Didi couldn’t forget the pervasive stench of citrus-scented disinfectant, which mingled with the smell of shit from the toilets there. She hated standing in front of the urinals, waiting for clients, so usually she would sit drinking beer in that glassed-in, subterranean bar, and watch, glassy-eyed, as the old men circled the facilities. I said to her:
“Back to work, Didi! Arbeiten! Even if it’s just for fifty schillings.” And she said:
“Ja sem žena leniva…”*
Once she finally did get her ass in gear, all she’d do was sit and drink beer with the fellow. Then she’d say to me, out loud since he didn’t understand anyway:
“Konene som nasiel toho pravého chlapa…”*
Didi wasn’t really suited for this kind of work. Once, exhausted by a client, she phoned ahead for a cab. She had a hard time finding the stairwell, the stairs were steep, and through the open entryway she could see the car waiting for her. So she hurried, started running down the stairs, carefree and happy that she had it all behind her and had a decent wad of cash in her pocket. And suddenly, just as she got to the last step, the world disappeared and there was a terrible thud! Didi blacked out. Coming from Slovakia, she wasn’t used to such clean, translucent windows. She wasn’t used to a lot of things. And later it pained her to no end that the cabdriver had seen her fall, had seen her careening head slam against the windows at full force; and she was embarrassed.
Things went downhill from there. She had less and less money. She even started living on the streets, which made her look like shit. It was a vicious circle: she had no money, so she looked awful, but in order to make any money, she’d need to get a bit of rest, bathe, and put on some clean clothes.
She was on her own, in the metro, and her shoes chafed her feet, so she couldn’t go roaming around Vienna. She hobbled over to Alfie’s, a bar for boys like herself (rent boys), sat down in the corner, and without drinking, without smoking, without eating, simply watched the goings-on, quietly humming Slovak rock songs to herself.
It was like a game of roulette: one day you might earn fifty schillings, but to do that you had to invest something first. Because most of the time you’d sit there for hours before picking up a client. During that time you’d end up drinking five coffees, five Fantas, five beers, five whatevers, because the waitstaff made sure that the rent boys ordered at least one drink per hour. So what you made in one day, you’d spend over the course of five just sitting and waiting. Didi watched with envy as the successful ones up at the bar stuffed themselves on enormous schnitzels with fries and salad or cutlets covered with eggs, sunny-side up. With beautiful halves of lemons for squeezing on that meat, those fries, on all that wonderful grub! She swallowed her own spit and smoked a cigarette she’d bummed off someone, which tasted like shit on an empty stomach. She wondered how long before they threw her out, since she couldn’t invest any money in their business. Even if she did dig up a few schillings, she knew what would happen: she’d trick once, then have nothing five nights in a row; she could lose everything. Even the Romanians—they’ve been dry for two weeks! And what Romanians they were! Oh my God! Through their oversized, baggy white trousers they showed Didi their gorgeous, fat cocks. Stretching the stained fabric around them. In their broken German mixed with Russian, they asked her to see for herself, starved as they were—two weeks. They wanted schillings, cigarettes, but what could she give them? They were handsome and masculine, none of that anesthesia in their eyes, like the Austrians, Swiss, and Germans have; they’re straight. Eighteen years old, swarthy, with bushy, black eyebrows!
An elderly john named Dieter, a copy of Günter Grass’s The Rat wrapped in brown paper under his arm, makes the rounds of the bar like a professor. Wearing a threadbare sports coat. With a little pipe. But he doesn’t know what he wants. Once he called Didi over to his table, bought her drinks, and then he said:
“Heute bin ich müde, lass mich in Ruhe…”* And then they made a date for Wednesday, though Didi really wasn’t sure he’d live that long.
