Then Fedor was beside her, and his face once more was that of a man returning home from long and fruitless wanderings, sorry now that he will have to kill the dog who's whimpering expectantly to him. "You are a citizen," he said, turning to Friedrich. "Is that like a citizen? My God, don't you feel any sort of duty toward Anja?" His skin was gray, as though dobbed with flour, the black stubble sprouting through the sand. Wasn't it laughable?
Friedrich pressed his palms to his chest; then he brought them down, feeling the contours of his body. He wanted to make sure. Was it not possible that he was dreaming, that he was a man lying in bed asleep, watching himself with fear and trembling as the hero of a nightmare drama? Or was there some chemical transformation of the air, the fumes and vapors, the lack of oxygen he was breathing as in the inside of a gasometer that was befuddling his senses, and causing him to hear words that couldn't possibly have been said? The only certainty was that the scene was laughable, either way, and that he would have to draw strength to utter a scream to escape from the dream, and get out of this nightmarish tangle. "What about you," came the scream, "to whom 'citizen' is a dirty word, so that you curl your lip with disgust when you throw it at me? What allows you to live in bourgeois countries, under foreign laws that you despise, instead of going home to your country, which I seem to have heard is socialist, in accordance with the principles you profess? Why don't you go home and help build the new world that you call for in speech after speech? Is it that your revolutionary strength is exhausted by wearing a symbolic sweater? You live in the revolutionary romanticism of the émigré who shuns any actual revolution because it would wreck his dim little world, the fairy-tale hour in poky restaurants with the hot soup of home that tastes so sadly familiar when sipped in exile?" Had he taken him on in a debate? Was he politicking? What was he doing, voicing these opinions? Emotion had told him what to say. Confusion, a rush of blood. Were his words sincere? He thought probably not. He went red, as after telling a lie he'd only later become aware of. Fedor's world was an empire of the dead. The shudders that went through Friedrich, they were genuine. He rejected that world. But didn't Sibylle live in it? Then he would free her. But was it possible to free someone who didn't want to be free? What were all those high- sounding words? Set free? Was that not the reason for his severity, the fact that he had been all ready and waiting to march into that world of Fedor's, to make common cause with the others, to be with Sibylle, and was it not just disappointment and dread not to have been called upon and not to have to leave, and was it not hate, the man-to-man hatred of Fedor, that prompted him to step forward with accusations [with accusations that were clean and sensible and for that reason were valueless if one wanted to be just], because Fedor was allowed to stay?
The faces of everyone in the room seemed to attack Friedrich. The unfinished masks of the comedians resembled the bloodthirsty expressions of fat ogres in Chinese stories. Fedor had a rebuttal all ready in his mouth, he was chewing it over before spitting it back at him, but Sibylle yelled "Shut up!" at him just as the mouthful was on the point of leaving his lips. She was like a drover. A radiant energy transformed her delicate, girlish appearance. She stood there, wide-legged and arms akimbo, like a young wrestler in a Roman arena, whose slender body in the course of murderous embraces has grown as sleekly muscular as a snake's. "And you go in the auditorium and watch, we're about to begin." She shoved Friedrich into the passage. Once again, he stumbled over the piles of rubbish behind the curtains. He entered the auditorium and stared into a hundred ranked, expectant faces. There wasn't an empty seat anywhere, and Friedrich sat down on a stool next to the piano at the foot of the stage.
The pianist struck some loud chords. His hands moved like those of a nervous man banging the tabletop in nervous desperation. He was a somewhat effeminate young man, and Friedrich was surprised at the brutality of his nimble fingers. The show was a success. There was laughter and cheering and sometimes people held their breath as an "aha" of discovery and agreement [silent, though; this wasn't parliament] caused them to draw a deep breath. The satirical elements went down best. They went with the low, cellarlike rooms. Some scenes were put on in a garish poster style. Old moralities integrated into the construction of an asphalt city. The figure of the peasant woman from bygone days sang a setting of Villon. She stood there like a monument, massive and stone—Rodin would have been impressed—and she possessed the secret of all acting, which was presence: she passed over the stage like a cloud and she reached every member of the audience. She's gifted, by God she's gifted; the old ghosts come to life when they're stood in the limelight. Friedrich knew: then Sibylle would be lost. And he could only imagine what was going on behind the scenes, in the breaks between numbers, in the suspenseful moments of waiting to go on. It was the immemorial question about the leading lady's leading man. No man can bear it. He knows he will lose out. He would have to be an actor himself to lose his crazed fear that one day the actress, who by day holds actors in contempt, in the moment of her walking off stage, exhausted and disoriented in the real world, will sink into the arms of her partner, who had bided his moment to collapse backstage into a puddle of dust and sweat and greasepaint with the diva trembling with nervous exhaustion.
