her wonderful management, but as they were inseparable from her youth
and dimples and shining eyes, they were of little practical use to
her aged aunt. The fortune-teller whom Liesel had just consulted had
assured her that she would have good luck in all her undertakings. One
glance at Liesel's open, happy face, framed in that glossy abundance
of waving dark hair was enough to start the least gifted of seers off
in the right direction. She had, further, informed her that a blond,
blue-eyed woman was to be avoided. Liesel _had_ stared at that, but
when she told her aunt about it they avoided each other's eyes, though
Tante Ilde did murmur something about its being "singular." Liesel was
dying to keep the conversation on lines that would inevitably have
led to the enthralling and inexhaustible topic of Fanny, but there
were certain matters that you just couldn't talk about with Tante
Ilde, not when you could see her eyes, so Liesel only said that the
fortune-teller had further told her that she had the exclusive love of
a man with dark hair and eye-glasses who had been wounded in the war.
Well, you had to admit that there was something in it all, when they
hit so many nails on the head, (even though, as Tante Ilde couldn't
help thinking, those nails were positively sticking up asking to be
hit).
Liesel found that having Tante Ilde for dinner wasn't at all bad. On
the contrary she had thoroughly enjoyed it. At the end she gave her
some macaroni and a few spoonsful of brown sugar to take home to Irma,
also a couple of Otto's old shirts; he had to look a certain way at the
Ministry and she had darned those till they weren't decent any more,
but for the boys.... And Liesel had been so sweet when she kissed her
goodbye, saying, "Now, Auntie, don't forget you're to come next Monday
and I'll see about getting something extra nice for dinner. What about
a Schmarrn?"
Frau Stacher had positively tripped from the Annagasse to the Hoher
Markt, in unaccustomed light-heartedness. "Happiness,--it's even more
contagious than misery," she thought, grateful to have been exposed to
the dear infection, and forgot that she'd been timid about going.
But the extraordinary part about it all was that that good meal,
instead of making her less hungry, seemed to engender an intolerable
desire for another. She was just wild for more noodles and butter when
night came, ready for a whole cutlet for herself. As they sat round the
supper-table, the three hungry boys with their eyes on the soup-tureen,
and Irma dipping the ladle in so carefully for Tante Ilde's share that
the few bubbles of life-giving fat would not slip into it, yet so
shallowly that none of the thick part came up, then Tante Ilde was, for
once, not faint for food, not at all. She was just wild for food. This,
however, she was able to keep hidden in her breast. Indeed she was
greatly ashamed of her sudden access of gluttony, and the next time she
went to confession....
When under the stimulating effect of the pleasant meal at Liesel's, she
had smilingly, but as it proved unwisely told Irma about the noodles
and butter, Irma, taking some last stitches by the waning light of her
north window, had listened with that intent expression the habitually
undernourished have in their faces when food is being talked about,
but her only answer had been:
"Well, with a meal like that you certainly won't be able to eat any
supper." She had fairly snatched the sugar and macaroni from her
sister-in-law's hands, then she had held the shirts, embellished with
their lace-like darns, up to the light, which had no difficulty in
getting through, saying:
"I should think she would send them! They're on their last legs."
No, Irma couldn't be gracious, she'd always been that way, even when
she was young and pretty and sheltered; and since the Peace....
But when Frau Stacher finally dipped her spoon into that watery soup,
after having broken into it the thin slice of bread pushed towards
her by Irma's careful yet resolute hand, she suddenly found that she
didn't really want even that, the boys ought to have every drop, every
crumb. She felt old, tired, completely superfluous, and she would have
loved above all things, even above food, to have had a room of her own
wherein she could hide the shame of her superfluity, shut the door on
it, turn the key and drop a few secret tears over it....
After the meal consumed with lightning rapidity by the hungry boys and
more slowly cleared away by their mother and aunt, they all placed
themselves around the table with its heavy red felt cover, and the
boys began to do their lessons for the next day in the light of the
swinging lamp pulled down very low. Irma took out those shirts of
Otto's, holding them again up to the light and making a clicking sound
with her tongue against her teeth as she did so.
Then there was silence except for the rubbing of the boys' feet on the
chair rungs and floor, the turning of the pages of their theme books
and the ticking of the brown cuckoo clock with its long, swinging
pendulum.
