Authors: Stefan Zweig
At last I reach the third floor, another long corridor, doors to the right and left and one in the middle. I am about to put my hand in my pocket to find a match and strike it, so that
I can see me the right number on the door, when a rather untidily clad maidservant comes out of the left-hand door carrying an empty jug. She is probably going to buy beer to go with her master and mistress’s supper. I ask whether Dr Condor lives here.
“Yes, does,” she says, in a Bohemian accent, “but is not at home, is gone to Meidling, says to mistress will be back soon for supper. You come in and wait.”
Before I have time to think that over, she is leading me in.
“Can put things there.” She points to an old softwood wardrobe, about the only piece of furniture in this dark little front hall. Then she opens the door to the waiting room, which looks a little better furnished; at least there are four or five chairs round a table, and the wall on the left is lined with books.
“Can sit there,” she said, pointing with some condescension to one of the chairs. I understand her meaning. Condor’s practice must be for the poor; rich patients are not received like this. What a strange man, I think again, what a very strange man. He could make a fortune out of Kekesfalva alone if he wanted.
Well, I wait. It turns into the usual nerve-racking session in a doctor’s waiting room, when without really wanting to read anything you leaf through the well-thumbed magazines, long out of date, trying to fool your own uneasiness with a show of busy occupation. You keep standing up, sitting down again, looking at the clock ticking in the corner, its pendulum slowly swaying. Twelve minutes past seven, fourteen minutes past seven, a quarter past seven, sixteen minutes past seven, and you stare as if hypnotised at the handle of the door to the consulting room. Finally—it is twenty-past seven—I can’t keep still any longer. I have changed chairs twice already, so I get to my feet and go over to the window. There’s an old man down
in the yard, limping as he oils the wheels of his handcart—a delivery man of some kind, obviously. On the other side of a kitchen window with a light in it a woman is ironing, another woman is bathing her small child in what I think is a tub. Somewhere or other—I can’t identify the floor for certain, but it must be just above or just below me—someone is practising scales, always the same scales over and over again. I look at the clock once more, twenty-five-past seven, half-past seven. Why doesn’t he come home? I can’t and won’t wait any longer! I feel that waiting is making me uncertain of myself, leaving me feeling awkward.
At last—I breathe a sigh of relief—I hear the click of a door closing in the next room. I immediately sit down. I must go carefully now, keep quite cool in front of him, I tell myself. Speak lightly, say I am only dropping in to say goodbye, and ask him casually to go out to see the Kekesfalvas soon and, if they should wonder what has happened to me, explain that I had to leave the army and go to the Netherlands. Oh, damn it all, for God’s sake why does he still keep me waiting? I clearly hear a chair being pushed back next door. Has that stupid servant girl forgotten to tell him I’m here?
I am about to go out and remind the servant of my
presence
. But all at once I stop. For whoever is moving about in the next room, it can’t be Condor. I know his footsteps very well. I know exactly—from the night when I accompanied him back into town—how he walks in his squeaking shoes, heavily, awkwardly, short of leg and short of breath. Whoever is next door, however, pacing up and down the whole time, has a very different step, more hesitant, more uncertain, a shuffling tread. I don’t know why those unfamiliar footsteps upset me so much, why I listen to them so intently. But it is
as if someone next door is listening with my own uneasiness and uncertainty. Suddenly I hear a very faint sound at the waiting-room door, as if someone were pressing down the handle, or just fiddling with it in, and sure enough it moves. The thin strip of brass moves visibly in the dim light, and the door opens just a crack, a narrow, dark crack. Perhaps it is only a draught of air, only the wind, I tell myself, because no one normally opens doors so surreptitiously, no one but a thief breaking in by night. But no, the crack is growing wider. The person on the other side of the door must be pushing it very cautiously, and now I see a human shape in the dark. Fixed to the spot, I stare. Then a woman’s voice just beyond the opening door asks tentatively, “Is … is there anyone in here?”