Vincent is behind the bar today, a tall, likeable Austrian; Didi and her ilk are good for business. Old torch songs waft out of the stereo speakers, even Edith Piaf. In the other room the rent boys play the slot machines. There’s one hideous, filthy African there who smells like shit; Didi knows she’s homeless, that she fell into the vicious circle, and that she’ll end up the same way, too, if a miracle doesn’t happen tonight. Then that sweetheart Vincent gestures to the security people to escort the African discreetly off the premises. Suddenly a raucous band of local playboys bursts in: middle-aged, wearing colorful handkerchiefs on their heads, chains around their necks, rings on their fingers. Noisy and cheerful, straight from a land called Miami, a land of movie stars, cocktails, and red convertibles pumping music at full blast. A land of moonscape wallpaper and faded dreams that’s only as far away as the mind of the next playboy. They order whiskies and smoke Marlboro Reds—they don’t care if smoking kills. Bald and monstrously obese, in the way that only wealth can bring about, because wealth always exaggerates a person’s personality—thinks Milan, the philosopher of the Bratislava council estates. Because if someone likes to eat and he’s poor, all he does is get fat; but if he’s rich (and for Didi all Austrians were rich), then he ends up looking like one of these behemoths. And if you have a really campy queen who’s loaded, she’s probably got on an entire jewelry shop, a coat of gold, furs—enough to trump any opera diva. The playboys’ bellowing fills the bar; they’re completely out of control, but of no use at all to Didi as long as they’re occupied with each other. She’s been around long enough to know that only the shamefaced, solitary daddies stuck in their corners were worth eyeing. The bald men unleash another volley of rowdy guffaws. While the real “rowdies”—the beautiful young Russians—sit quietly in the corners, fumbling in the pockets of their grubby jeans, counting out their last coins. There was yet another kind of john deformed by wealth: the middle-aged queens with their faces, their grimaces, each reminiscent of a different animal species: weasel, parrot, owl…Dripping with bracelets and hair transplants. A moment later, those poseurs are joined by beautiful, six-foot-five lads from the land of glittering lights and cheap entertainment, who come to take their coats, move their ashtrays closer, light their cigarettes, who exchange their place at the door for a chance to be taken. They even pull out their chairs for them, seat them at the table.
But even as those lads are rushing to serve them, the queens bat their eyelashes and slap them—clumsily, tenderly—or make indignant faces: “You look like a turd. I’m taking someone else home tonight! Pooh!” Even though they were old and ugly, they didn’t show the least sign of balding (thanks to those transplants) or graying (dye), they had no wrinkles, they were tall, well fed; it was only the jaded expressions on their faces that gave away their real age. They’d already had everything replaced. But they acted all snooty like those Czech actresses, those old girls with frizzy perms…Old gazelles with their bracelets and rings and cigarette cases and lighters, and everything smothered in diamonds, rubies, a hoard they’d spent years building up. Right next to them was a table of strapping bears with huge bald pates—a gang of taxi drivers. They’re tossing back beers, smoking those little brown cigars, cracking up for the whole bar to hear. They wear tin rings with skulls on them. And if one isn’t bald, then he invariably has his hair cut in a mullet, sometimes down to his ass in back, but a crew cut up front, with highlights. Now one of them swaggers to the jukebox like an old sailor and picks out a whole variety show of bad German dance songs about love. With choruses. A woman’s warm voice oozes out of the jukebox. All they need now are beer and schnitzel, thinks Didi, chewing her nails.
The macho breadwinners are playing billiards in the other room. Ad nauseam, for six hours already. As if they didn’t need to work at all. Oh, they’re ordering sandwiches! The expensive ones…Garnished and served right at the billiards table, with an extra charge for service…Those sandwiches with sausage and pickle and
tomato…Sometimes they leave the door to Alfie’s open and a breeze blows in. Some of the boys are always getting calls on their cell phones—they’re actual call boys…They put ads with their phone numbers and photos in the gay papers. They pick up their calls and walk slowly past the bar toward the door, chatting away. Hi, this is Eros; hi, this is Hyacinth…Their names are always made-up. Later, from pay phones, they call their girlfriends in Prague and Moscow, their fiancées:
“Hey Baby, I got a job in a restaurant. I can hardly wait till I’ve made the money for our wedding…Yeah Baby, I got the socks and clean sheets you sent, thanks a million…”
Every now and then a skinny, nervous, bald queen walks in, sits at the bar, orders a beer, and spends the whole evening igniting and extinguishing her lighter. When you ask her for a light, she looks at you for a moment with a completely vacant stare. Later a group of Polish yobs walks in. Heteros. Their eyes brimming with banality, hostility. They’re here to make money; they suppress their disgust. They wear tracksuits with POLSKA in enormous red letters emblazoned across the back. Right off they say:
“Jesus fucking Christ, I’ll fucking pulverize that piece of shit!”
Didi is deliriously afraid of them. But there’s one agreeable Pole amongst them. She hears him telling someone else how he’s just gotten back from France, from Cannes, how he didn’t make a cent, and in fact got cleaned out, and if his friend hadn’t cashed in on a slot machine, they’d have had no way to get back, would’ve gotten stuck in the old vicious circle there. At that, he stops; there’s no need to explain to anyone in that bar what the vicious circle is.
