The Post Office Girl

by Stefan Zweig

  “Turn out the light.” Again she felt ashamed and she needed all her strength to get dressed. Her limbs were leaden. They sat back down on the bed. She had no strength left. From the first second in this awful place she’d felt a storm brewing, and now it was here.

  The knocking went on downstairs. The sweep could be heard moving from room to room on the ground floor. Each time she heard them rapping on the wooden doors below, it was a blow to her heart. Ferdinand sat by her, stroking her hands. “It’s my fault, forgive me. I should have thought, but … I just didn’t have any other ideas, and I wanted … I wanted so much to be with you. Forgive me.”

  He went on stroking her hands, but they were still cold and trembling. Her whole body shivered.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, trying to soothe her. “There’s nothing they can do to you. And if … if one of those bastards gets fresh he’ll have me to deal with. I’m not that much of a pushover, I didn’t go through four years of hell to get leaned on by these uniformed night watchmen, I’ll give them something to think about.”

  “No,” she pleaded anxiously as she saw him reach back for what she thought might be a weapon. “Please, stay calm. If you love me a little, stay calm, I’d rather…” She couldn’t go on.

  The footsteps had moved upstairs and now seemed very close. Their room was the third; they heard the knocking at the first. They held their breaths. They could hear everything through the thin door. The first room took no time at all—on to the second. Three raps—knock, knock, knock—and they heard the door being flung open with a drunken shout: “Don’t you have anything better to do than harass decent people at night? Go chase the crooks, why don’t you!” A deep, harsh voice responded, “Your papers!,” then something else more quietly. “My fiancée, jawohl, my fiancée,” the drunk bellowed defiantly, “I can prove it. We’ve been together two years.” That seemed to be enough, and the door banged shut.

  Now it had to be their turn. There were only four or five steps between doors, and here they came, one, two, three … Christine’s blood froze. There was a knock. The police inspector stood discreetly at the threshold; Ferdinand faced him calmly. The inspector’s face was actually pleasant—round, broad, with a charming little mustache—though bright red from the tight collar of his uniform. You could see him in mufti or shirtsleeves, sleepily nodding along to some folk song. But now, frowning severely, he demanded, “Do you have your papers?” Ferdinand stepped forward. “Here, and my military papers too if you’re interested. A man with those isn’t surprised when things turn nasty, he knows all about that.” The inspector ignored the sarcasm and checked the identification against the registration slip before glancing toward Christine. Face turned away, she hunched in the chair like a prisoner in the dock. The inspector lowered his voice. “You know the lady personally … I mean … You’ve known her for a while …?” He was trying to make it easy. “Yes,” Ferdinand said. “Thank you,” the inspector said. He saluted and made as if to go, but Ferdinand, trembling with rage to see Christine humiliated and redeemed on nothing more than his say-so, took a step toward him.

  “I’d just like to know if…if these night sweeps are conducted in the Hotel Bristol and other Ringstrasse hotels too, or just here?” The inspector’s face assumed an expression of cold professionalism. He replied dismissively, “I have no information to give you, I’m following orders. But if I were you I’d be glad I’m not investigating too closely. It may be that the information in the register concerning your wife” (he emphasized the word) “would not check out completely.” Ferdinand gritted his teeth and choked back his anger. He had to squeeze his hands together behind his back to keep from hitting this representative of the government in the face. But the inspector, seemingly accustomed to such outbursts, calmly closed the door behind him without a second glance. Ferdinand stared at the door, seething with fury. Then he remembered Christine. She’d slipped down on the chair until she was almost lying flat—as though she’d died of fear. Ferdinand stroked her shoulder.

  “See, he didn’t even ask your name…It was really just a formality… All they want to do is turn your life upside down with these ‘formalities’ and ruin you. I remember there was something in the paper a week back about how a woman threw herself out of a window because she was afraid she’d be turned in and her mother might find out or…she’d be tested for VD…Better to jump, three stories down…I read about it in the paper, two lines, two lines…It’s really just a little thing, we’re not used to it, that’s all…At least you get your own grave if you do that, not a mass grave as in the old days, that’s something we can count on now…Ten thousand deaths every day, what’s one person compared to that, if it’s somebody like us, somebody with no rights. In the good hotels they salute and they bring in the detectives just so the ladies don’t have their jewelry stolen, nobody there goes snooping around the ‘citizenry’ at night. But why should I be embarrassed?” Christine sank still lower. She remembered something—what was it the little Mannheim girl had said…The doors opened and closed there all night long. She remembered: the wide white beds bright in the early-morning light, the silent doors that seemed to be cushioned, the soft carpets and the vase by the bed. There everything could have been lovely and good and easy—but here…

  She shuddered with revulsion. He stood next to her hopelessly, saying, “Calm down, calm down, calm down. It’s over now.” But her cold body still shrank from his hand. Something in her had torn like an overstretched sail, and her nerves were frayed. She didn’t hear him, she was listening only to the knocking that was still moving from one door to the next, one person to the next.

