“Symptom!” exclaimed Jolanth. “Didn’t I tell you right away, Elisabeth, that he’s a blue-eyed optimist! Didn’t I recognize it immediately?” With that, she put her small stubby hands on Elisabeth’s hand. As she did so, Jolanth’s gloves slipped from her lap onto the floor, I stooped to pick them up, but she pushed me away with some force. “Forgive me,” I said, “it’s the optimist in me.”
“You and your symptoms!” she exclaimed. It was clear to me that she didn’t understand the word.
“At eight o’clock Harufax is giving a talk on voluntary sterilisation,” said Jolanth. “Don’t forget, Elisabeth! It’s already seven.”
“I’ll remember,” said Elisabeth.
Jolanth got up, shooting a glance at Elisabeth to follow her. “Excuse me!” said Elisabeth. Obediently she followed Jolanth to the lavatory.
They were gone for a couple of minutes. Time enough for me to register that with my insistence on “putting my life in order,” I was only adding to my confusion. Not only was I growing more bewildered myself, I was adding to the general bewilderment. That was as far as I’d got with my pondering when the women came back. They paid. I didn’t even manage to call the waitress. Afraid I might anticipate them and curtail their independence, they had, so to speak, nobbled her on the short walk from the toilet to the till. As we said goodbye, Elisabeth pressed a little rolled-up piece of paper into my hand. And then they were off to Harufax, and sterilization. I unrolled the piece of paper. “Ten at night, Café Museum, alone,” it said. The confusion wasn’t over.
The café stank of carbide, or if you prefer, of rotting onions and corpses. There was no electric light. I always find it difficult to concentrate in the presence of strong smells. Smell is a stronger sense than hearing. I waited dully, without the least inclination to see Elisabeth again. Nor did I much feel like “putting things in order.” It seemed to have taken the carbide to make me see the perverse hopelessness of my desire to make order. I only hung on out of gallantry. But even that couldn’t outlast the police curfew. Which in turn — something I would ordinarily have railed against — struck me as excessively generous. The authorities knew what they were doing all right. They were compelling us to drop our inappropriate habits, and to amend our hopeless misunderstandings. But then, half an hour before closing time, Elisabeth arrived. She looked ravishing, storming in, like a hunted animal in her half-length beaver jacket, with snow in her hair and her long lashes, and flakes of snow melting on her cheeks. She looked like something running out of the woods for refuge. “I told Jolanth that Papa was unwell,” she began. And already there were tears in her eyes. She began to sob. Yes, even though she had on a man’s collar and tie under her open fur jacket, she was sobbing. Carefully I took her hand and kissed it. Elisabeth was no longer in any mood to push away my arm. The waiter came along, already out on his feet. Only two of the carbide lamps were still burning. I thought she would order a liqueur, but no, she ordered a pair of frankfurters with horseradish. Nothing gives a woman an appetite like crying, I thought. Anyway, the horseradish would be a cover for her tears. Her appetite moved me. I was overtaken by tenderness, the mindless, fatal tenderness of the male. I put my arm round her shoulder. She leaned back, dunking her sausage in the horseradish with one hand. Her tears were still flowing, but they meant just as little as the melting snow in her beaver coat. “I’m your wife, after all,” she sighed. It sounded like a yelp. “Of course you are,” I replied. Suddenly she sat up straight. She ordered another pair of frankfurters with horseradish and, this time a glass of beer.
Since the second-last carbide lamp was being put out, we had to try to leave. “Jolanth is waiting for me,” Elisabeth said outside the café. “I’ll walk you,” I said. We walked silently side by side. An inconstant, mouldering snow fell. The streetlamps failed, they too mouldering. They kept a little grain of light in their glass bulbs, spiteful and miserly. They didn’t brighten the streets, they darkened them.
When we got to Jolanth Szatmary’s house, Elisabeth said: “Here we are, goodbye!” I took my leave. I asked when I could visit. I made to turn for home. Suddenly Elisabeth put out both her hands towards me. “Don’t leave me,” she said, “I’ll go with you.”
