by John Irving
'Fuck me,' she said, flatly. 'Then stay the night, or go home. I don't care. Just leave the Hotel New Hampshire, please leave it -- please make sure Lilly, especially, leaves it,' she begged me. Then she cried harder and lost what slight interest she'd ever had in the sex. I lay still inside her, growing smaller. I felt cold -- I felt the draft of coldness from under the ground, like the coldness I remembered feeling when Frank first read to us from Ernst's pornography.
'What are they doing on the fifth floor at night?' I asked Fehlgeburt, who bit into my shoulder, and shook her head, her eyes closed tightly in a violent squint. 'What are they planning?' I asked her. I grew so small I slipped completely outside of her. I felt her shaking and I shook, too.
'They're going to blow up the Opera,' she whispered, 'at one of the peak performances,' she whispered. 'They're going to blow up The Marriage of Figaro -- something popular like that. Or something heavier,' she said. 'I'm not sure which performance -- they're not sure. But one that's full-house,' Fehlgeburt said. 'The whole Opera.'
'They're crazy,' I said; I didn't recognize my voice. It sounded creaky; it was like Old Billig's voice -- Old Billig the whore or Old Billig the radical.
Fehlgeburt shook her head back and forth under me; her stringy hair whipped my face. 'Please get your family out,' she whispered. 'Especially Lilly,' she said. 'Little Lilly,' she blubbered.
'But they're not going to blow up the hotel, too, are they?' I asked Fehlgeburt.
'Everyone will be involved,' she said ominously. 'It has to involve everyone, or it's no good,' she said, and I heard Arbeiter's voice behind hers, or Ernst's all-embracing logic. A phase, a necessary phase. Everything. Schlagobers, the erotic, the State Opera, the Hotel New Hampshire -- everything had to go. It was all decadent, I could hear them intoning. It was full of disgust. They would litter the Ringstrasse with art-lovers, with old-fashioned idealists silly and irrelevant enough to like opera. They would make some point or other by this kind of everything-bombing.
'Promise me,' Fehlgeburt whispered in my ear. 'You'll get them out. Your family. Everybody in it.'
'I promise,' I said. 'Of course.'
'Don't tell anyone I told you,' she said to me.
'Of course not,' I said.
'Please come back inside me, now,' Fehlgeburt said. 'Please come inside me. I want to feel it -- just once,' she added.
'Why just once?' I asked.
'Just do it,' she said. 'Do everything to me.'
I did everything to her. I regret it; I am forever guilty for it; it was as desperate and joyless as any sex in the second Hotel New Hampshire ever was.
'If you think you're going to die before you'll even have time to have a baby,' I told Fehlgeburt, later, 'why don't you leave when we leave? Why don't you get away before they do it, or before they try?'
'I can't,' she said, simply.
'Why?' I asked. Of these radicals in our Hotel New Hampshire I would always be asking why.
'Because I drive the car,' Fehlgeburt said. 'I'm the driver,' she said. 'And the car's the main bomb, it's the one that starts all the rest. And someone has to drive it, and it's me -- I drive the bomb,' Fehlgeburt said.
'Why you?' I asked her, trying to hold her, trying to get her to stop shaking.
'Because I'm the most expendable,' she said, and there was Ernst's dead voice again, there was Arbeiter's lawnmower-like process of thought. 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 t
he 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 Schraubenschlussel'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 Karntnerstrasse. 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 Karntnerstrasse 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 schon,' 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.
