by Linda Stift
I delivered the dog back to Frau Hohenembs and went home. The couple who’d viewed my flat were standing outside the door. I was at the far end of the corridor. But it was too late to turn around; they’d already seen me and were slowly coming in my direction. I didn’t move. I still hadn’t got through to the property-management company. They both put an arm around my shoulder and pushed me to the front door. They smelled of pub and sweat, of cold smoke. Their leather-jacketed arms lay heavily on my shoulders. Come on, open up. The man slammed the door behind us; the woman kept her arm around my shoulder. She was a head taller than me and quite strong, despite being so lanky. She directed me into the living room and pushed me onto the sofa. What do you want? I asked. The flat’s not available, I’ve already told you that. The woman sat down beside me, her right thigh was touching my left. The man wandered up and down, picking up newspapers and items of laundry like Frau Hohenembs over a week earlier, dropping them again, scraping at the floor with his foot as if trying to rub away an invisible mark, then he opened his mouth and said, Listen, we’re only interested in the flat. You’re going to be out by next Tuesday; you can take whatever you like of your things. We’ll come on Tuesday and get the keys. If you don’t hand them over willingly… we’ll have to handcuff you. He rubbed a wrist. His leather jacket tautened at the shoulders. The woman put an arm around my waist; she held me so tightly that I could feel my ribs. I gasped for air noisily, I couldn’t help it. It’ll get tighter, she said. When they’d left I rang the property-management company. This time I got through. They didn’t know anything about the conversation with a Frau Savka, there was no employee with that name working there, I must be mistaken. And unless I could show them something in writing any extension to my contract would not be legally binding. My contract was running out, they said, I hadn’t bothered to extend it and consequently the flat was being let out to another party.
BOOK TWO
I’m living with Frau Hohenembs now. She’s given me a small room in her apartment, a closet really, but it’s not that tiny; it’s even bigger than Ida’s. It’s the room where Lucheni’s head used to be stored. I kitted it out with my furniture. I’ve got my bed and my sofa, my desk with the computer and my office chair. For the few items of clothing I possess I use one of Frau Hohenembs’s old cupboards. Ida cleared it out for me and gave it the once-over with a foul-smelling cleanser. It took almost a fortnight for the revolting pong to disappear. In the apartment Ida wears the white coat during the day. Sometimes she forgets to take it off when we sit down to eat; Frau Hohenembs raps her knuckles on the table and shouts, Ida! Take off the coat! Then she’ll unbutton and remove it, only to have to put it on again five minutes later because Frau Hohenembs has finished her food so quickly, and Ida has to clear the table. I’ve got a few books here and a CD player. It’s only temporary. Frau Hohenembs has promised me a new apartment. An acquaintance of hers, Baron Wachtel, is close to death. The baron is ninety-five and bedridden, and, sooner or later, the apartment will become free. It’s more than 200 square metres, with a terrace and a view of the city. She’s going to sign the apartment over to me; she has no use for it herself. On the first evening Frau Hohenembs took me into her bedroom, where there was a large set of scales made from white-painted cast iron with golden edges, manufactured by the firm F. Russ in the nineteenth century; some doctors and chemists still use museum pieces like that. I was to get on the scales. Ida jotted down my weight, forty-nine kilograms, in a notebook dedicated to this very purpose. Ida was weighed too and in the end Frau Hohenembs got on. She pushed the sliding weight back and forth a number of times, muttering unintelligibly. She weighed forty-nine kilos too, even though she’s a good fifteen centimetres taller than me. There was a notebook each for the two of them as well, in which Ida carefully entered the figures. Frau Hohenembs said nothing about my weight, but she shook her head disapprovingly at Ida’s. If you go on like that, she said, it’s not going to end well. Show me your food diary. Ida handed over a well-thumbed notebook that she’d pulled from her dress. Frau Hohenembs flicked through it; she was not happy. I think you only note down half of what you eat – how else could you be so fat? Ida lowered her gaze. She probably didn’t even write down half of it. She repeats this ritual every evening. It reminds me of my grandfather, who spent years producing daily weight graphs. If the line rose too steeply upwards because he had sinned, he would instruct my grandmother to arrange a day of just potatoes or polenta, which she would be forced to join him in. She