The Post Office Girl (9 page)

When the dance is over, General Elkins guides her back through the room at a leisurely pace. She walks proudly on his arm, feeling her neck straighten as she looks ahead confidently, sensing that this makes her look younger and more beautiful. She told General Elkins straight out that this was her first time here and that she didn’t know the real Engadine (Maloja,
Sils-Maria
), but this revelation hasn’t made him any less respectful. Instead he seems pleased: Won’t she permit him to drive her
to Maloja tomorrow morning? “Of course,” she says, awed and happy, and presses the distinguished old man’s hand with a kind of comradely gratitude (where is she getting the nerve?). In this room, so unfriendly even that morning, she feels increasingly at home and sure of herself now that all these people are
practically
fighting each other off to please her, now that she sees how a little contact can create an easy sociability, while down in her own narrow little world people envy each other the butter on their bread and the rings on their fingers. She gives her uncle and aunt an enraptured report of the general’s gracious invitation. But she’s not allowed much time for conversation: the German engineer crosses the room for the next dance. Through him she meets a French doctor, also an American friend of her uncle’s, and a parade of other people whose names she’s too excited and happy to catch. In the last ten years she hasn’t met as many
gracious
, polite, elegant people as she has in these two hours. She’s being asked to dance, offered cigarettes and liqueurs, invited on drives and a climbing expedition: everyone seems curious to meet her and everyone treats her with a respect that apparently comes naturally to all of them. “You’re a sensation, child,” her aunt whispers, pleased by the stir her charge is creating. Her uncle stifles a tired yawn. He denies the obvious out of vanity but gives in finally. “Yes, perhaps that’s the best thing, we’ll all have a good rest. Not too much at once. Tomorrow’s another day and we’ll make a good job of it.” Christine takes a last look at the enchanting room, luminous with candelabras and electric lights, pulsating with music and dancing. She feels she’s stepped out of a bath, renewed and refreshed, every nerve quivering. She takes the old man’s arm and impulsively bends to kiss his hand in gratitude.

Then she’s alone in her room, stunned, confused,
overwhelmed
by her own self, by the sudden silence all around. Her skin burns under the loose dress, she’s tense with excitement. Now the room seems confining. She pushes the balcony door
open. Snow showers onto her bare shoulders. She goes out onto the balcony, where, shivering happily and breathing easily now, she looks out, full to bursting, over the empty landscape, her small heart beating under the great dome of night. There’s silence here too, but a bigger, more elemental silence than the one inside, a soothing silence instead of an oppressive one. The mountains that were glittering earlier are now in their own shadow, crouched like massive black cats, with glinting snowy eyes. The air is thin under the almost full moon like an irregular yellow pearl amid a spray of brilliant stars, its wan, cool light faintly illuminating the misty contours of the valley. An
inhuman
landscape, divinely silent, gently overwhelming, unlike anything she knows, but her excitement seems to flow out into the bottomless calm as she gradually loses herself in the silence. Suddenly a bronze mass of sound rolls through the frozen air: it’s the church bell down in the valley, echoing off rock faces to the left and right. Christine gives a start, as though she were the bell being struck. She listens to the bronze notes rumbling into the sea of mist. With bated breath she counts: nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Midnight! Is it possible? Only midnight? Only twelve hours since she arrived, shy, inhibited, and panicky, with a dried-up, paltry little soul, really just one day, half a day? In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.

