The Post Office Girl

by Stefan Zweig

  Christine gets up stiffly. She’s exhausted, light-headed; the four steps to the armoire seem like a great journey. She weakly pulls the door open and is shocked to see the Klein-Reifling dress and the hated blouse she came in, dangling there as white and ghastly as a hanged man. Taking them off the rod she shudders as if touching a dead thing. She is going to have to get back into that dead Hoflehner person! But there’s no choice. The dress rustles like satiny paper as she takes it off. One after another she sets aside all the other new clothes, the underthings, the sweater, the pearls, the ten or twenty pretty things she’s acquired. The shabby straw suitcase is quickly packed. She takes only the genuine gifts, a mere handful that fit easily.

  Done. She surveys the room again. Dress, dancing shoes, belt, pink chemise, sweater, gloves—all lie helter-skelter on the bed as though an explosion had ripped that fantastic creature Fräulein von Boolen to shreds. Christine shudders at the remains of the phantom that she was. She looks around to make sure she hasn’t forgotten anything that belongs to her. But nothing does. Others will sleep in this bed, others will see the golden landscape through this window, others will see themselves reflected in this mirror, but not her, never again. This isn’t goodbye, this is dying.

  The hallways are still empty as she steps out with her ancient little suitcase. She goes to the stairs automatically, but in her poor clothes she feels that she, Christine Hoflehner, no longer has the right to use the carpeted, brass-railed steps, the grand staircase. Instead she takes the winding cast-iron servants’ stairs near the lavatory. In the lobby downstairs, gray and only half cleaned, the nodding night clerk starts up suspiciously. What was that? A young woman, indifferently or even poorly dressed, a shabby suitcase in hand, is darting shamefacedly to the door like a shadow, without a word to him. He leaps forward and blocks the revolving door with a shoulder.

  “Excuse me, where do you wish to go?”

  “I’m leaving on the seven o’clock train.” The clerk is stunned to realize that a hotel guest (a lady!) wants to carry her own luggage to the station. He asks suspiciously, “May I … may I have your room number?”

  Christine understands now. Ah, the man takes her for an intruder. And he’s right too! But the thought doesn’t anger her. On the contrary, she has an unpleasant desire to be mistreated. Give me trouble, make it hard for me, all the better. She answers calmly, “Room 286, billed to my uncle, Anthony van Boolen. Christine Hoflehner.”

  “One moment.” The night clerk releases the door to check his book, but she feels his eye on her. Then he gives a nervous bow and says politely, his tone different now, “Oh, madam, I beg your pardon, I see the day clerk was informed that you’d be checking out … I thought, because it’s so early … and also … madam will surely not be taking her own luggage, the car will bring it twenty minutes before the train leaves. Please proceed to the breakfast room. Madam has plenty of time for breakfast.”

  “No, nothing more. Goodbye!” She leaves without a glance. He gazes after her in astonishment, shakes his head, and goes back to his desk.

  Nothing more. Good. Nothing, from anyone. She keeps her eyes down as she walks to the station, the suitcase in one hand, the umbrella in the other. The mountains are already bright and in a moment the blue will break through the restless clouds, the wonderful gentian blue of the Engadine that, without putting a name to it, Christine loved, but perversely she keeps her eyes down, to see nothing more, receive nothing more, from anyone, even God. She doesn’t want to see it, doesn’t want to be reminded that from now on and forever these mountains are for other people, the playing fields and the games, the hotels and their glittering rooms, the thundering avalanches and the hushed forests, not for her, ever again! As she passes in her cheap raincoat, with her old umbrella, on her way to the station, she averts her eyes from the tennis courts, where, she knows, proud bronzed people in glowing white, cigarettes in their mouths, will soon be exercising their supple limbs; from the shops, still closed, with their thousands of luxuries (for other people, other people), the hotels and markets and cafés. Away from here, away from here. Don’t look, forget it all.

