A Sad Affair (12 page)

H
E
HAD
stuck it out. He had loved her, and to the memory, they had been good days. He loved her still, and now that, once again, she was up onstage over him, was he to curse the boards she trod? She took her song to the people, her sad and tender little girl's song, and in the chorus the little girl was eaten up. Little Red Riding Hood is going through the forest. No Little Red Riding Hood sent by her mother with a bottle of wine for her grandmother, though. A little waif of a thing, and the trees formed up in two rows, it seemed they were actually office buildings, with paragraphs from the Constitution fluttering like flags on their roofs, and typewriter clatter coming out of their windows, and the wolf was driven up in an automobile, he was the Wolf of Wolf & Co., and he said: "Nothing under two thousand syllables, my honey," and he ran a thriving line in coffins in the basement. The movements were still hers, the gazelle leaps over the abysses, and everyone in the audience resolved to do some good deed on the way home, but by then they would have forgotten, so when the beggars stretched out their hands, no one would offer the homeless a bed for the night.

After Sibylle, it was the turn of Anja—the clown of the troupe, the prince's daughter—to be in the lights. Her sheepskin had stayed behind in the dressing room, and she had slipped into a sack. Properly crawled into it, and had the string drawn tight around her neck, under a cardboard mask, the stiff visage of a goblin, over her face. She took wobbly, shuffling steps. She was playing a sack of grain. The goblin-faced sack has eaten all the grain in the land. Now it feels sick and afraid. Its dizzy, it reels and falls to the ground. The tragedy of someone who's had enough to eat. Through the depersonalizing quality of the mask, it took effect. The audience howled with laughter. But was it really as funny as all that? Anja bowed. She took off the mask and held it in her hand. In the stage lights, she looked even paler and more coltish, and her mouth seemed even softer than by the ordinary light of day. It was Anja, who wanted to go away with Friedrich. A wave of tenderness, such as he had once felt for her already, came up in him again. But what about Magnus? Would Friedrich's prospects improve if he changed toward Magnus, whom he thought of as being in a situation resembling his own, and took the part of a seducer? If I take advantage of someone else's misfortune, then perhaps it will make me a different person.

A voice struck up and with a little effort filled the hall with song. Fedor leaned under a lamppost. On the edge of town somewhere. The lamppost and a bundle of old newspapers were meant to suggest the edge of town. The man under the lamppost stooped and picked up some of the newspapers. His singing was supposed to be what he read. The days passed, and truth went with them. It offered itself to anyone who came by and it was always what they wanted to hear. That's Fedor, the balladeer of simple truths, he has barely enough strength to sing. Friedrich felt fresh antipathy toward him. I haven't washed all day, he thought, and he looked with displeasure at his hands, which were streaked with dirt. He had no more interest in the cabaret. The somnambulism of art, which had held him for a while in the guise of the peasant woman from a bygone age, and Sibylle's song, and Anja's dance, was now less than enthralling. Friedrich longed for fresh air.

The street looked much as it had the night before, when he had first stood and gazed at the girls' pictures in the vitrine. Friedrich was practically the only person around. He pulled his coat tight and walked up and down outside the theater, like a policeman on his beat. The light of the
DIANA
VARIETY
THEATER
sign spilled over him. He was sorry he didn't smoke. A cigarette would have been a good prop. He wanted to come to a decision. It had been a mistake to go down the stairs to the basement theater. Everything had been a mistake. He had slipped out of his role. The role of the gentleman passing through, polite but basically uninterested. He clenched his fists and stamped on the ground. I must leave immediately, I'm not up to this, I don't have the stomach for it, if I stay for the end of the show, I'll go crawling into the dressing room like a dog, licking the dirt off their shoes, a repulsive whining creature, begging to be allowed to stay and sniff their skirts. His legs took him away. He left the spot, ran off. That was it: He saw himself walking on the edge of a half-frozen lake, in the middle of which Sibylle was skating, and he ran away into the forest, so as not to have to save her at the moment she crashed through the ice.

He actually had broken into a run. But was his scene not a piece of devilish deception? Had it not always been the other way around, that he had rescued Sibylle and had himself drowned every time, and died, so that he was no longer entitled to be a rescuer? He ran past the policeman staring down at his feet, who raised his white stick: '"What's the hurry?"

