8
Good, now wash your hands and you’ll be ready.
Is there water left?
Yes.
Well, all right then.
The water half-filling the bucket is covered in a thin layer of ice.
What a disaster.
Not to worry.
The old woman pokes her hands through the layer of ice into the water and washes them.
Goodness gracious, that’s cold.
And then: Hat, scarf, glove.
Oh, your boots.
I almost forgot my feet.
And with all the snow.
What a disaster. Don’t worry, I’ll manage, I’ll be fine.
There’s no rush. Oh, the card.
I almost forgot the card.
Thirty decagrams of meat.
Well, we’ll see.
Every morning she goes to the market and gets in line. In the second year of the war, when she was still new in Vienna and there wasn’t yet a vegetable shortage, she liked to finger the carrots, potatoes, or cabbage, just like back home.
Hands off the merchandise! the Viennese shouted at her, sometimes even slapping her hand away as if she were a disobedient child.
Surely it isn’t forbidden to look a bit before one buys.
Look all you like, but no pawing.
Later they simply pushed her away when she wanted to touch something intended for her stomach. Fire, locusts, leeches, plague, bears, foxes, snakes, insects, lice. But did these people ever stop to think about what it really meant to introduce things growing in the world into their bodies?
No matter. Zol es brennen, to hell with it.
Meanwhile, most of the sellers had armed themselves against these Galician refugees and their barbaric ways by posting signs: Touching the merchandise is strictly prohibited.
If only there were still merchandise left.
In her own shop back home, if she had forbidden the customers to touch her wares, she’d have gone out of business right away. When she thinks of all she left behind when she fled — the eggs, the sacks full of flour and sugar, the barrels of herring, all the apples — she could weep. People here are insolent, and they won’t even give you what you are entitled to according to your ration card. When she stands in line unsuccessfully, she sometimes gathers up a few cabbage leaves, rotten potatoes, or whatever else may have fallen into the snow around the vegetable sellers’ stands, and puts them in her bag.
That’s still perfectly good. What are they thinking? They’re experts at throwing things away, these goyim.
9
At the end of January her friend suddenly falls desperately ill. Lying in bed with a fever of 104°, she keeps talking about a pit filled with human flesh and a small child standing beside the pit who wants to gobble up all the meat. Her friend’s fiancé doesn’t know what to do; together they carry the sick woman down the stairs and bring her in a taxi to the barracks that was set up the year before in the General Hospital’s courtyard to accommodate those stricken by the epidemic. The next day they are not allowed in to see her, nor the day after that, and what’s more, a pulmonary infection has now made her illness worse, they’re told; on the fourth day they learn that the patient’s situation is very grave indeed, and on the fifth the doctor informs them that her friend died of the Spanish flu that very morning, at 3:20 a.m.
What’s going to happen to her now? her fiancé asks.
The 7031 will come for her tonight around eleven, the doctor says.
Who?
You must have been away at war a long time if you’ve never heard of it.
Yes, the fiancé says.
Explain it to him, the doctor says to her and leaves.
We’re going to stay here and wait, she says.
For what?
For the 7031.
They remain standing there until after nightfall, leaning against the wall of the hospital building, above their heads are two endless rows of windows, but no one is looking out to where they stand down below: everyone behind these windows is asleep or terminally ill, no one can get up and look out — the dead windows retreat before their eyes in two rows, growing narrower as they recede, impenetrably sealed. The arc lamps illuminate the street only until ten in the evening, after this it is completely dark. Every once in a while, one of them crouches, or walks a few steps. The fiancé smokes until his jacket pockets are empty. When it begins to snow, the two take shelter beneath the archway that four days ago was an entryway and soon will be an exit. Healing and Comfort for the Sick is written on a plaque above the arch. And then, shortly before midnight, the streetcar bearing the number 7031 really does arrive with its twelve horizontal slots for the dead, custom built the year before (when the horse carts could no longer keep pace with the city’s mortality rate). There is a silent loading up of several coffins — their mutual friend is silently lying in one of them — no one is standing on the running board of the car to catch a bit of air, and the end of the car, which used to contain doors for the living, has been nailed shut by the New Viennese Tramway Society. The two mourners are left behind in Alserstrasse, and their leave-taking from their friend is the silent, electrically operated driving off of streetcar number 7031. Above the conductor — who doesn’t even glance at the bereaved because he is busy operating the starting lever and making sure the switches for the rails are correctly set — an illuminated sign displays the car’s destination: Gate IV, Central Cemetery, Vienna.
10
The tremors were regular and soundless; they consisted of a slow swaying motion whose direction (judging by pictures set in motion on the wall), was north to south. Isolated small cracks are reported to have appeared on ceilings. As life continued, his wife’s manner — which at first he had found charming, a sort of childish stubbornness — solidified and became something different. This metamorphosis took place in stages, but the exact point when what might be described as severity began to dominate is something he can, in retrospect, no longer say.
Early on in their marriage, she had sometimes asked him to extend his lunch hour, so that after they ate they would still have time to take a walk — oh, just blow off the office, she’d say, making a blowing sound — or when they read Faust together, dividing up the roles, she would want him to read Gretchen’s lines, and once, to please her, he’d had to put on his dress uniform, when no one but she and the children was there to see it. Her requests had been laughable, they’d both laughed at them; fulfilling one of these requests had been simple enough, but it was also simple to say no to her and laugh all the same.
Together with the child’s grandmother, they had decided that half a year after their marriage — for which he’d had to declare himself unaffiliated with any faith — he would officially return to the Catholic church, just as — together with the child’s grandmother — they’d decided to baptize the child on its first birthday. Even so, as far as he could remember, they had their first argument over why she, the child’s mother, shouldn’t have her name entered into the baptismal registry, not even with the supplement Israelite. After all, if it weren’t for her, the child wouldn’t even be alive! He hadn’t been able to think of any way to save the child. And it had turned out that all that was needed was a handful of snow, nothing more than that!