A Sad Affair by Wolfgang Koeppen

in the doorways shivering in the biting evening wind, listening to the music that floats out on to the street, does she come and help. It's a shame, because that would be a simple and grateful and also a natural task for a fairy. She would only have to lift up a corner of the curtain, open the door a crack, make a wall transparent, and say: "Don't be sad, here, look, it's nothing special; just one of those funny masks people wear over their fear of life, listen to their hearts, press your ear against the chest of that blissful-looking fellow, do it the way a doctor does it, put on a serious expression, and do you feel the heart beating so feebly, so dully, so without any hope for happiness, like the trot of a heavy cab horse going home late at night, at the end of a long day's waiting outside the drafty cavernous hole of the station hall?" No fairy had come out to him, and so it happened that that morning Friedrich [it was a miracle, remember, that he was alive] had to suffer from a foolish, silly superficiality that need hardly have concerned him. And then when Beck suddenly started yelling and jumping up and down in front of Friedrich's bed again, and had obviously gone completely mad, suddenly claiming Sibylle loved him, loved Friedrich, and that she must have run off to him out of Auntie Molly's [famous, as we know, on account of the scandalous relationships among prominent people that were said to flourish there]—at that, Friedrich thought: No, she doesn't love me, she will never come to me again. But externally, toward Beck, he was careful to laugh, or at least he tried to, he twisted his mouth a little, he stuck the tip of his tongue out between his teeth, he made his mouth a little pointed, open, catlike, ambiguous, he thought, in the hope that Beck would hurl himself at him, and they would have a wrestling match.
    THE DAY had risen. Across the bleached foggy horizon—contrasting with it in color and fixity—lay the window bars in front of the window of Friedrich's room in the Grand Hotel of the foreign city. The noise in the corridor had increased. Pale, morning hands pulled the shoes inside from the doorstep. Thou shouldest wear sandals on thy feet! The man, the guest, the resident, was getting ready. The breakfast symphony sounded through the building. Clatter of dishes, knives, spoons, and cups. In the walls, the bathwater was going up and down; powerful and pure, it streamed into the tubs, scummy and discolored it gurgled away again into deep subterranean channels, taking with it the dust from the bodies of a traveling humanity, into the network of pipes under the city, and thence to never-seen sewage fields. Time had marched on, the minute hand had been once round, and Friedrich was still lying in the knotted sheets on his rumpled bed, and it was surprising in more than one way that he was still there. He was in the great city, where he had wanted to be. He had only to get up and go, and Sibylle would be there, visible to his eyes and palpable to his hands. His wish had been fulfilled, his longing could be satisfied. Why then was he still hesitating? Was he like an ancient clipper ship that, having found peace in the harbor, trembles with desire in the ropes of its rigging when the wind blows the salt breath of the sea to it, and yet, for all its longing, creaks and aches in every spar when happiness sets its sails, weighs its anchor, and sets its course for the great breakers? Was he past that? Not in terms of years. But possibly he was used up, the flame had already consumed his being, his sensibility, and his heart, and was he so exhausted with it, gone cold and weak, that he hadn't even noticed that in him there was just an orange core of warmth in a pile of ashes? The game had been played and lost a hundred times. Opinions differed on the way he had taken defeat. Some said he was on the run from guilt, because they reckoned a man in his situation, after so many and such public reversals, had no option