The Post Office Girl (3 page)

The bloated old woman, swathed in mufflers and petticoats, keeps getting up to labor on her massive legs over the creaking floorboards. She dabs her eyes with the big red handkerchief, overcome by happiness; she waves her arms more and more wildly, pausing amid her excited rambling to sit down, moan, blow her nose, and catch her breath for a new flood of words. She keeps thinking of something else to say, keeps talking and talking and clamoring and rejoicing and moaning and weeping all at once over the wonderful surprise. Suddenly, in a moment of exhaustion, she notices that Christine, upon whom she’s bestowing all this joy, is standing there in a daze, pale and
awkward
, with wondering eyes and in some perplexity, not knowing what to say. Frau Hoflehner finds this exasperating. Once more she struggles out of the chair and goes to the bewildered young woman, cheerily takes hold of her, gives her a heavy, wet kiss, pulls her close, and shakes her as if to wake her up: “Well, say something! It’s for you, silly, what’s the matter with you? You stand there like a stone with nothing to say for yourself, and what an opportunity! So be happy! Why aren’t you happy?”

Regulations strictly prohibit postal workers from leaving the premises for any length of time while the post office is open to the public, and even the most urgent private matter is subject to the Treasury’s priorities: official before personal, the letter of the law before the spirit. Thus a few minutes later the
Klein-Reifling
postal official is back behind her wicket, ready for work again. No one missed her. The loose forms still slumber on the table where she left them, the telegraph which not so
long ago set her heart beating is turned off and silent, glinting yellow in the gloomy room. Thank goodness no one came, no one needed anything. Now the postal official can with a clear conscience think over the confusing message that sprang off the wires—with all the excitement she still doesn’t know if it’s welcome or disturbing. Gradually her thoughts come into focus. She’s being asked to go away, away from her mother for the first time ever, for two weeks, perhaps longer, to visit strangers, no, to visit her aunt Klara, her mother’s sister, at a fancy hotel. She’s going to take a vacation, an actual, honest vacation, after so many years she’s finally going to have a break, see the world, see something new, something different. She turns it over in her mind. Actually it is good news, Mother’s right, she’s right to be so happy about it. Christine has to admit it’s the best news she’s had in years and years. To be allowed to get out of harness for the first time, to be free, to see new faces, a bit of the world, it’s a gift from heaven, isn’t it? But she hears her mother’s astonished, alarmed, almost angry question: “Why aren’t you happy?”

Mother’s right: Why is it I’m not happy? Where’s the flutter, the excitement? She keeps listening for a response inside, some reaction to this fine surprise out of the blue, but no: all she feels is confusion, fear, and mistrust. Strange, she thinks, why is it I’m not happy? A hundred times I’ve taken postcards out of the mailbag, picture-postcards showing gray Norwegian fjords, the boulevards of Paris, the bay of Sorrento, the stone monoliths of New York, and haven’t I always put them down with a sigh? When will it be me? When will it be my turn? What have I been dreaming about during these long empty mornings if not about being free someday from this meaningless grind, this deadly race against time? Relaxing for once, having some unbroken time to myself, not always in shreds, in shards so tiny you could cut your finger on them. For once getting away from this daily grind, the alarm clock, destroyer of sleep, driving you
to get up, get dressed, get the furnace going, get milk, get bread, light the fire, go to work and clock in, write, make phone calls, then go straight home again to the ironing board, the stove, wash, cook, do the mending and the nursing, and at last fall asleep dead tired. A thousand times I’ve dreamed of it, tens of thousands of times, here at this very table, here in this
ramshackle
coop, and now it’s finally sinking in, I’m going to travel, get away from here, be free, and yet—Mother’s right—why is it I’m not happy? How come I’m not ready?

