The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  Lucas went through the door into the yard. He was compelled to close his eyes, for he felt, ‘I have dreamt all this.’

  The sky above this yard was immeasurably blue. A lark was plunging up and down in the blue, beside itself with song. There was a raised pavement round the shrill white walls. And on this pavement a hundred strange things stood next to each other, blinding the eye.

  They were all mechanical toys, a delight for children and simple minds. Lucas saw a puppet theatre. A conductor cut out of cardboard was raising his baton, but the curtain was down. Next to it was a little ebony Savoyard, holding the handle of his hurdy-gurdy. Here was a mechanical pierrot in white baggy trousers, over there a group of statues representing a scene from the life of Napoleon, and then a barrel organ and other mechanical instruments; all these and many others too.

  For a moment Lucas forgot everything. A wild surge of childhood seized him again. He ran over to the mechanical toys and stared at them, engrossed.

  Suddenly he felt that his right side was leaning down and that he was holding something warm and delicately small in his hand. It was a child’s hand. A small child was looking at him.

  Lucas felt a shock that spread to the last recesses of his being, a shock such as only people can know who have passed close to death, close to the abyss of extreme knowledge, or who have met themselves. It was his lost dream. Who was this beautiful, lively child with the soft blond hair and the most profound wisdom in his face, full of observant otherness? On his childish features lay the wisdom of those creatures who have never become estranged from themselves by birth or become one with themselves in the moment of death. But what was that? Were those not his features, right down to the last detail? Was that his childhood? Was that the design which he had been, to which he had inevitably failed to match up? Was it he himself? Was it his…

  He was overcome by an unknown, infinitely warm feeling, and yet the mysterious shock did not leave him.

  Then the child said, ‘Go on, put a penny in.’

  They were standing in front of the puppet theatre. He put the coin in the slot. The curtain flew up. A thin, ragged, chirruping polka started. On the stage a few little puppets in pink and sky-blue tutus revolved jerkily and without rhythm. One kept halting, another whirled round like mad on its axle. Then it was finished, and the curtain fell even more quickly than it had risen.

  The boy gave Lucas’ hand a squeeze.

  ‘That was lovely, let’s see some more.’

  They went over to the Savoyard. Again Lucas put a coin in the slot. The motor rattled. The brown hand on the crank moved in short jerks and, with much whistling and jingling, an ancient, almost mythical tune from an operetta rang out and then suddenly broke off.

  ‘Good.’ The boy nodded his head. ‘Let’s go on.’

  Lucas made the clown dance and contort its limbs.

  The child laughed wildly with joy.

  Lucas lifted him up and looked him in the face. ‘Yes, it is you. Come with me. Come with me. Away from the beautiful playground. I will buy you other toys, much more beautiful ones.’

  The boy had an earnest expression.

  ‘You can’t take me with you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because only my mummy can take me.’

  ‘Where is your mummy?’

  ‘Not here,’ said the child.

  But Lucas kissed him passionately. ‘I know where your mother is. She has not died. She is alive. I spoke to her last night. I’ll carry you to her, my child. We’ll find her, we shall find her.’

  The child shook his head. ‘We must to talk to grandmother.’

  ‘Where is your grandmother?’

  ‘In there.’

  ‘In the house?’

  ‘Come, I’ll show you.’

  The child leads Lucas into the parlour of a farmhouse. There is a smell of decay. Spider’s webs stick a thousandfold to the ceiling and to the arch over the low window. There is a wooden partition dividing the room in two. The old woman is sitting at the spinning wheel, right at the back in the half-light, in an ancient peasant costume, with a headdress from years gone by: no, it is a model, a doll. The grandmother is filled with straw and she does not move.

  ‘Grandmother,’ calls the child.

  The figure moves, creaks and stands up. It takes a few steps and becomes quite human. Now it comes to the barrier. It seems not to see Lucas properly at all. ‘There you are, sonny,’ says the grandmother in a strange dialect.