herself developed gastric ulcers because, for months on end when she was forty, she drank freshly squeezed lemon juice on an empty stomach. After four pregnancies even she became unhappy with her figure. My grandfather would always ask me about my weight too, whistling through his teeth and looking aghast when I told him how many kilos, as if I’d said 150 rather than fifty-five. Strange that a grandfather should be interested in his granddaughter’s weight. For years he tormented me with comments about my appearance. Saying I was heavier than my mother, that I had footballer’s calves, fat upper arms and that I was really well stacked, whereas he’d describe my mother (his daughter) as beautifully slim and then as too thin. But the two of us weren’t that different. He didn’t like my eating habits either. I shouldn’t mash my potatoes in the sauce, why on earth did I eat the meat first, then the mashed potatoes at the end, if I wanted seconds I ought to take more of everything rather than just potatoes, I should eat my ice cream more quickly before it all melted, I’d soon be able to dip my bread in it, was I waiting for the ice cream and whipped cream to slosh together into a soup? I never ate fast enough, the mill grinds slowly, or, if I left something on my plate, then your eyes are bigger than your belly. Although the others berated him, Leave her alone, she can eat how she likes, he put me off my lunch. There was nothing nicer than being able to warm up my own food and sit on my own in front of the television at my grandparents’ dining table, or going outside in summer to my secret places – the box store or the tree house – to eat there, or alone in the empty kitchen. Then Grandfather’s control ceased. I could mash and mix my food to my heart’s content and eat as slowly as I liked. I could balance the plate on my thighs. The plate could fall on the floor. I could eat it all up or chuck half away. It was absolute freedom and the opposite of what my mother had grown up with. As a child, if she didn’t finish her plate she’d be made to sit for hours on her own in the dining room with her congealed leftovers. Her grandmother, who cooked for the family, forced her to. The coal would have burned down in the dining room, nobody would have put more on and the stove would have gone out. The room would be as cold as the lump of food on the plate. Her grandmother’s cooking was fatty and gooey. She sweated vegetables in flour and lard. No fat, gristle or bone was ever removed from the meat. If you got a tendon in your mouth you were never allowed to spit it out: We’d have been grateful for that in the war. If my mother saw it in time and cut it off the meat, she could pass it over to her grandfather, who would cheerfully cry, You don’t know what you’re missing!, make a big show of putting it in his mouth and pull a face as if savouring a rare delicacy. If, in spite of all her caution, my mother got a tendon in her mouth, she’d try to swallow it, but the tendon would often stick in her throat and she’d start retching and have to run into the kitchen and spit it out into the bin. Even if she did manage to swallow the tendon she’d be filled with such horror at the thought of that squidgy thing making its way down her that she’d have to stop eating there and then. At some point in the afternoon the maid would liberate my mother from the nauseating mass she was obstinately sitting in front of. She would be crying tears of fury and hatred. The maid would tip the leftovers into the bucket of slops reserved for the pig, and give her an apple. In the mornings the dog scratches at the door. When I let him in he looks around, wrinkles his dog nose, as if looking for something, and leaves the room. I think he’s searching for Lucheni’s head, which he used to bark at around this time of day. But he’s incorrigible; he keeps trying. Ida wasn’t
pleased when I moved in. She’s not getting my room! she griped at Frau Hohenembs. The two parrots in the corner imitated her: She’s not getting my room! She’s not getting my room! Ida hurled an embroidered cushion in their direction, which knocked the cage, fell to the floor and was dragged off by the dog. The startled parrots flew into the air, then settled back on their perch and, aggrieved, buried their beaks in their feathers. Frau Hohenembs didn’t bat an eyelid. I still don’t know what the dog’s name is, maybe Lucheni. I’ve put into storage the rest of my things that there isn’t room for here. It doesn’t cost much. I wasn’t going to leave those crooks who’ve stolen my flat so much as a cup. I’ve tried to ring Charlotte on a number of occasions; the first few times it was engaged or I was put straight through to voicemail. Eventually I was told the number didn’t exist any more. I tried directory enquiries – there was no phone number listed for her. I rang the number a few more times; I hadn’t been misdialling, sadly; Charlotte was unobtainable.
