The Post Office Girl

by Stefan Zweig

  “Well, you could have sat at the border and waited for another two years. You were just lucky—we got the short end of the stick. The telegrams came in half an hour after your transport left: the railway lines had been bombed by the Czechs, so back we went to Siberia. That was no fun, but we didn’t take it hard. We figured eight days, two weeks, a month. Nobody thought it would be two years, and only a dozen out of the seventy of us made it through. Reds, Whites, Wrangel,* war on and on, constantly back and forth and here and there, they shook us around like dice in a cup. It was 1921 before the Red Cross found a way back for us through Finland. Yes, my friend, we went through a lot, and you’ll understand why we didn’t put on much weight.”

  “What rotten luck, do you hear that, Nelly. All on account of half an hour. And I had no idea. Not a clue that you were stuck in that mess—you of all people! You of all people! What did you do for those two years?”

  “My friend, I could talk all day and there’d still be more to tell. I think I did everything a person can do. I helped with the harvest, in the factories, I delivered newspapers, banged away at the typewriter, fought for two weeks alongside the Reds when they were at the gates of our city and begged with the peasants when they entered it. Well, let’s not talk about it. When I think back on it today, I’m amazed to be sitting here smoking a cigarette.”

  Christine’s brother-in-law was agog. “Well, I’ll be. Well, I’ll be. A person doesn’t know how lucky he is. To think that you could have been alone here for two years, Nelly, you and the kids, it’s unimaginable, and a good fellow like you, you’re the one that got clobbered. Well, I’ll be. Thank goodness you’re in one piece at least. All that bad luck, you’re lucky nothing happened to you.”

  The stranger angrily ground out his cigarette in the ashtray. His face had suddenly darkened. “Yes, well, you could say I was lucky. Nothing happened to me, or almost nothing, just these two broken fingers, on the last day. Yes, you could say I was lucky. I got off easy. It was the last day, we couldn’t stand it anymore, the few of us still left, squeezed together in a single barracks, and we even cleared out a grain car at the station just so we could move on, seventy men cheek by jowl instead of the regulation forty per car. It was impossible to turn around, and if somebody had to relieve himself, well, I’m not going to talk about that in front of the ladies. But anyway, we were off, and happy about it. Another twenty got on at a station down the line. They were whacking each other with rifle butts to get to the front and they squeezed in one after another, and then another after that, even though we were already five or six deep, and that’s how we traveled for seven hours, in one groaning, shouting, wheezing, sweating, stinking mass. I had my face to the wall and my hands out in front of me so my ribs wouldn’t be crushed against the wood siding. I broke two fingers and tore a tendon, and I stood that way for six hours, not a breath of air in my lungs, half asphyxiated. It got better at the next station where we tossed out five corpses—two had been trampled to death and three were smothered—and we went on like that until evening. Yes, you could say I was lucky, just a torn tendon and two broken fingers, it’s a little thing.”

  He held up his hand: the third finger was limp and wouldn’t bend. “Yes, a little thing, that’s what it is—after a world war and four years of Siberia, a mere finger. But you wouldn’t believe what a dead finger does to a living hand. You can’t draw with it if you want to become an architect, you can’t type in an office, you can’t grab hold of things where there’s heavy labor to be done. Little devil of a tendon, just a wisp of a thing, and everything you want to do in your life hangs by a thread like that. It’s like when you make a mistake of a millimeter on the ground plan of a building, one little thing and it all comes crashing down.”

  Franz, aghast, helplessly repeated, “Well, I’ll be,” wishing he could pat Ferdinand’s hand. The women too had become serious and watched the stranger with interest. Finally Franz pulled himself together and said, “So go on—what did you do once you got back?”

  “Well, what I always told you I’d do. I wanted to go back to technical school—pick up where I left off, as a twenty-five-year-old sitting at the school desk I hadn’t seen since I was nineteen. Eventually I even learned to draw with my left hand, but then something else got in the way, another one of those little things.”

  “What was that?”

  “Well, it’s just the way things are—school costs a lot of money, and that was one more little thing I’d forgotten about. It’s one little thing after another, wouldn’t you say?”

