The White Body of Evening

by A L McCann

  There was a knock outside the apartment. Klessmann, he thought. He could’ve almost hugged him. He rushed to the door, pulling it open to find a stranger, wrapped in a fur, staring back at him out of the half-light of the hallway. She was beautiful, he thought. A long pale face, glistening red lips, sparkling brown eyes and fine eyebrows. She wore a fashionable hat, with a broad brim, tilted to one side, which set off the elongated elegance of her face.

  She took a bold stride past him, through the anteroom into the apartment, removing her hat and floating it about theatrically as she turned to face him.

  “Surprised?” She was ready to explode with happiness. She had to purse her lips and tense her cheeks to keep it all inside her. “I’ve run away.”

  It was Laura Thomas, but it was only the slight nasal edge in her softer accent that gave her away.

  “Aren’t you pleased to see me?”

  Paul took her hands and kissed the leather gloves she was wearing, making her laugh uproariously. He watched her eyes survey the apartment. She stretched her arms out as she turned, as if to test its dimensions, and then nodded approvingly.

  “I think you’ll find me a better conversationalist these days,” she said as she sat down on his chaise longue.

  “I think you’ll find me a much worse one.”

  She glanced at a pamphlet next to her.

  “Der Proze Riehl,” she read haltingly, looking at the cover as she leant back on a cushion. “I love it here, Paul.”

  “Where did you leave your mother?” He sat down beside her and took her hand.

  “Oh, don’t be silly. I didn’t really run away. She’s downstairs in that lovely foyer.”

  Paul smiled to himself.

  “Do you think I’m an idiot?” she asked, smiling as well.

  He kissed her hand again.

  “Mother is waiting. I thought you could walk us back to our hotel. What have you been doing?”

  He thought about Klessmann. His time in Vienna had been all Klessmann. It seemed to Paul that he had no tangible experiences of his own. All he really knew of the place was the obsessive invalid, his strange habits and his disconcerting twitch.

  “I met a very odd bloke in Hamburg, and we travelled here together,” he said.

  “Another artist?” Laura asked.

  “I suppose you could call him that.”

  If Europe had transformed Laura, the same was true for her mother, but in the opposite direction. Eleanor Thomas looked older and crabbier than Paul had remembered. She wore a smock-like dress and had powdered her hair white as if it were the fashion. She waddled with the heaviness of her dress as they made their way out onto the street.

  “You see, Paul, I’ve successfully worn Mother out,” Laura said. “She’s brow-beaten and subservient, aren’t you? I told her that if we couldn’t come here by Christmas I’d have to come alone. Of course we are later than I wanted to be. I thought it wretched that you’d be alone for Christmas. I imagined you starving in some garret, nibbling chestnuts by candlelight. Of course I didn’t realise that you were so well off here.”

  “Stop it, Laura,” her mother insisted, “you’re babbling. She has babbled since we arrived in London, Paul. Talked my ear off. Ran me off my feet. I’m not as young as I once was.”

  “You don’t say,” Laura said with feigned astonishment and a gentle laugh. She linked arms with her mother and drew her closer as they walked.

  They ate dinner in a restaurant on the Kohlmarkt after shivering through the twilight streets. Eleanor’s eyes rested approvingly on the velvet upholstery and the pink marble of the tabletop as she flattened her dress behind her and sat down. They had an alcove to themselves, surrounded by large wall mirrors composed of individual panels that reflected and multiplied each of them to infinity. The chandeliers dangling from the ceiling filled the room with a soft yellow light that caught the gilt frames and furnishings. A potted palm tree in the middle of the room and some ferns artfully arranged in the corners gave the place the ambience of an exotic garden.

  As they ate, Laura described the galleries she’d seen, and the young Englishmen and Americans, masquerading as artists, she’d met copying paintings in the Louvre. One of them acted as a guide for them, pointing out which works were worthy of their attention. She laughed as she described him, putting her hand over her mouth and blushing.

  “He was very gentlemanly,” Eleanor said.

