by Max Frisch
It was probably Southampton.
Mr Lewin stood up and went on deck.
I drank my beer and tried to remember whether it also used to be absurd with Hanna (in the old days), whether it had always been absurd.
Everyone went on deck.
When Sabeth came back into the festooned hall to fetch her handbag, I got a surprise: she dismissed her friend, who made a sour face, and sat down beside me. Her Hanna-as-a-girl face! She asked me for a cigarette and wanted to know once again what I was pondering about all the time. I had to say something, I gave her a light, which illumined her young face, and asked whether she would marry me.
Sabeth blushed.
Was I serious?
Why not?
Outside they were unloading the cargo, and everyone felt he ought to watch it; the weather was cold, but this was a point of honour, the ladies were shivering in their evening dresses, there was mist, a night full of lights, gentlemen in dinner jackets who tried to warm their ladies with embraces, searchlights that lit up the hold, gentlemen in paper hats, the noise of cranes, but all in the mist; the flashing lights on shore…
We stood without touching.
I had said what I never meant to say, but what has been said cannot be unsaid, I enjoyed our silence, I was completely sober again, but all the same I had no idea what I was thinking, probably nothing.
My life was in her hands…
For a time, Mr Lewin came between us; he wasn’t in the way, on the contrary, I think Sabeth and I were both glad, we stood arm in arm chatting with Mr Lewin, who had slept off his burgundy, discussing the problem of tips and so on. Our ship had been riding at anchor for at least an hour, day was already breaking. Then we were alone again, the last people left on the wet deck, and Sabeth asked me whether I meant it seriously. I kissed her on the forehead, and then on her cold and trembling eyelids, she was shivering all over, then on her mouth, which gave me a fright. She was more of a stranger than any other girl. Her parted lips – it was impossible. I kissed the wet tears from her eye sockets, there was nothing to be said, it was impossible.
In another day and a half we entered Le Havre.
It was raining, and I was standing on the upper deck, when the young stranger with the reddish pony-tail crossed the bridge carrying luggage in both hands, which prevented her from waving. I think she saw me wave. I had meant to take a film, I went on waving, although I couldn’t see her in the crush. Later in the customs shed, just as I had to open my trunk, I caught sight of her reddish pony-tail once more; she nodded too and smiled, both hands full of luggage, she was carrying far too much, to save herself a porter, but I couldn’t help her, she vanished into the throng – our child! But I couldn’t know that at the time, nevertheless I felt a strangling sensation in my throat as I saw her simply disappear in the crowd. I was fond of her. That was all I knew. On the boat train to Paris I could have gone through all the compartments again. What for? We had said good-bye.
In Paris I immediately phoned Williams, to give a preliminary oral report; he said hello and had no time to listen to my explanation. I wondered whether anything was wrong… Paris was the usual thing, a week filled with conferences. I was staying on the Quai Voltaire as usual and had my customary room looking out on to the Seine and this Louvre, which I had never visited though it stood right opposite.
Williams was odd.
‘That’s okay,’ he kept saying, ‘That’s okay,’ all the time I was accounting for my short trip to Guatemala, which, as it turned out when I reached Caracas, had not caused any delay, since our turbines were not yet ready for assembly, quite apart from the fact that I had arrived in time for this conference here in Paris, which was the most important event of the month. ‘That’s okay,’ he said again when I told him about the ghastly suicide of the friend of my youth. ‘That’s okay,’ and finally he said: ‘What about taking a holiday, Walter?’
I couldn’t understand what he meant.
‘What about taking a holiday?’ he said. ‘You look as though…’
We were interrupted.
‘This is Mr Faber. This is…’
I don’t know whether Williams was annoyed because I hadn’t come by plane, but had taken a ship for a change; his suggestion that I needed a holiday could only be intended ironically, for I have seldom been as sun-tanned as I was then, and after all the good food on board I was less gaunt than usual, and sun-tanned on top of that…
Williams was odd.