She sits with shoulders slumped, staring at the wall,
waiting
for an answer, waiting to feel some joy. She’s holding her breath without knowing it, listening to her body like a pregnant woman, listening, bending down deep into herself. But nothing stirs, everything is silent and empty like a forest where no birds are singing. She tries harder, this twenty-eight-year-old woman, to remember what it is to be happy, and with alarm she realizes that she no longer knows, that it’s like a foreign language she learned in childhood but has now forgotten, remembering only that she knew it once. When was the last time I was happy? She thinks hard, and two little lines are etched in her bowed
forehead
. Gradually it comes to her: an image as though from a dim mirror, a thin-legged blond girl, her schoolbag swinging above her short cotton skirt. A dozen other girls are swirling around her: it’s a game of rounders in a park in suburban Vienna. A surge of laughter, a bright trill of high spirits following the ball into the air, now she remembers how light, how free that
laughter
felt, it was never far away, it tickled under her skin, it swirled through her blood; one shake and it would spill out over her lips, it was so free, almost too free: on the school bench you had to hug yourself and bite your lip to keep from laughing at some funny remark or silliness in French class. Any little thing would set off waves of that effervescent girlish laughter. A teacher who stammered, a funny face in the mirror, a cat chasing its tail, a look from an officer on the street, any little thing, any tiny,
senseless bit of nonsense, you were so full of laughter that
anything
could bring it out. It was always there and ready to erupt, that free, tomboyish laughter, and even when she was asleep, its high-spirited arabesque was traced on her young mouth.

And then it all went black, snuffed out like a candle. It was the first of August, 1914. That afternoon she was at the pool. In the cabin she’d seen her smooth, naked sixteen-year-old body emerge like a flash of light from her blouse, almost fully formed, sleek, white, flushed, full of health. It was marvelous to cool off, splashing and swimming, to race with her friends across the rattling boards—she can still hear the laughing and panting of the half-dozen teenage girls. Then she trotted home, quickly, quickly, her feet light, for of course she was late again. She was supposed to be helping her mother pack: in two days she’d be going over to the Kamp Valley for summer vacation. So she takes the steps three at a time and goes straight through the door, out of breath. But, strangely, her mother and father fall silent when she comes in, and they don’t look at her. She’d heard her father speaking in an unusually loud voice, but now he seems oddly interested in the newspaper; her mother must have been crying, because now she crushes her handkerchief nervously and rushes to the window. What’s happened? Did they have a fight? No, never, that can’t be it, for now her father wheels about and puts his hand on her mother’s trembling shoulder, she’s never seen him so tender. But her mother doesn’t turn, the silent caress only makes her tremble more. What’s happened? They pay no attention to her, neither of them so much as looks at her. Even now, twelve years later, she remembers how afraid she felt. Are they angry with her? Did she do something bad, perhaps? Fearfully—a child is always full of fear and guilt—she slinks into the kitchen, where she gets the news from Božena, the cook, and Geza, the officer’s servant from next door (and he’d know). He says now it’s starting, the damn Serbs are going to be goulash. Otto will have to go as a
reserve lieutenant and also her sister’s husband, both of them, that’s why her parents are upset. And in fact the next morning her brother, Otto, is suddenly standing in the room in his
pike-blue
infantryman’s uniform, his brocade sash fastened at an angle, a gold sword knot on his saber. As a grammar-school substitute teacher he usually wears an ill-brushed black Prince Albert—a pale, thin, towering boy with stubbly hair and
yolk-yellow
down on his cheeks who looks almost ridiculous in solemn black. But now, pulled up straight in the close-fitting uniform, with a rigid set to his mouth, he seems entirely new and different to his sister. She looks up at him with a silly
teenager
’s pride and claps her hands: “My, don’t you look smart.” Then her mother, usually so gentle, gives her a shove, making her elbow hit the armoire: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, you heartless creature?”—an angry outburst relieving a hurt she can’t express. Now, nearly shrieking, she weeps openly, her mouth working and trembling, and in desperation she clings with all her strength to the young man, who resolutely looks the other way, tries to assume a manly bearing, and says something about duty and country. Her father has turned his back—he can’t look. The young man, face pale and jaw set, frees himself almost roughly from his mother’s impulsive embrace. He
covers
his mother’s cheeks with quick, harried kisses, hastily holds out his hand to his father (whose posture is unnaturally stiff), and darts past Christine with a quick goodbye. The saber rattles down the stairs. Her sister’s husband, a municipal official who’s been conscripted as a train sergeant, comes by that afternoon to say goodbye. This is easier; he knows he won’t be in danger. He makes himself comfortable and pretends it’ll be fun, jokes
encouragingly
, and leaves. But two shadows remain behind—her brother’s wife, four months pregnant, and her sister with her small child. The two of them come for dinner every evening, and each time the lamp seems to burn lower. All eyes regard Christine severely if she says anything cheerful, and in her bed
at night she’s ashamed at how bad she is, how unserious, how much she’s still a child. Without meaning to she grows silent. There’s no laughter left in the rooms, no one sleeps well. If she wakes up during the night she sometimes hears a faint steady sound like a ghostly faucet drip in the next room: it’s her mother, unable to sleep, on her knees before the illuminated Virgin, praying for her brother for hours on end.

