A Sad Affair (8 page)

She played along, put on a brave face, sometimes asking herself, vulgarly, in the coarse women's expression: "Is this the Devil in me?" He thought so anyway, Beck thought so, everyone thought so; later on, even Bosporus would think so. It was unquestionably a relationship. She called him up in the morning, once she'd dared to return home, called him up and asked him to come over, to put on some milk for her while she was resting, beat her an egg, read to her from one of the books that lay around her bed in great piles. Each time she called, she heard the way he plucked the receiver off the cradle at the first hint of a ring, snatched up by a hand that had lain in vigil during a sleepless night:
She's going to call me.
And no sooner was the conversation over than he was already there, standing in front of her in her room, a runner, bending down over her, breathless, pale, a pounding in his neck. He really had come at a run; he had no money at that time, no money at all, he was dirt-poor and he ran great distances, his knees thrown up, his hair flapping, the lover running amok, charging blindly into pedestrians on the street and spilling them into the gutter. There was something terrifying about him, which she felt, while others merely shuddered involuntarily.

Once, she was ill; Friedrich didn't leave her bedside, he tended her, washed her things, cooked her meals, shook the pillows, read her stories, playacted the lame man, and gave performances of exotic gentlemen, the Marquis of Oyakahoma desires to lay his country's celebrated moon at the feet of the sick princess, he juggled with balls, something he was only able to do in the rapture of his passion; all of it done to delight her heart, and when she laughed, he felt like a field full of larks taking wing in the morning; but the doctor, old Doctor Rapp, a friend of hers, said, when Friedrich passed him something: "Why are your hands shaking? You look like someone who's had the skin peeled from his face, who's suffering agonies of fever and fire." He had reached such a pass. She had hated him when it became clear, when she noticed. She had hated him, because, having come so far, in the hours when he was all done up, the prepared sacrificial victim, because like a dead beast he represented a seduction to her, in spite of her will and her judgment. Then she would feel herself driven, with the full horror of a forced woman, to do his every bidding. But not once had he taken advantage of such a situation. Was he too busy running into the walls with his head, the walls of the prison he thought he was caught in, the invisible walls that kept moving nearer together, that were already a cell as fitted as a corset and kept him from breathing? Or was it insane arrogance that kept him from exploiting a tailor-made situation and taking her?

Beck had told him once, and Sibylle knew it: "Take her, why don't you, take her, she wants to be taken; like this, you're just going to the dogs, and Sibylle's going to the dogs, make an end and take her!"

To which Friedrich—a fool hanging from a silken thread over an abyss—had replied: "Please understand me, Beck. I'm not after some shabby transaction. I love Sibylle; it's quite impossible for me to touch her, even against the appearance of her will."

And Sibylle had got to hear of this as well. So he wanted a consummation in happiness and joy. Maybe he dreamed she would come to him. Probably he did. And why didn't she? She had never come up with an answer to that. It never happened, that was all.

She too could feel the invisible wall he kept running into. Once, it was before Christmas, and she had to take the early train home to her parents, by the river, he had [she needed someone, to wake her, to fix her breakfast] stayed the night with her. It was a night they had both been happy, like children. She had liked it and [though not saying anything] been surprised by it. Liked it so much that, no sooner back in the city, she had repeated the experiment. With the same result. But then that too had palled. It got so that she had said to him: "All right, stay if you like, but I want you to know I love Bosporus [that time had already started] and you'll have to lie with me like old Socrates did with young Alcibiades." He passed the test. His heart had beat happily and vigorously. There was a joy in him:
I am lying beside
Sibylle!
She told him stories about what she'd been like as a child and a schoolgirl, how her father [a poet and a Buddhist and a manufacturer of plaster angels for Catholic countries, exports to Latin America] had introduced her to literature, at thirteen to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and George, Stendhal and Baudelaire, and how, indiscriminately, as a child she had made her way through libraries to the books of the mystics [spent days lounging in bed!], and then, arrived in the capital city, she had been inducted in matters of love by the celebrated critic Walter in Frühling's well-known brothel [a little bird with open eyes: but that's the way of the world!]. It had been very pleasant, to be talking with Friedrich in one bed together, warmed by one blanket. Thereupon she had fallen asleep, and Friedrich had guarded her sleep until she had started crying brokenheartedly in her dream, sobbing deeply, utterly, utterly miserable, like young kittens taken away from their mother, and when she woke up with a cry and started lashing out, then Friedrich thought she must have been dreaming that he, as had not been the case, had left the role of the old Socrates. He was crushed. That was the blow that ruined this night [which he, in his hubris had called—oh, folly of youth—the loveliest of his life] and filled him with grief and rage and illimitable despair and every kind of blasphemy.

