It was during this period of solitude that he kept ringing me up in the evening. His calls were often a nuisance, coming just when we had company. As a rule Stiller had been drinking; he began talking about Kierkegaard and pretended to be in urgent need of elucidation from me. He made these calls from a tavern—his own telephone had been cut off because he hadn't paid the bill. I was never an expert on Kierkegaard; I sent him the book following a conversation about melancholy as a symptom of the aesthetic attitude to life. When he rang me I hadn't got the book handy, and nor had Stiller. Above all, it was obvious that he had scarcely read Kierkegaard yet, so there must have been something else on his mind. He used to hang on for a quarter of an hour or more, half an hour sometimes, probably just to listen to a voice. In the background I could hear sounds from the tavern, the clink of glasses being rinsed, the clank of a pin-table. I could scarcely make out what he was saying. He must often have thought me a miserly skinflint and cursed me in his heart. I knew his economic position and tried to bring these expensive conversations to an end. I probably wasn't sufficiently capable of putting myself in his place. His jokes did not deceive me as to the degree of his loneliness, his longing for a friend. It was precisely because I was so clearly aware of this that I felt so helpless.
*
What does man do with the days of his life? I was scarcely aware of the question, it just irritated me. How could Stiller bear to face this question unprotected by affairs of social or professional importance, without any defences? He sat on the weather-worn balustrade, one knee drawn up and his hands clasped round it; when I looked at him I could not imagine how he could bear this existence, how any man can bear his existence once he has learnt from his experiences and is consequently free from vain expectations...
*
Unfortunately the obtrusive hotel up at Caux was again visible from here, and Stiller couldn't help launching out on the subject once more. His standpoint: 'They work miracles up there, no doubt about it, they produce Christianity not with the poor, but with the rich, where it apparently pays better, and they really manage to fix it so that one of those bandits, after he's collected sufficient swag, repents and spends two, three, four, or nine million for the peace of his soul, or at least so that a better ideology can quickly be opposed to Communism; he only keeps one single million for himself so that he shan't be a burden to the community in his old age. I can't stand that sort of Christianity. Seven millions are better than nothing, they say, and it's all given back in such a voluntary and human way, you know, so that the workers of the world, if they have any tact at all, can never take action against a bandit, for the possibility that one of these capitalist bandits may suddenly repent and improve the world from the centre outwards has been proved once and for all in that hotel up there—so please, if you want a better world, no revolutions please!'
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