HE LISTENED to the shifting and creaking in the bed overhead. Then perfect silence was restored to the compartment. Only the glimmer of a cigarette still left its hot reflection on the white paneled ceiling of the carriage. Each time light fell into the space, for seconds at a time, light from the stations, light from snowy fields, starlight, there were girl-things to be seen on the floor of the compartment, lying there in a disorderly scatter, mouse-gray stockings, a soft ivory colored chemise with a yellow animal's head stitched over the heart and a lace edge on the triangle of a pair of tumbler's panties. I'm traveling with a girl, I'm going across the Alps. I'm traveling with a girl, I'm going across the Alps. The sentence tumbled along with the wheels. It fitted the rhythm of their revolutions perfectly. A clear and simple thought, one could say it over and over again to oneself: "I'm traveling with a girl, I'm going across the Alps." It would sound good drunk.
Friedrich had wrapped up his stay in the city quickly and decisively. From the place where he had made his telephone call, he had traveled straight to the hotel by the lake, and had called out to the fellow in the hall, the black god in his tailcoat, standing in front of his ranks of scarlet-and-white-satin page boys, that he wanted to settle his bill, and immediately [this last with the raised voice of a company director], he was leaving, yes absolutely right away, on the night express in an hour. Then, a victor, a conqueror, a triumphant hero, crowned darling of the gods, he had hastened to his pauper's cell in the abode of the rich, had laughed at the bars outside the window, thrown together his belongings, and tossed the telephone directory up at the ceiling. Let the names fall where they might, what did he care about other people's names? They could be dentists or engineers for all he cared, let them live and die in the foreign city, it was nothing to him, he was leaving, happiness had come for him, he was living once more, and leaving with Sibylle, he imagined himself a second time standing with her in the light of the Hellenic sun on some goatherds rock, ringed by southern seas. One of the pages had come for his suitcase, and in his exuberance Friedrich scorned both stairs and elevator, and slid down the balustrade feet out and arms wide so rapidly that he couldn't control his descent and came to a stop at the feet of the suddenly frozen black god.
At the station, he bought tickets, he took a compartment with two bunks, just as Sibylle's voice had said on the telephone. And then the waiting began. No Sibylle. But she would come; she had to come; she had said she would. But where would he find her? The station was enormous. Maybe she was already there, as he was, waiting and panicking. The station seemed to grow. It stretched out and spread and went off into the distance. There was one hall after another. Friedrich saw himself as an ant in a termite burrow. His fear of missing her made him feel sick. In the end he rushed out into the departure hall. The platforms were not blocked off. He asked for his train. A clock showed its shining face. The big hand moved ever closer to the minute of departure. It was a decidedly unpleasant clock, as evil as the time clock at the entrance to the lightbulb factory. The hand bit into time like a tooth. It ate the minutes with an avid crunch. Travelers ran past Friedrich, followed by panting porters. He was bumped by suitcases, and he lost himself in the daydreams that took him. He saw himself as a foreign traveler with urgent business. Also he saw himself as one of the panting porters: the man weighed down and the man obliged always to remain behind. How lucky I am, he thought to himself, to be leaving with Sibylle. The increasingly frantic cries of newspaper vendors, fruit sellers, and cigar sellers, the increasingly monitory calls of the conductors, and the squeals of brakes being tested, all sent waves of sweat down his back. He raced down the length of the train. "Sibylle! Sibylle!" He was shouting. People turned to stare at him. Then in front of the blue sleeping car Anja appeared, the daughter of the prince, little Anja in her shaggy sheepskin, a cigarette in her soft mouth, a round, cracked leather case next to her [it even had a scraped sticker from the GRAND HOTEL ROMANOV, PETROGRAD], holding a letter in her hand and casually leaning back against the side of the carriage.
"What is it, what's going on, where's Sibylle, is she inside already?" Friedrich blurted, the words falling over each other.
Anja's expression was utterly calm. She held out her hand with the letter in it. It was addressed in Sibylle's large, clear, roman, and perfectly even childish hand. "She's not coming!"
