The Tobacconist Page 7

  ‘Excuse me, does a young woman live here, by any chance, from Bohemia?’ asked Franz.

  The old woman stared at him for a moment, then pointed silently at the ceiling with her spoon. A rubbery lump of dough peeled off and plopped into her lap. The sow heaved itself over onto its other side, raised its head and gazed dully at the wall.

  On the second floor most of the apartments seemed to be empty: almost all the doors stood open or were missing altogether. Only the door of the last apartment, right at the end of the corridor, was intact. An indistinct babble could be heard behind it. Franz knocked twice and it immediately fell silent. He heard brief whispers, then a high voice said, ‘Come in!’ Franz wiped the remnants of snow from his collar, took a deep breath and opened the door.

  As far as he could tell at first glance, there were about thirty women in the room. They sat at little tables, on chairs, crates, buckets. Three were perched next to one another on the window ledge like birds on a bough. Some were bedded down on old mattresses ranged along the walls. Two young girls sat cross-legged in front of a low charcoal stove, playing cards; a woman stood before a shard of mirror on the wall, making up her eyes with a stick of charcoal; another sat on an upturned laundry basket, clasping a tiny child to her breast.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Franz timidly, ‘does a young woman live here, by any chance, from Bohemia?’ One of the girls giggled; another, with blue eyes like water, put her hand over her mouth and stifled a laugh. The others just sat and stared at him.

  ‘Ah, is sonny boy with nice ass!’

  He recognised her voice immediately. She was sitting on a mattress, her knees drawn up, wrapped in a thin woollen blanket. Her hair had disappeared beneath a kerchief and her face was almost entirely shadowed by the blanket. But even so, Franz knew that she was smiling. And now he was smiling, too. And if the Bohemian girl in her woollen blanket hadn’t released him from his happy stupor with the words, ‘You can pay me meal and glass of wine, sonny boy!’ he would probably have gone on standing in the doorway for the rest of the afternoon, or beyond, smiling a smile that looked as if it could embrace the whole world, or at the very least these thirty women in their damp hovel.

  She was called Anezka, and she was three years older than him. She came from a ‘very beautiful willage’ called Dobrovice (‘curled up to hill Viničný like to dark lover’) in the district of Mladá Boleslav, and worked variously as a nursemaid, cook or domestic help — without an official permit, like all the other women in the yellow house. ‘All Bohemian. Lovely, good woman, every one!’

  They crunched along side by side through the snow-covered streets, and Franz told her about home, where the lake changed colour with the seasons: in spring it was dark green, in summer silver, in autumn dark blue, and in winter black as the devil’s heart. And he told her about the cows whose cowpats were so big a child could sink into them up to its knees, and about the fish he had pulled from the water as a little boy that were so fat a single one was enough to satisfy an entire brigade of woodcutters. He described the pleasure steamers that thumped across the water every day in summer with their colourful, chaotic crowds of tourists on deck and children swimming after them as they cast off, trying to race them. And he described for her his mother’s potato strudel, famous throughout the whole of the Salzkammergut: how in the winter months she would knead the dough on the table before frying it in goose fat in the big iron pan and piling it up in a golden-yellow, steaming, fragrant mountain. Franz told her about these and about other, quite different things. The words poured out of him, unfurling before them in such a wonderful panorama that they went on walking through the almost deserted streets until night fell and the gas workers climbed their ladders, brushed the snow caps from the lanterns, and lights began to shimmer all around them through the blizzard.

  Anezka stopped at a little tavern. ‘We eat now!’ she said, and went in. Franz ordered two portions of goulash and a bottle of foreign wine that was so good even the waiter couldn’t pronounce its name. The goulash was hot and spicy, the gherkins snapped, and the bread rolls crackled. Franz had never seen someone eat with such abandon. And he had never been so happy to watch someone eat. He ordered a second helping, then a third. Afterwards there were pancakes with chocolate sauce and a thick layer of icing sugar, and a second bottle of wine. When the last specks of pancake had finally been washed down with the last mouthful of wine, Anezka leaned back with a long-drawn-out sigh, crossed her hands over her belly and gazed languidly at Franz.

