The strudlhof steps, p.8
The Strudlhof Steps, page 8
For the rest, it’s disheartening even to think of how much they had to learn. Aside from legal studies, especially constitutional law and commercial law, they were naturally expected to master English and French to the point of perfect fluency. The chief emphasis, however, was still placed on the Near Eastern languages, specifically Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, as absolutely mandatory, with a very extensive command representing the acceptable minimum. The prerequisite for entrance into the academy—fifteen or twenty beginners at the very most were accepted each year—was passing the comprehensive final examinations in the humanities curriculum at a preparatory school; most of the students were likely to have come from the Maria Theresa Court Academy, which people in Vienna still today refer to by its shortened name of the Theresanum.
So much for the subject of Waisenhaus Gasse (“Golden Days of Yore” would be the heading in the parlance of dotage). The students had gradually gained entrée to Herr von Stangeler’s house, one bringing another on his next visit, and they showed up there during the winter very presentably decked out in green tailcoats, and at the country house during the summer in traveling clothes.
“Grauermann and Marchetti are going there tomorrow,” said Herr von Langl, “that much I know for sure. Honnegger’s playing in a piano quintet at my aunt’s in Döbling on Sunday.”
“Marchetti seems to enjoy talking with Asta,” Semski noted in passing. He had a way, incidentally—he was a few years older, after all, and an official with an appointment at Ballhaus Platz—of treating the students at the Consular Academy somewhat patronizingly.
“What’s wrong, Melzer?” asked Lindner quietly from across the table.
Our lieutenant had indeed become unsettled and was just at that moment struggling with some overwhelming feelings. They were all connected to the name Asta Stangeler, and they were grouping themselves around that name as if around their source and their midpoint. He’d as good as missed out on his whole leave by frittering it away. He could have been out there in the mountains, staying at that beautiful house with so many cheerful people, instead of at Zauner’s in Ischl. (The single appearance Lieutenant Melzer had made at the Stangeler house always constituted a noteworthy exception—he was the one and only officer it would have been possible to encounter there, since the father harbored an invincible prejudice against this profession; everybody knew it, too, and the daughters were never allowed to invite officers to their home, although a few navy men might be tolerated, because Herr Stangeler discerned in seafaring men people “who know something about something.” Melzer was once snowed in at the country place during a mountain-climbing party, and he, on the contrary, was pointed out as a “nice, alert, simple young man” and given the seal of approval.) Melzer had then started to feel something like stabs of pain as his friends talked over their plans for riding out to the Semmering area the following day, since it would be Saturday, and the feeling had finally developed a locus, an axis it could rotate on, as it were, in that one name—Asta Stangeler.
What was it that actually formed a bond between him and René’s darker-skinned sister, though, just yesterday still a half-grown girl, so to speak, when it was only the winter before last that she’d been seen at dances and parties for the first time? Now she stepped before his mind’s eye with greater distinctness, as part of a group sitting near the edge of a rocky cliff above the valley, with mountains looming close behind in preternaturally sharp resolution (a sign of bad weather coming), and Asta in her red and blue Styrian outfit with its many-colored shawl, laughing as only she could laugh. Melzer now remembered that he’d always done a great deal of laughing with her; it seemed to him now, in fact, that he never laughed with anyone else more heartily than he did with her. Hope instantly attached itself to this picture inside of Melzer, but what kind of hope was it? This memory dated back to a time before he’d known Mary Allern, and in fact in our lieutenant’s mind it stood for that whole carefree manner of living. So his way of hoping was paradoxical, directed as it was toward the past rather than toward the future. But that’s what we do for the most part anyway, isn’t it?
“I’m not happy about it, but I have to go soon, you know,” he said to Lindner. He still had time to hear them talking about “garden parties.” During the summer just past, the Schmellers out in Grinzing had adopted this new way of entertaining for the season now in progress, when everybody in creation would fetch back up in Vienna from the spas, the mountains, and the seashore; these were summer gatherings in a garden high above the city—whose rows of lights coming up the hillsides added to the charm—where the guests had supper outdoors and danced afterward. A less formal way of socializing, without tailcoats and evening gowns, and a kind of preview of the winter season that one could enjoy in a comfortable summer suit.
“Well, why don’t you come back soon, Melzer? You don’t always have to use up all your leave at the same time, you know.”
“And then run right off to Ischl . . .”
The glass door swung open, closed behind him, and the bath of movement in the streets received him. He hailed a fiacre on the Graben. Turning around at Stock-im-Eisen Platz, he saw the lofty cathedral standing amid the swarming crowds, and then he looked ahead, along Kärntner Strasse toward the Opera—he was going off in that direction. Off to one of those curious lands far to the south that had been parts of the old empire and whose allurements, fascinations, aromas, and even dubious odors all met right here, at this very point of intersection. Melzer’s eight hired hooves went clop-clopping merrily along Favoriten Strasse on their way to the South Station, near which was his hotel. Now he would have to change out of his sport suit; from this point on Melzer was traveling on official business and in uniform.
