by John Irving
'I don't know how you come up with such academic and pretentious ideas,' my father said.
'I'll look for a teaching job next year,' I said. 'I'd just like this year off, to get a good start on the book.'
'Why don't you forget the book? Wasn't the first one enough?' he asked. 'I'd rather finance a vacation - something good for you.' I maintained silence; I knew what he thought of historical novels. 'Why don't you find out everything about the painting before you go all the way to Vienna to see it?' he asked. 'You might find out that your leading character is the town tax collector or a Flemish fop! There's available iconography of every painting Pieter Brueghel ever made. Why don't you be professional, for Christ's sake, and find out what you're doing before you start doing it?'
He didn't understand; he thought that everything was a thesis project to be accepted or rejected. I'd told him a hundred times that I didn't really care about the history behind everything as much as I cared for what it provoked in me. But he was hopeless, a diehard factualist to the end.
He gave me the money; in the end, he always did. 'Apparently it's all I have to give you that you'll take,' he said. 'My God, Vienna!' he added with disgust. 'Why not Paris or London or Rome? Take my advice and have a good time before you start taking yourself so seriously. Next thing, you'll get married. Oh God, I can see it: some countess, in name only. Penniless, but used to the finer things. Her entire family of raving hemophiliacs wants to move from Vienna to New York but can't bear to leave the horses behind.
'Take my advice,' my father said from his easy chair. 'If you have to knock up anybody, knock up a peasant. They make good wives; they're the cream of womanhood.' Books, magazines, notecards slid about in his lap; my mother stood surprised beside him. I thought of Brueghel's painting and of my father as he might appear in it: scrolls in both hands, sitting legless, as amputated as a beggar, his goblet of bad wine pinched between his stumps.
'You want to make a novel from a sixteenth-century painting!' my father cried. 'An education clearly wasted - at least, run amok. Why don't you try the Orient? They make excellent wives.'
Shellshocked, I left for Europe. I said goodbye to my mother at the airport (my father refused to drive). 'Thank God you have enough money to do what you want to do,' she said to me.
'Yes, I do.'
'I pray you'll remember your father in happier moods.'
'Yes, yes.' I tried to remember some.
'Thank God for your education, despite what your father says.'
'I do.'
'He's not himself lately,' my mother said.
'God?' I said, but I knew she meant my father.
'Be serious.'
'Yes, yes.'
'He reads too much. It depresses him.'
'I'll send you pictures of Vienna,' I promised. 'The prettiest postcards I can find.'
'Just tell me the good news,' my mother said. 'And don't try to write anything on the backs of the postcards. There's never enough room.'
'Yes, yes,' I said, remembering another thing that depressed my father: people who write on the backs of postcards. 'Do they think they're saying anything?' he used to yell.
He gave me a note when I shook hands goodbye with him. I didn't look at it until the plane was descending on Schwechart Airport. Suddenly, in the midst of our downward pitch and roll, the stewardesses played an old recording of Strauss's 'Blue Danube'. The eerie, gooey music blaring from nowhere startled nearly everyone, and the stewardesses smiled at their little trick. A man beside me went into a rage. 'Aaach!' he cried to me; he knew I was an American. 'I am Viennese,' he told me, 'and I love Vienna, but I get so embarrassed when they play that wretched Strauss. Why don't you break that awful record?' he hollered at the stewardesses, who went on smiling.
The man reminded me of my father, and I remembered the note. As the plane touched down, I read it.
Say hello to Schmaltz for me.
Give my regards to Kitsch City.
Love, Dear Old Dad
And the rest is history. Edith Fuller and I came to Vienna and fell in love with our tour guides. In her case, Severin elected to be her guide, but in mine Utch was more literally employed.
I met her when I went to see the Brueghels in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. I asked for the standard tour in English. I said I was especially interested in the Brueghel rooms, and that I wouldn't mind skipping the Rubens and all that. It was November, stone-gray and Baroque-cold. The tourist season was over; Vienna was turning indoors. A tour guide would be available in a moment; I was told I could have a special Brueghel tour. ('He's one of the favorites.') I felt as if I were waiting in a delicatessen for one of the more popular meats. Everything felt cheap. I remembered what my father had said and wished I had come prepared and could stride through the Brueghel rooms as an authority on the Northern Renaissance. I wondered if I had conceived of an historical novel from the point of view of a tourist. When my guide was introduced, I was struck by her Russian name - and also by the tilt of her nametag perched on her high breast.