  The child stammers, ‘Just think, grandmother, he wants to take me with him. He’s seen mummy as well.’

  ‘First they send you to foster parents and then …’

  She lifts the child over the barrier and he holds up the palms of his hands.

  Lucas sees the lines of his own hands. He feels, ‘Never will I forget these little hands.’ Already without hope he says, ‘Grandmother, give me the child.’

  The grandmother does not listen to him. She takes the boy in her arms. He suddenly seems much smaller and is crying softly.

  He too is like a wax doll.

  ‘We’re closing now,’ the grandmother barks at Lucas.

  He leaves the room, he leaves the playground, he leaves the gate. Only when he is back in the clearing does he turn round.

  But by then the playground has disappeared and the dream he had found again.

  He goes to the other side of the hill and sees before him the small town, which he had left three days ago.

  How tired he is, infinitely tired.

  ‘Now I have to go down there,’ he says out loud.

  The Dream

  Georg Saiko

  The sudden outward thrust of a curve sent the whole carriage lurching sideways and for a few moments he was conscious of being in the compartment of this train, which had not come to a halt for twenty-four hours now, then he was silently borne off to sleep once more, back onto the spinning disc of a different state of being. Paris, it was still Paris but, in some way he could not quite conceive, he had the whole city inside him, as if he had swallowed it down into his body, a body which, lying there motionless, felt as if it had swollen to gigantically capacious proportions. Somewhere far away he was aware of the curvature, vast beyond human vision, of a tyre inflated to bursting point which yet, with a certainty he could not explain, signified himself. His skin was burning with a sharp transparence and his mouth was particularly sore. Although he was keeping it clenched shut, it felt as if his jaws were wide apart, dislocated, his mouth and the concourse of the Gare du Nord were one and the same, glass and iron and yet his muscles, his nerves, sooty iron and black glass seething with frenzied tumult, stifling miasmas from scrunched-up tatters of light and the clamour of many voices, many desires. More and more trains kept pouring into the vast twitching cavern that was his mouth, an infinite chaos of swaying lines of carriages overflowing with people. They gushed out in blue-grey waves shot through with rivulets of colour, uniforms, nothing but uniforms, gathered into heaving pools at the exits then surged on, eating their way into his body, into the city rumbling in his veins. He knew that the avenue des Champs Élysées cut him in two, right down the middle, cars were whizzing along his spine, his tortured marrow squirmed, flattened and torn away from many threads that were bouncing to and fro, perhaps his nerves, but definitely connected to the ridiculous old-fashioned harp, to which the old woman of St. Julien le Pauvre kept whining the same monotonous melody. She was standing by the side entrance, outside the decaying garden, her stony grey face, eroded and devoid of movement like the gargoyles over the arches, grew in a completely impersonal manner until he could feel it as his left hip-bone, pressing fitfully against the cushioning of the back wall and somehow, passing through an oppressive stretch of darkness in his body, clearly ending up on the quai d’Orléans. He sank down into the toxic gelatinous block of the river, into the middle of the luxuriant row of very green treetops, from beneath which the deep bowl of all finitude shone up with its redemptive light; he was pushed on by a
yearning sensation towards a boundless ecstasy of dissolution; already he was teetering on the cusp of his ultimate second, when the magic reality of the embankment above held him tight with its trees, which were nothing more than bulging sacks of paralysing fear. It lasted a long time and was yet very brief when he lost himself in the tangled skeins of apartment blocks rank with nauseating odours until, up behind the iron bars of the Tuileries, he felt his lungs, a jellied mass with round humps, a branched complex of clipped foliage over low trunks with the drowsy scent of many lurid flowers in the rich arabesques of the flowerbeds, their muted up-and-down calming, like the touching caress of a large, slightly hard hand; perhaps it belonged to his first nurse and at the same time to the whimpering old woman of St. Julien le Pauvre and both had the same cloud of security about them. But beyond it the cars on the avenue des Champs Élysées were tearing along with the drawn-out rasp of tyres on the thin layer of gravel, many of his nerves were aching and the old woman was whining to her harp, which was stretched, cruelly taut, across his body. Then, suddenly, he sensed a thick, reddish-blue aorta turning off to the left where white light was pulsating towards him from behind huge globes of frosted glass and a negro in a garish uniform was ceaselessly pushing at the shiny brass of the revolving door. He