A Sad Affair (11 page)

I really ought to take him by the hand, thought Friedrich, it is just exactly the way he's described it. But he's not a good man either. Friedrich pictured the line of scantily clad dancers waiting in the draft. The search for a good person oppressed him. How we all torment one another; must it be like that? He felt suddenly dizzy. He was uncertain, he moved back from his rebel leader's pose, and tried to burrow back into the ranks. A sensation of heat overpowered him. I can't believe it, I'm blushing. It was a feeling of shame he was unable to fight off.

He succeeded in forcing his way through the group, and back to Sibylle. "Get your bags packed. I'll come for you tomorrow morning at six at St. Peter's. You're coming away with me." Sibylle painted a horizontal black hunger line across her forehead. The line lay menacingly on her skin, like a dark thundercloud. "You can see, it's almost finished. Magnus can't do anything for you, what do you want to stay for? You'll end up being deported as well, and you haven't anything in common with these people who are real refugees. You've got a passport and a country and a consul behind you, you can turn your hand to something else; can't you see, it would be folly to stay on here."

Sibylle did not reply. She looked deeply into the glass, and checked her makeup. A layer of yellow on her lips gave her mouth a quality of decay Then the excited huddle left the window, and Anja came up to Friedrich. A bell rang, Jupiter threw open the door and called in: "Come on, children, we've got a full house." And true, he could hear a hubbub of voices. The beady-eyed woman at the till had done good work today, she was disciplined, and seemingly untouched by the chaos she made possible.

Anja opened her mouth. She spoke loudly and clearly, everyone was meant to hear, no cigarette smoke blurred the sound of her words on this occasion: "I don't want Magnus thinking I'm going to stay with him if the others are deported. Every one of us will have to look for a place to go, we can't stay together, and I'm going to go with Friedrich. He's the only one of us I'd even consider." A resolute speech. A match flared at the end of it, and once again Anja drew the smoke of a cigarette in fervent gulps down into her lungs.

What was Friedrich to do? How should he respond? Was it possible to refuse? It had never occurred to him to take her with him. How could she put him in such a position? It made things terribly awkward with Magnus. He said: "But,
but
..."
It was a mumbling and stammering. It didn't seem possible to offer an explanation that wouldn't offend Anja. Was she offering herself to him? What were her motives? Was she looking for protection, did she need help, or was he nothing but an escape route from her dependency on Magnus? He said: "I don't know if I have enough money for that. I only have a little, and I'm already taking Sibylle." His voice hadn't sounded as confident as Anja's. Fedor pushed away from Magnus and in the direction of Friedrich. Everyone looked at him. The young men had taken off their sweaters and were standing in front of their lockers in their little gymnasts' vests. The women were down to their underwear, or already half in costume.

Once again, the bell rang through the room. "First number, orchestra and beginners!" Jupiter, who had already turned up the stage lights, put his head through the door a second time.

Sibylle, all made up and in the tattered dress of the courtyard singer, leapt to her feet and knocked over her chair. "Are you mad? What gives you the right to make my decisions for me?" Her face was completely rigid. Under her makeup, her skin must be pale as marble.

"Sibylle!" He started trying to convince her.

Then Fedor was beside her, and his face once more was that of a man returning home from long and fruitless wanderings, sorry now that he will have to kill the dog who's whimpering expectantly to him. "You are a citizen," he said, turning to Friedrich. "Is that like a citizen? My God, don't you feel any sort of duty toward Anja?" His skin was gray, as though dobbed with flour, the black stubble sprouting through the sand. Wasn't it laughable?

