The Masochist by Katja Perat

Author:Katja Perat
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1­912545-30-8
Publisher: Istros books
Published: 2020-09-08T08:25:18+00:00

13

The way other ladies knitted, played the piano or discussed the woman question, I now had a lover. Regarding that, Freud had among other things a theory that I needed him to strengthen my position vis-à-vis Maximilian, to remind myself that I was the one who loved less, who had her own life on the side, the one who was less emotionally involved and thus less inclined to get weepy if something went wrong, the one who wasn’t going to end up like Wanda. Despite the fact that this theory seemed logically impeccable, I never really believed it. I needed him because I needed love. Because I couldn’t reconcile myself to the fact that somebody else’s choice had shoved me into marriage, someone whom I most certainly would have despised, if the attention that he was prepared to lavish on me hadn’t delivered him to me. I wanted to love the way men love women. So that I’d be the one to choose, I’d be the one attributing worth to the beloved, who might not even have any in his own right, I’d be the one to stare at his physical beauty as though he were an exhibit item, and credit it with metaphysical dimensions.

When Maximilian and I joined Helene and Wolfgang in Davos that summer, I expected that I would languish from missing Jakob, but I didn’t. In fact it did me good, the distance and the time that went with it, time that I could use to think about him instead of being with him, to write to him and read his letters to me, to let words do the great work of creating intimacy without bodies having to be present.

Now that we’re not together, he wrote, I’ve once again set about reading Sacher-Masoch. I had almost forgotten what marvellous things he wrote. I even think now that what I recalled as being important about his work is actually only of secondary importance, that it was never so much a matter of his teaching me how not to be ashamed of my own race, but rather of teaching me how not to be ashamed of myself as a human being. That the things my own father, who was never able to reconcile himself to the fact that I was never going to take over his business, that I wasn’t going to defend my honour with shouting and fisticuffs, that I couldn’t and wouldn’t become like him – that these things that my own father viewed as weakness and cowardice were perhaps things to which a person ought to aspire. That perhaps not we, but the people who saw violence and cruelty as manifestations of decisiveness were wrong. I know what you’ll say. I know you’ll reproach me for having overlooked critical passages in order to interpret him thus, but I want you to know that when I look at you I see in you traces of what your father has taught me. That you, with all your understanding,

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