•
Dressed accordingly, he left Schneider’s restaurant after his dinner and walked over to the station café.
At that time those places were beautifully kept up, relatively quiet, and more spacious than required by the amount of traffic in those days, before every little pastry cook started ceaselessly gallivanting hither and yon. It’s tempting to say that inside them there still reverberated all that was meant by the opening of the Semmering rail line, even though that had been fully half a century earlier. Around the columns of dark marble hovered the traditional atmosphere of a Viennese café, the aromas of strong black coffee and cigarette smoke and that absolute absence of any cooking odor or smell of frying, since a guest could have coffee prepared and served in any of six varieties but could not order more to eat than a little ham sandwich or a couple of eggs at the very most. There were always plenty of empty tables, and everyone who came in to take a seat tried to get as far away as possible from the ones already occupied, which is in itself enough to show how the taciturn and well-nigh meditative demeanor of the patrons in a Viennese café manifests itself.
“Has the lieutenant placed his order yet?” the waiter asked, knowing full well that Melzer had just walked in; avoiding any head-on manner of address, though, was counted as one of the ceremonial prerequisites for service here.
Melzer felt tired after this day filled with activity, the more so as he’d gotten up so early that morning (and had breakfast with Herr Allern). Moreover, he’d had two mugs of pilsner beer to go with his evening meal, in view of his upcoming journey by night, to help him sleep well, that is (but even that seems disrespectful to a certain extent, as his magnanimous uncle’s investments were in a different brewery, Dreher’s).
It began to grow dark. A porter from the Belvedere was standing on the platform, in front of the car with the first- and second-class compartments for the Zagreb train. He handed Melzer the baggage-claim ticket and told him that he’d saved him a good seat by setting his travel bag on it; “only one other gentleman in the compartment, a major,” he added. There were still twenty minutes until departure time. Melzer boarded the train, the porter opened the compartment door for him, and the lieutenant saluted when he saw a gold collar in the dim light.
“How are you, Melzer?” the major said.
“My respects, sir,” Melzer answered, not able to make out who the staff officer was, not even when they stepped closer and shook hands; only when the other turned up the gas lamp, which had been all the way down on low, did his name come back to our lieutenant—it was a Major Laska, battalion commander at Banja Luka in Bosnia.
“Coming off leave, it looks like, Melzer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Listen, how about if we each give the conductor a gulden so we can be left alone and get some sleep?”
“Very good idea, sir.”
Melzer was dominated by a strange twofold feeling, and while he was unbuckling his saber and putting it into the lower, narrower of the two luggage racks above the seats, he was inwardly still standing out on the platform, so to say, on this same platform where he had also at one time boarded a train for Payerbach-Reichenau to reach the Stangelers’ house in the country. That was all still waiting for him out there, unfinished business, as it were, and he had grown vividly aware of it right before he stepped aboard, as he looked out through the open mouth of the terminal. Now he had an urgent desire to go back onto the platform. Just then the moving stand that sold books and newspapers went rolling past. Melzer excused himself for a moment.
“Pick up a bottle of mineral water too, all right?” Laska called after him.
The lieutenant left the car, stopped the newspaper vendor, and quickly bought five English-language detective novels (another errand for someone in Trnovo, and he’d forgotten to do it in the city!) as well as some newspapers and magazines, and finally, when the refreshment cart was being wheeled past, the mineral water and some fruit. Then he stood there with all those things in his arms and looked ahead, out of the terminal. Tomorrow afternoon that whole crowd would take off from here—Grauermann and Marchetti, Semski and Grabmayr and Edouard von Langl, the master of light piano music. There was a mild odor of railroad smoke, just as there had been back then, and in Payerbach they’d get a real whiff of fresh mountain air when they got off the train. Then they’d ride up in the landau, and maybe Asta and Etelka would meet them on the serpentine road leading to the house.
“You brought the mineral water? Good job,” said the major when Melzer came back into the compartment. A wonderful aroma came at him, and Laska presently took out a long cigar case and offered Melzer a Kaiser-Virginia. “You know what?” he said in a happy mood, “I brought a bottle of Poysdorfer from Schneider’s with me, chilled nice and cold. Let’s have a little glass now. I hope the mineral water’s cold, too.” He felt the bottles, seemed satisfied, and produced from his travel bag a yellow case that held two small silver drinking cups, gold-plated on the inside.
