I'm Not Stiller Read Free Page B

that I could commit murder either.
    'I understand you perfectly,' he said, 'I understand you perfectly. You're annoyed with Switzerland because it greets you with imprisonment, understandably—I mean, understandably annoyed, for it is painful to look at one's homeland through bars—'
    'What do you mean, homeland?' I asked.
    'Only'—he skipped my not unimportant question—'don't make it difficult for me to defend you. Unfortunately some of the remarks you made when you were arrested have found their way into the Press. What's the use of making bad blood? I beg you, in your own interest, to refrain in future from criticizing our country, which is your country too, after all.'
    'What did I say?'
    'People here are very sensitive,' he replied with splendid frankness, but at the same time evidently unwilling to utter remarks uncomplimentary to Switzerland with his own mouth, and continued: 'To keep to the matter in hand, I have now examined all the papers, and if you will be good enough to tell me, at least in general terms, where and how you have spent the last six years—'
    He asks me that every time. And yet I swore not to make any statement without whisky. It's a positive dossier he takes out of his leather brief-case, so full that one can't even turn the pages without first undoing the clip. I laughed in his face. He is convinced that this dossier is mine, nothing will prevent him from reading it aloud for hours on end. As though the boredom he inflicts on me day after day were not also a kind of torture.
    'Herr Doktor,' I interrupted him today. 'I've just come from Mexico—'
    'That's what you say, I know.'
    'I've just come from Mexico,' I repeated, 'and you can take it from me, the famous human sacrifices of the Aztecs, who cut human hearts out of the living body as offerings to the gods, were child's play compared with the treatment you receive on the Swiss frontier if you come without papers—or with forged papers—child's play.'
    He only smiled.
    'So you admit, Herr Stiller, that your American passport was a fake?'
    'My name's not Stiller!'
    'I have been informed,' he said quietly, as though I had not shouted, 'that you are presumed—I say presumed—to be none other than Anatol Ludwig Stiller, born in Zürich, sculptor, married to Frau Julika Stiller-Tschudy, disappeared six years ago, last address 11 Steingartengasse, Zürich. I have been appointed—'
    '—to defend Herr Stiller.'
    'Yes.'
    'My name is White.'
    But I cannot make him understand, however often I repeat it. Our conversation runs like a gramophone record with the needle stuck in the same groove.
    'Why aren't you Stiller?' he asked.
    'Because I'm not.'
    'Why aren't you?' he said. 'That's what they told me.'
    In the end I kept my mouth shut. His time is limited; that's my only salvation from this thoroughly decent fellow who considers himself my defence counsel and is therefore offended because I don't do as he asks, after he has read the whole dossier. Finally he puts it back in the brief-case, presses the catch without a word until at last it clicks, stands up, makes sure he has got everything, his fountain pen, his glasses, and shakes hands with me as though he had just lost a game of tennis, telling me what time he'll be back tomorrow.
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    P.S. He's 'convinced of my innocence'. What does he mean by that? Suddenly the idea enters my head that there is some suspicion hanging over Stiller; that is why the authorities here are so keen to lay hands on their vanished citizen—some affair has to be cleared up.
    ***
    Knobel (that's my warder's name) is a real gem, the only person who believes what I say. While he is cleaning the cell, I lie on the bed, and he goes on cleaning until the water he wrings out of the floorcloth is clear enough to drink. It seems they take a lot of trouble over outward appearances. Even the window-bars get dusted in this country.
    'Well, if you tell me yourself you murdered your