Bandits! part the second and last

Your eyes do not deceive you: I have finished a work of prose fiction! Now that the exam-wave has crested I have a lot of time on my hands, so I'll have to be careful not to make it a habit. To guard against this contingency I am making myself proper dinners and finding other inventive ways to waste my time. Witness the results!

This is my newest craze, Balkan spaghetti. You simply fry a couple of chopped garlic cloves in a big splodge of tomato-paste, spoon on, and mix with lots of yogurt.

And this is how I have spent a thoroughly productive day:

I've had these rather fine measuring-matryoshki since Christmas (cheers, folks!) but they now appear for the first time in glorious technicolour, in the national blazons of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. It goes without saying that the whole thing is unbelievably rich in symbolic significance, possibly.

Should a newly-minted adult citizen be this pleased with himself about anything accomplished using Crayola paint-pots? Do I care?

And now, Bandits!: the not-so-thrilling conclusion.

Nebless Tom was selected, by the rough and silent democracy of cattle-rustlers, to represent the suit. As the planner of the raid and distributor of the loot, he could rely on his comrades to keep their eyes trained on each-other even while he exposed his back for some seconds together. And of course if there turned out to be some hitch in his plan waiting beyond the locked door, it was only fair that he should be the first to know.

The door, designed for a civilised modern age in which it is possible to fortify your tower with so many interlocking bastions of glamour, distraction, and deceit that actual fortification can be all but done away with, yielded to one determined boot. In strode Tom – and behind him the other chieftains (Watt was one of the few people in history to master the striding limp), squeezing through the door together before Tom was left alone with the loot for too long. 

‘Intae the neuk thare, you!,’ cried Skellit Harry, brandishing his pistol with a motion so expansive as to permit no doubt that the unfortunate ‘you’ might be any of the men around the conference table. (I regret to say that this sample of executives and officials were all indeed men; but in fairness to them so were all of there 16^th century adversaries, so you can’t say fairer than that then.) But for some lengthy seconds there was no exodus into the corner, or any other movement at all. In hindsight, of course, we can call this dangerously stupid; but then the whole point of hindsight is that it makes everything clearer, no?

In any case they all jumped to it after Jack Pott shot the windows out – which was his normal method of expressing agreement, disagreement, approval, disapproval, anger, jubiliation, surprise, and sundry other emotions.

‘Richt!,’ said Tom, slapping his gauntleted hands in satisfaction. ‘We’re gey sorrae it haed tae be denner-time whan we cawed, but juist haun’ ower the clink an we’ll be aff.’ 

This request, succinct and gentlemanlike though it certainly was, didn’t have quite the desired effect. The Bolivian chap, and many others besides, appeared to take it as some sort of mortal threat. The mass of neat suits containing the conference-goers shivered as if it had been one being.

‘Thare’s naw muckle a body can say for hou thay eat here,’ said Watt, surveying the supper of papers and Blackberries on the conference-table. This was interpreted as further elaboration of a cruel and unusual death.

It dawned on Peter Laidlaw that he was almost alone in understanding what had just been said. He cleared this throat. Whether he was a coward or not, or whether it was at this moment that he ceased to be one, are questions that need not detain us here. Suffice it to say that he found a quavering voice.

‘…What do you want?...’ His words hung uncomfortably in the air, demanding in the next few moments a dramatic resolution, one way or the other. (Rather like what kept happening to Jack Pott.)

‘The clink, ye gawkie,’ said Tom generously. ‘The siller. The money.’

There was a rippling of suits as frightened and quizzical glances were exchanged. The rievers had enough career experience to tell the fear of being robbed from the fear of being shot: it was clear enough that there was no money to hand.

Nebless Tom and Peter Laidlaw looked intently through each-other in the hush that followed, both rather surprised that nobody had deigned to shoot them yet.

‘We haed an ettlin,’ said Tom cautiously, his tongue weighing each new word much as his hands weighed the pistol and sabre at his belt, ‘That a guid severals hunder-thousand pound waur passin haunds the evening.”

Strictly, the conference-goers had to admit to themselves (for even the Bolivian chappie was able to follow the outline of this remark, thanks to that powerful thing, the survival-instinct), that was true. That was the purpose of the deal. What kind of a world would it be if people made efficiency savings purely for efficiency’s sake? But you didn’t say it! Men in steel bonnets didn’t burst in on meetings, either, but that at least was something you could by virtue of its clear impossibility avoid thinking about, when it wasn’t happening. No, it was the shocks that hovered over you waiting for their moment that were the worst.

‘Sae thare’s naw ony clink,’ said Watt philosophically. ‘Let’s awa. We’re still naw ony iller aff, whilk’s better nor some raids hae endit, aye, Harry?’ He was actually better-off, by several surreptitiously lifted Blackberries.

Harry nodded disappointedly, as did a relieved Tom. The three of them moved with a measured gait towards the door – measured once again so that they would all pass through it together. It was when this proved less of a squeeze than you might have thought that they realised Jack Pott had stayed perfectly still.

‘This is nae denner,’ he said slowly, like a man caught up in calculations. 'Thare’s money in this, a maiter gin it’s here for takin or naw. Wha’s is that, then? Yours, or yours?’

He gestured violently at the suits with his hand. You would almost have preferred it to be his sword; at least you know precisely why you were frightened to death of swords.

‘D’ye mind whan ye stealt thae hunder kyne aff o ma faither, Harry?,’ he said suddenly, almost conversationally. Skellit Harry tried to suppress a look of profound self-satisfaction. ‘A mind, aye,’ he said with masterful self-control.

‘But A cud aye hae liftit thaim back again…’ In fact he had; but Harry might have thought better of mentioning this even had Jack not sounded as if he expected no answer.

‘Gin we’re gangin, we maun gang,’ said Tom, looking nervously out of the broken window at the silvery smudge of the rising moon. But Watt hirpled back across the threshold with a bemused look on his face. 

‘We sud tak some wee thingum, ye’re sayin, aye, Jack? Something mebbe that’s haird for tae buy back?’

Jack nodded.

‘…Forby thae wee black things we waur liftin juist than, Watt?,’ said Harry. ‘Och, daed ye think a daedna see? A waes myndin tae git ma skare efterhaund.’

‘A’v a queesitive naitur,’ said Watt smoothly, tossing him a Blackberry. After a pointed cough, Tom received one of his own, after which he went over to the window, to signal to the men holding the horses far below. But Jack, though offered his portion, was still far away.

‘Something thay canna buy back…’

The papers were all full of it the next day, of course: perhaps it wasn’t a very weighty story, and perhaps they had received some hints that it should certainly be handled lightly from important quarters; but journalists, too, are human. Each was once a smiling child, hard as it may be to imagine. And there is such a thing as good old-fashioned fun. Some of the papers made rather good puns.

The men were found naked and bound in various skips and wheelie-bins south of the Clyde; their clothes eventually washed up in County Antrim; their documentation and their Blackberries were nowhere to be found. The consequences of this development for Bolivia turned out to be quite momentous; but why should I trouble myself about Bolivia? Hardly anybody did. LifeSunTechGrow and the World Bank never had. The papers promptly forgot about it – in spite of the best efforts of one Peter Laidlaw, who left his job and went to live there as a legal advisor to the peasants and who wrote several pretty good books about his experiences, the first of which was called ‘21^st-century Bandits’ and was rather confessional in nature.

And what of the men receding, in a clatter of pistols and sabres and Blackberries, over the brow of the purple hills and into the famous Mists of History? I can’t honestly say that they even knew where Bolivia was. They just knew fair when they saw it and – what is much more important – when they didn’t. 

