Friedrich made a feeble gesture of agreement and recognition. Bosporus was an officer who had been with the German troops in Turkey, and following the armistice, as they were returning through the Ukraine, had had his knee shattered by a bullet while he was perched on front of the locomotive, his rifle ready. "What about Doctor Magnus?" This question wasn't from Friedrich, it was just his voice, which had made itself independent of him, and to his own horror, put such a question.
"Magnus? I'm fond of him."
At that moment, there was a knock, and Fedor walked in. Friedrich had difficulty concealing his astonishment. So there was a Doctor Magnus, he must be alive for Sibylle to be fond of him, the plaque in the dining room over the buffet was more than just some dusty relic, this foundation for refugees from all countries, and this house, there was something in it, it was alchemy, and he, as if he hadn't sensed it already, had blundered into it! Fedor too was unchanged from the previous evening. He was in his sweater, as though determined he would greet the world always just like that. He kissed Sibylle's hand and shook Friedrich's firmly, like a friend. "How did you sleep?"
The question was directed at Friedrich, and Friedrich nodded: "Fine." What else was he supposed to say? Fedor simply expected that Friedrich would have slept well, that was a given, it was really the least you could expect if someone was staying at the Grand Hotel on the lake. Fedor was doing turns. He climbed onto the bedframe and balanced on top of it. Quite agile, but Friedrich thought: What do I do if he falls on to the bed? He wondered whether he would be able to endure that. But Fedor didn't fall, he vaulted back on the floor, and opened a little box of chocolates on the bedside table.
"They're from Magnus," said Sibylle. It was a request to him not to touch them. But Fedor was unable to hear that. He was insouciant [Sibylle called him naive] and he stuffed his mouth full of chocolates, and then he offered the box to Friedrich. Friedrich didn't feel like chocolate, but he didn't want to admit to himself that he was furious with Fedor for having failed to understand Sibylle's unspoken request; he helped himself to some of the chocolates, to make himself Fedor's accomplice. "You're behaving like swine," she screamed.
Fedor looked amazed: "What do you mean?"
Friedrich knew, and he felt sorry for Sibylle. It wasn't the chocolates, it was the breach of her prerogative that offended her. She always lived ringed by invisible pastures where no one was allowed to set foot. Why not do her the kindness, and agree to respect her boundaries? And, for the second time that morning, Friedrich felt like saying: "Little Sibylle."
But she had had enough of being at a physical disadvantage, the person lying in bed among others upright and dressed, and brusquely she leaped out of bed—making any feeling of tenderness quite inappropriate—ran over to the bathtub, turned on the faucets, supplementing the water with mixtures from mysterious bottles, was as enigmatically industrious as an apothecary or even an alchemist, and finally immersed herself completely, head and all, into the brimming water, and seemed not to want to come out of it, as if she were proposing to drown herself. Then she got dressed, little culottes, no top, powdered herself, wiped about her eyes, all with an animal agreeableness and naturalness and deliberateness, and when there was another, and this time a quieter, knock on the door, she called out: "Come in." It was Anja in her sheepskin.
With the entrance of this creature—this dreamy prince's daughter and clown of the troupe, soft mouth sucking rapidly and greedily on a cigarette—Sibylle transformed herself into a cavalier. She was as courtly as a well-brought-up young man from a prime regiment—no loutish heel-clack, but the soft, coaxing hand of an authentic gentleman, in whom politeness has softened into near-casualness—as she made room for Anja on her hurriedly made bed. So she was still that, a cavalier! Friedrich noted it happily. He knew that it was part of her manner, which he loved, to be courteous, friendly, and kind, to be solicitous to the few girls she allowed to come near her [she was more usually surrounded by men, but a girlfriend had been her dream from childhood on], just as a good rider flatters his horse and, with the respect he shows it, ennobles himself even as he tells it how to trot; and none of it done expressly or with any intention.
