Franziska E-Book

Ernst Weiß

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Following the death of her mother, Franziska turns away from love and follows a grimly determined path to achieve a career as a concert pianist. Her determination takes her from her humble home in a small Czech town to an unconventional life in Prague, and eventually draws to a destructive climax in pre-war Berlin. Franziska is a fascinating exploration of character, an alluring treatment of the power of music and of a woman's obsession. Ernst Weiss' second novel was published in 1914 and was highly regarded by Franz Kafka, with whom Weiss was in regular contact.

Leseprobe

ERNST WEISS

FRANZISKA

Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

Contents

Title Page

Part One

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

Part Two

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

Part Three

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

Part Four

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

Part Five

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

AFTERWORD

Also Available from Pushkin Press

About the Publisher

Copyright

FRANZISKA

Part One

I

AMOTHER LAY DYING.

The whole room was full of the aura of death. No one moved. The dim light of dawn lay outside the windows like mist, peering in with white eyes. The mother’s breath was fading. Franziska went over to the piano, took the two candles off the music stand and placed them at the old woman’s head, quietly and very tenderly; the thin glass candle-holders chinked with a bright, silvery sound. Then stillness fell in the room again, gathering like a heavy cloud in a narrow valley.

The sick-nurse lit the candles. The woman’s daughters stood back.

Now only her twitching mouth still moved in her already fixed and mask-like face, breathing hard, passionately, in tormented haste. Then the old woman’s breath grew calmer, sinking into itself. Unutterable silence took them all by the throat.

The nurse turned away. Franziska went to her mother, tidied her damp grey hair, very softly closed her eyes like a child’s. Her sisters stood in the doorway, trembling. That was all; only the crucifix was missing, lying hidden in the heavy folds of the blanket at the dead woman’s feet. Franziska put it in her mother’s hands, and then she herself leaned over the bed, sank to her knees, felt her sisters’ breath on the back of her bowed neck, closed her eyes and pressed her forehead to her mother’s now terribly still breast. She stayed there a long time; then she stood up, and so did her sisters.

The nurse beckoned to them, and they went into the next room. Minna, the youngest, turned back again at the door. In bewilderment, she threw herself on the dead woman’s pale hands, hands that had once been so severe and now had no will of their own, carried them to her mouth, kissed them, and looked at them as if she were seeing them for the first time: an old woman’s poor, sick hands, their lines and wrinkles still showing the grime of hard physical labour, bearing the marks of a life of toil like handwriting in dark ink on a white background.

Then the three sisters stood face to face, looking at one another like strangers.

Not a word, not a tear. Something mysterious had happened, and last night could never be undone.

Their mother’s heart had been weary and worn out for a long time, but only last night had it rebelled, making her hit out and strike her breast again and again, her pulse beating in her very fingertips. Then it was as if a fist had punched her in the eyes; suddenly she saw a red light as tall and broad as a wall. Red darkness before her, red darkness behind her. Where had her children gone, where was the room she had lived in for decades, the little town outside the windows, the old lamp above the old table?

The girls’ mother had pulled the tablecloth towards her, opening her mouth wide in the grip of indescribable fear.

Henriette the teacher looked up in alarm from her school exercise books, which fluttered down into the folds of her dress. She uttered a cry, and Franziska froze in the midst of her passionate, elated piano-playing. Trembling, their mother pushed something evil away from her with hands that clenched uncertainly. Then she collapsed, heavily yet very gently.

In an instant Franziska was beside her, bending over her, but her mother was murmuring distractedly in a strange, shy, girlish voice; she turned her head aside, and one eye, unmoving in the infinite dark, stared blindly at her daughter. The red darkness had grown yet more obscure; all was night.

Only Franziska shed no tears. She took her mother’s helpless hand and led her to her bed. Then she hurried away to call the doctor, but he was unwilling to come until next morning. So her mother couldn’t see anything, just a red light? He felt certain that she must have been reading a little while earlier, it was only some disorder of the eye—or no, not even that, a mere weakness. Couldn’t it wait until morning?

Franziska hurried back. Of course it was just as the doctor had said. Yes, it could wait until morning! Only ten more hours of anxiety and uneasiness, but the doctor was sure of himself; her mother couldn’t see any more, but there was no danger.

