A Sad Affair (15 page)

There ensued a wild part of Sibylle's life. With the departure of the critic, her life had lost all direction. She acted in a film that wasn't even finished before the production company ran out of funds. She visited balls without enjoying herself, she knew a thousand people without thinking anything of any of them, she was a guest in many apartments without thinking she had a home anywhere. Friedrich and Beck were her friends. She went out with them, she cooked meals with them, she frolicked about in the woods outside the city with them. It would have been idyllic, had each boy not wanted the girl for himself. Finally, it was Beck [Sibylle was not intended for him] who left the trio. After enduring many humiliations, he found the ability to attach himself elsewhere. Friedrich stayed. Stayed with her. Close to her. At the foot of the bed in which she lay. He made her tea and soup when she was ill. He was in a desert in front of the cloud of a constant mirage. He was athirst for her lips. He was pale, battered, impecunious, hollow-cheeked, and desperate. But he fought on. Fought on with gritted teeth and fought, as he thought and continued to think, a fair fight. He refused to take her against her own will. He would lash out at anyone who used that word, "take." "She's not an object, she's a human being," he said. He would mount a passionate defense of her against all accusations. At such moments, his face would take on a calm and arrogant expression. "Oh, I can see you don't know Sibylle," he would say. The sentence was unwavering. There was no appeal to be made against it. There was no life belt that could be thrown to Friedrich. And then he resolved to die. "I can no longer exist without you." Sibylle was mute. What was she to say? An old line. Repeated ad infinitum since the dawn of humanity. "I can't live without you!" What a demand! What a claim! What a theft! Would he not be ashamed to say: "I can't live without your money, your watch, your ring?" Was she worth less than a watch or a ring? What a claim. "I can't live without you!" What a hopeless and helpless claim.

One evening, as Sibylle was still out with a man who had taken her to lunch, he went up to the north of the city to hook up with some figures in the criminal underworld. The fruit of his endeavors was a large heavy police revolver. It sat in his pocket like a weight. Friedrich had a natural sense of the ridiculousness of the situation. It was ridiculous running around, packing his revolver. The bullets that the dealer had shown him while loading the chambers would rip great holes in flesh and bone if the barrel was set point-blank against his chest. What a mess, thought Friedrich, what a horrible great mess. Then he had an idea. He would use the weapon to fight with, to bring the war to a conclusion with the most visible investment of his physical being. He hurried round to Sibylle. Her windows were dark, the place was locked. He didn't have any money for a pay phone. The lack of ten pfennigs became crucial. "Ten pfennigs," he whimpered, "ten pfennigs." His happiness depended on having ten pfennigs. Doesn't the lover claim to be willing to do anything for the beloved? So Friedrich walked up to a man in the street. He said: "Ten pfennigs." The man was frightened. He jumped and ran off. Friedrich felt compelled: "I have to beg!" The idea that he might explain to someone calmly that just now, by silly mischance, he happened not to have ten pfennigs and that it was important didn't occur to him. The second time he went up to someone, he was shaking. His voice came out in an indistinct gurgle rather than a sentence. The second man looked annoyed. Disgust showed in his expression. He tossed a coin on the ground and hurried on his way. As Friedrich bent down to pick it up, he saw that it was a mark, and he was convulsed with horror as if by a high temperature. What use was a mark? He needed ten pfennigs. The machine would never swallow a mark. Machines are implacable. Its impossible to persuade them to depart from their normal course, even if it's to their advantage. Friedrich looked up at Sibylle's windows. He sent a piercing shout up into the air: "Sibylle! Sibylle!" Nothing stirred there, and it was only in the surrounding buildings that windows creaked and voices called for quiet. It wasn't till morning, when the people started to come out of their houses, that Friedrich quit his post. Where had Sibylle spent the night? Friedrich reeled, a wreck in the stream of the early traffic. He went to Beck's. At the foot of the bed, in which Beck was still asleep, he collapsed unconscious to the floor.

Beck felt compelled to have a word with Sibylle. He thought he was acting on Friedrich's behalf. He said: "He's going to do himself some mischief, I've seen the gun." He also said, since she didn't reply: "You've been with a few other men you've told me about, what is it that keeps you from going round to Friedrich's tonight and staying the night with him?"

