The Salzburg Tales

by Christina Stead

  “For the love of God,” cried the Musician: “is there no end to this frightful skeleton?”

  “Just so,” said the Centenarist. “The nerve-specialist’s son had the skeleton ground up into bone-dust and fed him to the chickens; and those chickens grew up to be so wonderfully cadaverous, and gibbered in such an odd way, that the family was able to sell them to a circus: all but one, and that one laid an egg: but it was a stone egg and when they broke it open, they found inside two stone tablets with an epitaph written on them. So they buried the stone egg under a headstone, with the epitaph engraved on it, and after that, there was peace.”

  There was a loud outcry at this. The Master of the Day exclaimed:

  “You should be ashamed, Centenarist, to foist that dreadful farce on us.”

  “I am perfectly serious,” protested the Centenarist. “I believe I read the story in a book on the unseen and the unconscious, or something of the sort, by a reliable psychologist. If I did not take it word for word, at least, it was a story very like.”

  “You slander science,” said the Doctress.

  “You are under suspicion,” concluded the Master of the Day, “and no good story-teller sends his audience to bed to dream about ghosts. You must finish off with something more cheerful.”

  “Here is a last tale,” said the Centenarist; “I am afraid it is about death too, but it is pythagorean, and not so fearful.”

  GREAT friendships spring up and flourish between Jews during their long lifetimes. These friendships are usually born disputing over chess or pinochle and get hardy over unsugared tea and Maatjes herring. When two Jews are real friends, every workday and Sabbath, every morning and evening, they spend together. Prayers are said together and the Talmud pored over at night behind a yard-long counter, between one yellow lamp and the paper pattern of a suit: in their dreams one and the other disputes with, or hunts for, and rejoices in finding again his friend. When they wake their first thought is to talk together about their night’s sleep and the state of their digestion, and to grieve over the rude manners of their children.

  Two old Jews, Simon and Theodore, had lived so together for many years in New York, a full fifty-seven years, when the time came for Simon to die. Theodore sat by his bed for weeks, praying for his reprieve and demanding of God some return for their long and regular attendance at the synagogue. He was by him all the time, from the moment he fell down at his bench, visited him every day in the hospital, and when at last he was moved home into the loft over the garage where he lived, to die, Theodore moved his bed there and slept by Simon every night.

  Simon was very low: the family sat by, loudly weeping: the harassed young doctor of the poor had left: Theodore sat by with his little black cap on, and his shoulders dismally hunched. Then he said, “Simon, do you hear me; can you still understand me, Simon? Listen, you know what we have often talked about—if we have another life? Say, Simon, if you live again, in another form, in whatever form, try to speak to me if you see me. I will be listening, I will try to help you, Simon: perhaps you will be worse off than in this life.”

  Simon groaned, “I will, Theodore.”

  “Think of it the last thing …” urged Theodore.

  “Hear, O Israel,” said Simon and turned his face to the wall and died.

  So he was buried, the professional mourners all were there, the breakfast was eaten, the Jewish Relief Board helped the children and the poor neighbours got the widow a job; and Theodore, week after week and month after month, went solitary through his days and nights.

  Then one hot July day as he was walking down Hester Street, he heard a voice, “Theodore, Theodore!” Where did it come from? The sky, the pavement? Was it someone at his elbow? There was no-one there, but the voice was Simon’s voice. Theodore listened, and stopped and looked: no-one in the street: an old woman sitting at her street-door half asleep, the iceman carrying two blocks of ice into a house two doors away, the iceman’s horse and cart beside him: nothing else, not a cat, not a fly. He heard again urgently, “Theodore, Theodore, it’s me, Simon!” He stared at the ice-man’s cart: “It’s me, the horse: I am now a horse, Theodore.”

  Theodore approached the bony barrel of the poor white horse and said, “How are you, Simon, poor friend? Are you all right in your new life: is it hard?”

  “Not too hard,” says Simon: “I can bear it all right, you know, with one thing and another: one must not complain. He is not too hard with me; sometimes he kicks me in the ribs, sometimes the children try to make me eat muck, sometimes they put sticks in my nose, the flies eat me a trifle, I get thirsty in summer, I am sometimes hungry, but I can bear it, it might be worse, I can’t complain: perhaps next time I will do better. And how are you, Theodore, and how is your Jewess?”

  “Ach, the same, always the same stomach trouble: and you know, with me, the same pain in my back: but I don’t complain: only, you know, now I have no-one to play cards with; it’s very lonely now, Simon. But tell me, can I do anything for you?”