Sibylle had felt it: So this is what he thinks now. She had known it. Now might have been the moment to surprise him. She might have lent him wings. The only reason she had been crying was because they had killed her favorite cuddly toy, Volleyball, a black dog. She had the magic in her hands, all she had needed to say would have been: "Change, old Socrates, abracadabra, to Alcibiades." But she had pronounced no spell, no word had passed her lips, she had turned her face to the wall, and murmured: "Its late, go to sleep." Nothing had transpired, then or at any other time, the invisible wall between them was intact. And then Friedrich had turned gray, or had begun to take on the varying but always pallid hues of the wallpaper behind him; to put it another way, they had both become tired, Nature had exhausted herself in them, she wasn't capable of producing the same measure of terror again and again in all perpetuity, and so all that remained had been this: Friedrich loved her, she was able to rely on him and his love; and what good did that do? Only her leaving the country had given him a little new interest. She was in turmoil, and he represented home, represented the city she loved, she wanted to talk to him, she wanted him to keep her informed, maybe she wanted to go home, but it was difficult to begin explaining the particular circumstances to him in which she found herself.

Anja had not quit the place on Sibylle's bed that Sibylle had cleared for her. She was still leaning against the pillows, puffing blue-gray cigarette smoke into the air, which under the ceiling was already heavy and dark, a cloudy seraglio sky. Anja was unimaginable without tobacco smoke. It was part of her nature, the ambience in which she lived, the tent she put up around her. She was always at home, always
chez soi,
wherever she happened to be sojourning, and it sometimes happened that her chance temporary hosts came to her to say good-bye: "Unfortunately, we have to go, but thank you, we very much enjoyed our stay with you"; so much more real than any room or apartment was Anja's castle in the air, so solidly put together from the misty blue rings of hastily drained cigarettes. When Sibylle had finished dressing, finished getting ready, thrown on her coat, put on her cap, and was on the point of leaving the room with Friedrich, Anja turned to Sibylle and said: "Magnus wants to see you."

Sibylle made a vague, dismissive gesture: "Later, maybe this evening, in the theater," and Anja was left in sole possession of her realm.

"Magnus is her husband," Sibylle said when they were on the street. They were walking through a district of ugly, plain, modern buildings. Leafless poplars withered at fifteen-pace intervals in the little squares cut out of the edge of the pavement showing the soil below, and their boughs looked like the hands of desperate, half-crazy people flung out above their heads and begging. A keen wind blew straight down the street. "That's a glacier wind from the mountains," Sibylle spoke into the wind. "When we get to the lake, you'll be able to see the white peaks in the distance."

They needed to lean forward like bicyclists pushing on the pedals with all their force, so as not to be thrown backward. On the corners, cross-breezes pulled aside Sibylle's coattails and picked up her skirts. Her bare, frost-reddened knees appeared momentarily. She's still the little girl in short socks, he thought, my plucky companion. He put his arm around her shoulder; she let it happen. He was once more moved, and both of them [for different reasons] were awkward. To him, her bare, scabbed knees were an embodiment of Sibylle's decency. They made it easier to be him. "She's a boy," he said to himself [he had said it many times], "a boy that I can treat like a young friend of mine." In fact, though, it was precisely in these moments when he pushed her girl nature into a different, unspecified, and, he thought, an asexual, if still erotic, role that his desire to call Sibylle his own
(she is destined to be mine!)
was especially acute and urgent, stabbing him with sharp needles from the hair on his head to the tips of his toes. He was also like the sculptor in front of his own statue. He saw her as a good piece of work, a successful endeavor, felt she was an incarnation of the concept
body
, firm and claspable, perhaps even asking to be picked up off the ground and held. "I am the Atlas who carries you, and you are a star for me, untouched in space, touched only by my arm which is your support." He would have liked to say that to her. With his arm on her shoulder, he clasped her and enfolded her entire being in a wide, protective embrace.

