The Bear Called State O’Maine 25 страница

. I realized that in order for Fehlgeburt to believe this, even our gentle Schwanger would have had to convince her.

“Why not Schwanger?” I asked Miss Miscarriage.

“She’s too important,” Fehlgeburt said. “She’s

wonderful

,” she said, admiringly—and full of loathing for herself.

“Why not Wrench?” I asked. “He’s obviously good with cars.”

“That’s why,” Fehlgeburt said. “He’s too necessary. There will be other cars, other bombs to build. It’s the hostage part I don’t like,” she blurted out suddenly. “It’s not necessary, this time,” she added. “There will be better hostages.”

“Who are the hostages?” I asked.

“Your family,” she said. “Because you’re Americans. More than Austria will notice us, then,” she said. “That’s the idea.”

“Whose idea?” I asked.

“Ernst’s,” she said.

“Why not let Ernst be the driver?” I asked.

“He’s the idea man,” Fehlgeburt said. “He thinks it all up. Everything,” she added. Everything, indeed, I thought.

“And Arbeiter?” I asked. “He doesn’t know how to drive?”

“He’s too loyal,” she said. “We can’t lose anyone that loyal. I am not so loyal,” she whispered. “Look at me!” she cried. “I’m telling

you

all this, aren’t I?”

“And Old Billig?” I asked, winding down.

“He’s not trustworthy,” Fehlgeburt said. “He doesn’t even know the plan. He’s too slippery. He thinks of his own survival.”

“That’s

bad

?” I asked her, brushing her hair back, off her streaked face.

“At

this

phase, that’s bad,” Fehlgeburt said. And I realized what she was: a

reader

, only a reader. She read other people’s stories just beautifully; she took direction; she followed the leader. Why I wanted to hear her read

Moby-Dick

was the same reason the radicals had made her the driver. We both knew she would do it; she wouldn’t stop.

“Have we done everything?” Fehlgeburt asked me.

“What?” I said, and winced—and would wince, forever, to hear that echo of Egg. Even from myself.

“Have we done everything,

sexually

?” Fehlgeburt asked. “Was that it? Was that everything?”

I tried to remember. “I think so,” I said. “Do you want to do more?”

“Not especially,” she said. “I just wanted to have done it all once,” she said. “If we’ve done it all, you can go home—if you want,” she added. She shrugged. It was not Mother’s shrug, not Franny’s, not even Jolanta’s shrug. This was not quite a human movement; it was less a twitch than it was a kind of electrical pulsation, a mechanical lurch of her taut body, a dim signal. The dimmest, I thought. It was a nobody-home sign; it was an I’m-not-in, don’t-call-me-I’ll-call-you signal. It was a tick of a clock, or of a time bomb. Fehlgeburt’s eyes blinked once at me; then she was asleep. I gathered my clothes. I saw she hadn’t bothered to mark the spot where she stopped reading in

Moby-Dick

; I didn’t bother to mark it, either.

It was after midnight when I crossed the Ringstrasse, walking from the Rathausplatz down the Dr. Karl Renner-Ring and into the Volksgarten. In the beer garden some students were shouting at each other in a friendly way; I probably knew some of them, but I didn’t stop for a beer. I didn’t want to talk about the

art

of this or that. I didn’t want to have another conversation about

The Alexandria Quartet

—about which was the best of those novels, and which was the worst, and why. I didn’t want to hear about who benefited the most from their correspondence—Henry Miller or Lawrence Durrell. I didn’t even want to talk about

Die Blechtrommel

, which was the best thing there was to talk about perhaps

ever

. And I didn’t want to have another conversation about East-West relations, about socialism and democracy, about the long-term effects of President Kennedy’s assassination—and, being an American, what did I think of the racial question? It was the end of the summer of 1964; I hadn’t been in the United States since 1957, and I knew less about my country than some of the Viennese students knew. I also knew less about Vienna than any of them. I knew about my family, I knew about

our

whores, and

our

radicals; I was an expert on the Hotel New Hampshire and an amateur at everything else.