was hesitating, but what could he do anyway when even the faintest flicker of intent was absorbed into the inevitability of what had to be, just as he was being absorbed into this too bright, overheated room filled with a sound like knuckles beating on wooden drums and his heart, obedient to the jazz band, was rising and falling in a rhythm that would never end, constantly washed over by the husky song of two bars of music, which kept on breaking out of the endlessness, only to reestablish it again immediately. A slight shiver made him contract, stretching a fine, brittle layer of resistance and impermeability over his skin. But in a trice the room, surging to the roar of distant breakers, engulfed him. A warm wave, sharp and sucking, swept him away, the little tables along the round walls floated past as patches of glossy white. The heavy-draped immobility of curtains, the long serrations of fans, the fleshy spikes of shrubs from which the intensive violet light in which everything was simmering had removed all appearance of organic life. He made a determined effort to distinguish between them and the women, white and coloured, too white and too dark from a thick layer of make-up, bobbing clusters of feathers round blond or black wigs, round twitching, thrusting hips with their glittering hint of brightly coloured veils between them. He sank to his knees in thick jelly, but that was the carpet, and stood up again in the middle of the dancers. The men remained expressionless faces, tailor’s dummies on black sticks, but the women were entirely pumas from the cage in the Parc Montsouris, smoothly coiling their brown and white bodies to dart forward with sudden menace, no longer behind bars but between the plate-glass windows of the rue de la Paix, among ladies’ hats, old lace, exotic plumes and jewellery. Some were bounding along on hands and feet, their thighs pumping up and down as they spiralled round him in narrower and narrower circles, towards him alone; the others, too, were basically seeking him out, only him. They were interlocked in the dance in a way that was difficult to make out, incomprehensible crosses between chorus girls, negro idols or birds of paradise. Their arms and legs, multiplied by movement, mixed a ponderous amalgam of rigidity and crisp drumbeat with a blend of bronze devotional image and mindless vaudeville. Immediately before his eyes a skinny, too-white hand with red-painted nails scraped across a back that looked like cigar-brown, overgreased leather. He turned his head, but it was still there, now with this thick smell of many kinds of strangeness whisked up together which bore him panting into a state of hysterical obliteration, aah … like the incense that set his chest coughing as a child, St. Germain des Prés was the village church at home and he curled up tiny in the lap of his gigantic nanna in the pew at the front and knew what God was like. God was like nanna’s lap and nanna’s great hand, tenderly placed on the top of his head with coarse hairs on its strong wrist sticking out from the blue knitted glove, God was like nanna’s shawl and nanna’s lap and nanna’s nice warm chest and had a bitter smell of black bread like nanna … And then it began, the horror, making him almost suffocate with shame. It started with the disappearance of the sense that he was dreaming. Nanna’s rough hand or the other white hand with red nails had wiped it away. As if, with puzzling clarity, a skin painted with the wildest delusions had been stripped away from people and things so that they were revealed in all their wretched ordinariness. An expensive brothel for international philistines, European provincials, Argentinian cattle breeders. All at once he recognised most of the frozen expressions over the low-cut necklines, but he could not have put a name to any of them. There was a gossamer film of strangeness peeping out from beneath them which signified something else that lurked within him as a petrifying fear and strove with violent convulsions to get away from the women. Had he made a gesture of invitation? The black woman right in front of him was jerking back and forward with movements more like a large shaggy dog snapping up a morsel someone had thrown it. But there was his old nanna, that white hand had fallen off her back, it smelt a little yellowed now and – he hesitated at what was to come – belonged to grandmother’s arm. Beyond the broad negro mouth, behind the familiar features of his nurse, was the pale quiver of an infinitely delicate bubble, his grandmother’s face. With a certainty beyond hope, he sensed that she too knew what all accepted without surprise: his heart, immense and floating free, was in the middle of them, rising and falling, giving the beat for which the negroes with their instruments were merely a façade. They were all staring at this huge heart, which was swelling up, larger and larger, setting the tempo for the women so that they lived by it, through it, and slackened when it pumped more slowly. But then there was this black woman, pushing right up against him.

