I've recovered my camera from the dark and noisome confines (I don't know what 'noisome' means, but I gather that it's not 'noisy' and that it is a common attribute of confines which happen also to be dark) of a discarded pair of trousers. Alas!: a day too late to record my rather delicious salmon-and-dill pasta. And you know what salmon costs, so some time this week you will be treated to the cheapest thing on our menu: the word-kitchen's Very Simple Pizza (Which Isn't, Strictly Speaking, Pizza). Think of it as the credit-crunch to my subprime-whatever boom. For now, though, I've got to rush off to see a show. Latecomers, my ticket informs me without any ambiguity whatever, Will Not Be Admitted.
So I'll skip on to the writing, which I prepared earlier. A new policy update had reached me from the powers that be here in Glasgow Uni. Apparently it has been determined that 1500 words including footnotes and bibliography is far too lenient a length for history essays; some students are still proving able to squeeze worthwhile analysis into a space which seedy internet dating services would consider insufficient and this will not do, it will not do at all. Therefore from now on all essays are to be submitted in strict haiku form.
Ah well: I must make the best of a bad situation. Here, then, are some prospective essays for the various questions according to the new rules. They can be purchased from me for £20 apiece.
Revolt and revolution
1. In what circumstance might common disturbances turn into violent revolt in Europe before 1850?
Customs violated;
Incorrect Christology;
Folk starving to death.
2. To what degree did the revolutionary movements in France between 1785 and 1871 share common grievances?
Lots; France was full of
Injustice; also, peace not
All that exciting.
3. ‘In the major European revolutions, violent repression by the authorities never worked as intended.’ Discuss with reference to at least two revolutions.
For the last bloody
Time: first you shoot and then you
Revoke civil rights.
Gender
1. ‘The Enlightenment created ideals of equality and individual rights.’ Why did it take so long for these ideals to be extended to include women?
How can I put this:
Well, recent research suggests
Men are huge bastards.
2. To what extent have concepts of masculinity gradually become more ‘civilised’ during the period 1500 and 2000?
I reject the term
‘Civilisation’; it’s a
Cultural construct.
3. In what respects did feminists of the ‘first wave’ (late 19th – early 20th Century) differ in approach from those of the ‘second wave’ (1960s-1970s)? You may focus on one or two countries.
Suffrage, good idea;
Equal pay, better; but best?
Essays on Jane Eyre.
The changing urban environment
1. How effective were the practical responses to the problems (social, administrative, environmental) created by urban growth EITHER in the period before 1800, OR after 1800?
Alcohol, smog, stench,
Child labour, overcrowding –
Glasgow’s not so bad!
2. Did the growth of cities enhance the opportunities for women in society?
Depends what’s meant by
‘Opportunities’, I guess.
(History’s like that.)
3. Why did urbanisation so often seem to make social inequality worse? Your answer should make specific reference to at least two cities.
The rich/the poor should
Have the decency to be
Rich/poor out of sight!
State-formation
1. Was absolute monarchy (before 1789) ever anything more than government by the elite, for the elite?
No, but then neither
Was anything else since then.
(Extra marks for Marx!)
2. ‘The transformation of “subjects” into “citizens” neatly represents the emergence of the modern state. Discuss with reference to at least two different parts of Europe.
In Britain we’re all
Apparently still subjects;
Ah well, never mind.
3. Why was democracy so fragile in twentieth-century Europe?
Raving demagogues;
Vast forces clash like glaciers;
Really not much fun.
Race and nationality
1. Is racism within Europe the inevitable outcome of the creation of colonial empires by the European powers?
Likely. As a white
Bourgeois, I am troubled by
Existential guilt.
2. Does the history of racism and of nationalism suggest the two are inter-connected?
Only as much as
Alcohol and drunkenness.
I mean, honestly.
3. In what respects have European concepts of ethnic identity and race changed since 1945?
Well, where I live we’ve
Chucked John Knox for Mel Gibson.
Shit idea, really.
War and Peace
1. ‘War made the creation of a well-organised state essential’. Discuss with reference to at least two parts of Europe before 1815
Clearly, Britain needs a
Strong army to defend our
Fleet, and vice-versa.
2. How successful was the ‘balance of power’ resulting from the Congress of Vienna (1815)
A century’s quite
Good, when you look at things in
The big picture, eh?
3. Why has Europe been involved in no major-power war since 1945, but has been implicated in a large number of other conflicts?
Because the Yanks are
A bunch of bloody cowboys
If you’re asking me.
4. How can the battlefield archaeologist contribute to our traditional historical understanding of warfare in Europe? (You may choose to discuss a broad chronological overview, or look at one conflict in particular such as WWI).
I hear if you do
This course in Honours you can
Fire a cannon! Yeah.
Spiritual and Temporal Power
1. Did the divisions created by Protestantism strengthen or weaken Christianity?
What with all the blood,
I admit maybe Gibson
Did less harm than Knox.
2. How substantial was the conflict between reason and religious beliefs in European cultural and intellectual life between 1618 and 1789?
Probably not more
Than that between flavours of
Religious belief.
3. How might the historian explain the declining role of Christian worship in some parts of Europe since the late 18th century?
Which parts? My gosh, you
Want pint-size essays, you should
Set full-size questions!
Sunday 26 February 2012
Saturday 25 February 2012
We now return to your regularly scheduled A.B.S.T
Seven full chapters, and in almost that number of days: I call that a success.
First, a whinge (possibly I should come up with a name for my whinge-column). This probably betrays my origins among the southern Edinburgh boowrrrrrrrrr-jwa-zie-ih (as we say in our native dialect) even more obviously than my belief that apple juice ought to come in glass bottles or getting me to say the word 'dear', but I must say it: why do people here in the Murano SSV not understand how door-intercoms work? You have to identify yourself! and give some semi-plausible reason for wanting in. I realise that saying aloud the words 'I've come to shove batches of postcards depicting scowling half-naked young men in horrible haircuts through everybody's letterboxes' might force a person to take a long uncomfortable look at their life and what they once dreamed it might be, but still, I can't let you in on the strength of 'hi'.
And now, we resume our serial.
"Rise and shine, Ottokar."
I was floating on the surface of a deep, dark, warm sleep. Who was calling my name? Why? Why this ungodly hour? And come to think of it, why did we even say 'rise and shine'? Didn't the sun more 'glow' than 'shine'? Shining implies reflection...
Such curious and disorderly thoughts as these swirled behind my eyes. I rubbed them, stiffly and sleepily at first, but with each press of my hands I became more lucid and when I was finished I felt already fully awake. I sat up, stretched dramatically, and let go a colossal yawn.
"Ahhhhhhh! Morning, Christian."
"Morning, Ottokar."
"Breakfast time, is it? I could eat a whole pig!"
"You're in good spirits," said Christian as if this were a harmless but telling vice. "And you can't have been asleep for too long, either, I know that. I got tired waiting to let you in last night and went to bed. Did you drink yourself off to dreamland? I keep trying and I always seem to end up in the hangover frontier."
I chuckled. "Sorry, old man, didn't touch a drop the other night. Keep trying, eh?"
"What a shame..."
"I'll be down in a moment, just let me get dressed. Skip along!"
Christian shrugged and left the room (not skipping, but on those treacherous stairs I could hardly blame him), leaving me to get dressed or, more accurately, change myself: I slept in my day-clothes even when I hadn't fallen asleep sitting up, for the attic was drafty and my blanket none too thick. My clothing was much the same from day to day: I had only the one coat and a few pairs of trousers, enlivened by a collection of differently-coloured neckcloths, which I'd somehow contrived to acquire in the course of my life without ever actually going into a shop and buying one.
I skipped along down to breakfast and found no whole pigs on offer, but my disappointment was limited: the food was good, and the conversation better (although Jan spent the meal with puff under his eyes, gargling and eying each mouthful suspiciously before swallowing it: he could cope with staying up all night, but merely late nights took it out of him for some reason). It was in a pause after I had just finished giving my thoughts about the Tsar of Russia's promises to the Poles in the most enthusiastic terms (don't ask me to remember what they were: like many students, I liked to have strong political opinions so much that I tried out new ones every week) that Madam Gottlieb said:
"This is all very well, Ottokar, but I'd be more fascinated to know why you missed dinner last night. If the story's a good one, I might even be persuaded not to charge you for it."
"Oh, I was smuggling books! That's excusable, surely?," I said with too much easy confidence.
"It might be. Do tell me next time. We had to divide your share up, and Christian and Rudi nearly came to blows over a chop."
The conversation moved rapidly on, and I finished up my plate - relieved that I'd been pressed no further about last night's events, but pretending even to myself that I was not, because after all what was there to be reticent about? Absolutely nothing! I told myself to get on with the day.
So I promptly went upstairs for my books and scarf, and then set out for the lecture with this Professor Amsel that Macebulski had set us on to - or rather, to find out when the lecture was, as I had never had the time yesterday to find out... But - I sent my train of thought away from that troublesome juntion - I didn't mind leaving early. It was a splendid day, cold and bright so that everything flashed with frost like an enormous ice-sculpture, and I wanted to be out in the city. I went to the philosophy department noticeboard, found the time, and then let the wind blow me by a roundabout route to the library to spend my surplus hours in some background reading. I saw some classmates there, and in the learned silence we nodded our heads in greeting.
Professor Amsel turned out to be a small gentleman who had difficulty keeping control of his bulky sheaf of notes (and yet never actually appeared to consult them) and was struck by coughing fits whenever the story of Great Moravia's decline and fall became especially exciting - but he knew an enormous amount about his subject and passed it one with such enthusiasm that you'd feel guilty if you didn't remember it. The two classes in attendance regarded each-other with a mutual suspicion that escaped the professor's notice.
The philology set beat a hasty retreat once the lecture was complete, but at this point Professor Amsel stuck up his finger dramatically as if receiving a sudden revelation.
"Oh! Is there a Mr. Jánkovač here?"
I shuffled out of the throng to the piercing looks of the history students, ready to receive my sentence.
"Your professor asked me to tell Mr. Jánkovač that he'd like his book back. That's all!"
The history lot, as one, looked away with sighs and mutters. For people who ostensibly study words, this gang aren't very careful with them, mutter, mutter...
I withdrew into the shelter of my own people, face red. It took me a moment to hear the queries of my classmates: I was rather dazed, and unseeingly let myself be jostled out of the theatre.
My memory is a long way from being perfect and I often forget things; I have forgotten things far more important and irrecoverable than that false book. That alone would certainly not have left me in such a state. No: it was the realisation that this very day, without any more hems and haws and endeavours to think about something else, I would have to return to the Fruehauf household - to her house, as I suddenly found it was marked on the map of Vienna in my mind. I boiled over with excitement and nervousness too blended to distinguish, on which my rational mind tried resolutely to keep the lid.
"So, Ottokar, what might this book be? Ottokar?"
"Oh, just something I borrowed the other day - you can get a look at any of his books if you just ask." Truer than they knew! My inquisitors were satisfied, anyway, and the conversation turned to other things. I stayed quiet, and by the time we had reached the coffee-house my rational mind had re-asserted his control and squashed the objections of my fluttering heart, and other organs with agendas of their own.
My course was clear. That I could waste no time in recovering the false book was obvious: anything else would invite the wrath of Macebulski, which simply could not be contemplated (I contemplated it anyway, however: it seemed to involve hot knives). But I wouldn't go by myself: since they'd expressed some interest in my adventures of the last night, it would obviously be nothing more than good manners to bring along Jan and Christian and introduce them to my new friend. My rational mind was pleased with this elaboration, in particular 'my new friend'. I sought out my cohorts at their customary table.
"Say, chaps?"
"Yes?" "Yes?"
"I must go over to the scene of last night's business. I forgot, ah, I forgot my Plato." I took comfort in reminding myself that whatever happened, I still didn't actually have to read Plato for my fun. "Care to come along?"
"Certainly." Christian gulped down his drink (it was coffee, but he was a man of strong habits and stronger, leathery tongue). "If this 'old colleague' can keep you up half the night, he must be a very interesting man."
"Oh, he is. I think you'll get on with him very well, actually."
"Is that 'you'll' Jan and me, or just me?"
"Is it far? We do have a lecture in a bit," said Jan before we could carry that one any further.
"In Wieden. When's your lecture?"
"Three."
"Oh, you'll be fine. We needn't stay long."
"Wieden, eh?," said Christian. "On the right side of the tracks. One sort of expects Macebulski's old colleagues to live in ramshackle dens like ours, smoking opium, you know?"
"Oh no, it's very... well, you'll see it!"
We went up to the front to pay and set out on our way. I felt that strange sensation that one always gets from following by daylight a course that is only familiar by darkness, that sensation of walking through a world similar to the one you've known but somehow unnervingly different.
We discussed the Tsar of Russia and the Poles: Christian helped disabuse me or my current set of opinions by being acidly cynical about everyone and everything, as happened about once a fortnight. Jan, meanwhile, tried to wring more out of me about our destination and its inhabitant, but although I did explain how I had marooned the hollow book, I avoided replying with anything substantial. And why should I waste time telling him what he'd soon find out for himself, anyway? The Polish question was important!
By daylight, the Mittersteig seemed very white, even for Vienna under snow: it was full of large flat spaces where the sunlight could reflect. It was a street that could afford decent-sized houses (and could afford to clean them, which counted for something in those smoggy days) but didn't venture anything fancy: a bastion of the miscellaneous middle-classes. As a setting it rather suited Pascal, but I couldn't help thinking that it didn't suit... oh, go on, think it... Elke. But then, would any house really reflect her? She didn't have a domestic nature. She made me think of the distant lines of mountains in the south and east.
"This it?," said Jan, interrupting the reverie. "I rather like it. Comfortable, but without pretensions. No fake Greek stuff."
"This is it." I went up to the door, and paused, trying to order my thoughts and come up with some idea of what might happen when I knocked. Possible futures flickered before me, vivid yet maddeningly vague. As I stood there, Christian reached over my shoulder and knocked briskly. Ah, well.
He turned to me. "Tell us more about this mysterious 'old colleague', Ottokar. You've kept us quite in the dark. An old colleague of Stańczyk could be any of several interesting things."
"That's what I thought, too, actually. He's a linguist, I think. He knows a great deal about names-"
At that point the door, on which Christian was resting his arm, was pulled aside without warning.
"Argkh!"
"Ottokar! I thought it might be you."
"Ow."
"Oh, sorry." Elke glanced down and up again and down again. "...Do you want a hand up?"
Christian, looking rather alarmed at the idea, got back onto his legs with an agility surprising for his bulk.
"I'm quite alright, madam." He brushed down his coat and removed his cap. "Christian Graf von Hoyerswerda, at your service."
"You're an impoverished student-prince, then! Are you another book-smuggler?"
Jan had reached the threshold; he had put an unlit cigar to his mouth, solely so that he could now remove it with a dramatic flick and crush it under his boot-heel.
"Please, madam. We prefer the term 'gentlemen bibliophiles'."
"Speak for yourself, Jan. Myself, I'd rather be a book-smuggler," I said.
"I'd rather you were a book-smuggler, too!"
"But whatever you wish to call it, madam, I'm interested to know how you're aware of our... operation." I could tell that Christian's question was directed firstly at me; I smiled gingerly.
"She caught me red-handed, I'm afraid."
"I did! Those books were for me, anyway." Elke closed her eyes and extended four fingers. "There was János Arany, unexpurgated..." she checked it off, and suddenly her eyes snapped open again. "Gosh, I haven't even started reading any of them!" She grinned. "I blame you, Ottokar."
"Oh, not Ottokar, madam!" Jan was about to continue when she cut him off with a girlish chuckle. She held a hand up to her mouth as if to arrest the escaping air.
"Why is everyone calling me 'madam' today? I'm Elke!"
Christian had gone over to close the neglected door, through which some snow was blowing. It shut with a heavy click, and at this Elke hugged herself and shivered, as if she hadn't noticed the chill until it was brought to her attention. She certainly wasn't dressed for the weather: she was wearing exactly what she had been yesterday. I remembered with a twinge of guilt that, thanks to me, she'd fallen asleep in her clothes.
"Brrrrrrrrr! I feel dreadfully sorry for you, tramping all over the city. I mean, I like tramping over it, but this is a day to watch through the window with a fire and a drink and a blanket. It wasn't nearly this cold a couple of days ago. I always feel it's slightly unfair when it gets colder after the new year."
"It's the wind changing," I said as I hung up my coat. "We're getting southerlies now. Winds like a wild dog, howling and whining all the night, and gnawing at your bones!"
"I like that! How you said it, I mean, not the winds as such. A chilly wind's not the worst though, hailstones are the absolute worst."
"Oh, yes!," I said, enthused. "Now, hailstones are like the tatar horde! They come storming in, they make everyone hide indoors, for the fear of their stinging whips, and they go as soon as they come, leaving wreckage."
I hung up my cap, and caught a glimpse of Jan and Christian engaging in a synchronised eyebrow-raise.
"Gosh, we could do this all day!," said Elke obliviously, sounding as if she were all in favour of the idea. "What're we? Hrm. You'd be snow! You come from the north in the middle of winter and you're very literary and a bit mysterious."
...Really? I was still digesting this information when she reached up and ruffled my fringe. "You have some snow in your hair, too, which is a dead give-away, really. What am I?"
"A... a South China Sea hurricane! You're wild and swift and sudden, and where you pass the ground is strewn with debris!" I wondered, immediately after having said this, whether it was the right thing to have said; but my mouth didn't seem to be receiving orders from my brain in the ordinary way. The same went for quite a lot of my body, actually.
"That's me!" Elke twirled around on the spot and made wind noises. "I'd be a very moral hurricane, though, because I'd only sink slave-ships and opium-traders. When there were no slaves on board, obviously! But I'd sink the opium."
"I", said Christian decisively, "am slush. I'm cold and wet and dirty and nobody will be happy until I melt. What was all that talk about fires and drinks?"
"Oh, hush, Christian." Jan, having hung up his outdoor gear, gave me what was possibly the least subtle wink in the whole history of everything. Elke, fortunately, wasn't looking at him but at Christian. She had to crane a little, this close-to.
"I might let you have something to drink," she said severely. "Have you brought me anything to read?"
Christian shot me a glance as if to say that this was my problem. I hesitated: I hated to wipe the look of excitement and anticipation from her face. Jan saved me.
"Have pity on poor Christian, ma- Elke, he's an alcoholic. Tell you what! Next time he's round here, Ottokar can bring over the book he's writing! That way we wont go dipping any further into the Forbidden Knowledge Society's resources, which is entirely... out of the question... I'm afraid..." He trailed off: she had already spun around.
"Are you really?"
I reddened. "Not really, Jan's just, ah... it's a lot of short stories, or the starts of them, and strange ideas I had to write down while they lasted. They're all in Czech, anyway."
"You must translate them for me! I like translating things. It shows you what's different about languages, how they understand things. I like that. And I like your strange ideas!"
"Right, splendid, excellent, that's settled, then," said Christian. "About that drink...?"
Elke giggled again.
"Good things come to those who wait! I shouldn't say that, though, it's very hypocritical of me. I like to go and get things!"
"Oh, I absolutely agree," said Jan, taking out another cigar to twirl around. We finally proceeded into the hall, where we passed by Jutte the maid: a tremendous, sweaty, powerful figure of a women with an air of permanent bustle, over forty but you'd be afraid to guess more precisely than that, whose usual expression was of sharp disapproval. This she gave us now.
"Isn't there an arrangement, young miss? I don't do your studies for you and you don't answer the door for me?"
Elke defiantly stuck out her tongue. "I got there first, and I do a very fine job receiving vistors, don't I? Say I do!" The three of us obeyed and Elke went on, satisfied. "Do you know where the brandy is, Jutte?" She turned to us. "Do you like brandy?"
"We love it." Christian's voice allowed for no contradiction.
"Me too! Plum-brandy is best."
Jutte intensified her disapproval, but nevertheless bustled away.
"Thanks, Jutte!"
We continued into a living room. It was cluttered, but in a neat way, the way of a meticulously organised room in which by force of habit a little too much has been organised over the years. It was quite unlike Elke's room, which had an enclave of territory on a table by the fire, creaking with books and crumby dishes. There was a sofa pulled up to this table, on which I recognised several cushions from Elke's chair upstairs, peaking out from under a blanket embroidered in a lively eastern peasant fashion.
"Help me move this, would you?" Between us, we shifted up another sofa opposite the first; then Elke burrowed under the blanket and emerged on the other side. "Sit down, everybody, sit down!"
Jan abandoned his usual predatory grace and threw himself full-length on the newly-arrived sofa. "Oi, Jan, budge," said Christian. I hovered.
"Come on, Ottokar, there's enough blanket for both of us. I'm not very big! Not that I'd blame you if you didn't notice. I'm big in spirit."
I wasted no further time in burrowing in alongside Elke, and Jan conceded Christian a space.
"Right! This is nice." Elke stretched out and murmured contentedly. "We're not moving, we've got a blanket, so you two had better pour the drinks."
"Not much of a hostess, this one," said Christian to Jan, pretending to whisper.
"Oh, I can't stand the hostess type!," said Jan. "Eh, Ottokar?"
Jan, you bastard, I thought. "Well, I've never gotten to know any, really, so I feel a little off at judging them, but really I don't want to get to know any. All they do is host, talk, and knit, and knitting's a great profession and somebody's got to do it but with all that time, perhaps they could think of something worthwhile to talk about! But it all seems to be chatter about what people are wearing and whose having affairs with who. Lying about nothing seems worse than lying about something."
Elke nodded approvingly. "See, Christian? At least you know I'm honest."
"You're right, of course," said Christian. "Can't stand 'em."
"But if you upset them," Jan added, "They become like tigers! Tigers!"
"Tigresses."
"Excuse me, Elke, you're quite right. Tigresses."
"Now, Elke," said Christian, "Tell us, if you'll forgive the cliché, about yourself. I fear we've been sorely misled. When Ottokar told us that we were meeting an old colleague of our smuggling-chieftain, we were expecting a man, not to put too fine a point on it. A grown man."
"I'm grown! Just not very much..."
This was true, I must confirm: we were pretty close-in under the blanket, close enough to tell a young woman from a girl. Perhaps I wasn't keeping myself to myself as much as I might theoretically have done, but it was a small sofa and who will judge me? By the standards of those days, when the arbiters of fashion were stuck on bare shoulders for some reason, Elke dressed very modestly, of course - ah, 'modest', there's a tricky word. To be modest is to conceal what you've got, and she'd got it, alright.
"Don't talk nonsense, Christian," said Jan. "Elke is clearly not our 'colleague', just because she lives here doesn't mean she's any 'colleague', and if Ottokar neglected to mention her, what of it? You need more surprises in your life!"
Christian chuckled resignedly. "I do, I do."
At that point, the brandy arrived: Jutte saved Jan and Christian their labours by pouring us a glass each and then withdrawing the bottle. "I know what students are like, miss, and I know what you're like. The only thing I don't know is which of you is worse."
Elke stuck out her tongue.
"Spoilsport!"
"Shall I fetch Mr. Fruehauf?"
"You needn't bother him. Thanks!"
Jutte bustled away; Jan and I sipped; Christian and Elke downed. She foamed a little more than usual for a moment.
I, meanwhile, was exploring the pile of papers on the table before us. There was a notebook filled with an intense, baffling onslaught of numbers and symbols that might as well have been Hebrew to me; there was a book about calculus filled with same; there was a sheet headed 'Questions to ask Mr.Ansbacher'. The questions included:
1. So who did invent it, then, Newton or Leibniz?
2. If Mr. Leibniz was so clever, why didn't he invent anything fun? Newton was better. I liked the story about the apple. It just goes to show, sometimes the cleverest people need a bit of fresh air and a hard knock!
3. Anyway, what's the point?
"Bah!," said Elke, noticing my curiosity. "Wretched calculus! I don't like it, because it isn't real!"
Christian raised his eyebrows. "On the topic of reality, Elke, I have to point out that you are in fact not a South China Sea hurricane. This mathematics textbook, on the other hand, seems perfectly apparent."
She leaned over towards him, putting her hands on the table for support. "Yes I am! Shwoooh-shweeoh-shwoouh! Krakoom!
"
"...'Krakoom?'"
"That was a thunderbolt, stupid!"
