The Tobacconist Read online

  On taking his first puff Franz had had to suppress a violent urge to cough; on the second, the urge to throw up; and now, on the third, he felt momentarily faint and had the sense that he was slowly falling forwards onto the parquet. Somehow he managed nonetheless to recover a degree of inner balance, and from then on things began to improve. After about the seventh or eighth puff he could already feel, in addition to the slight paralysis in his tongue, a sense of profound well-being spreading through him, warm as an oven.

  ‘I heard, of course, what happened to Herr Trsnyek,’ said the professor, clearing his throat into his small fist. ‘I’m very sorry.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Franz, after a while. ‘Now I’m the tobacconist.’

  The room gradually filled with a yellowish twilight. The chestnut tree rustled outside, and dark grey clouds gathered in the little piece of sky above the courtyard. Freud pulled the corner of a blanket over his lap. ‘And it’s getting cold, as well,’ he said grumpily, rubbing his feet together.

  ‘You should put on something warm, Herr Professor. A knitted waistcoat, perhaps. Or a woolly cardigan. Or you could light this tiled stove. And it wouldn’t hurt to take a bit more care of your health in general. At your age, I mean!’

  The professor feebly waved this away. ‘My age left health behind a long time ago.’

  ‘I will not allow you to say such a thing, Herr Professor!’ said Franz, raising a stern forefinger.

  ‘Children and old men should be allowed much more than that. But let’s talk about a very different complaint. How is your Bohemian Dulcinea?’

  ‘She’s not called Dulcinea, she’s called Anezka, and it’s over. Or rather, it never started. Perhaps the whole thing was a huge mistake, anyway.’

  ‘Love is always a mistake.’

  ‘She’s with a Nazi now. An officer. Or general. Or I don’t know what. Someone from the SS, anyway, all in black with silver skulls on his belt . . .’

  Franz faltered. Suddenly he felt the old man’s gaze upon him. They looked at each other for a moment in silence. His eyes, he thought, those strange, brown, bright, shining eyes look as if they’re not aging along with the rest of his body. Freud opened his mouth and allowed a little smoke to escape between his teeth; it crept up slowly past his nostrils, behind the lenses of his glasses and over his forehead.

  ‘Back when I boarded the train in Timelkam, my heart hurt,’ Franz went on, ‘and when Anezka ran away from me the first time, ten doctors wouldn’t have been enough to treat the pain. But at least I knew more or less where I was going and what I wanted. Now the pain has almost gone, but I don’t know anything any more. I feel like a boat that’s lost its rudder in a storm and is now just drifting stupidly here and there.’ After a short silence he added: ‘In that sense, Herr Professor, you’ve actually got it much better,’ he added, after a short silence. ‘You know exactly where you’re going.’

  Freud sighed. ‘Most paths do at least seem vaguely familiar to me. But it’s not actually our destiny to know the paths. Our destiny is precisely not to know them. We don’t come into this world to find answers, but to ask questions. We grope around, as it were, in perpetual darkness, and it’s only if we’re very lucky that we sometimes see a little flicker of light. And only with a great deal of courage or persistence or stupidity — or, best of all, all three at once — can we make our mark here and there, indicate the way.’

  He fell silent, bowed his head, then glanced out of the window. A light rain had begun to fall. The wet leaves of the chestnut tree were shining. Somewhere a door slammed and someone shouted something unintelligible; then all was quiet again.

  ‘That chestnut tree . . .’ Freud murmured. ‘How many times have I seen it blossom . . .’

  ‘Are there chestnut trees in London, too, Herr Professor?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Freud shrugged and looked at Franz. Franz could make out his own reflection in the lenses of Freud’s spectacles: a little, thin man with grotesquely distorted limbs. Suddenly a jolt passed through the professor’s body; he stuck his cigar between his teeth, pushed himself up from the couch with both hands, managed somehow to straighten up, and stood there for a second, swaying gently. Then he walked over, knees clicking, to the corner of the room, where the daddy-long-legs was crouching high above him.

  ‘Why in the world is he allowed to stay here, when I, the world-famous originator of psychoanalysis, have to go!’ he cried. He raised his arm and shook his fist threateningly at the creature. The daddy-long-legs trembled briefly, raised a leg, lowered it again, and stopped moving. Freud glared at it for a while in challenge. Finally he dropped his arm and stared without speaking at the smoke-browned wallpaper.

