A Sad Affair (16 page)

Then he became a beggar again, and stood in front of her and he was a damned soul without a body, and gasping and cramped, he said: "Your mouth, Sibylle, your mouth," and she forgot her laughter and took the happiness out of her expression, and said: "No, I like you." There it was once again, his devil in the guise of Sibylle, untouchable! Could you slap her if she was so calm and sensible and clever? His devil played at being her handmaiden. Friedrich served Sibylle. He helped her out of her bath, and rubbed her laughing with coarse towels till she was as red as a boiled lobster, a nice, sharp-scissored young lobster; but woe betide Friedrich if he should drop the coarse towels; woe betide him if his hands should settle on her skin, and stroke it in movements that were gentle, caressing, and full of love. A sudden transformation would occur, a metamorphosis in the adored figure, it was as if she pulled on, not a cap of invisibility, but a sort of magic shield that protected her from him from top to toe. "Leave," she would say, with chiseled features, and she was a statue of disappointment.

Then Friedrich would wander the thousand streets of the great city, through the day and into the night, wander blindly across the backdrop that all those who shared the time with him and the place, could see, and would hold judgment. He adjured God! [Never again would he be as believing as he was in his anguish over Sibylle, and it happened that he would go into churches and kneel down in front of the altars of saints, and pray to them for forgiveness and their blessing.] He showed himself to God as he panted and ran, in his perturbation and incomprehension, and he said: "Look, I fetch the wood for Bosporus's stove, I sweep the steps and lower my head, lest they see the welts and take fright at my rotting flesh, I would give my blood for Sibylle, I am all athirst for her mouth, oh, God, once only, a taste of those lips!" And God offered no reply while Friedrich cried His Name. It is perfectly possible that we have been sent signs and clues, but we overlook them in our zeal, with which we fail to advance our cause. And so Friedrich dreamed the dream of rapine. That dream too is as old as mankind, and Friedrich built a tower on a field miles away from human hearing and that offered no echo to any scream. And to it he dragged her [in his dream, oh, only in his dream] and set his demon in her guise, and fought with it and drove it out of Sibylle's body, and said: "Now stand condemned to howl and wail in this tower to the end of your days."

Still everything carried on. He served. Served Sibylle. Sure, he occasionally raised his weapon against himself, but what was a shot against the certainty,
She is destined for me
? Friedrich was not allowed to take himself off from this life that had Sibylle in it. "If she dies," he said, "then it's permitted." Did he desire her death? Who wouldn't like to see his demon destroyed? One night he woke up, and thought she had died. The thought was so ghastly that he hurried over to her, and sobbing, kissed her hands, while she wondered what had come over him. If life beside Sibylle was terrible, then it still had to be accepted in its terribleness, till the misunderstanding was resolved, the spell broken. And he even succeeded in breaking his dependency on her nearness, the habit of seeing her daily. He allowed her to depart on her first engagement, and he felt the train was passing over his own body as it left the station; but still he survived the test by thinking: She is in the world, she is breathing the same air.

A
LL THAT
was in the past. So had he perhaps come through the test, and was there an end in sight? He had better concentrate now—Friedrich stood up and stretched in the compartment, propped himself on his arms, morning had broken, sunlight spilled through the windows and a softer air—concentrate that he didn't make a mistake now, that the misunderstanding was not fealty to a love that lived solely off the strength of the past. Had he, during the months he hadn't seen Sibylle, distanced himself from her? Was it only her physical presence that beguiled him? Because in that case he was a fool, and it was his duty to break out of the madhouse of misunderstanding in his own emotional life, and leap into life, as long as there was a bit of happiness and joy to be caught. Had he not got through the night? Did he not overestimate the pain that he was in? Or was it that he was overly accustomed to the pain, and had therefore become immune to its deadly effect? He needed to account for his conduct. Perhaps he would have to write off those years with all their endeavor. Had he not traveled to the city in a bid to try and reach Sibylle after all, out of orneriness and in the guise of the man ostensibly passing through?
Sibylle, oh Sibylle!
Sunlight filled the frame of the window. And in the gleam of its light, Anja jumped down from her top bunk, and her body was all golden in the light. "Tuscany," she exclaimed. "It's Tuscany, and we're in Italy!"

They were in Italy. The south. The sun. There was the celebrated landscape of the Old Masters. In front of him, Anja still stood lustrously in the window The breeze blew on her breasts. Shadow flecked the light on her skin. She stood there, enraptured: "Italy! Italy! Do you know why I had to come away with you? I wanted to go to Italy, I wanted to see Italy for myself. That was all that was driving me away from Magnus. This: the sun, the landscape, the green." It happened quite effortlessly, that they were drawn to one another by the sight. The rush of wind from a train going the other way threw her into his arms. In the cold whistling of a tunnel, he had to warm her nakedness. His kiss lit on her dry girlish lips; he didn't say "Little Anja," because he was thinking
Sibylle
; and since she clasped him to her, he steered their fall together on to the lower bunk.