So I took her with me. I couldn’t take Elisabeth into any of those houses where I might still be remembered from pre-War times. We were adrift in the great, orphaned, gloomy city, two orphans ourselves. Elisabeth clasped my arm. I could feel her pulse through her fur coat. Sometimes we stopped under one of the miserable lamp posts, and I would look at her wet face. I didn’t know if it was from snow or tears.
Somehow we had reached Franz-Josefs-Kai, without knowing it. Without knowing it, we crossed the Augarten bridge. It was still snowing, that ugly, mouldy snow, and we didn’t speak. A tiny star blinked at us from a house on the Untere Augartenstrasse. We both knew what the star signified. We went towards it.
The walls were a toxic green, as usual. There were no lights. The porter lit a candle, dribbled a little wax, and gummed it down on the bedside table. A towel hung over the basin. On it was a perfectly round wreath picked out in green thread with a “Grüss Gott!” in the middle, in red.
That night, in that room, I made love to Elisabeth. “I’m a prisoner,” she said to me, “Jolanth has taken me prisoner. I should never have left, that night in Baden, when Jacques died.”
“You’re no one’s prisoner,” I replied. “You’re with me, you’re my wife.”
I tried to discover all the secrets of her body, and they were many. A youthful ambition — at the time I thought it was masculine — prompted me to wipe out any traces that Jolanth might have left. Was it ambition? Or jealousy?
Slowly the winter morning crept up the toxic green walls. Elisabeth awoke me. She looked very different, looking at me. With terror in her eyes and reproach; yes, there was a measure of reproach in her eyes. Her stern tie, silvery-grey, hung like a little sword over the arm of the chair. She kissed my eyes sweetly, then she jumped up and shrieked: “Jolanth!”
We got dressed hurriedly, with an indescribable feeling of shame. The morning was unspeakable. It was raining little hailstones. We had a long way to walk. The trams weren’t yet running. For fully an hour we walked in the teeth of the sleet to Elisabeth’s house. She brushed off her gloves. Her hand was cold. “Goodbye!” I called out after her. This time, she didn’t turn round.
XXVI
It was eight o’clock. My mother was breakfasting, as on any other day. Ritual greetings were exchanged. “Good morning, Mama!” Today my mother surprised me with a “Servus, laddie!” It was a long time since I had last heard that boisterous greeting from her lips. When would she have used it last? Maybe ten or fifteen years ago, when I was a schoolboy, in the holidays, when I could stop in for breakfast. At that time she liked to follow that with the anodyne joke that struck her as rather witty. Pointing to the chair I was sitting on, she would ask: “Well, and is the school bench pinching you?” On one occasion I answered, “Yes, Mama!” and my punishment was that for three days I wasn’t allowed to sit at the table with her.
Today, she even allowed herself a complaint about the jam. “What I don’t understand is where they get all those confounded beets from! Try it, boy! They claim it’s oh-so-good for you . . .” I ate beets and margarine and drank coffee. The coffee was good. I noticed that our maid poured mine from a different pot, and I saw that the old lady kept the good, hard-to-come-by Meinl coffee for me, and contented herself with bitter chicory brew. But I couldn’t let on that I knew. My mother didn’t like it when her little tactical moves were seen through. Her vanity was such that she could even cut up on occasion.
“So, you’ve seen your Elisabeth,” she began abruptly. “I know, your father-in-law was here yesterday. If I concentrate, I can understand what he says. He was here for a good two hours. He told me you’d spoken to him. I said I was happy to wait to hear about it from you, but there was no stopping him. So, you want to put your life in order — that’s wha
t I hear. And what does Elisabeth say?”
“I’ve been with her.”
“Where? Why didn’t you bring her back?”
“I didn’t know, Mama. Besides, it was very late.”
“He wants to get you on board somewhere, he said. You have no skills. You can’t keep a wife. I don’t know where he thinks he’s going to get you on board; you’d have to bring some capital with you. And we have nothing. Everything went into those war bonds. So it’s lost, just like the war. This house is all we have left. We could take out a loan on it, he said. You might talk to Dr Kiniower about it. But where are you going to work, and what will you do? Do you even know the first thing about arts and crafts? Your father-in-law seems quite the expert. His lecture about it was more exhaustive than your Elisabeth’s. And who is Professor Jolanth Keczkemet anyway?”
“Szatmary, Mama!” I corrected her.