I walked all the way through the Heldenplatz—the Plaza of Heroes—and stood where thousands of cheering fascists had greeted Hitler, once. I thought that fanatics would always have an audience; all one might hope to influence was the

size

of the audience. I thought I must remember this perception, and test it against Frank, who would either take it over as his own perception, or revise it, or correct me. I wished I’d read as much as Frank; I wished I’d tried to grow as hard as Lilly. In fact, Lilly had sent off the efforts of her growth to some publisher in New York. She wasn’t even going to tell us, but she had to borrow money from Franny for the postage.

“It’s a novel,” Lilly said, sheepishly. “It’s a little autobiographical.”

“How little?” Frank had asked her.

“Well, it’s really

imaginative

autobiography,” Lilly said.

“It’s a

lot

autobiographical, you mean,” Franny said. “Oh boy.”

“I can’t wait,” Frank said. “I bet I come off like a real loon.”

“No,” Lilly said. “Everyone is a hero.”

“We’re

all

heroes?” I asked.

“Well, you all

are

heroes, to me,” Lilly said. “So in the book you are, too.”

“Even Father?” Franny asked.

“Well, he’s the most imagined,” Lilly said.

And I thought that Father had to be the most imagined because he was the least real—he was the least

there

(of any of us). Sometimes it seemed Father was less with us than Egg.

“What’s the book called, dear?” Father had asked Lilly.

“

Trying to Grow

,” Lilly had admitted.

“What else?” Franny said.

“How far’s it go?” Frank asked. “I mean, where’s it

stop

?”

“It’s over with the plane crash,” Lilly said. “That’s the end.”

The end of reality, I thought: just short of the plane crash seemed like a perfectly good place to stop—to me.

“You’re going to need an agent,” Frank said to Lilly. “That will be me.”

Frank

would

become Lilly’s agent; he would become Franny’s agent, and Father’s agent, and even my agent, too—in time. He hadn’t majored in economics for nothing. But I didn’t know that on that end-of-the-summer evening in 1964 when I left Fehlgeburt, poor Miss Miscarriage, asleep and no doubt dreaming of her spectacular sacrifice; her

expendable

nature was virtually all I could see when I stood alone in the Plaza of Heroes and recalled how Hitler had made so many people seem expendable to such a mob of true believers. In the quiet evening I could almost hear the mindless din of “

Sieg Heil

!” I could see the absolute self-seriousness of Schraubenschlüssel’s face when he tightened down the nut and washer on an engine-block bolt. And what else had he been tightening down? I could see the dull glaze of devotion in Arbeiter’s eyes, making the statement to the press upon his triumphant arrest—and our mother-like Schwanger sipping her

Kaffee mit Schlagobers

, the whipped cream leaving its pleasant little moustache upon her downy upper lip. I could see the way Schwanger braided Lilly’s pigtail, humming to Lilly’s lovely hair the way Mother had hummed; how Schwanger told Franny that she had the world’s most beautiful skin, and the world’s most beautiful hands; and I had bedroom eyes, Schwanger said—oh, I was going to be dangerous, she warned me. (Having just left Fehlgeburt, I felt not very dangerous.) There would always be a little

Schlagobers

in Schwanger’s kisses. And Frank, Schwanger said, was a genius; if only he would consider politics more thoughtfully. All this affection did Schwanger shower on us—all this with a gun in her purse. I wanted to see Ernst in the cow position—with a cow! And in the elephant position! With you know what. They were as crazy as Old Billig said; they would kill us all.

I wandered on the Dorotheergasse toward the Graben. I stopped for a

Kafee mit Schlagobers

at the Hawelka. A man with a beard at the table beside me was explaining to a young girl (younger than him) about the death of representational painting; he was describing the exact painting wherein this death of the whole art form had occurred. I didn’t know the painting. I thought about the Schieles and the Klimts that Frank had introduced me to—at the Albertina and at the Upper Belvedere. I wished Klimt and Schiele were able to talk to this man, but the man was now addressing the death of rhyme and meter in poetry; again, I didn’t know the poem. And when he moved on to the novel, I thought I’d better pay up and leave. My waiter was busy, so I had to listen to the story of the death of plot and characterization. Among the many deaths the man described, he included the death of sympathy. I was beginning to feel sympathy die within me when my waiter finally got to my table. Democracy was the next death; it came and went more quickly than my waiter could produce my change. And socialism passed away before I could figure the tip. I stared at the man with the beard and felt like lifting weights; I felt that if the radicals wanted to blow up the Opera, they should pick a night when only this man with the beard was there. I thought I’d found a substitute driver for Fehlgeburt.

