Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  In the lobby of the former palace where we had set up camp, an Arab woman in a headscarf was waiting amid dozens of shopping bags, printed with the nouveau-riche constellation of Gucci, Prada, DKNY – but her posture was that of the stolid female vendor amid pyramids of colorful herbs in the souk at Aleppo. An Arab hurried by on his way to the elevator, his one hand clutching that of a monstrously fat little boy, the other holding bags full of McDonald’s happy meals. He had been out foraging to feed the nest. The royal households, the nobility, they all wasted away or were already extinct, now it was other people’s turn to populate the palaces: porno stars and Arabs who had brought their desert ways along with them. But we would never succeed in making this life our own, we would always feel the thrill and excitement of a successful burglary; the manners and natural-born insouciance of the original inhabitants of these houses were not ours to imitate. The rabble had been admitted to the palace gardens, had descended like a plague of locusts, and the original inhabitants had been driven off to ever-smaller reservations.

  In the room I dialed Sarah’s number. Her cheerful voice, the summons to leave behind something nice on the answering machine. It was early in the afternoon there, we lived in different worlds, different times. It was the umpteenth time I’d called, she had never answered once. Silence breeds the greatest of disasters. I punched the repeat button and gave her the phone number of the hotel and our room number. It wasn’t the first time I’d done that. Maybe she had accidentally erased my earlier messages. Perhaps my letters had never arrived. I had left so triflingly, with no idea of the consequences. I hadn’t felt this coming. It was logical, but the heart knew nothing about that. I sat on the edge of my mother’s bed and waited for the phone to ring.

  Around midnight I went to bed. It was two in the morning when my mother came in. She slid the doors closed quietly, and after a while the light shining through the cracks went out as well.

  The scene changed. Now the creeping graduality of Prague. Making acquaintance with a people of despondent drinkers. Women with the most beautiful legs I’ve ever seen. A skin flick is made in Prague each day, it is the capital of European pornography. The first week of the new year and I still haven’t heard a word from Sarah. Every day I make plans to go back. I’m afraid of what I might find. I can’t count on things being as they were when I left, she told me that. That could mean anything, but not much good.

  We travel from one gorgeous backdrop to the other. But this time the reality is moth-eaten. Hotel Europe is on the point of collapse.

  ‘They dreamed up those three stars themselves,’ my mother says. ‘I don’t even have a TV in my room. What a dirty mess.’

  I see our own inevitable downfall in that, in that mess. That I revel in it does not seem like a good sign to me.

  Our rooms are next to each other on the first floor. The hubbub of Wenceslas Square intrudes all day and all night. A little further along is a stand where they fry sausages and hamburgers, providing the dominant aroma in our rooms. I feel more at home in Hotel Europe than I did at the Imperial, but my mother acts as though she’s being taken to the cleaners. Rollo Liban is staying at a hotel down the street. She’s sure that it’s a much better place. The beds here are as hard as the expressions on the chambermaids’ faces. My mother sleeps poorly. There are little vertical lines above her lips, creases that can’t be disguised with powder, except when in a state of complete immobility. I see a few wrinkles running like the channels of a river delta from her décolleté to her throat. Here’s what I think: time stood still for her once she left the limelight, but now that she has come back to it the clock has started ticking again – and faster than ever. I fantasize about vampire-like creatures who screech horribly and turn to dust as soon as they are exposed to sunlight. When we checked in I heard her ask which floor the gym was on, a question the Czech girl at the desk did not understand.

  ‘Sports,’ my mother said. ‘Physical exercise.’

  She imitated someone bicycling at an admirable pace, then rowing and running. This was understood, and the reply in sign language was that this was not available at the hotel. The girl behind the desk was pretty. She smiled at me while we stood waiting for the elevator.

  I am bored in Prague, I count the passing hours. Atop my nightstand is an orange telephone with a real dial. In the café downstairs the pianist is busy destroying the collected work of The Beatles. The gray-haired musician has something professorial about him. Sometimes he strolls back and forth between the piano and the hall leading to the toilets in order to work the stiffness out of his joints. On occasion you actually forget he’s there. Only when he stops playing are you overcome by a sense of deep fatigue, because he’s been plugging your ears the whole time with a carpet of sound. It seems as though he plays from memory, songs he heard as a boy and which he is now trying to reproduce. There’s always someone who will sing along with ‘Yesterday’.

  Although my emotional state is governed by a woman with dark, curly hair who doesn’t return my calls, my senses are wide open to the melancholy beauty of the Hotel Europe. Of the way it must have looked when it opened its doors in 1889 I can only dream. It must have been a jewel. Now it smells like an old people’s home. I love wainscoting and wooden ceilings. Hanging from the balustrades are plastic baskets with artificial plants – only on the fifth floor, where the poor people and students live, are the plants real; there they are whipped to a pallor by the wind, gasp for breath between the balusters. The potting soil is covered with a white, moldy film.

  The floors are all built around a skylight. You look down to the first floor, where our rooms are. The light, by the time it gets down there, is weak, like at the bottom of a well.

