The Longest Winter

by Mary Jane Staples

  ‘I understand all that, Corporal Jaafe, but exactly why is there a complaint laid against you?’

  ‘She is very Italian, Herr Major.’

  ‘Who is very Italian?’

  ‘The maid. Maria. She waves her arms about like a Neapolitan. I’ve only to put my head round the door and she’s flapping about like an alarmed chicken and crying, “Out, out.” If she could she’d have me shining your boots outside in the snow, which—’

  ‘Which is out of the question, of course. It seems they don’t like what they think is your proprietary air.’

  ‘Herr Major, I merely come and go.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Carl allowed himself the flicker of a smile as the corporal polished a brass knob of the bedstead with the subconscious gesture of a man who automatically aimed for lustre on the face of metal. ‘It goes without saying that you’d not force your attentions on the maid.’

  ‘Herr Major?’ Corporal Jaafe was the soul of innocence.

  ‘Yes, what happened?’ asked Carl.

  ‘Ah,’ said Jaafe as if remembering a trifling incident. ‘Well, this is how it was, Herr Major. As you know, a woman who flaps her arms and runs about falls over herself like a blind acrobat. The least a man can do when this occurs is to catch her, and to be frank, Herr Major, it occurred this morning.’

  ‘She fell over herself?’ Not a muscle moved in Carl’s face. ‘And you caught her?’

  ‘Fortunately, I was close enough to. But she’s not a small woman, Herr Major, and as I caught her a little collision took place.’

  ‘A collision?’

  Corporal Jaafe coughed in the best interest of credibility.

  ‘You’d not believe it, Herr Major, but it resulted in a kiss.’

  ‘Your lips collided with hers? Extraordinary,’ said Carl, ‘and normally, no, I’d not believe it. In future perhaps it would be better to let her fall about. Similar collisions must be avoided.’

  ‘Very good, Herr Major.’

  Lunch took place in an atmosphere of contrived politeness, Pia addressing most of her remarks to her mother, who did not seem as if she considered this a favour. She appeared to be a quiet figurehead against the stronger personality of her daughter. The younger girl, Mariella, sat with her eyes on her food most of the time, though she occasionally essayed a shy glance at the uninvited guest. The fare was plain. No one had had anything better for months. Carl made no conversation at all. Not until Mariella was excused to go off to afternoon school did he mention that he had spoken to Corporal Jaafe.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Pia. Her mother gave Carl a little nod of acknowledgement. Since the absence of the father, wherever he was, placed the mother at the head of the household, Carl addressed his next remark to her.

  ‘However, Signora Amaraldi, Corporal Jaafe’s duties require him to use the kitchen from time to time. This is understood?’

  Pia’s mother, fingering the silver crucifix that hung from its fine chain and rested on the bodice of her black dress, smiled and said without animosity, ‘Of course, Major Korvacs.’

  Pia cut in a little testily, saying, ‘As long as he does not give Maria orders or offend her in any way, Corporal Jaafe may use the kitchen, yes.’

  ‘I think your mother and I have already agreed on that, fräulein,’ said Carl, and that brought her hot blood rushing. He was daring to put her into what he thought was her place and to provoke her further by calling her fräulein when he had just given her mother the courtesy of the Italian form.

  ‘My mother, Major Korvacs, knows I am to be consulted too on all domestic matters.’

  ‘As you wish.’ He refused to attach any importance to it.

  He was on his way out again after lunch when Pia appeared in the hall. She attempted a conciliatory smile.

  ‘Please, I must apologize again,’ she said, ‘I must not get so cross, I realize things are as difficult for you as for us.’

  ‘By comparison with other things,’ said Carl, ‘there’s nothing here I find difficult. And is it so difficult for you, having one officer in your house and one corporal who merely comes and goes?’

  ‘We are trying to adapt ourselves,’ she said.

  Carl, not disposed to engage in more trivialities, said, ‘Where is your father?’

  She hesitated before saying, ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Is he in the army?’

  Again she hesitated. Then, ‘Yes.’

  He was prompted to ask, ‘Which army?’