Fedor appeared oblivious of the style, the tone that prevailed between the girls. He tossed everything into one pan and assumed that whatever he ate from it must be good. And so he now proceeded to suggest a meal together in a restaurant that belonged to an organization and was supposed to be inexpensive. Friedrich saw Sibylle slipping away from him, lost to him all this day, he was fumbling for an excuse not to go to this organization restaurant, which seemed repugnant to him before he'd even seen it, but Sibylle had already taken the initiative and said "No." "No, Friedrich is only here for today, and he and I need to talk. Now run along and leave us alone."
That rough form of rejection was awkward for Friedrich. He would gladly have taken the edge off it with a word or two, perhaps an invitation for later on. He thought Fedor would blush and be furious. But all he did was laugh, and laughing, say: "You and your secrets!" And he walked over to Sibylle, kissed her on the forehead [she allowed it to happen; therefore, it was allowed], tried to put his arm round Anja too, but she pushed it aside, and went out, already humming to himself. He really was, as Sibylle called him, an uncomplicated fellow. Just a boy, thought Friedrich, it's too bad that I can't be equally nice and open and chirpy in my dealings with him. But there was the poison on Friedrich's side that got in the way of any friendly feelings he might have toward Fedor, the poison that had corrupted and tainted his soul, his body, his being such as it was from its very foundations: Fedor is one of those people who has the apple of felicity land in their lap, without having to go to any trouble to pluck it, he is one of those who wake up in the morning holding the diamond in their hands, one of those who don't understand what is being done to them, he is the man, one of the men, but they are a type, a species, the man for whom Sibylle is not intended, and [oh, unaccountable world!] still he holds her, even if he doesn't realize who it is [in his arms]. Wasn't Friedrich therefore bound to hate Fedor? Wasn't it natural that he thought the cloud is lifting, the day will be fine, when the door closed behind him?
Sibylle had sent Fedor away in order to remain alone with Friedrich. She, who hated writing letters, had, since she'd been living abroad, to his delight sent him letters regularly, sometimes quite long and detailed. Reading between the lines of the last of them, Friedrich had thought he took a "Won't you come visit?" and a violent confusion. He was right about both. Her handwriting, her large, solid, upright, almost printed roman hand had gone astray. The verticals no longer went so steeply up. The trunks of the letters seemed broken, and a shrill nervousness beetled madly across the pages in the guise of a wild scatter of dots, and of bizarrely twisted and contorted lines. These were letters that made Friedrich wildly agitated when they reached him. He replied with telegrams and screeds of his own, sent declarations of love, marriage proposals, offers of shared apartments, lengthy explanations, detailed news, desperate beseechings, and a thousand good wishes, out into the world, all bundled together into one long "Come back!" He hurried to train stations, to airfields, to telephone exchanges in order to be able to reach her promptly and immediately.
To Sibylle, he was a shadow. Her eyes barely took him in as a physical shape. He might stand before her, as now, or he might be far away from her in a different country—it made no difference, he was still a shadow. He was a piece of her past, a thing in her present, and whether he would be an item in her future, that remained to be seen. The shadow didn't offend her eyes, it could camouflage itself like a chameleon—since, in her eyes, he always seemed to take on the shade of the wallpaper, he was even a little less than gray, he was of a tonelessly discreet appearance. This had not always been the case. She had seen him once. At first even seen straight through him [as she thought] with terror and inexplicable desire. Then he had been a flame, a human torch, consuming itself. She thought of the Christians in the gardens of the Emperor
Nero. Her terror had eaten up her [inexplicable, in any case] desire. He had turned into a vision, hurrying toward her through the myriad streets of the megalopolis. She would dream of him at night. Every owl's flutter outside her fifth-floor window was his ghostly knocking. She stopped sleeping at home. He was the reason that she went off to sleep away, he caused her to ask Beck to keep watch over her at night, it was Friedrich, who never took his eyes off her life. He was always ready. Running up like a sprinter. Breathless, pale, a pounding in his neck. To him it was like running for his life. Maybe like running for her life. No one knew which, back then.
