in which the snow continues to fall, we meet good Hedvige and old Marcus, and stroll with Emmanuel from Schikanedergasse to Naschmarkt
from: emmanuel@gmail.com
Even here, in this room where I’m confined – for my own good, they never fail to say – the first snow brings serenity and joy. And even though the narrow slice of landscape I see through the window is now my whole world, that world is sublime in its beauty once it’s covered in white. The west wind casts snow on the gnarled branches of the plum tree, the browning grass of the hill and the bristling willows. There are other days when the lake is a leaden grey and impossible to distinguish from the sky, which is eternally grey here in the Alps. The surface of the water sometimes shakes as if someone were walking on it, unseen and unheard. The water ripples and the little waves move towards me. They won’t shake the willow branches dipping into the lake and don’t have the strength to reach the shore. If it weren’t for me patiently awaiting them every winter as I stare out through the window, probably no one would notice their so potent existence.
Those waves which won’t foam, let alone carry away or smash anything, are a sign: they herald the first snow. The wind which raised them will soon strengthen and bring driving snow to the lake. A flurry of snowflakes will descend on the landscape and white will re-establish its order. But not before several large, watery stars have stuck to my window. By evening, ice will have covered the glass: I’ll press my face up against it and feel the cold on my forehead. Outside everything is at rest, and inside everyone has fallen asleep. That is my time: I can melt the ice with my breath right through until morning. Every few seconds I breathe life into a shape – and a being on the window-pane starts to move. Now it’s a bird, next time it’s a wolf. And however often the cold comes for them and the ice reclaims them, I bring them back with my breath.
My world lacks breadth, perhaps. It lacks people, above all, because apart from the village children in summer who go scooting down the grassy hillside on sheets of cardboard and plunge head-first into the lake with a scream – hardly anyone calls by. But there’s no lack of order. My world is as ordered as a Chekhov play. If I mention a plum tree, children will come and pick its fruit in the autumn. If I look at the willows, some youngster is bound to jump from them into the water by the end of the summer to demonstrate his manliness, which in my world and all others is always done in primitive and superfluous ways. And then there’s the lake! It, too, is a nail which someone will hang their coat on by the end of the play. Its waters are calm and buoyant, it accepts visitors…and sometimes keeps the particularly careless and weak. As I say, there’s no lack of order in my world. Nor any lack of excitement: there are quite enough changes for my liking.
Not to mention memories. When you’re confined, you learn to live backwards. Tomorrow will be the same as today. The only future you have is your memory. The only uncertainty which awaits you is what you’ll remember tomorrow. You go back and tell yourself stories in which you’re the main hero. Most of those stories never happened, but who cares – they could have happened, and that’s all that counts. Your past contains innumerable possibilities for lives different to the one you live. So: go back, young man!
I go back to the hall of our Vienna apartment in 5 Schikane-dergasse. I’m seven years old. From my hiding place behind the shoe cabinet I can see that my nanny has fallen asleep in the armchair beneath Lucian Freud’s painting. The picture had belonged to our neighbour who committed suicide after the bank took away all his property, but not before papa bought the picture from him ‘for a fair and reasonable price’, as he and my mother emphasised every time Freud was the topic of conversation in our drawing room. Fair and reasonable wasn’t good enough for the bank, which confiscated and flogged off all the neighbour’s possessions, turning the heir of a tailor’s shop which had clothed the Viennese for over three centuries into a homeless pauper who had no choice but to drown himself in the Danube, a way in which people in a similar quandary had ended their lives for more than three centuries.
So Hedvige, my nanny, was sleeping beneath the picture painted by the grandson of the great dream interpreter. My parents had gone to visit Aunt Esther, who’d been dying for at least as long as I’d been alive. When they took me to see her the first time, she was lying like a big white polar bear on a wide, heavy bed, the same one I found her on when we’d visited the last time, at New Year. When they introduced me to Aunt Esther, she said: ‘The boy is most irritatingly blue-eyed – I can’t help it, but those misty blue eyes have something distinctly Prussian about them.’
