That’s how life works.
Fifteen hundred tons of flour from Switzerland, the mother said.
Well, we’ll see.
13
They returned from Alserstrasse to the apartment on foot, and now they are waiting for time to pass — all at once it’s become so slow. He sits beside her in the kitchen, bent over, his elbows propped on his knees, gazing at the floor in silence. Only when she hears the regular dripping does she look at him and see that tears are running down his cheeks to the tip of his nose, collecting there, and dripping to the floor tiles at his feet. Then she wants to go home. And then he says she should stay. What, stay? Stay overnight with him — who is now alone? He grabs her by the shoulders and weeps into the crook of her neck, or was it really a kiss? What? Happiness cuts shame, shame covers unhappiness, unhappiness unfurls happiness. Hope pushes aside grief, proving to be so much stronger — so strong that it surprises even the seventeen-year-old herself, this is the intensity of women fighting over bread in front of the Anker bakery — the old ones are often stronger than the younger ones, though they are so much closer to dying. Suddenly alert with hopefulness, she says: Yes, and follows the man, not heading for the vestibule this time, as she’s always done when spending the night here, but instead lying down next to him at his request, obediently lying down in the bed of her friend, lying for the first time beside the man whom she has loved ever since he returned home from the war that past December like someone she’d never seen before. What? She lies down in the place of her dearest friend, who has been dead only since the morning, 3:20 a.m. The end of a day on which a life has ended is still far from being the end of days. Inconsolable, she will now — what? — inherit what belonged to her friend, who yesterday was still warm; she will metamorphose into her friend and continue her conversations in her body with their beloved. Has anyone before seen such soft lips on a man who was forced to kill so as not to be killed himself, has anyone seen such shiny, wetly gleaming teeth, and a nose whose nostrils flare with arousal, has anyone seen such long lashes shading a pair of eyes — such beautiful shadows — these lashes brought home unsinged from all the fires? Ever since the moment when he was standing there unexpectedly at the door, she has known that this is the man who was destined for her all along, and now at long last he knows it too, at long last he is lying beside her just as she imagined countless times, breathing so close beside her that she can inhale his breath, and if it weren’t so dark, she would surely be able to see him gazing at her through the night, gazing all the way through her. What?
14
In the local scythe factory — situated not on the Judenburg Terrace but directly on the left bank of the Mur — fifteen cm. lengths of stacked steel were thrown in a northeasterly direction. In a smithy in Purbachgraben, approximately one hundred m. from the right bank of the Mur — where the limestone massif of the Liechtenstein Mountain descends to the Judenburg Terrace — tools on the west wall were thrown to the east. In Aichdorf a small bell tolled (plane of oscillation: east/west). In Fohnsdorf, a man was thrown out of bed in an eastwardly direction. Several persons staggered or fell in an eastwardly direction, e.g., a schoolboy on the road between Rikersdorf and Allerheiligen, who simultaneously heard a howling sound and a thunder-like crash; a local apprentice on a ladder; and in the building next door, a schoolboy on the stairs. Taking into account the objects’ inertia, these findings correlate well with the observations of several witnesses, who were sitting quietly at the time and had the impression that the main thrust came from the east.
15
When her mother comes to relieve her at midnight, the younger daughter doesn’t say that she just saw her older sister with a man. The two of them walked right past her where she stood hidden among the crowd of people. And she, the little sister, didn’t dare call out her sister’s name, her sister was walking with her head down, tight-lipped, not speaking to the man who was walking at her side. So this is how her sister spends the nights she’s not at home. Years ago, when the younger sister had stumbled across her older sister’s diary and read a little bit of it, her sister had suddenly come into the room, but she hadn’t shouted or struck her sister when she saw what she was doing, she just calmly removed the book from her hands and said to her:
Do you think I was happy when you were born?
Maybe.
Do you remember the glass marbles you always played with?
Yes.
Do you remember the time I told you to try swallowing them?
Maybe.
Why do you think I wanted you to do that?
Dunno.
Do you remember the wall behind the house where Simon the coachman lives?
Yes.
Do you remember the time I told you to try jumping down from it?
Maybe.
Why do you think I would have said that?
Dunno.
If you ever touch this book again, you will no longer be my sister. Do you understand?
Yes.
And so now her tight-lipped sister had walked down the street beside a tight-lipped man without realizing her little sister had seen her. Even a public place like this, even in the middle of the night, could reveal something that was none of anyone else’s business, just like an open book, in a city as large as Vienna there was no avoiding someone’s reading it. She had been standing there for the past five hours so that her sister would be able to eat cow udder the next day in order to survive, and also so that she herself would be able to eat it to survive, along with her mother and father. Her sister, in turn, while she, the little sister, was at school, would accompany her mother to the Vienna Woods to collect firewood, for hours she and their mother would march through the frigid woods and exhaust themselves lugging armfuls of filthy waterlogged sticks, only so that the younger sister — and she herself, of course, and their mother and father — would not freeze in their own home. Nonetheless, it was perfectly possible that if this very same sister knew that her younger sister had watched her walking through the nocturnal Viennese streets at the side of a man, she would wish her dead, perhaps with more success this time. How many fronts like these were there in a life that might cost a person her life? How arduous it was surviving all the battles in which one would not fall.
16
But then, the man falls asleep as soon as he is lying beside her, the warmth of his body next to the warmth of her body, the man does not touch her the entire night, not even in a dream. All night long she hears him breathing next to her; from breath to breath, she knows with increasing certainty there is no point putting out a hand to touch him. The weeping that has been stuck in her throat ever since the departure of the 7031 now breaks to the surface, but now they are tears of a different sort: This weeping for her dead friend gets twisted — still in her throat — into a weeping out of jealousy, tears of mourning become tears of fury at the man she loves, who has invited her to share his bed but now is refusing to console her for the loss he has suffered. By the end of the night, she is weeping only out of shame. She has now received an answer once and for all to a question that, left to her own devices, she would not have asked for a long time, perhaps never. An answer she would never willingly have asked for, namely that the man is friendly but does not love her, that his mourning for the deceased is genuine and deep, while her own duplicitous nature has no counterpart anywhere in the world. If he shared her sentiments, how little would she care what her father, mother, and friends had to say about it, but now this defeat has condemned her irrevocably. Sleeping, he had encouraged her to hope, and sleeping, he has struck her down in crushing defeat. Lonelier than ever, she arises at dawn from the side of the sleeping man; no one who knew what she had hoped for could ever wish to consort with her again; she herself has no choice but to go on enduring her body, which has led her so badly astray, if only she had gone home the night before, as she’d originally intended, the way home would have been nothing more than walking, setting one foot before the other. But now she knows what it means to no longer have any possibility of retreat. She gathers up her things and leaves the apartment without waking him.