Frau Stacher sat just outside the circle of light, in deep shadow; if
she had put her hand out she could have touched the curtain of the
alcove. She felt increasingly useless and lonely. They would be sitting
there just the same if she were dead.
Irma was continually taking off her glasses and wiping them on the
piece of old linen she kept by her for that purpose. She knew her eyes
were getting worse and sometimes she was very frightened. The light
caught her big, capable hands, fell on the heap of white linen in
her lap, glowed about the fringe of the little, red, three-cornered
shawl crossed over her low, heavy breasts. She had brought it from
Agram in those days that as the calendar ran were not so far away,
but might have been, for all their resemblance to the present, of
another century. Her face was left in deep shadow which did not soften
something roughhewn about it. It was broad through the forehead and
her cheeks with their deep-dyed spots of color had very prominent
bones, her nose alone was the rather formless kind that escapes memory
or description. Above her short, full upper lip was a dark duvet, like
a thick smudge put on with a careless finger and getting darker every
year. Twisted about her head were heavy coils of rather oily black
hair that anxiety had neither greyed nor thinned, though her eyes,
once so bright under that low, full forehead with those two other
wide, black smudges for eyebrows, had got quite dull. It gave her a
strange expression at times, all except the eyes keeping its freshness
that way. She _had_ good looks, the family had to admit it, in a
bright, square, hard way, like a strongly-outlined, heavily-colored
poster; like a poster of a peasant woman binding sheaves that one
might come across in a Railway station, meant to be looked at from a
distance and to encourage travel. But somehow Irma hadn't worked out
comfortably in the shorter perspectives of a city. Why Heinie had
been mad about her, his sister had never understood. But Heinie had
been a marrier. She couldn't think of Heinie not married, though why
just Irma, uncomplaisant, worrying Irma strayed into that Viennese
world of theirs, familiar and dear to them as their own breath, with
its comfortable, care-free ways. There had been so many attractive
young women about with easy smiles and pleasant habits who would have
flavored his lengthening years. Now the family were, one and all,
horribly bored by Irma, left heavily on their hands. They forgot that
Pauli had said when his father-in-law married that she reminded him
of a late harvest, with vermilion melons and stacks of yellow grain
against black earth, and that Heinie knew winter was near.
There in the shadow, her useless hands lying folded in her thin lap,
her colorless head bent, her pale lids dropped close over her eyes,
Frau Stacher shivered, suddenly remembering that phrase about winter
being near. In the warm haze of the protracted Indian summer of her
life she hadn't in the least understood what it meant. She fell to
thinking of that and of other long past things; of present things she
had no thoughts, only confused, painful sensations, which were cutting
deeper wrinkles and scars in her face than all the living through of
her pleasant three-score years and ten.
Ferry, the eldest boy, thin and tall for his years, with very long
black lashes shadowing his blue eyes and falling upon his thin cheeks
with their tiny spot of bright color, had closed his books and taken a
rattling, illy-jointed knife out of one coat pocket and a little figure
in wood that he was working on out of the other. Even with that poor
blade he had given it a touch of life,--a woman with her arms hanging
at her sides.
"I'm going to make two little buckets to put into her hands, one for
apples and one for pears," he whispered to his mother as he held it
up,--"see how she's already bending under the weight," he added with
his slight but persistent cough.
He had, for all his pale adolescence, a strong resemblance to his aunt
Ilde. She had always cared a lot for Ferry; he'd been a snuggling,
affectionate baby, something inexpressibly dear and unexpected in her
elderly life; they had, in a way, she and her brother, forgotten such
things. Now she was aware of a hot yearning to give him a new knife.
From somewhere that knife must come.
Gusl, the next, was formed in his mother's image: thick-set, short
with a certain roughness in his ways and those same bright, hard eyes
under a full brow and shaggy dark hair.... The peasant caught in the
city, and what he would do with the city or it with him was still
tightly rolled on the lap of the gods. Ferry's future was easier to
foretell--he would betake himself and his talent to some garret and
starve, after the immemorial way of poverty, youth and genius. Gusl
hated desperately his books and he was always hungry. Any meal that his
mother set out he could have eaten alone. Calories were nothing to him.
He wanted lots, lots. But Ferry was always dreaming, sometimes even
over his food.
