had to be paid in compensation to hush it up.
Only Crescenz stood unmoved, like a patient cab-horse in the rain, in the midst of this stormy tumult. She took no one’s side, ignored all changes, didn’t seem to notice the arrival of strangers with whom she shared the maids’ bedroom and whose names, hair-colour, body-odour and behaviour were constantly different. For she herself talked to no one, didn’t mind the slammed doors, the interrupted mealtimes, the helpless and hysterical outbursts. Indifferent to it all, she went busily from her kitchen to market, from market back to her kitchen, and what went on outside that enclosed circle did not concern her. Hard and emotionless as a flail, she dealt with day after day, and so two years in the big city passed her by without incident, never enlarging her inner world, except that the stack of blue banknotes in her little box rose an inch higher, and when she counted the notes one by one with a moistened finger at the end of the year, the magic figure of one thousand wasn’t far off.
But Chance works with diamond drills, and that dangerously cunning entity Fate can often intervene from an unexpected quarter, shattering even the rockiest nature entirely. In Crescenz’s case, the outward occasion was almost as ordinary as was she herself; after ten years, it pleased the state to hold a new census, and highly complicated forms were sent to all residential buildings tobe filled in by their occupants, in detail. Distrusting the illegible handwriting and purely phonetic spelling of his domestic staff, the Baron decided to fill in the forms himself , and to this end he summoned Crescenz to his study. When he asked for her name, age and date of birth, it turned out that as a passionate huntsman and a friend of the owner of the local game preserves, he had often shot chamois in that very corner of the Alps from which Crescenz came. A guide from her native village had actually been his companion for two weeks. And when, extraordinarily, it turned out that this same guide was Crescenz’s uncle, the chance discovery led on the Baron, who was in a cheerful mood, to further conversation, in the course of which another surprising fact came to light: on his visit to the area, he had eaten an excellent dish of roast venison at the very same inn where she was cook. None of this was of any importance, but the power of coincidence made it seem strange, and to Crescenz, for the first time meeting someone who knew her home here in Vienna, it appeared miraculous. She stood before him with a flushed, interested face, bobbed clumsily, felt flattered when he went on to crack some jokes, imitating the Tyrolean dialect and asking if she could yodel, and talked similar schoolboy nonsense. Finally, amused at himself, he slapped her hard behind with the palm of his hand in the friendly peasant way and dismissed her with a laugh. “Off you go then, my good Cenzi, and here’s two crowns because you’re from the Ziller valley.”
In itself this was not a significant emotional event, to be sure. But that five minutes of conversation had an effect on the fish-like, underground currents of Crescenz’s dullnature like that of a stone being dropped into a swamp: ripples form, lethargically and gradually at first, but moving sluggishly on until they slowly reach the edge of consciousness. For the first time in years, the obdurate and taciturn Crescenz had held a personal conversation with another human being, and it seemed to her a supernatural dispensation of Providence that this first person to have spoken to her in the midst of the stony maze of the city knew her own mountains, and had even once eaten roast venison that she herself had prepared. And then there was that casual slap on the behind, which in peasant language represents a kind of laconic courtship of a woman. Although Crescenz did not make so bold as to suppose that such an elegant and distinguished gentleman had actually been expressing any
Only Crescenz stood unmoved, like a patient cab-horse in the rain, in the midst of this stormy tumult. She took no one’s side, ignored all changes, didn’t seem to notice the arrival of strangers with whom she shared the maids’ bedroom and whose names, hair-colour, body-odour and behaviour were constantly different. For she herself talked to no one, didn’t mind the slammed doors, the interrupted mealtimes, the helpless and hysterical outbursts. Indifferent to it all, she went busily from her kitchen to market, from market back to her kitchen, and what went on outside that enclosed circle did not concern her. Hard and emotionless as a flail, she dealt with day after day, and so two years in the big city passed her by without incident, never enlarging her inner world, except that the stack of blue banknotes in her little box rose an inch higher, and when she counted the notes one by one with a moistened finger at the end of the year, the magic figure of one thousand wasn’t far off.
But Chance works with diamond drills, and that dangerously cunning entity Fate can often intervene from an unexpected quarter, shattering even the rockiest nature entirely. In Crescenz’s case, the outward occasion was almost as ordinary as was she herself; after ten years, it pleased the state to hold a new census, and highly complicated forms were sent to all residential buildings tobe filled in by their occupants, in detail. Distrusting the illegible handwriting and purely phonetic spelling of his domestic staff, the Baron decided to fill in the forms himself , and to this end he summoned Crescenz to his study. When he asked for her name, age and date of birth, it turned out that as a passionate huntsman and a friend of the owner of the local game preserves, he had often shot chamois in that very corner of the Alps from which Crescenz came. A guide from her native village had actually been his companion for two weeks. And when, extraordinarily, it turned out that this same guide was Crescenz’s uncle, the chance discovery led on the Baron, who was in a cheerful mood, to further conversation, in the course of which another surprising fact came to light: on his visit to the area, he had eaten an excellent dish of roast venison at the very same inn where she was cook. None of this was of any importance, but the power of coincidence made it seem strange, and to Crescenz, for the first time meeting someone who knew her home here in Vienna, it appeared miraculous. She stood before him with a flushed, interested face, bobbed clumsily, felt flattered when he went on to crack some jokes, imitating the Tyrolean dialect and asking if she could yodel, and talked similar schoolboy nonsense. Finally, amused at himself, he slapped her hard behind with the palm of his hand in the friendly peasant way and dismissed her with a laugh. “Off you go then, my good Cenzi, and here’s two crowns because you’re from the Ziller valley.”
In itself this was not a significant emotional event, to be sure. But that five minutes of conversation had an effect on the fish-like, underground currents of Crescenz’s dullnature like that of a stone being dropped into a swamp: ripples form, lethargically and gradually at first, but moving sluggishly on until they slowly reach the edge of consciousness. For the first time in years, the obdurate and taciturn Crescenz had held a personal conversation with another human being, and it seemed to her a supernatural dispensation of Providence that this first person to have spoken to her in the midst of the stony maze of the city knew her own mountains, and had even once eaten roast venison that she herself had prepared. And then there was that casual slap on the behind, which in peasant language represents a kind of laconic courtship of a woman. Although Crescenz did not make so bold as to suppose that such an elegant and distinguished gentleman had actually been expressing any
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