  ‘And now I want you, sonny boy!’ she said.

  The shop floor was silent, bathed in the blue, snowy light that fell through the few gaps on the poster-covered windows. When Franz had closed the front door behind them, Anezka raised her nose, sniffing, deeply inhaling the smell of tobacco and paper. Franz was planning to indicate the way to his little room with a gesture both polite and, at the same time, nonchalant and urbane when he felt her hand on his behind, on the exact same spot where it had lain once before, so very long ago, when they danced in the Schweizerhaus. His heart immediately started hammering like mad, and a fiery heat welled up inside him. He wanted to ask something, something tremendously urgent, something incredibly important, something that was tingling on the tip of his tongue, but already her other hand was on his other buttock and her hip was pushing against his, and the words evaporated in his head like drops on a hot stove. She looked him in the eyes and, very slowly, brought her face up close to his, and when he felt her breath on his mouth and saw the delicate trembling of her puckered top lip, a shudder of joy passed through him with such force that he would almost certainly have fallen backwards into the cigar rack if Anezka hadn’t caught him at the last moment and pressed him firmly against her body. He closed his eyes and heard himself make a gurgling sound. And as his trousers slipped down his legs all the burdens of his life to date seemed to fall away from him; he tipped back his head and gazed up into the darkness beneath the ceiling, and for one blessed moment he felt as if he could understand the things of this world in all their immeasurable beauty. How strange they are, he thought, life and all of these things. Then he felt Anezka slide down before him to the floor, felt her hands grab his naked buttocks and draw him to her. ‘Come, sonny boy!’ he heard her whisper, and with a smile he let go.

  And if anybody had, for any reason, been loitering outside a couple of hours later on that icy night, perhaps they would have seen the door of the old Trsnyek’s tobacconist’s fly open and two naked figures, a thin young man and a plump young woman, tumble out into the open air, pelt each other, squealing, with snow for a while, dash a little way down Währingerstrasse and finally, arms and legs outstretched, fall backwards into a great heap of snow at about the level of old Frau Sternitzka’s furrier’s shop. But of course at that time of night and in that filthy weather nobody was out on the street. Nobody was there to see Franz and Anezka lie beside each other, panting, looking up at the sky. And no one was there to hear the brief conversation Franz initiated with a question that had been buzzing around his slowly cooling head for some minutes.

  ‘Why did you run away back then, in the Schweizerhaus?’

  Anezka stretched her arm up in the air and traced the contours of the surrounding roofs with her finger. It had almost completely stopped snowing; dark scraps of cloud were scudding across the sky, and the moon shimmered weakly from behind a chimney.

  ‘Sometimes must run away, sometimes must stay,’ she said. ‘So is life.’

  ‘Well, maybe . . .’ Franz began, in feeble protest, but even as he did so her hand made an elegant turn in mid-air, then swooped down abruptly and with devastating accuracy to seize his cock. ‘Not talk so much,’ she said, ‘better to screw again.’ Of course, she didn’t say ‘screw’ but ‘scrrrrrrew’, with rolling, Bohemian r’s. Franz understood her perfectly all the same.

  Franz’s sexual deliverance did not signify an improvement in his general state of being. A fire had been ignited between his thighs; it burned fiercely and would
be impossible to extinguish again, that much was clear to him. At the same time — of this too he had been made painfully aware — there was still so much to learn. The night had been too short; even a whole lifetime seemed insufficient to comprehend the mystery of Woman in all her terrible beauty. ‘Even the best among us are dashed to pieces on the rocks of the Feminine’, the professor had said. That may be, thought Franz, but if so, then that was just how it was. Let him be dashed to pieces — as long as it was on Anezka’s splendid coast. There was no going back now. He wanted to keep going, keep practising, keep learning. He wanted to lie beside her again come what may, with her wonderful scent in his nostrils and her hands on that eager student, his behind.

