The Tongue Set Free by Elias Canetti

Author:Elias Canetti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Espionage

The apartment we lived in was a small place on the third floor of 73 Scheuchzerstrasse. I can only recall three rooms in which we moved; but there must have been a fourth and smaller room, since we once briefly had a maid.

We had a hard time with maids, however. Mother couldn’t get used to there not being maids here as in Vienna. A maid was called a “house daughter” and ate at the same table with her employers. That was the first condition that a girl stated upon coming in. Mother, in her high-handed way, found that unbearable. She had always treated her maids well in Vienna, she said, but they lived in their own room, which we never entered, and they ate by themselves in the kitchen. “Dear Madame” was the normal way to address one’s employer in Vienna. Here, in Zurich, that was gone, and Mother, who liked Switzerland because of its attitude, could not resign herself to the democratic ways, which reached to the very heart of her household. She tried speaking English at the table, rationalizing it to Hedi, the “house daughter,” by saying that the two little brothers were gradually forgetting it. It was necessary, Mother said, to at least refresh their knowledge during meals. That was true, but it was also a pretext for leaving the “house daughter” out of our conversations. She was silent upon hearing the reason, but she didn’t seem offended. She was silent for a couple of days, but how amazed was Mother when, at lunchtime, Hedi corrected a mistake that George, the youngest, had made in an English sentence. Mother had let the mistake pass, but Hedi corrected it with an innocent expression.

“How do you know that?” Mother asked, almost indignant. “Do you know English?”

Hedi had had it at school and understood everything we said.

“She’s a spy!” Mother said to me, later on. “She’s infiltrated our home! There’s no such thing as a maid knowing English! Why didn’t she tell us earlier? She’s been eavesdropping on us, that awful creature! I will not let my children sit at the same table as a spy!”

And now she remembered that Hedi hadn’t come to us alone. She had shown up with a gentleman, who had introduced himself as her father and had scrutinized us and the apartment, inquiring very thoroughly about his daughter’s working conditions. “I could tell right away he wasn’t her father. He seemed like someone from a good family. He interrogated me as though I were looking for work! I couldn’t have asked more rigorous questions in his place. But he was no housemaid’s father. They’ve planted a spy in our home.”

Now there was absolutely nothing to spy on in our apartment, but that didn’t bother her, she ascribed an importance to us that would have justified espionage. Cautiously, she took counter-measures. “We can’t dismiss her right away, that would look funny. We have to endure her for two more weeks. But we’ve got to be on our guard.

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