A Sad Affair

by Wolfgang Koeppen

  Beck felt compelled to have a word with Sibylle. He thought he was acting on Friedrich's behalf. He said: "He's going to do himself some mischief, I've seen the gun." He also said, since she didn't reply: "You've been with a few other men you've told me about, what is it that keeps you from going round to Friedrich's tonight and staying the night with him?"

  Sibylle's expression remained veiled. "That's not the point," she said.

  Friedrich caught up with her as she was on the point of shutting the elevator door. The conveyance took them up. Her lips trembled because of her proximity to him. He wanted to avoid all lugubriousness and give a cheerful sound to what he felt compelled to say. "You're smelling like a fairy again," he said as they walked into her room. "But do fairies have a smell? I prefer you." And he said: "Sibyllchen." She was doing her tiger pacing. The tension between them was unbearable. Sibylle said later that she was convinced that he'd come to shoot her. That was her interpretation of his taut pallor, though there was nothing more behind it than suicide. He started in to hack at the knot. He asked: "Can you name me anyone who loves you as passionately as I do?"

  She said: "No," not raising her clear and beautiful voice, keeping it at a calm level, in the way she was to do throughout the whole confrontation. Her comportment was heroic. No heroine could have been braver. She was impeccable in her posture, and braced. Nor did she permit herself to be deflected into womanish blind alleys of argument. She confronted him. He admired her unreservedly.

  "Fine," said Friedrich, and his voice and manner also remained calm. "I love you, you admit, the most of all the men who know you. I believe in this love of mine as an unalterable fact that has somehow been chosen to be my lot; certainly, I cannot be persuaded that it is a sort of idée fixe from the catalog of insanity. Now, what has happened with us, to my mind, is a misunderstanding. I need to sort it out, otherwise it will destroy me. People tell me you want to be taken. I find that remark as stupid as most of what people are pleased to spout in their mindless way. It's a bit of popular wisdom, and it doesn't impress me. If you were a girl whom I could beat and who would then kiss my hand afterward, I wouldn't think much of you. To me, you're a human being, and there is no triumphing over the dignity of another human being, viz. by destroying it. That sort of victory makes the victor merely despicable. It would be a victory that man celebrates over his own kind. But the misunderstanding between you and me, that misunderstanding is based upon the fact that you're a woman—and you don't want your body to be touched against your will, which may only be changed by touching you anyway, in spite of you. Maybe it sounds overintellectual to you. I have no choice. I am going to rape you. I will do so to clear our misunderstanding. But I will give your will every chance to assert itself, to meet force with force. Here is my revolver. It has six bullets. I will take off the safety catch and give it to you. You can defend yourself against my attack, and I ask that you do. If you shoot me, the law will be on your side, the moral law and the letter of the law. No one in the world will blame you or hold you culpable." He handed her the weapon. It sat like a cannon in her little hand. She made as if to weigh it. If only she'd shoot, thought Friedrich, if only she'd shoot. He was all ready to be hit by her. Death approached him in a surprising nimbus. Friedrich took a step forward. Then she raised the gun and fired. She was shooting at the mirror, in which they were both visible. The glass shattered. She fired one, two, three shots. Each bullet flew past Friedrich. Just past Friedrich. She has a very steady hand, he thought, and kept moving toward her. Then she threw the gun down.

  He seized her; she didn't stir; he saw her face; it was calm, expressionless, averted; he felt her heart beat; she parted her pale lips just slightly, and said: "I don't want this." She said it without any emphasis. A little sadly. She had won. He let his arms fall. The tears started from her eyes. She cried, and he cried. They sat together crying and holding one another. They were disturbed by the sound of voices. The police were banging on the door, demanding an explanation. Friedrich had to go with them. A magistrate found him guilty of unlawful possession of a weapon, and of a breach of the peace. Then—was it really a mistake on the part of the official, or more a curious intervention of destiny in the course of events?— they forgot to take the gun off him, and Friedrich walked out with it still in his possession.

