A Sad Affair

by Wolfgang Koeppen

  THE DAY had risen. Across the bleached foggy horizon—contrasting with it in color and fixity—lay the window bars in front of the window of Friedrich's room in the Grand Hotel of the foreign city. The noise in the corridor had increased. Pale, morning hands pulled the shoes inside from the doorstep. Thou shouldest wear sandals on thy feet! The man, the guest, the resident, was getting ready. The breakfast symphony sounded through the building. Clatter of dishes, knives, spoons, and cups. In the walls, the bathwater was going up and down; powerful and pure, it streamed into the tubs, scummy and discolored it gurgled away again into deep subterranean channels, taking with it the dust from the bodies of a traveling humanity, into the network of pipes under the city, and thence to never-seen sewage fields. Time had marched on, the minute hand had been once round, and Friedrich was still lying in the knotted sheets on his rumpled bed, and it was surprising in more than one way that he was still there. He was in the great city, where he had wanted to be. He had only to get up and go, and Sibylle would be there, visible to his eyes and palpable to his hands. His wish had been fulfilled, his longing could be satisfied. Why then was he still hesitating? Was he like an ancient clipper ship that, having found peace in the harbor, trembles with desire in the ropes of its rigging when the wind blows the salt breath of the sea to it, and yet, for all its longing, creaks and aches in every spar when happiness sets its sails, weighs its anchor, and sets its course for the great breakers? Was he past that? Not in terms of years. But possibly he was used up, the flame had already consumed his being, his sensibility, and his heart, and was he so exhausted with it, gone cold and weak, that he hadn't even noticed that in him there was just an orange core of warmth in a pile of ashes? The game had been played and lost a hundred times. Opinions differed on the way he had taken defeat. Some said he was on the run from guilt, because they reckoned a man in his situation, after so many and such public reversals, had no option but to pay with his life. Beck, who had left the fray and embarked on a new liaison [Sibylle had not been destined for him!] but kept an eye on developments, would reply to them: "But he is paying, look at the life he's living." And Friedrich himself remained entangled in the inevitable conclusion of all his thinking: She is destined for me! I will one day prevail Perhaps he was a gambler. We like to seek out the banal and otherworldly explanation, and are afraid to say: "He had been chosen by Fate [the devilish or demonic, but always, one way or another, the destructive force] to love this one among all the women in the world."

  He stood in front of the door of the St. Peter's Hostel, and was five minutes late. He had taken a cab to ease his journey. To take the weight off his feet. To be able to bound up the steps. Once, she had said to him: "You don't love me at all, that's just an illusion; but you love the idea of being in love with me!" He knocked on the door and opened it and knew, when he saw her lying in an iron bed crowded with toys, black dogs and brown bears, still sleepy, pink, dreamy, rubbing her eyes, looking up and then stretching out her hand, the smell of her perfume, "After the Storm," in the room, and the smell of her, Sibyllesmell, the aroma he had once whimpered to dwell in [in one of his letters to her, he had written: "In the Northland, in the upper reaches of the Baltic, where lonely pines rise out of the tundra, and beckon to your sisters in the white nights of June, where reindeer graze, unsaddled and unmilked by men, the air is so pure in the soft drift of the summer breeze that it must be like the coming and going of your sleeping breath, Sibylle"], and he knew that the accusation about being in love with love was nonsense. He would so have liked to say: "Little Sibylle," and sit down on her bed, but that wasn't possible, that didn't accord with the protocol that had established itself between them, and which broadly he respected.

  "Will you go and get me some breakfast?" she asked, and he went downstairs to the dining room, and there, at the buffet, softly [because, while he enjoyed serving others, being served made him bashful] asked for breakfast for the lady in room fourteen. And while he was standing at the buffet waiting, and watching the maid disappear into the kitchen with his order, his eyes, for once raised up, happened to light upon a sign over the cupboard where the bottles were kept, a dusty, smoked sign that read in old-fashioned signwriting: ST. PETER'S HOSTEL, DOCTOR MAGNUS FOUNDATION FOR REFUGEES OF ALL NATIONS.

