Sibylle (so she says) understood his hesitations about receiving her in his studio, where everything reminded him of his sick Julika. She regretted it, because, as I have said, his big, light studio appealed to her, but she understood. What would Sibylle not have given to have a healthy rival, a woman who was her equal, to whom she could have offered friendship or open conflict, yes, even a fury of jealousy, who laid moral mines for her everywhere in society, or a crazy woman who made ridiculous threats with the gas oven, a gallant fool who headed straight for counter-adultery—she would have preferred anything to this sick woman who retired to a sanatorium at Davos and immediately put the healthy ones in the wrong, and on top of this a woman Sibylle had never seen face to face, a phantom! But that's how it was, and so his studio was out of the question. Where else could they meet than in God's open air and a few inns? A rainy week was as disastrous for their love as will-o'-the-wisps and midsummer night's dreams are for other people's; the inns began to repeat themselves; the roads round the town began to lead nowhere; their conversations began to grow melancholy, witty, but melancholy—in a word, it couldn't go on like this...
And yet they really loved one another.
'Come,' said Sibylle one day, 'let's go to Paris.' Stiller laughed uncertainly. 'Don't worry, I've just been to the bank,' she said. 'All we have to do is to find out when the train leaves.' Stiller asked the waiter for a timetable. There was no lack of trains to Paris. And one day, it was in July, they actually got as far as the platform and sat on a bench underneath the electric clock, the tickets in their pockets and equipped with toothbrush and passport. 'Are we going or aren't we?' asked Stiller, as though the inhibitions were all on her side, not on his. The porter was already going from carriage to carriage. 'Take your seats,' he shouted. 'Take your seats please.' She felt sorry for Stiller. There could be no doubt about his resolution to put her wishes into action at last, but suddenly Sibylle found she had lost all desire to go; she was upset by the grimness of his determination. 'What about Julika?' she asked. Meanwhile the hand of the electric clock was jerking on from minute to minute. At bottom (so she says) Stiller was glad that the hesitation, in appearance at least, came from her, whereas he, with her suitcase in his hand, represented masculine ruthlessness personified. The doors were being shut of one carriage after the other. Sibylle sat where she was, she felt so clearly that the phantom was already sitting inside, and Sibylle had no desire to wander about Paris with a phantom...
The train left the station; they remained on the platform with the resolve that Stiller would first go to Davos and speak quite openly to the sick Julika—there was nothing else for it.
Stiller went to Davos in August.
For her part Sibylle felt perfectly free, even if her husband's remarkable composure (as she says) got on her nerves. Every time they sat down to black coffee, when little Hannes was no longer there, she waited for the heart-to-heart talk. In vain, Rolf merely said, if you're free on Thursday evening, there's that organ recital in the Fraumiinster...' Sibylle saw to the percolator. 'I'm not free,' she said, and that was the end of the organ recital. She could have killed Rolf: he allowed her a freedom, an independence that was downright insulting. It wasn't Rolf, but Sibylle, who burst out: 'I don't understand you, you know I love someone, that I see him practically every day, and you don't even ask what his name is. That's ludicrous!' Rolf smiled: 'What is his name then?' In response to such condescension Sybille naturally couldn't tell him, and they waited silently for the coffee. 'I think I told you,' remarked Rolf chattily, 'that they want to have me as public prosecutor...' Rolf always had something with which to evade the issue, something important, something objective.
At last the coffee boiled in the glass sphere, the steam whistled. It couldn't go on like this with Rolf either, she thought. Amongst other things, money was suddenly beginning to assume an importance: not for Rolf, but for Sibylle. She was secretly hurt at the way her dear Stiller took it as a matter of course that every stitch Sibylle wore had been paid for by Rolf; Stiller earned almost nothing, true, and he couldn't go and fetch money from the bank, she realized that, and yet it secretly hurt her, against all common sense. The most Stiller ever did was to call her a spoilt darling, feel the quality of her new material, and praise her choice of colours; but the idea—which Sibylle would straight away have affectionately talked him out of, that goes without saying—the idea that Stiller ought no longer to let Rolf buy her clothes for her, never so much as crossed his mind. It didn't worry Stiller, no, and it didn't worry Rolf either. Often (so she says) she found both men impossible. Then she felt an itch to take it out of him. 'By the way,' said Sibylle, 'I need some money, but rather a lot. The fact is, we are thinking of spending this autumn together in Paris—' She looked at him out of the corner of her eye after this remark; Rolf said nothing. The one thing she hadn't expected happened, to wit, nothing. She filled his cup and set it down in front of him. 'Thanks,' he said. Either Rolf, her husband, was opposed to her going to Paris with another man (and with Rolf's money), or Rolf wasn't opposed to it; there was no third alternative that she could see.
