The strudlhof steps, p.40
The Strudlhof Steps, page 40
“Do you know all of this through Stangeler?” the squirrel asked, interrupting him at last.
“No,” said Melzer. “I’ve never talked with him about any of this. In fact, I’ve never actually talked with Stangeler at all, strictly speaking.”
He surprised even himself after he’d made this last remark, but it was undoubtedly true.
“I seldom see him,” he added.
“But you know all the details.”
“Oh, details . . .” Melzer said, but then he didn’t follow up with an answer for the time being. He was feeling as though he’d been run over by his own self, as it were, with his rash, hasty chatter of a moment before; it had come out of him like something foreign (altogether like an actual foreign object in his mouth), a pebble or a piece of gravel picked up somewhere or other. For several seconds he felt downcast. Then he continued. “No, I really don’t think you could say I’ve got all the details. The captain—I mentioned him a while ago—fills me in on some odds and ends. He probably gets all his information from Dolly as well. Then there’s a man named Leucht, and he always knows exactly what’s going on with that Masch or Lasch or whatever his name is.”
“I know that Herr Leucht,” said E. P. “He’s one of our bank’s competitors, and I spent a year in the department that handles pending litigation. You won’t be surprised that he’s so minutely informed about Cornel Lasch’s private life when I tell you that he’s close friends with Herr Lasch’s manservant. His name is Scheichsbeutel.”
“It’s what?!” Melzer cried.
“You heard me,” said E. P. “Scheichsbeutel.”
“But how can anybody be named Scheichsbeutel?” said Melzer, affronted.
“Well, somebody can. As you can see.” Intense amusement was beaming from E. P.’s eyes, and it had to do with this name. This was a rich moment for him! He’d kept a wonderfully straight face and then behaved with total nonchalance and unruffled calm when he finally led with his ace. He resolved on the spot, by the way, to name the wastepaper basket next to his desk at home “Scheichsbeutel” and to label it accordingly. The first syllable had had too many fecal overtones, the second too many suggestions of a pouch or bag not to be weirdly suitable.
Melzer resolved something, too, after his eyes had rested for a while on the cream-colored curtain now drawn across the large window looking out to the street; it was to have an especially pretty bunch of tea roses sent up to Frau Roserl the following day.
“The Scheichsbeutel family—it’s a fairly large one—lives right next door to the Stangelers, incidentally,” E. P. added, as though it were a startling piece of information to supplement the startling name. “In the house on the corner.”
Melzer dropped the tea roses at once and asked with unusual energy, not to say vehemence, “And what floor do these Beutels, or whatever their name is, live on?”
“Just a second—I know, because I was up there once visiting the Beutels. On the third floor. It was six months after Grete and I broke up, meaning of course after I was on the outs with Stangeler, too; naturally I thought of him when I was up there in Scheichsbeutel’s home. Of course I did—I thought, ‘Right there, just behind that wall, and on the same floor, lives René.”
“Behind that wall,” Melzer said to himself. “By the way, it isn’t exactly the same floor; there’s a difference in levels.”
“In every sense of the word,” E. P. replied. “This man Scheichsbeutel was a large-scale black marketeer, and that’s why I was there. Whether he was already in Lasch’s employment at the time, I don’t know. He may have been. At any rate, he made a few trips abroad and smuggled goods in. I was hoping to get some genuine chypre perfume by Sauzé for Roserl; it was relatively cheap, too. Leucht was the one who referred me to him. He looks like a retired civil service worker, which I think is what he is. Very neat and tidy, dignified, a bit sharp, and speaks very slow. The family was just sitting down and having coffee when I showed up. The wife’s a good person, certainly, from someplace like Silesia, extremely concerned about her Scheichsbeutel, her wedded husband, and very submissive to him. Their two daughters were there. The older was a typical ‘young matron’ from one of the neighborhoods in Vienna—quite pretty, around thirty, married. The younger was a very peculiar individual, though. Frail as could be, with a tiny little face, like an insect; the eyes very large but somewhat oblique, an expression in them like nothing I’d ever seen before; impossible to tell whether it was just childishness or brazen impudence and indecency. She was still doing her hair completely in little-girl style. The creature was maybe sixteen or seventeen. She didn’t have a single word to say. The son was there, too; he doesn’t show the least bit of resemblance to anyone else in the family—dark-skinned, good-natured, simple and unaffected. I’m pretty sure he was still in school. It’s that skinny, tiny little thing, combining boundless impudence with maidenliness, who’s the star of the family, though; she’s been ‘sponsored by some art lovers’—which is the way her father expressed it—and has somehow even grown to be pretty famous, I’m told. In her work as a dancer she’s naturally not called Scheichsbeutel; her professional name is Angely de Ly.”