Little Heinie had almost immediately fallen asleep, leaning against
the table, a ring of brown curls and two big ears catching the light as
it played about his bent head.
Yes, that was the way they would be sitting if she were not there,
if she were dead. She felt thinly miserable, like something that had
been and no longer was ... like her own ghost. Irma was wiping her
spectacles again.
"Give me the mending," said her sister-in-law, but somewhat timidly,
she never quite knew what Irma would do, "I haven't used my eyes today."
Irma passed it over to her silently and changed places with her. She
felt a little less useless then; coming into the circle of light with
the boys seemed to take her out of that shadowy, unpleasant world where
superfluous, dependent old women were waiting uncertainly, wretchedly,
to get into the cold grave. No, Irma's ways were not comfortable ways,
and it was all a part of the general misfit of things that it was Irma
who was the widow and had the alcove and the three sons and needed help.
When from time to time Ferry coughed, just a tiny cough, but quite
regular, almost like the slow, sure tick of the clock, his mother's
black brows would contract at that spectre of the "Viennese malady"
which had found its way into her home. Her sister-in-law wasn't the
only ghost there.
Irma was from the Plitvicer Lakes, beyond Agram, now become Serb.
There was always that something rough, even fierce about her, not at
all like the easy-going Viennese, not like the fiery Hungarians, not
like anything Frau Stacher was familiar with. Perhaps it was what had
attracted Heinie. But she was vaguely afraid of it.
Irma had at one time tried to go back to her own country, to her
people, with her sons--a woman bringing sons would be welcome. Then
the extraordinary, the unbelievable thing revealed itself. She found
she didn't exist there any more, no more than if she were dead; less
than that even, for then she would have had a grave. Austrian papers
were of no use to her and Servian papers she could not get. The little
town where she was born, on the wild Milanovac Lake was no longer a
Crownland. Her people were no longer her people; even her brother was
no longer her brother. The white house with the warm brown roof and
the vine growing over the door that got so red in the autumn, and the
chestnut tree that got so yellow, there in front with the circular
seat--all that, their father's legacy to them--she no longer had any
share in it. There were, it appeared, many of these spots, these
veritable no man's lands, where children had no rights and strange
people went over thresholds worn by parental feet and strange people
slept in the beds they were born in. If only she could have gone back
there with her boys and wrested her living in some way from the wild
soil, ... and Ferry in the mountain air! No wonder Irma was sombre,
was fierce, and bore her sorrows heavily.
Frau Stacher kept reminding herself of all this, but what could she
or anybody do about it? They were all caught in a trap ... simple and
terrible as that. As she sat measuring the tuck in a shirt sleeve, she
was suddenly aware of being worn to exhaustion with the changes and
excitements of the new order of her days. Such desperate exertions
just to keep the breath in her body! She wanted to get her clothes
off, lie down, shut her eyes, be in darkness with the effortless night
before her. But she sat on silently, drawing the thread weakly in and
out of the thin stuff and now and then looking up at the boys. They
were pale, but they were young. They could--even Ferry--expect more
brightly-colored, fuller years. But for herself!... With difficulty she
kept the tears from falling over her work, but only when Irma said:
"Now, boys, to bed, you've studied enough," did she feel free to lay it
aside.
Then Irma quite ostentatiously told the children to say good night,
though Ferry was already leaning affectionately, after his way, against
his aunt and saying that he would help make up the divan, but Irma
who suffered terribly from jealousy and could ill endure these signs
of love, told him it was late and that she would help Tante Ilde. The
three then kissed her resoundingly, but sleepily. When she felt the
nearness of those young bodies, their adolescent strength held in leash
by that sapping undernourishment, she realized all the more that she
was useless, her sands run. She forgot that she was paying for the
alcove and wondered if this was the way things would always be, as she
finally laid herself down on the old brown divan, on that divan that
had for years been in the sitting room at Baden, and when all the beds
were in use had offered a pleasant night's rest to the last-come child.
Now she was sleeping on it herself, but as an intruder, fitfully,
unquietly, from time to time hearing Ferry cough and turn in his bed,
and always Irma's loud, empty snore.
III
ANNA AND PAULI
_Innig, lebhaft._
Du meine Seele, du mein Herz,
Du meine Wonn', O du mein Schmerz.
