Outside the Dog Museum

by Carroll, Jonathan

  I glanced up from my map as we swept past the immense baroque abbey at Melk, overlooking the Danube. When riding a train, I like to look at a map of the route we’re traveling. First I search for any cities on it I’ve heard and dreamed of all my life, their names as romantic and exciting as movie stars: Sazburg, Venice, Prague. Next comes the search for superbly named places I will never see but am glad to read once, and forever after know exist—Ybbs, Znojmo in Czechoslovakia, Winklmoos Alm. Bronze Sydney gave me this gift. She said it was like looking out a car window and watching someone who doesn’t see you. That way, you’re always one up on them, though it’s unlikely you’ll ever see them again. Znojmo, I know you, but you don’t know about meeee … .

  The train ride was bliss. The snow whipping horizontal outside only added to the feeling of cozy luxury and calm I felt as we flew clickity-click over the flats in the east and then began to rise and see mountains in the distance once we had passed the city of Linz. I had a history of Saru in my bag but deserts, burning sand, and camels didn’t fit the mood of this trip. Neither did an English translation of Otto Wagner’s Modern Architecture, which I’d bought in Vienna but not looked at since. Although I was content to be there alone, after a few hours I became slightly restless and got up to go out into the corridor to stretch my legs. Sliding the compartment door open, I checked both ways to see if anyone was in the passageway. Not a soul. Stepping out, I bent down to look out a window and desperately wished I had a cigarette. To smoke in that empty corridor, with the noise of the train getting louder, my head pressed against the frosty glass, would have been perfect. Outside, two white cows stood in a white field looking impassively at each other as snow landed on their backs and dark noses. A farmer drove a tractor slowly down a country road parallel to the tracks. A woman sat next to him on the seat, hands crossed in her lap. Both wore green cardigan sweaters against the swirling snow. Their faces were very red and their hands were bare. I saw no buildings of any kind around and wondered where these people were going, how much longer they had to travel.

  Caught up in worrying about freezing farmers, it took time to realize English was being spoken nearby. When I’m traveling in a country that doesn’t speak English, suddenly hearing it again is both a treat and an insult after so much verbal static. A treat because I know those words! I can understand again. Praise the Lord! An insult because once you listen, it’s mortifying to hear what people say in your language. Everything is a complaint, everything is a comparison—“I’ve been constipated since I left home.” “You’re lucky—I got just the opposite problem. I’m missing half my tours!” “How much is that in real money?” Etc. Ozzie and Harriet go abroad. “I Love Lucy” without the humor.

  Prepared to listen for five minutes to grumbles and whines about food, prices, accommodations … I tuned my eavesdropping ears to the next compartment where the door was open and the English was coming from. A man with a resonant voice and slight accent was speaking. Curious, I walked down the hall a ways as if I were out for a stroll. Turning, I came back and looked in at the last second. A rather pretty teenage boy was facing a gray-haired man, who was wearing a black sweater and pants. At first glance I thought he was a priest. Both were nodding their heads. Neither looked at me.

  “Where did I fight? I fought the Russians in Wien! At the end of the war, the Nazis were sending any boy out who could breathe and carry a rifle. My brother Klaus, seventeen years old, was killed and my best friend too. Many people hid their sons from the Nazis at that time, as later they hid their daughters from the Russians for exactly the same reason—to stop the rapes. The Nazis raped us boys by putting us in helmets and sending us to fight. The Russians raped the girls … Hmph! … in the more normal way. But what’s the difference, you know? Either way it is, take off your pants and do what I tell you or die.

  “I was a big shot when I was fifteen, if I do say so myself. At fifteen every boy is full of shit. So Mr. Big shot full of shit says, ‘Okay, I’ll go and fight.’ We boys, children, against the Russian army. There was nothing left of our army! No bullets, no food, all of the officers had been taken back to defend Germany … . Ha! It was suicide, but we big shots went to fight. Can you imagine our stupidity? It was almost beautiful.”

