So you aren’t one after all, the pale lad asks long after she has stopped laughing. No, she says. She’s surprised at how hard the young man is sweating even though he doesn’t have his coat buttoned. She wouldn’t mind being cheap if it meant she wouldn’t be on her own forever with all the time in the world. How many people can simultaneously be in possession of all the time in the world? Would she like to.? She decides to join him for a glass of wine. That is. She has no idea how grateful. In the café he seizes her hands and holds them to his face, using them to wipe the tears from his eyes and the mucus from his nose, perhaps she’ll excuse him, he’s never been with one before, but just now he wanted, perhaps she will understand, you see his fiancée just, that is, no longer, and sent him packing, although for two years now, an engagement after all, or doesn’t that mean.
How long does a life last, anyhow?
Seventy or eighty years?
Doesn’t she already know more than she can bear?
. his fiancée would see all right if he carried on just like she did, preferably with lots of girls. really, though, someone ought to kill her.
Oh dear, the young woman thinks, her hands already dripping with tears. Does he know her, this man? Does he know what she has wished for? Does he know what a burden she is finding life, which from inside always looked to her like a sphere with perfectly smooth, black walls, and you keep running and running and there isn’t even a shabby little door to let you out?
He’d have shot her if only she’d come out of her building, he says. But she knew what he was capable of, so she stayed where she was, and what was he supposed to do now. he never thought. after all he was. and he’d always treated her. and never once. He’d have shot her? she asked. How?
Right here, he says, slipping his fingers into the right-hand pocket of his coat, it’s my father’s Mauser.
Now all at once she understands why she is sitting here with this man, on whose face what goes by the name of heartache — in her own case, too — makes so pitiful an impression. Now the inside of the sphere that always seemed infinite to her suddenly contains this shabby little door. You know what, she says, pulling her hands away from the sobbing man, it would be the easiest thing in the world to insult your fiancée in a way she will remember all her life. Really? he says, looking up, and meanwhile she is drying off her hands on her skirt under the table.
Her mother says: I’m going to bed now, she gathers up her sewing things, puts them back in their basket, brings the basket back out to the cold parlor. Her father calls: I’m coming, too. Her sister has already been lying in bed for half an hour, but despite the darkness she’s still awake. Her father picks up the carbide lamp by its handle.
Do you really think? he says.
Of course.
And if something goes wrong?
They’ll certainly know what to do on Alserstrasse if anything goes wrong.
Healing and Comfort for the Sick.
And if everything goes right, she thinks, we’ll soon enough be continuing our journey on the quietest car of the New Viennese Tramway Society.
All right, I’m going to call her and tell her.
But just one sentence.
Just one sentence.
He settles up, she says goodbye to the waiter, that’s how easy it is to pass from one world to the next. The telephone booth is just across the street, and when the youth puts his weight on the floor of the booth, the light goes on — a soul would be telephoning in the dark, she thinks. Just one sentence. She waits outside in the snow, watching the lovesick young man speaking in the light: he speaks, listens, responds again, listens, contradicts. She’d better drag him back out of this cell, otherwise he might slide back over to the other side again; the glass panes of the booth are already fogging up with his hot breath when she pulls open the door.
In the receiver a female voice is exclaiming: For the love of God, speak with my daughter tomorrow!
Tomorrow will be too late!
But I’m telling you she isn’t here!
Please tell her that even in death I was —
You still have your whole life ahead of you!
Now he falls silent. He says nothing at all. His hair is thin, at twenty-five, he might already have a bald spot. Then she calmly takes the receiver from his hand, and in his place she says into it:
Don’t you understand? He has to die.
We have to go stand in line at five o’clock. You don’t always have to be looking men in the face like that. I have to do all the work myself. Your grandmother has to take responsibility for herself.
And the young man?
He’s got to die now, that’s all there is to it, and she has to ride in his sled with him, all the way to hell.
She says the one thing and only thinks the rest, then she hangs up the telephone.
The mother hears the father shutting the kitchen door so that the warmth from the stove will keep until morning, then he goes out to the stairs, the toilet is half a flight down. It flushes with water from the tap in the hall. The mother turns over on her other side. The older girl has only just gotten back on her feet again, and already it’s anyone’s guess what she’s up to. She sacrificed herself for this daughter, who almost died as a baby, and this is the thanks she gets.
The younger daughter doesn’t like it when her sister’s bed stays empty overnight. If her sister were to move out altogether, as she sometimes threatens when she’s fighting with their mother, there’d be just one advantage: they’d stop referring to her, the younger sister, as the little one. The teacher said on Friday that Austria is now only one-tenth its original size. She, on the other hand, has grown during the war years, she’s now five foot seven. So the borders of the country she lives in have nothing at all to do with her own size, but it’s probably best if she doesn’t point this out in class tomorrow.
The father turns out the light and lies down in the dark bed beside the mother. The blue-tinged shadows around the chin of his older daughter these past few weeks involuntarily remind him of something he doesn’t want to be reminded of, but his thoughts don’t much care whether or not he wishes to think them; when the time is right they make their way, like it or not, through the thicket of all the things he has ever thought or seen.
And now here they are in front of the opera house, Salome has already been served Jochanaan’s head on a silver platter, the bloody papier-mâché head with wool hair that is now back in its place in the dark properties closet, on the shelf beside the wooden platter someone painted silver. They have agreed to take a taxi to Alserstrasse. They will isolate the precise moment when the taxi stops in front of the hospital and remove it forever from amid all the other time that exists. The taxi drives up Burgring, takes a left onto Volksgartenstrasse, then heads north up the avenue known first as Museumsstrasse, then Auerspergstrasse and finally Landesgerichtsstrasse where Alserstrasse turns off to the left. The trip takes no longer than five and a half minutes, during which not a word is spoken in the back seat of the taxi. In front of the entrance to the hospital the taxi driver stops, just as his passengers requested.