Friedrich slumped against the side of the carriage. He tugged at the envelope, and it took a while before he held the page of a letter in his trembling hand. "HEE-HEE-HEE, HO-HO-HU, HA-HA-HA" ran the first paragraph in large letters drawn across the breadth of the page. There followed three rapidly scrawled lines, as if Sibylle had been running away from them. "Live only by your wits," he read, an allusion to a song. "Your wits won't feed more than a louse.{2} I must stay with Fedor, and Anja has to leave Magnus for a while. Have a nice trip: your Sibylle." There followed one more paragraph at the bottom of the sheet, clearly written this time, and added perhaps to console him: "If you haven't guessed by now: I'm the old woman who lives next door, though you don't know what I'm for—that's the song we sing in the dressing room, and you may sing it in blithe and cheerful fashion, by special permission of Sibyllchen and the Management." Hammers dropped from the sooty glass bell of the hall. Friedrich was sightless; neither Anja nor the train existed for him. "All aboard, ladies and gentlemen, all aboard," called the conductors. Doors slammed shut. Hands pushed him helpfully up the steps. His suitcases were slid in after him. Another door banged shut, the mouse was in the trap, the train began to move. In the light of the platform, waving arms were left behind.
Friedrich was still clutching the letter. Without discerning any outlines, his eyes rested on the lit-up rooms in the houses next to the tracks. Then the letter was gone. He must have put it down somewhere. It didn't matter anyway "Your reservations, please," said the conductor. "May I see your reservations, please? Monsieur and Madame have beds fourteen and fifteen, thank you." So we're monsieur and madame now, thought Friedrich. How funny, he thought, with a serious attempt at laughter. And also: I wonder whether the conductor would continue to say "monsieur and madame" if I were to pull off my shoes and run down the corridor like a gorilla, smashing all the windows as I went. But he lacked the strength even to untie his laces. "May I have your tickets as well, please," the conductor went on, "so that Monsieur and Madame won't be disturbed in the night." How nice, we won't be disturbed! The conductor took the tickets. He received a tip as well; naturally his care deserved a tip, everything smoothly took its course, as befitted a monsieur and a madame.
They were on their own. The door had been closed on them. As yet, not a word had passed between them. Here, in the narrow space at the foot of the two bunk beds, there was no escaping the other. They stood and faced each other. What does she think will happen? Friedrich wondered. Is she expecting me to slap her across the face? That I take hold of her and throw her out of the window? Anja looked at him. Her face was unchanged in its utter tranquillity. Her look seemed to go past Friedrich and out into infinite space. This is the end, thought Friedrich, the living end. He raised his two hands toward Anja, and they fluttered up and settled on her shoulders like two birds. Like Magnus, as he was trying to appease her! They stood so a while, both of them very serious. Is Sibylle sleeping with Fedor? He didn't even think she was; it didn't seem enough for Sibylle; he wanted to bewail the loss of a queen. He took Anja's head in his hands and kissed her on the mouth. He did so thinking she needs to be told that I won't throw her out. Her lips tasted of tobacco, and they were cool and dry like the lips of a child. "Top or bottom?" he asked, gesturing at the bunk beds.
"Top," she said. Thereupon he laid himself, just exactly as he was, on the lower bed, while she took off her dress. She had the attractive curves of a girl, and a firm bosom. Friedrich had expected her to be a little more boyish. "Good night," she said, and she clambered into the top bed.
"Good night," said Friedrich. He got up once more, to open the window and switch off the light; then, dressed
as he was, he rolled himself up in the sheets.
It is sometimes good to travel like a banker, or a fraudster. Bedded on soft mattresses, even worried souls get to where they want to go. Whereas those who endure the hard planks of third-class accommodation will never reach the kind station of their destination. Adversity forces one to recognize the futility of human endeavor, it makes for insight and compliance. Wakeful nights scrape the deceit of optimism from one's expression. With naked and battered visage, the traveler steps into the corridor in the morning and is assailed by the pale and nimble specter of the new day, chasing the train across the meadows, leaping in at the window, and pressing the exhausted traveler as he struggles for breath, till he is prepared to confess and to implicate himself. But Friedrich, by taking the night train over the mountains [like a banker, or again a fraudster], experienced a magnificent riot of the senses. He rested, the while the blue carriage climbed ever higher. He could follow the process. Like fast-forward movements in a fantastic film, the night charged by into Friedrich's view, as he gazed out of the interior of the darkened compartment toward the rectangle of the open window. He experienced the surge and sway of the ride, the steep corners, the furtive shadows and leaping lights, the flats of snow, walls of ice, crystal waters, violet-colored gulfs of fog, holes in the deep sky, cloud gallops, stars, red and green signals, white lamplight over the deserted platforms of remote mountain stations, shining slate walls of tunnels, endless winds, storm currents in the air, pure and powerful aromas, dust of snow, as occasional swirls in the rise and fall of the journey. It was a journey like a drug rush, and it most resembled the reeling experienced by sensitive listeners as they concentrated on certain musical sequences.
