*
The decision to move out of her parents’ apartment is one she would have made that evening in any case, whether it was sitting with a broken leg in the waiting room of the General Hospital, in the Vienna Woods with her grandmother’s rucksack strapped to her back, or on her grandmother’s sofa, shivering beneath a thin blanket after her grandmother offered to let her spend the night. If you can’t go up, you’ll have to go down — but if you can’t go across, you still have to go across. Most probably, though, she’d have been lying at home in her own bed, and in the other bed would be her sleeping sister: this little sister who was already five foot seven; and if she’d been certain that her sister’s slumber, though restless, was nonetheless sound, she would have gotten up again to retrieve her diary from its hiding place behind the wardrobe and with a small pencil — writing in the dark, blind — she would have written an entry about everything that had happened. Just as at the age of fourteen, in the midst of hunger, she had resolved not to let hunger blackmail her any longer, she would now have resolved, in the midst of her unhappy love, not to let herself be blackmailed by unhappy love. If she had managed to avoid the one place in Vienna and the one moment of the evening that could have translated her desire to cast her life away into a death, she would now have realized, while writing in her diary, that in fact writing was the only thing she wanted to do to make money, and she would have started to consider how and what she could write, and so for the first time in this entire week of misery she would have been thinking about something other than the man she loved and her own shame and unhappiness.
The next morning she would have no longer have been able to decipher what she’d written, since in the darkness of the night before, she’d have inscribed half and whole letters one on top of the other in a single line. The shabby young man would have remained hale and unscathed, and a few years later, at twenty-five, he would already have developed a bald spot. Her grandmother would not have fallen down the cellar stairs, and more than a decade later she would have hidden her granddaughter for several days when she was threatened with arrest; but under these circumstances, her father would not have postponed his own death and would have died on March 2 of this same year, just five weeks after this night, of heart failure. Standing beside his grave, his older daughter would involuntarily have thought for a second time of the lemon the Gothic father held out to his child — whether it was a boy or girl was uncertain — in the midst of all that darkness. She would have taken possession of her father’s excerpts from Notes on Earthquakes in Styria and, weeping as she wrote, used them for her very first article: “May the earth gape open once more and swallow up the war profiteers!” For although her father died in his bed — of myocardial insufficiency, the doctors said — she was convinced that in the end he had died of the war.
Her mother would have been paid the March installment of her husband’s salary, which at that moment was just enough for the current week’s groceries.
BOOK III
1
A woman sits at a desk writing an account of her life. The desk is in Moscow. This is the third time in her life she’s been asked to write an account of it, and it’s entirely possible that this written account will put an end to her life, possible that this piece of writing will be transformed, if you will, into a weapon to be used against her. It’s also possible that this piece of writing will be kept in reserve and that from the moment she turns it in she’ll be obliged to live up to it, or to prove herself worthy of it, or else confirm the darkest suspicions that might arise from it. In the last case, the words she’s writing here would also — after a brief or protracted delay — be something like a misdiagnosed illness that eventually, inevitably, would kill her. Didn’t her husband always say that in the theater there’s never a gun hanging on the wall that isn’t going to be fired off at some point? She remembers Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and how she wept when the shot was finally fired. But perhaps she’ll succeed — after all that’s why she’s sitting here, her one hope, and the reason she is taking such pains to find just the right words — perhaps she’ll succeed in writing herself a way out, in extending her life by means of a few letters more or less, or at least making her life less onerous; there’s nothing left for her to hope for now than to succeed in using her writing to write her way back into life. But what are the right words? Would a truth take her farther than a lie? And which of the many possible truths or lies should she use? When she doesn’t even know who will be reading what she writes?
There’s only one thing she doesn’t assume: that this piece of writing will be nothing more than a sheet of paper with ink on it, slipped into a folder and forgotten. In a country in which every child and every cleaning woman and every soldier can recite poems by Lermontov and Pushkin from memory, that would not be likely.
2
I was born in 1902 in Brody to a civil servant and his wife, in other words I had a bourgeois background. And what exactly made this background bourgeois? Perhaps the fact that when her grandmother fled from Galicia to Vienna more than twenty years ago, she dragged along an edition of Goethe’s Collected Works? Her father’s salary wasn’t enough for her parents to employ a maid even during their very first years in Vienna. She never had piano lessons, nor did her sister play the violin. She knows of course that her background is considered bourgeois because her father, instead of being a factory worker, was an official at the Meteorological Institution. I earn my money with my buttocks, he liked to say, meaning all the hours he spent in a chair poring over data. Even so they’d nearly starved. Despite this fact, both her first account of her life, which she’d written when she applied for a visa to enter the Soviet Union, and the second one, composed apropos of her unsuccessful bid to be admitted into the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, were marred by this bourgeois background of hers, as no doubt this third one would be as well. Her background stuck to her, there was no helping it, and she was stuck to it as well. She’d been able to remake her thinking from scratch, but not her family history.
Never would she possess the same level of freedom as her husband, who was free for all time, doubly free — and in principle free even now that he was in prison, since he’d completed an apprenticeship as a metalworker before beginning to write, he’d been a laborer, a doubly free laborer; in other words: possessing nothing that could tie him down, he could go anywhere he wanted. From a societal perspective, he was immune to blackmail. The working class has nothing to lose but their chains. But did she herself really have more to lose? Had she perhaps inherited not only the myopia but also the fearfulness of her father, who all his life was obliged to worry that some trifling offense might prevent him from rising on schedule from one pay grade to the next and in the worst-case scenario — a revolution, say — even cause him to lose his position? Were hands by nature more honest than heads? As a young girl, how she would have loved to work with her hands, creating something that hadn’t previously existed — but ever since that day at school when a crafts teacher had held up the doll’s dress she had made, presenting it for the entire class to see as an example of what she called shoddy and sloppy work, since this day at school she had lost her faith in the work of her hands. If there were such a thing as being born to grace, there was probably also a gracelessness you could be born to. Sloppy and shoddy. She had later made the workers’ struggle her own all the more fervently.