“She’s famous, all right,” Melzer said. “She’s now appearing at the Ronacher Theater.”
“Well, what do you know!” cried E. P. “I didn’t know that, because I have no interest in the art of dancing and things of that nature.”
“I really don’t, either,” noted Melzer. “But you see her name on billboards.”
They fell silent. More coffee came. In spite of his jovial little anecdote about Scheichsbeutel, E. P. still seemed to have something on his mind or to feel the need for a vindication of some sort. Just as a streetcar went clattering by outside—which indeed made Melzer think about E. P.’s room and that resonating mournful sound that would sing out every time the trolley went whizzing past below—he burst out all of a sudden.
“You say, Major, that Stangeler hasn’t done wrong by me and that these are things that just can’t be helped. All right. But he’s an excellent example of the kind of person who doesn’t just sit and do nothing, who takes things as they come, who accepts whatever passion has him in its grip like a finger pointing the way and simply follows the path shown by the signpost. No, not at all. His whole relationship with Grete has consisted for the last four years of nothing but attempts to tear himself away from her. That much I know with certainty; that’s how much detail I have. Why has he acted so destructively? What’s his purpose? And he’s destroyed so much more than just this. He’s destroyed an entire epoch in our lives, an epoch that should have lasted longer, that hadn’t yet run its course, one that began when we first saw each other again after he came back from Russia. A brilliant epoch. We weren’t much past twenty-five or twenty-six in those days. At the time of René’s homecoming in August 1921, Grete had been living in Norway for a good while, and she stayed there until the following summer. If she’d stayed longer, or if she’d altogether . . .”
“How’s that?” said Melzer, inside whom a switch now flicked on to illuminate something he’d never understood, even though the threads that had just come unknotted presently joined again in a weave still harder to understand. “You mean when René came home you weren’t seeing Grete, weren’t in a relationship with her?”
“We wrote to each other from time to time.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” said E. P.
“And when she came home?”
“Things started right away between her and Stangeler. I was actually in a hurry to get them together. Then it was all over.”
“And your hopes destroyed,” said Melzer to himself, in a tone somehow lyrical and lilting.
“I didn’t really have any,” E. P. drily observed.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t fully understand this whole thing,” said Melzer, “but then again, what is it that I do understand, anyway?” (An illumination? An inspiration? Civilian mentality aborning? Civilian spirit?) “Forgive me, but I think this is just a case of . . . let’s call it double jealousy. Please don’t be angry with me, Herr P.; I hope I’m not being harsh—of course you know that—but you said something just a moment ago that’s of great interest to me. I mean your statement about the pointing finger or the signpost. Very concrete, if I may put it that way, very concrete indeed. Do you believe that most people simply follow such a thing?”
“And those who don’t—what would make them think they have any better or clearer knowledge of what to do?”
Ten minutes earlier, Melzer might perhaps have countered, however modestly, with, “Well, I suppose they must have their reasons.” In the meantime, however, he’d been visited with an inspiration, so to speak, and was no longer likely to say things like that.
