Going Ashore (17 page)

I didn’t talk about the war; there was no one to talk to. I didn’t mix with the people on the farm. They didn’t want to mix with me. There were six boarders besides us: a Hungarian couple named de Kende – dark and fat with gold teeth; and a family from Vienna with two children. The family from Vienna looked like rabbits. They had moist noses and pink eyes. All four wore the Salzburg costume, and they looked like rabbits dressed up. Sometimes I smiled at the two children, but they never smiled back. I wondered if they had been told not to, and if they had a list of instructions like mine: Don’t mix with Americans. Don’t talk to Army wives … We ate at a long table in the dining room, all of us together. There was a tiled stove in a corner, and the room was often so hot that the windows steamed and ran as if it were raining inside. Most of the time Walt ate with the Army. He was always away for lunch, and then I would be alone with these people – the Enrichs, the de Kendes from Hungary, and the rabbity family from Vienna. Only Mr. de Kende and his wife ever tried to speak to me in English. Mr. de Kende had a terrible accent, but I once understood him to say that he had been a wealthy man in his own country and had owned four factories. Now he traveled around Austria in an old
car selling dental supplies. “What do you think of that for Yalta justice?” he said, pointing his fork at me over the table. The others all suddenly stared at me, alert and silent, waiting for my reply. But I didn’t understand. All I could think of then was that my brother-in-law was a dentist, and I remembered how he’d taken me into his home when my mother died, and how kind he had been, and I had to hold my breath to keep from crying in front of them all. At last, I said, “Well, goodness, it’s quite a coincidence, because my sister happens to be married to a dental surgeon.” Mr. de Kende just grunted, and they all went back to their food.

I told Walt about it, but all he said was, “Don’t bother with them. Why don’t you get to know some Army wives?”

He didn’t understand how hard it was. We lived out of town, and I didn’t know how to go about meeting anyone on my own. I thought it was up to Walt to take me around and introduce me to people, but he had only one friend in Salzburg and seemed to think that was enough. Walt’s friend’s name was Marvin McColl. He and Walt came from the same town and had gone to the same school. He seemed to have more in common with Marv than with me, but they were the same age, so it seemed only natural. Walt wanted me to be friends with Marv’s wife, Laura.

He said we were going to be together a lot and it would help if we girls were friends. Laura was twenty-six. She had long hair and big eyes and always looked as if someone had just hurt her feelings. She had no girl friends in Salzburg, other than me. She hated foreigners and couldn’t stand Army wives. Three times a week, or more, Walt and I went out with the McColls. We went to the movies or drank beer in their apartment. Marv hardly spoke to me, except when he’d been drinking. Then he would get tears in his eyes and tell me I was the first and only girl Walt had ever taken seriously, and how they’d never thought Walt would ever marry. He said I was lucky to get Walt, and he hoped I’d make him happy.

“Dry your tears, Marv,” Laura would say, rather sarcastically. She would leave Walt and Marv together and take me to another part of the room, so that we could talk. Our conversations were always the same. I would talk about home, and Laura would tell me how much she hated Salzburg and how Marv didn’t understand her and her problems. Meanwhile, Marv and Walt drank beer and talked about people I didn’t know and places I’d
never been. On the way home, Walt would always ask me if I’d had a good time, and before I could answer he’d tell me again that Marv was his best friend and what a lot of fun the four of us were going to have together in Salzburg. I didn’t mind the evenings so much, but I didn’t care one bit for the afternoons I had to spend alone with Laura, because then she would curl up with a drink, girls together, and tell me the most awful things about her private life with Marv – the sort of thing my married sister would never have said. As for me, they could have cut my tongue out before I’d have talked about Walt. Naturally, I never repeated any of this to Walt. The truth was that he and I never talked much about anything. I didn’t know him well enough, and I kept feeling that our real married life hadn’t started, that there was nothing to say and wouldn’t be for years.