The food that made an Empahr

The public houses of our island are festooned in banners celebrating 'the beer that made an Empire', and so for my first dinner back in the Second City of the said, Glasgow, I decided to join in this culinary festival. I made a dish of that traditional hale and hearty lumpy-mash-based stuff that sent Britain's sons exploring, conquering, and looting the four corners of the world. They crossed oceans in buckets, clambered mountains, marched beneath the cruel sun of Rajastan, battled the ferocious Naringi-Burbas of the Sudan; and for what? For riches? No! You should have seen what we paid the boys in red who gave us command of the riches of the world, it's a laugh. For glory? No! We threw our soldiers out of public houses and jeered them in the streets! For the good of humanity? Pshaw! *Slapping of thighs in merriment*

No, it was for a cause far more profound than such vanities: to find somewhere where they would never and could never be served old-fashioned British dinners. Three cheers for us!



Take three good-sized potatoes, wash, peel, cut into lumps and put on the boil. While they're boiling, slice up a decent-sized onion or most of a big one, and a pack of white mushrooms. Cut up a couple of back-rashers, and half a good handful of cherry tomatoes. (Tomatoes, it is true, aren't traditional British food. If you want to keep it authentic, get some South African or Nigerian ones, certified Unfair Trade. I mean, empire must have some perks, right?) Oil up a frying pan (at this point the potatoes should want another ten minutes or so) and start with the onions, adding the mushrooms, the bacon, and finally the tomatoes as you go.

When the potatoes slide off a knife, drain them, dice them up a bit finer, and mash thoroughly. Then chuck in the contents of the frying pan, season well, and stir together. This recipe is good for two or even three helpings: if after half of it you feel an urge to march on Khartoum, that means it's working.

Down with non-partisan bloggers!

We're back! That is to say myself, my camera, my dinner, and my muse (the latter two are possibly one and the same). And here is the proof:



My budget was in a small surplus the other day: I could have gotten myself a new shirt, or an album on iTunes. I could have saved up to repair my bicycle, or helped end world hunger. I could have blown it all on sin and vice. But why would I do any of those things when I could have smoked salmon for tea?

Well, anyway, there are no more excuses to not be writing. Essays are done, and what is more, after much lingering awkwardly at the door, twiddling on the balls of her feet, Spring has come to Scotland! The sun spills light on sandstone and slate; buds blossom brightly in the Botanics; alliteration adds appeal. The lines of hills beyond Glasgow have gone from iron-grey to cautiously green; even the moss and creepers on the bare trees seem to have a richer colour.

It is just as well that my essays are indeed done: so that I can take time to go outside and write things using a pen and paper as my ancestors did in ancient days, yes; but also because Winter is a much more suitable season for the stern Marxist finger-wagging of which my essays invariably consist. Some residue of revolutionary fervour is left, however, and under the touch of the sun it has taken on a rather whimsical character.

During the long lead-up to the opening of the preliminaries of the preparation for the first round of the contest that precedes the American presidential election, we heard from various mouths that Corporations are People and they (as distinct from the people who own them and whom they employ) have all the rights of Americans. I wait keenly for the state of Texas to execute one. The whole idea seems to me an eloquently stupid example of how we have been accustomed to viewing society in late decades: as a mechanism for defending us, by tributes of treasure and the periodic sacrifice of a virgin welfare-state, against the dragon Economy. Nobody can predict the continent-shaking stirrings of this beast - who is certainly not just people making things and doing things whose relations might be re-organised to the general good. No, it is something beyond mere mortal kenning, with breath like the desert wind and a mouth like the pit of damnation.

But rather than just get pissed off, I decided to follow on with the idea of 'corporate personhood'. There follows part 1 of, hopefully, a recurring series.


Jonathan Bracejaw turned. He tossed. He turned again. He tossed again. All to no avail: sleep eluded him. He was tired, more tired than he had felt in a long time; but tonight... it was almost as if some alien presence were lying there in the darkness, forbidding sleep, watching him.

In point of fact of course there was a presence in the bed beside him, that of Marmalade. Marmalade, I should clarify, was a young woman (the bed had been stained with a great many things literal and metaphorical but never orange-flavoured jam) whose real name was Marya Sergeevna Bondaruka, or had been, long ago and far away; her pseudonym arose from a misunderstanding. But she was not really alien: she, or somebody physically very much like her (by surgical means, if necessary) had become something of a fixture.

Still, Jonathan could have done without her. She snored like a soprano sawmill, which cut across his ideas of how blonde amply-breasted young women to whom the adjective 'lithe' might be applied if anybody could tell me what it meant were supposed to behave, at any rate on the job. And he found it particularly distressing now: he felt, as he so seldom did, a need to think in the quiet and the dark.

After several attempts - the covers were all over the place - he kicked her.

"How much do I owe you?"

"Yeet's thriy o'clawk yeen the mauwrneeng," she said indistinctly. She could actually speak English with a cut-glass Home Counties accent, but she had learned not to: like the snoring, about which nothing could be done, it for some reason upset people.

"What, 'nothing', did you say?"

"Oh, peeez awf. Fawr-hahndred."

Jonathan clambered out of the bed and shivered. He disliked being naked as a rule (why he was willing to pay four-hundred dollars for a procedure to which nakedness was more-or-less essential is a question for the sociologists): it turned his imposing height into gangliness. "It wasn't worth it," he said as he fumbled for the money kept on his desk for this purpose.

"I know the feeling," said Marmalade irritably, neglecting her accent.

"Clear out." He tossed a wad at her with vehemence.

"I have to get dressed!"

"Do it in the toilet."

She sighed, got out of the bed, and switched on the lights. For all that her naked body, besides being the sort to which the poets and rock-and-roll stars of the human race have devoted too many fine words to justify me any adding some more, was entirely natural and just went to show what comes of a healthy diet and frequent exercise, the sight of it did not arose Jonathan so much as a fully-clothed and icy secretary of even moderate beauty would have: some mixture of gnawing guilt, distractedness, and excessive familiarity was the reason. He occupied himself in gathering up his own clothes from the floor.

"This is disgusting!," said a voice from the bathroom as he wrestled with his underwear.

"Fuck off back to Russia!"

"Ukraine!"

"Fuck off!"

He slumped on the bed, stared at the ceiling of his office, and listened to the receding sound of some exceedingly high heels. He was alone, for a little while at least. When he was alone, he felt less profoundly lonely.

But now it was no good. The ceiling was too large and bright, so he turned over, and found the pillow too dark and mysterious. A nagging voice - like his own, but not quite his own, belonging to his younger, better self, or to his conscience, or possibly to his mother - kept asking him how long it had been since he'd talked to someone he didn't, in one way or another, employ. He urged silence on the voice, but it took no heed: it wondered aloud where Marmalade had gone, and whether she was sparing him a thought; it speculated about these distant countries which he had never visited even though their citizens had almost certainly contributed to his fortune, Russia and Ukraine and - where had that other girl come from? Morocco! He hadn't been able to remember until now, and now he was assailed with memories. He remembered New England: the green fields, and stone walls, and the thundering green field of the Atlantic walled in by the little towns where he had spent his childhood. He had visions - wildly inaccurate, the dutiful narrator must record - of Russian, Ukrainian, Moroccan childhoods, and the hopes they nurtured, and the memories they left to torment their exiled children years later, in other countries, their hopes betrayed. And had he, who had ended up on top of them in the same soiled bed, done any better?

This was not the first such episode, though it was the most intense to date, and it would have ended as they all did - drowned in an artisan vodka that was, with an irony Jonathan might have appreciated had he ever noticed, Ukrainian - had it not been for one of those inexplicable farts of the vast digestive system of the universe.

It is necessary here to draw back the all-seeing narrative eye from Jonathan's office on the 567th floor of the LifeSunTechGrowLife Industries Building and cast it a short distance into the past. There we can view a sum of money orders of magnitude than that paid to the long-suffering Marmalade as it is transferred from the accounts of LifeSunTechGrowLife Industries to a gentleman with the rather absurd name of Athanasius McGill, an utterly trustworthy person, who pools it with even more money and distributes the whole to representatives and senators of the great United States.

