The White Body of Evening

by A L McCann

  “What about some company?” a young woman said to him, leaning out of the shadows as he hurried by her. He caught a glimpse of her shivering scarlet cheeks, the steam of her breath in the cold air, the shades of green and black around her eyes. She bent down to adjust a stocking, raising her skirt hem to reveal a lace-up boot. As he glanced at her, a day labourer rolled right into him, knocking him back a few steps, muttering to himself in a language Paul couldn’t understand, and shaking his head.

  When he recovered himself Paul had lost sight of Klessmann. He hurried along thinking that he could only be a step or two beyond his field of vision. But there were lanes and still smaller alleys snaking off at all angles and with the narrowness and congestion of the street his hopes of setting eyes on him plummeted. A cart dragged along by a donkey blocked his way. An old woman tumbled a sack full of potatoes over the cobblestones and a gang of urchins descended upon them as she tried to shoo them away. For a moment Paul thought he could see Klessmann’s hat. He darted along the side of the street, but when he got closer his certainty quickly faded and he had to admit that Klessmann was gone.

  Paul walked on to the end of the street. He’d come a long way and had no idea where he was. The crowd was sparser now. Annoyed with himself he turned back the way he had come only to find that he was lost and couldn’t quite retrace his steps. He thought he knew the general direction, but after a while realised that he was walking aimlessly. He stopped outside a Wirtshaus and peered in through the window at a quartet – violins, a bass and a clarinet – playing on a stage, while men and women twirled each other around a dance floor. He felt the urge to go inside, but the scene in front of him looked too intimate, as if the people were all familiar with each other, one great big rollicking family to which he didn’t belong. He walked on, despondently, wandering for what must have been hours. Sometimes he thought a street looked familiar, only to find it winding into an area he didn’t recognise. He could see prostitutes on the corners, rugged up against the cold, coughing horribly into their hands, propped up in doorways like dummies. Finally, near a train station, he recognised Mariahilfer Straße from a map in his room and followed it back to the centre.

  It was late by the time he made it back to the hotel. He was cold, exhausted and disheartened by the pitiless squalor of the streets Klessmann had dragged him through. The silence of the room filled him with a sense of his own loneliness. He longed for a conversation as much as he longed for the warm glow of the fireplace in the Montague or the familiar rattle of a tram along Bourke Street. Homesickness. It was childish. He pushed the sentiment away, recalled how badly Melbourne had used him, and resolved to make a better fist of things the next day.

  He could only have been asleep for a few hours when a knock at the door awoke him. The deep blue light of another dawning winter’s day had seeped into his room. He got up, still wearing the clothes he’d had on the night before. Hastily he smoothed over his hair with his hand and rubbed the blood back into his face, straightening himself as he opened the door to find Klessmann standing on the other side, hat, as usual, in hand.

  “How in God’s name do you do it?” Paul said.

  Klessmann looked at him with puzzlement.

  “Why don’t you catch a bloody streetcar? You walk through the city, through that wretched slum and out into God-knows-where every night.”

  “The tram, the tram is fourteen heller,” Klessmann said, looking embarrassed.

  “Here then, take the money.”

  Paul rummaged about in a drawer and shoved a hundred kronen into Klessmann’s pocket.

  “No, I could not.” He tried to return the gift.

  “Take it,” Paul said. He snatched the money and put it back into Klessmann’s pocket.

  “Very, very kind, Paul.”

  “When was the last time you ate properly?” he demanded.

  Klessmann looked at the floor, and jerked his head. He’s wasting away, Paul thought. He took him down to the dining room and ordered coffee and some rolls. Klessmann ate self–consciously, pecking at the food, a crumb at a time. It put Paul on edge.

  “What is wrong with you, for God’s sake? Are you trying to starve yourself to death?”

  To silence him Klessmann took bigger mouthfuls, chewing more vigorously. Paul could see his bony jaw doing its best, but it wasn’t used to such sustained activity. They ate in silence. Klessmann seemed ashamed of himself. His eyes wandered around the room with an uneasy, distracted look. It was only when he again broached the topic of Albert’s writing that he began to reclaim his usual detachment.

