“Fine by me,” Franz said, opening the front door. “There’s a promising beer hall just around the corner, I passed it earlier and noticed they had schweinshaxan on the bill of fare—”
“Just a moment,” Lowy said, his manner changing to that of a grand inquisitor or some equally stern, forbidding character. “Before this goes any further.”
“Yes?”
“Who’s paying?”
BARELY AN HOUR later, it took three people to clear away the carnage. Only the bones were left of the pork knuckles, which had been done to perfection, from the crispy skin to the succulent meat. Of the fried potatoes, red cabbage, and beer there was not a trace.
“I don’t know what was more remarkable,” Lowy said, “the tale you’ve just told me or that meal.”
Franz, unable to move or think, belched. He had unburdened himself of everything that had happened to him since awakening on Wednesday morning to just before Lowy arrived, editing out one or two items he thought the actor wouldn’t readily grasp, such as Inspector Beide’s shifting gender and the entire existence of Gregor.
“So many questions,” Lowy said, casting a wary eye on the liqueur and coffee the waiter set before him. “I don’t know if I can handle much more.”
“I completely understand,” Franz said, “but there it is. It’s incredible, and I’m right in the middle of it.”
“I meant the coffee and kirsch,” Lowy said. “Maybe if I just take a sip of each every five minutes…”
Franz couldn’t even look at his after-dinner drinks. He pushed them away. “Perhaps if we just sat here and said nothing,” he said. “Just… think. Reflect. Digest.”
“Yes,” Lowy said. He lit a cigarette, watched the smoke laze its way to the ceiling. “If I didn’t know you are always so deadly earnest about everything,” he said, “I’d say you had just told me the premise of one of your amusing fictions.”
“I wish it was fiction,” Franz said, “then I could do with it as I pleased.”
“Have you finished that story you were working on, the one about the man who finds himself arrested for a crime, only no one will tell him the nature of the crime?”
“I hadn’t finished it, no.”
“Or the one about the—”
“No.”
“Why?”
Franz shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You should finish them.”
“When I’ve the time.”
“Don’t wait for time, Franzel. God knows time won’t wait for you.”
“Do you always churn out such trite aphorisms?”
“You can’t insult me with your big words you think I don’t know. As an aphorism is a pithy observation containing a kernel of truth, the answer is yes, I do. Now, what I don’t understand—”
“Only the one thing?”
“—is where I come in.”
“It was clear to me this morning,” Franz said. “Now, not so much. I’m sorry. If I had any control over this whole mess, I wouldn’t have sent that radiogram, which I didn’t send in the first place, and yet…”
Lowy waved it away. “Inexplicable or not,” he said, “it didn’t put me out. Just last night I was considering coming to Vienna anyway, so it all worked out.”
“You thinking of coming here? Why?”
Lowy gave an anguished groan worthy of a dying monarch, which caused a few nearby diners to look towards their table with concern. He flicked ashes. “The bane of my existence, of course,” he said. “Christian Werdehausen. And that’s the last time I wish to hear his name.”
“Werdehausen? The actor?”
“I told you I didn’t want to hear his name!”
“Sorry. What’s he done to you?”
“What he’s always done to me,” Lowy said, forgetting his prior objections and gulping down his kirsch. “Usurp me.”
“From what?”
“From everything.”
“Yitzy, I don’t understand…”
Lowy ground his cigarette into the ashtray. “Proxauf has a new play. It’s magnificent, so I’m told. Well, of course it is; it’s Proxauf, for God’s sake. The man couldn’t write shit if you paid him. You recall the enormous success I had with his Tarsinian a few seasons ago?”
“I do indeed, it was a—”
“Well, he’s got this new one, The Scapegrace, and everyone who’s read it says I’m the only man for it, only Lowy deserves it, it was written for the great Lowy… and I haven’t been able to so much as get my hands on a copy…”
“Did you ask Proxauf?”