  What was this, what did that signify: "Doctor Magnus Foundation for Refugees of All Nations"? Was Sibylle a refugee? Hardly. But then why was she sleeping in a hostel for refugees? Anyway, what refugees, and who was this Doctor Magnus that he felt able to take them in? The simplest explanation was that this was merely an old sign, a pub sign, a bit of the history of the hostel, and without any relevance to today, kept out of piety and respect, and hung up over the cupboard of wines and essences and brandies. That must be it, in the Wild Man Pub, you hardly expected to run into the wild man in person. And yet, Friedrich felt vaguely disquieted by the sign. Moved by the sleepy face of his beloved, he had been on his way back to her, to resume their old game, a man who is happy if his humble, loving gift is accepted. Now experience called on him to "Beware." What new traps were lying open for him? He was ready to tie the mask on tighter, to play the traveler passing through, merely by chance, with no particular interest. As he turned to go back upstairs to Sibylle's room, he saw Anja. She stood behind him, she must have crept into the room like an animal on velvet paws. Night hadn't changed her. She was unkempt and didn't seem to have taken off her clothes. The shaggy sheepskin hung off her just as heavily as it had the previous evening. Even the cigarette she was drawing on hurriedly and impatiently, blowing the smoke up to the ceiling in blue rings, might be the same as yesterday's, though in all probability there had been dozens of others in between. So other members of the troupe than just Sibylle and Fedor were staying at St. Peter's. Perhaps it was cheap, and well known to groups of traveling artists. That could easily be the explanation. The sight of Anja had the effect of calming Friedrich's nerves a little. He still didn't know how to greet her, though—Anja, the clown of the troupe, the girl with the soft features and the red mouth. He was shy of being too intimate with people he didn't really know, even if he happened to have bumped into them once already. He contented himself with nodding to her, to show that he knew who she was, and going on by.

  In her room, Sibylle had wrapped herself in a dressing gown and was pacing up and down. It was her tiger walk, as Friedrich called it, a taut, nervous, springy gait. It was a sign that she was thinking, that she was intellectually occupied, invariably hunting for some argument that would bolster her current position, whatever it was. Like Anja, she was smoking in short, swift, vehement puffs. These girls, thought Friedrich, they're under pressure, under pressure from something that sets them apart from the world. "I've ordered breakfast," he said, "and Anja's downstairs, smoking like you. I think of her in her sheepskin as a young refugee, pacing up and down next to her tired horse and her heavily laden cart."