“Trotsky,” the young girl with the bearded man blurted out, suddenly—as if she were saying, “Thank you.”

“Trotsky?” I said, leaning over their table; it was a small, square table. I was curling seventy-five pounds, on one arm, on each of the dumbbells, in those days. The table wasn’t nearly that heavy, so I picked it up, carefully, with one hand, and lifted it over my head the way a waiter would raise a tray. “Now, good old Trotsky,” I said. “If you want an easy life,” good old Trotsky said, “‘you picked the wrong century to be born in.’ Do you think that’s true?” I asked the man with the beard. He said nothing, but the young girl nudged him, and he perked up a little.

“

I

think it’s true,” the girl said.

“

Sure

it’s true,” I said. I was aware of the waiters nervously watching the drinks and the ashtray sliding slightly on the table over my head, but I was not Iowa Bob; the weights never slid off the bar when I lifted, not anymore. I was better with weights than Iowa Bob.

“Trotsky was killed with a pickax,” the bearded fellow said, morosely, trying to remain unimpressed.

“But he’s not

dead

, is he?” I asked, insanely—smiling. “Nothing’s

really

dead,” I said. “Nothing he

said

is dead,” I said. “The paintings that we can still see—they’re not dead,” I said. “The characters in books—they don’t die when we stop reading about them.”

The man with the beard stared at the place where his table was supposed to be. He was really quite dignified, I thought, and I knew I was in a bad mood and wasn’t being fair; I was being a bully, and I felt ashamed. I gave the table back to the couple; nothing spilled.

“I see what you mean!” the girl called after me, as I was leaving. But I knew I had kept no one alive, not ever: not those people in the Opera, because sitting among them was surely that shape Frank and I had seen in the car, driven away between Ernst and Arbeiter, that animal shape of death, that mechanical bear, that dog’s head of chemistry, that electrical charge of sorrow. And despite what Trotsky said, he was dead; Mother and Egg and Iowa Bob were dead, too—despite

everything

they said, and everything they meant to us. I walked out on the Graben, feeling more and more like Frank, feeling anti-everything; I felt out of control. It’s no good for a weight lifter to feel out of control.

The first prostitute I passed was not one of

ours

, but I’d seen her before—at the Kaffee Mowatt.

“

Guten Abend

,” she said.

“Fuck you,” I told her.

“Up yours,” she told me; she knew that much English, And I felt lousy. I was using bad language, again. I had broken my promise to Mother. It was the first and last time I would break it. I was twenty-two years old and I started to cry. I turned down Spiegelgasse. There were whores there, but they weren’t our whores, so I didn’t do anything. When they said, “

Guten Abend

,” I said, “

Guten Abend

” back. I didn’t answer the other things they said. I cut across the Neuer Markt; I felt the vacancies in the chests of the Hapsburgs in their tombs. Another whore called to me.

“Hey, don’t cry!” she called to me. “A big strong boy like you—don’t cry!”

But I hoped I was crying not just for myself but for them all. For Freud calling out the names who’d never answer in the Judenplatz; for what Father couldn’t see. For Franny, for I loved her—and I wanted her to be as faithful to me as she had proved she could be to Susie the bear. For Susie, too, because Franny had shown me that Susie wasn’t ugly at all. In fact, Franny had almost convinced Susie of this. For Junior Jones, who was suffering the first of the knee injuries that would force his retirement from the Cleveland Browns. For Lilly who tried so hard and for Frank who’d gone so far away (in order to be closer to life, he said). For Dark Inge, who was eighteen—who said she was “old enough,” though Screaming Annie insisted she wasn’t—who before this year was over would run away, with a man. He was as black as her father and he took her to an Army-base town in Germany; she would later become a whore there, I would be told. And Screaming Annie would scream a slightly different song. For

all

of them! For my doomed Fehlgeburt, even for the deceiving Schwanger—for both Old Billigs; they were optimists; they were china bears. For everyone—except Ernst, except Arbeiter, except that

wrench

of a man, except for Chipper Dove: I hated them.

