Two Women and a Poisoning Page 3
Grete Bende was a strange creature. She was given to vague, powerful emotions and loved fanciful, romantic turns of phrase. She understood little, knew that she often blundered; to refine and better herself, she spoke with a dark, swelling pathos. She had grown up with her mother and never left home; she was, even now, living with her mother. Grete’s clinging devotion to her had left her dependent; she was brimming with emotions, but she and her mother between them had stifled her urge for autonomy. She made frequent attempts at freedom, but never in earnest; she remained the way she was, in a state of childhood. One such attempt was her marriage to Bende. That, too, had failed. She was too weak to keep a restless man like him at her side, let alone queen it over him with feminine wiles; she disappointed him in his desire to be reined in and dominated—provoked him to violence and arbitrary acts. Helpless and intensely jealous, she would escape back to her mother, who was always there, waiting for her. Grete felt hard done by; she was much given to protesting and complaining. The mass of frustrated feelings had surged and swollen inside her. And now here was Elli, playful little Elli, with her fun-loving, boyish ways, wanting help and someone to lean on. Grete was touched and moved and unsettled by her as by no one else before. No one had ever really courted this quiet, serious, rather gloomy woman. And as she wavered over what to do about her feelings for Elli, flattered, excited and charmed by the cheerful but troubled creature, Elli herself pointed the way. Grete must give comfort, approval, support. This loosened her ties to her mother; at the same time, Grete showed herself her mother’s daughter by taking on her role. She drew Elli close. Elli was her solace, a substitute for the bad husband she couldn’t hold on to. Answering some inner need, Grete hid herself, cocooned herself in her feelings for her. Elli Link must be protected; she needed help. Grete Bende would give it to her. Elli was her child.
In this way they adapted themselves to one another. Grete released her dammed-up love on Elli. And Elli, freed of her burden and tenderly wooed, was relieved to find herself back in her old role. She was, once again, the cheeky little rascal she had been in the past, and Grete Bende was enchanted.
•
Link was shaken by Elli’s escape to her parents. The raging continued, but he’d suffered a blow. His insecurity persisted after the move. He was flailing, groping; he had reached a turning point. Elli was changing her ways. But not enough and not for long—he could see that. And he too couldn’t, no, wouldn’t restrain himself; the ranting and raving had become almost mechanical. She could hardly hold it against him—that was his feeling on the matter. But it struck him that Elli’s voice now had a slightly challenging tone when they argued, a strange, new edge. In some way, he realised—and this riled him all the more—she wasn’t playing the game. When they quarrelled, she fought with incredible doggedness. That goaded him yet further. He resisted, objected: they had their own flat, he was earning a good salary—why weren’t things getting better?
Grete Bende had been waging a more or less hopeless battle against her husband, notching up defeats. Now, yielding, overwhelmed, she took the battle beyond the walls of her house. She was fighting a bad man—Link. In her mind, he became almost as one with Bende. But she fought Link the more fiercely because there was a trophy, an as-yet unnamed trophy, to be won from him. Grete could take her revenge on her husband while, at the same time—and the thought stirred her tremendously—drawing close to Elli, undisturbed, a living being, a creature of her own, her very own. She could love.
Elli carried her rage to Grete, hot from the battle, and Grete received it with delight. Link fought, flailed around, struggled on. He didn’t notice that he was fighting two people—or one new, fiercely strong person. Elli now had a second force of will—Grete—and that force was hard to contend with because he had no immediate contact with it, but could only take it on in the abstract, quite vaguely, in a kind of vacuum.
The two friends drew closer together. Grete drew them together. The woman couldn’t let go of Elli. She burned to have a hand in every aspect of her marriage. It was a sign of her insecurity and impetuousness that she was unable to stop telling Elli what to do. Jealous and sensitive to anything and everything, she had to give her instructions. Grete was oddly troubled in those early days by the strange, though understandable, force of Elli’s resistance to her. Elli hated her husband, but not as keenly as Grete would have liked. Elli chopped and changed—and Grete with her. One day Elli would come to her, agitated, weepy, bursting with anger, and Grete would talk to her soothingly; they would sit cosily side by side. The next day Elli would be a dear, but she wouldn’t say a word about Link. Nor would she listen to Grete’s scornful remarks, her usual rants. This made Grete unspeakably sad. She often talked about it to her mother—but kept from her what she felt. Elli, poor child, must be freed from that bad man, that scoundrel who beat her and didn’t deserve such a woman. She let him run rings around her. Grete’s voice trembled with indignation as she spoke.
