The End of Days

INTERMEZZO

But if her grandmother had left for the Vienna Woods just half an hour later to gather firewood; or if the young woman who was so eager to cast her life aside had not, after leaving her grandmother’s locked door to wander through the city, taken a right turn from Babenberger Strasse onto Opernring, where she coincidentally encountered her own death in the form of a shabby young man; or if the fiancée of this shabby young man had not broken off their engagement until the next day; or if the shabby young man’s father hadn’t left his Mauser pistol in the unlocked drawer of his desk; if the young woman hadn’t looked from behind like a girl of easy virtue because her skirt was just too short — why in the world had she cut it half a year before; or, given how cold it was, if she’d crossed Babenberger Strasse in the icy spot despite the danger of slipping (instead of protecting herself from this danger with healthy instincts only to run right into the arms of death moments later with all her limbs intact), indeed, if she had slipped and fallen, perhaps even broken a leg, then she would have been brought to the Vienna General Hospital to have her leg set in plaster, instead of several days later, in the bloom of health, succumbing to a violent death of her own choosing and winding up in a chilly storage room; or if the frigid weather sweeping in from Sweden had given way to the warm Gulf stream two days earlier, then her grandmother wouldn’t have needed to go to the Vienna Woods until that Wednesday, or the puddle wouldn’t have been frozen, and when the young woman came to the end of Babenberger Strasse, she would certainly have made the decision to cross the street at that point and walk past the Vienna Museum of Fine Arts, which would have been closed that Sunday evening — she’d once seen a picture there of a family consisting of a father, grandmother, and child — and at that moment, she would have been thinking not about having herself shot, but about the lemon the father was holding out to the child, that brightly glowing bit of yellow in the dark painting that, during these hours when the museum was closed, was now hanging on a wall unseen. Who decides what thoughts time will be filled with? Only half an hour, or perhaps an entire hour later, becoming conscious that her only option for a bed that night was at her parents’ apartment, she would have turned around, would have walked down the Ring, but this time in the direction of home, since she wouldn’t have had the money for a taxi, and while her homeward journey would still have taken her past the opera house, the young man would have no longer been waiting there on Opernring, he would long since have been lying — for the price of two pounds of butter, fifty decagrams of veal, and ten candles — in the arms of some girl of easy virtue, while she herself would have gone home unmolested, would to be sure have been obliged to ring the concierge’s bell, waking her, and then to ask her mother to pay the twenty-heller fee, for which her mother would have reproached her, but these reproaches would only have strengthened her resolve to start earning her own money as soon as possible so as to finally be able to move out of her parents’ apartment and rent a room of her own. But the decisive moment was probably not the one that had just passed, it was everything that had come before. There was an entire world of reasons why her life had now reached its end, just as there was an entire world of reasons why she could and should remain alive.

*

The decision to move out of her parents’ apartment is one she would have made that evening in any case, whether it was sitting with a broken leg in the waiting room of the General Hospital, in the Vienna Woods with her grandmother’s rucksack strapped to her back, or on her grandmother’s sofa, shivering beneath a thin blanket after her grandmother offered to let her spend the night. If you can’t go up, you’ll have to go down — but if you can’t go across, you still have to go across. Most probably, though, she’d have been lying at home in her own bed, and in the other bed would be her sleeping sister: this little sister who was already five foot seven; and if she’d been certain that her sister’s slumber, though restless, was nonetheless sound, she would have gotten up again to retrieve her diary from its hiding place behind the wardrobe and with a small pencil — writing in the dark, blind — she would have written an entry about everything that had happened. Just as at the age of fourteen, in the midst of hunger, she had resolved not to let hunger blackmail her any longer, she would now have resolved, in the midst of her unhappy love, not to let herself be blackmailed by unhappy love. If she had managed to avoid the one place in Vienna and the one moment of the evening that could have translated her desire to cast her life away into a death, she would now have realized, while writing in her diary, that in fact writing was the only thing she wanted to do to make money, and she would have started to consider how and what she could write, and so for the first time in this entire week of misery she would have been thinking about something other than the man she loved and her own shame and unhappiness.

The next morning she would have no longer have been able to decipher what she’d written, since in the darkness of the night before, she’d have inscribed half and whole letters one on top of the other in a single line. The shabby young man would have remained hale and unscathed, and a few years later, at twenty-five, he would already have developed a bald spot. Her grandmother would not have fallen down the cellar stairs, and more than a decade later she would have hidden her granddaughter for several days when she was threatened with arrest; but under these circumstances, her father would not have postponed his own death and would have died on March 2 of this same year, just five weeks after this night, of heart failure. Standing beside his grave, his older daughter would involuntarily have thought for a second time of the lemon the Gothic father held out to his child — whether it was a boy or girl was uncertain — in the midst of all that darkness. She would have taken possession of her father’s excerpts from Notes on Earthquakes in Styria and, weeping as she wrote, used them for her very first article: “May the earth gape open once more and swallow up the war profiteers!” For although her father died in his bed — of myocardial insufficiency, the doctors said — she was convinced that in the end he had died of the war.

Her mother would have been paid the March installment of her husband’s salary, which at that moment was just enough for the current week’s groceries.