AND THAT was the hell into which he had delivered her. Friedrich remembered Sibylle's first public appearance. It was a drama school production. He had taken her to it. Better, he had dragged her there, like a calf to the slaughter. Of course, like everyone who had trained under the old director, she had to play Lulu, Act I, the scene in the Pierrot costume in the painters atelier. She had been like a wild animal, beside herself with fear, excitement, and the vague pain of having to reveal herself. Early that morning, Friedrich had gone to collect her from the bed she had shared with Bosporus, still carrying the smell of him on her skin, and she was already ablaze. She had driven Friedrich out of bed for a "day of the naughty Sibylles." [On such days, they called each other the "S twins" and carried on like a variety act, swinging on trapezes in a winter garden.] On streetcars, they had been strangers calling each other names. In coaching inns, they discoursed in foreign tongues. On the escalator of the department store, Sibylle had contrived a fainting fit, and with wild gestures, Friedrich had dragged her backward downstairs, which had taken some doing, calling out: "My wife always suffers these attacks when she sees the rayon bosses in their frock coats." They had undertaken mysterious and highly suspicious measurement of civic buildings. They turned vague acquaintances into victims by walking up to tell them they had just been invited by telephone to attend a feast of shark fins newly flown in from Asia. Such days were wonderful, but they cost something too. They walked into cinemas, glanced at the screen, and said: "Dear me, how inappropriate, that woman's décolletage," and walked out again. They crisscrossed the city on open-top buses for the purposes of organized inverse theft. They had armed themselves with cheap children's watches and tried to stuff them undetected into other people's pockets. They thought how much more exciting it must be to find someone else's watch on you than to be missing your own. "Naughty Sibylle" days were days of happiness for Friedrich. Sibylle laughing, Sibylle merry, what did it matter that he tottered home exhausted, feverish, poor, hungry, penniless, and with no prospects? On the day of her first public appearance, however, it wasn't fun that drove Sibylle to these tricks but nerves. They had gone to Sibylle's apartment, and Sibylle had thrown herself on her—during the Bosporus period largely unused—bed. "Feel my heart," she had said. And her heart had lain under his hand. "Little Sibylle"—and even so he had delivered her. They had taken a taxi to the theater in the city center. Sibylle, who, for a laugh, was prepared to try the most risqué, exhibitionistic improvisations in front of partygoers, was now so shaky at the prospect of her debut that he had had to lie on top of her to calm her down. They had some brandy with them in a flask, and Sibylle drank it, and got drunk, without becoming any more valiant. On the way to the dressing room, she had lost her fear. She had puked while Friedrich held her
trembling head. He had her hair in his mouth. She was a small creature, and devoted to him. He had left her in the passageway backstage.
