A Sad Affair (13 page)

Friedrich was still clutching the letter. Without discerning any outlines, his eyes rested on the lit-up rooms in the houses next to the tracks. Then the letter was gone. He must have put it down somewhere. It didn't matter anyway "Your reservations, please," said the conductor. "May I see your reservations, please? Monsieur and Madame have beds fourteen and fifteen, thank you." So we're monsieur and madame now, thought Friedrich. How funny, he thought, with a serious attempt at laughter. And also: I wonder whether the conductor would continue to say "monsieur and madame" if I were to pull off my shoes and run down the corridor like a gorilla, smashing all the windows as I went. But he lacked the strength even to untie his laces. "May I have your tickets as well, please," the conductor went on, "so that Monsieur and Madame won't be disturbed in the night." How nice, we won't be disturbed! The conductor took the tickets. He received a tip as well; naturally his care deserved a tip, everything smoothly took its course, as befitted a monsieur and a madame.

They were on their own. The door had been closed on them. As yet, not a word had passed between them. Here, in the narrow space at the foot of the two bunk beds, there was no escaping the other. They stood and faced each other. What does she think will happen? Friedrich wondered. Is she expecting me to slap her across the face? That I take hold of her and throw her out of the window? Anja looked at him. Her face was unchanged in its utter tranquillity. Her look seemed to go past Friedrich and out into infinite space. This is the end, thought Friedrich, the living end. He raised his two hands toward Anja, and they fluttered up and settled on her shoulders like two birds. Like Magnus, as he was trying to appease her! They stood so a while, both of them very serious. Is Sibylle sleeping with Fedor? He didn't even think she was; it didn't seem enough for Sibylle; he wanted to bewail the loss of a queen. He took Anja's head in his hands and kissed her on the mouth. He did so thinking she needs to be told that I won't throw her out. Her lips tasted of tobacco, and they were cool and dry like the lips of a child. "Top or bottom?" he asked, gesturing at the bunk beds.

"Top," she said. Thereupon he laid himself, just exactly as he was, on the lower bed, while she took off her dress. She had the attractive curves of a girl, and a firm bosom. Friedrich had expected her to be a little more boyish. "Good night," she said, and she clambered into the top bed.

"Good night," said Friedrich. He got up once more, to open the window and switch off the light; then, dressed as he was, he rolled himself up in the sheets.

It is sometimes good to travel like a banker, or a fraudster. Bedded on soft mattresses, even worried souls get to where they want to go. Whereas those who endure the hard planks of third-class accommodation will never reach the kind station of their destination. Adversity forces one to recognize the futility of human endeavor, it makes for insight and compliance. Wakeful nights scrape the deceit of optimism from one's expression. With naked and battered visage, the traveler steps into the corridor in the morning and is assailed by the pale and nimble specter of the new day, chasing the train across the meadows, leaping in at the window, and pressing the exhausted traveler as he struggles for breath, till he is prepared to confess and to implicate himself. But Friedrich, by taking the night train over the mountains [like a banker, or again a fraudster], experienced a magnificent riot of the senses. He rested, the while the blue carriage climbed ever higher. He could follow the process. Like fast-forward movements in a fantastic film, the night charged by into Friedrich's view, as he gazed out of the interior of the darkened compartment toward the rectangle of the open window. He experienced the surge and sway of the ride, the steep corners, the furtive shadows and leaping lights, the flats of snow, walls of ice, crystal waters, violet-colored gulfs of fog, holes in the deep sky, cloud gallops, stars, red and green signals, white lamplight over the deserted platforms of remote mountain stations, shining slate walls of tunnels, endless winds, storm currents in the air, pure and powerful aromas, dust of snow, as occasional swirls in the rise and fall of the journey. It was a journey like a drug rush, and it most resembled the reeling experienced by sensitive listeners as they concentrated on certain musical sequences.

And yet those notes, coming to him from outside, were only the accompaniment and the amplification of the melody that was in his heart.

