The Vienna Melody (52 page)

Since she knew so well what he was, he had no need either to explain or prove himself to her. That did away with his uncertainty. With her he recovered his desire to live and the gaiety which was natural to him but which had been deadened by his long period of isolation.

Nor was that the only reason that he felt her loss so irreparably. It was also because Selma had been destroyed before she could fulfil herself. The very word ‘death,' in connection with a life full of such unspent riches, seemed to him incomprehensible. As in everything, he sought the meaning, but could not find it.

“Spiritual monogamy” was the expression used by his teacher Freud when he wrote him a letter of condolence and spoke of the consequences of a “cult oriented toward the past.”

Every evening he would talk to her picture. He told her what had happened that day, what he had thought about, every thought being bound up with her. He begged her pardon for many things, over and over again for that evening he first came home, when he did not want to see her on the stage. The devastating sense that he could never make up for the hurt feelings now left him no peace; he recalled every lacerating word he had ever said. But in the name of God's mercy, surely she would not have gone out of life for that? Sometimes he tortured himself with the thought that there was some basis for the stationer's testimony, some things he did not know; there may have been another man whom she had loved and she had fled from life on his account; at that his heart stood still.

On one of these nights he was reading the last letter she wrote to his prison camp, and which he had always carried with him since that time, when Martha Monica came to see him. Since Selma's death he had had the feeling that his sister had drawn away from him. But as he noticed nothing and, moreover, knew that she did not think of anyone except her lover, he paid no attention to this. Sometimes it occurred to him that people were right who insisted she was not his father's child. Besides, he had reached the point where he no longer expected anything either from fate or from people.

“It's late,” she said. “But you were not in bed anyway. I can't sleep either. So I thought I'd come and see what you are doing.”

He noticed how badly she looked. Perhaps she expected him to ask why she could not sleep. But he did not do it. His grief had made him taciturn.

He offered her a cigarette, which she threw away half smoked. Her voice and her fingers were restless. “I don't know how to tell you, Hans …” she began tentatively.

Go ahead and say it
, he thought.
You are going to have a child. Or he has deceived you. Or you are in love with someone else. Just say, “I can't bear it.” And I'll answer, “You are to be envied! Oh, how I envy you! It is only finality which is unbearable.”

“It is about Mother,” Martha Monica said.

“Is she ill?”

“No.” Now she looked positively alarming.

“Is it about Mother and—Father?”

She seemed to search for words without finding them.

“With Mother and—you,” she said finally.

He was more attentive now. Had not Martha Monica always been one to take things lightly—in any case much more lightly than Father took them?

“Please give me another cigarette,” she said. She took a few puffs, then said in an expressionless, jerky voice, as she put match after match to her already lighted cigarette, “At first I thought I shouldn't tell you at all. You have no idea how often I have been on the point of telling you. But then I always said to myself, Why do it? It's hard enough for him as it is. But I can't stand it any longer. I wanted to ask someone what I should do. I didn't know what I ought to do. Yesterday I asked Hermann. He thought I must absolutely tell you, because it depends on you.” She was not looking at him.

“What depends on me?”

She opened and closed her hand spasmodically; her cigarette fell from it. “I have a terrible suspicion,” she said.

He gazed into her face.

“You understood me, Hans?”

Selma's wrist-watch, which he wound up every night, lay on the desk. It was so still in the room that its ticking could be heard.

“What do you know?” he asked tonelessly.

She had overheard a conversation, she said in a scarcely audible voice. Selma had reproached Mother with not understanding Hans. He should be treated like a patient. Martha Monica hesitated.

“Go on!” he urged.

“Because it's a thousand times harder for you,” she continued. “You're an idealist, and the people in the house here are killing you because they demand that you continue with your life as though there had been no war or revolution or defeat. And because you have to work in the factory instead of wherever you might achieve what you wish to achieve. This house is your undoing, and she intended to ask Papa to allow you to move away.”

“What did Mother say to this?”

“Mother answered that she knew you best and would not allow Selma to raise the question of moving away with Papa, who must be protected from excitement. She herself had suffered from the house, but she had conquered her feelings, and Selma would too.” Martha Monica stopped to take breath. “Selma said if Mother insisted that you could not live elsewhere she would not stay with you in Vienna. She would accept a film contract to go to America.”

“When was this?”

“After the opening of
Saint Joan.
”

“What did Mother say? Word for word!”

“She would in no circumstances let you go to America. But when Selma said that Mother had no authority over you, Mother answered, ‘You're not going to put yourself in my way! Not you! I'll see to that!'”

In the numbness which gripped him like a vice, and in which he heard the ticking of Selma's watch ten times more acutely and painfully, Hans asked, “Have you any more stories to tell?” He stressed the word ‘stories.'

Tears rose to Martha Monica's eyes. “Don't look at me like that! That's why I haven't wanted to tell you for so long, because I thought you would be angry with me. I have nothing to do with it!”

“Correct,” he said, using Ebeseder's favorite expression. “And what has”—he hesitated to say “Mother;” then he ended—“she to do with it?”

Martha Monica went on with her account. She related facts she had denied before the examining magistrate. She had seen Mother take the little white envelopes out of the box of powders for Papa's heart ailment, empty and dissolve them in a glass of water. This glass, covered with a strip of parchment, had remained untouched for several days on the medicine table in Papa's room and then disappeared. Papa had not touched it. On the day the glass disappeared Mother had asked her to copy the prescription of old Dr. Herz, so that she could have it filled at the St. Anna pharmacy. Why disturb old Dr. Herz, who was no longer practicing? Mother had said. Martha Monica had asked what became of the glass on Papa's table. Then Mother had looked very frightened, had not been able to speak at all at first, and had finally asserted she had had to throw it out because it had stood too long.

