The Vienna Melody (44 page)

“You live at Number 10 Seilerstätte,” he said. “I shall wait at the corner of Annagasse until you come.”

In front of the hotel he said good-bye in formal manner to his guests.

On the way home they were approached at every other step by beggars. One veteran who had lost both legs was selling shoelaces. “Please!” he called. “Please!” One veteran, whose whole body trembled from nervous shock, was selling comic papers.

“A ghastly evening,” said Fritz.

“But the food was excellent,” commented his wife.

“Among hyenas I have no appetite,” he said.

Meanwhile Martha Monica had found the answer to her problem. You could say what you liked against the Sozis, but it was a first-rate thing in their favor that they had done away with janitors and introduced individual door keys. To be sure, she did not possess one of her own yet, but she borrowed one under strictest admonishments from Liesl while Fritz was buying a morning paper. “But watch out!” warned the dancer good-naturedly. “He's dangerous!”

“Didn't you like him, Liesl?” Martha Monica asked.

“Who, I? Enormously!” Liesl admitted.

The angel-with-the-trumpet entrance was unlocked, and good-nights were said. After the Drauffer couple had gone into their apartment Martha Monica waited with pounding heart for some time. Then she slipped downstairs again and unlocked the door. On the corner of Annagasse stood the man whom she did not know what to call.

“Promise me one thing,” she said, when he greeted her with a cry of joy.

“Anything!”

“You will not kiss me. If you don't promise me that I shall go back.”

He promised.

They walked off together into the night. There was something ghostly about the misery that pushed its way into districts where some remnants of well-being still remained and where night life was provided for foreigners. Between the exhibition of neediness in the streets and the routine of the night clubs there was no bridge. The music of the entertainment business drowned out the whistles of the rescue cars, picking up people collapsing from starvation in front of doors behind which bands played for pleasure-seeking foreigners and for native Viennese who wrung a profit out of misery.

Martha Monica was frightened. But the Italian reassured her. “Don't think of bad people today. Rather think of me,” he said in his amusing accent.

Why were these people bad? the girl wanted to know.

Santa Madonna!
They were just people who made capital out of their infirmities, so she learned. Besides, some of these infirmities were not even real, but simulated. Would she bet him that that fellow over there in a tattered infantry uniform was artificially producing that chronic trembling in his limbs?

With the unfathomable readiness of human nature to insult the misery of others in order to lull its own conscience, the smooth-speaking Italian piled proof on proof. In its abundance it sounded plausible, and besides, Martha Monica had no possible way of checking it. Foreigners always knew better than the residents.

Soon they were sitting in the Trocadero, to which they had gone on foot the short distance from Seilerstätte along Walfischgasse.

Conte Gaetano regretted that they had had to walk. Tomorrow (for it was not true that he was leaving the next day) he would make it clear to an acquaintance of his in the Police Administration that something must be done about this terrible annoyance. How could a person get into the mood of enjoyment if along the pavement people with amputated limbs and nervous affections were allowed to make themselves so troublesome?

“A small loge, Count?” inquired the head-waiter with obsequious recognition.

This was Martha Monica's first night club. How much she had heard about them and how ardently she had wished to see one! Yet what now met her eyes exceeded her dreams. The colored spotlights on the dancing couples! The flattering music that never stopped! No one had any cares. No one was sad. They danced. They sang. They laughed.

Champagne was brought when they had barely taken their seats, and the head-waiter bowed and asked if the count had any special wishes for the band; Herr Haupt, the leader, would consider it an honor to play anything for him. Conte Gaetano smiled, drew out a ten-thousand-crown note from his purse, handed it to the amiable
chef de salle
, and asked Donna Monica what the band should play. She said “
Wien
,
Wien nur du allein
,” and a second later the bandmaster was leading it just for her, and the musicians were singing it just in her honor, “
Wien
,
Wien
,
nur du allein
,
sollst stets die Stadt meiner Traüme sein
…” As they played and sang a flower-girl brought a basket of long-stemmed yellow roses and held out a few of them, whereupon Conte Gaetano bought them all and laid them beside Martha Monica. Then he led her out on the dance floor, the band played the Strauss “Emperor Waltz.” Never had she danced before with such a marvellous partner. He held you so lightly and firmly, led you with the sureness of a sleepwalker, and whirled you till you lost your breath. And every now and then he whispered, “
Io t'amo
,
Donna
Monica!”