  ‘I’m sure a daddy-long-legs doesn’t always have it easy either, Herr Professor,’ said Franz, cautiously breaking the silence. Freud looked at him as if he had just noticed something entirely new, an entirely unknown form of life that, during his long absence, had made itself at home on his couch. He dismissed Franz’s comment with a tired wave of his hand. Then he took a puff of his Hoyo, which had already almost gone out, walked back to the couch with small steps, and allowed himself to sink slowly into it as if after immense exertion. It had grown even darker in the room. Outside, thunder was rolling in from a distance and the chestnut seemed to cower in the confines of the courtyard. Inside the house there was almost total silence; only now and then a muffled sound would reach them from one of the rooms further off.

  Franz felt the professor’s breaths coming and going beside him, sometimes accompanied by a slight clearing of the throat. He could hear the rubbing together of the professorial socks, shortly followed by a series of creaks in the wooden floor, the crackle of the glowing cigar. Then silence again.

  ‘By the way, I didn’t buy any of your books in the end,’ said Franz. ‘Firstly, they’re quite expensive, secondly, they’re incredibly thick, and thirdly, there’s no room in my head for things like that at the moment. I did follow your advice, though, and started writing down my dreams,’ he added. ‘Most of them are probably nonsense, but there are some funny ones in there. I don’t mean laugh-out-loud funny, more sort of funny-peculiar. I don’t know where they all come from. Because I can’t imagine that such peculiar things could grow in my head all by themselves. Or what do you think, Herr Professor?’

  Freud murmured something unintelligible and stretched his legs out in front of him. Franz giggled. ‘In any case, I write them on a piece of paper every day and stick them on the shop window. Whether it’ll achieve anything remains to be seen. For me personally, I mean. But it’s good for the shop. People stop, press their noses against the glass and read whatever’s drifted through my mind that night. And as they’ve already stopped, they sometimes come in and buy something as well.’ He paused.

  ‘That’s just how it is, Professor!’ he continued. He couldn’t help giggling again. His whole body was flooded with a warm sense of cosiness. At the same time, he was slightly dizzy. Pleasantly dizzy, though, as if he were sitting not on an old couch but on the far older, rotten jetty on the southern shore of the lake, which was already half sunk in the water and always bobbed so nicely over the waves as they rolled in from the steamer. Maybe it was because of his Hoyo, harvested on the sunny banks of the San Juan y Martínez River and rolled by the tender hands of beautiful women, he thought, and contemplated its delicate, leafy skin for a while. Or the almost unreal proximity of the professor. Perhaps, though (his thoughts ran on) it was because of something quite different, although actually it was completely irrelevant where this warm cosiness had come from all of a sudden — cosy was cosy, and that was that. There was nothing more to think about. Large, solitary raindrops were splashing against the windowpanes, shining streaks driven apart in all directions by the wind. One by one lights went on in the windows on the opposite side of the courtyard.

  ‘You won’t know this, Herr Professor,’ said Franz, slowly rotating the cigar between his fingers, ‘but Otto Trsnyek wasn’t a smoker. Otto Trsnyek wa
s a newspaper reader. Newspaper reader and tobacconist. Although for him that was pretty much one and the same. It’s funny, really: a man spends decades sitting in his tobacconist’s and doesn’t want to smoke. He sits there, knows practically everything about cigars, knows their provenance and qualities and distinctive characteristics right down to the last detail and can describe their inner life like a doctor describing the inside of a corpse — but doesn’t have even the faintest idea what they actually taste like.’ He tapped a long trail of ash into the ashtray positioned between his thigh and the professor’s. ‘It really is funny,’ he repeated thoughtfully. ‘Of course, I don’t understand much about smoking yet, either. But when you come back I’ll know more, I promise. And you will come back. Most definitely, no matter what, you will come back. Because your homeland is your homeland, and home is home. And Hitler’ll calm down again one of these days. And all the rest of them, too. And everything will be like before. Or — what do you reckon, Herr Professor?’

  Freud made a grumbling noise, and Franz let himself sink a little deeper into the cushions.

