I said goodnight with my heart in my throat again. As I went out of the doorway she passed me: I greeted her, and her eyes smiled slightly at me. My blood flowing fast, I took this forgiveness on her part as a promise that she would keep silent in the future too.


From then on I became attentive in a new way; hitherto, my boyish veneration of the teacher whom I idolized had seen him so much as a genius from another world that I had entirely omitted to think of his private, down-to-earth life. With the exaggeration inherent in any true enthusiasm, I had imagined his existence as remote from all the daily concerns of our methodically ordered world. And just as, for instance, a man in love for the first time dares not undress the girl he adores in his thoughts, dares not think of her as a natural being like the thousands of others who wear skirts, I was disinclined to venture on any prying into his private life: I knew him only in sublimated form, remote from all that is subjective and ordinary. I saw him as the bearer of the word, the embodiment of the creative spirit. Now that my tragicomic adventure had suddenly brought his wife across my path, I could not help observing his domestic and family life more closely; indeed, although against my will, a restless, spying curiosity was aroused within me. And no sooner did this curiosity awaken than it became confused, for on his own ground his was a strange, an almost alarmingly enigmatic existence. The first time I was invited to a family meal, not long after this encounter, and saw him not alone but with his wife, I began to suspect that they had a strange and unusual relationship, and the further I subsequently made my way into the inner circle of his home, the more confusing did this feeling become. Not that any tension or sense that they were at odds made itself felt in word or gesture: on the contrary, it was the absence of any such thing, the lack of any tension at all between them that enveloped them both so strangely and made their relationship opaque, a heavy silence of the feelings, like the heaviness of the föhn wind when it falls still, which made the atmosphere more oppressive than a stormy quarrel or lightning flashes of hidden rancour. Outwardly, there was nothing to betray any irritation or tension, but their personal distance from each other could be felt all the more strongly. In their odd form of conversation, question and answer touched only briefly, as it were, with swift fingertips, and never went wholeheartedly along together hand in hand. Even their remarks to me were hesitant and constrained at mealtimes. And sometimes, until we returned to the subject of work, the conversation froze entirely into a great block of silence which in the end no one dared to break. Its cold weight would lie oppressively on my spirit for hours.

His total isolation horrified me more than anything. This man, with his open, very expansive disposition, had no friends of any kind; his students alone provided him with company and comfort. No relationship but correct civility linked him to his university colleagues, he never attended social occasions; often he did not leave home for days on end to go anywhere but the twenty steps or so it took him to reach the university. He buried everything silently within him, entrusting his thoughts neither to any other human being nor to writing. And now, too, I understood the volcanic, fanatically exuberant nature of his discourse in his circle of students—after being dammed up for days his urge to communicate would break out, all the ideas he carried silently within him rushed forth, with the uncontrollable force known to horsemen when a mount is fresh from the stable, breaking out of the confines of silence into this headlong race of words.

At home he spoke very seldom, least of all to his wife. It was with anxious, almost ashamed surprise that even I, an inexperienced young man, realized that there was some shadow between these two people, in the air and ever present, the shadow of something intangible that none the less cut them off completely from one another, and for the first time I guessed how many secrets a marriage hides from the outside world. As if a pentagram were traced on the threshold, his wife never ventured to enter his study without an explicit invitation, a fact which clearly signalled her complete exclusion from his intellectual world. Nor would my teacher ever allow any discussion of his plans and his work in front of her; indeed, I found it positively embarrassing to hear him abruptly break off his passionate, soaring discourse the moment she came in. There was even something almost insulting and manifestly contemptuous, devoid of civility, in his brusque and open rejection of any interest she showed—but she appeared not to be insulted, or perhaps she was used to it. With her lively, boyish face, light and agile in her movements, supple and lithe, she flew upstairs and downstairs, was always busy yet always had time for herself, went to the theatre, enjoyed all kinds of athletic sports—but this woman aged about thirty-five took no pleasure in books, in the domestic life of the household, in anything abstruse, quiet, thoughtful. She seemed at ease only when—always warbling away, laughing easily, ready for bantering conversation—she could move her limbs in dancing, swimming, running, in some vigorous activity; she never spoke to me seriously, but always teased me as if I were an adolescent boy; at the most, she would accept me as a partner in our high-spirited trials of strength. And this swift and light-hearted manner of hers was in such confusingly stark contrast to my teacher’s dark and entirely withdrawn way of life, which could be lightened only by some intellectual stimulus, that I kept wondering in amazement what on earth could have brought these two utterly different natures together. It was true that this striking contrast did me personally nothing but good; if I fell into conversation with her after a strenuous session of work, it was as if a helmet pressing down on my brow had been removed; the ecstatic ardour was gone, life returned to the earthly realm of clear, daylight colours, cheerfulness playfully demanded its dues, and laughter, which I had almost forgotten in my teacher’s austere presence, did me good by relieving the overwhelming pressure of my intellectual pursuits. A kind of youthful camaraderie grew up between her and me; and for the very reason that we always spoke casually of unimportant matters, or went to the theatre together, there was no tension at all in our relationship. Only one thing—awkwardly, and always confusing me—interrupted the easy tenor of our conversations, and that was any mention of his name. Here my probing curiosity inevitably met with an edgy silence on her part, or when I talked myself into a frenzy of enthusiasm with a strangely enigmatic smile.