A Sad Affair (6 page)

In the meantime, what had happened with Sibylle was this: She had waited. She too had heard the door being pulled shut. She too guessed that the door would not open again, a territory had been walled off, in which she would not set foot, and yet she didn't understand any more than Friedrich that her life would not take this direction. She waited. She thought: He's gone out to get something. Then she looked for the telephone. He didn't have a telephone, though; otherwise, she would have called the factory. [Later on, when not even that would help him anymore, he kept a telephone always on the alert, and lived in dread of the rising expense.] It was never ascertained, and maybe she was never in a position to give information about what she purposed in Friedrich's poor room, what she wanted, and how she finally was converted from it. She went foraging, she opened drawers and files, browsed in letters and notes, leafed through books, finally scattered everything that had writing on it round about her, stacked the two chairs in a pyramid arrangement on the table, pulled down the curtain ropes and wove them into a net over the bedposts, and then she left a message, written in block capitals: W
HEN
THE
GOOD
GIRL
COMES
,
YOU
'
RE
NEVER
HOME
! And underneath that, she drew a bold illustration of a little girl going for a walk with a tiger. She attached the board on top of Friedrich's bed, and she left the room.

Yes, she was gone out of the room, and Friedrich, having experienced the miracle of being allowed to remain alive after he had fallen against the live copper circuitry, was carried into his room by an ambulance man. That morning, he lacked tears with which to cry. Not on account of his injuries, a few burns on his left arm, but more the sight of his room where, as he had dreamt, she ought now to have been swinging, high up on the pyramid of chairs on the table, but most especially on account of Beck, who returned to see him, and reported to him on the experiences the pair had had together during the past night.

"Lets go eat," Sibylle had said to him, and they had gone to a wine bar, and then on to other bars, to
palais de danse
that stretched out their tentacular lights into the night, and then to Auntie Molly's, an establishment of which Beck could not say enough, how numerous the women there had been, and how beautiful, and how difficult it had been to get him in. It wasn't just any old bar, oh no! A sign—
PRIVATE
FUNCTION
—had hung on the door, and it had taken Sibylle, who had been received there like an infanta on her birthday, graciously mingling with the common people, to vouch for him to gain him admission. Oh, the folly of youth. Beck was beaming, in spite of the unhappiness that had befallen him later that evening, and Friedrich too felt repulsed by the words, and felt he had been there in these places with their gaudy bottles, their garish film placards, the bartenders with their impassive Prince of Wales faces, the girls with their bare backs, Friedrich too felt firmly convinced [oh, folly of youth!] that the delight of life had been tasted, the height, the zenith, apogee with Sibylle, what an apotheosis for Beck! No fairy came to Friedrich to console him. Not to any of the young men who stand in the doorways shivering in the biting evening wind, listening to the music that floats out on to the street, does she come and help. It's a shame, because that would be a simple and grateful and also a natural task for a fairy. She would only have to lift up a corner of the curtain, open the door a crack, make a wall transparent, and say: "Don't be sad, here, look, it's nothing special; just one of those funny masks people wear over their fear of life, listen to their hearts, press your ear against the chest of that blissful-looking fellow, do it the way a doctor does it, put on a serious expression, and do you feel the heart beating so feebly, so dully, so without any hope for happiness, like the trot of a heavy cab horse going home late at night, at the end of a long day's waiting outside the drafty cavernous hole of the station hall?" No fairy had come out to him, and so it happened that that morning Friedrich [it was a miracle, remember, that he was alive] had to suffer from a foolish, silly superficiality that need hardly have concerned him. And then when Beck suddenly started yelling and jumping up and down in front of Friedrich's bed again, and had obviously gone completely mad, suddenly claiming Sibylle loved him, loved Friedrich, and that she must have run off to him out of Auntie Molly's [famous, as we know, on account of the scandalous relationships among prominent people that were said to flourish there]—at that, Friedrich thought: No, she doesn't love me, she will never come to me again. But externally, toward Beck, he was careful to laugh, or at least he tried to, he twisted his mouth a little, he stuck the tip of his tongue out between his teeth, he made his mouth a little pointed, open, catlike, ambiguous, he thought, in the hope that Beck would hurl himself at him, and they would have a wrestling match.