Sibylle's expression remained veiled. "That's not the point," she said.

Friedrich caught up with her as she was on the point of shutting the elevator door. The conveyance took them up. Her lips trembled because of her proximity to him. He wanted to avoid all lugubriousness and give a cheerful sound to what he felt compelled to say. "You're smelling like a fairy again," he said as they walked into her room. "But do fairies have a smell? I prefer you." And he said: "Sibyllchen." She was doing her tiger pacing. The tension between them was unbearable. Sibylle said later that she was convinced that he'd come to shoot her. That was her interpretation of his taut pallor, though there was nothing more behind it than suicide. He started in to hack at the knot. He asked: "Can you name me anyone who loves you as passionately as I do?"

She said: "No," not raising her clear and beautiful voice, keeping it at a calm level, in the way she was to do throughout the whole confrontation. Her comportment was heroic. No heroine could have been braver. She was impeccable in her posture, and braced. Nor did she permit herself to be deflected into womanish blind alleys of argument. She confronted him. He admired her unreservedly.

"Fine," said Friedrich, and his voice and manner also remained calm. "I love you, you admit, the most of all the men who know you. I believe in this love of mine as an unalterable fact that has somehow been chosen to be my lot; certainly, I cannot be persuaded that it is a sort of idée fixe from the catalog of insanity. Now, what has happened with us, to my mind, is a misunderstanding. I need to sort it out, otherwise it will destroy me. People tell me you want to be taken. I find that remark as stupid as most of what people are pleased to spout in their mindless way. It's a bit of popular wisdom, and it doesn't impress me. If you were a girl whom I could beat and who would then kiss my hand afterward, I wouldn't think much of you. To me, you're a human being, and there is no triumphing over the dignity of another human being, viz. by destroying it. That sort of victory makes the victor merely despicable. It would be a victory that man celebrates over his own kind. But the misunderstanding between you and me, that misunderstanding is based upon the fact that you're a woman—and you don't want your body to be touched against your will, which may only be changed by touching you anyway, in spite of you. Maybe it sounds overintellectual to you. I have no choice. I am going to rape you. I will do so to clear our misunderstanding. But I will give your will every chance to assert itself, to meet force with force. Here is my revolver. It has six bullets. I will take off the safety catch and give it to you. You can defend yourself against my attack, and I ask that you do. If you shoot me, the law will be on your side, the moral law and the letter of the law. No one in the world will blame you or hold you culpable." He handed her the weapon. It sat like a cannon in her little hand. She made as if to weigh it. If only she'd shoot, thought Friedrich, if only she'd shoot. He was all ready to be hit by her. Death approached him in a surprising nimbus. Friedrich took a step forward. Then she raised the gun and fired. She was shooting at the mirror, in which they were both visible. The glass shattered. She fired one, two, three shots. Each bullet flew past Friedrich. Just past Friedrich. She has a very steady hand, he thought, and kept moving toward her. Then she threw the gun down.

He seized her; she didn't stir; he saw her face; it was calm, expressionless, averted; he felt her heart beat; she parted her pale lips just slightly, and said: "I don't want this." She said it without any emphasis. A little sadly. She had won. He let his arms fall. The tears started from her eyes. She cried, and he cried. They sat together crying and holding one another. They were disturbed by the sound of voices. The police were banging on the door, demanding an explanation. Friedrich had to go with them. A magistrate found him guilty of unlawful possession of a weapon, and of a breach of the peace. Then—was it really a mistake on the part of the official, or more a curious intervention of destiny in the course of events?— they forgot to take the gun off him, and Friedrich walked out with it still in his possession.

