17
At some point, nearly morning, she finally. what time though, dunno, around six or maybe seven? Dunno. Was she crying? I don’t think so. I was just surprised when she refused to get up, even at nine she was still, she didn’t get up all morning, her eyes were shut, but she wasn’t sleeping. And not a bite of anything. Not even coffee. All day long just lying there. I’m going to lie here and never get up again, she said to me. Really. She wouldn’t come to the woods on Tuesday either. No one on earth. On Wednesday I got the eggs from Mizzi but she didn’t want hers. And then the night after, her hair! Exactly, I didn’t go out for my chess game; I really thought we’d be off to Steinhof to commit her. So did I. Her beautiful hair. But on Friday she seemed better. Yes, that was my impression too. Completely calm. There was a fresh snowfall on Saturday, her first time downstairs. I draped my coat over her, and downstairs she said it made her dizzy to look at the falling snow. I said: so don’t look. And I said: eat something proper, then you’ll be able to stand on your feet again. And she opened her mouth and let the snowflakes fall into it. Yes, that’s right. I couldn’t help laughing. Me neither.
And then it was Sunday.
18
On Sunday, thank God, the older girl finally wants to go out for a little walk again. Are you going to see your friend? her mother asks. Yes, she says. Her mother shuts the door behind her; before the door closes, the girl hears her mother calling to her father: Don’t you think it’s strange that her friend didn’t come to see her even once? Well, how could she? Maybe on the 7031? It’s her parents’ own fault they know so little about their daughter. It’s not as if anyone ever asked her if she wanted a sister in the first place, or whether she liked Vienna so much the first time they visited that she wanted to move there. When a handicrafts teacher at the lyceum had used the words sloppy and shoddy to describe a doll’s dress she had sewn with great effort, she’d understood that even after years in Vienna she was still a foreigner here and would remain one. She still remembers her grandmother coming to stay with them right after she fled Galicia; for several days the kitchen had smelled like in the old days, smelled of pear compote and challah, but when the provisions her grandmother had brought with her were exhausted, her mother had immediately found the old woman another apartment and forbidden her daughters to visit her there. How lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts. Only then did she realize that she, too, was of Jewish descent, but her father still took her and her sister to services at a Christian church Sunday after Sunday, they sat in the civil servants’ pew with other civil servants and their families. For more than ten years now, her father had been telling his colleagues that his wife wasn’t so steady on her feet and therefore attended a church closer to their home, and in this way — this much one must grant him — he had advanced to the ninth pay grade, but even for a civil servant of that grade, it was no great feat these days to starve to death as miserably as the monkeys, camels, and donkeys in the Schönbrunn Menagerie. Did keeping her misguided love a secret from her friend make her just as halfhearted and deceitful as her parents? It had done no good to keep the truth to herself either, for a truth remained even if it was never spoken aloud, day after day it went on doing what it had to. Landstrasser Hauptstrasse, Arenbergpark, Neulinggasse — which eventually turns into Gusshausstrasse on the way to the district called Margareten and then later becomes Schleifmühlgasse — and finally Margaretenstrasse itself — the scrap of paper on which her mother had written down her grandmother’s address had been right there in the kitchen drawer.
19
Time to go. Let’s go.
Every Sunday she went to the Vienna Woods to get firewood. She would take the tram to the end of the line at Rodaun or Hacking, along with a great many others. Like her, they would carry baskets, rucksacks, or satchels on their backs; from there, she’d enter the woods to collect kindling, perhaps breaking off a branch here and there that was not too heavy.
My cousin helping me out with coal — wouldn’t that be nice. Hat, coat, glove. Good.
Returning home in the evening, she sometimes had to let a tram or two pass before managing to squeeze into one of the overcrowded cars, so she often remained standing at the tram stop in the dark for over an hour, freezing, while in the illuminated tram people stood or sat, with the wood they had gathered sprouting awkwardly from their rucksacks and panniers.
And the basket. And the rucksack.
From the outside, a tram like that resembled an aquarium, and when the car lurched into motion or braked, all the people behind the fogged-up glass swayed back and forth with their bundles of twigs like one huge organism.
Oh, it’s all getting tangled up. What a disaster. The boots. Now look, it’s falling out the top. Oh, this shvakhkeyt, this weakness. Well.
Even before this, she’d thought at times that deprivation made people more alike, made their movements, down to the gestures of their hands and fingers, ever more predictable. When she encountered other people in the woods who were also looking for wood, she saw their bending over, their breaking twigs, their stripping off the dry leaves — exactly resembling her own bending, breaking, and stripping. When it came down to surviving the hunger and cold, and nothing more, all human beings adopted this same economy of movement, perhaps still common to them from back when they were animals, while everything that distinguished them from each other was suddenly recognizable as a luxury.
All right, that’s good now. Oh, I almost forgot the key. That would have been something.
20
You just have to start walking, then a street name scrawled on a scrap of paper with a building and apartment number will turn into a route to follow: with buildings on either side, with weather (cold and damp), with the sound of footsteps sinking into slush and snow, and with other people on this or that errand, willing or unwilling; a route that leads you past dimly lit taverns and shops whose windows are almost empty or sealed up with shutters. The low, stooped building where the old woman lives has a stone angel keeping watch over the entryway. How lovely is your dwelling place, oh Lord of Hosts. After fleeing the provinces and spending her first few days in Vienna in her daughter’s apartment, the old woman told her older granddaughter about the two angels that prophesied the fall of Sodom to Lot and conducted him to safety. These angels were so beautiful that the citizens of Sodom wanted nothing more than to tear the flesh from their limbs and devour them. Sheyn vi di zibn veltn. As beautiful as the seven worlds. Now, as the older granddaughter presses down on the door handle, trying to remember how her grandmother said this sentence to her, it suddenly seems unfamiliar, and she wonders whether she just dreamed it. As beautiful. The building’s dark entryway stinks, above one of the doors on the ground floor is a little metal plate with the apartment number. In the stairwell, it seems that some of the windows facing the courtyard are broken and have been replaced with wooden panels. The beautiful man; oh, his lips, the wings of his nose, his eyelashes. Has beauty never had any other purpose than to cause those who wish to possess it to rise up against each other, and, in the end, between them, tear the beautiful object to shreds, or, failing that, destroy each other instead? She rings the bell and also knocks on the door, but no one answers. As a girl, she had marched to the Rathaus, demanding that the war come to an end. Now she is in the middle of her own war, one in which — even at so great a distance from bombs, grenades and poison gas — she is still finding it infinitely difficult to survive each day from beginning to end, and then all through the night.