And yet those notes, coming to him from outside, were only the accompaniment and the amplification of the melody that was in his heart.
The weak reflection of a cigarette glow under the ceiling of the compartment was gone. Was Anja already asleep? Friedrich listened. He couldn't hear her breathing. What about Sibylle? He didn't need to fight the idea that she could be sleeping with Fedor. That idea was completely absurd. It wasn't even that Fedor was too lowly; Sibylle had had fleeting relationships with still lowlier types, in Friedrich's view, and Sibylle had even admitted the inferiority of these passing fancies of hers. "It's just what I felt like," she had said. But Fedor struck Friedrich as just not worthy. It can't be any fun to have a poor man come home to you. Friedrich could only imagine Fedor in the exhausted posture of a little man without any deeper insight into things, and then, once home, or in a circle of others like himself, raging against this world in order to refuse all blame or responsibility for it. Sibylle couldn't love Fedor. That much seemed clear. Friedrich accounted for their chumminess, as he tried to term it to himself, with reference to Sibylle's loyalty to the capital of her country, where Fedor had performed and known people and was able to name places and streets and events. He'll just be there to give her memories a cue. And so Fedor played no part in the deception that had just been practiced on Friedrich. Friedrich didn't hate Fedor. He merely envied him, as he envied anyone who was allowed to live in Sibylle's proximity. Other than that, he didn't care one way or the other about Fedor. The deception was purely Sibylle's. At the most, Anja might be a peripheral figure in the plan. Anja had wanted to get away from Magnus, and Sibylle loved playing the role of a knight in shining armor to young girls. Why shouldn't she help Anja to get away on a trip? Maybe the whole thing was just a joke. It struck him as possible that Sibylle had thought to herself: What if I send along a substitute? She was certainly capable of it. Perhaps it was foolish of Friedrich not to avail himself of the substitute. Maybe a girl was just a girl, and all his woe and agitation could be settled biologically. He listened again for sounds of sleep or vigil over his head, but there was nothing. Friedrich felt his heart. Once again, it was the frightened bird palpitating in a strangers large hand. He thought: If Anja were to sleep with me, I wouldn't do anything to hurt her, but she could give me the sense of another body next to mine, she could warm me and take my heart away from the stranger, and put it back in my breast. He knew his idea of their chastely lying together was a sentimental one, but that didn't bother him just then. In certain shocking predicaments, in spite of the unsentimental century, a man yearns for a creature he can stroke. And while cats and dogs and other animals are not routinely lent out to the sorry, wakeful occupants of international sleeping cars for the duration of their journey, he at least had Anja there with him. Even so, he was reluctant to wake her. Only when light happened to fall on the girl-things on the floor, light from stations, light from snow plains, starlight, he thought for a moment of calling to her; but even as he was thinking about it, the idea disappeared among others in his head. What if Sibylle had come? What if they were her things instead of Anjas that were lying on the floor? If it was the sound of her breathing he was trying to hear? How would it be with him then? Not the deceitful fantasizing (I'm traveling with Sibylle), but suppose she had actually come and it was Sibylle asleep in the top bunk? Did he not have it in him to think in more generous ways, and so wasn't it a matter of indifference whether Sibylle was sharing the same wagon-lit, or the same planet? What further benefits could accrue to him from her nearness? A greater degree of excitement. But couldn't he derive that from her distance too? Did the thoughts he was having on this nocturnal journey mean that his love for Sibylle was over? By understanding this love as an arduous task that he had put behind him, he might be able to keep it going by compiling a catalog of his torments, raking them together from the field of past time where they sprouted, into a bonfire over the pain of his latest disappointment.
He was benumbed. He kept wanting to utter her name. But never in the course of that night did it take the form of a crazed brutal yell over the thunder of the train, the rattle of the wheels, the whistle of the locomotive, the echo of the valleys. Was it that the heart of the "monsieur" in the sleeping car was already too old to love and rave and burn? Back when, following the night in the lamp room, the electric shock from the storm of little lightnings in the suddenly extinguished inferno, and the morning contretemps with Beck, when he had gone round to Sibylle's in the afternoon to pick up his keys—back then he hadn't been a "monsieur" yet, traveling across the mountains at night in a compartment with a girl he barely knew.
