Part 5

Suddenly her aunt's eyes had filled with tears:

"It would make me so truly happy," she entreated. Then Otto had cried:

"But yes, little goose, let Tante Ilde do as she will!"

So Liesel stayed with Otto and as Tante Ilde went in and out she could hear them talking as if they hadn't seen each other for a week, trying to decide if they would go, that very evening, to a cosy little cabaret in the Annagasse, a stone's throw from their house and Liesel wear her new pink dress; or whether they would go to the Circus Busch movie in the Prater Stern, where it didn't matter what you wore and where they were giving a wonderful moral drama in six acts called "Sinful Blood," and where they would hold hands in the dark just as if they weren't going to spend the night together.

Tante Ilde herself even began to hum that waltz tune from the Graf von Luxenburg, though she had long been nobody's "dear little wife."

When she was putting tenderly away in the tiny cupboard the white plates with the gold "S" that Liesel was also "keeping" for her, she got suddenly a quite unexpected whiff of the once familiar salami, proceeding irrepressibly from a tightly-tied up little package.

"Sausage for Otto's supper!" she murmured to herself, and then wondered if she were mistaken, though Liesel _was_ equal to anything ... but all without any envy. She'd had a good meal, flavored with love and happiness, and suddenly a thousand other thoughts and feelings pressed in upon her that she'd forgotten existed. She was increasingly glad of Liesel's youth and love, that out of the starving, mourning city she had grasped her comfortable joy....

Finally Otto saying warmly, "auf Wiedersehen, Auntie," had given her a sounding kiss on both cheeks, and placing several on Liesel's red lips had contentedly limped off to the Ministry.

Then Liesel had proceeded to initiate her into some of the secrets of 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.