  There was nothing for him but to leave the capital city where Sibylle was living. Beck had given him some money, and Friedrich felt he'd been deported. He spent some time in a monastery on an island in the Baltic. The spring gales tore across the sea. Friedrich sent telegrams until he didn't have a penny left for the official at the counter. The official took Friedrich for a madman. All the telegrams ever contained was the name "SIBYLLE! SIBYLLE! SIBYLLE!" It was Walter's cry, translated into the sober medium of post and telecommunications. Thereafter he yelled the name to the fields and waves. He plunged himself into work, followed the plow, made friends with the horses and cows. He told them about Sibylle. He talked about his love. The horses lowered their heads, the cows replied: "Moo"; they were a serious audience, and they were patient with him. A foal was born. No sooner could it stand than it showed affection. Friedrich named it Sibylle. He even kissed it on its fluffy pink muzzle. The mother made startled eyes and, after a pause for thought, expressed her approval of Friedrich's suit with a trusting scrape of her left hoof. Sibylle would go into Friedrich's room. She followed him over the fields and meadows and seashore. She would eat out of the hollow of his hand. Sibylle was gentle and affectionate, and grew to be a wonderful fox-colored mare, good and clever wherever she went. She presented the stallion to whom she was brought with an alert and clean-limbed foal like herself.

  Days followed of fresh despair, which expressed itself in angry thoughts against the dear, good, innocent, and immaculate mare Sibylle. Was it right that he should have wasted so much time? Why had he consented to be banished; had he not simply fled? When he returned, after an interval of some months, to the capital, Sibylle was tanned from the summer, and a new scent drifted out of the little strips of rawsilk that were her dress and her shirt at once. They rode in a car throughout the city. She was radiant, a contented snail in an invisible house of joy; a young kitten rolled into a ball, feeling the pleasure of being itself, and purring songs of praise to the Almighty. She loved a man, and her love elevated her beauty into the pure concept "she is beautiful" that was beyond comprehension, and could only be venerated like the grace of genius whose presence abruptly is remarked in a sound from the throat of Orpheus, or a miracle of color, or the revelation of a poem. Their drive ended in front of a house on the green canal bank. "Come in," she said, and he made the acquaintance of an apartment full of old fittings, chests and cupboards and tables with broad surfaces that felt good to touch, and all the wood was richly carved, and on the walls there hung dark old paintings, dignified faces, and then there were weapons, sabers and pistols, and a knight's helmet; but that was from the last war. Bosporus met Friedrich with courtesy. Out of one of the old cupboards he brought bottles full of colored liqueurs, and he would only sit once Friedrich was seated, even though he was older, and dragged his wounded leg behind him a little. Bosporus was poor, but he had the ability with a gesture to create an aura of wealth about him. He also had the ability, in few, casual words, to draw a ring of mystery around his affairs. In the center of town, he ran a laboratory for chemical experiments; but the sign over the door bore a name that was not his; when Sibylle discovered this, the rumor started: he manufactures poison gas. Bosporus never said anything to the contrary. Did he know anything about Sibylle? He had taken her in. More could not be discovered. It was certain that he loved her, but what was just as certain was that he knew how to handle her. He listened to her young wishes and let it appear he didn't want to keep her. He was wise, and had the experience of danger behind him. The leash on which he held Sibylle was long and barely perceptible. Friedrich, who had a lot of sympathy and understanding for this particular case, still made the mistake of blaming himsel
f. "It was a time she was all ready to love," he said to himself, "and I wasn't around." But Sibylle wasn't intended for Bosporus either. He was certain of that. He repeated, rephrased, the question he'd asked in the scene with the revolver: "Do you think Bosporus loves you more than I do?"

  She said: "No." She even performed the tragedy of the woman unhappily in love, and with real tears. A touch of melancholy added further to her appeal. She was a good girl.

