A.B.S.T, Ch4

Oh, dear. Today I dined in a sannie-joint, so were I to give you my dinner's recipe I would be dragged in front of the courts and harshly sentenced. What can I do to avoid letting you down, good readers? I know! I will inform you that gypsy-punk act Gogol Bordello are super-whizz. And as I legally own that song - I had to give my soul to iTunes, but I wasn't doing anything with it - what I did just there, my lawyer assures me, was advertising and perfectly fine.

Anyway, the seven-day plan rolls on inexorably!

...Can things even be exorable? In Scots dialect at least there's couthie opposite uncouth, but I've never heard of exorable and neither has spell-check. Mind you, the cheeky bugger has heard of 'spellchecker' without the hyphen, so I suspect him of ulterior motives...

Anyway!

We slipped softly down the stairs - at least I did, for I couldn't resist a little superstitious stealth to suit the occasion. At the bottom, the boarders sat clustered round the stove, leaning back almost horizontally in chairs that were on the point of disintegration. Madam Gottlieb was poking at the logs, making them spark contentedly. On any other night I should have liked to sit down myself and stay; but tonight we entered silently, Christian communicating our business with only a tap on Madam Gottlieb's shoulder. Without a word, without looking up from the stove, she retrieved a pair of keys on a chain from some unknown recess of her dress - and we were gone.

Spittelberggasse was dark and deserted. The only light was the reflected silvery-blue of the moon on the snow; the only sounds were the wind, forced into a tunnel by the tall houses, and the whisperings of the skeletal trees that someone had planted in oversized clay pots along the foot of their facade: lashed cruelly by the wind, they shook and shivered and clawed at the wall, begging for shelter. Our scarves whipped up about our faces.

We moved along briskly, briskly enough to mandate silence. I longed to open fire with a barrage of questions, but had no notion of what the first one should be, or any of the others, come to that: I simply wanted to flap my tongue and in doing so realse some of the pressure of my curiosity, my nerves, and my excitement. But, not wanting to make a fool of myself, I kept quiet and let as much of it as I could in kicking through the snow.

We navigated a labyrinth of streets that all looked almost exactly like Spittelberggasse, as if they were all in on a conspiracy to confuse the night-time traveler - or at least the stranger who had no guides, but Jan and Christian knew their way. Perhaps, I thought giddily, the city liked to lead policemen astray down alleys which coiled like snakes and came out here one night and there the next... the notion gave me an absurd feeling of comfort.

Down these snow-smothered streets we stole, until we came to their abrupt end. That was the last year before the ring-road was built: there was still a wide, open expanse separating the new suburbs from the heart of Vienna in its old fortifications, outlined starkly against the night. We crept into the shadow of these bastions, along the interlocking paths that criss-crossed the empty park-land. In bygone years, besieging armies had pitched their tents on this ground; now it was covered in snow and seemed, after the angular claustrophobia of Neubau, as bleak as the tundra.

Succeeding where the armies of Islam had failed, we overcame the fortress and took the inner city. As if to thumb our noses at the imperial government, we passed right under the Palace of Hofburg. Did the Emperor glimpse us as he drew his bedroom curtains? (Franz Josef struck me as a man to draw his own bedroom curtains: whatever I thought of his administration, I rather liked him.) Pleasant to imagine so: the dramatic irony would be too delicious to pass up.

Beyond the palace, we wound our way through rows of squat wooden houses: they had survived fire and flood and the armies of the Sultan and Napoleon, twice each, but they were then just starting to give way to the architectural megalomania of the new Vienna. The snow was thicker here, and there was a squalid, anachronistic charm about the the place.

Then we moved forward to the 18th century near the Danube Canal, and here, for the first time in my life, I encountered streetlights. They were nothing but lamps strung on ropes in those days: the broken patterns in which their weird orange light fell on the snow were singularly eerie, and their light hid all the stars from view. I preferred the darkness, especially on a mission like ours. At the bottom of the canyon-like Seitenstettengasse, just as I reached an acute pitch of nervousness, our journey was suddenly at an end.

It hadn't taken us long: in the 1850s you had the run of any city outside perhaps London and Paris, if your boots were good and you didn't mind getting them dirty.

Our destination was an entirely unremarkable townhouse; I would have expected this, except that it was the city synagogue. Over in Leopoldstadt, the 'Jewish island', wondrous temples were just then flowering to accommodate the waves of migrants that were just starting to follow my path to Vienna from Prague and Poland and Hungary: temples that curled and coiled and, like their worshippers, belonged partly to Gothic Germany and partly to the mysterious east. But the Emperor Leopold himself had been a strident anti-semite (I thought the fate of his city-quarter served the hateful man quite right) and had decreed that in the old city, only Catholic churches could open onto the streets. Vienna's oldest and greatest synagogue was enclosed by houses on every side. It was a Temple of the Word, and it was invisible! How singularly appropriate, I mused...

