The Tobacconist Read online

  I’m very sorry Otto Trsnyek has fallen ill. I hope he gets better soon. Please send him my very best wishes for his recovery. He’s a sensitive soul, you know, beneath that grumpy tobacconist exterior. I believe so, anyway. It can’t be an easy thing to lose a leg in the trenches. Especially when you ask yourself who it was actually for. It’s no wonder if your soul ends up a bit unsteady, too, is it?

  To be honest, I don’t exactly know what to think of your acquaintance with Herr Professor Freud. I’m not altogether happy about it. I used to be able to forbid you to associate with other boys if I didn’t like the look of one of them. Those days are gone. You’re old enough now and you must know what you’re doing. But please bear this in mind: even if Jews are perfectly respectable, what good does it do them if there’s no respectability any more in the world around them?

  My dear Franzl, I’m sorry, of course, that nothing came of it with the girl, either for now or for good. Especially as everyone knows how well Bohemians cook. On the other hand: who knows what it was good for! Sometimes you have to let one thing go for another to come. You asked me if I knew anything about love. The truth is: I know nothing about it. Although I have known it. No one knows anything about love, and yet the vast majority of people have known it. Love comes and goes, and you don’t understand it beforehand, and you don’t understand it afterwards, and you understand it least of all when it’s there. And so let me tell you this: no one is cut out for love, and nonetheless, or for precisely that reason, it gets to almost all of us at some point!

  It breaks my heart when I hear that you’re sometimes sad. What can I tell you? There are as many kinds of sadness as there are hours in our lives. And probably a few more as well. It doesn’t make any difference whether you know where this or that sadness comes from. It’s part of our lives. If you ask me, even animals are sad. And maybe trees as well. Only stones aren’t. They just lie around doing nothing. But who wants that?

  My darling Franzl, are you eating enough? You were always so thin! Whenever you jumped in the lake we would completely lose sight of you. Thin and smooth and white, like a young char in spring. I know I shouldn’t tell you this, but sometimes I open the box with your things. Then I pull out one of your old jerseys, hold it up to my face and smell it. I think people get more and more strange as the years go by. I have grey hairs already, but at least my bottom is still reasonably firm. The innkeeper is too stupid and unsavoury for my taste, but in the last few days one of the new tourist guides has been giving me the eye. He’s a good-looking chap with a moustache and large hands. We shall see what comes of it. I have to stop now and go over to the inn. A couple of uniforms from Munich have taken up residence; they make a lot of noise and even more dirty laundry. I would so love to send you a tray of potato strudel, but you just don’t know with the post these days. My dear, dear boy, you are always in my heart!

  Your Mother

  Franz ran the tips of his fingers across the lightly ribbed stationery. A peculiar feeling welled up inside him like a fat bubble, percolated along his spine and slipped up the back of his neck into his head, where it floated about softly and pleasantly for a while. Your Mother, she had written; not Your Mama, like on the postcards, or as she had always done before whenever she left a scribbled note on the kitchen table. Children have mamas; men have mothers. He folded the letter and pressed it to his nose. It smelled of mouldy jetty planks and dry summer reeds, of charred scraps of beef, melted clarified butter and his mother’s flour-dusted kitchen apron.

  That night Franz dreamed of his late father, a woodsman from Bad Goisern whom he had never known as he was killed by a rotten English oak only a few days before Franz was born. They said he spoke little more in life than in death. In the dream they were walking along a path between quiet fields. Franz was still small and had dust in his hair. The sun burned high above them, and his father merged with his own shadow. They arrived at the big office and entered the shining marble lobby. In the middle sat a fat man furiously stamping his desk pad. A queue of people soon formed in front of him; everyone wanted a stamp, but the fat man wouldn’t listen to their begging and pleading. Again and again he brought his stamp whizzing down onto his desk pad. The blows echoed through the room like cannon fire, while the loud blasts of a golden horn announced splendid times to come. Franz’s father took him by the hand and tried to push into the queue. He was afraid; his hand was dry and rough like a piece of wood. ‘Forgive me,’ he kept saying, more to himself than to the people, ‘forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.’ ‘Exactly!’ said the fat postal worker triumphantly, and brought his stamp down on Franz’s father’s forehead. It said FUTURE, and thin trickles of blood ran down between the letters. Franz woke dripping with sweat, and with a peculiar fluttering behind his heart. Still dazed and spiralling out of sleep, he wrote down his dream on a piece of paper:

  A walk with Father, the sun is burning, and we go into the big official building where a fat man is stamping away, Father pushes in and excuses himself, the golden horn blares, the fat man stamps the word FUTURE on Father’s forehead and cuts him.

