The Vienna Melody (19 page)

“Do you want to do something to please Christl very, very much?” she asked the boy.

He nodded eagerly.

“You know, I'm always alone and have no one to tell me any stories. Would you like to tell me one now? No one can hear us. One about the peacock? Yes?”

His face was thoughtful.

“You know, if you tell me a story I'll be happy again at once!” she declared.

“Are you unhappy?” he asked with the first words anyone had heard him say for a long time.

She admitted it.

Whereupon he looked at her and at the cloth picture in his peculiarly penetrating way, hesitated a little, laughed, grew serious again, and began: “Once upon a time there lived a peacock …” That his tale about the peacock repeated what she had just told him about the lion did not bother either of them, for all he wanted to do was to comfort her, and all she wanted was to hear him speak. The happier she grew, the prouder and more loquacious he became, and the words he had so long scorned to use now came tumbling from his lips: “Then the peacock roared so frightfully that his yellow mane shook!” he was saying as Aunt Hetti entered.

She remained standing at the door, listening to the tongue-tied child, who in the heat of his narrative paid not the slightest attention to her, as he used words applicable to a lion in describing a peacock.

No one could look more rapturously happy at that moment than she did, thought Christine. If only she loved me that much too! Went through her mind. And both Henriette and Christine listened until the story ended and the peacock was tamed, whereupon they praised the story-teller highly. But what he wanted to know was whether Christine was still unhappy. This she denied. Henriette said no word of thanks to her.

From then on Hans talked.

How often had it been said to him, as though it were the best thing that could happen to anyone, “Wait until you get into the Upper School!” To reach that stage increased one's standing from a schoolboy to a student, and Hans had even seen visiting cards on which “
Stud
,
gym.
,” standing for “
Studiosus gymnasii
,” was neatly printed under the name. The school was the Francis Joseph Gymnasium at Number 3 Hegelgasse, two streets from Seilerstätte.

Until the day in July when his father led him by the hand along that short distance to take his entrance examinations he had not known fear. The first ten years of his existence had been clouded once by measles and once by his mother's absence on a trip to Abbazia, during which the children remained alone with Neni nine weeks in all. Now, as the door of the great gray building in which they promised to equip him with a “humanistic education,” closed behind him, everything in his life suddenly began to change. He entered a classroom on the door of which the following inscription was pencilled: “Entrance Examinations for the School Year 1900-1.” It was only much later that he realized the meaning of what his grandfather Stein said to him after his examinations: “You will hardly come to know the new century in there.” On the broad, raised platform which occupied a third of the room stood a broad brown and green table, a chair, and an even broader blackboard. Above the table, on the gray plaster wall, hung a crucifix, and over the blackboard a framed lithograph of Francis Joseph; it represented him in his red velvet, ermine-trimmed coronation robes, a sceptre in his hand, a crown on his head. Behind the table, dominating the eleven rows of low, rigid benches with their erstwhile green desks, now devoid of color as a result of ink spots and penknife carvings indicted on them by generations of scholars, sat Professor Alwin Miklau. He was the master of the class to be formed by the boys passing their tests on this day. He was over sixty and had been on the faculty of this school for more than thirty years. Latin and Greek were his subjects; he had gall-bladder trouble; his face was yellowish, and his round shoulders were bowed. The salary of an Imperial and Royal high school teacher enabled him to take the cure at Karlsbad every fourth year and to buy in turn a suit or an overcoat about every third year. He came from Styria; consequently he spoke the dialect of the Ausseer region and hated cities and city people. Whether he was married or single, where he lived, what he did in his free time not one of his thousands of students had ever known and not a single one of them had ever been interested enough to find out. They feared or hated him, whereas to him they were a matter of indifference. Their task was to execute the curriculum endorsed by the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Education and to follow the rules prescribed by the Municipal School Council. The curriculum subjected them to almost daily tests for a term of eight years, and the rides for the same period: forbade them to smoke, imbibe alcoholic drinks, join societies, or publish any of their own writings. The strict observance of these commands and prohibitions constituted the whole of Professor Miklau's (and of his associates') relations to his class.