Pauli Birbach especially disliked the Mariahilferstrasse, an endless
street. Here and there a century-old peasant house caught up in the
tide of the growing city; here and there some rococo palais in a side
street visible from a corner; here and there a great department store.
But mostly there were little shops, little businesses connected with
little lives, the lives of the middle and lower middle classes that
crowded its interminability. The true motive power of every one in that
street in those post-war years, and in every one of the side streets,
no matter what their condition in life, was the desire for food.
Indescribable meannesses were practised, crimes even, were committed
for a bit of fat, a little sugar or molasses. Those who weren't
actually confronted with starvation had that terrible hunger for fats,
for sweets, a hunger that touched the brain, that could arouse in
the gentlest soul cruel, predatory thoughts. Now and then the rumor
would get about that a certain delicatessen shop had cheese or salami.
It would be stormed by those who had money to buy, and the entrance
encumbered by those who could only see, or others more fortunate, who
could get near enough to smell. Those who had reason to get in were few
in comparison to the many who remained outside. Indeed the only peace
in Vienna was that which reigned inside certain expensive provision
shops.
Pauli's dislike of the Mariahilfer street was profound and
temperamental. He liked things diversified and grandiose. Mariahilfer
street was neither. Now it was more than ever depressing in that drab,
monotonous struggle for survival. Any one of the indwellers knew
how near the potter's field was, the hospital, the asylum. A little
sagging of endeavor and they would find themselves in one or another
of those undesirable places. Anna had stupidly, tactlessly taken that
apartment during the war, when her husband was away, and before the
housing problem had come to add the difficulty of shelter to that of
nourishment. He had said to himself when he learned of the new address:
"Now isn't that just like Anna--the one street I hate in Vienna."
She had crowded their furniture, but uncosily, into the restricted
space. There were three sofas in the living room and various tables
besides the one they used for their meals. No books in Anna's home any
more than in Liesel's. A similar glass compartment above a somewhat
similar desk held an accumulation of bric-à-brac of purely family
interest. Two white and gilt cups bearing the words "dem lieben
Vater," "der lieben Mutter" that had been Hermine's first gifts to
her parents for their morning coffee; several solemn vases that on
various occasions the women had presented to each other, and in whose
narrow necks outraged flowers always wilted; a slab of wood with the
Castle of Salzburg painted on it against a blue background; a group
of carved wooden bears from Innsbruck and other souvenirs of the days
when they travelled. Some gay Dresden china figures in minuet postures
immediately struck the eye, that Pauli had given Anna when they were
first married, now extraordinarily out of keeping with the paralysis of
their conjugal life.
The sofa cushions were in dull linen, worked in dull colors and bore
the usual mottoes: "Nur ein viertel Stuendchen," "Traeume suess" and
the like.
The once too-bright pattern of the Brussels rug had faded into browns
and greys. The various chairs carried on their backs and arms their
ugly, witless, crocheted doilies.
Even over Tante Ilde's gay little brass-bound chest, containing dear
but unsalable odds and ends, Anna had thrown a brown cloth cover
worked sparsely in white and yellow daisies.
There was something dead about it all and about the two dull women the
expression of whose being it was.
To Pauli, gay, sparkling, eager, passionate Pauli, it was as pleasant
to visit his home as it would have been to visit the cemetery. In one
corner was the table on which, wrapped in a scarlet cloth, was Pauli's
zimbalon. It was the only thing in the dwelling that spoke of its
master. It was the bright flower on the grave, and too, he visited his
home not much oftener than he would have visited Anna had she been
lying in the Central Cemetery.
One of those stupid, fatal marriages. Anna had never understood
anything about it, either the making or the unmaking of it. But she
continued to love him with all the force of her poor being, and
accepted, because she had to, his now habitual absence.
Pauli's mother had been a Hungarian and in his bright Magyar way he had
long since put the dots on the "ies" of the conjugal situation: "Anna?
Dead since years. She ought to wear a bead wreath."
That sombre flame in her eyes that from time to time he was
unpleasantly aware of was, indeed, no more attractive to him than the
phosphorescence shining about something decayed.