As a result of all this, reality was altered in a small but important respect. After all, the United States government is certainly the most powerful institution ever constructed by humans, and if they can't alter the universe, who the hell can, I ask you? They have the power to legislate that green is blue and so it shall be. This explains a great deal. And if, a mere author of frivolous fiction, can cause such a person as Jonathan Bracejaw to exist, then the United States government can by the same means as me create whole categories of person.

The United States government declared that LifeSunTechGrowth Industries was as much a person as Athanasius McGill and Jonathan Bracejaw and Marmalade - possibly moreso than her, in fact. And so it was.

Now, we skip ahead again, to where we left Jonathan deep in introspection, guilt, and self-confrontation. By an astonishing coincidence, it was just as he made a heartfelt appeal to whatever higher power his battered soul believed in for company that the bill which he had a part in creating was passed into law, and caused his cry to be heeded in a highly - even an excessively - literal fashion.

There was a brisk knock at the door.

'Mr. Bracejaw, sir?'

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.

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.

A.B.S.T, Ch3

Tractor-production in the Kharkov district is up 300%! We have surpassed Japan in per-capita steel-production! Potato reserves have doubled! Nothing can halt the progress of the seven-day plan!

And while we're in a Russian mood: mushrooms! Is there anything they can't do? Certainly they are the centrepiece of the word-kitchen's Mushroom Watsits (not many people know that!). Buy a supermarket pack of big mushrooms, choosing ones with a nice large internal cavity. Take a medium-sized eating potato per mushroom, peel them, and dice them finely; then pre-boil for a short spell, and at the same time pre-fry a couple of bacon rashers in their juice. When the potatoes are al-dente, drain them and put them back in the pan on a low heat. Spoon in enough herb-and-onion soft-cheese to coat all the potato-bits nice and evenly as it melts, then spoon the mixture into the mushrooms, top with snipped bacon, place in an oven-proof dish, and drizzle in olive-oil. Stick in the oven at about 200 degrees for twenty minutes.




A book-smuggler's tale, chapter 3

When my memory regained its grip on the situation, I felt as though I was stirring from several centuries of a sleep that made death seem but a shallow snooze, like an ancient king under the mountains. In fact, it was the next morning, and I was resting not on a slab of cavern-stone but on a comfortable though unfamiliar sofa.

I lay there for I don't know how long, attempting to construct an accurate historical record from my scant sources, and after much racking of my brains (doubly cruel, since they were badly injured to begin with) I thought I had the general outline. There had been a police cart involved, but I didn't appear to be under arrest. This seemed grounds enough for relief and satisfaction. Now for step two: establishing contact with civilisation.

"Hello?," I said cautiously to the ceiling.

"Ottokar!"

In swept Jan, clad in a dressing gown.

"Excuse the improper clothes. Christian is still asleep and reeks of the demon drink."

"Am I in your home?"

"We rent it."

I took a proper look around. I was in one room of a two-room flat that seemed too small for all that it contained: the affects of two young men, both of them fascinating, busy, and incurably messy. There were tottering stacks of papers, shelves covered in all the strange detritus their lives had swept up, and unwashed cups and plates balancing precariously on every corner. The walls were peeling where they were visible at all, but some of the furnishings - an old chair in the corner, a coffee-table, the sofa of my repose, and an inexplicable Greek urn - had an unmistakable, incongruous grandeur about them in spite of their stains and the heaps of... stuff that covered them (the urn appeared to contain biscuits). Dusty light peered in cautiously from the other room, the one from which Jan had emerged. The roof was viciously sloped and very nearly got me on the head as I stood up.

"Hope you slept well."

"Better than I might have expected, to be honest."

"That sofa is unreasonably soft, would you not agree? My old dad's. It was murder getting it up here, but absolutely worth it!" He collapsed onto it as I searched the drifts of discarded miscellania on the floor for my coat, cap, and bag.

"Yes, I think I can spot what used to be your father's," I said with a wry smile. "Where does he live?" I felt falling unconscious in someone's company must break some down barriers.

"In the Alsergrund, near..."

"In Vienna?"

"But of course in Vienna! Do I look like a descendant of barbarians?"

My curiosity was aroused: so Jan's father lived in what was, to judge by his sofa, a respectable townhouse - why, then, was his son, who showed no evidence of real poverty, sharing one room of an inoffensively squalid attic flat in... in...

"...Where am I?"

"Thirty-six Spittelbergasse, attic room on the left," said Christian, entering. He too was in his dressing-gown, but seemed - as he always did on waking - to be fully in possession of his faculties. "Welcome to our most humble abode, Ottokar. A location for which the imperial authorities search in vain."

"Ah!," I lit up at this apparent explanation, "So you stay here to... evade detection?"

Christian raised his eyebrows: this was his default response to nearly eveything.

"What on Earth are you talking about? The imperial authorities couldn't detect His Majesty's arse with both hands."

"Well, I thought Jan had quite a bit of money..."

"So I do, so I do, but this is home! There's more to a home, Ottokar, than wasted space and fancy curtains."

"Yes," I said doggedly, "But surely you can afford somewhere where you could live in humble piety and still stand up completely straight?" I nursed my head.

The duo exchanged glances.

"Well..."

"That's technically true..."

"It's the company, you know."

"Local colour."

"And Madam Gottlieb is a very excellent landlady. Liberal in her politics. Tolerant of a spot of antics, you know?," Jan said.

I nodded. I could do with a residence where a bit of 'antics' could pass unremarked myself...

"Anyway, when's your lecture?," asked Christian.

I jerked up as though electrocuted, that particular fragment of yesterday's memories suddenly returning - but the clock showed plenty of time before the lecture was to begin, at one. I inwardly chuckled at myself. Of course you haven't slept that late... I was rather new to this business of being irresponsible!

"Not for a bit. Your landlady's a liberal, is she? Any socialist tendencies? If her lodgers drag home a drunk, does she give him breakfast?"

"I fear there's only one way to find out," said Christian, "Stay here for a second, we must get dressed."

They retreated to the other room, and I surveyed more closely the one in which they left me. The centre of existence appeared to be the coffee-table: the further I went from it, the thicker and more ancient the mess became. I couldn't resist a glance over the topmost sheets of paper piled there: this one, in a cramped Hebraic hand, lectured me about German legal history that largely went over my head; that one, a graceful cursive addressed from Schloss Hoyerswerda, Styria, thanked our dear son for his very timely gift of [here it was obscured by a Balzac novel lying open on its spine]; another one said cryptically: 'Goethe: #3 off. Stunk. #4 yours for fortnight. No antics. -Stańczyk'.

At this point Jan and Christian emerged, making running adjustments to their hair, in their usual combination of smart coats and tatty everything else. We left, locking their creaky little door from out in one of those dusty, angular little spaces that hide in large and rickety buildings. Another door faced theirs, tight shut.

"Morning, Herr Kaestner!"

"Go to hell, Oberkirch!", said a disembodied voice that presumably came from within.

"Bye, Herr Kaestner!"

We clambered down wooden stairs. There should really have been a ladder, but perhaps climbing stairs to get there made living in an attic more socially acceptable. The descent was a little hair-raising for the first flight, but we reached slightly firmer ground below. At the bottom of another three flights (how high could you build a place like this?), we emerged into a moderately sized room that gave me an immediate impression of dead flowers in dry vases, the smell of a thousand bygone dinners made from the remains of even more bygone dinners, and sunlight: the windows alone were immaculate. This room was dominated by a long table, inhabited but sparsely by one of those old women who by some secret of bearing remind you that they have been young women, whom I took to be Madam Gottlieb; a large newspaper held by a pair of feminine hands; and a dark and silent man who had that unsettling property of being almost entirely forgettable.

