A Sad Affair (2 page)

The policeman put out his arm, "Over there!" and a white baton jerked out in the appropriate direction. "Over there!" were some luminous letters, clambering up a wall. The eye first had to get used to the rhythm, and then it was able to read:
DIANA
VARIETY
THEATER
.

Now what did that mean: a basement and a main entrance? In the vitrine next to the main entrance were pictures of an unambiguous nature. Groups of girls, naked save for a sparkling little
rien
round their loins, the ghost of a pair of knickers, a puff of material that was just enough for the eyes to seize upon, so that a minimum of imagination, the little bit that the johns here might manage to muster, would suffice to suggest to the brain what further strippings, colorings, games, and surprises might be possible. And also, there was the strong man with the dumbbells extended high above his head, bulges of muscle under his bursting singlet, and there was the chanteuse with heavy gray face and décolletage, and sparkling glass cherries in her water-waved hair.

But Sibylle! Where was she? He pressed his face against the glass, he could taste makeup and the salt of tears, and he felt his way through the faces, one after another, and he saw round cows' eyes, empty, willing faces, teasingly curled fingers, expressions miming desire, worn mouths; it was disgusting. He felt himself blush. Blush, here, where no one knew him. A man walked past, and he wondered: What must he take me for? But only for a second. And then once more: Sibylle! But where was she? This couldn't be the troupe she was acting in. That was impossible. The newspaper in which he had read the review would never have written up the sort of scenes that stared up at him from behind the glass. Then he saw the basement entrance, and there, way down, so that you had to bend down to see it, was another vitrine.

A child's face, a little melancholy, that was her, and the other one, jaunty in her blue-and-white-striped school pinafore, that was her as well. "Sibylle," and there it was again, the muted tone in his voice as it whispered in her ear, and he felt the hair stand up on his neck, and he loved her, and he hoped her hands would still be a little grubby, and her fine, deft fingers, when he leaned down to kiss them, would still smell of colored sweets and sweetish herb vinegar.

"Ah'
tu es
belle!"
someone had written across the juncture of her cheek and neck. "
Ah
'
tu es
belle!";
the fellow must have pushed his pen between the bars to do it, the glass was smashed there, and he must have taken quite some trouble to write it:
"Ah'
tu es
belle!"
He should be pleased. She would say: "It makes you miserable if people like me." But he was pleased. He even laughed to himself. But he was afraid, a little, for the man who had written it. She smiled. An Italian might have written
"O belle dolce."
Her colleagues alongside her looked pretty grim. A woman with a shapely Roman head. Young men and women in sweaters, because that was the style. The whole thing had a somewhat Russian effect. It could be a basement cabaret in Moscow, to say it right out, but, to say it even more clearly, it wasn't.

Then they all came out. People, so many people. It was baffling that so many people could have been accommodated in that cellar. But they looked neither rumpled nor exhausted. They wore good coats, and the women had fashionable hats. Some even disappeared into the cars that had suddenly driven up, purring, from all different directions. If you'd asked him, Friedrich would have replied that it was people from the educated middle classes who had come up from the depths.

He himself descended. Or perhaps rather, he thought he would. He needed some willpower to walk down the steps and enter the premises. A buffet seemed to have been set up in the anteroom. Cloakroom attendants and waiters were reckoning up with a fat man behind the bar. A girl was shouting angrily. It was something about the number of paintings by some artists that had been sold. The girl was getting unpleasantly heated. She was arguing over a small sum of money, as if her life depended on it. She belonged to the troupe, she was in fact the cashier who traveled with them wherever they went.

Friedrich would have had to cross the anteroom to reach the theater proper, but it felt like a barricade he didn't dare cross. He also had an apprehension that the cashier's sharp voice would snap at him, even after the performance was over, and, with passionate professionalism, demand money from him for a ticket. Not that he would have minded about the money, but he was ashamed of having imagined a scene where he would pay up rather than make a fuss, and without needing to, without it even being sensible. Instead, he stopped at the buffet and ordered a drink, so as to justify his presence there in some way.