Friedrich pressed his palms to his chest; then he brought them down, feeling the contours of his body. He wanted to make sure. Was it not possible that he was dreaming, that he was a man lying in bed asleep, watching himself with fear and trembling as the hero of a nightmare drama? Or was there some chemical transformation of the air, the fumes and vapors, the lack of oxygen he was breathing as in the inside of a gasometer that was befuddling his senses, and causing him to hear words that couldn't possibly have been said? The only certainty was that the scene was laughable, either way, and that he would have to draw strength to utter a scream to escape from the dream, and get out of this nightmarish tangle. "What about you," came the scream, "to whom 'citizen' is a dirty word, so that you curl your lip with disgust when you throw it at me? What allows you to live in bourgeois countries, under foreign laws that you despise, instead of going home to your country, which I seem to have heard is socialist, in accordance with the principles you profess? Why don't you go home and help build the new world that you call for in speech after speech? Is it that your revolutionary strength is exhausted by wearing a symbolic sweater? You live in the revolutionary romanticism of the émigré who shuns any actual revolution because it would wreck his dim little world, the fairy-tale hour in poky restaurants with the hot soup of home that tastes so sadly familiar when sipped in exile?" Had he taken him on in a debate? Was he politicking? What was he doing, voicing these opinions? Emotion had told him what to say. Confusion, a rush of blood. Were his words sincere? He thought probably not. He went red, as after telling a lie he'd only later become aware of. Fedor's world was an empire of the dead. The shudders that went through Friedrich, they were genuine. He rejected that world. But didn't Sibylle live in it? Then he would free her. But was it possible to free someone who didn't want to be free? What were all those high- sounding words? Set free? Was that not the reason for his severity, the fact that he had been all ready and waiting to march into that world of Fedor's, to make common cause with the others, to be with Sibylle, and was it not just disappointment and dread not to have been called upon and not to have to leave, and was it not hate, the man-to-man hatred of Fedor, that prompted him to step forward with accusations [with accusations that were clean and sensible and for that reason were valueless if one wanted to be just], because Fedor was allowed to stay?

The faces of everyone in the room seemed to attack Friedrich. The unfinished masks of the comedians resembled the bloodthirsty expressions of fat ogres in Chinese stories. Fedor had a rebuttal all ready in his mouth, he was chewing it over before spitting it back at him, but Sibylle yelled "Shut up!" at him just as the mouthful was on the point of leaving his lips. She was like a drover. A radiant energy transformed her delicate, girlish appearance. She stood there, wide-legged and arms akimbo, like a young wrestler in a Roman arena, whose slender body in the course of murderous embraces has grown as sleekly muscular as a snake's. "And you go in the auditorium and watch, we're about to begin." She shoved Friedrich into the passage. Once again, he stumbled over the piles of rubbish behind the curtains. He entered the auditorium and stared into a hundred ranked, expectant faces. There wasn't an empty seat anywhere, and Friedrich sat down on a stool next to the piano at the foot of the stage.

The pianist struck some loud chords. His hands moved like those of a nervous man banging the tabletop in nervous desperation. He was a somewhat effeminate young man, and Friedrich was surprised at the brutality of his nimble fingers. The show was a success. There was laughter and cheering and sometimes people held their breath as an "aha" of discovery and agreement [silent, though; this wasn't parliament] caused them to draw a deep breath. The satirical elements went down best. They went with the low, cellarlike rooms. Some scenes were put on in a garish poster style. Old moralities integrated into the construction of an asphalt city. The figure of the peasant woman from bygone days sang a setting of Villon. She stood there like a monument, massive and stone—Rodin would have been impressed—and she possessed the secret of all acting, which was presence: she passed over the stage like a cloud and she reached every member of the audience. She's gifted, by God she's gifted; the old ghosts come to life when they're stood in the limelight. Friedrich knew: then Sibylle would be lost. And he could only imagine what was going on behind the scenes, in the breaks between numbers, in the suspenseful moments of waiting to go on. It was the immemorial question about the leading lady's leading man. No man can bear it. He knows he will lose out. He would have to be an actor himself to lose his crazed fear that one day the actress, who by day holds actors in contempt, in the moment of her walking off stage, exhausted and disoriented in the real world, will sink into the arms of her partner, who had bided his moment to collapse backstage into a puddle of dust and sweat and greasepaint with the diva trembling with nervous exhaustion.