  ‘The Italian army,’ she said defiantly.

  His blue eyes were cold. A number of Tyrolean Italians had evaded service with the Austrians to go and fight for Italy.

  ‘Your father is an Austrian subject. If he’s captured he’ll be shot. You realize that?’

  ‘We all realize it.’ But she spoke quite proudly.

  Carl left the house to stroll around the small snow-encrusted town. There had been a fresh fall in the night, but it was sunny now, the air invigorating, the layers of snow crisp and sparkling. Soldiers of various mountain units, taking a brief rest from the front line, were casually abroad. They were not noisy. They were men whose eyes seemed set deep in their faces, men aware they were still alive. It was often difficult, out there on the icy, bitter ridges, to decide whether one was surviving or not. One often felt dead. Oberstein represented bright, sunlit proof on a day like this that ordinary life and everyday occupations still existed. Civilians went about their business, farmers went up to sheds to see that their cows were still safe and warm under cover, and women queued at the shops for what was going. And the little cafés were always full, mostly of soldiers, though not offering the kind of coffee the Tyroleans were used to.

  Carl got a little tired of returning salutes. He might have gone back to the house, to lie on his bed and think of nothing as he had promised himself. But that, if one indulged it too much, brought on a kind of moribund mentality which could eventually turn a man into a manic depressive. He had seen that happen to officers and men drained mind and body by months of mountain slogging, by the feeling they were in a war that had no end. At first, morose moods alternated with bursts of irritation. Later, introspective silences set in, became prolonged, and finally every emotion lay inert.

  He might have joined fellow officers in the club set aside for them, but they would want to talk of the ifs and buts of war, they would want to talk of Vienna and the old days, and he was unable to engage in such conversations. He thought of his family. They were the only real figures to which his mind could relate. He had not been able to get to Vienna for fifteen months. He knew he might never get back. He could think about that without fear or prayers now. But he wanted to survive, to live on, to see his family again. Fortune had favoured him so far and his every instinct bore on self-preservation, probably because the margin of luck grew daily narrower.

  He thought of Sophie. She would be suffering because of what the war was doing to people, to her. The rest of the family would be suffering because of what it was doing to Austria. Sophie’s letters – she wrote frequently – were affectionate, descriptive and without heroics. She touched a little on her war work, but did not relate it to the glory of Austria, only to plain necessity. Anne had lost Ludwig to the Russians. Not permanently, perhaps, but unhappily. Sophie had lost her love to the British. That had to be permanent.

  Looking back at the way he had parted from James, he could see only his own pompous absurdity. He could not clearly remember how James had taken it. Fairly quietly, he thought. He rather wished he could go back and say a different goodbye. He was older now, he had grown up. After four years a man did not indulge in a daily hate of the enemy. The hate only came alive when shot and shell were murderously piecemealing comrades and the only desire was to pay back in kind. Hate was impossible to sustain, and the things governments and generals said to whip it up were an embarrassment to most soldiers.

  He was out of the little town now. In front the vista was one of ascending slopes and eye-hurting brightness. The sun wa
s low, a huge disc of golden light tinted with winter red. He shook his head at himself, turned about and made his way back. He stopped at a café reserved for officers and had a cognac. He nodded to some he knew but did not sit with them. He was not sure exactly when he had shed the exuberance of patriotism for the mantle of disillusionment. Perhaps, while he still had some kind of exuberance, he should have married. There was a fundamental necessity about marriage, the one institution that remained stable through every crisis of civilization, the link between a man and a woman that stayed unbroken in spirit when the mightiest of other institutions were tumbling and crashing.

  He had known a woman, the widow of a fellow officer in Innsbruck. Gerda, widowed for two years. Fragilely blonde in her black lace and desperately young. Wanting love. She was unlike Sophie, whom he thought independent enough, when all was said and done, to make her own life. He mentioned Gerda in this vein in a letter to Sophie, and Sophie in her reply had said, ‘You are very wrong to assume it is easy for me to contemplate a life in which only my own face stares at me from my mirror.’

