HORNSCHUCH
For all my liking for Dr Chmelius I could no longer blind myself to the fact that this overburdened man was lacking in dynamism. He could feel it himself; on several occasions he had made the friendly suggestion that I relieve him of his brief, if there was someone else I would prefer. Then a young lawyer was enthusiastically recommended to me, one Hornschuch, who had moved into our area and within a short time had built up a large practice among the local farmers. He had served on the Front for four years and people said he had displayed exemplary courage as an officer. When the war was over, he felt no inclination to return to the city and the circles he had formerly frequented; a passion for solitude unusual in a man in his prime, bursting with energy, had prompted him to go into voluntary exile and live by his own lights and following his own rough-hewn and unconventional methods.
In his service of justice he now displayed exactly the same cheerful positive attitude that he had previously shown in the army. Almost all the cases he took on involved some striking injustice that his clients had suffered. He saw it as his duty to shed light on public maladministration, and to jolly along the snail’s pace of bureaucracy by his forthright and occasionally dangerously eccentric campaigns. It was no surprise that he was not the authorities’ favourite. But everything I heard about him made sense to me, and so one day I went along to see him. He lived and worked out of a tiny house about an hour away. There was no sign on the door, no office; it was a civilian receiving a visitor. He was a boyish-looking man with Tartar features and a stubborn expression in his blue eyes. Silently and almost impassively he listened to me. Then he said: ‘I’ll take a look at the papers. Perhaps colleague Chmelius will be kind enough to have them sent to me.’
Which duly happened. For a couple of weeks I didn’t hear from Hornschuch; he didn’t write, didn’t call. Then, one afternoon in late autumn, he had himself announced and the following conversation took place between us:
‘Having traded my colleague Chmelius for your humble servant,’ he began, ‘you should try and see that the other party dispenses with Dr Stanger-Goldenthal. One good turn deserves another.’
‘And how am I supposed to do that?’
‘Very simple. Who do you think will end up paying for the services of the double-barrelled one?’
‘Presumably I will.’
‘And do you have much hope that his bill will be moderated by his appreciation of your work?’
‘Hardly.’
‘Do you want to proceed on that assumption?’
‘All right.’
‘I would.’
‘And then?’
‘Then you tell him: I will pay you, but only within reason and not until after the divorce is concluded.’
‘Won’t he laugh at me?’
‘Never mind that. Let him laugh, and I’ll see to the rest.’
‘You mean, he needs to see that delay isn’t in his interest?’
‘Exactly. Either he will compel his client to take an irreversible step, or else he will give up representing her.’
‘That’s a possibility. But then Ganna will just go to someone else, and who knows whether we’ll be any better off.’
‘You should leave that to me, Sir. Allow me to operate as your brain for a while.’
‘So tell me what will happen.’
‘Since, as you rightly predict, Mme Ganna will not take the irreversible step, you will ask my colleague at the appropriate time for the bill, while pointing out to him that he will have to talk to his client about the size of the sum. He will not be gentle with her once that’s on the table, you may be sure of that. He will take her by the throat and then, if she wants to breathe, she will have to accept a lawyer of our choosing.’
Columbus and the egg. That, more or less, is precisely what happened. I had often appealed to Ganna to give up an adviser who used all his cunning and experience to stir things up between us instead of calming them, to tangle the threads instead of combing them out, but she believed in Dr Stanger-Goldenthal as in the Bible — no, what am I saying, more than she had ever believed in the Bible. When two individuals, whose pleasure and art it is to fish in troubled waters and intone abracadabras, join forces, their relationship will be closer than most real friendships, just as bonds between thieves — ‘thick as thieves’ — tend to be firmer than those between honest men. But when Ganna was suddenly presented with the bill for her entente cordiale, when the vast sum showed her how much she was paying for personal and legal support, that every telephone call was rated as highly as dinner at Sacher’s, that a single one of the delightful and stimulating conferences swallowed more money than she spent in a week — she screamed blue murder about villainy and extortion. There was only one comfort that remained to her: that she could tell herself and persuade me that it was all for my sake that she had broken off relations with her star lawyer. There followed a brief interregnum, a time of no lawyers; to her it felt like a time of no drugs to a morphinist. Disturbed and bitter, she wrote to me: ‘There, now you’ve achieved what you wanted to with your tactics, and I’m to be put under pressure of an inadequate lawyer.’ And when I brought up Hornschuch, and suggested using him as our mutual counsel, the name sounded like the rumble of thunder from a black storm cloud. An unknown; she didn’t know the first thing about him, and yet she already hated him with the consuming hatred of the maniac, whom fear of the unknown drives to the most desperate and dangerous pre-emptive efforts.
SIXTEEN TO TWENTY GANNAS
At one of my frequent conversations with Hornschuch he gave me to understand that the greatest obstacle to a rapid settlement lay in my continued personal dealings with Ganna. He advised me to stop answering Ganna’s letters and not to arrange any more meetings. I told him I had to look after my children, Doris especially.
‘In that case, why don’t you have the children stay with you if you need to be in the city every four to six weeks anyway?’ asked Hornschuch.
‘That’s not much good. If I call them, it’s Ganna I get on the phone.’
Thereupon Hornschuch made a remark that caused me to fold in on myself as if I’d been pricked with a pin. He asked me if I had ever considered how hurtful my continual dealings with Ganna were to Bettina. I denied this most vehemently. That wasn’t possible. He was surely mistaken. I wasn’t aware of the least sign of that being so. He smiled, in his ironic way.
He wasn’t mistaken. When I think about it today, my stupidity or sheer blindness of that time astounds me. If I’d been given the gift of awareness, I should have realized long ago that these regular assignations with Ganna, the regular, repeated visits to her, the meetings in the city and in various places between Ebenweiler and Vienna, must have been mystifying to Bettina.
She had seen that the — to her — repugnant fight she had got involved in against her will was destroying far more in the way of life and happiness than it could ever create. The dubious victor’s prize meant nothing to her. She wasn’t in the least tempted by the status of certificated bourgeois and wife, that wasn’t where her ambition lay, it wasn’t even possibly her style; and under no circumstances would she have condescended to bend the knee to Ganna or become indebted to her. It went against her pride, it went against her dignity as a woman. One day she said as much to me quite openly.
‘You know, I don’t really care whether you get a divorce or not,’ she said, ‘in fact, I don’t give a damn either way.’
I was shocked. ‘What about our son?’ I countered.
‘What about him? What’s it got to do with him?’