  Someone apparently thought that red and fluorescent green would be the best colors for the stairwell. The pillars on each floor are circled by plaster garlands, ending in a wreath. Nicotine-colored moisture runs down the walls. It is a clash of styles and influences, the good old Louis-the-Something hotel style, Art Deco, the impoverished fashion of the socialist workers’ paradise and the stagnation of a hotel that falls short of the demands of the modern age. The carpets are grimy, the decorative picture frames cracked, we are witnessing a monumental demise. The hotel is so tired, it is begging for attention, for a renaissance.

  On our floor is a set of stairs, six or seven steps, that suddenly disappears into a wall – this is where the ghosts come out at night. It is glorious and sad, this hotel, a royal grave left unplundered.

  We are sitting at a table in the Titan restaurant. From the speakers come songs by artists forgotten everywhere in the world except here. Joe Cocker. Barbra Streisand. In the middle of the restaurant is a table set for forty, but no one is seated at it.

  ‘As though someone was going to throw a party, but changed their mind,’ my mother says.

  The whole thing has given her the giggles. The waiter hands us the menu. In a plastic folder is a sheet of paper bearing the words JULY SPECIAL. My mother asks for the January special. The man says it’s the same as this one. I order the July special. While she tries to decipher the menu’s English, she asks, ‘Have you talked to your girlfriend yet?’

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend anymore. You know that. It’s over.’

  ‘Well it doesn’t have to be so definite, does it? You two are so theatrical.’

  ‘I can’t reach her. Not since we left. I’ve talked to her answering machine so often that it must be full by now. I left the number in Vienna, the one here, slowly, so that she could write it down. But she hasn’t called back or left a message.’

  ‘Something could have gone wrong that you don’t know about, sweetheart. It’s possible.’

  ‘She may be chaotic, but her principles are like cast iron. I left, these are the consequences. That’s what she’s trying to tell me.’

  My mother sniffs in disapproval.

  ‘Love isn’t a principle. Love should be accommodating and compassionate. You can’t determine the course of love, that’s
what Khalil Gibran says. Love itself determines the course of events for you, if it thinks you’re worthy. Not the other way around.’

  ‘Gibran, the spiritual snake-oil merchant.’

  ‘Maybe she’s not the kind of girl you can leave alone.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘There are girls like that. You can’t leave them alone.’

  ‘What are you saying exactly?’

  ‘That things happen.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I think you can figure that out for yourself.’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’

  ‘She plucked at her hair the whole time. That says something as well.’

  ‘What?! What for Christ’s sake . . .’

  The waiter comes out of the kitchen, chewing on something. My July menu is served. A whole duck. Tucked away beneath it is a bed of red cabbage, white cabbage and, the great blunder of Czech popular cuisine, a pile of noodles. Boiled strings of dough. Sometimes made from potato flour, sometimes wheat. Resignedly, my fork putters about between the duck, the cabbage and the starch.

  ‘I’m not sure this is really cheese,’ I hear her say across the table.

  The chef ’s salad, always a risky thing to order. You want to look the other way, but the bright light from the electric candles overhead reveals everything in its nakedness.

  ‘When was the last time you smiled?’ she asks.

  I look up.

  ‘Or said something nice to me?’

  ‘You have journalists for that, don’t you? Talk show hosts?’

  ‘I’m so tired of this, Ludwig. Really, so very tired. I don’t have to take it anymore. I must be crazy to have let this go on so long. That you blame me for living my life, that’s your business, but I don’t want to listen to it anymore. Do it somewhere where I’m not around.’

  Dinner has come to a halt. It takes a little while for my mother to pull herself together.

  ‘I’ve thought about this for a long time, Ludwig, but I think it would be better if you went away. Lead your own life. You’re twenty years old, you . . .’

  ‘Twenty-one,’ I murmur.

  ‘You’re old enough to stand on your own two feet. I’ll give you money to help you get set up, but I don’t want this anymore. This sour old man who comments on everything, on everything I do. I get a knot in my stomach every time I see you. It makes my stomach hurt.’

  I barely hear what she’s saying, until she asks, ‘What are you doing here, for heaven’s sake? You follow me around like a vicious little dog. Why, Ludwig?’

  ‘To save you,’ I say. ‘To keep you from making a complete mess of things.’

  Her shrill laugh, almost hateful.

  ‘To save me? Do you have some kind of Messiah complex or something? Please, stop it. Save me? It’s been a long time since I’ve felt as down as I have ever since you . . . Go save yourself, buddy.’

  *

  And so came the unexpected end to my European tour with her. She weeps, again, and I remember the words from the shredded Bible I had found on the street: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh; I have done precisely the opposite. She tosses her knife and fork into the bowl of chef ’s salad and pushes back her chair with a screech. The people at the next table look up as she leaves the restaurant, bent over, wrapped in her sorrow. Then they look at me. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.

  I went back to Los Angeles. From one defeat to the next. Between the airport and her house I died of misery. It was a stroke of luck that I hadn’t returned her key before I left. The apartment had not been abandoned, as I had feared, but seemed barely occupied either.

  ‘Hello, Dylan,’ I said to the fetus.