*
She developed an almost maternal attentiveness to tame my gluttony. She was forever telling me how harmful it was to eat so much. My édes szeretett angyalom was permanently concerned that I would get too big and she appeared appalled by my weight; I was ordered onto the scales regularly. But I always had a good appetite and, whatever my personal circumstances, food was a tonic for me. I was unable to go without it, even if it was not always of the highest quality – the fact that I was not particularly choosy was what astonished her most. Especially for my aggravating headaches, food proved a reliable remedy.
*
My mornings are generally free, then at two p.m. we have lunch together, prepared by Ida. There’s always lots of meat and few vegetables, and barely a salad leaf in sight. In the afternoons we take a long walk in the Vienna Woods or the meadows of the Prater. A Greek teacher comes three mornings a week for conversation with Frau Hohenembs. He’s short, a little stunted, and he worships Frau Hohenembs like a Greek goddess. She bosses him around, but he puts up with everything. He never stays for lunch, although there’s plenty to go around; Ida always cooks too much. I get the feeling that each time the lesson is over he’s hoping for an invitation from Frau Hohenembs. He’ll gaze dreamily at the lunch table, which by then Ida has laboriously set for three, sticking his large nose into the air. Mmmm, he’ll say, that smells good. What delicacies are on the menu today? When nobody answers him he shuffles indolently towards the hall, casting several longing glances back at the table. Once out of the door he slams it shut behind him, his only protest against his poor treatment, and something he only dares to do because he’s out of reach. I once spoke to Frau Hohenembs about it, but she didn’t give me an answer. And yet it would be a nice change to have someone different at the table. Frau Hohenembs picks at her food, pushing pieces of meat and potatoes from one side of the plate to the other until everything’s cold. She eats a little of the meat and leaves the rest. Or she eats nothing at all, just drinking raw spiced meat juice or whisked salted egg whites, orange juice if I’m lucky, a glass of milk if I’m not. As I find white dairy products nauseating, I can barely look if anyone’s having them. As a child I could have earned money drinking milk, for my parents offered me five schillings for each glass, but in spite of my childish desire for money I couldn’t get it down me. The grainy streaks of white that run slowly and viscously down the inside of the glass make my stomach turn, with buttermilk being the most repugnant of all. Only at breakfast does Frau Hohenembs eat at a normal speed, choosing things that don’t put me off my food. Sometimes, however, Ida has to make British porridge, which I detest as much as milk. It keeps you going, Frau Hohenembs affirms with all seriousness when she sees my face; this is what she kept hearing in Britain. Ida, on the other hand, keeps wolfing it down like there’s no tomorrow, and when Frau Hohenembs is on liquids only, her pace becomes even more frenzied for fear that Frau Hohenembs could finish at any moment. Ida has the repulsive habit of continuing to chew on her food for an hour or two if she thinks no one’s watching. She’ll retch up a bite back into her mouth, chew on it, then swallow it again. I imagine it comes from the need to eat so quickly at the table, because otherwise she never gets enough. On the occasions when Frau Hohenembs catches her doing this she’ll scream, Ida! You’re doing your revolting thing again – stop it at once! Ida will turn away and swallow guiltily, but the moment she’s certain that she’s no longer under close scrutiny she’ll start again. It reminds me of my most embarrassing experience. It’s so embarrassing I can hardly bear to remind myself; not even Charlotte knows. What would Frau Hohenembs say? Once when I’d cooked and eaten spaghetti with sauce, I felt I hadn’t had enough; I was hungry for more, no matter what it was. But there was nothing else to eat, so I vomited onto my empty plate and had another go at the puked-up spaghetti, now in smaller bits. The actual eating of it wasn’t the worst, as I couldn’t taste any gastric acid and it looked like tinned spaghetti for little children. But afterwards, when I’d thrown up a second time, now in the loo, I was so ashamed that I got ill and couldn’t eat again for days. Later