The Post Office Girl

by Stefan Zweig

  The warning buzzer sounded and the late arrivals hurried to the cloakroom, taking off their coats as they went. The room was empty again and Christine heard the music starting. It was over; the invisible barrier came up again. She walked on. The white moons of streetlamps swayed over the Ring. The avenue was still filled with people. Christine followed the crowd along the Opernring, with no particular destination in mind. She stopped in front of a large hotel, as though drawn to it. A car had just driven up. The liveried bellhops rushed out for the suitcases and handbag of a somewhat Oriental-looking lady and the revolving door swallowed her up. The door was like a whirlpool; Christine was unable to resist a desire to observe the longed-for world for a minute. I’m going to go in, she thought, what could happen to me if I ask the desk clerk whether Frau van Boolen from New York has arrived, it ought to be possible. Just one look, only one, to bring it all back, to really make it come back, to be that other person for a moment. She went in. The desk clerk was talking to the woman who had just arrived. No one stopped Christine from walking through the vestibule, looking at everything. Gentlemen in smart, well-tailored traveling clothes or smoking jackets and handsome little patent leather slippers sat in the armchairs, smoking cigarettes and chatting. In an alcove sat a conclave of three young women loudly haranguing two young men in French, laughing all the while, that careless casual laughter, that music of the carefree that she found so intoxicating. At the rear of the hotel was a broad marble-columned court, the dining room. Waiters in tails kept watch at the entrance. I could go in and eat, Christine thought, automatically checking the leather handbag for the two hundred-franc bills and the seventy schillings that she’d brought. I can eat here, what will it cost? If I could just sit in a big room again, be waited on, looked at, admired, pampered. And the music, here too there was music coming from inside, breezy and low. But the old fear was back. She didn’t have the right dress, the talisman that would open the door. She felt uncertain, and the invisible barrier rose again, that impassable magic pentagram of fear. Her shoulders shook and she left the hotel quickly as though fleeing from it. No one had stopped her. No one had even seen her, and that made her feel even weaker than before.

  She continued along the streets. Where should I go? Where am I now? The streets were gradually emptying out. A few people hurried past, intent on getting their dinners. I’ll go into some café, Christine thought, not a fancy restaurant where everyone will look at me. Some bright place full of people. She found one and went in. Almost all the tables were taken, but she found an empty one and sat down. No one took any notice of her. The waiter brought her something and she chewed it nervously and indifferently. I came for this, she thought, what am I doing here? You can’t sit looking at the tablecloth. Ordering and eating only takes so long, you’ve got to get up sometime and go on. But where? It’s only nine. A newspaper vendor came to her table—a welcome interruption. She bought two or three of the evening papers, not to read but to have something in front of her and look like she was busy, or maybe waiting for someone. She glanced through the news without interest. What did any of it matter, problems in forming the government, a murder and robbery in Berlin, stock market quotes, what’s the point of this gossip about the singer at the Opera, whether she stays or goes or sings twenty times or seventy times a year, I’ll never hear her. When she put the paper down, the bold heading ENTERTAINMENT on the back page leaped out at her. “What’s on Tonight?” And underneath, things to do, theaters, dance halls, clubs. She picked up the newspaper nervously and read the ads. “Dance Music: Café Oxford”; “The Freddi Sisters, Carltonbar”; “Hungarian Gypsy Band”; “The Famous Negro Jazz Band, Open Until 3:00, Where Vienna’s Best Society Meets!” It would be wonderful to be back among people who were enjoying themselves, to dance, relax, throw off her hated coat of armor. She made a note of a bar, two bars; both were nearby, the waiter told her.

  She handed in her coat at the cloakroom, feeling better when the hated carapace was gone and she could hear the fast, aggressive music coming from below. She went down to the cellar. Disappointingly, it was mostly empty. Some white-jacketed lads in the orchestra were giving it all they had, apparently trying to make the few people sitting self-consciously at the tables get up and dance, but there was only a taxi dancer—plainly for hire, with hints of black eyeliner, a bit too soigné and too mincing in his dancing style—guiding one of the barmaids listlessly up and down the middle of the square dance floor. Fourteen or fifteen of the twenty tables were empty. One was occupied by three ladies, doubtless professionals, one with dyed ash-blond hair, another in a mannish outfit with a clinging overgarment cut like a smoking jacket over her black dress, the third a fat, heavy-breasted Jewess sipping whiskey through a straw. All three looked at her, their glances oddly appraising, and then began laughing quietly and whispering, their well-trained eyes having spotted her for a novice or a provincial. There were men sitting alone at a number of tables, apparently business travelers, ill-shaven, tired, and waiting for something to startle them out of their lethargy, slouched over coffee or little glasses of schnapps. Entering this place, Christine felt like someone who descends a flight of stairs only to step into empty space. She would have liked to turn around again, but the waiter swooped down, asking solicitously where the gnädige Frau would like to sit, so she took a seat somewhere and waited for something to happen like everyone else in this cold hot spot. One of the gentlemen (actually a dry goods agent from Prague) got up heavily at one point and hauled her around the floor before parking her again. Apparently he wasn’t up to it, wasn’t interested enough. In some way too he must have felt this strange woman’s ambivalence, her odd indecisiveness, her willingness and unwillingness, and it was too much for him to deal with (he had to catch the express train back to Zagreb at 6:30 in the morning). But Christine sat there for an hour. By that time two new gentlemen had sat down with the ladies and were making conversation. She was the only one who was alone. Abruptly she summoned the waiter and paid. She was in a state of hopeless fury as she left, pursued by curious gazes.

