The Tobacconist Read online

  ‘Are you feeling unwell, young man?’ A little lady stood in front of Franz, looking up at him with red, inflamed eyes. Despite the midday heat she wore a heavy loden coat, and a shabby fur hat on her head.

  ‘No, no!’ said Franz quickly. ‘It’s just so noisy in the city. And it stinks a bit. I suppose it’s the canal.’

  The little lady pointed her forefinger at him, like a withered twig.

  ‘It’s not the canal that stinks,’ she said. ‘It’s the times. Rotten times, that’s what they are. Rotten, corrupt and degenerate!’

  On the other side of the street a horse and cart rumbled past, piled high with beer barrels. One of the massive Pinzgauers arched its tail and let fall a few droppings, which a scrawny boy, trotting along behind purely for this purpose, scraped up with his bare hands and stuffed into the sack on his shoulder.

  ‘Have you come from far away?’ asked the little lady.

  ‘From home.’

  ‘That’s very far. The best thing you can do is turn around and go straight back!’

  A vein in her left eye had burst and expanded into a rosy triangle. Tiny clumps of coal dust were stuck to her eyelashes.

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Franz. ‘There’s no going back, and anyway, one can get used to anything.’

  He turned and walked off, crossed the ring road in heavy traffic, dodged a speeding omnibus at the very last moment, sprang lightly over a puddle of horse piss and turned into Mariahilferstrasse, the street across from the station, just as his mother had told him. When he looked behind him, the little lady was still standing by the streetlamp at the entrance to the station, a loden-green dwarf with an outsize head and sunlight glowing in the fine tips of her fur hat.

  Otto Trsnyek’s little tobacconist’s shop was in Vienna’s ninth district, on Währingerstrasse, squeezed in between Veithammer Installations and the Rosshuber butcher’s. A large metal sign above the entrance read:

  Trsnyek Tobacconist’s

  Newspapers

  Stationery

  Tobacco Products

  est. 1919

  Franz smoothed his hair with a little saliva, buttoned his shirt right up to the collar, which he felt lent him a certain air of seriousness, took a deep breath and entered the shop. A soft tinkle of little bells sounded from the doorframe above his head. Hardly any light made it into the interior through the posters, leaflets and advertisements that almost completely covered the shop window, and it took a few seconds for Franz’s eyes to adjust to the gloom. The store itself was tiny and crammed to the ceiling with newspapers, magazines, notebooks, books, writing utensils, cigarette packets, cigar boxes and various other tobacco products, items of writing equipment and small goods. Behind the low sales counter, between two tall stacks of newspapers, sat an older man. His head was bent over a file, and he was entering figures, carefully and with great concentration, into columns and boxes clearly designated for this purpose. A muffled quiet filled the room; the only sound was the scratch of pen nib on paper. Dust glimmered in the few narrow rays of light, and there was a strong smell of tobacco, paper and printer’s ink.

  ‘Hello, Franzl,’ said the man, without looking up from his numbers. He said it quietly, but in those cramped surroundings the words were surprisingly clear.

  ‘How do you know who I am?’

  ‘You’ve still got half the Salzkammergut stuck to your feet!’ The man pointed his fountain pen at Franz’s shoes, where a few clumps of dark earth clung to the stitching around the toes.

  ‘And you’re Otto Trsnyek.’

  ‘Precisely.’ With a weary wave of his hand Otto Trsnyek closed his file and slipped it into a drawer. Then he hauled himself out of his little armchair, disappeared behind the pile of newspapers with a peculiar hop, and came straight back out again with two crutches under his armpits. As far as Franz could tell, all that remained of his left leg was half a thigh. The trouser leg was sewn up in a flap that dangled below the stump and swung back and forth slightly with every movement. Otto Trsnyek lifted one of the crutches and with a circular, almost tender gesture indicated the range of products in the store.