•
It had been the new moon since the nineteenth of the month. The eye looking upward from the ravine of the street sees only darkness at first; not until the second glance does it notice how clear and starry the sky is. Melzer walked away from the front door of the Miserovsky Twins, which closed behind E. P. A light had been turned on in the stairway and was shining above the door now, through the fanlight. The major crossed Porzellan Gasse on a slant, though not going in the direction of his apartment. He turned into Fürsten Gasse, walked past the heavy baroque portal, and before long he was standing at the lower end of the Strudlhof Steps.
And heard the fountain plashing above him, on the landing toward which the stairs pirouetted. The ramps lay in brightness. Whether there was moonlight or a new moon didn’t make much difference here; the stars, when they rose, were better able to watch everything that might go on here than to cast light on it, since that was done, above and below, by the tall candelabra on their slender, barred masts, another at each turning of the ramps, each one entwined with vine leaves, through which they shone in green.
Melzer went up slowly, climbing through strata, in a sense, as though he were emerging up from the ground and not as if plunging downward into the depths of time. The past lay high above him, as something bright and sparkling from which the sunlight of bygone days could be recaptured, not as something dismal and dark. This latter depth was what he wanted to surge from, so he could “taste the sweet air of the surface,” as Gütersloh once put it.
Melzer didn’t come to a stop until he was at the upper ramp; he had quickly darted past a couple kissing down below. Otherwise, the place was deserted. His visit to the steps now, at nighttime, wasn’t quite the same as the little walk of a few blocks people often like to take before they go to bed. And it wasn’t some nostalgic journey through memory, either. No, it was nothing other than an inquiry, a way of questioning. His steps had been guided there by some last, deeply buried remnant of the same impulse that had once led devout pagan pilgrims to Delphi. It led him to the genius loci here. Who was asleep. For now. Her small head drooping, the dryad of the Strudlhof Steps now slept, deep in the wood of a tree trunk or some other place.
PART THREE
Julius Zihal, a senior councillor in the Central Bureau of Revenue and Tariff Computation, had, rich in attainments and honors, entered retirement status in the year of our Lord 1913 and had soon thereafter, occasioned by that circumstance, changed his place of residence, a circumstance that does not appear comprehensible without some additional elucidation, as we herewith readily concede. He shifted his domicile to a less expensive district, ostensibly as a way of responding with accountability to the margin of difference that would henceforth stand open between his retirement income and his previous compensation, which latter had, to be sure, been higher. It seems plausible as an explanation, but it does not remain so when one gains familiarity with Zihal’s financial situation in its entirety. His deceased first wife, a widow named Deidosik, eighteen years his senior, had bequeathed him valuable assets in the form of part ownership in an apartment building and a store, the secured yield from which furnished an income substantially greater than Zihal’s pension. For the most part, however, the civil service councillor’s living habits had nonetheless confined themselves in the expenditure they entailed to a level below the total consumption of his professional earnings, almost as though he wished to remain independent of his spouse even after her demise. But now, with the end of his active working career, matters could not of course remain quite as they had hitherto stood with this old bachelor friend of ours (more bachelor than widower), accustomed as he was to a measure of creature comfort. And yet Zihal offered spirited resistance to this readily apprehensible fact, thereupon initiating a series of computations, using the amount of his retirement income as a basis, in regard to such expenditures for his personal maintenance as he could legitimately authorize himself; but his need to assess nearly caused him to obsess, to the point that he was quite seriously ready to open an official file on himself. So as to be able, amidst all these transactions and debates with himself, to continue holding the reins in his own hands, at least to a limited extent, he resolved to make a move and found in the same area—albeit in a section still comparatively new and consisting primarily of multistoried rental buildings—an apartment whose considerably lower rent once more consolidated his position, so to speak, in reference to the Deidosik inheritance. Even from the few trivialities adduced thus far (“basically they’re nothing but spiteful remarks,” as the civil service councillor once expressed it), we can see that Zihal was one of those individuals whose overmastering concern is to persevere in their internal stances, which for them have come to be more decisive than ease and comfort, more decisive, for that matter, than anything idyllic or Arcadian in their lives—after all, who else would so readily exchange an old house with garden in Lichtental for a fifth-floor walkup, much though we must at this point make allowance for the realization that we today, as a consequence of having endured certain improvements to this world of ours, are more susceptible to sansculotte-style rearrangements along such lines than were people in those days, who were still living on a human scale in circumstances as yet unimproved, not to say on a human scale resistant to improvement (incorrigibly human, we might say)—in a word, none of that entered into Zihal’s decision; and what may be yet more telling is that even the concrete facts of his financial situation were incapable of bringing about in him the decision, however much they might warrant it, to spend his life as a retired civil servant in the house of Fräulein Theresa Schachl, enjoying his breakfast in the garden during the summer months whenever possible and taking his ease in general, walking around in his shirt and suspenders and smoking a Virginia cigar, which was his habit back then.