  ‘They say that in England it rains more than in the Salzkammergut. So that must be practically all the time. That can’t be healthy for a gentleman who’s getting on in years, if you’ll pardon the expression. In any case, you must meet my mother sometime. I think the two of you would get along well, you see. Because Mama knows a lot about people, too, and all the stupid things they do, so you’d have plenty to talk about. And she can make potato strudel, too. The proper, authentic one: fried in an iron pan with clarified butter, with or without greaves, with or without lentils, however you like it . . .’

  Franz fell silent. It seemed to him that he had never talked so much in his life. And perhaps that was true. Previously, not talking had always seemed very desirable to him. What did you need to talk about, really, when you were surrounded by trees, rushes and algae? His mother had never liked to waste words, anyway. Most evenings they would sit together in the cottage in silence, and it was nice like that. Mother. Where was she now? What was she doing? Was she thinking of him at this moment? Of her little Franzl, who was not actually little at all any more? Franz blinked. Outside, rain was pelting against the windows. The cushions at his back were softer than anything he had ever touched in his life. Apart from his mother’s arms. And Anezka’s belly. And the hollows at the backs of her knees. And the hill of her shoulder blade. And the other, quite different parts of her body. His stomach gurgled quietly. The tiled stove in the corner answered with a quiet crackle. A shadow floated along the wall. Something was moving in the display cabinet, too. A wooden warrior the size of a thumb stood on tiptoe, slowly raised his hand, and waved as if in farewell. ‘That’s nonsense, of course,’ said Franz quietly. Or thought out loud. Never in his life had he felt so tired and heavy.

  ‘Herr Professor?’ he asked. His voice trembled slightly; he held the cigar away from his face and watched as the glowing end went blurry before his eyes. ‘You are coming back, aren’t you?’

  The professor didn’t answer, and when Franz looked at him he saw that he had fallen asleep. His breathing was regular, both hands lay quietly in his lap; the stump between his fingers had long since gone out. Franz set down his Hoyo in the ashtray and bent over the old man. He seemed extraordinarily delicate. Like the figurines in his display case, thought Franz. As if, were he to slip off the couch in his sleep and onto the parquet floor, he might break into a thousand pieces. Or simply turn to dust. His head was tipped back, his mouth slightly open. His skin looked like yellowed paper that had been crumpled a thousand times and smoothed out again. He lay there, completely calm; only his eyes were flickering back and forth beneath his eyelids, as if they didn’t want to resign themselves to the silence and darkness around them. Franz took the cold remnant of the cigar out of the professor’s hand and placed it in the ashtray. Carefully he stuffed one of the smaller cushions behind the professor’s neck to support it; he straightened the bent shirt collar with his fingertips and gently blew some little flakes of ash off the tie. Then he took the blanket, spread it over the professor’s body and stroked his hand over the wool. He stood beside the couch for almost another minute, not moving, watching the professor’s quiet breathing. When at last he tiptoed out of the room, he glanced up at the ceiling one more time. The daddy-long-legs had vanished.

  The afternoon of the following day — it was the fourth of June, 1938 — Professor Sigmund Freud, along with a sparse group of his closest friends and relatives, left Vienna, the city where he had spent almost eighty years of his life, to take the Orient Express via Paris and on to exile in London. The formalities had been arranged. The exit permits had been issued; the Reich Flight Tax, almost a third of the family fortune, had been paid, and most of the household, furniture and antiquities had either been shipped or was in a warehouse awaiting transportation to England. Why they were nonetheless accompanied by some twenty suitcases, trunks, boxes and bags was a mystery to the professor, as, incidentally, was the fact that the majority allegedly belonged to him. Far too many possessions for an old man, he thought, watching the day pass as if in a dream. Unnecessary ballast on the final stretch of a long journey. Anna was in charge, and had everything in hand. She ordered the two big taxis to Vienna West Station; she arranged porters, bought the tickets, and gave the official on the counter a few coins to reserve them seats. The passports, visas and other papers of all the travellers in their little group were safely stored in her handbag, and with her in a basket she carried a few slices of cold smoked meat, a pot of her homemade cabbage with noodles and a remarkable quantity of bread dumplings, still warm and wrapped in tea towels. Right at the bottom of the basket she had also hidden a bottle of vermouth and some tiny glasses. For the first few metres after the border, she thought. A toast to freedom. As the little group crossed the arrivals hall, followed by curious glances and a swarm of whispers, Anna’s mother burst into tears. Anna passed her a handkerchief and stroked her head, then made it very clear to her that she should pull herself together and keep walking. She had never loved Vienna as her parents did. Or hated it as they did, either. When all was said and done, she had no particular feelings at all for the city of her birth. For her, their departure was nothing more nor less than fleeing from the National Socialists, an act in which they had at last succeeded after all. There was a great throng on the platform. People were shouting, crying and laughing, clasping each other in their arms, kissing or fighting one last time, calling out to one another through the open windows of the train, gathering in little groups, talking loudly all at once, or standing alone beside a suitcase, looking confused, with a pale blue ticket in their hand.

