The strudlhof steps, p.14
The Strudlhof Steps, page 14
For the time being, conditions were most inopportune for announcing an engagement publicly, because Etelka, much to the wrath of her father, had not long before broken off an engagement he had warmly welcomed. And at the end of this summer Grauermann would be moving into only his third year at the Consular Academy.
So the whole thing was kept secret for the time being. That was how Etelka wanted it.
Now she sat upright on the chaise longue, and Grauermann continued reading to her about the “fourfold root of the law of sufficient reason.”
He’d scarcely gotten a good start when Asta’s footsteps were heard in the piano room next door, followed by a faint scratching at the door of Etelka’s room, a prearranged sign that the coast was clear and that there was no reason for alarm, just that Asta wanted to join them. “Come on in!” called Etelka, smiling in a somewhat distracted way, and going with Grauermann, who had stood up quickly, to the door, since nothing else was happening. Only a narrow crack was opened, noiselessly. About halfway up the door, a dark-colored, well-known object came reaching in toward Etelka, moving closer and closer, until the little tinfoil sleeve grew visible that wrapped one end of this bar of deliciousness made of chocolate and marzipan.
“Just what is this?” cried Etelka in a low voice, stepping back, her hands raised, splendidly feigning surprise and shock.
“You ought to know,” Asta now said, and she opened the door all the way. Grauermann gave her a friendly hello full of genuinely warm feeling. And Etelka had meanwhile set aside her veiled, world-spurning mood and gone ahead and taken a hearty bite.
These were exactly the things Asta couldn’t stand about her sister, though.
•
René Stangeler left the Consular Academy at quarter to six and turned left, walking a few slow steps uphill along Waisenhaus Gasse.
The boy felt totally bowled over by the impression he’d just received of a sphere of living and a manner of living that caused his own world to drop to the ground like a withered leaf and lay in the dull dust by comparison. Even leaving out of the account that at this time Stangeler couldn’t so much as look at any person or thing without immediately wanting to be it and to live in the manner and the milieu proper to it—everything had the same effect on him, too, an opera or a detective movie—whatever he had just experienced fit in with his tastes the way a key fits into a lock, and it opened up a little door to the safe of his glimmering ideas.
He was not aware that it was mainly Herr von Honnegger to whom he was indebted for so profound an impression, one produced within fifteen minutes and solely because Herr Teddy was much too grown-up and long since too clever to allow his own superiority to manifest itself in front of a mere boy. (Yes, he thought of this young man in the upper prep-school grades as a boy; René’s progress had been delayed, and by more than a year and a day, for he’d originally been sent off to a technical school, which did not prove to be an undeniable mistake until his second year there.)
All of it taken together was what was now bearing up and firing up René—the F-sharp minor sonata, the small waiting room, the silence in the building, the sunlight in the music salon where the three of them had sat and had even had a nice talk. The content of that talk was the most unimportant aspect of it, however. Stangeler had completely forgotten it by now, in fact. To a certain extent, he’d been forced into the conversation by the outward situation in which he’d found himself. As for the rest, everything seemed to him to have moved along easily and freely. René had a good feeling, without any of the awkwardness that would often bother him after a change of scene or after leaving a place.
For his part, Herr von Honnegger had been scrutinizing the schoolboy very attentively during their conversation while himself remaining unobserved.
He had a peculiar feeling. Something like a small meteor struck him, and now, all of a sudden, at the sight of Etelka’s brother, light was shed for him on Grauermann’s relationship with Etelka, whom he hardly knew. Up to this point, the whole story of Pista’s engagement—and he realized it now—had been for him nothing more than a space to look into with good wishes and hold in esteem, one filled in as time went by with mere names and other vital statistics, as it were, but not containing anything concrete. However, sitting opposite René Stangeler in the music room, from which the sun was just then silently and cautiously withdrawing the last of its fingertips, he came to feel and to understand nothing less than the exact nature of the power of attraction that Etelka must be exercising over Grauermann. Teddy was deeply amazed. Until now, he had never had the experience of realizing that a woman’s impact could become comprehensible through a boy.
The starting point of their conversation had been music, and it yielded a dialogue that went as follows.
Teddy: “The laws of harmony seem to be merely relative. The interval of the third, to our ears an ordinary consonance, as it were, was considered dissonant in the Middle Ages.” (He was making up this dubious little tidbit of musicological wisdom on purpose to throw René off.)
René (a frown gathering on his face): “Is it your opinion that music existed before harmony, or harmony before music?”
“Music existed first, of course.”
“Can you imagine grammar as an empirical science?”
Teddy hesitated, and after he’d made the mental leap, it became clear to him that it wasn’t.
“No,” he said. “You are correct to the extent that grammar does not merely describe the forms of a language but also indicates the concept of what language is in the first place. Let’s come to an agreement in this way—before music and before language, harmony and grammar existed. But the systematized laws of harmony and of grammar came into existence after the different genres of music and the different languages.”
