Telegrams of the Soul (10 page)

Chitchat between two stunning young domestics, on their afternoon break, on the fifth floor in the darkened corridor outside my dear little lighted room:

“Jesus, what a fine and fancy broom you've got up here! Ours down in the café kitchen is a sight! Like a plucked chicken!”

“I'll give you mine! Peter'll buy me another!”

“What Peter?!”

“Ya know, Peter. Peter Altenberg. He's a slob, I mean, poor guy, he ain't got nothin', but for practical hardware he's got a heart. Can you believe it, that guy bought a duster for the photographs on his wall, 100% young gray ostrich feathers, it cost him five whole Crowns!”

“Oh, I'd like to get my hands on that one. It must be lovely to wipe with!”

“Yeah, well, that one he don't give to nobody. A hundred times already I must've pleaded with him! He says: ‘In my will!' But he's got a good ten years to go. People like that that never lift a finger in their life, except for a little scribbling, they last!”

I checked into the quiet little room on the fifth floor of the good old Stadthotel with two pairs of socks and two large bottles of slivovitz for unseen eventualities.

“If it please, Sir,” said the concierge, “shall I have your luggage brought up?!?”

“I have none,” I said straight out.

Then he said: “Would you like electric lighting?!”

“Yes.”

“It'll cost you fifty Heller a night. But you can also make do with a candle,” he said, considering my circumstances.

“No, I'd rather have electric, please.”

At midnight, I heard sounds of wallpaper being torn and scratched. Then a mouse appeared, climbed up into the wash basin, made all sorts of curious circular perambulations, and leaped back down to the floor, since porcelain did not suit its purpose. Having no definite, far-reaching plans for the future, it finally found the darkness under the cabinet a rather convenient refuge, under the circumstances.

In the morning, I said to the chambermaid: “Say, last night there was a mouse in my room. That's some clean house you keep!”

“There are no mice in this establishment—that's a good one! Where's a mouse to crawl out of, pray tell?! No one can say such a thing about this hotel!”

After that, I said to the concierge: “Your chambermaid has some nerve. There was a mouse in my room last night.”

“There are no mice in this establishment. Where's a mouse to crawl out of, pray tell?! No one can say such a thing about this hotel!”

When I stepped into the hotel lobby, the doorman and the porter looked at me, as did the other two chambermaids and the manager, the way one looks at a person who checks in with two pairs of socks and two bottles of slivovitz and proceeds to see mice that aren't there.

My book,
What the Day Brings
, lay open on my table, and I once caught the chambermaid reading it.

Under these regrettable circumstances, my credibility in regard to mice was rather dubious. On the other hand, however, I did reap the benefits of a certain aura: No one argued with me any longer, they even allowed for little weaknesses to go unnoticed, shut an eye on eccentricities, behaved in an exceptionally accommodating manner as one would with an invalid or a person over whom one takes special pains for some other reason.

Still, the mouse made its regular nightly appearance, scratched at the wallpaper, and often climbed into my wash basin.

One evening, I bought myself a mousetrap complete with bacon, marched ostentatiously with the contraption past the doorman, the porter, the manager, room service, and the three chambermaids, and set the trap in my room. The next morning, I found the mouse in it.

I considered nonchalantly carrying the mousetrap down. The thing would speak for itself!

On the stairs, however, it occurred to me how embittered people become if proven wrong, especially since a mouse is not supposed to be found in a room in a hotel in which “there simply are no” mice! I considered, moreover, that my aura of a man without luggage, with two pairs of socks, two bottles of slivovitz, a book entitled
What the Day Brings,
and who already claims to see mice every night, would, thereby, be considerably shaken, and I would immediately have been relegated to the disagreeable category of complaining and altogether ordinary transient guests. Consequently, I disposed of the mouse in a place rather well suited for such purposes, and once again set the empty trap on the floor of my little room.

From then on I was treated with even greater deference, under no circumstances was I to be upset, and they catered to my needs as to a sickly child. When finally I checked out, my departure was met with the friendliest expression of sympathy and devotion, even though my luggage consisted exclusively of two pairs of socks, two empty slivovitz bottles and a mousetrap!

At three
A.M
. the birds started quietly chirping, suggestively. My worries grew and grew. It started in the brain, as if with a little rolling stone, tore all the joys of hopefulness along with it, the joys that brighten your life, swelled into a sweeping avalanche, burying under the ability to endure the day and the merciless commanding hour! To rise to happenstance! A quiet storm brewed in the branches before my window. For no reason, for absolutely no reason I had burned and bothered the life of sweet Ms. J. And one of my benefactors cut off his modest monthly largesse as of next month. He'd heard something or other about me and my views. They were too radical for him, too uncharitable. My aesthetic ideal, Ms. W., belongs now to those who can pay her. I who pursued the “mystic cult of beauty” was always too inelegantly dressed for her, too incomprehensible and too altogether mad. When I sank to my knees before her, deeply, so deeply stirred by her noble bodily perfection, she said I had perverse inclinations, it wasn't her fault! My hotel room is lighting up, my soul is darkening. Morning is breaking.

The song of the birds in the treetops grows clearer with shreds of simple melody. Quiet storms disseminate the scent of meadows. It would be the perfect hour to hang myself from the window box—.

The elevator is still a great mystery to me.

I am not so dumb as to spoil the thrill of the blessings of modern culture by allowing myself to get too accustomed to them!

I still feel it as something wonderful, this secret stair-transcendence, this preservation of my knee joints, of my heart, of my oh! by no means costly time.

The door of my elevator closes slowly, automatically, which proves to be downright annoying to people with packages or baskets, albeit rather pleasant for a writer.

