“So,” she said, already knitting, “you’re all alone now, Mr. Minster? Your wife has died?” He didn’t say “Yes” right away, perhaps he didn’t say it at all. But at least he looked wordlessly over the edge of his newspaper. “But she suffered for a long time? My God!” Then she returned to knitting. Perhaps she paid a visit to the deceased at the summit of her mountain of knitting. But the old man gave no response to that, either. He knew what it means to be a rich old man. He had married an old woman himself. Of course, back then her hair was still black, and she was barely over fifty. But with that marriage she had begun her decline. From the first day on, and for the next ten years, she was dying. Until her natural time for death had come.
She had been a good wife. Throughout her life, which had followed a straight line from childhood to that final day, she had retained something childlike — not simplemindedness, exactly, but a semblance of simplemindedness; a kind of goodness that one only reluctantly acknowledges as such. That might have been what caused her husband to treat her with increasing cruelty, or even what led him to propose to her in the first place, not out of goodness, but out of a sort of mockery, perhaps.
Yes, she was aging from the first day on. (For what must be begun, must begin at once.) She was aging, even as he seemed to grow more youthful. And from that very first day, she was ashamed of this marriage. Why hadn’t she been ashamed of it before? A few days before the wedding she had even bought a dozen bright red carnations for her future window. Oh, if only she hadn’t married! Surely she would have remained lively and happy for a long time to come. But in this marriage, she had to sink into sorrowful old age.
They had promptly moved to another city, just as they had planned. Her little house was sold on the last day before the wedding, and with the money she had taken part ownership of a nice tenement building, where she had then lived and died. Ten years. Ten years isn’t long? I can assure you that ten years is very long; sometimes even longer than an entire life. It is a cruel pursuit, calamity that comes so late. It claims the dimensions of an existence fully justified. And already she had ceased to smile from joy, smiling only when she was alone now, and only because it had been her habit before. She smiled at her sugar bowl and at her clock, which stood transfigured under a glass dome; she smiled at her yellow canary. But when she died, the bird lay on the sand in its cage as well, it had lived those same ten years along with her. (She had bought this bird at the time of the wedding, too.)
And to put ourselves in the place of the café owner again, we must also ask where the discord in this marriage lay. For she would not accept a natural, harmless explanation of the familiar sort. She rejected almost everything the first time she heard it, only to slowly, discreetly adapt the idea and claim it for her own. At that point there was no use contradicting her, or pointing out that you had said the same yourself, because she was always the first and the last. For her there was nothing but herself and her café. And everything else around was only there to serve these ends. And this, she thought, was the way all others lived their lives as well. And anyone who thought differently only earned her scorn. And even if in some small part of her soul she knew what life was like for others, and that their lives were not like her own, still she gave no credence to this view, because, as mentioned, it contradicted her own principles. This is how it was for her, as she knitted and spoke to the widower. And even though he didn’t like all of this, nonetheless he really did stay a while longer than usual. Simply because that was her intention.
Her overture had been pure torture for him. And what had she really asked, then? Almost nothing.
He stood up and left. A day like that is long for an old man. Particularly when he isn’t a good old man, but instead an old man like this one. He had no way out, no excuse to escape from this boredom. His young caretaker had diligently deprived him of all such excuses. This was the curse of his spiteful nature, that it had left him all this time for nothing. He walked down the street with the prettiest shop windows. He looked at all the things in them. I can’t be sure what he thought as he looked. He walked under the arcades and looked at the weathered paintings, one by one. But more out of elderly absentmindedness than any real interest. Then a parade march summoned him out from beneath an archway. What did he think of music? Nothing. He could actually draw only two distinctions: marches and waltzes. And neither one could ever win him over. The people who cared about such things seemed to him to be chasing a golden goose, bound to it against their will.
And to return to his own life: though from the outside he appeared to be all one color, in fact he was sharply aware, down to the smallest detail, of the pain and sadness he could call forth in those near to him, and of how he himself could be humiliated and made small. For all his own mundaneness, he did not lack an understanding of the mundane.
If he never said hello, but simply sat down at the lunch table — never said hello to that friendly creature (the food, after all, had been cooked in such a spirit), if he never offered his thanks for the fact that his linens were white as blossoms, and gently pressed as a fine gentleman’s (as far as class is concerned, he was roughly the equal of a clerk), wasn’t her hand bound to slowly, literally weaken? For he ate nothing, enjoyed no pleasure, out of self-inflicted coldness.
How could she continue to work for this man with all her energy as time went by. . After all, every task requires its own source of energy. But he took it away from her, for he didn’t live his life with her or even alongside her, he was not even served by her hands, but rather by any old hands. He acted as if she weren’t there. He walked right past her. Back then he was only sixty. He was in good health, you could be sure of that. He was like petrified wood. He had paid too dearly for his wife, at least by his own reckoning. He had nothing but disdain for her. But perhaps her own friendliness was to blame for everything. You could see it that way. But she herself, without his noticing, had turned her sorrow and humiliation inward. She humbled herself in her own eyes. For instance, as she silently served her husband, she would say: Now this is your own punishment. Why did you marry this young man anyway, you old fool? (In truth, he was not so young anymore.) But she willfully degraded herself in her own eyes. Had all of that really been necessary? Had the devil himself whispered into her ear that she should marry? Hadn’t she had the finest life before? Hadn’t she sat at her window as if in a chaise when all her little morning work was done? No one had even disturbed her then, much less aggrieved her. She had had a life like the purest honey.
Thus did she speak to herself as she served her husband. For already on the second day of their married life she had ceased to sit down at the table with him. Think what that must have meant to someone of such harmless character.