The Forever Street by Frederic Morton

Author:Frederic Morton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

XXI

BY 1913 THE TWINS, now past twenty, had long since moved to the flat at No. 6 Turk Place left empty by the Schalls’ departure. But Conrad still had his morning coffee in the dining room of the parental apartment at No. 5. At 7:30 AM sharp Resi would bring in a tray with two cups of coffee, four rolls and a copy of Wiener Tagblatt, which Conrad would read backward. He would start, chortling, with the classifieds on the final page that advertised “Sequestered Waiting Rooms of Doctors for Secret Diseases.” After a few minutes Resi would poke her head in from the kitchen door, to nod at the second cup of coffee getting cold. Where was Herr Ferdinand? Skipping breakfast again?

“Oh, you know him,” Conrad would say. “Up at dawn to blast the swineherds.” And he’d drink the second coffee himself.

By “swineherds” he meant Serbia, that unruly chieftancy of hog raisers which racketed against the southeastern border of the Habsburg realm. Compared to the Empire, the hog-raisers’ kingdom was puny and primitive; but that didn’t keep them from coveting the imperial province of Bosnia-Herzegovina next door. They tried to rouse the Bosnians against Austria with whoops and roars about the Slav heritage they both shared. As countermove, Austria fortified Bosnia’s allegiance by literally electrifying it: wiring its cities and linking Bosnian progress to Habsburg heraldry. The covers of all utility manholes, for example, featured a central bronze panel with the imperial seal. And the panels were forged in bas-relief at the Turk Place factory.

Just before his retirement Councilman Novak had planted Schall’s adaptation of the seal on the right desk of the Public Works Ministry. Whereupon Berek Spiegelglass had received an order for thirty-seven hundred quadrangles of imperial blazonry to grace every access to sewage or electric lines throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina.

None of the machines at Turk Place could stamp out so intricate a design. On the other hand, few workers were able to hand-punch an engraving thick enough to withstand road usage, as was necessary for the Bosnian item; and those few workers who could tired fast. Ferdinand didn’t tire. A massive six feet three, he “blasted the swineherds” all day long by clanging metal onto metal. He began at 6 AM, long before anyone else, and as he worked through the morning, he never lost track of a whisper flowing beneath the clangor, namely the river of his father’s breath.

He knew that Berek stayed in bed late and that toward 9 AM he was likely to be sleeping in an empty apartment, unprotected. That was when Hester always sipped tea with her daughter in the roof garden of No. 6. Cook Resi was out shopping. As for Conrad, he had a habit of being shocked by his watch at eight-thirty; he’d throw his paper down and run off to the factory office, often leaving the parental apartment wide open. At that point anyone could get at Berek.

Ferdinand still had not rid himself of the image of the dead piglet on the pillow, next to his father’s dreaming face.

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