She played along, put on a brave face, sometimes asking herself, vulgarly, in the coarse women's expression: "Is this the Devil in me?" He thought so anyway, Beck thought so, everyone thought so; later on, even Bosporus would think so. It was unquestionably a relationship. She called him up in the morning, once she'd dared to return home, called him up and asked him to come over, to put on some milk for her while she was resting, beat her an egg, read to her from one of the books that lay around her bed in great piles. Each time she called, she heard the way he plucked the receiver off the cradle at the first hint of a ring, snatched up by a hand that had lain in vigil during a sleepless night: She's going to call me. And no sooner was the conversation over than he was already there, standing in front of her in her room, a runner, bending down over her, breathless, pale, a pounding in his neck. He really had come at a run; he had no money at that time, no money at all, he was dirt-poor and he ran great distances, his knees thrown up, his hair flapping, the lover running amok, charging blindly into pedestrians on the street and spilling them into the gutter. There was something terrifying about him, which she felt, while others merely shuddered involuntarily.
Once, she was ill; Friedrich didn't leave her bedside, he tended her, washed her things, cooked her meals, shook the pillows, read her stories, playacted the lame man, and gave performances of exotic gentlemen, the Marquis of Oyakahoma desires to lay his country's celebrated moon at the feet of the sick princess, he juggled with balls, something he was only able to do in the rapture of his passion; all of it done to delight her heart, and when she laughed, he felt like a field full of larks taking wing in the morning; but the doctor, old Doctor Rapp, a friend of hers, said, when Friedrich passed him something: "Why are your hands shaking? You look like someone who's had the skin peeled from his face, who's suffering agonies of fever and fire." He had reached such a pass. She had hated him when it became clear, when she noticed. She had hated him, because, having come so far, in the hours when he was all done up, the prepared sacrificial victim, because like a dead beast he represented a seduction to her, in spite of her will and her judgment. Then she would feel herself driven, with the full horror of a forced woman, to do his every bidding. But not once had he taken advantage of such a situation. Was he too busy running into the walls with his head, the walls of the prison he thought he was caught in, the invisible walls that kept moving nearer together, that were already a cell as fitted as a corset and kept him from breathing? Or was it insane arrogance that kept him from exploiting a tailor-made situation and taking her?
Beck had told him once, and Sibylle knew it: "Take her, why don't you, take her, she wants to be taken; like this, you're just going to the dogs, and Sibylle's going to the dogs, make an end and take her!"
To which Friedrich—a fool hanging from a silken thread over an abyss—had replied: "Please understand me, Beck. I'm not after some shabby transaction. I love Sibylle; it's quite impossible for me to touch her, even against the appearance of her will."
And Sibylle had got to hear of this as well. So he wanted a consummation in happiness and joy. Maybe he dreamed she would come to him. Probably he did. And why didn't she? She had never come up with an answer to that. It never happened, that was all.
She too could feel the invisible wall he kept running into. Once, it was before Christmas, and she had to take the early train home to her parents, by the river, he had [she needed someone, to wake her, to fix her breakfast] stayed the night with her. It was a night they had both been happy, like children. She had liked it and [though not saying anything] been surprised by it. Liked it so much that, no sooner back in the city, she had repeated the experiment. With the same result. But then that too had palled. It got so that she had said to him: "All right, stay if you like, but I want you to know I love Bosporus [that time had already started] and you'll have to lie with me like old Socrates did with young Alcibiades." He passed the test. His heart had beat happily and vigorously. There was a joy in him: I am lying beside Sibylle! She told him stories about what she'd been like as a child and a schoolgirl, how her father [a poet and a Buddhist and a manufacturer of plaster angels for Catholic countries, exports to Latin America] had introduced her to literature, at thirteen to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and George, Stendhal and Baudelaire, and how, indiscriminately, as a child she had made her way through libraries to the books of the mystics [spent days lounging in bed!], and then, arrived in the capital city, she had been inducted in matters of love by the celebrated critic Walter in Frühling's well-known brothel [a little bird with open eyes: but that's the way of the world!]. It had been very pleasant, to be talking with Friedrich in one bed together, warmed by one blanket. Thereupon she had fallen asleep, and Friedrich had guarded her sleep until she had started crying brokenheartedly in her dream, sobbing deeply, utterly, utterly miserable, like young kittens taken away from their mother, and when she woke up with a cry and started lashing out, then Friedrich thought she must have been dreaming that he, as had not been the case, had left the role of the old Socrates. He was crushed. That was the blow that ruined this night [which he, in his hubris had called—oh, folly of youth—the loveliest of his life] and filled him with grief and rage and illimitable despair and every kind of blasphemy.
