The strudlhof steps, p.6
The Strudlhof Steps, page 6
Neither frivolous (unduly reductive) nor emotional (unduly expansive) standards and explanations are applicable here; or rather, the frivolous and the emotional are both applicable, and both at the same time. This hadn’t been some adventure undertaken by a swashbuckling cavalier, but then again, perhaps that’s exactly what it had been after all, when looked at objectively, and it could even be called mesquin. A kiss at the wrong time, nothing more. Herr von Semski paid for it, though, paid for not having been able to build his happiness on the bedrock of patience, for allowing his enthrallment to scuttle the next installment of cunning forethought required not just in the lower echelons of life but equally essential for a military commander or an artist to engage with his daimonion. So should Eros, a god, rest content with less punctilious observances?
Mary came out of the locker room with her racket. The game between Semski and Oscar was still in progress. Mary stood at the edge of the court, watching with irritation. At the same time, she felt that this irritation had a deeper cause than she was capable of grasping; it came gushing out of her like water out of a fountain. What’s the sense of playing this way? Sports are meant to be pleasurable, whereas the veins were bulging on Oscar’s forehead. Semski had to be under a great strain too, by the way; his large head was completely soaked. And so those two men went dashing about on the clay, as Homer might say in a summary formula. They came for Mary now, since she was going to play doubles.
She was in for some surprises. On the opposing side was a married couple of about her age, and for her partner she had a Frau Sandroch, ash-blond, fortyish, an ethnic German from Russia or some such place, an elegant, dissipated-looking woman who always seemed to have something dry and somehow dusty about her. This Frau Sandroch (no one had ever seen a Herr Sandroch at the club) was a far better player than any of the other three on the court. And today, furthermore, Mary’s arms were made of glass, and her joints felt as if they were made of wood. Even before the game started, she wanted just suddenly to walk off the court. She was convinced that she wouldn’t be able to hit even the simplest serve. It might have been better that way, too, for the match was an ordeal! Frau Sandroch played in silence, setting the pace in a casual, very nonchalant style; she played her opponent right into the ground. She excused herself and left after twenty minutes, and Oscar, who’d meanwhile been enjoying a break, came back to take her place—whereupon Mary’s irritation flummoxed her completely. The path was barred that could have directed this irritation toward Frau Sandroch; after all, she’d asked right at the start to be allowed to play even though she had only a little time and would have to leave the court in the middle of the game—so she and Oscar, then, must have made arrangements for him to take her place. Mary knew all that. She also knew that Oscar would not overexert himself in this situation. And so it was, in fact. As much as possible, he left every ball to her—and she missed every one.
After Frau Sandroch left, then, the K. couple soon started falling behind, which Mary thought was unnecessary.
She began pushing herself, making a hard job of it. It didn’t help much. Nor did it exactly help when, after a short time, she saw Frau Sandroch—who must have really rushed through her shower!—walking past in the background with Herr von Semski in front of some close-cropped, practically gray plots of grass that had a dry and almost dusty look, oppressed as they were by the sunlight of the advancing afternoon. Frau Sandroch was wearing a jacket that shone in brilliant electric blue, and Semski had on a summer suit with hat and walking stick. They were ambling along slowly before the open prospect; in the background could be seen just a few rows of trees and some houses in the adjoining section of the city, but quite indistinctly, only in outline. This couple struck Mary like something presenting itself, as it were (pro-menade in its literal meaning)—like a traveling stage set, a platform, a theatrical tableau. And just what might they have in mind right now? Joining forces, anyway, that much was certain. Perhaps they were going to get a bite to eat together. Mary stepped suddenly into the picture she’d made up and began walking around inside it in place of Frau Sandroch; some demand on her part was insisting that she act this way, at least today. She could have had all that.
“You’ve got to help me out!” she called in an aside to Oscar. “All right, Mitzi,” Oscar said, smiling. It was just now his turn to serve. He started off strong and continued that way, placed the ball, ran up toward the net, and their score began to improve. But then he slacked off again, and Mary, for her part, was really all thumbs today, a bumbling extra. To all the other participants and observers, Oscar’s abruptly animated game had made a surprising and perhaps even embarrassing contrast with his behavior during the rest of the set.
The K.s were beaten, of course; the other couple won handily but not headily, so to speak. Mary hurried off to the locker room at once, not thinking even remotely of playing another match today. In fact, it seemed to her at the moment that she would soon give up playing altogether at this rate. She ducked into the shower and then took a fresh sport shirt out of her locker. While she was putting her wristwatch back on—for some reason the little clasp was resisting and didn’t want to snap shut—she grew seriously irritated at her husband. When she came back out, he had already changed and was standing, in his summer suit, by the benches near the courts, a briefcase under his arm and his soft, lightweight Borsalino hat pushed back on his head. Mary cast a backward glance across the park; Semski and Frau Sandroch had vanished. “Mitzi, we’ve been trounced, annihilated, slaughtered; we’ve disgraced ourselves,” cried Oscar gleefully when he spotted his wife. The way he spoke these words, he was virtually flaunting how narrow the margin of Semski’s victory over him had been today, at least as Mary saw it. “It didn’t have to be like that,” she said, somewhat uncertain, and then, “all I need now is for you to say it’s my fault.” “Not at all,” said the male partner from the married couple they’d played—he was an attorney who was very well known in Vienna at that time—“no one would dream of stating any such thing.” “Why not? I’ll state it flat out,” Oscar said. “That’s outrageous, and you know it,” Mary cried, the charmingly pretty, slender bridge of her nose now looking as if it were being shattered by miniature bolts of lightning; “The only one who could have turned that match around was you!” “You did play below your strength, Herr K., there’s no doubting that,” said the lawyer soothingly, uneasy at seeing what appeared to be a marital flare-up igniting here. “I was just tired,” Oscar replied offhandedly.
