Following this train of thought he had come to the conclusion, bleak, even pagan though it seemed, that since we can’t be really good we should at least be polite. This politeness of his, however, was no mere ceremoniousness, not a thing of compliments and idle chatter. It often consisted of nothing more than subtly slipping in at a crucial moment a word which might seem noncommittal, but which someone was desperately awaiting from him as an acknowledgment of their existence. He considered that tact his most particular virtue. Better than so-called goodness, in any case. Goodness preaches constantly, wants to change humanity, to work miracles from one day to the next, makes a show of its substance, wants to question essentials, but in fact is most often just hollow, lacking in substance and merely a matter of appearance. Whereas even if politeness does look entirely formal, in its inward nature it is substance, essence itself. A good word which has not yet been put into practice holds within itself every virgin possibility and is more than a good deed, the outcome of which is dubious, its effect arguable. In general, words are always more than deeds.
He waited anxiously for his traveling companions to return. They didn’t come, didn’t come. He looked at his pocket watch. It was a quarter to one. It had been exactly three-quarters of an hour since they’d disappeared.
At one o’clock footsteps were heard in the corridor. The guard was passing his compartment with a lamp in his hand, the new Croat guard, a friendly man with a mustache, and looked in on him and asked in faultless German and with Austrian cordiality where he was going and why he wasn’t asleep. He couldn’t, however, enlighten him on the whereabouts of the woman and the girl. Then, in his perfect German and with Austrian cordiality, he said “Ich wünsch’ Ihnen eine scheene, gute Nacht,” saluted, and as he left, closed the door of the compartment after him.
A couple of minutes later the door creaked open. Esti thought that the guard had come back to chatter on, to fraternize, Slav fashion, in the hope of a tip, because life was hard, the children many, and so on. There wasn’t a word spoken in the corridor. It was as if the door had opened itself with the motion of the train. From where he was sitting he could see no one. This must have lasted ten or fifteen — very long — seconds.
Then a voice could be heard breathing, “Go in, dear. In you go.” It was the woman. They were back.
Minutes went by. Not another sound, no movement. Then the girl stepped in.
After her — on her heels — her mother. She shut the door, sat down by the window. Opposite Esti.
The girl didn’t sit down. She just stood there, moodily, obstinately, tensely. But those are just words, tentative words, an attempt somehow to appreciate her resolute petulance. She looked a little flushed, too, as if she’d taken a hot bath or had rouged her face a little — it was still very pale. Esti looked questioningly at the mother, as if to ask where they could have been. The mother’s face was unchanging and negative.
The girl — like lightning, like the snapping of a spring — knelt on the seat in the opposite corner, by the corridor window, face to the wall, turning her back on the other two. She knelt and didn’t move. Knelt rigidly. Rigidly and wilfully. Her neck muscles were tensed. Her back was as flat as an ironing board. Her long arms, her long rachitic arms, dangled. She was showing her long, rachitic legs — left uncovered by the short white stockings — her skinny legs and the almost unworn soles of her patent leather shoes. There was something comical about it all. It was like when someone’s made to “be a statue” in a game of forfeits and the company can do what they like by way of teasing the person concerned. Only there was something very serious and frightening in her immobility and her pose.
So what was all this about? Esti again gave the mother a questioning look. This time a couple of words were on his lips, he meant to implore her, to say that the time had come for her at last to explain things to him, because it was becoming a little unbearable. She, however, avoided his eye. Esti choked back his words.
He was no longer surprised at the girl. What surprised him was that the woman wasn’t surprised at her. She just sat there, staring at nothing. Clearly, she was used to her. Had she seen such things before, and stranger too? Clearly, she could have acted no differently. She made nothing of it. And that was the most natural thing.
The train clattered on. Esti took out his pocket watch every five minutes. Half past one. Two o’clock. The girl still didn’t tire. They were approaching Zagreb.
Now the mother got up and, like one acting against her principles and better judgment, went to the girl. Once more she was warmhearted, as she had been at the start of the journey. She knelt down beside her, put her face to hers, and began to speak. She spoke quietly, nicely, sensibly, cheek to cheek, spoke into her face, her ears, her eyes, her forehead, her whole body, talked and talked without tiring, with a constant flow and impetus, and it was all incomprehensible, as incomprehensible as the girl’s whispering had been before, and incomprehensible too that one could find so much to say: what old words, pieces of advice, exhortations, what banalities she must have been repeating — previously painful but now no longer felt, known by heart, deadly dull — banalities which she had obviously used thousands and thousands of times before in vain, and which had long since been gathering dust in a lumber room, unused.
The part of the heroine in a five-act tragedy can’t be so long, nor can a single prayer, not even the whole rosary, that a believer mumbles to his unknown, unseen god. The girl took no notice whatever. She wasn’t disposed to budge from the spot.
Thereupon the mother grasped the girl’s neck, pulled her hard to her, with great force lifted her into the air, and sat her at her side.
She stroked her hair. She dabbed her forehead with a cologne-scented handkerchief. She smiled at her too, once, just once, with a smile, a wooden, impersonal smile which must have been the remains, the wreckage of that smile with which long ago she must have smiled down at that girl when she was still in swaddling clothes, gurgling in the cradle, shaking her rattle. It was a wan smile, almost an unseeing smile. But like a mirror that has lost its silvering, it still reflected what that girl must have meant to her back then.
She was holding a silver spoon in her hand. She filled it with an almost colorless liquid which Esti — who was the son of a pharmacist — recognized from its heavy, volatile scent as paraldehyde. She meant to administer this to her daughter, and that was why she had smiled. “Now, dear, you have a nice, quiet sleep,” she said, and put the spoon to the girl’s lips. The girl gulped the medication. “Go to sleep, dear, have a nice sleep.”
They arrived in Zagreb.
The sleepy life of the train came to. There was shunting, whistling. The heated wheels were tapped with hammers, and the sound wafted musically through the nighttime station. The engine took on water, and a second engine was attached so that two could pull the carriages to the great height of the Karszt mountains. The friendly Croat guard appeared again with his lamp. Just a few passengers got on. They were not disturbed.
The woman gave the girl a sweater, pulled her skirt down to her knees, and retied — more neatly — her strawberry-colored bow. She dressed her for the night rather than undressing her. She spread a soft, warm, yellow blanket over her legs. The girl closed her eyes. She breathed deeply, evenly.
The woman too now prepared to rest. She tied a light black veil over her ash-blonde hair.