by Max Frisch
‘You’re a restless creature,’ I said, ‘you can’t stay quiet for even a quarter of an hour…’
She rose to her knees and looked round.
We heard voices.
‘Shall I?’ she asked, pursing her mouth as though to spit. ‘Shall I?’
I pulled her down by her pony-tail, but she wouldn’t put up with it. I also thought it a pity we were not alone, but there was nothing to be done about it. Not even if one was a man! She always had this funny idea: You’re a man, aren’t you? She evidently expected me to jump up and start throwing stones and drive the people away like a flock of goats. She was seriously disappointed, a child I was treating like a woman, or a woman I was treating like a child, I didn’t know myself which it was.
‘This is our place,’ she said indignantly.
They were obviously Americans, I could hear their voices as the party wandered round our tomb; to judge by the voices, they might have been steno-typists from Cleveland.
‘Oh, isn’t it lovely?’
‘Oh, is this the Campagna?’
‘Oh, how lovely it is here!’
‘Oh,’ etc.
I sat up in order to peer across the undergrowth. The ladies’ mauve-dyed hair interspersed with the bald patches of the gentlemen, who had taken off their panama hats – they must have broken out of an old age home, I thought, but I didn’t say it.
‘Our grave mound,’ I said, ‘seems to be a famous one.’
Sabeth indignantly:
‘Look, there are more of them coming.’
She was standing, I was lying in the grass again.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘a whole charabanc full!’
Sabeth was standing above and beside me. I could see her rope-soled shoes, then her bare calves, her thighs, which even when foreshortened were very slender, and her pelvis in the tight jeans; she was standing with both hands in her trouser pockets. I couldn’t see her waist; because of the foreshortening. But her breasts and shoulders were visible and above them her chin and lips and above these her lashes and the underside of the eye socket as pale as marble because of the reflected light from below, then her hair against the dazzling blue of the sky, it looked as though her reddish hair would become entangled in the branches of the black pine tree. She stood like this, in the wind, while I lay on the earth. Slender and straight and speechless as a statue.
‘Hello,’ someone called out from below.
Sabeth answered gruffly: ‘Hello.’
Sabeth couldn’t believe her eyes.
‘Would you believe it,’ she exclaimed, ‘they’re having a picnic.’
Then, as though to spite the American besiegers, she dropped down and lay on my chest as if to sleep; but not for long. She sat up and asked whether she was heavy.
‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re light.’
‘But?’
‘No but,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re thinking something.’
I had no idea what I had been thinking; one is generally thinking something or other, but I really had no idea. I asked what she had been thinking. She asked for a cigarette, without replying.
‘You smoke too much,’ I said. ‘When I was your age…’
Her likeness to Hanna struck me less and less frequently the more intimate we became, the girl and I. Since Avignon it had never occurred to me at all. At most I wondered how I could ever have thought she bore any likeness to Hanna at all. I studied her closely. Not the slightest likeness! I gave her a light, although I was convinced she smoked too much, a child of twenty…
She always answered mockingly:
‘You talk like a heavy father!’
Perhaps I had (once again) been thinking that to Sabeth, when she lay on my chest and studied my face, I must appear an old man.
‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘that was the Ludovisian Altar we liked so much this morning. It’s madly famous!’
I let her give me a lecture.
We had taken off our shoes; I enjoyed the feel of our bare feet on the warm earth and everything else.
I thought about our Avignon (Hôtel Henri IV).
Sabeth with her open Baedeker knew from the outset that I was a technologist, that I was going to Italy for a rest. Nevertheless she read aloud:
‘ “The Via Appia, the queen of roads built in 312 B.C. by the censor Appius Claudius Caecus…” ’
I can still hear her Baedeker voice.
‘ “The more interesting section of the road begins, the old paving is uncovered at several points, first comes the magnificent series of arches of the Aqua Marcia (cf. page 261).” ’
She always turned back to the reference page.
At one point I asked:
‘What is your Mamma’s first name?’
She didn’t allow herself to be interrupted.
‘ “A few minutes further on stands the tomb of Caecilia Metella, the most famous ruin of the Campagna, a circular structure sixty-six feet in diameter, resting on a square base and clad with travertine. The inscription on a marble tablet runs: Caecilia Q. Cretici f(iliae) Metellae Crassi, of the daughter of Metellus Cretius, step-daughter of the triumvir Crassus. The interior contained the burial chambers.” ’
She stopped and thought.
