29
In the middle of a snowy field — a few gravestones here and there — at the very back of the Israelite section of the cemetery, it would be easy to find the hillock of freshly disturbed dirt. Gate I, Gate II, Gate III and finally Gate IV. According to the beliefs a person held while alive, he or she will come to lie in the ground near either one or the other tram stop. Less than a minute and a half’s ride separates deceased Protestants, Catholics, and Israelites. From her grandmother’s grave, a mourner could easily glance over at the high wall surrounding the Catholic cemetery at the tall, snow-covered trees, and in this silence, even at a distance, she’d be able to hear the sound the snow makes when, having grown too heavy for its own good, it slides from a branch, making the branch spring quickly back into the air.
30
It is cold inside her dead mother’s apartment, cold and dark. Even the water in the bucket is frozen. When she goes to empty it in the courtyard, it falls to the ground as a solid lump of ice. Fire, locusts, leeches, plague, foxes, snakes, insects, lice. With the first installment of his Viennese salary, her husband once took her to the Burgtheater. They sat in the cheapest seats and saw Iphigenia on Tauris. “Farewell,” she remembers. At the time, she imagined she understood better than anyone else in the theater, at that final moment before the curtain closed, what it meant to renounce something. Never did she see her mother reading the Collected Works of Goethe, but now, every one of its volumes is standing there in her grandmother’s bookshelf, tidily arranged next to the miniature grandfather clock, just the same as back home. So that’s why the suitcase her mother brought with her to Vienna was so heavy. Farewell. All her life she’s paid for having snatched her first child back from hell with nothing more than a handful of snow, and only now is it becoming clear that there are things that have no price. No breath of air disturbs the place. / Deathly silence far and wide. / O’er the ghastly deeps no single / Wavelet ripples with the tide. Was she the one her mother had brought these books to? She also packs the seven-armed candelabra from the sideboard in the suitcase. Zay moykhl un fal mir mayne trep nit arunter. Don’t go falling down the stairs. Now it is too late to speak Yiddish with her mother. A number of the windows facing the courtyard in the stairwell have been replaced with wooden panels. She can’t see the angel above the entryway because she doesn’t turn around. She would like to know what exactly her mother had been paying for all her life. At home, in Volume 9, the spine of which is a bit scraped, she finds the play that for the most part she can still recite by heart. She doesn’t make a fire in the stove, she doesn’t wash the dishes, she doesn’t go stand in line, she doesn’t sew, doesn’t darn and doesn’t cry; she sits down quietly in the kitchen, wrapped in blankets, and just as she did back when she was a young girl, she reads Goethe’s play Iphigenia.
31
The father doesn’t die until just over a year later, on December 2, 1920. His wife sells his clothes on the black market, but first she cuts off the gold-colored buttons with the eagle of the monarchy and puts them in a box. The father’s December salary, paid out to the widow as a final installment, is just enough for one midday meal. At least the daughter gets an extra portion of milk with cocoa each day at school, thanks to the Americans.
32
In 1944 in a small forest of birch trees, a notebook filled with handwritten diary entries will fall to the ground when a sentry uses his rifle butt to push a young woman forward, and she tries to protect herself with arms she had previously been using to clutch the notebook to her chest. The book will fall in the mud, and the woman will not be able to return to pick it up again. For a while the book will remain lying there, wind and rain will turn its pages, footsteps will pass over it, until all the secrets written there are the same color as the mud.
INTERMEZZO
But if her grandmother had left for the Vienna Woods just half an hour later to gather firewood; or if the young woman who was so eager to cast her life aside had not, after leaving her grandmother’s locked door to wander through the city, taken a right turn from Babenberger Strasse onto Opernring, where she coincidentally encountered her own death in the form of a shabby young man; or if the fiancée of this shabby young man had not broken off their engagement until the next day; or if the shabby young man’s father hadn’t left his Mauser pistol in the unlocked drawer of his desk; if the young woman hadn’t looked from behind like a girl of easy virtue because her skirt was just too short — why in the world had she cut it half a year before; or, given how cold it was, if she’d crossed Babenberger Strasse in the icy spot despite the danger of slipping (instead of protecting herself from this danger with healthy instincts only to run right into the arms of death moments later with all her limbs intact), indeed, if she had slipped and fallen, perhaps even broken a leg, then she would have been brought to the Vienna General Hospital to have her leg set in plaster, instead of several days later, in the bloom of health, succumbing to a violent death of her own choosing and winding up in a chilly storage room; or if the frigid weather sweeping in from Sweden had given way to the warm Gulf stream two days earlier, then her grandmother wouldn’t have needed to go to the Vienna Woods until that Wednesday, or the puddle wouldn’t have been frozen, and when the young woman came to the end of Babenberger Strasse, she would certainly have made the decision to cross the street at that point and walk past the Vienna Museum of Fine Arts, which would have been closed that Sunday evening — she’d once seen a picture there of a family consisting of a father, grandmother, and child — and at that moment, she would have been thinking not about having herself shot, but about the lemon the father was holding out to the child, that brightly glowing bit of yellow in the dark painting that, during these hours when the museum was closed, was now hanging on a wall unseen. Who decides what thoughts time will be filled with? Only half an hour, or perhaps an entire hour later, becoming conscious that her only option for a bed that night was at her parents’ apartment, she would have turned around, would have walked down the Ring, but this time in the direction of home, since she wouldn’t have had the money for a taxi, and while her homeward journey would still have taken her past the opera house, the young man would have no longer been waiting there on Opernring, he would long since have been lying — for the price of two pounds of butter, fifty decagrams of veal, and ten candles — in the arms of some girl of easy virtue, while she herself would have gone home unmolested, would to be sure have been obliged to ring the concierge’s bell, waking her, and then to ask her mother to pay the twenty-heller fee, for which her mother would have reproached her, but these reproaches would only have strengthened her resolve to start earning her own money as soon as possible so as to finally be able to move out of her parents’ apartment and rent a room of her own. But the decisive moment was probably not the one that had just passed, it was everything that had come before. There was an entire world of reasons why her life had now reached its end, just as there was an entire world of reasons why she could and should remain alive.