“One doesn’t solicit a playwright for a peek at a script when one is… well, me. And besides, he should have had sense enough to send it to me straight away. And now there’s a rumor that… oh, damn, I suppose I’ll have to say his name… they say he wants that fat hack Werdehausen for the production…”
“I don’t recall Werdehausen being fat—”
“He’s a barrel of lard!” Lowy said. “My God, if they wanted to produce The Comedy of Errors, they could engage him as both sets of twins!”
“So… The Scapegoat—”
“Scapegrace.”
“—is being produced here?”
“That’s the rumor. And they say that if it’s to premiere in Vienna, then Two-Ton Werdehausen is the natural choice. Natural choice, my incisors! As if an actor can’t travel! I’ve crisscrossed Europe in my time, Franzel, you know that, and had successes anywhere you point your finger on a map. Werdehausen, the only choice for Vienna! Horseshit! I can be in Vienna in four hours. I just proved that! Travel aside, and given its subject matter, Vienna is definitely not the best place for its premiere. It belongs in Prague. ‘Let it play Prague!’ is what I say, and after I’ve made a brilliant success with it and wrung out two years of packed houses, then it can come to Vienna and that slob Werdehausen, and good luck to him once they compare him to me! Are you going to drink that?”
“My coffee?”
“Your Benedictine.”
“No.”
Lowy drank the Benedictine.
“I wouldn’t stoop to confronting Proxauf or Werdehausen,” he said. “I want to see Ernst Lothar. He’s to produce it.”
“I’ve never known you to grub for work,” Franz said. “Are you sure that’s wise?”
Lowy looked as though he had been stabbed in the heart. “Grub for work? I?” he asked. “How dare you, Kafka? I have no intention of grubbing for work. Lothar and I go way back… No, I was considering just dropping in for a pleasant word. The I-happened-to-be-in-the-neighborhood sort of thing, swap some stories, have a few laughs, ask him how business is, naturally he asks me to lunch, I say ‘Just for a quick bite,’ emphasize how trim I am, unlike that elephant Werdehausen…”
“My dear Lowy,” Franz said, passing him his untouched coffee, “it’s no use obsessing over it. Don’t let it consume you. No good can come of it.”
“No good can come of Werdehausen. He’s a disgrace to the profession.”
“You’re the king of Yiddish theater.”
“And you can bet Lothar will hold that against me!” Lowy said, rather too loudly for the other patrons. The waiter, who had been approaching with the dessert cart, rolled it away without a word.
“Calm down.”
“Don’t think I don’t know the prejudices people have,” Lowy said. “You’re kind to call me the king of Yiddish theater, Franzel, and there’s no shame in being known as such, but still… Just because Werdehausen and his herd are gentiles… Oh, the hell with it.”
He drank Franz’s coffee.
“Why do you want me to see this Hanging Artist?” he asked, his mood completely changed. “You know it’s all tomfoolery, don’t you?”
“Well, that’s just the thing,” Franz said, adjusting to the sudden change of tack. “It’s a hodgepodge of this and that, and I’d love to know just how much of it is magic and how much of it is authentic.”
Lowy shook his head. “It has to be one thing or the other, not
a mix of both,” he said. “You’re not so much a stranger to the theater as to not know that.”
“Then I’ve expressed myself poorly,” Franz said. “I want to know if it’s authentic magic.”
“None of it, then,” Lowy said, lighting another cigarette. “There’s no such thing as authentic magic, because magic doesn’t exist outside of the theatrical realm.”
“Is that so?”
“Stagecraft, Franzel. I don’t care how real it looks to you, it’s fake.”
“You haven’t seen him.”
“I don’t have to. A man can’t hang himself and then take a curtain call.”
“He doesn’t take a curtain call.”
“But he shows up for the next performance, doesn’t he? He rents rooms at rooming houses, he wears gloves and tan suits, he eats food (we presume), he has a sister, he served in the war, he asks you take a stroll with him… He does everything, in fact, except be anywhere near these people who have been killed when they were killed.”