‘I asked you a question,’ I said.
‘I beg your pardon.’
She shut her Baedeker with a bang.
‘What did you ask me?’
I took hold of her Baedeker and opened it.
‘Is that Tivoli over there?’ I asked.
There must be an airfield on the Tivoli plain, even if it wasn’t shown on the maps in this Baedeker; the whole time we heard engines, just the same vibrant hum as I used to hear above my roof garden on Central Park West, every now and then a DC-7 or a Super-Constellation flew over our pine tree, its undercarriage out ready to land, and disappear somewhere in the Campagna.
‘The airfield must be over there,’ I said.
I really wanted to know.
‘What did you ask?’ she repeated.
‘What your Mamma’s name is.’
‘Piper,’ she said. ‘What else should it be?’
Of course I meant her first name.
‘Hanna.’
She was already on her feet again, peering across the undergrowth, both hands in her pockets and her reddish pony-tail on her shoulder. She didn’t notice the effect her answer had on me.
‘My goodness,’ she exclaimed. ‘You should see what they’re eating down there, there’s no end to it – now they’re starting on the fruit!’
She stamped like a child.
‘I say,’ she exclaimed, ‘I must go behind a tree for a minute.’
Then I asked:
Did Mamma ever study in Zurich?
What?
When?
I went on asking questions, although the girl had to go behind a tree for a minute. She answered rather unwillingly but she left me in no doubt.
‘Walter, I don’t know that.’
Naturally, I was after precise dates.
‘I wasn’t there at the time,’ she said.
She was amused because I wanted to know so much. She had no idea what her answers meant to me. She was amused, but that didn’t alter the fact that Sabeth had to go behind a tree for a minute. I sat there holding her forearm, so that she shouldn’t run away.
‘Please,’ she said, ‘please.’
I asked my final question.
‘Was her maiden name Landsberg?’
I had let go of her forearm. As though exhausted. I needed all my strength just to go on sitting there. I was probably smiling. I hoped she would run off.
Instead, she sat down and asked questions in her turn.
‘Did you know Mamma, then?’
I nodded.
‘No!’ she said. ‘Really?’
I simply couldn’t speak.
‘You knew each other while Mamma was at the university?’ she asked.
She found it fantastic, sim
ply fantastic.
‘I’ll write and tell her,’ she said as she walked away. ‘Mamma will be pleased…’
Today, now that I know everything, I find it incredible that I didn’t know everything at that time, after our conversation by the Via Appia. I don’t know what I thought during the ten minutes in which the girl was away. Of course I did some mental stocktaking. I only know that I felt like making for the airfield. Maybe I didn’t think anything at all. It didn’t come as a surprise, it merely brought certainty. I like to be certain of things. Once I’m certain of something I find it almost amusing. So Sabeth was Hanna’s daughter! My first thought was that marriage was now out of the question. Yet I never thought for a moment that Sabeth might actually be my own child. It was within the bounds of possibility, naturally, but I never thought of it. More accurately, I didn’t believe it. Of course I thought of it – our child at that time, the whole affair before I left Hanna, our decision that Hanna should go to a doctor, to Joachim. Of course I thought of it, but I simply couldn’t believe it, because it was too incredible that this child, who shortly afterwards climbed up on to our grave mound again, should be my own daughter.
‘Walter,’ she asked, ‘what’s the matter?’
Sabeth was completely unsuspecting.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘you smoke too much yourself.’
Then we talked about aqueducts.
Just to have something to talk about.
I explained about communicating pipes.
‘Yes, yes,’ she said, ‘we had that too.’
She was highly amused when I demonstrated that if the ancient Romans had been in possession of this sketch on my cigarette packet, they could have done without at least ninety per cent of their brickwork.
We were lying in the grass again.
Aeroplanes flew overhead.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘you really shouldn’t fly back.’
It was our last day but one.
‘We shall have to part some time, my dear child, in one way or another…’
I watched her.
‘Of course,’ she said. She sat up and pulled out a stalk of grass, then she stared straight in front of her; the thought that we must part didn’t trouble her at all, it seemed, not at all. She didn’t stick the stalk between her teeth, but wound it round her finger and said: ‘Of course…’
There was no thought of marriage on her side!
‘I wonder whether Mamma still remembers you.’
The idea amused her.
