The Tobacconist Read online

  ‘How am I looking at you?’

  ‘I don’t know. As if I’d just said something unbelievably stupid.’

  ‘No, you didn’t do that. You most certainly did not do that.’

  Freud attempted a smile, then ran his fingers distractedly through his hair, took his hat from his knee, put it on his head and rose from the bench. ‘I think we’ve talked enough for today. The sun will be going down soon. And who knows whether it will ever come up again.’

  With remarkably quick steps, his walking stick beating time on the gravel, the professor walked back in the direction of Ringstrasse. Franz remained seated for a while. Only when the grey hat had finally disappeared behind the hedge did he jump up and run after it.

  They said goodbye in Berggasse with a brief handshake. Freud’s fingers felt dry and light. Like fishbones, thought Franz. Like the bones of a worm-infested carp that has ended up with the cats instead of on the restaurant customers’ plates, and whose skeleton crumbles in your hands when you pulled it out a couple of weeks later from under the damaged fishing boats.

  After the professor had disappeared into the house, Franz put his ear to the door and closed his eyes. The wood was still warm from the sun, and Freud’s steps echoed inside in the stairwell. When Franz opened his eyes again and moved away from the door, his first steps were still rather hesitant and careful. Soon, though, he marched off decisively to the little restaurant round the corner in Türkengasse — for a goulash and a glass of beer.

  The following evening Red Egon sat bent over his radio in his basement apartment in Schwarzspanierstrasse, listening to Kurt Schuschnigg’s voice bereft of strength and resistance. It was the chancellor’s last speech to a people that had long since ceased to be his. Coerced by Hitler’s vehement threats of violence, he cancelled the plebiscite for a free Austria and announced his resignation. In order not to provoke a bloodbath when the German troops crossed the border, as it now seemed almost certain they would, he had ordered the Austrian army to offer no resistance. He closed his address with the words: ‘And so, in this hour, I take leave of the Austrian people with a word of farewell uttered from the bottom of my heart: God protect Austria!’ Scarcely had he finished his speech than uncontrollable roars erupted on the streets: ‘One people! One Reich! One Führer!’, ‘Death to Judaism!’, or merely inarticulate yelling, singing and howling. Red Egon switched off the radio. Through the little dust-fogged window that looked out directly onto the pavement he saw the legs of agitated Viennese men and women hurrying, running, racing past. He stood and went over to his wardrobe. For a moment he contemplated his gaunt figure, reflected in the dark glass of the door. He adjusted the knot of his tie, licked the tip of his index finger and smoothed his left eyebrow. Then he opened the wardrobe, took out a length of material rolled up in a big ball, a hammer and a few nails, and left his apartment without locking it. On the staircase he met the two sons of the railway worker couple from the second floor. Their short trousers flapped below their knees as they dashed out into the street, uttering piercing cries. Somewhat out of breath, Red Egon climbed the stairs to the top floor and entered the attic through a low door, where his toe encountered a pigeon’s lifeless body. Suppressing a slight feeling of revulsion he clambered up a wooden ladder, through a skylight and onto the roof. A dusty squall hit him full in the face and he had to close his eyes for a moment. The noise from the road billowed up to him, muted: the individual voices of ten thousand Viennese citizens united in a single note that kept swelling and subsiding, a kind of wail, like a siren, to which the whole city seemed to vibrate. He walked cautiously across to the edge of the gently sloping roof and sat down. With a few blows of the hammer he fixed one end of the length of material to the tarred roof cladding. Then he simply let it roll over the guttering and heard, with satisfaction, the five metres of fabric smack against the side of the house underneath him and against the attic window of the recently deceased Frau Hinterberger. Carefully he stuck the hammer and the rest of the nails in the inside pocket of his jacket, shuffled a little further forward, swung his legs over the edge of the roof and dangled them above the roar of Schwarzspanierstrasse. The smell of roast meat reached him from an open window on the opposite side of the road. Two pigeons were perched on a chimney. From time to time one of them would draw itself up and tiptoe briefly round in a circle, the wind puffing its plumage into a fluffy ball of feathers. Red Egon slipped a crumpled packet of filterless cigarettes from his trouser pocket, took one out, placed it on his open palm and contemplated it for a while. Then he put it in his mouth and lit it. He inhaled deeply with his eyes closed. When, after precisely seven drags, the skylight flew open and three men and a woman with swastika armbands, cudgels, and faces twisted with murderous intent came crawling onto the roof, he didn’t even turn round. He shifted his weight forward, flicked the cigarette into the abyss, and plunged after it.