"Good morning to all!," exclaimed Jan, suddenly seeming to come fully awake. He snatched the chair opposite the newspaper and dived onto it. "Good morning, Miss Reiniger! I am so sorry to have missed dinner, but I had to show this young student around some of our city's more obscure charms." He turned to me, addressed me as a tour-guide might. "Here, Ottokar, is the dining room of the best lodging house in Vienna. This is our landlady Madam Gottlieb, a living myth of kindness and generosity, and this is Frieda Reiniger, who I should say is more charming than anything else we have seen so far!" He winked very unsubtly at the newspaper, which stayed where it was. "And that's, ah, Mr. Winkel."

The newspaper lowered momentarily, revealing a girl with hard but handsome features and a resigned expression and straw-blond hair. She smiled dutifully at me and returned to her reading without a word.

"Madam Gottlieb," said Christian, settling himself down as well, "would it be terribly bold of us to ask if Ottokar can enjoy some remnants of breakfast? He has a lecture to be at soon. It would be cruel to force anyone to undergo an education on an empty stomach."

"Certainly. What are you a student of, young man?"

"Slavic philology." I sat down and helped myself to some crispy bread.

"Ah, something a little out of the usual. I have students in and out of my rooms all the time, but I'll be glad to have a break from Hegel and Fichte. You'd think they were lodgers, this table talks about them so much. Where do you stay?"

"Oh...," I felt somehow embarrassed, even ashamed, and tried to hide it by speaking breezily "...With some people I'm half-related to. Most abominable type. The master of the house is a cultivated thug, bought his way up the ladder, and he keeps his place full of over-rich food and poisonous gossip."

I was a little surprised at my own faux-casual vehemence, but it seemed to go over well with my tiny audience: Madam Gottlieb nodded sagely, and the newspaper lowered itself a little. Both subjected me to further inquiries, and soon Jan and Christian were joining in as well. Only 'Mr. Winkel' stayed aloof: I suppose he must have got up and left, because at the end of the inquiry he was gone, but I was never aware of him moving - or aware of him at all.

I was pre-occupied with retracing my origins back through my father and my ill-remembered grandfather, back to the semi-mythical founder who, some time in the middle of the last century, had driven his wagon into Brno from the forested Slavic wilderness of Rural Parts. My soul had often strayed back to those dark lakes set in dark woods - sometimes taking my feet with it. After all, Brno was not half so big then. Neither was Vienna, come to that; but it felt as big as the world when I arrived there.

I was strangely content: I seemed to have found a place where my father and his work, my nationality, my studies - all the things that might have made me at best an object of interested disdain in my uncle's household - were accepted or even admired. On this happy note, we finished breakfast, said our goodbyes, and left.

The street outside was narrow and towering. Vines had been coaxed up the sides of rickety houses in a vain attempt to disguise their dirtiness; shabbily neo-classical windowframes peered down on us suspiciously; on the sharply-sloped roofs the pile snow seemed to be holding its breath before the plunge. Far above us I could make out the solitary little window of the attic room. Snow was thin on the ground between these high-stacked houses: scuffed by boots, it revealed long-suffering cobblestones.

All that could be seen in the distance was a jungle of similar houses poking their heads over those of their brethren, and far away a few of the city's famous spires. The street ran on a pronounced incline, and with every house it passed it bent a little, so that whichever way you looked its course was soon hidden from sight: I fancied it might have stretched on forever, one way up and the other down... At Number Nothing, Spittelberggasse, one might find Cerberus at the devil's door; and at Infinity Spittelberggasse, Saint Peter sat by the celestial gate! I smiled at the thought.

"We're in Neubau district," said Jan. "This is student country. You're safe here."

From the powers of heaven and hell, perhaps? "From my uncle, you mean?"

"That's up to you to decide", said Christian. I turned to him.

"Damn, though, what am I going to do about him? He's going to be getting my letters from home and everything. I wonder what he thinks has happened to me..."

"Any guardianship?," said Christian nonchalantly.

"No, I'm glad to say."

"Spit in his eye and write home to change your address, then. Nothing he can do about it."

"...Damn."

"You can stay on with us, if you like. 'Conceal and shelter comrades from any hostile authority, whether imperial, educational, financial, female, or otherwise'."

"Smuggler's Code, 4(ii)," Jan chimed in, and extracted a cigar from somewhere. "Anyway, I already pay the rent."

"You'll stay kipping on the sofa, make no mistake, and you'll have to pay in for meals."

This was what I had been pretending, even to myself, that I wasn't hoping for. I made a relieved noise somewhere between a chuckle, a gasp, and a 'Thanks, chaps!'.

"No trouble at all. You're under our protection now, Ottokar. Vienna holds no perils for you!," said Jan.

"Except Jan, obviously."

"And Christian."

"And me, yes. Say, where's your lecture?"

"In the department building, in a little theatre there. There's not too many of us."

"Then here we must part," said Jan. "See you in Kaltenbrunner's, young novice, and tonight you shall be initiated!"

So part we did, and without friends alongside me the cold had more sting to it: it was a windy day, bitterly windy. The gale was from the east, and like the hordes of the steppes it came riding into town and forced the inhabitants to seek shelter and pray for its passing. It carried me along streets that were slippery were the packed snow had turned to ice.

As I approached the building I became aware, though my eyes were thoroughly focused on my feet, that the midwinter wind was carrying a few others into its doors with their scarves whipping above them and their hair blown across their faces - there was a definite trend towards hair that was, as mine, neck-length and a bit disorderly. Passing a pair of them, I heard what sounded something like my own language: Serbo-Croat, in fact. I hailed them, a little awkwardly at first, as Slavic brothers in our mutual language German, about which we had a chuckle. They were Radko Novik and Mutimir Stipanov from Dubrovnik, and knew eachother from school. I fell in with them: they were good-natured souls, infectiously enthusiastic for the subject.

We found the entrance to the theatre - a living room furnished to the purpose, still with stucco decorations on the ceiling - surrounded by a mess of students, chatting away in twos and threes and fours. These little knots were distinguished sometimes by accent or even language, but largely by cut of coat and shine of boot.

In dived Radko, shaking every hand and taking every name (I almost immediately forgot most of these, but he didn't). Soon he had separated all the national and social knots and gathered up a knot of his own: the rabble was well on its way to becoming an army. He showed a keen interest in anything other people had to say, which funnily enough always seemed to result in a conversation about a topic of his choosing. I thought that he was destined to be a politician; but he wasn't one yet, only a student like me, so I had nothing to hold against him. As everyone seemed to end up doing, I liked him.

When we were called into the theatre, I sat down by him somewhere in the middle. He immediately produced a notepad and hovered his pencil eagerly overly it, ready to pounce tiger-like at the first words from the stage and pin them helplessly on the paper; a predatory urgency glinted in his small round spectacles.

Through a back door and up to the lectern strode Andrzej Macebulski, on his way to some certain and important destination but deigning to stop here in Theatre B and impart to us some of his wisdom.

"Good morning. Most of you have met me already, so to business. The Slavic languages are a vast, an old, a fascinating subject. Let us establish firstly what they are..."

In ringing tones (most of his tones were ringing, whatever the context), he narrated their origins and history: narrated, because one felt that a voice and a style like his - simple, direct, precise, every word considered - would be an ideal voice for a storyteller: old village tales, the declamation of epics and chronicles, and all the rest of it. It was a powerful voice, and took such thorough command of the ear that every other sense was made subordinate to it: the hearer saw his words, felt and smelled and tasted them, and found himself transported to other places and other times.

I lost any sense of the passage of time back in the theatre and indeed any sense of anything else, with one exception: the scritch and scratch of many pencils, with their various pitches and tempoes, was heard distantly beneath all my fantastical visions.

When the professor finished, the student body rose with a surge - but not I. With quite a few others, Radko among them, I made my way across an abandoned waste of chairs to the lectern, where the professor sat himself down to take our questions. He would hold up his hand for silence after each one and take some time, a few seconds or half a minute, to formulate his answer; then his voice rang out again, and we scritched with our pencils.

