Outside the Dog Museum

by Carroll, Jonathan

  IF YOU’VE NEVER BEEN to a place, you naturally create an image beforehand of what it will be like. Although my images have rarely been correct, I am always slightly resentful of how “off” I am in my conjuring, i.e., Radcliffe’s Vienna was going to be a “Guidebook City”; a combination of living museum and quaint wine gardens.

  There are “Guidebook Cities” and there are “Living Cities.” You can visit a “Living City” with nothing more than your wallet and a map, but after a few days of walking, eating, and sleeping there you begin to “get it”; to feel and understand its idiosyncrasies and greatness without guides or tours or visits to the place’s famous spots: London, Venice, Athens.

  “Guidebook Cities” are stern and demanding—no slackers allowed. To know this town you must experience certain things: walk this street, smell this garden, visit this cathedral (page 82 in your books). See the Michelangelo, Mozart’s house, Napoleon’s sword. Words like “essential,” “extravagant,” and “tragic” are commonplace. There will be a final examination before you’re permitted to leave. Any questions?

  The first Viennese surprise was passing through customs and seeing who was there to meet us: our smiling chauffeur from Los Angeles. Was it déjà vu or did he have a twin brother?

  He took our baggage, struggled it out onto the street and while setting it down, gestured for us to stay put while he went for the car. After a particularly big smile, he raced off for the parking lot a few hundred feet away.

  “Do you think they make those guys en masse in Saru?”

  Fanny was sniffing the air like a setter. “What does it smell like here? I can’t figure it out.”

  The weather was clear blue, sunny and cool. An airplane rumbled through its takeoff above us.

  “It smells like grass. It smells like lawns.”

  “That’s right! How strange. When was the last time you were in an airport that smelled green?”

  The ride into town was along your typical airport-to-city freeway, but the difference was the road was flanked on both sides by more greenery and after a certain point, the Danube Canal. You sensed how far east you were when road signs said Prague and Budapest.

  When we turned onto the Ringstrasse, passing Fabiani’s Urania Theatre, the city opened up like a beautiful gray fan.

  “It’s so clean!”

  “Look at those horse-drawn carriages.”

  “Oh Harry, there’s the Opera House!”

  The chauffeur was kind enough to take us on a short sight-seeing tour before dropping us at the hotel. Not that we could understand a word he was saying, but he pointed in all the right directions and we were able to get a good first glimpse of Freud’s home.

  Vienna had the clean, orderly, tight-assed feel of a Communist city with Western frills: stores full of goodies, every other car a Mercedes, well-dressed women … . A town where people were suspicious and kept secrets. How did I know all this in half an hour? I didn’t, but walking around the place that night with Fanny told me things. The center of town was empty and quiet after nine o’clock. Even the drunks kept their voices down, but looking for an open bar to have a drink was tough. When we found one, the people inside were frantic with good cheer, as if they needed to store it up before going out again into those solemn streets.

  I’ve often had interesting experiences in new cities my first day there, and Vienna was no exception. On an L.A. friend’s suggestion, we hunted down a Hungarian restaurant that was supposed to be atmospheric and serve perfect goulash.

  The restaurant turned out to be a tiny hole-in-the-wall with eight tables and a two-hundred-pound waitress who looked like The Fabulous Moolah’s tag-team partner. We sat down and ordered the strangest-sounding things on the menu. I noticed when we walked in that the restaurant closed at ten, and since we arrived at nine-thirty, there were only a few people left. One of them was a shabby-looking old man who ate slowly while reading a newspaper in Cyrillic. By the time our food arrived, the three of us were the only customers left.

  On finishing, the old man signaled to the waitress for what I thought was the check. Instead she walked to a sideboard and, opening a drawer, took out a thick handful of passports. When she put them down in front of him, I looked as closely as possible without being too obvious and saw as he shuffled through them that they were all from Communist countries. Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary. I kicked Fanny under the table and gestured for her to check it out.