My answer dries up in my throat. I know at once that only the blind can speak like that and ask such questions. Only the blind walk with that shuffling gait and feel their way so quietly, only they speak so tentatively. And at that moment a memory surfaces in my mind. Didn’t Kekesfalva tell me that Condor had married a blind woman? This must be his wife, it can only be his wife standing beyond the opening door asking that question and unable to see me. I stare intently at her shadowy form in the dim light, and finally I make out a thin woman in a full-skirted house dress, with grey and rather untidy hair. Good heavens, this woman, devoid of any charm or beauty, is his wife. How terrible to feel her staring at me with such dead eyes, and to know that she can’t see me, while at the same time I feel, from the way her head comes forward as if she is listening, how hard all her senses are trying to make out the stranger whom she cannot see in this room. The strain of it distorts her large, heavy-lipped mouth more unattractively than ever.
I am deprived of words for a second, Then I stand up and bow—I bow although of course bowing to a blind woman is pointless—and I stammer, “I … I’m waiting to see the doctor.”
She has opened the door fully now. Her left hand is still clutching the handle as if she needed some kind of support in the dark room. Then she moves cautiously forward, her brows rise above her sightless eyes, and a different, harsh voice sharply addresses me.
“You’re outside consulting hours. When my husband comes home he needs to eat and rest before he does anything else. Can’t you come back tomorrow?”
Her face works with every word she speaks. Obviously she can hardly control herself. A hysteric, I think at once. I mustn’t irritate her. So I murmur—stupidly, bowing as if to empty air again—“I’m so sorry, ma’am … of course I wouldn’t dream of consulting the doctor on medical matters so late. I just want to give him some news … it’s about one of his patients.”
“His patients! His patients all the time!” Her voice changes from bitter to tearful. “Someone came for him at one-thirty last night, he was off on his rounds at seven in the morning, and he hasn’t been home since consulting hours were over. He’ll fall ill himself if he doesn’t get any rest! But never mind that now. You’re not within consulting hours, I told you. They end at four. Write down what you want to tell him, or if it’s urgent you’d better go to another doctor. There are plenty of doctors in the city, four on every street corner.”
She gropes her way closer to me, and I guiltily retreat from her angry face, in which the whites of her wide-open eyes suddenly look very bright.
“Go away, I said. Go away! Let him eat and sleep like other people! Why do you all keep clinging to him? In the night,
first thing in the morning, all day long—his patients all the time, he’s suppose to work his fingers to the bone for all of them, and charge nothing! Because you all feel he’s weak you cling to him and no one else. Oh, how thoughtless you are! Nothing on your minds but your own illnesses, your own troubles, that’s all any of you know about! But I won’t have it, I won’t allow it. Go away, I told you, go away at once! Leave him alone for a change, let him have just one hour to himself in the evening!”
She has made her way to the table. Some kind of instinct must have told her roughly where I am standing, for her eyes are staring straight at me as if they could see me. There is so much genuine and yet sick desperation in her anger that I instinctively feel ashamed of myself.
“Yes, of course, ma’am,” I say apologetically. “I entirely
understand
that the doctor needs his rest … I won’t trouble you any longer. Please just allow me to leave a word, or perhaps telephone him in half-an-hour’s time.”
But, “No!” she cries desperately. “No! No! No telephoning! The telephone is ringing all day long, they all want something from him, they’re all full of questions and complaints! As soon as he’s put a morsel of food in his mouth he has to jump up and answer it! Come back tomorrow during consulting hours, I said, it can’t be as urgent as all that. He must be left in peace for once. Go away … go away, I said!”
And the blind woman, hesitantly, groping her way, makes for me with her fists clenched. This is terrible. I feel that her outstretched hands will seize me any moment now. However, just then the front door clicks in the hall outside, and then latches shut again. This must be Condor. She listens, gives a start, and her features change at once. She begins trembling
all over, her hands, clenched into fists just now, suddenly open in an imploring gesture.
“Don’t keep him now,” she whispers. “Don’t tell him anything. He must be tired, he’s been out and about all day … please have some consideration! Don’t you feel any sym—”
But at that moment the door opens, and Condor comes into the room.