  “Paul, there is something your father has written. Can you tell me what it means?”

  He took a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and read:

  “Hand over my mouth, eyes glistening, a silver blade in her white, blood-flecked hand. In Hanna Street, rats gnaw at the castrated carcass. ‘Um Mitternacht,’ you said, but there was something else, a word, and I knew that we had met before.”

  Klessmann paused, as if he were letting the sense of the words take hold of him.

  “What is Hanna Street?”

  “I don’t know,” Paul said evasively, dunking a roll into his coffee. “I think it has a sewer or a drain opening.”

  “I see. There is no point in being too literal, with the rest of it. You have a sister, yes?”

  Klessmann didn’t wait for an answer. He returned his eyes to the page and felt around in his pocket for his pills.

  “Paul, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t follow me again.”

  Paul was angry that his hospitality had not been appreciated.

  When they finished eating, he let Klessmann back into the apartment and left to recommence his wanderings through the city. In the foyer a clerk handed him a letter mailed from Paris. It was from Laura Thomas. Whimsically he’d sent her his address a day after arriving in Vienna. He put the letter into his pocket, touching it with his hand every other moment to make sure that it was still there. He walked quickly to a nearby café, ordered a concoction of coffee and whipped cream, and then tore the envelope open, barely able to contain himself.

  Dear Paul,

  I am so glad we met and that you had the time to write to me. I’m reading Balzac, since we are in Paris, and he says that the life of the true artist is a terrible thing, full of daily struggles and hardships that ordinary people can’t imagine. So thank you for taking the time. It is wonderful here. I cannot even begin. Everything is wonderful. We have seen the Louvre and walked through the lovely gardens, and even though it is cold it is wonderful.

  I am running my poor mother off her feet. But she is enjoying herself, she can’t hide it, though she thought our people in London were condescending. She said that — “our people”. It sounded odd to me, because they were so stuck–up that they couldn’t possibly have been “our people”. My cousin (I call him that, though he isn’t a real cousin) treated me like a yokel and made snotty comments about the colonies. He thought I wouldn’t take any offence, but I felt like slapping him, only he looked so sickly that I thought I might kill him if I did. Anyway, the good of it is that I think I’ve convinced my mother to give the Continent a proper go. And so we may come to see you. I hope you don’t mind. I know I shouldn’t if you were suddenly to appear here. I miss our talks and look forward to seeing you.

  Yours, Laura

  Her handwriting was firm and controlled. Very adult, he thought. Very self-assured. For a moment he couldn’t reconcile the maturity of the hand with the giddiness of the sentiments. Was she having him on with her line about the artist? He shrank from the memory of how Laura and her mother had embodied the shabby truth behind his hubris and pretension. Did she see through it as well? Had she been laughing at him the whole way out? He felt hollow, emptied of hope and inspiration.

  While Klessmann worked like a maniac, his own energy seemed to ebb away, dissipating into a purposeless existence, where looking at culture had become an easy way to avoid making it. He slouched into his s
eat. The café was lively. People read newspapers and journals, chatted, drank and lingered idly. It was the life he had dreamt of, but it could do well enough without him. He was inconsequential and the thought of this insignificance oppressed him until it became intolerable. He’d kill himself sooner than accept it.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Weeks slid by before Klessmann finished typing, then editing his manuscript. The manner of its completion was itself an oddity. Paul was on the verge of venting his frustration, of locking the invalid scribe out of his room, when one morning, as he sat by the window waiting for the usual knock at the door, he wandered over to the desk to take a look at Klessmann’s progress. On top of the manuscript was a piece of paper bearing the name of a publisher and a Spittelberg address. Paul picked it up. Underneath it was the title page: Romanze zur Nacht. Gedichte von Albert Walters. The manuscript looked finished. Fifty-odd poems in all, distilled and translated from the notebooks which, Paul noticed to his dismay, were gone. Klessmann must have taken them with him, Paul thought. But why? He sat down and watched the clock tick past ten. Klessmann wasn’t coming.

