“What did you do, Johanna, to make you so desperate? Or what was done to you?”
“You come too late. Oh, if you had asked me before, just asked, just once. It is too late. There was too much empty time. The time was the ruin of me. I’ve wasted my heart.”
“Tell me how.”
“Once there was one who opened the dark and heavy portal just a tiny bit. Then I thought: it will be beautiful now. But he slammed the door shut in my face. And the crash—I still feel it in my bones. It was rash and foolish in me. I should not have had that glimpse of the lovely things beyond the gate.”
“You are right, Johanna; I deserve it. But tell me how it is with you now? Why are you so torn and perturbed?”
She did not answer for a while. Then she said: “Do you know the old fairy-tale of the goose-girl who creeps into the iron oven to complain of her woe? ‘O Falada, as thou hangest, O Princess, as thou goest, if thy mother knew of thy fate, the heart in her bosom would be broken.’ I haven’t taken a vow of silence, and I haven’t a burning oven for refuge, but I can’t look at anyone or let him look at me. Go over by the window and take your eyes from me, and I’ll tell you of my woes.”
With serious promptness Christian obeyed. He sat down by the window and looked out.
With a high, almost singing voice Johanna began. “You know that I got caught in the snares of that man who was once your friend. You see there was too much time in the world and the time was too empty. He acted as though he would die if he didn’t have me. He put me to sleep with his words and broke my will, my little rudimentary will, and took me as one takes a lost thing by the roadside that no one wants or claims. And when he had me in his grip the misery began. Day and night he tortured me with questions, day and night, as though I’d been his thing from my mother’s womb. No peace was left in me, and I was like one blinded by his own shame. And one day I ran away and came here, and it was just the day on which Michael came in after the terrible thing had happened to him, and of course you had no eyes for me and I—I saw more clearly than before how low I had fallen and what I had made of my life.”
She stared down emptily for a moment; then she shut her eyes and continued. There had been an evening on which she had felt so desolate and deserted that she had envied each paving stone because it lay beside another. And so she had suddenly, with all the strength of all the yearning in her, wished for a child. She couldn’t explain just how it had come over her—that insane yearning after a child, after something of flesh and blood that she might love. Just as that day in Christian’s room she had turned his behaviour into an envious experiment and test, and had wondered in suspense how he would take and withstand the utter misery of Michael; so, on that other day, she had put her own life to the test, and had made everything dependent on whether she would have a child or not. And when Amadeus had come, she had thrown herself at him—coldly and calculatingly. She wondered whether such things often happened in the world or had, indeed, ever happened before. But as time passed it became clear that her wish was not to be fulfilled and she was not even capable of what any woman of the people can accomplish. She wasn’t good enough for even that.