She pushed herself closer to Elli. A correspondence—a strange correspondence—began between the two of them, two women who lived in the same street, saw each other daily and yet felt the need to prolong their conversation, their advances and rebuffs, even into their brief periods of separation. They wrote as lover and beloved, pursuer and pursued. At first, they didn’t write much. Then they discovered the lure of writing, the peculiar thrill of keeping up the game of friendship, pursuit and love when the other was absent. There was something strangely stirring about it, something sweetly secretive—and half consciously, half unconsciously, they continued in their letters along the courses they had set themselves: Grete was the pursuer, luring Elli, catching her, taking her husband’s place, while Elli was given to playfulness, surrender, protests of submission. The letters seem to have been a means of helping one another, of plotting against their husbands, and soon, more than anything, they were a form of self-intoxication. They wrote to spur each other on, to reassure one another, outshine one another. The letters were an important step on the path to further secrecy.
Grete’s mother stood by the two women. Elli treated her with affection and flattery. Before long she was calling Mrs Schnürer her second mother. Like Grete, Mrs Schnürer felt rejected by Bende; Grete was all she had and she saw how badly he treated her. She looked on, sharp-eyed and compassionate, as her daughter fought for her husband’s attention—felt Grete’s rejection as her own, drew her closer with maternal indignation. It was no mere negative feeling that moved her; she was reclaiming her daughter, who was everything to her. The circle widened and Elli stepped in—became her daughter’s friend. Her fate resembled Grete’s. The three women isolated themselves from the men, became warmly attached to one another. In spite of their different attitudes towards one another, they were a small community. They were at ease in their feelings, found a threefold security in their rejection of the boorish men. In a letter to Elli, Grete Bende wrote: ‘When I was standing at the window waiting for you yesterday evening after eight, Mother said to me: Look at those three tulips there, so close together. The three of us—you and Elli and I—must stick together like that, too, and we must fight until we’ve won.’
•
That was the state of play between them. Now Grete fell into a sweet fever brought on by Elli. Very gradually, very slowly, this fever aroused something similar in Elli herself. They had set off down the path of secrecy in mere defiance of their husbands; now they were propelled down it headlong. But neither admitted to the other—or to herself—that their path had veered off course.
The men were brutal; the women fended off their savage attacks. But in between times, Elli and Grete listened to one another, tender, sympathetic. There was something in it of a mother swaddling her child. Elli was bright and playful, droll and flattering towards her friend. But passionate Grete, with her too-profuse emotions, spoke nice words to her and pressed her hand, making sure of her. Elli had to confess to herself that she’d never known such seductive tenderness. She hadn’t expected to
play more than the cheeky rascal and the little cajoler. Now, against her will and with a surprise that was far from pleasant, she felt herself touched and captured. To justify herself, Elli reminded herself of her husband’s brutality, the whole reason for this friendship of hers. She was violently ashamed—though she couldn’t have said why—of the secrets she shared with Grete Bende. This weakened her position against Link. It meant that she was sometimes cold towards Grete, without Grete’s understanding why. At other times, she would turn her shame and guilt at her relations with Grete into exasperation and anger at her husband, concealing her guilt, now blindly, now with the dim sense that he was partly to blame—if it wasn’t for him, I’d never have come to this. Each scene with Link threw her more forcefully into Grete’s arms: this time she would stay with her; she was right to stay. Her feeling for her friend deepened and, polyp-like, spawned others.
Link worked, tried to placate his wife, shouted at her again, drank. He was in a rut and only digging himself deeper, though he did, at least, have his wife back. Her parents were on his side; she would sow her wild oats with him. He continued to attack her sexually; she suffered it with intense repulsion, making no attempt to conceal her loathing or disgust. She wanted to get right away—away from the region of her psyche that he had ripped open—a region of strife and savagery and tangled hatred.