Christian, predictably, raised his eyebrows.

"You're entirely sure you got the address right?"

"Entirely," said Jan.

"But... it's the synagogue."

"And? Nobody knows more about the power of the word than the Jews, Christian."

"...So are we supposed to just... knock?"

"I imagine so. Knock away."

"I mean, is that correct? It doesn't seem right."

I stayed out of this little debate, in which the outlines Jewish theology became a cover for 'You knock!', 'No, you knock!', and cast my eyes nervously up and down the street. I jumped when I heard a drift of snow slide lazily from someone's windowsill; I jumped again when I saw a man approaching at a fast and measured pace, like a steam engine, and shrank instinctively into the shadows. From there, I saw that it was Max 'Münchhausen' Eberstark, the violinist.

"Il Capitano, Goethe. Did you know that there's a boy hiding from you in the doorframe of the house of the Rabbi Kochmann? This is most impolite of him."

Ashamed, I shuffled out and tried to brush off any rabbinical curses I might have gotten on my coat.

"Oh, that's the new boy, Ottokar, remember?," said Jan. "Only call him Sts. Cyril and Methodius."

Max nodded, for which I was glad.

"Ah, Münchhausen, could you resolve something for us? Goethe thinks that it would be improper to knock on the door of the..."

"He's quite right. If a gentile should knock, his offending arm is torn off. By the Golem. We use it to make Matzos." Max knocked. "Of course you bloody knock. How do you think we take deliveries?"

I was a little in awe of Max, and his ability to out-Christian Christian in spite of being Jewish.

We were admitted into a large but plain cloakroom by a mousy student who's hair seemed to turn black, then brown, then black again as the light caught and lost it; his glasses flashed in synchrony. He had a banned book of his own in hand, with his finger stuck in at his page.

"Wipe your boots and keep everything else on," he told us matter-of-factly, "You'll be going out again soon. Ho, Goethe, who's this?"

"New boy."

He eyed me with curiosity or suspicion: it was hard to discern under those incessantly flickering spectacles.

"Münchhausen, you take the door, mhm? I'll show them in," he said after a while.

"Mhm," came the reply.

He led us deeper into the hidden temple: I was dimly aware of passing through a high, circular chamber in whose darkness polished metal and rich fabrics could be not so much seen as felt. We carried on, into those plain whitewashed corridors that run though houses of worship as through concert halls and theatres, behind the show: to pass through them is always to be let in on a secret.

Then we found ourselves below the level of the floor and in the dark. I ran my hand along the bare brick wall, so as to be sure that my senses detected something in these gloomy, empty passages; as we ventured on and down, I could feel it becoming rougher and damper.

We came at last to a cellar. It smelled strongly of wax: by the light of a single safety-lamp I could see box after box of candles stretching away out of sight. The dim shapes of men were crouched among them, knees bent, arms holding the edge of something in readiness to spring up: nobody was relaxed enough to make themselves comfortable.

We settled down amongst them and I glanced nervously about, anxious to take them in but not wanting to give the impression of peering. Their faces were largely hidden in shadow between their caps and their neckerchiefs: I recognised only Macebulski, dressed much as the students were but betrayed by his unmistakable beard.

We sat there for God knows how long. It wasn't long, I shouldn't think, but it felt like an eternity down in that cellar that was both claustrophobic and agoraphobic: for as we huddled, cramped, around our single dim light-source, I could sense a dark infinity beyond it. I was aware of a dripping noise somewhere, which did nothing to calm me.

In dripped smugglers, too: first Max, then more who I didn't recognise. After the fifth (making us eleven) and without any fanfare, Macebulski rose. There was a rustle: faces looked up at him and became half-visible.

"Firstly. Our thanks is due to the Rabbi Kochmann for hosting us, and Münchhausen for suggesting it. This is all gratis and the Rabbi is taking a considerable risk on our behalf, so I doubt he would be surprised to receive a series of small anonymous donations from friends of the Jews of-"

There was another shuffle.

"Not now. Later. You ought not to have much money in your pockets, it's risky. Secondly, our welcome to the newest of us, Sts. Cyril and Methodius."

I felt relieved: a barrier that separated me from the others had been lowered. There was a single collective glance in my direction, and after that I was no longer the subject of any funny looks. It seemed a very uncomplicated initiation - but the real test, unceremonious as it was, was on its way.

