He bundled Nini downstairs, waited, glowering, whilst she put on her coat. We strode out into the snow and down the Walterstrasse. God knows what it is about that boy in his extraordinary muffler that makes the cab drivers stop for him, but he only flicked his fingers as we crossed the road and the driver turned and reigned in beside him.
‘Get in,’ he said, and gave the cabby his instructions.
I hadn’t been in the Municipal Hospital since Rudi died. The same corridors, the same smell of lysol as we followed Daniel. Nini was very pale now, but he didn’t even look over his shoulder.
No one stopped us this time; it was visiting hour. The corridors grew a little lighter, a little less sombre, and we entered a ward with pictures on the wall and a rack of well-worn toys.
And so neat, so clean, so small in their iron beds — the children.
Nini faltered and turned away, but Daniel took her arm and led her to one particular bed over which two nurses were bending.
They straightened, recognized Daniel.
‘Ah, Herr Frankenheimer.’ The sister lowered her voice. ‘He seems a little better. He liked the engine you sent, but of course he doesn’t really know much yet; we have to keep him so heavily drugged.’
The boy turned his head on the pillow. Seven years old, perhaps. A grey-white face, fair hair darkened by perspiration. For a brief moment he opened his eyes.
‘Would you like to see?’ whispered the nurse. ‘The surgeon’s made a beautiful job of the operation; there’s a good chance that he’ll pull through now.’
She drew back the bedclothes. The child moaned once. There wasn’t anything to see, actually. Only that he had no legs.
Daniel lifted his head.
‘Meet an Enemy of the People, Nini,’ he said quietly. ‘His name is Heini Fischer. His mother took him to town to look at the shops. They didn’t buy anything because his father’s unemployed, but they like to look in the windows. When Herr Knapp drove by, she pushed him forward so that he could see the important gentleman in his fine car.’
Nini showed no emotion. She didn’t gasp or turn faint. She just walked away down the ward, down the corridor, out of the hospital. I followed her, but she said nothing, and when we got home she went to her attic and I heard her pull the chest of drawers across so as to block the door.
She came down in the morning to do her work, but still she wouldn’t speak and when Daniel came she went upstairs again and refused to see him.
It has been her life since she could think at alclass="underline" the revolution, the movement, the cause. It was what sustained her in the slums of Budapest and the tenements of Vienna: the danger, the romance, the ideology. I think it has all gone, banished by those small, blood-soaked stumps in Heini Fischer’s bed.
But of course in destroying her beliefs, Daniel has destroyed the part of her he loved the most: the wild, brave, passionate girl who wanted anything except to live an everyday, unthinking, uncommitted life.
He knew at once, even in the hospital, what he had done, but he waited for a few days in case she would see him. Before he left he gave me a card.
‘It’s the name of our agent in Vienna. If ever she changes her mind he’ll fix everything up for her: passports, tickets, money.’
I embraced him, and there were tears in my eyes. At the door he said something unexpected. ‘Of course if he’s dead, it’s different. But if it’s not that, if he’s alive still, I’d have thought it would come right. I’d have thought you were almost impossible to leave.’
Then I let him out at the back because the children were waiting for him in the front, and he had to catch his train.
Herr Schnee has gone. The van came two days ago and his belongings were piled into it.
‘No point in hanging round,’ he said gruffly, coming to shake my hand.
I’ll miss him; already the empty shop next door makes my rooms seem colder; it’s incredible how quickly a place looks neglected and forlorn. I think it has shaken everybody, his departure — we can see that it’s true now, that it’s going to happen, the destruction of the square.
Poor Augustin Heller is ill; he sits in his dressing gown and coughs. It may be the dust as he moves piles of books that have been undisturbed for years, but I think it’s exhaustion and fear of the future. I’d feel afraid if I was going to live with Maia’s mother in Wiener Neustadt.
‘He’s so messy in his habits,’ she complained when I took him some soup, not knowing she was there, and Maia scowled. She loves her grandfather, I think.
I’ve decided to accept Peter Konrad’s offer. I looked at two more shops, but they were dark and gloomy places without any accommodation, and the only one that was at all possible was ludicrously expensive. Peter and I understand each other, it should be all right, and at least Nini will be looked after; he’s offered to employ her as a vendeuse — though personally I’d rather be served by a cougar than Nini in her present state. Fortunately there’s so much work to do now, finishing orders, clearing the stock, packing, that she goes to bed thoroughly exhausted. What she does when she gets there is another matter. Much what I do, I suppose.
It now becomes necessary to celebrate Christmas.
I shall do my best. I’ve ordered my carp from the fishmonger and asked Old Anna to keep me the smallest Christmas tree that she can find. Usually I decorate the shop, but we are at the packing case stage now and there would be no point.
What has not been easy to endure have been the visits of all the people who work in the square: the dustmen and lamplighters and window cleaners who come for their Christmas bottle of wine and their tip.
‘It’s a crying shame what’s being done to this place,’ they said one by one, ‘it’s a sin,’ — and the roadsweeper became so lachrymose that we had to have recourse to Gretl’s uncle’s eau de vie.
In the café too there is little rejoicing. Joseph’s mother has shown no inclination to leave her bed; she used to start baking her poppyseed beiglis in the first week of December and the smell was always part of Christmas for me. And Father Anselm’s Adam’s apple seems more prominent than ever as he sets out the crib in the vestry and pins up the notice of the services for Holy Night. The new presbytery to which he’ll move the boys at the end of January is a gaunt red-brick building without a garden, and far too far from his beloved church.
But there’s one household where this loveliest of festivals is secure. The Schumacher girls each have their advent ring, their gingerbread house (Donatella has already eaten the cotton wool smoke from her chimney). Their painted clogs went out punctually on St Nicholas’ Day so that the saint could bestow his silver coins, and their tree has arrived on a dray from the timber yard; the tallest, loveliest tree in Vienna.
Herr Egger may have blighted the rest of us, but not Mitzi and Franzi, not Steffi and Resi or Kati and Gisi — and certainly not Donatella — as they prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ!
Well, I did it! Christmas is over and until midnight, at least, nobody actually cried!
It’s no good pretending that Alice and I were in the best of spirits as we lunched on my excellently roasted carp. Christmas is never the easiest time for Other Women, but in previous years there was the hope that January would bring the men we loved back in to our lives. Nor was Nini, gloomily chasing her food around her plate, exactly a social asset. But I had invited Professor Starsky to join us and there was plenty of wine. There are times when a well-informed dissertation on aphagia in the reptiles of South America can be of real benefit, and Christmas Eve in the year 1911 seemed to be one of them.