“But then you suddenly got your form back after all!” Mary cried out in a totally adamant tone that could not help catching the attention even of people who knew nothing at all about this match and hadn’t witnessed a minute of it. “Either you play or you don’t play; but to go up against weaker players and patronize them, deigning to take a few strokes here and there, and then make it so obvious . . .”
Herr Adler (that was the name of the attorney who had played against the K.s, along with his wife) had joined them in the meantime, and now Mary was practicing a kind of demagoguery, looking for adherents in her dispute with Oscar, even if her overt recruitment (of her own person as well, to be sure) to the ranks of the weaker players would not be demagogically very advantageous to her. Oscar K. was a sight to behold, though—he seemed to feel that today was a real red-letter day, and those disparate facial features of his achieved nothing short of unity in the smile he flashed while getting in another dig, so as to prolong the argument with his wife.
“If I’d kept taking strokes away from you, that wouldn’t have been right, either.”
“Of course not,” she burst out, “but you might have done a better job of taking care of your own!”
“Mitzi,” he said, “I didn’t do a thing except follow your lead—that’s what I do all the time anyway. You know that.”
This heated exchange had taken Mary to a place where she did not want to go; it gushed out of her like water out of a fountain, or rather, this bickering wriggled its way out of her like pigeons and rabbits and guinea pigs out of a magician’s top hat—and now those little beasties were scuttling all over the place; guinea pigs of every species had come tumbling out! But Oscar, who now took Mary’s arm so affectionately and said goodbye to the group by smiling and waving backward to them at the same time, was holding out to her a large piece of wrapping paper or a cloth or a container into which every one of these accursed, swarming creatures could be made to disappear all neat and tidy, all of it a great joke. Now he was really and truly turning the match around! She was suddenly full of gratitude and allowed herself in her innermost being to sink into his sheltering arms while she walked away, leaning on him and snuggling against him. Yes, some tapering little flame inside her was leaping up past the usual boundary of their old joke; she planted a quick kiss on her husband’s cheek as they walked along. Finally they both turned once again, laughing, and waved to the people standing by the courts, who waved a farewell back. Then Oscar and Mary turned off behind a row of trees and a pavilion. So they went on their way; or not, for they soon came to a standstill and embraced, here where it was secluded. They pressed closer and kissed passionately, as if each wanted to intoxicate the other. Something fits in perfectly right here and so it has to be said right now—Mary, according to her own statement, was holding two thoughts fast in her mind during this scene: the first was that she was sorry she was wearing only that white fleece jacket instead of a wrap or sweater in a bright color, something that would have seemed more stylish to her; and the second was that she was thinking back to 1910 and picturing the newly constructed Strudlhof Steps in the Alsergrund district, where her husband, whom she’d married such a short time prior, had kissed her all of a sudden on a warm evening in autumn when there was the scent of leaves on the stone stairs.
•
Dr. Negria, meanwhile, had become trapped inside a double-edged barricade, as an officer of the Royal and Imperial Austrian General Staff once expressed it in regard to a similar situation. The cause was an explosion that had just taken place in the large café on Nussdorfer Platz where he was waiting for Mary. It was totally silent and totally specific, affecting Negria alone. By now either you’ve guessed or you haven’t: a woman was sitting there, a woman who, as she sat there, looked to Negria like a gate standing open to the fulfillment of all his wishes.
Now he began to fear that this gate might be slammed shut at any moment, whether it be that the object of his rapidly awakening instinct for a breakthrough did not remain sitting alone much longer (even the appearance of a female friend would have foiled his campaign, his intervention, and it was possible, or even highly probable, that in this café she would indeed be expecting a female friend, frequented as the place was by ladies and by families), or whether it be that Mary’s arrival and appearance occurred promptly at the time they’d arranged. He had fifteen minutes left.
Nothing on the face of the earth could have kept a man like Negria from swinging into action. Yes indeed, things had to be done without delay, and so they were.
