by John Irving
'I can drive,' Franny said to Ernst.
'You can't,' I said. 'You never even got your driver's license, Franny.'
'But I know how to drive,' Franny said. 'Frank taught me.'
'I know how to drive better than you, Franny,' Frank said. 'If one of us has to drive, I'm a better driver.'
'No, I am,' Franny said.
'You did surprise me, Franny,' Ernst said. 'You were better at following directions than I thought you'd be -- you were good at taking instructions.'
'Don't move, dear,' Schwanger said to me, because my arms were jerking -- the way they do when I've been curling the long bar, for a long time.
'What's that mean?' Father asked Ernst; his German was so poor. 'What directions -- what instructions?' Father asked.
'He fucked me,' Franny told Father.
'Just sit tight,' Wrench said to my father, moving near him with his tool. But Frank had to translate for Father.
'Just stay where you are, Pop,' Frank said.
Freud was swishing the baseball bat as if he were a cat and the bat were his tail, and he tapped my father's leg with it -- once, twice, thrice. I knew that Father wanted the bat. He was very good with the Louisville Slugger.
Occasionally, when Freud was napping, Father would take us to the Stadtpark and hit us some grounders. We all liked scooping up ground balls. A little game of good old American baseball in the Stadtpark, with Father whacking out the ground balls. Even Lilly liked playing. You don't have to be big to field a ground ball. Frank was the worst at it; Franny and I were good at fielding -- in a lot of ways, we were about the same. Father would whack the sharpest grounders at Franny and me.
But Freud held the bat, now, and he used it to calm my father down.
'You slept with Ernst, Franny?' Father asked her, softly.
'Yes,' she whispered. 'I'm sorry.'
'You fucked my daughter?' Father asked Ernst.
Ernst treated it like a metaphysical question. 'It was a necessary phase,' he said, and I knew that at that moment I could have done what Junior Jones could do: I could have bench-pressed twice my own weight -- maybe three or four times, fast; I could have pumped that barbell up and not felt a thing.
'My daughter was a necessary phase?' Father asked Ernst.
'This is not an emotional situation,' Ernst said. 'This is a matter of technique,' he said, ignoring my father. 'Although I'm sure you could do a good job of driving the car, Franny, Schwanger has asked us that each of you children be spared.'
'Even the weight lifter?' Arbeiter asked.
'Yes, he's a dear to me, too,' Schwanger said, beaming at me -- with her gun.
'If you make my father drive that car, I'll kill you!' Franny screamed at Ernst, suddenly. And Wrench moved near to her, with his tool; if he had touched her, something would have happened, but he just stood near her. Freud's baseball bat kept time. My father had his eyes closed; he had such trouble following German. He must have been dreaming of hard ground balls spanked cleanly through the infield.
'Schwanger has asked us, Franny,' Ernst said, patiently, 'not to make you children motherless and fatherless, too. We don't want to hurt your father, Franny. And we won't hurt him,' Ernst said, 'as long as someone else does a good job of driving the car.'
There was a puzzled silence in the lobby of the Hotel New Hampshire. If we children were exempt, if Father was to be spared, and Susie the bear wasn't to be trusted, did Ernst mean he would use one of the whores for a driver? They couldn't be trusted -- for sure. They were only concerned with themselves. While Ernst the pornographer had been preaching his dialectic to us, the whores had been slipping past us in the lobby -- the whores were checking out of the Hotel New Hampshire. A wordless team -- friends in any crisis, thick as the thieves they were -- they were helping Old Billig move her china bears. They were bearing their salves, their toothbrushes, their pills, perfumes, and prophylactics away.
'They were the rats abandoning the sinking ship,' as Frank would say, later. They were not touched with Fehlgeburt's romanticism; they were never anything larger than whores. They left us without saying good-bye.
'So who's the driver, you super shit?' Susie the bear asked Ernst. 'Who the hell's left?'
Ernst smiled; it was a smile full of disgust, and he was smiling at Freud. Although Freud could not see this, Freud suddenly figured it out. 'It's me!' he cried, as if he'd won a prize; he was so excited, the baseball bat tapped double time. 'I'm the driver!' Freud cried.
'Yes, you are,' said Ernst, awfully pleased.