  “Was it exciting?”

  “It was boring at first because nothing happened, then in one night it was the most frightening time I have ever known. This night they woke us up screaming ‘Run! The Russians are coming, there are millions of them and no stopping them. Run. Try to get away.’”

  The old man stopped talking. I was craned so far over to catch every word that my back ached. Then I heard the sound of a match popping open, a cigarette being lit, a long draw, exhaling. Not only did I want to hear the rest of this story sitting comfortably in a warm compartment, I also wanted to bum a cig from the guy.

  “So we ran. My God did we run! But at night, where are you going to go? The enemy could be anywhere. Especially when you don’t know an area. Up near Gmund we were, on the border. It was so dark and we were so scared. Running and falling and running again. What a night! Finally the sun started coming up, thank God. It was very quiet. We kept stopping and listening for cannons or guns, but nothing. It was a beautiful day. We got directions south toward Wien from a farm woman who was crying, ‘What do we do? They’ll kill us. They’ll come in and kill us all!’ By then we had dropped our guns and packs somewhere because they were too heavy. The Russians were right behind us, what did we care about rucksacks? Well, we cared the middle of that day when we were so goddamned hungry and didn’t have anything to eat! Now you must remember that there was very little food around in those days. Did I already tell you that? The only available food was for the army, so when we didn’t have any, we couldn’t just go up to a door and ask someone for a bread or potato. There were none. None! The entire country was starving. The Russians were coming, the Americans were coming, everyone was coming and we were starving.

  “Now I will tell you the most incredible part of the story. I have remembered this image more clearly, I must say, than many other things I remember from forty years ago and the war. I don’t know why. Maybe because it was so strange and unreal.

  “We had been running for twenty hours and none of us had eaten any food. Nothing. Water we could find, but food was nowhere. At the end of the day we slept again in the woods. You know how dark those forests are in the Waldviertel, eh? But we had to sleep somewhere, so we walked far into the woods and lay down to sleep in the dark and cold again. It was again the most terrible and frightening kind of night. Every sound woke us up. One boy was crying. And then early, early in the morning, for the first time, we began to hear big guns going off somewhere and we knew they were coming now. So there were three of us sitting up together in the black woods, waiting for the first light, any light, to come so we could start again running to Wien.

  “But now listen, when the light did come and we’d been going maybe two hours, we came to the wonder, a vision I see as clearly this moment as forty years ago. On the main road near Eggenburg we came to a house, a farmhouse, that had bread everywhere. There were trucks in the Hof full of bread, the doors of the Scheune, the barn, were open and it was full of bread. I cannot explain to you what it was like. Bread was everywhere. We could smell it from the road, Markus, can you imagine? A house of bread! And us so damned hungry. We looked at each other and thought this is a trick of God. Or the devil. This wasn’t possible—life was never so friendly. We forgot about the Russians and ran across the road like wild men. You have never seen so much bread in your life. Who was it for? My friend Tilo went over to a truck and climbed on it. He got up there and started throwing bread to us over his shoulder. Like this—fuf-fuf-fuf. Big round, brown breads. God! They were rolling all over the ground and us laughing, running to catch them. We were crazy with hunger but were going to eat fresh bread in one minute, all that we wanted. As we rushed over to grab them up—BANG! a gun went off. From heaven to hell in one second. We’d forgot
ten the war and the Russians with all that beautiful bread in sight. Then someone yelled in German, ‘Don’t touch that bread! Get away from it or I’ll shoot you!’ We looked around, I with two fat ones in my hands, and there’s a boy no older than us with a rifle pointed.

  “‘Are you crazy?’ Tilo screamed at him. ‘What do you care if we take some? There are hundreds here, thousands!’

  “‘I know, but I can’t let you do it,’ the boy said. ‘My orders are to kill anyone who takes even one. It’s bread for the army.’

  “‘But we are the army!’ I screamed. Look at our goddamned uniforms, Trottel!’

