Poached Egg on Toast

by Frances Itani

  The second time Mr. Berkuson had tea with Ruth, she admitted that she was short of money The university paid so little; the next cheque was not due for another four days. She had a toothache, needed attention. Mr. Berkuson promised to sneak her into the American clinic. He skirted bureaucratic procedure and she had a tooth filled that same afternoon. Mr. Berkuson was an amazing man when it came to accomplishment, action. He paid for the tea and offered her twenty Mark to help her get through to the end of the week. She declined the money, but allowed him to pay for the tea.

  Frau Mueller hovers over the table as she serves Brot, presents the Senf, collects the soup bowl. Will the Frau Professor help herself to another serving of meat? Ruth shakes her head. She begins to stammer in German. She would like, oh she would like to talk to Frau Mueller. Frau Mueller has a motherly, tender face. She is large-boned and large-bodied, and behind this is a woman who has feelings, a woman who cares about others. Frau Mueller goes to the bar and brings a small pitcher of wine. The wine is local; it can be bought by the case directly from village distributors. The grapes have been harvested for centuries from the slopes surrounding the city.

  They sit together, each drinking a glass of wine; they speak in low tones. Ruth’s German improves as she sips at the wine. Frau Mueller munches on a piece of meat as she listens.

  She was married, Ruth tells Frau Mueller. She is married. She will be getting married. She confuses her tenses. There is Taig. No, there is no Taig. For Taig died, his good lung having been destroyed by metastases. It is the reason she took the overseas job. Only for one year, she’d told herself. Now she would like to go home. Heimgehen. And the letter. She picks up the letter and shows it to Frau Mueller.

  “Von Ihrem Mann?” Frau Mueller asks, wanting to help the Frau Professor, the Frau Doktor.

  Ruth opens her purse, places the letter inside, closes the purse. The letter cannot be from Taig. It must be from Martin. Martin will want to come to Europe. He probably thinks he will have a free place to stay.

  He must not come. “Er soll nicht kommen!” Ruth tells Frau Mueller. And the dreams, she wants to tell her of the dreams. How she pulls a book from the shelf, opens it to the centre pages, sees the face of Taig. How she wakes, perspiring; how she wakes holding fiercely to Taig and how his body withers until there is no one beside her.

  There is a hush throughout the dining room. Ruth stands to leave. She feels dizzy lightheaded. An inner ear problem? She does not know. She moves towards the door at the back of the café. Just before she enters the passage that leads to the stairway and the butcher shop, she turns to look behind her. There they are, the two old women in their crocheted collars; Herr Koch reading his papers; Herr Knopf drumming his fingers on the table; Frau Montag, who is thin and wispy; Oma and Opa, their hands in their laps. Everyone has finished the evening meal, but each is staring separately out through the window in the direction of the Golden Lion across the street.

  The sky has changed; the night is darker. Laughter and noise can be heard, even through closed windows and doors. The light over the door shines back into the café, and Frau Mueller’s diners sit, grey and golden, but mostly golden in that light. All tufts and whiskers and straight backs and stilled hands and silence.

  The smell of flesh encircles Ruth when she is halfway up the stairs. She is never ready for the way it assails the front of the nostrils. She sucks a breath into the bottom of her lungs. Frau Mueller has followed her through the passageway, and looks up, sympathetically.

  “Schlafen Sie gut,” she calls up after Ruth, because she can think of nothing else to say. “Sleep well.”

  “But the dreams,” Ruth begins. “How can I sleep?” She switches to German. “Die Trauben!”

  Did she say Trauben or Träume? The grapes or the dreams? Now, she is not certain. A look has crossed Frau Mueller’s face, but Ruth has missed it, does not know what it means. The grapes or the dreams—what difference does it make?

  Ruth continues up the stairs to her room. Frau Mueller is not certain of what she has just heard. She turns back to the café, wondering. Tomorrow, she will talk with her friend Frau Mohn, who will arrive with Trudi for the afternoon visit. Together, they will try to understand.

