The Tobacconist Read online

  ‘Perhaps we should . . .’ said Franz, and faltered.

  ‘What?’ asked Anezka. She placed her hand over the hand on her neck.

  Franz shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I really don’t know.’ Then he turned and left.

  As he pushed past the tables, heading for the exit, the lemon-yellow master of ceremonies was executing an elegant bow and waving his hat above his bald and sweaty head. Long after Franz had left the grotto and was slowly heading up the narrow, fenced alleyway towards the Giant Ferris Wheel, he could still hear the muffled applause behind him. It made him think of the bats he had watched so often as a boy: all day they hung, almost motionless, from the roofs of the limestone caves in Unterach, only to detach themselves just after sunset as if at a silent signal and swoop out into the night in a gigantic swarm.

  Since the Nazis had definitively been calling the shots all over Vienna — and so in the central post office too, of course — not everything had changed for the worse, the postman Heribert Pfründner thought as he trudged the last few metres up Berggasse. Admittedly, some things might even have changed for the better; you had to give them that much, to be fair. For example, they’d changed the word for ‘postage stamps’, and the new stamps were now much prettier, more colourful and somehow more impressive, with the eagles and the crowds and the Danzig coat of arms and all the other stuff. Some stamps had a picture of the Führer now, too. Basically, despite all that fervent German nationalism, the Führer was still an Austrian, thought Heribert Pfründner, a true Upper Austrian from the nice though really quite unremarkable town of Braunau am Inn, so he’d know what was good for a country like this, with all its residents and its post office customers. Because if the Führer didn’t know what he was doing he wouldn’t be a Führer; he’d be mayor, or head of the local council, or treasurer of the local council of Braunau am Inn, at best. Some things did seem rather dubious, though, he thought, listening to the tinny sounds made by the envelopes and postcards as he dropped them into the letterboxes in the house on the corner of Berggasse and Währingerstrasse. For example, these stories you heard more and more often lately about the Jews. After all, wasn’t it a bit disgraceful, actually, to throw the Jews out of their apartments, businesses and official positions, and especially out of all the post offices, and then make them shuffle up and down the pavement on their knees as well? Or that bad business with the letters that people were whispering about at work. Word had it that there was a vast basement underneath the central post office, rooms with blinding lights where hundreds of men and women worked in shifts, opening letters and, depending on the contents, either releasing them for delivery or passing them on to the postal authorities for closer examination. And it was true that almost every other letter you delivered nowadays had been slit open, which of course was nothing but a complete and utter disgrace for every halfway respectable postman and thus especially for him, Heribert Pfründner, who was, as everybody knew, the most respectable postman in the Alsergrund/Rossau district. But then, he thought, what did all this have to do with him? It had been a long time since he received any post himself, and somehow or other he would gasp his way through the few remaining years until retirement. Besides, he wasn’t a Jew; he was originally from Upper Styria, and so had a spotless family tree that could be traced right back to the Stone Age.

  Lost in these thoughts, and other, quite different ones, Heribert Pfründner had finally arrived outside the little tobacconist’s on Währingerstrasse. From his postbag, which now hung nice and loose on his shoulder, he dug out a copy of the Alsergrund local newsletter and a few brightly coloured brochures, shot a quick glance at that day’s dream note on the windowpane, pushed open the door and entered the shop with what was for him a fairly cheerfully mumbled ‘Heilitler!’

  Behind the counter Franz looked up from his bookkeeping, which he had been struggling with half the night and all of the morning, and gave the postman a nod. ‘Mr. Postman,’ he said wearily, ‘as far as Hitler’s concerned, you can stick him you know where. That aside, I wish you a good morning!’

  Heribert Pfründner acted as if he hadn’t heard. He cleared his throat awkwardly, the leather shoulder strap on his bag creaking a little, looked around at the newspaper shelves, yawned, tugged at the knot of his tie, and cleared his throat again.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll have heard,’ he said at last, leaning in a little closer to the sales counter. ‘Since you’re a close acquaintance, as it were, of the Herr Professor.’

