A Sad Affair (9 page)

And Friedrich limped, dragging one leg behind, staring straight up into space, and Sibylle laughed until she felt ill, and the people on the street stopped and stared, and Sibylle and Friedrich clasped hands and danced in the middle of everyone, and the people were happy and wore happy smiles, and said: "Ah, what is it to be young," and they remembered, and old men stroked the hands of old women, the air felt somehow a little balmy, a gutter lad sang out: "Love is a many splendored thing," and he drew out the melody longer and longer, and the bicycle he perched on turned with it, easily, sweetly, purringly, just like a wickedly elegant electric Italian hurdy gurdy—and then suddenly Friedrich and Sibylle let go of the other's hand, and stopped dancing and laughing and looked at each other, earnestly and awkwardly, blushing and with mounting indignation [but against what?], and the wind blew harder, and peoples expressions changed as they said: "Well, really, grown-ups behaving like silly children, the things these tourists permit themselves in our public streets," and the gutter lad yelled and stamped on his pedal: "Must have been bitten by the wild waddock."

Bitten by the wild waddock? Could be. They stopped to have something to eat. It was late. The restaurant on the shore had already lit its lamps. It might have been anywhere, blandly neutral and characterless in its design. Sibylle ordered salads, lots of fun greenery. Friedrich wanted wine. From the lake terrace, it was still just possible to see the sun on the tips of the mountains. Dark bulks with white snowcaps high in the sky, they constituted the background and the end to the lake. It was on those slopes that the wine had grown in summer, good wine. Friedrich drank it in large, rushed mouthfuls; it was calming. He said: "To you, Sibylle." So there he was, a gentleman in a rich, famous, foreign city, sitting opposite the queen of his heart, and drinking wine from the snowcapped mountains. Was he not to be envied? Who else led such a life, who could boast of doing anything comparable now? And if it should cost him his life, then this hour was worth it. You needed to wear blinders, it wasn't good to see everything; already the lake fogs were brewing up ghosts on the surface of the water and the shore grass, ghosts that would soon commence their eerie, chilly dance over the waters.

And Friedrich took a run-up to try and clear an obstacle. He knew he wouldn't succeed, he knew he'd get caught halfway, but he took his run-up, and he attempted it. He said: 'This is just by chance, I've been given some money to do some work, I want to go traveling with the money, it would probably last me three months on my own, but it would be far, far nicer if you would come with me, and we could go through it together in a month or so. I think it would be wonderful to go with you to the edge of Europe, and look across at Africa. It's already hot down there, the oranges are ripe and plentiful on the boughs, you've never seen that, I've never seen it either, it's the landscape of the Greeks, those were the groves that Homer sang, come with me, what are you doing with yourself here in this cold and foggy and expensive city, what are you doing with yourself in this basement cabaret, with all those Russians, how did you ever get into that sweater club, come away with me." It was a good and a persuasive speech he had given, he had gotten impassioned, his optimism was aroused, as he ran up he almost believed he would clear the obstacle, he saw himself standing with Sibylle on some rocks, looking over the foaming waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea, and he saw to his delight that Sibylle was looking thoughtful and contemplative.

At last, she started fixing her salad, shook the bowl, mixed the whole thing up again, poured in oil and vinegar, shook salt and pepper over it, surely she must have ruined it, and then she said: "I can't. I've got a contract. I can't get away."

"Contract, forget it!" Friedrich made a sweeping movement with his arm, as though to set the world to rights. "Honestly, forget it. What kind of troupe is that? You ought to start acting again. Properly, in a proper theater. Do you remember how we used to rehearse you as Juliet, and how you used to make me cry, really howl, because you were so moving when you stood on top of the wobbly table in my room declaiming: 'Romeo is banished . . . Romeo is banished!'? You have to play her, play poor, cheated Juliet, properly on the stage, no one can ever have seen such a genuine Capulet princess. Come with me, and we'll practice the text, like Demosthenes on the beach, and everything will turn out wonderfully."

"No, no, I can't," she was putting up quite a fight, drumming her feet like someone being dragged away somewhere. "I can't. The troupe needs me. Anja needs me. Fedor needs me. Magnus too. And maybe Bosporus will come and see me. His leg is hurting him again. I have to be there for him. You see that, don't you?"