Sibylle filled her own cup. 'So you want to go to Paris,' was all he said. Sibylle didn't leave him without further explanation: 'I don't know for how long, maybe only a few weeks, maybe longer—' Rolf didn't jump up from his chair, he didn't smash a cup against the wall, this Rolf with his ridiculous composure, to say nothing of falling on his knees and beseeching Sibylle to come to her senses and stay with him. Nothing of the sort. Rolf blushed slightly for an instant; he had probably imagined that the affair with the fancy-dress pierrot was finished, and now he had to get used to the idea of her happy adultery all over again. But why did he have to, in heaven's name? Rolf stirred his coffee. Why didn't he throw a flowerpot at her, or at least a book? When she saw his cup trembling slightly, it aroused no remorse in her, not even pity, but rather disappointment, bitterness, scorn, sadness. 'Or have you anything against it?' she asked, passing him the sugar and explaining her reasons: 'You know what it's like here, there will only be gossip if people see me. It makes no odds to me. But it's unpleasant for you. Especially now that they want you for a public prosecutor. I'm sure it will be much better for you, too, if we live in Paris...' She looked at him. 'What do you think, Rolf?'
He took a sip, stirred, sipped, blew, and stirred, as though nothing else was so important at the moment as drinking this hot coffee. Quite casually came his matter-of-fact inquiry: 'Yes, well roughly how much money do you need?' Cowardly as men always are when they are not doing the attacking themselves, he immediately sought refuge in practical matters, whereas Sibylle wanted to hear what he felt, what he hoped. Was Sibylle in Paris with another man a matter of indifference to him? Did he find it quite in order? Did he find it unbearable? Sibylle asked him straight out: 'What do you think of it?'
Rolf was now standing at the big window, showing her his broad back, with both hands in his pockets like a bystander watching a fire. His back seemed to her so broad, his head so round and fat. She shot at his tranquillity: 'I love him,' she said unasked. 'We really love each other,' she added. 'Otherwise we wouldn't be going to Paris together, you'll believe me when I say that, I'm not irresponsible.' And then men always have to get back to work, yes, yes, it was already ten minutes past two; a sitting, the bastion of their indispensability, Sibylle knew all about that. If Rolf didn't go back to work now, law and order would break down all over the world. 'You must know yourself,' he said briefly, 'what is the right thing to do.' And then, after he had put on his overcoat and forced the buttons into the wrong holes, so that his wife had to button it up properly, he added in a rather melancholy tone, 'You must do what you think right,' and left ... And Sibylle, alone in her room, wept.
In this sense, then, Sibylle was free.
Stiller, on the other hand, came back from Davos having settled nothing and acted as though his ballerina were on the point of death; under these circumstances a trip to Paris was out of the question. Once
more they sat at the edge of a wood—all round the ripe corn had already been cut, summer was passing, thunder clouds were gathering above the blue lake, a bumblebee zigzagged humming through the summer stillness, the heat haze quivered over the fields, hens were cackling in the farmyards, and the world was a faultless, perfectly arranged, positively inspiring affair. Only their happiness (or what they expected from their love) was very complicated. They sat silently on the ground, two adulterers with their hands tenderly interlocked, each with a blade of grass between lips stretched tight with care, and the only thing in this world that was not complicated seemed to them to be marriage, not marriage with Rolf and not marriage with Julika, but marriage to one another.