No danger? Yet her mother’s face was not what it had been yesterday. Her eyes were closed, she was asleep. Perhaps irreversible darkness dwelt in the depths of those eyes. Dreadful as blindness was, however, there were even worse things. What did this stillness mean? Why this frozen sleep? What did it mean when her mother drew breath with unspeakable difficulty from the depths of her breast, dragging herself laboriously through the twilight hour by hour? But then her breath came more and more easily, faster and faster—the three sisters sighed with relief—it was gliding along, like someone racing in haste down wide paths, up flowering mountains, his eyes shining, and then pressing his hand to his sweetly trembling heart, as if he stood radiant in the embrace of the sudden blaze of the noonday sun, delighted to reach his journey’s end, holding his breath in amazement.

The sisters had hurried to the sick woman as she sat up, hands rigidly thrust out as if to ward something off, her blind eyes seeming to see some supernatural sight. Then she sank back again, and faint breath came back into the mother’s breast, as if from much too far away. Another soul was running its race with death in the darkness of the night.

Around three in the morning Franziska hurried off to fetch the doctor for the second time, but now he was not at home. The weather was harsh, and there had never been so many sick people as now. His pony-trap was just bowling down the road. So Franziska ran to the priest, who knew the old woman and had already given her Extreme Unction during a sudden illness two years ago. His mild demeanour calmed them all. The heady scent of incense made the sisters sleepy, the unconscious woman seemed to smile when he anointed the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet with his holy oil. Her frozen gaze turned human again in the light of the consecrated candles. And with the priest came the nurse, unasked-for but welcome, for she stayed.

The dreadful silence imposed by that savage fist was gone, and so was the terror of running a relentless race, for other people now knew what was going on. Everything would pass, nothing ever happened for the very first time, and so it became an everyday act of death, the ordinary end of the story of an ordinary life.

II

HENRIETTE AND MINNA were weeping: Minna passionately, like a child crying her whole heart and soul out; Henriette like a weary, depressed woman with many years of toil behind her, a woman with few hopes, a great burden of work, and no friends.

Franziska stood at the window and felt her heart beating stormily. She couldn’t weep, not just now, not in this mercilessly grey daylight, with only the wall between her and the woman who might perhaps still be able to hear her.

The nurse quietly opened the door. Her smile conveyed sympathy, understanding, and a wish to give comfort. Her grave gaze made all pain an everyday event, bounded by the four white walls of the room where a simple woman had died an unassuming death.

Beside the deathbed, two large candles rose from tall brass bowls filled with sand. The other lamps had been extinguished and stood at the open window, looking insubstantial and unobtrusive.

Franziska folded down the music-rest on which her Beethoven sonata from the previous evening still stood open. The old piano sighed. Minna had placed a little bunch of cowslips gathered in the woods yesterday on her mother’s bedspread.

Franzi saw that she was still crying.

At that moment she fervently wished she could shed such tears herself. She would have liked to founder silently in them, dissolving for ever in that pain which resembled the pain of the whole world; she longed to forget herself entirely, if only for a second, and for that one second at least to belong to the dead woman and devote herself wholly to her mother, as she had never been able to do in life.

The nurse had left the sisters alone, and was walking about the kitchen with her heavy tread. She felt at home here now, but the dead woman’s daughters did not. They did not raise their voices and never took their eyes off their mother’s mouth, which wore a stern, almost sardonic smile.

“Oh, to be out of here … just for an hour!”

“Franziska!” said Henriette gravely.

“Can’t you understand? I must go out. I’ll sit with her all day and all night after that.”

“Then I’ll sit with her tomorrow,” said Henriette.

“And I will … for the last time, the last day,” said Minna, in tears.

The table was laid in the kitchen. Frau Reichner the nurse had found the three girls’ sets of cutlery, and held their mother’s old, black-handled knife, fork and spoon in her own hard, bony hands. That took the sisters’ breath away. But the nurse was smiling, although it was a humble and submissive smile. After they had eaten, she went back into their dead mother’s room, pushed the chairs and table against the wall, and asked them to get their mother’s best dress out of the wardrobe. Now it lay there, shimmering with the glow of violet silk, slightly faded and very soft, letting the living noon-day light flicker over its old-fashioned flounces, little glass beads and crumpled bows. When Frau Reichner took it in her hard, greedy fingers, the old dress trembled.

I won’t love anyone ever again, thought Franziska, and then no one’s death can hurt me.

The moorland outside the little town was still grey and stony, covered with undergrowth and dead branches that seemed to be embracing the last of the snow in their thin arms.