I found out that, in Catholic and state homes for children, one of the favourite punishments in the 1950s and 60s, and even into the 70s, was to make children sit in front of their plates until everything was eaten up, and if they vomited in disgust, which was not a rare occurrence because the food in those institutions was often inedible, they had to eat up what was left on their plate and the sick. Come what may, the plate had to be empty. I was never forced to eat up every last morsel – my mother was still haunted by all those plates with ice-cold food – I did it willingly. In spite of this, full of self-pity, I wallowed in the image of the soup bowl I’d thrown up into twenty years ago. A white soup bowl, an everyday bowl, not from a posh dinner service. The bowl was on the stained, smooth kitchen table, together with all those things that accumulate on kitchen tables: salt cellar, pepper mill, used napkins, sugar bowl, newspapers, brochures, biros, notepad, instruction leaflets for medicines, crumbs. Crying and sobbing, perhaps even gagging – the scene became ever more dramatic in my memory – I spooned up the sick. I find myself increasingly getting carried away by Ida and so start eating more than I actually want to, which puts me into great difficulty. It’s very hard for me to puke here: the lavatory is right next to Frau Hohenembs’s bedroom. I can’t sneak off unnoticed, as you have to go through the drawing room and Frau Hohenembs’s bedroom, a disagreeable undertaking, particularly at night. The parrots, whose cage is covered with a blanket, must not be woken, otherwise they’ll get ill. And then there’s the dog, who, when he’s not asleep, tends to follow you wherever you go. Frau Hohenembs says I’m allowed to use the loo (as is Ida) whenever I like. If she’s not in her bedroom I’m always worried she might burst in at any moment, for you can’t lock the loo door; if she is there I feel like an annoying intruder. At night I never know if Frau Hohenembs is pretending to be asleep and listening to the sounds I make, or whether she really can’t hear anything at all, which is what you’d think from the regular rattle of her breathing. If Ida’s in the loo, which you can tell by the strip of light beneath the door, I return to my room, listen for her to come back, then enter Frau Hohenembs’s bedroom again; she seems oblivious to all this coming and going, but I don’t trust her. Sometimes I’ll wait more than half an hour, but Ida still won’t have come back. Then I have to check whether she really is in the loo or if she’s just forgotten to turn out the light. It’s perfectly possible, of course, that Ida deliberately keeps the light on to rob me of sleep. Few words are spoken at the table – Ida hasn’t got time to speak because her mouth is permanently full and Frau Hohenembs is lost in her thoughts. Sometimes she stops eating unexpectedly and writes poetry in a black notebook. If she’s in a particularly good mood she’ll read out selected verses and we have to give our opinion. Ida marvels at these outpourings; I maintain that I know nothing about poetry. Her verses are vulgar doggerel; only seldom is there the odd bite or even humour. They bear witness to her contempt for ever
yone. What’s more, she claims Heine as her inspiration. These poems are the only thing she pens herself; everything else is dictated to Ida, or, more frequently now, me. Like Ida, I have to have a notebook on me at all times. Mostly it’s shopping lists or instructions for small tasks we’ll carry out later. Frau Hohenembs wanted me to keep a food diary like Ida, but I refused. Maybe you’ll reconsider, she said, handing me an A5 hardback writing book – Italian, with thick colourful paper inside and small images on the cover. It really is a great help. I’ve kept umpteen food diaries in my life; I’ve added up millions of calories, and subtracted, divided and multiplied, all of it useless. It never meant I weighed one gram more or less. All it did was reinforce my obsession with food, which fills every cell of my body anyway. My thoughts focus only on the next meal, how I can compensate for the last meal with the next one (best to skip it altogether), what I’m not going to eat any more or, caught up in the delirium, all the things that are going to be bought on the next shopping trip. Ida keeps Frau Hohenembs’s food diary. She falsifies her own unashamedly. It’s not just that she notes less than she’s eaten, as Frau Hohenembs rightly