A Sad Affair (20 page)

He barely slept, and was up early. When he pushed back the shutters, he was suddenly flooded with light and noise. The sun stood over the canal. The white arch of the bridge seemed to float in its flittering light. The gondoliers loomed over the bows of their vessels. Friedrich went out into the throng of the market behind the bridge. He bought fruit and flowers, and dashed back to the hotel to decorate Sibylle's room. He put the flowers in various containers, and pulled a couple of books out of his suitcase. The ride to the station was a ride through sunshine and past meridional ghosts. The dead seemed to peer from every window of every palazzo— they had built Venice, and now they couldn't tear themselves away from their labor. They were behind every pillar and in every ray of light. They had to endure a great chill in a later epoch, and they were wicked conveyancers to all the pleasures and deaths of their time. "This is where you shall love," they cried, and the traveler desired to love there. "This is where you shall die," they cried on another occasion, and the traveler desired to die there. How would Friedrich be able to stand it if Sibylle failed to show? That too was possible. Friedrich looked up at the station clock, feeling so tense with expectation that he sought to push the hands toward the time of the train's arrival.

Fear of missing Sibylle on the platform had led Friedrich to take up a position behind the barrier, in front of the serried hotel agents. The travelers pushed past him in a black stream that he scanned with impatience. There was no Sibylle. The stream dwindled, dried up, the porters returned empty-handed to their bench in the waiting room. Had Sibylle really not come? Was his fear realized? And his crushing disappointment? Friedrich wrestled with the machine that dispensed platform tickets. He charged through the barrier, and veered toward the platform. A ribbon of gray stone lay between the brown ballasted troughs of the rails. Friedrich was breathless; his eyes flicked over the stone to the end. There was a suitcase, and a person. It was Sibylle. She was waiting. She was standing next to her suitcase, her coat draped over her shoulders in military style, and waiting. A ray of light fell through a gap in the grimy glass roof of the station and lit her face in such a way that it looked like a picture thrown on a screen by the conical dust beam of a projector in the cinema's artificial night. Friedrich stopped running barely two steps from where she stood. Sibylle laughed, and Friedrich laughed. All at once, they were overcome by an embarrassment that was so great that, without a word, they picked up her suitcase together, and wandered off to the exit. Not until he was calling for a gondola did Friedrich use his voice.

They rode in the gondola, and both of them perceived it as a coffin, as they glided along the little canals with their hands on the black, lacquered wood. They sat side by side like the lovers of a thousand descriptions, and they both perceived it at the same time, and they both separately started for the other seats in the middle and upset the balance of their craft, which began to wobble violently. They looked at one another as they laughed. Once again, Friedrich attempted to fathom what was going on behind the smooth oval of her forehead [oh, how he would have liked to place his hand over it]. He knew nothing of the torment of her last days in the foreign city, but he sensed: She is all alone in the world now. In her face exhaustion from her train journey mingled with the excitement of having arrived and the stimulus of the new place. Might he not cover it with his kisses—it was more alabaster pale than the faces of the young sailors on the train to Rome—the brow, the eyes, the mouth? He watched her he stretched out on the floor of the gondola, and he was bent over her, breathing in her breath, and he wished the journey would never end.

The flowers in her room were a further reason to look away. Was he expecting thanks? Sibylle was angry because he indicated through signs what she already knew. "I would have come even if you hadn't called me," she said, and then she regretted having said it. She saw the shadows settle round Friedrich's eyes. She saw him striving to keep an expression of friendly equanimity on his face.

"See that bridge?" he said. "That's Shylock's bridge." Why did he say that? Who cared? Was it his way of luring her over to the window, to have them both looking out onto the canal, so that he could be cheek to cheek with her, and feel her hair, without them having to look at each other?

