A Sad Affair

by Wolfgang Koeppen

  And because she too had the sensation that she was being contained (He's wrapping me up, he's carrying me, warming me), she freed herself of the weight of his arm with a sudden jerk, an abrupt spinning free of her form, a quick twitch of the mouth, and when she saw that he was upset, and since she knew the truth of his affection for her, she produced herself in gross insults, words that frightened her, once they had come out of her mouth and made a sound in air. "You're like a toad, you're like a toad crawling on my back, a slimy scaly goggle-eyed toad in a swamp!"—and the evocation terrified and disgusted them.

  The world bucked him. There was no reason and no sense in it, it was incomprehensible. He was not allowed to touch her. Strangers, people on the street, all comers practically, were allowed to hold her. The rending wolf's bites that had torn his heart when he had seen at a party in the capital how extras in tails with little brilliantined Hollywood mustaches had touched her lips with theirs. "Oh, that's completely harmless, a kiss at a party, don't be silly," she had said. And she was right, of course, it was silly to get excited, but was it not the cry of the man dying of thirst in the desert that had broken from him, terrible, cracked, almost rabid in its shame and despair? Her lips seemed to him the font of life, the source of all joys, the world offered no drink to set beside the kiss of her lips and never, never once, had he been allowed to breathe on them, to feel them, their redness, their flesh, their moist gleam that shone to his faint spirit, a craving, a signal, a finishing line in a gauntlet race through an infernal landscape, to the scornful laughter of the happy, the contented, the sated, the living; he was without anyone to pity him, the compassion of the world denied itself to him with these same lips. They walked awkwardly on, calamity shielded them, evil spirits danced in the wind, they were two convicts chained together, attempting to flee but about to be caught, they walked faster.

  Sibylle had been glad too. "He's coming, good, I want him to stay" Friedrich's desire to stay had been Sibylle's desire too. And yet the impossibility, the impracticability of this desire had struck them both in the very second they had seen one another again. It was glaring; there was no point in even talking about it. There was nothing to be done about it, it just wouldn't go. The invisible wall rose up, you left of the wall, me right of the wall, that's the way it is, the wall between us remains intact. When they respected that border, and looked at each other like objects in a shop window, then they could be one heart and one soul.

  It is a mistake to think they were joyless. The little joys of the day were there for them. To Friedrich, having choked down the toad, they even seemed enormous. Wasn't he walking with Sibylle, didn't he see her, feel her, couldn't he sometimes [only not too often] bump into her as if by accident and for a split second feel her as something more than imaginary? Was it not bliss that she existed, that she was alive in the world at the same time as he was, and that he had received the blessing of knowing her, of meeting her, of being allowed to walk with her here? Certainly, it was bliss, and he scolded himself for being an ingrate if he complained. When he was away from her, he was sometimes befallen by the sweet giddy notion: She is breathing, somewhere in the world, she is breathing the air. Heart beating, restless and sleepless, tossing on his bed at night, he had felt the pulsing of her blood as well. She is my contemporary! Even that was substantially a source of happiness.

  How great was her capacity for joy. Was there anyone in the world who could feel so much joy? He looked at her and felt like doing handsprings. The way her eyes assailed the window displays in the Bahnhofstrasse, which they had now reached. "Hey, look at the scarf with the tiger on it! Will you buy me that tiger scarf? And I've seen some shoes, the sweetest shoes, with really low heels, the kind you like, and made out of the skin of a southwest Indian river mule! Are there such things as river mules? Do they have rivers in southwest India? You've absolutely got to buy me a map so I can find out, I want a wild, garish, luminous map, drawn by ancient sages, checked by stargazers with beards longer than the tower they live in, and with flying crocodiles on it and cannibals, hungry black ones, roasting a fat white missionary. Come on, let's go in this store, it's so posh, I'm sure only marquises come in here otherwise, let's ask them for a bra for two, husband and wife, or one for an entire family. Come on. And will you find out for me what those feather boas cost, I'd so like to wear a feather boa, you know all my life it's been my dream to wear a feather boa, that, and to marry a man with two wooden legs that he locks up in a cage every night so they don't run away; their names are Peter and Paul, you know, like the fortress in Russia, where they killed all those people just because the czar didn't like them, I'm sure you know that, Anja knows it too. Oh, don't be so stupid. You're such a killjoy. I want you to limp now, I want you to drag one leg behind, and to stare straight up into space."