suspects, but she also puts down other things like fruit and vegetables, things she gives a wide berth, except in processed forms such as jam and pickles. In light of the unfavourable loo situation, I’ve had to reinstate my old screw-top jar system that I used as a little girl. I vomit in my bedroom into large jars I hide in the cupboard or behind the bookshelves. In the past these jars were my emergency puking vessels; plastic bags were no good because the smell leaked out. From the jars I was able to gauge my weakness, this unappetizing weakness that manifests itself as the contents of a jar in muted, dirty colours and in various layers. The worst is when I want to puke and there isn’t an empty jar, which is a regular occurrence. I haven’t collected that many jars as it isn’t easy to pinch them unobserved from Ida’s kitchen. When I was a girl these jars would remain in my bedroom for weeks, fermenting away. Sometimes the lid would pop off and the jars explode. Which meant the puke would fly all over books or my clothes. Or I’d vomit into empty 500-gram yoghurt pots, which I would seal with aluminium foil and plastic bands, then hide in the loft under dusty beams. I’ve no idea what happened to those pots. They’re probably still there today, empty and mouldy, because mice and rats will have gobbled up the contents. If I don’t find a way of emptying out these jars without being seen, they’ll leak and emit a God-awful stench. I can only empty them if I’m alone in the apartment and that’s happened just twice. Barely had I emptied the jars down the loo, washed them in the kitchen and hidden them in my room again than the two of them were back and the dog was snuffling around me interestedly. I can’t throw the jars away; I’d have to get new ones and that would arouse too much suspicion, as Ida uses the empty jars for making jam and pickling peppers. I could buy some, but I can’t smuggle them into the apartment unnoticed; I have to ring the bell when I come home. Frau Hohenembs promised me a key when I first came here; Ida was instructed to get some cut for the entrance downstairs and the door to the apartment, but she keeps procrastinating – the key-cutter is on holiday or he’s changed his opening hours, then she doesn’t have any time or she can’t find her own key, etc. How am I supposed to justify buying a bag full of clanking jars? Ida would assume they were for her preserves. If I don’t have any opportunity to throw up in the apartment I go to the park just down the road, wait till there’s no one about, then puke behind a hedge. I avoid looking up at my old flat. Sometimes I notice inadvertently that the windows are open or closed, or the blinds are down. Then I quickly turn my head and leave the park. Or I go to the loo in an ice-cream parlour. As cover I’ll buy an ice cream afterwards, which I’ll throw away outside before I can succumb to the temptation of eating it. Unfortunately, that smell is hanging in my room again. In the past this sour stench pervaded my bedroom, I was permanently surrounded by it, I lived in it. My mother and father would grimace whenever they entered my room. They didn’t have to say anything; I could tell from their faces that they could smell it when I came out of the loo or bathroom, or back from a walk that I’d taken to throw up behind a bush. The pungent smell clung to my body. It stuck to my clothes, my hair; it must have been literally emanating from me. The stench of fermented sick will follow me all my life. I can smell it spontaneously in the most unlikely places. All I have to do is see a skinny girl somewhere – and I see them everywhere; they spring from the ground like scrawny mushrooms – and the smell is back in my nostrils. On Saturday afternoons we always go to a betting café. Frau Hohenembs watches dog and horse racing and places complex wagers. Sometimes Ida will advise her against a bet, but this doesn’t stop her from placing it. Mostly Ida is proved right. Although Frau Hohenembs never misses a race and must know all the animals by now, her gambling success is limited. Occasionally, I’ll put money on a horse whose name I like, or on a greyhound with a particularly long fringe or whose eyes look noticeably sad. I have even less luck than Frau Hohenembs; I’ve never won a single race. During the races Frau Hohenembs will torment us with tales from the time when she rode herself; she used to be one of the best hunt riders in the whole of Europe, she