The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  Do you cut off the legs at the thigh or the knee?

  Mostly the thigh, sometimes the knee. At the knee if I have time.

  And the arms?

  Never at the elbow, always at the shoulder.

  Why?

  Don’t ask me, perhaps it’s just habit. There’s not much flesh on the lower arm, none at all on yours, but still, it looks better when it’s there. I mean, just think of eating a chicken leg.

  The man was right.

  A cannibal knows how to eat people.

  Do you use spices?

  Only salt. Human flesh is sweet, you’ll know that, and who likes eating sweet flesh.

  He opened his suitcase. No, I screamed, I’m not asleep yet.

  No need to be afraid, scaredy-cat, I just wanted to show you I’m not joking. He rummaged round among his tools. There really were only five in the case, just lying there, loose. It was a small case. Like a doctor’s, but their instruments are attached to the lid, which has a velvet lining. Here they were just lying on the bottom. Wooden mallet, saw, drill, chisel and pliers. Simple carpenter’s tools. There was a cloth as well. The salt cellar was wrapped up in the cloth. A simple glass salt cellar like you see on the table in cheap restaurants. He stole that from somewhere, I said to myself. He’s a thief.

  He stuck the salt cellar under my nose. There was salt in it. He poured some salt out into my hand. Taste it, he said, top-quality table salt. He saw the annoyance on my face, I was speechless. He laughed. His tiny teeth were repulsive.

  Yes, he said with another laugh, I bet you’d prefer to be salted alive than eaten dead.

  He closed his case and lit another cigarette. It was half past three. The train wasn’t just going, it was flying, but there still won’t be Paris at the end, neither the earthly nor the heavenly city. I was trapped. Death comes to everyone. Is the way you die really so important? You can be run over, you can be shot by accident, you can have a heart attack, if you live to be old enough, or you can die of lung cancer, which is very widespread today. People kick the bucket one way or another. Why not being eaten by a madman in the Nice-Paris express?

  All is vanity, simply vanity, of course. We have to die, it’s just that we don’t want to. We don’t have to live, but we want to. The only things that are important are things that are necessary. Big fish eat little fish, the lark eats the worm and still its song is beautiful, cats eat mice and no one has ever killed a cat for it – everything eats everything to stay alive, people eat people, what’s unnatural about that? Does it hurt more if you can say, ‘That hurts’? Animals don’t cry, people cry when a relative dies, but is there any reason to cry at your own death? Do you like yourself that much? Then it’s vanity. You aren’t heartbroken at your own death. That’s the way things are.

  I felt a warm glow. Here’s a madman, he aims to eat me up. At least he has an aim. What’s my aim in life? Not to eat anyone up, is that as honourable? What’s left if you don’t want to do what you definitely ought to?

  If you don’t do the disgusting thing, what happens to your disgust? It sticks in your throat. Nothing sticks in the throat of the man from St Pölten. He swallows.

  A soft voice said, and it sounded almost tender, There, you see, you’re getting sleepy, that comes from thinking. What is there for you in Paris, anyway? Paris is just another city. Who do you need and who needs you? You’re going to Paris. So what? Sex and drink don’t make people any happier. Not to mention work. You get nothing out of money. And out of life you get shit all. Off you go to sleep now. You won’t wake up, that I can promise you.

  But I don’t want to die, I whisper. Not yet. I want to go to Paris and…. walk around.

  Walk round Paris? Oh, great. You’ll just get tired. There’s enough people window-shopping anyway. The restaurants are crowded. The brothels too. You’ll just be de trop in Paris. Do me a favour and get to sleep. This night’s not going to last for ever, and it means I’ll have to gulp everything down so quickly you’ll give me stomach-ache.