  ‘Have you read this?’ asked Otto Trsnyek darkly, waving the morning edition of the Reichspost above his head. Franz shook his head. In the past few days he’d hardly got round to reading the papers, or rather had not made much effort to do so. Recent events were buzzing around in his head like a swarm of disturbed flies, and he could scarcely open a newspaper before the letters began to lift off the paper and disintegrate into an incomprehensible muddle.

  ‘Sit down and listen, then,’ the tobacconist ordered. Franz interrupted his work, which consisted of clearing the previous day’s newspapers from the shelves and replacing them with new ones that smelled of fresh printer’s ink. He quickly stuffed the latest issue of the Bauernbündler into the appropriate rack — like almost all the newspapers that week it had on its front page a photograph of Adolf Hitler looking impressive — and settled himself on his stool. The tobacconist spread the Reichspost out in front of him and began to read.

  ‘“Cowardly attack thwarted! Yesterday it emerged that several Viennese men and women succeeded, through courageous intervention, in thwarting a perfidious attack on the new intellectual freedom of our Reich . . .”’

  ‘Ha!’ cried Otto Trsnyek, slapping his palm down on the sales counter. ‘Did you hear that? “New intellectual freedom”!’ He raised his arm again to slam his hand down on the desk but controlled himself at the last minute and continued, hoarsely: ‘“In the early evening, the unemployed Bolshevist Hubert Panstingl, known — indeed, notorious — in certain circles as ‘Red Egon’, gained access to the roof of the tenement building in which he lived on the Schwarzspanierstrasse. There he was able to proceed undisturbed and put his plan into action. He unfurled what was clearly a home-made banner; the graffiti he scrawled on it, which cannot be reproduced here, was intended to vilify our Reich, our people and our hope-filled city in a most despicable manner.”’

  Otto Trsnyek snatched up the paper, hopped out from behind the counter with surprising agility, bent over Franz and bellowed, ‘What, may I ask, is still “hope-filled” about a city that publishes such lies — the clumsy scribblings of a filthy, jingoistic, über-Germanic tabloid?’

  Franz tried to make himself as small as possible. ‘Listen to what it says next!’ the tobacconist cried. ‘“It was only thanks to the bravery of a few passersby and residents who hurried to the scene that this dangerous crank did not succeed in attacking the Viennese citizenry for any longer than necessary. Fully aware of the great danger they were putting themselves in, the men and women climbed onto the roof, confronted the deranged attacker and requested that he immediately hand over the aforementioned banner. However, the cowardly Communist Panstingl had no intention of abandoning his project; instead, he planted himself defiantly in front of these ordinary people and threatened them. We were not able to clarify before going to press whether or not a gun was involved, but statements by the parties concerned suggest that it can be assumed with relative certainty.”’

  ‘Ha!’ Otto Trsnyek shouted again. ‘A gun! Red Egon would rather butter his bread with his fingers than touch a knife!’ By now his face was purple and drip
ping with sweat. He wiped his forehead with the frayed sleeves of his woolly cardigan and read on: ‘“However, in the course of his brutal attack it seems that the perpetrator lost his balance, tripped over the edge and fell off the roof. Fortunately no one was injured when he hit the pavement. The perpetrator is dead, and the disgraceful banner secured and destroyed.”’

  The tobacconist stood for a moment, swaying slightly, staring at the newspaper in his hands. Suddenly a shudder passed through his body. With quick, sharp movements he ripped the pages into smaller and smaller pieces that spun down around him to the floor. When he had finished he slowly lowered his hands. His cardigan had slipped and hung crookedly from his shoulders. The slight movement of his leg made his shoe creak quietly.

  ‘Do you know what was written on the banner?’ he whispered. Franz shook his head silently. “‘Freedom of the people requires freedom of the heart. Long live freedom! Long live our people! Long live Austria!’”

