The strudlhof steps, p.25
The Strudlhof Steps, page 25
It lay between walls that retained the heat, though they weren’t high. They weren’t blank, either, but had plenty of nooks and crannies and little windows, mostly with yellow frames and green shutters. The sky narrowed only a little as it came down over this patch of garden, which extended leftward along a neighbor’s two garden walls, and there stood four fruit trees with a bench and a table in their shadows, as well as a lounge chair Paula had bought herself, blond wood and canvas dyed in several colors. There had never been furniture like this in the house before. Bygone times often give us the impression that, taken with their own self-assured competence, it never occurred to people to make themselves comfortable when they took a seat, as if in those days they had gone through their entire lives assuming stiff postures and stances without ever quite realizing it. The truth is that they lived more comfortably, though, even if they didn’t fix their eyes directly on a goal called comfort or coziness, which people can’t do anyway until they’ve grown untrue to life and accordingly arrange it more than live it—of course noting, as if they were outside observers, and eliminating every tiny flaw in their decor, while still, needless to say, never achieving the comfort they seek by doing so, for it dwells inside life and not beside it.
By which we weren’t referring to Paula’s lounge chair in particular. Lying in it, she would try to think of the next project she could get her aunt all wrapped up in. A high, feathery cloud would sometimes hang in the sky, whose unceasing bounteousness of warm blue was in itself enough to create anxiety. Here in the garden there was very little sound from the city traffic. The streets of Lichtental, narrow and lying beyond the main routes, were hardly traveled at all by automobiles and noisy horse-drawn carts. Once in a while, coming from near Nussdorfer Strasse or Alserbach Strasse, could be heard a horn honking and an engine racing and that grinding, thunder-like noise, with no one single sound leaping out from it, into which the daytime roiling of a large city blends at some distance. Paula’s concern was to see to it that her last days in Vienna overlapped with René’s impending visit in such a way that she would be able to get together with him a couple of times at least, and this ultimate aim of all her ingenious maneuvering she kept unswervingly before her eyes, kept a tight grip on without letting loose, the way a person will squeeze a pair of pliers. But soon after the middle of August she found a general-delivery letter waiting for her—not addressed to “Meningitis Cerebrospinalis” this time, but more simply to “Strudlhof Steps”—in which René announced his arrival on the twenty-second of the month and asked her if, at three in the afternoon on the twenty-third, she could please be at that bakery we’re already familiar with.
With that, a kind of reversal took place. Paula now sat or lay much more at ease in her garden chair than before. Forthwith she reached an agreement with her aunt; it was established that their vacation could begin as of the twenty-fifth, and so their journey to Vitis (to the extent that it can be called a journey) stood fixed on the agenda for that date. It was still a good ten days until then.
Now Paula could lie out in the garden more often, and for longer periods of time, too, because her doing so would no longer be bound quite so inevitably to bring about the concomitant result of causing her aunt, in reaction to the manifestly slight demand for Paula’s services on the part of the attorney’s office, to break out into lamentations over vacation time that all this while still wasn’t being granted. Up to now, that was often the reason why afternoon walks along the Danube docks had been opted for, why at home it had seemed so much more advisable not to provoke, through rest and relaxation, but to enmesh, through cloud masses of busy work. In this regard, Paula was demonstrating in prefiguration the instincts and methods of certain politicians who would not come swooping over Europe until much later. Now she could enjoy the garden. Now she could enjoy waiting; now finally she could enjoy a walk. Somewhere off in a corner of her mind, by the way, she was looking forward to getting out to the country. But that was something that just peeped through, no more than a pleasant backdrop, a kind of consoling thought off in the background and held in reserve, even though it also meant that once again she wouldn’t get to see René for a long time. So the anticipation remained faint. With all the intensity of her years, which even inside uncomplicated people like herself are forever betwixt and between in their efforts to make life into something like a poem or some other work of art, Paula deeply breathed in these summer days of white and red and gold. That which is called the art of living, however, is something young people of course do not command; this term has the flavor of living arrangements made by aging bachelors, artists of living where there can be no more art to living, because the person has died in the meantime.
