The Vienna Melody (18 page)

Simmerl (who had finally succeeded in having himself called “Herr” Simmerl) went on from the point where he had been interrupted by Professor Stein's Thursday call. As he polished the brass fittings on the dining room door he came to the dramatic moment. “Said the baron to me, ‘Herr Simmerl,' he said, ‘if you ever see that captain again face to face, you must let me know immediately!' For you must know that the baron never talked much, and as for the baroness, he had a kind of admiration—Does your ladyship not feel well?”

“I'm not sure,” she said. “Please go on, Herr Simmerl.”

The tall man with the long face, on which there were scarcely any eyebrows, so that its expression was one of constant wonder, proceeded with his task of story-telling and cleaning the door brasses, for which he used a chamois cloth and some white polish. But Henriette had let a sound of pain escape, so he stopped a second time.

“Perhaps it were better to notify Dr. Herz?” he asked, as usual speaking in the subjunctive and thereby implying that his suggestion was only tentative.

When Dr. Herz came he maintained—as usual when he came to visit one of his patients at Number 10—that everything was exactly as it should be. A little later, as Henriette lay in her bed, the thought came to her that she would die.

“What nonsense!” said Dr. Herz, who seemed to have arranged for a protracted stay. “Everything is absolutely normal!”

Normal that one should have such pain and afterwards such a sense of passing away? Why had no one ever told her that it was so frightful?

“Why should they have discouraged you? A first birth is always a little more strenuous,” the doctor explained with a gentleness which aroused only bitterness in her. “You must surely have known that.”

“I don't think I can stand it!” she replied. She had known nothing of the sort! Up to this very second she had not even known what would happen.

“Now, now! They all stand it,” Dr. Herz said. “To do a good job takes time. We can't alter nature. You can understand that, can't you, my dear little lady?”

The pains and deathly terror never abated now. Towards three o'clock they fetched Franz home from his office. Towards seven a man whom she was barely able to distinguish came into the room of pain-wracked woman. He was a consulting specialist—not an ordinary physician, but a professor of gynaecology—whom Dr. Herz had sent for. He, Dr. Herz, was only a general practitioner, and you couldn't afford to take chances at a house like Number 10. Dr. Herz not only was no specialist, but was also young and poor. He couldn't risk losing patients who paid five florins for each visit. The professor first examined the case, then declared to Franz, when he joined him in the next room, that perhaps the case was not quite so normal as his esteemed colleague had supposed. “I don't wish to alarm you in any way,” he said, “but the labour pains have ceased.”

“Does that occur sometimes?” Franz asked.

“Oh, certainly! We see it repeatedly.”

“Is she in danger?”

“Not at the moment.”

Whereupon Franz, who had sat there motionless for four hours, fists pressed together, rose slowly from his seat. He slipped a small silver cross he had been holding into his vest pocket. “She must not die!” he said to the professor.

“Everything that lies in my power will be done.” The professor did not include the power of Dr. Herz.

“She must not die!” repeated Franz. “Do you understand me?” The attitude of this husband, whom the professor had known in his chess club and whom he considered a rather unemotional fellow, was so unexpected that he regaled the other club members with his story at the next occasion. “Lots of things have happened to me in life,” he told them, “but never anything like this. I've seen relatives of patients who beseech me as though I were a saviour or bribe me as though I were a highwayman. But never one who wanted to murder me! I swear to you that man would have strangled me with his own hands!”

However that may have been, and although Franz, for the four hours since he had come home, had been strictly forbidden to do so, he now tore open the door to his wife's bedroom and stood on the threshold staring at the bed like one bereft of his senses until he was forcibly led away.

Henriette was not aware of this either. The storm of pain had passed, but her body felt like lead. Her thoughts, too, were blunted and consisted mostly of a vague consciousness of being dead. She tried, without success, to remember when it had happened. Nor could she fathom where she was. But the roaring sound in her ears and the putrid, sweetish smell of lagoons was something she recognized. Then they both passed; she was swallowed up in complete blankness and darkness. That, too, disappeared for a few seconds at a time and then returned for a few seconds.

