FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The Post Office Girlby Stefan Zweigtranslated by Joel Rotenberg
EACH DAY PASSES, dreary and without hope. The war is over but all that remains is poverty. It is 1926 and for Christine, now 28 and a lowly clerk in the pay of the Austrian postal service, her life is heading nowhere, hot on the heels of her now vanished youth. She knows she should be grateful for even having a job, but gratitude is not on her mind. Her father is dead; her brother was killed at the front and her mother is ailing. Vienna is two hours away by train, but it might as well be two hundred.
Austrian writer and leading Viennese literary figure Stefan Zweig was one of the great witnesses. He chronicled the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In common with Joseph Roth, he evoked the despair and the melancholy as well as the mood of his time. The title alone of Zweig's posthumous autobiography, Die Welt von Gestern, translated as The World of Yesterday, speaks volumes. He was also a well-known journalist and biographer. A close friend of Freud and Richard Strauss, he wrote accounts of their lives. He was also a gifted short-story writer. Chess Story is a brilliant piece.
The Post Office Girl is his second novel. Apparently he worked on it on and off for years. The opening sequences, which describe a beaten, depressed Austria, have all the irony of Roth. It soon develops into an extraordinary study of one young woman’s character as her circumstances shift between dramatic extremes. One day a letter arrives from her mother’s sister, a former fashion model whose life took various turns. This sister, Christine’s aunt, is now wealthy and living in the US. Suddenly, after long years of silence, she wants to see her sister and invites her to a hotel in Switzerland. Christine’s mother is far too frail to travel; the girl will have the holiday.
For Christine, it is like an invitation to heaven. This is an extraordinary narrative, impossible to put down. It is as if the reader is standing in the room. The mother and her daughter have a good friend, a school teacher from the next village. He is a quiet, shy man whose wife is ill; “all the doctors have given up on her case” and his children are staying with relatives.
Throughout this novel Zweig demonstrates his feel for characterisation; the meticulous little school master, defeated yet hopeful, is one of several touches of genius. His quiet devotion to the young girl is hinted at; while his wife is still alive he will say nothing. Several people agree to look in on Christine’s mother, but it is obvious that he is the only one who will keep his word.
The little man carries the girl’s shabby suitcase to the train station. There, he gives her a present, and quickly he corrects himself, saying it is merely something that may come in useful. “Surprised, she opens the long handmade paper construction. It’s a map of her route from Linz to Pontresina . . . All the rivers, mountains and cities along the train route are microscopically labelled in black ink, the mountains shaded in with finer or coarser hatching corresponding to their altitude and with meter figures shown in tiny numerals, the rivers drawn in blue pencil, the cities marked in red: distances are indicated in a separate table at bottom right, exactly as on the Geographical Institute’s large maps for schools . . . Christine blushes with surprise. Her pleasure encourages the timid little man and he produces another small map” – it even includes the hotel where she’ll be staying.
THE JOURNEY through the Alps is as breathtakingly described as the scenery. Zweig places the girl in a world that surpasses her imagination. Hard work is replaced by indolence and leisure. Her arrival at the hotel becomes a social initiation. With expensive, borrowed clothes, make-up and a new hair style, the girl is transformed. Having been physically reinvented, she acquires confidence and soon is part of the busy social set that inhabits the hotel. It becomes easy to conceal her origins and allow wealth to become her right. There is nothing moralistic about Zweig’s handling of this transformation. With each day, the girl acting more like a teenager than a woman in her late 20s is increasingly drawn into a new world and identity.
Romance becomes both a possibility and a threat. Her aunt’s generosity begun almost as a project begins to sour when her own secrets are threatened with exposure.
To liken this devastating narrative to a fairy tale is simplistic and misleading. It is all too plausible. Christine’s eager delight in becoming accepted is touching as is her childlike tussle with romance, its temptation and its dangers. Zweig presents her as a greedy child. This hunger becomes her downfall; she not only forgets to thank her aunt, she forgets about her dying mother back in the Austrian village. The influence of Thomas Mann begins to take over from that of Roth. Christine will be found out, her aunt’s secret may be safe, but the older woman is not taking any chances. The girl’s holiday comes to a brutally abrupt end.
Back home, more grief is waiting. But even harder to bear is her increased contempt for her world and the people in it. During a visit with her sister in Vienna, Christine watches as her brother-in-law has a chance encounter with one of his old friends from the war. The pal had a tougher war and has had a harsh life since. The embittered veteran tells his story and also that of Austria. His rage enables Christine to voice her discontent. Here are characters rebelling against fate and its choices.
Not for nothing was Zweig a friend of Freud’s. The more she listens to Ferdinand rail against his life, the more Christine sees a kindred spirit. It proves a strange awakening. Zweig is brilliant on the squalor of reality. His life begun in wealth in Vienna turned to flight from the Nazis. He and his second wife died in a suicide pact in Brazil in 1942, which confers a slightly sinister tinge to part of the novel.
In part a dark romance, a study of chance and brutal realism, The Post Office Girl is ultimately a psychological journey concerned with choice. Whether or not the manuscript as found after Zweig’s death is as he intended it, the final book remains a mystery. There is an ambivalence about it; or perhaps there is none – all of which adds to the drama of a wonderfully convincing, atmospheric novel that shimmers with a strange conviction.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times