That was how their conversation went. When Honnegger stepped into the corridor with Grauermann—they were on their way up to their rooms—he was visited by a sudden feeling of dejection concerning Pista’s future. Pista himself seemed satisfied on the assumption that his future brother-in-law, whom he’d been showing off (to a degree, anyway), had made a good first impression here. “Quite an unusual character, isn’t he?” Pista casually remarked while they were going up the broad staircase.
“No question about it,” Honnegger said. It had struck him like an arrow whose barbs were holding fast. Unexpectedly, and by way of a strange detour, he had arrived at a concrete image of Etelka Stangeler, and he realized now, of course, that he had well-nigh disliked her from the start. Out of an insignificant facade and a photograph only half registered in his consciousness, a whole portrait, even a sculpture, now seemed to have materialized. For several days the image wouldn’t leave him, and it even reached the point where he—at that time, the only concerned person among so many who were unconcerned about this matter!—shortly afterward gave utterance to a fleeting remark on the subject, specifically to Herr Stephan von Semski, in the Café Pucher, while inwardly keeping before his eye the moment when he and Grauermann had walked out of the music room, its double doors painted in white enamel.
Meanwhile, René had reached the corner of Strudlhof Gasse and remained standing there. The slanted rays of the sun were still shining wherever a surface presented itself, like a thick, dappled carpet. Here now, at the corner, the sunlight extended into the gap and over to the treetops behind it. On the right side, standing orderly and closed in, were the buildings of the university’s Department of Physics and Radiology, their contents unfathomable, and they exuded a new kind of romantic air, one that proceeds chiefly from none other than the most exact of the sciences, as if their essence were being transformed during emanation into their opposite, in a way.
The direction in which René Stangeler was walking had nothing whatever to do with going home. His direction now could only have been designated as “not on the way home,” in fact. The state of subjective inebriation that René now found himself in is one likely to be deemed appropriate for a youth. The actual age is of much less importance in this case, though, than might be assumed at first glance. The same state was equally prevalent in the adult members of the family, and as a basis of their everyday lives, at that. Just as René, while now walking toward the Strudlhof Steps, was expecting nothing less than the extraordinary, so too his sisters considered it a tariff due and payable to them at any time, so to speak, as well as a standard they were entitled to apply in assessing their lives; they shied away from any other. And so there was one thing that these people, so gifted in so many ways, would have found impossible to achieve—namely, to be regular, ordinary people.
Now the street ended. René stood at the head of the steps.
Stangeler had relatively little knowledge of his native city and none at all of this area here. Excursions by night, which even back then he was undertaking not infrequently, just like his sister Etelka—except that he was alone—kept leading him, again and again, no farther than to the bars and the cafés in District I, the center of the city, or to the artists’ haunts along Prater Strasse, close to his family’s home. The slight surprise Stangeler was now feeling at the upper end of the Strudlhof Steps fit right in with all the rest of his romantic folderol, and it put the last dot, as it were, on the i of his whole mood, which was undergoing an intensification wholly out of proportion to the simplicity of what was giving rise to it. He was taken with the feeling that all the world’s a stage and that here the curtain was just about to go up on one of life’s stages, one where he was longing to play a part that would suit his taste; and while he was looking down at the stairs and the ramps, he experienced, quickly and in the deepest part of himself, a sense of treading the boards in some scene that would be able to play itself out all the way to the end here, a crucial scene, of course, an ascent and a descent with a meeting in the middle, just like an opera.
In brief, one of those scenes that we hold in memory exclusively from the theater but that actually can occur in real life as well, if only seldom; when they do, they arise altogether unexpectedly. And then only in hindsight do we recognize them for what they were.
Walking slowly down the steps, René was disposed more to appreciation than contemplation.
Some treetops were leaning over the edge of the slope. The stairs led gently downward, but they were surprisingly steep. There was a smell of earth here.
Liechtenstein Strasse lies at the bottom of the stairs, and Stangeler followed it to the left, where it presently runs into a wider traffic artery near a tavern called the Flight into Egypt. René was familiar with this place, of course, and at the moment that bothered him, as though a light were shining from the side into his dream, as though a draft were blowing in. He crossed Alserbach Strasse quickly and made his way along Liechtenstein Strasse, which becomes much narrower here.
This street seemed to be the boundary between two very different sections of the city, which sized up one another, like strangers, across its narrow width. More precisely, one part looked down on the other from a greater height; first, the ground on which houses had been built rises on the left, as does the whole area, and second, some shoddy-looking new buildings, four and five stories high, were situated on that left side of the street, while the right side consisted mostly of one-story houses, few much newer than a hundred years old. That part of the city is known as Lichtental, and it was the neighborhood Franz Schubert had called home; he had at one time been the organist in the parish church of Lichtental. René knew nothing about these kinds of things, though, and right now he wouldn’t have cared to hear anything about them. He was an intense enough person, granted, but essentially an uncultivated one. It could be said that at the foundation of his being he was the diametrical opposite of someone who has turned out like, say, that Major Laska, subsequently Colonel Laska, who once took Lieutenant Melzer with him on the bear hunt.