  “But why? Your family always had money, you had a house down in Merano and fields and the pub and the tobacco shop and the grocery … and … all that stuff you told me about … And then your grandmother who did nothing but save, never gave away a button and slept in a cold room because she was too cheap to shell out for the kindling and the paper. What happened to her?”

  “Yes, she still has a fine garden and a fine house, practically a palace. That’s where I was coming from on the streetcar—the nursing home outside Lainz where they grudgingly consented to take her on. And she’s got money too, a big pile of it, a strongbox full to the brim. Two hundred thousand crowns, in old thousands. She has it in the chest during the day, under her bed at night. All the doctors laugh at her and the attendants get a kick out of it. Two hundred thousand crowns. She was a good Austrian and sold everything down there, the vineyard, the pub, and the tobacco shop, because she didn’t want to turn into an Italian, and she put it all into the brand-spanking-new thousand-crown notes that they turned out so brilliantly during the war. So now she has them hidden in her strongbox under the bed and swears they’ll be worth something again someday. They started out as twenty or twenty-five hectares and a beautiful stone house and some fine old heirloom furniture and forty or fifty years of work, didn’t they, so they couldn’t just stay nothing forever. The poor dear is seventy-five and doesn’t understand much anymore. She just goes on believing in the good Lord God and His earthly justice.”

  He stuffed tobacco into a pipe he’d pulled out of his pocket and began puffing away. Christine felt the anger in the gesture—a cold, hard, scornful fury that she recognized, and somehow she felt he was her ally. Her sister stared off irritably, obviously conceiving some aversion to this man who was inconsiderately stinking up the room while treating her husband like a schoolboy. Franz’s submissiveness toward this poorly dressed, surly fellow annoyed her—she could sense the spirit of revolt in him as he sat there tossing stones into the pond of her gemütlichkeit. Franz himself seemed stunned, gazing at his buddy with a mixture of good humor and alarm while foolishly spluttering, “Well, I’ll be.” He thought for a moment. “But after that—go on, what did you do then?”

  “All sorts of things here and there. At first I thought if I made a little extra on the side, that would be enough for me to go back to school on. But it was never enough—I barely made enough to feed myself from one day to the next. Yes, my dear Franzl, banks and offices and businesses just didn’t need men who needlessly took two extra winters of vacation in Siberia and then came home with half a hand. Everywhere ‘sorry, sorry,’ everywhere people already parked on their fat asses, people with healthy fingers, and me always with that one little thing I’d picked up.”

  “But—you can go on disability, can’t you, since you’re unfit for work or partly unfit? You’ve got to be getting some financial assistance—surely you’re entitled to it?”

  “You think? I agree. I agree that the government has a certain obligation to help someone who’s lost a house, vineyards, a finger, and six solid years. But, my friend, in Austria all roads are crooked. I thought there’d be no problem too, so I went to the disability office and showed them I’d served here and served there and here’s my finger. But no, first I had to prove that I’d come by the injury in the war or that it was somehow due to the war. That’s not so easy if the war ended in 1918 and the injury occurred in 1921 under circumstances such that no one made a record of it
. Still it would have worked out in the end, except that the bureaucrats made a great discovery—it’ll amaze you, Franz—which is: I’m not an Austrian citizen at all. According to my baptism certificate I was born and am domiciled in the administrative district of Merano, and in order to have Austrian citizenship I would have had to adopt it by a certain time. So that was that!”

  “Yes, but then why … why didn’t you adopt it?”

  “Good grief, now your questions are just as dumb as theirs. As though they posted the official Austro-German gazette on the walls of Siberian thatched huts and barracks in 1919! My friend, in our Tartar village we didn’t know if Vienna was part of Bohemia, or maybe Italy. And we didn’t give a damn. All we cared about was stuffing a crust of bread down our throats and getting the lice out of our hair and finding some matches or tobacco sometime in the next five hours. Wonderful—I should have adopted Austrian citizenship there. Well, finally they at least gave me a piece of toilet paper saying that I could expect to be ‘an Austrian citizen under the terms of Article 65 as well as Articles 71 and 74 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain effective September 10, 1919.’ But I’ll sell it to you for a packet of Egyptian, because I never got a red cent out of any of those agencies.”

