The Post Office Girl

by Stefan Zweig

  And then 1915: seventeen years old. Her parents seem a decade older. Her father is dwindling as though eaten away from inside; he struggles from room to room, sallow and stooped, and everyone knows he’s worried about business. For sixty years, since her grandfather’s time, there’s been no one in the entire monarchy who could dress chamois horn or do game taxidermy like Bonifazius Hoflehner and Son. Her father prepared hunting trophies for the castles of the Esterházys, the Schwarzenbergs, even the archdukes, working with four or five assistants, painstakingly, exactingly, and honorably, from morning till late at night. But in times as deadly as these, when the only thing people shoot is people, no one comes in for weeks on end. Yet the daughter-in-law’s pregnancy, the grandson’s illness, it all costs money. The shoulders of the now taciturn man slump more and more, and they give way completely one day when the letter arrives from the Isonzo, for the first time not in Otto’s handwriting but his commander’s. Even without opening it they know what it is: a hero’s death at the head of the company, eternal remembrance, and so forth. The house becomes quieter and quieter; her mother has stopped praying, the light over the Virgin has gone out; she’s forgotten to fill it with oil.

  1916: She’s eighteen. There’s a new catchphrase in the household, used constantly: too expensive. Her mother, her father, her sister, her sister-in-law escape from their troubles into the smaller-scale misery of the bills, from morning until night they reckon up their poor daily life aloud. Meat, too expensive, butter, too expensive, a pair of shoes, too expensive: Christine hardly dares to breathe for fear it might be too expensive. The things most necessary to a bare existence flee as though terrified, burrowing like animals into lairs of extortionate prices—you have to hunt them down. Bread has to be begged for, a handful of vegetables inveigled from the grocer, eggs brought in from the country, coal carted by hand from the train station: thousands of freezing, hungry women vie with one another in pursuit of quarry that’s scarcer every day. Her father has something wrong with his stomach, he needs special, easily digestible food. Ever since he had to take down the BONIFAZIUS HOFLEHNER sign and sell the business, he hasn’t been talking to anyone, he just presses his hands to his belly sometimes and moans when he thinks he’s alone. The doctor really ought to be called. But: too expensive, her father says, preferring to double up furtively in his distress.

  And 1917—nineteen. They buried her father two days after New Year’s; the money in the bankbook was just enough for them to dye their clothes black. It’s getting more and more expensive to live, they’ve already rented out two rooms to a pair of refugees from Brody, but it’s not enough, not enough, even if you slave until late at night. Finally her uncle the privy councillor finds a job for her mother as a caretaker in the Korneuburg Hospital and one for her as a clerk. If only it wasn’t so far—leaving at daybreak in an ice-cold train car and not back until evening. Then cleaning, mending, scrubbing, darning, and sewing, until, without thinking, without wanting anything, you fall like an overturned bag into a grudging sleep from which you’d prefer not to wake.

  And 1918—twenty. The war still on, still not a day to yourself without worries, still no time to glance in the mirror, to poke your head out into the street. Christine’s mother is beginning to complain, her legs are swelling up in the damp, uncellared ward, but Christine has no strength left for sympathy. She’s been living too long with infirmity; something in her has gone numb since she started having to type admission records for seventy or eighty atrocious mutilations every day. Sometimes a little lieutenant from the Banat toils into the office on his crutch to see her (his left leg is shattered), his hair golden-blond like the wheat of his homeland but terror etched into the still-unformed child’s face. In his quaint Swabian dialect he tells homesick stories (poor blond lost child) about his village, his dog, his horses. One evening they kiss on a bench in the park, two, three feeble kisses, more pity than passion, then he says he wants to marry her as soon as the war is over. A tired smile is her only response; she doesn’t dare think that the war might ever end.

