The strudlhof steps, p.54
The Strudlhof Steps, page 54
Things went better in Vienna, where the ground wasn’t burning under his feet, as it were. Nonetheless, he kept to himself here, too, as if isolated, proving totally powerless, for example, to make a telephone call to Asta’s husband, Building Inspector Haupt, as he’d meant to, if only because he’d never answered her letter and then because of the need to bring them up to date so they’d be better informed of developments. For the rest, his business dealings went so very smoothly, almost strikingly so, that he had them all taken care of by Saturday afternoon (it was August 29) and was sitting in his hotel room at an empty desk, a notepad in front of him that showed only crossed-out writing on a sheet he didn’t bother tearing off so that a blank new one, pure white, could present itself. He’d read almost everything in the newspapers and bought the usual idiotic magazines, too, and he’d already put into his hand luggage a large package from Kugler’s for Etelka and some marrons glacés from Demel’s. Now there began a concentrated attack of emptiness from all sides, its spectral battle formations on the move, pressing in on him ever closer. A car horn sounded. Fraunholzer reached the night express in plenty of time. It would be too late for him to make a connection with one of the postal buses out there, but that made no difference; Fraunholzer was almost never able to summon much patience for hustle and bustle anyway and preferred taking a horse-drawn carriage from a country station.
•
On Friday, August 21, at seven thirty in the morning, René Stangeler woke up in his room in Vienna and was met with an intense scent of lavender. The marble washstand holding a small, tightly closed bottle filled with lavender water was about four and a half meters away from the bed. Also, the sensation lasted much more briefly than we can indicate here. The scent seemed to have entered his nose on its own power, directly from his head, as it were, even to the extent that he found the process and himself to be identical in some indisputable way: he and it were the same.
“That would come in handy,” he thought with pleasure, “then I wouldn’t have to buy it on the Graben.”
He lay on his back without moving, as though he were waiting for something.
And it came.
He suddenly thought of the little gold locket Editha Pastré had once given him.
Where on earth was it now? He felt his way backward, tracing a path through the bottoms of boxes and a little storage chest where he’d seen it not so long before. Yes!
Now he jumped up, brown as a faun.
René liked sleeping without nightclothes.
The locket was where he remembered it. He opened it by cautiously inserting the blade of his penknife. The cover popped open. There was her picture. “Unchanged,” he realized. “She’s just as she was then.”
Then. When was that? The year of the tropidonotus serpent (that’s what his chronology looked like). The year of Paula.
The year of the Strudlhof Steps.
Like a curtain fluttering high up in the wind and opening a view to the rooms behind it, the sound of the words now drifted toward him and a picture of the place hovered above him. He stood in the middle of the room with his eyes closed, the small bauble on its chain in his hand. There was space around him here, and inside him, too, for that matter, opening far out so that he could turn around in it like a weather vane, all depending on which way the wind was blowing. Now more than ever before. He stood waiting. No worries. Not about finances, either; seven payments for various jobs of tutoring and coaching had come his way all at once—the largest fees arriving, oddly enough, when he was going through a bad time, having no idea how he was going to drum up money and hardly ever leaving his room. (Only on the evening after he returned from Budapest—he’d spent it with the captain, unburdening his heart, with Thea Rokitzer on hand and listening, by the way.) He now felt free again for the first time since those awful days when Grete’s dreadful rantings and ravings from Naples had kept bursting in on him like miniature bombs, so to speak, in his garden room at the Grauermanns’ on the Fasor. It even seemed to him now as if he were tasting freedom for the first time in his life.
Fourteen years ago, then.
In August. Around the twentieth.
Maybe even fourteen years to this very day or the next. He felt coolness on his skin like foam from a bath; the air held a morning freshness, since this room faced north. He looked up and out, past the mighty spread of the foliage at its fullest, over toward the buildings opposite. A sharp white gleam flashed out from a window sash somebody was closing. The sound could be heard in the stillness.
Faced with such freedom inside him and such emptiness all around him as they unceasingly called to him in silence and seemed to enclose spectral regiments of forces waiting in readiness, on alert for valid orders, there suddenly struck him like an arrow shot from the ceiling an idea so utterly astonishing that he—right there, and as he was—slowly sat down under its weight, growing heavier as it ripened, on the nearest stool and remained sitting there like a new rendering of Rodin’s Thinker, albeit somewhat weaker in every respect.
Well, he could turn this freedom to account by . . . making his mind up about Grete and honorably letting himself in for whatever that decision entailed. After all, she’d been . . . been . . . shown to him (he couldn’t think of a different or better word at the moment); it wouldn’t be right just to disavow that fact, and bypassing it through a simple “No, no” without some solid reason was downright unthinkable.
At no time had he ever made his mind up about Grete, and he realized that now.
The telephone rang sharply through the empty apartment.
Just by the sound of the ring René had a feeling that the call was for him, not for his brother-in-law, the building surveyor, now occupied at the ministry, or for Asta, in case somebody or other thought she was back in Vienna . . .
