The Post Office Girl (24 page)

They ordered simple dishes and the waiter brought them with two glasses of pale Gumpoldskirchner. Smiling, Ferdinand took his glass for a toast. But as he straightened to raise it there was a small, dry, clattering sound. A loose button had come off his coat. It rolled around on the table mockingly before
toppling
off. His face darkened. He tried to catch the button, to
hide it, but, seeing that the little accident had not escaped her, he became awkward, embarrassed, and grim. Christine tried not to look. There was no mistaking the meaning of this tiny sign. He had no one to care for him, no one to look after him! No woman—she felt sure of it. Her trained eye had already noted his unbrushed hat with its dusty band, the baggy, wrinkled, unpressed pants. From her own experience she understood his distress.

“Pick it up,” she said. “I always carry a needle and thread. People like us have to do everything ourselves. I’ll sew it back on.”

“No,” he said in dismay. Nevertheless he did as he was told and bent to pick up the telltale button from the gravel. But then he kept it hidden in his hand, uncertain and reluctant.

“No, no,” he pleaded, “I’ll get it done at home.” And when she insisted, he became vehement. “No, don’t! Don’t!” he said, roughly doing up the other two buttons of his coat. Christine did not press further, seeing that he was ashamed. Something in their companionability had been disrupted, and in the tightness of his lips she suddenly sensed he was about to say something mean. Out of shame, he was going to become abusive.

And he did. Seeming to take cover within himself, he looked at her defiantly. “Well, I’m not properly dressed, but I didn’t know I was going to be inspected. It was plenty good enough for a visit to the nursing home. If I’d known, I would have put on something better. But I’m lying to you. To tell the truth, I don’t have the money to dress respectably. I just don’t have it, or not enough for everything. I get some new shoes, but by that time the hat’s shot. I get a hat, but then the coat is beat up. I get this and I get that but I never catch up. Maybe it’s my own fault, but I don’t care. So there you are, I’m poorly dressed.”

Christine opened her mouth to speak, but he cut in. “Please, don’t try to mollify me. I know it all already. You’re going to tell me that poverty’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not true,
though. If you can’t hide it, then it is something to be ashamed of. There’s nothing you can do, you’re ashamed just the same, the way you’re ashamed when you leave a spot on somebody’s table. No matter if it’s deserved or not, honorable or not,
poverty
stinks. Yes, stinks, stinks like a ground-floor room off an airshaft, or clothes that need changing. You smell it yourself, as though you were made of sewage. It can’t be wiped away. It doesn’t help to put on a new hat, any more than rinsing your mouth helps when you’re belching your guts out. It’s around you and on you and everyone who brushes up against you or looks at you knows it. Your sister sensed it right away, I know the way women look down on you when you’re down at heels. I know it’s embarrassing for other people, but the hell with that, it’s a lot more embarrassing when it’s you. You can’t get out of it, you can’t get past it, the best thing to do is get plastered, and here” (he reached for his glass and drained it in a deliberately uncouth gulp) “here’s the great social problem, here’s why the ‘lower classes’ indulge in alcohol so much more—that
problem
that countesses and matrons in women’s groups rack their brains over at tea. For those few minutes, those few hours, you forget you’re an affront to others and to yourself. It’s no great distinction to be seen in the company of someone dressed like this, I know, but it’s no fun for me either. Don’t be shy, just go ahead and say what you have to say, but spare me the politeness and the pity!”

He pushed his chair back and made as if to get up from the table. Christine quickly laid a hand on his arm. “Not so loud! Do these people have to know everything? Move closer.”

He did as he was told. The defiance was gone, the anxiety was back. Trying to hide how sorry she was for him, Christine said, “Why torment yourself, and why torment me? It’s all
nonsense
. What makes you think I’m some kind of ‘lady’? If I were, I wouldn’t understand a word you’ve said. I’d think you were overexcited, unreasonable, and full of hate. But I do understand
and I’m going to tell you why. Move closer. There’s no reason everyone has to hear this.”