"Thirst," panted Friedrich.

His feet dragged him up the four stone flags. Then it was as though he had been stood in the smoke of a chimney breast. Human shadows slunk around him. He grabbed hold of the bar— a brass life belt. "Brandy and soda." He was given a glass and swallowed the contents like a bitter medicine. He felt alive once more. A notion came to him. He saw a fat girl smiling at him from behind the bar. "Where am I?" he asked. "I mean, what's the name of this pub, what's the address?"

The girl took his words for a come-on. She said: "I'm sure you know perfectly well where you are," and laughed as though it was the funniest thing.

Friedrich hit the brass rail with his fist: "Come on, quick, I want to know!" The girl was sluggish, what was the stranger playing at? She cheerfully told him the name of the bar, the street, and the number. Friedrich wrote it all down. Then: "I'd like to place a telephone call."

The telephone hung on the back wall. Friedrich was obliged to stand between two couples, who broke off their embraces and stared at him with hostility. It seemed to take an eternity before the operator came on. He asked to speak to the Diana Variety Theater, the downstairs cabaret.

"I need a number from you," the stern voice told him.

"I can't, I don't know it, please don't hang up on me." Friedrich pleaded and urged: "It's the Diana Variety Theater, it must be an easy matter for you to find it."

The voice remained pedantic and unyielding: "I'll pass you on to information," it said.

Another eternity passed. Had the telephone been invented as an instrument for the torment of lovers? Information came on, fresh explanations, fresh objections, at last he was furnished with the number, then back to the stern voice, a further eternity, then a clicking in his earpiece, a fresh eternity, finally a sonorous bass voice, the bartender of the cabaret, thank God it was the bartender rather than a member of the troupe. Friedrich said Sibylle's name. "Listen please, it's important, she has to come to the phone, quickly, it's urgent." A thousand eternities, a thousand sounds in the earpiece pressed to his straining ear, desperate, terrified, while his unoccupied right hand flapped nervously, to try to calm the noise all around.

Sibylle came on, sounding thoughtful and hesitant. "Oh, it's you," she said. "Where have you got to?"

Friedrich flew at her. He would have bitten through the telephone. He wanted to seize her, and carry her off. "Sibylle," he screamed, "I'm waiting here, you've got to come away with me, you've got to, you can't stay there, I'm waiting for you, I'm expecting you, we're leaving tonight." He described the landscapes that lay ahead of them, he heightened, he exaggerated, he launched himself into the comfort of the hotels, which were such that he couldn't possibly have afforded them, he assailed her with a torrential waterfall to rob her of her senses.

She said: "Just wait a minute, don't go." And once more there was an eternity to wait. He harkened like a man digging his ear into the ground to listen to the breathing of the mystery of life within it. He heard footsteps that drew reluctantly nearer, then her voice was there, sounding teary [as Friedrich would tell himself later] and uncertain and gently caressing: "Friedrich, there's a night train. In one hour. Be at the station. Buy a second ticket, take a couchette in the wagon-lit.
And
..."
Maybe there were more words on their way to him, but they were no longer audible. A rushing sound, like a tap, filled his listening ear. Maybe Sibylle had broken the connection.

H
E
LISTENED
to the shifting and creaking in the bed overhead. Then perfect silence was restored to the compartment. Only the glimmer of a cigarette still left its hot reflection on the white paneled ceiling of the carriage. Each time light fell into the space, for seconds at a time, light from the stations, light from snowy fields, starlight, there were girl-things to be seen on the floor of the compartment, lying there in a disorderly scatter, mouse-gray stockings, a soft ivory colored chemise with a yellow animal's head stitched over the heart and a lace edge on the triangle of a pair of tumbler's panties.
I'm traveling with a girl
,
I'm going across the Alps. I'm traveling with a girl
,
I'm going across the Alps.
The sentence tumbled along with the wheels. It fitted the rhythm of their revolutions perfectly. A clear and simple thought, one could say it over and over again to oneself: "I'm traveling with a girl, I'm going across the Alps." It would sound good drunk.