"I see her point, though," I said, truthfully. "We all know what 'hurricane' means, what it looks like, what it is. I say 'hurricane' and you see one, and only after that do you start coming up with abstractions to explain it. Calculus is all abstraction. In one way, the way we think, or I think, anyway, it's less 'real' even than things which are fantastical or absurd. When I say 'kobold', you think of a kobold, no abstraction about it."
Elke beamed. "'Sright! Kobolds are real, though. Seen 'em."
At this exact moment we heard the polite little cough of a man who wants to intrude without intruding. Pascal had entered the sitting-room unnoticed and settled down to read. He now removed his reading-glasses and folded them up.
"Excuse me, young sirs. Elke has a very low tolerance for alcohol, I'm afraid."
Elke giggled irrepressibly.
"If I'll be honest, and I am always honest," said Christian, "she strikes me as someone for whom the drink is not so much the cause as the excuse. I'm not criticising, of course, I'm the same."
"'Sright! I'm just happy, is all! I am... ekhem! 'Perfectly lucid, composed, and sober', I am. My diction is exquisite! Wir Wiener Wäscheweiber würden weiße Wäsche waschen, wenn wir wüssten, wo weiches warmes Wasser wäre! See? If I wanted to, I could derive that equation right now. I just don't. Want to."
Pascal smiled. He was one of those kindly souls for whom a smile does the work of a sigh and a shake of the head.
"Mr. Ansbacher goes to a lot of trouble on your behalf, Elke."
"And I go through a lot of trouble on his! I don't...," her she broke down laughing and then recovered, "...I don't derive any pleasure from calculus!"
Pascal smiled again. "I'd hate you boys to get the wrong impression. She's a very diligent learner."
"Oh, don't worry, don't worry!," said Jan, and here Christian interjected: "Not at all. That was actually pretty funny." Jan gave him a look. "Don't worry, I was just saying. Our fault entirely, for getting Miss Vanderschmidt diverted, eh, Ottokar?."
Oh, don't you raise your eyebrows!
Pascal rescued me. "May I ask to what I owe the pleasure of your visit?"
Jan opened his mouth.
"Ottokar left a false book we use round here the other night. We just dropped by to pick it up," said Christian.
Jan closed his mouth.
"And you are...?"
"Sorry, I'm Christian Graf von Hoyerswerda. They call me Goethe. This is Jan Dietrich Wilhelm 'Il Capitano' Oberkirch, and this is Ottokar 'Sts.Cyril and Methodius' Jánkovač, you've met."
"Ah, Andrzej has mentioned you two, but not by your real names. Wilhelm, meaning 'vehement defender'... goes well with Dietrich, actually..."
"Mentioned us flatteringly, I hope?," said Jan with a grin. Good, he'd finally stopped giving me pointed looks!
"Oh, very. Now, 'Dietrich' is the same name as 'Theoderich'-."
"Theoderich the Goth."
"Yes, indeed, Elke, Theoderich the Goth-"
"His regime," she said confidently and with the brandy suddenly gone from her voice, "was not at all doomed to collapse from the start as some have suggested. The religious divide between Goths and Romans would have lessened over time, given that he enforced tolerance and allowed conversions. Arianism in isolation always tended to die out. If he hadn't been let down so badly by his heirs, I don't see any reason why the Goths couldn't have gone the way of the Franks."
I blinked. I had known Theoderich had been a Goth, and I was fairly certain he had fought Romans; that was the extent of my knowledge.
"I like history the best," said Elke by way of explanation. "It's the only subject where you do better by disagreeing with whatever the book says."
"I thought you'd make a good philologist, myself. You love languages and words."
"You're right, actually! I just never had lessons in them. I picked up my languages in bits and pieces and I read and read and read." She was altogether sober now; I felt perhaps that Christian had been right and she had never been really drunk. "You should teach me Czech! I'd like to learn it."
"I suppose I could give you those stories in the Czech as well, to start with-"
"Yes! And you must teach me how all your funny letters work."
"They're actually quite simple. It was a lot harder five-hundred years ago when we had to try and write everything in the German alphabet! The 'funny letters' were invented by Hus, back when we were starting the Reformation and beating the armies of all Germany while we did it," I said with a facetious grin. This, I may note here as well as anywhere, is the one bit of nationalistic chauvinism I permit myself. Those were fraught times, in many ways, between our peoples - though in other ways not nearly so fraught as the present - and I certainly held myself a patriot, and my smuggling to be in some vague sense on behalf of the much talked-about Nation; but I've never seen any reason to dislike the Germans and Germany. I was fed up on Goethe and Schiller in my youth, as every educated Czech still was; raised in what was then a mostly German town; and I feel I've always known the Germans too well not to be rather fond of them, though reserving the outsiders right to laugh or shake his head. I'd never liked the idea of going around setting fire to effigies of the emperor and who knows what else: to me, the vaunted National Revival meant speaking our language and reading it and, indeed, teaching it. And of course I've good fortune in the Germans I've met!
"I've always loved alphabets," said Elke. "Maybe one day I'll be like Jan Hus and make my own! There's lots of languages that aren't lettered. I'd like to go and make up alphabets for them all, for a living, and all my alphabets would be entirely different. I think it's wrong for all languages to look the same. Everyone writes Romanian in Latin letters now, as though it were Italian. Bah! Look at Asia! They have a hundred alphabets there, sometimes more than one for the same language. That's what we should be like."
"I quite agree. It's not as though they're hard to learn! And the Latin script is so bland when you look at some of those Indian ones, so blocky. They look like you'd have to be careful pronouncing them, or you'd catch your tongue on all those jagged edges."
Elke nodded keenly. "Tibetan, most of all, Tibetan or Mongolian! You could kill someone with those letters! But I like Arabic, it's exotic but gentle. I think Arabic letters might have killed lots of people long ago, but they're all tired out now, and very kind, really. Ooh!" She puffed up excitedly into my face. "I shall show you my..."
"Ahem."
I started about: Jan, Christian, and Pascal had left the room entirely without my notice and returned with the book of even-hollower-than-usual Plato.
"It's been delightful, Mr. Fruehauf," Christian was saying, "But I'm afraid we have a lecture to attend in a while. We'll call back soon, I imagine." Are you implying? Stop implying! "I'm sorry we couldn't stay longer."
"Oh, that's quite all right, dear boy. Elke ought to be getting on with her work in any case."
"Bah! I was just going to show Ottokar our qu'ran. Ah, well. It'll still be there tomorrow..."
She smiled hopefully. I was debating whether to point out that I didn't have any lecture to be attending, and had just reached my decision and mustered my resolve when Jan broke in.
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry, but tomorrow is impossible. You see, it's theatre night-"
Christian blinked. "Is it?"
"Yes of course it is, Christian, you silly ass. It's theatre night, and we have tickets for the Josefstadt, which is obviously an opportunity we can't pass up, can't afford to pass up..."
"Oh, well. The day after, then. I insist!," said Elke. "What are you seeing?"
"Oh, I can't tell you that. Smuggler's secrets." Jan rolled these two words about in his mouth with relish.
"Well, that's stupid, isn't it? If I really wanted to know, I could always just go to the box office and see what's on."
"You could, I can't deny. Girls are altogether too clever these days, would you not agree, Christian?"
"I decline comment."
"Well, Elke, if you're going to be like that, I suppose we'll have to take you along to keep you quiet."
She bounced on the spot.
"I'll finish everything I'm supposed to do for three days, Pascal, I promise! Can I?"
"Well, I think you should reimburse these gentlemen for your seat. Students have to work hard to make ends meet, Elke..."
"I will!"
"Ahem. What are we doing about tickets, anyway? Ahem," said Christian pointedly.
"Ahem. Tickets are fixed, as you know, and as for her seat suppose we'll just have to ask good old Maxi, who as you know is also coming, whether he'll be a good chap and give up his seat. Unless you want to? Ahem."
I had sat through all of this dumbly: it didn't take a brilliant mind to see that Jan was making it all up, or to discern why. Part of me wanted to protest, but other parts raised treacherous objections. Just what was I protesting? Having matters taken out of my hands!, said my rational mind indignantly.
You'd just sit there fiddling with them and never get anything done and you know it, said a treacherous part. It's Jan's watch now, isn't it? And she's thrilled! Do you not care what she thinks, hmm? Some gentleman you are.
Well, said my rational mind, there are such things as standards.
Ah, that smile of hers..., said the treacherous part.
My rational mind fumed silently and so, indeed, did I.
"Well then," Jan was saying, "We'll pick you up here, uh, when we pick you up. It's a secret! Be ready."
He bowed and then darted away like an exceptionally polite criminal caught in the act; Christian sighed.
"Goodbye, Mr. Fruehauf, on my colleague's behalf as well. Goodbye, Miss Vanderschmidt."
I stood up hurriedly.
"I, ah, ought to be going as well. I'll see you soon."
"Tomorrow, in fact!" Elke sprang up after me and tugged at my arm. "Wait a second!" Christian had already left the room, but she held me back, leaned close to me with an air of criminal conspiracy, and whispered:
"What's the play? I promise not to read it if you tell me what it is!"
"We've established that that is a secret!" I grinned outwardly and groaned inwardly. Argh, Ottokar, why are you an idiot?
Elke giggled. "This is tortuous!," she said at her normal volume. "I think I shall sleep in tomorrow to keep the wait short. I can do my work this evening if I put my mind... but no, you absolutely have to see that Qu'ran! I must find it. Pascal, do you have any idea where it might be?"
"I don't know," said Pascal, who had returned his reading glasses to his nose and his nose to his book. "It is yours, Elke. You remember? It was a present. We just don't keep it in your room because the shelves aren't big enough."
"I know, I know! Well, it must be somewhere."
"Books do sometimes seem to move about by themselves. I have my suspicions," I said.
"Not this one, though! It's very heavy and dignified. Oh, you must see it!"
We were in the cloakroom now, and I was buttoning up my coat.
"Well... I'm sure you'll have found it by tomorrow!" Such an idiot...
"Tomorrow!" The very concept seemed remarkable and wonderful to her.
"Tomorrow, then!" I stepped out of the door, and she hopped up to the threshold.
"Tomorrow!" We waved for a moment; then she shut the door and I stood for a moment, remembered my purpose, and broke into a run.
I caught up with Jan and Christian near the corner of the Mittersteig, panting a little, and brought them to a halt with a shout containing no coherent words. I contained no coherent words, and so for what felt like longer than it was Jan and I merely engaged in a staring contest. Well, I stared penetratingly; he feigned innocent surprise.
He was the first to speak. I scored that as a victory for myself.
"Something you must understand, Ottokar, is that I never come to any type of occasion or entertainment if I've been invited."
I felt another staring/surprise contest coming on, so I pre-empted it.
"...Is this relevant?"
"It means, alas, that I am quite unable to be your best man... or indeed anybody's best man, come to think of it. Any marriage schemes you've been forgetting to tell me about, Christian?"
I went back to the penetrating stare. Jan was not perturbed. "If you take my advice, you'll have an autumn wedding."
Stare. One might even have said 'glare'.
"Gosh, this is the thanks a fellow gets!"
Wintry silence.
"Well, mustn't dither! Four tickets to the Josefstadt the night before the show is doable in this city, for the man who knows a thing or two - and I know at least five - but that's not to say it's going to be easy... Christian, you reckon she likes Shakespeare? Pfuh, stupid question, let me rephrase it: Christian, what's her favourite Shakespeare, do you reckon?"
"I strongly suspect she favours plots of great historical importance with some witchcraft or ghosts or something and some nice juicy gore."
"You know, Christian, I think you're right. Something in her disposition... Well, we'll see what's on. Christian, you'd better sign my name and take my notes at the lecture. Wish me luck!"
Jan finally deigned to notice my ongoing attempt to stare him into shame (about what I was increasingly unsure) and an explanation (now that I could certainly do with!): he cheerfully scarpered.
"Ah, typical."
I looked expectantly at Christian, who had leaned against a wall with all the grim dignity of a martyr accepting his fate. He seemed like a man with an explanation on his lips.
He sighed. "Jan is fond of the eccentric-uncle-who-introduces-our-tender-young-lovers role, but he prefers to leave the tedious business of explaining to me. Oh, I could tell you so many stories... Ahem! I am digressing. Let Uncle Christian set things straight here."
I shuffled uncertainly before settling against the wall.
"Now, Ottokar, you come from a provincial town. Your parents, I may hazard a guess, were respectable pillars of the lowest middling sorts... perhaps 'cobbles' is better than 'pillars', if architecture is my metaphor. You've had a different upbringing from Jan, or me, and we're happy to look after you a bit while you adjust to the dip in the cold water. Don't worry, we don't have much money, and your moral upbringing will come right back when the cash runs out. But not to get away from the point: we like you. You're a good soul. You remind me a little of myself before I was a degenerate. Jan's always been a degenerate, of course. We're letting you share the room, and money counts more than anything in this time we live in, just listen to Maxi. Cash nexus, isn't it? We're doing you some real favours. Well, this business? Jan thinks he's doing you another favour, so why don't you do him one and humour him?"
He paused.
"And since I'm always honest, I don't think it's a bad idea, anyway. I'm not an expert in women and Jan is less of one, but I know that one's out of the ordinary and I think she deserves the ordinary to be well out of it. I'm out of the ordinary myself - I'm going to be a baron and I haven't got any money - and I feel an urge to look after the tribe, soft heart that I am. Well, we know what a moderate income and a pretty face add up to..." I thought of my aunt and flinched "...But you throw in an education and that changes everything! Probably couldn't fix Miss V what is called a good marriage for cash down in any civilised nation or America. And anyone can see she's off-her-wits in love with you, and vice-versa-"
"...!"
"Yes, what?"
"..."
"I thought as much. Where was I? Yes, you being desperately in love with her. I can see you're new to that show and I can see why anybody wouldn't want Jan and his harebrained matchmaking schemes dogging them, I'm not blind. And since I'm not blind, and since neither of you is any good at hiding anything... So why not do yourself a favour? Lose a bit of the bourgeois sense of decency? Try your luck? Make a confession? Anyway, we're taking her to the theatre, that's pretty bourgeois. If you knew some of what happens in this city..."
Christian chuckled to himself.
"Anyway, I don't mind the idea of going to see a show when there's no way in hell jan can make me pick up the price. Quite the treat for you, and once money changes hands it's a treat you can't refuse! Cash nexus, like I said, cash nexus or whatever it is. So, why not enjoy it? You've got every reason." He smiled, and I realised then how seldom he did. I couldn't help but smile back. "I'll let you have a think. After all, I'm not Jan."
I nodded and felt relieved and, as is the way with such things, made a point of not having a think all day. It was a good thing for my academic career: I was so determined not to have a think that I caught up with all my notes and required reading.
And at length I silently gave in, gathered up my little bits of paper, found a favourite, and began to translate it into German -scrupulously not thinking what I was doing. I was still at it when I fell asleep.
Author's note:
I confess: even though one (1) thing happens to advance the plot, this chapter is one of my favourite pieces of writing. I like doing Jan and Christian's speaking parts: they're such lads. And Elke's offensively cheery and un-Scottish disposition is rather catching; and it's fun watching Ottokar arguing with himself. I just like bouncing the characters off each-other. And it does give you more insight into them as people, or should, anyway.
First, a whinge (possibly I should come up with a name for my whinge-column). This probably betrays my origins among the southern Edinburgh boowrrrrrrrrr-jwa-zie-ih (as we say in our native dialect) even more obviously than my belief that apple juice ought to come in glass bottles or getting me to say the word 'dear', but I must say it: why do people here in the Murano SSV not understand how door-intercoms work? You have to identify yourself! and give some semi-plausible reason for wanting in. I realise that saying aloud the words 'I've come to shove batches of postcards depicting scowling half-naked young men in horrible haircuts through everybody's letterboxes' might force a person to take a long uncomfortable look at their life and what they once dreamed it might be, but still, I can't let you in on the strength of 'hi'.
And now, we resume our serial.
"Rise and shine, Ottokar."
I was floating on the surface of a deep, dark, warm sleep. Who was calling my name? Why? Why this ungodly hour? And come to think of it, why did we even say 'rise and shine'? Didn't the sun more 'glow' than 'shine'? Shining implies reflection...
Such curious and disorderly thoughts as these swirled behind my eyes. I rubbed them, stiffly and sleepily at first, but with each press of my hands I became more lucid and when I was finished I felt already fully awake. I sat up, stretched dramatically, and let go a colossal yawn.
"Ahhhhhhh! Morning, Christian."
"Morning, Ottokar."
"Breakfast time, is it? I could eat a whole pig!"
"You're in good spirits," said Christian as if this were a harmless but telling vice. "And you can't have been asleep for too long, either, I know that. I got tired waiting to let you in last night and went to bed. Did you drink yourself off to dreamland? I keep trying and I always seem to end up in the hangover frontier."
I chuckled. "Sorry, old man, didn't touch a drop the other night. Keep trying, eh?"
"What a shame..."
"I'll be down in a moment, just let me get dressed. Skip along!"
Christian shrugged and left the room (not skipping, but on those treacherous stairs I could hardly blame him), leaving me to get dressed or, more accurately, change myself: I slept in my day-clothes even when I hadn't fallen asleep sitting up, for the attic was drafty and my blanket none too thick. My clothing was much the same from day to day: I had only the one coat and a few pairs of trousers, enlivened by a collection of differently-coloured neckcloths, which I'd somehow contrived to acquire in the course of my life without ever actually going into a shop and buying one.
I skipped along down to breakfast and found no whole pigs on offer, but my disappointment was limited: the food was good, and the conversation better (although Jan spent the meal with puff under his eyes, gargling and eying each mouthful suspiciously before swallowing it: he could cope with staying up all night, but merely late nights took it out of him for some reason). It was in a pause after I had just finished giving my thoughts about the Tsar of Russia's promises to the Poles in the most enthusiastic terms (don't ask me to remember what they were: like many students, I liked to have strong political opinions so much that I tried out new ones every week) that Madam Gottlieb said:
"This is all very well, Ottokar, but I'd be more fascinated to know why you missed dinner last night. If the story's a good one, I might even be persuaded not to charge you for it."
"Oh, I was smuggling books! That's excusable, surely?," I said with too much easy confidence.
"It might be. Do tell me next time. We had to divide your share up, and Christian and Rudi nearly came to blows over a chop."
The conversation moved rapidly on, and I finished up my plate - relieved that I'd been pressed no further about last night's events, but pretending even to myself that I was not, because after all what was there to be reticent about? Absolutely nothing! I told myself to get on with the day.
So I promptly went upstairs for my books and scarf, and then set out for the lecture with this Professor Amsel that Macebulski had set us on to - or rather, to find out when the lecture was, as I had never had the time yesterday to find out... But - I sent my train of thought away from that troublesome juntion - I didn't mind leaving early. It was a splendid day, cold and bright so that everything flashed with frost like an enormous ice-sculpture, and I wanted to be out in the city. I went to the philosophy department noticeboard, found the time, and then let the wind blow me by a roundabout route to the library to spend my surplus hours in some background reading. I saw some classmates there, and in the learned silence we nodded our heads in greeting.
Professor Amsel turned out to be a small gentleman who had difficulty keeping control of his bulky sheaf of notes (and yet never actually appeared to consult them) and was struck by coughing fits whenever the story of Great Moravia's decline and fall became especially exciting - but he knew an enormous amount about his subject and passed it one with such enthusiasm that you'd feel guilty if you didn't remember it. The two classes in attendance regarded each-other with a mutual suspicion that escaped the professor's notice.
The philology set beat a hasty retreat once the lecture was complete, but at this point Professor Amsel stuck up his finger dramatically as if receiving a sudden revelation.
"Oh! Is there a Mr. Jánkovač here?"
I shuffled out of the throng to the piercing looks of the history students, ready to receive my sentence.
"Your professor asked me to tell Mr. Jánkovač that he'd like his book back. That's all!"
The history lot, as one, looked away with sighs and mutters. For people who ostensibly study words, this gang aren't very careful with them, mutter, mutter...
I withdrew into the shelter of my own people, face red. It took me a moment to hear the queries of my classmates: I was rather dazed, and unseeingly let myself be jostled out of the theatre.
My memory is a long way from being perfect and I often forget things; I have forgotten things far more important and irrecoverable than that false book. That alone would certainly not have left me in such a state. No: it was the realisation that this very day, without any more hems and haws and endeavours to think about something else, I would have to return to the Fruehauf household - to her house, as I suddenly found it was marked on the map of Vienna in my mind. I boiled over with excitement and nervousness too blended to distinguish, on which my rational mind tried resolutely to keep the lid.
"So, Ottokar, what might this book be? Ottokar?"
"Oh, just something I borrowed the other day - you can get a look at any of his books if you just ask." Truer than they knew! My inquisitors were satisfied, anyway, and the conversation turned to other things. I stayed quiet, and by the time we had reached the coffee-house my rational mind had re-asserted his control and squashed the objections of my fluttering heart, and other organs with agendas of their own.
My course was clear. That I could waste no time in recovering the false book was obvious: anything else would invite the wrath of Macebulski, which simply could not be contemplated (I contemplated it anyway, however: it seemed to involve hot knives). But I wouldn't go by myself: since they'd expressed some interest in my adventures of the last night, it would obviously be nothing more than good manners to bring along Jan and Christian and introduce them to my new friend. My rational mind was pleased with this elaboration, in particular 'my new friend'. I sought out my cohorts at their customary table.
"Say, chaps?"
"Yes?" "Yes?"
"I must go over to the scene of last night's business. I forgot, ah, I forgot my Plato." I took comfort in reminding myself that whatever happened, I still didn't actually have to read Plato for my fun. "Care to come along?"
"Certainly." Christian gulped down his drink (it was coffee, but he was a man of strong habits and stronger, leathery tongue). "If this 'old colleague' can keep you up half the night, he must be a very interesting man."
"Oh, he is. I think you'll get on with him very well, actually."
"Is that 'you'll' Jan and me, or just me?"
"Is it far? We do have a lecture in a bit," said Jan before we could carry that one any further.
"In Wieden. When's your lecture?"
"Three."
"Oh, you'll be fine. We needn't stay long."
"Wieden, eh?," said Christian. "On the right side of the tracks. One sort of expects Macebulski's old colleagues to live in ramshackle dens like ours, smoking opium, you know?"
"Oh no, it's very... well, you'll see it!"
We went up to the front to pay and set out on our way. I felt that strange sensation that one always gets from following by daylight a course that is only familiar by darkness, that sensation of walking through a world similar to the one you've known but somehow unnervingly different.
We discussed the Tsar of Russia and the Poles: Christian helped disabuse me or my current set of opinions by being acidly cynical about everyone and everything, as happened about once a fortnight. Jan, meanwhile, tried to wring more out of me about our destination and its inhabitant, but although I did explain how I had marooned the hollow book, I avoided replying with anything substantial. And why should I waste time telling him what he'd soon find out for himself, anyway? The Polish question was important!
By daylight, the Mittersteig seemed very white, even for Vienna under snow: it was full of large flat spaces where the sunlight could reflect. It was a street that could afford decent-sized houses (and could afford to clean them, which counted for something in those smoggy days) but didn't venture anything fancy: a bastion of the miscellaneous middle-classes. As a setting it rather suited Pascal, but I couldn't help thinking that it didn't suit... oh, go on, think it... Elke. But then, would any house really reflect her? She didn't have a domestic nature. She made me think of the distant lines of mountains in the south and east.
"This it?," said Jan, interrupting the reverie. "I rather like it. Comfortable, but without pretensions. No fake Greek stuff."
"This is it." I went up to the door, and paused, trying to order my thoughts and come up with some idea of what might happen when I knocked. Possible futures flickered before me, vivid yet maddeningly vague. As I stood there, Christian reached over my shoulder and knocked briskly. Ah, well.
He turned to me. "Tell us more about this mysterious 'old colleague', Ottokar. You've kept us quite in the dark. An old colleague of Stańczyk could be any of several interesting things."
"That's what I thought, too, actually. He's a linguist, I think. He knows a great deal about names-"
At that point the door, on which Christian was resting his arm, was pulled aside without warning.
"Argkh!"
"Ottokar! I thought it might be you."
"Ow."
"Oh, sorry." Elke glanced down and up again and down again. "...Do you want a hand up?"