Now Didi gets up and walks out of the bar, out of its heavy air thick with the smell of cigarettes, schnitzel, beer, and cologne…She walks to the little park next door, where others are stomping their feet on the ground from the cold. They’re like her—so broke they can’t even sit in a bar. Out on the street, it all looks just like it must have in the past. People stand there; old, fat, and bald, the johns walk between the parked cars along the street; sometimes someone beats someone else senseless, or else the cops come round and everyone vanishes into thin air.
And that’s when the lawyer turned up, who for the next three months would make her his domestic whore. In exchange for cleaning and sex, he tended to Didi’s legs, which were chafed to the bone, and all of the diseases she’d contracted during those five days when she’d been homeless. When she’d had to sleep…no, in fact, she hadn’t actually slept anywhere. Because they lock up the metro with those grilles that drop down from the ceiling like in old castles. They shut everything down; they raise the drawbridges; it was red lights everywhere for Didi of Bratislava! The first night seemed like it would never end. Milan stood in the freezing cold from midnight until daybreak. And nothing happened. Snowflakes fell against a backdrop of lit streetlamps. Was that all? Was that all that was going to happen? Sometimes an elegant, streamlined Mercedes would drive by; but Didi no longer wanted a Mercedes—all she wanted was her own room, in her apartment, in her block, in Bratislava; for her mother to make her tea; to be doing her homework. It’s just that her passport…Well, basically, there was no passport. So why did Milan leave? Because the soup was too salty. Didi came here a year ago because she was having troubles in school, and she couldn’t stand the food at home, the smell of burned food in the kitchen…Things like that. Because they made her go to vocational school, and she was getting bad grades and stuff. Because life was something that happened somewhere else; life meant dancing with millionaires and drinking champagne, not the smell of burning all the time. The idea came to her suddenly. She started stealing this and that and sold it, and as soon as she had enough, she left town. Later, once she’d disembarked in Vienna, she swore she’d arrived in Paradise, that she’d never go back, and she tossed her passport down a manhole.
Around five in the morning she started eating snow. From the lawns, because she thought it had to be cleaner than the snow in the street. She hobbled down one of the main streets, studied the shop windows, and got a taste of that unique and inimitable flavor that the West takes on when you don’t have a cent to your name. She tried to sneak into an underground garage, thinking that even the cars must have it better than she had; but she tripped the alarm and had to run for it. And so, for five days and five nights she shambled over the whole of that fucked-up city. When she went down the less-frequented streets she would take off that awful shoe of hers, in the winter, in the snow. She wanted to freeze. She’d station herself on bridges and watch the Danube with its enormous, slow-moving ice floes. She inspected all the curbs and gutters, filled with a beggar’s certainty that at any moment she was bound to find some money there, that it was statistically impossible for her not to find anything. In the metro station there was a vending machine, and in it, behind the glass, chocolate bars and hot chicken wings. Everything. She just needed to find some money, and she spent every night searching for it. Every single bottle cap looked like a coin, and every stone embedded in the asphalt begged to be picked up. When she had only a few coins left…That was awful. Three days earlier she was about to call home, her parents, and ask them to come with their car and pick her up, to arrange for a provisional passport at the embassy, but the phone ate her money. She pounded it with her tiny fists, but nothing came out. There was a sign with a toll-free number to call and report such incidents, but of course it didn’t work; all she got was an automatic message with some bitch’s voice rattling off whatever. To get her revenge on those Austrian fuckers, Didi stuffed the payphone with sticks and matches (matches that would’ve come in handy about now).