Later, after the conference, I went to a restaurant I didn’t know, alone and depressed every time I thought of Williams. He wasn’t generally petty. Did he by any chance imagine I’d had a bit of a love affair in Guatemala or somewhere else en route? His smile vexed me, because in professional matters, as I have said, I am conscientiousness personified; I have never – as Williams very well knew – been as much as half an hour late for a conference on account of a woman. That just didn’t happen with me. But more than anything else I was vexed because the distrust or whatever it was, expressed in his repeated remarks of ‘That’s okay’, so preoccupied me that the waiter also treated me as though I was an idiot.
‘Beaune, monsieur, c’est un vin rouge.’
‘That’s okay,’ I said.
‘Du vin rouge,’ he said, ‘du vin rouge, avec du poisson?’
I had simply forgotten what I had ordered, my mind was elsewhere; that was no reason to go as red in the face as a beetroot – I was furious at the extent to which this waiter (who behaved as though he were serving a barbarian) sapped my self-confidence. After all, I had no reason to feel inferior, I did my job, I had no ambition to be an inventor, but I did as much, I thought, as any old Baptist from Ohio who poked fun at engineers; what a man like myself achieves is a great deal more useful, I supervise plant that runs into millions, I have whole power stations under me, I’ve worked in Persia and in Africa (Liberia) and Panama, Venezuela and Peru, I’m no country bumpkin – as this waiter obviously thought.
‘Voilà, monsieur!’
What a palaver they make when they show you the bottle, uncork it, pour out a trial sip and ask:
‘Il est bon?’
I hate feeling inferior.
‘That’s okay,’ I said, refusing to be browbeaten, I was well aware that it tasted corked but I didn’t want to start an argument. ‘That’s okay.’
My mind was elsewhere.
I was the only diner, because it was early in the evening; the only thing that irritated me was the mirror facing me, a mirror in a gilt frame. Every time I looked up I saw myself looking like a portrait of one of my own ancestors: Walter Faber, eating salad, in a gilt frame. I had rings under my eyes, that was all, apart from that I was sun-tanned, as I have said, not nearly so gaunt as usual, on the contrary I looked splendid. I’m a man in the prime of life (I knew that without a mirror), grey-haired, but athletic. I’ve no regard for handsome men. During puberty I used to be worried about the length of my nose, but not since then; since then there have been enough women to free me from false feelings of inferiority: the only thing that irritated me was this restaurant, with its mirrors wherever I looked, and this eternal waiting for my fish. I called firmly for the waiter, I had plenty of time, but what upset me was the feeling that the waiter was treating me with disrespect for some reason, the whole empty restaurant with five whispering waiters and a single diner – Walter Faber crumbling bread in a gilt frame wherever I looked. My fish when it finally arrived, was excellent, but I didn’t enjoy it at all, I don’t know what was the matter with me.
‘You look as though…’
It was only this stupid remark of Williams’s (and yet he likes me, I know) that made me neglect the fish and keep looking at those ridiculous mirrors that showed eight versions of Walter Faber.
Of course one grows older.
Of course one’s hair starts getting thin on top.
I’m not in the habit of going to doctors, I’ve never been ill in my life, apart from my appendix – I looked at the mirror m
erely because Williams had said, ‘What about taking a holiday, Walter?’ And yet I had seldom been so sun-tanned. In the eyes of a young girl, who wanted to become an air hostess, I was a man at the age of discretion perhaps, but not one who had lost interest in life, on the contrary, I forgot to go to a doctor in Paris, as I had actually decided to do…
I felt perfectly normal.
The next day (Sunday) I went to the Louvre, but there was no sign of a girl with a reddish pony-tail, although I spent a whole hour in this Louvre.