  “Oh, he was a pompous twit. Of course I told him that we know artists in Vienna, where the whole thing is taken a bit more seriously. That slowed him down a bit. And his paintings,” she added, raising her eyebrows, “I couldn’t believe he had the courage to try selling us one.”

  Laura and her mother exchanged affectionate taunts throughout dinner. Paul had never seen Laura look so wonderful. Surely she could see how idle he had been. The best he could offer them was a glorified tour. As the conversation ran on ahead of him, his thoughts wandered back to the folly of his plans and the despair he’d felt the moment before her arrival.

  But he was happy she had come. When he could do so without being obvious, he let his eyes rest on the faint freckles running from her nose onto her cheeks and fading under her pale skin. He made an effort to look animated and to focus on the trivial currents of conversation flowing around him, picking up the drift with a comment here or a nod of the head there. Laura and her mother could talk tirelessly. They were staying for the winter and had planned to travel further when the weather got warmer. By then he’d be exhausted by the chatter. He thought he might have to coach Laura into a quieter, slightly more reserved manner. When she noticed the conversation getting too obscure she gave him a look of pained sympathy that told him to grin and bear it for her sake.

  Slowly his mood improved under her benign influence. He wanted to touch her under the table, to push his hand up under her dress and rest it on her thigh, to see if she could keep a straight face. He noticed a man in the next alcove looking at her approvingly. Perhaps he was taken with her lightness of manner, which was so pleasingly out of place. The woman next to him looked dour by comparison. She barely spoke, edging around her food with a mild disdain for it as her partner’s eyes continued to drift towards Laura.

  After the meal Eleanor excused herself. As soon as she was out of sight Laura took Paul’s hand.

  “I’m sorry. Just humour us for a while.”

  He kissed her hand and said nothing, noticing a waiter standing silently beside them.

  “Chambre séparée?” he asked with starched formality.

  “Yes please,” Laura said enthusiastically. Paul looked doubtful. He wondered if he’d heard him correctly and if Laura had understood.

  When they remained sitting, the waiter had to wave them on. The man opposite smiled at Paul as Laura leapt out of her chair. The waiter led them through the dining room and down another hallway, presenting them with a white door and a gilt handle. Laura smiled and opened it, grabbing Paul by the cuff and dragging him in.

  There was something immediately disturbing in the room’s silence. It was cold and Paul could smell a trace of gas, mingling with perfume and stale smoke. It was all red velvet and gold. In the middle of the room was a cushioned couch surrounded by ferns draped over it to simulate a tropical canopy. There was a full-length mirror opposite and an ashtray perched on a stand. Nothing else.

  Laura turned to him, biting her lower lip with embarrassment, then stretching it into something between a smile and a grimace, as if she’d just taken a wrong turn and led them to a dead-end.

  “I think we had better go,” she said, nodding as if he had suggested it.

  “Yes,” he said.

  He took her hand as she walked past him to the door. She turned and he kissed her quickly on the lips. Even in the dim light of the room he could tell she was blushing. Her neck had suddenly rashed and she clutched it, trying to hide the discolouration.

  “It’s so depraved,” she said. “Who would have thought?”

  “Indeed
. Who would have?”

  They made it back to the table just as Eleanor was reappearing. They all sat down together, Laura looking flustered, but Paul quietly pleased. Their unexpected brush with the other reality lurking behind the glittering façades of glass and gold promised her to him. They both knew it. He wondered how many trivial conversations and strolls around the Ringstraße lay between them and the chambre séparée. He was restless, but also found something wonderfully beguiling in the deferral. As long as he never lost sight of the still, silent room he could wait and wait with the pleasure of his expectations growing steadily beneath the formality.