I brushed past a whore or two signaling me off the Kärntnerstrasse. A tall, stunning whore—out of the league of our Krugerstrasse whores—blew me a kiss from the corner of the Annagasse. I walked right by the Krugerstrasse without looking, not wanting to see one of them, or all of them, waving to me. I passed the Hotel Sacher—which the Hotel New Hampshire would never be. And then I came to the Staatsoper, I came to the house of Gluck (1714-87, as Frank would recite); I came to the State Opera, which was the house of Mozart, the house of Haydn, of Beethoven and Schubert—of Strauss, Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler. This was the house that a pornographer playing with politics wanted to blow sky-high. It was huge; in seven years, I had never been in it—it seemed classier than I was, and I was never the music fan that Frank was, and never the lover of drama that Franny was (Frank and Franny went to the Opera all the time; Freud took them. He loved to listen; Franny and Frank described it all to him). Like me, Lilly had never been to the Opera; the place was too big, Lilly said; it frightened her.

It frightened

me

, now. It is too

big

to blow up! I thought. But it was the

people

they wanted to blow up, I knew, and people are more easily destroyed than buildings. What they wanted was a spectacle. They wanted what Arbeiter had shouted to Schwanger: they wanted

Schlagobers

and blood.

On the Kärntnerstrasse across from the Opera was a sausage vendor, a man with a kind of hot-dog cart selling different kinds of

Wurst mit Senf und Bauernbrot

—a kind of sausage with mustard on rye. I didn’t want one.

I knew what I wanted. I wanted to grow up, in a hurry. When I’d made love to Fehlgeburt I had told her, “

Es war sehr sch

ö

n

,” but it wasn’t. “It was very nice,” I had lied, but it wasn’t anything; it wasn’t enough. It had been just another night of weight lifting.

When I turned down the Krugerstrasse, I had already decided that I would go with the first one who approached me—even if it was Old Billig; even if it was Jolanta, I bravely promised myself. It didn’t matter; maybe one by one I would try them all. I could do anything Freud could do, and Freud had done it all—our Freud

and

the other Freud, I thought; they had simply gone as far as they could.

Nobody I knew was in the Kaffee Mowatt, and I didn’t recognize the figure standing under the pink neon: HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE! HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE!

It’s Babette, I thought, vaguely repulsed—but it was just the sickly-sweet diesel breeze of the last night of summer that made me think of her. The woman saw me and started walking toward me—aggressively, I thought; hungrily, too. And I was sure it was Screaming Annie; I momentarily wondered how I would hold together during her famous fake orgasm. Maybe—given my fondness for whispering—I could ask her not to do it at all, I could simply tell her I

knew

it was a fake and it simply wasn’t necessary, not for

my

benefit. The woman was too slender to be Old Billig, but she was too solid to be Screaming Annie, I realized; she was too well built to be Screaming Annie. So it was Jolanta, I thought; at last I would find out what she kept in her evil purse. In the time ahead, I thought—shuddering—I might even have to

use

what’s in Jolanta’s purse. But the woman approaching me was not

solid enough

for Jolanta; this woman was too well built in the

other

way—she was too sleek, too youthful in her movements. She ran toward me on the street and caught me in her arms; she took my breath away, she was so beautiful. The woman was Franny.

“Where have you

been

?” she asked me. “Gone all day, gone all night,” she scolded me. “We’ve all been

dying

to find you!”

“Why?” I asked. Franny’s smell made me dizzy.

“Lilly’s going to get

published

!” Franny said. “Some publisher in New York is really going to buy her book!”