Slowly, the sisters climbed to the hill. A light mist rose from the moors and crept after them, laying its grey hand on the stony paths and distant slopes, and all that had been harsh looked soft and yielding.

“What are we going to do now?” asked Franzi.

“Let’s not talk about that today,” said Minna.

“Why not? Is this some special holiday?”

“Franzi! Don’t you ever think of anyone but yourself? With our mother barely cold in her …”

“Oh, words. If Mother were … were still here, I’m sure that’s what she’d be discussing too: can the three of us stay together or can’t we?”

“How can you ask? You know how things are—or don’t you? If you’re heartless enough to raise the subject on a day like this then you’d better speak frankly—and I’ll answer you just as frankly: you can’t go on living as you do now. I’m ready to work harder than ever, I’m already at school from early in the morning until late evening; I’m prepared to work forty-two hours a week. As for you, Minna, you’ve never had a moment to yourself, you’ve done all the work about the house, you’ve spared our mother any trouble, and all free, all without any payment …”

“Don’t talk about it, Henriette,” said Minna.

“But this concerns you, dear Minna,” said Henriette. “All we can afford to rent now is one room and a small kitchen. And however large the room may be, it will hardly be big enough to take the piano. You see, Minna, Franzi’s piano will have to go to leave room for your bed.”

“Are you telling me my piano must go?”

“I don’t say so out of spite, Franzi. You started this yourself. I wouldn’t have stirred up old disagreements today. We’re already in difficulties. I earn a little money, there’ll be a salary of seven hundred miserable gulden, but only when I’m finally fully qualified. Well, I will be some time. Soon, maybe. But what’s such a sum between three people? You tell me! We can pinch and scrape, make do and mend, the arithmetic still doesn’t work out. I’m tired. When I get home in the afternoon I’d like a little rest. But you’re always at that piano. Well, I think, I can’t help thinking: one of us earns our daily bread, one of us stands over the stove, but the third …”

“Ah, yes, the third,” said Franzi, with an ironic smile. “You needn’t say it. I know. I don’t want to live on your miserable money. Not for a single day. That’s why I wanted to talk to you now …”

“Oh, talk!” said Henriette. “What use are all these words? I’ve told you a thousand times. If Mother didn’t like to tell you, at least someone must speak to you frankly. I mean, where is all this leading? What use is all your work? If only you’d been to teacher training college too! How else can we face our future now?”

“And I mean,” said Franzi, “it doesn’t have to be like that. I can earn my living even without going to teacher training college, though maybe not here.”

“Oh no, Franzi,” said Minna. “Whatever happens, we must stay together. I’m sure that’s what Mother would have wanted.”

“No,” said Henriette. “Three is one too many.”

“I know that. I never wanted to live at the expense of you two. I consider Henriette’s seven hundred gulden sacrosanct. So what am I to do? What’s to become of my piano? I suppose you can chop it up and burn it for firewood in winter. And perhaps someone will employ me as a shop-girl. Only during the day, though. I’ll come home in the evening … and maybe you’ll have some warm corner by the stove for me?”

“Oh, Franzi,” said Minna, “whatever are you thinking of? We wouldn’t let you sleep in a corner.”

“There’s only enough to feed two,” said Henriette.

“Very well, then let me tell you two my plan,” said Minna. “I shall leave. I’ll go to Prague. I’ll go into service with decent people. Small children like me. I can …”

“No,” said Henriette. “I can’t allow that. You—a servant? No, that’s impossible!”

“But I won’t be doing it here. No one will know. I won’t be putting you to shame.”

“That’s not the point. Are you really serious?”

“What have I been here if not your servant? Henriette teaches at the school, you play the piano, what’s left for me?” She smiled. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be no worse off than I am here.”

They had reached the top of the wooded hill. The moorland, far below, shone like grey silk among the tall green trees. The earth smelled of spring, the whole grey February world breathed spring-like scents, and a gentle rain was falling. It caressed the long, greyish needles of the pine trees, suddenly turning them dark green and shiny.

Franziska took Minna’s hand. They said nothing, but walked back to the little town and the old house where their mother lay in the shadow of the church. When they reached it they saw the two big candles for the dead shining at the window in the early spring weather.

“Write to tell me when you get there,” said Franziska quietly, “and then … then I’ll come to see you.”

“Oh, never mind about that,” said Minna. “I’m not doing it for the sake of you two—or for your sake alone, Franzi.”