'Fraulein Kudashvili?' I said. 'Isn't that Russian?'
'Georgian,' she said, 'but I am an Austrian. I was adopted after the war.'
'What's your first name?'
'My name is Utchka,' she said. 'I am not familiar with Americans.'
'Utchka?'
'Ja, it's slang. You won't find it in the dictionary.'
Nor are there words, I'm sure, for all the things Utch and I did in Vienna those first few weeks of November 1963. Are there words, for example, for the faces of Utch's ex-roommates in her Studentenheim on Krugerstrasse? Over a line-up of gleaming sinks, we three shaved each morning in the Herrenzimmer. Willy had a goatee which he avoided like his jugular; Heinrich had a mustache no thicker than the artery at his wrist. I watched their razors and whistled. After the third night I spent with Utch, Willy shaved off his goatee, tears in his eyes. After the fourth night, Heinrich emasculated his mustache. Then Willy emptied a can of shaving cream into his curly blond hair and leered over my shoulder, as my own razor shakily skimmed my throat. After the first week with Utch, I asked, 'These fellows down the hall, the ones I meet in the men's room each morning - you know them?'
'Ja.'
'Uh, what were they to you?' I asked.
And Utch would go on and on about her guardian Captain Kudashvili, about Frau Drexa Neff's steam room, about attending the memorial service for Stalin. And every morning while I shaved, Willy and Heinrich took off more hair. It was my second week in the Studentenheim when Willy shaved the furry ridge off his stomach and made strong strokes through the blond clump hiding his navel.
'Their demonstrations are getting worse,' I told Utch. 'I don't think they like me.'
So Utch told me about the Benno Blum Gang - especially the man with the hole in his cheek, her last bodyguard. The next morning Heinrich loomed over my shoulder in my mirror, and shaved a quick swath through the dark forest on his chest, slashing a hidden nipple in the process. His blood turned the shaving lather pink; he dabbed it on his eyebrows and grimaced at me.
'I think I'll grow a beard,' I said to Utch. 'Do you like beards?'
We went to the opera and the zoo; like the opera fans, the animals kept to themselves. She showed me the little streets, the famous Prater, the parks with their neighborhood orchestras, the gardens, Kudashvili's old apartment house, the Soviet embassy. But it was November; it was more fun indoors. Her room at the Studentenheim was almost anti-girlish; she was twenty-five, after all, and had inherited no mementos from her mother. She had grown up with a Soviet Army officer and, more recently, with dictionaries and art history. She had grown up a little with Willy and Heinrich too, though I wouldn't know this until later. She had a narrow single bed, nearly as firm and compact as Utch herself, but she allowed me to rest my head between her breasts.
'Are you comfortable?' I kept asking her. 'Are you all right?'
'Of course!' she said. 'Aren't Americans ever comfortable?'
In the mornings, I still had to brush m
y teeth; I could not avoid the Herrenzimmer altogether. As my beard grew, Willy and Heinrich grew balder, and I said to Utch, 'It's as if they're trying to suggest symbolically that my presence has deprived them of something.'
I heard more about the man with the hole in his cheek, another symbol. Utch had compressed him into all her bodyguards, into all her years of growing up in the occupation. The man had become Benno Blum; she dreamed of him; she swore to me that even now she occasionally fantasized him; he would appear in the windows of passing cabs or in the aisles of swaying Strassenbahns, no doubt lurking behind a raised newspaper. Once she saw him when she was conducting a tour in the Kunsthistorisches. He appeared like a fallen angel in the bottom corner of a huge Titian, as if he'd dropped out of the painting and, wholly out of grace, was waiting to be discovered.
For two weeks Utch kept her job and I had to trail behind her tours. But it was November; the tourists were going south or home; guides were being laid off. She said she liked the job because it was nonpolitical. In winter, she was often in the service of the Soviet embassy's M. Maisky. She had been the interpreter for a ballet troupe, a string ensemble, a mystic, a colonel out of uniform and several 'diplomats' with an undisclosed rank and purpose. Most of them had made Russian propositions to her. She had always thought of her future as narrow. 'I can either be a Communist in Vienna,' she told me, 'or I can be a Communist in the Soviet Union.'
