Part 6

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.

During the earlier years of Anna's married life, when Pauli saw how things culinary were going, a young Hungarian servant had been sent him by one of his sisters. She was an excellent cook and had taught Anna in a way, a lot of things, but she had been landed, like all good cooks, in the net of marriage, and was succeeded in the Birbach household by various maids of varying and inferior talents. But Anna really didn't know good food from bad, and she got careless too. Pauli was oftener and longer absent, and then the War came and then the Peace. Pauli by no means let them starve, but he didn't see his way to keeping those two ghosts, who unnaturally bore his name, supplied with the delicacies or, to be more exact, the relative delicacies of post-war Vienna, that oftener than not they would spoil in the cooking.

He had his two sisters, widowed on the same day of the war, and their broods of little children to support. It had not been so difficult to care for them at first for they had taken their children and gone back to the house of their mother near Groswardein, that comfortable Landhaus that they had all three inherited with its acres bearing wine and grain. But when they thought the war was over they suddenly found themselves one dark night fleeing with the rest of the inhabitants before an unexpected army. After days they got into Budapest and when the panic had abated and they wanted to go back, they found to their consternation that though they were still Hungarian their lands had become Roumanian. Some dark, transmuting evil had been worked. Suddenly they had no civil state there where they were born and no longer possessed what their parents had bequeathed them ... as unbelievable as that.... Pauli enabled them to eke out a reduced existence with their many children in some rooms on the outskirts of Pesth.

The comfortable Landhaus with its pink walls, its green shutters, its sloping roof, the grapevine growing up over the door, the great plane tree in the garden, became as a lost paradise to be described to children at the knee,--with hints of recovery when they were old enough to fight for their own.

Though Anna suspected that Pauli supported his sisters and in her heart was bitter about it, she had no courage and less opportunity to reproach him with it.

Pauli loved his sisters very much, especially his sister Mimi, and he had never told her the tale of Geza's death brought back by his comrade. How they were to charge a certain hill in Galicia one chilly autumn dawn in the face of the enemy, waiting millions of them, it seemed, after the Russian way of lavish cannon-food. How Geza naturally a laughing man had been leaden-hearted as they went up side by side; even the schnapps served out to the troops had not put heart into him. He had said, "I'm going up because I must, but it's quite useless--I'll never come down again."... Geza loved life ... and when they got up to the top immediately a great splinter of shell struck him in the chest and he looked a last reproachful look at his comrade as he fell against him.... The end of Geza who loved life.

No, Pauli couldn't bear to think of that. Some day he meant to tell Mimi of those cruel last moments, when Geza knew, knew that his end was near.

... Perhaps he never would, and then again the day might come when it wouldn't hurt Mimi so much. The children would never understand. And it would be as if Geza, heavy with premonition, had never charged that hill and said those last words,--as if he had never been at all. That was the way of life, but Pauli didn't like to think of it ... all that being no more ... as if you had never been; his bright, strong flesh rejected it.

He was, somewhat vaguely to his wife, in business that brought with it frequent mention of the Travel Bureau in the Kaerntnerring and entailed many absences. They had grown accustomed to his travels, and anyway the thoughts of his wife and daughter ran, with that of the rest of the population on what they were going to eat and how they were going to get it, rather than on the coming or going of any non-edible, even husband and father. So, though they were among the relatively well-to-do in the starving city, the two women talked almost entirely of what they had eaten or were going to eat and Hermine was to experience her greatest enthusiasms when scurrying home with a bit of fat or a can of jam.

* * * * *

The difficulty of getting to Anna's from the Hoher Markt was occupying Frau Stacher's thoughts as she lay awake in the early dawn, watching the day grow stronger, till she could see Haydn leading the young Mozart by the hand, and the gilt of the flat, white vase on the bracket underneath began to glisten faintly in the dull light coming in over the top of the curtains.