There was nothing for him but to leave the capital city where Sibylle was living. Beck had given him some money, and Friedrich felt he'd been deported. He spent some time in a monastery on an island in the Baltic. The spring gales tore across the sea. Friedrich sent telegrams until he didn't have a penny left for the official at the counter. The official took Friedrich for a madman. All the telegrams ever contained was the name "
SIBYLLE
!
SIBYLLE
!
SIBYLLE
!" It was Walter's cry, translated into the sober medium of post and telecommunications. Thereafter he yelled the name to the fields and waves. He plunged himself into work, followed the plow, made friends with the horses and cows. He told them about Sibylle. He talked about his love. The horses lowered their heads, the cows replied: "Moo"; they were a serious audience, and they were patient with him. A foal was born. No sooner could it stand than it showed affection. Friedrich named it Sibylle. He even kissed it on its fluffy pink muzzle. The mother made startled eyes and, after a pause for thought, expressed her approval of Friedrich's suit with a trusting scrape of her left hoof. Sibylle would go into Friedrich's room. She followed him over the fields and meadows and seashore. She would eat out of the hollow of his hand. Sibylle was gentle and affectionate, and grew to be a wonderful fox-colored mare, good and clever wherever she went. She presented the stallion to whom she was brought with an alert and clean-limbed foal like herself.

Days followed of fresh despair, which expressed itself in angry thoughts against the dear, good, innocent, and immaculate mare Sibylle. Was it right that he should have wasted so much time? Why had he consented to be banished; had he not simply fled? When he returned, after an interval of some months, to the capital, Sibylle was tanned from the summer, and a new scent drifted out of the little strips of rawsilk that were her dress and her shirt at once. They rode in a car throughout the city. She was radiant, a contented snail in an invisible house of joy; a young kitten rolled into a ball, feeling the pleasure of being itself, and purring songs of praise to the Almighty. She loved a man, and her love elevated her beauty into the pure concept "she is beautiful" that was beyond comprehension, and could only be venerated like the grace of genius whose presence abruptly is remarked in a sound from the throat of Orpheus, or a miracle of color, or the revelation of a poem. Their drive ended in front of a house on the green canal bank. "Come in," she said, and he made the acquaintance of an apartment full of old fittings, chests and cupboards and tables with broad surfaces that felt good to touch, and all the wood was richly carved, and on the walls there hung dark old paintings, dignified faces, and then there were weapons, sabers and pistols, and a knight's helmet; but that was from the last war. Bosporus met Friedrich with courtesy. Out of one of the old cupboards he brought bottles full of colored liqueurs, and he would only sit once Friedrich was seated, even though he was older, and dragged his wounded leg behind him a little. Bosporus was poor, but he had the ability with a gesture to create an aura of wealth about him. He also had the ability, in few, casual words, to draw a ring of mystery around his affairs. In the center of town, he ran a laboratory for chemical experiments; but the sign over the door bore a name that was not his; when Sibylle discovered this, the rumor started: he manufactures poison gas. Bosporus never said anything to the contrary. Did he know anything about Sibylle? He had taken her in. More could not be discovered. It was certain that he loved her, but what was just as certain was that he knew how to handle her. He listened to her young wishes and let it appear he didn't want to keep her. He was wise, and had the experience of danger behind him. The leash on which he held Sibylle was long and barely perceptible. Friedrich, who had a lot of sympathy and understanding for this particular case, still made the mistake of blaming himself. "It was a time she was all ready to love," he said to himself, "and I wasn't around." But Sibylle wasn't intended for Bosporus either. He was certain of that. He repeated, rephrased, the question he'd asked in the scene with the revolver: "Do you think Bosporus loves you more than I do?"

She said: "No." She even performed the tragedy of the woman unhappily in love, and with real tears. A touch of melancholy added further to her appeal. She was a good girl.

She often visited Friedrich. Spent whole days in his room, or he slipped back into the role of the runner, who raced panting through the city when he got her call. It was the time that Friedrich handed her over to the theater, sent her to drama school and had the happiness of rehearsing the ingenue roles of the classical repertoire with her. In the evenings, they would appear in public as a trio: Bosporus, Friedrich, Sibylle. Friedrich dressed the bride, she put on what he wanted, and she was led to Bosporus. People talked, Friedrich faced them down. "You're wrong," he said bluntly and decisively. "You're wrong. Sibylle isn't like any of the others. She's a goddess." His earnestness was invincible. Sibylle was the best-protected woman in the city. Friedrich's attitude would have been impeccable, if he hadn't still suffered from this terrible thirst. The thirst for her lips.