A Sad Affair (10 page)

This was news. Friedrich thought: Why am I interested in this fellow?

They were standing a little back from the group of women, and Sibylle went on: "Magnus loathes these women. Cows, he calls them, cooks who can't cook, professional mourners who go onstage out of pique. Once, when he was still running the Variety, he tried to take on girls who, as he describes them, were like young, mulish, headstrong bulls; wild eighteen-year-olds, tanned, agile gymnasts, gazelles, chance offshoots of supple breezes, who, out of inborn dislike for any origins, were game for anything, even out of resentment against the boredom of their parental sofa world,
echt
filles de joie
, hetaerae such as you find in the poems of Lucian. And the upshot of all his endeavors was that he practically went broke. The regulars stayed away, took their custom elsewhere, to the bars on either side. Only a few people with no money went, down-at-heel students with ragged trousers spent the whole night with eyes like saucers in front of a single glass of something that they were too preoccupied even to touch. The little guy who owns a dairy, a greengrocer's shop, or a pork butcher's, what he wants to see is his neighbor's wife, the woman he runs into on the staircase, the girl who's working for him, the housemaid who sweeps up the dirt in front of the steps down to his shop—figures from his day-to-day experience gyrating in front of his eyes in the tiny white glitter knickers of naked dancers, while he's hunched over a mug of beer or a glass of wine. That's the secret of the pleasure industry, a lesson that Magnus isn't able to apply personally, but [we live off stupidity] is happy to have applied by others on his behalf. He's a remarkable man, you'll get to see him in a moment, he's on his way; only leaving those poor girls out in the gale I think is a petty form of vengeance that isn't even worthy of a shriveled dwarf."

From the opposite side of the street, they heard a strident whistle. Fedor stepped into the light of a streetlamp and approached them. His walk was tired, and no longer as bouncy and insouciant as it had been that morning. He was carrying a small suitcase in one hand. A hotel stamp was stuck on one corner of it. Maybe it had his makeup things in it. It couldn't have been much. He looked like a salesman coming home after a trying day, without the least success. Over his sweater he was wearing a jacket. It was very tight and waisted. The stiff hat he had on in place of the cap that would have looked right with what he was wearing gave his appearance the element of posturing one might associate with a backstreet pimp. Only his face wasn't rosy enough. It's Russian, thought Friedrich, so incredibly Russian. It expresses the melancholy of those lugubrious tunes that are played by balalaika ensembles of ex-officers. Fedor shook hands with them both—kind, friendly, and unreserved. He gave off a slight whiff of alcohol, which suited his appearance to a tee. "What have you been up to?" he asked. "I've been running around all over the place." He was stateless, and was looking for a nationality that would supply him with a passport. Magnus, who by marrying Anja had made her a citizen of his country [which was probably the reason they had gotten married in the first place], had promised Fedor he'd adopt him. But now the authorities were making difficulties. It did not appear that Magnus had sufficient influence to get around them. Or maybe he wasn't serious about the adoption in the first place. That was Fedor's suspicion. He said: 'There's something fishy going on." He was in a grim mood. "Come on, let's go down, it's cold. Did you and Friedrich have something to eat?" he asked Sibylle.

In the anteroom, the wardrobe women put on their starched white aprons. The beady-eyed cashier was already in place by the curtain that led into the auditorium. Her long fingers riffled the canary yellow tickets. She too seemed not to have stirred overnight. The notion that the whole world wanted nothing but to push past her into the theater poisoned her sleep and her time off. Fedor and Sibylle greeted her in passing. When they tried to take Friedrich through with them, however, she snapped shut. Fedor got agitated: "Friedrich isn't going to have to pay, is he?!"

"Either that, or he'll have to get a chit from Magnus."

So Magnus was her god, he was the one who counted, he was the one she obeyed. Friedrich hesitated; it was a disagreeable scene; he was perfectly willing to buy a ticket, but he thought it would demean him in front of the others. He said: "I'm just accompanying my friends to the changing room."

"Yes, but from there it's an easy matter to slip into the auditorium without paying."

"You seem pretty taken with the show!" Friedrich saw a way of ironizing the dispute: "I take my hat off to you." Coins chinked, there was a giving, a taking, and a changing.