"Thirdly. We're here tonight because from where we're standing, it's barely a stone's throw to the Danube canal." This knowledge was not comforting, not when you could hear that maddeningly irregular yet maddeningly constant drip. "I recently reached an arrangement with a learned society in the University of Pest. Their manuscripts are being moved up the Danube by a former student and sympathiser who is an engineer in the steam-shipping company. We'll take them off and they'll be collected by a mutual friend for publication in the United States. They're light."

This revelation was clearly welcome to the smugglers, but they kept an attentive silence.

"Tonight, the Hunyadi János is docked on the Franz Josef Quay and the crew are ashore. The manuscripts are in a box under the floor of the engine room. Goethe and Sts. C&M will form the boarding party; Münchhausen will keep watch on deck; Cherusker and Junius west; Götz and Der Freischütz east; Lafayette, Il Capitano, and Andreas watch the streets. All clear? Hustle!"

With smooth motions and without words, everyone got to their feet and followed Christian and the safety-lamp to the door and thence to the surface. I let myself be carried along in the urgent mass-migration, at a loss: I felt like a man treading water in a swift river, now and again bobbing above the surface and seeing the shore go rushing away as best he can through his stinging eyes.

We scattered out into the night and turned away towards the Danube Canal. Each of us kept the furious pace, and whenever one quickened nervously, so did we all - though we never quite broke into a run.

The canal was unfrozen that year - that turned out to be a mercy - and so the still water reflected everything with near-perfection. In the clear air above and the clear water below, I could see two moons, two fields of stars, and two ships: the Hunyadi János was an ugly, boxy little craft, so dark with the residue of steam that its reflection was like a great black gap in the starry waters. Its lights were down, and in spite of the calmness of the night it was pitching and rolling and bumping restlessly against the quay, as though its sleep were troubled.

Our group spread out across their various stations: I was almost glad that my role was the decisive one, for otherwise I should have had no idea where to go.

Christian, Max, and I slowed to an ordinary walking pace as we hopped down onto the jetty. I didn't like its motion beneath me: I had never been off dry land, and as far as I was concerned, this was not dry land. Our boots were terribly loud on the planking.

I was the last to scramble aboard, and as I did, Christian spoke for the first time in the night:

"I hate boats."

"It's the rocking-," I started to agree; but Max cut me off.

"Shhht! Get below, sharpish!" We left him looking so shifty that I expected him to start hopping from one foot to the other.

The scents of soot and sweat assaulted my nostrils and made my eyes water as we clambered down through the vessel, ten time danker than the cellar had been.

"Right, 'C&M', you wouldn't know where they'll keep the engine on this bucket?"

"The back?"

"Thanks." I don't know if Christian was being sarcastic or sincere: his nerves made it impossible to tell.

But find it we eventually did. Its chamber was a mass of pipes and gauges, their meaning utterly foreign to me: I was afraid that by touching anything I should blow us all to smithereens, and so hovered uselessly for a moment before imitating Christian as he dropped to his knees and started tugging urgently at the planks. We soon found the loose ones and wrenched a couple free, releasing a smell that the first few circles of hell couldn't have topped. Undaunted, Christian vanished down the hole, taking the lamp with him.

"Watch the door for me," said his disembodied voice. "We'll carry the cargo between us when I've got it up it."

I stood above the hole for a while, hands in pockets, swivelling on the balls of my feet and trying to refrain from nervous humming. I glanced around: some of the gauges were juddering, and I felt this couldn't possibly be a good sign. I tried to ignore them and stay focused on the door (or the fore-hatch, if you're feeling nautical, which I decidedly was not), but this only made them appear to vibrate more frantically. They were driving me mad...

Christian made a noise that I can't begin to transcribe.

"There's bilge down here. If it's got to the books, someone will die. It could be me, or somebody else. We'll have to see how things unfold."

I made no reply: I had gone over to hide in the shadows by the door. I hadn't any idea how to go about ambushing interlopers, but at least there I couldn't see any of those infernal gauges - and they couldn't see me, either. That was what was so unsettling about them, I realised: those white spots in the dark were like eyes, watching me with disapproval.

Perhaps my mild paranoia was a blessing in disguise: it heightened the sensitivity of my eyes and ears, and I immediately detected the man entering through the after-hatch despite not having known, up to that point, that there was an after-hatch.

My first reaction was to freeze. A hundred options clamoured for my attention and I was too panicked to properly consider the merits of any of them - and at the same time, my mind was busy imagining all the horrible fates that might await me: Spielberg, the gallows, a soggy corpse floating down the Danube... Did I call out to Christian? Had he heard? Should I stay silent? Would he...

