A Glove Shop In Vienna Read Online Free PDF

time-defying
bon mot
, but for something both less spectacular and more remarkable: a Great Love.
    Needless to say, in the matter of a Great Love there are bound to be elements of secrecy, of mystery… As a boy, overhearing the women gossip in my mother’s drawing room, the story bored me. A Great Love seemed to me in every way less interesting than the ability to swallow eighteen
Zwetschkenknodel
or throw pickled gherkins at the Imperial Guard.
    Now, close on half a century later, I was no longer quite so sure.

    The story of my Great-uncle Max’s Great Love is unusual in that it has not only a happy ending but a happy middle. The beginning, however, was sad.
    Max Bergmann was thirty-nine, unmarried, a successful solicitor, small, blue-eyed and just a little bald when he attended, on a historic night in May, a performance of
Rheingold
at the Opera House.
    Rheingold
, if you remember, is the first work in Wagner’s great operatic cycle,
The Ring
. Uncle Max, slipping into his box and bracing himself a little (for Wagner made him nervous) thus saw the curtain go up on what the programme referred to as ‘the underwater bottom of the Rhine’.
    The Vienna Opera at the time prided itself on the realism of its stage effects. Cardboard waves undulated laboriously from left to right and back again: jagged rocks pierced the watery gloom; undefined but undoubtedly sub-aquatic plants wreathed upwards towards the proscenium arch.
    And dead centre, triumphant, the
piece de resistance
: the three Rhinemaidens, lowered from steel cables to hang suspended some twenty feet above the stage.
    Mermaid-tailed, scale-covered, golden-haired – the size of half-grown hippopotami — they swayed and sang, immortal sirens of the deep, beckoning men to their doom.
    ‘
Weia Waga, Woge du Welle’
sang the centre maiden, a lady named Helene Goertel-Eisen, not because she was off her head but because that was what Wagner, in his wisdom, had given her to sing.
    The rest is operatic history. The ghastly twang of snapping steel; the orchestra, at first unheeding, pursuing its relentless Wagnerian
leitmotif
, then breaking into splintered sound, silence…
    While Helene Goertel-Eisen, pushing forty, topping the scales at one hundred and twenty kilos, came crashing to the ground.
    She was not, in fact, greatly hurt. Shaken, of course. Bruised. Angry; very. And the lawyer she called in to help her sue the Opera Company was Uncle Max.
    Max had been deeply upset by the incident. The vast, invincible figure hanging aloft in shimmering silver, and then the flailing limbs, the crumpled body, the broken mermaid’s tail rolling into the footlights…
    He never attended a performance of
Rheingold
again. And six months after the accident, he married Helene Goertel-Eisen.

    Whether my Great-uncle Max and my Great-aunt Helene were happily married I cannot say, for it was a question which, in the Vienna of my childhood, no one asked, let alone answered. In those days (when the infant Freud, I daresay, was still bowling his hoop along the Pfeffer Gasse) one wasn’t happily married. One wasn’t unhappily married either. One was married.
    Certainly my Uncle Max was very good to her. To the end, he called her his ‘Rheinmaderl’ and denied her nothing. As for my Aunt Helene, she gave up her career and settled down contentedly in the big yellow villa in the suburb of Hitzing which Max bought for her, furnishing it in the Makart style which was just sweeping Vienna: peacock feathers, shell ornaments and large numbers of small stuffed animals under glass. Freed from even the minimal restraints of her career, she was able to indulge her passion for Karlsbad plums and
Linger Torte
and became, even by current standards, not just very, but extraordinarily fat.
    After a year or two, being of a rather indolent nature, she brought her Cousin Lily to live in Hitzing, to take over the housekeeping.
    Cousin Lily belonged to that now extinct band of faintly-etched and unassuming