The weak reflection of a cigarette glow under the ceiling of the compartment was gone. Was Anja already asleep? Friedrich listened. He couldn't hear her breathing. What about Sibylle? He didn't need to fight the idea that she could be sleeping with Fedor. That idea was completely absurd. It wasn't even that Fedor was too lowly; Sibylle had had fleeting relationships with still lowlier types, in Friedrich's view, and Sibylle had even admitted the inferiority of these passing fancies of hers. "It's just what I felt like," she had said. But Fedor struck Friedrich as just not worthy. It can't be any fun to have a poor man come home to you. Friedrich could only imagine Fedor in the exhausted posture of a little man without any deeper insight into things, and then, once home, or in a circle of others like himself, raging against this world in order to refuse all blame or responsibility for it. Sibylle couldn't love Fedor. That much seemed clear. Friedrich accounted for their chumminess, as he tried to term it to himself, with reference to Sibylle's loyalty to the capital of her country, where Fedor had performed and known people and was able to name places and streets and events. He'll just be there to give her memories a cue. And so Fedor played no part in the deception that had just been practiced on Friedrich. Friedrich didn't hate Fedor. He merely envied him, as he envied anyone who was allowed to live in Sibylle's proximity. Other than that, he didn't care one way or the other about Fedor. The deception was purely Sibylle's. At the most, Anja might be a peripheral figure in the plan. Anja had wanted to get away from Magnus, and Sibylle loved playing the role of a knight in shining armor to young girls. Why shouldn't she help Anja to get away on a trip? Maybe the whole thing was just a joke. It struck him as possible that Sibylle had thought to herself: What if I send along a substitute? She was certainly capable of it. Perhaps it was foolish of Friedrich not to avail himself of the substitute. Maybe a girl was just a girl, and all his woe and agitation could be settled biologically. He listened again for sounds of sleep or vigil over his head, but there was nothing. Friedrich felt his heart. Once again, it was the frightened bird palpitating in a strangers large hand. He thought: If Anja were to sleep with me, I wouldn't do anything to hurt her, but she could give me the sense of another body next to mine, she could warm me and take my heart away from the stranger, and put it back in my breast. He knew his idea of their chastely lying together was a sentimental one, but that didn't bother him just then. In certain shocking predicaments, in spite of the unsentimental century, a man yearns for a creature he can stroke. And while cats and dogs and other animals are not routinely lent out to the sorry, wakeful occupants of international sleeping cars for the duration of their journey, he at least had Anja there with him. Even so, he was reluctant to wake her. Only when light happened to fall on the girl-things on the floor, light from stations, light from snow plains, starlight, he thought for a moment of calling to her; but even as he was thinking about it, the idea disappeared among others in his head. What if Sibylle had come? What if they were her things instead of Anjas that were lying on the floor? If it was the sound of her breathing he was trying to hear? How would it be with him then? Not the deceitful fantasizing (
I'm traveling with
Sibylle
), but suppose she had actually come and it was Sibylle asleep in the top bunk? Did he not have it in him to think in more generous ways, and so wasn't it a matter of indifference whether Sibylle was sharing the same wagon-lit, or the same planet? What further benefits could accrue to him from her nearness? A greater degree of excitement. But couldn't he derive that from her distance too? Did the thoughts he was having on this nocturnal journey mean that his love for Sibylle was over? By understanding this love as an arduous task that he had put behind him, he might be able to keep it going by compiling a catalog of his torments, raking them together from the field of past time where they sprouted, into a bonfire over the pain of his latest disappointment.

He was benumbed. He kept wanting to utter her name. But never in the course of that night did it take the form of a crazed brutal yell over the thunder of the train, the rattle of the wheels, the whistle of the locomotive, the echo of the valleys. Was it that the heart of the "monsieur" in the sleeping car was already too old to love and rave and burn? Back when, following the night in the lamp room, the electric shock from the storm of little lightnings in the suddenly extinguished inferno, and the morning contretemps with Beck, when he had gone round to Sibylle's in the afternoon to pick up his keys—back then he hadn't been a "monsieur" yet, traveling across the mountains at night in a compartment with a girl he barely knew.