  ‘Of which professor?’

  ‘Well — the idiot doctor.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Franz, feigning lack of interest. Although secretly he was rather flattered by this assessment — from a public official, no less — of his relationship with the professor. He dabbed the nib of the fountain pen with his little ink sponge, with particular care. ‘What exactly is it I’m supposed to have heard?’

  ‘Well, that the professor is leaving. Leaving Berggasse, leaving Vienna, leaving Austria, with family and furnishings, lock, stock and barrel!’

  Franz nodded. Something nasty rose up in his throat and stuck there for a moment before rising higher, spreading out somewhere behind his eyes, seeming to fill his entire head. ‘Right,’ he said, looking down at the columns, his freshly inked entries blurring into a slushy blue mess of numbers.

  ‘Yes, that’s how it is,’ the postman went on, with an eager nod. ‘Because the professor is one of them, too, you know. A Jew, I mean. And as a Jew on the one hand and a professor on the other, he’ll have thought: “I’d rather go before it gets really unpleasant.”’

  ‘Aha,’ said Franz. ‘And where’s he planning to go?’

  Heribert Pfründner straightened up and shrugged. ‘To England, they say. Maybe they’ll leave him in peace over there. They have a king, anyway, and plenty of idiots, I expect, who’ll pay him something for his ideas.’

  ‘Aha,’ repeated Franz. ‘And when’s he leaving?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said the postman. The postbag had slipped forward; he slung it onto his back with a circular movement of his torso. ‘Tomorrow afternoon at three.’

  After the postman had left the shop Franz’s head felt as if it were on fire, and it was a while before it had cooled somewhat and was capable of initiating meaningful action. So now the professor was going, too. Everyone was going. It was as if the whole world was upping and going somewhere. Yet he had only just arrived! He put away the accounts book and stationery under the sales counter, went to the back of the shop, splashed cold water on his face, combed his hair with his fingers, went out front again, selected three particularly fine, plump, aromatic specimens from the box of Hoyos, wrapped them in the arts section of the Bauernbündler, hid the parcel inside his shirt, locked the shop and set off on the short walk to Berggasse No. 19.

  The two plain-clothes policemen were recognizable from afar. They were sitting close together on the little bench; one had tipped back his head and seemed to be observing the pigeons in the gutters, the other sat leaning slightly forward, staring down at the pavement. It looked as if they had been sitting like that for a very long time, completely motionless, their backsides glued to the bench, but when Franz reached the door and put his finger on the bell for the Professor’s practice they were suddenly standing behind him.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked the younger of the two.

  ‘Well — in there,’ answered Franz.

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘The professor.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’m bringing him his theatre tickets.’

  ‘What theatre tickets?’

  ‘Burgtheater, of course,’ said Franz. ‘Middle of the front row of the stalls. Schiller, I think, or Goethe. Something serious, anyway!’

  The older man stepped right up to Franz, but he didn’t look him in the eyes; instead, he seemed to focus on a point on his forehead or somewhere just above it. ‘There’s no show for Jews today,’ he said. ‘Not tomorrow, either. And certainly not the day a
fter. The show’s over for Jews. So you can take your theatre tickets and bugger off, and be quick about it. Otherwise I’ll stick ’em so far up your arse not even a horse doctor’ll find them!’

