Amok and Other Stories (9 page)

At last, far away, he saw the light. At that moment he felt a pang in his heart, and could not have said if it was fear or jubilation. He flung himself down on the rails with a brusque movement. At first he felt the pleasantly cool sensation of the strips of iron against his temples for a moment. Then he listened. The train was still far off. It might be several minutes yet. There was nothing to be heard but the whispering of the trees in the wind.
His thoughts went this way and that in confusion, until suddenly one stopped and pierced his heart painfully, like an arrow: he was dying for her sake, and she would never know. Not a single gentle ripple of his life as it came to its turbulent end had ever touched hers. She would never know that a stranger’s life had depended on her own, and had been crushed by it.

Very quietly, the rhythmic chugging of the
approaching
engine came through the breathless air from afar. But that idea burned on, tormenting the dying man in his last minutes. The train rattled closer and closer. Then he opened his eyes once more. Above him was a silent,
blue-black
sky, with the tops of a few trees swaying in front of it. And above the forest stood a shining, white star. A single star above the forest … the rails beneath his head were already beginning to vibrate and sing faintly. But the idea burned on like fire in his heart, and in his eyes as they saw all the fire and despair of his love. His whole longing and that last painful question flowed into the white and shining star that looked mildly down on him. Closer and closer thundered the train. And once more, with a last inexpressible look, the dying man took the sparkling star above the forest to his heart. Then he closed his eyes. The rails were trembling and swaying, closer and closer came the rattling of the express train, making the forest echo as if great bells were hammering out a rhythm. The earth seemed to sway. One more deafening, rushing, whirring sound, a whirlwind of noise, then a shrill scream, the terrifyingly animal scream of the steam whistle, and the screech and groan of brakes applied in vain …

The beautiful Baroness Ostrovska had a reserved
compartment
to herself in the express. She had been reading a French magazine since the train left, gently cradled by the rocking movement of the carriage. The air in the enclosed space was sultry, and drenched with the heavy fragrance of many fading flowers. Clusters of white lilac were already hanging heavily, like over-ripe fruit, from the magnificent farewell baskets that she had been given, flowers hung limp on their stems, and the broad, heavy cups of the roses seemed to be withering in the hot cloud of intoxicating perfumes. Even in the haste of the express as it rushed along, a suffocatingly close atmosphere heated the heavy drifts of perfume weighing oppressively down.

Suddenly she lowered her book with limp fingers. She herself did not know why. Some secret feeling was
tearing
at her. She felt a dull but painful pressure. A sudden sense of constriction that she couldn’t explain clutched her heart. She thought she would choke on the heavy, intoxicating aroma of the flowers. And that terrifying pain did not pass, she felt every revolution of the
rushing
wheels, their blind, pounding, forward movement was an unspeakable torment. Suddenly she longed to be able to halt the swift momentum of the train, to haul it back from the dark pain towards which it was racing. She had never in her life felt such fear of something terrible, invisible and cruel seizing on her heart as she did now, in those seconds of incomprehensible, incredible pain and fear. And that unspeakable feeling grew stronger and stronger, tightening its grasp around her throat. The idea of being able to stop the train was like a prayer moaned out loud in her mind …

Then she hears a sudden shrill whistle, the wild, warning scream of the locomotive, the wailing groan and crunch of the brakes. And the rhythm of the flying wheels slackens, goes slower and slower, until there is a stuttering rattle and a faltering jerk.

