Malina

by Ingeborg Bachmann

  My father signs a document that once more undoubtedly has to do with depriving me of my rights, but the others begin to notice me. Panting heavily, he sits down to eat with relish, I know that once again I won’t get anything to eat, and I watch him in all his boundless egotism, I see the bowl of frittatensuppe, next he is handed a plate of schnitzel and a dish of our apple compote, I lose control, I have come unarmed but I notice in front of me the large glass ashtrays found in all offices and the paperweights, I take the first heavy object and throw it right into the soup bowl, my mother is surprised and uses her napkin to wipe her face, I take a heavy object and aim it at the schnitzel, the plate breaks and the schnitzel goes flying into my father’s face, he jumps up, pushing away the people who have come between us, and advances toward me before I can throw a third object. Now he is prepared to listen to me. I am completely calm, no longer afraid, and I say to him: I only wanted to show you that I can do anything you can. Just so you know, nothing more. Although I didn’t throw a third object, the sticky compote is running over my father’s face. Suddenly he has nothing more to say to me.

  * * *

  I’ve woken up. It’s raining. Malina is standing by the open window.

  * * *

  Malina:

  * * *

  You could suffocate in here. Besides, you were smoking too much, I’ve covered you up, the air will do you good. How much of all that did you understand?

  Me:

  Almost all of it. One time I thought I didn’t understand anymore, my mother had me completely confused. Why is my father also my mother?

  Malina:

  Why do you think? If one person is everything for somebody, then that person can be many people in one.

  Me:

  Are you suggesting that someone was ever everything for me? What a mistake! There’s really nothing more bitter!

  Malina:

  Yes. But you will act, you will have to act, you will have to destroy all the people in that one person.

  Me:

  But I am the one who has been destroyed.

  Malina:

  That’s also true.

  Me:

  It’s getting so easy to talk about, already it’s a lot easier. But it’s so difficult to live with.

  Malina:

  It’s not supposed to be discussed, just lived with.

  * * *

  This time my father again has the face of my mother, I don’t know exactly when he is my father and when he is my mother, then the suspicion intensifies, and I know he’s not either one, but some third thing, and so I wait among the other people, extremely agitated, for our meeting. He is overseeing an enterprise or a government, he is staging a play, he has Daughter Rights and Daughter Societies, he is constantly giving orders, speaking on several telephones at once, and because of this I still can’t make myself heard, not until the moment he lights a cigar. I say: My father, this time you are going to talk to me and answer my questions! My father waves me off, bored, he’s heard it all before, my coming and asking questions, he keeps on phoning. I walk over to my mother, she is wearing my father’s pants, and I say to her: You’re going to speak with me before the day is over and give me some answers! But my mother, who also has my father’s brow, which she raises the same way he does — in two folds over tired, indolent eyes — mumbles something about “later” and “no time.” Now my father is wearing her skirts, and I say for the third time: I think I will soon know who you are, and I’ll tell you myself tonight, before the night is over. But the man sits down at the table serenely and signals for me to go, however when I reach the door, which is opened for me, I turn around and slowly walk back. I walk with all my strength and stop at the large table in the courtroom, while the man on the table opposite begins to carve his schnitzel underneath the cross. I don’t say anything, just show my disgust at the way he is using his fork to play with his compote, smiling at me jovially, just as he is smiling at the audience that must suddenly leave the room, he is drinking red wine, next to that is yet another cigar, still I say nothing, but he cannot mistake the meaning of my silence, since it now carries weight. I take the first heavy marble ashtray, heft it and hold it high, the man continues eating quietly, I aim and hit the plate. The man drops his fork, the schnitzel flies onto the floor, he is still holding his knife, he raises it, but at the same time I pick up the next object, because he still isn’t answering, and aim exactly at the dish of compote, he wipes the juice off his face with a napkin. Now he realizes that I no longer have any feelings for him and that I could kill him. I throw a third time, I take my time aiming, and I aim exactly, and the object wipes the table clean, so that everything goes flying off — bread, wine glass, plate shards and a cigar. My father is holding his napkin in front of his face, he has nothing more to say to me.

  Well?

  Well?

  I wipe off his face myself, not out of pity but in order to see him better, and I say: I will live!

  Well?

  The people have scattered, they hadn’t come at their own expense. I am alone with my father under heaven, and we are standing so far apart our words echo in space:

  Well!

  My father first takes off my mother’s clothes, he’s standing so far away I don’t know which costume he’s wearing, he’s constantly changing them, one minute he’s wearing the bloodstained apron of a butcher standing before a slaughterhouse at dawn, next he’s wearing a hangman’s red coat and climbing up the steps, next he’s wearing silver and black, with shiny black boots, in front of electric barbed wire, in front of a loading ramp, inside a watchtower, he’s wearing his costumes for the riding crops, the rifles, the execution pistols, his costumes are worn in the deepest night, bloodstained and hideous.