  Franz walked slowly down Berggasse. The policemen had gone back to the bench and resumed their positions: head back looking at the pigeons, head down looking at the pavement. After about fifty metres he turned into Porzellangasse and stopped. The parcel crackled beneath his shirt. He could smell the Hoyos even through the newspaper. Carefully he peeped around the corner. The men were sitting there, unchanged, grey and unmoving as statues. Opposite them, a few steps away from the entrance to the professorial apartment, was a coal merchant’s. The wooden doors to the cellar coalhole stood open and the street was covered in coal dust, blackened almost to the middle of the road. Franz was reminded of Anezka’s eyelashes. Black, he thought, black as the devil’s heart. Loud clattering and the clopping of heavy hooves announced the arrival of a beer cart, approaching from the Danube Canal. The driver clicked his tongue, the horses leaped forward, the cart accelerated and jolted briskly up Berggasse. It was a big cart, laden with eight huge barrels and two apprentices who sat on the back, dangling their legs from the loading bed. As the cart passed between him and the plain-clothes policemen, Franz started running. Bent double, he jogged alongside the shoulder-high wheels, turned sharply as they drew level with the coal merchant’s, and in three steps found himself standing before the pitch-black coalhole. He grabbed the frame with both hands, swung himself through, slid down the short coal slide on his bottom, landed on a softly clacking mound of coal, and looked around. Coal was everywhere: shovelled into heaps, packed into sacks, briquettes stacked up in shining black walls, stray lumps scattered all over the ground. Beneath a little window in the back wall stood a grubby desk; in front of it, three sacks of coal were piled on top of each other as a seat. Franz climbed onto the desk, stuck his head out into the open and found himself overlooking a deserted back courtyard. High, grey walls, an old chestnut tree in the middle, here and there an open window, a few crumpled geraniums, the smell of damp whitewash, boiled cabbage and communal toilets. Franz hauled himself up and crawled out. A low door led from the courtyard to the stairwell of number 19. He went up to the first floor, paused for a moment to calm his hammering pulse, then pressed the bell. It was half an age, or precisely forty-seven heartbeats, before the door opened and Anna’s narrow face appeared in the crack.

  ‘Good day, I would like to speak to your Herr Papa, if you please,’ said Franz.

  ‘My father doesn’t see patients any more.’ Her voice was high and soft. Her eyes were brown, like the professor’s, but a little darker and calmer.

  ‘I’m not here as a patient,’ Franz explained, jutting his chin out belligerently, ‘but as a close acquaintance, you might say.’

  Anna Freud raised her left eyebrow. Franz had always admired people who could perform this feat. In Nussdorf, as far as he could remember, there were only two: Langelmaier, the old teacher in the village school, and his mother. He himself had tried for years, at home in front of the little mirror or bent over the water by the lake, but had never achieved more than a peculiar contortion of the forehead. Anna took off the safety chain and opened the door. She was wearing a rather shabby woollen gown that reached almost to the floor and buttoned up to the neck: a kind of evening coat or housecoat, or dressing gown. Her feet were bare.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said, and walked on ahead. They went through the waiting room and a bare outer office and into another room. Anna opened the only piece of furniture, a wardrobe almost as tall as the ceiling, where about twenty pairs of neatly ironed trousers hung side by side. She took one out: earth-coloured, with high turn-ups.

  ‘Put these on.’

  Only now did Franz realize how dirty he was. The slide into the cellar had dyed his trousers black, and he was discharging a little cloud of coal dust with every step. Anna turned to face the window, crossed her arms and bowed her head slightly. Franz could see in the reflection that she had closed her eyes. Carefully he slipped out of his trousers and put on hers instead. Women’s trousers — a bit too wide in the hips, a bit too tight on the calves, a bit short overall, but they would do. When he was ready she turned and nodded.

  Passing through several empty rooms, with only a few crates stacked up here and there against the walls, they arrived outside the professor’s consulting room. Anna tapped on the door three times with her fingertips, then opened it gently and, with a brusque inclination of the head, indicated to Franz to enter.

  It was several seconds before he spotted the professor. The room had been stripped of all but a few items of furniture and he was lying on a shapeless couch, his head supported by a heap of plump cushions, the rest of his body concealed beneath a heavy woollen blanket. All that remained, apart from the couch, was a huge tiled stove and a glass cabinet full of peculiar figurines, manikins, and grimacing animal faces.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ The professor’s voice had transformed once and for all into the rasping creak of a rotten branch. He seemed to have lost weight. His head, resting on the cushions, was even more fragile than Franz remembered. His jaw looked as if it had sort of slipped to one side, and it was in constant motion. Franz approached the couch, stepping cautiously across the parquet floor.