“May I ask if the major is also coming off leave?” Melzer said, after they’d sat down by the folding table at the window.
“No, I’m not. I was just in Vienna for a few days, sort of a courier, at the ministry. Among other things, there was one item of discussion that will interest you, by the way.”
“Oh, what was that? And incidentally, does this train stop in Payerbach?”
“No, I don’t think so. This one here goes straight through from Gloggnitz to Semmering. But what made you think of that? Are you planning on getting out there?”
“No, I just heard people talking about it earlier.”
“The express to Graz is the one that stops in Payerbach. It’s standing right over there, on the next track.”
“Oh,” said Melzer, “the Graz express stops in Payerbach.”
Pain gripped him all of a sudden. Mary would look at him so oddly. He had never really quite understood her. She was something special; she was unique. Fear of the irretrievable, of genuine loss, squeezed his chest; he could feel it like a pressure on his throat.
“Listen,” said Laska, as the train began moving almost imperceptibly and glided out of the terminal, “they’ve just made me game warden for Bosnia, and that means your bear is guaranteed. I’m taking you to the Treskavica with me. Your old man will just have to turn you loose for a few days. I’ll ask him myself. He’s a friendly guy, anyway, your man Captain Zeisler. Cheers, now!”
They toasted one another.
“Many thanks and deepest respects, sir,” said Melzer, “that’s really great!”
A sudden sense of well-being coursed through him now, along with vague astonishment at the drastic changes in his mood throughout this day, now drawing to an end. Laska filled the cups again and in a beautiful bass voice struck up a melody from Johann Strauss’s operetta Die Fledermaus:
Why feel strange?
Just arrange
To forget what
You can’t change . . .
Happiness,
We profess,
Comes when you
Forget your stress . . .
He ended with “Cheers!” Melzer stared at him in boundless amazement for the briefest second. The train went gliding along, thrusting gently through the darkness, and stopped for two minutes by the empty platform in Meidling. The two gentlemen leaned back in their padded seats, the glorious local vintage tasting delicious as it went down, the blue haze floating under the hemisphere of the overhead light.
Now Melzer was traveling down to Bosnia with nothing less than passionate eagerness. However, it wasn’t the prospect of a bear hunt—as much as he’d been wishing for it—that had the ability to bring about such a drastic change; instead, the atmosphere diffusing itself through the compartment seemed alone to be producing a powerful healing effect that nothing inside him was able to withstand in the long run. Something here was lifting him up and supporting him stalwartly. Above their seats, the same saber with the same black tip was lying in the narrow luggage rack on both sides.
By the time they passed the country house, around Baden, their talk had long since worked its way down to the most minute details of their hunting plans; Laska, an old Bosnian from way back, knew his subject exhaustively. When the platforms at Payerbach went flying past a good hour later, Melzer didn’t even take notice until afterward, as the train was crossing the large viaduct. They’d slid air-filled rubber pillows under their heads and stretched out to go to sleep. The hollow whooshing sound in the Semmering tunnels penetrated agreeably into the slumber enveloping them, which also had enclosed within it, as it were, something else Melzer found agreeable—his firm resolution to spend his next leave in Vienna, and a part of it in the areas around Rax and Semmering too. And what would there be to stop him, anyway?
•
A month later, Laska and Melzer were riding uphill along a stony path to the hunting lodge, a Catherine hut, on the Treskavica Mountain, the sky a virtually endless blue above bare and wooded hills. The lower part of the Treskavica has both at the same time; on its north slope is a dense forest of beech, while the south slope is all meadowland, and so the mountain as a whole looks something like an old man with a mighty beard but a bald head.
This was the second hunting expedition these two officers had set out on together since their journey back from Vienna. Two weeks earlier, Laska had taken the lieutenant with him on a boar hunt into Sierscha Canyon near Dobro Pole. This was completely virgin territory, still under stringent preservation in those days—in fact, the actual presence of the game warden himself, appointed by the Ministry for National Defense, was required for anyone to enter this region carrying a rifle. The major’s rifle had misfired at the crucial moment of that other hunt, just as the quarry broke out from the underbrush and the black dogs were storming over a ridge with trees farther apart; the boar ran past the two huntsmen close enough for Laska to fling aside the rifle that had failed, draw his pistol, and kill a strong boar with it at scarcely ten paces. The major had practically leapt after his own pistol bullet, continuing to fire the whole time. As they later saw, three hits lodged in the boar’s skull and several more in its lungs. Everything was covered with blood—bushes, grass, moss; over so great an expanse, Melzer had also had ample opportunity to use his rifle (besides, it may be that the major wanted to put his hunting skills to the test before they went after the bear—it worked out satisfactorily, in any case).