I don’t know if I was unhappy or happy in those days. It wasn’t what I’d expected, none of it, being married, or being an Army wife, or living in Europe. Everything – even conversation – seemed so much in the future that I couldn’t get my feet on the ground and start living. It seemed to me it had been that way all my life, and that being married hadn’t settled anything at all. My mother died when I was little, and my father married again, and then I went to live with my married sister. Whenever I seemed low or moody, my sister would say, “Wait till you grow up. Wait till you have a home. Everything will seem different.” Now I was married, and I still didn’t have a home, and there was Walt saying, “We’ll have our own place soon. You’ll be all right then.” I never told him I was unhappy – I wasn’t sure myself if that was exactly the trouble – but often I could see that he was trying to think of the right thing to say to me, hesitating as if he was baffled or just didn’t know me well enough to speak out. I was lonely in the daytimes, and terribly shy and unhappy at night. Walt was silent a lot, and often I simply burst into tears for no reason at all. Tears didn’t seem to bother him. He expected girls to be nervous and difficult at times; he didn’t like it, but he thought it was part of married life. I think he and Marv talked it over, and Marv told him how it was with Laura. Maybe Laura had been worse before they’d got the apartment. I know they had waited seven months, living in one room. Laura wouldn’t be easy in one room. Anyway, I don’t know where the notion came from, but Walt truly believed, if I was silent, or pale, or forlorn, that an apartment would make everything right.

I never thought about the apartment, except when Walt mentioned it. I wanted to be away from the farm, but I didn’t know where I wanted to be. Our room at the farm was small, cold, and coldly clean. We slept in twin beds. At night, after Walt left me and went back to his own bed and went straight off to sleep, I lay close to the wall, trying to imagine it was a wall somewhere else – but where? At my married sister’s, I had slept on a couch in the dining room. I didn’t want to be there again. The daytime was worse, in a way, because I had to be up and around, and didn’t know what to do with myself. I did a lot of laundering; I washed my sweaters until the wool matted. I’d always been clean, but now, being married, I felt I couldn’t get things clean enough any more. Walt had told me to go for walks. Once every day, at least, I set out for a walk, a scarf over my hair, my head bent into the wind. I never went far – I was afraid of getting lost – and I felt that I looked like a miserable cat as I skirted the muddy tracks on the road outside the farm. I had never lived in the country before, and it seemed crazy to just walk around with nothing special to look at. The sky was always gray and low, as if you could touch it. It seemed made of felt. The sky at home was never like that; at least, it didn’t press down on you. Herr Enrich said this was the Salzburg autumn sky, and that the clouds were low because they were holding snow. It was frightening, in a way, to think that behind all that felt there were tireless whirlpools of snow, moving and silent.

One afternoon when I was tramping aimlessly around the yard, I heard somebody singing. I couldn’t tell if the singer was a man or a woman, and I couldn’t make out the words of the song. But the voice was the nicest I had ever heard. I stood still with my hands pulled up into my sleeves, because of the cold, and I looked up to the top of the house, where the voice was coming from. I wondered if it was the radio in someone’s room, but then the singer stopped and sang the same phrase four or five times. The kitchen-maids were sitting on a bench in the yard, plucking chickens for supper in front of an open brazier. They stopped talking and listened, too, very still, and the yard was like one of those fairy tales where everyone is suddenly frozen for a thousand years. But then the voice stopped completely, and we became ourselves again, the girls working and giggling, and me trudging about on my eternal walks.

That night, Herr Enrich mentioned the singer. It was an American, a woman. Her name was Dorothy West. She had finished a concert tour in three countries and was here to rest. She was tired and didn’t want to meet people and was having all her meals in her room.

“She used to come to us before the war,” Herr Enrich said, looking conceited. “We are so pleased that she has remembered us and come back.”

I said, timidly, “I’m American, too. Maybe she’d like to just meet me.”

Herr Enrich said, “No, no one,” like a dragon, so, of course, I didn’t say more.