Three paces and I was at the front door, which I closed behind me noiselessly. A descent down the wide, marble staircase awaited me. The stairs were made so that they not tire a person out. Papa always made a point of emphasising what he called ‘the humaneness of Vienna’s stairs’. I don’t think we ever went up to our apartment together without him remarking that these stairs could teach you all you needed to know about Viennese architecture. Although it mirrored the narcissism of tradition and the power of the former empire, it above all reflected the idea that ‘buildings, even the most palatial ones, are to serve people’ – I think those were his words. To his mind, Viennese stairs had to be made so that walking up them was no more strenuous than a Sunday stroll on Stephans-platz. Vienna’s opera houses were the only buildings on the planet fit to host operas: everything else was a barbaric blasphemy which ought to be banned by law. The proportion of the height of the ceiling to the length of the windows in Viennese cafés was simply perfect, and visitors got the impression they were drinking their kleiner Brauner in the very centre of the world. Overpriced Parisian cafés were claustrophobic and kind of obscure, papa claimed. The cafés in Rome, on the other hand, seemed frivolous: when you were drinking your espresso there you felt the visitors and waiters were about to tear off their civilian clothes or uniforms and show themselves in costumes, revealing their true nature as characters from a commedia dell’arte. In a nutshell: papa loved Vienna, and a life outside that city was unimaginable for him.
The stairs which were made so that even the oldest residents of Vienna, at least those who were still mobile, could mount them with a minimum of effort, were also made so that I could imitate the hops of a kangaroo – the animal which fascinated me most at the time – and go bounding down them two steps at a time without danger of falling and getting hurt, although I doubt that was the intention of the constructors. When I’d jumped the last few steps, it was just four more hops to the main door of the house. One more after that and I’d finally be out on the snow-covered pavement, staring at the bright sign on the other side of the street: Carlton Opera Hotel.
I was a sickly child. If my chronic bronchitis improved for just a second, I’d be bed-ridden with sinus pain. There was probably no day I didn’t have a cough, a sore throat or an annoying cold. To top it all off, there were the allergies. I wasn’t allowed to eat strawberries: just a morsel of the red fruit sufficed to cause an attack of asphyxiation. We also discovered under dramatic circumstances that I was allergic to penicillin. I was two at the time. After I’d been given an injection of penicillin an intensive red appeared, starting at the point of the injection. Then my temperature shot up, and it took them days to get it to come down again. Just when maman et papa had given up hope for me, my fever subsided, and the doctors wrote CAVE PENICILLIN in thick red letters on my medical record card.
What I want to say is that I wasn’t allowed to play most children’s games. Running out into the snow in only a jumper – without my fur coat, cap and gloves – was a blatant violation of the unwritten but no less rigid rules. It was always the same: I’d use my parents’ absence for my street adventures. I’d always return home before they did. Poor Hedvige would be waiting for me in tears after having woken up, called for me, looked in all the hiding places in the apartment, and then burst into inconsolable sobs. It meant nothing to her that I came back running every time: she seemed not to perceive the pattern behind such simple repetition. She’d always be worried out of her mind as if I’d run away for the very first time. She waited for me on the landing at the apartment door, beside herself with anxiety. Instead of scolding me when I returned, she’d lift me up a little, embrace me and repeat: ‘Oh Master Emmanuel, thank goodness you’ve come back to me.’ That woman is up with the angels now, I’m sure. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t say a word to monsieur et madame,’ she’d tell me. She demanded only one thing of me – precisely the one thing I couldn’t promise her, however sincerely I regretted the misdemeanours I’d committed each time: that I never, never do it again, she repeated in the tone of voice I imagined Heidi’s grandfather used to tell her important lessons. And sure enough, she never gave me away. But I would go up to maman et papa while they were still taking their coats off and admit everything. ‘This child is beyond our help,’ my mother would sigh and start to cry. ‘May God protect you because I obviously can’t,’ she sobbed and withdrew into her room, complaining of a headache.
Papa would tell Hedvige to give me a warm wash and put me to bed. Later he’d sit on the edge of my bed until I fell asleep and tell me in a low voice, like a lullaby, how much my mother had suffered because of me. It wasn’t good to return her kindness like this, he whispered. I felt warmth washing over me, my limbs became as light as wings and I sank into sleep, with his gentle, patient voice a distant echo in my ears: She’s made so many sacrifices for you. She’d do anything for you…
Whenever I was outside, opposite the Carlton Opera Hotel, an irresistible adventure would begin. There was a story connected with that hotel which probably all nannies in the neighbourhood told to give the children a fright. I heard it from Hedvige: A horrible man hung himself in the hotel. He’d done terrible things during the war many years before you were born. The army he commanded was defeated. But, being cunning, he dyed his hair black, grew a beard and moustache to conceal his identity, donned glasses, changed his name – and disappeared. For ever, people thought. Until one day a woman happened to go and see a doctor who practised in an apartment on the top floor of the Carlton Opera Hotel. She realised it was the same evil man whose hospital she’d been detained at during the war. She called the police and demanded they immediately arrest the doctor, whom she blamed for the death of her husband and thousands of other innocent people. The horrible man probably knew what was in store for him when he saw the police car pull up in front of the hotel. The police called on him and demanded that he give himself up. In the end they broke into his surgery and found him hanging from a light fixture, dressed in the uniform he’d worn during the war. Boys like you mustn’t go there because the ghost of the doctor still haunts the halls of the hotel. They say that if he finds children who go there despite the warning, he lures them into the lift with sweets. The lift is like a cage: its doors clang shut and he takes them straight down to hell. That’s what Hedvige used to tell me.