*
I’ve really forgotten my first experience with a woman, the very first, that is to say I never remember it at all if I don’t want to. She was the wife of a teacher of mine, who used to invite me to his house for week-ends shortly before I took my final examination; I used to help him read the proofs of a new edition of his textbook, in order to earn some money. My dearest wish was a cheap second-hand motorcycle, it didn’t matter how old the machine was so long as it went. I had to draw geometrical figures, Pythagoras’s theorem and so on, in Indian ink, because I was the best pupil at mathematics and geometry. His wife, as she appeared to me at the age I was then, was a lady in the years of discretion, forty, I believe, consumptive, and when she kissed my boyish body she seemed to me like a madwoman or a bitch; and I continued to address her as ‘Frau Professor’. That was absurd. I forgot about it from time to time; only when my teacher came into the classroom and put the exercise books down on the desk without a word, I was afraid he had found out about it, and the whole world would find out about it. As a rule, I was the first he called up when the exercise books were distributed, and I had to go out in front of the class – the only one who had made no mistakes. She died the same summer and I forgot about it, as you forget water you drank somewhere when you were thirsty. Naturally I felt bad about forgetting it and once a month I forced myself to visit her grave; I took a few flowers out of my briefcase, when no one was looking, and quickly placed them on the grave, which had no tombstone yet, only a number; at the same time, I felt ashamed because I was always glad when it was over.
Only with Hanna was it never absurd.
*
It was spring, but it was snowing, as we sat in the Tuileries, flurries of snow descending from a blue sky; we hadn’t seen each other for almost a week and she was glad to see me, I thought, because of the cigarettes, she was broke.
‘I didn’t believe you anyway,’ she said, ‘when you told me you never went to the Louvre…’
‘Well, very seldom.’
‘Seldom!’ she laughed. ‘I saw you the day before yesterday already – down there among the antiques – and again yesterday.’
She was really a child, although a chain smoker, she thought it was really coincidence that we had met again in Paris. She was wearing her black jeans and rope-soled shoes again, and with them a duffle coat and no hat, of course, only her reddish pony-tail, and it was snowing, as I have said, out of the blue, so to speak.
‘Aren’t you cold?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘but you must be.’
I had another conference at 4 p.m.
‘Shall we have a coffee?’ I said.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I’d like one.’
As we crossed the Place de la Concorde, hounded by the gendarme’s whistle, she gave me her arm. I hadn’t expected that. We had to run, because the gendarme had already raised his white bâton and a pack of cars was starting out after us; on the pavement, having escaped arm in arm, I noticed I had lost my hat – it was lying in the middle of the road, already squashed to a brown pulp by a tyre. ‘Eh bien!’ I said and walked on arm in arm with the girl, hatless like a boy in the flurrying snow.
Sabeth was hungry.
To avoid flattering and deluding myself I decided that she was glad to see me because she had almost no money left; she was stuffing herself with pâtisserie so eagerly she could scarcely look up, scarcely speak… It was impossible to talk her out of her plan to hitchhike to Rome. She had worked out an exact itinerary: she could miss Avignon, Nîmes and Marseilles, but she mustn’t miss Pisa, Florence, Siena, Orvieto, Assisi, and what have you; she had tried that morning already, but evidently on the wrong road out of Paris.
‘Does your mother know about it?’
She told me she did.
‘Doesn’t your mother worry?’
The only reason I was still sitting there was because I had to pay, I was all ready to go, with my briefcase resting on my knee; I didn’t want to be late just now, when Williams was behaving so oddly.
‘Of course she worries,’ said the girl, scraping the last remnants of her pâtisserie together with her spoon and only prevented by her upbringing from actually licking the plate; then she laughed. ‘Mother is always worrying…’
Later she said:
‘I had to promise her I wouldn’t go with any Tom, Dick or Harry – but that’s obvious, I’m not stupid.’
In the meantime I had paid.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
I didn’t dare ask: what are you doing this evening? I knew less and less what kind of a girl she really was. Uninhibited in what sense? Perhaps she really accepted invitations from any man, an idea that didn’t shock me, but which made me jealous, positively sentimental.
‘Do you think we shall meet again?’ I asked and immediately added: ‘If not, I wish you all the best.’
I really had to go.
‘Are you going to stay here?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve got plenty of time.’
‘If you’ve got time to do me a favour…’ I said.
I was looking for my lost hat.
‘I wanted to go to the Opéra,’ I said, ‘but I haven’t any tickets yet.’
