The Post Office Girl (19 page)

She goes to the station buffet and has a glass of tea with rum; it burns in her bloodstream and revives the numb brain cells so she can think again. It occurs to her now that she should wire ahead to tell them when she’ll be arriving. Just around the corner to the right, the porter says, you have plenty of time.

At the counter the window is closed, so she raps on it. Reluctant footsteps approach and the window goes up with a clatter. “What is it?” says a woman in glasses with a peevish gray face. Christine is too shocked to respond immediately. This weathered fossil of an old maid with tired eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles and parchmenty fingers
automatically
handing her the form might be Christine herself in ten or twenty years—seen now in some diabolical mirror. Her fingers tremble and she has difficulty writing. That’s me, that’s what I’ll be, she thinks, shuddering as she sneaks looks at the
driedout
woman waiting patiently behind the counter, head bowed, pencil in her hand—oh, she knows that gesture, the tedium of those minutes of waiting, how you die a little with each one that passes, becoming old, all for nothing, hapless and used up like this mirror-phantom. Christine struggles back to the train, her knees weak. Her forehead is beaded with cold sweat, like a dreamer who sees himself dead in a coffin and wakes with a cry of fear.

When Christine hauls her sore limbs out of the train at St. Pölten, tired from a sleepless night, someone hurries toward her across the track: Fuchsthaler the teacher, who must have been
waiting
all night. One look and Christine knows it all. He’s dressed in black, with a black tie, and as she reaches her hand toward him he gives it a sympathetic shake, his eyes helpless behind his glasses. Christine asks no questions. His discomfiture has said it all. But she’s oddly unmoved. She feels no pain, no grief, no surprise. Her mother is dead. Maybe it’s good to be dead.

On the local train to Klein-Reifling Fuchsthaler gives a
tactful
but complete account of her mother’s last hours. He looks bleary, gray in the gray morning, his face stubbly, his clothes rumpled and dusty. He went to her mother’s on her behalf three, four times every day, kept vigil on her behalf at night. Kind friend, she thinks silently. If only he’d stop, shut up, leave her alone, stop talking at her in that sentimental choked-up voice through those yellow, poorly mended teeth. She’s ashamed of the physical aversion she now feels for a man who seemed so likable before, but the feeling is so strong it’s like bile on her lips.

Despite herself she’s comparing him with the men up there, those slim, tanned, healthy, sleek gentlemen with manicured hands and coats with narrow waists. With a kind of malicious curiosity she notes the laughable details of his mourning getup, the obviously turned cuffs and collar of his coat, its threadbare elbows, the off-the-rack black tie over the cheap dirty shirt. This skinny little man dressed in black strikes her as intolerably lower middle class, ridiculous beyond words, this village schoolmaster with his white protruding ears, his scanty, carelessly parted hair, his red-rimmed pale-blue eyes behind steel-framed spectacles, his shrewlike parchmenty face above the crushed yellow
celluloid
collar. And he wanted … he … No, she thinks, never. There’s no way she could let him touch her, submit to the timid, undignified, tremulous affections of this deacon-like little man, in those clothes—impossible. The very thought of it revolts her.

Fuchsthaler breaks off. “What is it?” he asks with concern. He’s seen her shudder.

“Nothing … nothing … I’m just too tired, I guess. I can’t talk now. I can’t pay attention to anything.”

Christine leans back and closes her eyes. She feels better as soon as she doesn’t have to look at him or listen to the soft consoling voice, made unbearable by her own humiliation. It’s
terrible, she thinks, he’s being so kind, he’s sacrificed himself. But I can’t look at him anymore, can’t bear him, I can’t. Not these people, not a man like him. Never.

