Free I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch Page B

prison van (meals for the driver and the police constable were extra), Julika by train. In better weather it would have been a pleasant bit of countryside, no doubt about it. Once, down in the valley, we overtook the train, Julika waved.
    ***
    My greatest fear: repetition.
    ***
    Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy discovered the old scar over my left ear and wanted to know how I got it. She kept on about it. I said to her:
    'Somebody tried to shoot me.' 'No,' she said pressingly, 'seriously—' I told her a story.
    ***
    P.S. Julika, now that I have seen her more often, is quite different from what I thought at our first meeting. Just what she is like, I should find it hard to say. She has moments of unexpected grace, especially when my counsel is not there, moments of defenceless innocence, a sudden blossoming of the childhood years that were never lived, a face as it must have been the first instant it was awakened by the breath of the Creator. Then it is as though she were surprised herself- a lady in a black tailor-made costume and a Paris hat, generally surrounded by a veil of smoke—surprised that no man has yet known her. I can't understand this vanished Stiller. She's a hidden maid waiting under the cover of mature womanhood, at moments so beautiful it takes your breath away. Didn't Stiller notice? There is nothing womanly this woman does not possess, at least potentially, smothered over perhaps, and her eyes alone (when she stops believing I'm Stiller for a moment) have a gleam of frank anticipation that makes you jealous of the man who will one day awaken her.
    ***
    Repetition. And yet I know that everything depends on whether one succeeds in ceasing to wait for life outside repetition, and instead, of one's free will (in spite of compulsion), manages to turn repetition, inescapable repetition, into one's life by acknowledging: This is I ... But again and again (here, too, there is repetition) it needs only a word, a gesture that frightens me, a landscape that reminds me, and everything within me is flight, flight without hope of getting anywhere, simply for fear of repetition—
    ***
    While we were soaping down in the showers today the little Jew told me we were probably seeing one another for the last time, because he was shortly going to hang himself. I laughed and advised him not to. Then we marched along the corridor again one by one with towels round our necks.
    The latest news:
    'It won't be long now,' said Knobel. 'You'll get your whisky at last, Mr White, perhaps this week.'
    When I asked him what he meant, he didn't answer; I realized at once that he had heard something, but wasn't supposed to talk about it. At the end, when he had already picked up the soup pail, he nevertheless added:
    'The lady seems to have taken a great liking to you.'
    'So what?'
    'Anyhow she's gone bail for you,' he said in an undertone, 'a tidy sum.'
    'What for?'
    'Well—for you, Mr White,' he grinned and winked his eye.
    'So that you can go for walks with her.'
    ***
    Once again (for the last time!) I made an attempt today to help my over-solicitous counsel to escape from his positively touching misunderstanding of my situation, which has caused him so much work, so much fruitless work and so much annoyance with me, with me who am really so grateful to him for his daily cigar—
    'Are you familiar,' I asked him as I once more bit the dry knob from the cigar, 'with the story of Rip van Winkle?'
    Instead of an answer he gave me a light.
    'An American fairy tale,' I said with the cigar in my mouth and hence rather indistinctly. 'I read it once as a lad, decades ago that's to say, in a book by Sven Hedin, I believe. Do you know it?'
    As I spoke (this is important) I held his silver lighter with the little flame without lighting the fragrant cigar, that one and only sensual pleasure available to me in my imprisonment on remand, no, notwithstanding my avid desire I repeated my question:
    'You don't know it?'
    'What?'
    'The story