Even the simple circumstance of Zihal’s having lived in this area at all, as it was a considerable distance from the Tariff Bureau, points in the same general direction we’ve already indicated. For him, any argument based on a short commute to his place of employment carried no weight. He regarded such deliberations as appropriate for a mechanic, perhaps, but not for a Royal and Imperial civil servant. And to live right by one’s place of employment itself was quite suitable for, say, a tavern keeper or a grocer. So it was that throughout all those years of living on the upper floor of Fräulein Schachl’s house in Lichtental, he would make his way each morning to the bridge across the river; be swallowed up at that point in the station of the city rail system, present his long-term government-employee pass with a gesture restrained in its dignity as he went through the turnstile (which was unnecessary, though, for most of the conductors manning the turnstiles knew this character, a man by whom they could confidently have set their official clocks); and descend the wide, ample stairs to the platform below.
The cars belonging to the city rail system, the Stadtbahn, which is what the network of elevated trains and subway trains in Vienna is still called today, were driven by steam locomotives back then, which made for a significant roar when, storming and bellowing out of their tall, broad black chests, they would come hurtling into the narrow station building and along the platform, a line of brown cars behind. These, however, were pleasantly warm in wintertime; if anything, they were most often a little too warm. Zihal always took up a position at exactly the same spot on the platform, directly underneath a sign reading, “Second-Class Cars Stop Here.” And there, in accordance with his social standing, is where he would get on. The government as it was in those days (unimproved and unimprovable) never thought twice about offering its subjects something in return for the fares they paid—the passengers could see it with their own eyes and grasp it with their own hands, no matter where those might range. Demand for vehicles of public transportation was met by a supply more than adequate; indeed, Zihal was almost always by himself in one of those slightly overheated compartments, sitting alone under the gaslight, which burned at all hours because of the tunnels. In the winter months, this trip to his office made for a self-contained pleasure of its own, for he could read his morning newspaper and smoke the one cigarette our civil service councillor would allow himself all day; everything was beautifully laid out as if custom-tailored to the purpose, filling in quite nicely the brief trip of four stops.
That was all history, though. Café Simberl, near the Tariff Bureau, was the only place he still frequented.
The dogged preparations for moving that Zihal made after his retirement remained undiminished in the matter of expense and value, at least as far as upholding inner attitudes is concerned, and that even in light of a fact that effectively pulled the ground from underneath all previous considerations or, if one will, shifted them all to a new ground of calculation—to wit, that not even six months after going on pension, the counselor entered into matrimony.
So along with the wheels of Zihal’s moving van, a good number of other wheels got rolling too, and along tracks that had not been spotted in advance. Due and proper foresight was shown only by Fräulein Theresa Schachl, who immediately began, after the departure of the civil service councillor, to regard (and then very quietly, by way of this or that little renovation or improvement, to remodel somewhat) that upstairs apartment in her house as the future conjugal home of her niece, Paula. Meanwhile, however, she rented the apartment to others, even if only on a temporary basis during the war. But in 1920 the rooms were once more standing empty, though they now had nice furniture in them; that was the same year the whole apartment was totally refurbished with the finest of everything. And in 1921 the young woman—whose name was now Paula Pichler—moved in.