At the open grave the minister runs through the prayer quickly: rain is falling hard, straight down. The gravediggers, shovels in their hands, shift impatiently from one foot to the other in the mud. The downpour becomes heavier and the minister speaks faster. Finally it’s over, and the fourteen people who had
accompanied
the old woman to the churchyard head back wordlessly to the village, almost at a run. Christine is again horrified at herself: she felt nothing during the ceremony, but was
preoccupied
with tiny annoyances. That she wasn’t wearing galoshes; last year she wanted to buy some and mother said it wasn’t necessary, Christine could borrow hers. That Fuchsthaler’s turned-up coat collar is frayed and worn on the inside. That her brother-in-law Franz has grown fat and wheezes asthmatically whenever he exerts himself. That her sister-in-law’s umbrella is tattered, she really should have the fabric replaced. That the grocer lady didn’t send a wreath, just a few wilted flowers from her front garden, tied with a piece of wire. That Herdlitschka the baker has had a new signboard made while she was gone. Everything hideous, narrow, disagreeable about this little world she’s been pushed back into digs in its barbs until she can’t even feel her own pain.

In front of her apartment the mourners say goodbye and, spattered with mud, go sprinting home underneath their
umbrellas
. Only her sister, her brother-in-law, her brother’s widow, and her brother’s widow’s second husband, a cabinetmaker, climb the creaky stairs to her apartment. There are five of them including Christine, but only four places to sit. The place is uncomfortably cramped and dreary; a damp, musty smell comes from the hanging wet coats and dripping umbrellas. The
rain drums on the windows. The dead woman’s empty gray bed waits in the shadows.

No one speaks. Out of embarrassment, Christine says, “You’ll have some coffee?”

“Yes, Christl,” says her brother-in-law, “something hot would be nice. But you’d better be quick because we can’t stay long, our train leaves at five.” He sighs, a Virginia cigar in his mouth. He’s a good-natured, jovial municipal official with a premature paunch (he began putting it on as a baggage-train sergeant during the war and it’s been growing more rapidly in peacetime). He only feels at ease when he’s at home in his
shirt-sleeves
; throughout the ceremony he was standing at attention with a conscientiously doleful expression, but now he partly unbuttons the black mourning jacket (it looks like a disguise on him) and leans back comfortably: “It was a good idea not to bring the children. Nelly thought they ought to be at their grandmother’s funeral, but I said children shouldn’t see sad things like that, they can’t understand them yet anyway. And after all the trip here and back is so horribly expensive, a whole lot of money, and in times like these …”

Christine is working hard at the coffee mill. Back five hours and already she’s heard it ten times—“too expensive,” that accursed refrain. Fuchsthaler thought it would have been too expensive to bring the chief physician from St. Pölten Hospital, said he couldn’t have done anything anyway; her sister-in-law said it about the cross for the grave, a stone one would be “too expensive”; her sister said it about the requiem mass; and now her brother-in-law is saying it about the trip. The same phrase on everyone’s lips like the rain on the eaves, washing all joy away. It’s going to be a constant drip, drip, drip every day: too expensive, too expensive, too expensive! Christine trembles with fury as she works the mill. If she could only get away from here, stop having to see and hear this! The others are sitting quietly around the table as they wait for their coffee, trying to
make conversation. The man who married her brother’s widow, an unpretentious cabinetmaker from Favoriten, sits with his head down among his half relations; he didn’t know the old woman at all. The conversation lurches from question to answer without going anywhere, as though something were blocking the way. Finally the coffee is ready—a distraction. Christine sets down four cups (all she has) and goes back to the window. The embarrassed silence among the four of them is suffocating, an oddly restrained silence clumsily concealing one thought and one only. She knows what’s coming, feels it in her bones. Out in the hall she saw that each of them had brought two empty rucksacks. She knows, she knows what’s coming now, and is choking with disgust.

Finally her brother-in-law begins, in his pleasant voice. “What a downpour! And that absentminded Nelly didn’t even bring an umbrella. The simplest thing would be for you to give her your mother’s to take along, Christl! Or do you need it for yourself?” “No,” says Christine from the window and shudders. It’s coming, any minute now. Just let it be quick.

