Vienna

War stories almost never deal with what happens after a war. This one is different. I should note that the, what seems to me to be, two casual anti-Semitic elements of the story are similar to those sometimes found in works of the pre-Holocaust period, even works by liberal or left-leaning authors. At the time this story was written anti-Semitism ranged from casual or offhand statements that expressed opinions widely held to much more virulent anti-Semitism, the kind that led to the Holocaust, which also had a seizable representation in western societies. I believe that if Storm Jameson had written the story twenty years later there would have been no anti-Semitism.

Vienna was under snow. The children of well-to-do industrials and financial experts dragged sledges up and down the main walks in the Prater and the Stadt Park. Most of the shops were closed. Those that remained open displayed riding saddles of Austrian leather, sledges, and skis. It looked as though a country that was being starved to death had lost interest in everything but winter sports. As a matter of fact no one was buying either skis or saddles but there were plenty of them in stock and they took the place in the shop-windows in the Kärntner-Strasse of cakes made with cream, sugar and eggs, model gowns, walking suits in English tweed, and salami. The only other things offered for sale were second-hand necklaces, watches, family heirlooms, prints, oil-paintings, little-worn fur coats, miniatures, exquisitely bound books, spoons and wineglasses engraved with a crest and the date, tapestries-the jettisoned cargo of a sinking vessel.

The weather was intensely cold. The Jews on the Black Bourse had icicles at the end of their noses as well as round the edges of their greasy fur caps. Children were dying quickly from cold instead of slowly from starvation. Each death reduced by a unit the appalling total of suffering and despair which the statesmen of Europe were trying to balance. One morning Emily saw the maid who was sweeping her sitting-room scrape a few flakes of chocolate on the table and stow them carefully in a screw of paper in her pocket. Another day Evan told her that a professor from the university, a scholar of international reputation, had seized the chance when his back was turned to steal a few coins from his desk. Another time it was a lump of sugar and the thief was the wife of a well-known doctor.

They stayed in the Imperial Hotel. Food was plentiful: it was delivered at a side door in the early morning, after the waiters who slept out had gone home. Lavish meals of meat-the Viennese eat quantities of pork and beef during the hottest summers-not very good fish from the Danube, oysters, fresh caviare, fruit, ices, white bread. The waiters were carefully selected by the manager for their discretion. It was considered unwise to allow the starving mob outside to know that rolls of white bread and huge joints of fresh meat were devoured daily in the dining-room of the Imperial Hotel. By whom? By wealthy industrials, landowners who had escaped the general ruin, French, English, Italian and American investigators, members of the Danube Commission, and by Herr Castiglione.

One afternoon as Emily was hurrying along the Kärntner-Ring towards the hotel she noticed a young woman a few yards in front. Swaying from side to side as she walked, the young woman finally collapsed in the middle of the pavement at the moment when Emily drew level with her. Her head fell backwards, as if there were no stuffing in her neck.

Emily bent over her. At the same time a policeman stepped up and jerked the young woman to her feet. “Be off home,” he said curtly. “You tried this yesterday.” The girl looked at him, smiled, and began to walk away.

“Stop,” Emily said.

The young woman stopped, looking over her shoulder. A short fur coat fitted tightly to her waist. Under it you caught glimpses of a light-coloured blouse and a tie like a schoolgirl’s uniform. She wore shoes and thin black silk stockings.

“I warn you,” the policeman said, “I have observed this person before. Yesterday she pretended to faint in front of a French general. The officer was wise. After one glance, he stepped over her and walked on.”

“Please let me speak to her,” Emily said, in a precise slow voice. She spoke German as though it were an exercise.

The man shrugged and turned away. His attitude suggested that he had done his duty and it was in any event too cold to stand talking to foreign lunatics. The Austrians are an extremely charming race. They dislike trouble, and if it were left to the ordinary Viennese bourgeois to arrange it no war would ever be worse than a riot.

Emily took the girl into the hotel and up to her room. In the corridor the manager hurried up to her and began to remonstrate in rapid French against the introduction into his hotel of a young female probably already infected with influenza or the plague or merely with the instinct to steal. Emily answered him coldly in English. She drew the girl into her bedroom and shut the door. The central heating had broken down the day before and fires had been lit in the enormous baroque stoves in the best rooms. The girl went directly over to the stove and laid her hands on it.