“Szekely for all I care,” my mother retorted. “So who is she?”
“She has short hair, Mama, and I don’t like her.”
“And Elisabeth is a friend of hers?”
“A very close friend!”
“Very close, you say?”
“Yes, Mama!”
“Ah!” she said. “Then leave her be, boy. I’ve heard about friendships like that. I know. I’ve read things in books, boy. You have no idea how much I know; a boyfriend would have been better. A woman is practically impossible to get rid of. And since when have there been lady professors anyway? What faculty is she in, this Keczkemet?”
“Szatmary, Mama!” I corrected her.
“Have it your own way: Lakatos,” said my mother, on reflection. “How are you going to compete with a lady professor, boy? A wrestler or an actor would be something else!”
How poorly I had known my mother. The old lady who went to the park once a week to “take the air” for two hours at a time, and for the same purpose took a cab to the Praterspitz every month, was fully informed about so-called inverts. What a lot she must have read, how clearly she must have reflected and thought about it in the long and lonely hours she spent at home, propped on her black cane, wandering from one of our dimly lit rooms to the next, so lonely and so rich, so sheltered and so knowledgeable, so remote and so worldly wise! But I had to defend Elisabeth — what would my mother think if I didn’t! She was my wife, I had just come from our embrace, I could still feel the smooth weight of her young breasts in the palms of my hands, still breathe the scent of her body, the image of her features with the blissful half-closed eyes still lived in mine, and on my mouth was pressed the seal of her lips. I had to stand up for her — and as I defended her, I fell in love with her all over again.
“Professor Szatmary,” I said, “doesn’t stand a chance against me. Elisabeth loves me, I am certain of that. Last night, for example . . .”
My mother didn’t let me finish: “And today?” she interrupted me. “Today she’s back with Professor Halaszy!”
“Szatmary, Mama!”
“I don’t care what she’s called, boy, you know that perfectly well, stop correcting me the whole time! If you want to live with Elisabeth, you’ll have to keep her. So, as your father-in-law says, you’ll have to take out a loan against our house. What am I saying our house — it’s your house! Then that professor with the bloody name will have to go back to making corals out of pine cones — for the love of God! The flat on the ground floor is empty, four rooms, I think, the janitor
will know. I have something in the bank, I’ll share it with you, ask Dr Kiniower how much there is! And we can share the household. Can Elisabeth cook?”
“I don’t believe so, Mama!”
“I used to be able to,” said my mother. “I expect I can still do some things! But the main thing is that you can live with Elisabeth. And she with you.” She’d stopped saying: your Elisabeth, I took it for a sign of exceptional maternal grace.
“Go out on the town, boy. See your friends! Maybe they’re still alive. How about that? A trip to town?”
“Yes, Mama!” I said, and I went to Stellmacher in the War Ministry to ask after my friends. Stellmacher ought to be still extant. Even if the War Ministry was now just a Department. Stellmacher was bound to be around still.
He was — old, stooped and iron-grey. He sat there, behind his old desk, in his old office. But he was in civilian clothes, in a strange, baggy suit which was much too big for him and had been turned. From time to time he drove a couple of fingers down between his neck and collar. His collar bothered him. His shirt-cuffs bothered him. He kept ramming them against the edge of his desk to push them back. He had some information, though: Chojnicki was still alive, and living in the Wieden; Dvorak, Szechenyi, Hallersberg, Lichtenthal and Strohhofer got together every day to play chess in the Café Josefinum on the Währinger Strasse. Stejskal, Halasz and Grünberger were unaccounted for. I went round to Chojnicki’s in the Wieden.
He was sitting in his old drawing room, in his old flat, but he was almost unrecognizable, because he had had his moustache taken off. “Why, whatever for?” I asked him. “So that I can look like my own manservant. I am my own valet. I open the door to let myself in. I polish my own shoes. I ring when I want something, and then I inquire: what would sir like? Cigarettes! Very good, sir. And I send myself round to the Trafik. I can still eat for nothing at the old lady’s.” The old lady, in our circle, meant Frau Sacher. “I still get wine at Fatso’s.” Fatso in our circle was Lautgartner in Hietzing. “And Xandl’s lost his marbles and is in the Steinhof,” and with that Chojnicki closed his tour d’horizon.
