The Edit

by J Sydney Jones

  Like I say, the mind is at once so fanciful and so mundane. All these images, these fantastical apparitions of a woman’s love seat, to be reduced to four square centimeters of Frau Wotruba’s person. Yet, that now became my target, my goal. It was required, and quickly, before summer vacation ran out, for not again in many months would I have time enough to myself to accomplish my task—sex had already become associated with labor because of that miserable scrivener’s suggestions.

  With the aid of hindsight, it is as if the whole of the summer had been building to one day late in August. It was a Wednesday. I remember this because the paper shop across the way from our apartment house had half-day closing on Wednesday. I wanted to stop for a card, something to carry, some excuse for the visit, but the paper shop was closed. I almost turned around and went home again, but then saw the candy shop next door was open. In that lush chocolate enclave I used up the few Groschens of pocket money I had—now I would have to walk rather than take a tram to her apartment—on Schweden Bombe for the frau. I bought three: two with coconut covering and one plain chocolate. Not half a block from the candy shop, I stopped and ravished one of the coconut-covered candies. I bit ravenously into the chocolate: I still remember the luscious silky sensation of marshmallow oozing about my teeth and gums. Soft and warm as I imagined Frau Wotruba to be down there. I felt no remorse; after all, she would have two of the sweets all to herself. The sun glared off the cobbles and the sidewalk. I could feel the heat through the soles of my leather shoes. The air was scarcely breathable, contaminated by diesel fumes and horse droppings. Ours was a fairly wide avenue, but as I set out into the outer districts, the streets narrowed and the air became scarcer and scarcer until I felt I would no longer be able to breathe, until I felt as if I were suffocating.

  My heart pounded so furiously in my chest as I approached Hubertusgasse that I felt sure passersby would hear it. Reaching our old street, I could only stand outside the apartment building where we once lived and where the frau still lived, stand there for minutes on end, unable to bring myself to ring the portier’s bell for admittance. The portier would ask my business: She was an evil old shrew who would see through my lie—which I had not yet even concocted—and would know that I had only come to touch Frau Wotruba’s pussy. I felt myself getting hard even thinking of this word and so had to wait more minutes for the erection to subside. I walked down the street a few buildings, conjuring up a series of disgusting thoughts in order to lose tumescence. Across the street, I saw Herr Braunstein come out with his little dog on a lead. Half-day closing meant he was not at his frame shop this afternoon. I quickly turned my back to the street, for I did not want him to see me there. The thought of this nattily dressed little Jew calling out to me and announcing my presence to the whole neighborhood was enough to make me lose the erection. By the time his dog and he had reached the corner, I was in condition to ring the portier’s bell.

  Just as I turned to head back to the apartment building, however, I saw my father walking up to its door. He inserted a key and entered the main door as blithely as if he still lived there. He had not seen me, and I could only stand dumbfounded on the street watching the door close in back of him.

  I could not understand this. Not only did he no longer live there and was, therefore, no longer entitled to the sacrosanct house key, but there was also the fact that he should be working. He had no half-day Wednesday as some shopkeepers did. He should be hard at it in Hütteldorf where he had told us his crew was repairing track the whole summer. I could think of only one explanation for his presence here: some terrible thing had happened. An emergency of some sort. Frau Wotruba! She was ill, or perhaps dying. And instead of feeling remorse and sympathy for the poor tortured soul, all I could think of was that now I had lost my chance to touch her. I ran to the door but was unable to reach it before it latched itself. I had no choice but to ring the portier, who took her time in coming. She finally recognized me and allowed that a message from my mother to Frau Wotruba was grounds enough for letting me in. Having no time to prepare the lie, it came out quite well, I thought. I thanked her and raced up the familiar stairs, along the dark passages with their communal sinks. Frau Wotruba’s flat was on the fourth landing and I was out of breath by the time I got to her door, and sweating heavily to boot. The dark passage was cool compared to outside. I leaned against the wall for a moment, feeling the coolness of the plaster permeating my shirt. Old apartment buildings and churches: those were our air-conditioning in those years before climate control.