'Brilliant!' Freud cried. 'The perfect job for a blind man!' he shouted, the baseball bat like a baton, conducting, leading the orchestra -- Freud's Vienna State Opera Band!
'And you love Win Berry, don't you, Freud?' Schwanger asked the old man, gently.
'Of course I do!' Freud cried. 'Like my own son!' Freud yelled, wrapping his arms around my father, the baseball bat snug between his knees.
'So if you drive the car properly,' Ernst said to Freud, 'no harm will come to Win Berry.'
'If you fuck it up,' Arbeiter said, 'we'll kill them all.'
'One at a time,' Schraubenschlussel added.
'How can a blind man drive the car, you morons?' screamed Susie the bear.
'Explain how it works, Schraubenschlussel,' Ernst said, calmly. And now it was Wrench's big moment, the moment he'd been living for -- to describe every loving detail of his heart's desire. Arbeiter looked a little jealous. Schwanger and Ernst listened with the most benign expressions, like teachers proud of their prize pupil. My father, of course, didn't understand the language well enough to get all of it.
'I call it a sympathy bomb,' Wrench began.
'Oh, that's brilliant!' Freud cried out; then he giggled. 'A sympathy bomb! Jesus God!'
'Shut up,' Arbeiter said.
'There are actually two bombs,' Schraubenschlussel said. 'The first bomb is the car. The whole car,' he said, smiling slyly. 'The car simply has to be detonated within a certain range of the Opera -- quite close to the Opera, actually. If the car explodes within this range, the bomb in the Opera will explode, too -- you might say "in sympathy" with the first explosion. Which is why I call it a sympathy bomb,' Wrench added, moronically. Even Father could have followed this part. 'First the car blows, and if it blows close enough to the Opera, then the big bomb -- the one in the Opera -- then it blows. The bomb in the car is what I call a contact bomb. The contact is the front license plate. When the front license plate is depressed, the whole car blows sky-high. Several people in its vicinity will be blown sky-high, too,' Schraubenschlussel added.
'That's unavoidable,' Arbeiter said.
'The bomb in the Opera,' said Schraubenschlussel, lovingly, 'is much more complicated than a contact bomb. The bomb in the Opera is a chemical bomb, but a very delicate kind of electrical impulse is required to start it. The fuse to the bomb in the Opera -- in a quite remarkably sensitive way -- responds to a very particular explosion within its range. It's almost as if the bomb in the Opera has ears,' Wrench said, laughing at himself. It was the first time we had heard Wrench laugh; it was a disgusting laugh. Lilly started to gag, as if she was going to be sick.
'You won't be hurt, dear,' Schwanger soothed her.
'All I have to do is drive the car, with Freud in it, right down the Ringstrasse to the Opera,' Schraubenschlussel said. 'Of course, I have to be careful not to run into anything, I have to find a safe place to pull off to the side of the street -- and then I get out,' Schraubenschlussel said. 'When I'm out, Freud gets behind the wheel. Nobody will ask us to move on before we're ready; nobody in Vienna questions a streetcar conductor.'
'We know you know how to drive, Freud,' Ernst said to the old man. 'You used to be a mechanic, right?'
'Right,' said Freud; he was fascinated.
'I stand right next to Freud, speaking to him through the driver's side window,' said Wrench. 'I wait until I see Arbeiter come out of the Opera and cross the Karntnerstrasse -- to the other side.'
'To the safe side!' Arbeiter added.
'And then I just tell Freud to count to ten and floor it!' Schraubenschlussel said. 'I'll already have aimed the car in the right direction. Freud will simply floor it -- he'll get up to as fast a speed as he can. He'll run smack into something -- almost right away, no matter which way he turns. He's blind!' Wrench cried, enthusiastically. 'He has to hit something. And when he does, there goes the Opera. The sympathy bomb will respond.'
'The sympathy bomb,' my father said, ironically. Even Father understood the sympathy part.
'It's in a perfect place,' Arbeiter said. 'It's been there a long time, so we know no one knows where it is. It's very big but it's impossible to find,' he added.
'It's under the stage,' Arbeiter said.
'It's built into the stage,' Schraubenschlussel said.
'It's right where they come out to take their fucking final bows!' Arbeiter said.
'Of course, it won't kill everyone,' Ernst said, simply. 'Everyone onstage will die, and probably most of the orchestra, and most of the audience in the first few rows of seats. And to those sitting safely back from the stage it will be truly operatic,' Ernst said. 'It will provide a very definite spectacle,' said Ernst.