Yes, he could see that, there was nothing to be done. "But what's going on," he went on to say, "all of them depending on you, Anja, Fedor, Magnus, the whole troupe, what's that all about?" And once more he thought he was facing a storm, a block of sultriness under leaden skies, in which he would surely be asphyxiated, and from which he would be lucky to escape alive.

Sibylle did a little tiger pacing. The restaurant was empty. The waiters were dozing in the corners, it was a good place to stalk about, in among the rows of tables, in front of the lake's now-swirling fogs. She started to speak but broke off, just as she had done in her room in the morning. And once more Friedrich felt appalled: Had she turned cowardly, was she tangled up in some desperate intrigues that she was ashamed of, was she no longer master of the situation? "Oh, let it wait till tonight, you'll find out, wait till you meet Magnus and the others." She said the words very quietly. He made a move to stroke her hair, she let it happen a while, then she turned her head away and said: "Come on, let's walk by the lake for a while before I have to go to the theater."

They climbed down some steps from the terrace, and found themselves on a mole that led to the city's harbor. In summer, there was swimming here, ice-cream stalls and tents. But at this time, the mole, below the highway that led to Friedrich's hotel, was deserted. In the dingy light of dusk and lake fog, Friedrich and Sibylle were all alone, and felt cut off from the city and the world in general. They walked past heaps of bricks unloaded from barges, stacked in skewed red walls and small, squat piles. Cement crunched underfoot, scraps of coal, old buckets, household rubbish, ashes, dirt, and rubble. There were things flitting and darting out of cracks and holes. Maybe rats, they couldn't quite see. Why did Sibylle take this path? There was a chance that homeless people might be camping out here, beggars, evicted and desperate people who were condemned to lurk here like spiders till some victim ran into their arms. Sibylle thought of snow. She thought of white flakes, falling at a slant, and sharp cold. A damp miasma came out of the deeps of the lake. On the opposite side of the lake, the fog lamps were on again, flaky and milky, like fluffy dandelion heads. If the wind blew them out, I could play the Delphic game: loves me, loves me not, loves me, till I'm down to the very last flowerhead—but we're far past the oracle of scattered dandelion heads, Friedrich thought, shivering. He tried to put his arm round Sibylle again, as he had at lunchtime in the city. She started, and let it lie. Friedrich even thought he felt her body rest against his. Was she afraid? She had grown up in warm woolens and under the eye of a watchful mother, small and delicate: the Christ child, people had called her in her home by the river between the vine-clad hills. It had seemed horrible and unnatural, and humiliating in front of her friends, to be so cosseted and guarded. The cry "Mind you don't catch cold!" was to her a cry from hell. A curse that wrecked the day. She had suffered real, terrible childhood grief and never got over it, even today the tears came to her eyes when she looked back on it, the pain of not being allowed to go to school like other, rougher girls in her own class, in short socks in winter. The bare, cold legs of a classmate had been her desire and her torment. She had managed to capture the seat next to that girl in the classroom, and during class, Sibylle's hands never tired of touching the cool, bare skin of that other, envied girl under the desk. She would have liked to bite into that tempting flesh. It was her first love, and she didn't know it. A wintry passion: the joy of being a queen or a fairy-princess must certainly pale in comparison to this nonpareil of delight, of going about bare-legged in winter. Her mother turned a deaf ear to her pleas. So it was all Sibylle could do, occasionally, to tear the long, itchy, quite disgusting, woolen tights off her legs and secretly go barelegged in dark and empty lanes at night. Once, a stranger had seen and stopped her. She had shaken like a leaf, in her mortal dread. But when he had asked her: "Aren't you cold with your bare legs?" and stroked them with his hand, then she could have swooned with delight. And now she was leaning against Friedrich.