Considering the machinations—difficult enough, after all—that Paula had had to be so involved in and our awareness that any attempt to stay behind by herself in Vienna would not exactly have met with success, it might be tempting to conclude that she was given only a limited measure of freedom by Fräulein Theresa Schachl. But such was not the case. It was more the situation itself than the character of the retired lady that created the impasse. She of course didn’t know a thing about any René Stangeler. But she possessed as part of her heritage a deeply rooted understanding of how precious those years are that Paula was just now living through when measured against what would come later, what could not help coming along with the physical weight of life. She was not the least bit spinsterish. Still attractive, if somewhat on the robust side, there lurked in her voice some honey from a past she’d known how to enjoy; a gold-green shimmer like wine gleamed on her lips and coursed along her tongue. Although there was no explicit reference during any talks on the subject—no such talks ever occurred—it was yet obviously being taken into consideration that a girl of Paula’s age isn’t still hanging around with just her playmates or girlfriends. Ever since she’d made Stangeler’s acquaintance, Paula hadn’t bumped up against any obstacles worth mentioning when she wanted to go out, even in the evening. Underlying Theresa Schachl’s attitude in these matters was what sounded like a triad whose three notes consisted of an almost peasantlike ability to refrain from judgment, the knowledge that one can do nothing to stop what’s going to happen sooner or later anyway, and a self-confident trust in one’s own kind, which she recognized anew each day in this child who so resembled her deceased brother.
Paula was enjoying waiting, “a woman’s chief occupation.” Perhaps Grete Siebenschein wasn’t so wrong after all with the statement she was to make later on (as of now, she was still in school and growing up in Dornbach, in a villa her father was then renting, next door to the beautiful garden by König, long before he moved his residence and his office to the house diagonally across from the Bohemia Station, the house with all the overdone, showy staircases full of senseless tassels and festoons and mirrors—but returning to the subject: Grete could have said what she later did about the “chief occupation” even back then, which is how far advanced she was by sixteen).
So now Paula was waiting. It was often like a sweet ache, nothing more, not a presence aggravated by resolving into or combining into particular details. One of her dresses was between a violet and a lavender blue. She enjoyed wearing it now. It was her waiting color. At the Danube docks, in the direction of the Kahlenberg or the Bisamberg, there took shape in the evenings a portal filled with blazing colors first layered and then melting into one another. The water would later look as if it had been extinguished, and it appeared to flow more quickly if one looked carefully, streak for streak, eddy for eddy, like very thin sheets of ice. All along the embankments of the Danube Canal, and holding sway until the late hours of every afternoon, life spread out and then literally dismantled into its component parts, into articles of clothing peeled off by people who came to catch the sun and the air and to go swimming. One day Paula walked all the way out to Nussdorf and then rode back on the streetcar. The main river of the Danube, conversely, opened everything out on an incomparably wider scale, would have no part of that heat-shriveled dismantling which people brought to its banks from both sides. It cooled them and flitted swiftly past, however much they wanted to hold it besieged by their troops and swarms. Likewise, the countryside was most definitely divided in two; here there wasn’t any tinge of “well, that’s the best they can do” about two banks’ being joined by bridges quite narrow in their span, as on the Danube Canal.
The garden was glowing. Not until evening began approaching did the fruit trees cast shadows that could offer help. Then at last everything would be set up and lined up just right, green-gold fingers across the grass. There were still roses. The table for the evening meal had been moved outdoors here, and one got the feeling that everywhere else too people were eating outdoors, as voices came drifting from all the other gardens of the nearby houses. These days, Paula enjoyed stepping into this basin of rose-filled quiet early in the morning as well.
Neither then nor later did Stangeler ever make it this far. He wasn’t worth it, we’d like to say; it wasn’t granted to him; he was never mature enough, as it were. But Lieutenant Melzer, later Major, and later yet Senior Councillor, did sit here once, having a nice talk with Paula and her husband and holding their kicking child on his knees.