  ‘And these are my acquaintances. My friends. My family. If I could, I’d keep them all.’ He leaned his crutches against the counter and ran the back of his hand softly over the covers of the colourful, shiny magazines on one of the shelves. ‘But still I give them out, every week, every day, at all hours, from opening to closing. And do you know why?’

  Franz didn’t know.

  ‘Because I’m a tobacconist. Because I want to be a tobacconist. And because I’ll always be a tobacconist. Until I can’t do it any more. Until the good Lord rolls down my shutters. It’s that simple!’

  ‘Aha,’ said Franz.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Otto Trsnyek. ‘And how’s your mother?’

  ‘Same as ever, really. She said to send you her regards.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Otto Trsnyek. And then he initiated his apprentice into the secrets of the tobacconist’s life.

  Franz’s main workplace would be the little stool by the front door. He was to sit there quietly (when there was nothing more urgent to do), not talk, wait for instructions, and otherwise work on extending his mind and horizons, which was to say: read newspapers. Because reading newspapers was the only important, the only meaningful and relevant part of being a tobacconist; furthermore, if you didn’t read newspapers it meant you weren’t a tobacconist, or even that you weren’t really human. However, the proper reading of newspapers could not, of course, be understood simply as a quick leaf-through of one or maybe two miserable tabloids. The correct reading of newspapers, equally extending both mind and horizon, encompassed all the newspapers on the market (and therefore also in the shop), if not from cover to cover then at least in greater part, meaning: front page, editorial, the most important columns, the most important commentaries, and the most important reports in the sections Politics (Domestic and Foreign), Regional, Economy, Science, Sport, Arts, Society, and so on. It was a well-known fact that the sale of newspapers constituted the core business of every serious tobacconist’s, and the customer, or rather the newspaper buyer — insofar as he was not one of the many who, for intellectual or emotional or political reasons, were regular readers of a particular publication — wanted the newsagent to advise and inform him accordingly, and if necessary guide him, with gentle emphasis, or emphatic gentleness, towards the paper that on this day, at this hour, in this mood, was the only appropriate one for him, the customer, the reader, the newspaper buyer. Had Franz understood this properly?

  Franz nodded.

  Then there were the tobacco products. With cigarettes it was pretty easy. Any country bumpkin who happened to come along from the Salzkammergut or wherever it might be and accidentally bumbled into a tobacconist’s could sell cigarettes. Cigarettes were to a tobacconist what bread rolls were to a baker. Everyone knew that you didn’t buy either bread rolls or cigarettes for their taste or the way they looked; the only reason you bought them was because you were hungry or addicted. And with that you’d said and noted pretty much everything you needed to know about the sale of both bread rolls and cigarettes. Cigars, now, were a very different matter — very different! Only by selling cigars could a serious tobacconist’s become the perfect tobacconist’s; only the aroma, the scent, the taste and flavour of a proper range of cigars transformed a standard newspaper kiosk with smoking accessories into a temple of mind and senses. Could Franz follow all that, more or less?

  Franz nodded and sat down on his stool.

  The problem, said Otto Trsnyek, glancing sadly at the wall rack packed tightly with boxes of cigarettes all the way up to the ceiling — the big problem for the cigar business (and for many other things as well, incidentally) was politics. Politics always messed up absolutely everything, so it didn’t really make much difference whose fat bum currently occupied the seat of government — the late Kaiser, the dwarf Dollfuss, his apprentice Schuschnigg or that megalomaniac Hitler across the border �
� politics messed up, screwed up, fouled up and dumbed down absolutely everything, and basically ruined it one way or another. The cigarette trade, for example. Especially, and above all, the cigarette trade! There were hardly any cigarettes to be had any more these days! Deliveries got held up; they’d become unreliable and unpredictable; the amount of stock varied hugely, with a steady downward trend; the contents of some of the boxes had been sold weeks and months ago: the boxes were just sitting there empty, as decoration, a sort of sad memento of better days!