“How much?” I said, because I was hoping it might be

enough

. It might be our ticket out of Vienna—the ticket that the second Hotel New Hampshire would never buy us.

“Jesus God,” Franny said. “Your sister has a

literary

success and you ask ‘How much?’—you’re just like Frank. That’s just what Frank asked.”

“Good for Frank,” I said. I was still trembling; I had been looking for a prostitute and had found my sister. She wouldn’t let go of me, either.

“Where

were

you?” Franny asked me; she pushed my hair back.

“With Fehlgeburt,” I said, sheepishly. I would never lie to Franny.

Franny frowned. “Well, how was it?” she asked, still touching me—but like a sister.

“Not so great,” I said. I looked away from Franny. “Awful,” I added.

Franny put her arms around me and kissed me. She meant to kiss me on the cheek (like a sister), but I turned toward her, though I was trying to turn away, and our lips met. And that was it, that was all it took. That was, the end of the summer of 1964; suddenly it was autumn. I was twenty-two, Franny was twenty-three. We kissed a long time. There was nothing to say. She was not a lesbian, she still wrote to Junior Jones—and to Chipper Dove—and I had never been happy with another woman; not ever; not yet. We stayed out on the street, out of the light cast by the neon, so that no one in the Hotel New Hampshire could see us. We had to break up our kissing when a customer of Jolanta’s came staggering out of the hotel, and we broke it up again when we heard Screaming Annie. In a little while her dazed customer came out, but Franny and I still stayed on the Krugerstrasse. Later, Babette went home. Then Jolanta went home, taking Dark Inge with her. Screaming Annie came out and back, out and back, like the tide. Old Billig the whore went across the street to the Kaffee Mowatt and dozed on a table. I walked Franny up to the Kärntnerstrasse, and down to the Opera. “You think of me too much,” Franny started to say, but she didn’t bother to finish. We kissed some more. The Opera was so big beside us.

“They’re going to blow it up,” I whispered to my sister. “The Opera—they’re going to blow it up.” She let me hold her. “I love you terribly much,” I told her.

“I love you, too,

damn

it,” Franny said.

Although the weather was feeling like fall, it was possible for us to stand there, guarding the Opera, until the light came up and the real people came out to go to work. There was no place we could go, anyway—and absolutely nothing, we knew, that we should do.

“Keep passing the open windows,” we whispered to each other.

When we finally went back to the Hotel New Hampshire, the Opera was still standing there—safe. Safe for a while, anyway, I thought.

“Safer than

we

are,” I told Franny. “Safer than love.”

“Let me tell you, kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “

Everything’s

safer than love.”

A Night at the Opera: Schlagobers and Blood

“Children, children,” Father said to us, “we must be very careful. I think this is

the turning point

, kids,” our father said, as if we were still eight, nine, ten, and so forth, and he was telling us about meeting Mother at the Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea—that night they first saw Freud, with State o’Maine.

“There’s always a turning point,” Frank said, philosophically.

“Okay, supposing there is,” Franny said, impatiently, “but what is this particular turning point?”

“Yeah,” said Susie the bear, looking Franny over very carefully; Susie was the only one who’d noticed that Franny and I were out all night. Franny had told her we’d gone to a party near the university with some people Susie didn’t know. And what could be safer than having your brother, and a weight lifter, for an escort? Susie didn’t like parties, anyway; if she went as a bear, there was no one she could talk to, and if she didn’t go as a bear, no one seemed interested in talking to her. She looked sulky and cross. “There’s a lot of shit to deal with in a hurry, as I see it,” said Susie the bear.

“Exactly,” Father said. “That’s the typical turning-point situation.”

“We can’t blow this one,” Freud said. “I don’t think I got many more hotels left in me.” Which might be a good thing, I thought, trying to keep my eyes off Franny. We were all in Frank’s room, the conference room—as if the dressmaker’s dummy were a soothing presence, were a silent ghost of Mother or Egg or Iowa Bob; somehow the dummy was supposed to radiate signals and we were supposed to catch the signals (according to Frank).

“How much can we get for the novel, Frank?” Father asked.