  I stood motionless amid the chaos. I had left this paradise of my own accord, my return was a clandestine intrusion, a breaking and an entering. The apartment seemed to have been left in a hurry, but then it had always seemed that way.

  ‘Where’s your mother, Dylan?’

  The answering machine showed a blinking number 20. I tossed a T-shirt over it. The daylight was fading slowly, I sat on the edge of the bed and thought about the state of inertia in which I found myself. Shadows were crawling out from the objects in the room. Even putting on water for tea seemed like an effort from which I might never recover. After a little while I fell back on the bed, my hands folded behind my head. If I craned my neck I could see the photo of the fetus. I drifted in and out of sleep.

  ‘I was in Vienna, Dylan,’ I said. ‘Not your kind of place. Austria is a completely racist country. I was in Prague too. In fact, I can’t remember seeing a single black person. Maybe if I’d paid more attention.’

  The black coach in Vienna, the rattling sound of hoof beats. Der Tod, das muss ein Wiener sein.

  ‘Life is strange, Dylan. I’m trying to reconstruct the train of thought behind the stupid mistake I made by leaving your mother – what was I thinking? What kind of idea could be weighty enough to make you leave the sanctuary of love? I should make a sacrifice, I haven’t forgotten about that. Maybe a self-sacrifice, to show her what that is. To set an example. You and I are both sons, we both know how difficult all that can be. What we basically need is a mother who gives herself away for us. But giving yourself away isn’t exactly in my genes. I should know, because I tried. The sacrifice was not accepted, more or less as I’d predicted. I thought maybe it would bring us closer, that we would belong together again if one of us had the courage to forget his own self-interest, without restrictions, without conditions, all those things that make a sacrifice look more like a transaction. The sacrifice didn’t create the orderliness I was looking for. All it brought was more distance and chaos. It wasn’t the right time or the right place and, more fundamentally, we’re not the right people. It might be my fault for expecting results. I took it to the market and hung a price tag on it. I wanted harmony. But that calls for dedication, and that’s exactly what she doesn’t have. I was going to show her how it was supposed to work. I didn’t take myself into account. By leaving your mother, I scotched my own desires. But scotching your desires isn’t the point. That’s not a sacrifice, that’s self-castigation.

  ‘During our last supper, coincidentally or not, she asked me whether I had a Messiah complex. Maybe I actually was seeing myself in a sort of holy light, while in reality I was her vicious little dog. I’m ashamed of being arrogant enough to think I could be someone else’s salvation. In the plane on the way here I had a lot of time to think about that. It’s amazing how, in one fell swoop, you can chase away the only two people who really matter. At first they fought over me, like the two mothers before King Solomon – and now neither of them wants to see me anymore. Be glad you didn’t have to go through all this, Dylan, be glad. Especially the loneliness. Sometimes that can be glorious, you soar above the world on wings of wax, above everything and everyone, with that kind of loneliness it’s actually a pity not to have an audience, no oohing and aahing. But you also have the other kind, when you’re buried like a stone under the earth, all locked up in yourself, and no-one comes to dig you up. You might be there, you might not, you’re dead to the world. My optimism, if you can call it that, consists in not making a production of that. In not bowing to the heaviness or to the lightness.’

  The irrepressible light of morning, you had almost forgotten how pure it is. The day lies before you like a swimming pool without a ripple, you’re the first bather. Gradually it becomes populated with the things that were interrupted by sleep.

  Where Sarah is.

  My knees go weak when I consider the possibilities.

  I leave the house only in order to go shopping, to get takeaway meals, grab a macchiato on Rose Avenue. That light, the glaring, open sky, I can barely stand it. I hurry back to the apartment’s shadows, to my waiting room. She could come back any moment, and be gone again before I arrive.

  The days faded into each other. I folded
her clothes and piled them neatly in the wooden chest. My fingertips slid over cloth that had been a second skin to her. I went to a laundromat to do the dirty clothes and looked at the crotch of her panties as though reading her diary. Her underwear, the pale stripes at the crotch often in plain view, had been scattered everywhere, despite my comments. Her voice, sounding offended, ‘But we’re open down there, Ludwig . . .’

  ‘Your mother’s a dirty girl, Dylan,’ I said. ‘The sweetest dirty girl I know.’

  Sometimes my heart leapt at a noise from the backyard, but no-one ever came. I lit the candle in front of Dylan’s photo. Someone had to keep the ritual alive. It had to be her hands that held him, it was a dramatic gesture, I could see her doing it, and also the father’s revulsion at the theatricality of it.

  One afternoon I went out, to UCLA, to see whether they might know where she was. The girl who went to fetch the boss seemed vaguely amused, as though I were not the first to ask about Sarah. The boss came, looking like a man who had never been able to cash in on his college degree. She had quit weeks ago, he said, he had told her she could always come back.

  ‘She’s a good person to have around, always cheerful, even when the going’s tough.’

  ‘Do you know where she went? Why she quit?’

  He raised his hands and shrugged.

  ‘A boyfriend maybe? She didn’t say anything, in fact I don’t know very much about her, now that you ask me.’