  The Reason for It

  Hermann Ungar

  Leopold stood by the door of the house he had just left and thought. He had the feeling he had forgotten something up there. He slowly turned round and went back up the three steep flights to the musician.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, going into the room.

  He saw the picture straight away. Before, he had only caught a glimpse of it. Now he knew that the memory of this picture was what he had forgotten.

  ‘A remarkable picture,’ he said, looking at it in consternation. ‘Truly, a remarkable picture.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the musician. He was astonished that was all Leopold had to say.

  At the door Leopold turned round.

  ‘I’m going to Wilhelm Rau’s inn in Brunnenstraße now,’ he said. ‘You know the place. I’ll be there until ten. Then I’ll go home.’

  The musician didn’t ask, why are you telling me this?

  He was young and shy.

  The thought of this picture weighed heavy on Leopold. It was in a simple frame. You saw a table. A man with bony hands together, palm upward on top of the table, was counting silver coins. Upfolded hands. They were slender and had long fingers. Beside him sat a woman whose loose dress revealed her sagging breasts more than it concealed them. She had her hands upfolded too. Some liquid had been spilt on the table, a sticky liquid, he guessed. Their faces were angular, white and severe. They were bony faces, slender, sorrowful and folded like their hands.

  Leopold thought that this picture could be called ‘The Supper’ or ‘The Consecrated Host’. It reminded you of things it definitely had nothing to do with, no more than it had with the Last Supper. Basically it was a non-religious picture. It was the hands that made it sacred, the hands and the eyes.

  Their hands were upfolded. That was the remarkable thing. Leopold had never heard the word used in that way before. But he knew it was a well-known sacred word. Perhaps it came from some forgotten hymn.

  The musician began to play. Leopold could hear him because the musician’s window was wide open. The street was deserted.

  He remembered he had promised the musician he would go to Brun
nenstraße. The musician might come and look for him. It was nine o’clock.

  Leopold started to walk quickly.

  The thought of the picture weighed heavy on his mind. Now it seemed to Leopold that the liquid that had been spilt on the table was not wine or schnapps, as he had originally assumed, but blood. Although the picture had given the impression black and white were the only colours, the damp patch on the table seemed red, sticky, not yet dry. He could tell with his fingers that it did not have the feel of wine or spirits, that the stickiness did not come from sugar, that it was the stickiness of blood. It seemed to have flowed out of those bloodless fingers. But perhaps it had already been sticking there. The innkeeper came over to wipe it away but withdrew when Leopold didn’t take his fingers out of it, left his beer untouched and gave him a forbidding look.

  There was no doubt everything would soon be cleared up, as soon as the musician who owned the picture came. He could say what it was.

  Leopold straightened up, moving his elbows out from his body. But he kept his fingers upfolded. He was horrified that the blood was on the table and looked towards the door that ought to open. There was no one apart from the innkeeper in the room.

  Leopold rubbed his forehead, for the thought of the picture lay heavy on his mind. It was a thought he was trying to forget.

  But the money, he thought. What about the money? There’s a reason for everything. ‘A reason.’ He said it out loud and the word seemed incomprehensible, alien, scarcely bearable.

  He left without having drunk his beer. It cost a lot, he thought, and his wife was starving. But he had promised the musician. And now he hadn’t come.

  The clocks were striking ten when he went out into the street. He began to run.