“Why do you have to leave tomorrow?” she asked as they danced, and he answered: “Orders. Don't you want me to go?” She knew she shouldn't say no, but she said it. After the “Emperor Waltz” came a tango, and they danced it. They danced a one-step and the “Rosenkavalier Waltz” they rested for a little, and it was more beautiful than any dream.

“Did you notice that in the theater I had eyes for nothing but you?” he inquired.

She knew she should not say yes, but she said it.

They danced again, and then there was a slight interruption. A man with an appallingly emaciated face had forced his way in and was standing in the midst of the dancing couples. A spotlight fell full on him, on his dry lips, his gray, sunken cheeks, on his infantry uniform which had grown so big for him. He stood there with wide-open eyes and did not move. A couple waltzed past him. The gentleman in evening dress said to his artificially blonde partner, “What strange persons they let stand around here!” Another man put his hand into his pocket, found some small coins, and offered them to him. But the head-waiter had already taken the intruder by both arms; he did not weigh much, so it was not difficult to throw him out.

As he left he was heard to shriek, “They are dancing!”

“It was bananas, bananas she wanted from me,” blared the band. Martha Monica had looked inquiringly at her partner. Simply outrageous that beggars were now allowed to get into such exclusive restaurants, was his comment. But Martha Monica had meant the man's cry and the extraordinary way he looked round, as though he were trying to comprehend something and could not.

She soon forgot him, however, for after that dance there was champagne, and after the champagne another dance. Conte Gaetano said that he worshipped her, and the music was more wonderful all the time and if only he didn't have to go away it would be paradise.

When it was time to leave he asked, “What would you do if I stayed?”

He was not going to stay, so she replied, “I should be happy.”

“I shall stay,” he said. “I love you too much.”

Clinging close to him, she walked home. He promised to stay as long as she wished.

“For ever!” she said.

His enthusiastic reply was, “
Va bene
!” It was the loveliest answer of her life.

On the corner of Walfischgasse stood the emaciated man. As they passed they heard him mutter, “They are dancing!” again and again to himself in a bewildered way.

“Do you think he's crazy?” Martha Monica asked.

“Drunk,” was his reply.

They walked on and the man vanished. “Tell me once more that you love me.”

“I love you.”

“How long did it take for you to love me?”

“One second.”

“Are you a liar, Gaetano?”

“I love you, Donna Monica.”

Hans had hardly reached home when he realized that it could not go on like this.

The thought of ‘going home' had kept him alive. He was one of those most unfortunate so-called ‘undocumented' military persons whose personal identification papers had, it was alleged, been lost in a prison camp and proved irrecoverable. Such persons, despite the conclusion of peace, were not transferred until the necessary papers were finally produced. According to the findings of the League of Nations, called to the rescue of these unhappy ones, the lack of proper papers served in most cases merely as a pretext to hinder the return home of “displeasing or undesirable elements.” The result was that for 78,522 prisoners the war lasted not four but up to eight years. Hans was one of these, and, like the rest, never discovered what the reasons were.

When the bliss of the first meeting, the happiness of speaking his own language, the joy of not having to obey any orders was over, the disenchantment was violent.

In his endless years as a prisoner Hans had given up what Sigmund Freud once had called his “luxury of evasion” and had learned to think things through to the end. While he was still in the trenches Selma had sent him a novel. The title was
The Murdered Man, Not the Murderer, Is Guilty
, and the author's name was Franz Werfel. Hans had taken this book, and especially two words out of it, with him into captivity. They were two remarkable words, which as such displeased him: “social release.” In the life of every young person, according to them, comes a day when his individual worthlessness ceases and he must take his place within the frame of existing society. His complete individual worthlessness had been drilled into Hans by the war in all its horror. One had ceased to have a will or a mind of one's own. But what he, on the other hand, did not agree with was the place in an already-existing society. The longer he thought about it, the more he was inclined to believe that social release was the initiation into a part of your life when you should take up your position not in an existing society but against it.