  And 1919—twenty-one. The war has in fact ended, but poverty has not. It only ducked beneath the barrage of ordinances, crawled foxily behind the paper ramparts of war loans and banknotes with their ink still wet. Now it’s creeping back out, hollow-eyed, broad-muzzled, hungry, and bold, and eating what’s left in the gutters of the war. An entire winter of denominations and zeroes snows down from the sky, hundreds of thousands, millions, but every flake, every thousand melts in your hand. Money dissolves while you’re sleeping, it flies away while you’re changing your shoes (coming apart, with wooden heels) to run to the market for a second time; you never stop moving, but you’re always too late. Life becomes mathematics, addition, multiplication, a mad whirl of figures and numbers, a vortex that snatches the last of your possessions into its black insatiable vacuum: your mother’s gold hair clasp off your neck, her wedding ring off her finger, the damask cloth off the table. But no matter how much you toss in, it’s no use, you can’t plug that black hellish hole, it does no good to stay up late knitting wool sweaters and rent all your rooms out and use the kitchen as a bedroom, doubling up with someone else. Sleep, though, that’s still the one thing you can’t begrudge yourself, the only thing that doesn’t cost money: the hours when you throw your spent, wan, now gaunt, still-untouched body on the mattress, unconscious of this ongoing apocalypse for six or seven hours.

  And then 1920–1921. Twenty-two, twenty-three years old, the flower of youth, it’s called. But she doesn’t hear that from anyone, and she herself has no idea. From morning till night, just one thought: how to get by, with money tighter and tighter all the time. Things have gotten just a touch better. Once more her uncle the privy councillor has helped out by going personally to his poker buddy in the postal administration to cadge a temporary postal worker’s position, in Klein-Reifling—a wretched hole in the wine country, but it’s permanent employment, it’s a foothold. The bare wage is only enough for one, but she’s had to take her mother in (her brother-in-law didn’t have room) and make everything stretch twice as far; each day still begins with making do and ends with counting up. Every matchstick is itemized, every coffee bean, every speck of flour in the dough. But you’re breathing, you’re alive.

  And 1922, 1923, 1924—twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six. Are you still young? Are you already old? Her temples show a scribble of a few fine lines, her legs are sometimes tired, in the spring her head aches strangely. But there’s progress, things are getting better. There’s money in her hand, hard and round, she has a permanent position as “postal official,” her brother-in-law is even sending her mother two or three banknotes at the beginning of every month. Now would be the time to try, in some small way, to be young again; even her mother is urging her to go out and enjoy herself. Her mother finally gets her to sign up for a dancing class in the next town. These thumping dance lessons aren’t easy, her fatigue is too much a part of her. Sometimes she feels her joints are frozen—even the music can’t thaw them out. Laboriously she practices the assigned steps, but she can’t really get interested, she’s not carried away, and for the first time she has a feeling: too late, toil has exhausted her youth, the war has taken it away. Something must have snapped inside her, and men seem to sense it, for she isn’t really being pursued by any of them, even though her delicate blond profile has an aristocratic look among the coarse faces, round and red like apples, of the village girls. But these postwar seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds aren’t waiting quietly and patiently, waiting for someone to want them and take them. They’re demanding pleasure as their right, demanding it as impetuously as though it’s not just their own young lives that they’re living but the lives of the hundred thousand dead and buried too. With a kind of horror Christine, now twenty-six, watches how they act, these newcomers, these young ones, sees their self-assurance and covetousness, their knowing and impudent eyes, the provocation in their hips, how unmistakably they laugh no matter how boldly the boys emb
race them, and how shamelessly they take the men off into the woods—she sees them on her way home. It disgusts her. Surrounded by this coarse and lustful postwar generation she feels ancient, tired, useless, and overwhelmed, unwilling and unable to compete. No more struggling, no more striving, that’s the main thing! Breathe calmly, daydream quietly, do your work, water the flowers in the window, ask not, want not. No more asking for anything, nothing new, nothing exciting. The war stole her decade of youth. She has no courage, no strength left even for happiness.

  Christine sighs as she pushes her thoughts aside. Just thinking about the horrors of her early life makes her feel tired. All the trouble Mother has caused! Why leave now and go visit an aunt she doesn’t know, be among people she isn’t comfortable with? But my God, what can she do? That’s what Mother wants and it would make her happy if she went, so Christine really shouldn’t fight it. And why fight it anyway? She’s so tired, so tired. Slowly, resignedly, the postal official takes a sheet of foolscap from the top shelf of her desk, folds it carefully in the middle, puts a sheet of ruled paper underneath as a guide, and writes, in a clear, clean hand with lovely shading, to the postal administration in Vienna, asking that, for family reasons, she immediately be permitted to begin the vacation to which she is legally entitled and requesting that a substitute be sent next week. Then she writes to her sister in Vienna, asking that she obtain a Swiss visa for her, lend her a small suitcase, and come out so they can discuss a few things having to do with their mother. And during the next few days she slowly, carefully gets everything ready for the trip, without joy, without expectation, without interest, as though this were not her life but just more work and responsibility.

