My lover continued to be so entertained by his supposed birth in the state bed of Prince Eugene and his wild rides, ventre a terre, on the gelding of the saucepan manufacturer’s mother-in-law, that the love we made that night was distinctly on the rococo side. Afterwards I said: ‘I promise I won’t go there, I’m through with sentimental journeys. But what is the Burg like? The place where you do live?’
He rolled on to his back. ‘Quite small. High up. There’s a single tower… wooden… a courtyard. The rooms are a bit cramped… there’s a smell of leather and wood.’ He wound one of my curls round his finger. ‘The stables are almost as big as the house,’ he said, and grinned.
I was satisfied. In such a place I could see him and — just as important — I could see Hatschek.
The Kaiser has departed for his villa in Bad Ischl, and God help the poor chamoix which, for the next month, he will pursue relentlessly in lederhosen. They say he has run out of wall on which to stick their horns. Well, all of us have problems.
His departure is always the signal for the city to empty for the summer. Most of my clients have houses in the mountains or by a lake. Frau Hutte-Klopstock is going back to the High Tatras. The glacier named after her proved to be so small that it melted, and she and her husband are going to try and find glory by pioneering a different route.
Leah Cohen spends the summer on the Bodensee. She came to invite me to go with her, but though I shall close the shop for two weeks at the end of the month, I shan’t go away. There’s a lot of work to be done on the Huber trousseau, and I love these weeks of high summer: the dark trees trembling in the breeze that you can scarcely feel down below; the quietness.
‘How is the psychoanalysis?’ I asked her. ‘Does it help?’
Leah has been getting so depressed and having such bad dreams, that her husband has sent her to Professor Freud in the Berggasse for treatment.
‘Well, it doesn’t help my depression — but then I know why I’m depressed. It’s because I don’t want to go to the Promised Land and dig holes for orange trees. But I must say it’s simply marvellous for the feet! You know how my ankles kept swelling after Benjamin, and an hour on the couch is simply bliss!’
Professor Starsky is going to a conference on Herpetology in Reykjavik, and the English Miss will spend August on the moors near the Scottish border where her people live. A friend is going to take the setter bitch into the country while she is away which will give Rip a chance to pull himself together. Inflamed by the heat, his passion has broken all bounds. As soon as the bitch appears, he pounds across the square and weaves hysterically in and out of her legs. To see the stomach of your beloved arching high above you, as unreachable as it is desired, cannot be easy, and it is no wonder that as he lies panting in the shade of the chestnut trees, he is inclined to be short-tempered.
Herr Heller never goes away. His dusty shop is like the shell of one of Professor Starsky’s reptiles. Even when he leaves his books just to go and stand outside on the pavement, he somehow looks unprotected and a little lost. He’s going to have a hard time with his granddaughter, though. The Schumachers left yesterday with forty-five pieces of luggage for a fortnight in Ascona, so Maia won’t have anyone to bully into making yurts.
My neighbour on the other side, Herr Schnee, has had a splendid piece of luck! The tackroom and workshops of the stables housing the horses of the Carinthian Jaegers has been destroyed by fire and he has a big order for new harness in time for a state parade in October. His nephew is a cornet in this crack regiment which puts the Cossacks to shame for style and ostentation: shakos with golden plumes, dolmanyis, breeches of white kid, and he’s threatening to line up his horses outside his uncle’s shop for a fitting!
‘On my fiftieth birthday, this is to be —’ said Herr Schnee, drawn out of his usual crustiness by this event. ‘He’s a wild lad; I wouldn’t be surprised if he meant what he said!’
Tomorrow I’m going to do battle with Nini!
My God — you’d think I was proposing to crucify the girl. Of course I realize that no one with Hungarian blood in them can be regarded as normal but my suggestion that Nini should go away to the country and have a holiday while I closed the shop was received as if I’d threatened to do her a frightful injury.
‘Why? Why should I go away?’
‘Because you need a break; because you’ve been working very hard; because the heat is impossible.’
‘I don’t want to go to the country. I don’t like the country. I never know what to do when I’m there. Walking up a mountain, walking down again, what’s the point? Anyway why should I have a holiday when there are families living six to a room who can’t even afford the tram fare to the Prater? I don’t see what I’ve done to be sent away.’
For heaven’s sake, Nini, I’m offering you exactly the conditions you’re fighting so hard for for the poor and the oppressed. The Cohens have offered to have you, so have the Schumachers — or I’ll pay for a room for you in a pension.’
‘What about Gretl? Why doesn’t she have to have a holiday?’
‘Gretl doesn’t spend her nights in stuffy cellars planning to blow up the bourgeoisie. Anyway she’s having the fortnight off to prepare for her wedding.’
‘Ha!’ said Nini. I saw her point; Gretl very much likes being engaged — the ring, the status — but she doesn’t show the slightest hurry to name the day. ‘And anyway,’ Nini went on, ‘something very interesting is coming up in Ottakring.’
This, unfortunately, I knew to be true and it was one of the reasons I was determined to send her away.
‘Nini, I’m not prepared to argue. I’m closing on the twenty-second and you’re going away.’
She flounced off in a temper, wearing white pique, to paste slogans on a railway bridge. When she returned, however, she was in an accommodating mood.
‘One of the men told me about a summer camp for workers’ children on the Grundlsee. It’s run by an international welfare organization. Children come from all over the world, and doctors and students and counsellors look after them. They want people to wash up and do the chores, I wouldn’t mind that.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s settled.’
I haven’t said anything to Jan Kraszinsky about my efforts on Sigismund’s behalf which is as well because there’s been no sign of Van der Velde.
‘We have money for six more weeks,’ he said when I met him in the paper shop.
The child is practising something which seems to smoothe out everything inside one very gently, yet at the same time makes one feel as though there are bubbles inside one’s nose, so I suppose it is by Mozart.
Oh God, I don’t know how to write this…
I felt it the last time I lay in Gernot’s arms; I knew it was there, the ultimate horror waiting to strike. Only it isn’t I that have been struck down; not this time. It is Alice.
Two days ago, Rudi Sultzer collapsed in his office. They thought it was the heat and he was taken home to the Garnisongasse to rest. Laura gave him vegetable juice and read to him from Faust and said it was nothing serious, but the doctor, when he came, disagreed with her. Rudi’s heart was tired and he needed absolute rest. Then yesterday morning he had a second attack and this time an ambulance took him to the Municipal Hospital. His heart was not just tired, it was failing, and he lay propped on pillows, blue-lipped and scarcely conscious, fighting for his life.