Franziska
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
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VI
VII
VIII
IX
Part Three
I
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VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Part Four
I
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IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Part Five
I
II
III
IV
V
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VII
VIII
IX
X
AFTERWORD
Also Available from Pushkin Press
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Copyright
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.
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