  I have to eat you up. In the first place I’m hungry, and in the second I like you. I told you straight away I liked you, and you thought I was a queer. But now you know. I’m a simple cannibal. It’s not a profession, it’s a need. Come on, don’t you see, you’ve got a purpose, your life has a purpose. And it’s all because of me it has a purpose. You think it was pure chance you got into the compartment where I was? Don’t you believe it. There’s no such thing as chance. I watched you walk all along the platform in Nice. Then you got into my compartment, mine, of all compartments. Because I’m so handsome? Not at all. Is a seal handsome? You came into my compartment because you knew there’d be some action here.

  Very quietly he opened his little case. He took out the mallet and closed the case. He held the mallet in his hand.

  Shall we get on with it? he said.

  In a moment, I said, in a moment. And suddenly I stood up. God knows how, but I was on my feet and stretching out my arm. The thin wire tore, the lead seal came off, the train hissed and squealed. There were screams in the next compartment. Then it stopped. The man from St Pölten hastily slipped the mallet back into his case, took his coat and was at the door in no time at all. He opened it and looked round. I feel sorry for you, he said. This nonsense will cost you a fine of ten thousand francs, you fool, you’ll have no choice but to walk round Paris now.

  People pushed into the compartment. A guard and a policeman appeared. Two soldiers and a pregnant woman shook their fists at me.

  The seal from St Pölten was already outside, just below my window. He shouted something. I opened the window. You’ve made a complete fool of yourself, he yelled, for your whole life. And a person like that insists on staying alive. He spat, shrugged his shoulders, carefully climbed down the embankment, holding his little case in his right hand, and disappeared into the darkness. Like a country doctor hurrying to a confinement.

  The Unmasking of the Briefly Sketched Gentlemen

  Gerhard Amanshauser

  For a baby not to bawl is a clear sign of a lack of vital energy, writes a well-known paediatrician, for crying is a baby’s physical exercise. The Protestant nurse knew that, but she said nothing to the mother, who anyway suspected some sort of abnormality would appear. Actually, she had been surprised by the baby’s complete conformity with the standard model you see on posters everywhere. Wasn’t there a finger missing somewhere, a toe? Even if she hadn’t gone for an all-out abortion, a lot of things had been done that were against the guidelines: knocking back strong drinks or even certain chemicals, doing violent ballet steps, indulging in bizarre fantasies and childish incantations – water under the bridge, as you might say. Still, it was funny when you thought how others stuck to the rules and now and then some monstrosity would emerge, as if further proof were needed of what the cosmos thinks of our laws.

  That young physics teacher she’d met at the fancy dress ball, the one who’d kept going on about the cosmos (whatever that was), as if she’d be impressed by it, could he be the father? The date in question was pretty definite, the day of that party in the abandoned warehouse, but after a party like that it was impossible to say for sure who was the father. And later on, when the first individual features began to emerge from the stereotype infant, at best it would be a guessing game.

  ‘He’s so remarkably quiet,’ said the young mother to the Protestant nurse, as she carried the child past the inscription, All things that appear on earth must first go past God, back into the room, ‘and such a funny yellow colour.’ The next bed was surrounded by a whole forest of flowers, like a death-bed, and in it, by way of contrast, was a corpulent woman who was constantly being visited by whole groups, poked by podgy arms, snowed under with grins and encircled with tongues and jaws in unceasing motion. Whilst the flowers in the bouquets and pots, as if under the influence of toxic fumes, were starting to droop and the first signs of decay were appearing on the aristocratic tips of the leaves, the fat woman came more and more to life, took her bawli
ng infant to her spherical breasts, where it drank furiously, laughed with the nurses or the doctor and enriched her vocabulary with hospital jargon, proudly dwelling on every detail of her bodily functions.

  The silent, yellowish child, on the other hand, suckled so weakly, so apathetically, that it had to be artificially fed; it would wrinkle its forehead like an old man and the only response that could be elicited from it was a weary blink. No one came to visit the bed where the young mother in her black night-dress scarcely moved, just occasionally lifted up her white-powdered face and pushed aside her long strands of hair with sharp fingernails to stare into space. Clouds of suspicion drifted towards her from all sides: no father to be seen; excesses had got their all-too-visible comeuppance, resulting in an unfortunate situation that aroused nothing but smug gloating.