And that was still the state of play when a young fellow came out of the theater, one of the ones he had seen outside in sweaters, and he walked up to Friedrich and shook his hand. "Come with me," he said, and there was something in his voice that sounded pleased and welcoming. Friedrich followed him into the theater, and felt oppressed by some premonition, even before he had any firm idea of what was going on. "Here he is," called the young man in the sweater, once they'd crossed the room, which was like a battlefield strewn with chairs, "here he is, and here," he said, pointing up at the stage, "is Sibylle." Who straightway came bounding through the gap in the curtains, jumped down, laughed, gave Friedrich her hand, casual, lovable, familiar: "So there you are, you old so-and-so!" And then: "Have you two met, I thought you might know Fedor," and then Friedrich did remember, and he remembered cafés and night clubs and a young Russian who had sung songs about hunger and revolution in a low bass voice, Fedor, the man in the sweater—and he turned to look at him.

And then others came down from the stage as well: the Roman girl; the rough form of a peasant woman from olden days; a lanky albino chap with watery eyes; Anja, a little girl bundled up in a sheepskin, the clown in the troupe, now coughing and rapidly drawing on a cigarette in her soft mouth. They all clustered around Friedrich, welcomed him, and asked him for news of home, as they called the country he had just left, although to them, Russian émigrés from the wave of 1917, it could hardly have been home. Fedor took charge, he spoke for Friedrich, gave answers on his behalf to questions [to which Friedrich had not collected himself] and finally said "
Du
" to him, taking his arm with a generous, fraternal gesture: "What do you want to drink, let's have a bite to eat, come and join us at the buffet."

A long table had been set up, at which members of the troupe but also other persons were sitting. People who weren't directly involved with the cabaret but were somehow friends or hangers-on, who got a meal ticket from one or other member. Friedrich saw faces that looked tense, hungry, and unsure. "They are refugees," he said to himself, and then he thought: But the czar's no longer alive, so why are they sitting here in the basement chewing their bread like anarchists on the eve of the great day when they will take the bomb they've hidden in their coat, and throw it at the feet of the horses drawing the Imperial carriage? There was a measure of repugnance and disapproval in Friedrich. He felt bourgeois, which he hadn't really before, a man who acted by the lights of reason and sense. "Perhaps I'm in a bad mood," he said to himself. "Something is predisposing me against these people." He was not a loudmouth. He wasn't happy to have to talk to strangers, with a lot of people he didn't know, of whom he knew only what he thought he saw, and whose society he had not sought. Principally, however, had he come here to sit so far away from Sibylle, who was only one of the voices in the general conversation? He was sitting next to her, he had at least managed that, but could he do more than look at her from the side? Questions, questions. She smells of something. Maybe it's old greasepaint grown rancid. She looks excited. How did she fall in with these people in the first place? She's no Russian, she's from the west, I'm more of an Easterner than she is.

"Can we go?" he said.

And she: "Where to, everything here closes at midnight."

He hung his head. Do I still desire her? I can't even say whether I find her attractive. Her face doesn't have the power it once had, to fling me to the ground. I have an actress next to me, a member of a troupe of savages, who seem intent on conferring the gamy taste of darkness to everything they do. Now Anja over there, the soft round face above the shaggy white sheepskin, and the tired expression of a child still awake at the end of the party, I could feel some tenderness for. Whereas Sibylle, why? All right then, then it'll be over, I'll go home to my hotel, and tomorrow I'll travel on, have a wonderful time, see the south and the sun and the sea.

"Where are you staying?"

The question was from Fedor, and he was thrown into a panic. He said: "The Grand Hotel," and he said it quietly, and he saw, before anyone was able to say anything, that it was something to be ashamed of. He explained: "It was the only hotel I knew by name, and I wanted to be right on the lake."

Sibylle asked: "How long are you staying for?"

He said: "Only till tomorrow."

"But we've got so much to talk about, and I wanted to go out with you somewhere!"