  Franz was beginning to perk up now. He had an idea he might be able to help and was suddenly feeling better. “I’ll fix that for you, leave it to me. We’ll get some results soon enough. I can attest to your war service if anyone can, and the assemblymen know me from the Party, they’ll give me an in, and you’ll get a reference from the municipality—we’ll make things happen, you can count on it.”

  “I appreciate it, my friend, I really do! But that’s it for me. I’ve had enough, you don’t know what kind of documentation I had to lug in—military documentation, civilian documentation, from the mayor’s office, from the Italian embassy, proof of indigence, and I don’t know what other trash. I’ve spent more on notaries and postage than I could have begged in a year, and I pounded the pavement so much that it got me down more than I can say. I was in the Federal Chancellery, the Ministry of the Army, at the police, at the municipality. There’s no door I wasn’t shown, no stairs I didn’t stumble up and down, no spittoon I couldn’t have spit in. No, my friend, I’d rather crawl in a hole and die than go from door to door again on that fool’s errand.”

  Franz gazed at him in disbelief. He looked like he’d been caught out—perhaps he was embarrassed by his own comfortable existence. He moved closer: “All right, but what are you going to do?”

  “Anything. Whatever comes along. For the time being I’m the technical supervisor on a construction site in Floridsdorf, half architect and half watchdog. The pay’s not bad, and it’ll keep me going until the building is done or the company goes under. Then I’ll find something else, I’m not worrying about that. But what I told you about up there, up there on our wooden pallet, all that about being an architect and building bridges, that’s finished. I’ll never get back all the time I slept and smoked and frittered away behind barbed wire. The door to the academy’s closed and I’ll never get it open again—they knocked the key out of my hand with a rifle butt back at the beginning of the war, it’s lying in the Siberian mud. But let’s drop that. Why don’t you give me another cognac. Schnapps and cigarettes are the only thing I learned from the war.”

  Franz obediently filled his glass. His hands shook. “Well, I’ll be. That somebody like you, so hardworking, so smart, such a good fellow, should be slaving away at odd jobs. Such a shame—I’d have bet anything you were going places, and if anybody deserves to, it’s you. Well, that’s got to change. There must be some solution.”

  “‘Must’? I see! I thought the same for five years after I got back. But ‘must’ is a hard nut to crack, and it doesn’t always fall from the tree no matter how hard you shake it. The world’s a tad different from what they taught us back in school: ‘Be ever faithful and upright…’ We’re not lizards whose tails grow back when you cut them off. My friend, once they’ve cut six years out of your body—the best ones, from eighteen to twenty-four—then you’re always a kind of cripple, even if (as you put it) you’re lucky enough to make it home safely. When I go looking for work, I’ve got nothing more to show for myself than some glorified apprentice or teenage layabout, and when I see my face in the mirror, I look forty. No, we came into the world at a bad time. No doctor’s going to fix that, those six years of youth ripped out of me, and who’s going to reimburse me? The government? That prize no-good, that first-class thief? Name one among your forty ministers, for justice, for public welfare and wheeling and dealing in war and in peace, show me one who’s for doing the right thing. They herded us in, played the Radetzky march and ‘God Save the Kaiser,’ and now they’re blowing a different tune. Yes, my friend, from down in the muck the world doesn’t look that delightful.”

  Dismayed as ever, Franz now noticed his wife’s evident annoyance; out of embarrassment he began making excuses for his friend. “The way you talk, Ferdl, I’d hardly know you. You should have seen him, the best, most uncomplaining fellow of all of them, the only decent one in the bunch. I’ll never forget when they brought him in, a skinny kid, only nineteen. All the others were overjoyed because the storm had blown over for them, he was the only one who was furious because they’d nabbed him during the retreat, pulling him out of the railroad car before he could fight and die for the fatherland. The first night, I can still remember—we’d never seen anything like it—here he is in the middle of the war, straight from his mother and the parish priest, and he gets down on his knees and prays. If somebody made a joke about the Kaiser or the army he’d practically throttle them. That’s what he was like, the most decent guy of the whole lot. He still believed everything it said in the papers and the regimental orders—and now look how he’s talking!”

