A Sad Affair (18 page)

Downstairs in the bar of the St. Peter's sat the members of the ensemble, which was not performing on that day, smoking and drinking at Magnus's expense. Fedor had asked Sibylle to come down. He had been quite blithe and cheerful. "It's going to be all right," he said. "Magnus will look after us. He knows Anja will only come back if we're here, so he can't let us fall." Sibylle had turned away. She had made a sacrifice and received no blessing in return.

What was it actually worth to her, the cabaret in the cellar of the Diana Variety Theater in the oldest street in the foreign city? On reflection, not a bean! The very thought of it disgusted her. It was a sort of abyss for somnambulists going to their doom. There are a few abysses like that in the world. In difficult times they are dug by people, who, acting apparently without self-interest, on a secret commission, dig a grave to give a particular burial to a few of the century's refugees. Sibylle took Friedrich's Roman telegram off the table and, not really reading it, held it in front of her eyes. The yellow piece of paper gradually came to rest, along with the hand holding it, against her side, and then joined her body in the swaying tiger stride.

F
RIEDRICH
HAD
opened the tall French windows, and the curtains billowed into the room like lowered flags in the damp wind. Since leaving Anja in the Japanese man's room, he had felt freer than for some time. "I'm able to devote myself," he told himself, "unintermittendy, and undistracted by anyone who's locked into the same four walls as me, to the thought of Sibylle." From his vantage point, the curving bay road was a line of lit lampposts, bending under the pressure of the heavy clouds. There were more lights over the sea, as it rolled up beyond the castle rock, against the harbor wall: red and green light signals and the sliding fire of lighthouses, revolving apathetically like clock hands on their unceasing patrol. Among the gray gunboats in the little military harbor, an occasional shrill metallic horn sounded its command. Every few minutes, a wave would tumble over the wall and drench the promenade in front of the hotel, where a new bay was in process of formation, giving off a smell of seaweed, fishes, shells, and salt, the universal coastline smell.

A man stood on the end of a jetty, watching a ship that was on the point of disappearing over the horizon. It was Friedrich, and at his back were the bright strip of sand of a northern beach, a brick tower, and the gabled houses of an old Hanseatic town.
Here and there alike
,
the waves chew the land.
On that night in Naples, the Mediterranean proved to Friedrich that it was no more than just another of the world's seas, its charms were merely generic, not charged with any particular revelations reserved for him, in the face of the old wonders. Friedrich found it resistible. It grew to be a matter of indifference to him compared with his love for Sibylle, and he felt a strong sense once again of the joy of being filled with a single desire. He was alone, and prepared to endure any pain. He believed the period of excesses was past, the period of errors and delusive consolations, and he was once more on the right way, which could only and always be the way to Sibylle. He had a ticket to take him to Sicily, but he had a mortal dread of that country that was still farther away from his beloved. How could he get to her in time, if she were lying somewhere ill? Before him he saw the temples of Agrigentum and the African sea, and it was a sight of such elemental scale and danger that just then, when he understood that he had not yet come through the battle of his life, he could not feel equal to it. The massy leaden plate of a storm moving up from Africa pressed the air over the mirror-smooth sea into a block of white-hot iron; the pillars of the temples turned ashen, and their cracked plaster crumbled away and struck the ground with the frightening echoey sound of drops squeezed from a loose tap into a basin; a man sat slumped on a mule, so swaddled in a blanket that he looked more like an amorphous bundle than a human being, carried by the patient beast through the hilly country, as the first lightning ripped open the gate of heaven. Friedrich was afraid of the lightning. He saw himself lying crushed beside the pillars. He didn't want to die; he mustn't die; he must go to Sibylle. The only possible salvation was the bell beside the door, and he gave the alarm signal. His finger stuck in terrible exhaustion in the dirty, ivory bell push, only relieved when Friedrich saw the face of the night porter before him in the crack of the door. He hurriedly negotiated the terms of his departure, and calm, the calm of the fugitive who has successfully managed the first stage of his flight over the barbed wire, came over him, and filled him with warm contentment as he sat in the carriage, listening to the easy trot of the horse, taking him through the deserted streets of the sleeping city to the nearest station. The hour he had to wait for the next train to Rome seemed never-ending.