Bosporus was in the auditorium. They sat together. Bosporus had no stains on his coat. That mattered to Friedrich, though it was unclear whether his emotion was pain or pride. Friedrich and Bosporus were friends. That was what Sibylle had wanted. Friedrich admired Bosporus, but there were times when he would gladly have murdered him. What does he know about Sibylle, it's a mistake [she isn't destined for him!]: that was what he had tended to think at such times. And then she had gone out onstage, after the shrill jingle of an alarm clock, and she hadn't been able to get a word out, she was drunk and distrait, but her movements had taken her through the scene, the movements of a gazelle leaping boldly over abysses. She allowed herself to be pursued, she knocked over props and fittings, the third wall fell over, the flame caught, the audience was uneasy, but Friedrich experienced a revelation of acting, a display of naked genius, a shy foal whose bolting gave promise of future triumphs, and Friedrich felt vindicated when at the end of the scene the director of the Kammerspiele had sent his card to Sibylle: "With my awe at your performance." Then they had gone out together, Bosporus and Sibylle and Friedrich. Friedrich had had to borrow money from Bosporus; and that hadn't been easy for him, but still easier than to leave the proximity of Sibylle and to decline the wine in which they were to toast her "dramatic career." They broke up outside Bosporus's apartment on the green canal bank. Sibylle and her lover [even so, she was not destined for him], he favoring his wounded leg ever so slightly, climbed up the stairs to bed. Friedrich had observed them through the glass of the front door. Was that a silent, wild peal of laughter that caused their shoulders to shake? Their heads, their shoulders, their backs, slid out of the top of the glass, and last of all their feet. With his hand on the heavy bundle containing the police revolver he had purchased from some criminals, his forehead against the glass, Friedrich had watched them go.
HE HAD stuck it out. He had loved her, and to the memory, they had been good days. He loved her still, and now that, once again, she was up onstage over him, was he to curse the boards she trod? She took her song to the people, her sad and tender little girl's song, and in the chorus the little girl was eaten up. Little Red Riding Hood is going through the forest. No Little Red Riding Hood sent by her mother with a bottle of wine for her grandmother, though. A little waif of a thing, and the trees formed up in two rows, it seemed they were actually office buildings, with paragraphs from the Constitution fluttering like flags on their roofs, and typewriter clatter coming out of their windows, and the wolf was driven up in an automobile, he was the Wolf of Wolf & Co., and he said: "Nothing under two thousand syllables, my honey," and he ran a thriving line in coffins in the basement. The movements were still hers, the gazelle leaps over the abysses, and everyone in the audience resolved to do some good deed on the way home, but by then they would have forgotten, so when the beggars stretched out their hands, no one would offer the homeless a bed for the night.
After Sibylle, it was the turn of Anja—the clown of the troupe, the prince's daughter—to be in the lights. Her sheepskin had stayed behind in the dressing room, and she had slipped into a sack. Properly crawled into it, and had the string drawn tight around her neck, under a cardboard mask, the stiff visage of a goblin, over her face. She took wobbly, shuffling steps. She was playing a sack of grain. The goblin-faced sack has eaten all the grain in the land. Now it feels sick and afraid. Its dizzy, it reels and falls to the ground. The tragedy of someone who's had enough to eat. Through the depersonalizing quality of the mask, it took effect. The audience howled with laughter. But was it really as funny as all that? Anja bowed. She took off the mask and held it in her hand. In the stage lights, she looked even paler and more coltish, and her mouth seemed even softer than by the ordinary light of day. It was Anja, who wanted to go away with Friedrich. A wave of tenderness, such as he had once felt for her already, came up in him again. But what about Magnus? Would Friedrich's prospects improve if he changed toward Magnus, whom he thought of as being in a situation resembling his own, and took the part of a seducer? If I take advantage of someone else's misfortune, then perhaps it will make me a different person.
A voice struck up and with a little effort filled the hall with song. Fedor leaned under a lamppost. On the edge of town somewhere. The lamppost and a bundle of old newspapers were meant to suggest the edge of town. The man under the lamppost stooped and picked up some of the newspapers. His singing was supposed to be what he read. The days passed, and truth went with them. It offered itself to anyone who came by and it was always what they wanted to hear. That's Fedor, the balladeer of simple truths, he has barely enough strength to sing. Friedrich felt fresh antipathy toward him. I haven't washed all day, he thought, and he looked with displeasure at his hands, which were streaked with dirt. He had no more interest in the cabaret. The somnambulism of art, which had held him for a while in the guise of the peasant woman from a bygone age, and Sibylle's song, and Anja's dance, was now less than enthralling. Friedrich longed for fresh air.
