The Tobacconist Page 5

  ‘Oh, have you come crawling out as well?’ the tobacconist yelled at him.

  ‘What’s going on?’ stammered Franz.

  ‘Open your eyes!’ Otto Trsnyek’s face was crimson; the veins writhed on his temple like a little pile of bluish worms. Shaking with fury, he pointed one of his crutches at the tobacconist’s. The pavement and the shop front were daubed with a reddish-brown liquid. It looked as if someone had splashed it with several buckets of paint or muck. Large, dripping letters on the shop window spelled GET OUT JEWLOVER!, while emblazoned on the wall beside the shop entrance was a round shape, scrawled clumsily and in obvious haste, but clearly recognizable nonetheless as an enormous human posterior with rudimentary features: a so-called ‘arse-face’.

  Franz stepped over to the window and cautiously touched the J of JEWLOVER with his finger. The graffiti seemed to have been applied with a coarse brush, and had a horrible feel to it — dry and crusted at the edges, still sticky and damp where it was thicker. It also exuded a disgusting smell: rancid, sickly-sweet, but slightly sour as well.

  ‘What is this?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Blood!’ yelled Otto Trsnyek. ‘Pig’s blood! Daubed there by our dear neighbour Rosshuber himself!’

  ‘I’d like to see you prove it,’ said the master butcher calmly. ‘Besides, that’s not sow’s blood, it’s chicken’s. Anyone can see that!’

  ‘Chicken’s, then, for all I care!’ Otto Trsnyek exploded. ‘And who handles these creatures all day long? And who’s brainless enough to paint their own self-portrait next to my front door? And who’s been wearing the swastika under his lapel for half his life already and can’t wait for a chance to turn it outwards?’

  ‘What I wear under my collar is none of your damn business,’ said Rosshuber, crossing his massive arms over his chest. ‘And the portrait is of the right person!’

  ‘And your hand?’ roared Otto Trsnyek.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s still sticky with blood!’

  ‘What else is it going to be sticky with? I’m a butcher, after all!’

  Otto Trsnyek gulped. For a moment it looked as if he was going to drop his crutches and fly at the butcher’s throat. Suddenly, though, he turned to the circle of people standing around, which had closed in around the commotion and had swelled to quite a sizeable crowd.

  ‘This person!’ he began. ‘This so-called butcher — whom, incidentally, it would be far more accurate to call a sausage doctorer because he bulks up his sausages by stuffing them with old fat and sawdust — this so-called person and sausage doctorer has blood on his hands. He also has shit for brains and black malice in his heart. And, looking around, he’s not alone in that. So far it’s only a sow that’s had to meet its maker. Or a couple of chickens; whatever. So far it’s only a tobacconist’s shop that’s been defiled. But I’m asking you here, today: what, or who, will be next?’

  No one said anything. Some people grinned, some shook their heads, someone left, others joined the crowd and pushed their way through the curious bystanders.

  ‘One man has blood on his hands, and the others stand there and say nothing. That’s how it always is!’ Otto Trsnyek continued. Rosshuber stood next to him, smiling crookedly. ‘That’s how it always is, that’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it will always be, because that’s probably how it’s written somewhere, and that’s how it’s been instilled into the infinitely stupid human head. But not in mine, ladies and gentlemen! My head still thinks for itself. I won’t dance at your party. I don’t pin a swastika under my lapel, I don’t doctor sausages, I don’t sneak about on the pavement in the dark daubing arse-faces on innocent houses, I don’t stay silent, and there’s no blood on my hands — the only thing you might find there is printer’s ink!’

  Suddenly all his energy seemed to leave him. His head drooped between his shoulders and he stared down at the pavement. For a few seconds there was silence outside the shop. Only the handles of the crutches could be heard quietly creaking as Otto Trsnyek’s fingers clenched around them. At last he gathered himself and, together with a long-drawn-out breath, straightened up again, turned to the butcher and, along with a few flecks of spittle, spat out his concluding words: ‘And another thing, Rosshuber. In 1917 I left one of my legs in a mud-filled hole on behalf of our country. This one is all I have. It’s old, it’s pretty stiff at the hip, and it sometimes feels a wee bit lonely — but it’s still enough to give someone a good kick up the arse if necessary!’

