The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig

Author:Stefan Zweig [Zweig, Stefan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Romance, Fiction
ISBN: 0954221729
Publisher: Sort Of Books
Published: 1982-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

All night Christine sits motionless in the chair by the table, her thoughts revolving dully around the feeling that everything is over; not an actual pain so much as a drugged awareness of something painful going on deep down—the way a patient under anesthesia might be aware of the surgeon’s knife cutting into him. She sits there in silence, empty eyes on the table, but something’s happening, something beyond her benumbed awareness: that new creature, the manufactured changeling that had taken her place for nine dreamlike days, that unreal yet real Fräulein von Boolen, is dying in her. She’s still sitting in that other woman’s room, with that other woman’s pearls around her frozen neck, a bold slash of red lipstick on her lips; the beloved dragonfly-light gown is still on her shoulders, but now it’s like a winding-sheet. It’s no longer hers, nothing here, nothing in this other, exalted, more blessed realm belongs to her anymore, it’s all as borrowed and alien as on the first day. Nearby is the bed, smoothly made up with its white flowered coverlet, soft and warm, but she doesn’t lie down: it’s no longer hers. The gleaming furniture, the gently suspiring carpet, the brass, silk, and glass on every side, none of it belongs to her now. The gloves on her hands, the pearls around her neck, everything belongs to that other one, that murdered doppelgänger Christiane von Boolen who is no more, yet lives on. She tries to push the artificial self aside and find the real one again; she forces herself to think about her mother, keep in mind that she’s sick or maybe even dead, but no matter how she prods she can’t muster any pang or feeling of concern. One feeling drowns out all the others, a boundless rage, a dull, clenched, impotent rage without outlet or object (her aunt, her mother, fate), the rage of someone who has suffered an injustice. All she knows is that something has been taken from her, that now she must leave that blissfully winged self to become a blind grub crawling on the ground; knows only that something is gone forever.

She sits all through the night, frozen with fury. None of the life of the hotel reaches her through the upholstered doors; she doesn’t hear the untroubled breathing of sleepers, the moans of lovers, the groans of the sick, the restless pacing of the sleepless, doesn’t hear through the closed glass door the morning breeze that’s already blowing outside; she’s aware only that she’s alone in the room, the building, all of creation, a bit of breathing, twitching flesh like a severed finger still warm yet without feeling or strength. It’s a cruel death-in-life, a gradual freezing to death; she sits rigidly as though listening for the moment when that warm von Boolen heart will finally stop beating. Morning comes after a thousand years. The staff can be heard sweeping the hallways, the gardener is raking the gravel in front of the hotel.

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