  ‘That’s how it is and no mistake,’ said Otto Trsnyek, observing Franz thoughtfully. Then he took his crutches, swung himself back behind the counter with a couple of hops, took his file out of the drawer, stuck the tip of his tongue between his front teeth and went on scratching away at his accounts.

  From that day on Franz appeared in Otto Trsnyek’s tobacconist’s at precisely six a.m. every day. He had been given the little storeroom at the back of the shop as his living-, bath- and bedroom, so the journey to work was pleasantly short. He himself was surprised by how fresh he felt in the mornings; he would leap up from his mattress, put on his clothes, brush his teeth over the metal washbasin, run his wet fingers through his hair and head out front to start work. For the most part he spent the mornings reading the newspapers on his little stool beside the door without too many interruptions. Under Otto Trsnyek’s direction he would stack up a pile of fresh morning papers and set about reading them one after the other. To begin with the work was arduous, and as he read he was often so tired he had to pull himself together in order not to topple onto the floor. There had hardly ever been any proper newspapers back home, with the exception of the monthly Nussdorf parish newsletter, which the mayor’s wife wrote herself. The only place where there was always a little pile of newspaper was in the privy next to the elder bush behind the cottage, ripped by his mother into handy squares. Franz had from time to time read a headline, a sentence or two, perhaps even half a paragraph before wiping, but had never derived much benefit from this. Back then, world events had slipped through his hands and under his bottom without ever touching his soul. Now, it seemed, this was changing. Although for the first few days he made very slow progress, he soon grew accustomed to the reporting style, which was usually rather stilted with many clumsy, recurring formulations; he even found himself increasingly capable of extracting the meaning from the various different articles. Finally, after a few weeks, he was able to read the newspapers almost fluently; if not from cover to cover, then at least in greater part. And although their different, sometimes even diametrically opposed views and positions thoroughly confused him, he also derived a certain degree of pleasure from his reading. It was an inkling that he could sense rustling among all those printed letters, a little inkling of the possibilities of the world.

  Sometimes he would set the papers aside and take a cigar out of one of the many brightly painted wooden boxes. He would turn it in all directions, hold it up against a chink of light from the display window, examine its brittle, leafy skin with the tips of his fingers and, eyes closed, pass it under his nostrils and sniff it. Each brand had its own particular smell, yet they all had this in common: they bore within them the aroma of a world beyond the tobacconist’s, Währingerstrasse, the city of Vienna, beyond even this country and the whole wide continent. They smelled of damp black earth, of giant trees mouldering away in silence, of the roars of predators filling the jungle darkness with longing, of the even greater longing in the songs of Negro slaves that rose up from the shimmering heat of the tobacco plantations into the equatorial sky.

  ‘A bad cigar tastes like horseshit,’ said Otto Trsnyek, ‘a good one like tobacco. A very good cigar, on the other hand, tastes like the world!’

  He himself, incidentally, was a non-smoker.

  Over the first few weeks Franz got to know the clientele. There were a lot of casual customers, harried individuals who came running in, breathlessly panted their requests, ran back out and were seldom or never seen again, but the majority were regulars. Since being granted the tobacconist’s shop a year after the end of the war under the compensation law for invalids, Otto Trsnyek had established himself as a permanent fixture in the Alsergrund. None of the locals had known him as a young man. He had simply appeared one day, swinging down Währingerstrasse on his crutches; he had put up the big metal sign outside the shop and the chimes above the door, sat down behind the sales counter, and been part of the district ever since, like the Votive Church or Veithammer Installations.

  ‘Watch the customers. Make a mental note of their habits and preferences. A tobacconist’s memory is his capital!’ he told Franz.