And she told him. She told him everything: the rage, the shame, the exhilaration, the change. It was good to speak for the first time about that delirium of wealth, and good too, even as it tormented her, even as it filled her with bitterness and anger, to describe how the desk clerk took her for a thief just because she was carrying her own suitcase and was shabbily dressed. Franz sat silent and motionless, but his flaring nostrils made her feel he was breathing it all in. He understood her the way she understood him, with the solidarity of anger and
invisibility
. And once the floodgates were open, there was no
closing
them. She said more than she really wanted to about
herself
, her hatred for the village, her anger over the wasted years; it came out powerfully and vividly. She’d never told anyone so much.

He sat in silence, not looking at her, slumping more and more. At last he said, as though from the bottom of a hole, “Forgive me for jumping down your throat like that. It was a stupid thing to do. I could kick myself for always flying off the handle like a fool, so angry, so bullying, as if the first person I ran into was to blame for anything and everything. And as if I was the only one. I know I’m just one out of legions—millions. Every morning when I go to work I see people coming out of their front doors, underslept, cheerless, their faces blank, see them going to work that they haven’t chosen and have no love for and that means nothing to them, and then again in the
evening
I see them on the streetcars on their way back, their
expressions
leaden, their feet leaden, all of them exhausted for no good reason, or some reason they don’t understand. They just don’t know it, they don’t believe it or they don’t feel it
strongly
, not the way I do, this horrible purposelessness. For them getting ahead means earning ten more schillings a month or getting a new job title, another dog tag, or they go to their
meetings in the evening and hear about how capitalism is on the way out, socialism is going to conquer the world, give it another decade, or two decades, and the system will collapse—that whole line. But I’m not as patient as that. I can’t wait a decade or two decades. I’m thirty years old, and eleven of those years have been wasted. I’m thirty and I still don’t know who I am, and I still don’t know what it’s all for, I’ve seen nothing but blood and sweat and filth. I’ve done nothing but wait, wait, and wait some more. I can’t take it any longer, being at the bottom and on the outside, it makes me livid, it’s driving me crazy, and I feel time’s running out while I’m just doing odd jobs for other people, even though I know I’m just as good as the architect who’s telling me what to do, I know as much as the guys at the top, I breathe the same air, the same blood runs in my veins. I just showed up too late, I fell off the train and can’t catch up no matter how fast I run. I know I can do it all—I learned some stuff, nobody’d call me stupid, I was first in high school and at the monastery school, I was good at music, studied French with a Father from the Auvergne too. But I don’t have a piano or any way to play and I’m forgetting it all, there’s no one to speak French with and that’s going too. In those two years at technical school I stuck to my books while the rest of them were
knocking
each other about in the fraternities, and even in the Siberian pigsty I went on working, but I’m just not getting anywhere. I just needed a year, one free year, like a running start before you jump … One year and I’d be on top of it, where or how I don’t know, but I do know I’ve still got it in me to grit my teeth and use all my muscles, to study for ten hours, fourteen hours—just a few years with my nose to the grindstone and I’d be up there with the others, I’d be tired but happy, I could be at peace with myself, I’d say: Done! Over! But right now I can’t, right now I hate them all, those happy people, they get to me so much that sometimes I clench my fists in my pockets just to keep from
attacking
them and their complacency. Look at those three over
there. All the time I’ve been talking I’ve been mad at them, I don’t know why, maybe out of envy, because they’re so stupid and jolly, so respectable and having such a good time. Look at them, here’s what they are—that one’s probably a sales
assistant
in some notions shop, all day long he’s pulling packages out of drawers and bowing and babbling, ‘The latest style, 1.80 per meter, genuine English manufacture, long-lasting, durable,’ and then he tosses the package back and gets another one and then another one and then a few ribbons and some trim, and in the evening he goes home and thinks that’s a life. And the others—that one’s in the tax office, maybe, or the post office savings bank, all day he pounds out numbers, numbers,
hundreds
of thousands, millions of numbers, interest, compound interest, debits and credits, not knowing who it belongs to, where the money’s coming from and for what, who owes what, who owns what, he knows nothing and in the evening he goes home and thinks that’s a life. And the third, what does he do? I don’t know, he works in a municipal office or somewhere, but I can tell from his shirt that it’s a desk job, paper, paper, paper, the same wooden desk, the same hand doing the same work all day. But today, because it’s Sunday, their hair’s greased up and they’re looking happy. They’ve been at a soccer match or at the races or out with a girl and now they’re telling each other about it, and one of them is showing off in front of the others, telling them how smart, how clever, how capable he is—just listen to them laughing, soft, comfortable, self-satisfied, they’re machines that got a break on Sunday, working stiffs let out of the morgue for the day, just listen to them, the way they laugh, so excited, the poor sons of bitches, just because somebody let them off the leash for a minute they think they own this place and the world. I’d like to smash their faces in.”

