The Post Office Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

But these postwar seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds aren’t waiting quietly and patiently, waiting for someone to want them and take them. They’re demanding pleasure as their right, demanding it as impetuously as though it’s not just their own young lives that they’re living but the lives of the hundred thousand dead and buried too. With a kind of horror Christine, now twenty-six, watches how they act, these newcomers, these young ones, sees their self-assurance and covetousness, their knowing and impudent eyes, the provocation in their hips, how unmistakably they laugh no matter how boldly the boys embrace them, and how shamelessly they take the men off into the woods—she sees them on her way home. It disgusts her. Surrounded by this coarse and lustful postwar generation she feels ancient, tired, useless, and overwhelmed, unwilling and unable to compete. No more struggling, no more striving, that’s the main thing! Breathe calmly, daydream quietly, do your work, water the flowers in the window, ask not, want not. No more asking for anything, nothing new, nothing exciting. The war stole her decade of youth. She has no courage, no strength left even for happiness.
    Christine sighs as she pushes her thoughts aside. Just thinking about the horrors of her early life makes her feel tired. All the trouble Mother has caused! Why leave now and go visit an aunt she doesn’t know, be among people she isn’t comfortable with? But my God, what can she do? That’s what Mother wants and it would make her happy if she went, so Christine really shouldn’t fight it. And why fight it anyway? She’s so tired, so tired. Slowly, resignedly, the postal official takes a sheet offoolscap from the top shelf of her desk, folds it carefully in the middle, puts a sheet of ruled paper underneath as a guide, and writes, in a clear, clean hand with lovely shading, to the postal administration in Vienna, asking that, for family reasons, she immediately be permitted to begin the vacation to which she is legally entitled and requesting that a substitute be sent next week. Then she writes to her sister in Vienna, asking that she obtain a Swiss visa for her, lend her a small suitcase, and come out so they can discuss a few things having to do with their mother. And during the next few days she slowly, carefully gets everything ready for the trip, without joy, without expectation, without interest, as though this were not her life but just more work and responsibility.
     
    Preparations have been going on all week. The evenings are spent in energetic sewing, mending, cleaning, and fixing up of old clothes; and her sister, instead of buying anything new with the dollars Christine sent her (better to save the money, was her anxious thought), has lent her some things from her own wardrobe—a canary-yellow travel coat, a green blouse, a mosaic brooch that their mother bought in Venice when she was on her honeymoon, and a small straw suitcase. This will do, Christine thinks, in the mountains you don’t dress up, and whatever she’s missing, if it comes to that, would be better bought once she’s there. At last the day comes. The schoolteacher from the next village, Franz Fuchsthaler, carries the flat straw suitcase to the station himself; he doesn’t want to miss this chance to do a favor for a friend. A scrawny little man, anxious blue eyes hidden behind spectacles, he showed up at the Hoflehners’ to offer his help as soon as he heard the news; they’re the only people he’s friendly with in the remote vineyard village. His wife has been in the state hospital for tuberculosis at Alland for more than a year—all the doctors have given up on her case—andboth his children are staying with relatives elsewhere; so almost every evening he sits in silence in his two lonely rooms, making modest little objects with the care of a craftsman. He puts plants into herbaria, inking the names in calligraphy (red for the Latin, black for the German)