They made small talk. They exchanged observations. Sibylle filled her lungs, became alert and radiant; she was taking to Venice. They walked through the alleys, stood on bridges and squares, in cool courtyards, they felt the beauty of smooth pillars, ate in small tucked-away restaurants overlooking the small canals, drank strong black coffee in the sumptuous hall in St. Marks Square, and, where their imaginations were fired by a masked ball, they were tempted to dance. Days they spent in this way. In the mornings, they played at getting lost. They plunged out of the hotel into the tangle of serpentine alleyways, and tried to keep going in the same direction. They passed through lanes and courtyards that were so narrow that their shoulders brushed against the damp masonry on either side. Then Sibylle would walk in front of him. Seen from behind, she was a boy. He loved having her near enough to touch. After wandering for hours, they sometimes reached the edge of the city. The ground fell away steeply. Ahead of them was the lagoon. It was a visible frontier. Beyond, an abstract geometrical rectangle, was the cemetery island. Gondolas ferried the coffins across from the mainland. The steamer wailed a warning that did not interrupt the sleep of the dead.

Gradually, Friedrich and Sibylle came to hate Venice. If they were to avoid the assault, the horrible nakedness of its ending, then there was only the piazza with its cafés, its tourists, its brazen waiters, postcard sellers, and tour groups outside the garish fairground of St. Marks. Sibylle took against the pigeons, referring to them as "overfed gluttons." She favored the cats. She would go up to them wherever she saw them, and told them of a campaign they should mount one morning, all the cats of the city together, to storm the piazza in an almighty phalanx and eat up the pigeons. Friedrich would sometimes go into the church, while Sibylle stayed outside and returned the glances of the officers—who would ceremonially carry their polished sabers in front of them in black or blue or gray cloth—with such calm, seriousness, openness, and frank appraisal as to confuse and terrify these cavaliers. Friedrich no longer prayed. Full of revulsion, he watched the tourists fill the nave with their field glasses and cameras. He turned to look at the choir. In their low seats sat old men—white, crumpled ancients with red caps on their bald heads—mumbling their litanies. They too were among the dead of this city. Could they help him? The place was infected by the chill of dead hearts. The patterned tile floor had been worn concave by the knees of innumerable worshipers who had long since departed this life.

Once, they crossed the lagoon to the Lido. They rented bicycles and bowled along the promenade behind the beach and the bathing huts. Sibylle seemed to float on the shiny metal. She flew in front of him, and he gave chase. He would catch up, but then she would craftily give him the slip once more. They tumbled breathless onto the sand, in the midst of a group of bathers who, in spite of the early season, had already ventured out. They were a mixed company of young people, playing gramophone records in the sun, and they extended a jolly welcome to Friedrich and Sibylle. The pleasant wistfulness of English dance tunes seemed especially thin and delicate against the beat of the waves. The boys and girls danced together on a wooden pier. They laid their brown arms round their hips, in stark contrast to the white of the bathing suits. The girls pressed themselves against the boys. Sometimes one would throw her long arms around her friend's neck, while he spun her round in a circle, till she dropped on the sand with a breathless squeal. Friedrich and Sibylle had the same thought. Why could they not join in? They didn't dare hold hands, they knew it was an impossibility. They leaped up, as though they'd seen a ghost, and without saying good-bye, hurriedly pedaled off.

The past was brushed over. They didn't talk about it. Sibylle didn't mention Fedor or Magnus, the cabaret or the foreign city. Friedrich didn't mention Anja. They tried to exist like two people who happened to have run into each other in Venice. There was a wall of glass between them. It was only in the evenings that it sometimes became a little thinner. Then they would go upstairs, laughing about the hotel manager who, in unctuous front-of-house fashion welcomed Sibylle with an "I kiss your hand, Madame." The manager liked Friedrich and Sibylle. He treated them with the respect that two young people deserve, [he was touched by them] who, for the sake of appearances, he thought, and out of nervousness, rent two rooms instead of just the one. Each time he bade them good-night, it was with benevolence and irony. He would have liked to spread his arms over them in benediction like a priest. Sibylle was laughing herself silly. Friedrich laughed as well. But in his heart he wasn't laughing. Bedtime followed a long-established routine between them. Sibylle was shown up to bed. Once she was under the blankets, in her realm, it was forbidden to sit on the bed. Friedrich had to draw up a chair, and read her a fairy tale. "Another one," she would say when it was over. "Another one, please, I want another one," and she reached out her hands imploringly, and he wasn't allowed to seize them. They were always the same fairy tales. Sibylle had heard them when she was little. She lay there and dreamed. Friedrich had already devised a technique that permitted him to read the story and gaze at Sibylle at the same time. Her face was never lovelier than in these dreamy hours before sleep. Friedrich loved that hour, loved reading aloud, and loved the fairy tales, because he loved Sibylle. He read her to sleep. After the third fairy tale, she would be away. Her breath had fallen into the lovely easy rhythm of her nights. Her nose pointed to him; her mouth pouted, and between her lips there was a shimmer of white teeth. He watched her breathe. Her throat rose and fell. Her blood pulsed. Nothing in the world to Friedrich was as lovely or desirable as Sibylle's face asleep. For seconds at a time, though, when the thirst for her lips overcame him, he would hate her; but her sleep was sacred. Was it not in his keeping? Friedrich was afraid Sibylle might wake if her lips felt the touch of his. He was afraid of her scream. Her horror that would wash over him. Above all, he feared betrayal. Only after hours spent watching did he leave her room, feeling utterly reduced.

