A Sad Affair (5 page)

The way I behaved, in keeping with my sudden paralysis, was clear and logical. I was stiff and remote. I picked a tie off the floor, though not in order to tie it round my neck. Instead, I made it into a sling, and then dangled my arm in it. Only after this bizarre carrying-on did I turn to her again—she hadn't sat down on the chair I'd offered, but had lain down on my bed as if she wanted to sleep [which maybe, who knows, she did]—and said: "Forgive me for not shaking hands with you, the fact is I've just broken my arm." I said it with a perfectly straight face, nor is it my impression that anyone laughed.

But my humiliation still had a lot further to go. I saw myself as the most wretched of men, living in a crumbling hut, with ocher streams of sewage swilling round it. I had never had a girl in my room, and now here was a young lady stretched out on my bed, practically purring like a young cat wanting milk, and her skirts had ridden up, she was wearing kneesocks and I was tormented by the thought [as if I didn't have enough on my mind]: Where was it again that I read the line, "Dorian maiden, with thighs exposed!"? And that was followed by a further stream of associations: Greek temples, stadia, athletes' limbs, bowls of wine and roses wreathed in hair. Also I could see the scene again, on a lake up in the east, in slant, reddish evening light and against the backdrop of black pine forests, the young fellows from the sawmill riding the horses into the water, naked and shining on the gleaming wet hide of the snorting animals.

"Walter's not home tonight, he's been asked to a premiere, so why don't we go out together for supper, and maybe go on to Aunt Molly's afterward." She seemed to be speaking to herself, and I can't help but think of a cat, purring from deep within, its claws retracted, warm and expectant. So she was going to go on to Aunt Molly's. That was news to me. I had never been there myself, but I had heard of it. It had a bad reputation, and people whose purpose it served to appear disreputable liked to meet there. I said: "I'm afraid I can't go, I'm busy at night." [God knows, I didn't want to go either, in my stained suit and with no money in my pocket, it was bad enough her seeing me in the one I had on.]

Then she said: "You're ill." And pointing to the sling with my arm in it, "And you're a cripple!"

It was true. At the moment of my first encounter with Sibylle, I got in the habit of feeling crippled with indecision. It happened to me then. I hobbled across the room, exaggeratedly, like a ham, dragging one foot after, stooped and skewed. The worst of it was that Beck, who up until now had been leaning pale and angry against the cold stove, now got the bug and started limping as well.

We wandered through the room, a couple of beggars out for a stroll, and, without any rehearsal or arrangement, fell into a grim sport, taking turns at being big and small, now face-to-face, now at opposite ends of the room. Any sane person would have thought we had lost it, but there wasn't a sane person in the room. Sibylle observed us unsmilingly, but pleasantly. She was like a child who has just been given a new toy and is still perplexed, wondering how to play with it. Her face seemed to be inclined over us, even if it was actually lower than we were, walking, and I think the way we were looking up at her was like puppets at the puppet-mistress who was holding our strings.

"Now what about tonight?" she asked. And to me in particular: "You're ill, you don't need to be a doctor to see that." Beck nodded. I insisted I wasn't, and began to wish they would both leave, so I could quickly go and lie down on the bed that presently had Sibylle on it. Beck said something to that effect, and asked Sibylle to come away. "I won't hear of it, I'm tired, I want to rest," and suddenly she was almost furious, and crossly turned her face to the wall. Beck went purple, and I wanted to say something nice to him, but I couldn't think of anything. Then Sibylle suddenly yelled: "Leave me alone, you moron, and stop staring at me!"

Naturally, Beck pulled the door open and stomped off. Or at least that day, it still seemed the natural thing to do. What else was a man to do? But for me it was probably the last day of these natural thoughts. I felt sorry for Beck, much more than I had done before. And I even thought: This is awful. And stood, still half-shaved, by my bed, which had Sibylle lying in it, a girl who had come to me in much the same way as, when you're still very young, you imagine children coming into the world: all of a sudden they're lying on your bed, or somebody's, and they're there.