  With that he left the butcher and all the other people standing and disappeared into his shop with two vigorous swings on his crutches. The door slammed behind him so hard that the windows rattled and the jangling of the bells reached an almost tumultuous crescendo.

  In the weeks that followed these events Franz travelled back to the Prater again and again, looking for the girl. He wandered the streets and alleyways for hours, sat in taverns or loitered in front of the swingboats, always in the hope of seeing the face with the straw-blonde hair rise up somewhere in front of him. In vain. Recently it had grown quite uncomfortable, too. Winter had arrived earlier than usual this year: the first snowflakes mingled with the cold drizzle, the rides soon lay under a thick blanket of snow, and one after another had to close down. Only a couple of stalls, the taverns and the pony carousel defied the snow and the cold. Franz stood freezing in front of the little arena and envied the horses, which had now grown woolly winter coats and, untroubled by love and other aberrations, continued to stamp their circles into the cold sand.

  At night he often lay awake for hours, thinking about the gap in the Bohemian girl’s teeth and tossing and turning with the heat of his own body. If he did eventually find the sleep he longed for, he was immediately beset by turbulent dreams. Pig’s blood dripped from the ceiling straight into the round barrel that was his skull; the bed swung higher and higher, out on that sunlight shriek of delight, through an immense black gap, then on, in a little blue wagon, into the eternal darkness of the grotto. His mother appeared and stroked Otto Trsnyek’s leg with the back of her hand, which made Sigmund Freud laugh so heartily that his hat flew off his head and he spread his wings and sailed away high above the Votive Church following the setting sun.

  If it got too bad, Franz would slip out of the shop through the little door to the back courtyard and walk aimlessly through the streets, until he heard the clip-clopping of the milk carts and the winter dawn was breaking over the frozen roofs. These walks in the silent, nocturnal streets soothed him: he heard the snow crunch beneath his feet and saw his breath drift in front of his face like a delicate little flag. In the early morning twilight, when the lamplighters were climbing their ladders to put out the gas lamps and the first workers were setting off for the early shift with shadowed faces, he found himself in a nebulous limbo between waking and dreaming. And at such times, as he crept back to the tobacconist’s, slow and tired, he would see the Bohemian girl on every corner. Bohemian girl under the lantern. Bohemian girl behind the fence. Bohemian girl in the doorway of a house, face illuminated by the glow of a cigarette. Bohemian girl in a shop window, stretching out her arms to him and laughing.

  Postcard of Schönbrunn Palace gardens, lamplit and sugar-frosted with snow.

  Dear Mother,

  I’ve been here in the city for quite a while now, yet to be honest it seems to me that everything just gets stranger. But maybe it’s like that all through life — from the moment you’re born, with every single day, you grow a little bit further away from yourself until one day you don’t know where you are any more. Can that really be the way it is?

  With best wishes,

  Your Franz

  Postcard of the Attersee, green and shimmering like a jewel, clearly taken from an aeroplane or Zeppelin.

  Dear Franzl,

  Have you fallen in love, I wonder? Because that would be one explanation for the way you’re feeling. It’s well known that falling in love means you don’t know where you are any more.
As far as your question is concerned, I can tell you that all of life is perpetual parting. A mother knows that only too well. But that’s just the way it is, and you get used to it. I hope you are well otherwise and that you’re not discrediting Otto Trsnyek. Here at the lake there’s no news for the time being, and that’s actually quite nice.

  Sending you a big hug,

  Your Mama

  ‘You look terrible,’ said Otto Trsnyek, without looking up from his bookkeeping.

  ‘What?’ asked Franz, confused. He lifted his head, which had sunk onto his chest again. Two months had passed since he had found happiness in the Prater and promptly lost it again. Two months of gloomy days and sleepless nights.