He went out through the corridor to the front room, undressed as he was and still holding the locket in his hand. But what he was really doing during these few seconds was in fact walking into and through himself, the way a man might walk through a long, straight set of rooms, leaving all the doors open as he passes through, so that at the far end his glance can turn back unimpeded to the beginning: the time before he had met Grete, the time when it would have been entirely possible for him to live without her. To be able to return to that point and find a hold there, to click into place as into the notch of a tautened crossbow seemed to him now to be the only way of truly returning to her, and of his own free will, so to speak.
“Well, as I live and breathe!” boomed a jovial voice on the other end, after René had said hello. “Redivivus. Allow me as the first order of business to extend the most heartfelt of salutations, Cadet.” (Eulenfeld often called him this; in his language it meant something like “a creature on the whole still endowed with the disposition of a moonstruck calf.” His attitude was not entirely unrelated to the de rigueur manifestations of goodwill—known to us from earlier days—accorded to creatures of the hound-dog variety at the Consular Academy, while it contained at the same time a kind of general pardon for understandable youthful excesses—they had good cause to be understandable, after all!—to which the older well-wisher was himself not disinclined to succumb even today and which thereby included the elder’s own little peccadilloes within the general pardon.) “Are you doing tolerably well? I’ve been trying over and over, though in vain, to reach you. The last times were yesterday and the day before. Are you all right? Went through a good deal in July, didn’t you? Our little Grete is in Paris, as rumor has it. Well, good. I imagine you’ve been out in the country up to now? Working? Very well, then.”
He told René that they—meaning his whole crowd—were thinking of driving out to Greifenstein on the Danube on Saturday at noon. Did he have anything planned for Saturday morning? Was he free? Yes, René said, but he’d rather not go away this coming Saturday or Sunday because he was expecting a telegram from Grete from Paris; she was going to be returning to Vienna. “I imagine she’s had her fill of Cornel and company!?” Eulenfeld commented. (“But she probably won’t come back for a few more days . . .” was what now ran through René’s mind.) “But that’s just what I wanted to ask you—not to come with us, but to stay in Vienna. Here’s the explanation—I want to make the trip; I’ve had a hard week and urgently need some relaxation. And I’ve already made some arrangements in Greifenstein for Saturday anyway—you know what I mean; we all need a little recreation to soothe our nerves. Editha most likely won’t be coming out until Sunday, if she comes at all; she’s got various irons in the fire, and she gets those headaches of hers now and then, so—long story short—she’s staying at home on Saturday afternoon. She’ll be left all alone, all by herself. So I was wondering if you would stop by and keep her company for tea. She thinks very highly of you; I’m not sure you know how much. You’d be doing me a big favor. You did say you’re free. There’s no relying on Melzer; he might even want to come with us. All well and good, then. She’ll give you a call soon and invite you.”
Stangeler went back into his room.
He’d been holding the locket by its chain the whole time.
•
On the following day, however, Saturday August 22, in the afternoon (Melzer is just now beginning to gather momentum and speed through his trópoi), he was wearing it around his neck, next to his skin under his shirt, low on his breastbone, for the chain was long. He was damp all over, his hair, his handkerchief, his underwear all fresh and cool from lavender water. He’d been lavish with it after his bath. Moving in a cloud of fragrance, he turned off Währinger Strasse and walked along Waisenhaus Gasse—long since renamed Boltzmann Gasse by now—on the right side, by the park wall of the Clam-Gallas Palace, headed for a detour down the Strudlhof Steps: not to take them was utterly out of the question; the afternoon absolutely mandated it.
Much as his actions right now had basically been of his own arranging, at least to some extent—the little golden disc resting on his chest, scheduling ample time to take a completely different and longer route—he had in essence been led here nonetheless by a kind of unconscious process that obviated any other choice. And now, because he felt as if he were being more or less pushed and shoved along, he hesitated before the corner around which, dropping straight and short and downward into greenery, the inconceivable stage was standing and waiting where events unfathomable to him had once taken place; now, though, the encounters he’d once witnessed as they played out before him, as well as the whole lead-up and background to them, which he would later learn about from Asta, no longer struck him as unfathomable—rather, they were past and gone; rather, Old Man Schmeller wasn’t going to turn up again with Melzer behind him, above, and he himself with Paula Schachl and Grauermann, down below.
The street was empty, the sun shining down on it and irradiating the domes of greenery to the rear.
René went along slowly. He sank downward. Like a swaying autumn leaf. He remained alone. He encountered no one on the ramps; chance had it so. His ear, keenly attuned, had already caught the fountain’s murmured soliloquy while he was still above it. He tarried even more. The warmth came closer in on him, and with it the silence. Down below, on Pasteur Gasse, he turned back and examined the site, marveling at how it lay as if embedded miles deep in the late-summer silence of a city now emitting no sound, uttering no word, and now—now of all times—keeping perfectly silent for moments at a stretch.