Fedor said: "You're a fool, Magnus would have given you a chit."

Yes, of course, it was feeble of him, in spite of the pretense, but Friedrich didn't want to be seen to be scrounging a favor off Magnus. In the auditorium, which was now fully occupied, the ranks of chairs were straight as soldiers on parade. "It looks pretty good," Friedrich said almost aloud. It was strange, the moment he ran into Fedor he felt like a bourgeois, a believer in cleanly swept floors, and order and decency and sobriety and moderation in all things. And this was Friedrich, who led a solitary existence cut off from any ties, and even as a child had favored all forms of gypsyishness.

They crossed the narrow stage, past wood blocks, nails, ropes, and pieces of cardboard, greeted a young fellow in blue overalls who was called Jupiter, probably because he tended the lights, and barged open the door to a room that smelled of laundry soap, combed-out hair, perfume, greasepaint, alcohol, dust, and rags. The changing room of the troupe. It was quite a large room, with curtained-off sections for men and women. The middle, the greater part of the room, was neutral. In any case, the curtains were still drawn, and Friedrich had to wonder whether they were ever made to do their supposed duty. In the middle of the room, facing the door, leaning over the window seat—a blacked-out rectangle that looked not unlike a photographers studio background—stood the tall albino man, with eyes of runny aquarelle blue, that Friedrich had noticed the night before, resting his hands on the shoulders of Anja, who was standing in front of him, small by comparison, wrapped in her sheepskin, and puffing out smoke with an expression he couldn't see, as she had her back turned to the door. And it transpired that the giant was indeed Magnus, the son of that Doctor Magnus who had started the old foundation for "refugees of all nations."

An argument was in progress. Strife between Magnus and Anja.

The veins on the backs of his large hands were great, forceful canals. His will seemed to go straight into his hands; Anja's slumped shoulders trembled under their weight. His face, meanwhile, seemed calm, his mouth was closed, he didn't speak. And yet there was widespread disturbance, the others were talking and shouting. The room had filled up. The troupe was assembled. The boys in sweaters, the figure of the ancient peasant woman from bygone days, the sculpted Roman head of the lady in black tulle all spoke up, and Fedor also ran up, voicing his complaint. Shadows rose in Sibylle's face. Dissent was spreading, and her face was like a bright body of water, crossed by the great wingspan of a large night fowl, whose cawing, in popular legend, brings misfortune to the huts of those people who hear it. She returned to her makeup stool and her mirror. What possesses her to stay here, my God, why does she stay? thought Friedrich; that, and: If only I had a horse, a strong and mettlesome steed! I'd come galloping up and crash through the blacked-out windows, and snatch up Sibylle, and lay her across in front of me, and fly away, leaving in my wake only a shower of sparks from the impacts of the four stout, shod hooves of my mount. Oh, if only I had a horse! He almost said it aloud. Sibylle was fiddling about with boxes and bottles and pencils. A compact was knocked over, and a fine dusting of powder was scattered about the room like the white smoke of a locomotive as it whistles into the mouth of a tunnel, and left the arguing parties looking a little hazy, like people stepping out of East End pubs in London town on a foggy evening, the smoke of the wheat brandy in their throats, reeling in dazzlement, till they drown in the grimy, turbid milk that God, who also provided them with a blade to slit their fellow man's throat, spread over His streets. They were in danger, and so they showed their teeth. The ground they stood on was swaying. The immigration police had shown an interest in their enterprise, and they were to be deported. The members of the troupe were either, like Fedor, stateless, or else they had the passport of some nation that was not worth having. They enjoyed no diplomatic protection. They could not, when ordered to leave the country, puff out their chests and say: "Well, our embassy will have something to say about that, but for now we should put you on notice of the poor impression your decision will make internationally, and of the possible deterioration of the political situation that seems likely to follow from it." All this they could not do. All they could do was meekly bow their heads and appeal to the sympathy of some middle-ranking official. No country gave much for what happened to them. And as their situation was so bad, so desperate, so hopeless, so, correspondingly, their complaints were bitter, their cries of indignation frightful, and the tears in their eyes—tears of rage and shame and disappointment—genuine. Magnus had undertaken to plead their case in the name of his father's old foundation, appealing to the hallowed memory of his forebear, who had established the right to shelter and asylum. Had Magnus failed them? Did his connections not extend far enough? Was he not able to help, or did he not want to stand in the way of the departure of the troupe? Friedrich's view of things was as follows: He is the son, merely the son of the old Doctor Magnus who set up the foundation "for refugees of all nations," and it is with other sons that he will have to deal. There will be no chance for the troupe. The sons have never taken up the cause of the persecuted in a world where, any day, they themselves may be persecuted. For which of them, on getting up in the morning, can say with any certainty whether, amid the fates of the nations, in the turmoil of economics and the nightmares of rulers, of kings and ministers and managers of factories and mines—which of them is confident that his own death sentence has not, without a word to himself, been pronounced? The sons are unable to master life, and their consciences lie buried under the mountains of their fears. What do they care about someone from another nation, so long as they themselves are free from persecution, not forced to stand at others' doors and beg in others' languages? They turn away and ignore the needs of others, because need is a type of rejection, and carries the germ of death in it, so that no one dares to reach out a helping hand. And he felt sorry for Magnus. He is the son of old Doctor Magnus, who must have been an unusual man. And he is compelled to lug about the unusual inheritance, the unusual kindness and understanding perhaps, like a punishment with him. He has to look after the foundation, and talk to the ostracized. It's not that he lacks compassion. Don't condemn him! He is trying to hold on to Anja.