I didn't yet know, and how could I have known, I wasn't a psychologist and I hadn't had the experience either, I was always, not exactly lonely, but at least solitary, so I didn't know yet that it was young Sibylle's way [when I met her she had just turned seventeen], her destiny if you like, to fall in love with people that others had told her about, often quite zany particulars. And that was what Beck had done about me. And on top of that she was so perverse— she told me that later, when I was quite done in, and needed picking up; oh, she just made life worse, really—that the midden I was living in, my bad suit trousers, and my features that looked ill nourished, all struck her as the essence of grime, to which she, in a different and lascivious orbit at this time of her life [it was a life of luxury, Cockaigne, she was going out with the famous drama critic] felt attracted. Yes, her mouth offered itself to me, and that item of consolation unhinged me! I have never kissed it, but in that hour of ostensibly my lowest humiliation, I could have become someone else, another man in pomp and glory! Yes, if I had lain down at her side then—I could have become a sailor or a revolutionary, a folk hero, a flag-bearer for definite, and the cynosure of all eyes, because, since I didn't become any of these things, I feel that if I had gone to her, I would have had to have become radiant for all eternity. I didn't, and I'm gray, an uninteresting traveler carrying a suitcase whose colorful labels are merely the evidence of meaningless journeys.

I needed to do something for Beck. I flung myself on the idea like a dog on a bone. I loved her, but first of all I needed to do some gnawing on Beck's behalf. And the silly ladies' hat lying next to her: I couldn't stand ladies. I said: "You should wear children's hats!"

"Sure!" She agreed right away, dismissed the hat as the drama critic's idea.

"Why?"

And then she told me: 'Well, you know," and she said she would just count up the number of people she had been unfaithful to him with, and she counted the whole of the known world [I didn't know any of them], and then she concluded: "So it's not too much to ask really, he loves me so much, Walter does, that I might as well do him a favor with the hat, since he cares about it so much."

She wasn't a monster either. I was only given proof of that much later. "Well," I said, back then, "you know [and I kept with the '
Sie',
I clung to it like a shipwrecked man clinging to a mast], you know Beck is crazy with desire for you, so why don't you add another one to the number of horns you're making your master wear, and it would be a good deed too?"

"I don't want to do any good deeds!"

Aha, that was the explanation. Beck had offered himself in the wrong way. You couldn't play the abject Werther
{1}
card with her. I could see that. A reluctance came over her words that made the case appear hopeless.

"I can't," she went on to say. "What do you think? If I don't want to, I can't; surely you can understand that."

And it's true, I've never met a woman who was less able to give herself against her own will than Sibylle. But that understanding took a long time to arrive as well. I was still at the stage of getting everything confused. I was so stupid, I even asked: "Then why do you go out with Beck; why do you torment him and get his hopes up?"

"Oh, you know, it's like this," [and she purred again], "everyone wants something from me ever since I've been here, and Beck who comes from my home, by the river where I come from too, I thought with him he didn't want anything. Just someone to have fun with. You know, I need that. Of course he'd like to sleep with me as well, everybody does, but that's silly, isn't it? You'd like to, too, wouldn't you?"

The leap once more from Beck to me, Alcibiades' question to Socrates. I didn't say, but I was all atwitter in my lark's nest. "Well now, Miss, I need to go now, I've got to go to work, all night, yes, no, I'm not ill, I can't afford to be ill, I'm the night watchman!" I acted terribly mysterious over my silly lightbulb job. She made a
moué
, I don't like the word, I think it's horrid, but she pouted, it felt like that to me, I have to use a teenage word to get that across, damnit, if only I'd had a sister, I thought at the time, I've never been around girls in my life.

I left, it really was high time if I was to get to work, and she stayed behind in my room, in my bed. "There's the key for the front door," I said, "but please don't lose it, I'll come and collect it, by the time I get back tomorrow morning, the front door'll be open already, so good-bye."

