The Post Office Girl (21 page)

Christine listened amicably as she walked next to him. He’d always been very friendly, this uncomplicated little man who took pleasure in little things, a good person, obliging,
credulous
, trusting. It was clear why his comrades wanted him for that modest office; he deserved it. Yet as she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, short, pink-cheeked, easygoing, with a double chin and a belly that wobbled as he walked, she was
almost
appalled to think of her sister: how could she … I couldn’t bear to be touched by this man. But it was good to be with him in broad daylight with a lot of people around. Standing with the children in front of the cages at the zoo, he was practically
a child himself. With secret envy Christine thought: If only I could go back to taking pleasure in such little things, instead of yearning for the impossible. At five they decided to return home (the children had to go to bed early). First the children were crammed onto one of the packed Sunday streetcars; there was standing room only, but the rest of them squeezed in. As the tram clattered along Christine thought of the shiny car
immaculate
in the morning light, the sweet-smelling air streaming over her temples, the cushioned seat, the landscape flitting by. She closed her eyes and lost track of time, hovering in that other realm in the midst of the jostling crowd. Her brother-in-law tapped her on the shoulder: “We have to get off. Why don’t you come for coffee before you catch your train. Wait, let me go first and clear a path for you.”

He pushed on ahead, and, in spite of being so short and stout, he had no trouble elbowing a narrow path among the bellies, shoulders, and backs doing their best to move out of the way. He was at the door when there was a sudden
commotion
. “Quit shoving me in the gut, you idiot,” shouted a tall thin man in an inverness coat rudely and furiously. “Who are you calling an idiot? You all hear that?” Christine’s brother-in-law exploded. “Who are you calling an idiot?” The thin man in the inverness coat, hemmed in, laboriously squeezed through while the rest stared, and a squabble seemed about to break out, but Christine’s brother-in-law’s angry voice suddenly changed. “Ferdinand! Well, I’ll be! Now that really would have been something. I nearly got into a fight with you!” The other man too was astonished and laughed. The two of them gripped each other’s hands and looked into each other’s faces. The
conductor
interrupted: “If you gentlemen wish to get off, please do it! We have a schedule to meet.” “Come on, you have to get off with us, we live two doors down. Well, I’ll be! Come on, let’s go.” The face of the tall thin man in the inverness coat had brightened. He reached down to put his hand on the shoulder
of Christine’s brother-in-law. “I’d love to, Franzl.” They both got off. The surprise had winded Christine’s brother-in-law and he stood at the stop catching his breath, a greasy sheen on his face. “Who’d have thought we’d run into each other again! I’ve often wondered where you’d ended up and I’ve always intended to write to the hotel down there and find out. But you know how it is, things get in the way. And now here you are. Well, I’ll be! What a pleasure!”

The stranger opposite him was also glad. He was a younger man, more controlled, but a slight trembling of his lips gave his pleasure away. “Forget it, Franzl, I’m sure you did,” he said, reaching down to clap the little man on the shoulder, “but now introduce me to the ladies. One of them must be your wife, Nelly, who you always told me about.” “Right, right, give me a minute, I’m flabbergasted. Ferdinand, it’s such a pleasure to see you!” And then to the others: “You know the Ferdinand Farrner I’ve always talked about. We were in the same barracks for two years in Siberia. The only one—it’s true, Ferdinand, you know it—the only one who was a decent fellow among the Ruthenian and Serbian trash they dumped us in with there, the only one you could talk to and the only one you could depend on. Well, I’ll be! But come on up, I’m really curious. Well, I’ll be. If someone had told me I was going to be so happy today—why, if I’d taken the next tram we might never have laid eyes on each other again.”

Christine had never seen her easygoing, phlegmatic
brother-in
-law so lively, so animated. He practically ran up the stairs of the building and pushed his friend inside. A faint
indulgent
smile on his face, the stranger yielded to his war buddy’s outpourings of enthusiasm. “So take off your coat, make
yourself
comfortable. Here, have a seat in the armchair—Nelly, coffee for us, schnapps, cigarettes—now let me look at you. You haven’t gotten any younger, you’re actually looking damn thin. What you need is a square meal.” The stranger obligingly let
himself be scrutinized—Franz’s childlike joy plainly cheered him. The hard, tense face with the beetling brow and the
pronounced
cheekbones gradually relaxed. Christine too looked at him and tried to remember—earlier she’d seen a picture in the museum, a portrait of a monk by a Spaniard. The name was gone now but it was the same bony, ascetic, almost fleshless face, the same tension about the nostrils. The stranger
good-humoredly
smacked Christine’s brother-in-law on the arm. “Maybe you’re right. We ought to just go on sharing everything the way we used to do with our rations. You could let me have some of your bacon. You’d never miss it and your wife wouldn’t have any objection, I hope.”