  ‘Sister, where do those fibres at the corner of its eyes come from? And it always has fibres like that at the corners of its mouth too.’

  ‘Oh, they’re nothing to worry about.’

  ‘I’m convinced it can focus. It follows my movements with its eyes.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  When she went for a walk in the corridor outside, between the deathly white of the walls, doors and trolleys, between paintings representing stuffed mothers or crucified flowers, she had the feeling she’d been condemned to prison for life. She picked up a book lying on the table and opened it. The Bible! She flung it back onto the table as if it were poisoned.

  It was a relief to get out of the hospital and escape the sister’s care. Every gesture of assistance there was tied to unspoken conditions which built up into a deposit of all-embracing terror in invisible chambers. But the house in the suburbs to which she returned with the child was empty. There were things here you could tell hadn’t been used for ages. Still lying in the hall were two suitcases, coats and bags, things that had been recovered from the wrecked car in which her parents had died. For months now she hadn’t been able to bring herself to touch them, to open the cases, even to dust them. She didn’t need a third of the things her mother had used in the house. It was out of respect for the memory of her parents that she left their bedroom untouched, didn’t even go into it. She’d never liked bedrooms and she found all these double beds ridiculous, completely absurd. Thus parts of the house, and the furnishings, sank into oblivion, slowly covered themselves in dust and abandoned their less compact parts to the small, inconspicuous creatures which were already starting to riddle them with holes and passageways, spread out their nets in the airspace and stake out their territories.

  Now the child had started to make occasional noises, which could be taken for crying, only they were about an octave too deep and had a strangely hollow sound. Taken together with its wrinkled brow and bald head, they made it seem like a shrunken old man at death’s door. But the doctor assured her its heart-beat was strong and there was no question of debility. He seemed unwilling to admit that the odd fibres that formed at the corners of the baby’s eyes and mouth were fibres, explaining them away as either secretions or traces of milk, and he simply laughed at the mother when she tried to tell him how little of the latter she produced. He, too, assured her the infant could not focus, even though the mother had repeatedly observed its eyes following her from beneath its lashes, which, in contrast to its bare head, were unusually long.

  ‘There are exceptions,’ she said.

  ‘Not in this case,’ explained the doctor, who always seemed to manage to avoid looking straight at the child and therefore not to see anything he could not explain. Printed on the products the child needed were almost identical pictures of babies that seemed to be somehow related in form to young piglets. Perhaps they represented the images that people, and therefore also the doctor, had decided to see when they looked at an infant.

  The mother, on the other hand, had the impression the child was departing more and more from this model, and in ways that were disturbing. Its cries or, rather, the plaintive moans it sometimes emitted, were not spontaneous, the child had obviously learnt to use them to achieve certain ends. For example, it seemed to like the noise of the radio; if it was switched off, it would start to moan, when it was switched back on, it would quieten down. It could lie for hours beside the noisy radio without falling asleep, though as it always kept its eyes half closed, it was impossible to say for sure whether it was actually awake or not. Once it was lying so that it could look out of the window and the mother thought she could see its eyeballs flicking back and forward in the crack between its lids as cars drove past,

  But that was not all. At night, when the baby was in the adjoining room, it never cried, as one would have expected, but made movements which stopped immediately the mother came in. Sometimes its cradle was still rocking.

  The child – at least that was how it seemed to her – was developing a life of its own which it was trying to hide from her. Even if it was too early to assume it had thought processes of its own, it certainly seemed to have alien instincts which were guiding it towards some unknown existence. Since whatever hints she dropped about this were dismissed by the doctor in a manner that was nothing short of brutal, this idea, that she shared with no one, fixed itself at the back of her mind, and sometimes she would smile with the stubborn pride of one who, surrounded by the blind who refused to be persuaded, was the sole possessor of the truth.