With difficulty, she makes her way to the window to fill her lungs with fresh air. The pane rattles down. Dark figures are hurrying around … words fly back and forth, different voices: a suicide … under the wheels … dead … yes, out here in the open …

She starts. Instinctively, her eyes go to the high and silent sky and the dark trees whispering above it. And beyond them, a single star is shining over the forest. She is aware of its gaze on her like a sparkling tear. Looking at it, she abruptly feels such grief as she has never known before. A fiery grief, full of a longing that has not been part of her own life …

Slowly, the train rattles on. She leans back in the
corner
and feels soft tears running down over her cheeks. That dull fear has gone away, she feels only a deep, strange pain, and seeks in vain to discover its source. A pain such as terrified children feel when they suddenly wake on a dark, impenetrable night, and feel that they are all alone …

H
ER REAL NAME WAS
Crescentia Anna Aloisia
Finken-huber,
she was thirty-nine years old, she had been born out of wedlock and came from a small mountain village in the Ziller valley. Under the heading of ‘
Distinguishing
Marks’ in the booklet recording her
employment
as a servant, a single line scored across the space available signified that she had none, but if the authorities had been obliged to give a description of her character, the most fleeting glance would have required a remark there, reading: resembles a hard-driven, strong-boned, scrawny mountain horse. For there was something unmistakably horsy about the expression of her heavy, drooping lower lip, the oval of her sun-tanned face, which was both long and harshly outlined, her dull, lashless gaze, and in
particular
the thick, felted strands of hair that fell greasily over her brow. Even the way she moved suggested the obstinacy and stubborn, mule-like manner of a horse used to the Alpine passes, carrying the same wooden panniers dourly uphill and downhill along stony bridleways in summer and winter alike. Once released from the halter of her work, Crescenz would doze with her bony hands loosely clasped and her elbows splayed, much as animals stand in the
stable
, and her senses seemed to be withdrawn. Everything about her was hard, wooden, heavy. She thought
laboriously
and was slow to understand anything: new ideas penetrated her innermost mind only with difficulty, as if dripping through a close-meshed sieve. But once she
had finally taken in some new notion, she clung to it
tenaciously
and jealously. She read neither newspapers nor the prayer-book, she found writing difficult, and the clumsy characters in her kitchen records were curiously like her own heavy but angular figure, which was visibly devoid of all tangible marks of femininity. Like her bones, her brow, her hips and hands, her voice was hard too, and in spite of its thick, throaty Tyrolean accent, always sounded rusty—which was hardly surprising, since Crescenz never said an unnecessary word to anyone. And no one had ever seen her laugh. Here too she was just like an animal, for the gift of laughter, that release of feeling so happily breaking out, has not been granted to God’s brute creation, which is perhaps a more cruel deprivation than the lack of
language.

Brought up at the expense of the parish because of her illegitimate birth, put out to domestic service at the age of twelve, and then later a scullery maid in a carters’ tavern, she had finally left that establishment, where she was known for her tenacious, ox-like capacity for work, and had risen to be cook at an inn that was popular with tourists. Crescenz rose there at five in the morning every day, worked, swept, cleaned, lit fires, brushed, cleared up, cooked, kneaded dough, strained food, washed dishes and did the laundry until late at night. She never took any holiday, she never went out in the street except to go to church; the fire in the kitchen range was her sun, the thousands and thousands of wooden logs it burned over the years her forest.

Men left her alone, whether because a quarter-century of dour, dull toil had taken every sign of femininity from
her, or because she had firmly and taciturnly rejected all advances. Her one pleasure was in money, which she doggedly collected with the hamster-like instincts of the rustic labouring class, so that in her old age she would not have to eat the bitter bread of charity in the parish poorhouse yet again.