Her face was turned toward him now, and he saw it plainly, and he scraped away layers of what might be the bad air in this smoky room till she was the way he remembered her. Her mouth was without lipstick, and he thought: She used to take more care of herself. But then he thought that that was probably inevitable, because whom did she have to look after her? He felt like taking her hands between his and warming them, as if they had been those of a child that has fallen into the water and is lying on the stones of the quayside, trembling and pale, while the heroic policeman has left home, left wife and child and mother [and left the group photographs on his walls], and gone out in a boat after her, pulled her out with a boat hook, getting himself thoroughly wet in the process, and gives the alarm.

There was dismay. The group piped up. "But then you'll miss the performance?"

Friedrich admitted he would, and felt thoroughly rude. To these people, the performance meant everything. And Friedrich wanted to see Sibylle after all, had to see Sibylle. "All right. No, I can stay another day."

A doorman came and said he wanted to close. The fat bartender counted the takings. "We'll buy a bottle of schnapps," said Fedor, "and you can come with us; this is a miserable town, everything closes down at midnight."

And there it was again, his heart was once more in someone else's hand, sometimes they squeezed it shut, sometimes they allowed it to breathe, it wasn't to die on them, a little bird in a cage that had to sing. His chest collapsed, he was close to shaking. "With you?" Of course, when Fedor had fetched him from the buffet and led him into the theater to Sibylle, even then he had known it. And now there were the naked facts. You know there's a pillar in the dark corridor, and still you cry out in shock and pain when you walk into it.
Fedor?
He said: "No, no, I can't bear it, it's too much."

The three of them piled into a cab. Friedrich sat next to Sibylle, Fedor squatted on the foldaway seat opposite them. Once again, it was Friedrich's wish that the drive might go on forever. They zigzagged through shadows. Into a suburb, a long way from the lake. "Here we are, we'd better give the porter a tip"; the cab stopped; a brass sign winked:
ST PETER
'
S
HOSTEL
. "Are you staying here, Sibylle?"

"Of course, you know I am."

"What about Fedor?"

"He is too."

"I'm tired," Friedrich said. "You know, the long journey and everything, I don't want any more to drink, I'll just go home, good night."

Fedor seemed not to understand. He was disappointed. "Hang on, just a minute, I thought we were going to have some fun, celebrate your arrival, Sibylle's so pleased to see you!"

Well, that was nice of Fedor, and Friedrich felt he was much, much older than Fedor, who was certainly no younger than himself, and he said: "Well tomorrow, maybe tomorrow." Then he shook hands with Sibylle and kissed her on the cheek.

"Will you come and get me, ten o'clock, I'm in room fourteen."

"Sure, I'll pick you up, ten o'clock, St. Peter's, room fourteen." He climbed back into the taxi, and drove off. "The Grand Hotel," he managed to say, feeling it might just well have been the lake.

When he awoke, it was seven o'clock and still dark. The passage outside was being swept. A broom scratched at the doormats, shoes were returned from being polished. There was a rumbling of pipes in the walls, the heating came on and still it felt cold. What was he supposed to do? He was pale, and his eyes were wide open, staring up at the ceiling of his cave, and on into infinity.

When I was still living in the Akademiestrasse, I was able to shout and roar like a trapped animal, Friedrich could remember. And that, after just six months, had been what he was reduced to.

THERE IS,
obviously, a lot of literature about love, but a whole novel, and about one desperate, all-consuming, and unconsummated relationship, and little else besides?! One might come up with Goethe's
Sorrows of Young
Werther
, Wedekinds
Lulu
plays, Heinrich Mann's
The Blue Angel
; there are a few similarities as well to Proust—Swann expending so much feeling on Odette, a woman who wasn't even his type, "
mon
genre
"—and to Thomas Mann—Ingeborg Holm puts her hand, "not even a particularly slender or shapely little girls hand," to the back of her head, and Tonio Kröger falls in love for a lifetime—but it remains true to say that the obsessive intensity of
A Sad Affair
is more like that of lyric poetry, painting, ballet, or song: Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci," Dowson's exquisite "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae," the pictures of Munch or Klimt or Schiele,
Swan Lake
,
and any number of art songs and pop songs.