The Post Office Girl

by Stefan Zweig

  She was still clutching him, but now her arms stiffened. Silently she let go.

  “Don’t you understand how I feel?” he asked, raising his eyes calmly. “You’ve always been honest with me.”

  After a moment she said simply, “From time to time it crosses my mind too. Only I never dared to think about it so clearly. You’re right—there’s no sense in going on this way.”

  He looked at her uncertainly. He desperately wanted to believe. He said, “You would too?”

  “Yes, with you.”

  She said it calmly and firmly, as though she were talking about going for a walk. “By myself I’m not brave enough, I don’t know … I haven’t given any thought to how it’s done, or I might have done it a long time ago.”

  “You’d …” He was stammering with happiness as he seized her hands.

  “Yes,” she repeated calmly, “whenever you want, but together. I won’t lie to you any longer. The transfer to Vienna wasn’t approved, and here in the village I’m perishing. Better quickly than slowly. And I never did write to America. I know they won’t help me, they’ll send ten or twenty dollars—what good’s that going to do? I don’t want to agonize, I’d rather it was quick, you’re right!”

  He gazed at her for a long time. He’d never looked at her with such feeling. His hard face relaxed, and a smile began to show behind the challenge in his eyes. He stroked her hands. “I never thought that you … that you’d go so far with me. Now it’s twice as easy for me. I was worried about you.”

  They sat with fingers entwined. A passerby would have taken them for newly engaged lovers who had walked up the little Stations of the Cross path to seal their betrothal. They’d never felt so untroubled, so confident together; for the first time they were sure of each other and sure of the future. They sat for a long time gazing at each other, their expressions calm, clear, and at peace, their hands joined. Then she asked quietly, “How … how do you want to do it?”

  He reached into his back pocket and brought out an army revolver. The November sun glinted on the polished barrel. There was nothing frightening about the weapon.

  “In the temple,” he said. “Don’t be afraid, I have a steady hand, I won’t shake … And then in my heart. It’s an army revolver of the heaviest caliber, you can feel safe. It’ll be all over before they hear the two shots in the village. There’s no reason to be afraid.”

  She looked calmly at the gun, with practical curiosity but without agitation. Then, glancing up, she glimpsed the man of sorrows and the cross rising massively above the stone bench on which they sat.

  “Not here,” she said quickly, “not here and not now. Because …” (she looked at him, her hand tighter than his) “first I’d like to be together again … really together, without fear and without loathing … A whole night … Maybe we’ve still got something to say to each other … Those last things that people otherwise never get to say … And then … I’d like to be with you once, with just you for one night … Then they’ll find us in the morning.”

  “Yes,” he replied. “You’re right, one should get the best out of life before throwing it away. Forgive me for not thinking of that.”

  Again they sat in silence. A breeze caressed them, the sun was warm and pleasant. They felt good—happy and miraculously untroubled. Then the church bells in the village rang, once, twice, three times. She gave a start. “A quarter of two!”

  A bright laugh lit up his face. “See, that’s what we’re like. You’re brave and you’re not afraid to die, but you’re afraid of being late for work. That’s how enslaved we are, that’s how ingrained it is. It really is time to shake all that nonsense off. Do you really want to go back there?”

  “Yes,” she said, “it’s better that way. I’d like to put everything in order first. It’s silly, but I don’t know…I’ll feel better once I’ve straightened things up and written a few letters. And then…if I’m there until six this evening, no one will suspect and go looking for me. And tonight we can go to Krems or St. Pölten or to Vienna. I still have enough money for a good room, and we’ll have dinner and do what we want to do for once…It has to be nice, completely nice, and when they find us tomorrow morning nothing will matter. Come by at six. It won’t make any difference if they see me, let them say and think whatever they want…Then I’ll close the door behind me and everything else will be behind me too…Then we’ll really be free.”

  He kept gazing at her. Her unexpected resolve made his heart lift.

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll come at six. Until then I’ll go for a walk and have one more look at the world. So—auf Wiedersehen.”

  She ran down the path, feeling serene and lighthearted. When she looked back, he was watching. He pulled out his handkerchief and waved it. “Auf Wiedersehen! Auf Wiedersehen!”

  Christine went in. Now everything was easy. The desk, the chair, the counter, the scale, the telephone, the piles of paper, all the objects no longer lay in wait for her like enemies. They did not mock her silently (thousands, thousands, thousands of times): she knew now that the door was open. One step and she’d be free.

  She felt wonderfully calm, as serene as a meadow falling into shadow in the evening. Work seemed as easy as play. She wrote a few letters—one to her sister, one to the post office, one to Fuchsthaler to say goodbye—and she marveled at the clarity of her handwriting, the evenness of the lines, the precise calligraphic spacing of the words, as effortlessly neat as her homework had been back in school. All the while people were coming in with their mail or requesting telephone connections, piling up parcels on the counter, paying bills. And each time she helped them with special attention and courtesy. Without being aware of it she wanted these insignificant people who meant nothing to her—Thomas, Frau Huber, the forest ranger’s assistant, the grocer’s apprentice, the butcher’s wife—she wanted them to have a pleasant memory of her; it was her last trace of feminine vanity. And when one of them said “Auf Wiedersehen” and she responded “Auf Wiedersehen” with twice as much feeling, she smiled a special little smile because now she was breathing a different air, the air of deliverance. Then she took up the unfinished backlog, counted and estimated, put everything in order. Her desk had never been so neat. She even wiped off the ink stains and straightened the calendar on the wall—her successor would have nothing to complain about. No one would have anything to complain about, because she was happy now. She was putting her life in order and everything here should be in order too.