It was only for the money, in fact, that this dull-witted creature first left her native Tyrol at the age of
thirty-seven
. A woman who was a professional agent for
domestic
staff had come there on holiday, saw her working like a madwoman from morning to night in the kitchen and public rooms of the inn, and lured her to Vienna with the promise of a position at double the wages. During the railway journey Crescenz hardly said a word to anyone, and in spite of the friendly offers of other passengers to put the heavy wicker basket containing all her worldly goods up in the net of the luggage rack, she held it on her knees, which were already aching, for deception and theft were the only notions that her clumsy peasant brain connected with the idea of the big city. In her new place in Vienna, she had to be accompanied to market for the first few days, because she feared all the vehicles as a cow fears a motor car. But as soon as she knew her way down the four streets leading to the market place she no longer needed anyone, but trotted off with her basket, never looking up, from the door of the building where her employers lived to the market stalls and home again to sweep the apartment, light fires and clear out her new kitchen range just as she had cleared the old one,
noticing
no change. She kept rustic hours, went to bed at nine and slept with her mouth open, like an animal, until the
alarm clock went off in the morning. No one knew if she liked her job; perhaps she didn’t know herself, for she approached no one, answered questions merely with a dull “Very well”, or if she didn’t agree, with a
discontented
shrug of her shoulders. She ignored her neighbours and the other maids in the building; the mocking looks of her more light-hearted companions in domestic service slipped off the leathery surface of her indifference like water. Just once, when a girl imitated her Tyrolean dialect and wouldn’t stop teasing her for her taciturnity, she
suddenly
snatched a burning piece of wood out of the range and went for the horrified, screaming young woman with it. From that day on, everyone avoided her, and no one dared to mock someone capable of such fury again.

But every Sunday morning Crescenz went to church in her wide, pleated skirt and flat peasant hat. Only once, on her first day off in Vienna, did she try taking a walk. As she didn’t want to ride on the tram, and had seen nothing but more and more stone walls in her cautious exploration of the many bewildering streets, she went only as far as the Danube Canal, where she stared at the flowing water as at something familiar, turned and went back the way she had come, always keeping close to the buildings and anxiously avoiding the carriageway. This first and only expedition must obviously have
disappointed
her, for after that she never left the house again, but preferred to sit at the window on Sundays either busy with her needlework or empty-handed. So the great metropolis brought no change into the routine treadmill of her days, except that at the end of every month she held four blue banknotes instead of the old two in her
gnarled, tough, battered hands. She always checked these banknotes suspiciously for a long time. She unfolded the new notes ceremoniously, and finally smoothed them out flat, almost tenderly, before putting them with the others in the carved, yellow wooden box that she had brought from her home village. This clumsy, heavy little casket was her whole secret, the meaning of her life. By night she put its key under her pillow. No one ever found out where she kept it in the day.

Such was the nature of this strange human being (as we may call her, although humanity was apparent in her behaviour only in a very faint and muted way), but
perhaps
it took someone with exactly those blinkered senses to tolerate domestic service in the household of young Baron von F—which was an extremely strange one in itself. Most servants couldn’t put up with the quarrelsome atmosphere for any longer than the legally binding time between their engagement and the day when they gave notice. The irate shouting, wound up to hysterical pitch, came from the lady of the house. The only daughter of an extremely rich manufacturer in Essen, and no longer in her first youth, she had been at a spa where she met the
considerably
younger Baron (whose nobility was suspect, while his financial situation was even more dubious), and had
quickly
married that handsome young ne’er-do-well, ready and able as he was to display aristocratic charm. But as soon as the honeymoon was over, the newly-wedded wife had to admit that her parents, who set great store by solid worth and ability, had been right to oppose the hasty marriage. For it quickly transpired that besides having many debts to which he had not admitted, her husband, whose attentions
to her had soon worn off, showed a good deal more
interest
in continuing the habits of his bachelor days than in his marital duties. Although not exactly unkind by nature, since at heart he was as sunny as light-minded people
usually
are, but extremely lax and unscrupulous in his general outlook, that handsome would-be cavalier despised all
calculations
of interest and capital, considering them stingy, narrow-minded evidence of plebeian bigotry. He wanted an easy life; she wanted a well-ordered, respectable
domestic
existence of the bourgeois Rhineland kind, which got on his nerves. And when, in spite of her wealth, he had to haggle to lay hands on any large sum of money, and his wife, who had a turn for mathematics, even denied him his dearest wish, a racing stables of his own, he saw no more reason to involve himself any further in conjugal relations with the massive, thick-necked North German woman whose loud and domineering voice fell unpleasantly on his ears. So he put her on ice, as they say, and without any harsh gestures, but none the less unmistakably, he kept his disappointed wife at a distance. If she reproached him he would listen politely, with apparent compassion, but as soon as her sermon was over he would wave her
passionate
admonitions away like the smoke of his cigarette, and had no qualms about continuing to do exactly as he pleased. This smooth, almost formal amiability embittered the disappointed woman more than any opposition. And as she was completely powerless to do anything about his well-bred, never abusive and positively overpowering civility, her pent-up anger broke out violently in a
different
direction: she ranted and raged at the domestic staff, wildly venting on the innocent her indignation, which
was fundamentally justified but in those quarters
inappropriately
expressed. Of course there were consequences: within two years she had been obliged to engage a new lady’s maid no less than sixteen times, once after an actual physical scuffle—a considerable sum of money had to be paid in compensation to hush it up.