'Schlagobers and blood,' Arbeiter teased Schwanger, but she just smiled -- with her gun.
Lilly threw up. When Schwanger bent over to soothe her, I might have had an opportunity to grab the gun. But I wasn't thinking well enough. Arbeiter took the gun from Schwanger, as if -- to my shame -- he was thinking more clearly than I was. Lilly kept throwing up, and Franny tried to soothe her too, but Ernst went right on talking.
'When Arbeiter and Schraubenschlussel come back here, and report on our success, then we'll know we won't have to harm this wonderful American family,' Ernst said.
'The American family,' Arbeiter said, 'is an institution that Americans dote on to the sentimental extreme that they dote on sports heroes and movie stars; they lavish as much attention on the family as they lavish on unhealthy food. Americans are simply crazy about the idea of the family.'
'And after we blow up the Opera,' Ernst said, 'after we destroy an institution that the Viennese worship to the disgusting extreme that they worship their coffeehouses -- that they worship the past -- well ... after we blow up the Opera, we'll have possession of an American family. We'll have an American family as hostage. And a tragic American family, too. The mother and the youngest child already the victims of an accident. Americans love accidents. They think disasters are neat. And here we have a father struggling to raise his four surviving children, and we'll have them all captured.'
Father didn't follow this very well, and Franny asked Ernst, 'What are your demands? If we're hostages, what are the demands?'
'No demands, dear,' Schwanger said.
'We demand nothing,' said Ernst, patiently -- ever patiently. 'We'll already have what we want. When we blow up the Opera and we have you as our prisoners, we'll already have what we want.'
'An audience,' Schwanger said, almost in a whisper.
'Quite a wide audience,' Ernst said. 'An international audience. Not just a European audience, not just the Schlagobers and blood audience, but an American audience, too. The whole world will listen to what we have to say.'
'About what?' Freud asked. He was whispering, too.
'About everything,' Ernst said, so logically. 'We'll have an audience for everything we've got to say -- about everything.'
'About the new world,' Frank murmured.
'Yes!' Arbeiter said.
'Most terrorists fail,' Ernst reasoned, 'because they take the hostages and threaten violence. But we're beginning with the violence. It is already established that we are capable of it. Then we take the hostages. That way everybody listens.'
Everyone looked at Ernst, which -- of course -- Ernst loved. He was a pornographer willing to murder and maim -- not for a cause, which would be stupid enough, but for an audience.
'You're absolutely crazy,' Franny said to Ernst.
'You disappoint me,' Ernst said to her.
'What's that?' Father cried to him. 'What did you say to her?'
'He said I disappointed him, Pop,' Franny said.
'She disappoints you!' Father cried. 'My daughter disappoints you!' Father shouted at Ernst.
'Calm down,' Ernst said to Father, calmly.
'You fuck my daughter and then tell her she disappoints you!' Father said.
Father grabbed the baseball bat from Freud. He did this very quickly. He picked up that Louisville Slugger as if it had lived a lifetime in his hands, and he swung it levelly, getting his shoulders and hips into the swing, and following through with the swing -- it was a perfect line drive sort of swing, a level low liner that would still have been rising when it cleared the infield. And Ernst the pornographer, who ducked too slowly, put his head in the position of a perfect letter-high fast ball to my father's fine swing of the bat. Crack! Harder than any ground ball Franny or I could have handled. My father caught Ernst the pornographer with the Louisville Slugger flat on the forehead and smack between the eyes. The first thing to strike the floor was the back of Ernst's head, his heels plopping down one at a time; it seemed like a full second after the head had hit the floor that Ernst's body settled down. A purple swelling the size of a baseball rose up between Ernst's eyes, and a little blood ran out of one of his ears, as if something vital but small -- like his brain, like his heart -- had exploded inside him. His eyes were open wide, and we knew that Ernst the pornographer could now see everything that Freud could see. He had gone out the open window with one swift crack of the bat.
'Is he dead?' Freud cried. I think if Freud hadn't cried out, Arbeiter would have pulled the trigger and killed my father; Freud's cry seemed to change Arbeiter's slow-moving mind. He stuck the barrel of the gun in my little sister Lilly's ear; Lilly trembled -- she had nothing more to throw up.