“Explain, then, how he does it.”
“I’m not a magician.”
“But you’ve had experience with—”
“Well, I’ve known plenty, seen plenty, yes. And God knows I’ve seen how our stage managers arrange certain effects for my productions—rainstorms, thunder, lightning, the sound of horses, howling wind, wolves, ghosts, knifings, gunshots—and my God, the buckets of stage blood I’ve dealt with over the years.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“You want me to assure you that the Big Bad Man doesn’t really hang himself.”
“Don’t say it like that. I’m not a child; I know he doesn’t. However…”
“What you truly want to know is how The Hanging Artist is able to convince you that he’s truly hanged himself.”
Franz toyed with the salt cellar, avoiding Lowy’s gaze. “It’s not that, either,” he said. “Or maybe it is, partly. Am I so gullible? I didn’t think I was. It’s a combination of things, actually, that has me worried.”
“Worried?”
“Yes. Not just for me, but for everyone who watches his act. Give me a cigarette, will you?”
His cigarette lit, Franz drew deeply, exhaled, coughed, said, “I can’t get used to this,” then took another drag and blew smoke.
“We see a sign that advertises a Hanging Artist, and we’re intrigued,” Franz said. “We wonder what it means, why someone is claiming to be an artist in a method of execution. We buy our ticket, we take our seat. There’s light, there’s music. There’s a pleasant man, even friendly; not at all what we expected. He talks about judging oneself, about sins, about redemption, about justice. He talks about demons, imagined and real. He asks a stranger to test the noose, search his person. The stranger is convinced there is nothing out of the ordinary, and our Hanging Artist thanks and dismisses the stranger. He then intimates that his survival relies on us, his audience. He has already claimed he can hang himself and live, so why, exactly, does he need us? Why does he involve us?
“In the end, he hangs himself. And he does not survive, or so we think. The music ends, and there he swings, lifeless. We are faced with awkward moments of silence, as if no one knows what to do. Who decides to bring down the curtain, douse the lights, cut the poor man down? We don’t know.
“But the curtain comes down, finally. And he does not reappear. The band doesn’t strike up a triumphant chord as The Hanging Artist parts the curtain with a flourish, unharmed. No, we will have no reassurance until the next night. He leaves the theater by means of an obscure doorway off an alley to steal away into the night, while we walk like automatons to our beds, uncertain as to the meaning of death itself.
“It’s a trick, we say. We can understand trickery. Fine. But why has this man decided we need to see this particular trick? And why are we rushing to see him?
“And why,” Lowy concluded, “are people being murdered?”
“Not only murdered,” Franz said, “but in this fashion.”
“And why,” Lowy countered, “involve you?”
“It’s certainly an interesting if troubling way to spend my new lease on life.”
“That’s just it, Kafka,” Lowy said. “You, yourself, are a magic act.”
“How do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“I do not.”
Lowy closed his eyes and conjured up his best, most rounded tones, as if he were reciting a Shakespearean prologue.
“You see before you, fellow revelers,” he said, “a man hitherto condemned to death by no other authority than life itself. The disease that once afflicted him tightened its suffocating grip on him until he and everyone he knew despaired of his recovery. Thus felled by the inevitability of judgment, our hero consigned himself to a retreat that segregates the well from the unwell, the convalescent from the terminal. There he faced his final moments wondering, we have no doubt, what he had done to deserve such an end.”
“Please, Lowy,” Franz said. “That’s not funny.”
“You see before you, fellow revelers,” Lowy continued, “a real, live, bona fide miracle, as that same condemned man is not condemned after all, but upright, vigorous, free of any trace of the dreaded disease which until recently had claimed him as its own. How are we to understand his magical restoration? Has he merely recovered from his illness, or is he Lazarus, returned from death and sent to us to restore our faith in something or other? What is the lie: his disease, or his recovery?”