  For some reason, Professor Sigmund Freud was absolutely determined to be the last to board. His daughter, however, was pushing him before her with gentle firmness, up the iron steps and into the carriage. ‘Leave me alone, I can manage by myself,’ he said; and those were his last words on Viennese soil.

  Anna surveyed the overcrowded platform once more. The babble of voices seemed to swell beneath the high ceiling of the station hall; the whistle sounded over it, announcing their departure. A late traveller hurried to his carriage; a pair of adolescents fell theatrically into each other’s arms; flowers, hats and newspapers were waved; and the red of swastika arm-bands was all around, flashing amid the confusion. As Anna finally turned away to board the train, something caught her eye. Right at the back, at the entrance to the arrivals hall, where the crowd was at its thickest, stood the young tobacconist. He was standing stock-still with his back to the wall; his face was unusually white, and he seemed to be looking in their direction, but she couldn’t see his eyes at this distance. The whistle blew again, the conductor gave the signal for departure, and Anna boarded the train. Once she had closed the door behind her, and the carriage had given a ponderous jolt and started moving, she exhaled deeply and leaned her forehead against the window. The glass was pleasantly cool, and as the train left Vienna West station the afte
rnoon sun shone full in her face.

  Things were bearable again. Somehow things can always be borne. At any rate, he seemed to have survived the worst, passed the lowest point, put the most vicious of the stomach pains behind him. Even the hallucinations had almost stopped. Not even a day and a half had passed since Franz had tiptoed across the parquet floor of the Freud family’s labyrinthine apartment, searched for the front door, eventually found it, and pulled it to behind him as gently as possible. Even as he was saying farewell by tracing the professor’s name with his fingertip on the brass plaque beside the practice bell, his stomach had begun to feel rather peculiar, and by the time he reached the bottom of the stairs this peculiar feeling in his stomach had already become an overwhelming nausea. Reeling like a clumsy puppy he passed through the entrance hall. For a moment he imagined that he was lost in the tunnel of the old salt mine he had visited with his primary school class years earlier on a day trip to Gmunden. Back then he had kept covertly licking the tunnel walls, wanting to taste the salt buried deep in the earth, but each time he did so he was disappointed by the dusty taste of the stone. These memories vanished again as quickly as they had surfaced, and Franz staggered out onto the street. Rain pelted in his face; Berggasse had become a torrent, and a brown soup was bubbling up from under the manhole covers. The bench was empty. But as Franz pushed himself off from the door handle, which he had briefly used to steady himself, and headed for home, he noticed, through the thick veil of rain, a shadowy movement in an archway on the other side of the street. Nothing else happened, though — perhaps it was because of the rain, or perhaps it was because the Gestapo had orders to watch an entrance, not an exit. Either way, Franz was glad of it, and he headed home, doubled over and weaving a bit but otherwise unscathed.

  He spent that night and the following morning in bed, with roiling depths beneath him while above, against the backdrop of the tatty ceiling paper, a hazy collection of bizarre figures kissed and rubbed up against each other, limbs entangled, before scattering and evaporating in the stale air of the room. Sometimes his thoughts wandered out into the shop, to the cigars lying quietly in their boxes, some of which were Hoyos de Monterey, and every time they did so he was forced to stick his head in the laundry bucket positioned right beside his bed and allow matters to take their course. Around midday he started to feel a little better, and finally, at half past two in the afternoon, he clambered out of bed on rather wobbly legs and set off on foot for Vienna West Station.