He must have taken in the situation at first glance. But for a second he lost his composure.
“Ah, you’ve been keeping Lieutenant Hofmiller company,” he said in the jovial manner behind which, as I had noticed before, he liked to conceal tension. “How good of you, Klara.”
As he spoke, he went over to the blind woman and affectionately stroked her untidy grey hair. At his touch her entire expression changed. The anxiety that had just been distorting her large, heavy-lipped mouth disappeared at that one loving caress, and with a helplessly diffident, almost girlish smile she turned to him as soon as she sensed that he was close. Her rather angular brow looked pure and bright in the reflected light. After such a violent outburst of feeling, there was something indescribable about this expression of personal reassurance and security. She seemed to have forgotten my presence entirely in the happiness of knowing that he was so close. Her hand, as if magnetically attracted, went out to him through the empty air, and as soon as her tentatively searching fingers touched his coat she began stroking his arm again and again. Understanding that she wanted to be as close to him as possible, he went to her, and she leant against him like a woman entirely exhausted sinking
into rest. Smiling, he put his arm around her shoulders and repeated, without looking at me, “How kind of you, Klara.” It was as if his voice itself caressed her.
“I’m sorry,” she began apologetically, “but I had to explain to this gentleman that you ought to have your supper first, you must be terribly hungry. Out and about all day, and people telephoning you a dozen or fifteen times in between whiles … I’m sorry, I did tell this gentleman he had better come back in the morning, but …”
“But this time, my dear,” he laughed, caressing her hair again (I realised that he did that so that the laughter in his voice would not hurt her feelings), “this time you were wrong to put him off. Fortunately this gentleman, Lieutenant Hofmiller, is not a patient but a friend, and he promised long ago to visit me when he was in Vienna. His only time off is in the evening, because he has his military duties by day. Now we just have to settle the main question—do you have something nice we can give him for supper too?”
Once again that anxious, tense look came into her face, and I realised, from her immediate alarm, that she wanted to be alone with him after he had been out all day.
“Oh no, thank you very much all the same,” I hastily declined the invitation. “I have to leave very soon. I mustn’t miss the night train. I really only wanted to bring messages from out in the country, and I can do that in just a couple of minutes.”
“Is everything all right there?” Condor asked, looking me keenly in the eye. Somehow or other he must have guessed that something was
not
all right, because he added quickly, “Listen, my dear friend, my wife always knows how I’m feeling better than I do myself, and it’s a fact that I’m very hungry. I doubt
if I’ll be much use to anyone until I’ve had something to eat and smoked a cigar. So if it’s all right, Klara, you and I will go and have our supper quietly now, and ask the Lieutenant to wait just a little while. I’ll find him a book to pass the time, or he could rest—I think you must have had a very strenuous day,” he said, turning to me. “When I get to my cigar I’ll come back and join you, in my slippers and dressing gown if you have no objection.”
“And I really will stay only ten minutes, ma’am,” I said. “After that I’ll have to hurry off to the station to catch the train.”
This remark made her face brighten again. She turned to me in an almost friendly manner.
“What a pity you won’t eat with us, Lieutenant. But I hope you will come to supper some other time.”
Her hand came out to me, a very delicate, slender, already rather lined and faded hand. And I watched, with genuine respect, as Condor steered his blind wife carefully through the doorway, neatly making sure she did not brush past anything to right or left, as if he were holding something unimaginably fragile and precious.
The door stayed open for two or three minutes, and I heard the slightly dragging footsteps move away. Then Condor came back again with a different expression on his face, the keen, watchful expression that I knew was his at moments of stress. He must have understood that I had not come to his home unannounced without some urgent reason.
“I’ll be back with you in twenty minutes, and then we can discuss it quickly. I think you ought to lie down on the sofa meanwhile, or stretch out in this easy chair. I don’t like the look of you, my dear fellow, you appear to be exhausted. And we must both be fresh and able to concentrate.”
Then, quickly changing his tone of voice, he called so that he could be heard a couple of rooms away, “Back directly, dear Klara, I was just giving the Lieutenant a book to keep him occupied while he waits.”
