I'm Not Stiller Read Online Free PDF Page B

Alex took his life? So I've been told, anyhow; he put his head in the gas oven, I believe. Or wasn't Alex a friend of yours? But I don't want to give you a list of deaths. I'll just tell you again how pleased we are. I don't suppose I need tell you about Julika, according to the newspaper things are going much better with her now. She came to Mother's funeral. I can well understand that afterwards she didn't want to see any more of us, being your family. But I think she's still living in Paris. Perhaps you've already spoken to Julika.
I hope you won't mind, but I must stop now: we're just having a fruit show that's to be attended by a member of the Federal Council, and I've hardly asked you a proper question yet about your life and your future. I hope you will very soon be free.
Meanwhile, all good wishes from
 
Your affectionate brother
WILFRIED
    Â 
    As soon as I can get away from work for a couple of days I shall certainly come to see you. Today I just wanted to write and tell you that of course you can come and stay with us at any time.
    ***
    Nobody believes a word I say and in the end I shall probably have to take an oath that the fingers with which I am taking the oath are my own fingers. It's really laughable. Today I said to my counsel:
    'Of course I'm Stiller.'
    He stared at me.
    'What do you mean by that?'
    For the first time the idea entered his honest head that I might not be their missing Herr Stiller after all. Then who could I be? I gave him a few suggestions: Perhaps I was a Soviet agent with American papers. No joking please, and anyhow, in his opinion, anything connected with the Soviets was not a fit subject for jokes; it was simply too evil, just as, on the other hand, anything to do with Switzerland was too good to be a fit subject for jokes. I made another suggestion: Perhaps I was an S.S. man who had been underground for a bit and now saw an opening, the Unknown War Criminal with experience of the East, now very much in demand. But how could I prove I was a war criminal? However candidly I swore to it, they wouldn't let me go without proof. My counsel doesn't even believe that Mexico is more beautiful than Switzerland. Whenever I tell him so he just gets irritable and asks:
    'What's that got to do with it?'
    My counsel isn't interested in the way the Indians tear the cobra's fangs out in order to use them for their celebrated snake dance. He is even less interested in the Indians' attitude to death. And not at all in who ordered the murder of the Mexican revolutionaries. And he doubts whether it is true that the Mexican sky belongs to the vultures and Mexican mineral resources to the Americans. It's really not easy to keep this man entertained for an hour a day. He interrupted me in the middle of a story which I, at least, was finding enthralling:
    "Orizaba—where's that?'
    He whipped out his Eversharp and wouldn't rest until he had made a note of my polite but brief reply. Then he immediately asked me:
    'So you worked there?'
    'I never said that,' I replied. 'I earned money and lived there.'
    'How?'
    'Fine, thanks,' I said.
    'I mean, how did you earn money?'
    'Oh just the way people do earn money—' I said. 'Not by my own labour anyhow.'
    'How then?'
    'With—ideas.'
    'Explain that a bit more fully.'
    'I was a kind of estate manager—' I said with a gesture indicating honest profits'—on an
hacienda
.'
    He pretended not to notice the gesture.
    'What's an
hacienda
?'
    'A large estate,' I replied and gave him a full description of my position, which was inconspicuous, but the meeting place of the indispensable bribes from both sides, and my ideas on this subject, and then the topographical situation ofOrizaba, which is heavenly, close to the tropical zone yet just above this zone, which I can't bear with its humid luxuriance, gorgeous butterflies, slimy air, and damp sun, its clammy silence full of murderous fertilization—Orizaba lies just above this zone on a plateau that gets