•
Grauermann had been coughing and sneezing in the most pitiable way since Sunday (actually since that beautiful, warm summer Sunday night). His nose was all red and his eyes were constantly watering. His face took on more of a turned-up look, which it was already preformed to have anyway because of a short, straight nose whose tip did not stand out horizontal but instead bobbed back up a little on a slant, so that someone looking into his face from the same height would always see something of the nostrils. And now the nostrils were really visible. They were underlined in red, we might say. “You should lie down,” Etelka advised. He could have quoted in reply that line from a ballad by Schiller, “Such thanks, fair one, I do not crave” (Den Dank, Dame, begehr’ ich nicht), but with the accent on the word “such,” meaning “Don’t do me any favors.” Etelka’s nerves were shredded from the coughing and sneezing fits his cold had brought on. “Go lie down in bed,” she said. Asta shot her a brief glance from off to the side. They were supposed to travel to Vienna later that very afternoon to attend the garden party at the Schmellers’. That was why Asta packed into that look a whole sentence, one perfectly understandable to her sister: “Don’t make it so obvious, or else he’ll really want to come.” After all, Etelka had already said, among other things, “You can’t possibly go and mix with people in your condition. You’ve got a fever, too, and you belong in bed for a week.” Marchetti had gone back to Vienna; otherwise he would have known that he’d been made out to be a liar, that speaker with forked tongue! A sweater and a mackintosh aren’t enough to protect against the morning dew high in the mountains. So Grauermann would have been better off if he actually had disciplined and conquered himself.
They set off for an easy, short walk right after breakfast, so Ingrid Schmeller was able to hold her own and even go the distance without getting a stone in her shoe or pains in her knees. Semski had already come up to the house for breakfast. Now he was walking ahead with Asta, followed by Melzer with Ingrid and Editha Pastré, and at the rear, Grauermann, whose explosions could now and then be heard (Etelka’s corresponding bursts of indignation remained inaudible); as it happened, though, his condition improved markedly, not to say abruptly, right as they took this little walk (perhaps the exercise and the sunlight did him good, or his cold was now dwindling anyway). At any rate, the most turbulent of his symptoms began to disappear soon thereafter, and with them the bothersome noise that a quiet night of camping out had caused. René was not along. This time there was no duty to perform, no ministrations for him to attend to. Editha was all taken care of.
Semski walked faster. He was on his pet topic and wanted to gain some distance from those behind him. Perhaps he could also feel somehow that Melzer kept looking at his back all the while, right between his shoulder blades. It would have been more in the spirit of things for the lieutenant to look at Asta. The fact was, though, that he knew next to nothing about what direction he was looking in. He drew no conclusions, never. And much later on, still did not. A civilian understanding didn’t even begin to make its first rudimentary manifestations in him until he’d been out of military service for seven years. That’s how it carries people along with it. Now he was feeling unpleasantly wedged in between Ingrid and Editha; he wasn’t able to start the ball rolling with a conversation, and such few little remarks as he was able to drop sounded like nothing more than a squeaking and a tweaking on the string between the two girls, a string stretched only too tight as it was.
Asta’s mood that morning was sprinkled with joviality, the way the dark forest floor here is spotted with flecks of sunlight. That was upsetting Semski. In his efforts to vent his feelings, to come close, at least by talking about it, to a goal that otherwise always remained at the same far distance, he felt thwarted from a sideward direction and impinged on by some irony of a gentle but pungent sort. Accustomed to leaning on Asta in this whole cause of his, what was coming out of her today seemed to him downright unsuitable, something new and contrary to the tacit understanding they’d always had. His egoism, distressed and trapped in a blind alley, did not of course permit him to see except imprecisely and in passing, as if out of the corners of his eyes, and so he didn’t take in much more, on the whole, than that something was upsetting him. “You must absolutely try to get a decision now, Stephan,” she was saying, “there’s nothing else to be done. Do it any way you can. Try new ways. If your mind’s really made up, that is. I don’t think you should let anything stop you.”