When the rest had got their answers and gone, he turned to me. "Yes, ah... Ottokar?"

"I, uh, don't have a question, sir. I just wanted to take notes on your answers."

"Wise."

I grinned reflexively.

"You will be at the meeting this evening?"

"Of course, sir."

"Good. I have a job lined up for you." Then he gathered up his notes and said no more.

I trailed out into the snow to find a gaggle of classmates on the front steps being addressed by Radko, who was perched on the icy stone banister with a remarkable sense of balance. Balance is tied to the ear, isn't it? A discovery which might appear bizarre, but it has always seemed to me that talented listeners are also talented balancers, and here was evidence for the theory. It makes a strange kind of sense.

"Ah, Ottokar! I thought it would be awfully rotten of us all to go off without you." He went from sitting to standing without any apparent transition. "Do you know of a good warm place for a sip of coffee anywhere in this city?"

"I do, in fact." The knowledge strengthened still further my - quite unwarranted, but very enjoyable - sense of belonging there, belonging to the great city; and being commissioned as guide by my fellow-students and caught up in their chatter as I led them back along the way I had come gave me a sense of belonging among them, too.

We talked, naturally enough, about the professor, the work, the required reading - then about the city and our homes. There was a consensus among those with provincial origins that Vienna, for all its charms, stank to high heaven; I had never really noticed, myself. Brno at the time was called the 'Hapsburg Manchester'; growing up there, even on its edges, I had never been far from the smells of smoke and sulfur. For me, it was when the air was pure that it seemed full of an unfamiliar scent - a delicious one. I suppose I should be thankful for that.

We invaded Kaltenbrunner's in mass, and I wandered for a moment whether to stay with my new classmates or seek out Jan and Christian, but the dilemma didn't trouble me much: I was happily surprised to face it at all so soon after arriving, and it was resolved almost immediately when my new landlords emerged from the depths of the cafe to greet me.

"Good lecture?," asked Christian.

"Splendid." My classmates hovered back in rather embarrassing awe: a third-year! Was he talking to it?

"Myself and Jan are off home for some studying, so a vital initiation ritual is going to have to be rushed." He handed me a solitary key. "Take care of it. Just our door, not the front one, Madam Gottlieb's in charge of that. See you back there for dinner, seven o'clock."

"See you!"

I pocketed the key. "Those are the fellows I stay with," I said, and after a moment of incredulity the subject evaporated in the coffee-steam. We sat down to business: there were notes to be compared and points to be debated; there were books that would have to be bought for the lowest prices available, and native Viennese to cross-question on where to look for them; there were friends to be made, and a great deal to be smoked and drunk and eaten.


It was late in the afternoon when we started to dissolve and trudge our separate ways through the snow. Away from the constant coming and going of the main streets it was deep and soft, and I ploughed up a little furrow behind me. This criss-crossed with the trails of others. A bird, I thought, could look down and see all the myriad paths through Vienna that had been traced that day, a thousand lives caught in a still-picture. And in the night, they would all vanish under the new snow, and the slate would be clean for tomorrow...

I respectfully scraped the snow from my boots at the front door of Madam Gottlieb's, which stayed unlocked all through the day, but I still left a residual trail of meltwater up as far as the second floor. And then, my tracks vanished! I felt invisible.

Jan and Christian were deep in their study of the law.

"Ah, Ottokar. Jan, we should vacate the sofa. It is his bed now, after all."

"Thanks, chaps!"

I hopped onto it, and silence descended, as it naturally will when three people are busy and comfortable. I finished up my work; but my pen refused to halt, and started to tell the story of a man wandering a nameless but rather Viennese city. He was following tracks in the snow, and somehow he... remembered a little about whoever's tracks they were - but whenever two trails crossed, he switched to the new one and began to trace another story, sometimes forwards and sometimes backwards. And then it began to snow (I think it did outside our window, as well), and soon the footprints were vanishing. And who am I?, thought my nameless protagonist; and he turned and set off briskly back up his own trail, to find out.

There the story at last let me finish, and I went back over to fiddle with it until I was satisfied. Had dinnertime not arrived, I don't think I ever would have been.


We descended for dinner in our student dress: it was a uniform for much of the company. Madam Gottlieb's boarding house had rather more people signed on for dinner than for rooms, and round her table there gathered a curious little sample of the Viennese.

There was Frieda, a ward of Madam Gottlieb's whose father had been killed in the Italian war when she was a child, as she told me matter-of-factly in between Jan's incessant and fruitless attempts at flirting; there was Rudolf von Weilheim, the Poorest Aristocrat in Germany, an amiable and supremely lazy young man well-liked by my mentors, though Christian seemed to quietly envy his position as PAiG; there was Herr Kaestner, whom everybody took great care not to call a ticket-of-leave man, convicted of some unknown crime; there was Herr Winkel, about whom nothing whatever was known; there was the manager of a shabby little theatre; a a haggard city doctor who looked older than any 26-year-old I have met before or since; a retired butcher who liked to quote the works of Shakespeare. The rest, strange and individual stories though they all could tell, could be divided at a glance into students and prostitutes.

It was the kind of dinner table, in fact, that you will find in any city - though never quite the same - where the people who have dropped into cracks somewhere in the recognised social order gather to chew on Tafelspitzen among their own kind. The talk was jaunty and swift, street-calls and student witticisms batted across the table like tennis-balls; the stewed pears were a little aged but tasty, if you were willing to pay the extra kreuzers for them, and the beer was rich.

After dinner, the diners floated away or upstairs one by one, while others settled down with their drinks, cigars, papers, and conversations. I would have liked to stay; but Jan, Christian, and I stole upstairs together to don our coats not long after nine. It was time for the newly-conceived 'Sts.Cyril and Methodius' to have his initiation as a book-smuggler.



Author's note:

Hum. Same people, same stuff. I can't say much except that that will be the case for a while. Well, I could note that Spittelbergasse is more-or-less real. Mine is bendier.

The seven-day plan (A book-smuggler's tale, Ch1)

Scenes from the word-kitchen:



If you don't find this funny, please write and tell us why not.

I was disposing of my potatoes, of whatever peculiar shape, in order to create pork-chop three-decker. It's very easy: brush the chops all over with olive-oil, stick in the grill for about four minutes each side, and while you're at it slice some veggies and cheese. Take the chops out, brush with pesto on top, add the veggies and cheese, pop back in the grill for a couple of minutes, and serve with spare veggies and salad.

'Veggies and cheese' is a variable in the equation. You could use gorgonzola and tomatoes - if you were some sort of wealthy but depraved European sense-freak. Some of us, however a) need to use whatever's in the fridge to dispose of pork-chops before they go funny and b) BACK BRITAIN, so I used tatties and cheddar grown by the sweat of honest brows. Like so:




On the matter of putting stuff to use before it shows its age excessively: long, long ago, back when I was young, fresh as grass, and innocent, I started to work on a story. Well, that makes it sound like a discrete event, which it wasn't: several strands came gradually together in a rope. Things changed and changed again, and my obsessive-compulsive redrafting disorder didn't improve things on that score. I wasn't sure what the story was about or why I was writing it; but for the first time I had a real sense the the characters were growing and thinking for themselves, and so whatever it is I have a lasting affection for it.

And I still haven't bloody well finished it! What a productive person I am. But perhaps polishing and publishing the existing chapters here will help me get it back on the rails. And to ensure that I am still in the business of creating something a bit more intellectual than pork slathered in cheese, I will publish it with exclusive authorial commentary.

What's more: daily! Can it be done? Well, sacrifices must be made. People will go hungry. People will go cold. People will be made destitute. Some civil rights will have to be suspended. And yes, people will die. But I think it can be done.

