Weiss Franziska

1. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-1-908968-80-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

A tragic story of love, obsession and the power of music

Ernst Weiss (1884-1940) was born in Brünn (now Brno) in Bohemia. He worked as a doctor and served in The First World War. In 1938 Weiss emigrated to France. He committed suicide the day that German troops entered Paris.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weiss, Ernst

Weitere Mitwirkende

Bell, Anthea

Leseproben

VI

IN FEBRUARY OF THE NEXT YEAR Franziska went to Prague, where Leonore Constanza was giving a piano recital. It was a long journey; the dull droning of the train sounded dispirited and subterranean. Mist lay over the empty fields, now deeply furrowed in winter, and hovered around the arc lamps that swayed above the broad streets from barely visible cables. Mist drifted outside the display windows of shops, waiting; mist rose from the whole grand breadth of Wenceslas Square to its upper end, where a mighty bronze equestrian statue menacingly guards a pillared palace, a statue full of physical power, heroic and yet as gentle as a prince from the Thousand and One Nights outside a magic castle.

But the old building where her sister lived was a dismal sight. The dark staircase was crooked as a hunched back, the steps as rotten as an old man’s teeth. A year ago, Minna had gone into domestic service here with a retired general and his wife. Franziska rang the bell; an old woman put her alabaster-white face out of the door, and turned a parchment ear in her direction.

“I’d like to speak to Fräulein Minna,” said Franziska.

“Minna?” replied the deaf old lady, smiling. She pronounced the name as if she had never heard it, then waved a tremulous hand, closed the door, and shot the bolt.

Franzi waited. Down below electric trams were ringing their bells, footsteps passed the building, she heard people speaking a foreign language. She felt tired to death, tired as she had never been since childhood. Then someone came to the door, opened its two wings, and the chain rattled. Breathing hard, her sister took her in her arms, hugging her with painful fervour.

“I knew at once it was you,” said Minna. “Have you been waiting long? And how long can you stay? I’m not letting you go in a hurry! I have to work now, but the master and mistress will be out this evening, and then …”

“The master and mistress? What kind of talk is that?” asked Franzi.

“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way,” said Minna, and as if apologizing, “You mustn’t be cross, you know. Don’t you remember? I was unwell.”

“You poor thing,” said Franzi. “What was the matter with you?”

“It was typhoid fever, but you don’t have to feel sorry for me. I was so frightened of going to hospital, but all things considered it was nice there. Don’t you believe me? Well, just imagine, the kind nurses didn’t want me to leave. And when I was better, there was so much to eat. They really spoiled me, they gave me hot drinks, and I could lie there all day with no work to do … and my hair grew back, but at first I had a bald head like my mistress.’

“Can you take some free time now?” asked Franzi.

“Now? Oh no, I don’t think so. You see the General is asleep, well, he sleeps almost all day, he sleeps and eats and eats—and then he goes to sleep again, he’s old as the hills—and then, when he wakes up, everything has to be neat and tidy, and I have to wash the plates and lay the table and tidy up all six rooms, and light fires for the evening. Look!” she said, showing her hands, reddened by the heat of the fire in the kitchen and soapy dishwater. She was sometimes ashamed of them, for her hands had once been her pride and joy. At first she had rubbed glycerine into them and put on gloves before going to bed; later she resigned herself.

“But you’ll stay overnight, won’t you?” she asked. “You will stay with me? Please!”

“Oh no,” said Franzi, “please don’t ask me! I simply must go home tonight, Henriette will be waiting for me at the station.”

“Then what about this evening?” asked Minna with a timid smile.

“I’m going to the recital this evening.”

Minna was silent, and then said, gently, “So that leaves us with an hour, doesn’t it? Around six o’clock? The music won’t begin before seven. Is that all right? And you can come straight up to my room, it’s up here on the third floor, to the left in the attic. So goodbye for now, Franzerl, see you soon!”

Franziska was outside in the street again. A heavy bell tolled. Rain was falling. It was all wonderful, like something in a fairytale: the dark horseman cast in bronze, King Wenceslas of Bohemia presiding triumphantly over the silent city, Czechs passing by as she listened to their strange language, knowing that she would never set eyes on them again.