Christian, looking rather alarmed at the idea, got back onto his legs with an agility surprising for his bulk.
"I'm quite alright, madam." He brushed down his coat and removed his cap. "Christian Graf von Hoyerswerda, at your service."
"You're an impoverished student-prince, then! Are you another book-smuggler?"
Jan had reached the threshold; he had put an unlit cigar to his mouth, solely so that he could now remove it with a dramatic flick and crush it under his boot-heel.
"Please, madam. We prefer the term 'gentlemen bibliophiles'."
"Speak for yourself, Jan. Myself, I'd rather be a book-smuggler," I said.
"I'd rather you were a book-smuggler, too!"
"But whatever you wish to call it, madam, I'm interested to know how you're aware of our... operation." I could tell that Christian's question was directed firstly at me; I smiled gingerly.
"She caught me red-handed, I'm afraid."
"I did! Those books were for me, anyway." Elke closed her eyes and extended four fingers. "There was János Arany, unexpurgated..." she checked it off, and suddenly her eyes snapped open again. "Gosh, I haven't even started reading any of them!" She grinned. "I blame you, Ottokar."
"Oh, not Ottokar, madam!" Jan was about to continue when she cut him off with a girlish chuckle. She held a hand up to her mouth as if to arrest the escaping air.
"Why is everyone calling me 'madam' today? I'm Elke!"
Christian had gone over to close the neglected door, through which some snow was blowing. It shut with a heavy click, and at this Elke hugged herself and shivered, as if she hadn't noticed the chill until it was brought to her attention. She certainly wasn't dressed for the weather: she was wearing exactly what she had been yesterday. I remembered with a twinge of guilt that, thanks to me, she'd fallen asleep in her clothes.
"Brrrrrrrrr! I feel dreadfully sorry for you, tramping all over the city. I mean, I like tramping over it, but this is a day to watch through the window with a fire and a drink and a blanket. It wasn't nearly this cold a couple of days ago. I always feel it's slightly unfair when it gets colder after the new year."
"It's the wind changing," I said as I hung up my coat. "We're getting southerlies now. Winds like a wild dog, howling and whining all the night, and gnawing at your bones!"
"I like that! How you said it, I mean, not the winds as such. A chilly wind's not the worst though, hailstones are the absolute worst."
"Oh, yes!," I said, enthused. "Now, hailstones are like the tatar horde! They come storming in, they make everyone hide indoors, for the fear of their stinging whips, and they go as soon as they come, leaving wreckage."
I hung up my cap, and caught a glimpse of Jan and Christian engaging in a synchronised eyebrow-raise.
"Gosh, we could do this all day!," said Elke obliviously, sounding as if she were all in favour of the idea. "What're we? Hrm. You'd be snow! You come from the north in the middle of winter and you're very literary and a bit mysterious."
...Really? I was still digesting this information when she reached up and ruffled my fringe. "You have some snow in your hair, too, which is a dead give-away, really. What am I?"
"A... a South China Sea hurricane! You're wild and swift and sudden, and where you pass the ground is strewn with debris!" I wondered, immediately after having said this, whether it was the right thing to have said; but my mouth didn't seem to be receiving orders from my brain in the ordinary way. The same went for quite a lot of my body, actually.
"That's me!" Elke twirled around on the spot and made wind noises. "I'd be a very moral hurricane, though, because I'd only sink slave-ships and opium-traders. When there were no slaves on board, obviously! But I'd sink the opium."
"I", said Christian decisively, "am slush. I'm cold and wet and dirty and nobody will be happy until I melt. What was all that talk about fires and drinks?"
"Oh, hush, Christian." Jan, having hung up his outdoor gear, gave me what was possibly the least subtle wink in the whole history of everything. Elke, fortunately, wasn't looking at him but at Christian. She had to crane a little, this close-to.
"I might let you have something to drink," she said severely. "Have you brought me anything to read?"
Christian shot me a glance as if to say that this was my problem. I hesitated: I hated to wipe the look of excitement and anticipation from her face. Jan saved me.
"Have pity on poor Christian, ma- Elke, he's an alcoholic. Tell you what! Next time he's round here, Ottokar can bring over the book he's writing! That way we wont go dipping any further into the Forbidden Knowledge Society's resources, which is entirely... out of the question... I'm afraid..." He trailed off: she had already spun around.
"Are you really?"
I reddened. "Not really, Jan's just, ah... it's a lot of short stories, or the starts of them, and strange ideas I had to write down while they lasted. They're all in Czech, anyway."
"You must translate them for me! I like translating things. It shows you what's different about languages, how they understand things. I like that. And I like your strange ideas!"
"Right, splendid, excellent, that's settled, then," said Christian. "About that drink...?"
Elke giggled again.
"Good things come to those who wait! I shouldn't say that, though, it's very hypocritical of me. I like to go and get things!"
"Oh, I absolutely agree," said Jan, taking out another cigar to twirl around. We finally proceeded into the hall, where we passed by Jutte the maid: a tremendous, sweaty, powerful figure of a women with an air of permanent bustle, over forty but you'd be afraid to guess more precisely than that, whose usual expression was of sharp disapproval. This she gave us now.
"Isn't there an arrangement, young miss? I don't do your studies for you and you don't answer the door for me?"
Elke defiantly stuck out her tongue. "I got there first, and I do a very fine job receiving vistors, don't I? Say I do!" The three of us obeyed and Elke went on, satisfied. "Do you know where the brandy is, Jutte?" She turned to us. "Do you like brandy?"
"We love it." Christian's voice allowed for no contradiction.
"Me too! Plum-brandy is best."
Jutte intensified her disapproval, but nevertheless bustled away.
"Thanks, Jutte!"
We continued into a living room. It was cluttered, but in a neat way, the way of a meticulously organised room in which by force of habit a little too much has been organised over the years. It was quite unlike Elke's room, which had an enclave of territory on a table by the fire, creaking with books and crumby dishes. There was a sofa pulled up to this table, on which I recognised several cushions from Elke's chair upstairs, peaking out from under a blanket embroidered in a lively eastern peasant fashion.
"Help me move this, would you?" Between us, we shifted up another sofa opposite the first; then Elke burrowed under the blanket and emerged on the other side. "Sit down, everybody, sit down!"
Jan abandoned his usual predatory grace and threw himself full-length on the newly-arrived sofa. "Oi, Jan, budge," said Christian. I hovered.
"Come on, Ottokar, there's enough blanket for both of us. I'm not very big! Not that I'd blame you if you didn't notice. I'm big in spirit."
I wasted no further time in burrowing in alongside Elke, and Jan conceded Christian a space.
"Right! This is nice." Elke stretched out and murmured contentedly. "We're not moving, we've got a blanket, so you two had better pour the drinks."
"Not much of a hostess, this one," said Christian to Jan, pretending to whisper.
"Oh, I can't stand the hostess type!," said Jan. "Eh, Ottokar?"
Jan, you bastard, I thought. "Well, I've never gotten to know any, really, so I feel a little off at judging them, but really I don't want to get to know any. All they do is host, talk, and knit, and knitting's a great profession and somebody's got to do it but with all that time, perhaps they could think of something worthwhile to talk about! But it all seems to be chatter about what people are wearing and whose having affairs with who. Lying about nothing seems worse than lying about something."
Elke nodded approvingly. "See, Christian? At least you know I'm honest."
"You're right, of course," said Christian. "Can't stand 'em."
"But if you upset them," Jan added, "They become like tigers! Tigers!"
"Tigresses."
"Excuse me, Elke, you're quite right. Tigresses."
"Now, Elke," said Christian, "Tell us, if you'll forgive the cliché, about yourself. I fear we've been sorely misled. When Ottokar told us that we were meeting an old colleague of our smuggling-chieftain, we were expecting a man, not to put too fine a point on it. A grown man."
"I'm grown! Just not very much..."
This was true, I must confirm: we were pretty close-in under the blanket, close enough to tell a young woman from a girl. Perhaps I wasn't keeping myself to myself as much as I might theoretically have done, but it was a small sofa and who will judge me? By the standards of those days, when the arbiters of fashion were stuck on bare shoulders for some reason, Elke dressed very modestly, of course - ah, 'modest', there's a tricky word. To be modest is to conceal what you've got, and she'd got it, alright.
"Don't talk nonsense, Christian," said Jan. "Elke is clearly not our 'colleague', just because she lives here doesn't mean she's any 'colleague', and if Ottokar neglected to mention her, what of it? You need more surprises in your life!"
Christian chuckled resignedly. "I do, I do."
At that point, the brandy arrived: Jutte saved Jan and Christian their labours by pouring us a glass each and then withdrawing the bottle. "I know what students are like, miss, and I know what you're like. The only thing I don't know is which of you is worse."
Elke stuck out her tongue.
"Spoilsport!"
"Shall I fetch Mr. Fruehauf?"
"You needn't bother him. Thanks!"
Jutte bustled away; Jan and I sipped; Christian and Elke downed. She foamed a little more than usual for a moment.
I, meanwhile, was exploring the pile of papers on the table before us. There was a notebook filled with an intense, baffling onslaught of numbers and symbols that might as well have been Hebrew to me; there was a book about calculus filled with same; there was a sheet headed 'Questions to ask Mr.Ansbacher'. The questions included:
1. So who did invent it, then, Newton or Leibniz?
2. If Mr. Leibniz was so clever, why didn't he invent anything fun? Newton was better. I liked the story about the apple. It just goes to show, sometimes the cleverest people need a bit of fresh air and a hard knock!
3. Anyway, what's the point?
"Bah!," said Elke, noticing my curiosity. "Wretched calculus! I don't like it, because it isn't real!"
Christian raised his eyebrows. "On the topic of reality, Elke, I have to point out that you are in fact not a South China Sea hurricane. This mathematics textbook, on the other hand, seems perfectly apparent."
She leaned over towards him, putting her hands on the table for support. "Yes I am! Shwoooh-shweeoh-shwoouh! Krakoom!
"
"...'Krakoom?'"
"That was a thunderbolt, stupid!"
"I see her point, though," I said, truthfully. "We all know what 'hurricane' means, what it looks like, what it is. I say 'hurricane' and you see one, and only after that do you start coming up with abstractions to explain it. Calculus is all abstraction. In one way, the way we think, or I think, anyway, it's less 'real' even than things which are fantastical or absurd. When I say 'kobold', you think of a kobold, no abstraction about it."
Elke beamed. "'Sright! Kobolds are real, though. Seen 'em."
At this exact moment we heard the polite little cough of a man who wants to intrude without intruding. Pascal had entered the sitting-room unnoticed and settled down to read. He now removed his reading-glasses and folded them up.
"Excuse me, young sirs. Elke has a very low tolerance for alcohol, I'm afraid."
Elke giggled irrepressibly.
"If I'll be honest, and I am always honest," said Christian, "she strikes me as someone for whom the drink is not so much the cause as the excuse. I'm not criticising, of course, I'm the same."
"'Sright! I'm just happy, is all! I am... ekhem! 'Perfectly lucid, composed, and sober', I am. My diction is exquisite! Wir Wiener Wäscheweiber würden weiße Wäsche waschen, wenn wir wüssten, wo weiches warmes Wasser wäre! See? If I wanted to, I could derive that equation right now. I just don't. Want to."
Pascal smiled. He was one of those kindly souls for whom a smile does the work of a sigh and a shake of the head.
"Mr. Ansbacher goes to a lot of trouble on your behalf, Elke."
"And I go through a lot of trouble on his! I don't...," her she broke down laughing and then recovered, "...I don't derive any pleasure from calculus!"
Pascal smiled again. "I'd hate you boys to get the wrong impression. She's a very diligent learner."
"Oh, don't worry, don't worry!," said Jan, and here Christian interjected: "Not at all. That was actually pretty funny." Jan gave him a look. "Don't worry, I was just saying. Our fault entirely, for getting Miss Vanderschmidt diverted, eh, Ottokar?."
Oh, don't you raise your eyebrows!
Pascal rescued me. "May I ask to what I owe the pleasure of your visit?"
Jan opened his mouth.
"Ottokar left a false book we use round here the other night. We just dropped by to pick it up," said Christian.
Jan closed his mouth.
"And you are...?"
"Sorry, I'm Christian Graf von Hoyerswerda. They call me Goethe. This is Jan Dietrich Wilhelm 'Il Capitano' Oberkirch, and this is Ottokar 'Sts.Cyril and Methodius' Jánkovač, you've met."
"Ah, Andrzej has mentioned you two, but not by your real names. Wilhelm, meaning 'vehement defender'... goes well with Dietrich, actually..."
"Mentioned us flatteringly, I hope?," said Jan with a grin. Good, he'd finally stopped giving me pointed looks!
"Oh, very. Now, 'Dietrich' is the same name as 'Theoderich'-."
"Theoderich the Goth."
"Yes, indeed, Elke, Theoderich the Goth-"
"His regime," she said confidently and with the brandy suddenly gone from her voice, "was not at all doomed to collapse from the start as some have suggested. The religious divide between Goths and Romans would have lessened over time, given that he enforced tolerance and allowed conversions. Arianism in isolation always tended to die out. If he hadn't been let down so badly by his heirs, I don't see any reason why the Goths couldn't have gone the way of the Franks."
I blinked. I had known Theoderich had been a Goth, and I was fairly certain he had fought Romans; that was the extent of my knowledge.
"I like history the best," said Elke by way of explanation. "It's the only subject where you do better by disagreeing with whatever the book says."
"I thought you'd make a good philologist, myself. You love languages and words."
"You're right, actually! I just never had lessons in them. I picked up my languages in bits and pieces and I read and read and read." She was altogether sober now; I felt perhaps that Christian had been right and she had never been really drunk. "You should teach me Czech! I'd like to learn it."
"I suppose I could give you those stories in the Czech as well, to start with-"
"Yes! And you must teach me how all your funny letters work."
"They're actually quite simple. It was a lot harder five-hundred years ago when we had to try and write everything in the German alphabet! The 'funny letters' were invented by Hus, back when we were starting the Reformation and beating the armies of all Germany while we did it," I said with a facetious grin. This, I may note here as well as anywhere, is the one bit of nationalistic chauvinism I permit myself. Those were fraught times, in many ways, between our peoples - though in other ways not nearly so fraught as the present - and I certainly held myself a patriot, and my smuggling to be in some vague sense on behalf of the much talked-about Nation; but I've never seen any reason to dislike the Germans and Germany. I was fed up on Goethe and Schiller in my youth, as every educated Czech still was; raised in what was then a mostly German town; and I feel I've always known the Germans too well not to be rather fond of them, though reserving the outsiders right to laugh or shake his head. I'd never liked the idea of going around setting fire to effigies of the emperor and who knows what else: to me, the vaunted National Revival meant speaking our language and reading it and, indeed, teaching it. And of course I've good fortune in the Germans I've met!
"I've always loved alphabets," said Elke. "Maybe one day I'll be like Jan Hus and make my own! There's lots of languages that aren't lettered. I'd like to go and make up alphabets for them all, for a living, and all my alphabets would be entirely different. I think it's wrong for all languages to look the same. Everyone writes Romanian in Latin letters now, as though it were Italian. Bah! Look at Asia! They have a hundred alphabets there, sometimes more than one for the same language. That's what we should be like."
"I quite agree. It's not as though they're hard to learn! And the Latin script is so bland when you look at some of those Indian ones, so blocky. They look like you'd have to be careful pronouncing them, or you'd catch your tongue on all those jagged edges."
Elke nodded keenly. "Tibetan, most of all, Tibetan or Mongolian! You could kill someone with those letters! But I like Arabic, it's exotic but gentle. I think Arabic letters might have killed lots of people long ago, but they're all tired out now, and very kind, really. Ooh!" She puffed up excitedly into my face. "I shall show you my..."
"Ahem."
I started about: Jan, Christian, and Pascal had left the room entirely without my notice and returned with the book of even-hollower-than-usual Plato.
"It's been delightful, Mr. Fruehauf," Christian was saying, "But I'm afraid we have a lecture to attend in a while. We'll call back soon, I imagine." Are you implying? Stop implying! "I'm sorry we couldn't stay longer."
"Oh, that's quite all right, dear boy. Elke ought to be getting on with her work in any case."
"Bah! I was just going to show Ottokar our qu'ran. Ah, well. It'll still be there tomorrow..."
She smiled hopefully. I was debating whether to point out that I didn't have any lecture to be attending, and had just reached my decision and mustered my resolve when Jan broke in.
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry, but tomorrow is impossible. You see, it's theatre night-"
Christian blinked. "Is it?"
"Yes of course it is, Christian, you silly ass. It's theatre night, and we have tickets for the Josefstadt, which is obviously an opportunity we can't pass up, can't afford to pass up..."
"Oh, well. The day after, then. I insist!," said Elke. "What are you seeing?"
"Oh, I can't tell you that. Smuggler's secrets." Jan rolled these two words about in his mouth with relish.
"Well, that's stupid, isn't it? If I really wanted to know, I could always just go to the box office and see what's on."
"You could, I can't deny. Girls are altogether too clever these days, would you not agree, Christian?"
"I decline comment."
"Well, Elke, if you're going to be like that, I suppose we'll have to take you along to keep you quiet."
She bounced on the spot.
"I'll finish everything I'm supposed to do for three days, Pascal, I promise! Can I?"
"Well, I think you should reimburse these gentlemen for your seat. Students have to work hard to make ends meet, Elke..."
"I will!"
"Ahem. What are we doing about tickets, anyway? Ahem," said Christian pointedly.
"Ahem. Tickets are fixed, as you know, and as for her seat suppose we'll just have to ask good old Maxi, who as you know is also coming, whether he'll be a good chap and give up his seat. Unless you want to? Ahem."
I had sat through all of this dumbly: it didn't take a brilliant mind to see that Jan was making it all up, or to discern why. Part of me wanted to protest, but other parts raised treacherous objections. Just what was I protesting? Having matters taken out of my hands!, said my rational mind indignantly.
You'd just sit there fiddling with them and never get anything done and you know it, said a treacherous part. It's Jan's watch now, isn't it? And she's thrilled! Do you not care what she thinks, hmm? Some gentleman you are.
Well, said my rational mind, there are such things as standards.
Ah, that smile of hers..., said the treacherous part.
My rational mind fumed silently and so, indeed, did I.
"Well then," Jan was saying, "We'll pick you up here, uh, when we pick you up. It's a secret! Be ready."
He bowed and then darted away like an exceptionally polite criminal caught in the act; Christian sighed.
"Goodbye, Mr. Fruehauf, on my colleague's behalf as well. Goodbye, Miss Vanderschmidt."
I stood up hurriedly.
"I, ah, ought to be going as well. I'll see you soon."
"Tomorrow, in fact!" Elke sprang up after me and tugged at my arm. "Wait a second!" Christian had already left the room, but she held me back, leaned close to me with an air of criminal conspiracy, and whispered:
"What's the play? I promise not to read it if you tell me what it is!"
"We've established that that is a secret!" I grinned outwardly and groaned inwardly. Argh, Ottokar, why are you an idiot?
Elke giggled. "This is tortuous!," she said at her normal volume. "I think I shall sleep in tomorrow to keep the wait short. I can do my work this evening if I put my mind... but no, you absolutely have to see that Qu'ran! I must find it. Pascal, do you have any idea where it might be?"
"I don't know," said Pascal, who had returned his reading glasses to his nose and his nose to his book. "It is yours, Elke. You remember? It was a present. We just don't keep it in your room because the shelves aren't big enough."
"I know, I know! Well, it must be somewhere."
"Books do sometimes seem to move about by themselves. I have my suspicions," I said.
"Not this one, though! It's very heavy and dignified. Oh, you must see it!"
We were in the cloakroom now, and I was buttoning up my coat.
"Well... I'm sure you'll have found it by tomorrow!" Such an idiot...
"Tomorrow!" The very concept seemed remarkable and wonderful to her.
"Tomorrow, then!" I stepped out of the door, and she hopped up to the threshold.
"Tomorrow!" We waved for a moment; then she shut the door and I stood for a moment, remembered my purpose, and broke into a run.
I caught up with Jan and Christian near the corner of the Mittersteig, panting a little, and brought them to a halt with a shout containing no coherent words. I contained no coherent words, and so for what felt like longer than it was Jan and I merely engaged in a staring contest. Well, I stared penetratingly; he feigned innocent surprise.
He was the first to speak. I scored that as a victory for myself.
"Something you must understand, Ottokar, is that I never come to any type of occasion or entertainment if I've been invited."
I felt another staring/surprise contest coming on, so I pre-empted it.
"...Is this relevant?"
"It means, alas, that I am quite unable to be your best man... or indeed anybody's best man, come to think of it. Any marriage schemes you've been forgetting to tell me about, Christian?"
I went back to the penetrating stare. Jan was not perturbed. "If you take my advice, you'll have an autumn wedding."
Stare. One might even have said 'glare'.
"Gosh, this is the thanks a fellow gets!"
Wintry silence.
"Well, mustn't dither! Four tickets to the Josefstadt the night before the show is doable in this city, for the man who knows a thing or two - and I know at least five - but that's not to say it's going to be easy... Christian, you reckon she likes Shakespeare? Pfuh, stupid question, let me rephrase it: Christian, what's her favourite Shakespeare, do you reckon?"
"I strongly suspect she favours plots of great historical importance with some witchcraft or ghosts or something and some nice juicy gore."
"You know, Christian, I think you're right. Something in her disposition... Well, we'll see what's on. Christian, you'd better sign my name and take my notes at the lecture. Wish me luck!"
Jan finally deigned to notice my ongoing attempt to stare him into shame (about what I was increasingly unsure) and an explanation (now that I could certainly do with!): he cheerfully scarpered.
"Ah, typical."
I looked expectantly at Christian, who had leaned against a wall with all the grim dignity of a martyr accepting his fate. He seemed like a man with an explanation on his lips.
He sighed. "Jan is fond of the eccentric-uncle-who-introduces-our-tender-young-lovers role, but he prefers to leave the tedious business of explaining to me. Oh, I could tell you so many stories... Ahem! I am digressing. Let Uncle Christian set things straight here."
I shuffled uncertainly before settling against the wall.
"Now, Ottokar, you come from a provincial town. Your parents, I may hazard a guess, were respectable pillars of the lowest middling sorts... perhaps 'cobbles' is better than 'pillars', if architecture is my metaphor. You've had a different upbringing from Jan, or me, and we're happy to look after you a bit while you adjust to the dip in the cold water. Don't worry, we don't have much money, and your moral upbringing will come right back when the cash runs out. But not to get away from the point: we like you. You're a good soul. You remind me a little of myself before I was a degenerate. Jan's always been a degenerate, of course. We're letting you share the room, and money counts more than anything in this time we live in, just listen to Maxi. Cash nexus, isn't it? We're doing you some real favours. Well, this business? Jan thinks he's doing you another favour, so why don't you do him one and humour him?"
He paused.
"And since I'm always honest, I don't think it's a bad idea, anyway. I'm not an expert in women and Jan is less of one, but I know that one's out of the ordinary and I think she deserves the ordinary to be well out of it. I'm out of the ordinary myself - I'm going to be a baron and I haven't got any money - and I feel an urge to look after the tribe, soft heart that I am. Well, we know what a moderate income and a pretty face add up to..." I thought of my aunt and flinched "...But you throw in an education and that changes everything! Probably couldn't fix Miss V what is called a good marriage for cash down in any civilised nation or America. And anyone can see she's off-her-wits in love with you, and vice-versa-"
"...!"
"Yes, what?"
"..."
"I thought as much. Where was I? Yes, you being desperately in love with her. I can see you're new to that show and I can see why anybody wouldn't want Jan and his harebrained matchmaking schemes dogging them, I'm not blind. And since I'm not blind, and since neither of you is any good at hiding anything... So why not do yourself a favour? Lose a bit of the bourgeois sense of decency? Try your luck? Make a confession? Anyway, we're taking her to the theatre, that's pretty bourgeois. If you knew some of what happens in this city..."
Christian chuckled to himself.
"Anyway, I don't mind the idea of going to see a show when there's no way in hell jan can make me pick up the price. Quite the treat for you, and once money changes hands it's a treat you can't refuse! Cash nexus, like I said, cash nexus or whatever it is. So, why not enjoy it? You've got every reason." He smiled, and I realised then how seldom he did. I couldn't help but smile back. "I'll let you have a think. After all, I'm not Jan."