Her mind was awhirl with the emotions aroused in her by Grete and Link. She went running to Grete for peace and quiet. She neglected her little household. When Link set her chores and errands in the mornings, she was in such turmoil—and so disinclined to think at all—that she forgot to do them. She had to note down his instructions, and when he saw this, he took more pleasure than ever in setting her tasks; it was his way of making her think of him during the day, of tying her down, cutting her to size. Then, in the evenings, when he came home, he could put her in her place. How afraid she was when he got back, usually drunk. How frenzied his rage. At such moments, the Elli who stood up to him didn’t exist. He raged because he was master. These were the ruins, the relics of his great passion. He broke everything he could lay his hands on, making wild grabs for pieces of china, the table, wicker chairs, linen, clothes. ‘Don’t be so hard on me!’ she would shout. ‘I do my best. What do you expect of me? Stop hitting me over the head! You know I can’t stand being hit over the head.’
He: ‘Get your wits together!’
She: ‘My God, you won’t get anywhere talking to me in that tone. You’d do better to say something nice for a change. You make matters worse and worse, till I can’t promise anything. You keep on till the measure overflows.’
He: ‘You little silly! What can you do? Here’s the rubber truncheon. That’ll sort you out!’
How she hated the man. She wrote bitter letters to her parents. They’d driven her back to him; she wanted them to know how things stood. She told them she was making her husband feel as unwelcome as she could—let him leave if he didn’t like it. She got him his grub and that was it. Just the sight of him made her want to spit, she hated him so much. All that mattered was that he kept working—earned his keep and hers. She was planning to run away from him again and take everything with her—the bed he’d bought, even his mother’s allowance. There was no such thing as theft within marriage.
But even in the clutches of hatred—and hatred was something she willingly embraced—her words were bitterer than her feelings. She tried to justify her fondness for Grete, while refusing to admit it, either to herself or to anyone else; she spoke of their friendship in veiled terms. A strange conflict arose in Elli. She noticed it daily in her dealings with Grete; it became impossible to ignore. Elli told her about the goings-on with Link every day, but she felt forced into a role. She had to exaggerate and sometimes to put things in a false light; she had to deny the other side of her relations with her husband. She was leading a kind of double life. This toing and froing was not what she wanted.
Then things were settled, at least for the time being. Love flared up between the two women. From merely swearing friendship, comforting one another, kissing, hugging, sitting on each other’s laps, they progressed to sexual acts. It was Grete—emotional, passionate Grete—who found herself making the first, quivering move. At first, Elli had been her child, in need of protection. Now Grete was full of admiration for the girl’s resolve, her active energy. She pushed her firmly into the role of a man—a man who loved her and let her love him. She was not a woman who had ever been happy in the company of men, least of all that of her own husband. Now Elli was her man. Over and over she had to assure Grete that she loved her; Grete couldn’t have enough of her protestations, her tokens of love. And Elli, who was pushing herself free of Link, allowed Grete to lead her down this path. Her active energy and manly resolve now had a sexual foundation and began to grow dangerously.
After these events, the women felt more secure, more convinced that they belonged together. They still felt some shame and guilt towards their husbands, but it was waning. Elli began to repel her husband more fiercely. What she said and wrote to Grete was the truth: she often refused her husband intercourse, suffering him only under compulsion.
•
At that time, towards the end of 1921, the Links often came to blows when they argued. Elli was consumed with hatred for her husband. He was the stronger; she ended up with bumps and minor head injuries. She had her injuries certified by medical counsellor Dr L.
During her talks with Grete, Elli had made up her mind to separate from Link. She and Grete—the pair of them by now in a state of near delirium—had more than once talked through their splendid plan: the three of them, Grete’s mother, Grete herself and Elli, would all live together. The notion of divorce was firm in Elli’s mind. Her only thought now was to be active and manly, and prove her love to her friend. She hardly so much as glanced at her husband. He worked through the night in the days leading up to Christmas—two thirty-four-hour stints—but she went running to Grete. Bende had banned Elli from the house; he didn’t like the way the two of them sat around gossiping. Link didn’t want Elli seeing Grete either. He didn’t think much of his wife’s visits to her, jealously suspecting that there was a man involved. The two women lived in fear of being caught by their husbands, often meeting only fleetingly on the street. Their emotionally inflammatory correspondence swelled; it had become an escape from their husbands, a manless utopia. They gave each other the letters in person on the street, only occasionally having them delivered. They had agreed on lace-curtain signals at their flat windows to communicate their husbands’ presence or absence.