  And Friedrich limped, dragging one leg behind, staring straight up into space, and Sibylle laughed until she felt ill, and the people on the street stopped and stared, and Sibylle and Friedrich clasped hands and danced in the middle of everyone, and the people were happy and wore happy smiles, and said: "Ah, what is it to be young," and they remembered, and old men stroked the hands of old women, the air felt somehow a little balmy, a gutter lad sang out: "Love is a many splendored thing," and he drew out the melody longer and longer, and the bicycle he perched on turned with it, easily, sweetly, purringly, just like a wickedly elegant electric Italian hurdy gurdy—and then suddenly Friedrich and Sibylle let go of the other's hand, and stopped dancing and laughing and looked at each other, earnestly and awkwardly, blushing and with mounting indignation [but against what?], and the wind blew harder, and peoples expressions changed as they said: "Well, really, grown-ups behaving like silly children, the things these tourists permit themselves in our public streets," and the gutter lad yelled and stamped on his pedal: "Must have been bitten by the wild waddock."

  Bitten by the wild waddock? Could be. They stopped to have something to eat. It was late. The restaurant on the shore had already lit its lamps. It might have been anywhere, blandly neutral and characterless in its design. Sibylle ordered salads, lots of fun greenery. Friedrich wanted wine. From the lake terrace, it was still just possible to see the sun on the tips of the mountains. Dark bulks with white snowcaps high in the sky, they constituted the background and the end to the lake. It was on those slopes that the wine had grown in summer, good wine. Friedrich drank it in large, rushed mouthfuls; it was calming. He said: "To you, Sibylle." So there he was, a gentleman in a rich, famous, foreign city, sitting opposite the queen of his heart, and drinking wine from the snowcapped mountains. Was he not to be envied? Who else led such a life, who could boast of doing anything comparable now? And if it should cost him his life, then this hour was worth it. You needed to wear blinders, it wasn't good to see everything; already the lake fogs were brewing up ghosts on the surface of the water and the shore grass, ghosts that would soon commence their eerie, chilly dance over the waters.

  And Friedrich took a run-up to try and clear an obstacle. He knew he wouldn't succeed, he knew he'd get caught halfway, but he took his run-up, and he attempted it. He said: 'This is just by chance, I've been given some money to do some work, I want to go traveling with the money, it would probably last me three months on my own, but it would be far, far nicer if you would come with me, and we could go through it together in a month or so. I think it would be wonderful to go with you to the edge of Europe, and look across at Africa. It's already hot down there, the oranges are ripe and plentiful on the boughs, you've never seen that, I've never seen it either, it's the landscape of the Greeks, those were the groves that Homer sang, come with me, what are you doing with yourself here in this cold and foggy and expensive city, what are you doing with yourself in this basement cabaret, with all those Russians, how did you ever get into that sweater club, come away with me." It was a good and a persuasive speech he had given, he had gotten impassioned, his optimism was aroused, as he ran up he almost believed he would clear the obstacle, he saw himse
lf standing with Sibylle on some rocks, looking over the foaming waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea, and he saw to his delight that Sibylle was looking thoughtful and contemplative.

  At last, she started fixing her salad, shook the bowl, mixed the whole thing up again, poured in oil and vinegar, shook salt and pepper over it, surely she must have ruined it, and then she said: "I can't. I've got a contract. I can't get away."

  "Contract, forget it!" Friedrich made a sweeping movement with his arm, as though to set the world to rights. "Honestly, forget it. What kind of troupe is that? You ought to start acting again. Properly, in a proper theater. Do you remember how we used to rehearse you as Juliet, and how you used to make me cry, really howl, because you were so moving when you stood on top of the wobbly table in my room declaiming: 'Romeo is banished . . . Romeo is banished!'? You have to play her, play poor, cheated Juliet, properly on the stage, no one can ever have seen such a genuine Capulet princess. Come with me, and we'll practice the text, like Demosthenes on the beach, and everything will turn out wonderfully."