  “You can tell him to give me a bit more hay,” said the horse, “or you can bring me a carrot, or a bit of herring, some days, if you see me: you can recognise me by that scar on the haunch.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Theodore.

  “But one thing,” said the horse.

  “What is that?”

  “Most important,” said the horse, “above all, when you are speaking to him about me, don’t tell him I can speak, otherwise he will make me go down the street shouting, ICE! ICE!”

  Epilogue

  Now the yawning guests began to disperse and go off to bed; there were goodnights and goodbyes, there were till-tomorrows and till-we-meet-agains: there was haste and hankerings, and dawdling and dilly-dallying, for after such a week one gets to know another pretty well.

  The Viennese Conductor said to the Centenarist as they played chess:

  “Next week I will be no more Master of their Tongues; I am tired of it: in the evening you can still reign, but not I at all; let someone else do it—the Schoolboy, for example, here beside us, sitting pretty.”

  The Centenarist did not answer but quickly made a move, and while his adversary pondered, he broke out into a wild strain. The Schoolboy came up to the table and tried to size up the state of the board in a twinkling. The Viennese Conductor made a move and said to the boy, to distract the Centenarist, perhaps:

  “Sit down and watch the struggles of the rabbit with the stoat. Do you play chess?”

  “Yes,” said the boy, prudently, for he knew no one must interrupt a chess game.

  “Then here you can improve your game: you know the Centenarist has matched Alekhine?” said the Conductor.

  “In poker, for matches,” put in the Centenarist laughing, and stopping a moment in his song to move; and then going on with his spontaneous song, to which he put the following words, as if idly, as if musing:

  “In the desert, in the wild waste, in a city with seven gates,

  In the seventh of the gates, in a notch hung a gong,

  And softly blew the winds of the desert round the gong,

  And darkly went the dark Arab horsemen through the gates;

  All save the sixth gate, for there rode the chief; all save the seventh gate, for there hung the gong:

  Woe to the chief who cantered through the gate!”

  “Your voice is sweet and your tale interesting,” breathed the Schoolboy, drowsy by the Centenarist’s ear. “Is there more to it?”

  The Viennese Conductor started, moved his king out of danger, and the Centenarist quickly moved a bishop. The Viennese Conductor sat glumly looking at his knight, which was one of the white pair, and which was in danger, and the Schoolboy, anxious, said:

  “Your move!”

  The Centenarist began to sing softly again, as if abstracted, while the Viennese Conductor fell deeper into calculation:

  “On the sand-dunes, on the wild waste, on the horizon, rode a horseman,

  And the horse was yellow as g
old but the rider black as pitch,

  And blacker, with dust, and sweat, and vengeance, he, than pitch,

  When the sounds of the gong were borne softly to that horseman,

  And he rode for the city where his bride was in chains; he rode for the city where his brother was bewitched:

  Woe to the rider on the yellow, yellow horse.”

  The Viennese Conductor frowned and put his knight temporarily out of danger. Then, as, still lowly chanting, the Centenarist put out his thin hand and pretended to be about to castle, the Viennese Conductor, catching on, began to improvise on a harmonising strain:

  ‘“King Louis built a castle in a bog, and the cold marshes licked its towers,

  For music he’d the croaking of a frog, and for company the lizard in his bowers:

  The castle looked strong, but its history was not long!”

  “But I am not going to castle,” said the Centenarist smiling.

  A gentle snore arose: they looked round and saw that the Schoolboy, rosy, with fair hair fallen across his fair forehead, was fast asleep on the cushions of the settee.

  “When we have finished we will carry him to bed,” said the Viennese Conductor: “and he will not know how he got there.”

  “If we are finished before morning,” said the Centenarist: “and if not, it does not matter: the cushions arc soft.”

  So the Schoolboy slept and the great tale-teller and the master of tongues sang on through the quiet night. There was no indication that they would ever stop. But all things must have an end, nothing should last too long; the shortest of all things is patience, and the shortest of patiences is the patience of the ear. The guests who listened at the festival were surely a family of paragons, a nest of phoenixes. No one can believe they listened another day: but this we will never know, for the recording ear that heard them all, began to hear blow most loud the wind that blew over the compass and indicator on the Mönchsberg, with sounds from other corners of the earth, and it flew off with the night-wind to any other spot you like, for the earth breeds tales and songs quicker even than weeds.

  The clock in the drawing-room, where they sat with their chessmen and the sleeping boy, had Westminster chimes; and now they began. After a moment, they ceased, and the twelve strokes of midnight were heard; and thus the seventh day ended for the Salzburg Guests.

  Terminal hora diem, terminat auctor opus.