The Post Office Girl Read Online Free PDF

on a bench in the park, two, three feeble kisses, more pity than passion, then he says he wants to marry her as soon as the war is over. A tired smile is her only response; she doesn’t dare think that the war might ever end.
    And 1919—twenty-one. The war has in fact ended, but poverty has not. It only ducked beneath the barrage of ordinances , crawled foxily behind the paper ramparts of war loans and banknotes with their ink still wet. Now it’s creeping back out, hollow-eyed, broad-muzzled, hungry, and bold, and eating what’s left in the gutters of the war. An entire winter of denominations and zeroes snows down from the sky, hundreds of thousands, millions, but every flake, every thousand melts in your hand. Money dissolves while you’re sleeping, it flies away while you’re changing your shoes (coming apart, with wooden heels) to run to the market for a second time; you never stop moving, but you’re always too late. Life becomes mathematics, addition, multiplication, a mad whirl of figures and numbers, a vortex that snatches the last of your possessions into its black insatiable vacuum: your mother’s gold hair clasp off your neck, her wedding ring off her finger, the damask cloth off the table. But no matter how much you toss in, it’s no use, you can’t plug that black hellish hole, it does no good to stay up late knitting wool sweaters and rent all your rooms out and use the kitchenas a bedroom, doubling up with someone else. Sleep, though, that’s still the one thing you can’t begrudge yourself, the only thing that doesn’t cost money: the hours when you throw your spent, wan, now gaunt, still-untouched body on the mattress, unconscious of this ongoing apocalypse for six or seven hours.
    And then 1920–1921. Twenty-two, twenty-three years old, the flower of youth, it’s called. But she doesn’t hear that from anyone, and she herself has no idea. From morning till night, just one thought: how to get by, with money tighter and tighter all the time. Things have gotten just a touch better. Once more her uncle the privy councillor has helped out by going personally to his poker buddy in the postal administration to cadge a temporary postal worker’s position, in Klein-Reifling—a wretched hole in the wine country, but it’s permanent employment, it’s a foothold. The bare wage is only enough for one, but she’s had to take her mother in (her brother-in-law didn’t have room) and make everything stretch twice as far; each day still begins with making do and ends with counting up. Every matchstick is itemized, every coffee bean, every speck of flour in the dough. But you’re breathing, you’re alive.
    And 1922, 1923, 1924—twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six. Are you still young? Are you already old? Her temples show a scribble of a few fine lines, her legs are sometimes tired, in the spring her head aches strangely. But there’s progress, things are getting better. There’s money in her hand, hard and round, she has a permanent position as “postal official,” her brother- in-law is even sending her mother two or three banknotes at the beginning of every month. Now would be the time to try, in some small way, to be young again; even her mother is urging her to go out and enjoy herself. Her mother finally gets her to sign up for a dancing class in the next town. These thumping dance lessons aren’t easy, her fatigue is too much a part of her. Sometimes she feels her joints are frozen—even the music can’t thaw them out. Laboriously she practices the assigned steps,but she can’t really get interested, she’s not carried away, and for the first time she has a feeling: too late, toil has exhausted her youth, the war has taken it away. Something must have snapped inside her, and men seem to sense it, for she isn’t really being pursued by any of them, even though her delicate blond profile has an aristocratic look among the coarse faces, round and red like apples, of the village girls.