  Now it was upstairs. The knocking was suddenly heavy and increasingly violent: “Open up! In the name of the law!” They both strained to listen in the momentary silence. Again the hammering came from upstairs, but now it was the sound of a fist, not just knuckles on wood. The thudding made its way through every door, into every heart. “Open up! Open up!” a voice commanded. Someone was apparently resisting. There was a whistle, then footsteps on the stairs; four, six, eight fists pounded on the door upstairs. “Open up! Now!” Then an impact traveled through the entire building, wood splintered, and a woman screamed, high, piercing, terrified, sharp as a knife. Chairs crashed to the floor, there was a struggle going on, bodies fell like sacks of stones, shrill screams turned to wails.

  They listened as if it were them, as if it were Ferdinand upstairs fighting furiously with the policemen, Christine howling and writhing in their trained grips, half-clad and enraged. The scream came with horrible clarity: “I won’t go, I won’t go!” It was a wailing, screeching, frothing sound. Glass smashed—the harassed woman must have broken a window, or maybe someone else had. And now they’d grabbed her, two or three of them (that was what Ferdinand and Christine imagined), and they were dragging her along. And now they must have thrown her to the floor—the sound of her flailing and struggling came through the brick walls. And now she was being dragged through the hall and downstairs while her terrified high-pitched shrieking became more and more muffled and faint: “I won’t go! I won’t go! Let me go! Help!” Now they were downstairs. The car started up. They’d bagged her, like an animal.

  Now it was quiet again, even quieter than before—gloomy, as though a thick cloud hung over the building. He tried to take her in his arms, lifting her from her chair and kissing her cold brow. But she slumped in his arms like a drunk. He kissed her, but her lips were dry and unresponsive. He tried to sit her down on the bed; slack, dazed, and empty, she collapsed, while he bent over her, stroking her hair. Finally she opened her eyes. “Let’s get away from here,” she whispered. “Take me away, I can’t bear it. Not a second longer.” And then she knelt before him. “Take me away, I beg you. Take me away from this terrible place.”

  He tried to calm her. “But where, darling … It’s not even 4:30 and your train doesn’t leave until 5:30. Where can we go? Don’t you want to rest?”

  “No, no, no.” Loathing fil
led her as she looked at the rumpled bed. “Can’t we just get away, away from here, let’s just get away! And never again … never again … like this … somewhere … never again!”

  He obeyed. In the desk clerk’s cubicle a policeman was still poring over the hotel register and jotting down notes. His sharp glance was like a blow. Christine swayed and Ferdinand steadied her. The policeman bent over the register again. Outside in the alley, fresh air and freedom. She breathed deeply as if restored to life.

  Morning was still far off, but the streetlamps already seemed to be burning low. Everything looked tired, the empty lanes, the dismal buildings, the shuttered stores, the few people wandering about. Farmers’ horses plodded heavily by with bowed heads, pulling long vegetable carts to market and trailing a rank, humid smell. Milk wagons clattered over the cobblestones, the tin milk cans rattling; then the grim, gray quiet returned. There were a few people about, bakers’ boys, canal cleaners, other laborers of one kind or another, with drowsy, shadowy faces, looking gray and wan, vaguely unrested and resentful, and Ferdinand and Christine couldn’t help sensing the natural animosity between those who slept and those who were stirring in the sleeping city. Without speaking they moved through the darkness to the train station. There anyone could sit down and rest: a home for the homeless.

  They sat in a corner of the waiting room. Men and women lay on the benches, sleeping with mouths open and bundles next to them, themselves like battered bundles that destiny had deposited nowhere in particular. From outside came an occasional reluctant wheezing, puffing, and groaning: engines were being shunted about, the stoked-up boilers tested. Otherwise it was quiet.