  “‘I still can’t do it. I was told not to give any without orders. I have to shoot if you take any, so put them down.’

  “‘All right, you have orders, but one bread—one for each of us. You have thousands. None will be missed!’ I pleaded.

  “The son of a whore wouldn’t do it. When I started to hide one under my shirt, he saw and pointed his rifle at me. The look in his face said he would shoot me, no question. I let the thing drop on the ground. It was so soft. Never in my life have I wanted something as much as that bread at my feet. I couldn’t stop looking at it. Like I was hypnotized.

  “Tilo said, ‘Dreckskerl, give us one! Just one, who’ll know it’s missing?’

  ‘“Because they’ll shoot me if I do. How do I know you aren’t them?’

  “We argued more but no use. No bread for us. Ay Gott, I can still catch that smell in the Hof. Whenever I pass a Bäckerei and smell, I remember that day at the bread house. Anyway, we turned around and walked away. We discussed going back and killing this guy, but none of us were capable of that yet. We were boys!

  “Lucky us, we met with some soldiers who had food. They were going richtung Wien, so they shared their food and we moved on together. Later that day we heard the guns again and right after that we came to the next crazy place, just like the bread house. Only at this farm, there was a soldier guarding hundreds of bicycles. They would have gotten us home fast, but this hosnscheissa had crazier orders than the first: He wouldn’t let us have bicycles because he was guarding them against the Russians! The Russians were so close we could hear them loading their guns and laughing. We all knew how much they hated us for what our army had done to them, and they were savages anyway, nightmare people—Tartars and Cossacks and Ur-typs from Mongolia. We yelled and yelled at this man that we should all run now while there was still a small chance. But no—he was staying and fighting and we could go shit ourselves. Houses full of bread and bicycles, but none for us.”

  I SOUND LIKE DONALD Pobiner.” Shrugging the suitcase higher into my hand, I stepped away from the train. My best friend when I was ten was a tight-assed little shit named Donald Pobiner who was no fun and even then had the infuriating habit of making pronouncements that were mostly stupid but always irrefutable, as far as Donald was concerned. “Ketchup gives you cancer” being one of his more memorable ones.

  When the train slowed for Zell am See, I looked through the window and asked myself, “What’s so special about this place?” There was a nice lake surrounded by medium-sized mountains, their tops covered with snow. “Switzerland’s better” was my next Pobiner pontification when I climbed down the metal steps.

  Outside it was snowing lightly, which gave the air that nice warmth and stillness that can come with snow. One of the small enjoyable details of train travel in Europe is even when getting off at a large stop, you often must walk across tracks to get to the station. There we were, a small group of us crunching across the snow as the Innsbruck express rolled out behind us with a skate and screech of metal on wet metal. I turned once, impulsively thinking to catch sight of the old man and his young listener.

  “Harry!” Morton Palm shouted, as he stood under the eaves of the station with his bare hands up tight in his armpits and a big grin on.

  “Morton, you made it!” Walking up, I dropped my bag and patted his arm. I was genuinely glad to see the man. He was the first, and after long thought the only, person I called from Saru once I’d agreed to do the job. Obviously Hassan told Fanny, but I didn’t even call my partner to tell her what was going on. I contacted Palm because I wanted company when I was in Zell am See; company that could speak German well, knew something about my field, and was someone I liked being around. The fact that he was an ex-soldier didn’t hurt either. In the long conversation we had before I left Bazz’af, I asked him to meet me in the mountain town and bring, among other things, a gun. When I began to explain the recent situation in Saru, he said only, “I know, Harry. I’ve been following it. The gun’s a good idea.”

  We walked through a waiting room full of people wearing colorful ski clothes and the look of smug fatigue that comes with paying lots to use your muscles. Outside, taxis stood in front, puffing blue exhaust smoke into the still air. The drivers checked us out incuriously before going back to their newspapers.

  “Where are you parked?” I asked Palm.