  Preparations have been going on all week. The evenings are spent in energetic sewing, mending, cleaning, and fixing up of old clothes; and her sister, instead of buying anything new with the dollars Christine sent her (better to save the money, was her anxious thought), has lent her some things from her own wardrobe—a canary-yellow travel coat, a green blouse, a mosaic brooch that their mother bought in Venice when she was on her honeymoon, and a small straw suitcase. This will do, Christine thinks, in the mountains you don’t dress up, and whatever she’s missing, if it comes to that, would be better bought once she’s there. At last the day comes. The schoolteacher from the next village, Franz Fuchsthaler, carries the flat straw suitcase to the station himself; he doesn’t want to miss this chance to do a favor for a friend. A scrawny little man, anxious blue eyes hidden behind spectacles, he showed up at the Hoflehners’ to offer his help as soon as he heard the news; they’re the only people he’s friendly with in the remote vineyard village. His wife has been in the state hospital for tuberculosis at Alland for more than a year—all the doctors have given up on her case—and both his children are staying with relatives elsewhere; so almost every evening he sits in silence in his two lonely rooms, making modest little objects with the care of a craftsman. He puts plants into herbaria, inking the names in calligraphy (red for the Latin, black for the German) underneath the pressed flower petals; he binds his beloved brick-red Reclam booklets in brightly colored pasteboard with his own hands and uses a drawing pen with an ultrafine point to simulate printed letters on the spines with microscopic accuracy and remarkable detail. Late at night, when he knows the neighbors are all asleep, he plays a somewhat labored but enthusiastic violin from scores he wrote out himself, mostly Schubert and Mendelssohn, or copies the finest verses and thoughts out of borrowed books onto white textured quarto sheets, which, when he has a hundred of them, he binds into an album with a glossy cover and a brightly colored label. He’s like a Koranic calligrapher who loves the handwriting with its delicate curves and shading for the mute joy of it, its silent expressive flair. For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidized flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicolored rows; he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener’s delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands. He never goes to the village inn: he abhors beer and smoke as the holy do evil. If he’s outside and hears the boorish voices of brawlers or drunks behind a window, he hurries past with quick, outraged steps. The Hoflehners are the only people he’s been seeing since his wife fell ill. Often he drops in after dinner, to chat with them or (they’re fond of this) to read aloud from books, especially the Wildflowers of Austria’s own Adalbert Stifter. His voice is actually somewhat dry, but it soars musically when he’s in the grip of emotion. His timid and somewhat cramped soul always feels subtly more expansive when he looks up from the book and sees the young woman listening, her blond head bowed. She seems so sensitive, so attentive, and that makes him feel she understands him. Christine’s mother has noticed his growing feeling and knows that, once his wife has met her inevitable fate, he’ll look more boldly at her daughter. But Christine is stoic and says nothing: it’s been a long time since she gave any thought to herself.