So, comrades, onward with the seven-day plan! On to:


A book-smuggler's tale, Chapter 1


Where to begin, where to begin? With Vienna!: the city of emperors, artists, warriors, kings, saints, scholars, sieging sultans! A city of old streets and long memories, deeds heroic and villainous! A city of fate: for here, not long ago, the most powerful men in Europe had gambled with the fates of millions - and here, too, my own fate was to be decided. To a boy who had never before left his native province, it seemed on that evening at the chill and dark beginning of 1857 to be the center of the universe.

I remembered to step off the train, but that done I could only stand where I was, transfixed by the ghostly silhouette of the St. Stephens cathedral above me. Passengers jostled past, but I stayed with my boots buried in the snow that lay thickly on the platform, and soon I was alone. I don't know how long I lingered there in the shadow of the city; it was the numbness spreading out from the edges of my being that at last prompted me to set off, but I kept staring up at the spires and so staggered unseeingly along as if I were drunk. In a way, I was.

The whole city was like a deserted house: silent, still, and shrouded with white sheets. I, drifting along the narrow streets, felt no more substantial than a snowflake: had I been any more light-headed, any tinier in comparison to the great metropolis, the wind might have carried me away.

I suppose I must have been following the directions I had been given before I left home, but any memory of consulting signs or haranguing natives, such as were out of doors at this hour, has vanished: all that remains is an awed boy wandering alone through the snow and the history, lost in some dream of the past and the future. As with all the best dreams, the dull parts I have forgotten - up to a point. The parts just after I found my way to the address where I was to stay were among the dullest; but I regret that they are necessary to make some sense of my narrative.

It was a fine house, viewed from the outside: it had been built in the 80s of the previous century, making one think of Mozart, and was picked out by highlights of driven snow glowing silver in the moonlight; the windows had the yellowy glow of hospitality. But I felt rather nervous as I knocked: how could I feel otherwise? There was warmth and good cheer and the unmistakable scent of wealth inside, while there I stood shivering on the doorstep with snow in my hair and snow on my boots, all that I owned of the world in the battered trunk beside me, not knowing a soul inside. I felt like a stranger, even an intruder. The low boom of iron on oak did nothing to assure me.

It seemed to take a long time for the door to creak aside and reveal, anticlimactically, a footman looking put-upon. He peered at me quizzically, which seemed to confirm all my anxieties; my voice, when I spoke, sounded cracked and odd.

"I'm Ottokar Jánkovač...?"

"Ah. Yes. Sir." I felt there was something fundamentally false about any 'sir' addressed by man so overdressed as he to a bedraggled youth dripping on his threshold.

He bundled me through the hall and folded me into a chair; I staunchly resisted his efforts to relieve me of my trunk, which he seemed to take as an insult. On the positive side, it was a comfortable chair, and I soon found a mug of cocoa thrust grudgingly into my ready fingers. I let its warmth restore them to life before lifting it to my lips, which were almost frozen shut, and taking a hearty gulp. A draft of fire spread to every part of my body: my toes waggled; my brain started out of its stupor; the frosty haze fell from my eyes, and I became aware of where I was.

The hall was crowded, too crowded for me to gain any sense of the room itself, but no-one lingered there for long: it was all coming, going, hurried introductions, drawn-out goodbyes, urgent enquiries as to whether the Countess This could spare a moment to speak to the Baron That. What conversation flourished in this harsh climate was of that hardiest, ugliest species, gossip - though I did overhear two rustic-looking gentlemen, both drunk, who were speaking heatedly about gardening. I rather liked these thoroughly German types with their puffy red faces and callused red hands, but gardening, I'm afraid, has never been something I feel heated about, or feel anything about.

It took the hostess a while to find time for me. She was my aunt, but may not have remembered this fact: for my part I had until recently been scarcely aware of her existence. She found me in that advanced state of exhaustion wherein every muscle falls slack, crumpled over the chair like an empty set of clothes. She, I saw from the first glance, was almost a caricature of the weary Society wife: her straw-blond hair had lost any healthy glint long ago, which made obvious the first hints of grey amongst its braided, bundled strands. Under its excessive paint, her face was tired, worn, and lined. I could hardly imagine her bothering much about me; but she seemed to have some motherly instinct towards this damp young interloper, born perhaps from family resemblance, although I look much less like her sister than like my father - with whom my aunt, I gather, had never got on.

"Good evening, ah..."

I floundered. What to call her? We had never met: first names would have been as false as the footman's nearly-scornful 'sir'. But there seemed something wrong about calling one's flesh and blood by somebody else's surname, and something equally wrong with calling her simply 'aunt' before such an audience of great men - rich men, anyway, and men who would be great, and men who would be rich.

I settled for "...Good evening. I'm sorry if I'm intruding."

"Good evening, Mr. Jánkovač. I'm sure it's quite all right. I'm just a little busy now, but do let me show you where you'll stay. My husband will be up to speak to you as soon as he can."

We spoke German. Did she remember her own language?

I rose with an effort, took up my trunk, and shuffled along behind her. The crowd buffeted me, drove me off-course: I navigated between whirlpools of idle chatter, through winds made up of voices that pretended to be hushed as they announced the secrets of others. Affairs, dances, duels, and dowries formed a haze that obscured any strong personalities among the speakers or their subjects: everything became a gaudy blur.

I thought of a messenger riding into the palace late at night amidst drunken revelry with news of some far-off calamity, shivering and unheeded; of the old Polish tale of the jester Stańczyk sitting and brooding, the only one in the debauched court troubled by news of battles in the east. My boots made snowmelt footprints where they fell.

I found myself deposited in a dark little room above the party or soirée or whatever it was: it contained a bed and a desk that were almost touching, and was covered with a layer of dust worthy of some ancient barrow-tomb from which clouds blew up whenever anything moved, all made visible by a single feeble paraffin lamp.

I sat on the bed for I don't how long, thawing, knowing I should do something but again and again deferring it for just another second. But as my eyes adapted from the glitter of the rest of the house to the gentle lamplight, I saw that on all the walls were shelf after shelf of books, heavy and old.

Paper, I've always thought, ages much as people do, shrinking and wrinkling and going a slightly funny colour; I like to think of old books as ancient sages, withered and wise, like the oldest monk in the monastery who remembers long-gone kings and armies and legends. Books as old as these might almost have been copied out by such a monk... I took up the lamp and explored the little library reverentially, as though I were in a silent cathedral.

The books weren't as old as they had seemed to me in my excitement: all books that have been read much, I suppose, look old. These came mostly from Napoleon's time, and there was no scheme to them: there were diaries and ledgers along with history, biography, fiction, and at least one book of music. There also seemed to be a great many books about gardening, but somehow these did not rob the place of its temple-like quality.

What did was the entrance of my uncle. All my nerves jarred when he thrust open the door: he might have been a Vandal breaking into my little monastery, come to plunder the relics and burn the books. He certainly had a barbarian build: he was a strong, four-cornered man - perhaps it's prejudice, but I think that had we been in China I'd have known him for a German nonetheless - and I'll admit that I disliked him when first he met my eyes. I need not be ashamed of that: my instincts was entirely correct.

"Good evening, Ottokar," he said stiffly.

"Good evening, Herr Eferding." There seemed nothing wrong with this form of address: I'd be damned if he was any flesh and blood of mine.

"Settling in well, are you?"

"Yes."

"Forgive the dust."

"Yes."

"Do feel free to make it yours."

"Of course."

"I say... you look tired. Have you eaten?"

I was tempted to end this absurd attempt at friendly conversation by answering 'yes', but my stomach rose in revolt.

"Not since lunch."

"Do come down, do come down. You can join in with dinner, there's places to spare, not everybody's been able to come... and if you are to live in Vienna, you must know people."