“No,” said Melzer. “I’ve never talked with him about any of this. In fact, I’ve never actually talked with Stangeler at all, strictly speaking.”
He surprised even himself after he’d made this last remark, but it was undoubtedly true.
“I seldom see him,” he added.
“But you know all the details.”
“Oh, details . . .” Melzer said, but then he didn’t follow up with an answer for the time being. He was feeling as though he’d been run over by his own self, as it were, with his rash, hasty chatter of a moment before; it had come out of him like something foreign (altogether like an actual foreign object in his mouth), a pebble or a piece of gravel picked up somewhere or other. For several seconds he felt downcast. Then he continued. “No, I really don’t think you could say I’ve got all the details. The captain—I mentioned him a while ago—fills me in on some odds and ends. He probably gets all his information from Dolly as well. Then there’s a man named Leucht, and he always knows exactly what’s going on with that Masch or Lasch or whatever his name is.”
“I know that Herr Leucht,” said E. P. “He’s one of our bank’s competitors, and I spent a year in the department that handles pending litigation. You won’t be surprised that he’s so minutely informed about Cornel Lasch’s private life when I tell you that he’s close friends with Herr Lasch’s manservant. His name is Scheichsbeutel.”
“It’s what?!” Melzer cried.
“You heard me,” said E. P. “Scheichsbeutel.”
“But how can anybody be named Scheichsbeutel?” said Melzer, affronted.
“Well, somebody can. As you can see.” Intense amusement was beaming from E. P.’s eyes, and it had to do with this name. This was a rich moment for him! He’d kept a wonderfully straight face and then behaved with total nonchalance and unruffled calm when he finally led with his ace. He resolved on the spot, by the way, to name the wastepaper basket next to his desk at home “Scheichsbeutel” and to label it accordingly. The first syllable had had too many fecal overtones, the second too many suggestions of a pouch or bag not to be weirdly suitable.
Melzer resolved something, too, after his eyes had rested for a while on the cream-colored curtain now drawn across the large window looking out to the street; it was to have an especially pretty bunch of tea roses sent up to Frau Roserl the following day.
“The Scheichsbeutel family—it’s a fairly large one—lives right next door to the Stangelers, incidentally,” E. P. added, as though it were a startling piece of information to supplement the startling name. “In the house on the corner.”
Melzer dropped the tea roses at once and asked with unusual energy, not to say vehemence, “And what floor do these Beutels, or whatever their name is, live on?”
“Just a second—I know, because I was up there once visiting the Beutels. On the third floor. It was six months after Grete and I broke up, meaning of course after I was on the outs with Stangeler, too; naturally I thought of him when I was up there in Scheichsbeutel’s home. Of course I did—I thought, ‘Right there, just behind that wall, and on the same floor, lives René.”
“Behind that wall,” Melzer said to himself. “By the way, it isn’t exactly the same floor; there’s a difference in levels.”
“In every sense of the word,” E. P. replied. “This man Scheichsbeutel was a large-scale black marketeer, and that’s why I was there. Whether he was already in Lasch’s employment at the time, I don’t know. He may have been. At any rate, he made a few trips abroad and smuggled goods in. I was hoping to get some genuine chypre perfume by Sauzé for Roserl; it was relatively cheap, too. Leucht was the one who referred me to him. He looks like a retired civil service worker, which I think is what he is. Very neat and tidy, dignified, a bit sharp, and speaks very slow. The family was just sitting down and having coffee when I showed up. The wife’s a good person, certainly, from someplace like Silesia, extremely concerned about her Scheichsbeutel, her wedded husband, and very submissive to him. Their two daughters were there. The older was a typical ‘young matron’ from one of the neighborhoods in Vienna—quite pretty, around thirty, married. The younger was a very peculiar individual, though. Frail as could be, with a tiny little face, like an insect; the eyes very large but somewhat oblique, an expression in them like nothing I’d ever seen before; impossible to tell whether it was just childishness or brazen impudence and indecency. She was still doing her hair completely in little-girl style. The creature was maybe sixteen or seventeen. She didn’t have a single word to say. The son was there, too; he doesn’t show the least bit of resemblance to anyone else in the family—dark-skinned, good-natured, simple and unaffected. I’m pretty sure he was still in school. It’s that skinny, tiny little thing, combining boundless impudence with maidenliness, who’s the star of the family, though; she’s been ‘sponsored by some art lovers’—which is the way her father expressed it—and has somehow even grown to be pretty famous, I’m told. In her work as a dancer she’s naturally not called Scheichsbeutel; her professional name is Angely de Ly.”
