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

On the street in summer in bright sunshine, she might well try to persuade you: "We need to put up our umbrellas and buy new winter coats, it's snowing," but never did a lie that was not obviously a lie [for love of lying] spring from her lips. She had never used untruths or strategic evasions to gain a small, momentary advantage. Had that changed now, was she on the slippery slope, with herself no longer firmly in grip? Friedrich felt doubtful. Her face no longer had the tranquillity of the good girl. It was excited and looked somehow scraped, the face of a scout. Sharper in its lines and angles too. Was she looking straight ahead? Could she still steer her life, careful of every stone that might knock it off its course? Friedrich didn't know. He couldn't tell. As ever when he was confronted with Sibylle, he regretted that he wasn't a clairvoyant. What was going on behind her brow? It was a fortress, a bulwark, a concrete wall that kept repulsing him. If only he could manage to penetrate the windings of her brain, even once! That must be the key. He suffered from highly specific fantasies and saw an immaterial action as concretely as a blueprint in an educational film. He watched his thinking climb out of his head into hers, and he followed it, as like a red arrow it followed the mazy white tracks of her ponderings. He was palping the most sensitive nerves of her being. He wanted to know them. He wanted to find out: What am I to her, what is she thinking, where is salvation, can I right her and steer her [her misunderstanding!], and win her and make everything turn out well? What he wished to accomplish was a crime; the worst crime possible: to break into another's soul. But that's how it was between them. He was unable to withstand his desire to feel with her. So he was only thinking, as she always said, of himself and his own happiness. Maybe this thinking, this demented desire to possess that went far beyond the merely physical, was the reason why she refused to surrender her life to his claims, because his demands were too steep and too strange and caused a shudder to pass across her back. But: was he truly strange to her? It was to ascertain this, precisely this, that he was compelled to wish for a magical diving suit, his secret burglar's clothing, the devilish plan, to be able to inveigle himself into the chambers of her being. There she was, sitting in front of him, sipping tea in bed, and biting off a piece of croissant, and getting her mouth all jammy. What was her spell, why didn't he go, take his hat and pay the bill at the ridiculous hotel on the lake that wasn't his style, and travel on to the places listed on the ticket in his pocket? What was her spell? Was she beautiful, or rather, was she still beautiful? Friedrich remembered passing through the revolving doors of a café once, and, seeing her coming down from the upper story, so transcendently beautiful, so angelically delicate that he had to close his eyes lest they be blinded by such light, while a sea of tears—as deep as the tropical sea after the sun has gone down, and the forest breathes cinnamon, and cougars scream as they stare from waving palm fronds into the illimitable mirror—while a sea, then, of tears, a sweet ocean of happiness and emotion, fell from the bed of his closed eyes into his heart, splashy and soothing, so that it felt like dying, unconsciousness, sinking, subsiding, the death of a child of god that had seen her. That was how beautiful she was. And so young. A blue dragoon's coat with gray braid set off her face: head of Eros against idyllic Aegean backdrop. Now, for the last time, was she still as beautiful? He was able to behold her, so was the dazzling magic gone, and could he go? No! He loved her. Nothing changed. He was entranced. The longer he looked at her, the more profoundly he felt tied. She put the tray down on the ground, made a deliberate effort, and said: "So do you not like Fedor?"
    A difficult question. He had to