The Tongue Set Free, page 15
“Oh,” said his mother, pushing the snack towards us. “But you must be hungry by now.”
She then left, fortunately, for I didn’t touch the food, and Schiebl, empathetic as he was, had no appetite either. He let the soldiers alone, we didn’t play; when I left, he shook my hand warmly and said: “But tomorrow, when you come, I’ll show you something. I got a new artillery.”
Alice Asriel
My mother’s most interesting friend was Alice Asriel, whose family came from Belgrade. She herself had become a thoroughgoing Viennese, in language and manner, in everything that occupied her, in each of her reactions. A tiny woman, the tiniest of my mother’s friends, none of whom was very tall. She had intellectual interests and an ironic way of talking about things with Mother, none of which I understood. She lived in the Viennese literature of the period and lacked Mother’s universal interest. She spoke of Bahr and Schnitzler, in a light way, a bit giddy, never insistent, open to any influence; anyone who spoke to her could impress her, but he had to talk about things in that sphere; she barely heeded anything that wasn’t part of the literature of the day. It had to be men from whom she learned what counted; she respected men who spoke well, conversation was her life, discussions, differences of opinion. She loved listening most of all when intellectual men disagreed and argued. She was Viennese if for no other reason than because she always knew, without great effort, what was happening in the world of the intellect. But she just as much liked talking about people, their love affairs, their complications and divorces; she regarded anything connected to love as permissible, never condemned as my mother did; she argued with her when she condemned, and always had a ready explanation for the most involved complications. Anything that people did struck her as natural. Just as she viewed life, that was how life treated her, as though an evil genius had aimed at doing to her what she permitted others. She loved bringing people together, especially of different sexes, and watching their effects on each other, for she felt that true happiness was based chiefly on changing partners; and what she wished for herself, she granted equally to others, indeed she often seemed to be trying it out on them.
She played a role in my life, and what I have just said about her actually comes from later experiences. In 1915, when I first met her, I noticed how untouched she was by the war. She never once mentioned the war in my presence, but not like my mother, for instance, who was against the war with all her passion and kept still about it in front of me to prevent my having any trouble at school. Alice couldn’t relate to the war; since she didn’t know hatred and believed in live-and-let-live for anything and anyone, she couldn’t work up any enthusiasm about the war, and merely thought around it.
In those days, when she visited us in Josef-Gall-Gasse, she was married to a cousin, who also came from Belgrade and had also become a Viennese, like her. Herr Asriel was a small, bleary-eyed man, who was known for incompetence in all the practical matters of life. He knew just enough about business to lose all his money, including his wife’s dowry. They were living in a middle-class apartment with their three children when he made a last stab at getting on his feet. He fell in love with their maid, a pretty, simple, and submissive girl who felt honored by her employer’s attentions. They understood one another, their minds ran in the same channels, but unlike him, she was attractive and constant, and what his wife, in her light and fickle way, couldn’t give him, he found in the girl: moral support and absolute devotion. She was his mistress for a whole while before he left his family. Alice, who considered anything permissible, never reproached him; she would have lived on in the ménage à trois without batting an eyelash. I heard her telling Mother that she didn’t begrudge him anything, anything in the world. He should just be happy, he wasn’t happy with her, for there was nothing that kept them in limits from each other. He wasn’t capable of literary discussions; when books were talked about, he got migraines; everything was all right with him so long as he never set eyes on the other participants in these conversations and didn’t have to join in himself. She gave up telling him about them, she was utterly sympathetic about his migraines, nor did she resent him for their rapidly growing impoverishment. “He’s just not a businessman,” she told Mother, “does everyone have to be a businessman?” When the subject of the maid came up, and Mother was very hard on her, Alice always had a warm and understanding word for the two of them: “Look, she’s so good to him, and with her he’s not ashamed of losing everything. He feels guilty with me.”
“But he is guilty,” said Mother. “How can a man be so weak? He’s not a man, he’s nothing, he shouldn’t have gotten married.”
“But he didn’t want to marry. Our parents made us marry so that the money would stay in the family. I was too young, and he was too shy. He was too shy to look a woman in the face. Do you realize I had to force him to look me in the eye, and that was after we’d been married for a while.”
“And what did he do with the money?”
“He didn’t do anything with it. He just lost it. Is money that important? Why shouldn’t a person lose money? Do you prefer your relatives with all their money? Why, they’re monsters, compared with him!”
“You’ll never stop defending him, I think you still care for him.”
“I feel sorry for him, and now he’s finally found his happiness. She thinks he’s a grand gentleman. She kneels before him. Now they’ve been together for such a long time, and you know, she still kisses his hand and calls him ‘Sir!’ She cleans the whole apartment every day, there’s nothing to clean, everything is spotless, but she keeps cleaning and cleaning, and asks me if I need anything. ‘You just rest a bit, Marie,’ I say, ‘you’ve worked hard enough.’ But it’s never enough for her, and if they’re not together, she cleans.”
“Why, that’s outrageous. To think that you haven’t kicked her out! I would have shown her the door immediately, the very first moment.”