  “Stop thinking about it,” he said to her, “there was no harm done. Next time I’ll make sure nothing like this happens. You don’t mean to, but I think you’re holding it against me, and it’s not my fault.”

  “Yes,” she said half to herself, “I know that, I know … It’s not your fault. But whose fault is it? Why are we always the ones who suffer? We didn’t do anything, we didn’t do anything to anyone, but every step we take is a trap. I’ve never asked for much, once I went on vacation, and I wanted to be like the others, free and easy, eight days, two weeks, and then all that with my mother happened … And once I …” She broke off.

  He tried to soothe her. “But darling, it turned out all right, be sensible … They were looking for someone, and they just took down the particulars, it was just bad luck.”

  “I know, I know. Just bad luck. But what happened there … You don’t understand—no, Ferdinand, you don’t, you have to be a woman to understand. You don’t know what it’s like as a young girl, a child even, before you understand anything, to already be dreaming about what it would be like to be with a man that you loved … Everyone dreams about it … And you don’t know what it’s like and what it will be like, you can’t imagine it no matter how much your girlfriends talk about it. But every girl, every woman thinks of it as a great event … as something beautiful … the most beautiful thing in her life … in a way, I can’t express it very clearly, as what, yes, as what you’re actually living for … as what’s going to lift you up above all the meaninglessness … For years, years, you dream about it and imagine it … No, you don’t imagine it, you don’t want to and you can’t, you just dream about it, as something beautiful, so very, very indistinctly, like when … And now it turns out to be so … so horrible, so appalling, so dreadful … No, you just can’t absorb it when that’s been destroyed, because no one will ever be able to give that back to us once it’s been ruined, sullied …”

  He stroked her hand, but she stared down at the dirty floorboards without paying any attention.

  “And to think that it all turns on nothing but money, filthy, low-down, vile, despicable money. With a little money, two or three banknotes, I could have been among the blessed, I could have left, driven somewhere in a car … somewhere where no one could come after me, where I was alone and free … Oh, how wonderful it would have been just to relax, for you too … It would have made all the difference for you, you wouldn’t be so glum and distracted … But we’re like dogs, people like us, crawling into other people’s stables, getting whipped … No, I never thought it could be so awful.” When she looked up and saw his face, she added quickly, “I know, I know, you can’t help it, and maybe I haven’t gotten over it, the horror … You’ve just got to understand why it was so awful for me. Give me a little time, it’ll pass … ”

  “But you’ll come … you’ll come again?”

  His anxious question did her good. It was the first warm word.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll come again, you can count on that. Next Sunday, only … You know … That’s all I ask … ”

  “Yes,” he whispered, “I know what you mean.”

  She left on the train. He went to the buffet and quickly drank a few shots of brandy. His throat was parched. The brandy went down like fire and he could move his limbs again. He went along the street faster and faster, swinging his arms against an invisible enemy. People looked after him in astonishment, and at the construction site people noticed how furious he was, how unpleasant and dismissive, though before he’d always been so unassuming. Christine sat in the post office as always, depressed, silent, watchful. And when they thought of each other, it wasn’t with feelings of passion or love, but with something like pity—not the way you think of a lover, but of a friend in trouble.

  After this, Christine went to Vienna every Sunday. It was her only day off, and she’d used up vacation days for the summer. She and Ferdinand got along well. Too tired, too disappointed for passion, for a love affair with any excitement and optimism in it, they considered themselves lucky just to have found someone to confide in. They saved up all week for their Sundays, wanting to spend this one day together without constant penny-pinching, to go to a restaurant or coffeehouses, to the pictures, to drop a few schillings without constantly counting and calculating. And they saved up words and feelings too, thought about what they’d tell each other, and they were both glad to have someone who listened intently, with sympathy and understanding, no matter what happened to them. After so many months of privation this was enough, and through Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and with increasing restlessness through Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, they awaited this small joy with impatience. A certain restraint remained. They didn’t utter words that are usually on the lips of lovers. They didn’t speak of marriage or staying together forever. Everything seemed so vague and far away, and they hadn’t made enough of a beginning for any of it to be real. Usually she arrived around nine (she didn’t want to spend Saturday night in Vienna; it was too expensive to get a hotel room for herself, and the memory of her ordeal still made her shrink from sharing). He’d pick her up, they’d walk through the streets, sit on benches in the Volksgarten, take the metropolitan railway out of town somewhere, have lunch, stroll through the woods. It was nice, and they were still grateful to see each other’s faces when they sat down together, happy to walk through a field with someone else for a change and enjoy those little things that even the poorest people are permitted: a blue autumn sky, the golden September sun, a few flowers, and a free day that was special from beginning to end. It meant a great deal to them, and during the week they looked forward to the next Sunday with the patience of people whose troubles have taught them to keep their expectations low. On the last Sunday in October, autumn had turned mean: winds swept through the streets, clouds sped overhead; it rained from morning until night, and all at once they felt alien and useless. They couldn’t wander through the streets all day with no umbrella, just the inverness coat for shelter. Yet it seemed pointless and unpleasant to sit at congested coffeehouse tables, just bumping knees underneath from time to time as a sign of intimacy, not being able to speak because of all the strangers, but not knowing where else to go. Eventually they found that time weighed heavily upon them, even though it was so precious.