“She’s famous, all right,” Melzer said. “She’s now appearing at the Ronacher Theater.”
“Well, what do you know!” cried E. P. “I didn’t know that, because I have no interest in the art of dancing and things of that nature.”
“I really don’t, either,” noted Melzer. “But you see her name on billboards.”
They fell silent. More coffee came. In spite of his jovial little anecdote about Scheichsbeutel, E. P. still seemed to have something on his mind or to feel the need for a vindication of some sort. Just as a streetcar went clattering by outside—which indeed made Melzer think about E. P.’s room and that resonating mournful sound that would sing out every time the trolley went whizzing past below—he burst out all of a sudden.
“You say, Major, that Stangeler hasn’t done wrong by me and that these are things that just can’t be helped. All right. But he’s an excellent example of the kind of person who doesn’t just sit and do nothing, who takes things as they come, who accepts whatever passion has him in its grip like a finger pointing the way and simply follows the path shown by the signpost. No, not at all. His whole relationship with Grete has consisted for the last four years of nothing but attempts to tear himself away from her. That much I know with certainty; that’s how much detail I have. Why has he acted so destructively? What’s his purpose? And he’s destroyed so much more than just this. He’s destroyed an entire epoch in our lives, an epoch that should have lasted longer, that hadn’t yet run its course, one that began when we first saw each other again after he came back from Russia. A brilliant epoch. We weren’t much past twenty-five or twenty-six in those days. At the time of René’s homecoming in August 1921, Grete had been living in Norway for a good while, and she stayed there until the following summer. If she’d stayed longer, or if she’d altogether . . .”
“How’s that?” said Melzer, inside whom a switch now flicked on to illuminate something he’d never understood, even though the threads that had just come unknotted presently joined again in a weave still harder to understand. “You mean when René came home you weren’t seeing Grete, weren’t in a relationship with her?”
“We wrote to each other from time to time.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” said E. P.
“And when she came home?”
“Things started right away between her and Stangeler. I was actually in a hurry to get them together. Then it was all over.”
“And your hopes destroyed,” said Melzer to himself, in a tone somehow lyrical and lilting.
“I didn’t really have any,” E. P. drily observed.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t fully understand this whole thing,” said Melzer, “but then again, what is it that I do understand, anyway?” (An illumination? An inspiration? Civilian mentality aborning? Civilian spirit?) “Forgive me, but I think this is just a case of . . . let’s call it double jealousy. Please don’t be angry with me, Herr P.; I hope I’m not being harsh—of course you know that—but you said something just a moment ago that’s of great interest to me. I mean your statement about the pointing finger or the signpost. Very concrete, if I may put it that way, very concrete indeed. Do you believe that most people simply follow such a thing?”
“And those who don’t—what would make them think they have any better or clearer knowledge of what to do?”
Ten minutes earlier, Melzer might perhaps have countered, however modestly, with, “Well, I suppose they must have their reasons.” In the meantime, however, he’d been visited with an inspiration, so to speak, and was no longer likely to say things like that.