  She worked so happily, so briskly and diligently, that she lost track of time and was surprised to hear the door.

  “Is it really six already? My goodness, I hadn’t noticed. Another ten, twenty minutes and I’ll be finished with everything, I’d like to leave everything just so, you see. Let me close out the books and lock up the cash and I’ll be all yours.”

  He was going to go wait outside. “No, no, sit down, I’ll lower the shutters outside, and it doesn’t matter if they see us leave together, tomorrow they’ll know it all anyway.”

  “Tomorrow,” he smiled. “I’m glad there won’t be a tomorrow. For us anyway. The walk was wonderful, the sky, the colors, the woods. He was quite an architect, old God, a little old-fashioned, but better than I ever could have been.”

  She took him into the inner sanctum behind the glass, where no other outsider had ever set foot. “I don’t have a chair to offer you, our Republic isn’t that generous, but sit down on the windowsill and have a smoke. I’ll be done in ten minutes” (she breathed a sigh of provisional relief) “done with everything.”

  She added the columns one after another; it went quickly and easily. Then she took the black money pouch out of the till and balanced the books. She stacked up the banknotes—the fives, tens, hundreds, and thousands—on the desk, moistened her index finger on the sponge, and counted the blue bills with practiced deftness, quickly and mechanically, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty; she jotted down the total for each denomination, already impatient to c
heck the figure in the books against the cash on hand and draw the bottom line, that final, liberating stroke of the pencil.

  She heard a sound behind her and glanced up to find Ferdinand looking over her shoulder. He was breathing hard.

  “What is it?” she said in alarm.

  “Allow me” (his voice was dry) “allow me to look for a moment. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a thousand-schilling note and I’ve never seen so many all at once.”

  He held one delicately between his fingers as though afraid it would break, and she saw his hand trembling. What was wrong with him? He was looking so oddly at the blue bill. His narrow nostrils quivered and there was a strange light in his eyes.

  “So much money … Do you always have this much here?”

  “Yes, of course, and this isn’t even that much, 11,570 schillings. At the end of the quarter, when the winegrowers pay their taxes or the factory sends out wages, it can be as much as forty, fifty, even sixty thousand. Once it was eighty thousand.”

  He stared at the desk. He kept his hands behind his back, as though he were frightened.

  “And it doesn’t … it doesn’t make you nervous to have all that money in your desk? You’re not afraid?”

  “Afraid? Of what? The building is protected—see those thick iron bars—and Weidenhof and his family live over the grocery next door, they’d certainly hear if someone broke in. And at night it’s always put away. No, nothing’s going to happen.”

  “I’d be afraid,” he said tensely.

  “Nonsense. Of what?”

  “Of myself.”

  Glancing at him, she saw that his mouth was half open. His eyes avoided hers. He began to pace.

  “I couldn’t stand it, not for an hour. I couldn’t breathe with so much money around me. All the time I’d be thinking, that’s a thousand schillings, just a rectangular scrap of paper, and if I stuffed it in my pocket I’d be free, for three months, half a year, a whole year, I could do what I wanted and have my own life, and with that much—what did you say?—11,570 schillings, we could live for two years, three years, we could see the world and really be alive for every minute of it, not the way we’ve been living but the way we want to live, we could live the lives of the people we were born to be, let those people come out of us, become those people, instead of being stuck. All you’d have to do is reach out and take it, like this, one little movement and off you’d go, free. No, I never could have stood it, it would have driven me mad looking at it, having it so close, smelling it, feeling it, knowing it belongs to that idiot puppet, the government, which doesn’t breathe and isn’t alive and doesn’t want or know anything, the stupidest thing people have ever invented, something that crushes people. I would have gone out of my mind … I would have locked myself in at night to stop myself from taking the key and opening the drawer, and you—you were able to live with it! Haven’t you ever considered it?”

  “No,” she said, shocked. “Never.”

  “Well, the government was just lucky. Scoundrels always are. But finish up now” (he said it almost angrily) “finish up, put the money away. I can’t look at it any longer.”

  She closed the drawer quickly, with shaking fingers. Then they left for the train station. It was already dark. Through the lighted windows people could be seen at their dinner tables, and as they passed the last window a soft, rhythmic murmur rolled out: the evening prayer. He said nothing, she said nothing—it was as if they were not alone. There was an idea traveling with them like a shadow. They felt it in front of them and behind them, inside them, and it was still with them as they took the road out of the village and without thinking quickened their pace.

