Telegrams of the Soul (15 page)

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German troubadours

How miserable you feel on summer evenings in the big city. As if you've been left behind. Bypassed. For instance, I go walking after dark on the Praterstrasse! It's as if I and those I pass had flunked life's final exam and—, while the good pupils were permitted to enjoy their vacation by way of recompense. But we are only allowed to dream.

“Oh waves crashing against old wooden docks; oh little lonesome lake; oh clearings sparsely grown with grass and brown bog, where every private tutor will tell you: “You see? This is where deer come in the evening to drink.” Oh elder brush with black musk beetles and little metallic-looking mountain beetles and louse-ridden rose beetles and light brown mountain flies beside babbling brooks slipping over big stones at a speedy clip! And the brush nourishes insect worlds! Oh 22-degree well bubbling forth in an open basin on which linden blossoms float; for the pathway to the swimming hole is bordered with linden trees, and everything is covered with linden blossoms!White sailboat serenity in lacquered yachts! The ladies lightly tanned. The whole world trimming down. Who's going to win the regatta?! Risa, give me your hand on the pier. Noontimes loaded with 10,000 tons of solar heat, like the weight of war ships; afternoons with apricots, sour cherries, noble gooseberries; evenings with chilled Giesshübler;
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at night—do you hear the swans opening and closing their beaks?! And again, the swans opening and closing their beaks?! And nothing more—.”

But we wander down the Praterstrasse in the big city. 8
P.M
. Akin to all the failing shops on either side. Peaches in bins beside matjes herrings. Baskets full of this and that. Bathing caps. Black radishes. Bicycle lights blinking everywhere. As if the air, like in perfume factories bursting with the scent of violets, had here soaked itself full of the smells of potato salad, tar sandwiched between granite pavement slabs and millefleur de l'homme épuisé!
Arc lights burning as feebly as glow worms on summer nights could hardly make matters any worse. Summer misery all lit up! Leave it in the dark, if you please, to lower in silent shadows! But arc lights scream: “Take a look!” They screech out life's lapses, spilling the beans in their white light!

“Venice in Vienna,” 11:30
P.M
.: Performance of the Newsky Roussotine Troop. Just a hop, skip and a jump away from the Praterstrasse and summer's illuminated misery. As if you were to wake up on the Semmering after having fallen asleep in an air thick with red brick dust! Newsky Roussotine Troop. They dance like noble princesses!

Every movement sings out. “You heap of crippled, crawling, downtrodden slaves, see us swing free! We come from the Russian folk soul! We're poems straight from the steppes!”

As if far removed from life's insufficiencies, they peer at you, standing there with inordinately noble faces and red flowers in their hair; long, pale green strands of pearls hang down the front of their white silken gowns.

The songs, the dances are Russia incarnate. That's how you learn to recognize Russia. It's like a journey into the heart of the Czarist empire. No books can convey it. Or perhaps you'd rather read about the “noble melancholy” of the people who live there, about “the freedom ringing in their souls,” about the forests of birch trees and the embroidery in red and green?!?

Better, you mere mortal, keep your eyes on the Newsky Roussotine Troop!

Behold! They sing both chorales and wails! Just as in a warm bath an infant wails and in cold life a wise man mutters: “So be it!”

Behold, the youngest member of the troop, the most Russian of Russian Misses, shakes herself from her shoulders to her toes and lets spill a wail out of this life-filled organism, a long, childlike wail—the trill of nature! And then again somebody else declaims, as it were: “Respice finem” and “requiescat” and “Moskwá, Moskwá.”

And a noble lad dances his burning passion.

And the leader Newsky sings in a soft and tempered voice his
clear notes, looks over with calm and assurance at the little kneeling woman, circles round, beating on a tambourine in measured tact the rhythm of life lived to the fullest.

And the noble princess, the light blond? She's the very incarnation of nature itself in all its unspeakable inexhaustible bounty. Like waving, blustering corn fields in the evening wind, like brooding black Scotch pines on lofty heights, like Beethoven's adagios, telling it all in mild notes of dejection, all the while soaring with her lofty soul over the morass of miseries—!

Here she stands and sings, the loveliest, the lightest, the blondest, woman incarnate! Model woman! Crying, as it were: “Come to me, Lord of Life!” and crying: “Keep away!” Crying: “I love you!” and crying: “I cannot love you!” Crying: “Take me as a simple creature,” and crying: “Take me as the hundredfold soul of the world all!” Crying: “Take me in your arms, all-merciful man!” and crying: “Nay! Kiss me only from afar with your soft winks!” Crying: “Make me your servant!” and crying: “Make me your master!” Crying: “Can you be like that, oh Man, that I bind myself to you, to your dark wilted blossom on the tree of life, your man's heart, I the wellspring, the lightest, blondest source of all.”

Here she stands and calls and asks.

Bunches of red flowers bedeck her hair; pale green pearls dangle down her white silken gown.

Then suddenly the whole troop turn simple, leave Russia's steppes behind, embrace each other, bow their heads in friendship, and sing the song of life: “We will abide, we will survive!”

Late at night they all take their supper, in simple attire and sheer exhaustion, in the hidden cellar of the Johannis-Bräu, listening, amazed by the “Viennese ditties” that hover around them, that prime the soul like a horn-book for Spinoza, like the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, like “Hans, who Squandered his Good Fortune” and “Of the Violet Blooming in Hiding” and “Ring Around the Rosy, a Pocket Full of Posy.” Austria, what a naïve place you are! As if some poor soul unlucky in love cut himself a pipe out of reeds and merrily set to imitating bird calls!

But Newsky Roussotine Troop, whereto do you lead us?! From the miserable big city summer of the Praterstrasse to the fields of
tyranny, to the realms of future strength and freedom!