  Scenes from a Pension

  Bridget is a large woman, tall, angular, even muscular. With cheekbones like hers, surely she has been called handsome at some earlier time in her life. She is one of those international people of indeterminate age who have no home, no relatives, no history. No one thinks to ask about her personal life because it is assumed that she has no such thing. It is rumoured, from time to time among the guests who come to the Pension, that she has made her way to Austria via England and Australia, having come to the mountains because jobs for English-speaking workers are so plentiful in the ski resorts and hotels. Large numbers of winter guests travel here from England or America or from pockets of expatriates in Europe that spring up from one place to another. There must be people to work at these resorts—people who can deal with English-speaking tourists and answer their multitudinous questions.

  Actually, Bridget made her way here twelve years ago and New Guinea, not Australia, was her last stop. In any case, every year in late November she has come to this small Austrian village in time for the Early-Bird Ski Package, and here she has remained until the end of March. Where she spends the remaining months of the year, no one really cares. Except, perhaps, Maria and Maria’s father-in-law, old Opa. They respecting her privacy, do not ask, assuming that she takes her well-deserved money (Bridget can easily do the work of three, and does) and disappears to a third-rate hotel in Southern France, or perhaps to the night kitchens of Venice, or even to the Cornish coast where she might take odd jobs until the winter season begins again. Maria has stopped asking if Bridget will be back next year; she knows that one day in late November a phone call will come from the tiny railway station, and Bridget will be there, waiting to be picked up.

  This year when Bridget first returned, she saw that things had changed. For a day or two she worried that Maria might no longer need her. Maria’s husband, Wolf, was killed in a hang-gliding accident during the summer, and as Maria had no forwarding address for Bridget, she’d been unable to let her know. Maria buried the handsome middle-aged man who had been her husband and Opa’s son, and she and the old man, mourning together, through determination and despair, decided to carry on with winter business at the Pension. The death of Wolf did not alter the list of reservations. Maria freed a double room in the new extension built by Wolf, and moved herself to a single in the loft, nearer to Opa, in the older part of the house.

  Each day at six, Bridget rises, puts on a faded blue cleaning smock that hangs straight from her large-boned shoulders, and ties a handkerchief round her head, the knot showing at the front. Her hair is mostly blond, but occasional streaks of red and blond stick out through the kerchief. She wears black eye-makeup, applying it with an orangewood stick that was once given to her by a gypsy in a small village near the French-Spanish frontier. She knows how to hold the orangewood stick horizontally so that it disappears into the fold of her lower lids and slides out again, leaving her eyes miraculously intact. Bridget is amused and delighted each day that she can perform this act—the gypsy taught her well—and she would be surprised if she were to recall the number of years she has stood before the mirror with this same stick in hand.

  It is Saturday changeover day. Last week’s guests departed hurriedly in the early morning, and the new group is about to arrive. People will trickle in from all corners of the globe, between the hours of one and six, until every room is filled.

  The German and his wife the Finn are first. Three American families follow—the Markhams, Featherbys and Dickinsons. The first two are military families who have been posted to a base in West Germany; the third, the Dickinsons, have flown from Kansas City to Munich and have reached the Tyrol in a rented car. Six children accompany these three couples. There are guests from previous years, as well. The Allenb
ys, for instance, an English couple in their fifties who come from the Isle of Wight. Mrs. Allenby is the kind of woman who tries to assuage her friends’ sorrows by sating their stomachs. If your husband leaves you or your wife dies, you receive a pot of soup. If a parent wanders away from the old folks’ home, a piece of pie. Last year, when Bridget caught her foot in a doorway, Mrs. Allenby gave her a tin of sour lemon drops.