  Back onto the street. Night had fallen. She had no idea where she was going. Did it matter? Would it matter if someone grabbed her and tossed her into the canal, or if the car now braking on the bridge to avoid hitting this preoccupied pedestrian went ahead and ran her down? She didn’t care now. She noticed suddenly that a policeman was giving her a funny look, as if he wanted to come over and ask her something. Maybe he took her for one of those women, she thought, the ones who slunk out of the shadows to accost men. She went on. I ought to go back home now. What am I doing here, what’s the point of this? Abruptly she sensed a step behind her. A shadow appeared next to her, followed by its proprietor, who looked her full in the face. “Going home so soon, Fräulein?” She didn’t answer. But the man didn’t go away and he began to speak, insistently and cheerfully; she couldn’t help feeling better. Didn’t she want to go somewhere else? “No, I don’t.” “Come on, it’s too early to go home. Just to a café.” Finally she relented, just for the company. He was quite a nice fellow, a bank official, as he told her, but certainly married, she thought. In fact he had a ring on his finger. Well, so what, she just wanted a little company. Nothing wrong with absently listening to a few jokes. Now and then she glanced over at him. He was no longer young; he had crow’s feet, and he looked overworked, exhausted, somehow rumpled and crushed, like a suit of clothes. But his talk was nice. For the first time she was talking with someone again, or letting him talk, yet she knew that wasn’t what she wanted. And somehow his cheerfulness hurt her. A lot of what he said was amusing, but she felt the gall in her throat—gradually she was overcome by something like hatred for this stranger who was so happy and unconcerned while everything in her was mired in fury. When they left the café he took her arm and held it. That other man, in front of the hotel up there, had done the same thing, and the excitement scalding her now had nothing to do with this nattering little fellow next to her, but came from that other man, from a m
emory. Fear abruptly seized her. She might give herself to this stranger, throw herself at someone she didn’t want at all, out of mere fury, out of impatience. Just then a taxi drove by and she raised her arm, tore herself away from the baffled man, and jumped in.

  In the strange room she lay awake for a long time, listening to the traffic outside. It was over, she couldn’t get around or through the invisible barrier. In sleepless agitation she lay in bed, listening to the coming and going of her breath and wondering why.

  Sunday morning was as interminable as the confused and sleepless night. Most of the shops were closed, their allure hidden behind lowered shutters, so she killed time in a café, leafing through the newspapers. What had she been looking forward to? She’d forgotten why she came to Vienna, where no one was waiting for her, where no one wanted her. It occurred to her that she’d have to visit her sister and her brother-in-law sometime. She’d promised to pay them a visit, and of course she should. It would be best to go right after lunch, certainly not before, or they might think she was there for the food. Her sister was so strange now, ever since she’d had her children—she thought only of herself and scrimped on every soup bone. But there were still two hours, three hours until then. Wandering aimlessly, Christine noticed on the Ringstrasse that admission to the Gemäldegalerie was free today. She walked incuriously through the rooms, sat down on a velvet bench, watched the people, and continued on to a park, feeling lonelier every minute. At two o’clock, when she finally arrived at her brother-in-law’s house, she was exhausted, as though she’d been wading through snowdrifts. At the front door she encountered the entire family, her brother-in-law, her sister, the two children, all clearly in their Sunday best and honestly glad to see her—that cheered her up a little. “Why, what a surprise! Just last week I was saying to Nelly that we ought to write to find out what’s going on, because we never see you. You really should have been here for lunch, but how about coming along with us now? We’re going out to Schönbrunn so the kids can see the animals, and it’s such a nice day.” “I’d like to,” said Christine. It was good to have somewhere to go. It was good to be with people. Her brother-in-law hooked his arm in hers and told her all sorts of stories while her sister took charge of the children. As he talked, his broad, good-humored face was never still and he patted her arm in a friendly way. He was doing well, you could tell at two hundred paces, he was content and took a naïve pleasure in his contentment. They weren’t at the tramway yet, so he confided in her his great secret that the next day he’d be elected district chairman by the Party, but he had it coming to him, he’d been a representative practically from the minute he came back from the war, and if all went well and the right-wingers were brought to heel he’d be on the next municipal council.

