It was not Gernot who had written to me. It was the Hof Minister Willibald Egger.
What I remember next is Nini bending over me asking if I was all right.
‘What is it, Frau Susanna? Has something happened?’ motioned to the letter on my lap.
‘But he can’t!’ said Nini when she’d read it. ‘He can’t do that. He’s insane!’
‘The Walterstrasse is narrow,’ I managed to say.
‘So it’s narrow; that doesn’t mean he can pull down the whole side of the square. He can’t! Not your shop and Herr Heller’s and Herr Schnee’s… He can’t!’
‘Ah, but he can, Nini. He can.’
I took the letter from her. The kind man had provided a map to show the extent of his depredations. The chestnuts would come down and General Madensky on his plinth. Joseph would lose his terraces. The new road, veering westwards through the demolished side of the square and the presbytery garden, would leave St Florian’s as an island surrounded by traffic.
‘What does he mean you won’t get any compensation?’
‘I only rent the shop, you know that — he can give notice without paying me a kreutzer, and he has. April the first. Herr Schnee’s in the same position. Heller owns his shop so I expect they’ll have to pay him something, but it’ll be a pittance; Egger will see to that.’
‘It’s unbelievable. A swine like that, a man with a disgusting Little Habit able to destroy people’s lives…’
Gretl had come through from the workshop and the girls went to make me some coffee. I had begun to see what the loss of the shop would mean to them, but they only thought of comforting me. Then Herr Heller came past the window and knocked on the door of the shop. His white hair was on end; he looked grey with shock. Heller is sixty years old; his shop has been his life.
Helping him to a chair, pouring some coffee, steadied me a little. As he was drinking it, Herr Schnee arrived from the other side.
‘Isn’t there anything we can do,’ said poor Heller. ‘An appeal? A petition?’
‘Waste of time,’ said Herr Schnee tersely. ‘No one can do anything to stop Egger. Heinrid’s been trying for years: he’ll have opposed this scheme, with his family buried in St Florian’s, but he’s only the second-in-command and Egger’s got them all in his power. You’ll see — this place’ll end up as the Eggerstrasse with motors hooting down it all day long and clouds of dust and fumes. That’s probably why he’s bricking up the fountain: to make a place for his statue.’
We looked at the plans again. What was left of the square would be a travesty, that was certain.
Joseph came next from the café.
‘I told you… I told you. No one believed me. They’re all in league against us, the bureaucrats.’
‘At least you’ll still have a roof over your head,’ said Herr Schnee. ‘You can still run your café.’
‘What’s the use of that? It’s the terraces that brought the custom. My mother’s taken to her bed.’
All morning people came. Frau Schumacher hurried across and took me in her arms and cried.
‘I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it if you go! Albert says he won’t stay, not in what will be left of the place. And poor Father Anselm — when you think how he struggled to make a garden in spite of the boys. He’s gone to see the Church Commissioners, but they’ll never find a place like this.’
Then my clients began to arrive. Egger’s plans had been published in the morning papers. There was no way of keeping the news from them.
Frau Hutte-Klopstock tried to hearten me. ‘You’ll find somewhere else, Frau Susanna. You won’t be beaten.’
I don’t know. I don’t think I can do it again; not what I made here.
Leah Cohen arrived without an appointment and with a hamper which she unpacked on my yellow table, urging me to keep up my strength and eat.
‘When I think that Egger came to Heini only last month about his insomnia… I could so easily have told Heini to kill him with a little morphia — not that he ever listens to me!’
In the afternoon an extraordinary thing happened. The English Miss halted, tied the setter to the lamp post — and came in to the shop. Close to, the long-legged, high-breasted Amazon was a shy woman with gentle eyes the colour of her blue-green misty tweeds.
‘I wished to say how sorry I am,’ she said in excellent German. ‘It has been such a pleasure walking past here each day… it was like a garden — always something interesting and right for the season.’
She is not the daughter of a lord with horses in Rotten Row as I’d imagined. Her name is Norah Potts and she’s a paid companion.
Professor Starsky called with a bunch of roses. I was alone when he came and stupidly inattentive, for when I came out of my thoughts I found that he was again offering me, in my homeless state, his hand and heart. Well, who knows, perhaps I shall come to it. There may be worse things than being a Frau Professorin with access to herpetology conferences in Reykjavik.
Old Anna’s visit was almost the hardest to bear. She came with her basket as she’d come that spring morning when I decided to keep this journal, and there were tears in her eyes. ‘They want to take away everything that’s good, don’t they? They want to destroy everything that’s quiet and belongs to the past. Thirty years I’ve sat under those trees…’
‘Oh, Anna, you’ll find somewhere else. We can’t do without you.’
‘No, I’m through. I’ll have to go down and stay with my son. He doesn’t want me — no one wants an old woman — but he’ll have to put up with me. It doesn’t matter; my life is past. But it’s you. Such a lovely place you’ve made; it’s like a fairy story in here, the light and the prettiness of it all! And the way you’ve taken that wild Hungarian girl and given her a home. Oh, I could spit!’
I went to bed at the usual time, but of course I couldn’t sleep. Hour after hour the anxieties ran round in my head. How could I get my stock cleared and my orders fulfilled in so short a time? What was to become of Nini? Where could I go?
I got up and stood for a while looking down at the moonlit square. Each of those five chestnut trees were like people to me; entirely distinct. General Madensky had been cleaned only a few weeks before; his domed head was devoid of pigeon droppings and we had all admired him.
How could one man with a few pieces of paper destroy all this? Presently I put on my cloak and let myself out through the workroom and into the courtyard. It was very cold but my pear tree stood proudly in the light of the full moon. This time next year it would be gone, its roots covered in asphalt.
‘Whom the gods love die young,’ I said to the little tree, and touched its bark.
Then I looked more closely. The light was very bright; I could see the branches clearly.
My pear had gone. Only two days ago I had seen it hanging securely from its bough. I’d made a resolution to pick it on Sunday, it was already absurdly late.
I bent down and searched the paving stones. There was no sign of it. I fetched a lantern to look more thoroughly, and now I noticed that the stem holding the pear had been cut. There was no doubt about it; it was severed cleanly in a way that could only have been done by scissors or a knife.
And this suddenly was too much: this shoddy and pointless theft. I had lost Gernot, I had lost my livelihood and still kept some measure of control. Yet now, standing there in my nightclothes, I sobbed like a child because of a tiny, unripe and probably uneatable pear.
If only people weren’t so kind it would be easier.
Actually I’m lying; everyone hasn’t been kind. I met Chez Jaquetta in the Kartnerstrasse, all dyed lovelocks and battleship poitrine, and there’s no doubt about it — she smirked.