  He did not feel himself able to offer marriage to Gerda, for of all things that embraced the risk of making her a widow again. But he offered himself. Her gratitude for purely physical love softened him for the brief time he spent with her, and at the end she neither begged him to return nor made any kind of claim on him. She only said, ‘Thank you, Carl.’ If the war did not prove fatal to him he thought he owed it to her to go back to Innsbruck. It was unimaginative to think marriage was advisable only within the context of mutually glorious love. He knew enough about life and people now to realize marriage was a creative state, not an Arcadian one, that each marriage was a tiny but vital factor in the whole structure of civilization. Each broken marriage was like a small link snapping.

  He was walking again, back to the house through the snowy main street. In front of him he saw a young girl carrying her school satchel. Her dark hair hung in pigtails down her back. She was walking slowly. He recognized her as Mariella Amaraldi. He knew it was churlish to wish he did not have to bother with her. He caught her up.

  ‘Good after-school time, Signorina Amaraldi,’ he said in Italian.

  She was startled. She was shy. She threw him a quick upward glance. She was a pretty young thing.

  ‘Oh, signore. That is,’ she said hastily, ‘I mean Herr Major.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Life should not be as complicated as that for the young.’ He smiled.

  ‘Yes. I mean no.’ She was flushed. She was also shivering, despite her warm coat and stout boots. She should not, he thought, be as susceptible to the cold as this.

  ‘Aren’t you well?’ he asked kindly.

  ‘It’s nothing, signore.’

  But it was not nothing. Her shivers were acute. He knew the feverish mountain chill that could take the hardiest men by surprise.

  ‘You must see your doctor,’ he said, ‘where does he live?’

  ‘Over there.’ She pointed.

  ‘Come, I’ll take you,’ he smiled. One should not afflict the young with disillusionment.

  Mariella did not argue. She went with him. Old Dr Caporal had come out of retirement two years ago, because the younger doctor had gone off to serve with the Army Medical Corps. The housekeeper answered the door. She was sorry but the doctor himself was not very well at the moment and was in bed. Was it serious?

  ‘My young friend has a chill, I think,’ said Carl. The woman brought them in and asked them to wait. She went upstairs, came down after a minute or so, went into the surgery and reappeared with a bottle of medicine.

  ‘The doctor said this will do her no harm, whatever is wrong with her. If it is serious he will do what he can to see her. Tomorrow, perhaps.’

  ‘Thank you. Something is better than nothing,’ said Carl. He showed Mariella the bottle of medicine and they went on their way. She was shivering feverishly as she tried to thank him. He put an arm around her shoulders and hurried her home. He had to carry her up the steps to the front door. He glimpsed a face at the window, the moving curtain. Signora Amaraldi herself opened the door.

  ‘What is wrong, what has happened to Mariella?’ she asked in concern.

  ‘A chill, I think. She’s been to the doctor, we have some medicine.’

  Pia appeared. She was instantly hostile.

  ‘What are you doing with Mariella? Put her down.’

  Carl felt icily angry that they should let their prejudices govern all their reactions.

  ‘Don’t be foolish,’ he said, ‘the child is ill. I’ll carry her up to her room, if you wish. Do you have hot-water bottles? She should not be put into a cold bed.’

  ‘Who are you to tell me how to look after my own sister?’ Pia was hotly Italian. And he to her was an Austrian wolf, her pretty sister a trapped fawn. ‘Put her down.’

  ‘Give her to me,’ said Signora Amaraldi in maternal worry.

  Carl was incredulous at such behaviour, at the Italian insistence that anything was better for Mariella than help from an Austrian. It was bigotry gone mad.

  ‘I’ll put you down, Mariella,’ he said gently.

  The shivering girl, arms around his neck, had tears of distress in her eyes.

  ‘Stop it,’ she cried to Pia, ‘he has been kind to me. Let him take me up.’

  Her mother, reading the implications of the girl’s flushed skin and uncontrollable shivers, said quietly, ‘Herr Major, if you will carry Mariella up to her room I shall be grateful. I’ll see to the hot-water bottles.’

  Pia, chastened, followed Carl as he carried Mariella up the stairs to her room.