  "No, no, I can't," she was putting up quite a fight, drumming her feet like someone being dragged away somewhere. "I can't. The troupe needs me. Anja needs me. Fedor needs me. Magnus too. And maybe Bosporus will come and see me. His leg is hurting him again. I have to be there for him. You see that, don't you?"

  Yes, he could see that, there was nothing to be done. "But what's going on," he went on to say, "all of them depending on you, Anja, Fedor, Magnus, the whole troupe, what's that all about?" And once more he thought he was facing a storm, a block of sultriness under leaden skies, in which he would surely be asphyxiated, and from which he would be lucky to escape alive.

  Sibylle did a little tiger pacing. The restaurant was empty. The waiters were dozing in the corners, it was a good place to stalk about, in among the rows of tables, in front of the lake's now-swirling fogs. She started to speak but broke off, just as she had done in her room in the morning. And once more Friedrich felt appalled: Had she turned cowardly, was she tangled up in some desperate intrigues that she was ashamed of, was she no longer master of the situation? "Oh, let it wait till tonight, you'll find out, wait till you meet Magnus and the others." She said the words very quietly. He made a move to stroke her hair, she let it happen a while, then she turned her head away and said: "Come on, let's walk by the lake for a while before I have to go to the theater."

  They climbed down some steps from the terrace, and found themselves on a mole that led to the city's harbor. In summer, there was swimming here, ice-cream stalls and tents. But at this time, the mole, below the highway that led to Friedrich's hotel, was deserted. In the dingy light of dusk and lake fog, Friedrich and Sibylle were all alone, and felt cut off from the city and the world in general. They walked past heaps of bricks unloaded from barges, stacked in skewed red walls and small, squat piles. Cement crunched underfoot, scraps of coal, old buckets, household rubbish, ashes, dirt, and rubble. There were things flitting and darting out of cracks and holes. Maybe rats, they couldn't quite see. Why did Sibylle take this path? There was a chance that homeless people might be camping out here, beggars, evicted and desperate people who were condemned to lurk here like spiders till some victim ran into their arms. Sibylle thought of snow. She thought of white flakes, falling at a slant, and sharp cold. A damp miasma came out of the deeps of the lake. On the opposite side of the lake, the fog lamps were on again, flaky and milky, like fluffy dandelion heads. If the wind blew them out, I could play the Delphic game: loves me, loves me not, loves me, till I'm down to the very last flowerhead—but we're far past the oracle of scattered dandelion heads, Friedrich thought, shivering. He tried to put his arm round Sibylle again, as he had at lunchtime in the city. She started, and let it lie. Friedrich even thought he felt her body rest against his. Was she afraid? She had grown up in warm woolens and under the eye of a watchful mother, small and delicate: the Christ child, people had called her in her home by the river between the vine-clad hills. It had seemed horrible and unnatural, and humiliating in front of her friends, to be so cosseted and guarded. The cry "Mind you don't catch cold!" was to her a cry from hell. A curse that wrecked the day. She had suffered real, terrible childhood grief and never got over it, even today the tears came to her eyes when she looked back on it, the pain of not being allowed to go to school like other, rougher girls in her own class, in short socks in winter. The bare, cold legs of a classmate had been her desire and her torment. She had managed to capture the seat next to that girl in the classroom, and during class, Sibylle's hands never tired of touching the cool, bare skin of that other, envied girl under the desk. She would have liked to bite into that tempting flesh. It was her first love, and she didn't know it. A wintry passion: the joy of being a queen or a fairy-princess must certainly pale in comparison to this nonpareil of delight, of going about bare-legged in winter. Her mother turned a deaf ear to her pleas. So it was all Sibylle could do, occasionally, to tear the long, itchy, quite disgusting, woolen tights off her legs and secretly go barelegged in dark and empty lanes at night. Once, a stranger had seen and stopped her. She had shaken like a leaf, in her mortal dread. But when he had asked her: "Aren't you cold with your bare legs?" and stroked them with his hand, then she could have swooned with delight. And now she was leaning against Friedrich.