  Well?

  My father, who does not have my father’s voice, asks from far away:

  Well?

  And I speak across the distance, since we’re moving farther and farther away from one another and farther away and farther:

  I know who you are.

  I have understood everything.

  * * *

  Malina is holding me, he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, and for a while neither of us speaks. My pulse isn’t any faster or any slower, I show no signs of paroxysm, I am not cold, I’m not breaking out in sweat, Malina is holding me and holding me, we do not separate, for his calm has passed over to me. Then I disentangle myself from him, straighten out the pillows by myself, clasp my hands around his — it’s just that I cannot look at him, I stare down at our hands as they clasp one another tighter and tighter, I cannot look at him.

  * * *

  Me:

  * * *

  It’s not my father. It’s my murderer.

  Malina doesn’t answer.

  Me:

  It’s my murderer.

  Malina:

  Yes, I know that.

  I don’t answer.

  Malina:

  Why were you always saying: my father?

  Me:

  Did I really say that? How could I possibly say that? I didn’t really mean to say it, but you can only talk about what you see, and I told you exactly what was shown to me. Also I wanted to tell him something I’ve now understood for a long time — namely that people don’t die here, they are murdered. That’s why I also understand how he could have entered my life. Somebody had to do it. He was the one.

  Malina:

  So you’ll never again say: War and
Peace.

  Me:

  Never again.

  It’s always war.

  Here there is always violence.

  Here there is always struggle.

  It is the everlasting war.

  Three Last Things

  At the moment my greatest fear may be the fate of our postal officials. Malina knows that for many reasons I have a particularly soft spot for mailmen, in addition to an affinity for street repairmen. This latter should make me ashamed, although I’ve never done anything I shouldn’t have, I’ve always contented myself with a friendly greeting or a fleeting glance back through a car window at a group of suntanned sweating men with bare chests pouring gravel, spraying asphalt or devouring their lunches. In any case I was never so bold as to stop, nor have I ever asked Malina to help me get into conversation with a street repairman, even though Malina knows about and sympathizes with my ultimately inexplicable weakness.

  * * *

  My affinity for mailmen, however, remains completely untainted by impure thoughts. Years pass without my ever even recognizing their faces, for I sign the receipt they hand me at my door quickly, often with one of those old-fashioned pens they still carry. I also thank them cordially for telegrams and special deliveries and am not stingy with tips. But I can’t thank them as I would like for letters they do not deliver. Nevertheless my cordiality, my exuberance at the door is also intended for undelivered, lost or mixed-up mail. In any case from early on I was quick to appreciate the wonder of mail, the delivery of letters and packages. Also the mailbox in the front hall, set within a row of mailboxes fashioned by the most modem designers for the very farsighted mailbox industry, presumably for skyscrapers the likes of which Vienna has yet to discover, and standing in sharp contrast to the marble fin de siècle Niobe and the roomy, ceremonious entrance hall — this mailbox, too, prevents me from ever thinking indifferently about the men who fill my own with death notices, invitations from galleries and institutes, brochures from travel agencies beckoning to Istanbul, the Canary Islands and Morocco. Even registered letters are deposited by a sensible Herr Sedlacek or the younger Herr Fuchs so I won’t have to run to the post office in the Rasumofskygasse, and the money-orders which cause my heart to rise or sink are brought so early in the morning that I’m barefoot and in my nightgown, but always ready to sign. Evening telegrams, on the other hand, either reach me in a state of disintegration or recomposition, if they’re delivered before eight o’clock. I dash to the door with a towel thrown over my head on account of my freshly washed hair, one eye still red from the eyedrops, and am afraid that Ivan might have come too soon, but then it’s only some new friend or an old one with an evening telegram. What I owe these marsupial men, who carry in their pouches tidings of most precious joy or unbearable calamities, who wheel about on bicycles, who rattle up from the Heumarkt on motorcycles, who climb stairs, ringing doorbells despite their burdens, completely uncertain as to whether the trip will have been worth the effort, whether the addressee will be present, whether the addressee thinks the news is worth one schilling or four — what we all owe these men remains to be said.

  * * *

  A sentence was finally uttered today, not by Herr Sedlacek and not by the young Fuchs, but by a mailman I don’t believe I know, who has never appeared between Christmas and New Year’s with season’s greetings, and who thus has little reason to be friendly to me. Today’s mailman says: I’m sure all the mail you get is good, but I sure have to work hard getting it to you! I replied: Yes you do work hard, but we’ll first have to check to see if all the mail you bring really is good, since unfortunately your mail sometimes makes me suffer, just as my mail makes you suffer. If not a philosopher, this mailman is most certainly a rascal, for he enjoys placing four envelopes edged in black on top of two regular letters. Maybe he’s hoping a particular death notice will please me. But that one never comes, I don’t even need to look, I toss the four envelopes into the wastebasket, unread. If the right one were there I’d feel it, and maybe this wheedler of a mailman has seen through me, true confidants can only be found among people you scarcely know, among irregular mailmen like this one. I never want to see him again. I’ll ask Herr Sedlacek why we still need an extra postman who hardly knows our houses, who hardly knows me and who cannot keep his observations to himself. One letter contains a past due warning, in another someone writes that he’s arriving at the Südbahnhof tomorrow at 8:20 AM, I don’t recognize the writing and the signature is illegible. I’ll have to ask Malina.

