The Edit Page 3

  “Well, I call it home.”

  “Yes. It’s what one would expect.”

  “Expect, Miss O’Brien?”

  “From a romantic. You are a romantic, aren’t you, Señor ____?”

  “I don’t know about that. Won’t you take a seat? A romantic? I pilot a boat. Many of your Irish countrymen do the same. If that is grounds for being romantic, I plead guilty.”

  “—”

  “Black tea, I assume, Miss O’Brien?”

  “Lovely. … Sorry if I put you off just then. About my second virginity and all. A way I have. Irritates the bejesus out of some of my friends.”

  “Not at all. Refreshing, really. Breaks the ice, so to speak.”

  “Very baronial, this fireplace.”

  “—”

  “And a fine lot of small statuary. This one in particular. She’s quite lovely. May I?”

  “Go ahead. She’s an indestructible old girl. I call her my Kreuzberg Venus.”

  “Like the Willendorf Venus. … This is real Stone Age, isn’t it? Not a reproduction?”

  “As a younger man, I had a certain fondness for archaeology. These little totems were being turned up quite often.”

  “Great-breasted with hips for birthing.”

  “—”

  “And this. I loved these snowy globes when I was growing up in Donegal. Not much actual snow there, you know.”

  “That’s from my youth.”

  “Vienna, isn’t it? The main cathedral. What’s it called?”

  “St. Stephan’s. The Steffl. You get around, Miss O’Brien.”

  “It’s been a long time since Donegal, Señor ____. I live in New York now. My writing takes me to out-of-the-way places. … All the fluttery snow when you turn it over. Lovely.”

  “Those next to it are Mayan.”

  “I thought so, Señor ____. Museum quality. Naughty you. I didn’t think private collectors could lay their hands on these anymore.”

  “I’ll just put the water on for tea, Miss O’Brien.”

  “This jaguar is fine work. But frightening, don’t you think? You don’t have any real pets?”

  “My life’s too erratic. I’m at sea a good deal, you know.”

  “Which I suppose brings us to the purpose of my visit.”

  “Just a moment. I can’t hear you very well from in here.”

  “Which I suppose brings us to the purpose of my visit!”

  “Yes. That’s good, then. Just let it steep for a moment. I quite understand your urge for good tea. It is one of the finer things in life. Not easy to come by here, either. I have a connection with a shop in ____. They send such extravagances as Darjeeling tea, marmalade, chutney, and wine at regular intervals.”

  “A cosmopolitan romantic.”

  “Just about ready. Lemon or milk?”

  “Oh, white, please.”

  “It’s from the goat.”

  “As it comes. About the sea—”

  “Yes. I do hate to disappoint such a cordial potential customer as yourself.”

  “They say you’re the best.”

  “Sufficient. But you see—”

  “And I need the best. It’s for my work. I’m a journalist.”

  “Here you are. It might remind you of home.”

  “Mmm. Good. Very. Smells like the bleeding heather in bloom.”

  “I do believe you’re doing a stagy Irish accent for me, now. But as I was saying—”

  “I know what you’re about to say. A rough idea, anyway. I’ve visited your boat. It seems in fine fiddle. I heard the reluctance in your voice over the phone. Perhaps it’s because I’m a woman. But I assure you, I’d be able to pull my own weight on board. My father and brothers are in the fisheries in Donegal. I grew up on boats smaller than yours in seas rougher than these.”

  “Exactly what is it we’re talking about?”

  “A story. Sportfishing in the region. Something very nitty-gritty for the big-fish crowd. It’s really undiscovered country for such things. The Keys and Baja—those are well known. Even the Bahamas. But I think we may have something new here.”

  “Exactly. And I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “The secret is to warm the pot before steeping. I believe you know that, Señor ___. An excellent cup of tea.”