  I was about to knuckle on the door when I heard voices coming from the partially open transom overhead. Laughter. A man’s voice, and then a woman’s. The voices held none of the urgency I would have associated with an emergency. They were playful rather than alarmed. I stopped my hand midway to the door and listened. The man’s voice belonged to my father; there was no mistaking the deep gruff tones. But there was something new in it that I had never before heard: a lightness, a softness, and an almost tender playfulness. This was a tone he never exhibited to his family.

  Perhaps it was he who was ill? I listened, entranced, to the soothing sound of this never-before-heard tone of voice, and then Frau Wotruba laughed that full-throated laughter of hers that made one smile uncontrollably. I wished I were inside her flat saying the things that were making her laugh so exquisitely. And then the question finally arose: What was my father doing in the flat coaxing her laughter? What business had he with Frau Wotruba that did not entail emergencies and that allotted him a house key? Such keys were not easy to come by in Vienna. It is not like the Americas where one simply goes to a hardware store and has a man grind out a duplicate whenever you want one. No, in Vienna, one must have a note from the owner of the building, or at the very least from the portier explaining the necessity for a duplicate to be made. Locks are meant to be respected in Vienna. The key my father kept with him was surely not our old one, for it had been duly returned to the portier the day we left Hubertusgasse. That meant the key he was using was most likely Herr Wotruba’s house key. Father was using the key of her deceased husband. What else of the dead man was he using?

  The question was half formed in my mind when sounds from inside answered it. They were speaking louder now; perhaps they had moved back toward the kitchen, onto which the apartment door opened. I could hear her distinctly.

  “But why, Max?” (That was my father’s name.) “We’re such good friends. Why spoil it with that?”

  Then my father’s voice, still tender, though the gruffness was beginning to come through: “It won’t spoil it, little birdie. It’ll make it better, more. You’ll see. Just this once.”

  “But it’s just me down there … just me the same as you see here. We shouldn’t.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  A sound like the smack of lips.

  “You’ll like it.”

  “No, Max. Stop it. Please. Why can’t we just be friends?”

  “After. Afterward we’ll be friends. Now come on. You let that little runt of mine have his way, yet you keep me, a big healthy man, away from it. What kind of woman are you, anyway?”

  There was silence for a time. I looked around frantically for something to stand on. I did not want to miss one instant of this. Near the communal basin was a stool upon which sat a large and dusty rubber plant. I put the plant on the floor quietly and moved the stool to the door. Standing on it, I was just at eye level with the transom, and looking in I saw part of Frau Wotruba’s back. She was wearing a blue-and-white-striped housecoat that I had seen her wear many times. The material was coarse like mattress ticking. Father’s hand was clearly visible on her back, rubbing up and down her spine, and lifting the housecoat farther up her legs with each seemingly innocent rub. She was no longer protesting. She wore half-hose reaching only to her knees. These were revealed as father persistently kneaded the housecoat upward. Abruptly, he stopped kissing her and held her out at arm’s length. I
could see neither of their faces through the tiny crack in the transom, only their decapitated trunks. Frau Wotruba shuddered as he continued holding her away from him, then came a loud snort from Father, followed by a girlish giggle from Frau Wotruba. I thought for a moment that he had left her, for his hands were no longer upon her, though she continued to stand very still. Suddenly her housecoat slipped off her shoulders, spilling in a pile to the floor. She stood in brassiere and underpants with those half-stockings still on. Her flesh looked all goose-bumpy despite the warmth of the day. Then Father’s calloused hands appeared in back of her again, undoing the brassiere and then pulling down the underpants. These last left lines around her waist and at the bottom of her buttocks. She helped him by stepping out of the panties very slowly, as if in a dream. And I was amazed, once divested of clothing, at how lithe she appeared. I felt my own breath coming in short gasps now, my own urgency building. I became so dizzy I almost fell from the stool and had to exercise great self-control to be able to keep watching.