The trolley that she could take at the Opernring was itself far off and the fares had jumped up to prohibitive prices. Foreigners, workmen and Jews alone had the wherewithal. She decided finally as she proceeded, soundlessly as possible, to make the limited toilet the alcove permitted, that she would walk. The hot cup of ersatz coffee with the ersatz sugar and the thin slice of gritty bread seemed somehow quite sufficient. She had entirely lost that wild hunger of the night before, so curiously the result of the tasty meal at Liesel's. She made up her divan, put her things in order and carefully pulled back the curtains of the alcove. She had been made aware, the morning before, that Irma liked to have them drawn back early and tight, and certainly it did give a more spacious aspect to the living room, off which were the two little bed chambers, one occupied by Irma with her youngest boy and the other by Ferry and Gusl. Except for the fading photograph, on the chest of drawers, of the long dead Commercial Advisor in its wooden frame of carved Edelweiss, got when he and his bride had gone to Switzerland, his widow was completely wiped out of that living space. She felt no more at ease there than if she were suspended in mid-air, or pressed into some shadowy yet too-narrow dimension,--in a word horribly uncomfortable....

The boys had had their cocoa, their thick slices of bread so carefully measured and cut, and had gone off to school. Heinie would get a midday meal at a relief station near the seat of learning, which provided for one scholar out of each needy family each day. The three boys took turns, coming home for dinner on alternate days. There was a fierceness about Irma where food for the boys was in question. When they had licked their spoons and looked about at the empty plates on the table, with their eyes a trifle too big, and Ferry with those bright spots on each cheek, Irma's jaw would set and her brow darken. Not long before she had discovered however, a way of adding to their nourishment ... the "Friends" in the Singerstrasse ... you received a ticket there and then you went to the Franzensplatz to get the package. But as the endeavor of the various foreign relief societies was not to fully nourish any one family or quarter at the expense of other families and quarters, but to the best of their limited ability to keep as large a part as possible of the two and one half millions from actually dying of hunger, that relief in any one case was only palliative....

When Tante Ilde set out on that tramp to Anna's dressed again in her best things,--Pauli always noticed what women wore, even old women,--she left Irma planning the midday meal. Irma in an extraordinarily fortunate way had got hold of some chicken legs,--it would never happen again she was sure, being inclined to pessimism. She had scraped and washed them, and was going to cook them with the rice. Furthermore into the rice she was going to put a little of the evaporated milk that had come in the thrice blessed package from the Franzensplatz, it would be nearly equal to meat. Enough for three plates full, two large ones for Gusl and for little Heinie and a smaller one for herself. A box of zwieback had come in the package too, and a piece for each would be dipped into some of the milk. It was a good day and she warmly returned Tante Ilde's farewell and told her she hoped Anna would have something fit to eat. She had a feeling that she couldn't get rid of, that some day Tante Ilde would have a cold or something and wouldn't be able to get out. However sufficient unto the day, and that morning she was almost affectionate.

When Frau Stacher got down into the street a great puff of wind caught her and slapped her dress about her legs, but she disentangled herself and stepped, not unbriskly, into the Rotenthurm Street. The day was cold and overcast, but the rain had not yet begun to fall. She passed St. Stephen's, crossing herself as she did so and got into the Kaerntner Street. In spite of the chill dampness and the great slaps of wind doing full honor to the reputation of the windiest of cities, (the Windobona of the Romans, that name on which generations of windswept inhabitants have made their jokes and puns), she felt more at home than in the alcove. After all the pavement was free to everybody, just as much hers, when you came down to it, as anybody's. Quite unlike the alcove which in some pervasive, though not at all indefinite way, seemed not to be hers. She tried to comfort herself with the thought that she was paying for it, just as Irma decently tried to remember that fact. But Irma clearly wanted to be alone with her children. Irma's nerves, for all her seeming bodily health, were certainly in a bad way....

Passing down the Kaerntner Street Frau Stacher stood a moment looking in at Zwieback's windows, such warm stuffs in such bright colors were displayed, gay knitted Jerseys and scarves,--a purple one that would have lain consolingly against her pale thinness. There were silk stockings too, beribboned underwear and in another window incredible evening dresses. Who on earth wore evening dresses--now? She remembered how she had got her grey silk dress there for Kaethe's wedding. In the old days she had shopped just like anybody else, buying things she didn't need and would soon forget she had....