“He wasn’t very polite, the manager,” she said, yawning. “All the same, you should have listened to him. How do you know I shan’t steal your rings?”

“Because I don’t care if you do,” Emily said. “You understood him, then-you speak French?”

“And English, and Italian. I am an honours student at the university. We’ll speak English now if you like.”

“Won’t you take your fur coat off?” Emily said.

Smiling, the girl unfastened its two buttons and drew her arms out. She wore no blouse, and not even a vest. A brown silk tie was knotted round her neck and hung down between her tiny breasts. She wore a black skirt. It was too wide for her and hung from her delicate hip bones.

“Have you really no blouse?” Emily asked.

“I have a very good one,” the girl said calmly. “I took it off this afternoon and washed it and hung it to dry. Then I thought I would come out and try whether I had the nerve to attract the attention of some fat Yugoslav factory-owner or a Rumanian colonel.”

“What did you hope he would do for you?”

“Invite me to have dinner with him first. Afterwards—well, I suppose my having scarcely any clothes on would have simplified matters.” She lifted her arms, as yellow and brittle as a famine child’s.

Emily had opened her wardrobe trunk and taken out a woven vest and a thick silk jumper. “Put these on.”

“You’re very kind,” the girl said, without a trace of pleasure. She slipped both garments on, tucking the vest inside her skirt and fastening the jumper round her waist with her tie. This naturalised it at once, so much so that you would have sworn it had been bought at a little shop in the Mariahilfer-Strasse instead of in Bond Street.

“Were you doing all this because you are hungry?” Emily asked bluntly. She spoke English. It seemed better suited to the occasion and her questions. The English are very humane but they like to know everything about the person they are succouring and if possible to fit him into one of several prepared moulds. Emily was mentally labelling the young woman: Weak but not vicious: can usefully be assisted.

“Really, I’m ashamed to tell you.”

“Do trust me. I don’t want to pry, but. . .”

The girl was almost beautiful. She had black eyes, set under brows so fine they were like a silk thread. Her lips were pale from under-nourishment, delicately moulded, the lower one short and full. Her hair was dark brown and smooth, plastered to her head. She had pulled her hat off and was passing her fingers over the flat coils, looking at herself carefully in the glass. “My name is Sophie,” she offered, over her shoulder.

“You haven’t told me yet why you. . .”

Sophie forced open her eyes. The warmth of the room, after the cold outside, was making her sleepy. The tip of her tongue appeared between her teeth: she was like a kitten considering a strange room.

“I am tired of having only one blouse,” she said calmly. “Then, too, my mother is dying of some illness or other-she is always shivering and she says her stomach has folded up like a gladstone bag, and sometimes we have nothing to put in it. To tell you the truth I have no objection to being hungry. I am used to it and it improves my figure. In the ordinary way I should be plump, perhaps fat, at my age.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen. . . . How much would you say I weighed? Listen, I’ll tell you. Under eighty-four pounds!” She patted herself triumphantly. When she seated herself on the bed her skirt fell into folds between her knees and you saw that she had long thin legs, like a pair of compasses.

Emily had ordered a meal of soup and Backhuhn. The girl ate delicately, with an air of indifference and boredom. When Emily’s back was turned she slid the remains of the chicken into her handkerchief and thrust it out of sight under her coat. She chattered about her studies, about the War, about trotting-races in the Prater. As she was leaving Emily held out to her a large envelope into which she had put all the Austrian money she had in her purse.

“Thanks ever so much for the meal and the blouse,” Sophie said. “They are things any young woman is allowed to take from another.”

“Take the money, too,” Emily said.

“No thanks.”

“Oh, why not?”

“Really, I don’t know,” Sophie said lightly. “I suppose I ought to take it and burst into tears. Perhaps even kiss your hand. . . . ‘Noble and charming Englishwoman,my thanks are those of my country. Long live England.’ . . . But, do you know, I find I can’t. Isn’t it strange? I like you frightfully, too. Come and see me sometimes.”

“Where do you live?”