“Actually,” her sister puts in, as though it had been planned beforehand, “wouldn’t it be the most sensible thing to go ahead and divide up Mother’s things now? Who knows when the five of us will be together again, Franz is at work so much, and you too, I’m sure” (she turns to the cabinetmaker). “And it wouldn’t be worth making another special trip here, that would cost more money. I think it’s best to divide everything up now, don’t you agree, Christl?”

“Of course.” Her voice is hoarse. “But please divide
everything
up among yourselves. You have two children, you can put Mother’s things to much better use. I don’t need anything, I won’t take anything. Just divide it all up among yourselves.”

She unlocks the trunk, takes out a few threadbare
garments
, and puts them on the dead woman’s bed (warm just yesterday; there’s nowhere else in the cramped attic room). It’s
not much: a few linens, the old fox fur, the mended coat, a tartan traveling rug, an ivory-handled walking stick, the inlaid brooch from Venice, the wedding ring, the little silver watch and chain, the rosary and enamel medallion from Maria Zell, then the stockings, the shoes, the felt slippers, the underthings, an old fan, a crushed hat, and the dog-eared prayer book. She omits none of the old pawnshop junk, the old woman had so little, then goes quickly back to the window and stares out into the rain. Behind her the two women are speaking in hushed tones, estimating the value of the items before coming to terms. Christine’s sister’s take goes on the right side of the dead woman’s bed and her sister-in-law’s on the left, separated by an invisible wall.

Christine is breathing heavily at the window. No matter how low their voices are, she can hear their appraising and haggling; even with her back turned she can see their fingers at work. Her rage is mixed with pity. “How poor they are, so wretchedly poor, and they have no idea. This junk they split up, that junk they hang on to; these shreds of old flannel and worn-out shoes, these horribly ridiculous rags are treasures to them! What do they know about the world? Do they have any inkling? But it might be better not to know you’re so poor, so disgustingly poor and wretched.”

Her brother-in-law comes up. “Fair’s fair, Christl, you can’t take nothing at all. You’ve got to keep something to remember your mother by—the watch, maybe, or at least the chain.”

“No,” she says firmly, “I don’t want anything, I won’t take anything. You’ve got children, that’s the point. I don’t need anything. I don’t need a thing anymore.”

When she turns around again, it’s all over; her sister-in-law and her sister have wrapped up their shares and put them in the rucksacks. Now the dead woman is really buried. The four of them stand around, embarrassed and somewhat shamefaced. They’re glad the awkward business has been taken care of so
quickly and agreeably, but they don’t feel entirely at ease. Before the train leaves they’ll have to find something solemn to say to dispel the memory of the wheeling and dealing, or perhaps just talk among themselves like relatives. At last Christine’s
brother-in
-law has a thought and asks her, “So you haven’t told us, what was it like up there in Switzerland?”

“Very nice,” she brings out through her teeth, hard as a knife.

“I believe it,” her brother-in-law says with a sigh, “we’d all like to go there sometime—go anywhere! But you can’t
manage
it with a wife and two children, it would be too expensive, forget about going to a posh place like that. How much do they charge for a night in your hotel?”

“I don’t know,” Christine whispers with the last of her strength. She feels her nerves are about to snap. If only they were gone, gone! Thankfully Franz looks at his watch. “Oh oh, all aboard, we have to get to the station. But Christl, don’t put yourself out, no need to see us off in weather like this. Stay here now and come to Vienna sometime! Now that Mother’s dead, we’ve got to stick together.”

“Yes, yes,” Christine says with stony impatience and goes with them as far as the door. They’re all loaded down with things on their shoulders or in their hands and the wooden steps creak under their weight. At last they’ve gone. Christine throws the window open. The smell is suffocating, the smell of stale cigarette smoke, bad food, wet clothes, the smell of the old woman’s dread and worry and wheezing, the awful smell of poverty. How terrible it is to have to live here, and why, who’s it for? Why breathe this in day after day, knowing that there’s another world out there somewhere, the real one, and in herself another person, who is suffocating, being poisoned, in this miasma. Her nerves are jangling. She throws herself down onto the bed fully clothed, biting down hard on the pillow to keep from screaming with helpless hatred. Because suddenly
she hates everyone and everything, herself and everyone else, wealth and poverty, everything about this hard, unendurable, incomprehensible life.