  ‘I said you look terrible!’ repeated Otto Trsnyek. ‘Godawful, to be precise. Like Death’s own grandfather. White as a sheet, thin as a rake, dog-tired, and a good ten years older than your age. If you carry on like this you can start drawing your pension next year.’

  ‘No, no, I’m fine,’ said Franz quickly, bending to pick up the paper that had slipped from his listless hands. ‘I’m finding the weather a bit difficult, I suppose, but everything’s all right apart from that.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the weather?’

  ‘It’s . . . a bit cold.’

  ‘It’s winter.’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Franz quietly. ‘Winter.’

  The tobacconist peered over the rim of his glasses at his apprentice, who was now trying to bury his head in the Business section.

  ‘And apart from the extremely unusual fact that winter is already upon us in December this year, what else is troubling you?’

  It took a few seconds for Franz to abandon his resistance, but then he finally allowed the newspaper to slide to the floor, leaped up from the stool and shouted at the dusty ceiling in despair: ‘I’ve fallen in love!’

  In the briefest of moments, about half as long as it takes to skim a headline, Otto Trsnyek grasped the seriousness of the situation. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ he exclaimed, ‘that’s bad!’

  ‘Worse than bad!’ cried Franz. ‘It’s a disaster! What on earth do I do now?’

  Otto Trsnyek considered. Eventually he shrugged. ‘I have no idea. Go to the swimming pool and swim a few lengths. That’s good for the bones and clears the head!’

  Franz lowered his hands and looked at him. For the first time he noticed how small the tobacconist was. It was as if he had shrunk in recent weeks. Soon he would have dissolved entirely in the dusty shadow of his stack of newspapers.

  ‘The swimming pool?’

  Otto Trsnyek scratched himself behind the right ear. His gaze travelled slowly across the sales counter, slid over the edge, down to the ground, and crept across the floorboards in little arcs before finally getting stuck somewhere just in front of Franz’s toecaps.

  ‘Listen, I don’t understand these things any more. Maybe I used to, when I still had something going for me in that regard. Ask your mother, she’ll probably remember. But that’s a long time ago. Half a lifetime. The truth is, I left my youth behind in the trenches along with my leg. That’s the way it is. Sometimes it’s painful, but to be honest it has its upsides, too. Love can’t do anything to me any more. I’ve got my peace and quiet as far as that’s concerned, and if I want to get het up I read the newspaper. There’s enough senselessness in the world, I don’t need that kind of thing in my shop as well. So if I might give you a modest piece of advice, my awkward young apprentice: in delicate matters such as these, look for another confidant, and don’t bring your problems to me.’

  He gave a slightly embarrassed smile, then blew carefully on the nib of his fountain pen to dry it and bent low over his books. After a while Franz sat down again, and neither of them said anything else for the rest of the day.

  At Berggasse 19 the most wonderful aromas lingered in the air. It smelled of savoury pancake soup, roast beef and onions in gravy with parsley potatoes, and vanilla pudding in a hot dark chocolate sauce, sprinkled with freshly roasted flaked almonds. Professor Sigmund Freud removed his napkin, surreptitiously undid the top button of his trousers and folded his hands on his stomach with a contented groan. Just this once — and only because Martha, the professor’s wife, was in bed two rooms away with a slight temperature and a nasty dry cough — his daughter Anna had done the cooking this Sunday. Over the years Anna had become not only an immensely productive and empathetic psychoanalyst (and more: her father’s only legitimate successor and a loyal champion of his work), but also — a fact of which Freud was secretly almost more appreciative — a proficient and talented cook. In particular, roast beef and onions was a dish she prepared better than almost anyone in Vienna: the meat was succulent and cooked to a turn, the onions sautéed golden yellow in flour and butter, and the potatoes sprinkled with tiny snippets of freshly chopped parsley. Freud looked at his daughter out of the corner of his eye. She was still prodding at her pudding with her little silver spoon while leafing through one of Arthur Schopenhauer’s thickest tomes. She had rolled her hair up into two snail-like coils at the back of her head, and these were illuminated by a couple of rays of the winter sun that, for a few midday minutes, had strayed down the urban canyon of Berggasse all the way into the Freud family dining room. It had always been a mystery to him where women found the dexterity and patience to construct such edifices upon their heads. From the bedroom came the sound of someone quietly clearing their throat, followed by a comfortable groan and a few indefinable noises from the bed. Ah, Woman, thought Freud, in silent wonder. What does she want, and what’s it all about?

