I didn’t speak, I just watched my mother and ate and drank the things she had prepared for me, had probably in a hundred different ways managed to acquire. Lots of things that were completely unobtainable in Vienna: salted almonds, white bread, a couple of bars of chocolate, a miniature of cognac, and proper coffee. She sat down at the piano. It was open. It might have been like that for days, perhaps since the day I first let her know I was on my way back. She probably wanted to play some Chopin for me. She knew that my love of him was one of the few tastes I had inherited from my father. I could tell from the thick, yellow, half-burned candles in the bronze candelabra on the piano that my mother hadn’t touched the piano for years. She once played every evening, only in the evening and only by candlelight. They were still the good stout, almost succulent candles from the old times, nothing like that would have been available during the war. My mother asked me for the matches. There was a matchbox on the mantel. Brown and vulgar as it was, beside the little clock with the delicate girlish face it looked out of place in the room, an intruder. They were sulphur matches, you had to wait a little while their blue flame turned into a healthy, normal one. The smell was intrusive, too. Our living-room had always had a particular smell, a mix of remote, already fading violets, and the bitter spice of fresh, strong coffee. What was sulphur doing here?
My mother placed her dear, old, white hands on the keys. I leaned against her. Her fingers slid over the keys, but there was no sound from the interior of the instrument. It was silent, inert. I couldn’t understand. It must be a strange phenomenon; and I didn’t understand the first thing about physics. I tried a few notes myself. Nothing. It was ghostly. In curiosity, I lifted the lid of the piano. It was hollow inside: there weren’t any strings. “But it’s empty, Mama!” I said. She inclined her head. “I’d quite forgotten,” she said quietly. “A few days after you left, I had a strange idea. I wanted to force myself to stop playing. I had the strings removed. I don’t know what was going on in my head. I really can’t say. I was confused, perhaps even a little unhinged. It’s only just come back to me.”
My mother looked at me. There were tears in her eyes, not the flowing kind, but the ones that brim like pools. I threw my arms around her. She patted my head. “Your hair is full of soot,” she said. She repeated it twice more. “Your hair is full of soot! Go and wash it!”
“When I go to bed!” I said. “I don’t want to go to bed just yet,” I said, as if I was still a child. “Let me stay up a bit longer, Mama!”
We sat at the little table in front of the fireplace. “While I was tidying, I found some cigarettes of yours, two boxes of those Egyptians you liked to smoke. I wrapped them in some damp blotting paper. I’m sure they’re perfectly good. Do you want to smoke? They’re by the window.”
Yes, they were the old packs of a hundred! I looked at them from all sides. On the lid of one of them I saw, in my handwriting, almost entirely faded, the name: Friedl Reichner, Hohenstaufengasse. I remembered straightaway. It was the name of an attractive girl who worked in the Trafik where I must have bought these cigarettes. The old lady smiled. “Who is she?” she asked. “A nice girl, Mama! I never tried to look her up again.” “And now you’re too old,” she said, “to go around picking up girls in Trafiks. Anyway, they’ve stopped making those cigarettes. .” It was the first time I’d heard my mother trying herself at a sort of joke.
There was silence for a moment. Then my mother asked me: “Have you suffered much, boy?” “Not so very much, Mama.” “Did you miss your Elisabeth?” (She didn’t say: your wife, she said: your Elisabeth, and with the stress on the “your.”) “No, Mama!” “Are you still in love with her?” “Too much water under the bridge, Mama.” “Don’t you even want to ask after her?” “I was just about to!” “I’ve hardly seen her,” said my mother. “I’ve seen more of your father-in-law. He was last here a couple of months ago. A little downcast, but still full of plans. He’s done well out of the War. They knew you were a prisoner. I think they’d have preferred to see you on the list of casualties, or so-called missing feared dead. Elisabeth. .” “It’s all right, I can imagine,” I interrupted her.
“No, you can’t imagine,” my mother persisted. “Guess what became of her?”
I tried to think of the worst, or what in my mother’s eyes might be the worst thing that could have happened.
“Maybe a dancer?” I suggested.
My mother shook her head solemnly. Then she said slowly, almost grimly: “No — arts and crafts. Do you even know what that is? She sketches, or who knows, maybe she even carves — these crazy necklaces and rings, those modern gewgaws, you know, all jagged, and brooches of fir. I think she can weave straw carpets too. The last time she was here, she gave me a lecture, like a professor, about African art, I think it was. Once, without asking me, she came with a friend. It was” — my mother paused for a while before bringing herself to say the word: “it was one of those hoydens, with short hair.”
“Is that so bad?” I asked.
“It’s worse, boy! Once you start making valuable-looking things out of worthless material! Where’ll it end? Africans go around in seashells, that’s another matter. If you cheat people — fine. But these people try to make something virtuous out of the deception. Do you understand, boy? No one can persuade me that cotton is as good as linen, or that you can make laurel wreaths out of pine cones.”
My mother spoke slowly, in her usual quiet tone. Her face flushed.
“Would you have liked a dancer better?”
My mother pondered for a while, then to my great astonishment said:
“Certainly, boy! I wouldn’t want a dancer as a daughter-in-law, but at least you know where you are with one. Loose morals are unambiguous. There’s no cheating, no deception. The likes of you can have a relationship with a dancer. But an interior designer craves legitimacy and marriage. Now do you see, boy? Once you’ve got over the war, you will. Anyway, you’re to go and see your Elisabeth first thing tomorrow. Where will you live, I wonder? And what will become of you? She’s living with her father. What time shall I wake you?”
“I’m not sure, Mama!”
“I breakfast at eight,” she said.
“Then what about seven, Mama!”
“Go to bed, then, boy. Good night!”
I kissed her hand; she kissed me on the forehead. Yes, that was my mother! It was as though nothing had happened, as though I hadn’t just come home from the war, as though the world didn’t lie in ruins, as though the Monarchy hadn’t been destroyed, our old Fatherland with its numerous, baffling but immutable laws, customs, habits, practices, inclinations, virtues and vices still extant. In my mother’s house, one got up at seven, even if one hadn’t slept for the past four nights. I’d arrived at midnight. Now the old clock on the mantel with its tired, tender girlish face was striking three. Three hours of tenderness were enough for my mother. Or were they? At any rate, she didn’t permit another quarter hour. My mother was right; before long I was asleep with the comforting sense that I was home, in the midst of a wrecked Fatherland; I was falling asleep in a fortress. My old mother with her old ebony crutch warded off the confusions.