Five Women Page 7

  The house must also be mentioned. With its five windows looking on to the street, it was a survival between towering new buildings that had shot up around it. It was in the back premises that Tonka lived with her aunt, who was actually her much older cousin, and her aunt's little son, the illegitimate offspring of a relationship that she had regarded as permanent, and a grandmother who was not really the grandmother but the grandmother's sister. In earlier days there had also been a brother of her dead mother's living there, but he too had died young. All of them lived together in one room and a kitchen, while the genteel curtains of the five front windows concealed an establishment of ill repute where lower-middle-class housewives of easy morals, as well as professionals, were brought together with men. This was something that the family tacitly ignored, and since they wanted no trouble with the procuress they even passed the time of day with her. She was a fat woman, very set on respectability. She had a daughter of the same age as Tonka, whom she sent to a good school; she had her taught the piano and French, bought her pretty clothes, and took care to keep her well away from the business. She was a softhearted creature, which made it easier for her to follow the trade she did, for she knew it was shameful. In earlier times Tonka had now and then been allowed to play with this daughter, and so had found her way into the front part of the house, at hours when it was empty, and to her the rooms seemed enormous, leaving her with an impression of grandeur and refinement that was only reduced to proper proportions after he came on the scene.

  Tonka was not her real name. At her baptism she had been given the German name Antonie, and Tonka was the abbreviated form of the Czech diminutive Toninka. The inhabitants of those back streets talked a queer mixture of the two languages.

  But where do such thoughts lead? There it was, she had been standing by a hedge that time, in front of the dark open doorway of a cottage, the first in the village as one came out from town. She was wearing laced boots, red stockings, and a gaily-coloured, stiff, full skirt, and as she talked she seemed to be gazing at the moon, which hung pale over the corn stooks. She was at once pert and shy, and laughed a lot, as though she felt protected by the moon. And the wind blew across the stubble fields as if it were cooling a plate of soup. Riding home, he had said laughingly to his comrade-inarms, young Baron Mordansky: "You know, I shouldn't at all mind having an affair with a girl like that, only it's too dangerous for my liking. You'd have to promise to make up a threesome, to keep me from going sentimental." And Mordansky, who had done a spell as a trainee in his uncle's sugar-mill, had thereupon told him about how, when the time came round for digging the beets, hundreds of such peasant girls laboured in the fields belonging to the mill, and it was said they were as submissive as black slaves to the supervisors and their assistants. And once, he remembered quite distinctly, he had cut short a similar conversation with Mordansky because it was an affront to his feelings. Yet it had not been at that time, he knew—what was now trying to impose itself on him as a memory was really something else, the tangle of thorns that had later grown inside his head.

  In reality it was in the Ring that he had first seen her, in that main street with the stone arcades where the officers and the gentlemen who worked in the government offices stood chatting at corners, the students and young business men strolled up and down, and the girls wandered along in twos and threes, arm in arm, after the shops closed, or the more curious of them even during the lunch-hour. Sometimes a well-known local lawyer would make his way slowly through the crowd, lifting his hat to acquaintances, or a local deputy, or, say, a respected industrialist; and there were even ladies to be seen, on their way home after shopping. There her glance had suddenly crossed with his, a merry glance, lasting only for the briefest moment—like a ball accidently landing in a passer-by's face. The next instant she had looked away, with a feigned air of innocence. He had turned round quickly, supposing that now the usual giggling would follow, but Tonka was walking on, looking straight ahead of her, rather tensely. She was with two other girls, and taller than either of them. She was not beautiful, but her face had a clear-cut, definite quality. There was nothing in it of that petty, cunningly feminine look which seems to result from the face as a whole; in this face mouth, nose, and eyes were each something clearly in their own right and could stand up to being contemplated separately, delighting the beholder simply by their candour and the freshness irradiating the whole face. It was odd that so gay a glance should stick fast like a barbed arrow, and she herself seemed to have hurt herself with it.

  So much was now clear. Well, then, at that time she had been working in the draper's shop. It was a large shop, employing a great many girls to handle the stock. Her job was to look after the rolls of material and get the right one down when it was asked for, and the palms of her hands were always slightly moist because of the irritation from the fine hairs of the cloth. There was nothing dream-like about that, and her face was guileless. But then there were the draper's sons, and one of them had a moustache like a squirrel's, turned up at the ends, and always wore patent-leather shoes. Tonka was full of stories about how smart he was, how many pairs of shoes he had, and how his trousers were every night laid between two boards and weighed down with heavy ston es to keep them well pressed.

