination had showed a physiological functional defect and the removal of an organ. The answer was in the sense that this defect only brought the lovable closer to the suffering soul; that without it there would have been no hope at all, it was just that which had made the fickle one accessible to the cry of pain; more still, and revealing enough: that the shortening of life which might result from it was more of a consolation and assurance to her who demanded possession than it was a moderation of her love. For the rest, all the strangely embarrassing details from that first talk were repeated now, only resolved in almost spiteful satisfaction: he might now make the same deprecating remark that he would have to show himself at the Langewiesches’ or the Rollwagens’ (people whom one did not know oneself) and thus betray that he said the same thing to them; but now there was triumph in the thought. The “raciness” of the Rollwagen girls was no longer worrying or distressing: mouth to mouth with him, the sting was drawn from those too ingratiating requests to indifferent people that they really must stop on longer with him. As for that frightful “There are so many unhappy ones already”: there was a kind of sigh on which the ignominy of the words was blown away. This woman was plainly filled with the thought that while she did indeed belong to the world of enlightenment and suffering, yet at the same time she was a woman and in her femininity possessed a means of snatching life and happiness for herself, of bringing arrogance to her feet and her heart. Earlier, indeed, by a look, a serious word, one could put light-headedness a moment in a thoughtful mood, temporarily win it; one could oblige it, after a flippant farewell, to turn back and correct it by a silent and serious one. But now these temporary gains had been confirmed in possession, in union; in so far as possession and union were possible in duality, in so far as a brooding femininity could secure them. It was this which Inez mistrusted, betraying her lack of faith in the loyalty of the beloved. “Serenus,” said she, “it is inevitable, I know it, he will leave me.” And I saw the folds between her brows deepen and her face take on a half-mad expression. “But then woe to him! And woe to me!” she added tonelessly, and I could not help recalling Adrian’s words when I first told him about the affair: “He must see that he gets out of it whole.”
For me the talk was a real sacrifice. It lasted two hours, and much self-denial, human sympathy, friendly goodwill were needed to hold out. Inez seemed conscious of that too, but I must say that her gratitude for the patience, time, and nervous strain one devoted to her was, oddly enough, unmistakably mixed with a sort of malicious satisfaction, a dog-in-the-manger attitude expressing itself in an occasional enigmatic smile. I cannot think of it today without wondering how I bore it so long. In fact we sat on until Institoris got back from the Allotria, where he had been playing tarok with some gentlemen. An expression of embarrassed conjecture crossed his face when he saw us still there. He thanked me for so kindly taking his place and I did not sit down again after greeting him. I kissed the hand of the mistress of the house and left, really unnerved, half angry, half sorry, and went through the silent empty streets to my quarters.
CHAPTER XXXIII
The time of which I write was for us Germans an era of national collapse, of capitulation, of uprisings due to exhaustion, of helpless surrender into the hands of strangers. The time in which I write, which must serve me to set down these recollections here in my silence and solitude, this time has a horribly swollen belly, it carries in its womb a national catastrophe compared with which the defeat of those earlier days seems a moderate misfortune, the sensible liquidation of an unsuccessful enterprise. Even an ignominious issue remains something other and more normal than the judgment that now hangs over us, such as once fell on Sodom and Gomorrah; such as the first time we had not after all invoked.
That it approaches, that it long since became inevitable: of that I cannot believe anybody still cherishes the smallest doubt. Monsignor Hinterpfortner and I are certainly no longer alone in the trembling—and at the same time, God help us, secretly sustaining—realization. That it remains shrouded in silence is uncanny enough. It is already uncanny when among a great host of the blind some few who have the use of their eyes must live with sealed lips. But it becomes sheer horror, so it seems to me, when everybody knows and everybody is bound to silence, while we read the truth from each other in eyes that stare or else shun a meeting.
I have sought faithfully, from day to day, to be justified of my biographical task. In a permanent state of excitement I have tried to give worthy shape to the personal and intimate; and I have let go by what has gone by in the outer world during the time in which I write. The invasion of France, long recognized as a possibility, has come, a technical and military feat of the first, or rather of an altogether unique order, prepared with the fullest deliberation, in which we could the less prevent the enemy since we did not dare concentrate our defence at the single point of landing, being uncertain whether or not to regard it as one among many further attacks at points we could not guess. Vain and fatal both were our hesitations. This was the one. And soon troops, tanks, weapons, and every sort of equipment were brought on shore, more than we could throw back into the sea. The port of Cherbourg, we could confidently trust, had been pu
t out of commission by the skill of German engineers; but it surrendered after a heroic radiogram to the Führer from the Commandant as well as the Admiral. And for days now a battle has been raging for the Norman city of Caen—a struggle which probably, if our fears see truly, is already the opening of the way to the French capital, that Paris to which in the New Order the role of European Luna Park and house of mirth was assigned, and where now, scarcely held in check by the combined strength of the German and French police, resistance is boldly raising its head.
Yes, how much has happened that had its effect on my own solitary activities, while yet I refused to look without—doors! It was not many days after the amazing landing in Normandy that our new reprisal weapon, already many times mentioned with heartfelt joy by our Führer, appeared on the scene of the western theatre of war: the robot bomb, a most admirable means of offence, which only sacred necessity could inspire in the mind of inventive genius; these flying messengers of destruction, sent off in numbers without a crew from the French coast, which explode over southern England and, unless all signs fail, have become a real calamity to the foe. Are they capable of averting actual catastrophe from us? Fate did not will that the installations should be ready in time to prevent or disturb the invasion. Meantime we read that Perugia is taken. It lies, though we do not say so, between Rome and Florence. We already hear whispers of a strategic plan to abandon the whole peninsula, perhaps to free more troops for the faltering defence in the east, whither our soldiers want at no price at all to be sent. A Russian wave is rolling up; it has taken Vitebsk and now threatens Minsk, the capital of White Russia, after whose fall, so our whispering news service tells us, there will be no longer any stopping them in the east either.