There was a glint of metal, moving in the dark. Shit.

I breathed heavily. There was no sign of Christian... Heavens, he was still down there in the dark and the bilge, back turned, with no way of knowing that we were discovered! I had to help the poor man! My flood of worries and speculations gave way to more powerful currants.

"Hoy!"

I left my hiding place with a little hop. It wasn't the most graceful or intimidating motion, but it served its purpose: my boots were loud on the boards. I awaited the worst.

The steely flash stopped and stayed where it was, motionless: silence, stillness.

Was my invisible adversary... afraid of me? It seemed absurd. But then, he couldn't see me. He had no idea who I was, and how afraid I was of him...

He said something in Hungarian ('Who's there?', but I had no idea of that at the time: even today, my Hungarian is abysmal), and then haltingly repeated it in German. I stayed silent and let my eyes adapt to the steamy darkness. The man who had inspired so much fear in me was a scrawny youth in a mariner's cap and a fraying coat, with a mop of hair that had been blonde once but had mopped one floor too many. The thing in his hand was a spanner: I was tremendously relieved by this discovery. I'd taken it for a gun, and now it lost some frightening magic. He couldn't kill me from where he stood: my stretched muscles relaxed, and I felt stronger.

Christian's head was poking up from the bilges, his eyebrows raised so high as to be lost altogether in his bedraggled hair. I tried in vain to communicate with him using only my mind.

"Hoy! Get back! Get back!"

I jumped forward again, stamping deliberately on the boards. I had shouted in Czech: a nervous mistake, but the foreign words probably added to what little frightfulness I could find in me. What certainly didn't was the way in which I held my arms wide like a boy at play, to preserve my balance against the boat's rocking and give them something to do. I hoped he couldn't see me.

The sailor backed slowly away from me for a few steps, then steadied himself and made a noise from somewhere in his throat. He shifted his grip on the spanner...

And at that moment Christian rose in one motion from the gap in the planking like a monster from the deep and grabbed the young man's neck in one bearish arm, taking care to cover his mouth so that we only heard the truncated beginning of his scream. With the other arm he snatched the spanner, and then he kicked the man's feet out from under him.

"Now! Let's establish a basis for negotiations! Spanner!"

He waved it in front of the sailor's face. With his matted hair, damp clothes, and wild eyes, Christian reminded me of the gruesome goblin that haunts Czech rivers in our tales, the Vodník: even friends were frightening in those mad and violent seconds.

"Max!," I called, "Max!"

"Shhhchchshhh! Spanner!" Christian glanced up. "Keep it down, C&M!"

Max entered through the fore-hatch; now, he practically was hopping from one foot to the other.

"What's happening? What's happening?!"

"Münchhausen, get down there and help C&M with the cargo! I'm negotiating safe passage. Spanner!
"

I took a deep breath and dropped into the bilges: there was a splash, the floor gave way a little, and for an instant I was more panicked than I had been all night, or in my life; but I regained my composure and cast about for the abandoned safety-lamp, which was visible as a sickly glow in the claggy bilgewater. I willed myself to be slow and thorough. You'll be out sooner that way...

Max dropped down behind me and hauled up the half-submerged trunk that was our target: he had good eyes for the dark, and surprising strength. I abandoned the lamp and helped him, and having dragged it clear, we fell panting beside it like rescuees from a shipwreck. Christian had knocked our captive cold, poor man...

"Is he alright?"

"He's fine. Move!"

Christian took the trunk from us in both arms as though it weighed nothing to him; and it was then that we heard someone (it was 'Lafayette') call out with a shrill and steady note:

"Police!"

"Move!
"

We piled out of the after-hatch, tripping over our own and one-another's feet - and the first things to confront us from the quay, mere metres distant, were the barking of dogs, and lamps swinging like searching eyes.

"C&M, can you swim?!," said Christian as his eyes flickered frantically to and fro.

"I used to dip in streams and never drowned!"

"I'll hold you up! Leave the trunk!"

Max had already wrenched off his boots and tied them about his neck with a hasty knot: now he swung smoothly over the side further from the quay and entered the water with barely a splash.

"We can't leave it! It'll point them to our engineer!"

"We-!"

"It's my fault we're in this foul mess, Christian, I sang out like a damn fool! Nobody else is going to go hang for me!"

I tossed the trunk over the side, and went limp and breathless from the sudden exertion. Christian heaved me up like a child.

"Son of a whore!," he cried, "Son of a pox-ridden whore!" But I think his cry was directed more at the men hurrying down the quay, and capricious Fate, than at me.