  Otto Trsnyek’s shoe had stopped creaking. He stood quite still. A moment later he shook off his paralysis, hopped back behind the sales counter and sat down. Franz watched as he leaned back and his face slowly disappeared in the shadow behind the lamp.

  That night, too, Franz had difficulty falling asleep. As always, of late. Ever since his arrival in Vienna, and despite the exhaustion that overcame him every evening, Franz found it hard to summon the sweet sleep that had always enfolded him and carried him away so easily in his bed beside the lake. Here he lay again, on his back, hands folded behind his head and eyes open, listening out into the darkness. Outside, the now customary daytime howling had metamorphosed into nocturnal whimpering, which was also now the custom. It seemed to move perpetually through the streets, and even drifted in to him in his little room at the tobacconist’s. From time to time there was a gurgling in the walls. Sometimes a quiet rustling reached him from the shop. Mice, perhaps, thought Franz, or rats. Or the events of the previous day, already turned into memories and rustling out of the newspapers. It’s pretty odd, actually, he thought, the way the newspapers trumpet all their truths in big fat letters only to write them small again in the next edition, or contradict them. The morning edition’s truth is practically the evening edition’s lie; though as far as memory’s concerned it doesn’t really make much difference. Because it’s not usually the truth that people remember; it’s just whatever’s yelled loudly enough or printed big enough. And eventually, thought Franz, when one of these rustlings of memory has lasted long enough, it becomes history. He kicked off the blanket and stretched his arms in front of him. He heard his heart beating out of the mattress, indistinct, thumping quietly, like a ship’s engine. That sounds nice, he thought, and he watched as his body slowly peeled away from the bed. It felt good, but it was only a brief flight. Someone shouted something after him, and far below steamers panted across the lake. The fish were showing their bellies, and a black hat rocked gently on the waves. The little flag on the horizon really couldn’t be overlooked any longer. ‘Excuse me, but your mother is waving!’

  Franz’s heart thumped him awake again, a regular pumping, getting louder. By now he had trained himself, with reasonable success, to write down his dreams. Night after night he would grope for his matches and scribble a few muddled words in the flickering candlelight on one of the pieces of squared paper he had stowed under the bed. It was a laborious process, and to begin with it made no difference. He was only really doing it for the professor’s sake, and because he secretly felt guilty if he didn’t. On the other hand, a degree of habit had established itself, especially over the past few days. Or a kind of satisfaction in his ability to make himself stick at it. Or perhaps even something like a small sense of relief and gratification. Franz couldn’t say what it was exactly, but ultimately it didn’t matter. He would write his dreams down, and afterwards — this being the rewarding side effect of all that effort — he was able to sleep peacefully for the next few hours, because he didn’t dream.

  A flight over the Attersee, wrote Franz in his childish scrawl, Someone is shouting after me, the steamers are pretty, the fish aren’t. The professor seems to have lost his hat, and Mother is waving at me from somewhere far away. He put the paper and pencil under the bed and blew out the candle. For a few moments it continued to flicker behind his eyelids. Aha, he thought, it seems there’s a memory flicker, too, as well as a memory rustle. He couldn’t help giggling a little. Since he had left the Salzkammergut his brain kept coming up with ideas he would never have thought he had in him. Most of them were probably absolute nonsense. But still kind of interesting. He turned on his side, closed his eyes and tried to recover that sense of drifting away.