The wristwatch ticked on fatefully. Hans stood up and put it away in a drawer in the desk. Still its incessant ticking sounded like a hammer in the silent room. “Is that all?” he asked.

That was all.

“To whom else have you told this nonsense?”

He had gone over to the window. The walnut tree was withered and leafless, although it was only July. The walls, usually veiled by its foliage, were bare. Old gray walls from which bits of mortar were crumbling.

“That's no proof,” he said before she could answer.

“Don't you think so?” she asked. “Really? You really think it's no proof?”

“I am convinced of it.” His back was turned to her.

“I am so glad to hear you say that!” she exclaimed. And since he said nothing, “Forgive me for having told you about it at all! Perhaps it wasn't even worth mentioning.”

“Thank you,” he said. “You meant well, as always. Good night.” He did not turn round.

When, infinitely relieved, she had gone away, his small amount of self-control deserted him. He too had had that inexpressible suspicion, but had repressed and overcome it as madness. That night when Selma died, and Mother stood at her bed with such hatred in her, he had had the real proof in front of his very eyes, yet did not want to see it. She had always hated Selma. Even when he first told her he was engaged. Now Hans called it all to mind. The jealousy. The envy. The disfavor. Never a kind look. Never a friendly word. Only the desire to humiliate or to belittle her.

As he stood at the window this son piled up against his mother an accusation of such inescapable force as Public Prosecutor Otto Eberhard could never have formulated. Yet as he did it he seemed to feel the last bit of solid ground cut from beneath his own feet. He heard everything splinter and crash into the abyss. Crushed, his memories fled the time when nothing in the world counted for him but his mother. But he could not rid himself of these memories. Everything that was wonderful in his childhood stemmed from her: the protection, the lightness, all the warmth.

He stood with his forehead pressed against the window, outside which towered the black skeleton of the long-since-withered but not felled walnut tree, and in him something happened that he was unable to prevent. He used all his power to protect himself against it, but to no avail.
Why is it I do not hate her?
he asked himself. He wanted to hate her. He tried to do so. He invoked Selma's last hours, her helpless smile before she died. He saw his mother standing at the bed of his dying wife. With the eyes of a mortal enemy she stood there. She had outwitted her, he told himself, through deceit, jealousy, cruelty, and in cold blood. He knelt beside me bed where murdered Selma had smiled her last smile. He pressed his lips to the pillow on which she had died. He loved her with a tenderness and sadness greater than ever. But he could not hate the woman who had murdered her.

Could not love be undone? Would he love Selma less had he known she had murdered someone? He tried to think about this and clung to the thought. He would love her just as much, he answered himself.

“You suffer so from this death. Therefore should you not have a burning desire to search out the person responsible for destroying your happiness?” the examining magistrate had said to him.

He had searched her out. His mother.

The branches before the window, which for generations had showered thousands of nuts on the ground, now stirred in sterile movements. Mother had cracked his first nut for him. All the first things had been done for him by her. It was she who had taught him how things tasted, how they felt. It was Mother who taught him what people are and what one must be to people.

Mother was Selma's murderess. He had not needed Martha Monica to know this. Unconsciously he had known it all the time, and not wanted to know it; he had sealed it away inside himself and thought it would never come to the surface; he had doubted it a hundred times and believed it a thousand. Never in his life had he struggled as much with anything. Mother was Selma's murderess. Not wanting to see had been of no avail; the not wanting to speak of it was of no avail; the countless ways of defence he had sought and found in his sleepless nights were of no avail. This was not a matter between him and his mother. It lay between him and Selma. He owed it to Selma to hate her murderess. No. He owed it to a murder to hate the murderess.

That much he admitted.

He owed it to Selma to call the murderess to account. If God were merciful she would not prove to be the murderess. But he must call her to account.

That much he admitted.

What did he owe his mother?

He had always stood with his forehead pressed against the windowpane whenever his life was in confusion. And so he stood now. Christl had been mistaken. It was not Selma's death which was hardest for him to bear. It was this hour.

He turned and nodded to her picture.

“I'm going now,” he said to the picture, as always before he left.

He walked up the stairs from the third to the fourth floor; there were only twenty-three steps. As an infant he had been carried up them in his baby carriage; as a boy he had bounded up them impatiently; as a man he had never noticed them. Now each step was a mountain, so steep he could hardly tell how to climb it. When he reached the top he hesitated before the door to the apartment of his past. He knew he had come in order to shut it forever behind him.

Simmerl opened to him.

“So late?” asked the tall man whose back had gradually grown bowed with time. He was in a dressing gown and ridiculous pointed nightcap without which he never went to bed.

“I want to speak to my mother,” Hans said.

“I think Her Ladyship only went to bed a short while ago,” said the butler. “The master has been having a very restless night, and she has been with him all the time.” He waited to see whether these words, which more than hinted at protecting people in need of rest, would determine the young master to withdraw. When this did not prove to be the case he nodded, as usual when egoists imposed their orders on him, “I'll call Her Ladyship.”

Henriette came into the room. A hundred times during these nights, with their words of comfort which meant nothing, with their medicines which did not relieve, she had said to herself that it would be a release for both of them. He now led nothing more than a shadowy existence; there was no reality to it; nothing that came near him was alive. One felt unreal oneself in this atmosphere of make-believe, in this maintenance of a world that no longer existed. Nevertheless, she refused to admit the idea of his death. He belonged to her. And she to him. She no longer denied that.

“So late?” she too asked.

“Is Papa not so well?” Hans asked. The words slipped from him, his eyes saw with difficulty. They looked on an exhausted woman, to whom he must say something that might break all ties between them.