  To that end he set off the very next evening to the yellow house on Rotensterngasse, walked through the stinking hall, up the crumbling staircase, past the old woman with the quietly snuffling pig and up into the apartment, which once again was crammed with Bohemian women. But Anezka wasn’t there. Nor the next day, either. Nor the following weekend. Or the one after that. Anezka not here, Anezka out, Anezka gone, Anezka somewhere, Anezka working, said the women who happened to be in the apartment at the time; they never, incidentally, seemed to be the same ones. Where or for whom she worked they couldn’t say, didn’t know, didn’t want to know, and Franz retreated again, with his shining, greasy carefully parted hair and the box of expensive chocolates he had purchased at a specialist confectioner’s in town under his arm. During the day he sat on his stool, white as a sheet, and pretended to read the paper. At night he tossed and turned in bed and buried his face in the pillow where, but a short while ago, her hair had fanned out like rays of sunshine. Periods of sleep were short and shot through with confusing dreams. Sometimes he followed the professor’s advice and tried to tame this frenzied inner life by writing down his dreams as soon as he awoke. It was no good. It was no help. Nothing helped or were any good. It was as if Anezka had ripped his heart out of his chest and was now carrying it around with her. The thing still beating in his chest was just the memory of what was already in her possession: in her open hand, the pocket of her apron, squashed between the slats of her bed frame, hot and pulsating before her on the kitchen table.

  And then it happened after all. A couple of agonizing weeks after the earth first moved at the tobacconist’s, Franz was roused from half-sleep in the middle of the night by a quiet knock. Outside stood Anezka in a short coat, freezing. She said nothing. Without a word she walked past him and got into bed. She left it to him to undress her. His hands were shaking so hard it took him forever. Slowly, bit by bit, her body revealed itself until at last she lay before him, naked and soft and plump in the milky radiance of the moonlight. Afterwards, as he lay on his back beside her, a little heap of happiness, he imagined how the following morning, as soon as they got up, he would ask her for her hand. But when he awoke, she was gone.

  Franz decided to implement the professor’s second proposed solution to the problem and forget Anezka. He tried very hard, but when, after more than three weeks, the prints of her small hands still burned his buttocks, and her name kept flashing up in ghostly fashion between every second line of the newspaper, and when finally the contours of first her puckered top lip, then her face, and lastly her body materialized in the grain of the floorboards as he was wiping up the drips left by Kommerzialrat Ruskovetz’s dachshund, he abandoned the forgetting idea. Instead, he tossed the rag into a corner and planted himself in front of Otto Trsnyek, feet apart and hands determinedly on his hips. He was sorry, he said in a very loud voice, but he simply couldn’t stand it any more. He had to go to a doctor right now, immediately, this instant, about his spine, which had started to collapse and was all in all quite painfully crooked from all the hours of sitting on the stool. The tobacconist screwed the top on his fountain pen, placed it carefully in its leather case, which had got a little greasy over the years, bent over the piece of paper he had just filled with a list of things that urgently needed ordering, gently blew the ink dry, looked over the top of his glasses at his apprentice, still standing in front of him in the same position, feet apart, and, sighing heavily, dismissed him for the rest of the day with the words: ‘Well, clear off, then, if that’s what you want!’