  Sibylle straightway got excited: "I don't want you to say anything against Anja [had he done such a thing?], I like her, she's the daughter of a prince, and when she was a child, a babe in arms, she saw Moscow burning." That could very well be, why not, Friedrich was quite used to the Russians that you met in Europe being descended from princes, and even the thing about Moscow burning could perfectly well be true. A little émigrée, in other words. Someone without a will of her own, flotsam. If it came down to it, weren't they all children of the War? He had often thought about that in the time he'd been away from Sibylle. He looked back on the day when the world had been supposed to end. Prophets had come forth all over the land, predicting it. Their words had sprouted like weeds on the farms and in the towns and villages along the Polish frontier. There were smallholders who had sold up, turned everything into cash, and hastened to the bars, to enjoy the end of their time with drinking and eating and whoring—because what better was there to do in their fear of the end, if they weren't to huddle together in prayer like toothless old women? Fires were blazing wherever you looked, along the banks of the Vi
stula and on the rafts. The bargemen got drunk and so did the peasants. The farmers and the craftsmen. The flat white caps of the Russian Imperial borderers sailed into the air, in pursuit of the elusive spirit of vodka, while they—Friedrich could picture the scene to himself as if he had dreamed it yesterday, even though he had been no more than six years old on the day the world had ended—his mother [the faint whiff of Leichner powder on her face], himself, and that nice, slender, colorful lieutenant, Uncle Thomas from the Uhlans, had stood on the balcony of their house to watch Friedrich's father go up in a balloon from the field behind the gasworks to greet the comet that was coming to destroy the world. It was truly a heroic act, comparable to the flight of Icarus, magnificent, the desire to cut loose from the Earth now trembling in panic, and to steer a course straight for perdition, toward the fixed star, into the arms of the lethal light. But that was typical of Friedrich's father. He would confront the demons! Who said the prophets were mistaken? And people in the Middle Ages were cleverer than we were, when they blocked off their wells and led their animals into the darkness of the light-garlanded stables and sheds at the approach of the trailing light in the night sky, because God did not want any yellow silk gas balloons floating toward the sign He had made in the air, and God knocked them to the ground. The people on the balcony, and all the others who were watching from the ground, saw the balloon rising higher and higher until it was just a dot among the stars, and then the comet came, and then came a fall, something, something indiscernible that plummeted down, and then a gasp from many voices, repeated, and the wreckage came down exactly on the frontier with Poland. On the night that Friedrich lost his father, on that night of the comet, in another part of the country, in the heart of a different landscape, Sibylle was born. Who could blame Friedrich for turning this death and this birth [when, already in love with her, he first learned of her] into the work of a fate to which he could not pray but could at least raise his hands toward in rage and in supplication? Had the comet not been a sign, a flaming sword? Uncle Thomas, the short, slender, jolly lieutenant in the Uhlans, lay buried in the Masurian forests. Friedrich had seen his grave, a little hump on the ground, marked by a propeller; the lieutenant had met his death as a fighter pilot. Friedrich's mother had collapsed after gleaning potatoes in a field that hadn't wanted to bear any more in 1918; the faint scent of the layer of stage powder from the yellow box and the feeling of her bony hands were all the memories of her that were left him. He thought of the long walks for milk in the early, black winter afternoons in the east, where you had to go for miles to the nearest ruined outbuildings, up to your knees in snow, sometimes stopping to listen whether it was the wolf coming after you. And he thought that, in another form, Sibylle must have had the same youth, standing in line for a little bit of butter at bare brick dairies in a gaggle of feeble women whose nerves would feel fear—yes, but not their hearts, which had grown impervious—when the drone of an airplane made them think a bomb was coming. And Anja too, if he wanted to adopt her into his Holy Family [for which there was every reason], Anja had seen Moscow, in flames, or some other town on the Volga, and at a time when she'd been quiet and dreamy still, the daughter of a prince! [oh, castles and estates with extensive gallops, with sleigh rides across the snow fields in the little light of the lamp attached to the pole between the two horses' heads, and the brilliance of the celebrations in the Kremlin, the young ladies wrapped in Brussels lace with lit candles in their hands], lying in her crib, which was the arms of a nurse who had fled with her, loyal and in disguise and in the hay of a cart belonging to a distiller from the edge of town. Eyes peeped through their lashes after sleep, and the whole sky was red, and the little girl stretched out her little arms toward the brilliance and, in rapture at the turning world, said: "Da!"

