274
PAR.TISAN R.EV IEW
"At least our climate's still wonderful. What if we only had winter?
Or only summer? Harmony is so important! And we've certainly got it
here. How lucky we are!"
Her husband looked hard and long at her.
"Yes, in fact someone was saying that just a while ago, in the news–
paper line. Spring is like a gift of nature! Not youth any longer, but still
a rebirth, eh? A real provocation."
His wife took off her glasses, put them on the heap of papers , and
looked down into her cup. After a few moments of silence, she began to
whisper. Yes, whisper.
"Do you still know when Franz Joseph died?"
"Eh? What's got into you now?"
"I don't know, just a bit of nonsense. I'm mixing things up. Well ,
you used to say he was a tolerant emperor."
The husband smiled. He was familiar with these morning antics.
Signs of tenderness and support for his studies. She did not ask him
anything about his work; she knew it would only annoy him before he
set off for the library. Anyway, he always talked about it again in the
evemng.
But in the morning she usually found various coded expressions
to
indicate that his work obsessed her, too.
"In fact, I was thinking: when did Caesar, Nero? I mean, when did
they ... ? And what about Franco, or Salazar? Mussolini I know - it
was in the spring, wasn't it? And it was the same with the Fuhrer: he set
fire to himself in the spring. But that other guy with a mustache, the
Georgian, he croaked in March. I couldn't possibly forget it. Is it the
siege of spring? Or like a whirlwind. Something unstoppable."
The husband tugged at the pile of papers, laying his gold-rimmed
glasses beside the cup. The woman primped her hair, gray and tight at
the back of her head.
"Yes, a siege, as you say. The onslaught of change. Something uncer–
tain, unstoppable. Let me read you a little story from today's paper. Just
let anyone say nothing ever happens here."
He smoothed the corner of the tablecloth. The woman stood up,
breadbasket in hand. He looked at her. The day's moment of peace .
Breakfast gave him strength. It was a calm reference point at the start of
a new day, before all the running and jostling around, the lines, library
cards, letters
to
the authorities, more lines.
"Listen: 'The facts, as we will briefly relate them here, seem
to
have
been taken from a film about the Ku Klux Klan or some gang of witch–
hunters. The hunting of witches in the neighborhood.' Listen, don't you
want to listen? "
