The Post Office Girl

by Stefan Zweig

  Her brother-in-law comes up. “Fair’s fair, Christl, you can’t take nothing at all. You’ve got to keep something to remember your mother by—the watch, maybe, or at least the chain.”

  “No,” she says firmly, “I don’t want anything, I won’t take anything. You’ve got children, that’s the point. I don’t need anything. I don’t need a thing anymore.”

  When she turns around again, it’s all over; her sister-in-law and her sister have wrapped up their shares and put them in the rucksacks. Now the dead woman is really buried. The four of them stand around, embarrassed and somewhat shamefaced. They’re glad the awkward business has been taken care of so quickly and agreeably, but they don’t feel entirely at ease. Before the train leaves they’ll have to find something solemn to say to dispel the memory of the wheeling and dealing, or perhaps just talk among themselves like relatives. At last Christine’s brother-in-law has a thought and asks her, “So you haven’t told us, what was it like up there in Switzerland?”

  “Very nice,” she brings out through her teeth, hard as a knife.

  “I believe it,” her brother-in-law says with a sigh, “we’d all like to go there sometime—go anywhere! But you can’t manage it with a wife and two children, it would be too expensive, forget about going to a posh place like that. How much do they charge for a night in your hotel?”

  “I don’t know,” Christine whispers with the last of her strength. She feels her nerves are about to snap. If only they were gone, gone! Thankfully Franz looks at his watch. “Oh oh, all aboard, we have to get to the station. But Christl, don’t put yourself out, no need to see us off in weather like this. Stay here now and come to Vienna sometime! Now that Mother’s dead, we’ve got to stick together.”

  “Yes, yes,” Christine says with stony impatience and goes with them as far as the door. They’re all loaded down with things on their shoulders or in their hands and the wooden steps creak under their weight. At last they’ve gone. Christine throws the window open. The smell is suffocating, the smell of stale cigarette smoke, bad food, wet clothes, the smell of the old woman’s dread and worry and wheezing, the awful smell of poverty. How terrible it is to have to live here, and why, who’s it for? Why breathe this in day after day, knowing that there’s another world out there somewhere, the real one, and in herself another person, who is suffocating, being poisoned, in this miasma. Her nerves are jangling. She throws herself down onto the bed fully clothed, biting down hard on the pillow to keep from screaming with helpless hatred. Because suddenly she hates everyone and everything, herself and everyone else, wealth and poverty, everything about this hard, unendurable, incomprehensible life.

  PART TWO

  STUCK-UP HUSSY. How obnoxious!” Michael Pointner the grocer banged the door shut behind him. “The audacity of that sharp-tongued creature! I’ve never heard of such a thing. What a witch.”

  Herdlitschka the baker was waiting for him in front of the post office. “Now, now, don’t get excited. What is it this time,” he said soothingly, smiling broadly. “Did somebody bite you?”

  “But it’s true. Of all the nerve! In all my life I’ve never seen such unmitigated gall. Every time it’s something different. She doesn’t like this, she doesn’t like that. All she wants is to be a pain and act sniffy. The day before yesterday it was because I used pencil instead of pen on the customs form for the candles. Today she tells me she’s in charge here and she doesn’t have to accept poor packaging. What if she is in charge? My word, before she started sticking her silly nose in I must have mailed a thousand packages. And the sound of her, so la-di-da, such fancy German, to show us we’re clods next to her. Who does she think she’s talking to? But I’ve had it. She’s not going to put on that act with me.”

  Fat Herdlitschka’s eyes gleamed with complacent schadenfreude. “Well, maybe she just felt like it, you’re such a dashing fellow. You never know where you are with those ladies-in-waiting. Maybe she’s taken a shine to you and that’s why she’s being a pain.”

  “Please, no stupid jokes,” the grocer said sullenly. “I’m not the only one she goes after. Only yesterday the administrator of the plant was telling me she snapped at him just because he was kidding her a little. ‘I won’t have that, I’m in charge here’—as though he were her shoeshine boy. The devil’s gotten into her, something’s wrong. But I’ll drive him out again, you can depend on it. She’ll take a different tone with me or she’ll be sorry. I’m going to have a word with somebody in the head office if I have to walk to Vienna.”