'Or you can come to America with me,' I said.
'I don't think America's a very good place to be a Communist,' Utch said.
'But why are you a Communist?'
'Why not?' she said. 'Who else took care of me?'
'I'll take care of you.'
'But I don't know any other Americans,' she said.
Her room was full of plants; she liked the color green. We could talk and breathe hard in there all day and night and always have fresh oxygen. But it was November; some of the plants were slowly dying, too.
In the Herrenzimmer one morning Heinrich shaved his head. My beard had grown almost a half-inch. Heinrich's skull glinted at me. 'I think Utchka and I are going to live in America,' I told him. He didn't appear to understand English; he stared at me, filled his mouth with shaving cream and spat in the sink. His opinion was pretty clear. I turned back to my sink; I'd been getting ready to brush my teeth when Heinrich's shining dome distracted me. When I picked up my toothbrush, all the bristles were shaved off; Willy had done the deed while I'd been talking to Heinrich. I looked at Willy, standing at the sink next to mine; he was grinning at me, changing razor blades. He didn't appear to understand English either.
'That's funny,' Utch said. 'Willy and Heinrich have had about seven years of English in school. Sometimes they speak it to me.'
'Fancy that,' I said.
'Was ist "fancy"?'
So we went to the gold-edged, red-brocaded office of M. Maisky in the Soviet embassy. M. Maisky looked looses-kinned and old; he gazed at Utch the way a sickly uncle lavishes fondness and bitterness on a robust niece.
'Oh Utchka, Utchka,' he said. He went on and on in Russian, but she asked him to speak English so that I could understand him, too. He regarded me sadly. 'You want to take her away from us, dear boy?' he asked. 'Oh Utchka, Utchka, what would poor Kudashvili say? America! Unashamedly he weep would!' Maisky cried.
'He would weep unashamedly,' Utch corrected.
'Yes,' Maisky said, his old gray eyes aswim. 'Oh Utchka, Utchka, to think of all the years you grow that I have watched! And now this ...'
'I'm in love,' Utch said.
'Yes,' I said stupidly. 'So am I.'
'How could this happen?' Maisky wondered. His suit was a loud gray, if that's even possible: his tie, a shiny sort of cardboard, was gray too, and so were his hair, his once-white shirt, the tinted lenses of his glasses and even the color in his cheeks.
'Sir,' I said, 'I think it will be necessary for Utchka to say she's not a Communist anymore - or even that she never really was - so that my country won't delay her immigration. But we hope you know that this isn't personal. She has told me how you've helped her.'
'Renounce us, you mean?' Maisky cried. 'Oh Utchka, Utchka ...'
'I hoped you'd understand,' Utch said, unmoved by poor old Maisky. I was quite touched by him, actually.
'Utchka!' Maisky shouted. 'If you go to America, there can be no God!'
'There is no God anyway,' Utch said, but Maisky gazed heavenward as if he were going to summon Him. Perhaps he will call upon the Workers of the World, I thought, but he just shook his head.
Outside it was all November; Maisky regarded the weather. 'I am by everything so discouraged,' he said. 'This weather, the price of things, East-West relations - and now this.' He sighed. 'By deteriorating quality of life everywhere I am discouraged, though perhaps where you're going it will be exciting because everything deteriorates a little faster over there.' He arched his stiff back and gave out a gray groan. 'By the values I see young people abandoning I am discouraged. The sexual liberties taken, the terrible self-righteousness of children, the probability of more wars, the extravagance of having so many babies. I suppose you want to have babies too?'
I felt guilty for all the things discouraging Maisky, but Utch said, 'Of course we'll have babies. You've just gotten old.' I winced. Who was this callous young woman I wanted to take home with me? She was not sentimental; I saw her inspiring blank shock in my mother. But perhaps she would flatter my father's pessimism.
Later Utch said, 'Some things about America do bother me.'
'What?'
'The terrible poverty, the automobile accidents, the racial violence, the sexual crimes ...'
'What?'