  Beyond the last house, they were in darkness. The sky was brighter than the earth, and the trees along the road stood out against its glassy light; like charred fingers, the black skeletons of the bare branches reached into the still air. Scattered peasants and wagons moved along the road, heard more than seen. Footsteps and the rumbling of the heavy carts told them that they were not alone.

  “Isn’t there a path across the fields to the station? A path no one uses?”

  “Yes,” said Christine, “turn here, off to the right.” She was glad he’d said something. For a second she could stop thinking about the dangerous, shadowy idea that had been silently dogging them since they left the post office.

  Ferdinand walked alongside her in silence, as though he’d forgotten her. His hand never brushed hers. Then abruptly he asked (the words fell heavily, like a stone), “Do you think that at the end of the month there might be as much as thirty thousand?”

  She knew what he had in mind, but she controlled her voice to keep from showing it. “Yes, I think so.”

  “And if you delay the deposits too … If you hold on to the taxes or whatever you’ve got there for a few extra days—they won’t be keeping such close track of things if I know anything about Austria—then how much would you be able to scrape together?”

  She considered. “Well, at least forty thousand. Maybe even fifty … But why?”

  He was almost stern. “You know why.”

  She didn’t dare to contradict him—he was right, she did know why. They went on in silence. They passed a pond where frogs were croaking madly. Their snoring, taunting sound was almost painful. Abruptly Ferdinand stopped.

  “Christine, let’s not kid each other. Things look bad for both of us, really bad, so we’ve got to be really straight with each other. Let’s think clearly and calmly.”

  He lit a cigarette, and in the light she could see the tension in his face. “Let’s think, yes. Today we made up our minds to end it all, we were going to ‘take our lives,’ to use that cliché. But that’s not true. We didn’t want to take our lives, you and I. We just wanted out of our ruined lives at last, and there was no other way out. It was poverty we wanted out of—not life but this life, the senseless, abominable, unbearable, inescapable life we have. That’s all. And we thought the gun was the only way. But that was wrong. Now we know there’s another way after all, one last chance. The only question is whether we have the courage to seize the opportunity, and how to go about it.”

  She was silent. He dragged on his cigarette.

  “It’s going to have to be thought through and worked out completely coolly and realistically, like a mathematical problem … I won’t keep anything from you—frankly, I have to say that this is probably going to take more guts than the other way. The other business is easy. Twitch one finger, a flash, and it’s over. This way is harder, because it’s longer. You’re kept in suspense, not just for a second but for weeks, months, and all the time you’ve got to be hiding, you’ve got to be looking out for yourself. Something indefinite is always worse than something definite, a strong fear that doesn’t last very long is easier than one that’s nebulous but doesn’t go away. So what we’ve got to do first is consider whether we’re strong enough, whether we can stand up to the strain, and whether it’ll be worthwhile. Whether to end our lives smoothly and quickly, or start again. That’s the concern I have.”

  He started walking again and she followed automatically. Her legs were doing the walking; her mind waited helplessly for what he was going to say next. She was so appalled, so drained of will that she couldn’t think.

  Now he stopped. “Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t have a trace of moral scruple, when it comes to the state I feel completely free. It’s committed such terrible crimes against us all, against our generation, that we have a right to anything. I’m not worried about doing it damage, we’ll just be recovering some damages for our entire battered generation. Who taught me how to steal, who made me do it, if not the state? Commandeering, that’s the word they used during the war, or expropriating—Versailles called it reclamation. Who taught us how to cheat if not the state—how else would we know that money saved up by three generations could become worthless in a mere two weeks, that families could be swindled out of pastures, houses, and fields that had been theirs for a hundred yea
rs? Even if I kill someone, who trained me to do it? Six months on the drill field and then years at the front! We have an excellent case against the state, by God, we’ll win in every court. It can never pay off its terrible debt, never give back what it took from us. Once there might have been a reason to have some qualms, back when the state was a good custodian, thrifty, decent, proper. Now that it’s behaved like a hoodlum, we have the right to be hoodlums too. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? There’s no reason for us not to even the score—I don’t have the tiniest doubt about that, and I don’t think you should. Why shouldn’t I go ahead and take my disability pension? It’s mine by rights, though the hallowed Treasury denies it, along with the money that was stolen from your father and mine and the living birthright that I and everybody like me was robbed of. No, I’m telling you my conscience is clear. Does the state worry about whether we live or die, and die a wretched death too? And if we steal a hundred slips of blue paper or a thousand or ten thousand, nobody in the country’s going to be any poorer for it—they’ll feel it as little as the meadow misses the grass the cow grazes on. So that doesn’t disturb me at all, and I think if I stole ten million I’d sleep as soundly as a bank director or a general who’s lost thirty battles. All I’m thinking about is us, you and me. We can’t go off half-cocked like some fifteen-year-old sales clerk who steals ten schillings from the till and blows it an hour later without ever knowing why or what for. We’re too old for that kind of thing. We’ve got just two cards left to play and it’s one or the other. A decision like this has to be made carefully.”

  He walked on to collect his thoughts. She could feel his concentration, and his cool logic chilled her. She surrendered as never before to her sense of his superiority.