  Frau Wotruba’s back was still to me, tiny and triangular, the spine ridged with muscles. The knobs of her spine stood out distinctly and her behind was high and fine, for she had never carried a baby. Just above the rump, at the small of her back, were two dimplelike impressions on either side of the spine. I could not take my eyes off the fold of her buttocks leading downward, downward to that secret spot between her legs. She, unwillingly it seemed, slowly moved her feet apart, opening her legs. Strands of dark hair curled out of the base of her buttocks. She arched her back as if in pain and gurgled some words I could not understand. The muscles of her buttocks went taut. The fingers of a sun-weathered hand suddenly appeared down there, cupping her, holding and rubbing her.

  I felt about to burst, but the extreme eroticism of the moment was tinged with betrayal. Betrayal both from the frau and from my father.

  Father turned her now and came around in back of her. He was still fully clothed, but his penis was sticking out of his pants, a great red angry sausage with thick black hairs bursting out of his fly at the base of the thing. He made poor Frau Wotruba bend over the table, her breasts crushed against the oilcloth covering, and then he placed that ugly penis between her legs and it disappeared. This seemed to cause her great pain or great pleasure, I could not tell which. She stuck her hand into her mouth as if to stifle a scream. Father moved his hips and out popped his sausage, glistening wet.

  Then Father began moving back and forth more and more quickly, sinking his shaft into her and then withdrawing it. Frau Wotruba, at each entrance and exit, emitted little gasps, like a choo-choo train climbing a steep gradient. Still she bit her knuckles. Then her hips began to move, too, uncontrollably and spasmodically. She pumped them around and around, up and down as Father gyrated back and forth like a belly dancer. His face got redder and redder; a vein pulsed and expanded on his forehead until I thought it might burst. I was surprised they didn’t knot up his wurst with such movements. Her frisson—the same she had with me when I gently rubbed her breasts—happened and suddenly her hips were still. But this did not stop Father from continuing to batter at her buttocks like a siege weapon at the gates of a Mussulman fortress. This went on, the slap of belly against rump, until finally he shouted out “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” and rammed very tightly into her, gripping her hips against his with such force that his fingers seemed to bite into her very flesh. They held together like that for a long moment, then Father pulled away from her and his penis was all crumpled now, no longer alert and angry, but a peaceful thing that occasionally jerked upward as it continued to droop. It was as if it did not want to lose its stiffness, its strength. It did not want to reassume the quotidian function of micturation and encumbrance inside tight-fitting pants. It wanted to hold on to this other existence, this life at the edges of experience.

  Perhaps it is romanticizing the event years after the fact, but I remember then, at that very moment as a young boy watching the act for the first time, that I felt the mystery of it; I saw the magic of the penis for the first time. And I hated him, my father, for it. For being the one to have Frau Wotruba, to steal her away from me. I hated him all the more because of the size of his instrument. She would never be satisfied with me now, after she had that massive thing inside her. Mine was a pencil in comparison to his. If before I felt mild disgust with Father, from that day until his death two years hence, I felt active jealousy and hatred. He had both shown and ruined the magic for me. He had been the one to get there first. There was no thought of the fact that he was betraying Mother with his activities. Such bourgeois morality has never played a part in my ethical system. No, father’s was a betrayal of a much larger scale: He had betrayed his own son’s sexuality. This stung at the very heart of me—it killed something inside of me. Some remnant of feeling I held vis-à-vis Father. I believe that day in August I truly left my boyhood behind.

  Cordoba called unexpectedly last night. It was not our card evening. I shall not transcribe the taped conversation. He merely handed me a letter postmarked from New York. It had been opened. I quickly pulled out the cream-colored linen paper and read the message for Miss O’Brien. Her agent had been mollified by the postcard sent from our village; she was looking forward to seeing her once again in New York.

