Little Apple (6 page)

The Professor sat back in his chair, smiling. He exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke.

"Oh, nothing much," he said. "It's just that my friend here insists on going to Moscow and killing a Russian officer."

A prey to the three girls' vacuous, uproarious laughter, his face convulsed with anger, shame and dismay, Vit¬torin strode from the room. He had been betrayed and derided. There was no point in his remaining a moment longer.

Outside in the hall, while the manservant was helping him on with his coat, which was still soaking wet, he had a brief conversation with Kohout.

"It was bound to happen, my friend, I could have told you that in the first place," said Kohout, shifting from foot to foot. "The middle classes have no self-respect, no guts. Didn't you notice how Feuerstein and the Professor made themselves scarce when we were singing those revolutionary songs? What a crew!"

Lola opened the box-room door an inch or two and peered in. Her brother was lying on his bed half-dressed, leafing through a notebook with a red cover. She went in.

"So you're awake," she said. "If I'd known you weren't asleep I'd have come much earlier. Do you know what time it is? Quarter to eleven. You didn't come home till one, Father heard you. Did you have a nice time? Good morning, by the way. Like me to bring you some breakfast?"

Georg Vit¬torin shut the notebook.

"No thanks, I'll be out in a minute. I've been awake for ages. Just revising a bit of Russian, a few words and phrases - the kind of stuff you need to make yourself understood. Did I have a nice time? Depends on your point of view. It was an instructive evening, anyway. Something bothering you, Lola?"

The subject she wanted to raise with him was very close to her heart. Herr Bamberger, the lodger, for whom she cherished the highest regard, had expressed an interest in her brother and wanted to meet him. It might prove an extremely useful contact, but she decided to start by speaking of matters to 'which she attached less importance.

"Franzi dropped in first thing this morning," she said. "She wondered if you'd meet her for lunch at the Domcafe. She's working right through, but she plans to take half an hour off around one, just for a snack. Why not join her? You haven't made a sign of life all week. She was going on about it like anything."

"I've been busy, she knows that perfectly well," Vit¬torin grumbled. "Interviews and appointments all day long - here, there and everywhere. Take yesterday afternoon: I had an important meeting in the 4th District. Half an hour later I had to be at the Café Splendide in Praterstrasse, then home to change and back to Prinz-Eugen-Strasse for yet another appointment — one long rush! Then there's the time I have to spend at the railway stations, standing there for hours on the lookout for POW trains. I need certain information. I have to make inquiries, and it's a job I can't leave to anyone else. Franzi knows that, so why does she keep pestering me?"

Lola was at a loss for an answer.

"Anyway, things are going to be different from now on," Vit¬torin pursued. "I won't have to hang around the stations any more. I've already found out 'what I wanted to know, and I've completed my preliminary discussions. Now I've got to work and earn some money. Is it really quarter to eleven already? High time I got dressed and went out — I've been lying here far too long. I mustn't fritter away another whole morning like this."

"You can afford to take it easy for another few days," Lola told him. "You needn't go back to work till the fifteenth, Father says."

"Back to the office and bang away at a typewriter?" Vit¬torin exclaimed. "I wouldn't dream of it. A hundred and eighty kronen a month, maybe two hundred next year if I'm lucky — you call that good money? I'd make more playing the violin in a cinema. Have you any idea how much people are earning these days?"

Lola perched on the edge of his bed.

"Listen, Georg," she said. "I meant to tell you this yesterday, but I hardly saw you. That cinema idea - you can't be serious. It's no kind of a job for people like us. I could sing for a living myself- my voice is good enough for a suburban music hall - and maybe I will, too. I'd sooner do that than marry Ebenseder." Her face darkened. "There was another row this morning, Georg. Father got terribly worked up - he's been so worried and irritable lately. I think they want to pension him off, you see, and he's only done seventeen years. It's awfully unfair, but don't let him know I've told you. He doesn't want it mentioned."