“Tampons! Quick!”

The lagoon smelled so sickeningly sweet.

“How is the pulse?”

“All right, Professor.”

“You call such a weak pulse all right! I knew it! If only I hadn't let myself be pushed into this by you! You can't operate in a private home! I need oxygen, by God!”

All black. Empty. Ugh, that smell!

“How is her respiration now?”

“I'd call it all right, Professor.”

A harsh glare of light in front of her closed eyelids.

“Tampons! Quickly! She's bleeding!”

I'm bleeding, she thought, without picturing to herself what it meant. Then there was a metallic roar and she plunged into deepest darkness.

“Hetti! Do you hear me? Hetti!”

Oh, yes. She heard him. The engine rushed along. They were in a sleeping-car. There is a rhyme to go with the throb of the engine.

“Herr Alt! If you remain here I refuse to take any responsibility!”

“Don't you see that she's not moving at all? God in heaven!” It was such a soul-rending cry that it penetrated the leaden apathy of Henriette's consciousness. She opened her eyes.

“Don't go back to sleep again right away, please, my dear little lady. Otherwise we shall never get your nervous husband out of the room!”

The glaring light was painful.

“Are you convinced now that your wife's all right, Herr Alt? We'll let you know when the time comes! Won't we, Frau Alt?” The engine roared on.
I am dead, all the way. I am dead, all the way
.

“The pulse is much better, Professor!”

“Give her another intravenous injection of caffeine, Dr. Herz.”

“I don't think she needs it any more. The whole trouble was she made no effort herself.”

“My dear colleague, you're mistaken again! The trouble is all stupid secretiveness. If you don't know anything about life you can't stand it!”

“I can stand it,” she said.

Later that night of October 21, 1890, she gave life to a son and preserved her own.

 

F
rom the very first instant he saw her Hans loved his mother above everything. “Mammi!” was his first spoken word, and even before he could frame it with his lips he said it with his eyes.

His whole little round face was wreathed in smiles as long as she was near him; it was only when she left him that he learned to cry. Indeed, he seemed born to laughter, for even when he still lay on his carrying pillow he hummed softly and pulled his mouth into jolly grimaces; he was the happiest child ever seen at Number 10. Not even the former Baroness Uiberacker, who kept sharp track of sister-in-law on the fourth floor, could assert that Henriette was a bad mother. Two years after Hans, Franziska was born, and a year after Franziska, Hermann came along. Although they did so with reluctance, the first floor was obliged to concede that the extravagant, flirtatious, and thoroughly undisciplined person on the floor was a better wife than they had expected her to be. In any case, it would have been hard to find a more contented husband than Franz. He was, to be sure, no pillar of the church, and it was quite ridiculous how he worshipped Henriette. Heaven only knows whether she was not perhaps leading him around by the nose and hiding things from him and the rest of the house.

When Hans learned to walk and talk he exercised the first of these faculties incessantly but made hardly any use of the second. On his sturdy little legs he slipped up and down the smooth old steps and the new stairs like a squirrel; in the nursery he squatted on the floor and studied with equal fascination the animal pictures in his cloth storybooks, with which he surrounded himself as with a circus, and the insides of his dolls. For hours on end he would stand in front of the cage of Cora, Sophie's parrot, now an inhabitant of the fourth floor, listening to her monologues. When the parrot spoke he nodded enthusiastically. But he himself hardly ever spoke.

Agnes the nurse, called Neni, found this so disturbing that she worried Henriette with her fear that he might end up with some speech defect. A child of almost four who did not talk! In Neni's rich experience such a thing had never occurred before. The family's physician, Dr. Herz, however, declared that the nurse was an alarmist and that Hans's power of speech was absolutely normal. There are quiet and noisy children. Hans belonged to the quiet group.

Nevertheless, the more Hans made a habit of using gestures instead of words to express what he wanted or thought, the more disturbed Henriette became. Sometimes one could think that the child, except for the one word “Mammi,” really was mute, for he no longer even sang or hummed as he used to. Moreover, his eyes, which had remained as blue as they were immediately after his birth, took on the searching, penetrating look of a deaf-mute.

