A Sad Affair (21 page)

After such nights, they were both tetchy and irritable. Since each was expecting an attack from the other, they both reacted oversensitively, like delicate instruments, to every sound they thought they heard. Their speech became coarse and aggressive.

"Stop staring at me," cried Sibylle. "Take your hand off me!"

"Who would want to stare at you," Friedrich shouted back, and he spluttered over the sarcastic laugh he tried to produce.

Sibylle was writing a letter to Bosporus: "It's impossible for me to stand Friedrich any longer. It's just impossible."

Friedrich took the letter to post it. While she'd been writing it, Sibylle had worn her inscrutable expression. Did this letter contain the thoughts behind her brow? Did Friedrich at last have her thoughts in his hand? He saw himself in a mirror in a barber's shop, and he blushed. He hated the squalid and petty transgressions of curiosity, little landlady nosiness about the post of her lodgers. Friedrich had caught himself out. He despised himself. His red face looked swollen. The flesh round his eyes was all puffy. He went right up to the mirror. He asked himself: "How can anyone love me?" He inspected his hair. The people all around didn't bother him in the least. He lifted strands of it. Was it thinning already? Was he making a mess of his life by clinging so desperately to Sibylle? He was twenty-seven. The blood left his face again. It was thin and pale and no longer puffy. He walked on, and saw Sibylle's face like a white mask in front of him. What if she'd set down her secret and written out the wish that might animate the mask? Was the letter he was holding in his hand the thought behind her brow? Friedrich tugged at the paper. Perhaps he was seeing ghosts, perhaps his eye was deceived, perhaps she did love him after all and was merely caught up in some obstacle? Of course, she loved him, the misunderstanding must be set aside; Friedrich opened the envelope, and the letter lay open before his eyes under the green shade of the post office lamp: "It's impossible for me to stand Friedrich any longer. It's just impossible."

"She must die. She must die." He whispered the sentence to himself, in the way that simpleminded old people play the same thought over and over again. What was he guilty of? What had he done, what had he done to her? Didn't he do everything for her?

Didn't he live for her? Would he not give up his life for her? He clutched the counter. A man eyed him, curiously, inquiringly— maybe a doctor, maybe a plainclothes policeman. Friedrich let go of the counter. It sailed away from him. He staggered in a vast emptiness. The man supported him. "No!" said Friedrich. "I just need an envelope." He pulled a white envelope out of a dispenser, and, not disguising his handwriting, wrote out Bosporus's name and address. Then he put Sibylle's letter in the envelope, stuck it and stamped it and dropped it in the box.

At the counter for
poste restante
, he asked if some money had arrived for him. The official shook his head. "
Niente
," he said,
"
niente
," continuing mechanically to sort letters into various files. Friedrich was on the street again, buying four large children's balloons from a vendor. One was blue, another green, the third was red, and the fourth yellow. Also, he bought fruit and some peeled almonds, because he knew Sibylle liked those.

She was happy, smiling, beaming, nibbling. Friedrich tied the balloons to Sibylle's bedposts. They hung in the room's still air like four moons. The almonds crunched behind Sibylle's lips, and he could smell their sweet fragrance.
It's impossible for me to stand
Friedrich
any longer. It's just impossible.
The lines felt as though they had been crammed down his throat. He felt full of them. His heart struggled to beat past them.

"What's the matter?" asked Sibylle.

"Nothing," he replied, "nothing," and he tried hard to imitate the indifferent expression of the postal employee automatically sorting mail.

He was quite certain: I don't hate her. He didn't curse her; he cursed the sinister powers of dark forces. Where was the transgression? What was he being punished for? "I love you! I love you!" he said suddenly. He screamed it to her. She sat on a chair, and looked up at him.

