The Post Office Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

grandfather’s time, there’s been no one in the entire monarchy who could dress chamois horn or do game taxidermy like Bonifazius Hoflehner and Son. Her father prepared hunting trophies for the castles of the Esterházys, the Schwarzenbergs, even the archdukes, working with four or five assistants, painstakingly, exactingly, and honorably, from morning till late at night. But in times as deadly as these, when the only thing people shoot is people, no one comes in for weeks on end. Yet the daughter-in-law’s pregnancy, the grandson’s illness , it all costs money. The shoulders of the now taciturn man slump more and more, and they give way completely one day when the letter arrives from the Isonzo, for the first time not in Otto’s handwriting but his commander’s. Even without opening it they know what it is: a hero’s death at the head of the company, eternal remembrance, and so forth. The house becomes quieter and quieter; her mother has stopped praying, the light over the Virgin has gone out; she’s forgotten to fill it with oil.
    1916: She’s eighteen. There’s a new catchphrase in the household , used constantly: too expensive. Her mother, her father, her sister, her sister-in-law escape from their troubles into thesmaller-scale misery of the bills, from morning until night they reckon up their poor daily life aloud. Meat, too expensive, butter, too expensive, a pair of shoes, too expensive: Christine hardly dares to breathe for fear it might be too expensive. The things most necessary to a bare existence flee as though terrified, burrowing like animals into lairs of extortionate prices—you have to hunt them down. Bread has to be begged for, a handful of vegetables inveigled from the grocer, eggs brought in from the country, coal carted by hand from the train station: thousands of freezing, hungry women vie with one another in pursuit of quarry that’s scarcer every day. Her father has something wrong with his stomach, he needs special, easily digestible food. Ever since he had to take down the BONIFAZIUS HOFLEHNER sign and sell the business, he hasn’t been talking to anyone, he just presses his hands to his belly sometimes and moans when he thinks he’s alone. The doctor really ought to be called. But: too expensive, her father says, preferring to double up furtively in his distress.
    And 1917—nineteen. They buried her father two days after New Year’s; the money in the bankbook was just enough for them to dye their clothes black. It’s getting more and more expensive to live, they’ve already rented out two rooms to a pair of refugees from Brody, but it’s not enough, not enough, even if you slave until late at night. Finally her uncle the privy councillor finds a job for her mother as a caretaker in the Korneuburg Hospital and one for her as a clerk. If only it wasn’t so far—leaving at daybreak in an ice-cold train car and not back until evening. Then cleaning, mending, scrubbing, darning, and sewing, until, without thinking, without wanting anything, you fall like an overturned bag into a grudging sleep from which you’d prefer not to wake.
    And 1918—twenty. The war still on, still not a day to yourself without worries, still no time to glance in the mirror, to poke your head out into the street. Christine’s mother is beginningto complain, her legs are swelling up in the damp, uncellared ward, but Christine has no strength left for sympathy. She’s been living too long with infirmity; something in her has gone numb since she started having to type admission records for seventy or eighty atrocious mutilations every day. Sometimes a little lieutenant from the Banat toils into the office on his crutch to see her (his left leg is shattered), his hair golden-blond like the wheat of his homeland but terror etched into the still-unformed child’s face. In his quaint Swabian dialect he tells homesick stories (poor blond lost child) about his village, his dog, his horses. One evening they kiss