As Henriette reached the climax of her worry the inexplicable inhibition was suddenly removed. It was Christine, the little daughter of Colonel Paskiewicz, who brought it about. She was fourteen now, taller, and promising to be as beautiful as her father, who, according to the laws of science, should long since have died but who nevertheless lived on. Anxiety about him still dominated Christine's home, since the colonel, between his inevitable attacks, challenged death with the same insouciance as he used to challenge his opponent in a duel. For Christine, going up to the fourth floor meant an escape into a better world. Up there everything was heavenly. The girl's adoration of Henriette took on dimensions which the rest of the house viewed with disapproval. It was not only the twins, but the grown-ups as well, who called her a “hysterical ninny.” But it was the colonel himself who annoyed his sister-in-law Elsa, the wife of the Public Prosecutor, by saying: “In this Godforsaken house she has sought out the only interesting person!”

As usual, Christine rushed upstairs after school, two steps at a time, and inquired breathlessly of the maid whether Aunt Hetti was in. No, Madame had gone out upon an errand. Disappointed, Christine, for whom this question was the event of each day, knocked nursery door. Neni, the nurse, was ironing innumerable tiny shirts on a long board underneath which Hans had cosily installed himself. He liked a roof over his head—just like a dog, Neni had often said to him by way of reproach, but this did not disturb him; he sat happily beneath the ironing-board, surrounded by his picture books and engaged in dismembering a woolly bear. At the window two-year-old Franziska sat in her high chair and rattled a little bell with persistence. Hermann, born one year after, lay sleeping in his cradle, his fists tightly balled. Except for the tinkle of the bell all was quiet.

“I thought maybe I might come in for a while,” Christine said, apologetically.

The nurse sprinkled a shirt with water and whispered: “But mind you don't wake my baby!” There was a secret rivalry between these two, for Hans worshipped his cousin. After Hen­riette, she was the one he liked best in the house. The others did not exist for him. And now his eyes brightened as he pointed to the floor, meaning: “Sit down by me.”

Christine was familiar with his gestures, and not just with them, for she also knew the speech of children in general, whether explicit or implied. She knew so well what children say and what they keep to themselves. Of this latter perhaps she knew even more. Without a word she sat down next to Hans on the floor.

“You shouldn't always give in to him,” the nurse declared in a low tone over their heads. “The boy does nothing except what he pleases. In every way people spoil him!”

But Hans had shown his big cousin the lion who was rampant page one of his cloth picture book and was pointing to it with his index finger. “Tell me about the lion!” was what he meant, and Christine told him. She did not tell him as a grown-up would, but in the way she had always wished stories might be told to her, with an answer to every question, so that one could tell what happened afterwards. “And then they live happy and contented for ever more,” was the way the fairy tales of the grown-ups were accustomed to end, but, according to Christine, that was no end but a beginning. Up to the moment when they lived happily they had existed in a state of terror or frightful adventures, and you really wanted to find out at last what a life of happiness and contentment was like. In a subdued voice, so as not to waken the baby, Christine told her story with one eye on the door to watch for Aunt Hetti's arrival home. Hans listened with rapt interest. When it reached the most exciting climax the nurse announced that she had finished ironing and that it was time to go for a walk in the Stadtpark. But Hans shook his head passionately. Stay here! Find out what happens next! Since she knew he was in safe hands, Neni dressed little Franziska, tucked the soundly sleeping Hermann into his carriage, and went off with the two of them. You could hear her say to Herr Simmerl, who helped her downstairs with the baby carriage. “That dumb boy is getting more headstrong every day! He's being brought up all wrong!” After which the dumb boy and Christine were left alone.

Hans sat under the ironing board and was delighted to learn that the wild lion grew tame and no one in the world had cause to fear him any longer, neither the king, nor the queen, nor the five princes. So he stroked the lion in the picture book, turned to the next page, where a peacock preened himself, and pointed to it, as much as to say: “Tell me about the peacock.” But Christine shook her head, for her opportunity had come. If she succeeded where every one else had failed, would Aunt Hetti perhaps love her a little more?