Sometimes he felt a brief pity for Hermine, his daughter, so young,
so unattractive, so mirthless. "The poor girl" he would think, and
then his thoughts would turn to fairer, brighter maids who might have
been called poor for quite other reasons. To be a woman and not have
beauty, grace--more or less--was in Pauli Birbach's eyes her one real
misfortune. Women's beauty was, indeed, the central point in his world,
that artistic, pleasure-loving, pleasure-giving world in which he was
at home. He used to think that if he had married any one of Heinrich
Bruckner's daughters save Anna he could have managed,--but just Anna.
He sometimes thought too, that if he could have explained why he had
sighed to possess Anna he could have explained any and all of the
puzzles of the Universe. It held indeed all riddles within itself.
But for the last year it had not been any one of Herr Bruckner's
handsome daughters. Since a certain day when he had gone with Corinne
to Kaethe's ... since that day when the simplest yet mightiest thing
had happened....
They had been standing at a window waiting for the rain to stop. They
were very near as they looked out. Suddenly Pauli had been aware of a
profound commotion in his being ... something hot and sweet and cruel
and his own. He was seeing Corinne as he had never before seen any
woman. She was deadly pale, her eyes were closed, her dark lashes
lying heavily upon her cheeks. When she opened them and looked back at
him the hovering magic, descending upon them had worked its purpose.
He was done suddenly and forever with the pluckable maids,
perpetually ripe fruit, all seasons being theirs, that abound in
Vienna; inaccessible too, to the sentiments that he had periodically
experienced for one or another woman who had crossed his susceptible
and magnetic orbit, whom he had possessed or not possessed, as the case
might have been. It was different from everything else under the sun
and was growing, growing. It was hope and image in his brain, greed and
hurry in his body. He was mad for Corinne, Corinne earning unnaturally
yet competently her daily bread in a bank when she should have been
holding court under some oak at the change of the midsummer moon.
Corinne placing endless, neat zeroes across broad, white pages when she
should have been plucking simples or brewing potions. That elfin brood
that crowded her pale heart overpowered his being, held it captive. One
would have said he needed something brighter, hotter.... Yet,
Corinne ... out of the whole world.... But that none of them knew as
yet save Tante Ilde in her shy, sure way. Anna, who never got things
straight, had a deep, dull jealousy of Fanny, a sentiment, however,
that she had been familiar with since her earliest childhood, and when
indirectly she learned that Pauli had seen Fanny, she was miserable
for days, after her chill, slow habit, miserable unto death almost.
She suspected Fanny of having made that arrangement about Tante Ilde;
Fanny, though one never saw her, was always everywhere it seemed to
Anna. Two dull fires had burned in Anna's eyes, two sombre red spots
had darkened her cheeks, excitement never lighted up her face, when she
learned not only that her aunt Ilde was to come and regularly, every
Tuesday, but that Pauli himself would cast his bright shadow over his
own dark threshold on that day. She and Hermine began straightway to
plan as attractive a menu as lack of talent and materials permitted....
When Corinne had asked Pauli if Anna couldn't take Tante Ilde once a
week for her midday meal, he had responded warmly, not simply to give
Corinne pleasure, but because he was made that way.
"But of course! The poor, dear Tanterl, I'll tell Anna to get the best
she can, you know she's not very clever at it, and I'll try to be there
myself."
Pauli was doubtless various kinds of a sinner, but his humanity
was always to be counted on. It wasn't because Corinne was looking
obliquely at him, with the look that stirred him hotly, madly....
Anna and Hermine talked ceaselessly of the possibilities or rather the
impossibilities of the meal. Hermine even went into her mother's bed
two successive nights and stayed there late. The various Hungarian
dishes he was so fond of presented immense difficulties. Those that
didn't need a lot of sugar, milk and eggs, needed a lot of butter, lard
or fat of some kind. Even love did not make Anna inventive and people
never sold her anything as they did to Liesel because they wanted to
see her smile when she got it. They passed in review one by one those
tantalizing dishes, pulling up round at a Paprikahuhn, chicken in
paprika. It rose up and clucked a ghostly cluck out of happier kitchen
days. But where to get that chicken in the flesh? It was no easier than
getting a tropical bird of bright plumage and stripping it. He liked
sweet things too, Kaiserschmarrn with a lot of powdered sugar on it, or
Palatschinken, those traditional pancakes, filled heavily with jam.