HAVING
REACHED
which point in his thinking about his relationship with Sibylle [it was the abiding problem, it was quite impossible to think enough about it, and to obtain clarity, and grasp the law that governed his life], having thought his way back to the instant when he left her asleep for the first time [in his room, in his bed], to go to the factory, to earn his wages, which before long he gave up doing, at a time when it made even less sense to miss anything, even the most foolish duty, over his wooing of Sibylle—having reached which point in his painful reflections, an inspection of his own person in the gray sequence of a reverie, Friedrich lying in his bed in the hotel in the foreign city, awaiting the morning, shouted out loud, and flung himself on the pillows next to him with the air of a man fallen off his steed into the mud, trying to bury himself in it away from the hooves. The gates of life were slammed shut. Forever. Behind him. He himself had thrown them shut. With every step he had taken, with every step to the garish lamp room in the bulb factory. He believed firmly, he had that in him, no hands could clutch a monstrance as tightly [and sometimes he prayed, contemned, in the back of churches], that it was his destiny and his vocation, and that Sibylle was intended for none but himself, and that a misunderstanding [oh, how he clung to the word:
misunderstanding
!], a serious error of feeling—he cried out, but Sibylle couldn't hear, she was always far away, always on the opposite shore, even when she was near—was to blame for everything. Sometimes he thought: Maybe it's like building a tunnel, Sibylle started digging over there, and I started here, according to the architect's plans we should have met, but then all we did was get close to one another; she heard the jab of my pick, and I took in the scrape of her shovel, the earth was already beginning to crumble, the layer separating us was finger-thin—and then I was blinded with folly, and I changed the direction in which I was digging, I drove my tunnel into the deep, toward the glowing kernel, toward Hell, the way its depicted in old paintings.

It all happened, this has to be emphasized, so dispassionately, so sternly and juridically. It happened like this: he set off for his lamp room, saw the evening lights come on in the street, they seemed to be readying the area for a party, women dressed in the ceremonial robes of the Stuart queens peered out of shiny automobiles on to the sidewalk, the commissionaires swung their sticks in front of the portals of theaters and restaurants with their veiled windows. In this part of town, which Friedrich only ever passed through, they were mounting a production of mankind in all its wealth and glory. Even the newspaper crier was participating, relaying with faintly bloodcurdling shouts the distant tremor of the ground under our feet from some epicenter away in the east that only reaches our seismographs in the form of a gentle, feeble wave, which we need to enjoy life to the full. He blazoned out the tragedy, "Jewel Theft!" he roared—oh, what a tragedy. So the jewels had been plucked off a white throat, some black fingers had reached out and taken them, and now the lady was weeping, and the insurance company was cursing; aside from them, who cared, who could eat off the stones, who could be made happy by them? But the newspaper was of the opinion that a jewel theft is a sensation. Friedrich passed on his way. The street ahead, and the street behind. In the street behind, they weren't so interested in the humbug of the evening edition. Here, people moved forward in masses, and, for the time being, against one another. One ought to join in, participate, feel concerned! Thus Friedrich, that evening. At least while he was on his way to work. Then the factory. The entry had been built in such a way that one had little option but to slip into it. No one could walk on by when the opening was agape. Friedrich lowered his head. His neck was prepared for the blow. The clock-punch bit. His card was stamped: arrived for work at such and such a time.

Doomed, doomed! The guardian of the lamps and no living being anymore. Stories of lighting the dead: And Death led him into a room, and in that room there burned myriads upon myriads of lights, and Death spoke, "These you see burning here are the lights of all men's lives, and this one is yours," and it was still strong, but as Death breathed it flickered, and when He stood near it, it seemed about to go out. Friedrich wandered through the ranks of burning bulbs. There, one had gone out. He unscrewed it from its socket, carefully, and wrote down: "Perished during the first minute of the night watch."

It could quite easily go on forever, the night seemed unending, and he took longer and longer routes through the lights, and gave names to the flames: This one is Sibylle, this one is me, this is Beck, that one is famous Walter, and whichever one of us is left gets to keep Sibylle. At which point Sibylle went out.

He reacted like a wild animal, not that he was cruel, but he responded in the simplest, most natural way. He reeled, and caught hold of something: She will die young, she is predestined to die young, and sympathy, and love [and a kind of charity that he would have found repulsive if he'd had his wits about him], and every wish to hasten to her, to swaddle her in blankets, to warm her, to feed and stroke her and kiss her, and protect her with his own body—Oh, your face, your breath, your faint little heartbeat under my chest. There was too much, too much reeling, and he couldn't catch himself. He fell, and striking the circuit rail as he did so, and breaking the next bulb, he caught an electric shock and a burn, and after a rain of spurting light that poured out of the fuse switches like the ultimate firework of a gala evening, it grew dark around him.