Even more mist had come off the lake and darkened the quay further. She lifted her skirts a little and let the wind blow against her knees and thighs. "I used to know boys," she said, "who still went swimming in October, and the time of the first snow." It was true, she really was pressing against him, pushing herself against his chest, like a cat, who wants to feel the petting hand still more. Friedrich held her. Held her in his arm. Held her fast, and wanted never to let her go. There seemed to be no one anywhere. It was doubtful whether a scream here would even be heard up on the main road. Her mouth against my mouth. Her lips parted, as though to drink. I have to kiss her now. Her breath in my face. The well is within reach. The source is flowing. I can drink, take a deep, liberating draft, feel the intoxication of the nectar of the gods, and never more awake into this world! He was a wolf at her throat. His eyes tried to gauge the distance to the water. He had even thought about dying with Sibylle. Once, high up on the topmost step of a high spiral staircase with a knee-high railing, he had thought: All I need to do is let myself fall, with my hands round her neck. And now again, the triumph grinned in him, to be, if nothing more, the last to drink from this mouth that had never been vouchsafed to him, and drain it. They stood barely two paces from the steep edge of the quay. They trembled together, like a tree in all its twigs. Her eyes were open wide, mirroring an infinity, as wide and deep and inapprehensible as a crack in a layer of clouds that suddenly opens up in front of a pilot, so that, dazzled by so much light, he suddenly succumbs in the dither of a fatal fall. They were swimming; her eyes, like flowing fire, were the eyes of a very young Sibylle, the eyes of a wild beast escaped from its lair, the irises were shining, and the pupils moved on the white sea between eyelids like two shining balls. Sibylle loitered in supernatural places. She was in a delirium of dream. Her hands clasped themselves round Friedrich's neck, and lay there as firmly as the chain on a door, and as tenderly as a rope woven from silk. His face inclined over her wind-contorted features in a steadily falling gazing; he thought someone was bound to come along at any moment, to push them calmly into death, and this time he did say, and the words broke the silence: "Little Sibylle"; and it roused her, and she came out of her spell, the twilight hour was over, and she said: "Come on, leave me be, and take your arm off of me, it's so heavy I feel it all down my back." And spontaneously, they both started running, wildly, dangerously, stumblingly, they ran madly and blindly courting danger, as though it were a matter of catching up with life, and suddenly they were both afraid of collisions with the piles of bricks, of blows, of throttling hands and sharp rodent teeth. They were reeling when they reentered the light of the main road and the apparent security of civilization.

They made for the old town, through the crooked lanes that Friedrich had seen the night before as he was looking for the Diana Variety. It was seven o'clock. The little local grocers were shutting up shop. Fearfully they put up bars and grilles in front of the doors of their premises. Blinds came down with a jerk and a clank in front of the fly-spotted windows, and darkness swallowed the deathly pale detergent advertisements in their storefronts. It was the hour for taps and lights-out and evening roll call. The street, where at night only the big policeman had stood staring dreamily at his feet, was suddenly full of people. They rolled up, the musicians and the chanteuses, the bartenders and the waitresses in the bars bordering on the street. Great double-bass cases hovered like heavily laden balloons just above street level in the hands of short fat men. Drums, on the other hand, approached and passed like the wide gaping mouths of ships' cannons, pulled into position, in the raw red hands of long-armed young men with unpleasant coughs. A group of women stood in front of the main entrance to the Diana Variety. They were pressed back against the walls, to be out of the worst of the wind. In their featureless navy wool suits, and with their dull, submissive expressions, they might have been a bunch of housewives waiting for a department store sale to begin. Sibylle greeted them, and a few of them greeted her back, reluctant, measured, as though proud of occupying an inferior rank. Friedrich felt like calling out:
"Grüss
Gott
, Mrs. Tax Inspector," but then he saw that these women were the girls whose almost naked photographs were on show in the glass vitrine.

"They're kept on a tight rein," Sibylle said. "They have to be here at seven sharp, but they never open the gates before quarter past. Magnus says he wants them to get some fresh air, because they don't get home till daybreak, and if it was up to them they wouldn't leave their beds."

"Does Magnus own the Variety, then?" Friedrich was astonished.

"Yes, he's the owner, but not the manager. He hates it really. He says he goes in there sometimes to make himself sick. But he lives off the takings. The whole city, he says, keeps it going. We live off their stupidity, he says to Anja, at dinner. Magnus's father was a wealthy man, a doctor and philanthropist, who left his entire fortune to a foundation for refugees. Magnus, his son, inherited three buildings. There's the St. Peter's Hostel, which he's not allowed to touch, this Variety Theater, and a little chalet outside the city, where he lives. Anja used to live there, she's married to him, but then she moved back into St. Peters."