He saw me. There was not the slightest doubt about it. He was coming directly towards me and when he caught sight of me, he smiled his slow, stupid smile and touched his cap.
Then he must have remembered his instructions for he flushed a fiery red and turned on his heel.
It was absolutely unmistakable: the recognition and the rebuff, but I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t take it in — and I called to him and hurried after him. I was quite without pride; all I wanted was just a few seconds to explain — just a few seconds, nothing more.
He increased his pace — then, just as I was catching up with him, he veered to the right and turned in through the archway where the Swiss Guards stand on duty.
That part of the Palace is sealed off to everyone who does not have business there. Hatschek knew the password; some of the offices of the Ministry of War are there, and they let him through, but not me of course — not a distraught woman carrying a cardboard box — and I stood there waiting helplessly while he hurried down a flight of steps and vanished.
So it’s true, you see. It’s over. Hatschek has been forbidden to speak to me. I’m like Serbia now, and Macedonia — bad for his master.
I must have loved Hatschek too, just a little bit, for somewhere in the agony of losing Gernot is this other foolish grief for the Bohemian Corporal who was my friend.
November
All Souls’ Day was a suitable one for a day given over to the dead: murky, dark and chill.
The bereaved came to St Florian’s all the previous evening bringing candles and coloured lanterns to burn through the night. Professor Starsky, whose wife lies there, brought a wreath of artificial poppies, and this year as in all the years since I’ve been here, the grave of the family Heinrid was tended by a hired crone who sat all night mumbling liturgies. They’re all over Vienna, these frightening old women muffled in shawls who, for a few kronen, will guard the graves on the night of All Souls, munching fat bacon from their baskets and calling on the Holy Ghost for the lost souls in purgatory. Herr Heinrid (who is eminent; he’s Egger’s second-in-command at the Ministry of Planning) rents the same one every year and then arrives himself, after a good breakfast, to fill the family urn with flowers.
I don’t know where Rip is buried. I’d have liked to pay my respects to him but Frau Hinkler will speak to no one since he died.
I had lit candles by Rudi’s headstone because Alice is away in Switzerland, but on the day of All Souls I do not stay in the city with its flickering lanterns and its Masses for the Dead. On All Souls I have business elsewhere. I go to Leck.
The monks are generous. Everyone who has served the abbey can lie within its walls. No grave here is untended, for a lay brother keeps the flower beds bright and the grass cut. It’s a sunny churchyard on the slope of a hill; one could grow vines there, but the church grows souls instead.
On All Souls’ Day, though, there is seldom any sun. As I walked from the station with my basket, the rain bit my face and flurries of wind whipped at my cloak.
I went first to the grave of the old monk who had told me about Sappho and her songs. He doesn’t need anything — he never did, even in life — but I say a prayer for him and leave a white rose because of what he told me: that in the valley where she lived they grew wild, the hyacinths and the roses, and she used to make garlands of them for her friends.
Then I went to see my father.
I never went back to see him after I eloped with Karli. He knew nothing of my daughter’s birth. I meant to write to him when I was settled, but I imagined Aunt Lina gloating over my disgrace, seizing any letter that came.
Actually I was wrong. She fell ill soon after I left and found it increasingly hard to look after my father. Who knows, she might have been glad of someone young and strong to help her. For my father grew cantankerous and difficult as he grew older. In the end she went home to die and my father lived on alone.
It wasn’t till the year after I left my daughter under the walnut tree that I returned to Leck. My father was pleased to see me; he wanted me to give up my job in Vienna and come back to keep house for him, and I refused.
So it never went right after that. I came a few times, and I wrote, but I wouldn’t do the one thing he wanted. The guilt was bad — it still is — but that’s the trouble with guilt: it can make you suffer like nothing else but it can’t change what you do.
It always seems wrong to put flowers on my father’s grave: an awl, a chisel is what he would have wanted there; it’s his hands I remember — planing, sawing, measuring… So I left my candles and asked his pardon for letting him die alone (though I was there actually, during his last illness, trying to undo the neglect of years with my assiduous nursing).
And then to the grave that would call me back from the furthest corner of the earth.
My mother lies in her own place beneath a tombstone that says only: Elisabeth Maria Weber 1841–1887. She was the beloved wife of Anton Weber; she was, God knows, the beloved mother of Susanna Maria Weber, but it doesn’t say so. When we buried her, my father and I, we felt no need to state the obvious.
The bells toll and toll always on All Souls’ Day, the solemn chant of the prayers for the dead goes on from dawn to dusk, and there is always a wind. Yet the day I spend with my mother, muffled like those graveyard crones so that the cold won’t drive me away, is never sad.
We talk, you see. We talk and talk, my mother and I. I tell her everything that has happened through the year and she listens (God, how that woman listened!) and then she tells me what she thinks. I was twelve when she died but even now there are thoughts that come to me only in her voice.
Mostly she approves of me, she really does. There are certain pettinesses she doesn’t care for, and she thinks there’s no reason for me to carry on the way I do about Chez Jaquetta who also has to live. But my mortal sins — the conception of my daughter without benefit of clergy, my relationship with Gernot — for those, out of her great compassion she forgave me long ago.
But this time she was not entirely pleased with me. She was sorry that the little dog died, sorry that Sigismund had gone without a word and very, very sorry that I had lost Gernot for she knew, if anybody did, how deeply I had loved him — but did I not still have my shop, my work, my friends, the beautiful square in which I lived? What about the sparrows, my mother wanted to know? What about the autumn leaves? She did not really want a daughter to whom a Hungarian Anarchist felt compelled to bring hot milk in bed.
‘It’s the only bad thing, Sannerl,’ said my mother in her soft, warm dialect. ‘Turning your back on the created world. Not seeing, not touching, not hearing. It’s what we can’t be doing with up here, that kind of waste. You’ve had twelve years of good living. Don’t whine, my darling. Because it is a kind of whining: getting bags under your eyes and not tasting the butter on your bread.’
I listened. I wept a little and I remembered how I’d lost my Lebensmut after my daughter was born and how everything goes wrong when you lose courage. Then I gave her the flowers that Old Anna always saves for me to bring to Leck — and went home.
And the next morning the letter came.
It was thick, white, with my name typed in black letters and the seal of the House of Habsburg on the back.
I took it with such eagerness. I knew it was from Gernot: he was going to forgive me: he was going to explain Hatschek’s strange behaviour: the nightmare was past!
Then I opened it.
The official language confused me so much that I couldn’t at first take in what I was reading. I had to go through the pompous cold jargon of bureaucracy twice before I understood the contents.