  Chapter Four

  Signora Amaraldi looked up from her fireside chair as Carl entered the drawing room. He asked how Mariella was. The girl had been put to bed half an hour previously.

  ‘It’s more than a chill, Major Korvacs,’ said Signora Amaraldi, ‘her throat is painful. I hope the doctor will be able to come tomorrow.’

  ‘May I see her?’ asked Carl.

  She was no longer disposed to be aloof. She said, ‘But yes, of course. Pia is sitting with her.’

  She went up with him. Mariella looked small under the mound of bedclothes. Pia, at the sight of Carl, got up from her chair by the bed and fussed at the blankets like a woman uncomfortable. Mariella had not been very pleased with her, with the way she had treated Major Korvacs. He sat down on the edge of the bed and Mariella smiled faintly at him. His return smile was comradely. Pia thought then how finely etched his features were, how irresistible he must be to her little sister. Mariella did not yet fully understand why one must dislike Austrian officers, the instruments of imperial oppression.

  ‘Hurting, Mariella?’ said Carl.

  ‘A little,’ she said and touched her throat.

  ‘Say ah.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mariella bravely.

  ‘More ah. Bigger,’ he said.

  Mariella opened her mouth wide. He peered, almost professionally.

  ‘Tck, tck,’ he said. Mariella understood. It meant she was ill but not seriously. The warm sheets and blankets felt so good around her feverish body, and she thought rapturously about sleep, except her limbs were so restless. Carl gave her another smile. ‘Nasty,’ he said.

  ‘Mmm,’ she conceded.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Carl, ‘I had it myself when I was young.’

  ‘Are you a doctor?’ asked Signora Amaraldi as he got to his feet.

  ‘No,’ said Carl.

  ‘But you are thinking something?’

  ‘Only tonsillitis,’ said Carl.

  ‘There, that is what I said, Mama.’ Pia burst softly in on the little conference. ‘Tonsillitis, yes,’ she said to Carl, ‘she had it once before.’

  ‘As your doctor may not be able to come,’ said Carl, ‘I’ll have an army doctor call to see her. Just to make sure, and to give her a draught to get her temperature down and make her sleep.’

  ‘Thank you, Major Korvacs,’ said Signora Amaraldi gratef
ully.

  ‘We’re only guessing,’ said Carl, ‘we’ll have to get that doctor. I’ll walk down to the hospital.’

  When he had gone Signora Amaraldi confronted Pia in the drawing room.

  ‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘We must take people as we find them. I must, at least, it’s my nature. And you should. I don’t wish to fight battles with Major Korvacs by being distant with him. It’s unnecessary. He won’t be here very long, he’ll be sent back to the fighting soon enough. It would have been better if you’d made no fuss, if we had accepted him graciously. But you will insist on things being done your way, you are so like your father. Well, now I am going to do some insisting for once. I am going to insist on all of us being hospitable to Major Korvacs.’

  ‘That’s the same as being hypocritical,’ said Pia, ‘we wish to be free of Austrians, not to make friends with them.’

  ‘What is being free, as you call it? We have all managed to live together so far and not everyone is as anxious to separate as you are.’

  ‘Or as Father is.’

  ‘Your father has always been single-minded. I can’t understand you, girl. You’ve always been ready to smile on any Austrians when you’ve wanted something. Why is it so difficult with Major Korvacs?’

  ‘He’s here, in the house, he has forced his way in—’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Signora Amaraldi.

  ‘He’s in the way. Any Austrian in this house is in the way. We must see that Mariella doesn’t get too friendly with him.’

  Signora Amaraldi threw up her hands.

  ‘You make no sense, Pia. What am I to do with a daughter who has no sense? To be hostile is to make him suspicious. To be hospitable is to make him our friend.’

  ‘I can’t make friends of arrogant men,’ said Pia.

  ‘Arrogant? What are you talking about? He’s a man who’s been in the war a long time, he’s had to fight hostile enemies for years and anyone can see he’s not going to put up with hostile civilians as well.’

  ‘The sooner he’s gone the better,’ said Pia, defiantly entrenched. ‘He looks at one.’