  The man took a large yellow fountain pen from his pocket and began to write a long time in each of them. What, I don’t know, but I sure don’t like the idea of anyone writing in my passport, particularly if I own one from a part of the world infamous for issuing passports about as frequently as hens lay golden eggs.

  When he was done, he gave the pile back to the woman, who quickly put them back into the drawer. He got up, didn’t pay, and left with a loud “Auf Wiedersehen!”

  “What the hell was he doing?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Wow. Welcome to Vienna.”

  The next afternoon Easterling met me in the lobby of the Imperial Hotel. Although clearly in his forties, he had the young, clean-cut blond look of a Mormon proselytizer or a gay dancer on Broadway.

  We walked across the street to a restaurant and small-talked our way for half an hour. Then a woman showed up, a real knockout, whom he introduced as his wife, Maris. She was the dark to his light—black hair, big marvelous brown eyes, pale skin.

  I liked her even more when she said she’d been a fan of mine for years and proceeded to rattle off intelligent insights into my work. I was impressed and flattered, especially when she said she’d “begged” Walker to let her come to our meeting.

  Basking in this, I didn’t notice the child really until it was standing by Maris’s elbow and looking at me.

  “And this is our son, Nicholas. Zack, this is Harry Radcliffe.”

  He put out his hand, but gave a “dead-fish” shake and wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  “Is your name Nicholas or Zack?”

  “Nicholas, but my friends call me Zack.”

  I’m good at guessing kids’ ages, but this one was a mystery. He might have been anywhere from eight to thirteen. His face said nothing—no little-boy innocence there, but no twelve-year-old wiseguy either. Unfortunately, he wasn’t a good combination of his attractive parents’ features—Walker’s nothing-special blue eyes above Maris’s small nose and large teeth.

  “How old are you, Nicholas?”

  He looked at his parents and, putting a hand over his mouth to cover a giggle, said, “One.”

  “Pretty big guy for one.”

  The waiter came and we ordered. Maris took out some paper and colored pencils and gave them to Nicholas, who started drawing, one hand over the sheet so we couldn’t see what he was doing.

  I talked about the shaman and why I’d wanted to meet with Easterling. He looked at me appraisingly. The food came.

  “Venasque came and spoke to me after he died.”

  I waited for more, but both Easterlings were watching to see how I’d react to that one. I cut a potato in half and shrugged. “No surprise. His dog, Big Top, has been protecting me since the old man died.” I briefly described the earthquake and how he’d led us to safety.

  Nicholas was whacking away at his meal as if he were in a film on “fast forward.” I paid no attention because his father was saying Venasque had appeared in their bathroom as Connie the Pig.

  “Connie died the same day as Venasque.”

  “Right. He said she had to die for him to be able to come and talk to me through her form.”

  “He came back as his pet pig? How’s that for a Jew reincarnating?”

  “Harry?”

  “Yes, Nicholas?”

  “I’m not really one.” Little Nicholas was fast becoming a pain in the ass, but I created a smile and looked his way. My eyes touched first on his plate and stopped. He’d ordered a Wiener schnitzel. He’d been eating it for ten minutes. But his
food looked exactly as it had when first served: golden meat uncut, slice of lemon sitting on top; french fries piled high and smoking; a fat tomato half, a splat of red, off to one side. I’d seen him eat that tomato in one big bite. Seen him shove it into his mouth and one cheek bulge out. But there was the tomato, the meat was whole … his glass still filled to the top with black Coca-Cola. Instinctively my hand came up, palm out, as if it were trying to keep him away.

  The boy reached down and brought up the paper on which he’d been drawing. It was of me exactly as I was at that moment: hand up just so, fingers splayed, mouth open, tongue at the gate of teeth ready to rush out and protest.

  “You!” Shock rippled down my body, but rippled back up as laughter and understanding. It was Venasque! He’d come once as a pig, why not show up next as a little boy over lunch in Vienna?