***
In the entirely rancourless recollection of this magnificent woman—I can see her before me while I write, in her blue wicker chair as she was the other day in the nursing home when I brought her the gladioli, with her lemon-yellow dressing gown and black hair—there is one point that would cause the missing Stiller no little astonishment, namely the fact that this summer or autumn, without ever saying a word to Stiller, she expected a child by him (it would now have been six years old)...
I will record the facts:
It was in September, and Stiller was very busy with all sorts of arrangements for an exhibition; important personages considered it desirable, indispensable, that Stiller should make another public appearance. 'Am I in the way?' asked Sibylle, as Stiller, after greeting her with an almost perfunctory kiss, went on sawing at a stand. She looked at him. A man never looks so handsome, she thought, as when he is working with his hands. 'I don't want to hold you up,' she said, 'but I just had to see you today...' She gave away nothing else, especially as Stiller did not inquire why she felt this need. The important things now were the stands. 'When is he coming,' asked Sibylle, 'this man from the art gallery?' She tried to take an interest. Outside it was a mild, blue September day. There were at least nine more stands to be made and then painted or varnished—quite an undertaking; the wrong stand can make a great deal of difference and what a lot of stands still needed varnishing, while from others, which were fortunately already varnished, the varnish had to be removed! That was the job at the moment.
'What about your wife,' asked Sibylle, 'are you going to exhibit her?' She had put on a kettle for tea and it was already boiling, so she was also occupied. 'I've brought you something,' said Sibylle. 'I've been baking.' And she showed him a fresh cake, a so-called seed cake; Stiller was touched, without looking at it, and talked about humbug. Sibylle couldn't see any difference in his sculptures; so why had they suddenly become humbug? And there was a letter from a curator, a hymn to Stiller, so that one might almost feel afraid Stiller would disappear in a cloud of fame.
'The tea's ready,' she announced and waited; she would never have thought that an art exhibition called for as much preparation as an invasion (Rolf had been talking to her about Churchill's memoirs over coffee), and she was sorry for Stiller. 'How do you like the poster?' he asked, rubbing away at a stand with glass-paper. Sibylle hadn't even noticed the sketch on a piece of packing paper. 'There's to be a poster as well?' she exclaimed in astonishment, and true enough, it was a proper poster like they have for Furtwangler or Persil. She thought it frightful—A. Stiller, his beloved handwriting on every hoarding, enlarged as though under a microscope. Hadn't men any shame? If he'd enjoyed it, at least; but Stiller cursed the whole exhibition. Then why did he do it? He drank his tea standing up and ate her cake while he talked, not even noticing the showers of crumbs that were falling everywhere....
Sibylle soon left him; it seemed to her that this was no moment to win him over to fatherhood, and she was glad he hadn't simply let her go, but had arranged to go sailing with her at five o'clock. She was happy to be able to meet him again that day. Merely to pass the time, she strolled along the Bahnhofstrasse in the September air, from window to window, from shop to shop, until she had found the nicest tie in Zurich. Unfortunately, it struck her, Stiller had no shirt that would go with this tie. She bought a shirt to go with it.
When sailing (says Sibylle) Stiller was always like a boy, so serious, without brooding, so relaxed, so happy with his toy; he handled the tiller and rope, while Sibylle lay in the bows, a hand or a foot in the rippling water. Here on the lake she was free from the phantom. The shores were lost in the autumn mist, their sail gleamed in the pale light of the declining sun, in the east the sky was already turning to purple dusk, and the water beside their gliding boat was shadowy, almost black under a light surface. Sibylle rested her head on her elbows so as to have the ever more oblique rays of the sinking sun full in her face, heard the gurgling under the boat when it rocked in the waves of a steamer, and looked at Stiller, her busy steersman, out of screwed-up eyes—his face, his narrow head, his pale hair in the wind, yes, she liked him very much, this man who was perhaps already the father of her second child. How would Rolf take it? Actually she felt quite indifferent. Apropos of Rolf: tomorrow he would take up his duties as public prosecutor. How able they were! Each in his own way. And Sibylle made up her mind to be sensible, to be content. In spite of everything. She was still young, and there was plenty of time. Something would happen. Perhaps she would have a child, perhaps Julika would die, perhaps a star would fall from heaven, and straighten everything out.