  She often visited Friedrich. Spent whole days in his room, or he slipped back into the role of the runner, who raced panting through the city when he got her call. It was the time that Friedrich handed her over to the theater, sent her to drama school and had the happiness of rehearsing the ingenue roles of the classical repertoire with her. In the evenings, they would appear in public as a trio: Bosporus, Friedrich, Sibylle. Friedrich dressed the bride, she put on what he wanted, and she was led to Bosporus. People talked, Friedrich faced them down. "You're wrong," he said bluntly and decisively. "You're wrong. Sibylle isn't like any of the others. She's a goddess." His earnestness was invincible. Sibylle was the best-protected woman in the city. Friedrich's attitude would have been impeccable, if he hadn't still suffered from this terrible thirst. The thirst for her lips.

  Then he became a beggar again, and stood in front of her and he was a damned soul without a body, and gasping and cramped, he said: "Your mouth, Sibylle, your mouth," and she forgot her laughter and took the happiness out of her expression, and said: "No, I like you." There it was once again, his devil in the guise of Sibylle, untouchable! Could you slap her if she was so calm and sensible and clever? His devil played at being her handmaiden. Friedrich served Sibylle. He helped her out of her bath, and rubbed her laughing with coarse towels till she was as red as a boiled lobster, a nice, sharp-scissored young lobster; but woe betide Friedrich if he should drop the coarse towels; woe betide him if his hands should settle on her skin, and stroke it in movements that were gentle, caressing, and full of love. A sudden transformation would occur, a metamorphosis in the adored figure, it was as if she pulled on, not a cap of invisibility, but a sort of magic shield that protected her from him from top to toe. "Leave," she would say, with chiseled features, and she was a statue of disappointment.

  Then Friedrich would wander the thousand streets of the great city, through the day and into the night, wander blindly across the backdrop that all those who shared the time with him and the place, could see, and would hold judgment. He adjured God! [Never again would he be as believing as he was in his anguish over Sibylle, and it happened that he would go into churches and kneel down in front of the altars of saints, and pray to them for forgiveness and their blessing.] He showed himself to God as he panted and ran, in his perturbation and incomprehension, and he said: "Look, I fetch the wood for Bosporus's stove, I sweep the steps and lower my head, lest they see the welts and take fright at my rotting flesh, I would give my blood for Sibylle, I am all athirst for her mouth, oh, God, once only, a taste of those lips!" And God offered no reply while Friedrich cried His Name. It is perfectly possible that we have been sent signs and clues, but we overlook them in our zeal, with which we fail to advance our cause. And so Friedrich dreamed the dream of rapine. That dream too is as old as mankind, and Friedrich built a tower on a field miles away from human hearing and that offered no echo to any scream. And to it he dragged her [in his dream, oh, only in his dream] and set his demon in her guise, and fought with it and drove it out of Sibylle's body, and said: "Now stand condemned to howl and wail in this tower to the end of your days."

  Still everything carried on. He served. Served Sibylle. Sure, he occasionally raised his weapon against himself, but what was a shot against the certainty, She is destined for me? Friedrich was not allowed to take himself off from this life that had Sibylle in it. "If she dies," he said, "then it's permitted." Did he desire her death? Who wouldn't like to see his demon destroyed? One night he woke up, and thought she had died. The thought was so ghastly that he hurried over to her, and sobbing, kissed her hands, while she wondered what had come over him. If life beside Sibylle was terrible, then it still had to be accepted in its terribleness, till the misunderstanding was resolved, the spell broken. And he even succeeded in breaking his dependency on her nearness, the habit of seeing her daily. He allowed her to depart on her first engagement, and he felt the train was passing over his own body as it left the station; but still he survived the test by thinking: She is in the world, she is breathing the same air.