Then suddenly she found that her heart was beating thickly. She was passing Fanny's corner, timidly looking away from it, magnetically drawn to it; the pavement seemed somehow alive under her feet.... She longed yet feared to meet Fanny; Fanny wrapped to her sea-blue eyes in her scented furs, Fanny young and beautiful, Fanny who knew neither cold nor hunger, nor about being unwanted. Fanny's desirability, though it brought no images with it, sent the blood pounding up darkly to her face....

But she was white again as she passed the Hotel Erzherzog Johann, remembering with a sudden stab how she had always driven there in a drosky when she came to Vienna from Baden for a day's shopping, and how pleasant that great, laughing, singing city had seemed. Now the iridescence had gone out of it. It was drab where once it had gleamed with a thousand vivid tints; beggarly where it had dispensed with a lavish unconcern.

She had been in the habit of taking her dinner at the Erzherzog Johann's, the proprietor had been a friend of her husband's. The old head waiter would always greet her warmly as a friend of the house he had served so long, and he would recommend a quarter of a roast chicken, the wing and breast, of course, and tell her how the noodles had been made fresh in the hotel that very morning, and then wind up by singing the merits of a Linzer or Sacher tart.

She'd leave her bundles there and come back at four o'clock for her coffee with whipped cream, and he'd cut her a slice of the fresh gugelhupf. Such happy days. She hadn't really had the slightest idea how happy they were; she thought how she had often worried about the stupidest things. She became conscious of an increasing sadness as she passed on down the street, realizing miserably how little human beings make of their actual blessings, whatever they may be, and she found herself sending up a prayer to be trusted with a little happiness,--just once more. She thought how never, never again, should they miraculously be hers, would she take as rightful dues her three meals a day, her comfortable bed, her clothes befitting the seasons, but that always, up from her heart would well thanks to the mysterious Giver or Withholder of these things.

She felt a little faint as she hurried past the delicatessen shop on the corner. There wasn't much in the windows; food wasn't kept in windows in those days, but inside there would doubtless be a maddening smell of cheese and sausage.

A one-legged young man, his leg gone to the thigh, in a tattered combination of military and civil coverings, stood always on that corner selling his miserable shoe laces....

But there was another note, quite another, that rang lustily out from the Kaerntner Street, for there the new feudal lords of Vienna, (which inevitably has lords of some kind), walked with ringing tread in the triumph of their plenty. That mushroom aristocracy come out of Israel and the war had pushed into some shadowy, scrawny underbrush of life that once great, powerful "First Society."

As Frau Stacher got near the Bristol the flooding crowd seemed almost entirely made up of large, showily-dressed women and bright, alert, stout men, whose prosperity was immediate and inescapable. Before it her seventy years of gentility were swept up, a bit of dust, into her otherwise bare corner. What had she to do with that new princedom arisen from the ruins of the war, or it with her? Their ways, their gestures, their looks were alien, inimical to those of the Princes, Counts and Barons of that old world; that old world the pride and joy even of those not of it. What the new Lords did and how they lived was a mystery to Frau Stacher that she had no desire to solve. Her fear increased. She felt but a bit of pallid wreckage in the flooding of that active, highly-colored element. It beat against her suffocatingly, frighteningly, that new blood flowing vehemently in Vienna's veins, its only blood indeed. In the familiar street she was both stranger and outcast daughter. She couldn't even look at the Bristol, whither so many of those new lords seemed bent, there where people still crumbled their bread at dinner instead of eating it.... It was Fanny's world. Perhaps even now Fanny would be on her way there with her light, straight, flying step, like a bird in the air. They all knew that walk of Fanny's....

That first comfortable feeling of owning the pavement, of independence had gone. She was increasingly confused by the myriad signs and symbols of money of which she had none. Everywhere "Cambio-Valute," "Devisen" in gilt letters, and banknotes laid out in patterns in the windows ... exchange bureaux, in which unholy rites were performed by those chosen men standing fatly, firmly on gold, while the rest of Vienna tottered and fell on paper. She was exhausted too, by the buffeting of the everlasting wind, and she suddenly and recklessly decided to take the three hundred crowns remaining in her purse and get on the trolley. There was one at the very corner that, mercifully, would take her up the interminability of the Mariahilfer Street. After lunch the wind would perhaps have fallen and she could walk back. She tried not to think how far it would be. She was too spent for thought by her impact with that new world, that world that suddenly had too much, trampling to death the world that almost as suddenly had too little or nothing. Outcast indeed.