'Please don't,' Franny whispered to Arbeiter. Father held the baseball bat tightly, but he held it still. Arbeiter had the big weapon now, and my father had to wait for the right pitch.
'Everyone stay calm,' Arbeiter said. Schraubenschlussel could not take his eyes off the purple baseball on Ernst's forehead, but Schwanger kept smiling -- at everyone.
'Calm, calm,' she crooned. 'Let's stay calm.'
'What are you going to do now?' Father asked Arbeiter, calmly. He asked him in English; Frank had to translate.
For the next few minutes, Frank would be kept busy as a translator because Father wanted to know everything that was going on. He was a hero; he was on the dock at the old Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea, except he was the man in the white dinner jacket -- he was in charge.
'Give the bat back to Freud,' Arbeiter told my father.
'Freud needs his bat back,' Schwanger said to my father, stupidly.
'Give the bat up, Pop,' said Frank.
Father gave the Louisville Slugger back to Freud and sat down beside him; he put his arm around Freud and said to him, 'You don't have to drive that car.'
'Schraubenschlussel,' Schwanger said. 'You're going to do it just the way we planned. Take Freud with you and get going,' she said.
'But I'm not at the Opera!' Arbeiter said, in a panic. 'I'm not there yet -- to see if it's intermission, or to make sure it's not. Schraubenschlussel has to see me walk out of the Opera so he knows it's okay, so he knows it's the right time.'
The radicals stared at their dead leader as if he would tell them what to do; they needed him.
'You go to the Opera,' Arbeiter told Schwanger. 'I'm better with the gun,' he said. 'I'll stay here, and you go to the Opera,' Arbeiter advised her. 'When you're sure it's not intermission, walk out of the Opera and let Schraubenschlussel see you.'
'But I'm not dressed for the Opera,' Schwanger said. 'You're dressed for it,' she told Arbeiter.
'You don't have to be dressed for it to ask someone if it's intermission!' Arbeiter yelled at her. 'You look good enough to get in the door, and you can see for yourself if it's
intermission. You're just an old lady -- nobody hassles an old lady for how she's dressed, for Christ's sake.'
'Stay calm,' Schraubenschlussel advised, mechanically.
'Well,' our gentle Schwanger said, 'I'm not exactly an "old lady." '
'Fuck off!' Arbeiter cried at her. 'Get going. Walk up there, fast! We'll give you ten minutes. Then Freud and Schraubenschlussel are on their way.'
Schwanger stood there as if she were trying to decide whether to write another pregnancy or another abortion book.
'Get going, you cunt!' Arbeiter yelled at her. 'Remember to cross the Karntnerstrasse. And look for our car before you cross the street.'
Schwanger left the Hotel New Hampshire, composing herself -- actually arranging her face in as motherly an expression as she could muster for the occasion. We would never see her again. I suppose she went to Germany; she might author a whole new book of symbols, one day. She might mother a new movement, somewhere else.
'You don't have to do this, Freud,' my father whispered.
'Of course I have to do it, Win Berry!' Freud said, cheerfully. He got up; he tapped his way with the baseball bat toward the door. He knew his way around pretty well, considering his total darkness.
'Sit down, you old fool,' Arbeiter told him. 'We've got ten minutes. Don't forget to get out of the car, you idiot,' Arbeiter told Schraubenschlussel, but Wrench was still staring at the dead quarterback on the floor. I stared at him, too. For ten minutes. I realized what a terrorist is. A terrorist, I think, is simply another kind of pornographer. The pornographer pretends he is disgusted by his work; the terrorist pretends he is uninterested in the means. The ends, they say, are what they care about. But they are both lying. Ernst loved his pornography; Ernst worshiped the means. It is never the ends that matter -- it is only the means that matter. The terrorist and the pornographer are in it for the means. The means is everything to them. The blast of the bomb, the elephant position, the Schlagobers and blood -- they love it all. Their intellectual detachment is a fraud; their indifference is feigned. They both tell lies about having 'higher purposes.' A terrorist is a pornographer.
For ten minutes Frank tried to change Arbeiter's mind, but Arbeiter didn't have enough of a mind to experience a change. I think Frank only succeeded in confusing Arbeiter.
Frank was certainly confusing to me.