I nodded and felt relieved and, as is the way with such things, made a point of not having a think all day. It was a good thing for my academic career: I was so determined not to have a think that I caught up with all my notes and required reading.
And at length I silently gave in, gathered up my little bits of paper, found a favourite, and began to translate it into German -scrupulously not thinking what I was doing. I was still at it when I fell asleep.
Author's note:
I confess: even though one (1) thing happens to advance the plot, this chapter is one of my favourite pieces of writing. I like doing Jan and Christian's speaking parts: they're such lads. And Elke's offensively cheery and un-Scottish disposition is rather catching; and it's fun watching Ottokar arguing with himself. I just like bouncing the characters off each-other. And it does give you more insight into them as people, or should, anyway.
Friday 24 February 2012
Eat yer parritch and wait for juistice!
Still lacking a camera, and worried lest my wide-eyed 1850s adolescents should get it into their heads that they own this place, I have produced something different, which happens to cover much of this blog's subject matter in a oner.
Recipe sonnet: a Scottish literary breakfast treat, as made in Scotland according to the traditional and sustainable method by craftsmen who care
A gnawing sense of guilt you can’t explain;
A mind tied up in dualistic twists;
Ancestral homes forever lost in mists;
A Gaelic air on lovers, drowning, pain;
Some nettle-water; tot of whisky; peat
Fresh taken from some Covenanter’s marsh,
A wild-eyed fear of Heaven’s judgment (harsh…).
Mix these ingredients on a medium heat
In equal parts, however much you need -
In this (one!) case, you needn’t be exact -
The oats must go in gradually, throughout.
Best sert wi sapsie Lallans bittocks, dried,
And with a jar of firm, grim faith in fact
(For best effect, include a nagging doubt).
This sonnet produced on behalf of VisitScotland with funds from the Scottish government. They paid for me to attend university, and as you can clearly see it was an obviously worthwhile investment.
Recipe sonnet: a Scottish literary breakfast treat, as made in Scotland according to the traditional and sustainable method by craftsmen who care
A gnawing sense of guilt you can’t explain;
A mind tied up in dualistic twists;
Ancestral homes forever lost in mists;
A Gaelic air on lovers, drowning, pain;
Some nettle-water; tot of whisky; peat
Fresh taken from some Covenanter’s marsh,
A wild-eyed fear of Heaven’s judgment (harsh…).
Mix these ingredients on a medium heat
In equal parts, however much you need -
In this (one!) case, you needn’t be exact -
The oats must go in gradually, throughout.
Best sert wi sapsie Lallans bittocks, dried,
And with a jar of firm, grim faith in fact
(For best effect, include a nagging doubt).
This sonnet produced on behalf of VisitScotland with funds from the Scottish government. They paid for me to attend university, and as you can clearly see it was an obviously worthwhile investment.
Thursday 23 February 2012
A.B.S.T, Ch6
No food this time: after dinner I must go and see to the seven-day plan's tight and extremely important alcohol distribution management procedure. Such are the burdens of command. But even shorn of it's first bit, there follows a big chapter, so you've got nothing to complain about.
The door was pulled abruptly aside and I, unprepared and cuddling my heavy burden, barely managed to stay on my feet as I tumbled over the threshold. I was half-aware of a rustling sound as someone hopped out of my way.
"Gosh! Sorry," said the voice of this figure - unapologetically - as it closed the door. It was a female voice, and its accent was unlike the gentle Austrian that I'd been breathing in with the air since I arrived in the city: it sounded middle-German and I tried in vain to place it. Saxon? Junius, from Dresden, spoke a little like that... Whatever its home, it boistered audibly.
I regained my balance as its owner turned to face me. She was a girl, and must have been about my age but appeared... not young, not any younger than her twenty or so years, but somehow very youthful - and certainly very short. Her dress - in that time when gaudy dies were cheap and ubiquitous, when skirts were held up by elaborate wooden frameworks, when hair was forever migrating northwards into great suspended masses - was remarkable for its plainness: simple blacks and whites, like somebody's governess; in their tattiness, they even reminded me of a student's clothes. The only flashes of colour were a bright red neckcloth tied in an oddly masculine fashion - like a student, again, or a sailor - for the benefit of which the top button of her jacket was undone; the floral pattern on her skirt, which had once been white but which was now the colour of cream that has gone funny, and was patched on both knees, one of the patches being patched again in turn; and her face.
It was a little, rounded face, coloured ruddy pink as if from exertion; there was no trace of powder or paint on it. It had an understated nose, a mouth almost too small for its own infectious grin, and enormous, eager eyes: it was as if their owner were forever pushing them a little wider than God had intended, so as not to miss a single detail of the world. They were brown, almost black. Her hair, indeed, was the colour of coal, and it framed everything in a disorderly mass: each strand and tangle did its best to strangle another.
In short, this young woman didn't quite fit my expectations of Macebulski's 'old colleague'.
"Hello. Who are you? What's your book?"
I felt suddenly very embarrassed. I mean, Plato!
"It's, ah, it's not mine!"
"Oh? Are you a thief, then?," she asked with neutral curiosity.
"Oh, no!," I said, anxious that I should be taken for a respectable criminal, or at least an interesting one. "I'm a... well, I suppose I'm a smuggler." Surely it couldn't hurt to tell her?
"Oh! What a fascinating occupation!" She tugged brazenly at the book. "Let me see! Would you please?"
I parted with it, reluctantly. "It's fake. The smuggler's gold is inside."
"Ah! That's very clever! Ah!"
I started awkwardly on the spot: for a moment, I'd been sure she was going to drop the false book in her excitement. She laid it down unceremoniously and straightened up with the first volume of its contents, holding the leather lovingly to her cheek. "Here it is! This is mine. It's for me, I mean. I've been wanting it for ages."
"They're all in Hungarian. Are they all yours?"
"Yes!" She dived and came up holding them all precariously under her arms. I offered uncertainly to take a couple.
"Oh, thanks. Which one will I read first? This one! No! That one! Argh!"
"...This one?," I said with a tentative gesture.
"That's it! No! Now I want to read the other ones! Bah!" She closed her eyes. "Give me one, and I shall have to read it first." I hesitated - worried that I'd choose the wrong book - then placed one at random in her hands.
She tore it open (again at random), opened her mouth, and seemed all of a sudden to have a different voice altogether: a surer and somehow older voice. Its words were meaningless to me and sounded strange, and I couldn't anticipate where the rhymes were to fall, but the rhythm of verse was unmistakable. I remembered the images of horsemen the text had called to mind: that was it, a galloping voice...
She came to a halt and looked up from the book with what seemed like an expectant expression.
"...That's remarkable," I breathed. "Are you Hungarian yourself? You-"
"Not really, I'm German, but I'm from Transylvania so I've always known it. My name's Elke Vanderschmidt."
Well, that explained her mysterious accent...
"I'm Ottokar Jánkovač. I'm from Brno, in Moravia."
"Ooh! Can you speak Czech? Do say something!"
It took me a moment to understand this request: nobody had ever made it before. If they knew Czech, they were Czech themselves (or they were Professor Macebulski), spoke our language as a matter of course and knew from a lifetime's experience precisely when to stop speaking it; and if they didn't, they didn't care. After a moment's hesitation, I cleared my throat and did my best Macebulski impression, recalling something from the lecture.
"How very... you know, like you're chewing at something! Aren't languages such wonderful things? I love hearing them, hearing words I've never heard before, but then I realise how many I don't know..." She trailed off.
"I know just the feeling. I study the Slavic languages, but I have a friend who knows English and French, and it makes me a spot jealous, to be honest, seeing the things he can read and wondering what they might say. It shouldn't! That we can come up with more kinds of language than anyone can learn in his life is just the wonderful thing, isn't it?"
"Yes!" She seemed to struggle with gravity whenever something she found particularly significant was said; gravity only just got the better of it.
"What languages can you speak?," I said once I was sure she wasn't about to float off.
"Well, Hungarian, Romanian, everyone from Transylvania should know those - but most people don't, I mean, most people can't read and out of people who can the Hungarians refuse to learn Romanian because they think they're too good for it and the Romanians won't learn Hungarian to get their own back and then we're just too lazy all around... it's so stupid!... anyway." She drew a deep breath and then continued apace. "Sort of French. I got some French books in the French and the German as well and sort of worked it out - Romanian helped - so I can read French, but when I try and speak it it comes out a bit funny. And enough Latin and Greek to fudge. I can read the Hebrew writing but I don't speak a word of it."
"Lord, that's impressive! I feel quite outdone," I said truthfully: I was amazed at the nonchalance with which she rattled it all off. "Czech and German is nothing, really, I learned them from the cradle."
"That doesn't make them nothing!," she sternly protested. "Every language has got something to say and it doesn't matter if you've always known it, or it doesn't have as much to say. What it does say you couldn't say in any other language."
I nodded eagerly. "You're right! Hah, you've made me feel better about it, studying the Slavic languages with their all being so close to each-other. But you can certainly hear the differences. The things only one can quite say. They suggest stories, as well."
Now it was her turn for an enthusiastic nod. "I taught myself French because I was learning about the Revolution, to start with..." She paused, looking thoughtful. "Do you ever wish there could be another one? When I'm bored, I sometimes think it would be nice if somebody were to start building a barricade and everyone could defend it to the death. It would be very dramatic."
"But a great many people would be killed."
She looked annoyed. "I mean, without that part!"
"Well... isn't smuggling books is revolutionary activity, of another kind?"
"Yes!" She grinned fiercely. "I suppose that makes me your accomplice!"
At this lull (fortunately for me, for I didn''t have the first idea what to say) there broke in a voice from up the hall. It belonged to a man who for all I know might have been standing there for a long time (on consideration, he probably had been): my eyes hadn't left Elke's keen little face.
"Excuse me, Elke, who is our visitor?"
The speaker, I knew at a glance, was our 'old colleague': he looked like somebody colleague, and old as time. He was so small and wrinkled that he seemed to have shrunk from drying out. His eyes peered out from between a pair of bushy eyebrows and the albatross-like moustache perched on his upper lip. A few remnants of hair were swept across his scalp like snowdrifts, and I somehow guessed from this that he and the girl weren't related: a strange prejudice, perhaps, but I simply couldn't imagine anyone's hair turning from perfect black to perfect white.
"Sorry, Pascal," said Elke, once again not sounding it in the least. "This young man diverted me!" I didn't consider this entirely fair. "He's a book-smuggler."
"Good evening, dear boy. My name is Pascal Fruehauf. This is Miss Elke Vanderschmidt. She stays with me when her father is away on his business. Andrzej Macebulski sent you, did he not?"
"Yes, sir."
"Oh, no 'sir'. Please, call me Pascal. If you're one of Andrzej's lads, you're already a friend to me. And what is your name?" He sounded a little sleepy; he always did.
"Ottokar Jánkovač-" I stopped myself from 'sir'ring.
"Ah! A very fine name. German root, ironically, since it's become so characteristically Czech: 'Odoacer', 'wealthy and vigilant'. It was the name of the first barbarian king of Italy after the fall of Rome, in fact."
I smiled. "I'm not really any of those things, I'm afraid."
"You're not the type to be a barbarian king," said Elke matter-of-factly. "They'd be very large and vulgar and red from quaffing all that mead, and very cruel. No, you're not like that at all. You'd be a skald! You know, wandering everywhere, declaiming the old sagas by the fireside and so on. You look cut out for that."
Pascal took no apparent notice of this interruption: the look on his face was even further away now than it had been.
"Jánkovač... it's no good, I'll have to look that one up. It's not often that a name gets the better of me, dear boy."
"I see you're something of an expert!"
"Oh, I've picked up a few things here and there," he said with self-conscious modesty. He saw an invitation in the expression of my face; I couldn't blame him. Experts never miss their chances, and I was genuinely interested: names fascinate me, like all words. "'Pascal' means having to do with Easter. It goes originally back to Hebrew. 'Fruehauf' is an easier one: pure German, and it of course means 'early riser'."
"He's not!"
Pascal smiled. "Yes, thank you, Elke. I'm not at all. 'Vanderschmidt' is obviously from-the-smithy, in the Low German rendering. I believe her family came originally from Frisia. 'Elke' is usually Frisian: it's a diminutive of 'Adelheid', meaning 'of noble birth' or 'a noble sort'."
"I hope it's the second," said the name's owner. "Just anyone can be of noble birth. Some people of noble birth are simply loathsome. But it takes something to be a noble sort! But my name is Elke, anyway, not Adelheid! I like to have a name that doesn't mean anything. If it meant something I might feel obliged to live up to it, but as it is I can do as I like! I shouldn't like to have any other name. And names do match people. I mean, I can't imagine you being anything but Ottokar, and we've only just met!"
"I'm glad to hear that, since I'm not wealthy or vigilant or a barbarian king! Although until today I never knew about any of that. Perhaps in the end names mean what we make them mean, to people who come after us. It's a great man who gives his meaning to his name and not ther other way around."
"That's true!"
Silence descended for a moment. She seemed to be contemplating this revelation: her eyes were intently focused on something in the middle distance that nobody else could see, and she wore an expression of almost comically intense thought. As for me, it dawned on me that we had been standing all this time in the cloakroom; I tentatively removed my cap and coat and hung them up. I did this out of instinct and because a drop of melted snow was creeping its way tortuously down my back, not foreseeing the implications.
"Do you live far from here, dear boy?"
"Oh, in Neubau." I had forgotten all about it.
"Oh! I am sorry! I'm afraid I can't offer you any dinner after detaining you like this, I've..."
"Who detained?," said Elke indignantly. "I did, and since I have detained him he can have my share of dinner. I shall have something spare. I'm not hungry, and we have never have guests! Hardly ever!"
Pascal looked at me as if to ask indulgence. "I'd have thought we had quite a lot of guests, Elke?"
"Never anybody I don't expect! Never anybody I've never met! And anyway, tutors don't count. You can refuse guests if you don't feel like seeing them, but not tutors."
"I don't want to intrude...," I tried to say.
"Come upstairs!"
She shot away as though impelled by some unseen force, animated by an energy too powerful to live in her little frame: I followed close on her heels. At that time, Young Ladies of the type that Jan harassed were forever trying to give the illusion of gliding everywhere: the interplay of foot and floor was considered inelegant and probably vulgar. Elke, on the other hand, bounced.
I followed her trippingly up darkened stairs and along a darkened corridor: they didn't burn many lamps or candles here, and I was only dimly aware of our bourgeois and book-laden surroundings, smelling of dust and old paper.
We came to a door from which yellow lamplight was pouring into the corridor, and in she dived. Inside, a jumble of books overspread the floor, finger-marked and stained and bristling with bookmarks and dog-ears; mixed in among them there were skirts and blouses and a nightdress discarded any-old-how. The walls were thick with shelves. Books dominated these as well - leaning this way and that, lying along each-other, balanced precariously on the brink - but here and there all manner of strange miscellania was squeezed in amongst them: here an abacus, there some toy soldiers poking their bayonets out of a box, there again a carved wooden elephant. The furniture was sparse and almost lost in the mess: an open wardrobe half-stocked with clothes, some hung up and some simply heaped; a heavy chair hiding beneath blankets and cushions; and a bed onto which Elke, having locked the door habitually and without looking, hopped and lay on her belly like a seal. On the bedside table were a crumb-covered plate and an empty coffee-cup, a wobbly stack of books (of course), and - to my slight alarm, I confess - a pistol.
It was a reasonably-sized room with a markedly undersized inhabitant, I thought, and yet it wasn't a big enough space for the mind it housed.
"This is where I live! Well... my house is up in Transylvaniam, really, in Schässburg, but I've ended up coming here so often that I've moved everything, bit by bit. Now I have to pack my things when I'm going to Schässburg - when father's there - instead of when I'm coming here. It's sort of sad..."
She flopped back on the bed and then immediately sprang up again, grinning as if out of breath. "I love Vienna, though!"
"Oh, it's wonderful!" I settled myself on her chair, atop the blankets. "You can duck down side-streets and come out a hundred years ago! The whole place reeks of history, and pulses like a living thing. It's almost like it talks to you sometimes..."
At this, she leaned forward on the bed. "What does it say to you?"
"Sometimes it tries to warn me about things." I chuckled, half to myself. "I don't listen!"
She nodded. "It's only a city! What does it know, anyway? And it's existed continuously for more than, let's see... one-thousand, eight-hundred, and seventy-two years, so it's probably gone senile."
"But it must remember so many things-"
"You're right! Next time I talk to it, I must ask it so many questions! Hrm. How long have you been here?"
"I arrived on the third." The day was the eighth of January. One short week! Not even that! It seemed to have contained more than a month of my old life.
"Gosh! How terribly exotic."
"I'd be just as foreign if I'd been here for a year, surely?"
"I know, but it's like you've been blown in! Blown in by the winter wind!"
"Ah, that reminds me of something!" Elke's conversational method of saying the first thing that came into her head on hearing the other party's words, liberally peppered with exclamation marks, was catching. Images and words bubbled up, all demanding to be spoken, though I wouldn't know were to start speaking some of them. But I was on safer ground in reciting Pushkin's 'Winter's evening'.
She squealed delightedly. "What's that?"
"It's a poem by Pushkin, all about the winter wind."
"Go on! Go on!"
I finished the verse as she sat stock-still, eyes shut, ears wide.
"...It is about winter evenings. I can tell."
"I suppose that's what poetry is. The meaning's in more than just the words-"
"That gives me an idea! Let me find it..."
She rolled onto the floor and was scrabbling about frantically among the books when a servant somebody rapped on the door and a gruff female voice with an accent like Elke's informed us that dinner was ready. This, I would learn, was Jutte Osterhagen, the household's only servant.
"Coming!," Elke said without looking up, and continued to search the floor. I slid off my seat. "What're you looking for? Can I help?"
"Anything by Vasile Alecsandri, he's-"
"There's a book of his in the pile by your bed." I had noted this earlier, thinking what a splendid name 'Alecsandri' was.
"So there is! Well, that's a stupid place for you to be!," she chided the book as she discarded all those above it in the pile. Retrieving the sought-for volume, she flourished it triumphantly; but at that point another knock interrupted her.
"Elke, I know perfectly well when you aren't coming."
"I'm not hungry!," she called out irritably.
"But our guest..."
"Neither am I! Could we please have a moment? We're busy."
I heard the maid rustle reluctantly away: one had to respect the wishes of guests. Elke grinned at me mischievously as she sat back down on the bed, as though we were both party to some conspiracy, and I smiled back.
"Sit down!" She thumped the space next to her with the book and I perched there a little awkwardly, tentatively. She didn't appear to notice: she was flicking through the book so fast that the air displaced by the pages was making stray strands of her hair quiver.
"Here! Ahem:"
She launched into 'Mioriţa', which these days any Romanian schoolboy knows by heart - but to me, on that evening, it and the language in which it was written were new and unprecedented discoveries. Romanian had a certain musical sound like Italian, but it sang of altogether different things: dark skies that glowered at the peaks of mountains clad in twisting forests - forests of a deep and living green into which man ventured only at the sufferance of the true owners, wolves and bears and eagles and who knew what else! Elke read all this with her nose close to the page, her eyes wide, looking surprised and thrilled at her own words.
"So, what do you think it's about?," she said when she had finished. I shooggled my head and regained my bearings. Vienna... Yes, Vienna, Lower Austria, that was it...
"Let me see..." I closed my eyes and tried to return to those wooded mountain slopes. "It's about mountains, mountains covered in forests, and it ends in tragedy, but with a note of hope."
She snapped the book closed, smiling so widely I had to smile as well.
"Exactly! That's exactly what it's about! There's three shepherds in the mountains, you see..." She dropped back into Romanian to repeat something without appearing to notice. "Anyway-"
"Elke? Mr. Jánkovač?" Dinner is getting cold."
I started, alarmed that I should be discovered. Discovered what? Discovered crouching on Elke's bed with our faces nearly touching as she smiled up at me? Don't be stupid, Ottokar. There's nothing to discover in here - except for forested mountain slopes, of course.
"Alright, alright! Bah!" Elke turned to me as she got up. "What good is a lock, if people can bang on my door and bother me whenever they please? If I could, I'd have a lock that would keep out noises. I'd have a lock that could keep out the whole world!"
"I never had a lock on my room back home," I thought aloud.
"Really? How did you manage?"
"Well, I was outside a lot, for one thing."
She nodded, sending her hair into a new chaos as we entered the dining room. Pascal, lost between an oversized chair and an oversized book, looked even smaller. He looked up, and removed a pair of wire-frame reading-glasses.
"I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Pascal. Roles are reversed, it seems!"
"Oh, it's quite alright, dear boy, quite alright. It's good for Elke to have people of her own age to talk to sometimes..."
And what is that supposed to mean? I apologised for being late for dinner, that's all! Can't a man be late for dinner in this country, without people implying things? Not that I'm implying anything!, I thought.
"...Absolutely," I said.
I sat down to sausages, potatoes, and sauerkraut. I was famished and had no time between mouthfuls for talking, merely nodding vague ascent to Pascal's speculations about the origin of 'Jánkovač'. Elke was silent too: she had brought her book of Alecsandri down to read as she munched on buttered bead. But I couldn't help noticing that she seemed to spend less and less time reading the book and more and more with her chin in her hands, staring without focus at my plate.
"Would you like a bit?," I said: hungry as it was, I hadn't the stomach to deny her.
"If you wouldn't mind...," she said distantly.
I forked over a share; she drowned everything in mustard and devoured it with savage ferocity, pausing only to tug at a few strands of her own hair that she had accidentally bitten down on. When she was finished and the carnivorous haze had lifted from her eyes, she noticed my stare and gave a mustard-stained smile, sudden and even shy. I hastily looked down to my plate, and finished it off promptly and quietly.
This done, I rose to my feet.
"Ah, that was delicious! Solid German stuff. My compliments to the cook, and thank you all! You've been terribly hospitable to this ragged-"
"Oh, you don't mean to say you're going? We've hardly even met!" Elke looked so distressed that there was nothing I could do but assure her that it would be uncharitable to thank people for hospitality only when you were taking leave of it; her smile returned, and I was glad, for on her lively features a frown was an aberration.
So we forgot the time, scampered back up to her room, locked out the world at large, and sat down on the bed; and then, after this flurry of activity, a moment of silence. Elke fizzed expectantly.
"Tell me about Brno! Tell me about Moravia!"
"Hmm... It's a country of big fields and little rivers. You know you're far from the sea. The soil is black, everything has dark, living colours. We have forests that go on for miles and miles. The whole country is in the shadow of green and black hills all around, so that on a clear day you can pretend that beyond us it's just wilderness, on and on. The towns are white with red roofs and little Baroque bits on all the great old houses. We lived on the edge of Brno, near my father's work. He's a clerk, for a firm making pencils-"
"Hm, yes. They make pencils and soap and steel in Brno, don't they? If you were the son of a steelmaker, you'd be very dirty and smelly. And if you the son of a soapmaker, you'd be very clean and smelly, which is worse."
Yes, I thought, that was true! That was just what you would expect, in some odd way: it was the kind of intuitive sense of how things ought to be that I often felt myself, but seldom gave voice to.
"Thanks," I said. "So, we lived on the fringes, and in the night I could sometimes hear the wolves-"
"It's the same in Schässburg! I sort of miss the sound of them sometimes, they..."
A look of doubt cast its shadow momentarily across her face. Once again, I found myself wanting to chase it away.
"Tell me about Schässburg!," I said, and she lit up again.
She told me about the little city, preserved almost perfectly since the middle ages, crouched in its walls against the things in the dark forest beyond - the place where Vlad III the impaler had made his refuge from the Turkish armies. Schässburg, Sighişoara, Segesvár! (In our part of the world, there's always more than one way to say the same thing.) There, one could always hear the unique and wonderful sound of German and Romanian and Hungarian blending together in the streets - "That's how I learned them!" - and in winter, the snow was like white flowers blossoming on all the trees, and piled up on the fluted clock-tower until it all slid off with a thump that had used to wake her up in the morning, so she could run to the frosted window to look out... and in summer...
She sighed.