  And now, as he got a clear glimpse of something real through the mist, that other smile emerged, the incredulous smile his mother wore—essentially an onlooker's smile, full of pity and disdain for him. That smile was real. What it said was: ‘Heavens, not that shop, surely?' And although Tonka had still been a virgin when he came to know her, that smile, treacherously furtive or masked, had also turned up in many a tormenting dream he had. Perhaps it had never existed as a single smile; even now he could not be sure of that. And then too there are nuptial nights when one cannot be entirely sure; there are, so to speak, physiological ambiguities, times when even Nature does not give an unequivocal answer. And in the very moment when he remembered that, he knew that Heaven itself was against Tonka.

  II

  It had been rash of him to bring Tonka to act as nurse and companion to his grandmother. He was still very young then. He had worked out a little stratagem: Tonka's aunt, who went out doing sewing for ‘the gentry', sometimes worked for an aunt of his, and he had contrived that she should be asked if she happened to know of a young girl, who ... and so on. The idea was to get a girl to look after his grandmother, whose merciful release was to be expected in a couple of years. Apart from her wages, the girl would be remembered in the old lady's will.

  But meanwhile there had been a number of little episodes. Once, for instance, he was going on an errand with her; there were some children playing in the street, and suddenly they both found themselves gazing at the face of a little girl who was howling—a face that wriggled and writhed like a worm, in the full blast of sunlight. The pitiless clarity of it there in the light seemed to him a symbol of life, over against the orbit of death that they had both just left. But Tonka was ‘fond of children'. She bent down to the child, cheerfully and consolingly, perhaps even slightly amused by it—and that was all, however much he tried to make her see that behind the appearance there was something else. From however many sides he approached it, in the end he always found himself confronted with the same opacity in her mind. Tonka was not stupid, but something seemed to prevent her from being intelligent; and for the first time he felt this wide expanse of pity for her, this pity that was so difficult to account for.

  Another time he said to her: "Tell me, how long is it now you've been with Grandmamma, Fräulein Tonka?" And when she had told him, he said: "Oh, really? It's a long time to have spent with an old woman like that."

  "Oh," Tonka exclaimed, "I like being here."

  "Well, you needn't be afraid to tell me if you don't. I can't imagine how a young girl can manage to put up with it.

  "It's a job," Tonka answered, and blushed.

  "All right, it's a job. But that isn't all one wants from life. Isn't that true?"

  "Y
es."

  "And have you got that?"

  "No."

  "Yes, no. Yes, no." He grew impatient. "What's the sense of talking like that? Can't you even grumble about us?' But he saw that she was struggling to find an answer, that she kept on discarding possible answers just when they were on the tip of her tongue. And suddenly he felt sorry for her. "I dare say you'll hardly know what I mean. It's not that I think badly of my grandmother, poor woman. No, it isn't that. I'm not looking at it from that point of view at the moment. I can't help thinking of it from your point of view and from your point of view she's a perfect old horror. Now do you see what I mean?"

  "Yes," she said in a low voice, blushing more than ever. "I understood all right before. But I can't say it."

  At that he laughed. "That's something that's never happened to me! But now I'm more curious than ever to know what you really think. I'll help you." He looked at her so intently that she became more embarrassed than ever. "All right, then. Here goes: do you like just having regular duties, a quiet, steady routine? Is that it?"

  "Well, I don't know quite how you mean. I like my work all right."

  "You ‘like it all right'. But you're not exactly mad about it, I suppose? I mean, there are people who don't want anything but a steady job."

  "What are you getting at?"

  "Desires, dreams, ambition—that's what I'm getting at. Doesn't a fine day like this start something up in you?"

  Between the stone walls of the streets the day was full of a quivering light and the honey of springtime.

  Now it was she who laughed. "It isn't that either."

  "It isn't that? Well, then, perhaps you have a special liking for darkened rooms, for talking in a whisper, for the smell of medicines, and all that? There are such people too, you know. But I can tell from your face that I haven't hit it this time either."

  She shook her head and faintly turned her mouth down at the corners—perhaps in shy mockery, perhaps only out of embarrassment.

  But he gave her no peace. "You see how wrong I go, how ridiculous I'm making myself in your eyes by keeping on guessing wrong like this! Doesn't that help you to come out with it? Come on now!"

  And now at least she came out with it. Slowly. Hesitantly. As if choosing her words carefully, in order to make intelligible something that was very difficult to understand: "You see, I have to earn my living."

  Ah, how simple it all was!

  What an ass he had been, and what a stony eternity lay

  in that so ordinary answer!

  And another such time was once when he had secretly

  gone for a walk with Tonka. They used to go for long walks

  in the country whenever she had her day off, which was twice a month. It was summer. When evening came, the warmth of the air was exactly the same as that of one's face

  and hands, and, walking for a moment with closed eyes, one felt as though one were dissolving, expanding, floating... . He described this to Tonka and, when she laughed, asked

  her if she knew what he meant.

  Oh, yes!

  But he was still not sure that she did and so he tried to get her to describe it to him in her own words. And this she

  could not do.

  So then, he said, she didn't know what he meant.

  Oh, but she did! And suddenly she said: it made you want

  to sing.