She began to shed tears as she went up the wooden steps, but no one, not even Minna herself, knew whether it was because her mother was dead, or because she, a girl with a middle-class upbringing, must now work as a servant.

III

AS FRANZISKA WENT TO THE STATION with her sister, she felt, to her own surprise, that she was looking forward to the moment when she would be entirely alone in her own four walls, looking forward to the first night alone in her room, and it seemed to her as if the world would be wider then, as if she would be sleeping in a distant land, inside a tent or under the open sky.

But Minna was crying, and her hands shook as they said goodbye. The train came in. Franziska kissed Minna on the lips. Minna’s arm around her neck felt so heavy, so demanding, was so disconcertingly affectionate that she feared she would never be free of it again. But that was only for a moment; then the wheels of the train squealed and it pulled out. Minna waved a white handkerchief out of the window of her compartment, and from a distance her face, although swollen with tears, seemed to be laughing.

As it happened, Franziska had only ever loved a single person, her father: as a child, as an adolescent girl, and then in her memory. She couldn’t imagine ever leaving someone she loved.

For two sleepless nights at the time of his death, the first sleepless nights of her young life, she had wished him back into existence with all the violence of her tears, back into life beside her, back into the flowering day. With him, she felt, the whole living world had died.

Only music still lived on. Nothing spoke to her as the old piano did, she never revealed her mind to anyone as she did when, alone in the dark room, she let the notes intoxicate her. Her father had given her her first lessons; when he died she was on her own. She had inherited his ability to improvise, and could spend hours extemporizing on some image or memory. Ideas came to her of their own accord; she often closed her eyes, or looked at the church with the delicate grille over its windows to make it harder for sparrows and pigeons to nest there. She would play for a long time without thinking at all, and thought anyone who wanted to could play like that. It gave her happiness, a faint kind of happiness, but happiness all the same.

When she was fifteen one Herr von Kornhen, an impoverished aristocrat who had been working as a sales representative for an insurance company, died suddenly.

Franziska happened to pass the church where the body was laid out before burial; there was a touch of mystery about the circumstances of the man’s death, and some people spoke of suicide, but the priest, who had been a good friend of his, was able to reconcile a church funeral with his own conscience.

Franziska’s dress brushed past the church porch. There was deathly silence in the tall building, and Franziska thought of the dead man lying there outstretched in his open coffin, with the rope in a noose around his neck or the mark of the fatal bullet on his forehead.

Her mother had forbidden her to attend the funeral mass, but Franziska couldn’t resist. She found a frisson of dread alluring.

Green darkness lay over the nave of the church; grey clouds of incense hovered in the air with heavy fragrance. The dead man’s son was kneeling beside the coffin, which in fact was closed. He was slender, with curly blond hair, and the way his small, white hands shook as he held them above the dark wood was more touching than any tears. Sweet organ music came down from the organ loft, little bells rang. The chirruping of birds flying up was light as a cool wind.

Franziska shuddered. She slowly retreated, her face always turned to the altar where pale candles burned. With a last glance she saw the old priest gently helping the young man to his feet. She dreamed of that fine, pale, boyish face. Her nights and her piano playing were full of it for a long time. His name was Erwin. The following year a woman musician, a foreigner, came to the small north Bohemian town and gave a recital in the dance-hall of its only inn. Franziska was impressed when she heard the first notes of the violin; after the first movement of the first sonata, however, she was deeply moved, trembling with excitement, and turned so pale that her mother, taking her in a firm hold, made her go home. Franziska never forgave her for that.

From that day on she thought she saw that she lacked the elemental strength for creativity, that she would never be able to rise above the moment, its sorrows and its joys, and that her semi-spontaneous improvising meant the certain ruin of her art.

She forced herself not to touch the keyboard for three weeks and then, at an age when others already had moderate achievements to their name, started to study the first systematic rudiments of playing the piano all over again.

Her ailing mother had engaged a young country girl to help with the heaviest of the work about the house. Franziska persuaded her to dismiss the girl, let Franziska herself do the work, and pay her what she would have paid the maid.

IV

YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE UNTHINKING ENERGY. Franziska knew nothing about life, nothing about art; she thought she could conquer both with her bare hands. She used the money she had earned to pay for piano lessons from an old organist who had once been an organ virtuoso in Leipzig, but Torvenius was as devoted to drink as to music, and the flexor tendons of his left hand had been cut with a broken beer glass during a brawl in a tavern. Now that he had been obliged to come home to the town of his birth he wished to avenge himself on life for doing him such an injustice, and his revenge consisted in drinking himself unconscious almost daily and beating a little dog called Orla, although the dirty, semi-feral animal was the only creature he loved, and he showed his affection for it in clumsy caresses.