"I miss it awfully sometimes. But it's not really home. I don't really have a home. You can't, if you miss one place when you're here and the other when you're there. And I've been shunted here and there so much... it makes me think of that poem by Heinrich Heine, what's it called?, the one that starts, uh..."
"I can't help, I'm afraid, I never had a chance to read anything of his."
"Gosh! Here, let me find you some."
And thus we were off on another diversion: our dialogue went on for a long time and touched on a great many subjects. A chance remark of mine would inflame her imagination, and off she would soar over some strange world where the history and myth of many lands and languages mixed together with little bits of half-remembered poems and paintings. She would bubble uncontrollably as she pointed out the landmarks of that fantastical country, and then a chance remark of hers would send us somewhere else, to somewhere nearby that only I knew of and pointed out to her; on and on and round and round we went, and forgot altogether that I had to go home, or that she had go to bed, or that we were in a house in Vienna in Germany on Earth.
I remember our travels with remarkable clarity, but I think I've already reproduced enough to give the reader some idea of this first meeting and its significance. It finished with her very nearly asleep, her mouth still struggling with its urge to yawn as it tried to impart one more of the landmarks of the dream-scape, her eyes still managing to sparkle as they at last fell shut.
"You must smuggle some more books...", and here her final murmur became wholly unintelligable.
I was reluctant to go go back into the dark and cold, so I sat reading an unearthed volume of Heine until the bells tolled midnight and chased me away.
My mind was elsewhere as I retraced my steps home. It was only as I turned up Spittelbergasse than I realised that the door would be locked, but I was let in by a disheveled Jan, who had been dribbling coffee into his mouth in the dining room.
"Good evening, Ottokar, you're unreasonably late. What've you been up to?"
"I had to do a job for Stańczyk. Drop some books off."
"Drop them off where, Pressburg?! You've been gone for hours!"
"Well, I got into conversation with the people at the house and I suppose I was sort of invited to stay for dinner."
"You're red. Why are you going red?," said Jan to himself, scratching his chin.
"It's cold."
"Fair enough. If you'll excuse me I'm going up to get some sleep."
"Good night. I should probably do some studying."
He grinned. "A conscientious student! We'll cure you yet."
"Ah... sorry for being tight with you, old fellow, I just..."
He had already slouched away up the stairs, so I followed him, and settled down on the sofa with my paper and pen. But before long the pen began to grow clumsier, my eye slower, my thoughts of Old Church Slavonic vaguer, and my thoughts of Miss Elke Vanderschmidt more vivid, until at last I fell asleep.
Author's note:
You'll have to indulge this pair of spoonies, but I wanted to give a good idea of our female lead, who I think is one of my more interesting creations. Obviously I'd be hanged if I was going to have a Victorian (Franz-Josefian?) heroine who behaved like they were expected to, but I needed a way to make it work without having the story be about it. You still don't know what the story is about (do I? Good question!), but after a while you will perhaps get a bit more idea and in the process be informed about Miss V's rather particular background and upbringing. Suffice it to say that she's outside ordinary society in more ways than refusing to go about in a crinoline.
I do quite look the way old narrator Ottokar has a fond snigger at his younger self. I thought of it years before Dickens or the Brontes or anybody, I assure you. (I ascribe to Literary Quantum Theory, according to which stories don't exist until I read them).
The door was pulled abruptly aside and I, unprepared and cuddling my heavy burden, barely managed to stay on my feet as I tumbled over the threshold. I was half-aware of a rustling sound as someone hopped out of my way.
"Gosh! Sorry," said the voice of this figure - unapologetically - as it closed the door. It was a female voice, and its accent was unlike the gentle Austrian that I'd been breathing in with the air since I arrived in the city: it sounded middle-German and I tried in vain to place it. Saxon? Junius, from Dresden, spoke a little like that... Whatever its home, it boistered audibly.
I regained my balance as its owner turned to face me. She was a girl, and must have been about my age but appeared... not young, not any younger than her twenty or so years, but somehow very youthful - and certainly very short. Her dress - in that time when gaudy dies were cheap and ubiquitous, when skirts were held up by elaborate wooden frameworks, when hair was forever migrating northwards into great suspended masses - was remarkable for its plainness: simple blacks and whites, like somebody's governess; in their tattiness, they even reminded me of a student's clothes. The only flashes of colour were a bright red neckcloth tied in an oddly masculine fashion - like a student, again, or a sailor - for the benefit of which the top button of her jacket was undone; the floral pattern on her skirt, which had once been white but which was now the colour of cream that has gone funny, and was patched on both knees, one of the patches being patched again in turn; and her face.
It was a little, rounded face, coloured ruddy pink as if from exertion; there was no trace of powder or paint on it. It had an understated nose, a mouth almost too small for its own infectious grin, and enormous, eager eyes: it was as if their owner were forever pushing them a little wider than God had intended, so as not to miss a single detail of the world. They were brown, almost black. Her hair, indeed, was the colour of coal, and it framed everything in a disorderly mass: each strand and tangle did its best to strangle another.
In short, this young woman didn't quite fit my expectations of Macebulski's 'old colleague'.
"Hello. Who are you? What's your book?"
I felt suddenly very embarrassed. I mean, Plato!
"It's, ah, it's not mine!"
"Oh? Are you a thief, then?," she asked with neutral curiosity.
"Oh, no!," I said, anxious that I should be taken for a respectable criminal, or at least an interesting one. "I'm a... well, I suppose I'm a smuggler." Surely it couldn't hurt to tell her?
"Oh! What a fascinating occupation!" She tugged brazenly at the book. "Let me see! Would you please?"
I parted with it, reluctantly. "It's fake. The smuggler's gold is inside."
"Ah! That's very clever! Ah!"
I started awkwardly on the spot: for a moment, I'd been sure she was going to drop the false book in her excitement. She laid it down unceremoniously and straightened up with the first volume of its contents, holding the leather lovingly to her cheek. "Here it is! This is mine. It's for me, I mean. I've been wanting it for ages."
"They're all in Hungarian. Are they all yours?"
"Yes!" She dived and came up holding them all precariously under her arms. I offered uncertainly to take a couple.
"Oh, thanks. Which one will I read first? This one! No! That one! Argh!"
"...This one?," I said with a tentative gesture.
"That's it! No! Now I want to read the other ones! Bah!" She closed her eyes. "Give me one, and I shall have to read it first." I hesitated - worried that I'd choose the wrong book - then placed one at random in her hands.
She tore it open (again at random), opened her mouth, and seemed all of a sudden to have a different voice altogether: a surer and somehow older voice. Its words were meaningless to me and sounded strange, and I couldn't anticipate where the rhymes were to fall, but the rhythm of verse was unmistakable. I remembered the images of horsemen the text had called to mind: that was it, a galloping voice...
She came to a halt and looked up from the book with what seemed like an expectant expression.
"...That's remarkable," I breathed. "Are you Hungarian yourself? You-"
"Not really, I'm German, but I'm from Transylvania so I've always known it. My name's Elke Vanderschmidt."
Well, that explained her mysterious accent...
"I'm Ottokar Jánkovač. I'm from Brno, in Moravia."
"Ooh! Can you speak Czech? Do say something!"
It took me a moment to understand this request: nobody had ever made it before. If they knew Czech, they were Czech themselves (or they were Professor Macebulski), spoke our language as a matter of course and knew from a lifetime's experience precisely when to stop speaking it; and if they didn't, they didn't care. After a moment's hesitation, I cleared my throat and did my best Macebulski impression, recalling something from the lecture.
"How very... you know, like you're chewing at something! Aren't languages such wonderful things? I love hearing them, hearing words I've never heard before, but then I realise how many I don't know..." She trailed off.
"I know just the feeling. I study the Slavic languages, but I have a friend who knows English and French, and it makes me a spot jealous, to be honest, seeing the things he can read and wondering what they might say. It shouldn't! That we can come up with more kinds of language than anyone can learn in his life is just the wonderful thing, isn't it?"
"Yes!" She seemed to struggle with gravity whenever something she found particularly significant was said; gravity only just got the better of it.
"What languages can you speak?," I said once I was sure she wasn't about to float off.
"Well, Hungarian, Romanian, everyone from Transylvania should know those - but most people don't, I mean, most people can't read and out of people who can the Hungarians refuse to learn Romanian because they think they're too good for it and the Romanians won't learn Hungarian to get their own back and then we're just too lazy all around... it's so stupid!... anyway." She drew a deep breath and then continued apace. "Sort of French. I got some French books in the French and the German as well and sort of worked it out - Romanian helped - so I can read French, but when I try and speak it it comes out a bit funny. And enough Latin and Greek to fudge. I can read the Hebrew writing but I don't speak a word of it."
"Lord, that's impressive! I feel quite outdone," I said truthfully: I was amazed at the nonchalance with which she rattled it all off. "Czech and German is nothing, really, I learned them from the cradle."
"That doesn't make them nothing!," she sternly protested. "Every language has got something to say and it doesn't matter if you've always known it, or it doesn't have as much to say. What it does say you couldn't say in any other language."
I nodded eagerly. "You're right! Hah, you've made me feel better about it, studying the Slavic languages with their all being so close to each-other. But you can certainly hear the differences. The things only one can quite say. They suggest stories, as well."
Now it was her turn for an enthusiastic nod. "I taught myself French because I was learning about the Revolution, to start with..." She paused, looking thoughtful. "Do you ever wish there could be another one? When I'm bored, I sometimes think it would be nice if somebody were to start building a barricade and everyone could defend it to the death. It would be very dramatic."
"But a great many people would be killed."
She looked annoyed. "I mean, without that part!"
"Well... isn't smuggling books is revolutionary activity, of another kind?"
"Yes!" She grinned fiercely. "I suppose that makes me your accomplice!"
At this lull (fortunately for me, for I didn''t have the first idea what to say) there broke in a voice from up the hall. It belonged to a man who for all I know might have been standing there for a long time (on consideration, he probably had been): my eyes hadn't left Elke's keen little face.
"Excuse me, Elke, who is our visitor?"
The speaker, I knew at a glance, was our 'old colleague': he looked like somebody colleague, and old as time. He was so small and wrinkled that he seemed to have shrunk from drying out. His eyes peered out from between a pair of bushy eyebrows and the albatross-like moustache perched on his upper lip. A few remnants of hair were swept across his scalp like snowdrifts, and I somehow guessed from this that he and the girl weren't related: a strange prejudice, perhaps, but I simply couldn't imagine anyone's hair turning from perfect black to perfect white.
"Sorry, Pascal," said Elke, once again not sounding it in the least. "This young man diverted me!" I didn't consider this entirely fair. "He's a book-smuggler."
"Good evening, dear boy. My name is Pascal Fruehauf. This is Miss Elke Vanderschmidt. She stays with me when her father is away on his business. Andrzej Macebulski sent you, did he not?"
"Yes, sir."
"Oh, no 'sir'. Please, call me Pascal. If you're one of Andrzej's lads, you're already a friend to me. And what is your name?" He sounded a little sleepy; he always did.
"Ottokar Jánkovač-" I stopped myself from 'sir'ring.
"Ah! A very fine name. German root, ironically, since it's become so characteristically Czech: 'Odoacer', 'wealthy and vigilant'. It was the name of the first barbarian king of Italy after the fall of Rome, in fact."
I smiled. "I'm not really any of those things, I'm afraid."
"You're not the type to be a barbarian king," said Elke matter-of-factly. "They'd be very large and vulgar and red from quaffing all that mead, and very cruel. No, you're not like that at all. You'd be a skald! You know, wandering everywhere, declaiming the old sagas by the fireside and so on. You look cut out for that."
Pascal took no apparent notice of this interruption: the look on his face was even further away now than it had been.
"Jánkovač... it's no good, I'll have to look that one up. It's not often that a name gets the better of me, dear boy."
"I see you're something of an expert!"
"Oh, I've picked up a few things here and there," he said with self-conscious modesty. He saw an invitation in the expression of my face; I couldn't blame him. Experts never miss their chances, and I was genuinely interested: names fascinate me, like all words. "'Pascal' means having to do with Easter. It goes originally back to Hebrew. 'Fruehauf' is an easier one: pure German, and it of course means 'early riser'."
"He's not!"
Pascal smiled. "Yes, thank you, Elke. I'm not at all. 'Vanderschmidt' is obviously from-the-smithy, in the Low German rendering. I believe her family came originally from Frisia. 'Elke' is usually Frisian: it's a diminutive of 'Adelheid', meaning 'of noble birth' or 'a noble sort'."
"I hope it's the second," said the name's owner. "Just anyone can be of noble birth. Some people of noble birth are simply loathsome. But it takes something to be a noble sort! But my name is Elke, anyway, not Adelheid! I like to have a name that doesn't mean anything. If it meant something I might feel obliged to live up to it, but as it is I can do as I like! I shouldn't like to have any other name. And names do match people. I mean, I can't imagine you being anything but Ottokar, and we've only just met!"
"I'm glad to hear that, since I'm not wealthy or vigilant or a barbarian king! Although until today I never knew about any of that. Perhaps in the end names mean what we make them mean, to people who come after us. It's a great man who gives his meaning to his name and not ther other way around."
"That's true!"
Silence descended for a moment. She seemed to be contemplating this revelation: her eyes were intently focused on something in the middle distance that nobody else could see, and she wore an expression of almost comically intense thought. As for me, it dawned on me that we had been standing all this time in the cloakroom; I tentatively removed my cap and coat and hung them up. I did this out of instinct and because a drop of melted snow was creeping its way tortuously down my back, not foreseeing the implications.
"Do you live far from here, dear boy?"
"Oh, in Neubau." I had forgotten all about it.
"Oh! I am sorry! I'm afraid I can't offer you any dinner after detaining you like this, I've..."
"Who detained?," said Elke indignantly. "I did, and since I have detained him he can have my share of dinner. I shall have something spare. I'm not hungry, and we have never have guests! Hardly ever!"
Pascal looked at me as if to ask indulgence. "I'd have thought we had quite a lot of guests, Elke?"
"Never anybody I don't expect! Never anybody I've never met! And anyway, tutors don't count. You can refuse guests if you don't feel like seeing them, but not tutors."
"I don't want to intrude...," I tried to say.
"Come upstairs!"
She shot away as though impelled by some unseen force, animated by an energy too powerful to live in her little frame: I followed close on her heels. At that time, Young Ladies of the type that Jan harassed were forever trying to give the illusion of gliding everywhere: the interplay of foot and floor was considered inelegant and probably vulgar. Elke, on the other hand, bounced.
I followed her trippingly up darkened stairs and along a darkened corridor: they didn't burn many lamps or candles here, and I was only dimly aware of our bourgeois and book-laden surroundings, smelling of dust and old paper.
We came to a door from which yellow lamplight was pouring into the corridor, and in she dived. Inside, a jumble of books overspread the floor, finger-marked and stained and bristling with bookmarks and dog-ears; mixed in among them there were skirts and blouses and a nightdress discarded any-old-how. The walls were thick with shelves. Books dominated these as well - leaning this way and that, lying along each-other, balanced precariously on the brink - but here and there all manner of strange miscellania was squeezed in amongst them: here an abacus, there some toy soldiers poking their bayonets out of a box, there again a carved wooden elephant. The furniture was sparse and almost lost in the mess: an open wardrobe half-stocked with clothes, some hung up and some simply heaped; a heavy chair hiding beneath blankets and cushions; and a bed onto which Elke, having locked the door habitually and without looking, hopped and lay on her belly like a seal. On the bedside table were a crumb-covered plate and an empty coffee-cup, a wobbly stack of books (of course), and - to my slight alarm, I confess - a pistol.
It was a reasonably-sized room with a markedly undersized inhabitant, I thought, and yet it wasn't a big enough space for the mind it housed.
"This is where I live! Well... my house is up in Transylvaniam, really, in Schässburg, but I've ended up coming here so often that I've moved everything, bit by bit. Now I have to pack my things when I'm going to Schässburg - when father's there - instead of when I'm coming here. It's sort of sad..."
She flopped back on the bed and then immediately sprang up again, grinning as if out of breath. "I love Vienna, though!"
"Oh, it's wonderful!" I settled myself on her chair, atop the blankets. "You can duck down side-streets and come out a hundred years ago! The whole place reeks of history, and pulses like a living thing. It's almost like it talks to you sometimes..."
At this, she leaned forward on the bed. "What does it say to you?"
"Sometimes it tries to warn me about things." I chuckled, half to myself. "I don't listen!"
She nodded. "It's only a city! What does it know, anyway? And it's existed continuously for more than, let's see... one-thousand, eight-hundred, and seventy-two years, so it's probably gone senile."
"But it must remember so many things-"
"You're right! Next time I talk to it, I must ask it so many questions! Hrm. How long have you been here?"
"I arrived on the third." The day was the eighth of January. One short week! Not even that! It seemed to have contained more than a month of my old life.
"Gosh! How terribly exotic."
"I'd be just as foreign if I'd been here for a year, surely?"
"I know, but it's like you've been blown in! Blown in by the winter wind!"
"Ah, that reminds me of something!" Elke's conversational method of saying the first thing that came into her head on hearing the other party's words, liberally peppered with exclamation marks, was catching. Images and words bubbled up, all demanding to be spoken, though I wouldn't know were to start speaking some of them. But I was on safer ground in reciting Pushkin's 'Winter's evening'.
She squealed delightedly. "What's that?"
"It's a poem by Pushkin, all about the winter wind."
"Go on! Go on!"
I finished the verse as she sat stock-still, eyes shut, ears wide.
"...It is about winter evenings. I can tell."
"I suppose that's what poetry is. The meaning's in more than just the words-"
"That gives me an idea! Let me find it..."
She rolled onto the floor and was scrabbling about frantically among the books when a servant somebody rapped on the door and a gruff female voice with an accent like Elke's informed us that dinner was ready. This, I would learn, was Jutte Osterhagen, the household's only servant.
"Coming!," Elke said without looking up, and continued to search the floor. I slid off my seat. "What're you looking for? Can I help?"
"Anything by Vasile Alecsandri, he's-"
"There's a book of his in the pile by your bed." I had noted this earlier, thinking what a splendid name 'Alecsandri' was.
"So there is! Well, that's a stupid place for you to be!," she chided the book as she discarded all those above it in the pile. Retrieving the sought-for volume, she flourished it triumphantly; but at that point another knock interrupted her.
"Elke, I know perfectly well when you aren't coming."
"I'm not hungry!," she called out irritably.
"But our guest..."
"Neither am I! Could we please have a moment? We're busy."
I heard the maid rustle reluctantly away: one had to respect the wishes of guests. Elke grinned at me mischievously as she sat back down on the bed, as though we were both party to some conspiracy, and I smiled back.
"Sit down!" She thumped the space next to her with the book and I perched there a little awkwardly, tentatively. She didn't appear to notice: she was flicking through the book so fast that the air displaced by the pages was making stray strands of her hair quiver.
"Here! Ahem:"
She launched into 'Mioriţa', which these days any Romanian schoolboy knows by heart - but to me, on that evening, it and the language in which it was written were new and unprecedented discoveries. Romanian had a certain musical sound like Italian, but it sang of altogether different things: dark skies that glowered at the peaks of mountains clad in twisting forests - forests of a deep and living green into which man ventured only at the sufferance of the true owners, wolves and bears and eagles and who knew what else! Elke read all this with her nose close to the page, her eyes wide, looking surprised and thrilled at her own words.
"So, what do you think it's about?," she said when she had finished. I shooggled my head and regained my bearings. Vienna... Yes, Vienna, Lower Austria, that was it...
"Let me see..." I closed my eyes and tried to return to those wooded mountain slopes. "It's about mountains, mountains covered in forests, and it ends in tragedy, but with a note of hope."
She snapped the book closed, smiling so widely I had to smile as well.
"Exactly! That's exactly what it's about! There's three shepherds in the mountains, you see..." She dropped back into Romanian to repeat something without appearing to notice. "Anyway-"
"Elke? Mr. Jánkovač?" Dinner is getting cold."
I started, alarmed that I should be discovered. Discovered what? Discovered crouching on Elke's bed with our faces nearly touching as she smiled up at me? Don't be stupid, Ottokar. There's nothing to discover in here - except for forested mountain slopes, of course.
"Alright, alright! Bah!" Elke turned to me as she got up. "What good is a lock, if people can bang on my door and bother me whenever they please? If I could, I'd have a lock that would keep out noises. I'd have a lock that could keep out the whole world!"
"I never had a lock on my room back home," I thought aloud.
"Really? How did you manage?"
"Well, I was outside a lot, for one thing."
She nodded, sending her hair into a new chaos as we entered the dining room. Pascal, lost between an oversized chair and an oversized book, looked even smaller. He looked up, and removed a pair of wire-frame reading-glasses.
"I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Pascal. Roles are reversed, it seems!"
"Oh, it's quite alright, dear boy, quite alright. It's good for Elke to have people of her own age to talk to sometimes..."
And what is that supposed to mean? I apologised for being late for dinner, that's all! Can't a man be late for dinner in this country, without people implying things? Not that I'm implying anything!, I thought.
"...Absolutely," I said.
I sat down to sausages, potatoes, and sauerkraut. I was famished and had no time between mouthfuls for talking, merely nodding vague ascent to Pascal's speculations about the origin of 'Jánkovač'. Elke was silent too: she had brought her book of Alecsandri down to read as she munched on buttered bead. But I couldn't help noticing that she seemed to spend less and less time reading the book and more and more with her chin in her hands, staring without focus at my plate.
"Would you like a bit?," I said: hungry as it was, I hadn't the stomach to deny her.
"If you wouldn't mind...," she said distantly.
I forked over a share; she drowned everything in mustard and devoured it with savage ferocity, pausing only to tug at a few strands of her own hair that she had accidentally bitten down on. When she was finished and the carnivorous haze had lifted from her eyes, she noticed my stare and gave a mustard-stained smile, sudden and even shy. I hastily looked down to my plate, and finished it off promptly and quietly.
This done, I rose to my feet.
"Ah, that was delicious! Solid German stuff. My compliments to the cook, and thank you all! You've been terribly hospitable to this ragged-"
"Oh, you don't mean to say you're going? We've hardly even met!" Elke looked so distressed that there was nothing I could do but assure her that it would be uncharitable to thank people for hospitality only when you were taking leave of it; her smile returned, and I was glad, for on her lively features a frown was an aberration.
So we forgot the time, scampered back up to her room, locked out the world at large, and sat down on the bed; and then, after this flurry of activity, a moment of silence. Elke fizzed expectantly.
"Tell me about Brno! Tell me about Moravia!"
"Hmm... It's a country of big fields and little rivers. You know you're far from the sea. The soil is black, everything has dark, living colours. We have forests that go on for miles and miles. The whole country is in the shadow of green and black hills all around, so that on a clear day you can pretend that beyond us it's just wilderness, on and on. The towns are white with red roofs and little Baroque bits on all the great old houses. We lived on the edge of Brno, near my father's work. He's a clerk, for a firm making pencils-"
"Hm, yes. They make pencils and soap and steel in Brno, don't they? If you were the son of a steelmaker, you'd be very dirty and smelly. And if you the son of a soapmaker, you'd be very clean and smelly, which is worse."
Yes, I thought, that was true! That was just what you would expect, in some odd way: it was the kind of intuitive sense of how things ought to be that I often felt myself, but seldom gave voice to.
"Thanks," I said. "So, we lived on the fringes, and in the night I could sometimes hear the wolves-"
"It's the same in Schässburg! I sort of miss the sound of them sometimes, they..."
A look of doubt cast its shadow momentarily across her face. Once again, I found myself wanting to chase it away.
"Tell me about Schässburg!," I said, and she lit up again.
She told me about the little city, preserved almost perfectly since the middle ages, crouched in its walls against the things in the dark forest beyond - the place where Vlad III the impaler had made his refuge from the Turkish armies. Schässburg, Sighişoara, Segesvár! (In our part of the world, there's always more than one way to say the same thing.) There, one could always hear the unique and wonderful sound of German and Romanian and Hungarian blending together in the streets - "That's how I learned them!" - and in winter, the snow was like white flowers blossoming on all the trees, and piled up on the fluted clock-tower until it all slid off with a thump that had used to wake her up in the morning, so she could run to the frosted window to look out... and in summer...
She sighed.