  Paul felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Finally now he might be able to reclaim control of his own life. But he was upset as well. The lack of ceremony in the German’s departure and the fact of the missing notebooks left him confused and, he had to admit, offended. Was Klessmann prepared simply to vanish into the anonymous masses of the city after working with such obsessive dedication that his health had suffered as a result? And what did he want with the notebooks now that the manuscript was finished? Paul spent the day trying to retrace what he remembered of his steps the night he had followed Klessmann. When he got back to his hotel he was depressed and dispirited. The one person he knew in Vienna had left him. He was not even worthy of a proper farewell. He would have given anything to have Klessmann knock again at his door, and anything to sit him down again and try to make him articulate exactly what he saw between his father’s notes and the poems he had fashioned out of them.

  The next day he took the manuscript to the Spittelberg publisher. The place was in the basement of a run-down building, wider at the bottom than it was at the top, as if its foundations were swollen with water. Paul looked up at the façade. Shutters hung precariously on their hinges and layers of sky-blue paint were cracking and peeling off, revealing the grain of the stone underneath and the crumbling, weatherworn masonry.

  In a dark room barely illuminated by a gas lantern, Herr Bressler blew a cloud of smoke over the pages as his eyes moved from line to line, skipping a page here and there, returning every so often to one he had already read. He was an earnest man, over fifty, balding with untidy whiskers hanging off his cheeks like red wisps of seaweed clinging to a rockface. All business, Paul thought. His officiousness was out of place in a room that looked as if it had been flooded once too often. The smell of damp lingering over the boxes of unmoved stock was overwhelming. Paul imagined rats nesting in old copies of cheap novelettes, books with titles like Confessions of a Streetwalker and Erotic Berlin.

  His eyes wandered over the posters on the wall as he tried to ignore the smell and let Bressler concentrate on the manuscript. They were posters for the theatre. Strange, corpse–like forms, in which lines seemed to twist out of shape in response to some inner tension or aggravation. A skeletal woman with deep-set eyes and rotting teeth cradled a flayed body. In another, a man’s profile shuddered so violently it threw off an after-image around it, as if the whole picture were vibrating.

  Bressler glanced up at Paul as his eyes wandered over the illustrations.

  “I devour you men and women. Half-waking listening children, the wild loving werewolf within you,” he said in a chant. “Kokoschka,” he added, and returned silently to the manuscript. “You can leave this with me? I’ll give you a receipt. You know, there will be no money. Quite the contrary, I may need to ask for your assistance. A small subvention.”

  Paul waved off the sense of warning in his voice, as if money meant nothing to him. Winton’s gold can pay for it, he thought sardonically. He wrote his address on a separate sheet of paper and handed it to Bressler.

  “Who is the author?” Bressler asked. “Or are these your own poems?”

  “No, they are my father’s.”

  “Father?” Bressler raised his eyebrows. “Well then. And he is still living?”

  “No. He drowned himself.”

  “Well. That’s all to the good. I’ll see what I can do for you.”

  Paul stood up to leave.

  “These are very theatrical, you know,” Bressler said. “Staged scenes, concealment, curtains. Did your father enjoy the theatre?”

  “To my knowledge he never went.”

  “I have a theatre not far from here. You might be interested. Do you know much about Vienna?”

  Paul knew next to nothing, and virtually nobody. Only Klessmann, he thought, the classic nobody, the original man of the crowd. The whole city was still a mystery to him. Every passer-by, every animated café conversation, every wonderful edifice or monument merely reminded him of how little he belonged.

  “I’d planned to sit the Art Academy exam,” Paul said.

  “The Academy. A very conservative place. There are other options. Kokoschka went to the Arts and Craft School. I could introduce you if you like. There is something of him in these poems, I think. Expressionist.”