They were in Rome, and Anja lived as she smoked, greedily and hurriedly, and she treated every hour as if it were the last [the prince's daughter who had seen Moscow burn, or some other town on the Volga] and tried to drain it of all its pleasure. Friedrich was astonished and amused. It was nice, it was simple, it was fun, girl-things lying around, and someone who said: "Sleep well," when night came, and in the morning, "Come on, the sun's shining," while two feet with little tidy toes were already kicking aside the blankets. But: "Am I that man?" he asked himself, as they curved out of the traffic-swarming
corso
across the Piazza Venezia into the Via del Impero, in a chariot drawn by a little horse. "Am I the man driving with a girl in my chariot past centuries of history towards the Colosseum, on my way to seeing the Baths of Antony behind the Palatine Hill?" Did the wonder climb out of the spectacular horizons ringing him, or did it fall on him with the beams of the sun, shining warmly in winter, or might it not be from anything that was happening to him, but rather the opposite, that he was acting, that he was taking steps forward or to the side, moving as though through thick forests when you feel you're going the wrong way, but for all that, and in spite of all your instinct, you're not able to follow the right path? He dreamed, but his dreams failed to make him happy. Nor was it a nightmare from which he awoke gasping. It was a dream of helplessness. The blurring, fuzzed images at the edge of reality. Did he love Anja? It was certainly pleasant not to be alone, but was it not also cowardly and reducing? There were times that he gave Anja money for the coachman, and leapt out of the carriage and lost himself in a tangle of little lanes. He visited the quarters of the poor, the gray huts on the banks of the Tiber. He wanted to be good, because he felt so bad. He bought fruit and distributed it to the dirty, half-naked children. They are beautiful, he thought, under their crust of grime they are beautiful. He bent down to one boy and kissed cheeks that were plumped with the blood that had held aloft the power of the Caesars. He was sworn at, and he didn't understand. He saw a telegraph office, and he wrote the words: "
I
LOVE
YOU
,
ONLY
YOU
,
STILL
AND
ALWAYS
," and he only understood that he had sent a wire to Sibylle when the words were already making their way down the wires to her. He followed soldiers and sailors into the shade of tight streets, supposing they were on their way to girls in brothels. He thought: I wish I were like them, working on a ship, and then going trustingly to find pleasure in a port. He had had enough of thinking. He distrusted it. He thought of Sibylle, Anja, Fedor, and Magnus, and he told himself: "I don't do anything but think about my desires. There's no truth there at all." He was a little dot in the vastness of the Eternal City. And even that, he thought, is overweening.

Anja couldn't do the taut and supple tiger walk of Sibylle, while she smoked and thought. She sat on the window seat in the hotel room with her soft mouth quickly, greedily sucking on her cigarette, dragging the smoke through her lungs and expelling it in short violent bursts into the air, looking at the Via Sallustiana and at the little church on the corner of the Via Piemonte. Draped in Friedrich's striped dressing gown, she was like a marmalade cat lying in the midday sun in sluggish contentment. She had made it, she was in Italy, the view of the street and the church completely satisfied her and gave her imagination a stage where she could perform. Only her craving to lean against someone else, to feel the warm pulsing of another life next to hers, her skin's desire to be stroked by other hands, and the desire of her hands to stroke another skin, reminded Anja, when she was abandoned, of the absence of the tardy Friedrich. "Maybe the only reason we're together is because we haven't adopted a little dog, whose pretty little leaps would give us the illusion of being loved."

Friedrich sensed this the moment he walked into the room, and he thought: If I were alone, I would be confronted by myself and the emptiness around me, and I might do the right thing. He saw night approach like an enveloping fog. He was frightened by its predictable course. Once again, he would take his place beside Anja; the window would be open, and over their bed, the cool of the early spring night in Rome would waft like velvet, scented by early blossoms; again, they would listen to the shouts down in the street, all of them rising, as if sung, and the saber clink of the gendarmes on their rounds in their embroidered tailcoats of valets; once again, his mouth would find the mouth of the girl and taste the tobacco on her cool childlike lips; and once again, he would think of another girl and other lips [he was still athirst and in his desert, with his gaze fixed on an eternal fata morgana on the distant horizon]; all the while Anja, hurriedly and greedily and as if it were her last, sought to draw all possible pleasure from the mild hour. Were they not drowsing in a tepid bath, as old and tired already as Petronius, who, with his veins open, had put it all behind him? Friedrich then also buried his head in the sand, and, unable to flee from his own soul, conceived the error of leaving the place where unease troubled him. He wanted no more nights in Rome. He wanted no more soft beds. He wanted the excitement of journeying on, to a new place. "We're going," he said. "We're going farther south. Tonight."