A
ND
THAT
was the hell into which he had delivered her. Friedrich remembered Sibylle's first public appearance. It was a drama school production. He had taken her to it. Better, he had dragged her there, like a calf to the slaughter. Of course, like everyone who had trained under the old director, she had to play
Lulu
, Act I, the scene in the Pierrot costume in the painters atelier. She had been like a wild animal, beside herself with fear, excitement, and the vague pain of having to reveal herself. Early that morning, Friedrich had gone to collect her from the bed she had shared with Bosporus, still carrying the smell of him on her skin, and she was already ablaze. She had driven Friedrich out of bed for a "day of the naughty Sibylles." [On such days, they called each other the "S twins" and carried on like a variety act, swinging on trapezes in a winter garden.] On streetcars, they had been strangers calling each other names. In coaching inns, they discoursed in foreign tongues. On the escalator of the department store, Sibylle had contrived a fainting fit, and with wild gestures, Friedrich had dragged her backward downstairs, which had taken some doing, calling out: "My wife always suffers these attacks when she sees the rayon bosses in their frock coats." They had undertaken mysterious and highly suspicious measurement of civic buildings. They turned vague acquaintances into victims by walking up to tell them they had just been invited by telephone to attend a feast of shark fins newly flown in from Asia. Such days were wonderful, but they cost something too. They walked into cinemas, glanced at the screen, and said: "Dear me, how inappropriate, that woman's décolletage," and walked out again. They crisscrossed the city on open-top buses for the purposes of organized inverse theft. They had armed themselves with cheap children's watches and tried to stuff them undetected into other people's pockets. They thought how much more exciting it must be to find someone else's watch on you than to be missing your own. "Naughty Sibylle" days were days of happiness for Friedrich. Sibylle laughing, Sibylle merry, what did it matter that he tottered home exhausted, feverish, poor, hungry, penniless, and with no prospects? On the day of her first public appearance, however, it wasn't fun that drove Sibylle to these tricks but nerves. They had gone to Sibylle's apartment, and Sibylle had thrown herself on her—during the Bosporus period largely unused—bed. "Feel my heart," she had said. And her heart had lain under his hand. "Little Sibylle"—and even so he had delivered her. They had taken a taxi to the theater in the city center. Sibylle, who, for a laugh, was prepared to try the most risqué, exhibitionistic improvisations in front of partygoers, was now so shaky at the prospect of her debut that he had had to lie on top of her to calm her down. They had some brandy with them in a flask, and Sibylle drank it, and got drunk, without becoming any more valiant. On the way to the dressing room, she had lost her fear. She had puked while Friedrich held her trembling head. He had her hair in his mouth. She was a small creature, and devoted to him. He had left her in the passageway backstage.

Bosporus was in the auditorium. They sat together. Bosporus had no stains on his coat. That mattered to Friedrich, though it was unclear whether his emotion was pain or pride. Friedrich and Bosporus were friends. That was what Sibylle had wanted. Friedrich admired Bosporus, but there were times when he would gladly have murdered him. What does he know about Sibylle, it's a mistake [she isn't destined for him!]: that was what he had tended to think at such times. And then she had gone out onstage, after the shrill jingle of an alarm clock, and she hadn't been able to get a word out, she was drunk and distrait, but her movements had taken her through the scene, the movements of a gazelle leaping boldly over abysses. She allowed herself to be pursued, she knocked over props and fittings, the third wall fell over, the flame caught, the audience was uneasy, but Friedrich experienced a revelation of acting, a display of naked genius, a shy foal whose bolting gave promise of future triumphs, and Friedrich felt vindicated when at the end of the scene the director of the Kammerspiele had sent his card to Sibylle: "With my awe at your performance." Then they had gone out together, Bosporus and Sibylle and Friedrich. Friedrich had had to borrow money from Bosporus; and that hadn't been easy for him, but still easier than to leave the proximity of Sibylle and to decline the wine in which they were to toast her "dramatic career." They broke up outside Bosporus's apartment on the green canal bank. Sibylle and her lover [even so, she was not destined for him], he favoring his wounded leg ever so slightly, climbed up the stairs to bed. Friedrich had observed them through the glass of the front door. Was that a silent, wild peal of laughter that caused their shoulders to shake? Their heads, their shoulders, their backs, slid out of the top of the glass, and last of all their feet. With his hand on the heavy bundle containing the police revolver he had purchased from some criminals, his forehead against the glass, Friedrich had watched them go.