Condor’s trained eye had not been wrong. Only now that he mentioned it did I notice how terribly tired I was, after a disturbed night and a day full of stress and strain. Taking his advice—I already felt inclined to do whatever he wanted—I lay back in the easy chair of his consulting room, my head on the cushions, my hands lying on the softly upholstered arms. Outside, twilight must have fallen during my tedious wait; I could hardly make out anything in the room except from the silvery glints of the medical instruments in the tall glass-fronted cabinet, and night was now like a dome covering the corner at the back of the room where the easy chair in which I was resting stood. I involuntarily closed my eyes, and at once saw, as if in a magic lantern slide, the blind woman’s face in that unforgettable change from alarm to sudden happiness as soon as Condor’s hand touched her and his arm went around her. What a wonderful doctor, I thought, if only you could help me too, and I felt, confusedly, that there was something else I wanted to think out further, about someone else who had looked just as restless and distressed and alarmed, there was someone in particular I wanted to think of, and I had come here for that purpose. But I couldn’t do it any more.
Suddenly a hand touched my shoulder. Condor, moving very quietly, must have come into the almost entirely dark room. Or
perhaps I really had dropped off to sleep. I tried to get up, but he gently pressed my shoulders back again firmly.
“Stay where you are, and I’ll sit down with you. It’s better to talk in the dark. I’ll ask you just one thing, let us talk quietly. Very quietly. You know how the blind sometimes develop magical powers of hearing, and with them a mysterious instinct for guessing right. Well”—and his hand moved from my shoulder down my sleeve to my own hand as if hypnotically—“well, tell me what it is, don’t feel shy. I saw at once that there was something wrong with you.”
How strange—at that moment a memory came back to me. I had had a friend at cadet school, Erwin was his name, a delicate, blond, almost girlish boy. I think that without admitting it to myself I was a little in love with him. We almost never talked to each other during the day, or if we did it was on unimportant subjects; we were probably both ashamed of our secret feelings, which we had never mentioned to each other. Only at night in the dormitory, after lights out, did we sometimes pluck up the courage to lean on our elbows next to each other in our beds, talking under cover of darkness, while everyone else was asleep, telling each other our childish thoughts and ideas, then always avoiding one another again next day, with the same awkwardness. It was years and years since I had remembered those whispered confessions that had been the secret happiness of my boyhood years. But now, as I lay stretched out in the easy chair, with the darkness around me, I entirely forgot my intention of pretending to Condor. Without meaning to, I was perfectly honest. Just as I used to tell my friend at cadet school about my little setbacks and wild, large-scale dreams, I now told Condor—and there was the secret pleasure of confession in my account—about Edith’s
sudden outburst, my horror, my anxiety and dismay. I told him everything in that silent darkness, where nothing stirred except the lenses of his pince-nez that glinted faintly from time to time when he moved his head.
Then there was silence, and after it a curious sound. Condor had obviously been pressing his fingers together and snapping the joints.
“So that was it,” he said quietly, sadly. “And fool that I was, I overlooked a thing like that. It’s always the same—you don’t see the invalid behind the malady. For all our accuracy in examination and diagnosis of symptoms, we can miss the essence of what is going on in a human being. That’s to say, I did feel something different about the girl; you’ll remember that I asked the old man, directly after examining her, whether anyone else had been treating her—and that sudden, heated desire to get better quickly, quickly, did make me wonder. Yes, I wondered whether someone else was involved, and I was right. But idiot that I was, I thought only of some quack or hypnotist. I suspected that some kind of mumbo-jumbo might have turned her head. The one thing that didn’t occur to me was the simplest, most logical of explanations. Falling in love is practically an organic phenomenon in girls of that age. How infuriating that it had to happen just now, and so forcefully—oh God, that poor, poor child!”
He had got to his feet. I heard his short steps pacing up and down, and the sigh he gave.
