Apart in her white room, Vera compared — like two pages of a book — the street scenes, the neighbors’ faces, the teachers’ reprimands, the children’s shouts, with the faces and behavior of the members of her own household and came to the painful conclusion that an abyss lay between the two. What should she do for it to be bridged, to be filled in? She sensed that something vague, something hidden would never allow that to take place, that making of peace.
Meanwhile, Vera’s mother slept. She had seen that Gerd, her son, had what he wanted; her room was warm, the bed soft, no one would wake her; tomorrow she could get up later than her husband. In his study, into which he had had his couch moved (ostensibly to have his books close at hand when he felt the need for them late at night), Kroner tossed and turned in the exasperated knowledge that she was sleeping peacefully, that she was not waiting for him, did not want him. Did she want anyone, in her daydreams or her sleep? He didn’t think so. He knew her for what she was: content as long as she was close to her son and enveloped by security. But that security was in the process of being destroyed, and her son was beginning to distance himself (he could see this already). Once those pillars of support were gone, he knew that she would wriggle away, slippery as a fish, just as she had wriggled free of her previous life and into his.
6
For his physical pleasures Robert Kroner went to the house of Olga Herzfeld’s girls. It was not far from his own, on a busy street behind the Baptist church. The house was solid, tall, jutting out on the corner with an entrance now bricked up: it was once the jeweler’s shop belonging to the late Philip Herzfeld, Olga’s husband. Even when he had no intention of going there, Kroner’s thoughts would stray to that corner, behind whose bricked-up wall his amorous assignations were kept. These visits were arranged beforehand, usually for an evening when, obscured by the gathering dusk, he could get away on the pretext of a walk before supper. When he got to Olga’s house, a girl would be waiting for him, one of the three or four of her “boarders,” who would stay with her for several weeks or months before ceding their place to others, or a girl or woman from the town whom Olga had persuaded to sell her charms. These “chance acquaintances”—women he had never seen before, to whom he was not introduced until they went to bed with him — were the ones he liked best; they gave him the thrill of the unknown, of surprise, providing the fulfillment or disappointment of an anticipation stretched to the limits of possibility. An anticipation including even love, for Kroner was prepared each and every time to find love, constancy, fidelity, with any woman who responded to his inner need, to his hunger for a missing feeling, a feeling that for a brief moment would flare up in him at the touch of a woman, only to fade away just as quickly each time.
Such a chance meeting had deceived him with an illusion of permanence when, in a similar fashion, in a similar brothel in the tavern opposite the Vrbas Railway Station, he had found his wife-to-be. He caught sight of her upon entering the vast, smoke-filled, noisy tavern, carrying his suitcase, intending to take a train. Her figure was fuller then, her face white with pouty red lips, to which she pressed the rim of a wine-filled glass that clinked audibly against her large white teeth before the pungent, fiery liquid plunged down the curve of her throat. He whispered the name, Reza, not daring to believe that it was really she, the German servant girl with whom he used to have pillow fights in the back room of their shop, and who used to lie down fully clothed next to him, her red plaits stretched out over the white pillow, to allay his fear of the dark until his parents came back from Sombor or Senta on market days. At the time, Reza, nimble and sturdy, looked like a tomboy compared with him, an undersized schoolboy dressed for bed in a long white nightshirt. When they had a fight, though, and he became angry, he was surprised at how easy it was to throw her down, helpless with laughter, onto her skinny shoulder bones. She had almost no breasts then, only small twin hummocks on the flat chest against which he lay, victorious, pinning her arms to the floor with his own, his legs pressing her thin, sinewy calves into the carpet to keep her from squirming free and throwing him off.
But there in the tavern, she was amply rounded, her white breasts bulging out of the open neck of her yellow silk blouse, her white teeth evenly set between her taut lips. When she got into bed with him in the room behind the kitchen, where she had led him as soon as the price had been agreed upon and the owner was paid, she gave herself to him with all the voluptuousness of a fully grown woman. Telling his mother that his frequent journeys to Vrbas were for the payment of bills, he went on visiting Reza in the station tavern, enjoying her debauchery and shamelessness, until finally he married her — after vacillating between moments of disgust, when he swore to break with her, and bouts of exaltation at her childlike tenderness, which brought back to him those nights when they were left alone in the Jewish merchant’s house, where a little German girl, a Christian, a Gentile, was never anything more than a servant, a being of a lower order, but still enigmatically dangerous and therefore kept at a distance.
For Robert Kroner, thin and morose, Reza was the only thing that stimulated him to play, to self-forgetfulness — before, during his childhood, and now that he was grown and seeking play and self-forgetfulness in the creation of new lives. He could not imagine having children with anyone else, even though, filled with remorse, he knew that that was something he should undertake with a woman of his own religion. But all the Jewish girls he met or who were set in his way by the schemings of his anxious mother only served to freeze in him any inclination to play, to go to bed, to procreate. It was as if all of them were older relatives with whom he would be committing incest. With the vision of their menacing, crooked smiles in his head, he continued traveling to Vrbas, to the station tavern, and taking Reza, slightly drunk on wine, to bed, a bed that was dirty and shameful but where she spread wide for him the red warmth of her hair and offered her tongue and her belly. But after he married her — bringing shame on himself and his mother, obliging the latter to move into the servants’ quarters so as not to be under the same roof, although even that could not keep her from being a neighbor of her former maid, whom she had once dismissed for some minor misdemeanor and by so doing had, so to speak, driven the girl down the wrong path, into immorality, and now, as punishment, got her back as her daughter-in-law — after he married Reza, Kroner no longer found in her his earlier playful companion.
By becoming a member of his family, it was as if she had lost all the freedom and capriciousness that play demands, as if she, too, had assumed the responsibility that weighed down those people whose main concern was survival. She took her pregnancy seriously, as a kind of duty: in bed with Kroner, she kept her eyes fixedly on the darkness above her, avoided abrupt movements, and remained unresponsive to his embraces, as if she had to account to someone else for her behavior. And that was indeed the case; that someone was her son, her first-born, Gerhard Kroner, a tyrant from the moment he was born, summoning her with his loud crying at those very times Kroner most wanted to be with her.