It's a long way from the “common concertina” to “Newsky Roussotine.” As far as from Marlitt
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to Tolstoy.

It's like a battle, the evolution of the new soul of man. Everyone resists it. Many fall beforehand, in exhaustion, before the unexpected. Many fall in the rain of enemy fire. Few manage to storm the newly conquered land, planting their flags in the soil of new concepts—.

How does it fit here?! I don't know. Because I love Russia's songs?!

At 11
P.M.
I wander down the Praterstrasse en route to the production of the Newsky Troop. The women wear thick bushels of red flowers in their hair, and long, pale green strands of pearls dangling down their white silken gowns. They all embrace each other and weep. They all embrace each other and wail. The noble lad dances his burning passion. Newsky, the man, beats on a tambourine in measured tact the rhythm of life lived to the fullest. Down the Praterstrasse I wander at 11
P.M.

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A wine punch

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Eugenie John Marlitt (1825 –1887), popular German opera singer and author

I wrote in the paper concerning the dear little dancer Hedi Weingartner, that she represents in body and soul the very incarnation of the Viennese belle. My conclusion read: “And nevertheless, for all the apparent gaiety, she's so very sad inside! About what? Just ask Franz Schubert and Hugo Wolf!”

My young room service waiter said to me: “Jesus, that was swell, what you wrote about that Viennese honey. And the story with that Mr. Wolf and the other guy!”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know, the two dudes that dumped that poor thing!”

“No, those are two long-dead, illustrious Viennese composers of Lieder who were cheerful on the surface and yet so very sad in their songs!”

“Aha—so that's what it's supposed to mean! To be perfectly honest, Mr. von Altenberg, I prefer my interpretation!”

She said: “Ever since they demolished my dear old ‘Bösendorfer Hall' (a concert hall in Vienna), I've been an unhappy person. I grant you that there are more pressing problems and tragedies in this World War, but for me, the most wretched soul alive, there are, alas—or thank God!—no others. So many heroes fall and I mourn my ‘Bösendorfer Hall.' Should I, therefore, be ashamed to admit it? It was my all. When I sat there I forgot the world. I forgot the present, the future. Later, at the dinner table, I had no idea what I ate. That will never happen again. I know the other concert halls. But I don't forget the present in them or the future. Am I ‘musical'!? Who knows! In the Bösendorfer Hall I was. Must one, can one possibly be it everywhere?! They're definitely ‘geniuses,' the ones that can be musical everywhere. People like me are terribly attached to just one place. In that one place he revives his spirit, there he thrives, there he comes to be himself! No, more than himself. For my sake alone they couldn't very well leave the building standing, that's clear. Just once I lost my cool. Someone said to me: ‘Its acoustics weren't even particularly good!' And I thought to myself: ‘If I were a tigress, I'd leap at him and tear out his throat with my claws!' But unfortunately, I'm no tigress.”

Coquetry is the immense decency of a desirable woman, thereby, for the moment at least, to hold off the disappointments she is bound to bring you.

Man stretches woman's soul on the Procrustes bed of his own cravings.

There are three idealists: God, mothers and poets! They don't seek the ideal in completed things—they find it in the incomplete.

“Say, coachman, do you know a Tschecherl
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still open at this hour?!?”

“I do indeed, Sir, but the clientele's too low class in that joint.”

“Listen, my good man, for me there are no lower class people and no upper class people, you understand?! Everybody's equal!”

“Oh they're equal alright, but the body odor's different!”

Green grocer: “But we also have fruit for the very fancy folk?!?”

“What kind of people are they, the very fancy folk?!?”

“The very fancy folk are them that buy the very fancy fruit!”

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A little café

These are your absinthe-ecstasies of life, you girls of the people! Everything gets turned and tumbled topsy-turvy! And on the down wards swing you shriek with terror and excitement! Here you forget that the rent is overdue and that at any moment you could get knocked up and be abandoned! Here you experience your cruise-ship emotions, seasickness for 10 Kreuzer!

And later in the meadows, in the dark distant meadows!

Whistle, fellah, if you spot a cop!

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Vienna's famous amusement park

They sat for hours in the Grabenkiosk
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on the last day of August, watched
fiakers
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roll by with foreigners in the passenger seats, automobiles like migrating birds returning from distant trips, ladies on the
trottoir
gliding by with astonishing self-assurance and others that pattered and pranced about to puff themselves up into something special.

At the Kiosk sat a French woman whom one dared greet only with one's eyes. And a sweet young thing with her “aunt,” whom one likewise saluted with the eyes alone. And unfamiliar damsels with veiled hats whom one did not greet at all. And a few men who'd already returned from their vacations. All these people felt a little déclassé to have been spotted at the Grabenkiosk in the high season, while the others were still basking in Ostende or Biarritz—.

Notwithstanding all this, the two friends made a few salient observations, gathered a few rare examples of the little species of man for their internal bug collection, pinned them up and arranged them in generalized categories.

At 6
P.M.
the red automobile, Mercedes 18-24, came by and drove them off to the Krieau.
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There they found an altogether dust-free country air and quiet. A man in a black suit and snow-white gloves mounted a horse. A
fiaker
brought a dancer (the Imperial Opera had just opened), a gray automobile drove up, muffled engine, roaring in a baritone, more than 30 horsepower. The little garden was full of yellow flowers that looked like little sunflowers and the rabbits in their cages pricked up their ears at an irregular slant. The two friends smoked Prinzesas and gaped at the mostly empty white tables and benches. In early spring and fall the place gets really hopping. But it was only August 31!

So the two friends drove on to the winter embankment.