And then 1915: seventeen years old. Her parents seem a decade older. Her father is dwindling as though eaten away from
inside
; he struggles from room to room, sallow and stooped, and everyone knows he’s worried about business. For sixty years, since her grandfather’s time, there’s been no one in the entire monarchy who could dress chamois horn or do game taxidermy like Bonifazius Hoflehner and Son. Her father prepared hunting trophies for the castles of the Esterházys, the Schwarzenbergs, even the archdukes, working with four or five assistants, painstakingly, exactingly, and honorably, from morning till late at night. But in times as deadly as these, when the only thing people shoot is people, no one comes in for weeks on end. Yet the daughter-in-law’s pregnancy, the grandson’s
illness
, it all costs money. The shoulders of the now taciturn man slump more and more, and they give way completely one day when the letter arrives from the Isonzo, for the first time not in Otto’s handwriting but his commander’s. Even without opening it they know what it is: a hero’s death at the head of the company, eternal remembrance, and so forth. The house becomes quieter and quieter; her mother has stopped praying, the light over the Virgin has gone out; she’s forgotten to fill it with oil.

1916: She’s eighteen. There’s a new catchphrase in the
household
, used constantly: too expensive. Her mother, her father, her sister, her sister-in-law escape from their troubles into the
smaller-scale misery of the bills, from morning until night they reckon up their poor daily life aloud. Meat, too expensive, butter, too expensive, a pair of shoes, too expensive: Christine hardly dares to breathe for fear it might be too expensive. The things most necessary to a bare existence flee as though terrified, burrowing like animals into lairs of extortionate prices—you have to hunt them down. Bread has to be begged for, a handful of vegetables inveigled from the grocer, eggs brought in from the country, coal carted by hand from the train station: thousands of freezing, hungry women vie with one another in pursuit of quarry that’s scarcer every day. Her father has something wrong with his stomach, he needs special, easily digestible food. Ever since he had to take down the
BONIFAZIUS HOFLEHNER
sign and sell the business, he hasn’t been talking to anyone, he just presses his hands to his belly sometimes and moans when he thinks he’s alone. The doctor really ought to be called. But: too expensive, her father says, preferring to double up furtively in his distress.

And 1917—nineteen. They buried her father two days after New Year’s; the money in the bankbook was just enough for them to dye their clothes black. It’s getting more and more expensive to live, they’ve already rented out two rooms to a pair of refugees from Brody, but it’s not enough, not enough, even if you slave until late at night. Finally her uncle the privy
councillor
finds a job for her mother as a caretaker in the Korneuburg Hospital and one for her as a clerk. If only it wasn’t so far—leaving at daybreak in an ice-cold train car and not back until evening. Then cleaning, mending, scrubbing, darning, and sewing, until, without thinking, without wanting anything, you fall like an overturned bag into a grudging sleep from which you’d prefer not to wake.

And 1918—twenty. The war still on, still not a day to yourself without worries, still no time to glance in the mirror, to poke your head out into the street. Christine’s mother is beginning
to complain, her legs are swelling up in the damp, uncellared ward, but Christine has no strength left for sympathy. She’s been living too long with infirmity; something in her has gone numb since she started having to type admission records for seventy or eighty atrocious mutilations every day. Sometimes a little lieutenant from the Banat toils into the office on his crutch to see her (his left leg is shattered), his hair golden-blond like the wheat of his homeland but terror etched into the
still-unformed
child’s face. In his quaint Swabian dialect he tells homesick stories (poor blond lost child) about his village, his dog, his horses. One evening they kiss on a bench in the park, two, three feeble kisses, more pity than passion, then he says he wants to marry her as soon as the war is over. A tired smile is her only response; she doesn’t dare think that the war might ever end.