I was amazed at my own presence of mind, I had never been to the Opéra, naturally, but Sabeth with her knowledge of human nature didn’t suspect for a moment, although I had no idea what was on at the Opéra, and she took the money for the tickets, quite willing to do me a favour.
‘If you feel like it,’ I said, ‘take two, and we can meet at seven o’clock – here.’
‘Two?’
‘It’s supposed to be marvellous.’
I had heard that from Mrs Williams.
‘Mr Faber,’ she said, ‘I can’t let you do that…’
I was late for the conference.
I really hadn’t recognized Professor O. when he suddenly stood there in front of me. ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry, Faber, where are you off to?’ His face wasn’t even pale, but utterly changed. All I knew was that I knew that face. I knew the laugh, but where had I heard it? He must have noticed. ‘Don’t you remember me?’ His laugh had become ghastly. ‘Yes, yes,’ he laughed, ‘I’ve been through the mill!’ His face was no longer a face, but a skull with skin over it, and even muscles that formed an expression, an expression that reminded me of Professor O., but it was a skull, his laugh was much too large, it distorted his face, it was much too large in relation to the eyes, which were set far back. ‘Herr Professor!’ I said, and had to take care not to add: ‘I know, they told me you were dead.’ Instead: ‘Well, well, how are you?’ He had never been so cordial, I looked up to him, but he had never been so cordial as now, while I stood there holding the taxi door. ‘Spring in Paris!’ He laughed, and I couldn’t make out why he kept on laughing, I knew him as professor at the Swiss College of Technology, not as a clown, but every time he opened his mouth it looked as though he was laughing. ‘Yes, yes,’ he laughed. ‘I’m better again now.’ Actually he wasn’t laughing at all, any more than a skull is laughing, it just looked like it, and I apologized for not having recognized him in my hurry. He had a tummy, a balloon of a tummy that welled out from under his ribs, all the rest was emaciated and his skin was like leather or clay, his eyes lively but sunken. I told him some sort of story. His ears protruded. ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’ he laughed and asked me if I wouldn’t come for an apéro. His cordiality, as I have said, was also much too large; he was m
y professor back in the old days at Zurich, I looked up to him, but I really had no time for an apéro. ‘My dear Professor…’ I never used to call him that. ‘My dear Professor,’ I said because he was holding me by the arm, and I knew what everyone knew, but he didn’t know apparently. ‘Then some other time,’ he said, and I knew for sure that this man was really already dead. I said, ‘Yes, I should like that,’ and got into my taxi.
The conference was of no interest to me.
I was always inclined to take Professor O. as a model; although not a Nobel Prize Winner, not one of the Zurich professors who was world-famous, he was nevertheless a true scientist. I shall never forget how we students stood around him in our white overalls and laughed at his pronouncement: ‘A honeymoon’ (he always said that) ‘is quite enough, afterwards you will find everything of importance in publications, learn foreign languages, gentlemen, but travelling, gentlemen, is medieval, today we have means of communication, not to speak of tomorrow and the day after, means of communication that bring the world into our homes, to travel from one place to another is atavistic. You laugh gentlemen, but it’s true, travel is atavistic, the day will come when there will be no more traffic at all and only newlyweds will travel about the world in a coach, no one else – you laugh, gentlemen, but you will live to see it!’
And there he suddenly was in Paris.
Perhaps that was why he kept laughing all the time. Perhaps it wasn’t true that (as people said) he had cancer of the stomach, and he was laughing because for two years everyone had been saying the doctors had given him less than two months to live; he was sure we should meet again…
The conference lasted a bare two hours.
‘Williams,’ I said, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Well, I’ve changed my mind…’
Williams drove me to the hotel, while I explained to him that I was thinking of taking a bit of a break after all, because of the springtime, a couple of weeks or so, a trip to Avignon and Pisa, Florence, Rome; he didn’t behave oddly at all, on the contrary, Williams was as generous as ever; he immediately offered me his Citroën, because he was flying to New York next day.