By the time I’d made my coffee and carried it back to the window, the procession of choristers shepherded by Father Anselm had left the presbytery beside the saddler’s and was passing the fountain. St Florian’s only has a sung mass once a week so the choirboys the Father trains also sing at other churches. Sighs of sentiment often follow these sweet little boys in their scarlet coats and navy breeches, but I don’t sigh. I’m too busy watching Ernst Bischof, the star pupil, whose rendering of Mozart’s Exsultate Jubilate reduces the congregation to tears, and who is a fiend. And sure enough, as I watched, the charming child kicked out savagely at the shins of the boy next to him. The day Ernst Bischofs voice breaks, Frau Schumacher and I are going to give a great party with champagne.
And now came the regulars who use the square as a passageway, taking a short cut through the alleyway of pleached hornbeams beside the churchyard towards the Ringstrasse trams.
Professor Starsky had changed his brown velour hat for a battered straw, beneath which his wispy grey hair spread out like an aureole. He comes past every morning and he’s usually carrying something in a brown paper parceclass="underline" a lizard with lung trouble or a tortoise that has expired inside its shell, for he is a Professor of Reptile Diseases and people send him their stricken pets from all over the Empire. Seeing me leaning unsuitably like Rapunzel from the window, he raised his hat.
‘Good morning, Frau Susanna.’
‘Good morning, Herr Professor. What is it today?’
He held up the parcel. ‘A stump-tailed skink. From a man who keeps a pet shop in Bolzen.’
Three years ago I found the Professor standing sadly in the churchyard where his wife is buried, and brought him in for a cup of coffee. Last summer, sheltering in my shop from a sudden rainstorm, he proposed to me.
‘I wouldn’t expect you to love me of course,’ he said, ‘an accomplished, beautiful woman like you. But I have a house as you know, and a villa on the Grundlsee — and of course I wouldn’t bring work home’ — and here he’d touched the leg of a pickled chameleon protruding stiffly from its wrappings — ‘not if you were to do me the honour.’
It was a nice proposal; I refused it nicely and we remained friends.
After Professor Starsky came the English Miss, striding to the Volksgarten to exercise her setter bitch. In her heather-mixture tweeds, high breasted and long-legged like her dog, she is a sight so splendid that for a moment she brings life in the square to a halt. Joseph put down the cloth with which he was wiping his tables and stared; in his Biedermeier house, Herr Schumacher left his six daughters at the breakfast table and hurried to the window. And Rip descended the three steps from his doorway, quivered, advanced… and recalled himself to sanity, for the bitch, like her owner, belongs to the unattainable world of myth and dreams.
The clock of the cathedral struck seven, and a minute and a quarter later our own St Florian’s followed suit. Now I could see Gretl, my sewing maid, turn in from the Walterstrasse between the chestnut trees with my breakfast kipferl and a jug of milk. Time to begin the day.
As I turned from the window I heard again the sound that for the past weeks has become as much a part of our lives as the plashing of the fountain or the bells of the church: the sound of someone practising the piano. It comes from the top floor of the apartment house directly across from me — from the smallest, shabbiest attic flat — and it goes on relentlessly from morning to night. Scales first, dozens and dozens of them; chromatic scales, scales in octaves, arpeggios… Then etudes by Chopin, by Czerny, by heaven knows who; Bach preludes, some pieces by Liszt… and of late a Beethoven sonata broken off suddenly in the last movement. Never in my life have I heard anyone practise so continuously or with such strength, and the strange thing is, I don’t know who is playing. We watched the piano being hoisted into the house and a thin, stooped man with greasy sideburns — very eastern looking — goes in and out, but once I thought I heard the music after I’d seen him go out across the square.
I listened for a little longer. Then I dressed and pinned up my hair — after which I climbed the stairs to the attics and went to wake Nini.
It is not actually my business to wake my chief assistant. She should wake of her own accord and be at her machine by seven thirty, but Nini is a passionate Anarchist and spent the previous night at a revolutionary meeting in the suburb of Ottakring. She went in high-heeled white kid sandals which cost her nearly three weeks’ wages and in an ostrich feather boa borrowed from the shop, and why I put up with this I really do not know.
Most of my sewing is done by outworkers, but I keep two girls full time in the workroom behind the shop. Gretl, who sleeps out, is a little packhorse of a girl, willing and stupid. She runs errands and does the hems and picot edgings and her life centres round her fiancé and his fire engine, a prima donna of a machine now threatened with mechanization.
Nini is another matter. Her stitches are as small as mine, her taste is unerring, and though she is really too thin to model I allow her into the salon to show the clothes.
She was just waking, stretching… extending one foot from beneath the coverlet. A foot whose elongated El Greco toes were caked with blood.
This made me immediately and justifiably angry.
‘Will you once and for all not go on marches in unsuitable shoes? I will not have blood-stained people touching my fabrics and modelling my clothes.’
Nini looked at me reproachfully. She is nineteen years old and could be my daughter — but this is not a line to pursue.
‘It was the anniversary of the Garment Workers’ Strike in Yaroslav,’ she said. ‘We went right along the Danube Quay and everyone supported us like anything.’
‘No doubt I shall get another visit from the police soon. When you’re actually imprisoned perhaps you’ll be satisfied.’
‘There is no progress without suffering,’ murmured my chief assistant. She rose in her shift and limped to the wash stand. Black tousled hair, ferocious Magyar eyebrows, a beak of a nose — and an unnaturally long neck which makes every movement memorable.
‘Oh, it isn’t the suffering. I’m sure you’ll enjoy that. It’s the head lice,’ I said — and Nini flinched.
But of course I understand. Oh, I mock, I despair as this girl who spends ten minutes removing a spider from the bath plans to assassinate archdukes and put the bourgeoisie to the sword, but I understand. She wants a better world for the poor and oppressed — and she wants to look pretty while she’s getting it — and don’t we all?
I found Nini when she was modelling for Paul Ungerer’s life class in his atelier off the Schottenring. She was sitting resolute and naked on a cane chair, her black hair hanging over her back, one leg stretched out and her behind too close to the stove which was one of those black capricious beasts of the kind that killed Emile Zola.
Paul Ungerer is a conceited fop who wears a black velvet beret and carries on like Delacroix, but his wife is a good customer of mine and I had promised to drop off a skating dress that she had ordered.
The students were drawing the model and Paul Ungerer was striding round the studio being sarcastic when there was a thud; the chair on the dais had fallen over — and the model lay in a dead faint on the draped, plum-coloured velvet.
Nini’s thighs were checked in red and white where the cane had bitten into her skin, and the burn on her behind was serious. I told Paul Ungerer what I thought of him, which pleased the students and took Nini home.
I meant only to feed her up a little, but her mother, it turned out, had been a seamstress. (The father, who had deserted them, had been some kind of clothes-prop hussar, all sabres and sapkas and wind. A Hungarian, of course!)