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What in the Lord God’s name did we do on Sunday evening?
Of the fourteen persons who fell victim to lightning in 1898, two were killed by lighting bolts striking inside buildings, two under trees, one under a wayside shrine where he’d taken cover, and seven out in the open, including two reapers working in the fields. In two cases, I was unable to determine the precise circumstances. Outside the town of Laufen an der Sann, lightning struck a woman who was carrying a hoe on her back. The woman was paralyzed, and a mark was left behind on her back in the shape of the hoe.
After the older girl went out on Sunday evening, her mother threaded new shoelaces in her younger daughter’s shoes. After the older girl went out on Sunday evening, her father spread out his files on the kitchen table and started reading. On Sunday evening, after her older sister had gone out, the younger girl did her mathematics homework, her mother got her sewing kit from the cold parlor and began to darn socks, and her father experimented with whether he could read better with his glasses on or without, he pushed the glasses down and looked over the top of them, then pushed them back up and finally said: This typeface really isn’t easy to read. The younger girl then put more wood on the fire, and the wood hissed because it was so damp. Her mother said: Go wash your hands, otherwise you’ll make your notebook dirty. The younger girl washed her hands in the bucket. The mother bit off the thread. The father turned the page of the file. The younger girl wiped her hands on her dress, sitting back down at the table. Her mother looked for a different color of thread in her sewing basket. Her father laid his glasses to one side and went on reading. The young girl dipped her pen into the inkwell and solved her arithmetic problem. Her mother coughed. Her father turned over another page of the file.
22
Margaretenstrasse, Heumühlgasse (down one or the other of those streets), then Rechte Wienzeile, across the Naschmarkt, Linke Wienzeile, somewhere or other, Girardigasse, Gumpendorfer Strasse, Stiegengasse, Windmühlgasse; everywhere, the snow is piled up shoulder-height on either side — Theobaldgasse, Rahlgasse — just as high on the right as on the left — Mariahilfer Strasse, Babenberger Strasse, Opernring — and it’s slippery, as smooth as glass. Does she really want to turn onto Opernring? Or would it be better to take a left onto Burgring? Today, it is exactly one week since she waited on Alserstrasse with the man she loves for the 7031. How long does a week last? Crossing the street to the left, toward the Museum of Fine Arts, would mean picking her way between two gigantic heaps of snow with a frozen puddle in between, so she turns to the right. In the opera house on the other side of the street, music and listening to music are locked up together. Why is she walking around outside? To exhaust herself to the point where she can neither see nor hear? Is she indulging in a stroll? Strolling to her demise? Two pounds of butter, someone whispers at her cold back. How much? She keeps going. Two pounds of butter and fifty decagrams of veal. The man’s whisperings insinuate themselves beneath the broad brim of her hat, slipping into her ear from behind. Two pounds of butter, fifty decagrams of veal, ten candles. Although the entire world lies open before her, which she thought might put an end to her hearing, she can hear what the man is offering in exchange for her person. Is she interested? Or would she rather return home, where what is called her life is taking place: her father reading his files, her little sister doing her homework, her mother calling her, her older daughter, a whore. Salome is being performed tonight. How long has it been since her parents went out together? Does she know a good reason not to accept? Or is she not so sure? When she turns around, she sees a young man, perhaps only slightly older than she is; he has no hat on, even though it’s the middle of winter, so she sees his thin hair, by the time he’s twenty-five he’ll have a bald spot, she thinks, and she’s surprised to see beads of sweat on his forehead in the middle of winter.
Two pounds of butter, he repeats, looking at her, fifty decagrams of veal, ten candles.
He says her price right to her face.
And why not twelve candles, she says and starts to laugh.
The time when it went without saying that the freshly fallen snow would promptly be carted from the streets of the Viennese city center to the Danube and dumped into the channel that had been knocked clear of ice is long past. Thanks to the war, something is missing: men, the freshly fallen men. The most that happens now is that the snow gets pushed aside, shoveled into heaps by a couple of war invalids, women and children; on warmer days these heaps of snow begin to melt until they are ringed with puddles that freeze over during the night in precisely those spots where the path was to remain clear. The layer of ice covering the sidewalks of Vienna, in heavily traveled spots above all, has grown so hard and thick in the course of the winter that no one even tries to chop it up any longer. Pedestrians wishing to cross from Babenberger Strasse to the Museum of Fine Arts or to walk down Burgring on the left away from the city center must take particular care not to fall. Captain Eduard Gabler, for instance, suffered a compound fracture of his forearm just yesterday when he fell on the ice walking at Freudenauer Winterhafen; Private Franz Adler also broke his forearm, on Marxergasse; factory owner Mortiz Gerthofer suffered an exposed fracture of his right shin on Nobilegasse; and nurse Frieda Bertin fell on Mariahilfer Strasse, not at all far from here, suffering a severe contusion of the left hip. Where one crosses Babenberger Strasse toward the Art History Museum, away from the city center, the ice between two heaps of snow has long since been polished smooth by the heavy pedestrian traffic, even though yesterday’s snowfall briefly covered it up. But because of the countless shoes, and also several bare feet, that have passed over this spot since then, the snow has become inseparably conjoined with the ice over the course of the morning, itself becoming ice. This ice appears black — though of course there is no deep body of water beneath its surface — and it displays the approximate contours of the African continent on a smaller scale. Seamstress Cilli Bujanow nearly slipped on this bit of ice around 2:30 in the afternoon, but was propped up by Lieutenant Colonel of the Chamber of Finances Alfred Kern, who happened to be walking behind her, sparing her the fall. Seven-year-old Leopoldine Thaler practiced skating on the puddle as she passed, eleven-year-old pupil David Robitschek attempted to shatter the ice by jumping up and down on it (unsuccessful), a stray dog of unknown provenance urinated on the right-hand heap of snow, causing a portion of the ice, corresponding roughly to the region of former German East Africa, to melt and also dyeing the area yellow approximately as far down as the Niger. By six, this bit too has frozen again, although the surface of the ice in this area is slightly roughened. The young lady who at approximately 6:00 p.m. at first considers crossing Babenberger Strasse here and then walking to the left toward of the Museum of Fine Arts would be compelled — before reaching the rougher area north of the Equator that promises salvation in the form of a firm foothold — to step on the treacherously slippery territory of South Africa, but at the last minute, she loses her nerve, and instead heads off to the right in the direction of Opernring.