St Florian’s on Easter Sunday is an unforgettable sight. It was hard to believe that two days earlier I had come in to see Our Lady wreathed in black, Father AnseIm in inky vestments, and the very stones impregnated with the sorrow of the crucifixion. And today pasque flowers spilled out of vases, the altar glowed with gold, and white-petalled stars of jasmine wreathed the Madonna’s head.
Everyone in the square seemed to be in church. Old Augustin Heller, who almost never leaves his book shop, sat beside his raven-haired granddaughter in her sailor suit. Maia’s head was bent reverently over her missal, but between its pages I distinctly saw the indented contours of a map.
In the same pew as Heller was my neighbour on the other side, Herr Schnee. The saddler is a crusty man who seldom speaks, but is always willing to be helpful if it is deeds not words that are required. I confess that I often envy him his clients: gentle carriage horses, spirited trotters, not one of whom wants to look like Karsavina in The Firebird or Isadora Duncan in bare feet. Beside Frau Schumacher, like crotchets in a descending scale, bobbed the heads of the six little girls…
Father Anselm proclaimed the resurrection. Ernst Bischof (who the day before had stoned a ginger tomcat sunning itself on the sacristy wall) sang the Gloria as though lowered down from heaven for the purpose. And as the service drew to a close, I steeled myself to waylay the vile-tempered concierge, Frau Hinkler, and ask her who it was that played in her attic flat.
I had known she was in church because I had seen Rip outside on the pavement. Fastened to the pretty wrought-iron gate that leads into our churchyard is a notice. It says: DOGS NOT ADMITTED — and Rip knows that this is what it says. Father Anselm, who is so young that his Adam’s apple still juts out above his clerical collar, did not put up this notice; nor — I am entirely certain of this — was it countenanced by God.
But Rip — a law-abiding Austrian animal — never enters the churchyard and lies with his head between his paws, only emitting occasionally the despairing sighs of those who wait.
I had risen to my feet and was about to accost Frau Hinkler as she stumped down the aisle when I was hailed from behind by Professor Starsky. The Professor had taken great trouble with his toilette. His tussore suit was scarcely crumpled, his tie unspotted by hydrochloric acid — but his eyes were troubled.
And understandably, for the story he told me as we moved out into the sunshine was a heart-rending one. A ferocious anti-vivisectionist lady had arrived at the university on a tandem and had released three hundred white rats and two cages of guinea pigs from the zoology lab.
‘And she took my terrapins,’ said the poor Professor. ‘There was another lady on the back and they took the whole lot away in a bucket and dropped them in the fountain. The ducks have made mincemeat of them of course. And I wasn’t going to dissect them, Frau Susanna — there would have been no point in that. I was only measuring the effect of mashed spinach on their rate of growth.’
By the time I had comforted the Professor and invited him to supper the following week, the grim Frau Hinkler, with Rip at her heels, had disappeared into the apartment house and shut the door.
My closest friend in Vienna is Alice Springer. She’s three years older than I am, gentle and funny, and though she talks almost without stopping she never seems to say anything wounding or indiscreet. Alice sings in the chorus of the Volksoper — a hard life of dirndls and um-pa-pa — and I regard this as a shocking waste because she has a real gift for millinery. Hats come to Alice like dresses come to me and she has total recall for any hat that has ever caught her interest.
She’s not a person to complain, but I think of late things have been hard for her. Though she’s so pretty — one of those nut-brown women whose eyes and hair have the same russet tint, she’s nearly forty and recently there’s been a tendency to put her in the second row, often with a hay bale or a milking stool. And from there, as everyone knows, it’s only a short step to the back row in a grey wig with the village elders and a spinning wheel.
I usually pick her up at the theatre and we go and have a spritzer at the Café Landtmann. Tonight I was early enough to use the ticket she’d left for me, and so I was privileged to see the whole of a new production from Germany called Student Love. Alice was in the second row again, holding huge steins of beer aloft because it all took place in Heidelberg and about the operetta itself I prefer not to speak.
At the same time people were enjoying it. I noticed particularly a very fat man in the same row as me. He had bright ginger hair parted in the middle and a round red face which clashed with his moustache and it was clear that he was very much moved by what was going on. During the song about the fast-flowing River Neckar he sighed deeply, during the duet in which the nobly born student and the impoverished landlady’s daughter plighted their troth, he leaned forward with parted lips, and during the heroine’s solo of (strictly temporary) renunciation he was so overcome he had to mop his face several times with a large white handkerchief.
When it was over I went backstage to fetch Alice, who was just lowering what looked like the mossy nest of a Parisian chaffinch on to her curls.
‘Oh Alice, what a marvellous hat!’ I said when I’d embraced her.
‘Yes, it’s good isn’t it? I got it at Yvonne’s. But listen; there were three straws in her window, all with identical brims: big ones. One trimmed with roses, one with mimosa and one with cherries. Imagine it, Sanna, exactly the same brims in every case!’
I too was shocked. How can anyone think that roses, mimosa and cherries can all be treated in the same way? For roses the brim must be wider, softer; mimosa (about which I’m doubtful anyway — one so easily feels one is in the presence of a hatchery for miniature chickens) needs to be wired on with a lot of greenery, and cherries really only work on a boater. You have to be quite rakish and impertinent when wearing fruit.
It was a beautiful evening; the scent of narcissi came to us from the Volksgarten and the waiter, who knew us, found us a quiet table, for together Alice and I are inclined to unsettle unattended gentlemen. As Alice poured our wine and mineral water she chatted cheerfully enough, but I know her very well and I thought she was worried.
‘How is Rudi?’ I asked — and I was right, the trouble was there.
‘He’s so exhausted, Sanna. So tired and grey — and he just works and works. And that wretched wife of his doesn’t even feed him properly! I have to cook goulash for him when he comes and that isn’t fair. It’s wives who should cook goulash; not mistresses — we have so little time.’
‘She’s become a vegetarian, I hear?’
‘Yes, but not the kind that eats proper vegetables — just the kind that has gherkin sandwiches sent to her room while she prepares talks on Goethe’s Nature Lyrics. And there’s a court case coming up, did you know? The university is suing her: she broke in at night and let out hordes of rats and mice. You can imagine how Rudi feels — one of the most respected solicitors in Vienna having to beg a colleague to defend his wife.’
‘So it was her? I did wonder. Poor Professor Starsky lost all his terrapins.’
‘If you knew what a saint Rudi was, Sanna. If anything happens to him…’ She blew her nose.
As a matter of fact I did know what a saint Rudi Sultzer was. I’ve never been surprised that this balding, bandy-legged solicitor has for so many years held Alice’s heart. Rudi Sultzer is an Atlas who supports uncomplainingly an enormous, dark and over-staffed flat in the Garnison Gasse, a villa in St Polten to which he never has time to go, and a wife and grown-up daughter who despise him because he reads cowboy stories and likes to play cards.