Frieda has been ill again. A high temperature keeps her in bed for days. It’s impossible to know what’s wrong. It’s in her lungs. In her arms. Inside her head. It’s in the suitcases, in the screech of wheels, in the train stations, in the view from each new hotel bedroom window. It’s in the emptiness when he goes on assignment and she’s left behind with nothing but the curtains moving. He asks his friends to write to her while he’s away. It would make her feel better.
He comes back to find her lying face down on the bed. She hasn’t eaten a thing in days. She needs protein and minerals, so he goes out to the market to buy liver, which he brings back on a bloodstained sheet of paper and cooks in the hotel room for her. The corridors are heavy with the smell of liver. It’s in the carpet like a lingering trace of previous occupants.
He begins to shape her like a novel.
He puts her on trains to faraway places. He takes her walking, early and late, across the bridges of Paris. Arm in arm, from one side of the city to the other, with his coat draped over his shoulders and a cane in his hand, they walk as newcomers, arriving and never arriving, stopping only to move on again. He makes her laugh. The boy inside him does imitations of horses’ hoofs. Entire regiments of cavalry horses with high black feathers sticking out of their heads. Like an athlete in patent black shoes, lifting her dress for the freedom of her knees, she clacks along the cobbled pavement until she is forced to stop with a breathless laugh and hold on to him because one of the shoes has come off.
He keeps reinventing her late into the night in his books, sitting at a small table at the back of a restaurant with a glass of brandy while she tries to sleep. The strain of being written down is beginning to show. She has become quiet in company. Afraid of gatherings. Sitting in a corner waiting for him to fill the pages, her reflection in his mind.
She has stopped being herself.
In the restaurant with his friends, he becomes easily jealous. Even to see her laughing at another man’s joke is enough to make him think he’s lost her. He cannot bear her watching the violinist in the string ensemble playing on stage. He rewrites her as a more restrained woman, not the daughter of a poor Viennese family but a woman of means in wealthy clothes, less open-hearted, less innocent, more calculated in company with writers who can see into her head and imagine her most secret thoughts. He likes the honest, worldly comments she makes on his work, but he wants her to shroud her opinions in academic language. He turns her into somebody she is not. At times he can no longer tell the difference between the woman he married and the woman he describes in his novels.
A courier arrives at the restaurant with a special transfer of money for him. He continues talking to his friends and asks Frieda to go and sign for it. Three thousand marks. A sizeable amount he’s earned from his newspaper reports. He has become so popular that readers have begun to say – whenever Joseph Roth writes, something will happen. While he continues talking to the group around him without dropping a word, she goes out to deal with the postman delivering the money.
She steps out of his novel, free of the author. There is dramaturgy in her movements across the floor of the restaurant and out into the foyer. It gives the sound of her shoes a self-fabricated quality. She comes back inside a while later and lays the banknotes in a pile on the table. He sees only two thousand marks. What’s happened to the rest of it, a thousand marks missing? She smiles and shrugs her shoulders. Her dimples spring to life with delirious optimism.
The violinist, she says. He has such sad eyes.
He shouts at her in front of the other writers at the table. In a drunken rage he stands up and accuses her of having slept with the violinist.
How can she deny what he invents?
His imagination is closer to the truth than he knows. While he was away on assignment, sleeping on trains going all the way to Albania, he kept imagining her slipping out at night like one of his fictional characters. He thought of her standing in the street at night waiting for the violinist to come out of the restaurant with his case under his elbow. He could see them linking arms. Their feet in unison. Their laughter like coins rolling along the street. He imagined them arriving back at the hotel and the concierge keeping it all quiet with a wink. In the room from which he was so often absent, he could see her lying naked on the bed with her long white arms and her long white legs while the musician played a sad Polish mazurka for her and everyone in the hotel sat up to listen.
With the other writers around the table looking on in shock, he continues shouting his accusations at her. She sits with her head in her hands, crying. He gets her up on her feet and takes her away by the arm, like a criminal being led out of the restaurant.
On stage, the violinist continues playing.
And then!
That terrible cloud of writer’s guilt comes over him when he returns to the hotel bedroom and steps back into the real world, where everything is beyond his authorial power. He wishes he could withdraw the words left behind in the restaurant. But the living world cannot be torn up and rewritten. The words are gone to print in her memory and the affair with the violinist cannot be retracted.
She can’t sleep and she can’t wake up. She looks in the mirror and fails to recognize herself. She can no longer trust her own face.
You’re making me ill again, she says.
He goes out to get more liver. The spongy meal clogs up her mouth. Between her teeth, she can feel the rubbery arteries that once carried the animal’s blood. She coughs it up like a knot of medical tubing. The pulp of organs makes her choke. The smell of liver is in her hair, in the sheets and the pillowcases, the taste of it in their kisses.