  Even more mist had come off the lake and darkened the quay further. She lifted her skirts a little and let the wind blow against her knees and thighs. "I used to know boys," she said, "who still went swimming in October, and the time of the first snow." It was true, she really was pressing against him, pushing herself against his chest, like a cat, who wants to feel the petting hand still more. Friedrich held her. Held her in his arm. Held her fast, and wanted never to let her go. There seemed to be no one anywhere. It was doubtful whether a scream here would even be heard up on the main road. Her mouth against my mouth. Her lips parted, as though to drink. I have to kiss her now. Her breath in my face. The well is within reach. The source is flowing. I can drink, take a deep, liberating draft, feel the intoxication of the nectar of the gods, and never more awake into this world! He was a wolf at her throat. His eyes tried to gauge the distance to the water. He had even thought about dying with Sibylle. Once, high up on the topmost step of a high spiral staircase with a knee-high railing, he had thought: All I need to do is let myself fall, with my hands round her neck. And now again, the triumph grinned in him, to be, if nothing more, the last to drink from this mouth that had never been vouchsafed to him, and drain it. They stood barely two paces from the steep edge of the quay. They trembled together, like a tree in all its twigs. Her eyes were open wide, mirroring an infinity, as wide and deep and inapprehensible as a crack in a layer of clouds that suddenly opens up in front of a pilot, so that, dazzled by so much light, he suddenly succumbs in the dither of a fatal fall. They were swimming; her eyes, like flowing fire, were the eyes of a very young Sibylle, the eyes of a wild beast escaped from its lair, the irises were shining, and the pupils moved on the white sea between eyelids like two shining balls. Sibylle loitered in supernatural places. She was in a delirium of dream. Her hands clasped themselves round Friedrich's neck, and lay there as firmly as the chain on a door, and as tenderly as a rope woven from silk. His face inclined over her wind-contorted features in a steadily falling gazing; he thought someone was bound to come along at any moment, to push them calmly into death, and this time he did say, and the words broke the silence: "Little Sibylle"; and it roused her, and she came out of her spell, the twilight hour was over, and she said: "Come on, leave me be, and take your arm off of me, it's so heavy I feel it all down my back." And spontaneously, they both started running, wildly, dangerously, stumblingly, they ran madly and blindly courting danger, as though it were a matter of catching up with life, and suddenly they were both afraid of collisions with the piles of bricks, of blows, of throttling hands and sharp rodent teeth. They were reeling when they reentered the light of the main road and the apparent security of civilization.<
br />
  They made for the old town, through the crooked lanes that Friedrich had seen the night before as he was looking for the Diana Variety. It was seven o'clock. The little local grocers were shutting up shop. Fearfully they put up bars and grilles in front of the doors of their premises. Blinds came down with a jerk and a clank in front of the fly-spotted windows, and darkness swallowed the deathly pale detergent advertisements in their storefronts. It was the hour for taps and lights-out and evening roll call. The street, where at night only the big policeman had stood staring dreamily at his feet, was suddenly full of people. They rolled up, the musicians and the chanteuses, the bartenders and the waitresses in the bars bordering on the street. Great double-bass cases hovered like heavily laden balloons just above street level in the hands of short fat men. Drums, on the other hand, approached and passed like the wide gaping mouths of ships' cannons, pulled into position, in the raw red hands of long-armed young men with unpleasant coughs. A group of women stood in front of the main entrance to the Diana Variety. They were pressed back against the walls, to be out of the worst of the wind. In their featureless navy wool suits, and with their dull, submissive expressions, they might have been a bunch of housewives waiting for a department store sale to begin. Sibylle greeted them, and a few of them greeted her back, reluctant, measured, as though proud of occupying an inferior rank. Friedrich felt like calling out: "Grüss Gott, Mrs. Tax Inspector," but then he saw that these women were the girls whose almost naked photographs were on show in the glass vitrine.

  "They're kept on a tight rein," Sibylle said. "They have to be here at seven sharp, but they never open the gates before quarter past. Magnus says he wants them to get some fresh air, because they don't get home till daybreak, and if it was up to them they wouldn't leave their beds."