‘You know, I can hardly imagine Mamma as a student,’ she said. ‘Mamma as a student living in a garret, you said, a garret – Mamma never told me about that.’
The idea amused her.
‘What was she like in those days?’
I held her head so that she couldn’t move, with both hands, the way you hold a dog’s head. I felt her exert her strength, but it was no use, the strength of her neck muscles; my hands were like a vice. She closed her eyes. I didn’t kiss her. I merely held her head. Like a vase, light and fragile, but growing heavier and heavier.
‘Walter,’ she said, ‘you’re hurting me.’
My hands held her head until she slowly opened her eyes to see what I was after – I didn’t know myself.
‘Seriously,’ she said, ‘you’re hurting me.’
It was up to me to say something; she closed her eyes again – like a dog when you hold it fast like that.
Then I asked my question.
‘Let me go!’ she said.
I waited for her answer.
‘No,’ she said, ‘you’re not the first man in my life, you know that…’
I didn’t know anything.
‘No,’ she said, ‘don’t worry…’
The way she pushed the flattened hair away from her temples, you might have thought her only worry was her hair. She took the comb out of her black jeans and combed it, while she stated casually: ‘He’s teaching at Yale.’ She had a hair-slide between her teeth.
‘And the other one,’ she said with the hair-slide between her teeth, as she combed out her pony-tail, ‘you’ve seen for yourself.’
She must have meant the ping-pong player.
‘He wants to marry me,’ she said, ‘but that was a mistake on my part, you know, I don’t like him at all.’
Then she needed the slide and took it out of her mouth, which now remained open but mute, while she finished combing her hair. Then she blew the comb clean, looked over towards Tivoli, and that was that.
‘Shall we go?’ she asked.
I really didn’t want to remain sitting there, I wanted to straighten up, fetch my shoes, put my shoes on, my socks first of course, then the shoes, so that we could go…
‘Do you think I’m bad?’
I didn’t think anything.
‘Walter!’ she said.
I pulled myself together.
‘That’s okay,’ I said, ‘that’s okay.’
Then we walked back to the Via Appia.
We were already sitting in the car, when Sabeth started off again (‘Do you think I’m bad?’) and wanted to know what was in my mind all the time. I inserted the ignition key to switch on the engine.
‘Come,’ I said, ‘don’t let’s talk.’
Now I wanted to drive off.
Sabeth talked as we sat in the car without driving, about her Papa, about divorce, about war, about Mamma, about emigration, about Hitler, about Russia…
‘We don’t even know,’ she said, ‘whether Papa is still alive.’
I switched off the engine.
‘Have you got the Baedeker?’ she asked.
She studied the map.
‘This is the Porta San Sebastiano,’ she said. ‘Now right, then we come to San Giovanni in Laterano.’
I switched the engine on again.
‘I knew him,’ I said.
‘Papa?’
‘Joachim,’ I said, ‘yes…’
Then I drove as ordered: to the Porta San Sebastiano, then right, until another basilica stood before us.
We went on sightseeing.
Perhaps I’m a coward. I didn’t care to say any more about Joachim or ask any questions. In the silence of my mind I calculated ceaselessly (while I talked, more than usual, I think) until the sum worked out the way I wanted it: She could only be Joachim’s child! How I worked it out, I don’t know, I cooked the dates until the sum, as a sum, really worked out right. In the pizzeria, while Sabeth left me for a few minutes I gave myself the pleasure of checking the sum on paper. It was right; I had picked the dates (Hanna’s announcement that she was expecting a baby, and my departure for Baghdad) in such a way that the sum was right; the only fixed date was Sabeth’s birthday, the rest could be juggled till a weight was lifted from my heart. I know the girl found me jollier than ever that evening, positively sparkling. We stayed till midnight in this working folk’s pizzeria between the Pantheon and the Piazza Colonna, where the singers came with their guitars after begging outside the tourists’ restaurants and ate pizza and drank chianti by the glass; I bought them round after round and everyone was in high spirits.
‘Walter,’ she said, ‘isn’t this wonderful?’
On the way to our hotel (Via Veneto) we were jolly, not drunk, but distinctly gay until we reached the hotel, where they held the door open for us and handed over the room key in the alabaster hall, addressing us by the names we ourselves had given.
‘Mr Faber and Miss Faber – good night!’
I don’t know how long I stood in my room without drawing the curtains, a typical Grand Hotel room, far too big, far too high. I stood without undressing. Like a machine that receives the information ‘Wash!’ but doesn’t function.