PART TWO

S
TUCK-UP HUSSY
. How obnoxious!” Michael Pointner the grocer banged the door shut behind him. “The audacity of that sharp-tongued creature! I’ve never heard of such a thing. What a witch.”

Herdlitschka the baker was waiting for him in front of the post office. “Now, now, don’t get excited. What is it this time,” he said soothingly, smiling broadly. “Did somebody bite you?”

“But it’s true. Of all the nerve! In all my life I’ve never seen such unmitigated gall. Every time it’s something different. She doesn’t like this, she doesn’t like that. All she wants is to be a pain and act sniffy. The day before yesterday it was because I used pencil instead of pen on the customs form for the candles. Today she tells me she’s in charge here and she doesn’t have to accept poor packaging. What if she is in charge? My word, before she started sticking her silly nose in I must have mailed a thousand packages. And the sound of her, so la-di-da, such fancy German, to show us we’re clods next to her. Who does she think she’s talking to? But I’ve had it. She’s not going to put on that act with me.”

Fat Herdlitschka’s eyes gleamed with complacent
schadenfreude
. “Well, maybe she just felt like it, you’re such a dashing fellow. You never know where you are with those ladies-
in-waiting
. Maybe she’s taken a shine to you and that’s why she’s being a pain.”

“Please, no stupid jokes,” the grocer said sullenly. “I’m not the only one she goes after. Only yesterday the administrator of
the plant was telling me she snapped at him just because he was kidding her a little. ‘I won’t have that, I’m in charge here’—as though he were her shoeshine boy. The devil’s gotten into her, something’s wrong. But I’ll drive him out again, you can
depend
on it. She’ll take a different tone with me or she’ll be sorry. I’m going to have a word with somebody in the head office if I have to walk to Vienna.”

Pointner was right. Something was wrong with Postal
Official
Christine Hoflehner. The entire village had known it for two weeks. At first no one said anything. My God, the poor girl lost her mother—that’s what’s bothering her, people thought. The minister had stopped by twice to comfort her; every day Fuchsthaler asked if there was anything he could do; the
next-door
neighbor offered to sit with her in the evening to keep her company; the woman at the Golden Ox had even asked if she didn’t want to board there so she wouldn’t have to maintain her own household. But she hadn’t even given them a proper answer, and everyone had felt she just wanted to get rid of them. Something was wrong with Postal Official Christine Hoflehner. She hadn’t been going to the choral society once a week as she used to; she said she was hoarse. She hadn’t been to church for three weeks, hadn’t even had a mass said for her mother. She told Fuchsthaler, who wanted to read to her, that she had a headache, and when he offered to walk with her she said she was tired. No one spoke to her now; when she did her shopping she acted as if she was rushing to catch a train and said nothing to anyone, and at work, where she’d been known for her courtesy and
helpfulness
, she was now invariably aloof, brusque, and overbearing.

Something had happened to her; she knew it herself. It was as though someone had sprinkled some venom into her eyes while she slept, so that now she saw the world in its light: everything was ugly, malignant, and hostile when viewed with malignant and hostile eyes. She began every day in a rage. The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was the
steep smoke-stained beams of her attic room. Everything in it—the old bed, the poor quilt, the wicker chair, the washstand with the cracked jug, the peeling wallpaper, the wooden
floor-boards
—it was all odious. She would have liked to close her eyes and sink back into the dark. But the alarm clock wouldn’t permit it, clamoring loudly in her ears. She got up furiously, got dressed furiously: the old underthings, the repulsive black dress. She noticed a tear under one of the sleeves, but let it go. She didn’t take up the needle to mend it. Why? Who would it be for? For these hicks, anything’s too fancy. Don’t bother with that, just get out of this hideous room and go to the office.