claims. Only a few men could keep pace with her, and they’d stay close by, following her like dolphins do a ship. Her escapades in Hungary and England, and later in Ireland, were legendary; the Queen of the Hunt, the British gazettes used to call her. When half of the riders had been thrown into ditches and had to shoot their horses because they had broken their legs or their bellies were gashed open, she’d long since negotiated all the obstacles. And this in the uncomfortable ladies’ saddle she used for official hunts, and in uncomfortable skirts. If she rode alone, or with her niece, she used a man’s saddle and wore men’s clothes. That was true happiness. You know! She was worshipped by all the well-known riders, both in Hungary and in Britain; everywhere she had the world at her feet. The Irish were particularly attached to her, she said, they still talk about her there to this day. She forged a place in the Irish consciousness as a mysterious fairy on horseback around whom legends grew. The sun and wind turned her the colour of a hare; her face was covered in freckles. The shuddering and foaming horses, the riders in red, the children on ponies and the English hounds with brown patches. The green fields. You don’t get that sort of green over here, she said. And English parkland, Irish forests. Oh, those were the days. Taking after her father, she also used to perform artistic riding tricks in the circus arenas she had built; her trainer was the famous circus rider Elise Renz. And – just imagine this – everything came to an end from one day to the next. All of a sudden, and for no reason, I lost my courage. I, who scorned every danger, now saw it lurking behind every bush, and I could not get these fearful visions out of my head! And riding is so good for the figure; even Flaubert said that. This is how she brags during those long Saturday afternoons in the gloomy, air-conditioned betting café. They know us here; the waiter automatically brings us two raspberry sodas (for Ida and me) and a lemon soda (for Frau Hohenembs). After the betting café we visit a confectioner’s. We have to make our way right across the city, because this particular confectioner’s is the solitary one in Vienna that makes violet ice cream according to an old Trieste recipe – the only ice cream Frau Hohenembs eats. It has a faintly euphoric effect. We eat three large portions and Frau Hohenembs orders another litre to take home. We mustn’t get any more as it spoils after a couple of days in the freezer compartment. Ida and I sit intoxicated next to each other on the tram. Frau Hohenembs, who as a matter of principle stands in the tram, looks out of the window giggling, with a hand to her mouth. Ida brings her ice cream back up into her mouth, probably dreaming of Corfu. In her youth she must have got caught up in something which Frau Hohenembs is now shamelessly exploiting. I’m only going to spend a short time here, then I’ll go and she won’t be able to stop me. When that Baron Wachtel dies at the very latest. Then she’ll have to give me the flat. I’m certain she lied that time on the phone when she said she knew how she could
keep herself and Ida out of the affair. If I were to tip off the police, the two of them would be in quite a bit of hot water. But they would implicate me. So I’ve got to sit it out. She gives me a little pocket money; my account is blocked. My only outgoings are for storage and what I spend in secret on food. I get by, but only just, and only because I changed up the collection of coins I found in the hall cupboard. They must have been the coins Frau Hohenembs was talking about when we were in the Prater. The first and only money she had ever earned. The coin album looked so dusty and forgotten that I hoped its disappearance would pass unnoticed. And it has, so far at least. I’ve had to break my fast. Eating then vomiting is the only thing that gives me a connection to my past. The palais of the Ringstrasse pass by the windows of the tram, these massive, grand buildings from the late nineteenth century. A melancholic evening is looming. When the effect of the violet ice cream wears off, Ida will administer Frau Hohenembs a dose of cocaine with the syringe from the museum – for medicinal purposes, as she claims. Then Ida will reach for her schnapps glass and I will consume the two 500-gram bags of bittersweet chocolate wafers that I’ve been hoarding. The parrots will be covered and the dog will sleep.