Only Crescenz stood unmoved, like a patient cab-horse in the rain, in the midst of this stormy tumult. She took no one’s side, ignored all changes, didn’t seem to notice the arrival of strangers with whom she shared the maids’ bedroom and whose names, hair-colour, body-odour and behaviour were constantly different. For she herself talked to no one, didn’t mind the slammed doors, the
interrupted
mealtimes, the helpless and hysterical outbursts. Indifferent to it all, she went busily from her kitchen to market, from market back to her kitchen, and what went on outside that enclosed circle did not concern her. Hard and emotionless as a flail, she dealt with day after day, and so two years in the big city passed her by without incident, never enlarging her inner world, except that the stack of blue banknotes in her little box rose an inch higher, and when she counted the notes one by one with a moistened finger at the end of the year, the magic figure of one
thousand
wasn’t far off.

But Chance works with diamond drills, and that
dangerously
cunning entity Fate can often intervene from an unexpected quarter, shattering even the rockiest nature entirely. In Crescenz’s case, the outward occasion was almost as ordinary as was she herself; after ten years, it pleased the state to hold a new census, and highly
complicated
forms were sent to all residential buildings to
be filled in by their occupants, in detail. Distrusting the illegible handwriting and purely phonetic spelling of his domestic staff, the Baron decided to fill in the forms
himself
, and to this end he summoned Crescenz to his study. When he asked for her name, age and date of birth, it turned out that as a passionate huntsman and a friend of the owner of the local game preserves, he had often shot chamois in that very corner of the Alps from which Crescenz came. A guide from her native village had actually been his companion for two weeks. And when, extraordinarily, it turned out that this same guide was Crescenz’s uncle, the chance discovery led on the Baron, who was in a cheerful mood, to further conversation, in the course of which another surprising fact came to light: on his visit to the area, he had eaten an excellent dish of roast venison at the very same inn where she was cook. None of this was of any importance, but the power of coincidence made it seem strange, and to Crescenz, for the first time meeting someone who knew her home here in Vienna, it appeared miraculous. She stood before him with a flushed, interested face, bobbed clumsily, felt
flattered
when he went on to crack some jokes, imitating the Tyrolean dialect and asking if she could yodel, and talked similar schoolboy nonsense. Finally, amused at himself, he slapped her hard behind with the palm of his hand in the friendly peasant way and dismissed her with a laugh. “Off you go then, my good Cenzi, and here’s two crowns because you’re from the Ziller valley.”

In itself this was not a significant emotional event, to be sure. But that five minutes of conversation had an effect on the fish-like, underground currents of Crescenz’s dull
nature like that of a stone being dropped into a swamp: ripples form, lethargically and gradually at first, but moving sluggishly on until they slowly reach the edge of consciousness. For the first time in years, the obdurate and taciturn Crescenz had held a personal conversation with another human being, and it seemed to her a
supernatural
dispensation of Providence that this first person to have spoken to her in the midst of the stony maze of the city knew her own mountains, and had even once eaten roast venison that she herself had prepared. And then there was that casual slap on the behind, which in peasant language represents a kind of laconic courtship of a woman. Although Crescenz did not make so bold as to suppose that such an elegant and distinguished
gentleman
had actually been expressing any intentions of that sort towards herself, the physical familiarity somehow shook her slumbering senses awake.