I rather liked Minka. She was friendly when we met on the staircase. Her voice was full and warm, and her smile beautiful. She looked Spanish, with her shining black hair and large black eyes. Her skin was lovely, and she used a lipstick of a most provokingly vivid red. She dressed well, and even her slight limping had a certain charm; she did not try to hide it but limped ahead courageously and decidedly. On Sunday mornings, I was invited by my grandmother to breakfast in her room. From the window I could follow the spectacle of Minka’s being called for by her official lover, a tall, fair, athletic chap, for their weekend outing. He was obviously an ice-hockey player. Sometimes he got into his roadster wearing his hockey uniform, vividly striped in red and white and yellow. Minka carried his sticks, knee pads, and shoulder pads. It all looked very smart and gay, and made me feel my isolation.
The courses in architecture at the Technische Hochschule bored me to tears. Instead of giving me a taste for harmony, the instructors tortured me with the theory of statics of rigid bodies, equations, the use of vectors, and so on, and I have always been a hopeless mathematician. Very soon I began to cut classes, and finally I did not go there for months at a time. I was too ignorant to enjoy either a concert or the theater. With the exception, perhaps, of a few operettas starring Fritzi Massary, I saw nothing of the good theater in Vienna of that time. My grandmother still kept a seat at the opera and never went there herself, so I drowsed through Rheingold and La Traviata, wondering why people sometimes sighed with delight and sometimes expressed their disapproval. But I walked a lot. I crisscrossed Vienna from one end to the other, sometimes walking as far as from Döbling to Hietzing, and then taking the tramway back. I walked, preferably at night, through the inner city, watching the swarms of whores on the Kärntnerstrasse. During the day, it was the most elegant of all Viennese streets, and at night it turned into something like the Canebière in Marseille. Or I would stand and marvel at the beauty of the empty Josefsplatz and Fischer von Erlach’s National-Bibliothek, wondering why my grandfather had never achieved this perfection. Nobody cared that I came home at four o’clock in the morning, and old Marie had long since given up trying to wake me, knowing that I usually slept till noon.
But of course I was too proud to admit my solitude to anybody. I spent most of my money on clothes, and when I set out for a stroll in the afternoon I would be most elegantly dressed, like some young dandy who is just about to get into his car and drive out to the golf course at Lainz or to the five-o’clock tea dance at Hübner’s Park Hotel in Hietzing. In the evening, I never left the house except in a very smart dinner jacket or sometimes even, when I felt like it, in tails, with a silk hat on my well-brushed head. After a couple of hours of lonesome walking through empty streets and somber parks, along the tracks of railways or the banks of the Danube Canal, I would sit down for a coffee and a brandy in the lounge of the Hotel Imperial, slipping off my patent-leather pumps under the table to ease my sore feet. One would have thought I was a young man with an exquisite social life.
Once, well after midnight, I came home to my grandmother’s house in tails and silk hat and found Minka at the door, fumbling in her handbag for the key she had either forgotten or lost. She was amused at the misfortune of having no key, and at my arriving just in time to open the door. She was a little drunk. Her eyes sparkled, and her teeth shone moist between those provoking red lips. But, of course, I behaved like a well-bred young man. I unlocked the door and held it open for her with the particular politeness of a certain reserve, and she smiled at me and said I looked splendid. Where had I been, so elegantly clad? At a dance, I said. Where and with whom? With people she would certainly not know. What was their name? she asked. Oh, Rumanians, I said stiffly. It was typically Jewish, I thought, to be so insistent and to ask such personal questions, and I did not like it. The Rumanians were passing through Vienna, I said, on their way to Paris.
She knew frightfully amusing Rumanians in Paris, she said. Had I been there lately? Not lately, I said, following her up the stairs. The steps were flat and easy to mount, but she had a little difficulty with her lame hip and the one drink too many she might have had, so I offered her my arm, and she leaned against it freely. My elbow registered that she was not so bony as the fashion of the early 1930s demanded. It was delightful, and a little embarrassing, so when we reached my grandmother’s floor, I stood still, and she let go of my arm and smiled again. “Thank you,” she said. “You are charming.”
“Would you like me to accompany you to your floor?” I asked, and then bit my lip at my own clumsiness.
She laughed. “Does it show that I’m drunk? I never realize it myself unless I have to get up these stairs on all fours. Come on, then, my young dandy, give me your arm again…. I once broke that silly left hip of mine,” she said, leaning trustfully against the length of my body. “Because I was in love — imagine! If I had gone on that way, I wouldn’t have a sound bone in my body. How are you making out with the girls?”
“Well …” I said, and smiled shyly, as if I were too modest to tell her the full truth.
She laughed. I said nothing more. I wasn’t quite sure she hadn’t seen through me and just been teasing me. “Would you like to come inside for a nightcap?” she asked when we arrived at her door.
“Thank you very much.”
“Thank you, yes, or thank you, no?” She looked straight into my eyes.
“Yes,” I said, and felt that I was blushing.
She handed me a key and said, “Fortunately, I haven’t lost this one.”
Again I unlocked the door and held it open, and she went in, dropping her fur coat on the floor. I picked it up and put it on a chair. “What nice manners you have,” she said. “It must be lovely to have you around. How old are you?”
It seemed too silly to say “I’m going to be eighteen next May,” so I lied. “Twenty-three.”
“Just my cup of tea. There is a phonograph in the corner. Put on a record if you want some music. What will you drink? Whiskey, or a brandy?”
“A whiskey with soda, please.” The flat did not look at all as I had imagined it would. She must have redecorated it since the death of the old Raubitscheks. With the exception of a huge library with black carved-wood bookcases that could have belonged to the chamber-music-loving Professor Raubitschek, there was no trace of the particular Jewish-middle-class stuffiness I had had glimpses of through open windows at home in the Bukovina. There were flowers all over the place — her lovers seemed to be quite generous, I thought. Through an open door I could see into her bedroom, gay and feminine, the huge bed covered with a soft, flowery comforter. While she fixed the drinks, I had a look at the records. There were masses of them, piled up carelessly around the phonograph. I put one on with the label “Star Dust,” hoping it was Mozart and not as violent as Beethoven’s “Allergique.” With the first sweet sounds, she came toward me with the drinks. “Here’s yours,” she said, putting a glass in my hand. “Let’s see how you dance.” I did not know what to do with my glass, but finally took it in my left hand and put my other arm around her, and we danced a few steps. I could not feel that she limped. “All right,” she said, and moved away from me. “A little stiff, but there is hope. I can’t dance long, because of my hip, but I love it.”