4
He wasn’t the only human being in the world who had an inkling of how everything was connected to everything else, otherwise, he’d have chosen dying over freezing and watching his family freeze, starving and watching his family starve. A remarkable phenomenon of the cycle of tremors beginning with the 1895 Easter earthquake in Laibach is that some of the aftershocks continued for quite some time afterward, taking a significant toll in certain areas, and displaying phenomena similar to those of the main tremor. The earthquake of April 5, 1897, though not particularly strong, was distinguished by the motion of the ground being less pronounced than the shock’s acoustic effects. In any case, he would have to remain alive until at least the first of the next month, because then his wife would receive his salary. One month’s salary, if she stretched it skillfully, would last a week. What would happen during the remaining three weeks of that month and the weeks of the following one, and what in the world would happen after that — this he did not know. The tremor consisted of two shocks from below, the first of which was stronger; each lasted for approximately 2 sec. with a 1 sec. interval between; according to observations, the shaking appeared to be directed from north to south and was accompanied by a sound like that of a cart being driven into a building’s entryway; this preceded the tremor by several seconds and was longer in duration. Clocks and lamps vibrated.
He cuts the tips off his gloves so he can hold the pen better. When the ink begins to solidify in the cold, he breathes on the nib.
5
In November, the war was declared over, and in December her friend’s fiancé finally returned home. One afternoon he was suddenly standing there at the door, and at first the girls didn’t even realize that they knew him, that’s how much he’d changed. Even weeks after his return they saw how it pained him when someone scattered crumbs for the pigeons in the park. When they asked him about the war, he refused to answer, he’d just take one of the cigarette stubs he’d collected somewhere out of his jacket pocket and start smoking. When they told him they wanted to go out, he didn’t mind, he just stayed home. And when in January the curfew was changed from ten p.m. to eight, they would often simply remain in her friend’s apartment to save the twenty heller coin they’d have to slip the concierge to be let in after curfew. They would drink and talk, sometimes she even stayed the night, sleeping on a mattress in the vestibule. On those few evenings when she went out without her friend, she refused to let anyone touch, much less kiss her.
6
At night, the younger daughter sits in the street, waiting for midnight to come. Indeed, she’s been sitting like this for years, sometimes with her mother, sometimes with her sister, and often alone. This waiting began soon after the start of the war — first for bread, meat, and fat, and later also for sugar, milk, potatoes, eggs, and coal. The war is over, and still she’s sitting here, just the same as before, in this dark forest of bodies that has been growing up all around her for the past five years, stretching its limbs further with each passing night into alleyways and streets, around corners, up steps, and across the squares of Vienna, while she herself has grown within it, grown to five foot seven now, shooting up like a beanpole despite the starvation, and for years spending night after night waiting amid thousands of others who, by waiting, were fighting for survivaclass="underline" in front of market halls, Ankerbrot bakeries, butcher shops, and flour distribution centers, waiting in front of the various points of sale maintained by the milk industry, and also in front of shops offering carbide, candles, shoes, coffee, or soap; they stood, lay, and sat everywhere: either in silence or murmuring, the blood of Vienna beginning to stir as morning approached, to push and shove, to kick and curse, to elbow its way forward, to complain, persevere, bite, or scratch until the obstacle fell away flailing, then was pushed aside, pushing others, screeching, crying, mocking, and falling into despair. Five foot seven, while others had become weak or old during these same nights, while some had gone insane or fallen into a stupor — a few had even died while they were waiting. She sits here on her folding chair, enjoying the fact that the cobblestones are so uneven that she can rock back and forth on the chair, she sits wrapped in a blanket, waiting for midnight when her mother will relieve her.
7
Sometimes when his wife retires so early in the evening, he goes over after she’s fallen asleep and watches her. In three homes, ordinary Swiss clocks whose pendulums swung in a north-south orientation stopped. When she sleeps, she does not speak. That’s all right, she says to him when she is awake, when he — after remarking that the sky is either overcast, blue, cloudy, or perfectly clear — announces that now he’ll be coming home earlier, because the office will no longer be heated after two in the afternoon. But when she’s asleep he likes to sit down beside her bed and make one further attempt to get to the bottom of what has seemed to him the greatest riddle in all the history of mankind: how processes, circumstances, or events of a general nature — such as war, famine, or even a civil servant’s salary that fails to increase along with the galloping inflation — can infiltrate a private face. Here they turn a few hairs gray, there devour a pair of lovely cheeks until the skin is stretched taut across angular jawbones; the secession of Hungary, say, might result in a pair of lips bitten raw in the case of one particular woman, perhaps even his own wife. In other words, there is a constant translation between far outside and deep within, it’s just that a different vocabulary exists for each of us, which no doubt explains why it’s never been noticed that this is a language in the first place — and in fact, the only language valid across the world and for all time. If a person were to study a sufficient number of faces, he would surely be able to observe wrinkles, twitching eyelids, lusterless teeth, and draw conclusions about the death of a Kaiser, unjust reparations payments, or a stabilizing social democracy. His wife doesn’t ask why he brought Notes on Earthquakes in Styria home with him, why he spends evening after evening reading this book and copying out the most important passages; the thing is, it describes in meticulous detail exactly the sorts of processes he is now able to see with completely different eyes: How one and the same cause can have a thousand different effects on different regions and locations. It feels to him as if the top layer is crumbling away all at once from everything he sees and encounters, a layer that once prevented him from comprehending, and finally he is able to recognize what lies below. Minds = landscape, he notes between one passage and the next. What a happy coincidence that these observations happened to fall into his hands: the hands of one who has taken it upon himself to investigate this primeval tongue — that’s what he’s calling it — for as long as his strength holds up. Persons standing upon solid ground detected a faint vibration of the earth. Nothing else is keeping him here in this miserable life in which a civil servant, ninth class, is forced to stand by and watch his family starve.