Then he went on, walking in the direction of the Bohemia Station. The doors of the buildings along the street behind it were standing in the heat like the open lids of crypts. But the stairwell was cool, holding the civilized-subdued odors of decorous living, the mask the genius loci wears in the city, a last remnant, now just a reduced symbol, of the smoky scent of the penates. The stairs and landings were still damp from the concierge’s Saturday ministrations with bucket and brush.
The bell sounded shrill, as if it were ringing in an empty house.
“Oh how nice, René,” said Editha. She let him in, not opening the door all the way, and ducked behind it smoothly like a fragrant cloud; a full-bodied, sweet-smelling aroma came up against the odor of lavender, tangy and almost bitter by comparison, with no mingling at first, like adjoining solid bodies. The outfit she was wearing struck him at once as somehow foreign in its bright, iridescent colors and its cut, which augmented her figure and enfolded her in swathes of material. “Plenty of tea to drink, as much as you want, you old Siberian, no limit; I’ve also made maté if you’d like to try it.” They’d stepped all the way inside. Just now, this room, with its two tall door panels left and right identically painted in white enamel and the Kahlenberg visible in the background through the window seemed to Stangeler in some peculiar way like a vehicle for transportation rather than a fixed and immobile spot; it was more like the gondola of a hot-air balloon or something of that kind. “Maté,” he said, “that’s South American, isn’t it?” “Yes,” she answered, “would you like to try it? I drink it all the time.” She poured him some. He leaned without self-consciousness over the flat, broad cup, now colored by the peculiar green tinge of the beverage, and breathed in its aroma while raising his eyes to her, still bending over in the same position. She smiled. From the other side of the tea table her face came very slightly closer to his as she leaned down a bit more. Seized with a distinct feeling that this whole room, along with its occupant, was now somehow making its way inside him through every pore and from every direction and coming back out of his mouth like a streamer, he improvised, but as if reading from a text:
“Oh smoky, far-off ports, expansive spaces;
The anchor chain runs rumbling, then lies still.
Distance means crudeness, yet it is my will
To go; a gentle pull within impels me to new places.
An empty sky. A palm as if of glass
Stares out from some remote, haze-blurred horizon.
My own land rasps my heart, can but harass
Me, yearning for the secret home my vision lies in.
Hoist all the anchors fully. No longer cleave the salt waves!
Airborne, the gondola ascending shows
Both strand and land receding. From high up
Objects are small. Space cramped. What hurts us here just goes
Its way, dispersed in light now breaking in upon us
Here in a room or gondola; broken years unravel,
Talks long past and forgotten. But it’s once more assembled—
The easy burden and the freight with which I travel.”
He was perplexed when he came to the end. She looked at him in sheer amazement, and they both kept complete silence, not moving a muscle for a time.
“What is that? Who’s it by?” she finally asked.
“By the maté,” he answered, feeling guilty and explaining, though guardedly; for a time he had in his mind’s eye the picture of Etelka, Government Councillor Guys, and a Latin poem his father had made him translate.
“They’ve all driven out there,” she said, and pointed in the direction of the mountains. “Nothing but noise and crowds. Don’t we have it nicer?” She held René’s lower arm while she was speaking. Then she stood up and took a few rapid, almost vehement steps toward the window. “My desire is to be somewhere far away,” she said, only half aloud and as if singing, “being somewhere far away again. Oh, René, we all need to avoid returning to what’s past and gone. When we do, it turns its back on us and shows us an empty hillside covered with debris and dead brushwood, the back of a flat slope where we’d been expecting a significant elevation, the back of an empty space, nothing more. And it’s because we didn’t turn our own backs with enough resolution. So now there’s almost nothing to see except a ‘haze-blurred horizon,’ as you just put it . . .” René was nowhere close to sharing her viewpoint (and on this subject he was in agreement with the major), but his astonishment at her peculiarly bookish or archaic way of expressing herself was much stronger and more to the fore. It never dawned on him that she might have been quoting from something she’d read. What was much more present in his mind was the enormous appeal of the whole situation—that someone right here, not even very far from the Strudlhof Steps, come to think of it, could be soaring high up in a white-enameled gondola and speaking in such a distinctive manner. He was paying no heed to the content of her words, to the effect that she wanted to be far away again or that she’d spoken about returning to old haunts. Now she again started moving briskly, the rich, delicate fabric swirling in every color of the rainbow around her limbs. Not only could he see them clearly; he also realized she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. The heat made that seem reasonable enough. She took a few steps closer to him once more, her face confronting him before the distant backdrop of the vista outside like that of a hovering dragonfly or some other strange insect with tunnels and towers of the unknown stored behind its unfathomable eyes. She was very far from still being the same woman as that Editha Pastré from the rock-climbing episode in the country, but he would naturally speak to her the same way, even if she was making use of the formal address Sie; she probably didn’t want to treat him as though he were still a schoolboy by keeping to the familiar Du. And that was exactly what caused René to toss his inhibitions aside and in a split second prevent the situation from going stale or lumbering to a halt.