  At the station she hides in the third-class waiting room. Here in the eternal third class, the same all over the world, with its hard benches, its shabby neutrality, she feels almost at home. When the train pulls in, she hurries to board: no one must see her or recognize her. But suddenly she hears her name—is it a hallucination? Hoflehner, Hoflehner. Someone’s calling her name, her hated name—is it possible?—the length of the train. She trembles. Is someone still jeering at her, even as she’s leaving? But it comes again clearly, so she leans out the window. The desk clerk is standing there waving a telegram. She must excuse him, he says, it came yesterday evening, but the night clerk didn’t know where to deliver it; he just now learned that madam was leaving. Christine opens the envelope. “Sudden deterioration, come quickly, Fuchsthaler.” And then the train leaves … It’s over. Everything is over.

  There’s an inherent limit to the stress that any material can bear. Water has its boiling point, metals their melting points. The elements of the spirit behave the same way. Happiness can reach a pitch so great that any further happiness can’t be felt. Pain, despair, humiliation, disgust, and fear are no different. Once the vessel is full, the world can’t add to it. Thus the telegram causes Christine no new distress. Her intelligence grasps clearly that she ought to feel shock, alarm, anxiety, but however alert she is the emotions don’t function.

  They don’t acknowledge the message, don’t respond, like a numb leg that the doctor sticks with a needle. The patient sees the needle, knows perfectly well that it’s sharp, knows it will hurt terribly as it goes in, and he tenses for a pain that must convulse him. But the glowing needle goes in, the paralyzed nerve doesn’t respond, and the patient realizes with horror that part of his body has no feeling, that he’s carrying a little bit of death in his own warm body. In the same way Christine is horrified by her indifference as she reads and rereads the letter. Mother’s ill, she must be in a desperate state or those penny-pinchers back home wouldn’t have spent so much on a telegram. Maybe she’s already dead, chances are she is. But not a finger trembles, her eyes remain dry, though just yesterday the mere thought had overwhelmed her. Total paralysis—a paralysis that spreads to everything around her. She doesn’t notice the rhythmic clangor of the train beneath her, the red-faced men eating wurst and laughing on the wooden seat opposite her, the cliffs outside the window becoming little hills covered with flowers and washing their feet in the white froth of streams—all these prospects, so vivid on Christine’s first journey, are numb to her numb eyes. When the passport official barges in at the border she finally feels something: she wants something hot to drink, something to thaw out this terrible frozenness a little, relax her clenched and seemingly swollen throat, so that she can breathe, let it out at last.

  She goes to the station buffet and has a glass of tea with rum; it burns in her bloodstream and revives the numb brain cells so she can think again. It occurs to her now that she should wire ahead to tell them when she’ll be arriving. Just around the corner to the right, the porter says, you have plenty of time.

  At the counter the window is closed, so she raps on it. Reluctant footsteps approach and the window goes up with a clatter. “What is it?” says a woman in glasses with a peevish gray face. Christine is too shocked to respond immediately. This weathered fossil of an old maid with tired eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles and parchmenty fingers automatically handing her the form might be Christine herself in ten or twenty years—seen now in some diabolical mirror. Her fingers tremble and she has difficulty writing. That’s me, that’s what I’ll be, she thinks, shuddering as she sneaks looks at the driedout woman waiting patiently behind the counter, head bowed, pencil in her hand—oh, she knows that gesture, the tedium of those minutes of waiting, how you die a little with each one that passes, becoming old, all for nothing, hapless and used up like this mirror-phantom. Christine s
truggles back to the train, her knees weak. Her forehead is beaded with cold sweat, like a dreamer who sees himself dead in a coffin and wakes with a cry of fear.

  When Christine hauls her sore limbs out of the train at St. Pölten, tired from a sleepless night, someone hurries toward her across the track: Fuchsthaler the teacher, who must have been waiting all night. One look and Christine knows it all. He’s dressed in black, with a black tie, and as she reaches her hand toward him he gives it a sympathetic shake, his eyes helpless behind his glasses. Christine asks no questions. His discomfiture has said it all. But she’s oddly unmoved. She feels no pain, no grief, no surprise. Her mother is dead. Maybe it’s good to be dead.