“Lost them?”
“Utterly. I look him up every week. The crocodile” — the uncle of the Chojnicki brothers, Sapieha — “slapped a court order on the estates. He’s Xandl’s guardian. I have no say whatever. This flat has been sold. I have another three weeks here. What about you, Trotta?”
“I’m about to mortgage our house. I’m married, you know. I have a wife to feed.” “Uh-oh, married!” exclaimed Chojnicki. “Come to think of it, so am I. But my wife is in Poland, God save and protect her, and give her a long life. I decided,” he went on, “to leave everything in the hands of the Almighty. He made my bed, let Him lie in it.” He was silent for a while, then he smashed his fist on the table, and shouted: “It’s you that’s to blame for everything, you” — he groped for a word — “you smart alecs,” he finally said, “you wrecked our state with your stupid witticisms. My Xandl saw it coming. You failed to see that those Alpine goiters and those Sudeten Czechs, those Nibelung cretins, offended and attacked our nationalities for so long until they began to hate the Monarchy and turned against it. It wasn’t our Czechs or our Serbs or our Poles or our Ruthenians who committed treason, but our Germans, our core people.”
“But my family’s Slovene!” I said.
“Forgive me,” he replied quietly. “It’s just that I have no Germans here to address myself to. Get me a Sudeten German!” he suddenly yelled, “and I’ll break his neck! Let’s go find one! Come on! We’re going to the Josefinum!”
Dvorak, Szechenyi, Hallersberg, Lichtenthal and Strohhofer were sitting there, most of them still in uniform. They all belonged to our old group. Aristocratic titles were banned now, but what difference did it make? “No one who doesn’t use my first name,” said Szechenyi, “is worth talking to anyway!” They played chess endlessly. “All right, where’s the Sudeten German?” yelled Chojnicki. “Here I am!” came the reply, from one of the kibitzers. Papa Kunz, old Social Democrat, editor of the Party newspaper and ready at any moment to prove historically that the Austrians were actually Germans. “Your proof, sir!” called Szechenyi. Papa Kunz ordered a double slivovitz and embarked on his proof. No one listened to him. “God damn the Sudetens!” cried Chojnicki, who had just lost a game. He jumped up and ran up to old Papa Kunz with raised, clenched fists. We managed to restrain him. He was foaming at the mouth, his eyes were bloodshot. “Pruzzian blockheads!” he yelled finally. That was the height of his rage. After that he be
came visibly milder.
It felt good to be home again. All of us had lost name and rank and station, house and money and net worth, past, present and to come. In the morning when we woke up, and at night when we went to bed, we cursed Death, who had invited us to his great gala celebration. Every one of us envied the fallen. They were resting under the ground, and in springtime violets would sprout from their bones. Whereas we had returned home incurably infertile, with paralysed loins, a doomed race, scorned by Death. The verdict of the military panel was irrevocable and final. It read: “Found unfit for death.”
XXVII
We all got used to the unusual. It was a hurried process of adjustment. Not really knowing what we were doing, we hurried to adjust, we chased after phenomena we hated and despised. We began to fall in love with our misery, just as one can love loyal enemies. We buried ourselves in it. We were grateful to it for consuming our little individual personal troubles, like their big brother, proof against consolation, but equally beyond the reach of our little daily anxieties. It is my view that the terrifying meekness of people nowadays in the face of their even worse oppressors is understandable and even to some extent pardonable, if one considers that it’s in human nature to prefer the vast, omnivorous misfortune to the specific individual mishap. The outsize calamity gobbles up the little misfortune, the stroke of bad luck. And so we in those years came to love our monstrous misery.
Not, please understand, that we weren’t able to redeem a few little joys in the face of it, ransom or reprieve or rescue them. We laughed and joked. We spent money, money that we couldn’t in fairness claim was ours — but then it didn’t have much value left either. We were happy to borrow it and lend it out, accept it and give it away, ourselves remain in debt, and pay the debts of others. It is like this that mankind will live on the day before the Day of Judgement. Sucking nectar from poisonous flowers, praising the fading sun as the giver of life, kissing the bleaching earth as mother of fruitfulness.