Friedrich had wrapped up his stay in the city quickly and decisively. From the place where he had made his telephone call, he had traveled straight to the hotel by the lake, and had called out to the fellow in the hall, the black god in his tailcoat, standing in front of his ranks of scarlet-and-white-satin page boys, that he wanted to settle his bill, and immediately [this last with the raised voice of a company director], he was leaving, yes absolutely right away, on the night express in an hour. Then, a victor, a conqueror, a triumphant hero, crowned darling of the gods, he had hastened to his pauper's cell in the abode of the rich, had laughed at the bars outside the window, thrown together his belongings, and tossed the telephone directory up at the ceiling. Let the names fall where they might, what did he care about other people's names? They could be dentists or engineers for all he cared, let them live and die in the foreign city, it was nothing to him, he was leaving, happiness had come for him, he was living once more, and leaving with Sibylle, he imagined himself a second time standing with her in the light of the Hellenic sun on some goatherds rock, ringed by southern seas. One of the pages had come for his suitcase, and in his exuberance Friedrich scorned both stairs and elevator, and slid down the balustrade feet out and arms wide so rapidly that he couldn't control his descent and came to a stop at the feet of the suddenly frozen black god.

At the station, he bought tickets, he took a compartment with two bunks, just as Sibylle's voice had said on the telephone. And then the waiting began. No Sibylle. But she would come; she had to come; she had said she would. But where would he find her? The station was enormous. Maybe she was already there, as he was, waiting and panicking. The station seemed to grow. It stretched out and spread and went off into the distance. There was one hall after another. Friedrich saw himself as an ant in a termite burrow. His fear of missing her made him feel sick. In the end he rushed out into the departure hall. The platforms were not blocked off. He asked for his train. A clock showed its shining face. The big hand moved ever closer to the minute of departure. It was a decidedly unpleasant clock, as evil as the time clock at the entrance to the lightbulb factory. The hand bit into time like a tooth. It ate the minutes with an avid crunch. Travelers ran past Friedrich, followed by panting porters. He was bumped by suitcases, and he lost himself in the daydreams that took him. He saw himself as a foreign traveler with urgent business. Also he saw himself as one of the panting porters: the man weighed down and the man obliged always to remain behind. How lucky I am, he thought to himself, to be leaving with Sibylle. The increasingly frantic cries of newspaper vendors, fruit sellers, and cigar sellers, the increasingly monitory calls of the conductors, and the squeals of brakes being tested, all sent waves of sweat down his back. He raced down the length of the train. "Sibylle! Sibylle!" He was shouting. People turned to stare at him. Then in front of the blue sleeping car Anja appeared, the daughter of the prince, little Anja in her shaggy sheepskin, a cigarette in her soft mouth, a round, cracked leather case next to her [it even had a scraped sticker from the
GRAND
HOTEL
ROMANOV
, P
ETROGRAD
], holding a letter in her hand and casually leaning back against the side of the carriage.

"What is it, what's going on, where's Sibylle, is she inside already?" Friedrich blurted, the words falling over each other.

Anja's expression was utterly calm. She held out her hand with the letter in it. It was addressed in Sibylle's large, clear, roman, and perfectly even childish hand. "She's not coming!"

Friedrich slumped against the side of the carriage. He tugged at the envelope, and it took a while before he held the page of a letter in his trembling hand. "HEE-HEE-HEE, HO-HO-HU, HA-HA-HA" ran the first paragraph in large letters drawn across the breadth of the page. There followed three rapidly scrawled lines, as if Sibylle had been running away from them. "Live only by your wits," he read, an allusion to a song. "Your wits won't feed more than a louse.
{2}
I must stay with Fedor, and Anja has to leave Magnus for a while. Have a nice trip: your Sibylle." There followed one more paragraph at the bottom of the sheet, clearly written this time, and added perhaps to console him: "If you haven't guessed by now: I'm the old woman who lives next door, though you don't know what I'm for—that's the song we sing in the dressing room, and you may sing it in blithe and cheerful fashion, by special permission of Sibyllchen and the Management." Hammers dropped from the sooty glass bell of the hall. Friedrich was sightless; neither Anja nor the train existed for him. "All aboard, ladies and gentlemen, all aboard," called the conductors. Doors slammed shut. Hands pushed him helpfully up the steps. His suitcases were slid in after him. Another door banged shut, the mouse was in the trap, the train began to move. In the light of the platform, waving arms were left behind.