  Pointner was right. Something was wrong with Postal Official Christine Hoflehner. The entire village had known it for two weeks. At first no one said anything. My God, the poor girl lost her mother—that’s what’s bothering her, people thought. The minister had stopped by twice to comfort her; every day Fuchsthaler asked if there was anything he could do; the next-door neighbor offered to sit with her in the evening to keep her company; the woman at the Golden Ox had even asked if she didn’t want to board there so she wouldn’t have to maintain her own household. But she hadn’t even given them a proper answer, and everyone had felt she just wanted to get rid of them. Something was wrong with Postal Official Christine Hoflehner. She hadn’t been going to the choral society once a week as she used to; she said she was hoarse. She hadn’t been to church for three weeks, hadn’t even had a mass said for her mother. She told Fuchsthaler, who wanted to read to her, that she had a headache, and when he offered to walk with her she said she was tired. No one spoke to her now; when she did her shopping she acted as if she was rushing to catch a train and said nothing to anyone, and at work, where she’d been known for her courtesy and helpfulness, she was now invariably aloof, brusque, and overbearing.

  Something had happened to her; she knew it herself. It was as though someone had sprinkled some venom into her eyes while she slept, so that now she saw the world in its light: everything was ugly, malignant, and hostile when viewed with malignant and hostile eyes. She began every day in a rage. The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was the steep smoke-stained beams of her attic room. Everything in it—the old bed, the poor quilt, the wicker chair, the washstand with the cracked jug, the peeling wallpaper, the wooden floor-boards—it was all odious. She would have liked to close her eyes and sink back into the dark. But the alarm clock wouldn’t permit it, clamoring loudly in her ears. She got up furiously, got dressed furiously: the old underthings, the repulsive black dress. She noticed a tear under one of the sleeves, but let it go. She didn’t take up the needle to mend it. Why? Who would it be for? For these hicks, anything’s too fancy. Don’t bother with that, just get out of this hideous room and go to the office.

  But the office had changed too—it was no longer the neutral restful room where the hours rolled slowly and noiselessly by as though on wheels. Whenever she turned the key and entered the terrible silence that seemed to be lying in wait for her, she’d remember a scene from a film she’d seen last year. Life Sentence, it had been called. A jailer, full-bearded, hard and aloof, accompanied by two policemen, was leading the prisoner, a frail, frightened youth, into a bare, barred cell. She and everyone else in the audience had shivered to see it, and she shivered now. That was her, jailer and prisoner in one. For the first time she’d noticed that these windows were barred too, and for the first time she’d begun seeing the office with its bare whitewashed walls as a dungeon. Everything in it had a new meaning. A thousand times she looked at the chair she sat on, the ink-stained table where she kept her papers, the wicket that she raised when the workday began. For the first time she saw that the clock never advanced, but ran in circles—from twelve to one, from one to two, and on to twelve, and then the same thing again, always the same progression without any progress, wound up again and again for the day’s work without ever getting a break, imprisoned in the same rectangular brown housing. And when at eight in the morning Christine sat down, she was tired—tired not from something achieved and accomplished, but tired in anticipation o
f everything ahead, the same faces, the same questions, the same chores, the same money. After precisely fifteen minutes, Andreas Hinterfellner the postman, gray-haired but buoyant as ever, brought the mail for sorting. She used to do it mechanically, but now she spent a long time looking at the letters and postcards, especially those addressed to Countess Gütersheim in her castle. The countess had three daughters. One was married to an Italian baron; the other two were single and traveled widely. The most recent cards came from Sorrento. Radiant arcs of blue sea sweeping into the landscape. Hôtel de Rome was the address. Christine tried to imagine the Hôtel de Rome and looked for it on the card. The young countess had made an X to show where her room was, among the broad terraces of luminous gardens and surrounded by espaliered orange trees. Christine imagined walking there in the evening, a cool breeze blowing from the blue sea, the rocks still giving off the warmth of the day, walking with …

  But there was mail to sort. Onward, onward. Here was a letter from Paris, which she knew right away was from the daughter of ———, the subject of all sorts of nasty rumors. She’d been mixed up with a Jewish oil baron, then she was a taxi dancer somewhere, and to top it off she was supposed to be with someone else now; and in fact the letter came from the Hotel Maurice, on the fanciest stationery. Christine tossed it away furiously. Next the printed matter. She set aside a few items addressed to Countess Gütersheim. Lady, Elegant Life, and the rest of the illustrated fashion magazines—what difference would it make if the Countess got them in the afternoon delivery? When the office was quiet she removed the magazines from their wrappers and opened them up, staring at the clothes, the pictures of actors and aristocrats, the well-tended country houses of English lords, the cars that belonged to famous artists. She inhaled it all like perfume, remembering. Her fingers shook nervously as she examined the women and their gowns with interest and looked almost passionately at the men, their extraordinary faces burnished by their lives of luxury or illuminated by intelligence. She put the magazines away only to take them out again. Curiosity and hate, desire and envy alternated in her as she gazed at this world that was at once so far away and so familiar.