I
T
WAS
raining in Naples. They left the station, and thought they were in an aquarium. The carriage that they huddled in was as wet and cold as a boat on a windy sea. They swayed all down the length of the Corso Umberto. There was no one on the streets. They saw only strange figures that looked like billowing pantaloons in a storm, clinging to the black balloons of umbrellas. The tiles in the Piazza del Pretis were awash, you thought you were crossing a thin layer of melting ice over gaping marine chasms. At last their carriage trundled downhill toward the sea, and it took the sight of turbulent waves to remind them that they were on terra firma. For both of them, it was their first sight of the Mediterranean. They were disappointed and surprised, and they felt annoyed with themselves for being disappointed. The palms on the shore were trembling with cold. Vesuvius was a leaden cloud in the distance. Was this really Santa Lucia's city of sunshine? They stopped in front of a hotel on the Via Partenope and got out. We're about to run out of money, thought Friedrich. A tailcoat greeted them in soft crooning French: "
Messieurs dames
have brought bad weather with them, but it will soon pass. The hotel is at your disposal. You are my only guests, except for a Japanese consular attaché. He is waiting for a ship to take him home. It's still early in the year, the season has yet to begin. Are
messieurs dames
proposing to take a ship themselves?" His chatter contrived to be at once humble and mysterious. He seemed to want to say to them: "I'm afraid I am unable to offer you the warmth associated with Naples; I am inconsolable, but at least I can still offer you a Japanese diplomat by way of compensation." They took a room facing the Castel del Ovo; they opened the tall French windows to hear the pounding surf, the waves breaking against the walls of the old sea fortifications; and they turned on the central heating, to let the steam fill the pipes and warm them.

In the afternoon, Friedrich went into town by himself. Anja had built herself a nest of cushions in front of the radiator, and said she wanted to wait for the sun to come out. The rain had eased slightly, and with his coat collar turned up against the gale, Friedrich remained fairly dry as he crossed the Piazza del Plebiscite and onto the Via Roma, which was jam-packed with two streams of humanity, one preceding him, the other coming toward him, and over them was a buzz of voices like the wing beat of a great swarm of birds. Friedrich didn't mind that he knew no Italian and was unable to understand anything of what was being said. He had a sense of wildness, and an idea that everyone was on display: the young fellows in their smart suits and their olive green hats set aslant on their gleaming hair; the sailors in their short sweaters, their rolling stride, and their little mustaches; the officers jingling with their spurs and swords, under their cloaks worn dashingly over one shoulder; and also the women, their blue-painted eyelids demurely cast down, and their mouths a shocking red. His desire to have Sibylle with him grew frantic. Wouldn't it excite her? he thought to himself, and he saw her in love with the street, her eyes large and shining, and he could actually feel her laying her hand on his arm and saying: "Oh look at that woman over there, wouldn't you like to have her?" A tangle of little alleyways opened on the left. They were so narrow that if you opened your arms, you could touch the walls on either side with your fingertips. These too were full of people and bustle. Life was lived out on the streets. Wood fires had been lit in the doorways. The inhabitants assembled round a bonfire to which they had all contributed. The cold was damp and piercing. The smoke was acrid. It was the poverty of the south in wintertime. The stalls, however, were well supplied. Meats, cheeses, and breads: all were piled high on the tables. Fruit sellers yelled. Oranges were wastefully pressed and tossed to the ground, which they soon came to cover, like humus in the forest. This jungle is something you've got to see for yourself! His thoughts were still with Sibylle. He only responded to the new sights and sounds by imagining her delighted reaction. He endeavored to see through her eyes. He held long conversations with her, and he thought: This lane here is where I would kiss her! He quite forgot the hotel and Anja. He bought himself an end of salami and a piece of bread, and ate them up on his aimless wanderings. He went to a wine stall and had them pour him, from a dusty barrel, a glass of heavy red wine that tasted like ink. He bit into oranges, sucked out the juice, and, with the pleasure of oversupply, threw away the flesh. He saw a monkey sitting on a barrel organ and gave it a banana, which the monkey ate up in a rather well-bred fashion. Its master, who was cranking the handle, thanked him politely. Night had come, and Naples was lit by a thousand fires.