He envied, hated and despised Franziska. Only the bitterest, most dire need could induce him to help her. He intended to torment her by setting her the most difficult exercises, but a character like Franziska’s knew no weariness. When she had been washing clothes until late at night in the damp laundry-room, or hauling baskets of coal and wood up the stairs from the cellar, she still found time to practise and to read theoretical books and scores. Anything seemed to her easy by comparison to the three weeks she had spent weaning herself off her free improvisations. For those had provided her only truly cheerful, happy times. It was wonderful, better than anything, to play what came into your mind, really play it, taking ideas of the beauties of this earth and her memories, half-dreams, and casting them into the evening silence like coloured balls in a game, finding the sweetest of notes on the keys with delicate fingers, yet suddenly shivering at the sound of an entirely new, incredibly wonderful harmony that was gone next moment, blown away by the wind as if it had never been, while the Biblical figures of which her father had told her walked over the lowered music stand on the piano: the Prodigal Son hesitantly knocking at the wooden door, welcomed in by loving chords; or Ruth walking blissfully over the rough stubble of the fields in the autumn sun; the Mother of God always stretching out her arms into the void with invisible tears in her eyes; Lot’s wife turned to a pillar of salt and standing on a sand dune in the desert, dwindling to an ever smaller figure in the rain. Later, after those three weeks of starvation, she could not understand how she had once come to unite music with the Biblical memories of her childhood.

He father’s own figure too became more and more translucent, like Lot’s wife, and so did the memory of the blond boy in the black-draped church. At seventeen Franziska felt that her first youth was already far behind her, a domain that she had left for ever, long since gone beyond retrieval.

Yet even now there were days when life as still wonderful. For everything she experienced, every moment flying past on shimmering wings, was hers alone, every step she took drew her on into unutterable distances, the outskirts of the dark forest were far away, so were the trembling lights coming on in the spring dusk in the little town in the valley, everything fell into her rough, work-worn hands. When she played a Bach fugue, a Haydn scherzo, a Beethoven sonata she felt as if she were hearing it for the first time, as if the music belonged to her alone. And as she walked under the sky with its distant stars, beneath trees where the night hung, she sensed the sweetly ineluctable moment, accepting it in the depths of her soul because she knew it would never come again.

There are people who are so strongly attached to themselves that they would rather not commit themselves to any other human being, instead giving themselves to nature and the infinity of the inanimate. They sink into it, intoxicated by silence, the mists, the fragrance of the forest.

And when a railway train thundered out of the dark woods beside the path, as if stamping on giant feet and shining in the thousands of golden sparks that streamed from the conical funnel of the engine, like a swarm of bees rising from a sunbaked hive in the garden, when the flame suddenly shot up from that funnel and rose high above the windswept tree-tops in dense, red smoke, then Franziska’s strong, virginal heart rejoiced to meet an invincible power, for she felt she was truly alive.

When the heavy train had rolled away into the distance she suddenly felt tired. Her room at home called her, the room where her mother had died and which would now be hers. And in it stood her mother’s bed, where she would sleep tonight and for all the nights to come.

Henriette was not home yet, but food had been left in the oven. Minna thought of everything. And what was she thinking of now?

Franziska didn’t want anything to eat; she felt as if she could nourish herself on sleep alone, inhaling it like an intoxicating aroma. When she knew she was falling asleep she longed for a dream, and immediately felt her tired eyes fixing on a vision. First she saw her mother standing in front of her, a black stocking around her neck, smiling gravely. Then she wasn’t standing at all but dragging herself over the ground, and she dragged her daughter down too, seizing her vigorously when Franzi wearily tried to resist. And as she went along she kept digging her way into the earth. The end of the stocking now trailing after her on the ground was really made of iron and gouged out a deep channel, her mother was holding a cutlery set with black bone handles and a thin silver spoon, which she wanted to bury in the earth. “You won’t be needing these any more,” said her voice. “Minna’s gone, and you others don’t deserve them.” Suddenly she pointed behind her with a terrible expression of ill-will, and there was her father too, pale and wearing an eyeshade, trying to stow away the gleaming black ocarina he always used to play in his breast pocket. Although it had been lying quietly on a green velvet cushion in a glass case, the instrument suddenly broke three months after his death,. Then many more figures came, including living people who had simply left the town. A little boy whom she had known when they were children held an empty cotton reel in his hand. Twilight surrounded all these figures, and their footsteps sounded like murmuring voices.