“But tell us now, Ferdinand, I’m dying to know. When the Red Cross got us out back then, I was in the first batch and you were supposed to follow the next day with the other seventy. Then we sat on the Austrian border for another two days. There wasn’t enough coal for all the trains. And all that time I was waiting for you to show up. We went to the railway clerk ten times, twenty times to get a wire sent, but everything was such an
unholy
mess, and after two days we went ahead, seventeen hours from the Czech border to Vienna. What happened to you?”

“Well, you could have sat at the border and waited for
another
two years. You were just lucky—we got the short end of the stick. The telegrams came in half an hour after your
transport
left: the railway lines had been bombed by the Czechs, so back we went to Siberia. That was no fun, but we didn’t take it hard. We figured eight days, two weeks, a month. Nobody thought it would be two years, and only a dozen out of the seventy of us made it through. Reds, Whites, Wrangel,
*
war on and on, constantly back and forth and here and there, they shook us around like dice in a cup. It was 1921 before the Red Cross found a way back for us through Finland. Yes, my friend,
we went through a lot, and you’ll understand why we didn’t put on much weight.”

“What rotten luck, do you hear that, Nelly. All on account of half an hour. And I had no idea. Not a clue that you were stuck in that mess—you of all people! You of all people! What did you do for those two years?”

“My friend, I could talk all day and there’d still be more to tell. I think I did everything a person can do. I helped with the harvest, in the factories, I delivered newspapers, banged away at the typewriter, fought for two weeks alongside the Reds when they were at the gates of our city and begged with the peasants when they entered it. Well, let’s not talk about it. When I think back on it today, I’m amazed to be sitting here smoking a cigarette.”

Christine’s brother-in-law was agog. “Well, I’ll be. Well, I’ll be. A person doesn’t know how lucky he is. To think that you could have been alone here for two years, Nelly, you and the kids, it’s unimaginable, and a good fellow like you, you’re the one that got clobbered. Well, I’ll be. Thank goodness you’re in one piece at least. All that bad luck, you’re lucky nothing
happened
to you.”

The stranger angrily ground out his cigarette in the ashtray. His face had suddenly darkened. “Yes, well, you could say I was lucky. Nothing happened to me, or almost nothing, just these two broken fingers, on the last day. Yes, you could say I was lucky. I got off easy. It was the last day, we couldn’t stand it anymore, the few of us still left, squeezed together in a single barracks, and we even cleared out a grain car at the station just so we could move on, seventy men cheek by jowl instead of the regulation forty per car. It was impossible to turn around, and if somebody had to relieve himself, well, I’m not going to talk about that in front of the ladies. But anyway, we were off, and happy about it. Another twenty got on at a station down the line. They were whacking each other with rifle butts to get
to the front and they squeezed in one after another, and then another after that, even though we were already five or six deep, and that’s how we traveled for seven hours, in one groaning, shouting, wheezing, sweating, stinking mass. I had my face to the wall and my hands out in front of me so my ribs wouldn’t be crushed against the wood siding. I broke two fingers and tore a tendon, and I stood that way for six hours, not a breath of air in my lungs, half asphyxiated. It got better at the next
station
where we tossed out five corpses—two had been trampled to death and three were smothered—and we went on like that until evening. Yes, you could say I was lucky, just a torn tendon and two broken fingers, it’s a little thing.”

He held up his hand: the third finger was limp and wouldn’t bend. “Yes, a little thing, that’s what it is—after a world war and four years of Siberia, a mere finger. But you wouldn’t
believe
what a dead finger does to a living hand. You can’t draw with it if you want to become an architect, you can’t type in an office, you can’t grab hold of things where there’s heavy
labor
to be done. Little devil of a tendon, just a wisp of a thing, and everything you want to do in your life hangs by a thread like that. It’s like when you make a mistake of a millimeter on the ground plan of a building, one little thing and it all comes crashing down.”