"I miss it awfully sometimes. But it's not really home. I don't really have a home. You can't, if you miss one place when you're here and the other when you're there. And I've been shunted here and there so much... it makes me think of that poem by Heinrich Heine, what's it called?, the one that starts, uh..."
"I can't help, I'm afraid, I never had a chance to read anything of his."
"Gosh! Here, let me find you some."
And thus we were off on another diversion: our dialogue went on for a long time and touched on a great many subjects. A chance remark of mine would inflame her imagination, and off she would soar over some strange world where the history and myth of many lands and languages mixed together with little bits of half-remembered poems and paintings. She would bubble uncontrollably as she pointed out the landmarks of that fantastical country, and then a chance remark of hers would send us somewhere else, to somewhere nearby that only I knew of and pointed out to her; on and on and round and round we went, and forgot altogether that I had to go home, or that she had go to bed, or that we were in a house in Vienna in Germany on Earth.
I remember our travels with remarkable clarity, but I think I've already reproduced enough to give the reader some idea of this first meeting and its significance. It finished with her very nearly asleep, her mouth still struggling with its urge to yawn as it tried to impart one more of the landmarks of the dream-scape, her eyes still managing to sparkle as they at last fell shut.
"You must smuggle some more books...", and here her final murmur became wholly unintelligable.
I was reluctant to go go back into the dark and cold, so I sat reading an unearthed volume of Heine until the bells tolled midnight and chased me away.
My mind was elsewhere as I retraced my steps home. It was only as I turned up Spittelbergasse than I realised that the door would be locked, but I was let in by a disheveled Jan, who had been dribbling coffee into his mouth in the dining room.
"Good evening, Ottokar, you're unreasonably late. What've you been up to?"
"I had to do a job for Stańczyk. Drop some books off."
"Drop them off where, Pressburg?! You've been gone for hours!"
"Well, I got into conversation with the people at the house and I suppose I was sort of invited to stay for dinner."
"You're red. Why are you going red?," said Jan to himself, scratching his chin.
"It's cold."
"Fair enough. If you'll excuse me I'm going up to get some sleep."
"Good night. I should probably do some studying."
He grinned. "A conscientious student! We'll cure you yet."
"Ah... sorry for being tight with you, old fellow, I just..."
He had already slouched away up the stairs, so I followed him, and settled down on the sofa with my paper and pen. But before long the pen began to grow clumsier, my eye slower, my thoughts of Old Church Slavonic vaguer, and my thoughts of Miss Elke Vanderschmidt more vivid, until at last I fell asleep.
Author's note:
You'll have to indulge this pair of spoonies, but I wanted to give a good idea of our female lead, who I think is one of my more interesting creations. Obviously I'd be hanged if I was going to have a Victorian (Franz-Josefian?) heroine who behaved like they were expected to, but I needed a way to make it work without having the story be about it. You still don't know what the story is about (do I? Good question!), but after a while you will perhaps get a bit more idea and in the process be informed about Miss V's rather particular background and upbringing. Suffice it to say that she's outside ordinary society in more ways than refusing to go about in a crinoline.
I do quite look the way old narrator Ottokar has a fond snigger at his younger self. I thought of it years before Dickens or the Brontes or anybody, I assure you. (I ascribe to Literary Quantum Theory, according to which stories don't exist until I read them).
Wednesday 22 February 2012
A.B.S.T, Ch5 1/2
What? The seven-day plan has compromised?! Alas, yes: economies have had to be made to fight off the fascist Essay forces; but the campaign is successfully concluded! And here's something: I redrafted as far as a likely-looking cliffhanger and stopped, so that very little actually happens. My chapters are too long anyway!, he protested, muchly.
Tonight's recipe is good for essaying as it's beyond simple (most of the cooking-time is spent on a chair by the oven), warm, filling, and sufficiently sticky to be eaten at a work-desk without risk of its falling off the fork. Take five-to-seven decent-sized potatoes and chop them into long wedges; boil these in salted water until al-dente. In the meantime chop about 100g of double gloucester into small cubes and slice up a small handful of chives. When the potatoes are done, drain them, put them back in the pan, and add a splash of vegetable-oil and half a big bag of small spinach-leaves. Cover the pan and leave it on a medium heat, shaking occasionally, until the spinach has assumed a mushy consistency; then reduce the heat and stir in the cheese, letting it melt and coat everything. Add the chives and season.
And your half-chapter:
The next day was less eventful than my first few in Vienna: it ended on the same sofa on which it had begun, which gave me the unmistakable feeling of being at home. For a long time after, I found it hard to get to sleep in even the softest bed if my legs didn't dangle over the end, as they dangled over that dear old sofa.
I received my first letter from my old home over breakfast that morning: the forwarding address written on the envelope was an unwelcome reminder of last night’s excursion, but I slit it open with the bread-knife, threw it away, and let unhappy memories dissolve in the new day's light.
The letter told me no more and no less than what I'd expected: my parents were anxious that all was well with me, they missed me, they hoped Vienna was good to me, they bade me remember this and that, and they were sorry that my allowance wasn't any bigger.
Upon reading this last message, I felt a momentary pang of guilt: for a squatter, the money came to quite a generous sum, and I had a nagging sense that I was defrauding them. But I felt that it would have been cruel to tell them I didn't need it, after they’d scraped it together from every saving and clipping in twenty years. And anyway, I reasoned further, I could always give the spare back later. But you never knew what might come up.
I went upstairs to gather up my studies (my worldly wealth may have fitted into a trunk, but at least my education required a shoulder-bag on top of that) and write a reply. It took me a long time to finish it and yet it still felt awfully short: almost a waste of the half-used paper. But what was I to say? I don't need all your money? Your brother-in-law is a cultivated brute? I'm living in a rickety boarding-house full of outcasts and renegades? I've gotten myself thoroughly drunk? I'm a member of organised crime? I've jumped into the Danube?
I'm happier here than I ever was back home?
I settled for telling them that was I happy, and that my aunt sent her warm regards.
Then I went to Kaltenbrunner's, and no sooner had I entered than someone called out: "Ottokar! Pull up a chair, old man!" Somebody from the class had called out to me. I couldn't put a name to the face then, at which I felt a little ashamed, but soon I had joined the chatter and the debate. At least two of us were always to be found in that cafe, like a night-watch constantly maintained.
From Kaltenbrunner's most of us proceeded to the university library. Strangely, it wasn't so overwhelming as Waechner's little bookshop had been: the big spaces and careful organisation put all the words at a distance. It was like a plain cathedral in its peaceful, solemn simplicity; I couldn't imagine anyone scooting along making a racket on a wheeled latter, least of all myself. Silence ruled in the reading-rooms: nobody spoke or even glanced up at one-another across the tables; but each of us knew why the others were there, and everybody somehow acknowledged everybody one's right to the place. I liked the library.
I came home later in the afternoon, after my mind had wondered from Slavic Philology: stories were coming off my pen in flash-floods of ink, most of them beginnings with no end. From my favoured position spreadeagled on the sofa, I turned out drifts of paper as thick as the snow outside, mostly beginnings without endings.
Dinner was a subdued affair, but nevertheless a merry one: last night's incident went unmentioned. If you couldn't have a joke at that dinner-table, where could you? We all offered our commentary on the latest scandal (a respectable girl had put arsenic in her lover's coffee or something): outcasts and renegades like nothing more than to be reminded that the best circles are no better than they are, and are probably worse.
After dessert, Jan and Christian asked mysteriously whether I'd like to attend a meeting of the 'Central Committee'. I eagerly assented and soon learned that this body, which met variously at all the student taverns and cellars in Neubau, was the Forbidden Knowledge Society's Central Committee for Beers, Wines, and Spirits. Its membership was the same as the Society's full strength, with the exception of Macebulski. "He's a professor," I was told, "Professors drinking with students is odd. We don't want to draw attention." "And anyway, he's Polish," put in Christian. "They drink undiluted paraffin."
(I had once tried a vodka, in some pan-Slavic spirit of adventure, at somebody's otherwise dull wedding back in Brno. I had to agree with Christian's assessment: that was a drink for winter on the great European plain - possibly also for starting bonfires and removing rust - but not for the delicate mouths of city-boys.)
We often took drinks together, always at a table of our own. Ten young friends who spent much of their time together scurrying through the darkened city with their eyes peeled for policemen needed all the time they could get in which to be merely ten young friends. I learned names and pseudonyms: to general amusement, we had someone called Andreas, who was not 'Andreas'. Some of them are now tremendously respectable people and would rather not have their real names given here, and I have been happy to oblige.
We were of all sorts. Max I've established was a Marxist atheist; Andreas (that is, 'Andreas'), a dark and quiet young man who's observations were as sharp and sparkling and as rare as diamonds, was a theology student who meant to take holy orders and go back to some mountain church in the Tyrol; 'Der Freischütz', with his puff of blond hair always floating above his nimble frame as if naturally bouyant, seemed to have no religion but the theatre. 'Cherusker' was a Jacobin with a voice that could set the Forces of Reaction trembling in their palaces, but when he wasn't being slightly bitter at having been born a decade too late to have died on a barricade, he was amiable and good-hearted. 'Götz', on the other hand, with his tremendous ruddy face waiting impatiently to grow a beard, came from a family who had, so they told everyone, gone with the Hapsburgs on Crusade - but where 'DF' and he differed in politics, they always shared their jokes, occasionally to the confusion of the rest of us. 'Junius' was a Saxon by birth, with as fine a specimen of the dueling-scar as any in Prussia; 'Lafayette' was a scholarship-boy from somewhere above the middle-Rhine who'd never touched a weapon in his life.
As a unit, such disparate souls were as fond of argument as we were of drink (ideally, we liked to indulge both pleasures at once), and I had to wonder whether, if each had been left to speak his very different mind, we should ever have come to know each-other half so well. But the government's remarkable achievement of censoring all these diverse opinions had given us a common mission; and after it, over a hearty drink, we had forgotten factions and denominations, departments and faculties, lands and languages: we had found nine other boys who were short of cash, who struggled with their studies, who sometimes missed home, and who craved poetry.
We stayed in the cellar late that night. They had Pilsner - which if I'll be honest was the only thing I had really been missing about my old home, save for speaking Czech - and I indulged in it liberally.
Then home to bed, and sleep, and breakfast once again. Without ever realising it, I was learning the names of my fellow boarders.
It was Friday, and my lecture wasn't until the late afternoon. I felt that I had done what needed to be done, and so I took a rare few hours of complete leisure and wandered over the city. I went to the Prater, the old imperial hunting ground, to see it under snow. I trod this way and that, letting my new boots reshape themselves around my feet.
I met my classmates on the steps of the philosophy building. I'd been missed when they took lunch, I learned, and I must admit that this caused me more satisfaction than the news that my parents missed me at home - or rather, in Brno - had caused me distress.
They say that a winter in Vienna makes you a native; I hoped so.
"I strongly advise you all to attend a lecture being given by my colleague Professor Amsel tomorrow on the topic of the decline of Great Moravia. Philosophy A. There'll be plenty of room. Class dismissed."
The dismissed class surged forward with our questions, and by the time all of mine were done, the theater was emptying.
"Jánkovač, will you please see me in my office?," said Macebulski with the same dry tone he used to answer questions. I glanced at those who were waiting for me at the door. They were all a little apprehensive, so I gave what I hoped was a re-assuring smile as I clambered down to the podium - some small protective magic was broken - and followed Macebulski out of the back.
The professor wasted no breath on words. He swept to his office, locked the door, opened up his cupboards and his cupboards behind his cupboards, and brought out a neat pile: four Hungarian books. I recognised a couple of the names: they were poets.
"And now, Sts. C&M," he said, speaking Czech - to bamboozle any passing listeners, perhaps?, "A trick of the trade. This was expensive and time-consuming to make, so don't lose it."
In his other hand (I marveled at his aged strength) was a heavy-set collection of essays on Plato. He opened it... and inside was nothing, an empty cavity below a few true pages. He loaded it up and shut it.
"This old colleague of mine lives on the Mittersteig." He elaborated his directions; I understood the gist, and felt very pleased with myself for doing so. "Just knock and tell him I sent you. He's not used to deliveries from you boys. We two make our own arrangements, normally. But he has no idea these books have arrived, and I need to get them off my hands. Good luck."
And so, without fanfare, but one of many students bustling around with big books, I set off. My load was awkward and heavy and didn't fit in my bag, but I had to admire the ingenuity of it: who would ever look askance at a student for carrying around a heavy book? Who'd ever open a book about Plato in a spirit of casual inquiry? I was sure that if the secret police had appeared then and there and searched me cap to toe, they would not have thought to trouble with the pompous old geezer!
It was getting dark, but tonight I saw no reason to hurry (in any case I couldn't, not lugging that great hollow book with me): perhaps it was the romance of the enterprise, or perhaps it was the stillness of the evening, but I rather enjoyed my journey through darkening streets. My legs took on a mechanical rhythm; I hummed tunes to myself; I wondered where I was bound for and who would meet me there. An 'old colleague' of Andrzej Macebulski might be a linguist, a teacher, a smuggler, or perhaps - so went the whispers of the lecture-theatre, the cafe, and the beer-cellar - a revolutionist!
The enigmatic man's house, when I reached it at last, was revealed as a respectable but unexceptional place of fairly recent construction. The criss-crossing side-streets that led me there were ill-trodden, and midwinter still had a tight grip on them; the place itself was covered in thick, even snow like the icing on a cake. I followed a lone set of footprints up its front path. They had been all but obliterated by the evening's gentle snowfall, so I couldn't see who's they were or which way they were going.
I knocked gently - anxious not to disturb the smooth, shiny paint and brass, so unlike what I was used to - but excitedly. I was eager to meet the owner, eager and anxious! And I was cold and tired and rather hungry and I needed the toilet...
But for a while there was no sound of stirring from within. I huddled against the door for shelter from the chill, and let my muscles go utterly slack. One of the most significant meetings of my life thus caught me, appropriately, quite by surprise.
Tonight's recipe is good for essaying as it's beyond simple (most of the cooking-time is spent on a chair by the oven), warm, filling, and sufficiently sticky to be eaten at a work-desk without risk of its falling off the fork. Take five-to-seven decent-sized potatoes and chop them into long wedges; boil these in salted water until al-dente. In the meantime chop about 100g of double gloucester into small cubes and slice up a small handful of chives. When the potatoes are done, drain them, put them back in the pan, and add a splash of vegetable-oil and half a big bag of small spinach-leaves. Cover the pan and leave it on a medium heat, shaking occasionally, until the spinach has assumed a mushy consistency; then reduce the heat and stir in the cheese, letting it melt and coat everything. Add the chives and season.
And your half-chapter:
The next day was less eventful than my first few in Vienna: it ended on the same sofa on which it had begun, which gave me the unmistakable feeling of being at home. For a long time after, I found it hard to get to sleep in even the softest bed if my legs didn't dangle over the end, as they dangled over that dear old sofa.
I received my first letter from my old home over breakfast that morning: the forwarding address written on the envelope was an unwelcome reminder of last night’s excursion, but I slit it open with the bread-knife, threw it away, and let unhappy memories dissolve in the new day's light.
The letter told me no more and no less than what I'd expected: my parents were anxious that all was well with me, they missed me, they hoped Vienna was good to me, they bade me remember this and that, and they were sorry that my allowance wasn't any bigger.
Upon reading this last message, I felt a momentary pang of guilt: for a squatter, the money came to quite a generous sum, and I had a nagging sense that I was defrauding them. But I felt that it would have been cruel to tell them I didn't need it, after they’d scraped it together from every saving and clipping in twenty years. And anyway, I reasoned further, I could always give the spare back later. But you never knew what might come up.
I went upstairs to gather up my studies (my worldly wealth may have fitted into a trunk, but at least my education required a shoulder-bag on top of that) and write a reply. It took me a long time to finish it and yet it still felt awfully short: almost a waste of the half-used paper. But what was I to say? I don't need all your money? Your brother-in-law is a cultivated brute? I'm living in a rickety boarding-house full of outcasts and renegades? I've gotten myself thoroughly drunk? I'm a member of organised crime? I've jumped into the Danube?
I'm happier here than I ever was back home?
I settled for telling them that was I happy, and that my aunt sent her warm regards.
Then I went to Kaltenbrunner's, and no sooner had I entered than someone called out: "Ottokar! Pull up a chair, old man!" Somebody from the class had called out to me. I couldn't put a name to the face then, at which I felt a little ashamed, but soon I had joined the chatter and the debate. At least two of us were always to be found in that cafe, like a night-watch constantly maintained.
From Kaltenbrunner's most of us proceeded to the university library. Strangely, it wasn't so overwhelming as Waechner's little bookshop had been: the big spaces and careful organisation put all the words at a distance. It was like a plain cathedral in its peaceful, solemn simplicity; I couldn't imagine anyone scooting along making a racket on a wheeled latter, least of all myself. Silence ruled in the reading-rooms: nobody spoke or even glanced up at one-another across the tables; but each of us knew why the others were there, and everybody somehow acknowledged everybody one's right to the place. I liked the library.
I came home later in the afternoon, after my mind had wondered from Slavic Philology: stories were coming off my pen in flash-floods of ink, most of them beginnings with no end. From my favoured position spreadeagled on the sofa, I turned out drifts of paper as thick as the snow outside, mostly beginnings without endings.
Dinner was a subdued affair, but nevertheless a merry one: last night's incident went unmentioned. If you couldn't have a joke at that dinner-table, where could you? We all offered our commentary on the latest scandal (a respectable girl had put arsenic in her lover's coffee or something): outcasts and renegades like nothing more than to be reminded that the best circles are no better than they are, and are probably worse.
After dessert, Jan and Christian asked mysteriously whether I'd like to attend a meeting of the 'Central Committee'. I eagerly assented and soon learned that this body, which met variously at all the student taverns and cellars in Neubau, was the Forbidden Knowledge Society's Central Committee for Beers, Wines, and Spirits. Its membership was the same as the Society's full strength, with the exception of Macebulski. "He's a professor," I was told, "Professors drinking with students is odd. We don't want to draw attention." "And anyway, he's Polish," put in Christian. "They drink undiluted paraffin."
(I had once tried a vodka, in some pan-Slavic spirit of adventure, at somebody's otherwise dull wedding back in Brno. I had to agree with Christian's assessment: that was a drink for winter on the great European plain - possibly also for starting bonfires and removing rust - but not for the delicate mouths of city-boys.)
We often took drinks together, always at a table of our own. Ten young friends who spent much of their time together scurrying through the darkened city with their eyes peeled for policemen needed all the time they could get in which to be merely ten young friends. I learned names and pseudonyms: to general amusement, we had someone called Andreas, who was not 'Andreas'. Some of them are now tremendously respectable people and would rather not have their real names given here, and I have been happy to oblige.
We were of all sorts. Max I've established was a Marxist atheist; Andreas (that is, 'Andreas'), a dark and quiet young man who's observations were as sharp and sparkling and as rare as diamonds, was a theology student who meant to take holy orders and go back to some mountain church in the Tyrol; 'Der Freischütz', with his puff of blond hair always floating above his nimble frame as if naturally bouyant, seemed to have no religion but the theatre. 'Cherusker' was a Jacobin with a voice that could set the Forces of Reaction trembling in their palaces, but when he wasn't being slightly bitter at having been born a decade too late to have died on a barricade, he was amiable and good-hearted. 'Götz', on the other hand, with his tremendous ruddy face waiting impatiently to grow a beard, came from a family who had, so they told everyone, gone with the Hapsburgs on Crusade - but where 'DF' and he differed in politics, they always shared their jokes, occasionally to the confusion of the rest of us. 'Junius' was a Saxon by birth, with as fine a specimen of the dueling-scar as any in Prussia; 'Lafayette' was a scholarship-boy from somewhere above the middle-Rhine who'd never touched a weapon in his life.
As a unit, such disparate souls were as fond of argument as we were of drink (ideally, we liked to indulge both pleasures at once), and I had to wonder whether, if each had been left to speak his very different mind, we should ever have come to know each-other half so well. But the government's remarkable achievement of censoring all these diverse opinions had given us a common mission; and after it, over a hearty drink, we had forgotten factions and denominations, departments and faculties, lands and languages: we had found nine other boys who were short of cash, who struggled with their studies, who sometimes missed home, and who craved poetry.
We stayed in the cellar late that night. They had Pilsner - which if I'll be honest was the only thing I had really been missing about my old home, save for speaking Czech - and I indulged in it liberally.
Then home to bed, and sleep, and breakfast once again. Without ever realising it, I was learning the names of my fellow boarders.
It was Friday, and my lecture wasn't until the late afternoon. I felt that I had done what needed to be done, and so I took a rare few hours of complete leisure and wandered over the city. I went to the Prater, the old imperial hunting ground, to see it under snow. I trod this way and that, letting my new boots reshape themselves around my feet.
I met my classmates on the steps of the philosophy building. I'd been missed when they took lunch, I learned, and I must admit that this caused me more satisfaction than the news that my parents missed me at home - or rather, in Brno - had caused me distress.
They say that a winter in Vienna makes you a native; I hoped so.
"I strongly advise you all to attend a lecture being given by my colleague Professor Amsel tomorrow on the topic of the decline of Great Moravia. Philosophy A. There'll be plenty of room. Class dismissed."
The dismissed class surged forward with our questions, and by the time all of mine were done, the theater was emptying.
"Jánkovač, will you please see me in my office?," said Macebulski with the same dry tone he used to answer questions. I glanced at those who were waiting for me at the door. They were all a little apprehensive, so I gave what I hoped was a re-assuring smile as I clambered down to the podium - some small protective magic was broken - and followed Macebulski out of the back.
The professor wasted no breath on words. He swept to his office, locked the door, opened up his cupboards and his cupboards behind his cupboards, and brought out a neat pile: four Hungarian books. I recognised a couple of the names: they were poets.
"And now, Sts. C&M," he said, speaking Czech - to bamboozle any passing listeners, perhaps?, "A trick of the trade. This was expensive and time-consuming to make, so don't lose it."
In his other hand (I marveled at his aged strength) was a heavy-set collection of essays on Plato. He opened it... and inside was nothing, an empty cavity below a few true pages. He loaded it up and shut it.
"This old colleague of mine lives on the Mittersteig." He elaborated his directions; I understood the gist, and felt very pleased with myself for doing so. "Just knock and tell him I sent you. He's not used to deliveries from you boys. We two make our own arrangements, normally. But he has no idea these books have arrived, and I need to get them off my hands. Good luck."
And so, without fanfare, but one of many students bustling around with big books, I set off. My load was awkward and heavy and didn't fit in my bag, but I had to admire the ingenuity of it: who would ever look askance at a student for carrying around a heavy book? Who'd ever open a book about Plato in a spirit of casual inquiry? I was sure that if the secret police had appeared then and there and searched me cap to toe, they would not have thought to trouble with the pompous old geezer!
It was getting dark, but tonight I saw no reason to hurry (in any case I couldn't, not lugging that great hollow book with me): perhaps it was the romance of the enterprise, or perhaps it was the stillness of the evening, but I rather enjoyed my journey through darkening streets. My legs took on a mechanical rhythm; I hummed tunes to myself; I wondered where I was bound for and who would meet me there. An 'old colleague' of Andrzej Macebulski might be a linguist, a teacher, a smuggler, or perhaps - so went the whispers of the lecture-theatre, the cafe, and the beer-cellar - a revolutionist!
The enigmatic man's house, when I reached it at last, was revealed as a respectable but unexceptional place of fairly recent construction. The criss-crossing side-streets that led me there were ill-trodden, and midwinter still had a tight grip on them; the place itself was covered in thick, even snow like the icing on a cake. I followed a lone set of footprints up its front path. They had been all but obliterated by the evening's gentle snowfall, so I couldn't see who's they were or which way they were going.
I knocked gently - anxious not to disturb the smooth, shiny paint and brass, so unlike what I was used to - but excitedly. I was eager to meet the owner, eager and anxious! And I was cold and tired and rather hungry and I needed the toilet...
But for a while there was no sound of stirring from within. I huddled against the door for shelter from the chill, and let my muscles go utterly slack. One of the most significant meetings of my life thus caught me, appropriately, quite by surprise.