But the office had changed too—it was no longer the neutral restful room where the hours rolled slowly and noiselessly by as though on wheels. Whenever she turned the key and
entered
the terrible silence that seemed to be lying in wait for her, she’d remember a scene from a film she’d seen last year.
Life Sentence
, it had been called. A jailer, full-bearded, hard and aloof, accompanied by two policemen, was leading the prisoner, a frail, frightened youth, into a bare, barred cell. She and everyone else in the audience had shivered to see it, and she shivered now. That was her, jailer and prisoner in one. For the first time she’d noticed that these windows were barred too, and for the first time she’d begun seeing the office with its bare whitewashed walls as a dungeon. Everything in it had a new meaning. A thousand times she looked at the chair she sat on, the ink-stained table where she kept her papers, the wicket that she raised when the workday began. For the first time she saw that the clock never advanced, but ran in circles—from twelve to one, from one to two, and on to twelve, and then the same thing again, always the same progression without any progress, wound up again and again for the day’s work without ever getting a break, imprisoned in the same rectangular brown housing. And when at eight in the morning Christine sat down,
she was tired—tired not from something achieved and
accomplished
, but tired in anticipation of everything ahead, the same faces, the same questions, the same chores, the same money. After precisely fifteen minutes, Andreas Hinterfellner the
postman
, gray-haired but buoyant as ever, brought the mail for
sorting
. She used to do it mechanically, but now she spent a long time looking at the letters and postcards, especially those
addressed
to Countess Gütersheim in her castle. The countess had three daughters. One was married to an Italian baron; the other two were single and traveled widely. The most recent cards came from Sorrento. Radiant arcs of blue sea sweeping into the landscape. Hôtel de Rome was the address. Christine tried to imagine the Hôtel de Rome and looked for it on the card. The young countess had made an
X
to show where her room was, among the broad terraces of luminous gardens and surrounded by espaliered orange trees. Christine imagined walking there in the evening, a cool breeze blowing from the blue sea, the rocks still giving off the warmth of the day, walking with …

But there was mail to sort. Onward, onward. Here was a
letter
from Paris, which she knew right away was from the
daughter
of ———, the subject of all sorts of nasty rumors. She’d been mixed up with a Jewish oil baron, then she was a taxi dancer somewhere, and to top it off she was supposed to be with someone else now; and in fact the letter came from the Hotel Maurice, on the fanciest stationery. Christine tossed it away furiously. Next the printed matter. She set aside a few items addressed to Countess Gütersheim.
Lady, Elegant Life
, and the rest of the illustrated fashion magazines—what
difference
would it make if the Countess got them in the afternoon delivery? When the office was quiet she removed the magazines from their wrappers and opened them up, staring at the clothes, the pictures of actors and aristocrats, the well-tended country houses of English lords, the cars that belonged to famous artists. She inhaled it all like perfume, remembering. Her fingers
shook nervously as she examined the women and their gowns with interest and looked almost passionately at the men, their extraordinary faces burnished by their lives of luxury or illuminated by intelligence. She put the magazines away only to take them out again. Curiosity and hate, desire and envy alternated in her as she gazed at this world that was at once so far away and so familiar.

Then she’d be startled when a peasant clomped with heavy shoes into this world of seductive images, his pipe clamped
between
his teeth, his eyes bovine and sleepy, to ask for a few stamps, and reflexively she’d find something to dress him down for. “Can’t you read? No smoking!” she’d fling into the
amiably
bewildered face, or some other sharp remark. It would be out before she knew it, as though she were driven to wreak vengeance for the ugliness and wretchedness of her world.
Afterward
she’d be ashamed. The poor fellows can’t help being repulsive, uncouth, filthy from their work, up to their necks in the mud of their village, she thought. I’m no different. I’m just the same. But her despair was hardly separate from her fury, which came out at any opportunity. In accordance with the law of conservation of energy, she had to relieve the strain somehow, and from this one position of power, her pitiful little counter, she discharged it at the expense of innocent people. Up there in that other world she’d been courted and desired—that had been an acknowledgment of her existence; here she didn’t exist unless she was angry, unless she was wielding her tiny bit of official authority. It was sad, it was deplorable, it was petty, lording it over these unsuspecting good people, she knew that, but it got rid of some of her pent-up fury for a moment. If there was no one to vent it on, it came out against mute objects. A thread wouldn’t go through the eye of the needle—she snapped it. A drawer wouldn’t close—she slammed it shut with all her strength. The head office sent her the wrong consignments—she wrote an outraged, belligerent letter instead
of a polite one. A telephone call didn’t go through right away—she threatened her colleague with an immediate official
reprimand
. She knew it was pathetic and she was horrified at how she’d changed. But she couldn’t help her hatred—she’d choke on it if she didn’t find some way to cast it out into the world.