  Bressler pressed the manuscript into a briefcase and led Paul up the stairs back out onto the street, where he blinked at the winter sun as if he had never seen it before. Opposite them a young woman was hunched over the ground, coughing with such violence that her whole body shook. She was pretty, Paul thought. Bressler noticed him staring.

  “Could you guess how many men in this city have syphilis, Herr Walters?” Bressler said, folding his arms over his chest and waiting for an answer. “One in five. And could you guess how many have tuberculosis?” he asked after a few more steps. “One in five. Or something like that. Now, I am sure you haven’t come such a long way merely to encounter these Viennese plagues. At least wait until I see your father into print.”

  They walked along Siebensterngasse. It was late in the afternoon and the sun soon vanished behind thick, grey clouds, plunging the city into premature darkness.

  “I hope your ambitions are not too grand, Herr Walters,” Bressler said. “Vienna has become a place of small achievements. Kleinkunst. We like to think of ourselves as the world in miniature. Everything seems to be shrinking. People won’t read a novel if they can read an essay. They won’t watch five acts if they can watch one. Soon we’ll have nothing but anecdotes. It’s the pace of modern living. These days it’s only the extremely rich or the extremely poor who have enough time to loiter in our cafés. I myself can seldom manage it. For everyone else, time has contracted too thoroughly. Why spend an afternoon if you can get the same result, read the same paper and gulp the same coffee in an hour or a minute or a few seconds. It is the beginning of the end.”

  Outside a Wirtshaus Bressler shook Paul’s hand, then raised his briefcase and tapped it portentously as he made his way in. “Business, you understand.”

  Paul lingered for a moment, looking in at the workers drinking beer in a room thick with cigarette smoke. It was a grubby-looking scene. The men were rough and the women they cavorted with wore loose blouses, hanging down around their shoulders. Smoke, spilt beer and congestion. It seemed to Paul much cruder than anything he had seen in Melbourne, where good old Victorian morality still had a powerful enough hold on the city to keep its vices under wraps until they could be pursued with a secret, furtive pleasure.

  He reached the Ringstraße and stood gazing at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Was it possible to feel crushed by so much monumentality? If it were a city of small achievements now, that said nothing for its past. Paul felt its weight press on him. All he’d ever do here is look at things, he thought. The poverty of the streets through which he’d followed Klessmann was
as picturesque to him as the buildings of the Ringstraße were grand. He looked at both with the tourist’s pitiful longing for the beautiful and the sublime.

  How many times had he rehearsed his response to Vienna? In a letter to Hamish he’d rattled on about the endless, grating friction between authority and rebellion, mind and body, the order of the man-made world and the chaos of nature, as if one needed a city of this scale to realise such things. How false it all sounded to him now as he made his lonely way through the mute splendour of the city, bustled by its traffic, withdrawing into himself, defeated by his own illusions. He couldn’t write to Ondine like this. He couldn’t possibly fool her. And he wasn’t about to confess his unhappiness. On Herrengasse he caught his reflection in a window and imagined himself exposed to the impersonal gaze of the city. He’d become a type: the Australian abroad, the faux bohemian longing for culture, eager to shake off the dust of the new world. He saw himself realised as a caricature in some satirical feuilleton.

  Back in his hotel he flipped through a copy of Die Fackel and was baffled by its busyness, the profusion of detail, names, scandal, the sense of a world that one was supposed to recognise behind the mask of satire. He lit a cigarette and read a paper, flinging it down after a while out of boredom. He wished again that Klessmann would show up to commandeer his room. He felt lost without the daily routine of being rudely brushed aside. He would have given anything to answer awkward, tactless questions about his mother and father. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, and remembered how enthusiastically he had chanted “Ich bin hier” only a few weeks earlier. Now he felt a numbness in his cheeks, a lethargy stealing over him. “Nothing, nothing, nothing,” he repeated to his reflected image. He felt impotent – bereft of ideas, bereft of inspiration.