  When the time came Paul didn’t even sit the entry exam for the Academy. He had tried to sketch in his room, but was unable to concentrate on his work, unable to shut out the city around him, and finally acknowledged that he had nothing worth submitting. He was annoyed with himself, but only mildly. Every day it seemed, he was walking with Laura and her mother, feeling trapped by the littleness of their conversation, yet glimpsing a wider field to which he and Laura might finally escape. He was happy to have company so constantly, yet he tightened up when, in this or that café, he could sense the animated discussions about literature and art going on around them. Yet he loved the subtle, seductive quality of being with Laura in a museum. The decorative grandeur of the spaces, the furtiveness of their glances, the play of concealment and the transport of meaning into the manner of their appreciation, filled him with excitement. When they went to the opera or the theatre the things they saw all had a terrific suggestiveness for him that he tried to impart to her. The cruelty of Strauss’s Salome fired his imagination. He saw Laura showering the severed head with kisses, pushing her tongue into the dead mouth, closing her eyes, drifting into a mad trance with the taste of something bitter leaking through the skull. Back in his room the phantom-train of sleep slowly trained her innocence towards a shameless collaboration in the debaucheries that never failed to grip him in the dead of night.

  Laura, pleasingly, began to learn German from a tutor. She sat in a café and went over grammatical rules and then studied the vocabulary in the newspaper. Later she would stumble through a few phrases with Paul, proud of her progress, and soon knew enough to discover the crude codes in the back page advertisements of the Neue Freie Presse.

  “Fraulein Willing. Call at number 69.”

  She looked at it for a moment and then smiled.

  In his apartment she glanced over some of the pamphlets on his desk, opening them at random and seizing on the start of a new paragraph.

  “Fort mit der Schamhaftigkeit, die die körperliche und geistige Gesundheit der Völker seit fast zwei Jahrtausenden untergräbt!” She read it slowly, tripping over each syllable. She read it again to herself and then looked up at Paul, puzzled. “Was bedeutet Schamhaftigkeit? Oh, of course, it comes from shame. What about untergraben?”

  He watched as the sense of the sentence sunk into her. She furrowed her eyebrows.

  “Away with the shamefulness?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “What is this?” She turned to the red cover and then flipped through it again. “Tell me what the rest of it says,” she demanded as she opened the pamphlet back to the page from which she’d been reading and handed it to Paul.

  He looked at it and shrugged his shoulders as if its contents were of little import to him.

  “Nature gives women sensuality – Sinnlichkeit – which is the fountain at which men can renew themselves, intellectually speaking.” He looked at her, studying her response.

  “Go on please,” she said, sucking in her lower lip.

  “The founders of morality have…” He broke off, pretending to translate in his head, but deciding to give her his own loose summary. “The founders of morality have corrupted human sexuality, dammed it away, and as a result both beauty and mental vitality are drying up. Under these circumstances, under such repression, all a man can do is canalise the flow of female sensuality, and his brain is empty and uninspired as a result.”

  He watched her turn the thought over in her mind.

  “It was written by a man called Karl Kraus, about the hypocrisy of modern morality and the way it makes us suffer the repression of our sensual selves.”

  Laura thought about the chambre séparée. Red velvet, deep shadows, fern leaves and gold. She recalled the detail of the room obscurely. She couldn’t remember its dimensions or its arrangement, but the trappings stayed with her. Something inexplicable had winked back at her out of the light and shadow. Once, after an idle stroll, she found herself staring through the window of the same restaurant, momentarily mesmerised by the reflected glitter within.

  As spring set in they all took longer walks through the Prater, looking at the panoramas and the sideshows, and spent lazy afternoons sitting in garden cafés planning trips to Prague, Budapest, Italy and the Alps. Occasionally Paul felt anxious at the thought of frittering away so much time, at feeling his ambition leaking away, choking in the silt of these endless diversions. Every now and then Laura would return to one of her pet themes: the Balzac novel in which the struggles of the artist were so vividly described. It merely reminded Paul of just how completely he had drifted from his own ideal. It occurred to him to look for Klessmann again, but he didn’t know where to start. He wasn’t even sure whether he would still be in Vienna.

  “Look at that, Paul,” Laura said, seizing him with one arm, her mother with the other, and dragging them both after her.