Tuesday 21 February 2012
A.B.S.T, Ch5
Alas, I've misplaced my camera. It must be somewhere, but I'm not going to spend ten minutes looking for it when I could be guzzling my grub.
Our first veggie dish, this one (after all, it is the 21st century), and quite simple: boil some spaghetti up, and mix a heaping tablespoon of green pesto and a bit more mascarpone in a bowl. Add a handful of chopped rocket and a sprinkle of black pepper and mix it all up. Drain the spag, reserving some water, and toss with the sauce, adding a couple of spoonfuls of water to loosen it. Then add some more rocket, put it all in a bowl, and grate parmesan over. You can have it hot or cold: it's nicely tingly and refreshing cold.
Meanwhile, the seven-day plan lumbers unhaltingly onward!
I awoke in a warm, soft bed: the first time in Vienna that I did, and that made it all the better.
Thinking on this, I smiled to myself: for years I had slept in the same bed, one blanket in summer and two in winter, as the mattress steadily accrued more patches and stitches. (In my last year at home I had had to bend my knees to fit, but I hadn't mentioned this to anyone: there was no point in making the expense of a new one when I would be gone so soon.) Since coming here I hadn't slept in the same place twice. It was bona-fide symbolic!
Where was I today, though? There had been a fire burning in the night: the air was thick and pungent with the residue of the flames, and the weak sunlight filling the room shared it with a reddish glow.
Sitting up was a daunting prospect: I felt limp, dried-out, weak as a paralysed kitten. After much effort, I stirred and pulled myself up, discovering in the process that I was quite naked.
I was in a small room that contained, besides the bed, no evidence of any habitation: a spare room, I thought, a room for sleeping in and not for living in. The cold light of the sun shone through a large window looking out on swirling snow and another window across the street, with nothing to be seen of the ground below; the red glow came from some dying embers hidden behind a grating - hung, I saw to my relief, with my clothes.
I unfolded myself from the bed little by little, pausing to adapt to each new temperature. Even lying naked on the covers, I wasn't uncomfortably cold: the room was cozy with ash-scented warmth. I even felt a little hot as I donned my garments. They were the same ones, I realised with a momentary prick of shame, that I'd been wearing when I stepped down from the Brno train three nights ago. There were my trousers, the flecks of mud about their ankles dry and distressingly obvious; my rough and crumpled shirt, rough because my family bought only rough Indian cotton, so as not to finance the American slave-barons - the crumpling was all on my watch; my subduedly checkered waistcoat; my neckcloth in the Brno colours of red and white, but so faded now that you could hardly tell; my low peaked cap in the German fashion - or un-fashion, as those were the days when everyone but students and soldiers wore top-hats, be they silky black or battered rabbit-skin, in totemic imitation of the chimneys springing up over Europe's cities; and the coat that had been my father's. Only my boots were missing, which brought the events of last night into sharp relief.
I went over to the window, imagining for some reason that the sight of the snow and the muffled sound of the wind would cool me down. As I went I tied my neckcloth under my shirt-collar like a sailer's neckerchief: a little badge of student status like the cap. I marvelled that this cap had somehow stayed attached through all my misadventures: probably this meant it was too small.
Outside, it was impossible to tell which way the wind was blowing, so intricate was the dance of the snow. Flakes plummeted in great swooping flocks towards the ground, and then swept at the last moment out of their dive, turned this way and that and wound back on themselves - and suddenly as one they lunged at the window and hurtled straight towards me! I stepped instinctively onto my back foot... and then they fell away to chase each other along Seitenstettengasse (just possible to make out from my vantage on somebody's fifth floor) like boys in pursuit of their ball.
I was still watching all this, mesmerised, when someone knocked at the door.
"Morning, Ottokar, you decent?," said Jan's voice.
"If you can stand the sight of my bare feet."
"I'm sure they're very nice feet, but fortunately I have some modest coverings for them." Jan entered, bringing with him a pair of boots. "These belonged to the Rabbi Kochmann, but his feet shrank. Should fit you nicely. The socks are his son's. We sort of, well... set fire to yours. By mistake."
I glanced suspiciously over to the fireplace: there did seem to be something fibrous in there...
"I'm sure it's a great privilege, to be given the Rabbi's boots," said Jan diplomatically, and I sat down on the bed to put them on. They were a good fit, and both soft and sturdy. They held your feet, but left room for you to waggle your toes: a privilege indeed, whether or not they were imbued with any mystical powers. I savoured their gentle tread as we descended two flights of stairs to join an ongoing breakfast. It was only a little past eight, according to a grandfather clock in the dining room: I must have been getting used to rough nights.
Around the table were the Rabbi Kochmann, a withered but tough old gentleman who reminded me immediately of his own boots; Mrs. the Rabbi Kochmann, who was even tougher and more withered, if that were possible; Macebulski; Christian; and Max. The breakfast was humble but varied: I could see all the staples of a German morning's table, even ham for the benefit of the gentiles and, conspicuously, Max.
"Benefits of atheism," he said when he saw me glancing at him; I blushed and felt rude.
"Master Eberstark is always welcome here, not only because his father is a very good friend of mine, but also because all the other Jews always agree with whatever I say," said the Rabbi. "His presence brings a little controversy. It's very refreshing."
"It is a theory of mine," said Macebulski conversationally as I pulled up a chair, "That the similar prohibition of pig-meat in Islam, as well as alcohol, is one reason why Vladimir the Great chose to make the Russians Christian. He was set on one of the great religions but doesn't seem to have cared which overly. The pig is important in their climate: they eat the fat as well as the meat, for warmth. And I've never tried to go a winter without my vodka, but I don't imagine it would be pleasant."
I nodded vaguely. "It's an interesting idea, but... Russia and Orthodoxy are so very deeply bound up, it seems... awfully prosaic."
Macebulski chuckled genially. "History usually is, 'Sts. C&M'. You're a romantic soul; that encourages a healthy interest in history, but to study it for a living you must be an utter cynic. I should know: I have been a history teacher in my long and checkered career. Language is the field for you."
"And besides, if you're to live in Germany, you must know all about tactical conversions," said Mrs. the Rabbi Kochmann. "Look at Heinrich Heine. 'God will forgive me, that's his job'!" The poet was a year dead then; I’d heard of him but never had a chance to read any of his works, banned as they all of course were. I chuckled along and seemed to see unexplored landscapes roll out before me.
"Or my father," put in Jan. "He has a sudden awakening and becomes Protestant once a fortnight, when it's time for his confessions. Then he forgets about it." There was another chuckle; mine, though, a slightly guilty one. When I was fifteen or so, my parents had said I should go to confessionals by myself, and shortly afterwards I'd stopped going. I didn't like to think of myself as a lapsed Catholic so much as a busy one. I went to church at Christmas, and when the fancy took me, and occasionally felt penitent about it all.
We had all soon eaten our fill from the Rabbi's generous table: I might have arrived later than the others, but my appetite was lesser, for I had a dreadful apprehension gnawing at my stomach and all my ham and cheese escaped through the resulting hole before I could properly digest it. At some lull in the conversation, I had realised I was going to have to get my luggage back today, somehow...
But fortunately a distraction appeared: Macebulski, who knew all about the superstitions of romantically-minded students, offered me a look at some of our prizes. We found them stowed about the house in various obscure corners, dark and dry.
"I'll be sending some of the troops round to collect them tomorrow night," he said. "We can't cause poor David and his wife any more trouble than we already have. You needn't come. You deserve a rest for now. There's something else you can do for me in a couple of day's time, a solo mission."
I made no reply: I was flicking dumbly through the book in my hands. It was in perfect condition, the pages crisp and supple with neatly printed Magyar words galloping incomprehensibly down them, fabulously adorned in accents and umlauts. They looked so wonderful, so exotic and fantastical, that I had to wonder how anyone could bring himself to ban them and burn them.
"Last night's mission was atypical. I can't ask anyone to go handing in essays and diving into the Danube every week. Our work is actually rather dull, usually. Dull but rewarding, I hope."
I nodded vacantly: I was somewhere on the Pannonian plain, in the wake of the Magyar horde.
"Geothe told me about your misadventures. I'd rather you got arrested than that you drowned, to be honest - but I need brave boys, quick-witted ones. You'll go far, Sts. C&M."
That was the third person to call me brave. Nobody had ever called me 'a romantic soul' in quite those words before, either (the phrasing had usually been closer to 'refuses to pay attention in class'; I had heard 'quick-witted' from some teachers, but others preferred 'his results are not consistent with his display of effort and discipline; cheating is probable'). It seemed that Sts. Cyril and Methodius was a rather more interesting, exciting person than Ottokar Jánkovač ever had been.
"...Thankyou, sir."
"Are you up for this solo job?"
I nodded: Sts. Cyril and Methodius, being brave, quick-witted, and a romantic soul, obviously took solo missions whenever they were on offer.
Macebulski nodded once in approval. "These are all Hungarian. Most of them are manuscripts needing publication, but there's a cluster that I took as a commission from an old colleague of mine. He lives just over in Wieden, and you can drop them round for me. I think you'll get on well with him."
"I hope so, sir."
"Good lad. You can do that after your lecture on Friday." He eased the book from my hands. "Off you trot, then! You've got required reading."
I stood on the spot for a moment: the abruptness of my dismissal had taken me aback. But then I recovered and darted away. After all, I did have required reading. I tried to stifle my sense of adventure for a while.
Partly it was conscientious obedience to the professor's parting words, partly it was a feeling that after all this smuggling I deserved some loot, and partly - though I would not admit it even to myself - it was a desire to dodge the urgent business of the day: but whatever the cause, I felt anxious to get my hands on a book. I told Jan and Christian, as we put on our winter gear in the Rabbi's cloakroom, that we would have to make a raid on the bookshop.
"Ah, splendid! Haven't been in a while, have we, Christian?"
"As you advance in life, the books get fewer and fatter," said Christian, attempting to work out which end of his scarf was which.
"Do you mean life or do you mean law?," I said with a smile. "Or can you not tell any more?"
The scarf was knotted into submission with a few sharp tugs. "You're developing a tongue there, Ottokar. Jan's been a bad influence on you, clearly."
"I try!," said Jan.
I grinned. "I try, too."
It was all too easy to slip back into carefree banter and to imagine - insofar as I considered them at all - that all my problems would vanish if I only ignored them for a little longer. I was soon chattering away, happy and voluntary oblivious to the immediate future; before I thought to wonder where we were going, we were hanging up our caps in the bookshop. It was a tiny place, sandwiched between the buildings to either side like mortar between bricks. 'Gustav Waechner, Bookseller', a creaking sign proclaimed.
"Right, what do you need?," said Christian as we kicked the snow off our boots.
"None of that! What do you want?," said Jan the professional hedonist.
I barely heard them. Shelf after shelf... I'd never seen so many words in such a small space! There was something electric in the hot, still air; something made every hair on my body stand up keenly, nervously. All sounds were muffled. I listened to the rustling noise my hand made on the nearest spine as I ran my fingers along it: I could tell the golden lettering from the leather with my fingertips, almost read it.
I wanted to run through the place, grabbing at books as the light fell on their titles, searching frantically through them, tossing them into my bag if any phrase, any single word could catch my imagination! Fancy making people pay for books...
"I... good God, go back to what I need! I want the whole damn place!" I looked up towards the ceiling. The shop had one of those ladders on rails used to traverse high shelves. I laughed nervously: I wanted to climb to the top of it and scoot along. I felt like a little child. "...I say, how are you for money?" The adult world returned, nastily.
"Well, we work: I tutor rich kids when I can, Jan translates if anything comes up. But some of that we send to my family: Jan's father makes him a big enough allowance. We live humbly. We don't eat to excess, and we don't drink to excess every night."
"I wouldn't expect you to follow Christian's brambly path of scholar-monasticism, though. I have money to spare. For now, go mad." Jan had read my hidden meaning with such ease that to him it surely wasn't hidden; I reddened a little, but nonetheless forgot my qualms and buried myself in amongst the bookshelves.
Even gathering up my required reading was a visit to the garden of temptations: I bade several Satans get themselves behind me, thinking sternly that studies had to come before leisure. But I was looking forward to the course-books themselves, and so felt greedier still in going after anything else. But I couldn't help myself: all around me were books whose titles had once caught my, that old schoolmasters and eccentric uncles had mentioned to me, books there hadn't ever been the money for...
That's Vienna: the place where the stuff of memories and dreams can be found in some stuffy little shop down a back-street somewhere near the Danube canal, so long as you can pay up. In the end I allowed myself one book beyond requirements, and made it a fat one.
Then we headed home, bantering again. Between that and the walk, we were short of breath when we reached Spittelberggasse: our bags were weighed down heavily. How much does this much leather and that much paper weigh? Not this much, surely? Knowledge has a weight of its own.
It was about time for lunch when we got home, but we'd eaten well enough with the Rabbi. Ottokar the schoolboy had eaten breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the same time each day (sometimes - painful recollections! - the exact same meal each day). Ottokar the student was to eat what he could when he could, ducking into cafes and pinching fruit whenever he found himself in someone else's kitchen. If he had to miss dinner at the boarding-house, well, he had to miss it. Eating, sleeping, Christianity: things that were strictly scheduled in Brno happened where I could fit them in Vienna.
We first went to hand back to Madam Gottlieb the key that had admitted us, which I had forgotten all about.
"You boys have had a long night. No trouble, I should hope?"
"Nothing that will touch the spotless reputation of Vienna's finest boarding-house, madam," said Jan with his signature upward-flicking grin. She smiled warily back at him.
Then we heaved our loads up to our room ('Good afternoon, Herr Kaestner!' 'Fall in a hole and catch the pox!') and released the books into the wild: Jan and Christian's purchases would soon join the swirl on the floor. I made a little pile of mine by the sofa and sat down heavily, ready at last to confront fate.
"Look, chaps... I need to go and get my things back from my uncle. I..."
"I thought my nose was trying to tell me something!"
"Oh, be nice, Christian."
"We'll do it after dinner."
And that was it; they hadn't even looked up from unloading their books. I'd expected something more, I don't know what. After a moment of stunned reflection, I stretched out on the sofa and reached for the topmost book of my pile. What was I so afraid of, after all? In all likelihood I'd go, get the luggage, come back. I might never see my uncle. Every law in the empire was on my side - for a change! Was it that terrible strength of his that I feared, that made his coat strain at its seems? Hah! Where did I think I was? Somewhere where muscles and money were all that made the man? I was in Vienna now!
With this happy thought, I settled down to read.
Jan and Christian had practically to hoist me up between them and carry me down to dinner: my nose was stuck between pages. I was finally persuaded to pull it clear by the smells wafting from the kitchen. They were too hot and heavy and intermixed for me to identify them with any certainty, but whatever they were they made me slaver like a dog: that's the German way in cookery.
Dinner began cheerily: Rudi von Weilheim led an inquiry into our last night's exploits, and I found that Jan and Christian did nothing to keep them secret. We were even something in the nature of local heroes. Everyone at that dinner table had something to blame on some authority: that was what had brought us there and united us. There was respect for those who defied, however furtively, the greatest authority of all, the stern stony palace of Hofburg. The tale of our escape on the canal, narrated (and tarted up a bit) by Jan with an instinct for comic timing like the wolf's instinct for the hunt, provoked applause and laughter. Madam Gottlieb offered us all a complimentary glass of Rhine-wine for a toast.
But here came a distressing turn: one of the guests had stayed very quiet throughout his history of our adventure. She was one of the girls who came up to dine with us from out of those dark dens in the south of the city, reeking of cheap schnapps and cheap bodies packed together tight, their faces always wearing the residue of their paint and a look of profound exhaustion. Some of them were angry and given to bristling; some were timid, almost unnervingly timid. She was one of the latter sort, and Madam Gottlieb's eyes soon settled on her.
"Are you quite alright, Greta?," she asked in the lull after our toast.
The poor girl lowered her eyes as if ashamed of something. Unintelligible noises struggled out of her throat.
"Bad day," said one of the angry girls.
"I..."
Greta got no further before she began to cry. It would be wrong to say that she 'burst into tears' or 'broke down crying': a few tears simply dribbled from the corners of her eyes into her lap.
"Now, Greta. Come with me, now. We'll soon sort you out." Madam Gottlieb spoke softly, but with an edge of steel as she steered the modestly sniffling young woman up and over to the door of the only bedroom on the ground floor, the landlady's own.
There was a moment of silence. Mr. Kaestner reached for the bottle of Rhine-wine, but Frieda Reiniger froze him with a stare. It took some time before conversation began again, and it stayed hushed.
"This happens sometimes," Christian said to me. "People aren't made for that life. Some of them go hard, some of them crack. Like soldiers."
"But a girl who goes to pieces at this table never gets sent back the next morning. We find a room for a while..." Jan smiled weakly, "Christian and I once had to sleep in the university library for half a week. Room was a damn sight neater when we got back, too. And then a place somewhere. A cook or a maid in some place a bit fancier than this. No questions asked if you've got Mrs. Gottlieb's reference and none expected, either."
Christian nodded. "There's no cash to chuck around, and you may not see it win any medals, but this place is a damn charity."
After that, I had no stomach for the remains of my meal, and it was in troubled spirits that I left the boarding house at the same hour as I had the night before. I told Jan and Christian I would take care of my business alone, and as soon as I was down the street I regretted it.
It was a windy night, and snowing: I steered a zig-zagging course through the little residential streets of Neubau to keep side-on to the wind, and passed below row after row of houses with their doors locked and their windows alternately dark and lit. Was I mad with cold and fright, or was there a figure silhouetted against each lamp, statue-still?
I shivered as a gust pushed past me. It whispered to me.
Now, I certainly didn't believe (then) that the wind was capable of speech, least of all in Czech. I knew that I had, of course, imagined it. But I have always been a man who pays due attention to what his imagination tells him.
"You shouldn't have come alone," said the wind.
Why not? I am not a lunatic and didn't say this out loud: I merely thought it with unusual volume.
"You oughtn't to be out alone on a night like this, or out at all. This isn't your place. This is the way the world was before you ever thought of taming fire. Tonight belongs to others."
Nonsense. This is Vienna. The imperial city.
"What if it is?"
There are police. There are courts! There are streetlights, aren't there?!
"They're miles away - they might as well be further, you don't know where they are - and they've never heard of you and don't particularly care. Here on this street, our street, you're by yourself. And can you even know what's a few feet away from you in the dark."
Shut up!
And shut up the windy voice did; confirming me in my opinion, which was probably, in hindsight, more-or-less correct, that it had been but an invention of my timid side. And Ottokar might be timid but damn Sts. Cyril and Methodius if he was! I quickened up as I crossed the old killing-field to the walled city, feeling an urge to be inside fortifications; and then willed myself to walk at a normal pace and be calm.
I had another fright by the gate: I heard, quiet but clear through the wailing of the wind, a rhythmic click. All my muscles tingled and tensed; my senses strained to find the source. A man was walking towards me along the path, hidden in the shadows of his greatcoat and hat. He looked a little like a crow, dark and hunched and ragged, and neither sped nor slowed his terrible, regular steps. I tried at once to look at him and look away.
And as I passed him, breath bated, I saw that his shapeless rags were what was left of an army uniform. I could make out the faded Hapsburg emblem on his cap. The clicking sound was his knobly walking cane, and the pace he kept up so relentlessly was a good one, for a man with one-and-a-half legs.
I felt overcome with guilt, guilty for having been afraid. I called out to him, fished some money from my pockets and silently handed it over, face red in spite of the chill; he tapped his hat, and his click receded behind me. I carried on, back in the real world, cold and callous place that it was - and forgetting for the time being the sense I had had that things older than the city, and cities, were abroad on the streets in the winter night.
At last, I was back on the street that I had bade farewell three mornings ago as the bells were tolling - and now the bells tolled again. I was so nervous now that I lost count of them.
I stood for a long time by the door of my uncle's house, lurking in the shadows like a thief to evade the notice of anyone coming or going. I was reluctant to leave the streets, however eerie, chilly, and slippery there were. The air at least was pure out here, and I didn't want to trade it for the smell of muggy perfumes mingling, rich food cooking, rich food going off, cellars full of wine corking, varnish on furniture, Cuban tobacco, and enough snuff to choke a man: the smell, in short, of wasting money. If gold could rust, that would be its smell.
In the end, I went round to the servants' entrance. I was no servant to that house, but other people used that route, I reminded myself: people with secret business to attend to. I wasn't sure quite when going to recover my legal property had become 'secret business' in my thoughts, but it had.
Even the servants' door was a grander affair than that of 36 Spittelberggasse: it was heavy-set, darkly-painted, and had a fine brass knocker. With a deep breath, I gave it a pull: its sound was both sharp and heavy. I shivered involuntarily, steeled my nerves, and stood my ground.
The door was eventually opened by a maid. In her white aprons, she reminded me of a snowdrop which had been repeatedly trodden on.
"Who is it?," she said uncertainly to the shadows in the snowy night.
"I'm here to collect some property left behind by my employer." I am not an easy liar, but this one came naturally, so fast I wasn't conscious of inventing it: when the question of my identity confronted me, I stepped aside as naturally as I would have sidled away from the barrel of a gun. I felt arrogantly sure that 'Ottokar Jánkovač' was a wanted man here, and cherished the anonymity of the night. "May I please speak to the lady of the house? Just for a moment."
"What was it?"
"A trunk. Please, I need..."
Alright, alright. She's entertaining. You'll have to wait."
Entertaining! The word lied by itself.
I was led through whitewashed, claustrophobic corridors until we reached the little room that had, for one night, been my residence. Not a thing had changed: even the dust had settled back in its place, and my trunk was where I had left it. I settled down with it to wait, and to calm my jangling nerves I took down a book. It was one of the ones about gardening. I read aloud under my breath and understood nothing, wondering whether I should steal away. But I had asked to see my aunt. Why? Well, I might as well see it through.
At length she arrived. I could only detect the traces of her black eye under her powder because I knew it was there.
"...Hello, Ottokar." I felt ashamed of myself for no very obvious reason. "You've taken care of yourself?"
"Yes. Thank- ...I'm sorry. I came back for my things. I hope..."
Without thinking, I laid a protective hand on the trunk.
"Ottokar?"
"...Yes?"
"Tell your father he was right."
I was silent for a moment; then I nodded, and with the nod started to gabble. "My letters will be addressed here. I'll write to change it but I'm sure mother will have already posted one and... you could... write back. To my parents. We're not rich, but I remember my father always said that it was foolishness not to have any money for yourself and I'm sure if he thought he could... help..."
She nodded slowly back; and with a rude haste I hefted one end of the trunk and left. I bumped down the servants' passageways, and felt a bizarre sensation of freedom. This box contained all that was mine in the world, excepting a suit of clothes and a pile of books. There was no money to worry me but that in my purse: nothing to govern where I went and what I did but me. The poor woman...
I forgot to close the door behind me as I skidded onto the street. "You oughtn't to be here," said the wind. I couldn't help agreeing.
I had to knock repeatedly before I was re-admitted by Madam Gottlieb. I fell almost to my knees on the threshold, panting.
"Lord, Ottokar, I hope you're alright."
"Fine, fine. Came back here at quite a whack, and this trunk's not light.
"You're not being pursued by anything, are you?”
I wiped my brow. The fire was low, mercifully: I needed to cool off.
"Just the wind."
I passed through to the stairs, and saw Rudi von Weilheim stretched out on a trio of chairs; he must have donated his room to Greta. His repose didn't look comfortable, but he was smiling gently in his sleep. I felt better for the sight.
It took a titanic effort and a few precarious wobbles to get my trunk upstairs. The first room - my room, I thought with new certainty - was dark and empty; the door to Jan and Christian's was tight shut. I lit a candle, and by its light sorted through my meager estate. By bulk, it was mostly books of poems and those rough Indian shirts, but I'd had the foresight to pack a blanket.
I took off my rabbinical boots and arranged them neatly at the other end of the sofa; I made a pillow of my coat; I blew out my candle, and it was as if that little expiration of breath cost my body the last of its strength.
I fell instantly asleep, a free man.
Author's note:
This one marks the end of the story's first phase. I wasn't much inspired writing it - it is of course a compendium of administrative loose-ends in the story - but now I've cut out a lot of the idle chatter I think it does an alright job. Hopefully there is now a reasonably clear sense of who Ottokar is; that taken care of I can launch him on his career. The poor bastard has no idea what's coming to him, hehe.