  They both knew what they needed. It was
ridiculously little—a room, a room of their own, a few square feet of privacy, four walls that were theirs for the day. They knew how senseless it was, two young bodies that were attracted to each other dragging about aimlessly all day in damp clothes or sitting on chairs in overcrowded rooms, but they were afraid to risk another night in a hotel. The simplest thing would have been for Ferdinand to get a place so she could visit him there. But he earned only 170 schillings a month. He lived in an old woman’s house and to get to his little cell he had to go through her room, but he wasn’t about to leave. During his months out of work she’d trusted him to pay the rent and expenses later, and now he owed her two hundred schillings which he was paying off month by month, and there was no hope of being out of debt for another three months. He didn’t tell Christine, he didn’t explain; despite their intimacy, he was still too ashamed to reveal his poverty or acknowledge his debts. But Christine had an idea it was money that was preventing him from moving out and getting a room, and she would have liked to lend him some, but the woman in her worried that she might wound him by seeming to be paying for the privilege of having him all to herself. She said nothing and they sat hopelessly in smoke-filled cafés, watching the windows, waiting for the rain to stop. The vast power of money, mighty when you have it and even mightier when you don’t, with its divine gift of freedom and the demonic fury it unleashes on those forced to do without it—they felt this as never before and were filled with bitter rage when, in the dark of the early morning, they saw the brightly lit windows and knew that those glowing gold curtains gave shelter and freedom to hundreds of thousands of people, men with women they desired, while they themselves were homeless, plodding blindly through the streets, through the rain; it was cruel as only the sea could be cruel—the sea in which a person can die of thirst. Quiet, secluded rooms with light and warmth and soft beds, tens of thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, innumerable unused and unoccupied rooms, and only they had nothing, no place where they might lean close and brush lips for so much as a second, no help for their raging thirst, their fury at the senselessness of it all, except to delude themselves that it couldn’t go on like this forever, and so they both began to lie. In the coffeehouse he’d go over the classifieds with her; she saw him write letters of application, and then he said he had splendid prospects for a splendid job. A friend of his, a war buddy, was going to find him an administrative job in a large construction company. He’d make so much money that he’d be able to catch up with his engineering studies and become an architect. She said (this was not a lie) that she’d requested a transfer to Vienna, formally applying to the head office, where her uncle had a lot of pull. In a week or two she was sure to get the good news. What she didn’t say was that in fact she’d surprised her uncle one evening. She’d rung the bell at eight thirty after listening at the windows: the family was at home. The bell had rung in the hall and then her uncle himself had appeared, looking somewhat nervous. It was too bad she’d come today, he said, her aunt and her cousins were away (from the coats in the hall she knew this was untrue) and he had two friends there for dinner, otherwise he’d ask her in, but was there anything he could do for her? She’d explained and he’d listened, saying, “Yes, yes, yes of course,” and she’d had no doubt that he was afraid she needed money and that he just wanted to send her on her way. None of which she told Ferdinand; why discourage him even more? Nor did she tell him that she’d bought a lottery ticket, and that she, like all poor people, expected a miracle. It was better to lie, to say she’d written her aunt to help her find work or come to America; when she was there she’d bring him over too and get him a job, they needed capable people there. He didn’t believe her; she didn’t believe him. So they sat around idly, their joy washed away by the rain and their eyes dimmed by the dimness, aware of the hopelessness of their situation. They talked about Independence Day and Christmas when they’d have two days off and go somewhere together, but November and December were far off: there was a long, empty, hopeless stretch of time to fill before then.