The Post Office Girl

PART ONE

O
NE VILLAGE
post office in Austria is much like another: seen one and you’ve seen them all. Each with identical meager
furnishings
provided (or rather issued, like uniforms) during Franz Josef’s rule, all drawn from the same stock, their sad look of
administrative
stinginess is the same everywhere. Even in the most remote mountain villages of the Tyrol, in the shadow of the glaciers, they stubbornly retain that unmistakable odor of old Austrian officialdom, a smell of stale cheap tobacco and dusty files. The layout never varies: a wooden partition perforated by glass wickets divides the room, according to a precisely
prescribed
ratio, into This Side and That Side—the public sphere and the official one. The state’s failure to give much thought to the significant amount of time spent by its citizens in the public area is clear from the absence of seating or any other amenities. In most cases the only piece of furniture in the public area is a rickety stand-up desk propped against the wall, its cracked oilcloth covered with innumerable inkblots, though no one can remember finding anything but congealed, moldy, unusable goo in the recessed inkwell, and if there happens to be a pen lying in the grooved gutter, the nib is always bent and useless. The thrifty Treasury attaches as little significance to beauty as to comfort: since the Republic took Franz Josef’s picture down, what might be called interior decoration is limited to the garish posters on the dirty whitewashed walls inviting one to attend exhibitions which have long since closed, to buy lottery tickets, and even, in certain neglectful offices, to take out war loans.
With these cheap wall coverings and possibly an admonition not to smoke, heeded by no one, the state’s generosity to the public ends.

But the area beyond the official barrier evidently demands more respect. Here the state arrays the unmistakable symbols of its power and reach. The iron safe in the corner may actually contain considerable sums from time to time, or so the bars on the windows seem to suggest. The centerpiece gleaming on the wheeled worktable is a well-polished brass telegraph; next to it the more unassuming telephone receiver sleeps on a black nickel cradle. These two items are accorded a certain amount of space betokening honor and respect, for, via copper wires, they link the tiny, remote village with the width and breadth of the Reich. The other postal implements are forced to crowd together: the package scales and weights, the letter bags, books, folders, brochures, and index files, the petty cash, the black, blue, red, and indigo pencils, the clips and clasps, the twine, sealing wax, moistening sponge, and blotter, the gum arabic, the knives and scissors, the bookbinder’s bone folder, all the varied equipment of the postal service lies in a jumble on a desk hardly broader than a forearm is long, while the many drawers and boxes hold an inconceivable profusion of papers and forms, each different from the last. But the seeming extravagance with which these objects are scattered about is deceptive, for every last piece of this cheap equipment is stealthily and inexorably enumerated by the state. From this pencil stub to that torn stamp, from the frayed blotter sheet to the used bar of soap in the metal sink, from the lightbulb illuminating the office to the iron key for locking it up, the Treasury is unyielding in demanding that its employees
account
for each and every piece of public property either in use or consumed. Next to the iron stove hangs a detailed
inventory
, typewritten, officially stamped, and bearing an illegible signature, which catalogues with relentless precision even the
humblest and most worthless items in the post office in
question
. No object not on this list has any place in the official area, and, conversely, every item entered on it must be present and to hand at all times. Orderly and by the book—that’s the official way of doing things.

It stands to reason that this typed inventory would also
specify
the individual whose job it is to raise the wicket every day at eight o’clock, the one who sets in motion the inert implements, who opens the mailbags, stamps the letters, pays the postal orders, and writes the receipts, who weighs the packages and deploys the blue, the red, the indigo pencils to scrawl strange hieroglyphics on them, who lifts the telephone receiver and switches on the telegraph machine. But for some reason the name of this individual, known to the public as a postal official or the postmaster, is not listed there. The name is on another official record, in another drawer, in another section of the postal administration, but is similarly kept on file, updated, and subject to review.

Within this official area sanctified by the bureaucratic
aristocracy
, no visible change is allowed. The eternal law of growth and decline is suspended at the barrier of officialdom; while outside, around the building, trees come into bloom and become bare again, children grow up and die old and gray, buildings fall into ruin and rise again in another form, the bureaucracy demonstrates its more than earthly power by staying the same forever. For any object within this sphere which is used up or worn out or lost is replaced by another identical object,
requisitioned
and delivered by the appropriate agency, thus providing the inconstant world with an example of the superiority of the powers that be. The substance passes, the form remains. On the wall hangs a calendar. Each day a page is torn off, seven times a week, thirty times a month. By December 31 the calendar has been used up, but a new one has been ordered, in the same format, the same size, the same style; the year changes, but the
calendar remains the same. On the table is a columned ledger book. When the left side is filled, the amount is carried to the right, and so on from one page to the next. When the last page is full and the end of the book has been reached, a new one is begun, of the same type, in the same format, indistinguishable from the old one. Whatever disappears is back the next day, as unchanging as the work of the office, and thus the same objects lie immutably on the same tabletop, always the identical pages and pencils and clips and forms, always different and always the same. Nothing leaves this realm of the Treasury, nothing is added to it, life goes on here without fading or flowering, or rather death never ends. The many kinds of objects differ only in their rhythm of attrition and renewal, not in their fate. A pencil lasts a week; then it has run its course and is replaced by an identical new one. A postal service manual lasts a month, a lightbulb three months, a calendar a year. The rush-seat chair is allotted three years until it’s due to be replaced, the individual who sits out his life on it some thirty or thirty-five years of service; then a new individual is seated on the chair, just the same as the old one.