S
IBYLLE
THREW
a coat over her shoulders—it bulked up her slender frame—and strode out of the room. Her shining strawberry blond hair shone under the black beret she had pulled low over her eyes. Her face was troubled and pale, only the lips made a dark stain. She walked downstairs without switching on the light. The painted-over glass in the door to the bar was a little scratched, and through it Sibylle could see the members of the troupe sitting together at a long table. The lanky albino Magnus with his eyes of runny aquarelle blue sat at the end, in a tired posture of a man having to support his head on his hands to stay upright. The others were all laughing and talking. Fedor was preaching world revolution. His extravagant gestures made the world seem so small he could have tucked it under his arm and carried it off. That was what Sibylle got for her good deed. Nothing tied her to Fedor other than a desire—baffling to herself—to protect a naive and simple man. Suddenly she sensed what a calamity it can be to feel sympathy for someone else, and already she could feel the pressure of restraints settling round her like chains. Sibylle had ensured the continued existence of the cabaret and saved Fedor from being deported by sending the eager traveler Anja away with Friedrich; her calculation that Magnus would, in the teeth of all manner of official disapproval, step in to save the cabaret as the only possible point in the world to which Anja might one day return, had proved correct. Magnus had wanted to retire with Anja into respectable middle-class life as the director of a Diana Variety Theater of normal productions, only faintly and dimly associated—by the honorific management of the foundation that his father had established—with refugees. Now, however, through Anja's leaving, Magnus had become a true associate of all restless and unhappy people. Doctor Magnus, who had set up the old foundation for persecuted people, had, by the terms of his will, bequeathed his son and another, wilder age a dish of poisoned milk, a temptation around which a few wrigglesome snakes, one or two vipers, and numbers of gray mice had collected. In the face of this onrush of crafty, needy individuals, Magnus, the heir, was actually more helpless than they were, and felt more vilified than qualified. Vilified, for instance, by Anja, who had come to him when still a little girl with whom he could have played catch, if he hadn't married her instead. His love for Anja had come out of a generalized pity for the poor waif, and the calculation this child will one day be a beauty. For her part, Anja had never seen him as much more than a sort of railway station with plenty of platforms, where one could wait with good prospects for trains to interesting places. The cabaret had been Anja's idea, and Magnus, as the more loving, and consequently, the inferior partner in his marriage, had been suitably supportive of it. And so a trench was dug, into which the wild and unstable enthusiasts, insufficiently drawn by the foundation for victims of persecution, fell as though shaken from a tree, irresistibly lured by the temptation of having found the proper stage for their ideas. At the time the cabaret was started, Sibylle had an engagement in the provinces, and found herself appalled at being slotted into the rigid hierarchy of an erstwhile court theater, at which approval to play Juliet might arrive roughly simultaneously with one's retirement. At night she had wept in her respectable lodgings, and pummeled the pillows with her fists and cried for the time when actors had used to go around stealing clothes off washing lines, and no respectable family would have dreamed of letting out a bed to any actress. The straight lines and right angles of her provincial town were to Sibylle nothing better than the swept corridors of a prison between concrete walls. For the first time in her life, she had felt lonesome and abandoned. Friedrich had wanted to accompany her to the town, but she had turned him down because she had wanted to take Bosporus, who then hadn't come. His mysterious chemical enterprise that had got him (with Sibylle's help) the reputation for being a wizard in poison gas, had suddenly and in rather a civilian fashion, failed, and, offended by the tormenting sensation I am poor, I am her kept man, Bosporus, a hero and a knight, had withdrawn, under an array of pretexts and pursued by creditors, to a regional nursing home, where he had lived off his officer's pension. He had brought his old weapons and his helmet along with him, and when he walked, slightly limping, down the village street, then he was a great man and a brave man. Sibylle, meanwhile, started writing Friedrich long letters, and she would have liked to be able to call him to her. However, her call would have sounded to him—who saw her through love's eyes—like the call to a lover, and Sibylle feared the arrival of one dazzled by happiness in a town where she suffered nightmares of oversize traffic policemen. She loved Bosporus; he was the angel in her life, he stood in the heavens with a flaming sword, and from time to time she was overcome by the thought: He was fighting for me! Friedrich had bowed to the strength of this passion, he respected it with gritted teeth, even though it was offered to a man for whom Sibylle was never intended. Friedrich believed in her faithfulness to Bosporus. That, to him, was a certainty that afforded him just enough tranquillity to carry on with his life. Sibylle was not allowed to depart from that faithfulness within sight of Friedrich. Or so she thought, and so, instead of going to him, her unrest drove her to performances in squalid nightclubs in the provincial town. The performances didn't interest her. The songs croaked out of gluey mouths revolted her with their beastly double entendres. She sat glum and bored over a drink she didn't touch, and the eyes of the habitués around her, the eyes that came with bellies, with short, stout thighs, the dissembled traces of doubly beringed widowers' hands, slid over her almost without noticing. But it was her destiny, in one of these ovens of some middle-size provincial limbo, to see Fedor doing a turn there, a turn without the slightest success, yes, greeted even by vociferous disapproval. Since his appearance before such a hostile public [if they were expecting anything, they were expecting something crude, and mistook Fedor for a revolutionary] took on something of the sudden pause of a breathless runner, he reminded Sibylle of Friedrich's most pitiable condition, as he reached her bed breathless after a long run. She felt aghast and compassionate, and, after having Fedor brought to her by a waiter, was surprised to find a human being who looked thoroughly poor and abject, and yet behaved with complete insouciance. He dismissed his hostile reception with a contemptuous reference to "stupid provincial bigwigs" and, after first making sure that his colleague from the legitimate theater was paying, filled up his glass. Sibylle was uncertain; she still had Friedrich somewhere in mind, she feared complications, and took Fedor's manner for that of a man who kept his cards close to his vest. Not until later did she realize that what you saw was what you got, and she was overcome by a protectiveness for a simple child who wanted to stay with her. That feeling, and her desire to get away from the bureaucratic atmosphere of the erstwhile court theater to a more chaotic stage that would look automatically more artistic, prompted Sibylle to run away with Fedor from the provincial town and go to the basement cabaret in the oldest alley in the foreign city. But she was too aware not to realize quite quickly that the scruffy colorful path of bohemia was only going to lead to the same barren and unsatisfying work as the calm and sober road of a more officially sanctioned career. Then, only the excitement of an unspecified curiosity held her. The Russians were strange. Magnus was strange. Performing in the twilight basement was strange. Cabaret was something she had snuffled at as the mouse snuffles at the bacon rind in the mousetrap. And now she was trapped, caught up in it, in conditions and events that were as remote from her as court intrigues in Manchuria, and—well, was she still that Sibylle who would have opposed almost to the death any restriction placed on her freedom?

