A Sorrow Beyond Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

how?
    How she would have loved to be really frivolous! And then she actually did something frivolous: “I’ve been frivolous today, I’ve bought myself a blouse”. All the same, and that was a good deal in those surroundings, she took to smoking and even smoked in public.
    Many of the local women were secret drinkers; their thick, twisted lips repelled her: that wasn’t the way to show them. At the most she would get tipsy, and then she would drink to lifelong friendship with everyone in sight, and soon she was on friendly terms with all the younger notables. Even in this little village there was a kind of “society”, consisting of the few who were somewhat better off than the rest, and she was welcome in their gatherings. Once, disguised as a Roman matron, she won first prize at a masked ball. At least in its merrymaking, country society thought of itself as classless—as long as you were NEAT, CLEAN, and JOLLY .At home she was “Mother”; even her husband addressed her as “Mother” more often than by her first name. That was all right with her; for one thing, it corresponded to her feeling about her husband: she had never regarded him as anything resembling a sweetheart.
    Now it was she who saved. Her saving, to be sure, could not, like her father’s, mean setting money aside. It was pure scrimping; you curtailed your needs to the point where they became vices, and then you curtailed them some more.
    But even in this wretchedly narrow sphere, she comforted herself with the thought that she was at least imitating the
pattern
of middle-class life: ludicrous as it might seem, it was still possible to classify purchases as necessary, merely useful, and luxurious. Only food was necessary; winter fuel was useful; everything else was a luxury.

    If only once a week, she derived a pleasurable feeling of pride from the fact that a little something was left over for luxury. “We’re still better off than the rest of them.”
    She indulged in the following luxuries: a seat in the ninth row at the movies, followed by a glass of wine and soda water; a one or two-
schilling
bar of Bensdorp chocolate to give the children the next morning; once a year, a bottle of homemade eggnog; on occasional winter Sundays she would whip up the cream she hadsaved during the week by keeping the milk pot between the two panes of the double windows overnight. “What a feast!” I would write if it were my own story; but it was only the slavish aping of an unattainable life style, a child’s game of earthly paradise.
    Christmas: necessities were packaged as presents. We surprised each other with such necessities as underwear, stockings, and handkerchiefs, and the beneficiary said he had WISHED for just that! We pretended that just about everything that was given to us, except food, was a present; I was sincerely grateful for the most indispensable school materials and spread them out beside my bed like presents.

    A budgeted life, determined by the hourly wages she totted up for her husband, always hoping to discover a forgotten half hour; dread of rainy spells, when the wages were next to nothing, which he passed in their little room talking to her or looking resentfully out the window.
    In the winter, when there was no building, her husband spent his unemployment benefits on drink. She went from tavern to tavern looking for him; with gleeful malice, he would show her what was left. She ducked to avoid his blows. She stopped talking to him. The children, repelled and frightened by her silence, clung to their contrite father. Witch! The children looked at her with hostility; she was so stern and unbending. They slept with pounding hearts when their parents were outand pulled the blanket over their heads when toward morning the husband pushed the wife into the room. At every step she stopped until he pushed her. Both were obstinately mute. Then finally she opened her mouth and said what he had been waiting to hear: “You beast! You