  Christine listened amicably as she walked next to him. He’d always been very friendly, this uncomplicated little man who took pleasure in little things, a good person, obliging, credulous, trusting. It was clear why his comrades wanted him for that modest office; he deserved it. Yet as she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, short, pink-cheeked, easygoing, with a double chin and a belly that wobbled as he walked, she was almost appalled to think of her sister: how could she … I couldn’t bear to be touched by this man. But it was good to be with him in broad daylight with a lot of people around. Standing with the children in front of the cages at the zoo, he was practically a child himself. With secret envy Christine thought: If only I could go back to taking pleasure in such little things, instead of yearning for the impossible. At five they decided to return home (the children had to go to bed early). First the children were crammed onto one of the packed Sunday streetcars; there was standing room only, but the rest of them squeezed in. As the tram clattered along Christine thought of the shiny car immaculate in the morning light, the sweet-smelling air streaming over her temples, the cushioned seat, the landscape flitting by. She closed her eyes and lost track of time, hovering in that other realm in the midst of the jostling crowd. Her brother-in-law tapped her on the shoulder: “We have to get off. Why don’t you come for coffee before you catch your train. Wait, let me go first and clear a path for you.”

  He pushed on ahead, and, in spite of being so short and stout, he had no trouble elbowing a narrow path among the bellies, shoulders, and backs doing their best to move out of the way. He was at the door when there was a sudden commotion. “Quit shoving me in the gut, you idiot,” shouted a tall thin man in an inverness coat rudely and furiously. “Who are you calling an idiot? You all hear that?” Christine’s brother-in-law exploded. “Who are you calling an idiot?” The thin man in the inverness coat, hemmed in, laboriously squeezed through while the rest stared, and a squabble seemed about to break out, but Christine’s brother-in-law’s angry voice suddenly changed. “Ferdinand! Well, I’ll be! Now that really would have been something. I nearly got into a fight with you!” The other man too was astonished and laughed. The two of them gripped each other’s hands and looked into each other’s faces. The conductor interrupted: “If you gentlemen wish to get off, please do it! We have a schedule to meet.” “Come on, you have to get off with us, we live two doors down. Well, I’ll be! Come on, let’s go.” The face of the tall thin man in the inverness coat had brightened. He reached down to put his hand on the shoulder of Christine’s brother-in-law. “I’d love to, Franzl.” They both got off. The surprise had winded Christine’s brother-in-law and he stood at the stop catching his breath, a greasy sheen on his face. “Who’d have thought we’d run into each other again! I’ve often wondered where you’d ended up and I’ve always intended to write to the hotel down there and find out. But you know how it is, things get in the way. And now here you are. Well, I’ll be! What a pleasure!”

  The stranger opposite him was also glad. He was a younger man, more controlled, but a slight trembling of his lips gave his pleasure away. “Forget it, Franzl, I’m sure you did,” he said, reaching down to clap the little man on the shoulder, “but now introduce me to the ladies. One of them must be your wife, Nelly, who you always told me about.” “Right, right, give me a minute, I’m flabbergasted. Ferdinand, it’s such a pleasure to see you!” And then to the others: “You know the Ferdinand Farrner I’ve always talked about. We were in the same barracks for two years in Siberia. The only one—it’s true, Ferdinand, you know it—the only one who was a decent fellow among the Ruthenian and Serbian trash they dumped us in with there, the only one you could talk to and the only one you could depend on. Well, I’ll be! But come on up, I’m really curious. Well, I’ll be. If someone had told me I was going to be so happy today—why, if I’d taken the next tram we might never have laid eyes on each other again.”

  Christine had never seen her easygoing, phlegmatic brother-in-law so lively, so animated. He practically ran up the stairs of the building and pushed his friend inside. A faint indulgent smile on his face, the stranger yielded to his war buddy’s outpourings of enthusiasm. “So take off your coat, make yourself comfortable. Here, have a seat in the armchair—Nelly, coffee for us, schnapps, cigarettes—now let me look at you. You haven’t gotten any younger, you’re actually looking damn thin. What you need is a square meal.” The stranger obligingly let himself be scrutinized—Franz’s childlike joy plainly cheered him. The hard, tense face with the beetling brow and the pronounced cheekbones gradually relaxed. Christine too looked at him and tried to remember—earlier she’d seen a picture in the museum, a portrait of a monk by a Spaniard. The name was gone now but it was the same bony, ascetic, almost fleshless face, the same tension about the nostrils. The stranger good-humoredly smacked Christine’s brother-in-law on the arm. “Maybe you’re right. We ought to just go on sharing everything the way we used to do with our rations. You could let me have some of your bacon. You’d never miss it and your wife wouldn’t have any objection, I hope.”

  “But tell us now, Ferdinand, I’m dying to know. When the Red Cross got us out back then, I was in the first batch and you were supposed to follow the next day w
ith the other seventy. Then we sat on the Austrian border for another two days. There wasn’t enough coal for all the trains. And all that time I was waiting for you to show up. We went to the railway clerk ten times, twenty times to get a wire sent, but everything was such an unholy mess, and after two days we went ahead, seventeen hours from the Czech border to Vienna. What happened to you?”