  On the local train to Klein-Reifling Fuchsthaler gives a tactful but complete account of her mother’s last hours. He looks bleary, gray in the gray morning, his face stubbly, his clothes rumpled and dusty. He went to her mother’s on her behalf three, four times every day, kept vigil on her behalf at night. Kind friend, she thinks silently. If only he’d stop, shut up, leave her alone, stop talking at her in that sentimental choked-up voice through those yellow, poorly mended teeth. She’s ashamed of the physical aversion she now feels for a man who seemed so likable before, but the feeling is so strong it’s like bile on her lips.

  Despite herself she’s comparing him with the men up there, those slim, tanned, healthy, sleek gentlemen with manicured hands and coats with narrow waists. With a kind of malicious curiosity she notes the laughable details of his mourning getup, the obviously turned cuffs and collar of his coat, its threadbare elbows, the off-the-rack black tie over the cheap dirty shirt. This skinny little man dressed in black strikes her as intolerably lower middle class, ridiculous beyond words, this village schoolmaster with his white protruding ears, his scanty, carelessly parted hair, his red-rimmed pale-blue eyes behind steel-framed spectacles, his shrewlike parchmenty face above the crushed yellow celluloid collar. And he wanted … he … No, she thinks, never. There’s no way she could let him touch her, submit to the timid, undignified, tremulous affections of this deacon-like little man, in those clothes—impossible. The very thought of it revolts her.

  Fuchsthaler breaks off. “What is it?” he asks with concern. He’s seen her shudder.

  “Nothing … nothing … I’m just too tired, I guess. I can’t talk now. I can’t pay attention to anything.”

  Christine leans back and closes her eyes. She feels better as soon as she doesn’t have to look at him or listen to the soft consoling voice, made unbearable by her own humiliation. It’s terrible, she thinks, he’s being so kind, he’s sacrificed himself. But I can’t look at him anymore, can’t bear him, I can’t. Not these people, not a man like him. Never.

  At the open grave the minister runs through the prayer quickly: rain is falling hard, straight down. The gravediggers, shovels in their hands, shift impatiently from one foot to the other in the mud. The downpour becomes heavier and the minister speaks faster. Finally it’s over, and the fourteen people who had accompanied the old woman to the churchyard head back wordlessly to the village, almost at a run. Christine is again horrified at herself: she felt nothing during the ceremony, but was preoccupied with tiny annoyances. That she wasn’t wearing galoshes; last year she wanted to buy some and mother said it wasn’t necessary, Christine could borrow hers. That Fuchsthaler’s turned-up coat collar is frayed and worn on the inside. That her brother-in-law Franz has grown fat and wheezes asthmatically whenever he exerts himself. That her sister-in-law’s umbrella is tattered, she really should have the fabric replaced. That the grocer lady didn’t send a wreath, just a few wilted flowers from her front garden, tied with a piece of wire. That Herdlitschka the baker has had a new signboard made while she was gone. Everything hideous, narrow, disagreeable about this little world she’s been pushed back into digs in its barbs until she can’t even feel her own pain.

  In front of her apartment the mourners say goodbye and, spattered with mud, go sprinting home underneath their umbrellas. Only her sister, her brother-in-law, her brother’s widow, and her brother’s widow’s second husband, a cabinetmaker, climb the creaky stairs to her apartment. There are five of them including Christine, but only four places to sit. The place is uncomfortably cramped and dreary; a damp, musty smell comes from the hanging wet coats and dripping umbrellas. The rain drums on the windows. The dead woman’s empty gray bed waits in the shadows.

  No one speaks. Out of embarrassment, Christine says, “You’ll have some coffee?”