•
It had been the new moon since the nineteenth of the month. The eye looking upward from the ravine of the street sees only darkness at first; not until the second glance does it notice how clear and starry the sky is. Melzer walked away from the front door of the Miserovsky Twins, which closed behind E. P. A light had been turned on in the stairway and was shining above the door now, through the fanlight. The major crossed Porzellan Gasse on a slant, though not going in the direction of his apartment. He turned into Fürsten Gasse, walked past the heavy baroque portal, and before long he was standing at the lower end of the Strudlhof Steps.
And heard the fountain plashing above him, on the landing toward which the stairs pirouetted. The ramps lay in brightness. Whether there was moonlight or a new moon didn’t make much difference here; the stars, when they rose, were better able to watch everything that might go on here than to cast light on it, since that was done, above and below, by the tall candelabra on their slender, barred masts, another at each turning of the ramps, each one entwined with vine leaves, through which they shone in green.
Melzer went up slowly, climbing through strata, in a sense, as though he were emerging up from the ground and not as if plunging downward into the depths of time. The past lay high above him, as something bright and sparkling from which the sunlight of bygone days could be recaptured, not as something dismal and dark. This latter depth was what he wanted to surge from, so he could “taste the sweet air of the surface,” as Gütersloh once put it.
Melzer didn’t come to a stop until he was at the upper ramp; he had quickly darted past a couple kissing down below. Otherwise, the place was deserted. His visit to the steps now, at nighttime, wasn’t quite the same as the little walk of a few blocks people often like to take before they go to bed. And it wasn’t some nostalgic journey through memory, either. No, it was nothing other than an inquiry, a way of questioning. His steps had been guided there by some last, deeply buried remnant of the same impulse that had once led devout pagan pilgrims to Delphi. It led him to the genius loci here. Who was asleep. For now. Her small head drooping, the dryad of the Strudlhof Steps now slept, deep in the wood of a tree trunk or some other place.
PART THREE
Julius Zihal, a senior councillor in the Central Bureau of Revenue and Tariff Computation, had, rich in attainments and honors, entered retirement status in the year of our Lord 1913 and had soon thereafter, occasioned by that circumstance, changed his place of residence, a circumstance that does not appear comprehensible without some additional elucidation, as we herewith readily concede. He shifted his domicile to a less expensive district, ostensibly as a way of responding with accountability to the margin of difference that would henceforth stand open between his retirement income and his previous compensation, which latter had, to be sure, been higher. It seems plausible as an explanation, but it does not remain so when one gains familiarity with Zihal’s financial situation in its entirety. His deceased first wife, a widow named Deidosik, eighteen years his senior, had bequeathed him valuable assets in the form of part ownership in an apartment building and a store, the secured yield from which furnished an income substantially greater than Zihal’s pension. For the most part, however, the civil service councillor’s living habits had nonetheless confined themselves in the expenditure they entailed to a level below the total consumption of his professional earnings, almost as though he wished to remain independent of his spouse even after her demise. But now, with the end of his active working career, matters could not of course remain quite as they had hitherto stood with this old bachelor friend of ours (more bachelor than widower), accustomed as he was to a measure of creature comfort. And yet Zihal offered spirited resistance to this readily apprehensible fact, thereupon initiating a series of computations, using the amount of his retirement income as a basis, in regard to such expenditures for his personal maintenance as he could legitimately authorize himself; but his need to assess nearly caused him to obsess, to the point that he was quite seriously ready to open an official file on himself. So as to be able, amidst all these transactions and debates with himself, to continue holding the reins in his own hands, at least to a limited extent, he resolved to make a move and found in the same area—albeit in a section still comparatively new and consisting primarily of multistoried rental buildings—an apartment whose considerably lower rent once more consolidated his position, so to speak, in reference to the Deidosik inheritance. Even from the few trivialities adduced thus far (“basically they’re nothing but spiteful remarks,” as the civil service councillor once expressed it), we can see that Zihal was one of those individuals whose overmastering concern is to persevere in their internal stances, which for them have come to be more decisive than ease and comfort, more decisive, for that matter, than anything idyllic or Arcadian in their lives—after all, who else would so readily exchange an old house with garden in Lichtental for a fifth-floor walkup, much though we must at this point make allowance for the realization that we today, as a consequence of having endured certain improvements to this world of ours, are more susceptible to sansculotte-style rearrangements along such lines than were people in those days, who were still living on a human scale in circumstances as yet unimproved, not to say on a human scale resistant to improvement (incorrigibly human, we might say)—in a word, none of that entered into Zihal’s decision; and what may be yet more telling is that even the concrete facts of his financial situation were incapable of bringing about in him the decision, however much they might warrant it, to spend his life as a retired civil servant in the house of Fräulein Theresa Schachl, enjoying his breakfast in the garden during the summer months whenever possible and taking his ease in general, walking around in his shirt and suspenders and smoking a Virginia cigar, which was his habit back then.