Sibylle had felt it: So this is what he thinks now. She had known it. Now might have been the moment to surprise him. She might have lent him wings. The only reason she had been crying was because they had killed her favorite cuddly toy, Volleyball, a black dog. She had the magic in her hands, all she had needed to say would have been: "Change, old Socrates, abracadabra, to Alcibiades." But she had pronounced no spell, no word had passed her lips, she had turned her face to the wall, and murmured: "Its late, go to sleep." Nothing had transpired, then or at any other time, the invisible wall between them was intact. And then Friedrich had turned gray, or had begun to take on the varying but always pallid hues of the wallpaper behind him; to put it another way, they had both become tired, Nature had exhausted herself in them, she wasn't capable of producing the same measure of terror again and again in all perpetuity, and so all that remained had been this: Friedrich loved her, she was able to rely on him and his love; and what good did that do? Only her leaving the country had given him a little new interest. She was in turmoil, and he represented home, represented the city she loved, she wanted to talk to him, she wanted him to keep her informed, maybe she wanted to go home, but it was difficult to begin explaining the particular circumstances to him in which she found herself.
Anja had not quit the place on Sibylle's bed that Sibylle had cleared for her. She was still leaning against the pillows, puffing blue-gray cigarette smoke into the air, which under the ceiling was already heavy and dark, a cloudy seraglio sky. Anja was unimaginable without tobacco smoke. It was part of her nature, the ambience in which she lived, the tent she put up around her. She was always at home, always chez soi, wherever she happened to be sojourning, and it sometimes happened that her chance temporary hosts came to her to say good-bye: "Unfortunately, we have to go, but thank you, we very much enjoyed our stay with you"; so much more real than any room or apartment was Anja's castle in the air, so solidly put together from the misty blue rings of hastily drained cigarettes. When Sibylle had finished dressing, finished getting ready, thrown on her coat, put on her cap, and was on the point of leaving the room with Friedrich, Anja turned to Sibylle and said: "Magnus wants to s
ee you."
Sibylle made a vague, dismissive gesture: "Later, maybe this evening, in the theater," and Anja was left in sole possession of her realm.
"Magnus is her husband," Sibylle said when they were on the street. They were walking through a district of ugly, plain, modern buildings. Leafless poplars withered at fifteen-pace intervals in the little squares cut out of the edge of the pavement showing the soil below, and their boughs looked like the hands of desperate, half-crazy people flung out above their heads and begging. A keen wind blew straight down the street. "That's a glacier wind from the mountains," Sibylle spoke into the wind. "When we get to the lake, you'll be able to see the white peaks in the distance."
They needed to lean forward like bicyclists pushing on the pedals with all their force, so as not to be thrown backward. On the corners, cross-breezes pulled aside Sibylle's coattails and picked up her skirts. Her bare, frost-reddened knees appeared momentarily. She's still the little girl in short socks, he thought, my plucky companion. He put his arm around her shoulder; she let it happen. He was once more moved, and both of them [for different reasons] were awkward. To him, her bare, scabbed knees were an embodiment of Sibylle's decency. They made it easier to be him. "She's a boy," he said to himself [he had said it many times], "a boy that I can treat like a young friend of mine." In fact, though, it was precisely in these moments when he pushed her girl nature into a different, unspecified, and, he thought, an asexual, if still erotic, role that his desire to call Sibylle his own (she is destined to be mine!) was especially acute and urgent, stabbing him with sharp needles from the hair on his head to the tips of his toes. He was also like the sculptor in front of his own statue. He saw her as a good piece of work, a successful endeavor, felt she was an incarnation of the concept body, firm and claspable, perhaps even asking to be picked up off the ground and held. "I am the Atlas who carries you, and you are a star for me, untouched in space, touched only by my arm which is your support." He would have liked to say that to her. With his arm on her shoulder, he clasped her and enfolded her entire being in a wide, protective embrace.
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