A woman’s love is inspired by various motives. Even waiting is one. She loves her own yearning and the substantial amount of time invested. Every women would despise herself for not loving the man she has waited for. Why, then, did Irene wait? Because the men on the spot are greatly inferior to those who are absent.
Moreover, she was choosy. She belonged to that generation of disillusioned upper middle-class girls whose naturally romantic disposition had been destroyed by the war. During the war these girls were in secondary schools, high schools, so-called finishing schools. In times of peace these are the breeding-grounds of illusions, of ideals and amorousness.
During the war education was neglected. Girls of all classes studied sick-nursing, current heroism and war communiqués in place of iambics. The women of this generation are as cynical as only those with much experience in love are. To them the obtuse, simple and barbaric nature of men is tedious. They already know in advance the despicable, eternal and unchanging modes of masculine courtship.
After the war Irene took a post in an office because by then it had become embarrassing not to work. She was one of those better office workers, who would be summoned by the chief himself rather than by his secretary. Thus one began to imagine that the world was topsy-turvy, that a general equality was now the rule. What had the world come to when the daughters of manufacturers had to reply to ‘yours of the eighteenth inst.’ in order to be able to wear better stockings! Such times were out of joint.
Irene waited (like many thousands of women) morning, noon and night for the postman. From time to time he brought an unimportant letter from the lawyer. Meanwhile she was accompanied by the sighs of the aristocratic lady, whose sympathy resembled a malicious gloating.
Irene was in contact with family friends from Trieste. They were an ancient family who had lived for decades by the manufacture of tiled stoves and plaster casts of classical statues. This family is responsible for most of the discus-throwers which stand under bell-jars on mahogany showcases. A branch of the Trieste family had — probably for business reasons — embraced the Irredentist cause, moved its office to Milan, and split away from that part of the family still loyal to the Hapsburgs. Never again did the two camps exchange wedding telegrams, so profound are the consequences patriotism can engender.
After the war relations were gradually resumed. As victory conduces to magnanimity, the Italian branch of the family began by extending its hand to the Austrian. There was a nephew who came from Milan to Vienna; and it was this man whom Irene eventually married.
He won her by gallantry. In those days this was a rare quality in German men — it still is today. He was unpretentious, lively, businesslike, he made money, and possessed the important and astute capacity of being at once mean and of making a woman unexpected and expensive gifts. His personal taste stood in startling contrast to his profession; his house did not contain a single one of the statues he manufactured.
Irene was delighted when she left the paternal villa and — for the first time in fifteen years — the noble lady.
As the dog accompanied the bridal pair, the housekeeper assumed part of his functions: she snarled at the postman.
Irene did not forget Tunda. Contrary to her good taste, she called her first child — it was a girl — Franziska.
IV
I have narrated how Tunda began to fight for the Revolution. It was an accident.
He did not forget his betrothed, but found himself no longer on the way to her but actually in the neighbourhood of Kiev and marching towards the Caucasus. He wore a red star; his boots were in shreds. He still did not know whether he was in love with this girl comrade. But one day when, following an ancient tradition, he declared his allegiance he was confronted with her opposition to such poetic nonsense and experienced the collapse of traditional laws.
‘I shall never leave you,’ said Franz Tunda.
‘I shall get rid of you!’ retorted the girl.
Her name was Natasha Alexandrovna. She was the daughter of a clockmaker and a peasant woman, had made an early marriage with a manufacturer of French perfumery and left him after a year. She was twenty-three years old. Her expression changed from time to time. Her arched forehead became creased, her thick short eyebrows moved close together, the fine skin of her nose became taut over the bone, her nostrils narrowed, her lips — usually round and half-open — pressed together like two bitter enemies, her neck reached out like a searching animal. Her pupils, usually brown and round, in thin gold circles, could become narrow green ovals between contracted lids like swords in their sheaths. She did not want to acknowledge her beauty, rebelled against herself, regarded her femininity as a reversion to bourgeois conceptions and the entire female sex as the unwarranted residue of a defeated expiring world. She was braver than the whole of the male troop with whom she fought. She did not realize that courage is a virtue in women and cowardice the prudence of men. Neither did she realize that all the men were her comrades only because they loved her. She was unaware that men are chaste and ashamed to betray their affection. She had taken none of them; she had not acknowledged the love of a single one because she was more bourgeois than she dared to admit to herself.
The men of her troop were sailors, workers, peasants, uneducated men of animal innocence. Tunda was the only man of bourgeois origin. She took him immediately. She did not accept that this was a significant relapse into bourgeois behaviour. She acknowledged his sexual parity, she ridiculed his bourgeois outlook. Out of these qualities she decided to make a revolutionary. She did not realize that she was able to succeed in this only because, though surrounded by all the others, she and he nevertheless lived on an isolated island and, despite their differing convictions, came to understand each other more quickly than anyone else.
Natasha Alexandrovna fell thoroughly in love with Tunda, in accordance with all the contested rules of love of the old world she denied. And so, when she said: ‘I shall get rid of you,’ she did not know she lied. Tunda began by swearing eternal love with the assurance of all the superficial men to whom many clever women have fallen prey. It was only the persistent, contrary and determined resistance of the woman and her self-conscious and — to him — inexplicably offhand refusal of all the delights of male seductiveness that made him fall in love for the first time in his life.
Only at this point did his betrothed recede into the distance, and the whole of his earlier life with her. His past was like a country abandoned for ever, the years he had spent there utterly meaningless. His fiancée’s photograph was a souvenir like the picture postcard of a street one has once lived in, his former name on his genuine documents like an old out-of-date police registration form.
Natasha once saw the photograph of his fiancée and, although jealous, handed him back the picture in unconcerned fashion, saying:
‘A good bourgeois type!’
It was as if she had been commenting on an antique pistol, properly constructed for its period but now completely superseded and quite unfit for use in modern revolutionary warfare.
How well she knew how to apportion the hours of their day, to combine comradeship with the delights of love, and love with the duties of combat!
‘We are moving forward at eleven-thirty,’ she said to Tunda. ‘It’s nine now. We eat till half-past, you draw the map for Andrej Pavlovich, you will be ready at ten, we can sleep together till eleven-thirty if you aren’t afraid of being too tired by then.’ ‘It’s all the same to me!’ she added with faint scorn, convinced that she had once more demonstrated her masculine superiority.