WHEN BECK left the room, Friedrich had leapt up out of bed. I need to get hold of some money, he thought. He had still felt a little wobbly on his legs and woozy in his head, floppy just about everywhere, particularly his heartbeat, but the measure he proposed to take could be done in his sort of sleepwalking condition. He bundled up everything he had by way of old and worn clothing, he could no longer go around dressed like that anyway, and went to the street by the wall to offer them for sale to the secondhand clothes dealers who lived there. The secondhand clothes dealers looked at what Friedrich spread out on their tables, as if they were loathsome toads that you had to keep away from your body with fire tongs. Friedrich, desperate for money, was too inexperienced to understand that the secondhand clothes dealers were behaving just as they always did, and wanted in fact to buy what he offered them. When, at the end of a contemptuous spiel, they offered him a few pennies—purely out of pity for him, "so you haven't had a wasted journey"—he was so astonished that he thanked them. It wasn't until he was back on the street that it dawned on him that he was still poor after this transaction. But he believed that everything depended on money He wanted to appear before Sibylle like a prince from Arabia, offering wondrous presents and having the magical ability to fulfill all desires instantly and with a smile, as though he had Aladdin's lamp, at the very least. On none of the hungry days he had lived through had the thought of being poor struck him so forcibly, like a curse, like a dismissal from the sight of God and from the joys of His worldly table. An aphorism of La Bruyère's struck him: "It is a calamity to be in love and not to have a large fortune!" He would have been willing to scrabble in the dirt to reach the means of
granting wishes and of supporting love. He hastened to exploit whatever possibilities he had. Where only recently modesty and breeding would have prevented him from applying, he now saw possibilities. He thought it must sometimes happen that bank messengers drop their envelopes, so he focused his eyes on the muck in the gutters. He cursed a world in which one could no longer sell oneself to the Devil [but later, he was of the view that he had indeed made a contract with the Devil, but on less favorable terms]. And after that he went scrounging. He was completely unscrupulous in this, and possessed a naive aptitude. His motto was that the end justified the means. He called on a few people, telling them about his recent accident at night and of the need for an expensive treatment. What he managed to raise in the course of these depredations had by lunchtime come to almost fifty marks. His victims said of his visits that they had felt obliged to help him out because they had never seen anyone with an expression of such desperate need. And with fifty marks Friedrich felt rich. He went to a barbershop to have his untrimmed beard taken off, and he had his hair washed with fragrant shampoos and cut, and his face invigorated by the application of hot towels. And he went out to lunch in an expensive restaurant. He didn't say so to himself, but what drove him was the desire to appear at the top of his form when he next saw Sibylle. And he drank a glass of Burgundy, to settle his heart and nerves. Then he bought some large yellow chrysanthemums and went round to Sibylle's apartment on the square in front of the KDW department store.
Even as he was going up the stairs, he was saying to himself: "Maybe I'll be able to do something to help Beck." He said it and stopped, because of the thought, tall and bright like a celestial star: She is predestined for me! He rang, and the room he was ushered into was immense. But it wasn't the starlet's apartment of which he had spoken mockingly to Beck, following Beck's description of it. It was an immense room in which the resident had so spread herself that she conquered it, whereas most tenants are in thrall to their rooms. The first thing Friedrich noticed were the books. They lay around all over the place, on tables, chairs, suitcases, cushions, and the floor. Next he saw animals. Brown teddy bears, gray woolly donkeys, white fluffy goats, wheeled elephants with magnificent red and gold harnesses. Picture books. Watercolors. A ticking railway set. Clothes. Materials. Ribbons and scarves. And bottles and flagons with powder, makeup, and tinted waters. Chinese dolls. A theater in which Death and the Devil were embracing. And many, many balls. And there, on a little rug in the middle of the room, in front of an electric reflector fire, lay Sibylle. She had barely anything on. Only a white silk shirt that permitted the heat to shine on her skin, and holding in the shirttails a little pair of swimming briefs, the triangle of a champion swimmer. As she jumped up to say hello, he sank to his knees on the floor. He was putting on a rather theatrical version of a greeting, to conceal his awkwardness. He still had the chrysanthemums in his hand. He saw she had legs like two slender columns, shining and firm and ivory. She's so perfectly made, she's like the young of some animal. God must be proud of her, thought Friedrich as he fell to his knees.
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