The Post Office Girl (22 page)

“Yes, but then why … why didn’t you adopt it?”

“Good grief, now your questions are just as dumb as theirs. As though they posted the official Austro-German gazette on the walls of Siberian thatched huts and barracks in 1919! My friend, in our Tartar village we didn’t know if Vienna was part of Bohemia, or maybe Italy. And we didn’t give a damn. All we cared about was stuffing a crust of bread down our throats and getting the lice out of our hair and finding some matches or tobacco sometime in the next five hours. Wonderful—I should have adopted Austrian citizenship there. Well, finally they at least gave me a piece of toilet paper saying that I could expect to be ‘an Austrian citizen under the terms of Article 65 as well as Articles 71 and 74 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain effective September 10, 1919.’ But I’ll sell it to you for a packet of Egyptian, because I never got a red cent out of any of those agencies.”

Franz was beginning to perk up now. He had an idea he might be able to help and was suddenly feeling better. “I’ll fix that for you, leave it to me. We’ll get some results soon enough. I can attest to your war service if anyone can, and the
assemblymen
know me from the Party, they’ll give me an in, and you’ll get a reference from the municipality—we’ll make things
happen
, you can count on it.”

“I appreciate it, my friend, I really do! But that’s it for me. I’ve had enough, you don’t know what kind of documentation I had to lug in—military documentation, civilian documentation, from the mayor’s office, from the Italian embassy, proof of
indigence
, and I don’t know what other trash. I’ve spent more on notaries and postage than I could have begged in a year, and
I pounded the pavement so much that it got me down more than I can say. I was in the Federal Chancellery, the Ministry of the Army, at the police, at the municipality. There’s no door I wasn’t shown, no stairs I didn’t stumble up and down, no spittoon I couldn’t have spit in. No, my friend, I’d rather crawl in a hole and die than go from door to door again on that fool’s errand.”

Franz gazed at him in disbelief. He looked like he’d been caught out—perhaps he was embarrassed by his own
comfortable
existence. He moved closer: “All right, but what are you going to do?”

“Anything. Whatever comes along. For the time being I’m the technical supervisor on a construction site in Floridsdorf, half architect and half watchdog. The pay’s not bad, and it’ll keep me going until the building is done or the company goes under. Then I’ll find something else, I’m not worrying about that. But what I told you about up there, up there on our
wooden
pallet, all that about being an architect and building bridges, that’s finished. I’ll never get back all the time I slept and smoked and frittered away behind barbed wire. The door to the
academy
’s closed and I’ll never get it open again—they knocked the key out of my hand with a rifle butt back at the beginning of the war, it’s lying in the Siberian mud. But let’s drop that. Why don’t you give me another cognac. Schnapps and cigarettes are the only thing I learned from the war.”

Franz obediently filled his glass. His hands shook. “Well, I’ll be. That somebody like you, so hardworking, so smart, such a good fellow, should be slaving away at odd jobs. Such a shame—I’d have bet anything you were going places, and if anybody deserves to, it’s you. Well, that’s got to change. There must be some solution.”

“‘Must’? I see! I thought the same for five years after I got back. But ‘must’ is a hard nut to crack, and it doesn’t
always
fall from the tree no matter how hard you shake it. The
world’s a tad different from what they taught us back in school: ‘Be ever faithful and upright…’ We’re not lizards whose tails grow back when you cut them off. My friend, once they’ve cut six years out of your body—the best ones, from eighteen to twenty-four—then you’re always a kind of cripple, even if (as you put it) you’re lucky enough to make it home safely. When I go looking for work, I’ve got nothing more to show for myself than some glorified apprentice or teenage layabout, and when I see my face in the mirror, I look forty. No, we came into the world at a bad time. No doctor’s going to fix that, those six years of youth ripped out of me, and who’s going to reimburse me? The government? That prize no-good, that first-class thief? Name one among your forty ministers, for justice, for public welfare and wheeling and dealing in war and in peace, show me one who’s for doing the right thing. They herded us in, played the Radetzky march and ‘God Save the Kaiser,’ and now they’re blowing a different tune. Yes, my friend, from down in the muck the world doesn’t look that delightful.”