'Does everyone cook in - what you call it? - a barbecue pit?' she asked. I tried to imagine her vision of America: a country of one vast smoldering cookout - with rapes and police skirmishes, car crashes and starving black children on the side.
We acquired the necessary papers for Utch at the American consulate. The man we talked to was discouraged by many of the same things which were discouraging to M. Maisky, but Utch and I remained cheerful. We returned to the Studentenheim on Krugerstrasse, where Utch practiced her renunciation speech. When I went to the Herrenzimmer, Willy was shaving his eyebrows. 'At this moment,' I told him, 'Utchka is practicing her entry into the United States.'
'Go practice your own entry,' he said.
Heinrich came into the Herrenzimmer bare-chested, stood at the mirror and aimed the shaving-cream can at himself as if it were an underarm deodorant; he filled both armpits with a lathery foam, turned away from the mirror and flapped his arms against his sides like some violent, awkward bird. Lather squirted on the walls, oozed over his ribs, dappled his shoes. 'I think you better marry her before you take her anywhere,' Heinrich said.
'Ja,' said Willy, eyebrowless, as startling as a newborn owl. 'That's the only decent thing to do.'
I went back to Utch's room to ask her if she agreed. We compared our philosophies on marriage. We spoke of fidelity as the only way. We considered conventional 'affairs' as double deceptions, degrading to everyone involved. We regarded 'arrangements' as callous - the kind of premeditation that is the opposite of genuine passion. How people could conceive of such things was beyond us. We speculated on the wisdom of couples 'swapping'; it hardly seemed wise. In fact, it seemed an admission of an unforgivable boredom, utterly decadent and grossly wasteful of the erotic impulse. (Philosophy is a pretty simple-minded subject when you've just fallen in love with someone.)
There were further permissions needed from and granted by the American consulate before we could get married. Since Austria is a Catholic country and I wasn't Catholic and Utch was long lapsed, the easiest thing was to be married in a nondenominational church. The American consul told us that this church was preferred by most Americans who got married in Vienna. It was called the American Church of Christ and was in a modern building; the minister was an American from Sandusky, Ohio, who said he'd been raised a Unitaria
n. 'But it doesn't matter,' he told us; he smiled a lot. He said to Utch, 'They're going to love your accent in the States, honey.'
The church itself was on the fourth floor and we took an elevator to it. 'Some young people like to use the stairs,' the minister told us. 'It gives them more time to think about it. Last year one couple changed their minds on the stairs, but no one's ever changed his mind in the elevator.'
'What's "change your mind" mean?' Utch asked.
'Isn't she charming?' the minister said. 'She's going to knock them over back home, you know.'
The form for the American consulate required the signature of a witness - in our case, the church janitor, a Greek named Golfo who had not yet learned to write his last name. He signed the form 'Golfo X.'
'You should tip him,' the minister told me; I gave Golfo twenty shillings. 'He wants to give you a present,' the minister said. 'Golfo witnesses lots of our weddings and he always gives a present.' Golfo gave us a spoon. It was not a silver spoon, but it had a tiny colored picture of St Stephen's Cathedral engraved on the handle. Perhaps we were to pretend that we had been married there.
The minister walked us around the block. 'You should expect that you'll have your little differences,' he told us. 'You can even expect some pretty good unhappiness,' he said. We nodded. 'But I'm married myself and it's just great. She's a Viennese girl, too,' he whispered to me. 'I think they make the best wives in the world.' I nodded. We all came to a halt suddenly because the minister stopped walking. 'I can't walk around that corner,' he told us. 'You'll have to go on by yourselves. You're on your own now!'
'What's around the corner?' I asked him. I assumed he'd been speaking metaphorically, but he meant the actual corner of Rennweg and Metternichgasse.
'There's a pastry shop there,' he said. 'I'm on a diet, but I can't resist the Haselnusstorte if I see it in the window.'
'I want a Mokkacremetorte,' Utch decided; she tugged me along.
'There's too much Torte in this city,' the minister confessed, 'but do you know what I miss the most?'
'What's that?'
'Hamburger,' he said. 'It's just not the same as back home.'
'Hamburger is cooked in the barbecue pits, right?' Utch asked.
'Oh, listen to her!' our minister cried. 'Oh, you have a winner there!' he told me.