Friedrich started. Magnus was desperate to hold on to Anja. That was evident. The only reason he was still in the room was because Anja was standing in front of him, calling him names. He could have taken his hat and gone. It was on Anja's account that he was staying, ensuring by his being there that the earth didn't open under the troupe and send them plummeting to new depths. Was Magnus like Friedrich? Friedrich felt the similarity between their motives. He was here for Sibylle. Magnus was here for Anja. That struck Friedrich like a bolt of lightning. He didn't want to be like Magnus. He hated this mirror that was being held up in front of him. Only a moment ago, he had been ready to spring to Magnus's defense [he isn't heartless!] but now a wave of irrational anger crested in Friedrich. "Why won't you get these people residence permits? You are a citizen of this land. You owe it to the foundation. Why won't you furnish them with passports all round?" Friedrich's voice thrust at Magnus like a dangerously sharpened pair of scissors. The image of the lanky fellow with his watery blue eyes gave way in his imagination to that of a squat Cossack policeman, a gendarme in some Siberian place of exile; he saw ridiculous scenes, he saw Magnus, the son, sitting in his guardroom, with his saber buckled on, saw him dole out passports, imposing black documents with masses of red stamps on them. Had he, Friedrich, gone crazy? All the while, he wondered. His brain was functioning automatically, without any especial animus. All it was was just his desperation not on any account to resemble Magnus. Who stood there, like the victim of a lynch mob. A steppe had grown around him, and cut him off from the clean and well-governed city with its hefty constables pounding their beat. His hands had come in contact with the east in the form of Anja's shoulders, of little Anja with the soft mouth. Eyes he was unable to read branded his face. The steppes rose up against him. The fire flickered. Friedrich, impartial Friedrich, had given the signal. He was pushed forward, and set up against Magnus, eyeball to eyeball. It was the face of Sebastian the martyr that faced him. "You love Anja," he said, and his fury that there was another lover beside him in the world kept his voice trembling. "You love Anja, and that obliges you to look after every one of these people here. Can't you understand: Anja belongs first and foremost to her comrades, and only then, maybe, to you." Was he mad? Was he not thinking of Sibylle? He saw her outside the circle. She was putting on makeup, coarsening her face to look like that of a poor girl, driven to sing in courtyards. He was desperate to smash the reflection of himself that he could see in Magnus. Then he wanted to grab Sibylle and take her away with him, just as she was, smeared with paint.

Magnus let his hands fall from Anja, who had been standing woodenly in front of him, with a gesture as though he were letting her go. Tired, he murmured: "What do you know about the conditions and circumstances of our life? I do everything I can. I don't understand what possesses you, a stranger, to intervene in a quarrel you can't know the first thing about."