‘Sabeth,’ I asked, ‘what’s the matter?’
She was standing outside my door; without knocking.
‘Tell me,’ I said.
She was standing there with bare feet, wearing her yellow pyjamas, her black duffle coat thrown over them; she didn’t want to
come in, only to say good night again. I saw her tear-reddened eyes…
‘Why shouldn’t I love you still?’ I asked. ‘Because of Hardy or whatever his name is?’
Suddenly she burst out sobbing.
Later she fell asleep, I had covered her up, because the night outside the open window was cool; the warmth seemed to calm her, so that she really fell asleep, in spite of the noise in the street, in spite of her fear that I might go away. It must have been a street with traffic lights, hence the din – motorcycles that revved up while they were stationary, then released the brakes, the worst thing was an Alfa Romeo that kept coming back and every time set off as though at the start of a race, making a noise that reverberated between the houses, it was barely quiet for three minutes at a time, every now and then the clock of some Roman church struck, then more hooting, the screech of brakes and tyres, revving up before starting off again, senseless, like the din made by urchins, then again the tinny roar, it really seemed as though the same Alfa Romeo was circling round us all night long. I became more and more wide awake. I lay beside her. I hadn’t even taken off my dusty shoes and my tie, I couldn’t move, because her head was resting on my shoulder. In the curtains shimmered the light of an arc lamp that swayed every now and then, and I lay as though being tortured, because I couldn’t move; the sleeping girl had placed her hand on my chest, or rather on my tie, so that the tie dragged at my neck. I heard the hours strike one after the other, while Sabeth slept, a black bundle with hot hair and breath, and I was incapable of thinking ahead. Then came the Alfa Romeo again, hooting its way through the streets there was a screech of brakes, then it revved up, started and sent its tinny roar out into the night…
*
What did I do wrong? I met her on the ship as we waited for our table tickets, a girl with a dangling pony-tail who was standing in front of me. She caught my attention. I spoke to her, as people do speak to one another on a ship like that; I didn’t run after the girl. I didn’t delude her in any way, on the contrary, I spoke to her more openly than I normally do, about my bachelorhood for example. I made her an offer of marriage without being in love, and we knew at once it was stupid and we said good-bye. Why did I look for her in Paris? We went together to the Opéra and afterwards we had an ice, then, without keeping her any longer, I drove her to her cheap hotel in Saint-Germain, I offered to let her hitchhike with me, since I had William’s Citroën, and at Avignon, where we spent our first night, we naturally stayed at the same hotel (anything else would have suggested an intention which I didn’t have at all), but not even on the same floor; I never thought for a moment it would come to that. I remember exactly what happened. It was the night (May 13th) of the eclipse of the moon that took us by surprise; I hadn’t read a newspaper, and we weren’t ready for it. I said: ‘What’s wrong with the moon?’ We were sitting outdoors and it was about ten o’clock, time to turn in, because we planned to leave early next morning. The mere fact that three heavenly bodies, the sun, the earth and the moon, occasionally lie in a straight line, which necessarily produces an eclipse of the moon, upset my equilibrium, as though I didn’t know exactly what a lunar eclipse was. As soon as I saw the round shadow of the earth on the full moon I paid for our coffee, and we walked arm in arm up to the terrace above the Rhône, where we spent a whole hour, still arm in arm, standing in the night watching this perfectly intelligible phenomenon. I explained to the girl how it was that the moon, although totally covered by the earth’s shadow, nevertheless emitted so much light that we could clearly see it, unlike the new moon, more clearly than usual in fact – not as the usual luminous disc, but definitely as a sphere, a ball, a body, an orb, an enormous mass in the empty cosmos, orange in colour. I can’t remember all the things I said during that hour. But I do remember that the girl felt for the first time that I took us both seriously and kissed me as never before. And yet to look at it was rather oppressive, an enormous mass drifting, or hurtling, through space, which brought to mind the objectively quite correct idea that we on earth were also drifting, or hurtling, through the darkness. I spoke about death and life, I believe, in quite general terms, and we were both excited because we had never seen such a clear eclipse of the moon before, even I hadn’t, and for the first time I had the bewildering impression that the girl, whom I had hitherto taken for a child, was in love with me. Anyhow it was the girl who that night, after we stood outside until we were shivering, came into my room…