“10, Wipplinger-Strasse.” She reflected, wrinkling her nose. “No, don’t come there. To tell you the truth, mother would disgust you. She has running boils all over her body like Job, and the smell is enough to knock you down. Her doctor says she needs a great deal of cream and nourishing foods. The American Mission sent her a bottle of cod liver oil but she wouldn’t drink it. I used it up on my hands.”

“I must see you again,” Emily exclaimed.

“Very well. Walk down the Neu-Gasse, off the Wiedner Hauptstrasse, and ask at the café at the comer for Herr Friedrich Laube. They will tell you where his room is. I am there every evening from eight o’clock onwards.”

It was four or five days before Emily was able to go in search of the young girl. She had said nothing to Evan. For two reasons-because he had ordered her not to go out alone after dark, and because she did not want him to meet Sophie. The girl was too attractive.

She seized her chance when Evan had an official engagement for the evening. He was to dine with the heads of the American Mission, to discuss informally problems arising from the extraordinary apathy of the Viennese population. Instead of being up and doing, as the English and no doubt the Americans would in similar circumstances, they had sunk into a dreadful apathy. Even very young children were dying as quickly from disgust and hopelessness as from cold, hunger, influenza, and colitis. It began to look as though the Allies had gone too far at Paris in 1919.

Emily dressed herself in a dark knitted dress and long coat and slipped out of the hotel at half-past eight. The porter spoke to her and she gave him a forbidding smile. As she crossed the wide Karls-Platz a drunken man emerged from the Underground station wearing half of an immensely shaggy fur coat. The coat had been divided vertically down the back. Against his uncovered side he clutched a large canvas. He was singing, breaking off to laugh and stamp his feet like a ballet dancer. She hurried away from him and plunged towards the shadows of the Hauptstrasse. An icy wind rushed across the Platz from the east, charged with hatred and resentment.

In the half-lighted café in the Neu-Gasse the proprietor offered Emily a chair. “I will send someone with you to Herr Laube’s.” He was polite, but his dark eyes examined her from head to foot. She felt dreadfully uncomfortable.

Just as he turned away to summon a waiter the man in the half-coat lurched into the café. He dropped the canvas he was carrying and shouted for a glass of coffee. The proprietor and a waiter carrying a glass of muddy steaming water arrived together.

“This Lady is enquiring for you, Herr Laube.”

Emily stood up. “I came to meet Sophie. . . . I don’t know her name.”

“Look at that,” Herr Laube shouted. “Why do you call it coffee? Why not own up that it is nothing but infected Danube water. It tastes of a painful death.”

“We have some drinkable Gumpoldskirchner . . .” the proprietor began.

“I never drink. You know it. All the same, give me a bottle of your Ersatz Tokay, for the comrades.”

He tucked the bottle under an arm and offered Emily the other. She was stiff with embarrassment. In the same moment as she realised that he was not drunk she remembered Evan’s warnings against walking alone in the districts occupied mainly by the unemployed. She was ashamed to show any hesitation. As they left the café Herr Laube apologised for his coat. “The other half is covering the bed in which my friend Werndl sleeps with his wife and their infant, a week old. Perhaps you think I should have given the whole coat? You are wrong. What guarantee have I against another such request? . . . Friedrich, lend me your coat. My wife’s pains have begun and we have nothing to put on the bed. . . . Certainly, my dear fellow, take half. . . . Would you believe, madam, that less than a year ago I was a family man? Now [an epigram in Greek is here], I sleep alone . . . children die easily nowadays. As for my wife, she was always running after them in a fright. . . . Ludwig, Elizabeth, where are you? what are you doing? have you fallen? Mother’s coming. . . . So of course she must be after them. You never saw anyone in such a hurry to die. . . . Here we are. Please be careful of your head.”

Herr Laube’s room was at the top of a shabby mansion. You crossed the courtyard, climbed four flights of unlit stairs, each flight marked by a different layer of stench, and passed under an archway into what had been a gallery overlooking the yard. The fourth side had been boarded in. There was a stove in the middle of the room with a little wood burning in it, and three people seated near it on the floor. Two of them, a young man and a very young woman, were sharing the same jacket. Sophie was not there.

The third of Herr Laube’s guests, a young doctor, was waiting for her. He told Emily that he wanted to marry her, but she would not leave her mother, with whom she lived in one very small room.

“And the old lady has the bed, you understand,” interrupted the young woman. “He even has to come here to be with Sophie. . . . Friedrich lends them his bed.”