  Franz did his best. To begin with he found it difficult to match people to their particular habits and desires, but day by day the connections became clearer. Little by little the chaotic, formless mass of customers began to crystallize into individuals with their own peculiarities, until eventually Franz was even able to greet them by name and use the appropriate title — which in Vienna was absolutely essential. There was, for example, Frau Dr. Dr. Heinzl, who would not even have recognized the university building and had certainly never been inside it. Frau Dr. Dr. Heinzl had been married twice, once to a Jewish dentist and later to a lawyer who on their wedding day was already as old as the hills. Both gentlemen followed the majority of Viennese in making their final journey to the Central Cemetery: their doctorates and titles, however, remained, and were proudly borne thereafter by the widow Heinzl. She wore a bluish wig, fanned her face constantly — even in winter — with a pair of salmon-coloured silk gloves, and ordered a copy of the Wiener Zeitung and the Reichspost every day in a slightly nasal, aristocratic tone of voice. However, the first customer of the day was the retired parliamentary usher, Kommerzialrat Ruskovetz. Herr Ruskovetz came every morning just after opening time, accompanied by his incontinent dachshund, and asked for the Wiener Journal and a packet of Gloriettes. Sometimes he and the tobacconist exchanged a few words about the lousy weather or the idiotic government, while the dachshund left yellowish drops on the floorboards. It was Franz’s responsibility to wipe them up afterwards with a damp rag. In the mornings the labourers came crashing in, picked up the Volksblatt or the Kleine Blatt and asked to buy loose cigarettes, which Otto Trsnyek fished out of a preserving glass and counted into their callused hands. Although some of them already smelled of beer first thing, and they brought in quite a lot of muck from outside on their clumpy shoes, Franz liked the labourers. They didn’t talk much, had angular faces, and were generally like the dusty brothers of the forestry workers back home. Then, around midday, the pensioners and students came. The pensioners asked for the Österreichische Woche, the students bought a couple of Egyptian cigarettes, plus the Wiener Zeitung, writing paper, and the latest satirical magazines. Old Herr Löwenstein appeared in the early afternoon for one or two packets of Gloriettes. After that it was housewife time. The housewives smelled either of cleaning fluid or cherry liqueur; they talked a lot and asked a lot of questions, and in between they requested the Kleiner Frauenblatt or other magazines of interest to the modern woman. Herr Kollerer, a very short-sighted justice department official, dropped in and bought his daily Long Heinrich, a thin, long-stemmed cigarillo, as well as one copy each of the Bauernbündler and the Wienerwald-Bote. At irregular intervals Red Egon came into the shop. Red Egon was an alcoholic, well-known in the neighbourhood, and — although the party was banned — a Social Democrat who publicly declared his allegiance at every opportunity and at the top of his voice. He was a gaunt figure with a glowering expression, but somewhere behind his high forehead there burned a fire that never seemed to cool. Scarcely had he pushed open the door than he began talking of revolutions, uprisings, upheavals, takeovers that were already well underway somewhere: they would smash this capitalist society, which was built on mountains of the pulverized bones of the worn-down, broken-down, ground-down working classes and thoroughly deserved its downfall. After this he usually stared gloomily at the
shelves for a while, eventually decided on a pack of filterless, paid and left. Schoolchildren would tumble in, asking for coloured pencils or the little cards they collected; old ladies wanted to chat; old men wanted peace and quiet, and to look at the magazine covers in silence. Sometimes one of the male customers would ask, in a hoarse voice, if he could take a look in ‘the drawer’. This was a certain inconspicuous drawer located under the sales counter that Otto Trsnyek was always careful to keep locked, and which was only ever opened at a customer’s specific request. The drawer contained so-called ‘erotic magazines’ (which the tobacconist referred to as ‘wank mags’ or ‘stroke books’ when talking to Franz); they had been strictly forbidden for years. The men would leaf through them for a while, trying to maintain as uninterested an expression as possible; they might then take away one or two pamphlets, which Franz would wrap in brown paper to safeguard them from prying eyes.

  ‘A good tobacconist doesn’t just sell tobacco and paper,’ said Otto Trsnyek, scratching his stump with the top of his fountain pen. ‘A good tobacconist sells enjoyment and pleasure — and sometimes the pleasures are guilty ones!’