I reprise: on the morning of July 9, a Thursday, Zündel had taken the cat round to Judith, and told her he was “going South.” On Saturday (July 11), Magda had returned home after a stay in Bern (with her friend Helen). She had looked in vain for her cat or a message from Konrad, and that night her efforts to shake off her deep disquiet and get some sleep had been similarly vain. (It was as though she had some psychic sense that her husband – pursued by two policemen – had been running down the lanes of Genoa, till brought up short by a metal chain.)
On Sunday, Magda had called various friends, myself among them. I told her about Konrad’s visit to me (on Tuesday, the night of July 7), but kept from her, so as not to make her still more anxious, the dreadful state he was in. (A state that – as we know from Konrad’s own notes – was only made worse by his janitor-Schmocker-induced fear of unfaithfulness on her part.) – Judith, however, when she was called by Magda, kept nothing back, but told her alarmed friend in excited detail how awful Konrad had looked when he had brought the cat round to her place, deathly pale, whey-faced, like a ghost, etc. and he had talked like a madman, she had been terrified, and asked him what was the matter, etc., etc.
After this information Magda could only fear the worst.
It was a shock to her to hear how tragically Konrad seemed to have reacted to their difference of opinion and her flight to Bern. She loved him! She clung to him. But for all that, she had been looking forward to getting a couple of weeks by herself. She had just been caught off guard by his early return, and hadn’t managed to respond except with impatience and irritation. It’s not possible always to be loving, sometimes one has the right to withdraw from the other, to deny him the understanding he expects, and to refuse his claim of intimacy. Konrad’s words! Words that Magda now remembered, without her feeling of guilt being any the less for it.
The following days ground her down. She waited. Ran down to the letterbox day after day. Nothing but junk mail.
She hardly dared leave the house, for fear that Konrad might return while she happened to be out.
If she went to the shops, she left an especially doting welcome note on the kitchen table, and a chocolate éclair beside it – they were a great passion of his, even though he never admitted it.
Once, she went swimming. Once to the cinema with Judith. And once she went to the Aargau to her mother-in-law, because she wanted to be with someone who was close to Konrad.
Magda admired Johanna Zündel at the same time as feeling slightly afraid of this unconventional woman who had raised her son alone and managed to give him love that was free of the usual devouring tendency. The fact that she had had to relinquish the father of her child could never induce her to sink her hooks into the child and go to him for everything she had been denied by his father. In fact, all things demanding, rapacious, greedy, and anxiously adhesive were foreign to her nature. And when Konrad and Magda married, Johanna had said to her daughter-in-law: Look after him, but don’t lock him up. – And to her son, whose fear of life she could sense, she said: Don’t expect too much of your wife, don’t turn her into your refuge!
Johanna radiated such serenity, such unshowy maturity, that Magda felt terribly young and flawed when she was with her.
But the visit did her good. His mother didn’t know anything about Konrad’s whereabouts either, but she was able to make Magda a little more optimistic, and take away some of her fears. Above all, Johanna wasn’t having any guilt from her daughter-in-law. Women – she thought – tend to have pangs of conscience as soon as they detect feelings in themselves that don’t sit with the ideal of devotion. The basic form of the relationship of a man and a woman – thus Johanna – since the time of Odysseus had the man going off to the wars or going bowling when he wanted to be without his wife, but assuming at the same time she would be sitting over her knitting till he got back; she had no need to spread her wings and do anything without her husband. She, Johanna, had always wished her son an affectionate but not submissive companion, and she had done everything in her power to protect Konrad from the usual, somewhat sadistic stereotype of woman. Moreover, she had tried to relativize his sense of manhood – thus influencing him from both directions – and she was glad she had, even if she could see he might feel a little weak and “unmanly.”
I refuse to raise a child, said Johanna, in conformity with something I have identified as bad, just so that he has an easier time of it. That’s not in my gift. I’d rather take the blame for having inadequately prepared him for so-called life. I bear some responsibility, I know. But isn’t it also guilt of a kind if you raise your child to be a reliable participant and perpetuator of idiocy? The question is, what do we want our children to be, reasonably contented accomplices or unhappy resistance fighters? What do you think?
Magda said: How about a happy resistance fighter!
As I say, the visit to her mother-in-law did Magda good, she felt lighter and stronger afterward, and when Konrad’s postcard, postmarked the 18, arrived from Genoa a couple of days later, on July 24, Magda felt a rush of relief. What he wrote was bizarre, but at least he was alive.
She thought about him a lot. Was he really – for all Johanna’s efforts – not just a typical man, with all the foibles that she, Magda, with the help of her women’s group, had learned to identify so thoroughly? Did she not regularly feel herself oppressed, leaned on, hobbled? Was she not sometimes afraid of his judgment? Did he not seek to dominate her? Why should she feel guilty when she was in the mood to go out and he was tired? And what if she actually did – it hardly ever happened – go out alone or with friends? Did all that not indicate that he was just another chauvinist?
Could she on the other hand forget how her parents had tied her down? Could that not be why she was so sensitive on that score? And more: was it not conceivable that she was subconsciously blurring Konrad with her parents, and trying to attribute to his forbidding voice what in reality was the voice of her parents still echoing around inside her? Wasn’t it possible that it was this voice and not Konrad at all that called for her subjugation, and talked her into feeling guilty on those occasions when she felt like going out and he was tired? And if she actually did – it hardly ever happened – go without him, as he had often enough encouraged her to do, then was it fair of her to hate him for it, and give him the blame for her guilt feelings?
Magda havered, she wasn’t sure how things really stood, and she thought every effort to analyze a relationship had something oddly random about it, and that even the most illuminating theories actually didn’t deserve any better than a shake of the head and some pity.
She felt closer to Konrad than ever.
Toward the end of the last week of the holidays her concern grew. Hitherto, Konrad had always used the last days of the holidays to prepare for the school term ahead. No matter how idyllic things were in Provence or wherever they might be: at the very latest four days before the start of classes they had to leave, and once he was home again, Konrad couldn’t be prised away from his desk. That he might one day simply slough off his exaggerated sense of duty was something Magda thought desirable but hardly likely.
And now it was Saturday, August 1.* In the evening there was a women’s group meeting, followed by a festive trip out to the lake, but Magda had said she wasn’t going.
She felt nervous. Each time a firecracker went off outside, she jumped. There was a lot of noise all day, and even though Magda had become familiar with the rowdy style of patriotism hereabouts, it almost drove her mad.
So the national holiday passed without Konrad, but then at nine o’clock on Saturday night – as already stated – there he was suddenly standing in the doorway.
* Translator’s note: August 1st is the Swiss national holiday, the equivalent to the Fourth of July and the Quatorze Juillet and all the rest of them.