6. Tea

At teatime, however, silence served as protection; an artificial stillness imposed itself on the house as if an external, isolating unction had occupied and transformed it into something more like a temple or exile than dwelling place. In any case, something had changed: if at any previous moment water had boiled or a pot had struck a stove burner, if knives had rattled in the drawer before being placed on the tablecloth, at the moment when the tea was drunk, everything became hushed, Wulda dozed, Lola did the accounts, and Katja stepped carefully. In no other moment reigned so much silence: not at night, as one by one the remaining lights went out, eyes closed, and breathing slowed under blankets, nor at morning with bodies yet to awake and move. While the guests and servants respected the silence, no one appreciated it like Madame Helena; voices and noise were subdued, and no one knew like her the house from end to end to reckon those changes without seeing them, the surprise of hours, the laziness of minutes, the exact place where the shadow of a doorjamb reached on that month day and instant of the year even if there were no sunshine to reveal where it would have been, the size of a crack in the herringbone parquet in a hallway, as if objects that could be displaced or removed or acquired mattered much less. Most of the day, however, was not that way; the time before lunch seemed to run counter to the peace of the afternoon, or even the most perfect Sunday because Sundays lay smooth and empty, a waiting blue hollow in which, although no one said so, a long series of events availed itself to the truce of an imperfect memory. The worst part of the day, like a pendulum or opposing force, a reliable balance to the still and hushed mid-afternoon maintained and imposed by the house, was the time before the evening meal when the day was over and done and could not be brought back except long afterward when defections and failures were no longer so indelible: a time when something halfway done could not be finished, much less could something be started anew, an impatient time when remorse or annoyance stretched out, fingers fidgeted in pockets, hands took things from their places and put them back like inopportune memories or the indecision that undid deeds: come on, finish it or give it up or let it be tomorrow already.

In the afternoons during good weather when the shouts of neighbors’ children playing in Scheller Street could be heard in almost the farthest corner of the house, in the afternoons Katja would bring up a china platter covered by a white napkin and nothing else because Madame Helena’s imperious furnishings held an entire tea service and teapot with its heater already over the marble-topped table. Katja knocked on the door and waited for Madame Helena to open it or give her permission to open the door and enter, and every day during this bothersome interval she tried to adopt a friendly and willing but not servile attitude thanks to which Madame would tell just by looking at her that she was good and proper, someone without strange thoughts intervening in what others would never say was there; nothing perturbed her, and not only that, she felt a certain satisfaction in herself since she knew how to fulfill her duties well, while she watched her hands on the sides of the platter so that only the thumbs were visible, the fingers on the china hidden under the napkin, trying to remember if she had stuffed all her hair, all of it, under the cap, thinking about Wulda almost without trying, the way someone can blow out a candle without thinking, or put a key in a lock without thinking, or clean one’s shoes on a doormat without thinking, because earlier, by earlier meaning her first days in the boarding house on Scheller Street, Wulda was the one who brought the platter with the hot little sesame-seed breadsticks or the soft rolls with butter or whatever Lola had prepared for the afternoon; but one day two or three weeks after she had started, when she was still unsure of herself and trying to learn whether she would be staying or going, Madame Helena had come down to the kitchen at a time when she never appeared there, at two or three in the afternoon, and Lola, sitting at a white table covered with a white tablecloth writing down what she needed to buy in a notebook, had looked at her strangely and had not stood up: she had only stopped moving her hand on the white paper and waited. Madame Helena had said from that day on she, Katja, would be the one to carry the china platter up to her room in the afternoon, and only then had Lola stood up and said yes, from this afternoon, Madame, Katja will bring up the platter and not Wulda, and everyone had been very happy with that change, especially Wulda.

The afternoon of the day Madame Nashiru arrived at the boarding house on Scheller Street had been as quiet as it had become every afternoon since Madame Helena had taken over the house and turned it into the most elegant boarding house in the city. She imagined Madame Nashiru already unpacking in her rooms, suitcases open, things strewn about, where else but on the bed, the dressing table and the chest of drawers: dresses, coats, underclothing on chairs, open drawers, letters, gloves, photographs, but her jewelry already put away, and her shoes? perhaps barefoot on the bedroom rug with feet that she had not seen and did not want to think about—and Madame Helena stood to one side so Katja could enter through the door that she had just opened. Katja left the platter on the table and asked as always if Madame needed anything more and Madame Helena said no and thanked her and Katja left.