“What about him? I can’t do that to him. Should I destroy their happiness?”
I wasn’t supposed to eavesdrop. When Alice came over with her three children, we played together, and Mother drank tea with her; Alice launched into her reportage, Mother was very anxious to hear the next installment, and the two of them, seeing me with the other children, never dreamt that I could hear everything. Later on, when Mother made reticent hints that things weren’t going so well in the Asriel home, I was cunning enough not to let on that no detail had escaped me. But I had no idea what Herr Asriel was really doing with the maid. I understood the words as they were said, I thought they liked standing together and I didn’t suspect anything beyond that; and yet I fully realized that all the details I had caught weren’t meant for my ears, and I never once blurted out what I knew. I think I also wanted to experience my mother in a different way; every conversation she had was precious to me, I didn’t want to let anything of her elude me.
Alice did not feel sorry for her children, who lived in that unusual atmosphere. The eldest, Walter, was backward, he had his father’s bleary eyes and pointed nose and walked just like him, leaning slightly to the side. He spoke entire albeit short sentences, never more than one sentence at a time. He expected no answer to his sentences, but understood what people said, and he was stubbornly obedient. He did whatever he was told to do, but he waited a bit before doing it, so that people thought he hadn’t understood. Then suddenly, with a jerk, he did it, he had understood. He didn’t cause any special trouble, but supposedly he sometimes had fits of rage; you never could tell when they would start, he would calm down soon, but you couldn’t risk leaving him alone.
Hans, his brother, was a smart boy, it was delightful playing “literary quartet” with him. Nuni, the youngest, kept up with us, even though these quotations couldn’t mean anything to her yet, while Hans and I reveled in the game. We just hurled quotations at one another, we knew them by heart; if one of us said the first word, the other instantaneously supplied the rest. Neither of us ever managed to finish his quotation; it was a point of honor for the other to leap in and finish it. “The place—”
“—a good man entered, it is consecrated.”
“God helps—”
“—the man who lets God help him.”
“A noble—”
“—man draws other noble men.”
That was our very own game; since both of us gabbed equally fast, neither won the contest; a friendship commenced, based on respect, and it was only when the literary quartet was behind us that we turned to other quartets and games. Hans was always present when his mother carried on about connoisseurs of literature, and he had gotten in the habit of talking as fast as those people. He knew how to deal with his brother; he was the only one who could sense a fit coming on, and he was so gentle and obliging with him that he sometimes managed to head off a fit in time. “He’s smarter than me,” said Frau Asriel in his presence; she had no secrets from her children, that was one of her tolerance principles, and when Mother upbraided her, “You’re making the boy conceited, don’t praise him so much,” Frau Asriel would reply, “Why shouldn’t I praise him? He’s got a hard enough time of it with his father and what not,” by which she meant the retarded brother. As for what she thought about this brother, she kept it to herself, her openness never went that fai; her indulgence for Walter was fed by her pride in Hans.
He had a very narrow, elongated head and, unlike his brother, he kept his posture very straight. He pointed his finger at everything he explained, and at me too when disagreeing with me; I always feared that a bit, for when his finger went aloft, he was always right. He was so precocious that he had a hard time with other children. But he wasn’t fresh, and if his father said something stupid—which I rarely witnessed since I rarely saw him—he held his tongue and withdrew into himself, as though suddenly disappearing. I then knew that he was ashamed of his father, I knew it although he never said anything about him, perhaps that’s why I knew it. His little sister, Nuni, was different in this respect; she adored her father and repeated everything he said: “Common, fine, says my father,” she suddenly declared, “but so common!” Those were her quotations, she was made up of them, and especially when we played “literary quartet,” she felt prompted to blurt them out. Those were the only quotations that Hans and I never completed, although we knew them as thoroughly as those by the poets. Nuni was allowed to speak till she was done, and any listener would have been surprised by Herr Asriel’s judgments in between the stunted lines of poets. Nuni was reserved towards her mother, and it was normally hard to lure her out of her reserve; one sensed that she was accustomed to disapproving of many things, a critical but reticent child, carried along by her single adoring love of her father.
It was a twofold delight for me when Frau Asriel came with her children. I looked forward to playing with Hans, his know-it-all attitude appealed to me because I had to watch out so carefully; I was seemingly absorbed in the game with him in order to save myself a disgrace, which he always pointed out at the tip of his stretching finger. If I managed to drive him against the wall with, say, geographical things, he would doggedly fight to the finish, never giving in; our argument over the biggest island on earth remained undecided. Greenland was “hors concours” for him: How could you tell how big it was with all that ice? Instead of pointing at me, he pointed his finger at the map, and said triumphantly: “Where does Greenland stop?” It was harder for me than him, for I constantly had to find pretexts for going to the dining room where Mother and Frau Asriel were taking their tea. I would look for something in the bookcase, and I kept looking in order to catch as much as possible of the conversation between the two friends. Mother knew how intense things were between Hans and me, I ran so decisively towards the bookcase, riffling through one book, then another, emitting grunts of annoyance if I didn’t find something, letting out a long whistle if I did find what I was hunting, and she didn’t even reproach me for my whistle—how could she have imagined that I was curious about something else, and eavesdropping on them!
