“You and your symptoms!” she exclaimed. It was clear to me that she didn’t understand the word.
“At eight o’clock Harufax is giving a talk on voluntary sterilisation,” said Jolanth. “Don’t forget, Elisabeth! It’s already seven.”
“I’ll remember,” said Elisabeth.
Jolanth got up, shooting a glance at Elisabeth to follow her. “Excuse me!” said Elisabeth. Obediently she followed Jolanth to the lavatory.
They were gone for a couple of minutes. Time enough for me to register that with my insistence on “putting my life in order,” I was only adding to my confusion. Not only was I growing more bewildered myself, I was adding to the general bewilderment. That was as far as I’d got with my pondering when the women came back. They paid. I didn’t even manage to call the waitress. Afraid I might anticipate them and curtail their independence, they had, so to speak, nobbled her on the short walk from the toilet to the till. As we said goodbye, Elisabeth pressed a little rolled-up piece of paper into my hand. And then they were off to Harufax, and sterilization. I unrolled the piece of paper. “Ten at night, Café Museum, alone,” it said. The confusion wasn’t over.
The café stank of carbide, or if you prefer, of rotting onions and corpses. There was no electric light. I always find it difficult to concentrate in the presence of strong smells. Smell is a stronger sense than hearing. I waited dully, without the least inclination to see Elisabeth again. Nor did I much feel like “putting things in order.” It seemed to have taken the carbide to make me see the perverse hopelessness of my desire to make order. I only hung on out of gallantry. But even that couldn’t outlast the police curfew. Which in turn — something I would ordinarily have railed against — struck me as excessively generous. The authorities knew what they were doing all right. They were compelling us to drop our inappropriate habits, and to amend our hopeless misunderstandings. But then, half an hour before closing time, Elisabeth arrived. She looked ravishing, storming in, like a hunted animal in her half-length beaver jacket, with snow in her hair and her long lashes, and flakes of snow melting on her cheeks. She looked like something running out of the woods for refuge. “I told Jolanth that Papa was unwell,” she began. And already there were tears in her eyes. She began to sob. Yes, even though she had on a man’s collar and tie under her open fur jacket, she was sobbing. Carefully I took her hand and kissed it. Elisabeth was no longer in any mood to push away my arm. The waiter came along, already out on his feet. Only two of the carbide lamps were still burning. I thought she would order a liqueur, but no, she ordered a pair of frankfurters with horseradish. Nothing gives a woman an appetite like crying, I thought. Anyway, the horseradish would be a cover for her tears. Her appetite moved me. I was overtaken by tenderness, the mindless, fatal tenderness of the male. I put my arm round her shoulder. She leaned back, dunking her sausage in the horseradish with one hand. Her tears were still flowing, but they meant just as little as the melting snow in her beaver coat. “I’m your wife, after all,” she sighed. It sounded like a yelp. “Of course you are,” I replied. Suddenly she sat up straight. She ordered another pair of frankfurters with horseradish and, this time a glass of beer.
Since the second-last carbide lamp was being put out, we had to try to leave. “Jolanth is waiting for me,” Elisabeth said outside the café. “I’ll walk you,” I said. We walked silently side by side. An inconstant, mouldering snow fell. The streetlamps failed, they too mouldering. They kept a little grain of light in their glass bulbs, spiteful and miserly. They didn’t brighten the streets, they darkened them.
When we got to Jolanth Szatmary’s house, Elisabeth said: “Here we are, goodbye!” I took my leave. I asked when I could visit. I made to turn for home. Suddenly Elisabeth put out both her hands towards me. “Don’t leave me,” she said, “I’ll go with you.”
So I took her with me. I couldn’t take Elisabeth into any of those houses where I might still be remembered from pre-War times. We were adrift in the great, orphaned, gloomy city, two orphans ourselves. Elisabeth clasped my arm. I could feel her pulse through her fur coat. Sometimes we stopped under one of the miserable lamp posts, and I would look at her wet face. I didn’t know if it was from snow or tears.
Somehow we had reached Franz-Josefs-Kai, without knowing it. Without knowing it, we crossed the Augarten bridge. It was still snowing, that ugly, mouldy snow, and we didn’t speak. A tiny star blinked at us from a house on the Untere Augartenstrasse. We both knew what the star signified. We went towards it.
The walls were a toxic green, as usual. There were no lights. The porter lit a candle, dribbled a little wax, and gummed it down on the bedside table. A towel hung over the basin. On it was a perfectly round wreath picked out in green thread with a “Grüss Gott!” in the middle, in red.
That night, in that room, I made love to Elisabeth. “I’m a prisoner,” she said to me, “Jolanth has taken me prisoner. I should never have left, that night in Baden, when Jacques died.”
“You’re no one’s prisoner,” I replied. “You’re with me, you’re my wife.”
I tried to discover all the secrets of her body, and they were many. A youthful ambition — at the time I thought it was masculine — prompted me to wipe out any traces that Jolanth might have left. Was it ambition? Or jealousy?
Slowly the winter morning crept up the toxic green walls. Elisabeth awoke me. She looked very different, looking at me. With terror in her eyes and reproach; yes, there was a measure of reproach in her eyes. Her stern tie, silvery-grey, hung like a little sword over the arm of the chair. She kissed my eyes sweetly, then she jumped up and shrieked: “Jolanth!”
We got dressed hurriedly, with an indescribable feeling of shame. The morning was unspeakable. It was raining little hailstones. We had a long way to walk. The trams weren’t yet running. For fully an hour we walked in the teeth of the sleet to Elisabeth’s house. She brushed off her gloves. Her hand was cold. “Goodbye!” I called out after her. This time, she didn’t turn round.
XXVI
It was eight o’clock. My mother was breakfasting, as on any other day. Ritual greetings were exchanged. “Good morning, Mama!” Today my mother surprised me with a “Servus, laddie!” It was a long time since I had last heard that boisterous greeting from her lips. When would she have used it last? Maybe ten or fifteen years ago, when I was a schoolboy, in the holidays, when I could stop in for breakfast. At that time she liked to follow that with the anodyne joke that struck her as rather witty. Pointing to the chair I was sitting on, she would ask: “Well, and is the school bench pinching you?” On one occasion I answered, “Yes, Mama!” and my punishment was that for three days I wasn’t allowed to sit at the table with her.
Today, she even allowed herself a complaint about the jam. “What I don’t understand is where they get all those confounded beets from! Try it, boy! They claim it’s oh-so-good for you. .” I ate beets and margarine and drank coffee. The coffee was good. I noticed that our maid poured mine from a different pot, and I saw that the old lady kept the good, hard-to-come-by Meinl coffee for me, and contented herself with bitter chicory brew. But I couldn’t let on that I knew. My mother didn’t like it when her little tactical moves were seen through. Her vanity was such that she could even cut up on occasion.
“So, you’ve seen your Elisabeth,” she began abruptly. “I know, your father-in-law was here yesterday. If I concentrate, I can understand what he says. He was here for a good two hours. He told me you’d spoken to him. I said I was happy to wait to hear about it from you, but there was no stopping him. So, you want to put your life in order — that’s what I hear. And what does Elisabeth say?”