And because she too had the sensation that she was being contained (He's wrapping me up, he's carrying me, warming me), she freed herself of the weight of his arm with a sudden jerk, an abrupt spinning free of her form, a quick twitch of the mouth, and when she saw that he was upset, and since she knew the truth of his affection for her, she produced herself in gross insults, words that frightened her, once they had come out of her mouth and made a sound in air. "You're like a toad, you're like a toad crawling on my back, a slimy scaly goggle-eyed toad in a swamp!"—and the evocation terrified and disgusted them.

The world bucked him. There was no reason and no sense in it, it was incomprehensible. He was not allowed to touch her. Strangers, people on the street, all comers practically, were allowed to hold her. The rending wolf's bites that had torn his heart when he had seen at a party in the capital how extras in tails with little brilliantined Hollywood mustaches had touched her lips with theirs. "Oh, that's completely harmless, a kiss at a party, don't be silly," she had said. And she was right, of course, it was silly to get excited, but was it not the cry of the man dying of thirst in the desert that had broken from him, terrible, cracked, almost rabid in its shame and despair? Her lips seemed to him the font of life, the source of all joys, the world offered no drink to set beside the kiss of her lips and never, never once, had he been allowed to breathe on them, to feel them, their redness, their flesh, their moist gleam that shone to his faint spirit, a craving, a signal, a finishing line in a gauntlet race through an infernal landscape, to the scornful laughter of the happy, the contented, the sated, the living; he was without anyone to pity him, the compassion of the world denied itself to him with these same lips. They walked awkwardly on, calamity shielded them, evil spirits danced in the wind, they were two convicts chained together, attempting to flee but about to be caught, they walked faster.

Sibylle had been glad too. "He's coming, good, I want him to stay" Friedrich's desire to stay had been Sibylle's desire too. And yet the impossibility, the impracticability of this desire had struck them both in the very second they had seen one another again. It was glaring; there was no point in even talking about it. There was nothing to be done about it, it just wouldn't go. The invisible wall rose up, you left of the wall, me right of the wall, that's the way it is, the wall between us remains intact. When they respected that border, and looked at each other like objects in a shop window, then they could be one heart and one soul.

It is a mistake to think they were joyless. The little joys of the day were there for them. To Friedrich, having choked down the toad, they even seemed enormous. Wasn't he walking with Sibylle, didn't he see her, feel her, couldn't he sometimes [only not too often] bump into her as if by accident and for a split second feel her as something more than imaginary? Was it not bliss that she existed, that she was alive in the world at the same time as he was, and that he had received the blessing of knowing her, of meeting her, of being allowed to walk with her here? Certainly, it was bliss, and he scolded himself for being an ingrate if he complained. When he was away from her, he was sometimes befallen by the sweet giddy notion: She is breathing, somewhere in the world, she is breathing the air. Heart beating, restless and sleepless, tossing on his bed at night, he had felt the pulsing of her blood as well. She is my contemporary! Even that was substantially a source of happiness.

How great was her capacity for joy. Was there anyone in the world who could feel so much joy? He looked at her and felt like doing handsprings. The way her eyes assailed the window displays in the Bahnhofstrasse, which they had now reached. "Hey, look at the scarf with the tiger on it! Will you buy me that tiger scarf? And I've seen some shoes, the sweetest shoes, with really low heels, the kind you like, and made out of the skin of a southwest Indian river mule! Are there such things as river mules? Do they have rivers in southwest India? You've absolutely got to buy me a map so I can find out, I want a wild, garish, luminous map, drawn by ancient sages, checked by stargazers with beards longer than the tower they live in, and with flying crocodiles on it and cannibals, hungry black ones, roasting a fat white missionary. Come on, let's go in this store, it's so posh, I'm sure only marquises come in here otherwise, let's ask them for a bra for two, husband and wife, or one for an entire family. Come on. And will you find out for me what those feather boas cost, I'd so like to wear a feather boa, you know all my life it's been my dream to wear a feather boa, that, and to marry a man with two wooden legs that he locks up in a cage every night so they don't run away; their names are Peter and Paul, you know, like the fortress in Russia, where they killed all those people just because the czar didn't like them, I'm sure you know that, Anja knows it too. Oh, don't be so stupid. You're such a killjoy. I want you to limp now, I want you to drag one leg behind, and to stare straight up into space."