THE
DAY
had risen. Across the bleached foggy horizon—contrasting with it in color and fixity—lay the window bars in front of the window of Friedrich's room in the Grand Hotel of the foreign city. The noise in the corridor had increased. Pale, morning hands pulled the shoes inside from the doorstep.
Thou shouldest wear sandals on thy feet!
The man, the guest, the resident, was getting ready. The breakfast symphony sounded through the building. Clatter of dishes, knives, spoons, and cups. In the walls, the bathwater was going up and down; powerful and pure, it streamed into the tubs, scummy and discolored it gurgled away again into deep subterranean channels, taking with it the dust from the bodies of a traveling humanity, into the network of pipes under the city, and thence to never-seen sewage fields. Time had marched on, the minute hand had been once round, and Friedrich was still lying in the knotted sheets on his rumpled bed, and it was surprising in more than one way that he was still there. He was in the great city, where he had wanted to be. He had only to get up and go, and Sibylle would be there, visible to his eyes and palpable to his hands. His wish had been fulfilled, his longing could be satisfied. Why then was he still hesitating? Was he like an ancient clipper ship that, having found peace in the harbor, trembles with desire in the ropes of its rigging when the wind blows the salt breath of the sea to it, and yet, for all its longing, creaks and aches in every spar when happiness sets its sails, weighs its anchor, and sets its course for the great breakers? Was he past that? Not in terms of years. But possibly he was used up, the flame had already consumed his being, his sensibility, and his heart, and was he so exhausted with it, gone cold and weak, that he hadn't even noticed that in him there was just an orange core of warmth in a pile of ashes? The game had been played and lost a hundred times. Opinions differed on the way he had taken defeat. Some said he was on the run from guilt, because they reckoned a man in his situation, after so many and such public reversals, had no option but to pay with his life. Beck, who had left the fray and embarked on a new liaison [Sibylle had not been destined for him!] but kept an eye on developments, would reply to them: "But he is paying, look at the life he's living." And Friedrich himself remained entangled in the inevitable conclusion of all his thinking:
She is destined for me! I will one day prevail
Perhaps he was a gambler. We like to seek out the banal and otherworldly explanation, and are afraid to say: "He had been chosen by Fate [the devilish or demonic, but always, one way or another, the destructive force] to love this one among all the women in the world."

He stood in front of the door of the St. Peter's Hostel, and was five minutes late. He had taken a cab to ease his journey. To take the weight off his feet. To be able to bound up the steps. Once, she had said to him: "You don't love me at all, that's just an illusion; but you love the idea of being in love with me!" He knocked on the door and opened it and knew, when he saw her lying in an iron bed crowded with toys, black dogs and brown bears, still sleepy, pink, dreamy, rubbing her eyes, looking up and then stretching out her hand, the smell of her perfume, "After the Storm," in the room, and the smell of her, Sibyllesmell, the aroma he had once whimpered to dwell in [in one of his letters to her, he had written: "In the Northland, in the upper reaches of the Baltic, where lonely pines rise out of the tundra, and beckon to your sisters in the white nights of June, where reindeer graze, unsaddled and unmilked by men, the air is so pure in the soft drift of the summer breeze that it must be like the coming and going of your sleeping breath, Sibylle"], and he knew that the accusation about being in love with love was nonsense. He would so have liked to say: "Little Sibylle," and sit down on her bed, but that wasn't possible, that didn't accord with the protocol that had established itself between them, and which broadly he respected.

"Will you go and get me some breakfast?" she asked, and he went downstairs to the dining room, and there, at the buffet, softly [because, while he enjoyed serving others, being served made him bashful] asked for breakfast for the lady in room fourteen. And while he was standing at the buffet waiting, and watching the maid disappear into the kitchen with his order, his eyes, for once raised up, happened to light upon a sign over the cupboard where the bottles were kept, a dusty, smoked sign that read in old-fashioned signwriting: ST. PETER'S HOSTEL, DOCTOR MAGNUS FOUNDATION FOR REFUGEES OF ALL NATIONS.

What was this, what did that signify: "Doctor Magnus Foundation for Refugees of All Nations"? Was Sibylle a refugee? Hardly. But then why was she sleeping in a hostel for refugees? Anyway, what refugees, and who was this Doctor Magnus that he felt able to take them in? The simplest explanation was that this was merely an old sign, a pub sign, a bit of the history of the hostel, and without any relevance to today, kept out of piety and respect, and hung up over the cupboard of wines and essences and brandies. That must be it, in the Wild Man Pub, you hardly expected to run into the wild man in person. And yet, Friedrich felt vaguely disquieted by the sign. Moved by the sleepy face of his beloved, he had been on his way back to her, to resume their old game, a man who is happy if his humble, loving gift is accepted. Now experience called on him to "Beware." What new traps were lying open for him? He was ready to tie the mask on tighter, to play the traveler passing through, merely by chance, with no particular interest. As he turned to go back upstairs to Sibylle's room, he saw Anja. She stood behind him, she must have crept into the room like an animal on velvet paws. Night hadn't changed her. She was unkempt and didn't seem to have taken off her clothes. The shaggy sheepskin hung off her just as heavily as it had the previous evening. Even the cigarette she was drawing on hurriedly and impatiently, blowing the smoke up to the ceiling in blue rings, might be the same as yesterday's, though in all probability there had been dozens of others in between. So other members of the troupe than just Sibylle and Fedor were staying at St. Peter's. Perhaps it was cheap, and well known to groups of traveling artists. That could easily be the explanation. The sight of Anja had the effect of calming Friedrich's nerves a little. He still didn't know how to greet her, though—Anja, the clown of the troupe, the girl with the soft features and the red mouth. He was shy of being too intimate with people he didn't really know, even if he happened to have bumped into them once already. He contented himself with nodding to her, to show that he knew who she was, and going on by.