I have no idea by what mechanical devices my elevator dangles. I am merely informed every now and then by the super that something's not quite right today and that the electrical fitter is there. And while I don't understand just what kind of catastrophe was in the making, or what an electrical fitter does, both seem to be linked to a possibly life-threatening situation.

It's awful to ride up with a stranger. You feel compelled to initiate a conversation and obsess on it from one floor to another. You suffer a delayed tension like that of the baccalaureate exam. Your face takes on a frozen glower. Finally you say: “Goodbye!” with a kind of intonation as if you you'd just ended a friendship for life. That's why, so as to sidestep all these unpleasantries, I never get home before six in the morning. At that hour the elevator isn't up and running yet.

He rode up to her in an open cast-iron elevator. It was like a wondrous cage, like a pierced parrot house. Upstairs there was a little white hall with white lacquered walls. The hall wafted with the scent of fine women's garments and Violette de Parme.

The woman stood there in a very small room which was rather warm.

“It really is a little cage—,” she said to the man. “Make yourself comfortable. Feel free to smoke—.”

“What are you looking at?” she said. “Oh, back into my youth. That one there on the wall is a picture of the room in which I grew up. It's a big homeland, even if it looks very small.”

“A big homeland?!” remarked the tattered Tartar.

“That's right. My guardian loved me—. So did his son. His wife's name was Evelyn and she always sat in an easy chair under fruit trees that didn't give off much shade. She only really needed the sun, and the shade of the fruit trees was superfluous. One time she said to me: ‘Anita—.' And then she paused. Then she said: ‘My husband loves you and my son loves you and I love you. I've never read novels. What's the use of novels? But I'm reading one now and I can't quite get the hang of it.' She expressed herself so sensitively about these complicated matters that were tearing her up inside. No one can explain what happened next. Do you find this boring?! I fled from my guardian, my guiding star, whom I loved, that's right, I fled, even though he wanted to share his life with me. But I held back my life and fled from his.”

Pause.

“Are you comfortable in that chair?” said the woman to the tattered Tartar. “You can fetch yourself a pillow. Go ahead, take these white silken ones. It makes no difference.”

Then she continued: “After that, the bank director said to me: ‘Anita, I love you, I'd like to take care of you—.' ‘What for, am I sick—?!' I said. ‘Just about—,' he said. So I accepted my gentle caretaker. He protected my somewhat fragile body like a holy thing, so that a soul could blossom in it, a soul that did not always sing his chosen hymns—. The noble man!”

Pause.

“And Evelyn and the son?” asked the Tartar.

“They shriveled up, I think. It may be that they both betook themselves to the fruit trees in the sun and let the dappled shade and sun spots do them in.”

“And did the beloved guardian never kiss you?!”

“Of course he did. That's what it was. A guiding star that starts burning instead of glowing! Why did he reject Evelyn, the guardian of us all, our guiding star?!”

The tattered Tartar thought: “Your love sank down to your waistline, Anita, splendid gazelle! You were the very incarnation of my notion of those souls that slip down to the waistline and have to stop here. The soul does not endure the ‘sacred transformation' to the bodily, it does not release itself unto the ‘blessed delirium,' but, rather, grows and grows into itself and never comes to an end. And finally it transforms you into an impassioned poet who is always enamored of someone, sings sweet hymns and has wondrous dreams. Love is never condensed into the ‘physical act,' there is no physical mode of expression, no instrument for the music of living on which the soul could cry itself out, sing its heart out, set itself free! The mystery of ‘sexual release' plays no role in the love of the sonorous, self-expressive, self-redemptive soul! Just as the word formed in the throat of the carnal, the sonorous, the revelatory, in the love that flows in bodily release, is a loose translation of the redemptive thought!

“Everything stayed inside you, Anita, and grew inward into the source of mysterious deeds! Of such love a symphony is born, an external score as with the man Beethoven, an internal score for the child-virgin. Never does a little baby blossom from such love, never can you expel it from your tired loins and set it out on your lap as a whole little person. It will always keep welling up and cooling back down again in you in luminous clouds. Woman, you're like a fantastic protoplasm, without the ‘holy becoming' and the peace! You're like an artist's soul in perpetual motion, like Beethoven and the sea!”

This is how he expounded upon Anita, traced her back to that place where she came from, her youth!

The woman stood leaning, actually pressing against the white
lacquered door, and a faint glimmer of what she had once been hovered over her brown golden hair.

She spoke. She stopped speaking. He spoke. He stopped speaking. She spoke. She stopped speaking—.

It was the second day of the fairy tale of the “stranger who becomes known.” The tartar lay in the heap of white pillows and smoked.

Then the woman spoke at greater length, with an exceptionally soft voice, saying: “What are we?! Firewood. Somebody sets us afire, we burn, we give warmth—. But actually we're something that no one knows———trees!We're a quiet entity unto ourselves, without any real purpose, like trees in the forest that nobody needs, adorned with leaves and blossoms—. We're something that grows out into the world, into a forest no man has ever tread, a silent wood. The tree had to bend to attain the height that man requires of it, to make little cords of wood cut up for the fireplace. But later, at another time of life, we start to stand upright again and grow, like trees with rustling leaves and stirring branches. Nobody says ‘bravo.' It's a forest solitude. Something similar happens on that perfidious night on which nature, that frightful slaphappy force, twists us into a woman. Big, tall, upright, reaching to the heavens, we rear up in childhood and then again much later. Like forest trees that nobody needs with rustling leaves and blossoms—.”

She stopped speaking—. They stopped speaking.

And a hundred days went by—. The hundredth day dawned.