At night, she sometimes dropped off in her chair. Her stick, like a trusty dog, lay at her feet.
But the “boarding house,” as Kiniower liked to say, was “up and running.”
XXX
I now slept in our house at the side of my wife. It soon turned out that she was blessed with an exceptional sense of so-called domesticity. She was positively obsessed, as many women are, with organization and cleanliness. Related to this fateful inclination was her jealousy. For the first time in my life I understood why women love their houses and homes more than they love their husbands. They are readying nests for their offspring. With unconscious cunning, they enmesh a man in a hopeless tangle of daily duties from which he has no hope of escaping. So there I was, sleeping in our house, at the side of my wife. It was my house. She was my wife. Indeed! Bed becomes like a second, discreet house in the middle of the public and plainly visible house, and the woman who awaits us there is loved, simply because she is there and available. She is there and available at any time we happen to return home. Therefore we love her. We love what is certain and safe. And if she waits up for us patiently, why, then we love her even more.
We now had about a dozen telephones in our house, and a dozen bells. Half a dozen men in blue overalls were at work on our water pipes. Dr Kiniower advanced us the money to pay for the improvements and rebuilding work. For my mother, he wasn’t the Jew any more. He had been promoted to the rank of “good fellow.”
In autumn we had an unexpected visitor: my cousin Joseph Branco. He arrived one morning, just like the very first time, and as though nothing had happened since then; as though we hadn’t been through a World War; as though he and Manes Reisiger and I hadn’t been prisoners of war, and then with Baranovich, and then in the camp; as though our country hadn’t fallen to pieces; that was how he came to us, my cousin, the chestnut-roaster, with his chestnuts and his mule, brown of visage, black of hair and moustache, and for all that glowing golden like a sun, like every other year and as though nothing had happened, so Joseph Branco came to us, to sell his chestnuts. His son was healthy and quick-witted. He was going to school in Dubrovnik. His sister was happily married. His brother-in-law had managed to survive the War. They had two children between them, both boys, and for simplicity’s sake both were called Branco.
And what had become of Manes Reisiger, I asked. “Well, that’s a long story,” my cousin Joseph Branco replied. “He’s waiting downstairs, he didn’t want to come up.”
I ran downstairs to get him. I didn’t recognize him right away. He had a wild tangle of grey beard, like a personification of winter in children’s storybooks. Why hadn’t he come up, I asked him. “For a year, Lieutenant,” he replied, “I wanted to visit you. I was in Poland, in Zlotogrod. I wanted to be the cabbie Manes Reisiger again. But what is the world, what is a town, what is a man, what is a cabbie come to that, against God? God confused the world and he destroyed the little town of Zlotogrod. Crocuses and daisies grow where once our houses stood, and my wife is dead as well. A shell tore her in pieces, along with other inhabitants of Zlotogrod. So I went back to Vienna. At least I have my son Ephraim here.” Of course! His son Ephraim! I remembered the prodigy, and how Chojnicki had got him a place in the Music Academy. “What’s he doing now?” I asked Manes the cabbie.
“My Ephraim is a genius!” replied the old cabbie. “He no longer plays. He doesn’t need to, he says. He is a Communist, the editor of the ‘Red Flag.’ He writes splendid articles. Here they are.”
We went into my room. The cabbie Manes had all the articles of his brilliant son Ephraim in his pocket, quite a sizeable pile. He demanded that I read them aloud to him. I read them one after the other, in a loud voice. Elisabeth came out of her room; later on, as usual in the afternoons, all our residents gathered in my room, my friends. “I’m not allowed to remain in Vienna,” said Manes Reisiger. “I’ve been given an eviction order.” His beard bristled, his face shone. “But my son Ephraim got me a false passport. Here it is.” And with that he showed us his false Austrian passport, combed his beard with his fingers, and said: “Illegal!” and looked proudly at us.
“My son Ephraim,” he began again, “no longer needs to play. When the revolution comes, he will be a cabinet minister.”
He was as convinced of the coming of the world revolution as of the fact that in calendars Sunday is printed in red.
“This year the chestnuts have been poor,” said my cousin Joseph Branco. “Many are wormy as well. I sell more apples now than I do chestnuts.”
“How did you manage to escape?” I asked.
“With God’s help!” replied the cabbie Manes Reisiger. “We were lucky enough to kill a Russian corporal. Joseph Branco tripped him up, and beat his brains out with a rock. Then I put on his uniform, took his rifle, and escorted Joseph Branco to Shmerinka. There we met the army of occupation. Branco joined up right away. He fought as well. I stayed with a good Jew, in civilian clothes. Branco had the address. As soon as the war was over, he came to me.”
“Splendid army!” cried Chojnicki, stepping into the room, to drink coffee with me, as he did every day. “And what’s your son Ephraim, the musician, doing?”
“He doesn’t need music any more,” replied Manes Reisiger, the cabbie. “He’s making revolution.”
“We already have a few of that sort,” said Chojnicki. “Not that you should imagine I’m in any way unsympathetic! But there’s something wrong with the revolutions of today. They don’t succeed. Your son Ephraim might have done better to stick to music.”
“You need a separate visa for each country now!” said my cousin Joseph Branco. “I’ve never seen the like in all my born days. Each year I was able to go and sell my roast chestnuts wherever I felt like: in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Galicia. .” He listed all the lost Crown Lands. “And now they’re all off limits. Even though I have a passport. With a picture.” He took his passport out of his jacket pocket, and it went the rounds of everyone.
“He’s just a chestnut-roaster,” said Chojnicki, “but if you think about it, there is no more symbolic profession. Symbolic of the old Monarchy. This gentleman was able to sell his chestnuts all over, in half of Europe, you might say. Wherever people ate his roast chestnuts was Austria, and Franz Joseph was Emperor there. Now chestnuts require a visa! What a world! What am I doing in your B&B? I should be with my brother in Steinhof!”
My mother came along, we heard her hard tread on the stairs. She dignified us with a visit every day at five o’clock. So far not one of our boarders had paid any money. Once Chojnicki, and once Szechenyi had shyly attempted to ask for their bill. Thereupon my mother had said that the caretaker was responsible for making out bills. But that wasn’t true. In fact it was Elisabeth’s job. She would take money from one or other of our guests, when the opportunity presented itself, and when the opportunity presented itself, she also paid our expenses. The bells shrilled all day long. We had two maids now. They ran up and down three flights of stairs like a couple of weasels. We enjoyed credit in the whole quarter. My mother was happy about the bells which she was still able to hear, the noise made by our guests, and the credit her house enjoyed. She didn’t know, the poor old soul, that it was no longer her house. She believed it was hers because silence would fall in our rooms when she came down, with her white hair and black stick. Today she recognized Joseph Branco, and she greeted Manes Reisiger as well. Altogether, since we had opened our boarding house, she had become a little gregarious. She would have welcomed a lot of complete strangers. Only, she was getting increasingly deaf, and it seemed her infirmity was also affecting her reason — not because she was so tormented by it, but because she insisted on pretending it didn’t exist, and on denying it.