In 1926, in the post office in Klein-Reifling, an
inconsequential
village not far from Krems, some two hours by train from Vienna, this interchangeable fixture “civil servant” is a member of the female sex and, as this facility belongs to a lower census class, has the bureaucratic designation of postal official. Not much more of her is visible through the wicket than the pleasant profile of an ordinary young woman, somewhat
thin-lipped
and pale and with a hint of circles under the eyes; late in the day, when she turns on the harsh electric lights, a close observer might notice a few slight lines on her forehead and wrinkles around her eyes. Still, this young woman, along with the hollyhocks in the window and the sprig of elder that she has put in the metal washbasin today for her own pleasure, is easily the freshest thing in the Klein-Reifling post office; she seems
good for at least another twenty-five years of service. Her hand with its pale fingers will raise and lower the same rattly wicket thousands upon thousands of times more, will toss hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of letters onto the canceling desk with the same swiveling motion, will slam the blackened brass canceler onto hundreds of thousands or millions of stamps with the same brief thump. Probably the wrist will even learn to function better and better, ever more mechanically and unconsciously, detached more and more completely from the conscious self. The hundreds of thousands of letters will always be different letters, but always letters. The stamps different stamps, but always stamps. The days different, but each one lasting from eight o’clock until noon, from two o’clock until six o’clock, and the work of the office, as the years come and go, always the same, the same, the same.

Perhaps, behind her wicket on this soundless summer morning, the ash-blond postal official herself is musing about these events to come, or perhaps she’s just lost in a languid daydream. In any case her hands, unoccupied, have slipped off the worktable and into her lap, where they rest, folded, slender, tired, pale. On this blue, stiflingly hot July morning, there’s little to do in the Klein-Reifling post office. The morning’s work is done, the hunchbacked, tobacco-chewing postman Hinterfellner has long since delivered the letters, there will be no packages or trade samples from the factory arriving for shipment before evening, and the country people have neither the time nor the inclination to write to anyone just now. The peasants are far off in the vineyards, hoeing under the shelter of their yard-wide straw hats, while the children on summer
vacation
romp bare-legged in the brook, and the irregular pavement outside the door lies empty in the seething, brassy noontime blaze. It’s good to be inside now, good to dream. The papers and official forms doze in their drawers and on their shelves in the shadows cast by the lowered blinds, the metal office
equipment glints feebly and lazily through the golden half-light. Silence covers everything like thick golden dust, except for a miniature summer concert: the thin violins of the gnats and the dusky cello of a bumblebee caught between the windowpanes. The only thing in constant motion in the room (somewhat cooler now) is the wood-framed clock on the wall between the windows, which gulps down a drop of time every second. But it’s a weak, monotonous sound, lulling rather than stimulating. Thus the postal official sits in a kind of pleasant waking
paralysis
at the center of her little sleeping world. She’d meant to do some needlework—this is clear from the needles and scissors there at hand—but she has neither the will nor the strength to pick up the embroidery lying rumpled on the floor. She leans back comfortably in her chair, hardly breathing, eyes closed, and basks in the strange and wonderful feeling of permissible idleness.

Clack! She starts. And again, harder, more metallic, more insistent: clack, clack, clack. The telegraph hammers wildly, the mechanism whirs: that rare visitor to Klein-Reifling, a
telegram
, is requesting a respectful reception. The postal official pulls herself out of her lazy half sleep, moves quickly to the wheeled table, and starts the tape. But no sooner has she
deciphered
the first words of unwinding type than she feels herself flushing to the roots of her hair: she’s never seen her own name on a telegram here. Now the entire dispatch has been banged out. She reads it once, twice, three times and still doesn’t
understand
. What can this be? Who could be sending her a telegram from Pontresina? “Christine Hoflehner, Klein-Reifling, Austria, Welcome, come any time, choose your day, wire arrival time in advance. Best, Claire—Anthony.” She ponders: Who is this Anthony who’s expecting her? Is somebody in the office playing a silly prank? But then she remembers something her mother said weeks ago, that her aunt would be coming over to Europe this summer, and, that’s right, her name is Klara. And Anthony,
that must be Klara’s husband, Anton is the name her mother has always used. Yes, now it’s coming back, a few days ago there was a letter for her mother from Cherbourg—Christine herself took it to her. She was tight-lipped about it, didn’t say what it was. But this telegram is addressed to her, Christine. Does it mean she’s supposed to go up to Pontresina to see her aunt? There’s been no mention of it. Her eyes return to the still-unglued tape, the only telegram she’s ever received in her own name here. She reads and rereads the strange document, at a loss, curious, disbelieving, confused. No, it can’t possibly wait until her lunch hour. She has to ask her mother what it all means right now. She snatches up the key, locks the office, and runs home. In her excitement she neglects to disconnect the arm of the telegraph; the brass hammer, forgotten in the empty room, goes on clacking and clattering furiously over the blank and unmarked tape.

Electricity moves at a speed greater than thought, a speed too great for thought to grasp. These twelve words, which have landed like a white, soundless thunderbolt in the airless
humidity
of the Austrian post office, were written only minutes before and three countries away, in the cool blue shadow of glaciers, under the clear violet Engadine sky, and the ink was not even dry on the telegraph form when the message, the summons, burst upon a bewildered consciousness.