Even the simple circumstance of Zihal’s having lived in this area at all, as it was a considerable distance from the Tariff Bureau, points in the same general direction we’ve already indicated. For him, any argument based on a short commute to his place of employment carried no weight. He regarded such deliberations as appropriate for a mechanic, perhaps, but not for a Royal and Imperial civil servant. And to live right by one’s place of employment itself was quite suitable for, say, a tavern keeper or a grocer. So it was that throughout all those years of living on the upper floor of Fräulein Schachl’s house in Lichtental, he would make his way each morning to the bridge across the river; be swallowed up at that point in the station of the city rail system, present his long-term government-employee pass with a gesture restrained in its dignity as he went through the turnstile (which was unnecessary, though, for most of the conductors manning the turnstiles knew this character, a man by whom they could confidently have set their official clocks); and descend the wide, ample stairs to the platform below.
The cars belonging to the city rail system, the Stadtbahn, which is what the network of elevated trains and subway trains in Vienna is still called today, were driven by steam locomotives back then, which made for a significant roar when, storming and bellowing out of their tall, broad black chests, they would come hurtling into the narrow station building and along the platform, a line of brown cars behind. These, however, were pleasantly warm in wintertime; if anything, they were most often a little too warm. Zihal always took up a position at exactly the same spot on the platform, directly underneath a sign reading, “Second-Class Cars Stop Here.” And there, in accordance with his social standing, is where he would get on. The government as it was in those days (unimproved and unimprovable) never thought twice about offering its subjects something in return for the fares they paid—the passengers could see it with their own eyes and grasp it with their own hands, no matter where those might range. Demand for vehicles of public transportation was met by a supply more than adequate; indeed, Zihal was almost always by himself in one of those slightly overheated compartments, sitting alone under the gaslight, which burned at all hours because of the tunnels. In the winter months, this trip to his office made for a self-contained pleasure of its own, for he could read his morning newspaper and smoke the one cigarette our civil service councillor would allow himself all day; everything was beautifully laid out as if custom-tailored to the purpose, filling in quite nicely the brief trip of four stops.
That was all history, though. Café Simberl, near the Tariff Bureau, was the only place he still frequented.
The dogged preparations for moving that Zihal made after his retirement remained undiminished in the matter of expense and value, at least as far as upholding inner attitudes is concerned, and that even in light of a fact that effectively pulled the ground from underneath all previous considerations or, if one will, shifted them all to a new ground of calculation—to wit, that not even six months after going on pension, the counselor entered into matrimony.
So along with the wheels of Zihal’s moving van, a good number of other wheels got rolling too, and along tracks that had not been spotted in advance. Due and proper foresight was shown only by Fräulein Theresa Schachl, who immediately began, after the departure of the civil service councillor, to regard (and then very quietly, by way of this or that little renovation or improvement, to remodel somewhat) that upstairs apartment in her house as the future conjugal home of her niece, Paula. Meanwhile, however, she rented the apartment to others, even if only on a temporary basis during the war. But in 1920 the rooms were once more standing empty, though they now had nice furniture in them; that was the same year the whole apartment was totally refurbished with the finest of everything. And in 1921 the young woman—whose name was now Paula Pichler—moved in.