Some Eros in a cheery mood, whom we might picture as rosy-cheeked and plumpish in the baroque style (almost like a Gambrinus, then, and armed, though if not with the classic bow and quiver, then perhaps with a cannon instead, albeit the proverbial one used for shooting at sparrows, that is), some celestial little rascal along these lines, appeared to be running the show here and steering everything toward the end result from the very start. To begin with, the two tables were close together, favorably situated, and screened by a corner from the rest of the spacious room; above all, though, a fluid contact had been made at once, the only kind that really counts. She was leafing through fashion magazines. Negria was leafing too. By this time Mary was a full ten minutes late, and the present soundless preliminaries had progressed to the point that Negria—making sure to be observed in the process—was able to scrawl a few lines on one of his calling cards, slip it inside a newspaper, and then exchange it for one that was lying there on the table where his new prospect was sitting, for which he received, in answer to his curt little bow, an equally formal consent (the patrons of any café in Vienna pester one another unrelentingly for the different newspapers and magazines). He watched her slowly pick up the paper after a few moments and skim the card; the mechanism would have to catch now. And it did. She looked up, squarely meeting Dr. Negria’s waiting, submissive glance, and gave a scarcely noticeable nod of her head in acknowledgment.
Our pediatrician friend was no bungler, after all, and he was conservative about using the techniques he’d polished to such a high degree of smoothness through diligent practice. For example, here is what the card said:
Boris Nicolaus Negria, MD, Assisting Physician at Pediatric Clinic No. 2 . . . Please, please, please, dear lady, before anything else, forgive my audacity, I really don’t mean to come off that way . . . People keep walking past one another in life, never seeing one another ever again—right now I’m being forward enough to try preventing that for a change. If your time at the moment should happen to be as free as mine, I entreat you to grant me the privilege of taking a short walk with you outside on this beautiful late-summer day; I’ll explain everything . . . May I wait for you outside on the square? I’m going to take a chance, anyway. With a kiss of the hand and very truly yours, Boris Negria.
Besides, he was a remarkably good-looking and elegant fellow; we mustn’t forget that.
Mary could have walked in at any moment while all this was going on. Negria forgot all about her during his campaign, though, so swept up was he in his breakthrough tactics and his interventionism. Only when he was outside on the sunlit square did he start recalculating the danger (which is what it had now turned into for him) from that quarter. Mary had exceeded her time by twenty-seven minutes (how precise was the reckoning against her now!). She had to be coming on the streetcar; one had just pulled up here and let off passengers. There were at least five minutes until the next one. Moreover, Eros-Gambrinus was running the show, and he cut short the torment. Just then—while Negria was growing happily aware that he was totally in the right and, so to speak, fully covered as far as Mary was concerned (she really couldn’t leave him waiting for more than half an hour; no sir, there was no such thing with him)—just then the glass door swung open with a flash and the woman of his dreams appeared and began walking toward him in a relaxed and casual manner. The streets on the other side of the square met at an acute angle, and there was Negria, lifting his hat with a flourish and greeting the young woman like an old acquaintance. But then he took good care to steer her (old boatman that he was) away from there, so they walked down to the river, toward the docking places.
•
E. P. and his future wife had the good luck that afternoon to be able to escape from the office early. The department head had quietly sent word around, in a friendly gesture, that the staff did not have to sit waiting till the end of the day, since they were caught up on the work they needed to get done (and his own managing director had gone off around noon, anyway). So then the employees began leaving one by one.
E. P. waited for Roserl in a bakery on Schotten Gasse; they thought they would quickly have coffee and then take a ride out to the Vienna Woods. Everything was magnificently awash in floods of sunlight pouring through the streets from heavy mists of gold in the west.
Here she came. He pressed the sight of her inside himself, as a person holds something close to the heart or presses a bandage spread with soothing ointment onto a wound. That was how he felt. On the other hand, he’d never bitten Roserl on her neck. And he’d never lost a friend on her account. He hadn’t had to contend with anyone for her.
E. P. had many wounds, “pre-traumatic” ones, so to speak, and as such, integral to his whole being.
Had there been no sword to wound him, they would have opened on his body all by themselves. But of swords there were in the not-uninviting meadowlands of his life almost as many as pointed blades of grass in a meadow.
From Nussdorf they went farther upstream, toward Kahlenbergerdorf, where they would climb a steep, short path to reach the highest point and meet the disappearing sunlight again. Near the Kuchelau a very elegantly dressed couple crossed their path, evidently just coming from a Heurige; as though it were a kind of emblem, they were carrying wine between them in a large straw-covered bottle (those demijohns are quite rare in Vienna, or at least not customary). They were conspicuous in the way they were both holding this basket, or casket, and swinging it to and fro. Their loud laughter could be heard from far off; didn’t it even look as if they might be engaging in a little tussle for the wine? At any rate, the lady and the gentleman were extremely carefree and exuberant, at a peak of enjoyment, we’re tempted to say, but in a sense taking up the whole width of the empty road. Our more idyllically unruffled couple simply had to turn, as if compelled, and look back after the other two had passed; they really had no choice. Then they saw that an embarkation was in progress. The bottle of wine was just about to be stowed somewhere off to the rear when the captain, bent over the quarterdeck of his trim craft, seemed to change his mind; he rummaged around under the helmsman’s bench and finally fetched two gleaming wineglasses from some compartment or other—these were for the stirrup cup, a drink for the launch, but a good part of it missed its mark and went into the water, an offering to the river god, or to Neptune, for that matter, as the Danube does eventually flow into the Black Sea.