Knowing People, I guessed and rightly, was most of Herr Eferding's work: a profitable occupation, but requiring a capital of time and cunning as well as money. Going from what I had gleaned from my father, Eferding (or his father, or somebody) had made his modest fortune in, what was it?, pots and pans, I think, some clattery maufacture - and, well, those were the days when money couldn't quite speak for itself: a place in the highest circles could not be outright bought. Once your frying-pan maker could afford a splendid house in old Vienna, he was obliged to fill it with People, and Know them, if he wished for his children ever to escape the indignity of having a frying-pan maker for a father. And for a mother? A bourgeois girl from his provincial town (he was from my native Brno originally, or Brünn, as it was in his language), rescued from near-poverty by a pretty face, where her plainer sister had married a lowly clerk. A Czech, too, and so like any Czech only a few generations from the peasantry.

I'm not sure what Eferding made of the clerk's son. He was friendly enough: was a person of rank and wealth supposed to be friendly to their inferiors? To people like me, with no wealth and no rank, not even an inferior one? Even servants knew where they stood. I realised how far I was from the world I knew.

These reflections went on as I followed him downstairs. Dinner was beginning with an awful crowding and crush; I felt almost grateful for his bulkiness. I was assigned to one of his spare places, and there I spent the meal with my head down, nibbling at scraps. I could hardly bare to swallow anything: the air imparted to it a taste of smoke and sweat, and it was all abominably rich.

Hours must have heaved their fat bellies along. Course followed course. The wine was tolerable but I drank sparingly: there is no pleasure in getting drunk without friends.

At last, dessert! How did they force it all down? Long practice, I theorised, long stretching of the gut to its very limit. They must have been trained by their families from an early age: I thought the smooth red faces of the older guests had a perversely childlike quality. Those under a certain age, though, were pale, the women painted white as China plates.

The dinner dissolved itself into shifting conversational sands: dunes rose and fell as people were carried from place to place by the winds of rumour, and I, the lonely Bedouin, was lost in the swirl. I had just eased myself to my feet and resolved to go upstairs, to try to ignore the babble and read or sleep, when I had a chance encounter. There are several such encounters in this story, most of which change it for the better: Vienna, where the many corners of Austria's awkward shape are folded together, is a good place for chance encounters.

As I dodged towards the stairs, I heard a phrase escape from the noise around me with striking clarity: not only in its smooth bass tone, loud and assured, but also in the simplicity of its words. To say anything directly here was to overplay one's hand - for it was all a game, a game with very high stakes - but the speaker employed a remarkable bluntness.

"I'll tell you a secret. There's a charming young woman at this charming dinner who I'm planning to abduct," said his mysterious voice. I turned instinctively to identify it, feeling that natural urge to go towards something that strikes anyone caught uncertain in a crowd.

It was easy enough to locate the young man: he was slouched luxuriantly in a chair, contemplating the chandelier through the bottom of his glass with an expression of idle curiosity. His neck-length hair, from which no light escaped, seemed to have been carefully sculpted, his pointy mustache and goatee to have been painted on with a fine brush. The hand not occupied by the glass held a cigar, which like the fingers between which it was wedged, his mustache and beard, his mouth, eyes, arms, legs, words - everything about him - was long and narrow.

A young woman in the brightly-dyed and immodestly-cut evening dress of the decade was leaning over him, attempting to distract him from the spectacle of the chandelier without much success. "Pretty, is she?," she asked in what was probably intended as a whisper but was perfectly audible to me. In this world, I realised, it was not quiet that gave you secrecy but noise: the babble of others absorbed in their own intrigues.

"Why of course she's pretty! I could spend all evening describing her in elaborate metaphor and words ending in '-ic'. I might even resort to just making a few up! That is the hold that she has on my heart."

The young man took a puff on his cigar (it was most certainly a puff and not a drag): some magic of his demeanour turned the smoke from the industrial smog that filled the room into romantic sea mist.

I, for my part, was resolved to scorn this transparent cad and all his kind! ...And yet for some reason I hovered there, watching. Partly it was the guilty glee of evesdropping on an intimate conversation (who in the world can ignore the overheard phrase 'I'll tell you a secret'?), but partly it was that voice of his. It sounded very low coming from his slender mouth, and like a great river it flowed deep, smooth, slow, and sure to its destination. Yet I could hear a smile breaking through that last solemn, silly phrase, hinting at a keen appreciation of the absurd.

"Aren't you going to give me any hints?," asked the girl.

"Oh, she's unreasonably blonde. There ought to be a law! There's a law about dangerous drinks, a law about dangerous ideas, but no law about dangerously blonde young women. Shocking! Yes, and not to put too fine a point on it, she's leaning over me with that delightful expression girls have when they're pretending not to be excited. She does it especially well."

The young woman appeared satisfied that proceedings were speeding up. "But where will you take her?"

"That is an excellent question. To some secret dens of mine, I should think, charming places. Not out of the city, of course, that would be a real outrage! There is no city quite like Vienna-"

"Not even Paris? I thought I heard you speaking French earlier. Have you ever been there?"

"Ah, Paris!, Paris is all very well but it's no Vienna. You see, I'm a patriotic man - German true - and French girls aren't entirely to my taste. Swans is what they are, and madam!," he made a sudden movement of his cigar like a pantomime-villain about to slit a damsel's throat, "my taste is in eagles!"

In his melodramatic attitude, his head dropped back and I might have noticed that he was looking almost directly at me with his steely blue eyes; but I was too absorbed, too taken in by the show to care that the actor had noticed me. Had I registered the little raise of his eyebrows, I might have been more prepared for what came next:

"Right, that's settled, then, I'm abducting you. Be a good girl, run along and pack your bags, you can be abducted at noon, Monday, on the Graben. As long as you can pay the necessary expenses, of course. There's the cab fair, the..." He waved his cigar lazily in lieu of further running costs of seduction.

She gave him an incredulous stare; he matched it. She gave him a haughty stare; he raised his eyebrows again.

"What, do I look like I'm made of money or something?"

Watching her storm off with thunderclouds gathering above her head, I was unprepared when he rounded on me. Flustered, I wiped the smile off my face and remembered to scorn him.

"Why, hello there, young fellow." I tried to open my mouth to reply; he took no notice. "You wear a shabby coat, and your hair has been snowed on: a very worthy uniform, I'm sure, but how did you manage to be let in wearing it?" He himself, I should mention, was wearing an impeccable set of... whatever it was that we had in 1857. There was definitely a bowtie involved, and shining boots. Frankly, he did look made of money

"Oh, I'm, the, ah, host's nephew. I've only, uh, just arrived. My name's Ottokar Jánkovač."

"Ah, exotic! Blown in from the land of the Slavs on a winter night... Say, you a student?"

"...I shall be, very soon..."

"Which dep- oh, sorry, quite forgot: I'm Johannes Dietrich Wilhelm Oberkirch here, but please, call me Jan. I do Law. And which department are you in?"

"Philosophy."

Having overcome my shock at being addressed at all, I spoke with a clipped correctness. I would even say it was a filed and colour-coded correctness, but 'Jan' didn't let that bother him: he met it with a dashing flick of his mouth upward and to the right that told of some secret joke on the world at large that he and I shared.

"You're not very at your ease, my good man. I think you're suspicious of this obvious scoundrel! Very wise. And I suspect you're not an enthusiast of over-rich dinners and over-fed guests, either?

This was the first time I was taken aback by his alliance of insight and directness, but was not to be the last. I made an affirmative gargle.

"My sympathies. It must be awfully tedious for you. I confess myself such an enthusiast but only, if you will, as the hunter is an enthusiast of the fox."

He wielded his cigar much as a stage-magician might wield his wand: in a flurry of flamboyant flourishes and twirls that punctuated his speech. It was somewhat mesmerising...

At this point another young man entered the scene, springing onto the arm of Jan's seat and balancing himself there in spite of his bulk: he was a giant, and shifted with a restless energy, seemed to chafe in the unnatural confines of his dinner-jacket. He had a bowl of nuts held securely in one of his large hands, and was chewing a mouthful urgently.