  ALL THAT was in the past. So had he perhaps come through the test, and was there an end in sight? He had better concentrate now—Friedrich stood up and stretched in the compartment, propped himself on his arms, morning had broken, sunlight spilled through the windows and a softer air—concentrate that he didn't make a mistake now, that the misunderstanding was not fealty to a love that lived solely off the strength of the past. Had he, during the months he hadn't seen Sibylle, distanced himself from her? Was it only her physical presence that beguiled him? Because in that case he was a fool, and it was his duty to break out of the madhouse of misunderstanding in his own emotional life, and leap into life, as long as there was a bit of happiness and joy to be caught. Had he not got through the night? Did he not overestimate the pain that he was in? Or was it that he was overly accustomed to the pain, and had therefore become immune to its deadly effect? He needed to account for his conduct. Perhaps he would have to write off those years with all their endeavor. Had he not traveled to the city in a bid to try and reach Sibylle after all, out of orneriness and in the guise of the man ostensibly passing through? Sibylle, oh Sibylle! Sunlight filled the frame of the window. And in the gleam of its light, Anja jumped down from her top bunk, and her body was all golden in the light. "Tuscany," she exclaimed. "It's Tuscany, and we're in Italy!"

  They were in Italy. The south. The sun. There was the celebrated landscape of the Old Masters. In front of him, Anja still stood lustrously in the window The breeze blew on her breasts. Shadow flecked the light on her skin. She stood there, enraptured: "Italy! Italy! Do you know why I had to come away with you? I wanted to go to Italy, I wanted to see Italy for myself. That was all that was driving me away from Magnus. This: the sun, the landscape, the green." It happened quite effortlessly, that they were drawn to one another by the sight. The rush of wind from a train going the other way threw her into his arms. In the cold whistling of a tunnel, he had to warm her nakedness. His kiss lit on her dry girlish lips; he didn't say "Little Anja," because he was thinking Sibylle; and since she clasped him to her, he steered their fall together on to the lower bunk.

  They were in Rome, and Anja lived as she smoked, greedily and hurriedly, and she treated every hour as if it were the last [the prince's daughter who had seen Moscow burn, or some other town on the Volga] and tried to drain it of all its pleasure. Friedrich was astonished and amused. It was nice, it was simple, it was fun, girl-things lying around, and someone who said: "Sleep well," when night came, and in the morning, "Come on, the sun's shining," while two feet with little tidy toes were already kicking aside the blankets. But: "Am I that man?" he asked himself, as they curved out of the traffic-swarming corso across the Piazza Venezia into the Via del Impero, in a chariot drawn by a little horse. "Am I the man driving with a girl in my chariot past centuries of history towards the Colosseum, on my way to seeing the Baths of Antony behind the Palatine Hill?" Did the wonder climb out of the spectacular horizons ringing him, or did it fall on him with the beams of the sun, shining warmly in winter, or might it not be from anything that was happening to him, but rather the opposite, that he was acting, that he was taking steps forward or to the side, moving as though through thick forests when you feel you're going the wrong way, but for all that, and in spite of all your instinct, you're not able to follow the right path? He dreamed, but his dreams failed to make him happy. Nor was it a nightmare from which he awoke gasping. It was a dream of helplessness. The blurring, fuzzed images at the edge of reality. Did he love Anja? It was cert
ainly pleasant not to be alone, but was it not also cowardly and reducing? There were times that he gave Anja money for the coachman, and leapt out of the carriage and lost himself in a tangle of little lanes. He visited the quarters of the poor, the gray huts on the banks of the Tiber. He wanted to be good, because he felt so bad. He bought fruit and distributed it to the dirty, half-naked children. They are beautiful, he thought, under their crust of grime they are beautiful. He bent down to one boy and kissed cheeks that were plumped with the blood that had held aloft the power of the Caesars. He was sworn at, and he didn't understand. He saw a telegraph office, and he wrote the words: "I LOVE YOU, ONLY YOU, STILL AND ALWAYS," and he only understood that he had sent a wire to Sibylle when the words were already making their way down the wires to her. He followed soldiers and sailors into the shade of tight streets, supposing they were on their way to girls in brothels. He thought: I wish I were like them, working on a ship, and then going trustingly to find pleasure in a port. He had had enough of thinking. He distrusted it. He thought of Sibylle, Anja, Fedor, and Magnus, and he told himself: "I don't do anything but think about my desires. There's no truth there at all." He was a little dot in the vastness of the Eternal City. And even that, he thought, is overweening.