Herr Vit¬torin had been completely unbalanced by the nation's defeat, the collapse of the army, the overthrow of the monarchy and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Unable to come to terms with the way things were going, he had become dogmatic, argumentative, and convinced that everyone was persecuting him. Devoid of legal training and incapable of grasping the nature of complex fiscal regulations, he had committed numerous blunders and applied incorrect scales of charges when working out the tax demands for which his department was responsible. When hauled over the coals, he had jumped to the conclusion that he was the victim of political intrigue and defended himself in a manner that only aggravated his position: he submitted a memorandum to higher authority in which he heaped his immediate superior with grave accusations. He not only called the man a schemer, an incompetent ignoramus, and an embezzler of government funds, but charged him with corruption, moral turpitude, and conduct unworthy of a public servant. The authorities promptly launched an inquiry which found that these charges were wholly unjustified. Herr Vit¬torin was urged to take early retirement, but insisted that he had no grounds for so doing. "I shall fight to the bitter end. What's right is right and nothing can change it."

Accordingly, he was suspended from duty and the final decision on his case referred to a disciplinary tribunal. At home he strove to maintain the pretence that nothing untoward had happened. He continued to leave home at nine each morning, complete with briefcase, and returned on the stroke of half-past three. The intervening hours he spent in small, secluded coffee houses, where he read the newspapers and adorned any passages that aroused his displeasure with exclamation and interrogation marks in blue pencil. Having read the papers from end to end, he engaged in muttered soliloquies or drafted interminable pleas for submission to the disciplinary tribunal.

"Pension Father off?" said Vit¬torin. "Ridiculous, Lola, you're always looking on the dark side. How old is he? Only fifty-four last summer, right? Anyway, what was this row about?"

"Oh, Ebenseder, as usual. Father shouted at me, didn't you hear? 'It's outrageous, the way you treat that man - I don't know what you think you're playing at! It's a miracle he still sets foot in this house. A decent, dependable, respectable man like that, and you don't appreciate him! That's the way you've always been: silly and inconsiderate and vain and irresponsible. You just can't go on like this!' I burst into tears and ran out of the room - my eyes are all puffy, can't you see? I do feel so sorry for Father all the same. When you came home, Georg, I thought at least
you
would back me up . . ."

"You'll have to be patient, Lola," Vit¬torin said, looking harassed. "Of course you can count on me. Herr Ebenseder isn't my cup of tea either, but you know I've got to go. I won't be so preoccupied when I get back, which will probably be in four or five weeks' time. I'll go to Father and have it out with him. 'Lola wants nothing to do with Herr Ebenseder,' I'll say. 'Either he stops coming here or we both move out, Lola and I.' And if he refuses to give way ..."

Lola smiled. "You mean well, Georg, I know, but the situation isn't as simple as you think. We can't just walk out on Father, not now. That wasn't what I meant to talk about, though - I don't know how I got on to the subject. I had something quite different to tell you. The night before last, when I was sitting alone in the living-room and thinking of going to bed, someone knocked at the door. It was Herr Bamberger, our lodger. He wondered if I could spare him a minute. Of course, I told him. Well, the long and the short of it is, he's heard that you're fluent in French and Italian, and that you know all about customs regulations and the freight business, and he thinks you may be just the man he's looking for."

"Who told him I speak French and Italian? It strikes me as odd that he should be so well-informed about me — I've hardly exchanged a word with the man. Do you know him well?"

"I see him now and again, of course, because I clean his room. Herr Bamberger is a nice, quiet, retiring person. He seems to have taken a great shine to Vally - she chats to him sometimes. Perhaps it was she who told him about you."

"All right, go on. Where do I come in?"

"He has a lot of commercial dealings with foreigners -Italians and people from the Balkans. Up to now he's had to transact all his business in coffee-houses, but he'll have his own office from the first of next month. He's very keen to have a private word with you. He'd get plenty of applicants, of course, but in your case he knows who you are. He couldn't pay you much to start with, he says, because his own resources are very modest, but he's sure he'll make a success of things, and later on he'll offer you a partnership."

"Ah, I knew there'd be a catch! He wants me to work my fingers to the bone but he doesn't want to pay me anything. It's always the same old story: promises come cheap. How naive you are, Lola!"