I entered the hotel and saw the terrible lift. Just a few steps lay between me and that shaft to hell. To the left was the reception desk, which was always staffed by several pretty and friendly young women. They knew me by now and called out: ‘It’s you, Emmanuel! How is the little Master today?’ I’d cautiously go up to the desk, raise my hand in greeting and lay it on the marble top. That was part of my rescue strategy: if the doctor appeared in front of me, I counted on the young receptionists whisking me behind the desk. I’d stand there for a while looking at the lift: it was an imposing contraption with thick, black bars and glass which definitely fitted the part. When one of the guests got in, the bars closed behind them and the lift would head upwards with a creak of chains. But when I heard the lift coming down, I’d think it was the evil doctor coming for me. Fear would get the better of my curiosity and I’d turn tail and bolt from the hotel.
I’d run until my cough made me stop. But I didn’t go back home. No way, my adventure had only just begun! I’d turn into the first street on the right and stand in front of the windows of old Marcus’s shop. There were bottles of liquor with colourful labels – I liked the green ones best, which looked as if they had nothing but smoke in them. More interesting still, Marcus’s window displayed a whole range of chocolate bars from exotic parts of the world. Brazil, it said, five, five, and then a funny sign. Ecuador, six, five, and the funny sign again, and South Africa, Kenya, and again numbers with signs I didn’t understand…There outside that luxury food shop, which after Marcus’s death was turned into a kebab outlet, I learned that everything I don’t know or don’t have can be substituted by things I imagine and believe in. There was no chocolate taster for whom those delicacies were more real than for me. Experts could try a little cube of chocolate with their eyes closed and unerringly identify its origin and the class of the cocoa, but what was that compared to the stories I could tell about those chocolates? I trembled with excitement at the yellow, green and orange wrappers with little maps of the countries from which these chocolates arrived in my world: on pack-horses through the jungle, on rafts through foaming rapids, in seaplanes through clouds and storms, on ocean-going ships past icebergs and waves as tall as the Staatsoper…The wrappers also showed palm trees, whose fronds the natives used to make huts to shelter from the tropical rain; I saw lions, black women with long necks carrying wicker baskets on their heads, and to top it all off there were stern warriors with spears and blowguns which fired poisoned darts deadlier than the fangs of a cobra; I convinced myself that every thought and word was true.
I’d stand there in front of the shop window until Marcus, who was forever sitting behind the counter reading, looked up through his glasses with lenses as thick as the jars in Hed-vige’s pantry. Then he’d come hobbling up to the door and pull me inside. ‘You’ve come out without your woollens again,’ he’d reproach me, ‘you’ll be in bed with fever again for a whole month!’ And before I could say a word in my defence he’d slip a hot cup of tea into my hand.
His shop always smelt of cinnamon and tobacco. Gentle music was playing which I’d recognise years later as Bach, whom my friend prized above all other composers. Business was going from bad to worse, so Marcus smoked most of the luxury cigars himself when their use-by date expired. He’d blow out the smoke of a thick cigar and say to me, imitating black-and-white-film icons: When you take poison, you have to do it with style, a lesson even Socrates read to humanity. Alas, in vain.
Marcus wasn’t a man of many words. If I tried to ask him something, he’d reach me one of the books he kept under the counter and say with a crafty smile: Here, read this, only to return to his cigar, book and silence. When I’d drunk my tea, and I made sure not to hurry, he’d see me out and send me on my way: ‘And now straight home!’
Later, when I was at high school, Hedvige told me that Marcus had sold the shop and used the money to pay for a place in a retirement home in Aspern, on the outskirts of Vienna. Since he had neither children nor any close relatives to look after him, he thought it was the best way of providing for a peaceful retirement. Before leaving our area for good, he met Hedvige on her way back from shopping and asked after me, although I hadn’t dropped into his shop for years. He told Hedvige that he’d lived in Aspern throughout the Soviet occupation. After the Russians shot his father in 1946, he grew up with his grandfather there. ‘The old man’s reign of terror was no better than the Russians’, he told Hedvige, who then told me. Marcus also mentioned that his father lay in a shallow grave in Aspern, as well as his grandfather, who had maltreated him as long as he’d had a breath left in his body; there were other gruesome memories, too, which he hadn’t been able to lay to rest and put behind him. Since that’s how things were, he felt it was only right that he also be buried in Aspern when his time came. And with that he politely said goodbye and headed off down the street, leaving a trail of smoke; I can just picture him with his cigar, like an old steamboat proudly chuffing away on its last voyage, to the salvagers.