  “At the hotel. It’s a five-minute walk.”

  “Where are we staying?”

  “You asked for the nicest place in town, Harry. I got us rooms at the Grand Hotel. You’ll like it—it’s right on the lake.”

  “The Germans beat these landscapes down into postcard pictures so they can promenade around them. Look at this—it’s straight out of The Magic Mountain or a Friedrich painting. Beautiful, striking, and absolutely wrong.”

  “Why wrong?” He took out a pack of cigarettes, which made me even happier he was here with me.

  “Could I have one of those? Wrong because it’s like topiary, or a ship in a bottle. Ships don’t belong in bottles—they belong out on limitless seas, fighting storms and sea monsters. This kind of vista should be dramatic and spectacular—not prettified and docile, like hedges trimmed in clever shapes. These are the Alps, man! Blizzards! Avalanches! Hundred-mile views! But what’ve they done with this place, besides tame it? Quaint little boat docks and wide-deck restaurants on the summit, where you can drink Remy and catch a little sun before taking the cable car down … .

  “Listen, in the Renaissance, people were so fucking afraid of mountains that when traveling across them by coach, they’d actually put on blindfolds so they wouldn’t be driven mad by their dangerous power! People really believed that could happen. That’s what I’m talking about. Where are those feelings today, Morton? I’m sure the only things that’ll drive us crazy here now will be the price of the hotel room or a drink at the bar.”

  “How come you’re forever angry, Harry? You’re a lucky man. You have what you want, your business is a success, and you even went crazy for a while without losing too much. But you’re always distressed, always angry. It’s hard for me to understand.”

  Palm didn’t say more than that as we walked toward our hotel, which was now in view. But coming from a man as placid and satisfied with the way his life had gone, the remark cut me in half. Was I so misanthropic and ill-tempered?

  The Grand Hotel am See was a nineteenth-century wedding cake properly restored. Our adjoining rooms with balconies looked out over the lake and mountains. Tame as it was, I wished someone I loved was there to share it with me. Fanny came to mind, as did our last conversation. Did I love her? Had I ever? Already many of my memories of her centered on our fights rather than the many good times we’d had together. Was that fair, or only because I was “forever angry”?

  Morton opened the doors to my balcony and stepped out on it while I hung things in the closet.

  “Come here, Harry. I want to show you something.”

  Sillily enough, I was afraid to join him. Afraid he might say something else true that would cut me in half the other way.

  “Christ, it is pretty,” I said a bit too heartily and full of false delight. Morton smiled with half of his mouth, knowing exactly what I was doing.

  “Off there to the right, behind us, is the Schmittenhöhe. We’ll go up there tomorrow, or whenever you’re ready. I skied here and at Kitzsteinhorn
once years ago. Both of them have beautiful views from the top and wonderful long runs down. Do you ski?”

  “I tried once.”

  His smile broadened. “You didn’t like it?”

  “I didn’t say that! I just said I tried it once. It was okay. Very, umm, healthy.”

  “Uh-huh. Now across the lake, there, is the town of Thumersbach and next to it Maishofen. They are much smaller and quieter than Zell am See. What I want to show you is to the right of Thumersbach. Follow my finger? That smaller mountain there is called Hundstein. Do you see where I’m pointing? That is where your Sultan owned his land.”

  “Hund means dog in German.”

  “That’s correct. The Sultan has the best place to build his museum—on a mountain called Dog Stone.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, the truth. I have talked with a man at the Verkehrsbüro here in town. He told me the whole story. The Sultan of Saru came to ski Kaprun once four years ago and heard there was a mountain here named Dog Stone, or Dog Mountain, to play with the translation. Since that time he had his people working to buy as much of the mountain as he could.”

  I asked Palm to point it out again. Instead he went to his room and brought back a detailed map of the area. By golly, there was the name in real black ink: Hundstein. Pointing to the map and then into the distance across the lake, we found it and looked in silence.