  “—”

  “Yes. I quite understand your reluctance. Rather like cutting your own throat if you’re a real fisherman—giving away all the best fishing spots. But you’re in the charter trade, aren’t you? You should be glad of the potential increase in business an article like mine could mean for you. And besides, if you do the leading, you can lead me away from your personal favorite places. But there’s going to be an article, one way or another.”

  “—”

  “You don’t care much for the idea, Señor ____?”

  “I must confess that I have very little use for journalists or journalism. The constant preoccupation with turning the world into tidy stories is just another step in the trivialization of life, of the encapsulation of experience into neat frameworks and packages.”

  “You sound as if you speak from experience. Your desk there looks as though it’s used for something other than letter writing.”

  “I’m … assembling some thoughts, shall we say.”

  “Memoirs? At your tender age?”

  “The flattery is appreciated, Miss O’Brien, but I really must decline your offer. My physical reactions are no longer as good as they once were. I am beginning to feel my age. In actual fact, I shall soon be retiring from the charter business.”

  “I can hardly believe that, Señor ____. Perhaps you’ll let me read what you have sometime. I might be able to help. In an editorial way.”

  “Kind of you to suggest that. But they’re really nothing more than the rantings of an old sea dog who has seen too many ports in his day.”

  “You’re German, aren’t you, Señor ____? I mean your accent. It comes from somewhere in central Europe.”

  “—”

  “Sorry. It’s the snoop in me. None of my business.”

  “No. Not at all. Swiss, as a matter of fact. More tea?”

  (Conversation was interrupted by the tocking sound of liquid poured too quickly out of its container.)

  “I am sorry, Miss O’Brien.”

  “Don’t be. It’s washable. You will, won’t you? Hire out your boat, I mean. We get along so well. And I trust you somehow.”

  “Please do not tell me that I remind you of your father.”

  “In ways. But it’s more than that. Your manner. It’s so old world and solicitous. Gracious even. You don’t find that very often these days.”

  “More flattery.”

  “No. A statement of fact. Please don’t make me be insistent. I would hate you to think me stone-cold stubborn.”

  “I assure you, Miss O’Brien—”

  “See what I mean? Delicious! Miss O’Brien. When most men would be using my Christian name by now, Kate-ing me up and down.”

  “It’s hardly my prerogative.”

  “You’re quaint. Cute, too. Let’s do business. Come on, what do you say? It could be fun. You look as if you could use some fun.”

  She was right, of course. Fun is something as foreign to me as Swahili. Miss O’Brien is a good judge of people: She knows just where to press me. That I so readily agreed to her request for a charter—knowing full well that she could be a mortal threat—comes as a surprise to me.

  Now, after she has left, I sit at the trestle table I have set up as a writing desk by the windows, and I look at my jungle ravine. My mind will not stop spinning and churning. I must be going crazy, I tell myself. I am inviting disaster by allowing this Irish, this woman, this journalist aboard the Clan. Surely she is no more interested in big-game fishin
g than I am in needlepoint. There can be only one thing to lure a journalist into this otherwise sleepy part of the world, and that is the unstable political situation in our neighboring country and the traffic in arms and certain undefined parcels that such instability encourages.

  Surely Miss O’Brien is here to investigate charges of gunrunning from my neutral country. Surely it is that connection she is after. And just as surely, such searches will lead directly to my door. Does she already have such suspicions, or is her visit the purest coincidence? Never mind. These thoughts hold no particle of fear for me; rather it is a challenge. One I am happy to meet.

  At any rate, we have agreed to make an initial excursion on Tuesday. Meanwhile, I have transcribed these notes. It is near sunset now and a drink is in order. A schnapps, perhaps. I will contact Cordoba about the Irish. His friends at the Interior Ministry may be able to tell me something about Miss O’Brien. At the very least, they will have her visa information, her place of origin.

  Why do I bother with this; why not simply say no?

  A schnapps now. Whenever I begin to ask myself impossible questions, a schnapps is indicated. And then, after dinner, I will continue with my memoirs. I feel an unexplainable urgency; I need to get my story down on paper.

