Frau Stacher bewildered at her own fate, felt quite incapable in that moment of picking up the threads of any other life, even of Corinne's. But her confidence awakened warmly at mention of Pauli. Pauli had a heart and was always showing it. Pauli understood, she felt sure, anything, everything.... Even poverty-stricken old aunts by marriage who had lived too long. Even to such Pauli was kind.
Pauli Birbach, the husband of her eldest niece Anna, had got through the war without a scratch or an illness,—of an unbelievable luck. When a bomb burst where he and his comrades were sitting or lying, he was certain to be unhurt and soon to be seen carrying the wounded in gently or burying the dead deeply. Typhus and dysentery alike avoided him. He was naturally a debonair and laughing soul, and his easy resourcefulness had endeared him to both officers and men. "As lucky as Pauli Birbach" was a phrase among his comrades. And even in little ways. Wasn't he always turning up with a handful of cigarettes or a bottle of wine or a chicken, got, heaven knew how, in a country picked bare as a bone? An excellent cook, too, he could instruct the warrior presiding over the pot how to make the very most of what little he had. Hot water and an onion under Pauli's direction became a delectable if not nourishing soup.
And the way he played the zimbalon he discovered in a castle they were quartered in during an interminable winter in the Carpathians, the Russians, millions of them it seemed, just opposite,—only half hidden by the snowy hill that some dark morning they must charge....
He had seen terrible things, terrible things to a laughing, soft-hearted man, things that knocked the laughter out of him like a blow on the chest.... The time he went out with a patrol at day break, the thermometer 40 below, and they thought they were coming to a tent or a little hovel in the grey half light.... But it was a dozen Kossacks huddled together, frozen stiff, their heavy boots sticking out....
And other things that had turned his pleasure-loving soul black with horror.... Christian Zimmermann, they'd been at the High School together, ... Christian, his comrade, three days in agony, hanging on that barbed wire and no one able to get at him and when Pauli finally did bring him in ... oh, no, you didn't think of such things.
And the Peace that stuck in his throat and lay on his chest, and the fierce angers it aroused, beyond, far beyond the blood-angers of the War ... Five years to repair the damages of the War—a century those of the Peace.... Still Pauli often laughed, even in that cold, grey Vienna, scarcely recognizable ghost of what had once throbbed and glowed, that funeral urn among cities; for he was naturally a man of hot hope, in spite of the fact that Fate at her most capricious had married him to Herr Bruckner's eldest daughter, a horse-faced, quite inarticulate woman, all of one color, with a solemn, brooding look in her eyes. She was so different from the glowing-eyed, sparkling-faced damsels about him that marriage with Anna Bruckner came to seem like the solving of some deep mystery. What lay behind those heavy, brooding eyes, with their curtain-like closing? She had rather fine broad shoulders, something long and big about her body, built in majestic proportions, or so it seemed to him. He got into a state where he had to know what it all meant—or die. He had been inexplicably mad about her all through his lyric years.... Anna his Sybil. Anna had been conscious of a flattered wonder, and her chill, slow blood had known its only warmth and quickening when she married Pauli Birbach. Then so soon.... Yes, Anna had gone through every hell, and there are many, reserved for stupid, jealous, ugly, virtuous women. She loved him more year by year. She was obsessed by the thought of Pauli, doggedly, uselessly obsessed, for early Pauli had passed to the contemplation of other mysteries.
It was a tribute to his humanity, however, that Tante Ilde felt not the slightest distaste at going to his house ... even in "that way" as she called it to herself. He gave more freely than he received, and he did both easily. Probably for all his good intentions he would not be at dinner on Tuesday, he had an airy, dissolving way with him, akin to atmospheric changes,—brightness into cloud, cloud into sun and you never knew.... But Anna with her joylessness and her one ugly daughter as like her as the eighteen years between them permitted, Anna was her own flesh and blood, and she had been at Baden with her aunt during innumerable infantile illnesses. She was always catching something and when her hair came out after the measles Tante Ilde had faithfully brushed it back to a shining, brown abundance. It was even now Anna's one beauty. They had, after all, so many memories in common—she couldn't have forgotten all, everything.... On Tuesdays then.
"On Wednesdays you're to go to Mizzi's," Corinne was saying.
"To Mizzi's!" exclaimed her aunt in astonishment, throwing back her thin shoulders and sitting up very straight.