  Almost exactly three seconds later he was sitting bolt upright in bed, holding his breath. He had been jolted back to reality by a loud noise, a crashing and splintering that seemed to rip the night apart. Then silence again. Franz leaped up and ran out into the shop. Before him in the pale early morning light was a scene of unbelievable chaos. The window had been smashed, the door hung crooked on its hinges, and there were long splinters jutting from the doorframe. The floor was covered in fragments of glass; two newspaper racks had fallen over and lay piled across each other; newspapers, cigar boxes, tobacco tins, open jars of pencils and individual cigarettes were scattered all around. Outside, loose pages of newspaper were billowing on the pavement and wandering over to the other side of the road like quietly rustling ghosts. Franz took a tentative step. The glass crunched beneath his leather slippers, which the tobacconist had let him have a while ago in exchange for eight hours of unpaid overtime. A thick liquid was dripping from the doorframe and collecting in a shining puddle on the floor. And then he saw the thing on the sales counter. A black thing, a dark form, a wet heap splayed across the counter. For a moment it seemed to him to be breathing, very slowly rising and falling and rising again. It gave off an unpleasant smell: rancid, sweet, yet also slightly sour. It was the smell of old meat, of blood and shit. Cautiously, he leaned in closer. The breaths were a figment of his imagination, of course. On the counter lay the innards of one or more large animals. Flaccid scraps of tissue, gleaming lumps of fat and swollen intestines crisscrossed with fine veins. Franz stepped back and something cracked underfoot. A severed chicken head lay amid the glass splinters, looking up at him with bluish, dead eyes.

  When Otto Trsnyek came to open his shop at six o’clock sharp, he didn’t say a word. He surveyed the scene in silence: the crooked inscription crudely daubed above the door — JEWS SHOP HERE! — the bucketfuls of filth strewn about, the shards of glass, the blood, the chicken’s heads, the stinking pile of entrails on the counter, and his apprentice Franz, who sat slumped on the stool in the windowless display, staring out at the pavement. For a long time he just stood there, speechless, without moving. Finally he opened his mouth to say something, but all that came out was a small sound, scarcely bigger than a bubble of saliva popping. And so he set to work.

  Together they swept the glass up off the floor and stuffed the innards and the chicken’s heads into big linen sacks that quickly became saturated with blood. They scrubbed the pavement, the walls, the tiles and shelves, and packed the dirty, soft, broken or crumbled cigars and cigarettes into a box and dumped them in a heap beside a small group of dustbins in the back courtyard. After that they carefully removed the remaining shards from the shop window frame, took the door off its hinges, hammered them straight again, put the door back on its hinges, and scrubbed the floorboards, shelves and counter a second time with vinegar and a pink, poisonous-smelling powder. A few hours later, when they had finished cleaning, the tobacconist braced both crutches against the ground, carefully placed the stump of his leg on the handles and took a deep breath. ‘We’ll go to the glazier later,’ he said. ‘First, go and fetch us a couple of beers!’

  They drank the beer from the bottle, without speaking, slowly and in small gulps, the tobacconist at his post behind the counter, Franz on his stool. It was a Styrian beer, dark and bitter. It
was now afternoon, and passers-by were rushing along the street; only a few paid any attention to the tobacconist’s and hardly anyone stopped to glance in at the interior through the windowless shop front. Once, an emaciated dog paused and sniffed around the entrance, but its master quickly put on its lead and dragged it away. On the other side of the road Frau Dr. Dr. Heinzl hurried past. She seemed to be concentrating very hard on where she was going; at any rate, she didn’t look at the tobacconist’s. An elderly policeman stuck his head through the door, looked around briefly, touched his cap in salutation and disappeared again without saying a word. Somewhere behind the Wienerwald the sun began to go down; the beers had been drunk, and Otto Trsnyek cleared his throat and started to put a few words together. ‘Interesting,’ he said, ‘that one can talk so little for a whole day.’

  At that moment an old-fashioned, dark-coloured car stopped outside the entrance, and three men in grey suits got out. One of them, a rather mournful-looking man with a yellowish, official face, knocked unnecessarily on the open doorframe. ‘Herr Trsnyek?’

  ‘We’re just closing,’ said the tobacconist.

  The man twisted his mouth into a crooked smile. His right ear glowed pink in the evening light. ‘That may be true,’ he said, ‘but only when we say so!’

  ‘Get out of here, you swine,’ hissed Otto Trsnyek quietly. It sounded as if he were trying to spit the three men’s hats off their heads. The mournful one froze for a second, then nodded to his colleagues and stepped aside. One of the men came through the door; the other stepped right in through the shop window. Without seeming to draw back his arm he punched his fist into Franz’s left ear. Franz felt the warm blood spurt out of it before he had even slid off the stool. Through the rushing in his ear he heard the tobacconist’s screams and his woollen cardigan ripping as they grabbed him, dragged him across the counter and flung him to the ground.