  “Yes, Christl,” says her brother-in-law, “something hot would be nice. But you’d better be quick because we can’t stay long, our train leaves at five.” He sighs, a Virginia cigar in his mouth. He’s a good-natured, jovial municipal official with a premature paunch (he began putting it on as a baggage-train sergeant during the war and it’s been growing more rapidly in peacetime). He only feels at ease when he’s at home in his shirt-sleeves; throughout the ceremony he was standing at attention with a conscientiously doleful expression, but now he partly unbuttons the black mourning jacket (it looks like a disguise on him) and leans back comfortably: “It was a good idea not to bring the children. Nelly thought they ought to be at their grandmother’s funeral, but I said children shouldn’t see sad things like that, they can’t understand them yet anyway. And after all the trip here and back is so horribly expensive, a whole lot of money, and in times like these …”

  Christine is working hard at the coffee mill. Back five hours and already she’s heard it ten times—“too expensive,” that accursed refrain. Fuchsthaler thought it would have been too expensive to bring the chief physician from St. Pölten Hospital, said he couldn’t have done anything anyway; her sister-in-law said it about the cross for the grave, a stone one would be “too expensive”; her sister said it about the requiem mass; and now her brother-in-law is saying it about the trip. The same phrase on everyone’s lips like the rain on the eaves, washing all joy away. It’s going to be a constant drip, drip, drip every day: too expensive, too expensive, too expensive! Christine trembles with fury as she works the mill. If she could only get away from here, stop having to see and hear this! The others are sitting quietly around the table as they wait for their coffee, trying to make conversation. The man who married her brother’s widow, an unpretentious cabinetmaker from Favoriten, sits with his head down among his half relations; he didn’t know the old woman at all. The conversation lurches from question to answer without going anywhere, as though something were blocking the way. Finally the coffee is ready—a distraction. Christine sets down four cups (all she has) and goes back to the window. The embarrassed silence among the four of them is suffocating, an oddly restrained silence clumsily concealing one thought and one only. She knows what’s coming, feels it in her bones. Out in the hall she saw that each of them had brought two empty rucksacks. She knows, she knows what’s coming now, and is choking with disgust.

  Finally her brother-in-law begins, in his pleasant voice. “What a downpour! And that absentminded Nelly didn’t even bring an umbrella. The simplest thing would be for you to give her your mother’s to take along, Christl! Or do you need it for yourself?” “No,” says Christine from the window and shudders. It’s coming, any minute now. Just let it be quick.

  “Actually,” her sister puts in, as though it had been planned beforehand, “wouldn’t it be the most sensible thing to go ahead and divide up Mother’s things now? Who knows when the five of us will be together again, Franz is at work so much, and you too, I’m sure” (she turns to the cabinetmaker). “And it wouldn’t be worth making another special trip here, that would cost more money. I think it’s best to divide everything up now, don’t you agree, Christl?”

  “Of course.” Her voice is hoarse. “But please divide everything up among yourselves. You have two children, you can put Mother’s things to much better use. I don’t need anything, I won’t take anything. Just divide it all up among yourselves.”

  She unlocks the trunk, takes out a few threadbare garments,
and puts them on the dead woman’s bed (warm just yesterday; there’s nowhere else in the cramped attic room). It’s not much: a few linens, the old fox fur, the mended coat, a tartan traveling rug, an ivory-handled walking stick, the inlaid brooch from Venice, the wedding ring, the little silver watch and chain, the rosary and enamel medallion from Maria Zell, then the stockings, the shoes, the felt slippers, the underthings, an old fan, a crushed hat, and the dog-eared prayer book. She omits none of the old pawnshop junk, the old woman had so little, then goes quickly back to the window and stares out into the rain. Behind her the two women are speaking in hushed tones, estimating the value of the items before coming to terms. Christine’s sister’s take goes on the right side of the dead woman’s bed and her sister-in-law’s on the left, separated by an invisible wall.

  Christine is breathing heavily at the window. No matter how low their voices are, she can hear their appraising and haggling; even with her back turned she can see their fingers at work. Her rage is mixed with pity. “How poor they are, so wretchedly poor, and they have no idea. This junk they split up, that junk they hang on to; these shreds of old flannel and worn-out shoes, these horribly ridiculous rags are treasures to them! What do they know about the world? Do they have any inkling? But it might be better not to know you’re so poor, so disgustingly poor and wretched.”