They had spent all the money they had, and didn't have a penny left for food; all the houses suddenly put their kitchens on show and sent sizzling sounds out into the streets, and spicy aromas. The sun covered St. Mark's Square, and the bells on a hundred clock towers chimed noon. Sibylle and Friedrich covered long and pointless distances. Friedrich drilled his toe into the stone slabs of the square. He was choked with shame and rage, and he felt like digging his way into the earth. Was Sibylle hungry? He felt as though his skin was pierced by thousands of needles. The pigeons hovered just over their heads in a dense swarm. A man in a cap scattered corn for them. The camera shutters clicked and clacked. Sibylle and Friedrich didn't say a word. They looked coolly off into the distance, like superior people who take their meals late, and like to stroll to work up an appetite.

And as they walked, it happened—after a long time, and they were standing before the lagoon facing the Lido—that the silence between them had grown so huge that it filled the canopy of the sky quite to bursting. And then Friedrich said: "Little Sibylle." And he stopped at the foot of a bridge and saw the water of a canal flowing into the lagoon, and he saw how young and beautiful she was, a fine, courtly figure on the quay next to the water's edge, a line of shadow in the bright air that was worth more to him than any and all air, and he took her and held her in his arms and kissed her, in the full bustle of the roadway, full on the mouth. He tasted something he couldn't quite place, it brushed his lips, he inhaled its fleeting fragrance, an aroma of almonds and sea air, and it was happiness. He looked into Sibylle's face. It was so near that he could feel the fluff of invisible little hairs on her skin, but so far that he could see it entire, round and full. It was perfect. A face without any flaw. Her eyes were open wide, her gaze calm and fixed. He felt her life. He held it wrapped in his arms. He could lift her up into the light. It all took a fraction of a second, and he was flooded with the miraculous.

I have touched her mouth; I have kissed
Sibylle.
He sprang up the steps; he hopped across the bridge on one leg; he limped down the other side, and he did many things for Sibylle's amusement.

They took a different way back, stopping in front of every shop window of the commercial street. "Would you like it, the material, the bracelet, the silk scarf, the Nile-smelling handbag of crocodile leather? I'll give it to you. I'll give it all to you!" Sibylle nodded. His gestures were magnificent. He spread all the treasures of the world at her feet.

In the hotel, there was a telegram waiting for Friedrich. It instructed him to go to Ragusa on a certain assignment, and to that end, gave him credit with an Italian bank. "You can go home. You can go back to Bosporus, if you want. You can look for a new engagement. You will play Juliet." He held her hand. Her face was sparkling in so much light. She lowered her eyes, and he kissed her eyelids.

She nodded. She thought for a moment: I could go with him; and she saw herself lying stretched out flat on the white, sand-scrubbed deck of a boat, looking up at the clouds wafting gently overhead. There was a lot of light in her hair as well. It was as though firelight was playing across her. She nodded. "I'll go home. I'll play Juliet." They both laughed, and they knew nothing had changed, and that the wall of glass was still between them, sheer as air and acutely reflecting the image of the other. It was a frontier that they now respected. Sibylle remained destined for him; Friedrich was the human being who belonged to her. Nothing had changed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

W
OLFGANG
K
OEPPEN
, the illegitimate son of a doctor who took no interest in his welfare, was born in 1906 in Greifswald on the Baltic coast. He was a student for a time, unemployed, and held an array of odd jobs including ship's cook, factory worker, and cinema usher. At the same time, he began to write for left-wing papers and by 1931 was in Berlin, writing for the
Berliner
Börsen-Courier. Eine unglückliche Liebe
(A Sad Affair)
(1934) was his first novel, published with the Jewish publisher Bruno Cassirer, followed by
Die
Mauer
schwankt
(The tottering wall) (1935). Following the publication of these two works, he emigrated to Holland for a short period in the mid-1930s. Prior to the war, he returned to Germany and spent the war years writing film scripts for UFA that were, as he put it, just good enough to keep him in work, and just bad enough not to be made. The end of the war saw him in Munich.