He was breathing hard. “But that’s nonsense, I know.
Always
the wrong note, always unfair. They may be poor sons of bitches, but they’re far from stupid—they’re doing the smart
thing: accepting themselves for what they are. They want to be dead and they are, that way you don’t feel a thing anymore. What an idiot I am, wanting to smack those happy little men, wanting to shake them up—maybe it’s just so I’ll have a pack to run in and not be so alone. I know it’s stupid, I know I’m just cutting off my nose to spite my face, but I can’t help it, these eleven poisonous years have filled me with so much hate that I’m fed up to here, I can barely hold it in. Whenever it starts to come out I run home or to the public library no
matter
where I am. But I don’t enjoy reading anymore. The novels they write these days don’t have anything to do with me. The little tales about how Hansel gets Gretel and Gretel gets Hansel or Mary cheats on John and John cheats on Mary, they make me want to throw up. And the books about the war, I don’t need those. And I can’t get down to studying since I know it won’t help and I won’t get any further as long as I don’t have the academic dog tag, and I don’t have the money for that, and since I don’t have money I can’t make money—you get this rage that grows in your guts, until you have to cage yourself like a vicious animal. Nothing makes you madder than wanting to defend yourself against something you can’t even get hold of, something the human race is doing to you, but still there’s nobody you can grab by the throat. Franzl knows all about that. All I’d have to do is remind him how sometimes we’d lie on the floor in our barracks at night, howling and scrabbling in the dirt with rage and smashing bottles out of pure moronic spite and plotting to take the pickax and do in poor Nikolai,
sweet-tempered,
quiet Nikolai the good sentry who was actually our friend, just because he was the only one we could get at out of all the people responsible for keeping us locked up, that was the only reason. And I’m sure you’ll understand now too why seeing Franzl made me feel so much better. I’d forgotten there was someone who could understand, but right away I felt that he understood—and then that you did.”

She looked up and his gaze flooded her; but immediately he was ashamed again.

“Forgive me,” he said in his other voice, the soft, anxious, small voice that contrasted so strangely with the hard,
aggressive
, angry one, “forgive me, I shouldn’t be talking so much about myself, it’s bad manners, I know. But I don’t think I’ve said as much in the whole last month as I’ve just said to you.”

Christine stared into the lantern. It was quivering slightly; a cool breeze was making the flame tremble. Its blue,
heart-shaped
center suddenly shot up narrowly. “Neither have I,” she said.

They were silent for a time. The unexpectedly tense and painful conversation had been tiring for both of them. The lights were going out at nearby tables; the windows facing the courtyard were dark now, and the gramophone was silent. The waiter passed with ostentatious urgency and cleared the
adjacent
tables. Now she remembered the time.

“I think I have to go now,” she reminded him. “The last train is at 10:20. What time is it now?”

He scowled, but just for a second. Then he smiled.

“See, I’m improving,” he said, almost cheerfully. “If you’d asked me that an hour ago, the vicious cur in me would have attacked you, but now I can tell you the way I’d tell a buddy like Franzl: I pawned my watch. And not even for the money. It’s a beautiful watch, gold with diamonds. The Archduke gave it to my father after he’d catered a shooting party, even taking charge of the kitchen—everyone thought he did a great job—and you’ll understand (because you understand everything) that if you pull out a gold watch with diamonds on a construction site, it sticks out like a sore thumb. And anyway, where I live it’s risky to have a watch like that. But I didn’t want to sell it, you could call it my emergency rations. So I just pawned it.”