In her room, Sibylle had wrapped herself in a dressing gown and was pacing up and down. It was her tiger walk, as Friedrich called it, a taut, nervous, springy gait. It was a sign that she was thinking, that she was intellectually occupied, invariably hunting for some argument that would bolster her current position, whatever it was. Like Anja, she was smoking in short, swift, vehement puffs. These girls, thought Friedrich, they're under pressure, under pressure from something that sets them apart from the world. "I've ordered breakfast," he said, "and Anja's downstairs, smoking like you. I think of her in her sheepskin as a young refugee, pacing up and down next to her tired horse and her heavily laden cart."

Sibylle straightway got excited: "I don't want you to say anything against Anja [had he done such a thing?], I like her, she's the daughter of a prince, and when she was a child, a babe in arms, she saw Moscow burning." That could very well be, why not, Friedrich was quite used to the Russians that you met in Europe being descended from princes, and even the thing about Moscow burning could perfectly well be true. A little émigrée, in other words. Someone without a will of her own, flotsam. If it came down to it, weren't they all children of the War? He had often thought about that in the time he'd been away from Sibylle. He looked back on the day when the world had been supposed to end. Prophets had come forth all over the land, predicting it. Their words had sprouted like weeds on the farms and in the towns and villages along the Polish frontier. There were smallholders who had sold up, turned everything into cash, and hastened to the bars, to enjoy the end of their time with drinking and eating and whoring—because what better was there to do in their fear of the end, if they weren't to huddle together in prayer like toothless old women? Fires were blazing wherever you looked, along the banks of the Vistula and on the rafts. The bargemen got drunk and so did the peasants. The farmers and the craftsmen. The flat white caps of the Russian Imperial borderers sailed into the air, in pursuit of the elusive spirit of vodka, while they—Friedrich could picture the scene to himself as if he had dreamed it yesterday, even though he had been no more than six years old on the day the world had ended—his mother [the faint whiff of Leichner powder on her face], himself, and that nice, slender, colorful lieutenant, Uncle Thomas from the Uhlans, had stood on the balcony of their house to watch Friedrich's father go up in a balloon from the field behind the gasworks to greet the comet that was coming to destroy the world. It was truly a heroic act, comparable to the flight of Icarus, magnificent, the desire to cut loose from the Earth now trembling in panic, and to steer a course straight for perdition, toward the fixed star, into the arms of the lethal light. But that was typical of Friedrich's father. He would confront the demons! Who said the prophets were mistaken? And people in the Middle Ages were cleverer than we were, when they blocked off their wells and led their animals into the darkness of the light-garlanded stables and sheds at the approach of the trailing light in the night sky, because God did not want any yellow silk gas balloons floating toward the sign He had made in the air, and God knocked them to the ground. The people on the balcony, and all the others who were watching from the ground, saw the balloon rising higher and higher until it was just a dot among the stars, and then the comet came, and then came a fall, something, something indiscernible that plummeted down, and then a gasp from many voices, repeated, and the wreckage came down exactly on the frontier with Poland. On the night that Friedrich lost his father, on that night of the comet, in another part of the country, in the heart of a different landscape, Sibylle was born. Who could blame Friedrich for turning this death and this birth [when, already in love with her, he first learned of her] into the work of a fate to which he could not pray but could at least raise his hands toward in rage and in supplication? Had the comet not been a sign, a flaming sword? Uncle Thomas, the short, slender, jolly lieutenant in the Uhlans, lay buried in the Masurian forests. Friedrich had seen his grave, a little hump on the ground, marked by a propeller; the lieutenant had met his death as a fighter pilot. Friedrich's mother had collapsed after gleaning potatoes in a field that hadn't wanted to bear any more in 1918; the faint scent of the layer of stage powder from the yellow box and the feeling of her bony hands were all the memories of her that were left him. He thought of the long walks for milk in the early, black winter afternoons in the east, where you had to go for miles to the nearest ruined outbuildings, up to your knees in snow, sometimes stopping to listen whether it was the wolf coming after you. And he thought that, in another form, Sibylle must have had the same youth, standing in line for a little bit of butter at bare brick dairies in a gaggle of feeble women whose nerves would feel fear—yes, but not their hearts, which had grown impervious—when the drone of an airplane made them think a bomb was coming. And Anja too, if he wanted to adopt her into his Holy Family [for which there was every reason], Anja had seen Moscow, in flames, or some other town on the Volga, and at a time when she'd been quiet and dreamy still, the daughter of a prince! [oh, castles and estates with extensive gallops, with sleigh rides across the snow fields in the little light of the lamp attached to the pole between the two horses' heads, and the brilliance of the celebrations in the Kremlin, the young ladies wrapped in Brussels lace with lit candles in their hands], lying in her crib, which was the arms of a nurse who had fled with her, loyal and in disguise and in the hay of a cart belonging to a distiller from the edge of town. Eyes peeped through their lashes after sleep, and the whole sky was red, and the little girl stretched out her little arms toward the brilliance and, in rapture at the turning world, said: "
Da!
"