Where’s the big one?
She’s not home.
Do you remember when you were her age? That’s when things started between us.
That’s enough now.
2
You look like a whore, the mother had said to her older daughter the previous summer when she shortened her skirt to above the knee and wanted to leave the house like that.
What do you know about whores? her daughter had shouted and slammed the door so hard on her way out, the panes of glass in the upper half rattled. After her daughter left, the mother sat there weeping for half an hour, but then she hiked her own skirt up to above her knees and looked at her legs in the mirror. After four years of war, Vienna had gone to seed, and so had she. She’d been so filled with hope when she had traveled here all alone. Once her husband’s transfer was certain, she’d come to look for an apartment. She still remembers the first time she walked into this building smelling of limestone and dust, a limestone and dust smell that only the buildings of a metropolis can have. It was shadowy and cool in the building’s entryway, while outside, the heat was so thick you could cut it with a knife. If her husband had come with her, he would have quickly slipped his hand into her armpit when no one was looking, and she would have said, cut it out, and laughed. Before she climbed the two flights of stairs to inspect the apartment, she had run her hand over the head of the eagle at the bottom of the banister, perhaps it would bring her luck. Two bedrooms with a view of the public baths across the way, the kitchen and one bedroom facing the courtyard — the girls could play down there — a shared water tap and a separate toilet in the stairwell. The apartment was affordable, one month’s rent in advance. Then she went home again to pack for the move. The last thing she packed was the footstool her grandmother had given her for her household; the first thing she would do when she arrived would be to place this footstool in the vestibule of the new apartment, and from then on Vienna would be her home. When her mother wrote her two or three years later that for the maneuvers taking place on the border they were now using live ammunition, perhaps a war was coming, she hadn’t worried. They had fled from the provinces to Vienna as if taking refuge on an enormous ship, but it would never have occurred to them to suspect that this ship was already beginning to sink. Fire, locusts, leeches, plague, bears, foxes, snakes, insects, lice were names that had often been given to Jews here in Vienna, but she hadn’t known that. God our Father whom we love, you gave us teeth, now give us food. Perhaps the eagle at the bottom of the banister was really a vulture that had been waiting all these years for her demise; in any case she’s been fighting back for years now, refusing to let her family be turned into fodder, but this requires all her strength — strength she has, and also strength she hasn’t had for a long time now. She’s stopped plucking the hairs on her legs, her toenails are hard, her calves full of blue veins. In the parks of Vienna, the grass grows knee-high in summer, open squares are used to grow carrots, potatoes, and turnips, the countryside is sweeping its way across Vienna, wiping away the city, and no one much cares as long as he himself survives, there isn’t enough life left to spend correcting and clipping away at life. And try your arm, as a boy beheads thistles, against oak-trees and mountain heights. In summer, Arenberg Park is barely distinguishable from the meadows surrounding Brody near the Russian border, but now she’s grown up and has other things to do than breaking off a hazel switch and scything the grass with it as she crosses a field (as she used to so as not to overlook the edge of the palatschinke). They didn’t escape to Vienna to starve there. But no one can predict when it will be revealed that a wish is going to be left unfulfilled.
I’ve got just a few more things to copy out, he tells his wife.
That’s all right, she says, and leaves the kitchen.
As the following chronicle documents, the Styrian ground shook for thirty days. The most extensive of these shocks were recorded on days when disturbances that originated in the area around Laibach were felt in our region as well.
The little one — she’s still called this by her parents even though she’s over thirteen now and nearly five foot seven — is out in the vestibule preparing for her nighttime shift standing in line; she clamps a blanket under her arm, and her mother straps the folding chair to her back. A lange loksh. After she leaves, her mother goes to sleep for a few hours before midnight when it’s her turn to take her daughter’s place in line. With any luck, after standing in line all night long, they’ll be given cow udder at seven in the morning. Udder is edible if you boil it in milk.
The big one’s bed is empty.
3
Most definitely she was not a whore. Already the year before last she’d have been able to sell herself for two pairs of shoes, and recently also for one liter of cream, fifteen potatoes, or a half pound of fat. Again and again she’d had her price whispered in her ear by one or the other black marketeer, a price that — like all prices — was constantly in flux according to the prevailing rates of exchange, a flux that invariably maintained a downward trend. She could have sold herself long ago to keep her family from freezing at home, or for her sister, who was growing faster than she should. Perhaps in the end her mother was angry with her for doing exactly the opposite of what she reproached her daughter for: still trying to be young without selling herself. On the banks of the Danube one night the previous summer, she’d let someone unbutton her blouse for the first time, a younger schoolmate had slipped his hand under the fabric and touched her breasts, but that’s all she’d permitted, after all, he was practically a child. Another night the previous summer, her father’s friend had met her once in secret and said he found her red hair more alluring than anything he’d seen in all his life, and then he’d kissed her hair and finally her shoulder, but that’s all she’d permitted, after all, he was too old. Possibly the man destined for her was just falling in battle on the banks of the Marne or the Soca, bleeding to death in the barbed wire outside Verdun, or losing his legs. This war was shooting her youth to pieces as she was still marching through it. Her best friend had gotten engaged to a university student who had been called up; for two years he had fought battle after battle and now he lay in a field hospital with gas poisoning. Someone should declare war on war, but how that was supposed to work, she didn’t know, and neither did her friend. In the food lines she’d seen mothers hold up their starving children in front of the soldiers on duty, threatening to hang them from the window frame and themselves as well, or to take care of the entire family at once by drowning everyone in the Danube; one of them had even laid her infant down in the street, refusing to pick the baby up again because she didn’t know how she could go on feeding it. Once, when the daughter was to return home empty-handed after hours of waiting, she felt such fury that she called on the other women to march on the Rathaus with her to complain, she’d waved her handkerchief in the air above her head like a flag, and sure enough, hundreds of desperate women fell into step behind her — a girl of only fourteen. But for several hours, no one came out of the Rathaus to negotiate with them, and the women — who still had to find something to feed their families that day — gradually scattered and dispersed. She, on the other hand, had sat down right where she was and wept, using the handkerchief that had served as her flag to blow her nose and dry her tears. She hadn’t told her mother of this defeat, but instead had resolved that very day to make herself independent of hunger, to stop letting her own body blackmail her into failure, and the less she ate — this is something she’d already noticed — the clearer her thoughts became. In the end her perceptions were so heightened that during the nights of that last summer, lying with her best friend on the banks of the Danube pretending to be young, she heard not only the river’s current but even the fish and snakes gliding beneath the water’s surface, clairvoyant with hunger she knew how the creatures in the river’s depths coiled around each other, snapping and hissing.