She turned away from the painted glass barroom door to the front door. She opened it, and at the same instant, the wind leapt violently into the corridor. Sibylle heard a shout, and she ran out into the street; not until she saw that no one was coming after her, and it was just the door falling shut behind her, did she walk on more slowly.

F
RIEDRICH
CLIMBED
into a third-class carriage on a train that had come up from Reggio, on the southernmost point on the peninsula, and was caked with soot from the many tunnels going through Calabria. The handles on doors and windows were grimy, and an acrid paste coated the hands of the passengers who had hauled themselves aloft, and from there, via involuntary gestures of impatience, their faces, which bore dark streaks so that they resembled half-finished masks. The inside of the carriage looked like a homeless shelter. The passengers, who already had a long journey behind them, lay variously sprawled or hunched on benches, floor, and rows of suitcases. In the cool blue glow of a night-light, it was at first not easy to separate one figure from another in the tangle of arms and legs and heads. The sleepers were a single many-headed and many-limbed organism. Friedrich was afraid he might stumble and fall, and he was further irritated by the sounds of breathing all around him in every pitch. He had a feeling of having broken into some strangers' bedroom, and he was relieved when he finally found a place on the end of a bench, not far from the door. After his eyes had gotten used to the space and the light, he saw that he had joined a group of young people, who were all wearing different parts of the same naval uniform. They were recruits, narrow-shouldered boys, who had been drafted into the navy, and were on their way to join their units. Four of them were sitting opposite Friedrich, and three on the bench beside him, so that he restored symmetry and equilibrium to the benches. Each young fellow had his knees spread, touching his neighbors, and together their upper thighs made a bed of supple, taut muscle on which a girl was laid sleeping, while the faces of the youths who were on their way to serve, and who resisted the girl because of the natural need for sleep in the young, and dreamed through the night with open eyes, their skin transparent and lit as though by inner fire in the exhaustion of the late vigil, constituted a kind of heaven above the girls sleep, noble and full of the beauty of the south. No queen could enjoy a better and better-protected sleep, and never will you be better loved, thought Friedrich, struck by the chaste manner of the group, to which he, a stranger, had somehow come to belong. He guessed that this girl, whom they permitted to sleep through the night thus bedded, was the girlfriend of one of these boys, whom out of love and passion she was seeing to his ship, and that the others, out of friendship for him, were all devoted to her and in love with her. The girl was beautiful. His feeling more than his senses told Friedrich she was. Love transfigured her. She lay in a holy aura. She was beloved and in love, and she was a pleasing thing in the natural order of the world. Was she not a child in a cradle, over whom the men were reverently bowing their heads? And how submissive they all were to the beautiful law of love. Surely they all desired the girl, but they left her to the one with whom she was affianced, instead of proceeding against him in a common violence of fists and murder, to tear her away from him and anyone else. They did not suffer. They laid other features on the face of the sleeping girl, and thought of their own girls slumbering, at night. Friedrich warmed to them. He brushed the arm of his neighbor, and he wished for a few moments he could be like that again, simple and in a state of grace and escaped from his destiny. But then, as the train drew near to Rome, and the first gardens became visible in the early light, he too saw the image of Sibylle in the face of the sleeper, and in an enormous desire he bent down into the line of lowered heads of the young sailors. Then the girl awoke, and they all saw themselves in her eyes, and they were glad, glad for no reason, and all embraced one another, and laughed and joked.