“When do you expect Sophie?” Emily asked. She had begun to shiver with cold, in spite of her warm frock. She was vexed with herself for coming. What good was it to get mixed up with these people? There was nothing you could do.

She remembered that she had some English cigarettes in her bag and shared them out. Sophie’s lover took her share and put them away for her. Herr Laube did not smoke. He sat in a corner near the only candle, and read, breaking off every now and then to slap his thigh and laugh like a fool. The others talked among themselves. They took no notice of Emily, who sat preparing polite speeches to explain her departure. She rejected one after another as not friendly enough or too condescending. In the meantime she caught snatches of conversation.

“He wouldn’t advance another cent on it. I threatened to give away his dirty thieving from the American Mission. . . . Would you believe?—Georg has a job now. He stands every evening in the vestibule of the Jardin de Paris, merely upright. He has no duties. Only to stand. . . . Sophie talks a great deal of nonsense, the silly girl. She said she would offer herself for what she could get. She would be afraid! Do you remember the New Year parties her father and mother gave when we were children? I was sick after one, from eating too much rich food. Think of it!”

If she had considered it at all, Emily would have supposed that the frightful insecurity of their lives would drive these young people, the children of cultivated middle-class parents, now penniless, to snatch desperately at such pleasures as were left them. On the contrary, they were languid and uninterested. The minds in their young bodies were already old and played-out: in their hold on things and on each other they had none of the fierceness of youth. They behaved as though so few years separated them from extinction that to attach themselves to anything or anyone would be useless and silly. She had noticed the same kind of indifference in very old women, who have survived husbands, friends, even their children, and to whom the sudden death of a grandchild is less shocking than a smashed vase or a badly-cooked meal.

The door opened suddenly and Sophie walked in. She came in with a smile and stood in the middle of the room, fumbling at the inside pocket of her coat. “Look!” She showed them five English ten-shilling notes, spreading them out with her thumb, like a hand of cards.

“All the same, he wasn’t English. He was a Pressburg Jew. I made him give me the money first.” She looked at them as though she were going to cry. “Not bad for a first attempt, eh?”

The other girl had pulled herself up and came across the room to finger the notes. “Beginner’s luck,” she said softly. “You won’t pull it off again.”

“Here, take one,” Sophie said. She thrust a note in the girl’s hand, which curved round it like a claw. Folding the others, she turned sharply to the young doctor. He was still leaning against the stove with his hands in his pockets. “You haven’t said anything, Püppchen.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Aren’t you interested?”

He turned his back on her and walked across to Herr Laube, who was reading aloud something that Emily took to be verse. Actually, it was a list of the trains to Wiener Neustadt for the summer of 1913. Half turning his head he answered: “I hope you enjoyed yourself.”

Sophie’s face changed quickly. Forcing back tears of fatigue and humiliation, she assumed the air of jaunty cynicism she had worn on first coming in. “Let’s talk about something interesting. You wouldn’t believe how little conversation those people have.”

Emily stood up noisily and came forward. “I must go,” she said in an awkward voice. She peered at her watch. “You’ve been so long coming. It’s nearly eleven o’clock. My husband will be wondering where I am.”

“Why, it’s the Englishwoman,” Sophie said.

“She came in with Friedrich.”

“I think we might have done something to entertain her. She’ll think we have no manners.”

“Friedrich! Your guest is going.”

Mortified by their complete indifference, Emily almost ran out. The young doctor followed her.

“Please mind the stairs. If you fell and were killed, the Allies would start another war on us.” He took hold of her arm. “It’s not a bad idea,” he said, laughing. “We could surrender en masse, and they would have to feed us. They say the English are kind to their prisoners.”

Arrived at the street door, Emily drew her arm back. “Good-bye.”

“Allow me to see you to your hotel.”

“No,” Emily said.

In her confusion she ran off in the wrong direction. There was not a soul in the street. She ran to the end of it. The unfamiliar look of the street into which she emerged halted her. Making a blind choice she plunged to the right. If she were not hopelessly lost it would lead to the Karls-Platz. It did. She reached the hotel to find Evan walking nervously up and down between the doors. The porter saw her first, and called out: “Excellency! It’s all right.”

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