This was the man who taught Hans the meaning of fear, Hans was afraid of him from the very first hour. It began when the professor said: “You will now say the Lord's Prayer with me. Cross yourselves.” Then the prayer was said in chorus, whereupon he repeated: “Cross yourselves! And now,” he went on, after he had given the examination contestants a sign with the palm of his hand indicating they were to sit down, for he had had them stand during the prayer, “I shall dictate seven sentences. You are to write these sentences on the left side of your copybooks, and the analysis, which you will undertake to make of them, on the right-hand side. Plan the spacing so that you have a margin of three finger-breadths to the right and two to the left.” He pronounced these words as though he were translating from the Latin, and he did not address the boys in the familiar second person singular to which they had been accustomed in elementary school, nor did he greet them at all. The fact that they were new there did not penetrate his consciousness.

He then dictated in his Styrian dialect, which not all of them could understand, and so rapidly that riot all of them could follow. So Hans put up his hand and asked about the words he had not understood; he thought he was allowed to do that.

“What is your name?” was the question he received instead of a reply, to which he answered: “Hans Alt.”

“Alt, Hans,” he was informed, “you will impress on your mind once and for all: you are to keep silent except when you are questioned!
Si tacuisses
,
philosophus mansisses
! You should have paid better attention! You have twenty minutes left. Anyone who does not finish will not pass. Alt, Hans, and every other one of you will bear that in mind.”

In Hans's short life this was the first time that anyone had threatened him.

According to the regulations of the entrance examinations in the upper schools of Austria, the morning was devoted to written tests and the afternoon to oral tests, although the ‘oral' was given only to the candidates who had not passed the ‘written.' Consequently, to be called up for the ‘oral' was in the nature of a disgrace.

Professor Mildau was followed by Professor Rusetter, teacher of natural history and mathematics. He was somewhat older than Miklau; his eyes were weak, and no one had ever seen him without dark glasses. He too gave dictation; his dialect was Tyrolean, his manner of speech military (he had served as a captain in the Bosnian Campaign), and his graying side-whiskers originally must have red. He had a habit of stroking them stiffly with both hands.

“You there in the second row!” he said to Hans. “You are improperly clad! Tell your parents that no one is allowed here with uncovered [he avoided the word ‘naked'] legs!” While the boys were struggling to solve the arithmetic examples he had given them he stood by the window, with his back turned, and examined his inflamed eyes in a small pocket mirror. It was good he did that at least, Hans thought. But he was mistaken, for the mirror served as a means of detecting credulous boys who dared to copy their comrades' problems. The former captain stalked them like a hunter until the mirror exposed them, then he would suddenly turn and, despite his heavy weight, rush over and pounce on the evildoer. “Caught!” he would cry gleefully, snatch away the boy's exercise book, and then lie in wait for his next victim.

After Professor Rusetter came the catechist, Professor Haberl. The snuffbox which he was constantly pulling out of the pocket in his cassock was made of horn. He had cotton-wool in his ears and sneezed resonantly after every pinch of snuff. Hans was relieved to find that at least he could laugh.

When the written test was over the students could, go home, but they had to return at two o'clock to find out who was obliged to take the ‘oral' and who was not. Mammi was as adorable as ever; Papa even found time to ask some questions, and there was Hans's favorite dish for luncheon—schnitzel with cucumber salad. Until now he had believed that the rest of the world depended on his parents, this home, this house. But now it appeared that they had no influence on the school. Perhaps he would fail? He was ashamed, too, of his bare legs.