The crowd was thickly waiting at the stopping place. In the rush for seats as the trolley slowed down, she was pushed frighteningly but fortunately along and up the high step and in a second found herself sitting, breathless and hidden between a man with a large sack of something that had, to the eager eyes of the other occupants, the interesting appearance of flour, and a pale young woman with a spindle-legged, big-eyed child of four or five in her arms. In her sympathy with the young mother and the doomed child and her relief at being seated Frau Stacher forgot her hunger and her fatigue and delivered herself up to the delightful sensation of being borne clangingly, powerfully along. She descended quite lightly at the crowded stopping place, though she was jostled and jammed again by the crowd fighting to get in. Crossing over she turned into a grey little street and entering a sombre doorway went up to the apartment where Anna was awaiting her husband and her aunt.

There was an air of expectancy about the room as Frau Stacher entered that somewhat relieved its terrible dullness. On the table was a fresh, fine linen cloth, from the days of comfort, and four places were set; a bottle of pale Tokay, like a streak of sunlight caught the eye. There was something sadly festive about it.

"I thought it was Pauli when I heard you outside in the hall," were Anna's words as she opened the door. But her aunt accepted the vicarious greeting without indeed noticing it. They all knew about Anna. That was the way she was.

Her heavy dark hair that Tante Ilde had once so faithfully brushed back into beauty was braided in a thick braid and twisted twice around her head; but when you had said that about Anna, that was all there was to be remarked. The rest was long, faded, shadowy. From those once noticeably broad, fine shoulders, now simply gaunt, her thin breast fell away into her flat waist above her bony hips. There was not one single thing about Anna Birbach to cause anyone to suspect that she belonged to a smiling, art-loving, easy-going, fatalistic race, with something of the West and much of the East in its make-up. Indeed the broad highway that leads east from the city is the straight road to the Orient, is already the Orient. Something only vaguely diagnosable, but highly-colored, slips in through that Eastern Gate to tint more deeply the Viennese population, a happy enough mixture when only a tenth of them, not nine-tenths, are starving. Hunger there has always been in Vienna. Even in the days of plenty there were thousands who, palely shadowing the street corners had nothing,--the bare, spectral want of the East without its sun and leisure....

Hermine was in the kitchen. She had no more knack at cooking than her mother, but the War had caught her in her earliest youth and the Peace had taught her a few lessons of culinary survival,--though her omelettes would always be hard and her pancakes tough.

The smell of the onions in the potato soup had its own peculiar charm, however. Tante Ilde found that she was very hungry and she was quite ashamed of certain uncontrollable, rolling sounds that proceeded from the empty region beneath her belt.

Anna began immediately to tell her that they had finally decided on a goulash,--it was safer and simpler to make than anything else. Both Hermine and her mother had an uneasy knowledge that Pauli was critical in regard to food, though he wouldn't say a word if a dish hadn't turned out right; only he wouldn't be seen again for a couple of months. Instinctively desiring to flatter him they had kept as far as possible along Hungarian lines; the potato soup had been a second choice, for Hermine's imagination had played at first opaquely about a Halászle, a fish soup that he loved, but she had no fish and she didn't know how to make it, so she slumped back on the potato soup as offering least resistance. She was hoping for great things from the Palatschinken, however, she had the batter prepared for cooking at the physiological moment and the can of gluey apricot jam (ersatz) was already open. Both women were obviously quite excited. Anna had those dull, maroon spots on her cheeks; Hermine was paler than usual and kept running into the kitchen and coming back and changing something on the table. It was a quarter of an hour later when they heard the somewhat rusty sound of the master's key in the door. He still kept that key hanging on his chain, though for all the use he made of it the bell would have sufficed. "The key of the cemetery" he called it to himself and was thankful as he went in that he would find Tante Ilde there among the graves.