Some guests were in the dining room drinking tea or hot chocolate or coffee according to their preferences; young Gangulf had not arrived nor had Madame Esther, and Katja had to go down to the kitchen and come back up to bring tea to fat Simeoni and her daughter. Two cups with their saucers, a platter with little browned loaves, butter, marmalade, cheese, two French rolls, two glasses, a pitcher of water, teapot, sugar bowl, milk, cream, knives, spoons, tongs for the sugar, a wand to stir the tea, napkins, strainer, and lemon candies: she did not know how she could manage to carry up so much without exhaustion, climb the stairs without dropping anything, milk, china, water, and honey spilling on the stairway, the rug stained, the tray rolling down and destroying the afternoon silence like maddened drums. She told Lola she did not know how to carry up all that, and Lola laughed and told her exercise would be good for her, it would make her arms fleshy and robust and men liked that, the plump arms of a girl who worked, not those weak things of a consumptive little lady, but all that meant nothing because Lola always laughed and encouraged her and Wulda.

Almost as if Madame Helena were not there, as if she had gone out, as if she were not on the other side of her door sitting and drinking tea: it occurred to no one to call on her, visit her, or even think about her; downstairs some guests read, others spread marmalade on hot bread without looking; upstairs Madame Sophie scolded her daughter, who did not want to look down the hall to see if Katja was arriving with the tray, and the daughter stubbornly replied that it was still early. Madame Helena, sitting at the table with the marble top, waited for the tea to steep in the teapot. She had become fond of tea after she married; when she was young she never drank tea, then it had tasted as bitter as illness, the scent as thick as fever, the taste like pain and the lethargic weight of convalescence; it smelled of weakness, closed windows, low lights, and whispering. But in Linz the smell of coffee was mixed with the odor of the tobacco plant that riled her stomach and kept her trapped more than a malady would, so behind the windowpanes and the lace curtains she began to drink tea and kept drinking it after all that had ceased to be important to her: in the afternoon she prepared a full pot of tea and knew that when it was ready Katja would knock on the door carrying a platter with freshly baked rolls or bread, not because Katja was punctual but Lola was, as she had said when she had come to discuss employment. If a cook does not smell good, is not punctual, fast, tidy, happy, and a little impertinent, Lola had told her, she would not do as a cook; she might know how to cook but would not do as a cook, and sooner or later that would be obvious; Madame Helena had liked those opinions and had preferred Lola to the first assistant from the kitchen of the former Bieder house, who came magnificently recommended, because he was thin, bilious, and bald and had a sad face; just because of that and his way of dressing, and she had not been wrong. She poured the tea and it fell like a coppery stream into the white cup, and the steam rose up in a sudden, aromatic caress thick with herbs and smoke. She drank tea very hot without sugar, not like the Simeonis who used milk, honey, cream, sugar, boiling water, lemon, and whatever else occurred to them at the time until it became something that was not tea and, she supposed, they complained and fought while they drank the now lukewarm liquid. Tea and silence: in Japan, and it seemed to her that she had heard or read that in other Oriental countries as well, teatime was surrounded by a grand ceremony, a ritual that had to do with religion or love or both. If she were to ask Madame Nashiru about this, it would not be indiscreet, in fact, this question could lead to an interesting conversation for everyone that would have nothing to do with feet locked into boxes or those women who play lutes and recite poems in houses of ill repute. She had not been able to get pearl tea but what she ought not to do was ask Madame Nashiru about the pearls she used, although she had told her she drank any kind of tea, green or black, and Madame Helena had wondered how that could be. Would Madame Nashiru be down there having tea with the General and Mr. Pallud? Would young Gangulf arrive in time for a cup of tea today? The tea ceremony would include, how could it not, silence; not silence like the silence in the house in the afternoon but a silence with the rustle of silk or the beating of wings. She brushed away a dream with the wave of a hand, a sip, a movement of her head: the dream in which a woman walked barefoot in the shadows of a bamboo and paper room, trembling because she did not wish to but she would submit, while in the darkness someone waited for her, rapacious, brushing his trophy with the tips of his claws.