Heart's Wings: And Other Stories by Gabriel Josipovici

Author:Gabriel Josipovici [Josipovici, Gabriel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781847778802
Publisher: Carcanet
Published: 2011-07-31T21:00:00+00:00

Volume IV, pp. 167–69

She was born in a small Austrian village a few miles from Salzburg. Her father was a baker and the smell of warm bread stayed with her to the end. It was not a good time to be born: 1928. She was the only child. Her mother died during the war, of fear and malnutrition. Her father went on baking. In 1946 she entered the University of Vienna. Obscurely, she already knew what her life would be like.

She took a degree in modern languages and then found a job in a big cement factory, dealing with the foreign correspondence. She saw the refugees pouring through Vienna but made no comment. Her stories had begun to appear in student magazines, and then in the more adventurous literary journals, in Berlin as well as Vienna. They were quiet stories, impersonal, level in tone. But their quietness masked an unease; or rather, affected the reader with unease by their very freedom from all sense of it. At the time they were described as ‘pure’, as ‘classically calm’, but their very purity seemed somehow to throw doubt upon the very possibility of classicism. All in all, a surprising literary venture in the hectic climate of those post-war years.

After only a few months she left her lodgings near the factory and went to live with a painter. They had known each other at university. He was older than she was and had been married before. Shortly after this she gave up her job, but the greater freedom this allowed her did not seem to affect her writing one way or the other. Her stories continued to appear, at the rate of one, or at most two, a year. Quietly, they made their mark.

Four years, almost to the day, after she had moved in with the painter she paid a visit to her father, the baker. She sat in the back of the shop, as she had done as a child, and watched him at work. Afterwards, they shared a meal. Then she went back to Vienna, packed her bags, and caught the train for Rome.

The painter did not try to follow her. He knew it would not be any use, felt even that somehow, somewhere, he had always known it would happen. From Rome she wrote to him, saying that the absence of German in the air soothed her. ‘My words on the white paper always look unreal,’ she wrote. ‘Now their unreality is justified.’ He would have liked her to say ‘at least’ – ‘is at least justified’ – but that of course she would never do, ‘is justified’ was all he could expect from her. Indeed, he would perhaps have been disappointed with anything else.

Her stories grew simpler, purer. As though she would force reality to manifest itself by isolating the very essence of that which it was not. She lived alone, in a small but comfortable flat in Trastevere. Her stories had been published in many countries now. In

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