All of his conclusions in life had been reached through the things he had experienced, seen, or felt, before he could think them out. “Herr Hans Alt suffers from incurable empiricism,” had been another of Freud's sarcastic remarks. This tendency had reached an acute stage in the time of Hans's utter loneliness. To think that human beings should suffer the things he had suffered and seen others suffer; that the chalked-up inscription on troop trains, originally destined for cattle, “Ten Horses and Forty Men,” wiped out the difference between man and animal, he had had to see with his own eyes in order to draw his conclusions about it; that killing was not murder and a crime, as he had been brought up to believe, but heroism, he would not have thought credible had he himself not been required to aim and shoot at unknown men.

When he had the incontrovertible proof that all this was done not for his country but against it, he went through a crisis. His faith in authority, which had been hammered into his very marrow by school and home, had been shaken that morning in the violet meadow. Nevertheless, it remained. His school, his father, his Emperor still had right on their side. But now their unrighteousness cried aloud to heaven, so that his faith in authority was dumb. Every one had been shamelessly betrayed. The sons who came back as despised beggars or, worse still, didn't come back and became names on tiny churchyard crosses or numbers in prison camps. The mothers who had given those sons. The fathers who had given all their money for war loans. The last trace of regard for anything that might go by the name of respectability vanished. Everything was criminally false that had been said, taught, required by authority for ages past.

Revolution, which is in the blood of Parisians, was not in the veins of the Viennese. In Hans's blood there was the Austrian amiability and the good manners learned in his nursery. He was not radical enough to come directly to final conclusions. Day and night, in his desolate prison barracks, while he was almost despairing of his coming home at all, he struggled to find a compromise. He found it in his decision to convince himself with his own eyes, as soon as he came home; the terrible reports reaching the prison camp might be exaggerated and aimed at convincing the prisoners that their camp was better than their home. But when he did see with his own eyes that it was far more terrible than anything he had heard, he did not allow himself any further evasion. Now at last he was ready for the final outcome.

One of the first things to strike him was that people in Vienna did not realize what had happened, and it was like a slap in the face. They went about and expected to continue as usual. But there was nothing to continue! Vienna had been an imperial capital, and an imperial capital cannot do without an empire. But the empire no longer existed. Austria was the concept of a super-national nation uniting nationalities. The concept had been destroyed. “German Austria,” the little land with seven million inhabitants, carved out of an empire of fifty-five million, possessed neither money nor friends. Nevertheless, at St. Germain they had been cynical enough to pile the burden of a succession on them that had no basis for existence.

Most incomprehensible of all to this returning prisoner was the attitude of Number 10. They were still calling die people begging in the streets “beggars,” because they either did not know or did not want to know that six out of every ten Viennese were compelled to beg and that Austria itself had been assigned a role which was nothing else than that of an international beggar. They carried on their businesses, continued to go to their offices, went on receiving their pensions.

“Of course, if you are suddenly going to expect your family to develop a social consciousness …!” Selma had said.

No, it was not social consciousness that Hans demanded; that smacked too much of politics, which was something that he, like most of his generation, rejected. What he demanded and what he intended absolutely to insist upon was that they open their eyes! They were asleep! Not even his illness was any excuse for Papa's writing the words for him, “No rise in wages!” Otto Eberhard repeated endlessly, “The terrors of the streets.” Even Mother had completely distorted ideas and seemed to believe that certain circles were not affected by the present, hers included. No need even to mention that complete ass Hermann, who was offering his war experiences to the
Neue Freie Presse
, while Martha Monica chose this moment as suited to falling passionately in love,