Another little street, practically an alleyway, branched off to the right. Attached to one of the corner houses, Stangeler now noticed—it wasn’t at any great height, on the second floor, just above the first—was a fully modeled ceramic statue, glazed in blue, depicting a unicorn.
He stayed standing there, in the narrow little side street, and was looking up at the unicorn when he heard footsteps behind him. They slowed and stopped.
René turned around and saw a girl about seventeen in a simple gray suit, with a briefcase under her arm.
He laughed right on the spot, and his laughter was a very skillful move, effortlessly establishing the connection he’d at once begun to seek. Laughing herself in turn, she looked up at the unicorn and asked, “Do you know what kind of strange animal that is?”
“A unicorn,” answered Stangeler. Now he saw that she had dark red hair, which charmingly framed her temples under her flat gray hat. The temples themselves were very white and pale, but not shiny, just like her face, in which her eyes were set somewhat on a slant (not unlike René himself, but naturally that didn’t enter his conscious mind).
“Was there ever really such a thing?” she asked.
“Oh yes—probably,” Stangeler said, and he thought of Julius Caesar’s reports about ancient Germania. “But,” he added (and he was well in his stride, so that everything came out very natural and completely ingenuous), “I’d very much enjoy it if you’d let me tell you more about it—only couldn’t we do it in that large café on the other side of Alserbach Strasse? I just have to have a bite to eat now. Won’t you join me? They have wonderful pastries there.”
After he’d stepped across the threshold that separates the boy from the young man, he’d attained something like a mechanistic security in his dealings with females, with whom, by the way, he was virtually intimate regarding the salient point. A few chances of this latter kind, remote though they might have been, had by no means escaped René’s attention; right here, in this early (indeed, this very first) choice of his, he was showing the occasional inclination of all the Stangelers toward the sweet-tempered, good-natured, and, as they imagined it, intellectually inferior type, all aspects required to form a sounding board for their own self-esteem, with which seasoning they could relish this or that experience all the more, just as many people consider nutmeg or curry indispensable with certain dishes.
Our couple, meanwhile, had walked down the wide street and gone into the café, where there was no skimping on anything, because René was flush, never mind the small amount of spending money he was given. What stood him in good stead here was a forgotten bookcase, a large one, off in the corner of an entry room on the third floor of his parents’ house; it was jam-packed with every novel published in the 1880s, in particular with the works of a certain Georg Ebers, books distinguished by their cloth bindings and gilt edges. Starting all the way at the back, René had been hollowing out this bookcase little by little, the way termites in Africa hollow out trees from the inside. His dealings at several secondhand book stores were pursued on a regular basis.
But now, instead of unpacking his sample case full of quaint and appealing wares and, as it were, getting his display window all arranged, he was overtaken, right here at the little marble table and as a result of the relaxed and easygoing mood of the afternoon, by something entirely different—namely, by a sovereign apathy toward that automatic mechanism which should have been operating to impress a girl. René found it flatly impossible to get himself all keyed up for the occasion, and, perhaps for the first time in his life, he was feeling indifferent as to what impression he might or might not be creating. This feeling—comparable to that of a person sitting in an easy chair only too deep and comfortable, so that it prevents him from standing up—was very distinct, and it was new to him. He welcomed it with deep joy and with the noteworthy desire to live like that all the time.
“So now, what about those cute little unicorns?” she asked, setting down her cocoa cup.
“Oh yes—unicorns,” said René, looking at her and going no further.
“It seems you were just after your bite to eat and now it’s too much trouble for you to talk about them,” she suggested with a smile.
“No, it’s not too much trouble at all,” he replied with a significant degree of emphasis, as it were, looking right at her and observing her head against the background of the street, now and then full of life, behind the large pane of glass. “Well then, unicorns, or ‘cute little unicorns,’ as you called them so endearingly, have in all probability always existed. A century ago, anything that didn’t fit inside the framework of science, which people thought had been erected once and for all, was considered sheer nonsense, merely fables and legends, but many new animals have been discovered since then, and today the belief is no longer held that there is such a thing as creatures purely and simply from the realm of legend. Everything goes back to some actuality—basilisks, dragons, and unicorns.”
“Are you a student at the university?”
“Yes. The unicorn was a wild and ferocious animal that lived by itself in an impenetrable forest. But it was easy to catch.”
“How did they do that?” she asked, more out of astonishment than snappishness. That latter tone didn’t seem to suit her at all well and was only an exterior fortification of her true nature, artificially put forward as a rapid means of self-defense, adopted and imitated from somewhere.