  Then she’d be startled when a peasant clomped with heavy shoes into this world of seductive images, his pipe clamped between his teeth, his eyes bovine and sleepy, to ask for a few stamps, and reflexively she’d find something to dress him down for. “Can’t you read? No smoking!” she’d fling into the amiably bewildered face, or some other sharp remark. It would be out before she knew it, as though she were driven to wreak vengeance for the ugliness and wretchedness of her world. Afterward she’d be ashamed. The poor fellows can’t help being repulsive, uncouth, filthy from their work, up to their necks in the mud of their village, she thought. I’m no different. I’m just the same. But her despair was hardly separate from her fury, which came out at any opportunity. In accordance with the law of conservation of energy, she had to relieve the strain somehow, and from this one position of power, her pitiful little counter, she discharged it at the expense of innocent people. Up there in that other world she’d been courted and desired—that had been an acknowledgment of her existence; here she didn’t exist unless she was angry, unless she was wielding her tiny bit of official authority. It was sad, it was deplorable, it was petty, lording it over these unsuspecting good people, she knew that, but it got rid of some of her pent-up fury for a moment. If there was no one to vent it on, it came out against mute objects. A thread wouldn’t go through the eye of the needle—she snapped it. A drawer wouldn’t close—she slammed it shut with all her strength. The head office sent her the wrong consignments—she wrote an outraged, belligerent letter instead of a polite one. A telephone call didn’t go through right away—she threatened her colleague with an immediate official reprimand. She knew it was pathetic and she was horrified at how she’d changed. But she couldn’t help her hatred—she’d choke on it if she didn’t find some way to cast it out into the world.

  When work was over she fled back to her room. Before, she used to stroll for a bit while her mother was sleeping, or chat with the grocer woman or play with the neighbor’s children; now she shut herself in behind her four walls, hiding her resentment away so she wouldn’t snarl at people like a vicious dog. She couldn’t bear to look at the street with its unchanging houses and faces. The women seemed ridiculous to her in their full gingham skirts, with their greasy hair piled on top of their heads and their plump hands covered with rings, the heavy-breathing, potbellied men unbearable, and, most repellent of all, the boys with their pomaded hair and citified airs. The tavern, reeking of beer and smoke, was unendurable, and the strapping girl who submitted to the lascivious embraces and jokes of the forest ranger’s assistant and the policeman struck her as a ruddy-cheeked idiot. She preferred to shut herself up in her room, leaving the lamps unlit so she wouldn’t see the hated things in it. She sat in silence, brooding, always about the same thing. Her memories were incredibly vivid and sharp, with innumerable details that she hadn’t noticed or felt at the time amid the whirl of activity. She remembered every word, every glance. The flavors of everything she’d eaten were powerfully there; she could taste the wines and liqueurs on her lips. She remembered the sheerness and the silkiness of the dress on her bare shoulders and the softness of the white bed. All sorts of things came back to her, like the funny dogged way the little Englishman followed her down the hallway in the evening and paused in front of her door. The skin prickled on her arm as she remembered the Mannheim girl’s affectionate caresses, and it occurred to her that women were supposed to be able to fall in love with each other. Hour after hour she recapitulated every second of every day of that time; how full of wasted opportunities it had been, she realized now. So she sat in silence every evening and dreamed of that time, what it had been like, knowing it was gone—not wanting to know but knowing nonetheless. If someone knocked at the door (Fuchsthaler made repeated attempts to console her), she froze and held her breath until she heard the footsteps creaking back down the staircase. Memories were all she had left, and she wouldn’t give them up. Exhausted by them, she’d get into her bed and find herself startled by its coldness and dankness; her skin was spoiled now. She shivered so much that she had to pile her clothes and her coat on top of the covers. Finally, late at night, she’d fall asleep. But her sleep was not a good sleep; it was filled with anxious and fantastic dreams. She’d be climbing in a car, hurtling quickly, horribly quickly up and down the mountains, at once afraid of falling and exhilarated by the speed, and there was always a man next to her, the German or someone else, and he’d be holding her. She’d suddenly realize she was naked, and there would be people laughing. The car would falter, she’d shout at him to crank it up again, quickly, hurry, harder, harder, and at last deep within her she’d feel the thrust of the engine, and a flood of pure joy as it took off over the fields, into the dark wood, and then she wouldn’t be naked anymore, but he’d be clasping her to him, more and more tightly, so that she groaned and thought she was dying. Then she’d wake up, sweaty and exhausted and with aching limbs, to see the garret roof, the smoke-stained, worm-eaten slanting beams, and the cobwebbed ceiling, and would lie in bed, tired and vacant, waiting for the implacable command of the alarm clock, and then she’d climb out of the hated old bed and into her hated old clothes to meet the hated day.