As always when they were sailing, they spoke little. Above the lake hummed the town with its traffic, schoolchildren waved from a homeward-bound steamboat, and seen like this with one's head lying flat the world consisted entirely of colours, of highlights, reflections, and shadows, of sound and silence; this was not the moment to reach decisions. Why shouldn't it be possible to love two men? Stiller was her intimate friend, he was not a man who subjugated. Rolf subjugated. That could be terrible, but in many respects it was simpler. Rolf didn't make sisters of women. At one point they scraped against a buoy, so that there was a grating noise, and Stiller, who had been talking about his exhibition and not watching out, apologized. Rolf never apologized; Rolf was self-righteous. One could be frightened for Stiller—not for Rolf. Both of them rolled into one, that would have been the ideal! Rolf often seemed to her like a big dog, a St Bernard, which it was better not to put on the lead for fear of being pulled over. Stiller seemed to her like a brother, almost like a sister...
It had imperceptibly grown cool, and Sibylle stood up, walked along the swaying boat to Stiller, took his head between her wet hands, and kissed him over and over again. He let go of the rope, so that the sail flapped, and asked, 'What's the matter?' Sibylle didn't yet know herself.
***
'Men are funny,' Sibylle still thinks so today: 'You with your seriousness! For hours and days, sometimes for weeks, one could imagine you want nothing else than the nearness of a woman you love, you seek this nearness thoughtlessly, you'd shrink from nothing, one supposes, from no danger, from no ridicule, and certainly not from brutality, if anyone stood in your way, there is only the woman, it seems, the woman you love—and then, in the twinkling of an eye, it's quite different, suddenly it turns out that a sitting is important, so important that everything has to be fitted in with it. You suddenly become edgy, you find the woman a fond burr that you can't shake off. I know this silly consideration for all sorts of strangers, for everyone but the woman who loves you. You and your serious affairs of life! An international conference of lawyers, the curator of an art gallery—suddenly there are once more things that must on no account be neglected. And woe to the woman who doesn't understand that, or even smiles! And then, in a twinkling of an eye, you're like little Hannes during a thunderstorm again. Isn't that true? These same men have to put their heads on our shoulders, so as not to despair, to feel that they are not entirely lost in this serious world, not entirely superfluous with all their legal eminence and art exhibitions ... God knows,' she laughed, 'you're a queer lot!'
***
One day at the end of September Stiller said over the telephone, 'Get ready, we're going to
Paris.' She couldn't believe her receiver. 'Are you serious?' The cheerful voice answered, 'Why not?' Still half in doubt whether Stiller was not joking, already half joyously serious she asked, 'When?' The cheerful voice answered, Tomorrow, today, when you like.' (They knew the trains to Paris by heart; there was a night train that came in through the suburbs of Paris at first light, then breakfast with the early workmen in a bar at the Gare de l'Est, coffee and brioches, followed by a stroll through the great covered market full of vegetables and fish—and suddenly, as in a fairy tale, all this was within their grasp?) 'I'm coming over right away,' said Sibylle; but it wasn't as simple as that, for in the morning Stiller was receiving another visit from his curator, and in the afternoon Sibylle had to take little Hannes to the circus. 'After the circus then,' she said and put down the receiver, as dizzy as a person who has just won a prize, empty with happiness...
At last things seemed to be moving.
'What shall we say,' asked Rolf over coffee, 'we must order the removal van, when would it suit you? I've no intention of making the whole move by myself. Will you be here next week?' Sibylle quite understood his urgency, troublesome as she found it. 'Yes, yes,' she said, 'I know, but I can't tell you today.'—'When will you be able to tell me?'—'Tomorrow.'—'Why are you so on edge?'—'I'm not on edge,' she retorted. 'Why should I be on edge?' Sibylle had hoped she would be able to let her decision mature; now she suddenly had a twenty-four-hour ultimatum. After all, it concerned everything in the world that mattered to her, Stiller, Rolf, Hannes, it concerned a life that was not yet born, people to whom her heart was bound, it concerned herself, it involved the question whether Sibylle would be capable of choosing her life for herself. All this was in the balance. And Rolf wanted to know by tomorrow, so that he could order the removal van, tomorrow over coffee...