A Sad Affair Read Online Free PDF

technically, because before long I lived in terror of some unforeseen accident, something that an expert would be able to remedy safely and perfectly easily, but to someone with my ignorance less easy and, in fact, potentially catastrophic. A short circuit, a failure in the transformer unit, a spark in the oil switch, bits of equipment that were nothing but names to me but still names that stood in some relation to various catastrophes, these made me tremble, and I carefully memorized the route to the alarm, so that in the event of my being plunged into darkness—deeper and more impenetrable darkness than you could find anywhere else in the world—even then, I would be sure to find it. Following these exertions, I came home in the morning exhausted, in an empty streetcar with three empty carriages attached to it to bring workers to the factory district when the shift came on, rumbling through the gloaming, and then to bed with the morning paper, which slipped from my grasp, sleeping, sometimes dreaming of the time clock with its cogs, until from the yard that my room opened on, the beating of carpets and the calls of the rag and bottle men would wake me.
    For this, as it transpired, enervating work I was paid a hundred marks per month. That represented my entire income. Except for what I needed to pay for my room, I had all day to spend it in.
    I got up at around noon and went into art school, not to study but to eat. There was a cafeteria there that was a little bit the way I imagine a bohemian restaurant in nineteenth-century novels. You could watch them come down from their ateliers in their paint-spattered overalls, their faces still radiant with creativity, casually picking a bowl off the rack and taking huge mouthfuls, and with them their models, noisy and full of themselves, and showing in their faces, too, some association with paint.
    It was in this cafeteria, which was always lively and always full, that I first met Beck. That is, I'd met him before, but this was where we got to know each other properly. In the summer I'd been swimming in the river near where Beck lived, and, not knowing the currents, I would have drowned if Beck hadn't pulled me onto his boat as he happened to be passing. He saved my life, I suppose you could say, although he hadn't done much beyond grabbing hold of me when he saw I was in trouble. And then, as luck would have it, Beck knew the man I was staying with, who specialized in fish paintings. They were all over the walls, these fishes, fishes out of water and fishes swimming; the painter would stand in front of them and stretch, and his hair would shoot up into the air, and he would say: "My paaaintings," and as he said the long a sound, he would stick out his tongue. Beck supported this painter by bringing him food from his mother's kitchen. From that point on, I referred to Beck as the art dealer, because I thought, as later proved to be the case, that he had a gift for these art-related business transactions. But the real reason for his fondness for the fish painter, and this speaks for him [and will always, whatever happens, speak for him], was that he wanted to see another picture that was hidden behind the fish paintings, and which had so far escaped my notice. This was no paaainting [tongue stuck out during the long a sound] but a pastel of a delicacy and feeling that one would not have thought the artist had had in him, a pastel of a girl, little more than a child, leaning against a chimney breast with a lyre in her hand, dressed like a fairy-tale prince. And that was Sibylle! Her parents lived in a country house a little way upriver, and the painter had been to visit them. He said the girl had been ill at the time and sitting up in bed and, following a sudden whim, and to cheer her up, he had done the drawing of her as described. I would have liked to have taken it with me, but Beck had a prior claim on it. The model didn't interest me much, and when I left, I learned, not that