  Christine kept to herself for four weeks in this morbidly overwrought and foul-tempered state. Then her dreams were spent, she’d recalled every last second of her experiences, the past could no longer sustain her. Tired, depleted, with a constant pain between her temples, she went to her work, doing it half consciously, asleep on her feet. In the evening sleep refused to come. Her nerves jangled in the quiet of the crypt-like garret; her body was hot in the cold bed. It had become unendurable. She suddenly felt an overpowering desire to look through another window at something other than the hideous tavern signboard of the Golden Ox, sleep in another bed, experience something else, be someone else for a few hours.
She was roused to action: on Friday she took the two hundred-franc notes left over from her uncle’s winnings out of the drawer, put on her best dress and her best shoes; she went straight from work to the station and bought a ticket to Vienna.

  She didn’t know why she was going there, had no clear idea what she wanted, other than to get away, away from the village, from her work, from herself, from the person she was condemned to be. She just wanted to feel wheels turning beneath her again, see lights, see different people, ones with more intelligence and style, to put up some resistance to the whims of chance, not be trampled underfoot; to move again, feel the world and herself, to be a different person, not the same old one.

  It was seven in the evening when she arrived in Vienna. She left her suitcase at a small hotel on Mariahilfer Strasse and quickly found her way to a hairdresser’s before the shutters rolled down. She had a mad hope that a pair of skilled hands and a bit of red would do it again, would turn her into the person she’d been. Again the waves of warmth spilled over her; again the clever hands caressed her hair. Lipstick deftly redrew the lips that had once been desired and kissed. Some color brightened her cheeks and a shadow of powder on her pale tired face conjured up her Engadine tan. When she stood up in a cloud of fragrance, she felt the old power in her knees, and she went down the street confidently, her back straight; if her clothes had been right, she might have believed she was Fräulein von Boolen. There was still a late glow in the September sky. It was good to walk in the cool of the evening, and with excitement she registered the brush of an interested glance now and then. I’m still alive, she thought, I’m still here. Occasionally she paused in front of a shopwindow to look at the furs, the dresses, the shoes, her eyes burning through the glass. Perhaps I can do it again after all, she thought; her spirits rose. She walked along Mariahilfer Strasse and onto the Ringstrasse. Her eyes brightened as she looked at the people strolling there, chatting and carefree and a good many of them truly attractive. They’re the same, she thought; there’s not much between us. There’s a way up somewhere, a little step to climb, you’ve just got to find it. She paused in front of the Opera. The performance was evidently about to begin, cars were driving up, blue, green, black, with glinting windows and shiny paint, to be met at the entrance by a liveried valet. Christine went into the foyer to look at the attendees. Strange, she thought, the papers talk about Viennese culture, the sophisticated public and the opera it’s created—I’m twenty-eight years old now, I’ve lived here all my life and this is the first time I’ve been here. But I’m still on the outside, only in the foyer. Out of two million people, a mere hundred thousand have seen this building. The others read about it in the papers and hear about it and look at the pictures and they never dare to come in. And who are these people? She looked at the women, and was not just disturbed but indignant. No, they aren’t any more beautiful than I was, they don’t move more lightly and freely than I did, all they have are the gowns and the invisible advantage of their confidence. Just a short step up, another step inside, and she’d be with them; up the marble staircase and into the loge, into the gilded music box, into the carefree realm of pleasure.