  ‘Are you sick, Herr Professor?’ he asked, so quietly that he barely heard himself.

  ‘For about forty years,’ nodded Freud. ‘Only now I spend my time with my hot water bottle on a couch that was actually meant for others. Incidentally, I’d like to offer you a seat, but I’m afraid our armchairs have either been shipped or are already being sat on by some sturdy National Socialist behind.’

  ‘I’m happy to stand, Herr Professor,’ said Franz quickly. ‘I heard you’re leaving?’

  ‘Yes,’ Freud grunted, drawing his knees up under the blanket into a sharp triangle.

  ‘Where for?’

  ‘London.’ The professor adjusted his glasses on his nose. ‘Why are you wearing Anna’s trousers?’

  ‘Your daughter was so kind . . . and I . . . I came through the courtyard . . . through the coal cellar . . . because the Gestapo are sitting outside . . .’

  ‘The Gestapo . . .’ the professor repeated, and it sounded like a stone falling from his mouth.

  Just then they were both distracted almost simultaneously, casting their eyes up to where a daddy-long-legs was trembling its way across the ceiling right above the couch. It skittered in a wide arc into a corner, stopped, bobbed back out a little way and was still.

  ‘I brought you something,’ said Franz. He took the little parcel out from under his shirt, carefully unwrapped the three cigars from the Arts pages, and offered them to the professor. Freud’s face lit up. With unexpected vigour he tossed aside the blanket and sat up. It was only now that Franz realized he was wearing a suit: an immaculate, single-breasted suit of grey flannel, with a waistcoat, starched shirt collar and neatly knotted tie. But no shoes. Freud’s feet, small and narrow like a child’s, were clad in dark blue socks; the right one had clearly been darned several times around the outer edge of the big toe.

  ‘One for now, one for the journey, one for England, I thought,’ said Franz.

  Freud contemplated the three cigars, weighing his head gently from side to side. Finally he picked one up with his fingertips and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  ‘That one is for the United Kingdom,’ he said. ‘The first puffs in freedom.’

  He took the other two cigars, held them up against the light from the window, palpated them gently, inhaled deeply and, on an enthusiastic, rattling breath, squeezed out the words: ‘Have you ever held between your teeth something so magnificent, so wonderful, so perfect in its imperfection?’

  Franz thought of the vines he and the other boys used to rip out of the undergrowth, cut into finger-lengths with a pen-knife, and smoke, lying on their backs on the jetty. They tasted vile — woody and bitter — but nobody
let it show. Instead, they all lay there pale and quiet, smoking up at the sky, trying to suppress the urge to cough that kept rising in their throats. Sometimes one of them would retreat into the reeds to puke in the water, doubling up among the tall stalks where the silvery char would immediately start fighting over the lumps.

  ‘No, I don’t think I ever have, Herr Professor.’

  The old man adjusted his jaw in a crooked smile. ‘Then it’s high time, my young friend!’

  At a nod from the professor, Franz hesitantly went over to the glass cabinet and took out a heavy lead crystal ashtray, flanked on either side by a headless terracotta horseman and a small but fairly erect marble phallus. ‘I’m not sure, Herr Professor, I’ve never tried it.’

  ‘Through trying, whole worlds are reinvented,’ said Freud cheerfully. ‘Besides, I don’t want to smoke on my own at our farewell. Sit down!’ he added, after taking another rattling breath, and patted the cushion beside him with his left hand.

  ‘On the couch?’

  ‘On the couch.’

  Franz sat, carefully. The couch felt surprisingly hard. Hard like the hours the patients had spent on it, he thought, yet not altogether uncomfortable. Whenever the professor moved beside him he felt it immediately; it was like a physical connection.

  They smoked the first puffs in silence. The daddy-long-legs on the ceiling had started moving again. It took a few tentative steps out of its corner, then hurried back and seemed to stop once and for all.