  Bridget looks over each of the groups in order of arrival. She watches them stretch stiffly after the long car journeys; she listens as they stick their noses into rooms, sniffing out shabbiness, commenting through their teeth. One thing she learned long ago: if you are a maid or kitchen help, people will talk in front of you as if you can neither see nor hear. Women are especially prone to do this. What a maid sees or thinks is discounted as if hers is not a mainstream human presence. This is a useful thing to know, though there are days when even Bridget has to ask herself if people actually see through her the way they let on they do, as they look past.

  Maria does not take part in first-day greetings or room allotments. She hovers behind the swinging doors of the kitchen, leaving it to Bridget to sort out an endless list of headaches that turn out never to be problems at all. Maria knows more English than she allows, but claims it is insufficient to deal with the rapid one-way flow of troubles that the guests themselves seem determined to create.

  “Do you sell beer?” will be the first question from the men as they stumble from their cars, hitching up their trousers. Bridget shows them to the kitchen refrigerator and initiates the chit system, the honour system, and they write out their room numbers at the top of each little pad.

  “Do you have white toast for the children’s breakfast?” the women ask.

  “How much are the tows? A guy told me this place where you can get a deal on a week’s pass for three different slopes.”

  “One of my bindings has snapped. Goddammit, Angela, didn’t you check these before I loaded them into the car this morning? Where am I going to get these fixed?”

  “Could we have a bigger towel, please, for the bath? There’s only a shower in the hall?”

  “What time is dinner? Breakfast? Would you mind writing out the hours? We don’t want to miss any of our meals.”

  “You don’t supply facecloths? But we didn’t bring any. What about American cigarettes—can we get those?”

  Yes, it gives Bridget a headache—changeover day. A screeching headache by dinner time every Saturday night.

  But it is Maria who soothes the guests in the evenings. Wearing fresh Dirndl, diamond knee socks and Austrian shoes with golden buckles, she brings out her home cooking, carrying it to each table herself. And not a guest has ever complained. Opa and Bridget, behind the swinging door, grin and marvel at Maria who can bring the tables to silence as she whirls through the room with rustling skirt and steaming plate. Maria gives Opa a wink as she kicks the door shut behind her, coming into the kitchen, while Bridget, knowing that the meal is irreversibly underway pours herself a three-finger gin and begins to clean the pots.

  Opa and Maria are the only hardy survivors of two disparate families; they share a bond of toughness which holds them the more tightly as others they love have fallen away. Bridget becomes part of this during the winter months each year, a kind of third wall to the triangle. The three serve and clean, launder and cook, and fall to bed under the eaves, exhausted each night after the last guest has made unsteady progress up the stairs to bed.

  It is the Mighty Sabbath. As Bridget wakes, she thinks, with a wry distortion of face, that it might be as much a pain in the neck as changeover day, unless the skiers are fed and shooed out to the hills before they change their minds.

  At six-twenty she taps on Opa’s door until she hears the old man mumbling, reaching for his teeth. She slips downstairs to the kitchen, where she makes two large urns of strong coffee, the fragrance of which, as it drifts from first to third floor, summons the guests room by room. The aroma of coffee wakes Maria, too. Try as she might, Maria cannot manage to be first in the kitchen. Bridget and Opa think that Maria has enough to do looking after the accounts and the business; they wish her as much sleep as she can take from the long and thankless hours of the days and nights.

  Before Maria comes down to the kitchen this Sunday morning, Opa and Bridget stand at the window looking out over the valley. The Pension has been built on a slope, dominated by the peak of Disappearing Mountain, which also dominates every village for thirty or forty miles in all directions. For a moment, as the two watch, the clouds that bury the face of Disappearing Mountain shift slightly in the wind; or perhaps they trick the observers into thinking they have seen the stark grey face of the old mountain that is just as quickly lost to them again, its uppermost profile invisible as before.

  Opa has looked out at Disappearing Mountain since he was a child, and he knows that it reveals itself to few. Somehow, in the old man’s mind, Wolf’s death is linked to Disappearing Mountain, even though Wolf was killed on another peak in a nearby village to the south. Some evenings, after the dishes have been dried and put away, and when the tables have been set for morning, Opa sits in the kitchen rocker and cries. He cries for Maria who is alone, and he cries for himself because he believes that sons should bury their fathers, and not fathers their sons.