"Mission accomplished," he said. "Have a few, they're the salty ones. Now, did my eyes deceive me or did I see that girl you had your eye on go storming past and spitting venom?"

"I thought this young gentleman was in need of rescue, so I dismissed her. He's Ottokar Jánkovač. Philosophy boy, as you might guess from his hair, and just blown in from the Czech country!"

The newcomer noticed me for the first time. His own hair was the colour of good brandy: a rich brown with red stealing through it in the right light. Its curls spilled down around his stark features and nearly joined with a bristly mustache. He wore then an expression which, I would learn, he usually did: 'I've got better things to be doing', it said. He was strong, formidably strong, but shook my hand as though he were absently drying his own.

"Christian Graf von Hoyerswerda, pleased to meet you, young sir. And to give you an idea of my sincerity, I haven't said that to anyone else all night."

"So you're not really enjoying my uncle's hospitality?," I said with a weak smile.

"I wouldn't even grace it with the title. We're only here because - stop me if I go wrong, Jan - Jan's father, who is a banker of considerable means, knows a woman."

"Right so far, albiet a little vague."

"Shut up. This woman is married to a man who knew the Minister of Finance in school. This man's son..."

"His nephew. His nephew who he has raised from his early years."

"Does that matter?"

"If they're going to get married it certainly..."

"This man's nephew keeps rather conspicuously being seen at the theater with the daughter of the minister of finance, who is engaged to be married to a rich shit from Bremen. Said shit's mother..."

"His mother's half-sister."

"You didn't know what I was going to say! Perhaps I was talking about his mother."

"I knew perfectly well what you were going to say, and it would have been scandalous."

"Fine!" Christian threw up his hands in surrender. "To cut it short, Ottokar, we are here in Society on behalf of Jan's father with a mission to disrupt this... entertainment. Believe me, there is little which could drag me here besides the possibility of sowing chaos and confusion."

"You're another student, yes?"

"Oh, sorry, yes. I study Law. I'm from Styria."

"His family have a crumbling castle on the crags!," said Jan cheerily. "It's crumbling because they're hard-up, but it does look extremely romantic."

We were moving gradually but purposefully through the crowd, which moved everywhere and yet stay filled everywhere, like a sea: fish flitted obliviously back and forth; great social whales, glittering with gems, discoursed to shoals of lesser creatures; Jan and Christian advanced, shark-like, and I swam along with them like a pilot-fish.

"You know, Ottokar," said Christian, "I don't think you belong here. Rich coming from me, I know, but really, its a damn shame, you being stuck here."

"Quite. He's here against his will. 'Tis unjust, I say, unjust!"

"We could show you a place where you'd fit right in, if you'd like," said Christian, seeming to muse aloud.

I was rather startled by so abrupt an offer to 'show me' anywhere: I hadn't expected any such invitations so soon after my arrival, or from them, or in fact at all - but I wasn't complaining, and in fact made up my mind to accept. There was something strangely compelling about the pair of them, infiltrating Society to nibble at its meals while they mocked its foibles. Perhaps that was where court jesters came from in the Middle Ages?: destitute nobles and ambitious commoners who fed themselves with their sharp tongues. Let them laugh! While we eat at their expense, the joke's on them.

I tried to remind myself that Jan was a rake, but my heart wasn't in it. I have a habit of judging people by their smiles: a bad one, I suppose, but it seldom leads me far wrong. Jan's smile was too earnestly winning for a mere cad; and he kept the company of Christian, whose dour cynicism, I thought, could hardly be deceived when it came to character. It was easy to invent reasons to take up their proposal and dutifully repeat them to myself.

"I should certainly be up for that," I said, surprised at the keenness of my voice.

"Splend- Christian, enemy vessel hard to starboard!"

"Ottokar, does eleven o'clock, outside here, tomorrow suit you?," said Christian matter-of-factly.

"Let no time waste, hm?," I said.

"Quite."

"To be sure, it suits!"

"Then we must part." Christian gave me a hand and we shook again, hurriedly, before he at last responded to Jan's urgent arm-tugging. I decided to observe from afar: it was fascinating to watch them at work.

The 'enemy vessel' matched with eery precision my mental picture of a 'rich shit from Bremen', from his hair (combed to the consistency of wet grass) to his accent (nerve-janglingly northern) to his boots (blindingly polished) to his walk (a strut that thought all the world was a stain to be scuffed off them). He was monopolising a cocktail tray and a young woman with bad grace when Jan and Christian struck.

"You, sir!," exclaimed the former.

"We have not forgotten you, Herr Schacht."

Herr Schacht tried to open his mouth, but not quickly enough.

"Know, miss, that Herr Schacht is a lier and a scoundrel who's fortune comes from dubious building contracts!"

"His father's fortune, rather, for he does nothing but spend it."

"Do I know you gent-," spluttered Schacht.

"He is also illegitimate!"

"And very nearly drove my dear sister to suicide."

I wondered idly whether Christian had a sister as the merchant of Bremen rallied.

"Well, sirs, I have never met you before in my life, and your accusations are quite..."

"Do I take it you are challenging me to a duel?!"

"I will be your second, good Johannes."

At this point, I thought it wise to escape whatever catastrophe was coming.


Back in my room, I surreptitiously slipped out my copy of Erben's anthology of poems, Kytice, and held it to the lamp. Through the floor, the sounds of the party came to a chaotic crescendo and then abruptly drained away, like a battle. Continuing to listen with half an ear I heard, somewhere below, what sounded like a voice raised in accusation, batting aside the objections of some other voice too quiet to hear; then the exchange stopped, and footsteps approached. Some instinct told me to hide away my book. I wasn't sure whether it was strictly legal: you never knew, in those days.

Herr Eferding's knock shook the door in its frame. Admitting him, I saw in the clenching and unclenching of his fist and the tension of his muscles a barely-contained fury; a fury which longed to manifest itself in some act of brutality. He spoke in an affectedly paternal tone; under it, too, seethed rage.

"Ottokar."

"Sir?"

"Eat well?"

"Very well."

"My chef's French."

"Indeed."

Seeing that this battering-ram of small-talk would not break down my gate, he cut to the point.

"Ottokar. I... should hope not to see you associating with people like Johannes Oberkirch. He won't be welcome in this house again, and... I'd hate to see a young man like you falling in with villains like him."

"It was an awful shame, what happened." I wandered what had happened: it wasn't as though I had heard the police turning up. By the sound of it there had been a commotion and the women and some of the men had been alarmed and some things had been broken. People, I supposed, must have become un-Known.

"Yes. You understand what I'm saying?"

"Of course."

"I'm glad."

He didn't sound it, and slammed the door to on his way out with undiminished anger. I returned to the anthology of Erben and finished 'The Water-Goblin'. There was nothing left to do outside my own room, so I went to wash.

On my way, I passed across the dining room. A troop of the surly footmen were sweeping up broken glass and righting overturned chairs under the direction of my aunt. Hearing my approach, she started; but on recognising me she gave a weak smile. Feeling that it was the right thing to do, I tried to return it, and to hide my shock: her hair was disturbed from its careful arrangement, her face smarted, and her eyes had a little black about them.

I returned to my room. Soon I had given up on reading and lay on the rough, unfamiliar mattress and the cold pillow, willing myself to sleep. My dreams were troubled.



Author’s commentary

Welp, this is the start. It’s been through more iterations than anything else, partly because it’s been there for longest and as mentioned I have a crippling redraft complex; but partly because I have smoothed the edges of the characters and gotten more of a feel for the society of the time.

The narrator’s voice is balanced somewhere between his wide-eyed young self of the time and the older self writing it down, and the balance wobbles somewhat – not that his older self is so much less wide-eyed.

My biggest worry about the story overall is that I spend too much time just pottering about my setting before finding the plot. I’m warning you, there’s like, ten more chapters of this. But Jan and Christian in particular are just good old-fashioned fun to write for, the bastards.