Boots still on us, we dropped into this stagnant branch of the great Danube! It was dirtier than I'd been hoping for.

I pulled my head clear of it, gasping desperately. My eyes were blind and stinging, all my muscles had frozen for a moment with the cold, and my boots were like the hands of a Vodník grasping at his victim. Of Max, there was no sign.

"Max! Ho, Max!," Christian shouted hoarsely, forgetting, as I had, our pseudonyms. "Max!"

Up Max splashed, hair dark with water and plastered across his forehead in strands as if a squid had caught ahold of him. He was shivering and choking uncontrollably: after several chokes, words escaped along with rancid canal water.

"Got her! Got her!"

He was kicking furiously at the water as it tried to drag him down, his arms struggling to bring the trunk to the surface.

"I can swim, Christian, let me help him!"

"Boots off!" As he made the command in paternal tones, Christian released me with one arm and used it to feel his way along the hull of the Hunyadi János. I kicked at one boot with the other: they were old and tatty and loose, and soon came free. I consigned them to a mariner's grave, and savoured my feeling of weightlessness.

"Here we are! Bottoms up!
"

I hefted the other end of the trunk, and Max and I trod water with it. I smiled weakly, and he returned it. Christian put his ear against the hull, and for the first time in minutes the world seemed to stop spinning.

"Shhhshsh! They're aboard. They've woken up our friend. Ah! They're going to check if anything's been stolen. Ha! Nothing they know of! We've even made them a gift, of our lamp! They should thank us! Haha! Let's swim to the Salztorg bridge, lads! Haha!"

He cast off, grinning like a lunatic. It was as if, having been wound so tight, he now had to run down: his swimming, mechanically regular but incredibly fast, furthered the impression of overwound clockwork. Max and I splished along behind him like scraps in the wake of a ship. I was glad it was dark: not only did this serve to protect us from any inquisitive eyes on shore, but when we reached our unseeable destination and bumped up against it, it came as a pleasant surprise. The black water had seemed to stretch on forever.

We clambered onto one of the bridge supports and sat together, pumping water from our lungs and silently rejoicing in our victory. Max was the first to speak.

"This had better be watertight," he said with a tap on the trunk.

"If it's not, well, it wasn't our idea to stow it in the bilge," said Christian. We all grinned stupidly, but I laid a protective hand on the trunk as well: I was troubled by the idea that all our effort might have been for nothing. And I hate a page of washed-out ink at the best of times: words that I might have read, gone forever...

There was a moment of silence: I felt somehow that it was my turn to speak.

"I'm sorry, chaps, I-"

"None of that!"

"You should've seen what Max did on his first run," said Christian, jerking his head.

I didn't believe a word of it; but I was happy. Sometimes it's better to be forgiven than to be innocent.

"I didn't walk straight at a man who could have knocked my brains out, calm as you like, that's for sure..."

Calm as you like?!

"...Or spare a thought for a man I didn't know when police dogs were barking at me. You're a damn brave man, Ottokar."

I didn't know what to think of that... Was I?

"I-"

"You got jumpy. So would anyone. We know for a fact you aren't a panicking coward. Quite the reverse." Christian squeezed rhythmically at his boots, which he had kept on, and they released more water than they looked able to hold. Max began to re-don his, his fingers working at the laces with remarkable agility and precision in the cold and dark.

"Ahoy!" Jan appeared, upside-down; his cultivatedly caddish hair went everywhere. "Mission successful?"

"How's Lafayette?," said Christian.

"Shook them off nice and easy up the Postgasse. We heard them coming back. He'll be in a warm bed soon. How are you?"

"Fine, fine. Wet. Heard them coming back?"

"We pretended to be drunks. They couldn't be bothered with us."

There were others with Jan: the whole lot of us, I realised as, as the boy who had met us at the door helped me up onto the bridge. 'Us': I felt another sudden, strange sense of comfort and contentment, despite my nerves and sodden clothes. They'd all come back for us, and the first thing Christian had done was to ask about Lafayette. We were... comrades. I'd never had comrades before.

There was a ragged cheer as we hoisted up the trunk and lifted it between four. I hopped down from the side of the bridge, and found that I was still weaker than I thought I was: my knees bent and I toppled over with a squelch.

"Good God, C&M, you haven't got boots!"

And before I could object two of the company, who I would come to know were Cherusker and Der Freischütz, lifted me between them and were carrying me away with the throng.

I wanted to see for myself the precious books; but before we had even reached the synagogue, I had fallen asleep on their shoulders.