In this new world even sleep is different: blacker, denser, more drugged, you’re completely submerged in yourself. As she
awakens
Christine hauls her drowned senses out of these new depths, slowly, laboriously, bit by bit, as though from a bottomless well. First she has an uncertain sense of the time. Through her eyelids she sees brightness; the room must be light, it must be day. It’s
a vague, muffled feeling, followed by an anxious thought (even while she’s still sleep): Don’t forget about work! Don’t be late! The train of thought she’s known for the last ten years begins automatically: The alarm clock will ring now … Don’t go back to sleep … Responsibility, responsibility, responsibility … Get up now, work starts at eight, and before that I’ll have to get the heat started, make coffee, get the milk, the rolls, tidy up, change mother’s bandages, prepare for lunch, and what else? There’s something else I have to do today … Right, pay the grocer lady, she reminded me yesterday … No, don’t doze off, stay alert, get up when the alarm goes off … But what’s the problem today … What’s keeping it … Is the alarm clock broken, did I forget to wind it … Where’s the alarm, it’s light in the room … Goodness, maybe I’ve overslept and it’s already seven or eight or nine and people are cursing at the wicket they way they did that time when I wasn’t feeling well, right away they wanted to complain to the head office … And so many employees are being let go these days … Dear God, I can’t be late, I can’t oversleep … The long-buried fear of being late is like a mole tunneling under the black soil of sleep. Abruptly the last of it falls away.

Where am I? Her eyes grope upward. What has happened to me? Instead of the slanting, smoke-stained, cobweb-gray attic ceiling with the brown wooden beams, a blue-white
ceiling
, clean and rectilinear with gilt molding, floats above her. And where’s all this light coming from? A new window must have appeared overnight. Where am I? She looks at her hands, which are lying not on the brown, patched old camelhair blanket but on a light, fluffy, blue one embroidered with
reddish
flowers. The first shock: this isn’t my bed. And not my room—that’s the second. And the third and greatest: now fully awake, she looks around and remembers everything—vacation, holiday, freedom, Switzerland, her aunt, her uncle, the
magnificent
hotel! No worries, no responsibilities, no work, no time, no alarm clock! No stove, no one waiting, no pressure
from anyone: the terrible mill of hardship that’s been crushing her life for ten years has ground to a halt for the first time. You can lie in your soft warm bed, aware of the blood flowing in your veins, the light waiting behind the delicately gathered curtains, the soft warmth on your skin. You don’t have to worry about letting your eyes close again, you deserve to be lazy, you can dream and stretch and spread out, you belong to yourself. You can even (she remembers now, her aunt told her) press this button at the head of the bed, on which a bellboy is represented at postage-stamp scale: all you have to do is reach over, and, by magic, two minutes later the door opens, the bellboy knocks and enters politely, pushing a cute little cart on little rubber wheels (she marveled at one of them in her aunt’s room), with coffee, tea, or cocoa the way you like them in fine dishes and with white damask napkins. Breakfast is there all by itself, you don’t have to grind the coffee, light the fire, toil at the stove with your feet in slippers in the cold, no, no, it’s all been done, white rolls and golden honey and delicacies like the ones yesterday come riding in, a magic sleigh floating up to the soft white bed without your having to lift a finger. Or you can press the other button, marked with a picture of a girl in a little white bonnet, and in she scurries after a gentle knock, wearing a bright apron and a black dress, asking what madam wishes, whether she should open the shutters or pull the curtains open or closed or draw a bath. You can make a
hundred
thousand wishes in this enchanting world and they’ll all be granted just like that. You can want or do anything here, but you don’t have to. You can ring or not, you can get up or not, you can go back to sleep or lie in bed, whatever you want, your eyes open or closed, and bask in a flood of fine carefree notions. Or you can think about nothing at all and just laze mindlessly, time belongs to you, not the reverse. You’re not driven onward by that frantic mill wheel of hours and seconds, you glide through time, eyes closed, as though in a rowboat
with oars pulled in. Christine lies there, enjoying this new feeling, her blood pulsing pleasantly in her ears like faraway Sunday church bells.

But no (she sits up energetically)—this is no time for
daydreaming
. Don’t waste any of this time, this time that brings more wonders every second. At home you can dream for months, years on end, in the creaky, broken-down wooden bed with the hard mattress at night, and at the ink-spotted
worktable
while the peasants are off in the fields, the clock on the wall like a sentinel, ticking inexorably and punctiliously. There, dreaming is better than being awake; here in this celestial world, sleep is a waste of time. She’s out of bed with a final decisive movement and splashes some cold water on her face and neck; now, refreshed, into the new clothes. Overnight her skin has forgotten their soft rustle and shimmer. The clinging caress of the luxurious fabric is a new pleasure. But don’t linger on these small delights, don’t waste time. Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore. She pulls on her sweater, jams on her hat, and dashes downstairs.