  Ferdinand looked at him gloomily. “Yes, I bought it all, just like a schoolboy. But you knocked it out of me! Weren’t you the one telling me from the first day that it was all a scam, that our generals were idiots, that the supply officers thieved like magpies, that anyone who didn’t surrender was a fool? And who was King of the Commies there, me or you? Who was it, buddy, going on about world socialism and world revolution? Who was the first to take the red flag and go over to the officers’ camp to yank their rosettes off? Think back a minute! Who stood next to the Soviet commissar at the governor’s palace and delivered the great speech saying that captured Austrian soldiers were no longer the Kaiser’s mercenaries but soldiers of world revolution and would be marching home to smash the capitalist system and establish a reign of harmony and justice? And now you’re back to your beloved boiled beef and your tankard of pils. What’s become of the clean sweep? Where’s your world revolution, Herr Socialist Supremo, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  Nelly stood up brusquely and bustled about with the dishes, now openly angry that her husband had let this stranger come into his apartment and tell him off like a boy. Christine felt oddly pleased as she watched all this—felt like laughing out loud at the sight of her brother-in-law, the future district chairman, hunched over in embarrassment and finally apologizing.

  “We did everything we could. You know we had a revolution on the very first day—”

  “Revolution? Allow me to bum another cigarette so I can blow some smoke too—your milquetoast revolution! You turned the kaiserlich-königlich signboard around and slapped some paint on it, but you obediently and respectfully left everything neat and tidy inside, with the top nicely on the top and the bottom nicely on the bottom. You pulled your punches to make sure nothing got shaken up. That was a Nestroy play,* not a revolution.”

  He stood and urgently paced up and down, then paused in front of Franz. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not from the Red Flag.† I know only too well what a civil war is. I couldn’t forget it if they burned my eyes out. Once when the Soviets retook a village (it went back and forth between the Reds and the Whites three times), they brought us all together to bury the corpse
s. I buried them with my own hands, charred, mangled bodies, women and children and horses, all jumbled together, one horror, one stench. I know what civil war means now, and I wouldn’t have any part of it even if I knew it was the only way to bring eternal justice down from heaven. I just don’t care anymore, I’m not interested, I’m not for or against the Bolsheviks, I’m not a Communist or a capitalist, none of it matters. All I care about is me, and the only government I’m going to serve is my own work. I don’t give a damn how the next generation makes out, whether it’s this or that, Communist or Fascist or Socialist. What’s it to me how they’re living or how they’re going to live? The only thing that matters is that I get the little pieces of my life back together again at last and accomplish what I was born for. Once I’m where I want to be, when I can breathe freely, when my own life’s straightened out, maybe then I’ll give some thought to fixing up the world—after I’ve had my dinner. But first I’ve got to know where I stand. You have time to worry about other things, but I’ve only got time for my own problems.”

  Franz made a movement.

  “No, Franz, I wasn’t saying anything against you. I know you’re a good fellow, I know you through and through. I know you’d rob the National Bank for me if you could and make me minister. I know you’re a nice guy, but that’s where we’re at fault, that’s our crime, that we were so good-natured, so trustful—that’s why people took advantage of us. No, my friend, I’m past that. I’m not going to buy the line that others are worse off, no one’s going to convince me that I was ‘lucky’ because I’ve still got all my arms and legs and I don’t walk on crutches. No one’s going to convince me that breathing and getting fed is all it takes to make everything all right. I don’t believe in anything anymore, not gods or governments or the meaning of life, nothing, as long as I feel I haven’t got what’s rightfully mine, my rightful place in life, and as long as I don’t have that I’m going to keep on saying I’ve been robbed and cheated. I’m not going to let up until I feel I’m living my true life and not getting the dregs, what other people toss out or couldn’t stomach. Can you understand that?”