I didn’t go to visit him. Not out of laziness or because I didn’t care about him. On the contrary: because he was so important to me. Marcus had known he mustn’t give me any of the chocolates from his shop window, however often I came, because that would ruin everything: our little game, all my reveries about faraway countries which began at his shop window, and our whole delicate and sincere friendship. And I knew I mustn’t go and see Marcus in the nursing home: he wouldn’t be behind the counter, on the throne of his empire, but enfeebled in a bed or wheelchair. No, it was best this way: kind old Marcus would forever stay in his shop, pretending to be strict and sending me home at the end of my visit.
I ran through the ankle-deep snow. Then I turned round, and when I saw through the veil of snowflakes that Marcus was no longer watching to check that I’d turned into Schikane-dergasse as he’d told me, I kept going straight on towards the Naschmarkt market.
They said on this morning’s news that snow fell in Ulcinj in the middle of summer, and now people will probably ask themselves why. Why, indeed, does snow fall? In the childhood stories I’m telling you it falls to bring peace and joy. I don’t think my story is different to that of most other people: childhood is a widespread phenomenon. And childhood’s most pleasant moments are often concentrated in blissful, snow-covered winter days.
James Joyce, for example, has snow fall so as to set the final scene of one of the most touching stories in the history of literature, which, although not as long as the history of snow, is similar to snow in that it reveals the footprints of those who’ve trodden this world. The ending of ‘The Dead’, where Gabriel Conroy realises that his wife will spend the rest of her days at his side but that the greatest event of her life was in the past, when a young man died because of his love for her, and Gabriel comprehends that everything he can give her in life is worthless compared to what the dead Michael Furey has already done for her…Oh, perhaps I take it all too personally. I have a soft spot for sad love stories.
Now you know why the snow falls for me. The world shines differently beneath the snow – that light falls from the sky, covering us, all we can see, and everything our senses perceive. However many times we’ve seen snow, the spectacle is always as fascinating as the first time. You can consider snow to be just congealed water, of course, but being rational is only good up to a point, beyond which reason destroys all joy in life. Things like snow have to stay unexplained, and therefore pure, so we can enjoy them. To stand beneath the sky as it sprinkles us with snow and reflect on the atmospheric processes which formed it is not irrational but is certainly a sorry state deserving of sympathy. For such a person, snow is just a nuisance – one of many which await them before death, the greatest unpleasantry lurking at the end.
I remember one snowfall better than all the others. It was during the war years, though I don’t remember exactly because they’ve all merged into a continuum of nausea and I can’t distinguish them any more. I didn’t experience those years then and there, but I did spend them with you as I sifted through newspapers and books, remembering every cutting and every Web link to do with the time and place where you were living. Human nature is hopelessly corrupt and this corruption is to be found in every system which people establish. So it is with the market, so it is with the Church, so it is here, too, where I’m confined for my own good. It’s fortunate that there’s corruption, I must add, because how else would I manage to get a computer into my room if no one was bribable, and how else would I get hold of the books I need so as to be with you as often as I can?
Yes, snow was falling that winter. There was a power failure. It lasted for days, so I walked with you every night through empty Ulcinj. The ice cracked beneath our feet as we talked about all that needed to be done, about how wise and careful we needed to be to survive one more year. That’s how a person cracks too, you told me: they stand firm and look as if they’re going to outlast eternity. But then just a little brush with misfortune, one hardship on top of that, and one more which treads on them and they shatter like shop windows on city squares under bombardment.
The north wind blew away the clouds over Ulcinj and the cold descended on the landscape to preserve it, like the canvases of the Old Masters are conserved. The radiance of the stars reflected on the snow-covered ground. Now, when the sub-stations had burnt out and the power lines were down, when people lit their houses with candles and there were no street lights, the town shone brighter than ever before. Radiant it was, like cities beyond the memory of the living, from times which no one now remembers. We know these things only from books printed on paper as white as snow, paper which awaits the moment when snow falls on the margins and it shall finally be revealed to us why snow falls: so that we see the word impressed on paper more clearly and also read the word – the text from which everything began.