The street looked much as it had the night before, when he had first stood and gazed at the girls' pictures in the vitrine. Friedrich was practically the only person around. He pulled his coat tight and walked up and down outside the theater, like a policeman on his beat. The light of the DIANA VARIETY THEATER sign spilled over him. He was sorry he didn't smoke. A cigarette would have been a good prop. He wanted to come to a decision. It had been a mistake to go down the stairs to the basement theater. Everything had been a mistake. He had slipped out of his role. The role of the gentleman passing through, polite but basically uninterested. He clenched his fists and stamped on the ground. I must leave immediately, I'm not up to this, I don't have the stomach for it, if I stay for the end of the show, I'll go crawling into the dressing room like a dog, licking the dirt off their shoes, a repulsive whining creature, begging to be allowed to stay and sniff their skirts. His legs took him away. He left the spot, ran off. That was it: He saw himself walking on the edge of a half-frozen lake, in the middle of which Sibylle was skating, and he ran away into the forest, so as not to have to save her at the moment she crashed through the ice.
He actually had broken into a run. But was his scene not a piece of devilish deception? Had it not always been the other way around, that he had rescued Sibylle and had himself drowned every time, and died, so that he was no longer entitled to be a rescuer? He ran past the policeman staring down at his feet, who raised his white stick: '"What's the hurry?"
"Thirst," panted Friedrich.
His feet dragged him up the four stone flags. Then it was as though he had been stood in the smoke of a chimney breast. Human shadows slunk around him. He grabbed hold of the bar— a brass life belt. "Brandy and soda." He was given a glass and swallowed the contents like a bitter medicine. He felt alive once more. A notion came to him. He saw a fat girl smiling at him from behind the bar. "Where am I?" he asked. "I mean, what's the name of this pub, what's the address?"
The girl took his words for a come-on. She said: "I'm sure you know perfectly well where you are," and laughed as though it was the funniest thing.
Friedrich hit the brass rail with his fist: "Come on, quick, I want to know!" The girl was sluggish, what was the stranger playing at? She cheerfully told him the name of the bar, the street, and the number. Friedrich wrote it all down. Then: "I'd like to place a telephone call."
The telephone hung on the back wall. Friedrich was obliged to stand between two couples, who broke off their embraces and stared at him with hostility. It seemed to take an eternity before the operator came on. He asked to speak to the Diana Variety Theater, the downstairs cabaret.
"I need a number from you," the stern voice told him.
"I can't, I don't know it, please don't hang up on me." Friedrich pleaded and urged: "It's the Diana Variety Theater, it must be an easy matter for you to find it."
The voice remained
pedantic and unyielding: "I'll pass you on to information," it said.
Another eternity passed. Had the telephone been invented as an instrument for the torment of lovers? Information came on, fresh explanations, fresh objections, at last he was furnished with the number, then back to the stern voice, a further eternity, then a clicking in his earpiece, a fresh eternity, finally a sonorous bass voice, the bartender of the cabaret, thank God it was the bartender rather than a member of the troupe. Friedrich said Sibylle's name. "Listen please, it's important, she has to come to the phone, quickly, it's urgent." A thousand eternities, a thousand sounds in the earpiece pressed to his straining ear, desperate, terrified, while his unoccupied right hand flapped nervously, to try to calm the noise all around.
Sibylle came on, sounding thoughtful and hesitant. "Oh, it's you," she said. "Where have you got to?"
Friedrich flew at her. He would have bitten through the telephone. He wanted to seize her, and carry her off. "Sibylle," he screamed, "I'm waiting here, you've got to come away with me, you've got to, you can't stay there, I'm waiting for you, I'm expecting you, we're leaving tonight." He described the landscapes that lay ahead of them, he heightened, he exaggerated, he launched himself into the comfort of the hotels, which were such that he couldn't possibly have afforded them, he assailed her with a torrential waterfall to rob her of her senses.
She said: "Just wait a minute, don't go." And once more there was an eternity to wait. He harkened like a man digging his ear into the ground to listen to the breathing of the mystery of life within it. He heard footsteps that drew reluctantly nearer, then her voice was there, sounding teary [as Friedrich would tell himself later] and uncertain and gently caressing: "Friedrich, there's a night train. In one hour. Be at the station. Buy a second ticket, take a couchette in the wagon-lit. And ..." Maybe there were more words on their way to him, but they were no longer audible. A rushing sound, like a tap, filled his listening ear. Maybe Sibylle had broken the connection.
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