  Whereas at first she had kept the baby under close observation, she now quite often gave it the opportunity to pursue its secret purposes, and just nodded when she heard its noises in the adjoining room at night, a rapid pattering, for example, a shuffling or knocking. She thought it likely it had reached the stage where it could climb out of its basket alone and get around carefully on all fours.

  Just as she kept herself under control and showed no reaction to the child, even if that meant a certain coolness vis-à-vis its feigned helplessness was unavoidable, she was careful to observe all the proprieties in the streets and shops. She, who had previously been known for her dissolute lifestyle, achieved an astonishing mastery in this. The precision with which she moved through her surroundings had a narcotic effect on her. She heard the expected words emerge from her lips as if there were some highly efficient machine inside her producing them; it just needed a touch to set it working. The game of conformity fascinated her much more than her previous unconventionality. People appeared to conclude she had finally come to her senses.

  To her amazement, she realised that the way of life of these people was nothing more than an indeterminate fiction, casually knotted together at particular points that were used again and again. With four or five remarks and a couple of facial expressions, she had mastered it with no problem at all. In the morning she would listen for the slamming of car doors and engines starting up, when various men, whom she called briefly sketched gentlemen, set off for randomly distributed, haphazard districts to pursue their salaries so they could keep up the façades in which the light from TV sets flickered in the evening. When she saw ties and cuff-links, she felt like laughing out loud because they made her think of the constant restoration of connections, which reproduced themselves in deadly earnest. Brassières and suspender belts also aroused her amusement, in fact anything that had to be hooked or fastened together. On television, which gave her a new kind of pleasure, these objects that were constantly being unbuttoned then done up again appeared a second time, and there you could see that corpses fell out of them. It kept on making her laugh. Everywhere these people had concealed corpses, which she called dolls, and when one of them tumbled out again, out of an open car door for example, she would shout, ‘Dolly!’

  But she liked watching other series as well. The Mysteries of the Cosmos for example. She was fascinated by shining objects moving through huge black spaces. They reminded her of the drunk physics teacher at the fancy dress ball who had kept on talking to her about alien galaxies, as if he were asking her to fish herself a few compliments out of the immense void, since now any others just seemed ridiculous. And
when you thought about it, a fancy dress ball was a not inappropriate place to imagine strange worlds and beings.

  The only thing she found unpleasant was that in her dreams she always went back to the same places with the same circumstances, as if her dream life were starting to assume a similar, brief yet plausible consistency to her day-time existence. Since she had become aware of the thread-bare texture of daytime existence, suggestions had the power, provided they repeated themselves and intertwined in certain patterns, to penetrate the cracks yawning everywhere in everyday life. These pieces of black crepe (that was her name for the night-time shapes that were trying to infiltrate the daylight hours) did bother her a little, and she would often wave her hand to shoo them away, saying, ‘Off you go.’

  It was not surprising that the child, having a life of its own, should leave more and more traces of this the stronger it grew. But who would have thought that the yellowish fibres, which the doctor had dismissed as secretions of no significance, should more and more take on the character of small growths or tufts? There was constantly something of that kind to wipe off, hanging from the edge of its cot for example or, more recently, stretched across to other pieces of furniture. In principle she had nothing against the child going over to producing things of its own. She didn’t find the strangeness of them disturbing, but the fibres, even if they were gossamer-thin, almost completely insubstantial, gave her the feeling of something unclean. At the same time the moths had spread in great numbers from the uninhabited parts of the house, so that those whitish structures formed everywhere on the materials, causing the fabric to split.

  Almost every day she went out for a walk with the child to the so-called air-raid-shelter pond, a left-over from the last war where there were a few benches beside empty cable drums and tar barrels; some rushes had grown there too. The child stayed perfectly quiet on these expeditions. She just left it in the pram and could have read for hours, except that recently she had discovered holes and crevices between the words which she immediately had to fill with her own ideas until she was fed up with patching up the makeshift constructs.