  * * *

  There are days when mailmen see us turn pale or red, and that may be precisely why they aren’t asked to come in, sit down, drink some coffee. They are too well initiated into the terrible things that they nonetheless bear through the city fearlessly and so they are dismissed in the doorway, with or without a tip. Their fate is completely undeserved. Such treatment, which even I expose them to, is foolish, arrogant and completely unreasonable. Not even Ivan’s postcards are enough for me to invite Herr Sedlacek to have some champagne. Of course Malina and I don’t have a single bottle of champagne in the house, but I should keep one on hand for Herr Sedlacek, for he sees me turning pale and turning red, he suspects something, he must know something.

  * * *

  That one might feel called to become a mailman, that delivering mail is not an occupation haphazardly chosen, that it is a mistake to even consider it one, was proven by the famous mailman Kranewitzer of Klagenfurt, who in the end was brought to trial and sentenced to several years’ imprisonment for malfeasance and misappropriation of funds, a completely misunderstood man, mistreated by the press as well as the court. I have read the reports of Kranewitzer’s trial more carefully than those of the most shocking murder trials of all these past years, and the man himself, who then merely amazed me, now has my deepest sympathy. From a certain day on, without being able to explain why, Otto Kranewitzer ceased distributing the mail and for weeks and months he accumulated it in the old three-room apartment where he lived alone, piling it up to the ceiling, he sold most of his furniture to make space for the growing postal mountain. He did not open letters or packages, he did not appropriate checks or bonds, nor did he filch any banknotes sent from mothers to their sons, nothing of the sort could be proven against him. He simply, suddenly could no longer deliver the mail, a sensitive, tender, great man who realized the full momentousness of his work, and precisely because of that the low official Kranewitzer was discharged from the Austrian Postal Service in disgrace and dishonor, as it takes pride in employing only reliable, energetic mailmen of stamina. But in every profession there must be at least one man who lives in deep doubt and comes into conflict. Mail delivery in particular would seem to require a latent angst, a seismographic ability to receive emotional tremors, which is otherwise acknowledged only in the higher and highest professions, as if the mail couldn’t have its own crisis, no Thinking — Wanting — Being for it, no scrupulous and noble renunciation otherwise granted all sorts of people, better paid, occupying academic chairs, people who are permitted to ponder the proofs of divine existence, to reflect on the Ontos On, the Aletheia or as far as I’m concerned the origins of the Earth or of the Universe! But the unknown and poorly paid Otto Kranewitzer was only accused of base behavior and dereliction of duty. No one realized that he had begun to ponder, that he had been gripped by the amazement which is, of course, at the root of all philosophical inquiry and anthropogenesis, and in light of the things which caused him to lose his composure he could in no way be pronounced incompetent, for no one could have been more capable than he — who had spent thirty years delivering letters to Klagenfurt — in recognizing the problem of mail, its problematic essence.

  * * *

  He was fully familiar with our streets, it was clear to him which letters, which packets, which printed matters were postmarked correctly. In addition, mo
re and most subtle differences in the writing of addresses, a “Rt. Hon. Sir,” or a name unaccompanied by “Herr” or “Frau,” a “Prof. Dr. Dr.” told him more about attitudes, generational conflict, signals of social alarm than our sociologists and psychiatrists will ever discover. By a false or insufficient return address he realized everything immediately, naturally he could distinguish a family letter from a business letter without a moment’s hesitation, somewhat friendly letters from those wholly intimate, and this distinguished mailman, who took whatever risks his profession required as a cross to bear for all others, must have been seized by horror, faced with the postal mountain rising in his apartment, he must have suffered indescribable pangs of conscience, inconceivable to others, to whom a letter is just a letter and printed matter merely printed matter. On the other hand, whoever even simply attempts, as I am doing, to assemble and confront his own mail from several years (and even such a person would not be unbiased, faced with his mail alone, and thus incapable of seeing the larger connections) would probably understand that a postal crisis, even if it only did occur in a smaller city and only for a few weeks, is morally superior to the accepted onset of one of the public worldwide crises so often thoughtlessly conjured up, and that thinking, which is becoming rarer and rarer, is not solely the property of a privileged class and its dubious representatives, the authorized ruminators, but also belongs to an Otto Kranewitzer.