"All the same, George, you ought to have a word with him some time. I'm not trying to talk you into it, of course — these things are a closed book to me — but if you're really set on giving up your job . . . Herr Bamberger makes a good impression, believe me. He looks like a man who knows exactly what he wants."

"Good heavens, it's gone eleven, I must dash! All right, I'll give your Herr Bamberger the once-over, but I'm pinning no hopes on him and I don't fall for empty promises. Human beings are unscrupulous swine, all of them, I know that now. One lives and learns, Lola dear, one lives and learns."

They were sitting side by side in a window alcove in the Dom-café. Franzi, who had finished her lunch, asked for a cigarette. Vit¬torin opened his case and held it out.

"I've still got a few Russian left - help yourself. They're the ones with the mouthpiece. Go on, take one. It's Crimean tobacco. In Siberia we also smoked Chinese tobacco. There was a very high-grade, expensive kind with an unusual aroma, but that was unobtainable. I only knew one man who smoked it."

Vit¬torin fell silent. He endeavoured to hold his cigarette in a special way, clamped between his ring finger and the tip of his little finger, but he couldn't do it properly and gave up.

"I must be back in the office by one," Franzi said, "but I've got a lot to tell you first. Do you know the latest? That young man from Agram got in touch again!"

Vit¬torin was drifting away from her, she could tell. She was no longer at the centre of his thoughts, she sensed that more and more distinctly every day and was frightened of losing him for good. Vaguely aware that some strange, hostile force was luring him away, she was determined not to give him up without a fight. Hoping to hold him and rekindle his waning love, she had boasted of imaginary flirtations and pretended that various men were ardently pursuing her. One of her most successful inventions, and the one she employed most often, was a Croatian medical student who tried to woo her in Viennese dialect. He had almost become flesh and blood, and she made him show up in Vienna as often as required. In addition to the Croatian student there was a sentimental giant, a courier from the Swedish Legation who sang superbly to the guitar, and a shameless young baron who wanted to install Franzi in an apartment and take her travelling with him.

"The young man from Agram?" Vit¬torin said absently. "The medical student, you mean? Is he back in Vienna?"

"Yes, just imagine, he called me at the office two days ago, even though I'd already forbidden him to do so twice - I told you, remember? I don't like being rung up by all and sundry, my boss might disapprove. Anyway, I said to myself, just wait, you Croatian pest, today you're going to get a flea in your ear, but he was so nice and amusing on the phone I hadn't the heart. 'Hello there, sweetheart,' he said, 'I can't wait to see you again. How are you, and how's that old scoundrel of a boss of yours?' He's terribly familiar on the phone, you see, because he knows I can't really tell him off."

Franzi paused for a moment. She searched Vit¬torin's face but failed to find what she sought. He was listening with an air of complete indifference.

"Well," she went on, "now for a little fun, I thought to myself, so I asked him, all innocent, 'Are you staying here long, Herr Milosh? Will you still be in Vienna on the first of December?' I haven't told you this, but my parents are planning a week-end trip to the country at the end of the month -you know, to visit my uncle, the one with the farm at Gloggnitz - and they're looking forward to it immensely. They leave on Saturday and they won't be back till Monday. I'm giving our old maidservant the day off and sending her home to her family, which means I'll have the apartment all to myself. I didn't say that to the young man from Agram -naturally not, because he might have got the wrong idea. And now comes the worst part. Guess what the fellow said?"

"Well?"

"He laughed and said, 'Of course I'll still be in Vienna on the first of December, sweetheart, why do you ask? Will you be all on your lonesome, by any chance? That would be terrific - I could pay you a visit.' Well, I was flabbergasted to think he'd figured it out so quickly. And then it occurred to me how nice it would be if
you
could spend the Sunday with me, Georg. You could simply tell your family you were going away for the day, and if the young man from Agram rang the bell you could go to the door and ask what he wanted, and he'd have to clear off. Wouldn't that be a laugh?"

Vit¬torin, looking at her, detected a timid plea and an unspoken promise in her eyes.

"We'd be together for a whole day, all by ourselves," she said softly. "We've never been that lucky before, Georg."