Several of the other diners had turned to watch Lowy’s oration, and a few now broke into applause, which he acknowledged by rising from his seat and making a few quick bows in all direction.
“I’m sorry I wanted you here,” Franz said, once his friend had returned to his seat.
“Am I wrong?”
“Is that how you see me, see my situation?”
“It’s one way to see it, my friend.”
“And did anyone try to see me after Tuesday? After Hoffmann said there wasn’t a scrap of hope left for me?”
Lowy stirred his coffee, only to discover there wasn’t any coffee left. Franz leaned into him, his voice measured, calm, simmering with suppressed anger.
“No one,” he said. “Is that it? I was left to die alone in that room. What were you waiting for, a call from Hoffmann to come claim the corpse? And when that didn’t happen on Wednesday, everyone reconciled themselves to waiting for Thursday. And when yesterday came and went, well… why not wait until Friday? Surely that bag of bones can’t last the weekend.”
Franz sat back and fought a wave of nausea.
“I apologize,” he said.
“It isn’t the easiest proposition in the world to see a treasured friend have the life sucked out of him,” Lowy said without a shred of histrionics. “I apologize, too. For myself, yes, but also for everyone who loved you too much to wait out your fate at your side.”
“Everyone except my father,” Franz said.
“The less said about your father, the better,” Lowy said.
“Do you know that monster actually saw my disease as the culmination of my lifetime of uselessness? He said, time and again, that the only reason I contracted the tuberculosis was because I was weak—morally, physically—and was looking for any excuse to escape the responsibility of living. Can you believe that?”
Lowy nodded. “Knowing your father as I do,” he said, “I can believe it.”
“I’m most surprised,” Franz said, “by Dora’s absence.”
“Perhaps she found the prospect of your mortality unbearable.”
“Don’t make a mockery of our… of our…”
“Yes?”
“Never mind. It’s the way you put things. You’ve had so many words put into your mouth in your profession that I often wonder which are original to you and which are from the third scene of the second act of something you’re rehearsing.”
“It if sounds good, it’s my own. Do you still intend to take that girl to Palestine
?”
“Yes. Why do you ask in that tone?”
“And open a… what was it? A vegetarian restaurant?”
“It was an excellent idea, Lowy, I don’t see why—”
“And spend the rest of your life as a waiter?”
“I’ll not have you make sport of my plans.”
“Good luck trying to sell a vegetarian regime in the Holy Land after the way you put away that schweinshaxan.”
“I can’t account for my sudden reversion to being a carnivore.”
“And a decidedly non-kosher carnivore, at that.”
“Dora fully endorsed the idea, Lowy.”
“Did you give her a choice?”
Franz squinted at him. “What do you mean by that?” he asked.
“Nothing, said the actor, sensing the ice along the dialogue and taking his cue to drop the subject of the absent amour altogether.”
Franz checked the time; it was nearly half past six. He needed to return to Frau Alt’s to meet Henker for the promised stroll to the theater.
“Yes,” Lowy said, “action. That’s what’s needed. Now then, here’s what I propose: I’ll not only watch this Henker’s performance with the hawk-like eye of a malicious critic, but I’ll also contrive to be the volunteer.”
“How are you going to do that?” Franz asked. “The place holds some three hundred people.”
“I know how to draw attention to myself,” Lowy said, straightening his necktie and placing his hat at a rakish angle. “Any blemishes upon my person of which I should be aware, before we sally forth unto battle?”
“None, surprisingly.”
“Excellent. Then hie thee to yon Hanging Artist, O Lazarus, and make the most of your private time in his company. I shall meet thee after the performance and tell you all I know and, I trust, allay your fears that this man is more than a cheap illusion.”
“Thank you, Yitzy,” Franz said.
The waiter brought the bill to the table, hesitated, put it in front of Lowy, bowed, and walked away. Lowy looked at the bill, then looked at Franz.
Franz reached for his wallet.
The Hanging Artist Page 18