Our first veggie dish, this one (after all, it is the 21st century), and quite simple: boil some spaghetti up, and mix a heaping tablespoon of green pesto and a bit more mascarpone in a bowl. Add a handful of chopped rocket and a sprinkle of black pepper and mix it all up. Drain the spag, reserving some water, and toss with the sauce, adding a couple of spoonfuls of water to loosen it. Then add some more rocket, put it all in a bowl, and grate parmesan over. You can have it hot or cold: it's nicely tingly and refreshing cold.
Meanwhile, the seven-day plan lumbers unhaltingly onward!
I awoke in a warm, soft bed: the first time in Vienna that I did, and that made it all the better.
Thinking on this, I smiled to myself: for years I had slept in the same bed, one blanket in summer and two in winter, as the mattress steadily accrued more patches and stitches. (In my last year at home I had had to bend my knees to fit, but I hadn't mentioned this to anyone: there was no point in making the expense of a new one when I would be gone so soon.) Since coming here I hadn't slept in the same place twice. It was bona-fide symbolic!
Where was I today, though? There had been a fire burning in the night: the air was thick and pungent with the residue of the flames, and the weak sunlight filling the room shared it with a reddish glow.
Sitting up was a daunting prospect: I felt limp, dried-out, weak as a paralysed kitten. After much effort, I stirred and pulled myself up, discovering in the process that I was quite naked.
I was in a small room that contained, besides the bed, no evidence of any habitation: a spare room, I thought, a room for sleeping in and not for living in. The cold light of the sun shone through a large window looking out on swirling snow and another window across the street, with nothing to be seen of the ground below; the red glow came from some dying embers hidden behind a grating - hung, I saw to my relief, with my clothes.
I unfolded myself from the bed little by little, pausing to adapt to each new temperature. Even lying naked on the covers, I wasn't uncomfortably cold: the room was cozy with ash-scented warmth. I even felt a little hot as I donned my garments. They were the same ones, I realised with a momentary prick of shame, that I'd been wearing when I stepped down from the Brno train three nights ago. There were my trousers, the flecks of mud about their ankles dry and distressingly obvious; my rough and crumpled shirt, rough because my family bought only rough Indian cotton, so as not to finance the American slave-barons - the crumpling was all on my watch; my subduedly checkered waistcoat; my neckcloth in the Brno colours of red and white, but so faded now that you could hardly tell; my low peaked cap in the German fashion - or un-fashion, as those were the days when everyone but students and soldiers wore top-hats, be they silky black or battered rabbit-skin, in totemic imitation of the chimneys springing up over Europe's cities; and the coat that had been my father's. Only my boots were missing, which brought the events of last night into sharp relief.
I went over to the window, imagining for some reason that the sight of the snow and the muffled sound of the wind would cool me down. As I went I tied my neckcloth under my shirt-collar like a sailer's neckerchief: a little badge of student status like the cap. I marvelled that this cap had somehow stayed attached through all my misadventures: probably this meant it was too small.
Outside, it was impossible to tell which way the wind was blowing, so intricate was the dance of the snow. Flakes plummeted in great swooping flocks towards the ground, and then swept at the last moment out of their dive, turned this way and that and wound back on themselves - and suddenly as one they lunged at the window and hurtled straight towards me! I stepped instinctively onto my back foot... and then they fell away to chase each other along Seitenstettengasse (just possible to make out from my vantage on somebody's fifth floor) like boys in pursuit of their ball.
I was still watching all this, mesmerised, when someone knocked at the door.
"Morning, Ottokar, you decent?," said Jan's voice.
"If you can stand the sight of my bare feet."
"I'm sure they're very nice feet, but fortunately I have some modest coverings for them." Jan entered, bringing with him a pair of boots. "These belonged to the Rabbi Kochmann, but his feet shrank. Should fit you nicely. The socks are his son's. We sort of, well... set fire to yours. By mistake."
I glanced suspiciously over to the fireplace: there did seem to be something fibrous in there...
"I'm sure it's a great privilege, to be given the Rabbi's boots," said Jan diplomatically, and I sat down on the bed to put them on. They were a good fit, and both soft and sturdy. They held your feet, but left room for you to waggle your toes: a privilege indeed, whether or not they were imbued with any mystical powers. I savoured their gentle tread as we descended two flights of stairs to join an ongoing breakfast. It was only a little past eight, according to a grandfather clock in the dining room: I must have been getting used to rough nights.
Around the table were the Rabbi Kochmann, a withered but tough old gentleman who reminded me immediately of his own boots; Mrs. the Rabbi Kochmann, who was even tougher and more withered, if that were possible; Macebulski; Christian; and Max. The breakfast was humble but varied: I could see all the staples of a German morning's table, even ham for the benefit of the gentiles and, conspicuously, Max.
"Benefits of atheism," he said when he saw me glancing at him; I blushed and felt rude.
"Master Eberstark is always welcome here, not only because his father is a very good friend of mine, but also because all the other Jews always agree with whatever I say," said the Rabbi. "His presence brings a little controversy. It's very refreshing."
"It is a theory of mine," said Macebulski conversationally as I pulled up a chair, "That the similar prohibition of pig-meat in Islam, as well as alcohol, is one reason why Vladimir the Great chose to make the Russians Christian. He was set on one of the great religions but doesn't seem to have cared which overly. The pig is important in their climate: they eat the fat as well as the meat, for warmth. And I've never tried to go a winter without my vodka, but I don't imagine it would be pleasant."
I nodded vaguely. "It's an interesting idea, but... Russia and Orthodoxy are so very deeply bound up, it seems... awfully prosaic."
Macebulski chuckled genially. "History usually is, 'Sts. C&M'. You're a romantic soul; that encourages a healthy interest in history, but to study it for a living you must be an utter cynic. I should know: I have been a history teacher in my long and checkered career. Language is the field for you."
"And besides, if you're to live in Germany, you must know all about tactical conversions," said Mrs. the Rabbi Kochmann. "Look at Heinrich Heine. 'God will forgive me, that's his job'!" The poet was a year dead then; I’d heard of him but never had a chance to read any of his works, banned as they all of course were. I chuckled along and seemed to see unexplored landscapes roll out before me.
"Or my father," put in Jan. "He has a sudden awakening and becomes Protestant once a fortnight, when it's time for his confessions. Then he forgets about it." There was another chuckle; mine, though, a slightly guilty one. When I was fifteen or so, my parents had said I should go to confessionals by myself, and shortly afterwards I'd stopped going. I didn't like to think of myself as a lapsed Catholic so much as a busy one. I went to church at Christmas, and when the fancy took me, and occasionally felt penitent about it all.
We had all soon eaten our fill from the Rabbi's generous table: I might have arrived later than the others, but my appetite was lesser, for I had a dreadful apprehension gnawing at my stomach and all my ham and cheese escaped through the resulting hole before I could properly digest it. At some lull in the conversation, I had realised I was going to have to get my luggage back today, somehow...
But fortunately a distraction appeared: Macebulski, who knew all about the superstitions of romantically-minded students, offered me a look at some of our prizes. We found them stowed about the house in various obscure corners, dark and dry.
"I'll be sending some of the troops round to collect them tomorrow night," he said. "We can't cause poor David and his wife any more trouble than we already have. You needn't come. You deserve a rest for now. There's something else you can do for me in a couple of day's time, a solo mission."
I made no reply: I was flicking dumbly through the book in my hands. It was in perfect condition, the pages crisp and supple with neatly printed Magyar words galloping incomprehensibly down them, fabulously adorned in accents and umlauts. They looked so wonderful, so exotic and fantastical, that I had to wonder how anyone could bring himself to ban them and burn them.
"Last night's mission was atypical. I can't ask anyone to go handing in essays and diving into the Danube every week. Our work is actually rather dull, usually. Dull but rewarding, I hope."
I nodded vacantly: I was somewhere on the Pannonian plain, in the wake of the Magyar horde.
"Geothe told me about your misadventures. I'd rather you got arrested than that you drowned, to be honest - but I need brave boys, quick-witted ones. You'll go far, Sts. C&M."
That was the third person to call me brave. Nobody had ever called me 'a romantic soul' in quite those words before, either (the phrasing had usually been closer to 'refuses to pay attention in class'; I had heard 'quick-witted' from some teachers, but others preferred 'his results are not consistent with his display of effort and discipline; cheating is probable'). It seemed that Sts. Cyril and Methodius was a rather more interesting, exciting person than Ottokar Jánkovač ever had been.
"...Thankyou, sir."
"Are you up for this solo job?"
I nodded: Sts. Cyril and Methodius, being brave, quick-witted, and a romantic soul, obviously took solo missions whenever they were on offer.
Macebulski nodded once in approval. "These are all Hungarian. Most of them are manuscripts needing publication, but there's a cluster that I took as a commission from an old colleague of mine. He lives just over in Wieden, and you can drop them round for me. I think you'll get on well with him."
"I hope so, sir."
"Good lad. You can do that after your lecture on Friday." He eased the book from my hands. "Off you trot, then! You've got required reading."
I stood on the spot for a moment: the abruptness of my dismissal had taken me aback. But then I recovered and darted away. After all, I did have required reading. I tried to stifle my sense of adventure for a while.
Partly it was conscientious obedience to the professor's parting words, partly it was a feeling that after all this smuggling I deserved some loot, and partly - though I would not admit it even to myself - it was a desire to dodge the urgent business of the day: but whatever the cause, I felt anxious to get my hands on a book. I told Jan and Christian, as we put on our winter gear in the Rabbi's cloakroom, that we would have to make a raid on the bookshop.
"Ah, splendid! Haven't been in a while, have we, Christian?"
"As you advance in life, the books get fewer and fatter," said Christian, attempting to work out which end of his scarf was which.
"Do you mean life or do you mean law?," I said with a smile. "Or can you not tell any more?"
The scarf was knotted into submission with a few sharp tugs. "You're developing a tongue there, Ottokar. Jan's been a bad influence on you, clearly."
"I try!," said Jan.
I grinned. "I try, too."
It was all too easy to slip back into carefree banter and to imagine - insofar as I considered them at all - that all my problems would vanish if I only ignored them for a little longer. I was soon chattering away, happy and voluntary oblivious to the immediate future; before I thought to wonder where we were going, we were hanging up our caps in the bookshop. It was a tiny place, sandwiched between the buildings to either side like mortar between bricks. 'Gustav Waechner, Bookseller', a creaking sign proclaimed.
"Right, what do you need?," said Christian as we kicked the snow off our boots.
"None of that! What do you want?," said Jan the professional hedonist.
I barely heard them. Shelf after shelf... I'd never seen so many words in such a small space! There was something electric in the hot, still air; something made every hair on my body stand up keenly, nervously. All sounds were muffled. I listened to the rustling noise my hand made on the nearest spine as I ran my fingers along it: I could tell the golden lettering from the leather with my fingertips, almost read it.
I wanted to run through the place, grabbing at books as the light fell on their titles, searching frantically through them, tossing them into my bag if any phrase, any single word could catch my imagination! Fancy making people pay for books...
"I... good God, go back to what I need! I want the whole damn place!" I looked up towards the ceiling. The shop had one of those ladders on rails used to traverse high shelves. I laughed nervously: I wanted to climb to the top of it and scoot along. I felt like a little child. "...I say, how are you for money?" The adult world returned, nastily.
"Well, we work: I tutor rich kids when I can, Jan translates if anything comes up. But some of that we send to my family: Jan's father makes him a big enough allowance. We live humbly. We don't eat to excess, and we don't drink to excess every night."
"I wouldn't expect you to follow Christian's brambly path of scholar-monasticism, though. I have money to spare. For now, go mad." Jan had read my hidden meaning with such ease that to him it surely wasn't hidden; I reddened a little, but nonetheless forgot my qualms and buried myself in amongst the bookshelves.
Even gathering up my required reading was a visit to the garden of temptations: I bade several Satans get themselves behind me, thinking sternly that studies had to come before leisure. But I was looking forward to the course-books themselves, and so felt greedier still in going after anything else. But I couldn't help myself: all around me were books whose titles had once caught my, that old schoolmasters and eccentric uncles had mentioned to me, books there hadn't ever been the money for...
That's Vienna: the place where the stuff of memories and dreams can be found in some stuffy little shop down a back-street somewhere near the Danube canal, so long as you can pay up. In the end I allowed myself one book beyond requirements, and made it a fat one.
Then we headed home, bantering again. Between that and the walk, we were short of breath when we reached Spittelberggasse: our bags were weighed down heavily. How much does this much leather and that much paper weigh? Not this much, surely? Knowledge has a weight of its own.
It was about time for lunch when we got home, but we'd eaten well enough with the Rabbi. Ottokar the schoolboy had eaten breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the same time each day (sometimes - painful recollections! - the exact same meal each day). Ottokar the student was to eat what he could when he could, ducking into cafes and pinching fruit whenever he found himself in someone else's kitchen. If he had to miss dinner at the boarding-house, well, he had to miss it. Eating, sleeping, Christianity: things that were strictly scheduled in Brno happened where I could fit them in Vienna.
We first went to hand back to Madam Gottlieb the key that had admitted us, which I had forgotten all about.
"You boys have had a long night. No trouble, I should hope?"
"Nothing that will touch the spotless reputation of Vienna's finest boarding-house, madam," said Jan with his signature upward-flicking grin. She smiled warily back at him.
Then we heaved our loads up to our room ('Good afternoon, Herr Kaestner!' 'Fall in a hole and catch the pox!') and released the books into the wild: Jan and Christian's purchases would soon join the swirl on the floor. I made a little pile of mine by the sofa and sat down heavily, ready at last to confront fate.
"Look, chaps... I need to go and get my things back from my uncle. I..."
"I thought my nose was trying to tell me something!"
"Oh, be nice, Christian."
"We'll do it after dinner."
And that was it; they hadn't even looked up from unloading their books. I'd expected something more, I don't know what. After a moment of stunned reflection, I stretched out on the sofa and reached for the topmost book of my pile. What was I so afraid of, after all? In all likelihood I'd go, get the luggage, come back. I might never see my uncle. Every law in the empire was on my side - for a change! Was it that terrible strength of his that I feared, that made his coat strain at its seems? Hah! Where did I think I was? Somewhere where muscles and money were all that made the man? I was in Vienna now!
With this happy thought, I settled down to read.
Jan and Christian had practically to hoist me up between them and carry me down to dinner: my nose was stuck between pages. I was finally persuaded to pull it clear by the smells wafting from the kitchen. They were too hot and heavy and intermixed for me to identify them with any certainty, but whatever they were they made me slaver like a dog: that's the German way in cookery.
Dinner began cheerily: Rudi von Weilheim led an inquiry into our last night's exploits, and I found that Jan and Christian did nothing to keep them secret. We were even something in the nature of local heroes. Everyone at that dinner table had something to blame on some authority: that was what had brought us there and united us. There was respect for those who defied, however furtively, the greatest authority of all, the stern stony palace of Hofburg. The tale of our escape on the canal, narrated (and tarted up a bit) by Jan with an instinct for comic timing like the wolf's instinct for the hunt, provoked applause and laughter. Madam Gottlieb offered us all a complimentary glass of Rhine-wine for a toast.
But here came a distressing turn: one of the guests had stayed very quiet throughout his history of our adventure. She was one of the girls who came up to dine with us from out of those dark dens in the south of the city, reeking of cheap schnapps and cheap bodies packed together tight, their faces always wearing the residue of their paint and a look of profound exhaustion. Some of them were angry and given to bristling; some were timid, almost unnervingly timid. She was one of the latter sort, and Madam Gottlieb's eyes soon settled on her.
"Are you quite alright, Greta?," she asked in the lull after our toast.
The poor girl lowered her eyes as if ashamed of something. Unintelligible noises struggled out of her throat.
"Bad day," said one of the angry girls.
"I..."
Greta got no further before she began to cry. It would be wrong to say that she 'burst into tears' or 'broke down crying': a few tears simply dribbled from the corners of her eyes into her lap.
"Now, Greta. Come with me, now. We'll soon sort you out." Madam Gottlieb spoke softly, but with an edge of steel as she steered the modestly sniffling young woman up and over to the door of the only bedroom on the ground floor, the landlady's own.
There was a moment of silence. Mr. Kaestner reached for the bottle of Rhine-wine, but Frieda Reiniger froze him with a stare. It took some time before conversation began again, and it stayed hushed.
"This happens sometimes," Christian said to me. "People aren't made for that life. Some of them go hard, some of them crack. Like soldiers."
"But a girl who goes to pieces at this table never gets sent back the next morning. We find a room for a while..." Jan smiled weakly, "Christian and I once had to sleep in the university library for half a week. Room was a damn sight neater when we got back, too. And then a place somewhere. A cook or a maid in some place a bit fancier than this. No questions asked if you've got Mrs. Gottlieb's reference and none expected, either."
Christian nodded. "There's no cash to chuck around, and you may not see it win any medals, but this place is a damn charity."
After that, I had no stomach for the remains of my meal, and it was in troubled spirits that I left the boarding house at the same hour as I had the night before. I told Jan and Christian I would take care of my business alone, and as soon as I was down the street I regretted it.
It was a windy night, and snowing: I steered a zig-zagging course through the little residential streets of Neubau to keep side-on to the wind, and passed below row after row of houses with their doors locked and their windows alternately dark and lit. Was I mad with cold and fright, or was there a figure silhouetted against each lamp, statue-still?
I shivered as a gust pushed past me. It whispered to me.
Now, I certainly didn't believe (then) that the wind was capable of speech, least of all in Czech. I knew that I had, of course, imagined it. But I have always been a man who pays due attention to what his imagination tells him.
"You shouldn't have come alone," said the wind.
Why not? I am not a lunatic and didn't say this out loud: I merely thought it with unusual volume.
"You oughtn't to be out alone on a night like this, or out at all. This isn't your place. This is the way the world was before you ever thought of taming fire. Tonight belongs to others."
Nonsense. This is Vienna. The imperial city.
"What if it is?"
There are police. There are courts! There are streetlights, aren't there?!
"They're miles away - they might as well be further, you don't know where they are - and they've never heard of you and don't particularly care. Here on this street, our street, you're by yourself. And can you even know what's a few feet away from you in the dark."
Shut up!
And shut up the windy voice did; confirming me in my opinion, which was probably, in hindsight, more-or-less correct, that it had been but an invention of my timid side. And Ottokar might be timid but damn Sts. Cyril and Methodius if he was! I quickened up as I crossed the old killing-field to the walled city, feeling an urge to be inside fortifications; and then willed myself to walk at a normal pace and be calm.
I had another fright by the gate: I heard, quiet but clear through the wailing of the wind, a rhythmic click. All my muscles tingled and tensed; my senses strained to find the source. A man was walking towards me along the path, hidden in the shadows of his greatcoat and hat. He looked a little like a crow, dark and hunched and ragged, and neither sped nor slowed his terrible, regular steps. I tried at once to look at him and look away.
And as I passed him, breath bated, I saw that his shapeless rags were what was left of an army uniform. I could make out the faded Hapsburg emblem on his cap. The clicking sound was his knobly walking cane, and the pace he kept up so relentlessly was a good one, for a man with one-and-a-half legs.
I felt overcome with guilt, guilty for having been afraid. I called out to him, fished some money from my pockets and silently handed it over, face red in spite of the chill; he tapped his hat, and his click receded behind me. I carried on, back in the real world, cold and callous place that it was - and forgetting for the time being the sense I had had that things older than the city, and cities, were abroad on the streets in the winter night.
At last, I was back on the street that I had bade farewell three mornings ago as the bells were tolling - and now the bells tolled again. I was so nervous now that I lost count of them.
I stood for a long time by the door of my uncle's house, lurking in the shadows like a thief to evade the notice of anyone coming or going. I was reluctant to leave the streets, however eerie, chilly, and slippery there were. The air at least was pure out here, and I didn't want to trade it for the smell of muggy perfumes mingling, rich food cooking, rich food going off, cellars full of wine corking, varnish on furniture, Cuban tobacco, and enough snuff to choke a man: the smell, in short, of wasting money. If gold could rust, that would be its smell.
In the end, I went round to the servants' entrance. I was no servant to that house, but other people used that route, I reminded myself: people with secret business to attend to. I wasn't sure quite when going to recover my legal property had become 'secret business' in my thoughts, but it had.
Even the servants' door was a grander affair than that of 36 Spittelberggasse: it was heavy-set, darkly-painted, and had a fine brass knocker. With a deep breath, I gave it a pull: its sound was both sharp and heavy. I shivered involuntarily, steeled my nerves, and stood my ground.
The door was eventually opened by a maid. In her white aprons, she reminded me of a snowdrop which had been repeatedly trodden on.
"Who is it?," she said uncertainly to the shadows in the snowy night.
"I'm here to collect some property left behind by my employer." I am not an easy liar, but this one came naturally, so fast I wasn't conscious of inventing it: when the question of my identity confronted me, I stepped aside as naturally as I would have sidled away from the barrel of a gun. I felt arrogantly sure that 'Ottokar Jánkovač' was a wanted man here, and cherished the anonymity of the night. "May I please speak to the lady of the house? Just for a moment."
"What was it?"
"A trunk. Please, I need..."
Alright, alright. She's entertaining. You'll have to wait."
Entertaining! The word lied by itself.
I was led through whitewashed, claustrophobic corridors until we reached the little room that had, for one night, been my residence. Not a thing had changed: even the dust had settled back in its place, and my trunk was where I had left it. I settled down with it to wait, and to calm my jangling nerves I took down a book. It was one of the ones about gardening. I read aloud under my breath and understood nothing, wondering whether I should steal away. But I had asked to see my aunt. Why? Well, I might as well see it through.
At length she arrived. I could only detect the traces of her black eye under her powder because I knew it was there.
"...Hello, Ottokar." I felt ashamed of myself for no very obvious reason. "You've taken care of yourself?"
"Yes. Thank- ...I'm sorry. I came back for my things. I hope..."
Without thinking, I laid a protective hand on the trunk.
"Ottokar?"
"...Yes?"
"Tell your father he was right."
I was silent for a moment; then I nodded, and with the nod started to gabble. "My letters will be addressed here. I'll write to change it but I'm sure mother will have already posted one and... you could... write back. To my parents. We're not rich, but I remember my father always said that it was foolishness not to have any money for yourself and I'm sure if he thought he could... help..."
She nodded slowly back; and with a rude haste I hefted one end of the trunk and left. I bumped down the servants' passageways, and felt a bizarre sensation of freedom. This box contained all that was mine in the world, excepting a suit of clothes and a pile of books. There was no money to worry me but that in my purse: nothing to govern where I went and what I did but me. The poor woman...
I forgot to close the door behind me as I skidded onto the street. "You oughtn't to be here," said the wind. I couldn't help agreeing.
I had to knock repeatedly before I was re-admitted by Madam Gottlieb. I fell almost to my knees on the threshold, panting.
"Lord, Ottokar, I hope you're alright."
"Fine, fine. Came back here at quite a whack, and this trunk's not light.
"You're not being pursued by anything, are you?”
I wiped my brow. The fire was low, mercifully: I needed to cool off.
"Just the wind."
I passed through to the stairs, and saw Rudi von Weilheim stretched out on a trio of chairs; he must have donated his room to Greta. His repose didn't look comfortable, but he was smiling gently in his sleep. I felt better for the sight.
It took a titanic effort and a few precarious wobbles to get my trunk upstairs. The first room - my room, I thought with new certainty - was dark and empty; the door to Jan and Christian's was tight shut. I lit a candle, and by its light sorted through my meager estate. By bulk, it was mostly books of poems and those rough Indian shirts, but I'd had the foresight to pack a blanket.
I took off my rabbinical boots and arranged them neatly at the other end of the sofa; I made a pillow of my coat; I blew out my candle, and it was as if that little expiration of breath cost my body the last of its strength.
I fell instantly asleep, a free man.
Author's note:
This one marks the end of the story's first phase. I wasn't much inspired writing it - it is of course a compendium of administrative loose-ends in the story - but now I've cut out a lot of the idle chatter I think it does an alright job. Hopefully there is now a reasonably clear sense of who Ottokar is; that taken care of I can launch him on his career. The poor bastard has no idea what's coming to him, hehe.
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