Read Online A Sad Affair by Wolfgang Koeppen - Free Book Online

the approach of the trailing light in the night sky, because God did not want any yellow silk gas balloons floating toward the sign He had made in the air, and God knocked them to the ground. The people on the balcony, and all the others who were watching from the ground, saw the balloon rising higher and higher until it was just a dot among the stars, and then the comet came, and then came a fall, something, something indiscernible that plummeted down, and then a gasp from many voices, repeated, and the wreckage came down exactly on the frontier with Poland. On the night that Friedrich lost his father, on that night of the comet, in another part of the country, in the heart of a different landscape, Sibylle was born. Who could blame Friedrich for turning this death and this birth [when, already in love with her, he first learned of her] into the work of a fate to which he could not pray but could at least raise his hands toward in rage and in supplication? Had the comet not been a sign, a flaming sword? Uncle Thomas, the short, slender, jolly lieutenant in the Uhlans, lay buried in the Masurian forests. Friedrich had seen his grave, a little hump on the ground, marked by a propeller; the lieutenant had met his death as a fighter pilot. Friedrich's mother had collapsed after gleaning potatoes in a field that hadn't wanted to bear any more in 1918; the faint scent of the layer of stage powder from the yellow box and the feeling of her bony hands were all the memories of her that were left him. He thought of the long walks for milk in the early, black winter afternoons in the east, where you had to go for miles to the nearest ruined outbuildings, up to your knees in snow, sometimes stopping to listen whether it was the wolf coming after you. And he thought that, in another form, Sibylle must have had the same youth, standing in line for a little bit of butter at bare brick dairies in a gaggle of feeble women whose nerves would feel fear—yes, but not their hearts, which had grown impervious—when the drone of an airplane made them think a bomb was coming. And Anja too, if he wanted to adopt her into his Holy Family [for which there was every reason], Anja had seen Moscow, in flames, or some other town on the Volga, and at a time when she'd been quiet and dreamy still, the daughter of a prince! [oh, castles and estates with extensive gallops, with sleigh rides across the snow fields in the little light of the lamp attached to the pole between the two horses' heads, and the brilliance of the celebrations in the Kremlin, the young ladies wrapped in Brussels lace with lit candles in their hands], lying in her crib, which was the arms of a nurse who had fled with her, loyal and in disguise and in the hay of a cart belonging to a distiller from the edge of town. Eyes peeped through their lashes after sleep, and the whole sky was red, and the little girl stretched out her little arms toward the brilliance and, in rapture at the turning world, said: " Da! "
    Now and again, Sibylle would interrupt her pacing. She did so suddenly, and with unusual violence. She tossed away the end of her cigarette, crushed it underfoot like a man, and said: "Oh, you don't need to know any of that, really." Had she turned cowardly? She had taken a long run-up to an explanation, had wanted to speak, and now she was hesitating, behaving like a cat on a hot, as the proverb says, tin roof. She climbed back into bed [was it to drive off? She knew the game: a bed is a car, beepbeep, gangway] and balanced the breakfast tray, which had arrived, on her knees, which she had drawn up to her chest. Friedrich stood with his back to the window to watch her. The thought that she might have become a coward, full of subterfuges and secrets and not the courage to speak, now alarmed him. That, if that were indeed the case, would be a different Sibylle. She had never made a secret of anything, and had always owned up to whatever she had done. There was no Sibylle of lies.