Dismayed as ever, Franz now noticed his wife’s evident
annoyance
; out of embarrassment he began making excuses for his friend. “The way you talk, Ferdl, I’d hardly know you. You should have seen him, the best, most uncomplaining fellow of all of them, the only decent one in the bunch. I’ll never
forget
when they brought him in, a skinny kid, only nineteen. All the others were overjoyed because the storm had blown over for them, he was the only one who was furious because they’d nabbed him during the retreat, pulling him out of the railroad car before he could fight and die for the fatherland. The first night, I can still remember—we’d never seen anything like it—here he is in the middle of the war, straight from his mother and the parish priest, and he gets down on his knees and prays. If somebody made a joke about the Kaiser or the army he’d practically throttle them. That’s what he was like, the most
decent guy of the whole lot. He still believed everything it said in the papers and the regimental orders—and now look how he’s talking!”

Ferdinand looked at him gloomily. “Yes, I bought it all, just like a schoolboy. But you knocked it out of me! Weren’t you the one telling me from the first day that it was all a scam, that our generals were idiots, that the supply officers thieved like magpies, that anyone who didn’t surrender was a fool? And who was King of the Commies there, me or you? Who was it, buddy, going on about world socialism and world
revolution
? Who was the first to take the red flag and go over to the officers’ camp to yank their rosettes off? Think back a
minute
! Who stood next to the Soviet commissar at the governor’s palace and delivered the great speech saying that captured Austrian soldiers were no longer the Kaiser’s mercenaries but soldiers of world revolution and would be marching home to smash the capitalist system and establish a reign of harmony and justice? And now you’re back to your beloved boiled beef and your tankard of pils. What’s become of the clean sweep? Where’s your world revolution, Herr Socialist Supremo, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Nelly stood up brusquely and bustled about with the dishes, now openly angry that her husband had let this stranger come into his apartment and tell him off like a boy. Christine felt oddly pleased as she watched all this—felt like laughing out loud at the sight of her brother-in-law, the future district chairman, hunched over in embarrassment and finally apologizing.

“We did everything we could. You know we had a revolution on the very first day—”

“Revolution? Allow me to bum another cigarette so I can blow some smoke too—your milquetoast revolution! You turned the kaiserlich-königlich signboard around and slapped some paint on it, but you obediently and respectfully left everything 
neat and tidy inside, with the top nicely on the top and the bottom nicely on the bottom. You pulled your punches to make sure nothing got shaken up. That was a Nestroy play,
*
not a revolution.”

He stood and urgently paced up and down, then paused in front of Franz. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not from the Red Flag.
†
I know only too well what a civil war is. I couldn’t
forget
it if they burned my eyes out. Once when the Soviets
retook
a village (it went back and forth between the Reds and the Whites three times), they brought us all together to bury the corpses. I buried them with my own hands, charred, mangled bodies, women and children and horses, all jumbled together, one horror, one stench. I know what civil war means now, and I wouldn’t have any part of it even if I knew it was the only way to bring eternal justice down from heaven. I just don’t care
anymore
, I’m not interested, I’m not for or against the Bolsheviks, I’m not a Communist or a capitalist, none of it matters. All I care about is me, and the only government I’m going to serve is my own work. I don’t give a damn how the next generation makes out, whether it’s this or that, Communist or Fascist or Socialist. What’s it to me how they’re living or how they’re
going
to live? The only thing that matters is that I get the little pieces of my life back together again at last and accomplish what I was born for. Once I’m where I want to be, when I can breathe freely, when my own life’s straightened out, maybe then I’ll give some thought to fixing up the world—after I’ve had my dinner. But first I’ve got to know where I stand. You have time to worry about other things, but I’ve only got time for my own problems.”

Franz made a movement.