Suddenly a blazing flame rose ahead of them. All faces were turned up, everyone was delighted, amazement and jubilation showed in all eyes. There was a desert all around them, a few palm trees trailed their lower fronds on the sand, which was damp with the night air, a deep and beautifully flowing melody like the sound of a stream came from behind a sand dune, and now Franziska saw herself sitting alone in the dimly lit room, sober again and believing herself back in reality. But the music went on. She heard herself improvising on the piano, felt more and more new notes receiving her with outstretched arms, more and more new harmonies. The old piano was walking along too on its three legs, although with difficulty, trying to reach the blazing pillar of flame like all the rest of them, while her mother stood closest to it, almost in the middle of the bright, singing blaze, her pale face thrown back with a blissful expression, and all the fine folds and wrinkles of her features gleamed like golden threads. Then Franzi suddenly felt everything slowly sinking, disappearing far, far away, and she woke up. Henriette was standing in the doorway, shining a lamp into the room.

V

NIGHTS OF SUCH DREAMS passed by like clouds above Franziska’s life, but were not reflected in it, for when did the sun and the stars ever cast their reflection on a rough country road? A voice in her mind said, “Forward!”, never mind where to. From one stage of her art to the next, from one laboriously saved pfennig to another. Every spare hour into which she pitilessly crammed more work seemed a gain, every difficulty that she overcame a positive joy, every day was wealth.

The first and last thing, death, remained beyond her comprehension.

She did not put it into words, she felt it: I am not among those who can die. Perhaps I will be some day, but then I’ll be waving to the Franziska of today from the opposite bank, another human being will be left behind, one existence will end and another begin.

One day she was waiting in the pouring rain for her piano teacher Torvenius. She stood in the porch of his small house, looking out at the lawn in the tiny front garden. In the air that was so pregnant with spring, it seemed to be visibly growing. At last Torvenius arrived carrying a suitcase. There was a strange gleam in his eyes, and his hand shook as he unlocked the case.

But Franzi never thought about other people; she played the piano. Torvenius said nothing and watched her. The sonata was finished. Franzi turned to him, waiting for his verdict. He got to his feet, opened the case, and took out the body of his dog.

Everything dies, thought Franzi. Yesterday the dog was running around, chasing past the pedal of the piano with a gnawed bone. Now the animal of today seemed to her a different dog, a double of the live one. But both made her shudder.

“So what now? People will say I beat Orla to death,” said Torvenius. “But I never touched the dog. The little brute used to howl when I just came through the door. The wretched creature howled for pleasure. Parrots live to be a hundred and fifty, but dogs must die like men. Don’t they, Orla, what do you say?’ And he bent over the lifeless animal, which had obviously died of sheer old age, and removed a white cloth that he had wrapped around its neck. No one ever discovered why he had been carrying the dog about in his case. Perhaps he had meant to bury it somewhere.

Torvenius went away next day and did not return for some weeks. Franzi took over his piano pupils. Then he suddenly reappeared in the town. He was no longer drinking, but it was now, curiously enough, that people avoided him, openly showing their dislike. At last the owner of a cinematograph theatre took him on to play the piano. The breathless audience was spellbound by the shimmering screen, and no one listened to the music or noticed anything wrong with the tendons of the pianist’s right hand. Franzi sometimes met him in the street. Now he greeted her meekly, even followed her and tried to talk to her, but Franzi felt that she hated him. She disliked him as much the two dogs he now had, and it was so obvious from her expression that he turned away again without a word. Next evening Franzi would see him in the cinematograph theatre. A tropical landscape, trees moving in the wind, dark boats, water glittering brightly and oars dipping—it all passed her by. Torvenius sat at his piano, his head flung back, his eyes half closed. Reflections of the changing light trembled around his tormented face. At that moment it looked beautiful to her, illuminated by an inner flame. But only for a moment.

Those hours in the cinematograph theatre, which held shows on Saturday evenings from seven to nine, were Franziska’s Sunday. For she didn’t observe Sunday any more, and since she had stopped going to church she no longer believed in God.