  Now and again, Sibylle would interrupt her pacing. She did so suddenly, and with unusual violence. She tossed away the end of her cigarette, crushed it underfoot like a man, and said: "Oh, you don't need to know any of that, really." Had she turned cowardly? She had taken a long run-up to an explanation, had wanted to speak, and now she was hesitating, behaving like a cat on a hot, as the proverb says, tin roof. She climbed back into bed [was it to drive off? She knew the game: a bed is a car, beepbeep, gangway] and balanced the breakfast tray, which had arrived, on her knees, which she had drawn up to her chest. Friedrich stood with his back to the window to watch her. The thought that she might have become a coward, full of subterfuges and secrets and not the courage to speak, now alarmed him. That, if that were indeed the case, would be a different Sibylle. She had never made a secret of anything, and had always owned up to whatever she had done. There was no Sibylle of lies. On the street in summer in bright sunshine, she might well try to persuade you: "We need to put up our umbrellas and buy new winter coats, it's snowing," but never did a lie that was not obviously a lie [for love of lying] spring from her lips. She had never used untruths or strategic evasions to gain a small, momentary advantage. Had that changed now, was she on the slippery slope, with herself no longer firmly in grip? Friedrich felt doubtful. Her face no longer had the tranquillity of the good girl. It was excited and looked somehow scraped, the face of a scout. Sharper in its lines and angles too. Was she looking straight ahead? Could she still steer her life, careful of every stone that might knock it off its course? Friedrich didn't know. He couldn't tell. As ever when he was confronted with Sibylle, he regretted that he wasn't a clairvoyant. What was going on behind her brow? It was a fortress, a bulwark, a concrete wall that kept repulsing him. If only he could manage to penetrate the windings of her brain, even once! That must be the key. He suffered from highly specific fantasies and saw an immaterial action as concretely as a blueprint in an educational film. He watched his thinking climb out of his head into hers, and he followed it, as like a red arrow it followed the mazy white tracks of her ponderings. He was palping the most sensitive nerves of her being. He wanted to know them. He wanted to find out: What am I to her, what is she thinking, where is salvation, can I right her and steer her [her misunderstanding!], and win her and make everything turn out well? What he wished to accomplish was a crime; the worst crime possible: to break into another's soul. But that's how it was between them. He was unable to withstand his desire to feel with her. So he was only thinking, as she always said, of himself and his own happiness. Maybe this thinking, this demented desire to possess that went far beyond the merely physical, was the reason why she refused to surrender her life to his claims, because his demands were too steep and too strange and caused a shudder to pass across her back. But: was he truly strange to her? It was to ascertain this, precisely this, that he was compelled to wish for a magical diving suit, his secret burglar's clothing, the devilish plan, to be able to inveigle himself into the chambers of her being. There she was, sitting in front of him, sipping tea in bed, and biting off a piece of croissant, and getting her mouth all jammy. What was her spell, why didn't he go, take his hat and pay the bill at the ridiculous hotel on the lake that wasn't his style, and travel on to the places listed on the ticket in his pocket? What was her spell? Was she beautiful, or rather, was she still beautiful? Friedrich remembered passing through the revolving doors of a café once, and, seeing her coming down from the upper story, so transcendently beautiful, so angelically delicate that he had to close his eyes lest they be blinded by such light, while a sea of tears—as deep as the tropical sea after the sun has gone down, and the forest breathes cinnamon, and cougars scream as they stare from waving palm fronds into the illimitable mirror—while a sea, then, of tears, a sweet ocean of happiness and emotion, fell from the bed of his closed eyes into his heart, splashy and soothing, so that it felt like dying, unconsciousness, sinking, subsiding, the death of a child of god that had seen her. That was how beautiful she was. And so young. A blue dragoon's coat with gray braid set off her face: head of Eros against idyllic Aegean backdrop. Now, for the last time, was she still as beautiful? He was able to behold her, so was the dazzling magic gone,
and could he go? No! He loved her. Nothing changed. He was entranced. The longer he looked at her, the more profoundly he felt tied. She put the tray down on the ground, made a deliberate effort, and said: "So do you not like Fedor?"

  A difficult question. He had to be careful not to offend her. He replied [and once more his heart was in the grip of another's hand] : "I hardly know him." And then, as the silence thickened in the room, and to take a little of the importance out of the subject (which irked him), he added: "I'm sorry, I'm not really interested in Fedor. I assume you've become friends, which I can understand in the situation you're both in, but I'm sure it'll pass."

  To which she nodded, and said: "It's so stupid, you know he's like a child."

  Friedrich was aghast when he heard that. An abyss opened at his feet. It was what he'd been terrified of. But he didn't want to jump into it. Not yet. He struggled for the self-mastery of the indifferent traveler, the man merely passing through. He said: "Well, never mind, that's not what's important," which was pretty stupid of him; and then came another question, in a voice that tried to mask the fact that it was shaking and slightly deranged: "And who do you love?"

  "Who do I love? How can you ask?" She looked earnest and sure of herself and perhaps a little indignant: "I only love Bosporus, you know that!"