  They were in the Prater, walking towards the Australian Panorama. It was too fantastic to believe. Paul had heard about whole African villages transported to European cities and exhibitions. Even Melbourne had imported a band of Maoris. But to see something like this in the middle of Vienna hardly seemed possible. They mingled with a crowd of spectators gathering around a large, enclosed area that housed a makeshift desert terrain of hard red earth and some huts made out of mud and straw.

  “We could tell them a thing or two,” said Eleanor. Laura had the good sense to nudge her mother into silence as they edged through the throng to see the inhabitants of the enclosure huddling around each other, protecting themselves from the mocking eyes peering in through the bars.

  “Sie sind wie Tiere,” said a woman standing next to them, wearing a neat summer frock with a blue shawl draped over her shoulders. “Tiere, die unter der Erde graben.”

  Paul was stunned. He looked at Laura, who had turned pale, and took her hand.

  “Barbarian,” Laura said under her breath.

  “Genau,” said the woman in the summer frock, nodding.

  “I mean you, you stupid, stupid woman.”

  She didn’t understand her.

  In front of them a pair of middle-aged men were talking quickly about the anthropology of the Stone Age, and the savage fear of incest.

  “It’s horrible, Paul,” Laura said. “How can they do that?”

  Paul couldn’t answer her. He had a vivid image of Les Collins in his mind and regretted that his book on the Kulin had never come to pass, but he was at a loss for words.

  Then Laura snapped, “Why don’t we have anything to say? We just look at it and feel bad and then walk away and soon forget about it! What kind of society puts people in cages in order to speculate on world history?”

  “Laura!” Eleanor seemed to rebuke her for the ability to express an independent thought.

  “It’s cruel, Mother.”

  For the second time she had the feeling of having led them down a cul-de-sac. Was she expecting the three of them to stand up and take responsibility for the cruelty, to shout down the crowd of onlookers or, more heroically, to put an end to the spectacle?

  One of the middle-aged men turned to them quietly. He had a head of jet-black hair, a neatly trimmed beard and a silver pince-nez. He spoke as if he were explaining something quite complicated by way of justifying the display. Paul couldn’t quite catch the detail above the noise of the crowd. Laura just shook her head. After a moment t
he man turned to one of the men inside the enclosure.

  “What are you earning a day, my man?” he asked.

  “None of your damned business,” the crouching man answered, poking the ground with a stick.

  “They are acting,” the man with the pince-nez said patiently.

  Paul looked more closely. It was hard to tell, but he guessed the people in the enclosure were wearing body paint. My God, he thought, is everything a trick?

  “They are actors from Berlin,” the man explained. “They do a different part of the world every day or so. Yesterday it was America. All money and humbug. Very funny. Can the conscience of the Antipodes rest a little easier?”

  As if he had verbalised the transformation that was occurring in Laura at that very moment, she began sobbing and flung her arms around Paul, hiding her head on his shoulder. He could feel her chest heaving and heaving until she gradually regained some equilibrium. Eleanor Thomas had tactfully turned away.

  Everything seemed farcical to Paul. They were lost in the surface of things, a prey to the most blatant kinds of deception and manipulation. He was becoming agitated. Laura still clung to him, wiping her tears away with the back of her hand, brimming with both relief and embarrassment. She looked at the figures in the enclosure. Of course they were actors. How could she not have seen it?

  As they walked away she bit her lip. Did it matter that they were actors? How did it change the sense of inhumanity? The question puzzled her. It was as if something had happened, and then, suddenly, it hadn’t. None of it was true. Or was it? Could it all be true despite the fact that they were actors? She felt as if she were being blown along by a breeze, about to be lifted up into the air and tossed about capriciously. She clutched Paul’s arm as if it might help her ground herself. Would she ever go back to the country to live out her life on the land? She hoped not, but for the first time in her life she had no sense of where the wind was going to drop her. Nothing seemed certain, and no one was what they seemed to be, least of all herself.