  For heaven's sake!

  But yes—that was it, she protested.

  They went on wrangling like this for a while. And then

  after all they both began to sing, rather in the spirit of someone firmly placing the corpus delicti on the table or inspecting the scene of the crime. They sang pretty badly, and something from a musical comedy, at that, but fortunately Tonka sang softly, and he was glad of that little sign

  of consideration for his feelings. He was positive she had not been to the theatre more than once in her life and that ever since then these trashy tunes summed up her notions of culture and elegance. However, it turned out that she had merely picked them up from the other girls at the shop where she had worked.

  He asked her if she really liked these tunes. It always annoyed him to come across anything still linking her with that shop.

  She did not know what it was, whether this music was beautiful or silly, merely that it made her want to be on the stage herself and put her whole heart into making the people in the audience happy or sorrowful. This was perfectly ridiculous, of course, in the light of what poor dear Tonka looked like while she was singing. It depressed him, and his own singing faded out on a sort of growl. Then Tonka suddenly broke off too, as if she felt the same thing, and for a while the two of them walked along in silence.

  Then Tonka stopped and said: "That's not what I meant at all, about singing."

  And since she saw in his eyes a little glint of responsive kindness, she began to sing again, still softly, but this time folk-songs from her own part of the country. So they walked along, with these simple tunes making everything vaguely sad, like the fluttering of cabbage-whites in the sunshine. And so now all at once it turned out, of course, that Tonka was right.

  Now it was he who could not express what was going on in him. Because Tonka did not talk the ordinary language that other people used, but some language of the totality of things, she had had to suffer being thought stupid and insensitive. He realised now what it meant if one said: Songs just come into her head. It seemed to him that she was very lonely. If it were not for him, who would understand her? So they both sang. Tonka recited the Slavonic words and translated them into German for him, and then they joined hands and sang together like children. Whenever they had to leave off to regain their breath, there would be a little moment of silence ahead of them too, where the twilight was creeping across the road—and even if the whole thing was foolishness, the dusk itself was at one with their feelings.

  And yet another time they were sitting at the edge of a. wood, and he was simply gazing into space through half-shut eyelids, not talking, letting his thoughts roam. Tonka began to be afraid she had offended him again. Several times she took a deep breath, as if about to speak, but then shyness held her back. So for a long time there was no sound but the woodland murmur that is so tormenting, rising and sinking away in a different place at every instant. Once a brown butterfly fluttered past them and settled on a long-stemmed flower, which quivered under the touch, swaying to and fro and then quite suddenly being quite still again, like a conversation broken off. Tonka pressed her fingers hard into the moss on which they were sitting, but after a a while the tiny blades stood up again, one after the other, row on row, until there was finally no more trace of the hand that had lain there. It was enough to make one weep, without knowing why. If she had been trained to think, like her companion, at that moment Tonka would have realised that Nature consists of nothing but ugly little things that one hardly notices and which live as sadly far apart from each other as the stars in the night-sky. The beauties of Nature... . A wasp was crawling over his shoe. Its head was like a lantern. He watched it, contemplating his shoe, which was sticking up broad and black, oblique against the brown of the earth.

  Tonka had often thought with dread of the moment when a man would stand before her and she would have no way of escape. The stories that the older girls in the shop had told her with such delight gave her a feeling only of a crude, boring frivolity, something that was not love at all, and she was indignant at the way men were always making amorous advances to her after scarcely exchanging more than a few words with her. As she looked at her companion now, she felt a sudden pang. It was the first time since she had been with him that she realised he was a man; for this was something completely different. He was lying back, resting on his elbows, his chin on his chest. Timidly, she tried to see into his eyes.

  What she saw was a peculiar smile. He had one eye shut, and with the other he was gazing along the length of his body, as though aiming at something. Doubtless he knew how ugly his shoe looked
at that angle, and perhaps too how little it amounted to that he was lying at the edge of a wood with Tonka. But he did nothing to change anything about it. Each detail was ugly, and the whole thing was happiness.

  Quietly, Tonka got up. She suddenly felt a burning inside her head, and her heart was thudding. She could not make out what he was thinking, but she read it all in his eye; and all at once she caught herself wanting to take his head in her arms and cover up his eyes.

  "It's time to go," she said. "It'll be getting dark soon."

  As they were walking along the road, he said: "I'm afraid you must have been bored. But you will have to get used to me." He took her arm, because it was becoming difficult to see the road distinctly, and he tried to excuse himself for his silence and then, almost against his will, for his thoughts too. She did not really know what he was talking about, but in her own way she sensed the meaning of his words, which came so gravely through the rising mist. And when now he went further, even apologising for talking in such a solemn way, she did not know what to do. Even her silent prayer to the Blessed Virgin was of no avail, and so she linked her arm more closely with his, although she felt dreadfully shy of doing so.