  “Don’t be so long between letters again,” she wrote by way of closing.

  My gambit would not, then, keep the woman at bay indefinitely.

  I was all smiles, but Cordoba only frowned at me. It seems our mutual friends are not pleased with my compromise. They do not want any trail leading to their country.

  “They are becoming very nervous, my friend,” Cordoba told me as he was leaving. “Very nervous.”

  This morning, I showed the Irish the letter and told her of Cordoba’s warning.

  “Let them sweat, the bastards.”

  This was her only comment. No Mexico City postcard until after she’s read more of my manuscript. There is no cajoling that will work on that score. So be it. If she is unconcerned for her well-being, why should I lose any sleep over it?

  But let me not be detoured from my major purpose: I wish to show explicitly what transpired during my years in the corps. That is what is of value here; enough of this other wallowing in sentimentality—the small bourgeois aperçu. This is not a chronicle of small struggles, awakenings, and disappointments, but of sweeping, magisterial world history. Indeed, the very world hung in the balance, not the paltry emotions of a twelve-year-old boy. And I was part of that movement which shook the very foundations of the world.

  Thus, back to the movement. …

  As planned, Operation Himmler gave us the opportunity we needed to dispose of the Polish problem. We invaded on the first of September; by the third, we were at war with both England and France. It was unfortunate that they felt the need to interfere in a border dispute between neighbors, but there it was. There was no going back, and within a matter of weeks, we had completely subdued the foolish Poles who fought us so ludicrously with sabers and horse cavalry while we rolled across their countryside in Panzer divisions and the Luftwaffe strafed and bombed them from the air. It was war practiced as it never had been before. A new word had to be added to the dictionary to describe such a lightning-quick attack: blitzkrieg. Apposite, both for the speed with which it transpired and for the fact that much of the attack did come from the skies, like lightning, or like the judgment of the old gods upon lesser evolved races. It was a purifying war, a holy war. We Germans were the modern Crusaders. Those were inspirational times, uplifting, ecstatic. No one can truly understand those times who did not live through them.

  No one can have an accurate picture of the Nazi movement without knowing what went before: the shame of Versailles; the runaway inflation of the twenties and thirties; the destruction of the very fiber of German intellectualism by the poisonous theories of the Jews Freud and Einstein. Those two between them, the first with his unconscious forces, the s
econd with his relativity, killed the world of certainties and moral exactitude upon which Western civilization is built. Little wonder then, amid the resulting anarchy of the thirties, that the Nazi Party, with its reestablishment of tried-and-true feudal values, its resurgence of law and order, and its belief in a quasi-Christian morality (“quasi” in that it blended the pagan with more orthodox traditions, not the least of which was Judaism itself with its sense of apartness, the chosen people)—little wonder then of the groundswell of support we experienced: from the displaced little people to wealthy industrialists, from the military to the university. We were in the flow of the time. We, in fact, created both the current and the time. To be a part of that movement—to be, indeed, among its leadership—those were heady times.

  I went back into training for several months following Operation Himmler and the onset of the war. From the start, it was tacitly agreed that I should not be part of the Waffen Schutzstaffel, which fought alongside and, more often, in advance of regular Wehrmacht units. My law degree, my interests, my connections (why be less than frank about this?) all pointed toward a higher administrative posting for me. Which was fine. I am not an overly brave man. I do in a pinch, but the action at the Hohenlinden forestry station demonstrated to me my own limitations. I am a man of moral action, but physically, I am, like most men, shy. Not cowardly, but certainly one who is frightened under fire. My skills would be better used and my fatherland better served in administration.

  By late fall of ’39, I was in Berlin on the Prinz Albrecht Strasse working as an assistant at Amt IV of Foreign Intelligence at Staffel headquarters. Lord knows the qualifications I had for such a position. I was, in fact, adjutant to Major General Heinz Jost, the man who had come to our training camp at Bernau and asked for volunteers for Operation Himmler.