“No, Franz, I wasn’t saying anything against you. I know you’re a good fellow, I know you through and through. I know you’d rob the National Bank for me if you could and make me minister. I know you’re a nice guy, but that’s where we’re at fault, that’s our crime, that we were so good-natured, so trustful—that’s why people took advantage of us. No, my friend, I’m past that. I’m not going to buy the line that others are worse off, no one’s going to convince me that I was ‘lucky’ because I’ve still got all my arms and legs and I don’t walk on crutches. No one’s going to convince me that breathing and getting fed is all it takes to make everything all right. I don’t believe in anything anymore, not gods or governments or the meaning of life, nothing, as long as I feel I haven’t got what’s rightfully mine, my rightful place in life, and as long as I don’t have that I’m going to keep on saying I’ve been robbed and cheated. I’m not going to let up until I feel I’m living my true life and not getting the dregs, what other people toss out or couldn’t stomach. Can you understand that?”

“Yes.”

Everyone looked up quickly. A loud “yes,” full of feeling, had come from somewhere. Christine flushed when she saw them all looking at her. She’d thought “yes,” she knew she’d felt it strongly, but the word had just slipped out. Now, suddenly finding herself the center of attention, she was embarrassed.
Silence
. At last Nelly had found an opportunity to vent her anger; she leaped to her feet.

“Where do you come in? What do you know about it? As though you ever had anything to do with the war!”

The room was suddenly ablaze with energy. Now Christine could let fly too, and it made her glad. “Not a thing! Not a thing! Just that it ruined us. That we used to have a brother, you were forgetting that too, and how our father died, and
everything
… everything …”

“But not you, you didn’t lack for anything. You’ve got your good job and you ought to be glad.”

“Ah, I ought to be glad. I ought to be thankful to be sitting out there in that hole. You don’t seem to find it all that
appealing
—I didn’t see you coming out to see Mother except on holidays. It’s all true what Herr Farrner says. They stole years from us and gave us nothing, no peace, no happiness, no time off, no rest.”

“So, no time off. Straight from the poshest hotels in Switzerland and here you are complaining.”

“I never complained to anyone. You were the only one I heard complaining during the entire war. As for Switzerland … That’s just why I know what I’m talking about, because I saw it. Now I know what … what’s been taken from us … what they’ve done to our lives … what I …”

She broke off uncertainly, aware of the stranger’s interested and penetrating gaze. Maybe she’d given too much away. She softened her tone. “Of course I don’t want to say my situation is the same, of course other people were more involved. But we’re all fed up, and we all have our own reasons. I never said anything, I was never a burden on anyone, I never complained. But when you tell me—”

“Quiet, children! No squabbling,” Franz broke in. “What’s the point of this? The four of us aren’t going to fix things here. No politics, that just makes trouble. Let’s talk about something else, and above all don’t spoil my pleasure. You don’t know how much good it does me just to see him again. It makes me happy no matter how much he gripes and growls at me.”

Peace returned, like the cooler air after a storm.

For a moment they all savored the silence, enjoying the
release
of tension. Then Ferdinand rose from his chair. “I ought to go. Call your boys in again—I want to look at them.”

The children were brought in. They looked at the stranger with wonder and curiosity.

“This one’s Roderich, born before the war. Him I know about. And the second one here, this charmer, the posthumous child so to speak, what’s his name?”

“Joachim.”

“Joachim! Shouldn’t he have been called something else, Franz?” Franz gave a start. “My God, Ferdl. I forgot all about it. Imagine, Nelly, I didn’t think of it—we promised we’d be
godfather
for each other if we got back and one of us had a child. I totally forgot about it. You’re not angry with me?”

“My friend, I don’t think the two of us could be angry with each other now. If we were going to fall out, we had plenty of time for that. But that’s the reason, you see—we’ve
forgotten
about that time. But maybe it’s better that way” (he ruffled the child’s hair, a warm expression flitting across his features) “maybe the name wouldn’t have brought him luck.”

He fell silent. The boy had awakened something childlike in his face and he said to Nelly, in an offhand but conciliatory tone, “No hard feelings, ma’am…I know I’m not a pleasant guest and I noticed you didn’t care all that much for my conversation with Franz. But if two people have spent two years picking the lice out of each other’s hair and shaving each other and eating out of the same trough and lying in the same mud, it’s a crime for one of them to get on his high horse and talk fancy talk in front of the other. You meet an old buddy, you talk the way you used to talk, and if I chewed him out a little that was just because I was annoyed for a second. But he knows and I know we’ll never drift apart. I guess I owe you an apology. I know you’ll be happy to see me leave, I assure you I understand that.”