Franz, aghast, helplessly repeated, “Well, I’ll be,” wishing he could pat Ferdinand’s hand. The women too had become
serious
and watched the stranger with interest. Finally Franz pulled himself together and said, “So go on—what did you do once you got back?”

“Well, what I always told you I’d do. I wanted to go back to technical school—pick up where I left off, as a twenty-
five-year
-old sitting at the school desk I hadn’t seen since I was nineteen. Eventually I even learned to draw with my left hand, but then something else got in the way, another one of those little things.”

“What was that?”

“Well, it’s just the way things are—school costs a lot of
money
, and that was one more little thing I’d forgotten about. It’s one little thing after another, wouldn’t you say?”

“But why? Your family always had money, you had a house down in Merano and fields and the pub and the tobacco shop and the grocery … and … all that stuff you told me about … And then your grandmother who did nothing but save, never gave away a button and slept in a cold room because she was too cheap to shell out for the kindling and the paper. What happened to her?”

“Yes, she still has a fine garden and a fine house, practically a palace. That’s where I was coming from on the streetcar—the nursing home outside Lainz where they grudgingly consented to take her on. And she’s got money too, a big pile of it, a strongbox full to the brim. Two hundred thousand crowns, in old thousands. She has it in the chest during the day, under her bed at night. All the doctors laugh at her and the
attendants
get a kick out of it. Two hundred thousand crowns. She was a good Austrian and sold everything down there, the vineyard, the pub, and the tobacco shop, because she didn’t want to turn into an Italian, and she put it all into the brand-
spanking-new
thousand-crown notes that they turned out so brilliantly during the war. So now she has them hidden in her
strongbox
under the bed and swears they’ll be worth something again someday. They started out as twenty or twenty-five hectares and a beautiful stone house and some fine old heirloom furniture and forty or fifty years of work, didn’t they, so they couldn’t just stay nothing forever. The poor dear is seventy-five and doesn’t understand much anymore. She just goes on believing in the good Lord God and His earthly justice.”

He stuffed tobacco into a pipe he’d pulled out of his pocket and began puffing away. Christine felt the anger in the gesture—a cold, hard, scornful fury that she recognized, and somehow
she felt he was her ally. Her sister stared off irritably, obviously conceiving some aversion to this man who was inconsiderately stinking up the room while treating her husband like a schoolboy. Franz’s submissiveness toward this poorly dressed, surly fellow annoyed her—she could sense the spirit of revolt in him as he sat there tossing stones into the pond of her
gemütlichkeit
. Franz himself seemed stunned, gazing at his buddy with a mixture of good humor and alarm while foolishly spluttering, “Well, I’ll be.” He thought for a moment. “But after that—go on, what did you do then?”

“All sorts of things here and there. At first I thought if I made a little extra on the side, that would be enough for me to go back to school on. But it was never enough—I barely made enough to feed myself from one day to the next. Yes, my dear Franzl, banks and offices and businesses just didn’t need men who needlessly took two extra winters of vacation in Siberia and then came home with half a hand. Everywhere ‘sorry,
sorry
,’ everywhere people already parked on their fat asses, people with healthy fingers, and me always with that one little thing I’d picked up.”

“But—you can go on disability, can’t you, since you’re unfit for work or partly unfit? You’ve got to be getting some financial assistance—surely you’re entitled to it?”

“You think? I agree. I agree that the government has a
certain
obligation to help someone who’s lost a house, vineyards, a finger, and six solid years. But, my friend, in Austria all roads are crooked. I thought there’d be no problem too, so I went to the disability office and showed them I’d served here and served there and here’s my finger. But no, first I had to prove that I’d come by the injury in the war or that it was somehow due to the war. That’s not so easy if the war ended in 1918 and the injury occurred in 1921 under circumstances such that no one made a record of it. Still it would have worked out in the end, except that the bureaucrats made a great discovery—it’ll amaze
you, Franz—which is: I’m not an Austrian citizen at all.
According
to my baptism certificate I was born and am domiciled in the administrative district of Merano, and in order to have Austrian citizenship I would have had to adopt it by a certain time. So that was that!”