  Franz, of course, went not to the doctor but straight to the yellow house in the Rotensterngasse, where he sat on a low pile of crumbling bricks behind one of the two rubbish heaps and waited. Nothing happened all afternoon. Women were constantly going in and out, but Anezka wasn’t among them. The hours passed: a few rays of sun wandered briefly across the rubbish, it rained a little, after which it grew cold, evening came and darkness fell. Franz felt the dampness of the bricks slowly seeping up through his trousers, and railed silently at himself. What had possessed him to come up with the harebrained idea of listening to some ancient, practically weightless professor — who smelled of sawdust, to boot — and getting caught up in something as idiotic as love? A little later, when the gas man came and lit the street’s three functioning lanterns, he finally gave up. There was a smacking sound as he raised his damp behind off the pile of bricks, about to beat a retreat to the tobacconist’s. Precisely at that moment, she came out of the house. Her head was slightly bowed; she had turned up the collar of her coat, and she walked down the street with small, quick steps, in the other direction. Franz emerged from behind the rubbish heap and followed her at a safe distance. Just like in the American detective movie he’d seen years ago with his mother at a well-attended screening in St. Georgen, with all those mercilessly grim or dreamily wistful men, he tried to use the intricacies of the urban environment as cover: he ducked into the entrances of buildings, jumped behind an advertising column, crossed the road, ran a little way alongside a diesel truck loaded with steaming tar, and hid behind the broad back of a tired sewer worker trudging home in his heavy thigh boots. Anezka crossed Weintraubengasse, reached Praterstrasse, and moved swiftly and surely through the thick traffic towards the Giant Ferris Wheel. Behind the Grand Autodrome she suddenly turned right and disappeared down a small, dark side street. Franz waited a few seconds, and then he too turned into the alley. The street was narrow and bordered on both sides by an unusually high fence: the planks loomed up, leaving only a strip of the starless night sky at the top. After about twenty paces the passageway opened out onto a rear courtyard enclosed by dirty walls. A couple of dustbins stood in one corner, huddled together like sleeping cows. A light bulb dangled from a naked wire, dispensing its dirty yellow light. Out of the corner of his eye Franz caught a movement in the semi-darkness of an alcove, soft and silent, like a languid wave. It was the fold of a curtain moving in a draught. Above it, a poster stuck on the wall read TO THE GROTTO in dull gold letters. Underneath, barely legible: COME CLOSER! COME INSIDE! SECRET PLEASURE, ALONE OR TOGETHER, COME SAMPLE OUR DELIGHTS! (ENTRY ONE SCHILLING)

  Franz pushed aside the curtain and went in. The room was tiny and completely immersed in dark green light. He was reminded of the lake, of dives he had made so often as a boy: the countless hot summer days when he had lain naked on one of the fishing jetties that smelled of wood and sunshine, listening to the rustling of the reeds and the friendly lapping of the water beneath him, until it became irresistible and he had to hurl himself in, headfirst or clutching his knees. Slowly he would let himself sink amid the swirling of his own air bubbles, and around him it would grow ever quieter and darker. The jetty posts were thickly populated with algae and mussels; beyond them, the reeds rose up towards the surface. From time to time a fish would peep from the thicket, usually a tench or a char. Sometimes a rare pearly roach would even put in an appearance, hovering motionless in the water for a few seconds before disappearing into the darkness again with a single flap of its fins. Little Franz sat quietly on the bottom, listening to the lake. He heard the rushing of the deep water moving to and fro, the glugging of waves on the surface, here and there a rustle in the reeds, and sometimes, from afar, the faint thump of the ferries. He felt the soft meadow of algae
under his buttocks and saw how the tiny floating particles shimmered above him in the sunbeams. Hours later, as he ran home on the path along the shore with the evening sun shining in his face, he still carried this silent green world within him and yearned for it a little.

  ‘If you’re going to take root, you’d better do it outside!’

  It was an old voice, high and cracked. Directly in front of Franz, at about chest height, the head appeared to which the voice belonged. It was completely bald, and it lacked eyebrows, too, which made it look rather lizard-like in the greenish light.

  ‘One schilling, if you want to see the show. If not, the exit’s over there, right where the entrance just was!’

  Only now did Franz see the box office window: a small, square opening in the wall. The lizard was sitting behind it in the half-dark, staring out at him.

  ‘One for the show, please,’ said Franz, and placed a schilling on the shelf of the counter.

  The lizard took the money and held out an entry ticket. ‘Unreserved seating, no interval, enjoy the programme.’

  An inconspicuous door opened in the wallpaper, and Franz went through. The room beyond was much bigger than he had expected and completely red. Ceiling, lampshades, worn carpet, wallpaper — all were bathed in a soft, dark red that flickered with the shadows from innumerable candles. Behind a mirrored bar a girl was fiddling with bottles and glasses. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen. She had a finger-length scar on her right cheek and the squashed nose of a boxer. There were twenty or so round tables scattered throughout the room, only a few of which were occupied — all of them by solitary men, as far as Franz could tell. The candlelight flickered over a hairy nape, a wrinkled forehead, a labourer’s hand with dry clay stuck to the back, an old man’s threadbare suit collar.