Every day, then, I heard Miss West. Her voice, deep and sure, filled the sky, and I heard her even in the woods far behind the house, where I dragged my feet on my dull walks. The people at the table told me she sang in French and Italian as well as English and German, but I didn’t recognize a thing. Having her there had made them somewhat friendlier with me; also, I was beginning to understand a little German. It made a nicer atmosphere, but not one you would call home. Some days, Miss West’s accompanist came out from Salzburg, where he stayed in a hotel. He was a small man in a shabby raincoat; it was a surprise to me that she should have anyone so poor. When he came, everyone was locked out of the dining room (the only really warm room of the house, because it contained the stove), and they worked together at a piano there. The accompanist had written a new song for her; that is, he had set a poem to music. The Enrichs stood out in the hall, where they could listen. Afterward, Herr Enrich told me it was a famous poem called “Herbsttag,” which meant “Autumn Day,” and he translated it for me. The translation was slow and clumsy, and didn’t rhyme the way a real poem should. But when he came to the part about it being autumn and not having a house to live in, I suddenly felt that this poem had something to do with me. It was autumn here, and Walt and I hadn’t a house, either. It was the first time I had ever had this feeling about a poem – that it had something to do with me. I got Herr Enrich to write it down in German, and I memorized the line, “
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr
.” The rest was all about writing letters and going for lonely walks – exactly the life I was leading. I wished more than ever that I might meet Miss West and tell her how much I liked her singing, and even how much this poet had understood me. I wanted to know someone outside my
marriage. I felt that I would never get to know Walt, partly because he was ten years older, but more simply because he was a man. It seemed to me that a girl friend was the only real friend you could have. I don’t know why I attached so much to the idea of Miss West: I thought that because I had liked her voice this gave me some sort of claim on her. I realize now what a crazy idea this was, but I was only nineteen and in a foreign country.

Soon after this, the first snow fell. It snowed in the night. In the morning, the ground in the yard outside was covered with a lacy pattern, the imprints of the feet of birds. There were hundreds of tiny birds, yellow and brown, in the woods behind the farm. They came from Finland and were going to Italy and had got lost. Herr Enrich found one frozen and brought it in while we were at breakfast. It lay on the palm of his hand. Its feet stuck foolishly in the air, like matchsticks. Its eyes were glazed.

Herr Enrich stroked the yellow feathers in its brown wings. “This is the smallest bird in Europe,” he said.

Walt never talked to anyone much, but this time he spoke up and said it was true: he had read it in the Salzburg paper. He got up and fished out the local paper from a pile on a bench by the stove and pointed to the headline. Herr Enrich read it aloud: “
SMALLEST BIRD IN EUROPE VISITS SALZBURG
.” I just sat and stared at Walt. I didn’t know until that minute that he read German or that he ever bothered to read the local paper. It wasn’t important after all, you don’t say to your wife, “Hey, I read German.” But I felt more than ever that I needed a friend, someone simple enough for me to understand and simple enough to understand me. The rest of the people at the table went on talking about the bird, and when they had finished discussing it and had all touched its frozen wings, Herr Enrich opened the door of the tiled stove and threw the bird inside. I looked again at Walt, but he didn’t seem to notice how horrible this was.

Mrs. de Kende, the Hungarian woman, smiled her toothy gold smile at me over the table, as if she sympathized. I had never liked her until then. We sat on after the others had left, and she leaned forward and whispered, “Come up to my room. We can talk.” I was glad, although she was too old to be a friend for me, and I really disliked her looks. Her hair was black and dry, and rolled in an untidy bun. There were always ends trailing on her neck. Her room was next to ours, but I had never been in it before. It
was stuffy and rather dark. She had an electric plate and a little coffeepot. “I creep up here to make coffee,” she said, shutting the door. “I can’t drink the stuff Frau Enrich makes. Don’t ever tell her I’ve invited you here.”

“Why not?”

“She might be jealous. She might take it as a slander against her coffee. She might think I was trying to get something from you; American coffee. She might make trouble. Much trouble.” She spread out her fat fingers to show how big the trouble would be. “You don’t know how people are,” she said. “You don’t know what the world is.”

I sat straight in my chair, like a little girl on a visit. I drank the coffee she poured for me. It tasted like tap water.

“Good?” she asked me.

“Oh, yes.”

I began to take in the room. It was littered with clothing. The bed wasn’t made; just the covers pulled over the pillows. From the back of a chair, a dirty cotton brassiere hung by a strap. The word “marriage” came into my head. It reminded me of something – a glimpse of my married sister’s bedroom on a Sunday morning, untidy and inexplicably frightening.