  At that moment he sensed Anna looking at him, a look he loved more than anything else in the world. ‘I’d better take another peek,’ she said. She set spoon and Schopenhauer aside, went to the window and glanced down into the street.

  ‘He’s still there!’

  Freud gave a little cough. ‘How long has he been sitting down there now?’

  ‘About three hours.’

  ‘In this cold?’

  ‘He’s got a scarf.’

  Freud gingerly explored his prosthetic jaw with the tip of his tongue. That sharp edge at the back needed a bit of smoothing, and the side corner would have to be polished slightly. While he was eating the pain in his mouth had been bearable, but it was slowly worsening again. The truth was that none of the eminent doctors were any good. Maybe he should see a carpenter next time. Or go straight to a tombstone carver. He stared for a while into the middle distance, expressionless. A solitary sliver of almond lay on the tablecloth beside the breadbasket. He tapped it with his fingertip and popped it in his mouth. Then, with a sigh that seemed to encompass the pain of all mankind, he rose and said, ‘I will smoke outside today!’

  Franz leaped to his feet the instant the heavy door swung open and the professor stepped outside. The momentum of his fervour almost knocked him down again: his legs were as stiff as boards, and his bottom ached from the hours of sitting on the cold wooden bench. Now, though, he stood and watched as the professor, slightly bent over as usual, crossed the street on rather unsteady legs and walked straight over to him.

  ‘May I sit down?’ asked Freud, sinking onto the bench without waiting for an answer. With his fingertips he fished a little matte silver box from his coat pocket and took out a Virginia. But before he could stick the cheroot between his lips Franz was already sitting beside him, holding a long, slim cigar under his nose. The professor swallowed. ‘A Hoyo de Monterrey,’ he said, huskily.

  Franz nodded. ‘Harvested by brave men on the sunny, fertile banks of the San Juan y Martínez River and tenderly hand-rolled by their beautiful women.’

  Freud gently palpated the cigar along its entire length and squeezed it lightly between thumb and forefinger.

  ‘An aromatic habano that is light in taste, yet persuades through great elegance and complexity,’ said Franz, with a naturalness that gave no hint of the many painstaking hours it had cost him to learn the descriptions on the cigar box by heart. He took a silver-pl
ated cigar cutter from the pocket of his trousers and handed it to the professor. ‘A habano should be cut precisely on the line — here, where cap and wrapper join.’

  Freud cut off the end and lit the Hoyo with a match as long as his finger. In doing so he held the flame about a centimetre away from the tip and drew on the cigar until the flame reached it. Then he turned it slowly between his fingers and blew softly on the embers. He leaned back with a faint smile and gazed at the bluish smoke curling up and away in the clear winter air.

  ‘Now then. Out with it. What do you want?’

  Franz cleared his throat awkwardly, shifted about on the bench, cleared his throat again, and finally turned to the man sitting beside him with the despairing face of a drowning man.

  ‘I’m in love, Herr Professor!’

  Freud held his cigar up to the light and contemplated it thoughtfully.

  ‘Congratulations!’ he said. ‘You don’t lose any time, do you?’

  ‘No, Herr Professor, but I’ve lost her!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The girl!’

  ‘I thought you were in love?’

  ‘Yes, but unhappily!’ The words burst out of Franz like a cork from a shaken champagne bottle.

  Freud, whose prosthetic jaw was starting to torment him again, put his head to one side and stared for a while into the empty space between the bench and the front door of his house. ‘Ut desint vires, tamen est laudanda voluntas,’ he said at last, and it sounded as if he was trying to grind each word individually between his teeth.

  ‘Excuse me, Herr Professor?’

  ‘It means something along the lines of “Chin up!”’

  ‘How can such a long sentence have such a short meaning?’