W
HEN
B
ECK
left the room, Friedrich had leapt up out of bed.
I
need to get hold of some money, he thought. He had still felt a little wobbly on his legs and woozy in his head, floppy just about everywhere, particularly his heartbeat, but the measure he proposed to take could be done in his sort of sleepwalking condition. He bundled up everything he had by way of old and worn clothing, he could no longer go around dressed like that anyway, and went to the street by the wall to offer them for sale to the secondhand clothes dealers who lived there. The secondhand clothes dealers looked at what Friedrich spread out on their tables, as if they were loathsome toads that you had to keep away from your body with fire tongs. Friedrich, desperate for money, was too inexperienced to understand that the secondhand clothes dealers were behaving just as they always did, and wanted in fact to buy what he offered them. When, at the end of a contemptuous spiel, they offered him a few pennies—purely out of pity for him, "so you haven't had a wasted journey"—he was so astonished that he thanked them. It wasn't until he was back on the street that it dawned on him that he was still poor after this transaction. But he believed that everything depended on money He wanted to appear before Sibylle like a prince from Arabia, offering wondrous presents and having the magical ability to fulfill all desires instantly and with a smile, as though he had Aladdin's lamp, at the very least. On none of the hungry days he had lived through had the thought of being poor struck him so forcibly, like a curse, like a dismissal from the sight of God and from the joys of His worldly table. An aphorism of La Bruyère's struck him: "It is a calamity to be in love and not to have a large fortune!" He would have been willing to scrabble in the dirt to reach the means of granting wishes and of supporting love. He hastened to exploit whatever possibilities he had. Where only recently modesty and breeding would have prevented him from applying, he now saw possibilities. He thought it must sometimes happen that bank messengers drop their envelopes, so he focused his eyes on the muck in the gutters. He cursed a world in which one could no longer sell oneself to the Devil [but later, he was of the view that he had indeed made a contract with the Devil, but on less favorable terms]. And after that he went scrounging. He was completely unscrupulous in this, and possessed a naive aptitude. His motto was that the end justified the means. He called on a few people, telling them about his recent accident at night and of the need for an expensive treatment. What he managed to raise in the course of these depredations had by lunchtime come to almost fifty marks. His victims said of his visits that they had felt obliged to help him out because they had never seen anyone with an expression of such desperate need. And with fifty marks Friedrich felt rich. He went to a barbershop to have his untrimmed beard taken off, and he had his hair washed with fragrant shampoos and cut, and his face invigorated by the application of hot towels. And he went out to lunch in an expensive restaurant. He didn't say so to himself, but what drove him was the desire to appear at the top of his form when he next saw Sibylle. And he drank a glass of Burgundy, to settle his heart and nerves. Then he bought some large yellow chrysanthemums and went round to Sibylle's apartment on the square in front of the KDW department store.

Even as he was going up the stairs, he was saying to himself: "Maybe I'll be able to do something to help Beck." He said it and stopped, because of the thought, tall and bright like a celestial star: She is predestined for me! He rang, and the room he was ushered into was immense. But it wasn't the starlet's apartment of which he had spoken mockingly to Beck, following Beck's description of it. It was an immense room in which the resident had so spread herself that she conquered it, whereas most tenants are in thrall to their rooms. The first thing Friedrich noticed were the books. They lay around all over the place, on tables, chairs, suitcases, cushions, and the floor. Next he saw animals. Brown teddy bears, gray woolly donkeys, white fluffy goats, wheeled elephants with magnificent red and gold harnesses. Picture books. Watercolors. A ticking railway set. Clothes. Materials. Ribbons and scarves. And bottles and flagons with powder, makeup, and tinted waters. Chinese dolls. A theater in which Death and the Devil were embracing. And many, many balls. And there, on a little rug in the middle of the room, in front of an electric reflector fire, lay Sibylle. She had barely anything on. Only a white silk shirt that permitted the heat to shine on her skin, and holding in the shirttails a little pair of swimming briefs, the triangle of a champion swimmer. As she jumped up to say hello, he sank to his knees on the floor. He was putting on a rather theatrical version of a greeting, to conceal his awkwardness. He still had the chrysanthemums in his hand. He saw she had legs like two slender columns, shining and firm and ivory. She's so perfectly made, she's like the young of some animal. God must be proud of her, thought Friedrich as he fell to his knees.