  How like him to tease, to draw me in my future, but wait till the present to stick it in my face.

  “What’s up, old man?”

  The drawing became animated. Alive. Turned its head this way and that, smiled, spoke to me. It spoke to me.

  In German.

  But I don’t speak German. My moment of truth had finally arrived! Epiphany! Spoken to from beyond the grave … but I couldn’t understand a fucking word of what was being said.

  Everything around us was frozen, as if in a snapshot. A woman across the room, her head thrown back in midlaugh, a waiter serving asparagus, a man bending over to pick up his dropped napkin … Nothing moved. There were no other sounds in the restaurant. No other sounds in the world. Only the picture and me and the smiling boy holding up a piece of paper were alive. Even his “parents” held their fixed positions.

  “Er musste jedes Gramm an Kraft und Mut zusammennehmen, um nicht auf der Stelle zu sterben.”

  “I don’t understand. Don’t do this! Please don’t play games, Venasque!”

  It did no good. He’d always done things his way. Whatever truths or information he had for me were hiding in a Black Forest of umlauts and verbs at the end, guttural r’s and a vocabulary that sounded rough and convincing at once.

  However, I knew too that he was never malicious or misleading. Like any superior teacher, there was meaning and great value in his actions no matter how bizarre or obscure they seemed at first. “Whatever you learn quickly is rarely important, Harry. It might help get you through the day, like memorizing someone’s phone number, but it doesn’t help you figure out life. Not usually, anyway.”

  “Mom, after lunch can I take Harry to the flea market?”

  Reality returned. The restaurant was once again noise and movement; asparagus was served with a yellow flourish; the woman dipped her head and finished her laugh.

  “Sure, if he wants to go.”

  Ten minutes later the boy and I were out on the street together hand in hand, walking the Ringstrasse toward the Opera. His parents had been very calm about letting little Nicholas go off and play tour guide alone with an almost-stranger.

  When I asked about that, Walker got an amused, there’s-more-to-this-than-meets-the-eye look and said only, “Zack knows what he’s doing.” Maris said nothing.

  “How come your parents let you go around alone like this? You’re pretty young.”

  He swung our arms back and forth, the way children do. “Did you like my drawing?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t understand what it was saying. I don’t speak German.” As if he didn’t know that! Instead of answering, he swung our arms back and forth, back and forth.

  I had to assume it was Venasque holding my hand, having fun playing in the skin of a precocious child. I so believed in him and his beneficence, his concern for his students’ well-being and progress. If not, if he hadn’t been choreographing all of the demons and fairies flying around and through my life then, designing the false leads, trapdoors and fata morganas that shimmered on the horizon, I would have been very, very scared. Faith is that—you stop worrying and go on with your business.

  The Ringstrasse was old-time lovely; enormous trees cast shadows across freshly painted benches. Flower stalls, clean hot-dog stands, no car honked its horn. There was no litter, no graffiti.

  “You don’t like it here, do you, Harry?”

  “No, not much.” I looked at the kid, unsurprised he’d read my mind. “It’s beautiful, but it’s finished. They’ll put up more buildings or take some down, but it’s like rearranging furniture in a house you plan to live in for the rest of your life. Cities have to have the feeling of incompleteness for me to be happy in them. Places like Vienna are perfect museums that’re happy with their permanent collection. Other cities are still trying to figure themselves out. That’s for me!”

  As if to support what I’d said, Nicholas led us past the spanking-clean Opera House, Café Museum, and Secession Museum, which was covered with scaffolding and workers restoring Olbrich’s oddity to its original condition.

  On to the Naschmarkt, Vienna’s open-air market. What a difference! Exotic and redolent, it gargled and spluttered with life and alien noise like a shortwave radio when you spin the dial across the channels. People pushed and yelled at each other in German, Turkish, Croatian. Children whined, dogs ran underfoot, bags were brusquely, expertly filled with Albanian “Paradise” tomatoes, Cretan goat cheese. One store, as large as a phone booth, sold only Hungarian paprika. Its aroma was the gift of the day.