At two o'clock, dressed in long black cotton stockings, he stood once more before Professor Miklau, who read their names out of a large stiff book with black covers. “The following candidates have not passed their written examinations: Alt, Hans …”

Until now he had not known ambition or envy either. As he saw the successful scholars who did not have to undergo any more tests leave, and found himself among the poor scholars who had to remain, he learned to know those emotions. “Alt, Hans,” said Professor, Miklau (for he came first alphabetically), “you handed in a fairly satisfactory paper in mathematics but a lamentable one in grammar. What goes on in your mind—if you have one? Do you think this school is here for illiterates?”

Hans did not know what illiterates were, for he had only just turned ten last October. But Professor Miklau was obliged by the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Education to use the formal third person plural in addressing ten-year-olds, and that, in his eyes, obliged them to be grown-ups. Besides, one could not begin too soon to root out the frivolous Viennese notion that to live is to enjoy!

“Alt, Hans, write on the blackboard: Life is a serious—comma—hard—comma—lasting struggle—period. Analyse the sentence!”

Hans said it was a “simple sentence,” “life” was the subject, “is a struggle” the predicate, and “serious, hard, and lasting” were adjectives modifying “struggle.”

“Well, then, make a note of it!” Professor Miklau said.

With that and his answer to the next question, to the effect that Vienna was the one-time Celtic Vindobona and had been in existence for two thousand years, he had passed. He was a little proud and a little embarrassed. He might have saved himself the oral test. In his sleep that night he was frightened by a vision of the ex-captain watching him in his mirror.

“I didn't copy anything!” he shrieked in terror, and Neni called sleepily and mechanically from the nursery (for Hans now slept across the hall in the study): “Hush! Go to sleep! Be a good child.”

With all her experience she might have known that his childhood had been taken away that day—but grown-ups sometimes are unaware of even the simplest things.

The rumor that Colonel Paskiewicz was dying spread once more through the house as it had so often before, but no one look it seriously. The colonel, they said, will outlive us all! Nevertheless, he died at the very moment when his wife was on the point of fetching a priest. She had waited for this moment for fully twenty years, and when it came it found her unprepared. Deprived of everything that had kept her strength and patience in a state of tension for so long, she collapsed.

When Christine returned from the kindergarten on the Stubenbastei, where she had been teaching since the previous autumn, she found her father lying rigid and dead and her mother stretched motionless over him. At first she thought them both dead, and it was her cry for help that Hans heard when he came home from school.

He knocked until she let him in, and then he saw his first corpse, for he remembered nothing about the death of his great-aunt, the former Miss Kubelka, except the black horses who drew her hearse.

The dead man lay in the bed, and he had the slightly altered features of Uncle Paskiewicz. Nor did Aunt Gretl move, yet one could see her breathe. Christl's teeth were chattering so much that she was unable to speak.

“Does Mammi know?” Hans asked.

She shook her head.

“Shall I go and fetch her?”

She nodded.

“Right away!” he promised, then took his school bag, and ran up to the fourth floor.

He had forgotten that Henriette had left the house in the early afternoon: “As a patroness, your mother had to help with the arrangements,” Herr Simmerl explained to him. Could she be reached? Hans wanted to know. “Whatever is the young master thinking of? Madame cannot be disturbed now! Does not the young master realize that it is a great distinction to be a patroness for the Metternich Redoute? It is the first great social event since the end of the court mourning for our poor Empress,” explained the butler, who took a personal interest in everything that concerned Vienna. Would his mother at least come home to change her clothes? No, Madame had taken her things along with her in the carriage.

The boy waited for nearly half an hour before he went downstairs again. He was embarrassed because his mother was not there. Of course she could not know that Uncle Paskiewicz would die, but should he tell Christl that she was away making preparations for a masquerade ball? If Papa at least were there … But he had left a few days earlier on a business trip.

“Mammi is out just now,” he said to the girl whom he loved best after his own mother. Meanwhile Aunt Gretl had recovered consciousness and was lying in her own room; Dr. Herz had given her a sedative. Christl told him that and added only, “I think you had better go back upstairs now.”