When work was over she fled back to her room. Before, she used to stroll for a bit while her mother was sleeping, or chat with the grocer woman or play with the neighbor’s children; now she shut herself in behind her four walls, hiding her
resentment
away so she wouldn’t snarl at people like a vicious dog. She couldn’t bear to look at the street with its unchanging houses and faces. The women seemed ridiculous to her in their full gingham skirts, with their greasy hair piled on top of their heads and their plump hands covered with rings, the heavy-breathing, potbellied men unbearable, and, most repellent of all, the boys with their pomaded hair and citified airs. The tavern, reeking of beer and smoke, was unendurable, and the strapping girl who submitted to the lascivious embraces and jokes of the forest ranger’s assistant and the policeman struck her as a ruddy-cheeked idiot. She
preferred
to shut herself up in her room, leaving the lamps unlit so she wouldn’t see the hated things in it. She sat in silence,
brooding
, always about the same thing. Her memories were incredibly vivid and sharp, with innumerable details that she hadn’t noticed or felt at the time amid the whirl of activity. She remembered every word, every glance. The flavors of everything she’d eaten were powerfully there; she could taste the wines and liqueurs on her lips. She remembered the sheerness and the silkiness of the dress on her bare shoulders and the softness of the white bed. All sorts of things came back to her, like the funny dogged way the little Englishman followed her down the hallway in the evening and paused in front of her door. The skin prickled on her arm as she remembered the Mannheim girl’s affectionate caresses, and it occurred to her that women were supposed to be able to fall in love with each other. Hour after hour she recapitulated 
every second of every day of that time; how full of wasted opportunities it had been, she realized now. So she sat in
silence
every evening and dreamed of that time, what it had been like, knowing it was gone—not wanting to know but
knowing
nonetheless. If someone knocked at the door (Fuchsthaler made repeated attempts to console her), she froze and held her breath until she heard the footsteps creaking back down the
staircase
. Memories were all she had left, and she wouldn’t give them up. Exhausted by them, she’d get into her bed and find herself startled by its coldness and dankness; her skin was spoiled now. She shivered so much that she had to pile her clothes and her coat on top of the covers. Finally, late at night, she’d fall asleep. But her sleep was not a good sleep; it was filled with anxious and fantastic dreams. She’d be climbing in a car, hurtling quickly, horribly quickly up and down the mountains, at once afraid of falling and exhilarated by the speed, and there was always a man next to her, the German or someone else, and he’d be holding her. She’d suddenly realize she was naked, and there would be people laughing. The car would falter, she’d shout at him to crank it up again, quickly, hurry, harder, harder, and at last deep within her she’d feel the thrust of the engine, and a flood of pure joy as it took off over the fields, into the dark wood, and then she wouldn’t be naked anymore, but he’d be clasping her to him, more and more tightly, so that she groaned and thought she was dying. Then she’d wake up, sweaty and exhausted and with
aching
limbs, to see the garret roof, the smoke-stained, worm-eaten slanting beams, and the cobwebbed ceiling, and would lie in bed, tired and vacant, waiting for the implacable command of the alarm clock, and then she’d climb out of the hated old bed and into her hated old clothes to meet the hated day.