  The schoolteacher carries the suitcase on one shoulder, the slightly lower one (he ignores the laughing schoolboys). It’s not much of a load, but Christine hurries ahead so nervously and impatiently that he pants to keep up with her; her departure has unexpectedly put her in a dreadful state. Three times, despite the doctor’s express orders, her mother stumbled down the stairs and followed her into the entry, inexplicably anxious to hold on to her; three times the stout old woman had to be led back up sobbing, though time was short. And then it happened, as so often in recent weeks: in the midst of her weeping and carrying on, the old woman suddenly became winded and had to be put to bed, gasping for breath. Christine left her in that condition, and now her worry is becoming a guilty feeling: “My God, I’ve never seen her so upset, what if something happens to her and I’m not there? Or if she needs something at night—my sister isn’t coming from Vienna till Sunday. The bakery girl, she gave me her solemn word she’d stay with her in the evening, but you can’t depend on her; she’ll abandon her own mother if there’s a chance to go dancing. No, I shouldn’t have done it, I shouldn’t have let myself be talked into it. Traveling, that’s something for people who don’t have someone sick at home, not for people like us, especially if it’s so far away you can’t go home whenever you want. And what will I get out of all this gadding about anyway? How am I supposed to enjoy myself if I can’t relax, if I’ve got to be thinking every minute about whether she might need something, and nobody’s there at night, and they don’t hear the bell downstairs, or they don’t want to hear it? They don’t like us in the house, the landlord and the landlady; if they had their way they’d have rented our rooms to someone else long ago. And the secretary from Linz, I asked her to look in for a minute in the evening and at midday, but all she said was, ‘All right,’ that cold prune-face, the kind of thing that didn’t tell you whether she really would or not. Maybe I ought to wire them to call it off? What does my aunt care whether I come or not? Mother’s kidding herself that we matter to them. If we did, they’d have written once in a while during all that time in America, or sent a care package during the bad years the way thousands of people did. All those packages I handled myself, and never one for Mother from her very own sister. No, I shouldn’t have given in, and I’d call it off now if it was up to me. I don’t know why, but I’ve got such a bad feeling. I shouldn’t go, I shouldn’t go.”

  The shy little blond man gasps out reassuring things as he hastens to keep up. No, don’t worry, he’ll look in on her mother that day himself, that’s a promise. She has the right if anyone does to give herself a vacation at long last, she hasn’t had a day of rest in years. He’d be the first to tell her if it was irresponsible. But not to worry, he’ll send news every day, every day. He blurts out whatever comes into his head to set her mind at ease, and in fact his urgent talk does her some good. She’s not really listening to what he’s saying, but she feels she has someone she can depend on.

  At the station, the train already has the signal. Christine’s timid esc
ort clears his throat in discomfort and embarrassment. She notices that he’s been shifting from one foot to the other—he has something to say but lacks the courage to say it. At last, during a pause, he bashfully takes a white folded object out of his breast pocket. She must forgive him, of course it’s not a gift, just a little something, maybe it’ll come in handy. Surprised, she opens the long handmade paper construction. It’s a map of her route from Linz to Pontresina, to be unfolded accordion-style. All the rivers, mountains, and cities along the train route are microscopically labeled in black ink, the mountains shaded in with finer or coarser hatching corresponding to their altitude and with meter figures shown in tiny numerals, the rivers drawn in blue pencil, the cities marked in red; distances are indicated in a separate table at bottom right, exactly as on the Geographical Institute’s large maps for schools, but here neatly, painstakingly, lovingly copied by a little assistant schoolmaster. Christine blushes with surprise. Her pleasure encourages the timid little man and he produces another small map, this one square and trimmed in gold braid: a map of the Engadine, copied from the large-scale Swiss ordnance map, with every hill and dale artfully reproduced down to the tiniest detail. In the center is a building given special distinction by a tiny circle around it in red ink: that’s the hotel where she’ll be staying, he explains, he located it in an old Baedeker. This is so she’ll always be able to find her bearings on outings and never have to worry about getting lost. She’s truly moved and thanks him. This sweet man must have secretly spent days in libraries in Linz or Vienna finding models to copy, must have sharpened his pencils a hundred times and bought special drafting pens to draw and ink these maps, tenderly, patiently, for nights on end, just to produce from his meager means something that was suitable and practical and would delight her. Her journey hasn’t even begun, but he’s anticipated it as though experiencing it himself, at her side for every kilometer of the trip; her route and what will happen to her must have been in his thoughts day and night. She’s touched, and as she now extends her hand to him in thanks (he’s still in shock over his own daring) she sees his eyes behind his glasses as though for the first time. They’re the fine mild blue of a child’s, a blue suddenly deeper and tinged with emotion. Abruptly she feels a new warmth, an affection and trust unlike anything she’s felt for a man. At that moment what was only a vague feeling becomes a decision. She’s never held his hand so long, with such earnestness and gratitude. He too senses the changed mood, feels hot at the temples, gets flustered, breathes deeply, and struggles to find the right thing to say. But the locomotive is already snorting like an angry black beast, with air eddying off both sides and almost blowing the paper out of her hand. There’s only a moment left. Christine boards hurriedly. Through the window she sees only a fluttering white handkerchief, quickly vanishing in the steam and distance. Then she’s alone, for the first time in many years.