“How . . . ?” he answered, understanding her less quickly than she was speaking, like a door being slowly moved on its hinges by a draft until finally it opens. “But you know I can’t . . .” He came to a standstill and looked into Asta’s face.
“And why can’t you?” she asked briskly and cheerfully, but at the same time with a brusqueness of the kind helplessness often induces. There was pallor underneath her tanned skin, the pallor that comes with overtaxing oneself.
In the meantime Melzer and the two ladies had drawn close.
•
Of course they more or less knew the place they were living in, though just in passing, seen out of the corners of their eyes—amid surroundings that could not be surpassed for quietness but that nevertheless testified unceasingly to their immense strength. In the ravines and fissures near the mountain walls, in these wounds of the woods, torn open anew each spring by masses of water with their dull grinding, there lay now, when they once more partly healed in summertime, green, fine sand, deposited and dried out in the large basins between boulders washed smooth. Brushwood and branches had long spanned the empty streambed from both sides once again. Nor did time stand still here, either, much though so many hours might be marked off from so many hours by nothing more than, say, the piping cry of a buzzard flying up high. It was just that time appeared to have been brought here to a kind of regularity like the breathing of someone in a deep sleep. In the morning, a first finger of sunlight would point past the trunk of a certain tree and into the hidden rift valley, to a particular stone; in the evening, green-gold and from the opposite direction, another one like it.
Perhaps it would not have been possible to fix all of this quite so firmly before one’s eye without first stepping away from life, so to speak, and growing untrue to it—but this latter condition had indeed come to pass, and so one was occasionally capable of the former. “Nature” is just something invented at one time (it was for its sake, really, that people traveled out here on Saturdays), and people remained under obligation to that invention called nature, subsisting in nothing more than that a word which once meant “state of existence” (the ancients understood it in that sense) has now become fraught with some nebulous, aestheticized content—which we are then duty bound as civilized human beings to place a positive value on. It keeps getting harped on and fussed over, and people feel each other out about it in rural surroundings like these by calling each other’s attention to various beauties of “nature.” If anyone ever said outright that this spinach-green sublimity up hill and down dale was enough to turn his stomach, he would be considered an evil person.
It never crossed the mind of anybody here.
It might have crossed Lovis Konietzki’s mind before anyone else’s; he was the one Frau von Stangeler always said looked like a dethroned king of Poland. Quite that exalted his lineage wasn’t, but his actual lineage was of even greater practical importance for him at the time. Konietzki was the illegitimate son of a very powerful man, the president of one of the leading banking institutions in the entire monarchy. When the appropriate time came, this man had seen to little Lovis’s being placed in a good middle-class family, whose name he then bore from his childhood. He did it in a different way, however—the youthful mistress of the aging bank president had later, with his generous assistance, made an advantageous marriage. As long as the father lived—and he did so most lavishly for the time—he of course held his hand over his son. Sheltered as he was under this kind of canopy, Lovis nonetheless displayed some remarkable talents. Of all the young men who visited the Stangelers’ home, no one else was deriving from his own work anything close to Konietzki’s income. True, the father had hoisted him into the saddle, but Lovis had gone on to prove how well he could ride. His position in the legal department of the bank was a very good one, and as if that weren’t enough, he was able to take yet further advantage of jurisprudence, the subject his father had supported his study of and for which he had just the right aptitude to put to practical use: in partnership with another man he gave preparatory courses for the government law boards and qualifying examinations; and because both men gave their best and charged fees that significantly undercut a competing, long-established operation, the Konietzki Institute caught on very quickly. People said that Lovis earned a minimum of nine hundred crowns a month, and in those days, for a young man of twenty-six, that was more than abundant. Besides that, he was said to be enjoying a large monthly allowance from his father. So if not exactly wealthy, he still had more money at his disposal than did any of the other young people; more, in any case, than the sons of the rich and great houses, who never get their hands on any, because there it has already reached its peak and even gone beyond its highest point, as it were, and now it counts as something harmful, indeed almost indecent, an attitude apparently connected to experiences garnered on the way up the ladder.