So I took in all the phases of the story of that marriage, to the very last. “He wants to go away,” said Frau Asriel, “he wants to live with her.”
“But he’s been doing that all this time,” Mother said, “now he’s walking out on all of you.”
“He says it can’t keep on like this in the long run because of the children. He is right, you know. Walter has noticed something, he eavesdropped on them. The two others haven’t a clue as yet.”
“That’s what you think. Children notice everything,” said Mother, while I listened, unnoticed. “What does he plan to live on?”
“He’s going to start a bicycle store with her. He’s always liked bicycles. It was his childhood dream to live in a bicycle store. You know, she understands him so well. She keeps telling him to make his childhood dream come true. She’ll have to do everything herself. All the work’s going to be on her shoulders. I couldn’t do it. That’s what I call true love.”
“And you actually admire that woman.”
I vanished, and when I came back to Hans and Nuni, she was quoting again: “‘Bad people have no songs,’ says my father.”
I was bewildered by what I had just heard, I couldn’t talk, and this time I realized how deeply it concerned the two children I was silent with. I held the book shut, though I had brought it to triumph over Hans, and I let him think he was right.
The Meadow near Neuwaldegg
Paula came soon after Fanny had gone, her antipode: tall and slender, a graceful creature, very discreet for a Viennese, and yet cheerful. She would have preferred to laugh all the time; since it didn’t seem proper to her in her job, only a smile remained. She smiled when she said something, she smiled when she was silent, I imagined that she slept and dreamt with a smile.
She did not act different whether speaking to Mother or to us children, whether answering a stranger’s question on the street or greeting a friend; even the dirty little girl, who was always there, had a happy time with her; Paula halted unabashedly upon seeing her, said a friendly word, sometimes unwrapping a piece of candy for her, surprising the little girl so greatly that she didn’t dare accept it. Paula would then coax her nicely and put the candy gently into the girl’s mouth.
She didn’t much care for the Prater amusement park, it was too coarse for her; she never said so, but I did sense it when we were there. She would shake her head in annoyance as soon as she heard something ugly, and she would give me a cautious sidelong glance to see whether I had understood it. I always pretended I hadn’t even noticed, and she soon smiled again. I was so used to her smile that I would have done anything to make her smile again.
In our building, the composer Karl Goldmark lived one floor below, right underneath us, a small, frail man with neatly parted white hair on both sides of his dark face. He would go for strolls on his daughter’s arm, not very far, for he was very old by then, but always at the same time every day. I associated him with Arabia; the opera that had made him famous was called The Queen of Sheba. I thought he came from there himself, he was the most exotic thing in the neighborhood and hence the most attractive. I never ran into him on the stairs or when he left the building; I saw him only when he was coming back from Prinzenallee; he had strolled a few steps there, back and forth, on his daughter’s arm. I greeted them respectfully, he lowered his head slightly, that was his almost imperceptible way of taking my greeting. I can’t recall what his daughter looked like, it was not her face that lodged in my memory. One day, when he didn’t come, I heard that he was ill, and then, toward evening, when I was in our nursery, I heard a loud weeping from downstairs, and it wouldn’t stop. Paula, who wasn’t sure whether I’d heard it, looked at me dubiously and said: “Herr Goldmark has died. He was very feeble, he couldn’t have gone for walks anymore.” The weeping came in thrusts and imparted itself to me; I had to keep listening and I moved to it, in the same rhythm, but without crying myself, it seemed to be coming from the floor. Paula grew nervous: “Now his daughter can’t go out with him anymore. She’s in absolute despair, the poor thing.” Paula smiled even now, perhaps to calm me down, for I noticed that it affected her deeply; her father was at the front in Galicia, and they hadn’t heard from him in a long time.
On the day of the funeral, Josef-Gall-Gasse was black with fiacres and people. We gazed down from our window, we thought there couldn’t be a free spot left below, but more and more fiacres and people kept coming and finding room after all.
“Where do they all come from?”
“That’s the way it is when a famous man dies,” said Paula. “They want to pay their last respects, they like his music so much.”
I had never heard his music and I felt excluded. I merely perceived the throng below as a spectacle, perhaps also because the people looked so tiny from the third floor; they were squeezed together, but some managed to doff their black hats to one another. That struck us as improper, but Paula had a placating explanation: “They’re glad if they know somebody among all those people, it gives them courage again.” The daughter’s weeping got to me, I heard it many days after the funeral, always towards evening; when it eventually began waning and then stopped, I felt a lack, as though I had lost something indispensable.
A short time later, a man plunged from the fourth floor of a nearby house in Josef-Gall-Gasse. The emergency squad came to get him, he was dead, a large blood stain remained on the asphalt and wasn’t removed for a long time. When we passed by, Paula took my hand and maneuvered me in such a way that she walked between the blood stain and me. I asked her why the man had done it, and she couldn’t explain. I wanted to know when the funeral would take place. There wasn’t going to be any, she said. He had been alone and had no kin. Maybe that, she said, was why he hadn’t wanted to go on living.