  He had the piece of paper in front of him on the sales counter all afternoon, and tried not to keep staring at it. This fat man was sort of pathetic, he thought to himself, despite being quite an imposing figure. Pathetic, and a little lonely, too, in his supposed magnificence; and, to cap it all, trapped in the dream of a tobacconist’s apprentice he doesn’t know from Adam. We ought to be able to see inside people’s heads, he thought, but only when they’re asleep. During the day you really didn’t want to know what was going on in there, and besides, there wasn’t a great deal to be expected from the contents of the average head. At night, though, in the quiet hours of darkness, things would look rather different. Caution would no longer stand in the way, and every fear, desire and crazy idea would be free to wander through your brain. Franz would have liked to talk to someone about his dreams, preferably Anezka, or if necessary the professor or Otto Trsnyek, or at the very least one of the customers. But it was gone midday and only two people had entered the tobacconist’s. One was Frau Veithammer, who bought herself the latest Illustrierte Wochenpost and took the opportunity to complain about her recently deceased husband, who she said couldn’t even seem to do things properly in the grave: the flowers above him started withering before they’d even really started to blossom. The other was a little girl, who asked for an HB pencil and counted the coins into Franz’s hand one by one with her tiny fingers. Of course, he couldn’t expect anything enlightening or otherwise useful from either of them as far as the content of dreams was concerned. But perhaps, thought Franz, the point was not to exchange views on dreams and their possible meaning or probable lack of it. Perhaps the point was to communicate the dreams, entirely without expectation — just to project them, like in a cinema, from the inside of your head onto the empty screen of the outside world, and in doing so to awaken something in observers who either happened to pass by or who approached intentionally; perhaps with a bit of luck, it would even be something of relevance, significance or permanence. He exhaled heavily and sank into the armchair. Blundering about in such dark and unfamiliar trains of thought exhausted him. Through the shop window his eyes fell on the row of houses opposite. One of the windows was almost completely obscured by green plants, and behind it in the gloom a man’s white vest was moving back and forth. Franz sighed. He couldn’t help thinking of the forest, the soothing murmur of the trees and the tweeting of birds, which never seemed to disturb the quiet despite being noisily omnipresent. A blob of greenish bird shit was stuck to the windowpane at eye level. City birds don’t tweet, they screech, he thought morosely. They also shit on your hat and on the shop window and lie down to die in some corner of the attic leaving just their dusty skeleton, a few feathers and a bit of a stench. He sighed again, even deeper than before, and as he was sighing an idea came to him. He fetched some sticky tape from the drawer, took the piece of paper with his dream on it, wrote the date in the top right-ha
nd corner, went out with it onto the street and stuck it on the window right over the blob of shit. He stepped back and regarded the little dream poster. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath of the Viennese spring air. For a tiny moment the word FUTURE flashed up behind his eyelids, rosy and bright, like a neon sign at the Prater. Then a delivery van from the United Viennese Ice Factories clattered past on the street behind him, laden with blocks of ice, and he went back inside the shop.

  The first people to pay any attention to the curiosity stuck on the shop window of Trsnyek’s tobacconist’s were three elderly ladies, their wrinkled faces like something carved from a tree root, who craned their necks to get their noses as close to the paper as possible. Franz, sitting motionless in the shadow of the sales counter, watched their eyes narrow until they disappeared almost completely in their wrinkled nests as the withered lips moved in soundless unison to deciphering the words. None of the three seemed to understand a thing. They stood there for a while, toothless mouths agape, then tottered off.

  Next to stop in front of the window were two girls in pale coats. After reading the note they shaded their eyes with their hands like little roofs, leaned their heads against the glass and peered into the shop. When they saw Franz they ran off, giggling. He was still watching the two patches of their breath evaporate from the glass when the next passer-by approached: a workman with an oil-stained face and a crooked roll-up in the corner of his mouth. He scanned the words, frowning, considered for a moment, then entered the tobacconist’s and planted himself in front of the sales counter. What was all this about, he wanted to know, this business with the weird scribblings on that piece of paper out there.

  Nothing at all, said Franz; at least, nothing in particular.

  The workman said he couldn’t really believe that, because you didn’t go sticking some completely meaningless bilge on the shop window for no reason, just because you were bored or fed up or both.

  That may be, said Franz, but something that was significant for one person might be uninteresting or indeed useless to another.

  The workman stared at his toecaps and shifted the roll-up thoughtfully to the other corner of his mouth. Did the young tobacconist think he was a fool?, he asked quietly. Someone who couldn’t make up his own mind about what was useless or significant to him?

  Of course he hadn’t meant anything of the sort, Franz answered truthfully. The fools sat elsewhere nowadays.

  Where was that, the workman wanted to know.

  Everywhere, really, said Franz, just not here in the shop.

  The workman nodded. The young tobacconist might well be right about that, he said. Nonetheless, he still wanted to know what this note was all about, goddamn it.