His room was below. It was the identical room. His bed was below her bed. He knew when he lay on it that he was directly underneath her. Why did God not answer his prayers? His body burned in the sheets. The bed was in flames. He was a man on a spit. Gone out of her room, out of her sleep, he damned himself for not being a beast. He talked nonsense. He yelled up at the ceiling. It remained immovably gray white. Had Sibylle not come to him? Had she not been sent to him? She was destined for him, wasn't she? But, because she had come instead of being seized, she enjoyed the protection of the laws of hospitality. He came up with these antique notions, at which the whole planet would have laughed. His devil in her guise had come to call.

Sibylle awoke. Was that the door? Was someone in the room with her? She thought she heard footsteps and the sound of someone breathing by her bed. Was it Friedrich? Sibylle didn't dare put out her hand; she was afraid of the dark, dangerous space over the bedclothes, where it might be seized by unseen hands. Did she want any confirmation of that? She lay there, listening. There was nothing to be heard. She knew: Friedrich is in his room downstairs. She knew: He is lying under me, unable to sleep, and his love is trying to drill through the ceiling and the floorboards. She knew: He is on fire. The blood fled from her lips; they grew pale; the blood shrank back into the heart. She felt her face turn chill. A river of ice crept under the blankets; it flowed over her throat, across her breasts and belly, and she felt it moving further down, covering her skin with little goosebumps and freezing her thighs. What if she went to Friedrich now? The thought mustn't be spoken out loud. She pressed her lips together so hard that her mouth was like a dam. The teeth bit into her flesh, and she tasted the salty, teary taste of blood, and felt a brief, thin stream trickle down her chin. I'd sooner let my blood flow than scream! She had a sense of bright blood. She would have liked to look at herself in a mirror, to study her face, to scrutinize its every pleat and fold, all its planes and elevations, but her arm didn't trust itself to go on the short journey from its cave under the bedclothes to the switch of the little lamp on the bedside table. Sibylle saw she had made a mistake. The mistake was to have come here. But whom else could she have turned to, if not to Friedrich? She thought about Bosporus, and knew that she could only have gone to Friedrich. She missed him when he was far from her. He was the person who belonged to her. Did she love him after all? No, no, no, she did not! But when she wasn't forced to see: He loves me, he's suffering [even though she needed the feeling that Friedrich loved her], perhaps she loved him then. "I see him looking at me, and it kills him," she said to herself, and then she hated him. Was it her fault that he loved her? Did she intentionally cause him to desire her? Once again, she wished she could have a mirror and light. Like all young women, she sometimes had a dreadful feeling that she was growing old and ugly. She knew that on the day Friedrich failed to notice her, on that day she would be old. She longed for him to come; she was sorry now that there was no one in the room; but she also thought: If he does come, he'll look at me, and I won't be able to stand being looked at. Why wasn't she an animal, a bird, a cat, a small dog, just some animal that he liked? In those nights, she thought she could have slept with any man off the street, only not with Friedrich. She thought: There will be another great Flood, and everyone will die; only Friedrich and I will be spared. And she saw two figures pursuing one another. They ran after each other shouting, on a green, blue, and brown globe that spun round on an axis, just like the globe in geography class at school.