She remembered from her childhood that there was an old bridge here. Her father had talked about it on winter evenings. Gilded statues of Bohemian saints, worn smooth by kisses, stood on its stone balustrade, while a little island rose from the bright silver water in the middle of the river close to an old, old mill. The crowns of rustling trees rose to the bridge, reaching over the grey balustrade and casting green shade around the golden martyrs on hot summer days.

She wanted to see this miraculous bridge. As she slowly went down the gentle incline of Wenceslas Square, spellbound by dreams again for the first time in ages, she thought that any road she took was bound to lead her there. The longer the way seemed, the faster she walked. She went down busy, lively streets lit by flickering street lamps, through dark, low-roofed, smoky viaducts, entirely lined by brightly coloured circus posters and with heavy, iron-grey freight trains thundering overhead, she passed narrow-fronted four-storey houses peering out at the dirty street through dusty windows, she walked along rows of streets all looking just the same, like orphan children or blind people being led about in a line—and now she slowly woke to reality again, feeling that she was old and sad and hadn’t had enough sleep.

Poor little shops crowded close to each other, selling old clothes for the poorer classes, grey underwear for workers, cheap food for everyone. Baskets of hard green apples and dried black prunes waited out in the street to tempt children, with close-meshed netting spread over them to keep thieves away, and in one shop with a low, vaulted ceiling she saw a fat woman with shaking, tiny, yellow hands lighting a paraffin lamp. A little boy stood at her feet watching curiously, with a half-eaten carrot in his small, dirty hand.

The streets, the piles of goods for sale, the grey shirts, the apples, the netting, the people’s tired faces were all blackened by the heavy soot from the locomotives that roared past, and the thinner smoke of the many factory chimneys standing as close here as trees in the forest.

This is your holiday! thought Franziska. She felt injured and embittered to the point of tears, as if all this, the grey street, the ugly poverty, the general wretchedness were here in this corner of a foreign city just to defy her.

This is your holiday! said a voice inside her only too clearly. And the woman who hated dreams, who refused to understand death and clung only to what was real, longed and hoped to capture only what was tangible and full of life, that woman awoke here in the grey streets of Žižkov, the working-class quarter of Prague, a place stretching interminably away in the dismal twilight of a spring evening.

This is your holiday! thought Franzi. She was passing judgement not just on this day, she felt, but on the whole long series of working days surrounding it. It was a grey day in the midst of other such days, like an orphan child in a long line, an empty sequence of hours in an empty world. Empty? But wasn’t her life borne up on the wings of music, the closest to humanity of all the arts? So why was the past so cold, cruelly desolate, no smiles in it, no memories—nothing but pages turned in a large book of musical notation? She had always played for herself, for love of herself alone, had closed the doors and windows, intoxicating herself on music as if it were a secret vice. What had meant so much to her meant nothing to others. Or did it really mean so much? Yesterday it had still been a comfort, hope, storm and calm, earth and the stars, merriment and pain. Today it was far away. No human being had ever been hers, no word from her had ever found its answer in another’s smile, no one had ever stood behind her and placed a hand on her shoulder when the last note of the piano died away, no one had extinguished the little candle in its brass candlestick with a soft yet masculine hand, no man had ever stroked her hair or taken her still quivering hands in his. Yesterday she wouldn’t have wanted such things, but today, among these tall, massively weighty grey walls, present and looking more than real in the colourless dusk of this factory-lined street, the magic of the human closeness she longed for shone with a soft glow. Here and now she would have liked to press her own tormented and trembling breast to another’s; here and now she hated the loftiness of her day’s labour. Her fanatical obsession came up against the bleak world. She wished fervently for the modest, happy fulfilment of an everyday life, a life that in the evening gets what it had wanted in the morning and no more.

It was raining quietly everywhere. The gas lamps were lit, their yellow flames burning calmly between four glass walls protected by a little roof of galvanized metal. Factory sirens began sounding. But the mighty shadows of the flywheels still chased across the windows, the pounding of flashing pistons droned on unmoved. Here and there workers in blue overalls appeared, children running ahead of them, all taking their familiar way home to some distant light, some distant roof, some distant hearth, until they disappeared in the darkness.

Franzi...