Blue Glass

Decisions and Lies

Walking up the stairs to the great double doors to the main headquarters of Sonnemann Wines and Co. was surprisingly exhilarating today, as opposed to how it usually was--foreboding and tedious. I would open the same door, walk down the same hallway, get the same cup of ersatz coffee, go to the same office, sit at the same desk, do the same paperwork, over and over and over again. Today, however, the creak of the double doors opening was a welcome sound to my ears. For once, I could finally put aside all of my secondary troubles and tackle the primary one: getting caught up on the predictably large stacks of paperwork that were sure to be on my desk when I got to my office.

No one was in the hallway. I breathed a sigh of relief as I bypassed the coffee table and went for the staircase leading to the second floor, where the managers of the different branches of the company worked. In an intelligent gesture that, as my mother put it at one point in time, rarely comes from men,they had decided to mark their doors with their last names to let the people coming in to see them who was who.

Maler...Braun...Schultheiss...Schulz...Weber.

I hastily knocked three times, nearly jumping with joy at the harsh, almost gruff "Come in" that resonated from the other side of the door.

Helmuth Weber looked his nose down at me from behind his rimless spectacles as I entered with the customary "Guten Morgen, Herr Weber."

"Good morning," he said after a pregnant pause. "You haven't shown your face in this building for quite a while now, Schwarz."

"My apologies." Suddenly, the second-nature tendency to lie that usually came to me so easily was starting to have cold feet, to be replaced by a growing feeling of gnawing guilt.  "As I said previously...my cousin was extremely sick and his wounds weren't healing correctly." I made the mistake of looking up from where my gaze was fixated on the scuffed toes of my boots. The skepticism on his face was so clear he ought to have written it on his forehead.

I didn't know why my lying abilities were failing me at such a moment. Nevertheless, I decided to continue spinning my web of falsehood in the hope that maybe it would suffice.

"Given his--emotional...constitution...and the fact that his father wasn't able to--wasn't able to take leave from his front-line duties, I thought that maybe--maybe my presence would do him good..."

To my surprise, he nodded, although the skeptical look in his eyes didn't fade in the slightest. "And is that all you did during your time away? Visit your cousin?"

"Y-yes. It took him a while to heal, and when he did, I saw him off to the Front once more and--"

"Ende gut, alles gut, Schwarz. Say no more." He lowered his gaze to a certain paper on his desk, pushing his spectacles back into place with his index finger. " You will find, however, that the length of your absence, however, has seen a rise to the unfinished paperwork in your office."

He believed me! I almost fell to the floor in relief.

"I'll give you three days to finish your overdue work. I expect nothing less than satisfactory results. That will be all."

I had never walked to my office as fast as I did then. Not only had I managed to reinstate myself at work without a hitch, but I was also given a grace period to catch up on my work. Things had never been looking so good for me.

I hunched over the first form I had to fill out. For the next hour or so, the only sound in the tiny room was that of the pen gliding over paper. My mind, however, was elsewhere as I filled out form after form, blank after blank.

No matter what I did, no matter how many cigarettes I smoked, I couldn't get my mother's words out of my head--and I couldn't stop myself from applying them to my own situation.

I had stayed away from boys since I was old enough to be courted for the simple reason that I didn't want to end up like my mother: jilted and cast aside, left to her own destructive devices. I never meant to blow my own horn, but I was pretty in my own right. The fact that I had had longer hair and was prettier--at least, according to the boys--than most of the girls in my class only seemed to draw more and more boys to me. I had used that to my advantage by introducing them to my friends and thus earning them potential boyfriends--and winning their friendship instead of having to fend off their jealousy. My friends could never understand my aversion to having a sweetheart and took it upon themselves to recount to me their escapades and one-night stands with various men in and outside of Vienna.

The idea of falling in love and being with a man who actually cared about you and treated you like a princess had been to me like a fairy tale to a child--amazing, alluring, beautiful, but realistically impossible and foolish. In my opinion, my mother had been hell bent on chasing that dream and making it her reality, only to be met with disastrous consequences when hit with the realization that such unadulterated love existed only in storybooks.

I paused to take a scalding sip of ersatz coffee. The biting burn that rippled through the inside of my mouth somehow numbed my sense enough for me to concentrate on my work and silence the voices in my head--temporarily. No sooner had it ebbed did the deluge of thoughts come rushing back to drench me.

I didn't see why I had broken that personal vow of abstinence to myself in favor of a German baron, and a famous aviator no less. Maybe because in the case of this "German baron", he radiated goodness like the sun's rays. Maybe because deep down, I had a feeling that he wouldn't be what my father had cracked up to be.

Although I didn't see how him and my father were any different--intellectually and psychologically, that is. They were both of minor nobility and both had military careers, although I was sure Manfred had lots of money to his name unlike my father, who carelessly spent his salary in casinos before and after he got married. Manfred had never struck me as a compulsive gambler, although I supposed all highborn men were social gamblers because they had to be.

My hand was beginning to ache from how much I had been writing. I dropped the pen I was holding with a noisy clatter and flexed my fingers, staring disapprovingly at my thin, bony hands. My mother always made a point of keeping one's hands in pristine condition, as they were, according to her, the first thing a man looked at when he met a woman. I remembered how she would always make Svetlana carry anything heavy, make Svetlana do anything that might cause the veins in the backs of her hands to rise. As a result, her hands were still, despite her age, remarkably smooth, although what use were they to her now? The person for whom she had maintained her hands was gone.

I snorted. I could never see myself doing anything as drastic for anyone, let alone a man, and I wasn't planning to start. And although I loved Manfred dearly, I would need to sort of slam the brakes on our relationship until I managed to sort out the things in my life that had been affected because of the lengths I had gone for it.
Such as the existence of all this overdue paperwork, I thought to myself ruefully as I picked up the pen again. Which had attributed to my hand cramp.
Yes, I would have to stop seeing Manfred for a time. If he wanted to write, so be it. If he wanted to call, by all means. But first, I needed to see that he put into the relationship as much as I had done, if not more.
I took yet another sip of ersatz coffee, then another and another. The amplified burn was the wax seal on the imaginary scroll that was my decision.

Ende gut, alles gut: a German proverb meaning "All's well that ends well."