She came to despise all the people getting into their cars, driving off to their Opera, reading the newspaper in their little Eduscho cafés, carrying their packages, running through their snow, kissing under their statues, and giving each other chocolates embellished with the heads of their Great Composers. Didi glared at the huge boxes of chocolate like a starving dog. Whole window displays of chocolate, each one individually wrapped in gold paper, painted with the profile of some musical fuckwit in an enormous, gray wig. Open round boxes of chocolate the size of carriage wheels shimmered in the empty street’s nocturnal light. Didi had crossed a boundary in her hunger and was feeling it less and less now. But she looked at those boxes of sweets and couldn’t pull her eyes away: the luxuries of the world had become so improbable and fascinating to her. A poor man dreams of work and enough money to get by; a beggar dreams of nothing less than millions! Bells were ringing in the distance; crimson garlands lit up, then went out; and Didi had the feeling that, at any moment, a carriage drawn by a legion of reindeer would come for her, here in front of the shop, and whisk her off into some fairy tale or other. She wasn’t quite sure which story best suited her: the one about the little girl with the matches, who froze in the snow? She’d stuffed her last matches into the payphone, and anyway, smoking was just awful! It did nothing at all to make the hunger go away. Or maybe the story of Kai and Gerda was better? That must have been one of those Scandinavian fairy tales, because Milan remembered only that it was full of ice, whiteness, blue skies, and lucre. Just like Sweden. And just when it seemed things couldn’t get any kitschier…Hmm, how to explain? There were these lights set up everywhere, and Didi figured, to her surprise, that they were rigged with photosensors, because whenever she got near them, they would start playing this one especially inane American Christmas carol. And in that empty, bitterly cold night, little bells really were ringing, but instead of reindeer a combination street-cleaner and garbage truck drove by, which in Austria all look like something out of a science fiction war game. Didi was feeling a lot like garbage herself, and couldn’t help thinking they must be coming on her account.
Eventually Didi stopped walking, because every time she took a step, her shoe would cut into her foot, practically to the bone. At least that’s how it felt. Those beautiful loafers—how she hated them now—were a reminder of the life of prosperity (Ralf! Alex!) she’d had not long befo
re, when instead of saving her money for times like this, she’d spent it all on heaps of new clothes. (Geld sparen, Geld sparen, Didi! Du musst Geld sparen!)* But later, when she was kicked out of her apartment by her Brazilian fag landlady (Sierra Ferreira da Silva), she stashed them all in a locker at the train station, threw in a coin and…and they were still there, but in order to get them out she’d have to deposit fifty schillings or something, because the meter was still ticking! The blinking display kindly informed her that if she didn’t remove her things within twenty-four hours, she wouldn’t be able to get them out at all. Or something like that—she didn’t entirely understand what those Austrian pigs had written there.
Didi was no longer able to walk or stand up, nor could she put up with the sadness emanating from all the Christmas trees and lights and jingling, caroling bells everywhere. She was so over that whole green-and-red festival of kitsch.
But then: a miracle! Didi, filthy and hungry though she was, snared a john in the metro. A fat, sweaty, unshaven Arab. Who smiled lasciviously at her nineteen years and fawn-colored hair. Milan thought she might kiss him for joy, right there in the subway! She was already figuring how many cutlets, French fries, and sandwiches he’d be good for…How much could she get out of a guy like that? Not much. But there was a shower at the Bahnhof; you just tossed in some coins and the doors parted. Only a few inches, though, so that two people couldn’t make it through at once. You had a half hour entirely to yourself. Washing up was wonderful, but being entirely by yourself for a whole half hour—that was pure bliss! To be off the street, finally; finally, to be alone! She’d go and wash up there and put on a pair of fresh socks, which she would buy. It would be a holiday.
The Arab didn’t have a place. She asked him, “You got a place?” But as if to spite her, the Arab didn’t even have a place to go. Didi wanted to get the whole thing over and done with as soon as possible, and was about to drag him off to the bushes in the park or the toilet in the metro, but the Arab (Ahmed) insisted that he knew the perfect spot. He took Milan to an underground parking lot that had some public toilets in it. They zigzagged between the variously colored cars. It was dimly lit; the only bright thing was a green sign with the word “exit.” They shut the door, and Ahmed sat down on the toilet. It was enough to make you throw up. He had breasts like a woman’s, except they were covered in hair, and he reeked of sour sweat. Every few minutes he would break into idiotic laughter and order Didi to lick his corrupted body from head to toe. Or else he would fart and laugh as if it were the funniest joke he’d ever heard. Didi did lick him, but all the while she fantasized about those cigarettes and cutlets, which allowed her to forget what she was doing. Suddenly someone started pounding against the door of the stall—it was the guard! The parking-lot guard! The guardian of all those underground garages, one after the other, deeper and deeper, leading all the way down to hell! One of those guards in the fluorescent vests, yellow, maybe orange. He banged against the door and bellowed. Didi didn’t understand a thing because he was yelling in German, and for her to understand he would have had to be yelling in Slovak, which he wasn’t. Instead he yelled in German, but Milan had no problem imagining the contents of his communiqué. In a word, they needed to get the fuck out, because the Polizei was on its way.
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 24