In 1948, he ghostwrote Jakob Littner's Holocaust memoir
Aufzeichnungen aus
eniem
Erdloch
(Notes from a hole in the ground), for which he was paid in food parcels. In 1992, the book was somewhat controversially republished under Koeppen's own name. The controversy was renewed when Littner's original manuscript, having been traced and translated into English by his relative, Kurt Grübler, appeared as
Journey through the Night,
published by Continuum in 2000. Critics have vindicated Koeppen, analyzing Littner's original text next to both Koeppen's and Grübler's versions. Ruth Franklin, writing in
The New Republic
, demonstrated that Koeppen remained quite true to the original and in no way betrayed the truth of Littner's account.

In the 1950s, Koeppen completed the three novels that established him, alongside Günter Grass and Heinrich Boll, among the leading contemporary German writers:
Tauben im Gras (
Pigeons on the Grass)
(1951),
Das Treibhaus
(The Hothouse)
(1953), and
Der
Tod in Rom
(
Death in Rome)
(1954). Although quite separate in terms of character, action, and setting, these three novels, taken together, comprise a kind of trilogy on the state of postwar Germany. German readers and reviewers, however, were wholly unequal to them, taking particular umbrage with
The Hothouse,
which suggested that ex-Nazis, now acting as politicians in the Bundestag, had merely changed their spots. Pilloried by the critics, Koeppen, either too proud, or too lazy, wrote no more fiction thereafter.

For the remaining forty-odd years of his life, he was a sort of literary pensioner kept by Suhrkamp, his loyal publisher, and by a series of prizes and awards that, guiltily and belatedly, came his way, among them the Büchner Prize of 1962. He wrote three travel books, on Russia, America, and France, and a memoir,
Jugend
(Youth), that appeared in 1976, yet he never wrote the new novel that was touted and promised over several decades. In 1986, Suhrkamp published his collected works, somewhat surprisingly running to six volumes. He died in 1996, shortly before his ninetieth birthday. In the summer of 2000, a 700-page collection of
inédits
was brought out under the tide
Auf dem Phantasieroß
(On the wings of imagination).

After the American and English publications of
The Hothouse
in 2001, there has been a renaissance of interest in Koeppen's work. "German writers knew Koeppen as an essential bridge," wrote the
Wall Street Journal
, "as the first postwar voice to speak of things as they are." Nadine Gordimer described it as "lyrically inescapable. . . . Scathingly beautiful in the nightmare landscapes of the failure of materialism's Supermarket to assuage the human inner destructions of the past." And Ruth Franklin (in
The New Republic)
declared, "It is hard to think of a German writer of his generation who has written more sensitively or more profoundly about the Holocaust and its effects than Wolfgang Koeppen."

Wolfgang Koeppen was born in 1906 and died ninety years later in Munich. He published five novels, two in the 1930s and three in the 1950s. In 1962 he won the Büchner Prize, Germany's most prestigious literary award. He is being posthumously recognized as a giant of European literature.

Michael Hofmann is a poet. He is the translator of eight books by Joseph Roth and was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize for translating
The String of Pearls
(Granta Books).

{1}
A reference to
Goethe’s
novel
The Sorrows of Young
Werther
(1774).

{2}
"The Beggars' March" from
The Threepenny Opera
(1928) by Brecht and Weill. The Willett/Manheim translation reads:

Mankind lives by its head

Its head won't see it through

Inspect your own.

What lives off that?

At most a louse or two.

{3}
"Fruit of the medlar tree, resembling a small brown-skinned apple with a large cup-shaped eye between peristent calyx lobes. It is eaten only when decayed."
(OED)
The medlar
—
like the fig
—
has strong literary associations with the female sex,
cf.
Mercutio
's
lines in
Romeo and Juliet,
II, i:

Now will he sit under a medlar tree,

And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit

As maids call medlars, when they laugh alone.

O Romeo! that she were, O! that she were

An open
et caetera
,
thou a poperin pear.