New Year’s Eve was particularly bad. Link, bleak and dismal as ever, was again irritable to an extreme. They spent the day at his sister’s house. When he and Elli were alone for a moment he said menacingly: ‘You dare to come home and you’ll be gathering up your bones.’ Frightened, Elli told Link’s sister, who took Elli’s side: if things didn’t change, Elli would have to leave him; he’d just have to go back to Mother. She arranged for the couple to stay the night with her. On New Year’s morning Elli went home. It was getting on for evening by the time Link got back, drunk. The shouting and name-calling started up—‘you whore, you bitch’—the hits and blows.
On 2 January, Elli secretly ran away. She had discussed her preparations for escape with Grete and her mother, who had found her a room in the house of a Mrs D. Elli’s right temple was bruised black and blue when she knocked at this woman’s door. But she was free. Her husband didn’t know the address.
Grete Bende was triumphant. It was as if, in her timid, hesitant way, she had escaped with Elli. She felt easier in herself; she was stronger, more assured in her domestic battles. Elli was all hers. She greeted her escape with enthusiasm. Elli must stand firm, they must stick together, strike while the iron was hot. ‘But my love, if you go back or love anyone else, we shall be gone from your sight.’ Knowing Elli’s doubts and weaknesses—for she knew her own—she warned her against Link. He was a rogue and a scoundre
l, and his letters were a mockery—pure infatuation; she mustn’t be taken in by them. He deserved to perish in the gutter. ‘One thing I swear to you, if you take up with that man again, I am lost to you forever.’ Grete saw with apprehension that Elli had fled like a hunted woman—and only with her help. When she was calmer and Link began to woo her back, things would become dangerous. She wrote to Elli—for she was still writing, thrilling at the dreamlike atmosphere of the letters—and said that she and her mother had too great a sense of honour and too much character to darken Elli’s door again if she returned to her husband. The thought was more than she could bear; her heart would collapse with grief and anguish.
Link was on his own. His mother wasn’t in the flat with him. He drank, cursed to himself, went and ranted to her. Elli had behaved disgracefully again. She was ruthless. She’d get the better of him again, he could tell. He felt helpless fury at the thought that the silly little thing dared toy with him in such a way. Rebellion was useless. It only scratched the surface. He felt the opposite of rebellious. He was already defeated, trying to love her once more. In the first days of pain and vindictiveness, he resisted. Then he was his old self again, the man he’d been at the time of their engagement. He went over the scenes of the past days. He’d been awfully bad to little Elli. His old sense of inferiority stirred; he wanted to change his ways, and took this to mean that he was longing for her. With each day that she didn’t come and he didn’t hear from her, his longing and affliction grew stronger and his sense of unworthiness deepened. He talked to his landlady, who confirmed to him, when she saw his distress, that Elli was always rushing off to see her friend and neglecting the housekeeping. Link resisted for a few days longer; then he laid down his arms. He wrote to her parents in Braunschweig, glad to feel the paper beneath his fingers and to know that the conversation with Elli was beginning. ‘How often,’ he wrote deploringly, ‘have I asked my dear wife—asked and asked her—to speak to me when I come home? How often have I told her not to spend all day at the Bendes’?’ And then: ‘Surely, too, it isn’t hard to see why I hit Elli. Just think, I’d worked long hours to give my wife a nice restful Christmas and get ahead a bit, and when I come home after work like that, I’m worn out in body and mind. Elli says she’s going shopping and then goes to see her friend instead, against my wishes and those of Mr Bende. She refuses to leave, though Mr Bende has forbidden her the house. The Bendes get into a row. Why must Elli do it? She hit me in the face and got a few slaps from me and all.’ He ended the letter with long protestations of love.