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.