When Corinne had asked Pauli if Anna couldn't take Tante Ilde once a week for her midday meal, he had responded warmly, not simply to give Corinne pleasure, but because he was made that way.
"But of course! The poor, dear Tanterl, I'll tell Anna to get the best she can, you know she's not very clever at it, and I'll try to be there myself."
Pauli was doubtless various kinds of a sinner, but his humanity was always to be counted on. It wasn't because Corinne was looking obliquely at him, with the look that stirred him hotly, madly....
Anna and Hermine talked ceaselessly of the possibilities or rather the impossibilities of the meal. Hermine even went into her mother's bed two successive nights and stayed there late. The various Hungarian dishes he was so fond of presented immense difficulties. Those that didn't need a lot of sugar, milk and eggs, needed a lot of butter, lard or fat of some kind. Even love did not make Anna inventive and people never sold her anything as they did to Liesel because they wanted to see her smile when she got it. They passed in review one by one those tantalizing dishes, pulling up round at a Paprikahuhn, chicken in paprika. It rose up and clucked a ghostly cluck out of happier kitchen days. But where to get that chicken in the flesh? It was no easier than getting a tropical bird of bright plumage and stripping it. He liked sweet things too, Kaiserschmarrn with a lot of powdered sugar on it, or Palatschinken, those traditional pancakes, filled heavily with jam.
During the earlier years of Anna's married life, when Pauli saw how things culinary were going, a young Hungarian servant had been sent him by one of his sisters. She was an excellent cook and had taught Anna in a way, a lot of things, but she had been landed, like all good cooks, in the net of marriage, and was succeeded in the Birbach household by various maids of varying and inferior talents. But Anna really didn't know good food from bad, and she got careless too. Pauli was oftener and longer absent, and then the War came and then the Peace. Pauli by no means let them starve, but he didn't see his way to keeping those two ghosts, who unnaturally bore his name, supplied with the delicacies or, to be more exact, the relative delicacies of post-war Vienna, that oftener than not they would spoil in the cooking.
He had his two sisters, widowed on the same day of the war, and their broods of little children to support. It had not been so difficult to care for them at first for they had taken their children and gone back to the house of their mother near Groswardein, that comfortable Landhaus that they had all three inherited with its acres bearing wine and grain. But when they thought the war was over they suddenly found themselves one dark night fleeing with the rest of the inhabitants before an unexpected army. After days they got into Budapest and when the panic had abated and they wanted to go back, they found to their consternation that though they were still Hungarian their lands had become Roumanian. Some dark, transmuting evil had been worked. Suddenly they had no civil state there where they were born and no longer possessed what their parents had bequeathed them ... as unbelievable as that.... Pauli enabled them to eke out a reduced existence with their many children in some rooms on the outskirts of Pesth.
The comfortable Landhaus with its pink walls, its green shutters, its sloping roof, the grapevine growing up over the door, the great plane tree in the garden, became as a lost paradise to be described to children at the knee,—with hints of recovery when they were old enough to fight for their own.
Though Anna suspected that Pauli supported his sisters and in her heart was bitter about it, she had no courage and less opportunity to reproach him with it.
Pauli loved his sisters very much, especially his sister Mimi, and he had never told her the tale of Geza's death brought back by his comrade. How they were to charge a certain hill in Galicia one chilly autumn dawn in the face of the enemy, waiting millions of them, it seemed, after the Russian way of lavish cannon-food. How Geza naturally a laughing man had been leaden-hearted as they went up side by side; even the schnapps served out to the troops had not put heart into him. He had said, "I'm going up because I must, but it's quite useless—I'll never come down again."... Geza loved life ... and when they got up to the top immediately a great splinter of shell struck him in the chest and he looked a last reproachful look at his comrade as he fell against him.... The end of Geza who loved life.
No, Pauli couldn't bear to think of that. Some day he meant to tell Mimi of those cruel last moments, when Geza knew, knew that his end was near.