The corridors are still gray and empty in the cold morning light, but in the lounge downstairs shirtsleeved hotel workers are cleaning the runners with electric carpet sweepers. The
puffy-eyed
night clerk shows ill-humored surprise at the sight of this excessively early guest, but sleepily doffs his cap. Poor fellow, so here too there’s hard work, unseen labor, ill-paid drudgery, there’s such a thing as having to get up and be on time. But let’s not think about that. What’s it to me? I don’t want to be aware of anyone but me, me, me. Go on, go on by. Outside the cold air pounces, scrubs eyelids, lips, and cheeks like an icy cloth. This mountain air does chill you, down to the bone. The only thing for that is to run, that’ll get the blood circulating.
This path must go somewhere. It doesn’t matter where. Up here anywhere is as magical and new as anywhere else.

Christine sets off at a vigorous pace, surprised that no one is out yet. At six in the morning the swirl of people that thronged the paths at midday yesterday must still be packed away in the great stone crates of the hotels, and the very landscape lies in a kind of gray trance. The air is soundless, the moon, so golden yesterday, is gone, the stars have vanished, the colors have faded, the misty cliffs are as drab and colorless as cold metal. Only high up, among the highest peaks, are there thick clouds moving restlessly, as if some invisible force were stretching them, pulling them. Now and then a cloud separates from the dense mass, floating up like a fat white cotton ball; it changes form as it climbs, suffused with a light from nowhere, bordered with gold. The sun must be nearby, already at work somewhere behind the peaks—not yet in sight, but warming the turbulent atmosphere. So move toward it, then, upward, higher! This trail here, perhaps, graveled, as gently winding as a garden path, it can’t be hard; and in fact it’s plain sailing. She’s not used to this sort of thing and is surprised by the joyous spring in her step. The path’s gradual turns and the buoyancy of the air draw her upward. A sprint like this warms the blood in no time. She tears off her gloves, sweater, hat: the skin should have a chance to breathe in this rousing chill, not just the lips and lungs. As she quickens her pace she becomes more confident, lighter on her feet. She should really stop (her heart is hammering in her chest, her pulse pounding in her ears, her temples
throbbing
), and she pauses for a moment to look down from this first bend and shake the moisture out of her hair: forest, white streets ruled straight amid the dense green, the river, curved and gleaming like a scimitar, and above it all the sun suddenly pouring through the notch. Wonderful, but her momentum won’t let her stop. The insistent drumming of her heart and the rhythm of the muscles and tendons keep urging her forward,
and she presses on, spurred and intoxicated by her own
excitement
, with no idea how far or how high or where she’s going. After an hour, perhaps, she comes to a vantage point where the slope of the mountain is cambered like a ramp, and throws herself down on the grass: enough. Enough for today. Her head is swimming, but she’s strangely happy. Her blood is pulsing under her eyelids, her skin feels raw where it was exposed to the wind, but the almost painful sensations are a new kind of pleasure. She never knew the blood could flow so strongly, the pulse could pound so eagerly, was never as aware of her own physicality, her light-footedness and energy, as in this extravagant, narcotic exhaustion. Clouds float overhead in an undreamed-of blue and the panorama down below opens up as she lets her hands dig pleasantly into cold fragrant Alpine moss. Washed by the sun and scoured by gusty mountain winds, she lies in a pleasant daze, awake and dreaming at once, savoring the tumult within her and the driving, tempestuous movement of nature for an hour or two, until the sun begins to burn her lips. She jumps to her feet and quickly gathers a few flowers—juniper, gentian, sage—still so cold that there are ice crystals among the petals. Then she hurries down, at first maintaining the measured stride of a tourist, straight and tall, before she yields to the pull of gravity, leaping from one stone to the next with increasing speed and daring. She feels self-confident and happy as never before, could almost sing as she whirls down the hairpin turns into the valley as though carried by the wind, skirt and hair fluttering behind her.