  A dream, said Franz. A dream, that was all.

  If that was all, said the workman, disappointed, then it was useless, at least as far as he was concerned.

  That, Franz replied, was precisely what he’d said. However, its possible uselessness had yet to be proved. Because perhaps, he continued, perhaps one day a strange dream note stuck to a shop window, like this one, might have some effect on an observer who happened to pass by, or might move them in some way — you never knew.

  Yes, said the workman with a tired sigh, you never did know. For now, though, could he have a packet of Orient tobacco, two boxes of matches and the Sport-Tagblatt?

  But of course he could, said Franz; that was what a tobacconist’s like this was here for, after all.

  From then on Franz stuck a new note beside the front door every day. Every morning, before it was time to open the shop, he would step out into the street in his pyjamas, hair tousled with sleep, and stick a freshly dreamed dream on the shop window, still cool from the night. This did not go unremarked. People’s curiosity and forgetfulness were still stronger than their fear, and the tobacconist’s that, until recently, had sold ‘erotic magazines’ to Jews and Communists was now just the tobacconist’s with the funny little stories on the window. Anyone walking past who happened to spot the note would also stop to read it. Most of them stared at it briefly, expressionless, then walked on. Some said nothing but indicated their disapproval by making a disgusted face. Others shook their heads and shouted a few insults at the shop door. Every now and then, though, Franz would see someone grow a little thoughtful as they read, and saw them quietly take this thoughtfulness away with them.

  People read, for example:

  April 9, 1938

  A song is being sung, it’s about love, but the melody is wobbling about all over the place, someone laughs and immediately afterwards jumps off the Votive Church, but the ground is soft, and the flowers are blooming in every colour, no one has seen the dead man, and a crane flies overhead, pulling a cross through the sky.

  Or:

  April 12,1938

  I’m standing with Mother beside the lake, a steamer is coming towards us, I’m frightened but Mother takes me by the hand — ‘IT’S ALL RIGHT, YOU’RE MY CHILD’ — but the steamer keeps coming, the lake sways, Mother has gone, and the steamer crashes into my heart.

  Or:

  April 15, 1938

  A girl is walking through the Prater, she gets on the Ferris wheel, swastikas are flashing everywhere, the girl rises higher and higher, suddenly the roots snap and the Ferris wheel rolls over the city and crushes everything, the girl shrieks with delight, and her dress is flimsy and white like a scrap of cloud.

  Frau Dr. Dr. Heinzl, who had switched back to walking on the tobacconist’s side of the road, found the paper with the dress ‘like a scrap of cloud’ particularly noteworthy. She stood in front of the window for a long time, frowning, and read the paragraph several times over. Perhaps she felt reminded of something somehow — impossible to say what. But it can’t have been too unpleasant, because when she finally walked off in the direction of Schwarzspanierstrasse with her head slightly bowed, she laughed down at the pavement: a small, high laugh, like dropped jewellery.

  One week after Otto Trsnyek was taken away, Franz made his first attempt to contact the tobacconist, or at the very least to discover his whereabouts. The officers at the Alsergrund police station were friendly, but they had, firstly, no time, and, secondly, other problems. At the City Centre police station the desk duty officer was far less friendly, but at least he was able to point Franz in the direction of the office of the recently established State Secret Police, which was responsible for cases like these. So Franz set off for Morzinplatz, where the Gestapo had taken up residence in the former Hotel Metropol, an ostentatious building with thick marble pillars outside the entrance. Three tall swastika standards now clattered before it in the soft spring air. Behind the windows of the upper floors there was a bustle of activity: men in uniform or women in grey suits with bundles of documents in their arms hurried back and forth or stopped briefly, exchanged a few words, nodded, smiled and saluted. Every now and then someone would set down his cap on the window ledge, smoke out into the springtime and let his gaze drift towards the Kahlenberg. Only on the lowest floor were the windows dark and blind, hidden behind bars and heavy metal shutters.

  Franz stepped into the entrance hall, where he was immediately approached by a doorman in a blue uniform. ‘Might I perhaps be of some assistance to the young gentleman?’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Franz, and listened for a moment to the way his voice echoed in the vastness of the room. ‘My name is Franz Huchel and I’m looking for a tobacconist called Otto Trsnyek, who is innocent, but has nonetheless been taken away or arrested or abducted.’

  ‘First of all, no one in this building is innocent,’ said the doorman, twisting his mouth into a forced smile. ‘At least, no one who isn’t wearing a uniform. Has the young gentleman already made a written application?’

  Franz shook his head. ‘I didn’t actually want to hand in anything at all, I just wanted to fetch the tobacconist Otto Trsnyek and take him back to where he belongs: to his shop!’