“It’s Lilly’s book,” Franny said. “It’s not

our

book.”

“In a way, it is,” Lilly said.

“Precisely,” Frank said, “and the way I understand publishing, it’s out of her hands now. Now is where we either get taken or we make a killing.”

“It’s just about growing up,” Lilly said. “I’m sort of surprised they’re interested.”

“They’re only five thousand dollars interested, Lilly,” Franny said.

“We need fifteen or twenty thousand to leave,” Father said. “If we’re going to have a chance to do anything with it, back home,” he added.

“Don’t forget: we’ll get something for

this

place,” Freud said, defensively.

“Not after we blow the whistle on the fucking bombers,” said Susie the bear.

“There will be such a scandal,” Frank said, “we won’t get a buyer.”

“I told you: we’ll get the police on

our

ass if we blow the whistle at all,” Freud said. “You don’t know our police, their Gestapo tactics. They’ll find something we’re doing wrong with the whores, too.”

“Well, there’s a lot that

is

wrong,” Franny said. We couldn’t look at each other; when Franny talked, I looked out the window. I saw Old Billig the radical crossing the street. I saw Screaming Annie dragging herself home.

“There’s no way we

can’t

blow the whistle,” Father said. “If they actually think they can blow up the Opera, there’s no talking to them.”

“There never

was

any talking to them,” Franny said. “We just listened.”

“They’ve always been crazy,” I said to Father.

“Don’t you

know

that, Daddy?” Lilly asked him.

Father hung his head. He was forty-four, a distinguished gray appearing on the thick brown hair around his ears; he had never worn sideburns, and he had his hair cut in a uniform, mid-ear, mid-forehead, just-covering-the-back-of-his-neck way; he never thinned it. He wore bangs, like a little boy, and his hair fit his head so dramatically well that from a distance we were sometimes fooled into thinking that Father was wearing a helmet.

“I’m sorry, kids,” Father said, shaking his head. “I know this isn’t very pleasant, but I feel we’re at

the turning point

.” He shook his head some more; he looked really lost to us, and it was only later that I would remember him on Frank’s bed, in that dressmaker’s dummy of a room, as looking really quite handsome and in charge of things. Father was always good at creating the illusion that he was in charge of things: Earl, for example. He hadn’t lifted the weights, like Iowa Bob, or like me, but Father had kept his athletic figure, and certainly he had kept his boyishness—“too fucking

much

boyishness,” as Franny would say. It occurred to me that he must be lonely; in seven years, he hadn’t had a date! And if he used the whores, he was discreet about it—and in

that

Hotel New Hampshire, who could be

that

discreet?

“He can’t be seeing any of them,” Franny had said. “I’d simply know it, if he was.”

“Men are sneaky,” Susie the bear had said. “Even nice guys.”

“So he’s not doing it; that’s settled,” Franny had said. Susie the bear had shrugged, and Franny had hit her.

But in Frank’s room, it was Father who brought up the whores.

“We should tell

them

what we’re going to do about the crazy radicals,” Father said, “

before

we tell the police.”

“Why?” Susie the bear asked him. “One of them might blow the whistle on

us

.”

“Why would they do that?” I asked Susie.

“We should tell them so they can make other plans,” Father said.

“They’ll have to change hotels,” Freud said. “The damn police will close us down. In this country, you’re guilty by association!” Freud cried. “Just ask any Jew!” Just ask the

other

Freud, I thought.

“But suppose we were

heroes

,” Father said, and we all looked at him. Yes, that would be nice, I was thinking.

“Like in Lilly’s book?” Frank asked Father.

“Suppose the police thought that we were heroes for uncovering the bomb plot?” Father asked.

“The police don’t think that way,” Freud said.

“But suppose, as

Americans

,” Father said, “we told the American Consulate, or the Embassy, and someone over there passed on the information to the Austrian authorities—as if this whole thing had been a really top-secret, first-class kind of intrigue.”

“This is why I love you, Win Berry!” Freud said, tapping time to some interior tune with his baseball bat. “You really

are

a dreamer,” Freud told my father. “

Дата добавления: 2015-11-04