  A rude place, no one had time for you here beyond a purchase and quickly counted change. Next! But life held sway here, process, the ignored flow and stumble of people getting through, choosing the best bunch of carrots, checking a list to see what’s needed next.

  How do you design buildings for this life? Do you try to contain it? I thought of marathon runners and the people who race up alongside, offering them water or a slice of orange. Was that how to do it—give what’s essential but stay the hell out of the way?

  “That’s the flea market down there, see?”

  Hard to imagine a more frantic, colorful scene than where we were, but one roiled only a few feet away. In a giant parking lot adjoining the Naschmarkt, Vienna’s Saturday flea market was in overdrive by the time we got there. Thousands of people milled and looked, bargained and dealt in an irresistible thunder of language and noise. Everything was for sale, everyone had something to say.

  Flea markets remind us of how narrow and fixed our values are: What unimaginable things can have meaning to people! A man bought a bent and rusty 1983 Nevada license plate for one hundred schillings. One woman did a brisk trade selling single used, unmatchable shoes, and empty record album sleeves. Astonished, I turned to Nicholas and asked, “How much do you think she charges for that stuff?” He said nothing, but a moment later the thought came that valuing something meant understanding it better than the next guy. To me, it was absurd buying an old license plate—but what if the man who bought it knew better? Knew more about it, even if that knowledge seemed spurious or even insane to me. And even if it was worthless, didn’t his wanting it make his imagination broader and grander than mine?

  “Like language.”

  “Huh?” I looked at Nicholas, although my thoughts were five miles away.

  “Like language. Listen to all this!” We stood in the midst of the flowing crowd. Putting up small hands, he gestured broadly around us. “How much of it do we pay attention to, even when we understand? It’s just noise, like junk, like old license plates. But that’s wrong, Harry, ’cause no matter what language, there are things being said above the noise. Come here.”

  He took my hand and led me to a building nearby that turned out to be a subway station—Kettenbrückengasse. Without stopping, Nicholas started to climb up the side of it and I went right up after him. With all the commotion of the flea market, only a couple of laughing punks noticed. A subway glided to a stop below us. Standing on one of the three graduated roofs, I looked down and watched the doors of the dirty silver train open.

  “What am I doing?”

  How many times had I sai
d that when I was with Venasque? How often had I climbed out on “limbs” with him, ostensibly to get a better view or perspective of what was troubling me at the moment. We climbed to the second roof, then over the edge to the third a few feet higher. Train tracks directly below to our left, the bedlam of the flea market in front of us.

  “Close your eyes and listen, Harry.”

  “For what?”

  “Your mother’s voice.”

  “Listen to that for my mother’s voice?”

  “Start with her. Close your eyes.”

  I closed them. I opened them. “My mother’s voice?”

  “Do it!”

  For a while I heard James Brown, but not Mom. Someone just below us kept playing his song, “I Feeeeeel Good …” over and over. The air was so full of sharp smells (cooking meat, smoke, metal, old clothes) that I sniffed more than listened.

  That changed. Somehow the noise suddenly moved a step closer. As if one moment it was out there, the next here, inches away, close enough to feel its breath on my face. Although my eyes were closed, I felt a kind of vertigo. My brain didn’t even have to click in before my stomach wailed, “Get back!” Only here it wasn’t fear of falling from a great height, it was because noise had so totally invaded and taken over. Perhaps we need five senses because singly they’re too intense and concentrated. Hearing alone, for example, would drive us mad. Life lived only through sound. That’s what vertigo is—suddenly life goes only through the eyes and it’s too much.

  I’d been told to concentrate on one, and for the few pitiful seconds I could do it, it was a terrifying look over the edge. Was life just keeping common things like this at bay; the sound turned down, gloves on so we don’t have to touch it directly?