“Terrible, and it has to happen just when we’ve arranged the trip to Switzerland. And no God can turn back the clock now, because she’s suggested to herself that she must be cured for your sake and not her own. The reaction will be appalling when it comes. Now that she hopes for so much, wants so much, no
minor improvement will satisfy her, no mere sign of progress. My God, we’ve taken on a heavy responsibility!”
I felt sudden resistance. I didn’t like the way he was dragging me into it. After all, I had come here to shake off the whole entanglement. So I interrupted him firmly.
“I entirely agree. There’s no foreseeing the consequences. It’s time there was an end to this crazy delusion. You must intervene, act firmly. You must tell her … ”
“Tell her what?”
“Well … that this idea of being in love is just childish nonsense. You must talk her out of it.”
“Talk her out of it? Talk her out of what? Talk a woman out of her ardent passion? Tell her she ought not to feel what she does feel? Tell her not to fall in love when she is in love? That would be the worst, most stupid thing anyone could do. Have you ever heard of logic winning the day in conflict with passion? Ever heard of anyone telling a fever not to be feverish, or a fire not to burn? Yes, what a fine, a truly humane idea it would be to tell a sick, lame girl to her face, ‘Don’t for God’s sake think that you, too, may be allowed to love! For you of all people it’s presumptuous to show any emotions or expect any in return—you’re a cripple, so you have to keep quiet. Naughty girl, you must stand in the corner! Resign yourself, give up!’ That’s what you obviously want me to tell the poor girl. Do please think what the wonderful result would be.”
“But you’re the one who must …”
“Why me? It was you who expressly took all the responsibility on yourself. Why me now, all of a sudden?”
“I can’t admit to her myself that …”
“Nor should you! Nor ought you to! First send her crazy, then suddenly demand reason! That’s all we need! Of course you
can’t say or do the least thing to make the poor child guess that her feelings embarrass you—that would be like hitting someone on the head with a hatchet!”
“But … ” I said, my voice failing me, “but after all, someone must make it clear to her that …”
“Make what clear to her? Be good enough to express yourself more precisely!”
“I mean … that … that it’s absurd, out of the question … so that she doesn’t … when I … when I …”
I stopped. Condor was silent too. He was obviously waiting. Then he suddenly took two firm steps to the door and reached for the light switch. The flood of bright light, sharp and pitiless, forced me to close my eyes instinctively. Three electric bulbs flared into glaring light, and all at once the room was bright as day.
“Well,” said Condor forcefully, “I see it’s a bad idea to make you too comfortable, Lieutenant Hofmiller. It’s easy to hide behind darkness, but when certain subjects are under discussion it is better to look someone in the eye. So let’s have no more of this havering, Lieutenant Hofmiller—there’s something wrong here. You won’t persuade me that you came only to show me that letter. There’s something more behind it. I can tell that you have something definite in mind. Either you had better tell me honestly what it is, or I must thank you for calling and suggest that you leave.”
His pince-nez flashed keenly at me. I was afraid of their circular reflection, and looked down.
“Your silence is not very impressive, Lieutenant Hofmiller. It doesn’t exactly suggest a clear conscience. But I am beginning to form some idea of what you’re playing at. No beating about the bush, please—is it your intention, after receiving that
letter—or the other one—to put a sudden end to what you call your friendship with her?”
He waited. I did not look up. His voice took on the insistent tone of an interrogator.
“Do you know what would happen if you ran for it now? Now that you’ve turned the poor girl’s head with your wonderful pity?”
I did not reply.
“Well, then I’ll allow myself to tell you how I’d describe such a course of action myself—wriggling out of it like that would be pitiful cowardice … Oh, come on, don’t draw yourself up with that military hauteur! We can leave the officer and his code of honour out of this! There’s more at issue here than such nonsense. This is about a living, feeling human being, a young and valuable one at that, and one for whose well-being I am responsible. In such circumstances I feel no inclination at all to keep a civil tongue in my head. At least let me free you of any illusions. With that end in view, I will tell you clearly what you’d be taking on your conscience. Running away at such a critical moment—please don’t close your ears to this!—would be a crime against an innocent being, and I am afraid it would be more—it would be murder!”