  “Bridget, why you didn’t wake me?” Maria asks as she hurries into the kitchen. But Bridget only grins, and hands Maria a mug of coffee.

  They hear the first guests enter the dining room beyond the kitchen door—children’s voices and a mother’s firm direction. It is the one called Ruby, Bridget knows. Ruby Featherby. She and her husband, Brighton, had been first to dinner last night, as well. They had stationed themselves at a corner table at the head of which Ruby had placed herself. Brighton sat at her left, and the children faced the row of potted geraniums along the windowsill. From this position, Ruby took charge of the room as people drifted in. She introduced herself and Brighton over and over again (college sweethearts, she told everyone), urging people to give up their first names and their background cities, urging the group feeling, unity for the week they will share at the Pension.

  Not all guests had responded in like manner. The German and his wife the Finn waved a hand in the air as if to wipe out their part in this unguarded familiarity, and chose a small table for two at the opposite side of the room where they spoke in low tones to each other and to no one else during the meal. Five of the six children protested with cries and complaints until they were given a table to themselves. This meant that Angela and Spence Markham, friends of the Featherbys, would now join Ruby and Brighton at their table. The other American couple, Harry and Shelby Dickinson, sat with their six-year-old son, Chippy, in the centre of the room. Shelby, although dressed in expensive sports clothes, looked drab and seemed to be unhappy. All of the Americans, Bridget had noticed, observing every detail from the kitchen, were in sock feet.

  Now, at Sunday breakfast, on the stroke of seven, the door is pushed open and Maria, Opa and Bridget carry out baskets of rolls, pots of marmalade, coffee and eggs. The kitchen door, portent of cheer, reminder of Mother’s blueberry pie, swings back and forth like the refrain of a lively tune everyone has on the tip of the tongue. Maria, watching her guests, marvels as she does every week, that several are already using first names, behaving as if they have known one another a lifetime. There are shouts between tables, laughter, challenges to be taken up later, on the slopes. The Markhams are telling everyone that they had a fight in the bedroom the night before.

  “My Angela’s a terror, I tell you,” says Spence Markham, stroking at his jaw and with proud mockery in his voice. “Didn’t you hear her take after me in our room last night?”

  “But where,” thinks Maria, “where are their real selves? It’s as if they have all shot out from under one granny’s apron.” She wonders why, when they were children, they had never been taught to deal with their own pain. For if they give away their laughter so readily, must they not
give away their sorrow as well?

  Maria has difficulty these days keeping her own pain in order, but she would not dream of behaving so publicly. Even the day the village men and their women came to tell her about Wolf, she kept her pain to herself.

  She had been hooking a rug in her room—it was after the extension had been built—and she’d raised her head from her work to look out at Disappearing Mountain. To her surprise, the triple-peaked hulk suddenly shone forth in the sun, and was as quickly covered again in mist and cloud. She’d felt Wolf in the room. He had stood behind her in the doorway where she could not see him, and he said, “You are not to worry, Maria. You will be all right.”

  When the others came to her doorstep to tell her the news, she had already known what they had to say.

  Bridget is refilling coffee cups, gritting her teeth as she passes the children’s table, teasing the lanky Mr. Featherby.

  “Don’t you go and break a leg today, Mr. Featherby. With this rowdy bunch to look after.”

  A frown shadows Ruby Featherby’s face at the mention of a broken leg. It is one of Ruby’s trials that she cannot control the thoughts of disaster that hang uppermost in her mind: accidents involving Brighton and the children; burning cars from which they cannot escape; decapitations; drownings. It is an ill omen, she thinks, if anyone else comes the slightest bit close to guessing her thoughts of tragedy and horror.

  The German and the Finn sit silently throughout breakfast. They are heavy, bulky people and are dressed in thick ski clothing, bracing themselves, it seems, for the day ahead.