  After the birth of my sister, Maria, Father and I were thrown more and more together. Equally dispossessed of Mother’s love (she now had eyes and breasts only for the hungry baby), Father and I formed an orphan’s bond out of shared loneliness. As much as I hated losing Mother’s undivided attention, I am grateful that it happened. I was not destined to be a coddled mama’s boy as so many of my fellow Austrians are. It is the national curse. The Scots have bad spines, Parisians a tendency to consumption, Americans a sagging in the derriere—while we Austrians, most pitiable among the lot, are raised as pashas with our shirts boiled, our shoes shined, our lives planned by Mama. Which, outwardly, might seem a divine situation for the male: It appears that we have female slaves to tend to our every care. Yet, in reality, this is the grossest form of enslavement; in the end, man becomes the slave to woman, for we are made helpless by having always been taken care of. Any hope of independence from the cursed domination by women is thus kissed and soothed away from the very first instant Mama begins to hold her infant son. It is the same for all to women born.

  Freud, of course, was the most notable among the rest of us Austrians to fall prey to this tyranny simply because he whimpered about it most loudly. Could Oedipus have reared his pink head in any other hothouse climate but Vienna? Even Hitler, a product of the same Vienna as Freud, fell into the early trap of maternal tyranny, a frame of mind that no doubt affected him to the very last day of his life in the bunker far below the streets of Berlin, his lonely death: returning to the very womb of the earth while the youth of the nation were laying down their lives aboveground.

  But for helping me escape that fate, I am grateful to my sister, Maria, God rest her restless soul. She does not figure directly into my narrative at this point, else I would bring her stage center employing a full panoply of descriptive tools. No, Maria, die Süsse, comes later. Her arrival, and its saving grace, is what I speak of now.

  Maria threw me—dislodged me, actually—out of Mother’s lap and into the unwilling hands of Father, he who garnered the entire sugar ration for his own uses. But as I have implied earlier, his tyranny, his Franz Joseph paternalism, was on paper only. Mother saw through his bluster: Hadn’t Father’s own mother boiled his shirts for him? Wasn’t he a product of the same castrating society of which I speak? And thrown together more with Father, I was relieved of a second childhood threat: awe of the father, of the male, the hairy, virile competitor for the mother—to dress it in full Freudian regalia.

  It happened like this.

  It was a Saturday afternoon one unseasonably warm autumn day. No longer did we three spend the afternoon leaning against the window and laughing behind our hands at Herr Braunstein’s stained spats. It was now Father’s and my time to be out of the house together. Mother’s newest caveat: “I want one afternoon without the two of you moping about underfoot!”

  Father and I had stolen a Pyrrhic victory, claiming the time as ours to be together, men out on the town enjoying ourselves. This particular Saturday of which I write was that of my seventh birthday. Guglhupf would be served at dinner; a gift had already been presented to me after lunch: a Struwwelpeter storybook with illustrations ghastly enough to keep me from picking my nose or telling lies. I had left it in the apartment when Father and I went out for our stroll.

  He smoked a cigar on these walks. I do not recall him smoking at any other time, surely not in the flat anyway, for Mother was a positive demon about odors, throwing open the windows in the coldest of weather to air out the place after cooking. So much did Mother dislike Frau Wotruba smoking in our flat that I had to plead and cry and make a general nuisance of myself to stop her getting someone else—nonsmoking—to look after me when they went out.

  I was filled with a secret admiration for Father as he strolled, thumbs stuck in his vest pockets, his derby tilted far back on his head, the black-brown cigar jutting out of a corner of his mouth. I fantasized we were an engineer and his train: the jets of smoke trailing behind us were proof of our progress.

  Father stopped suddenly, gripping my arm as if he had just had a brilliant idea. “What about a glass of soda water, little friend?”

  It was his feeble way of suggesting we stop in the little park café in the Volksgarten near the Hofburg, city palace, to have a viertel of wine or two. I usually had a raspberry soda on such occasions and was thus agreeable to the proposal. We chose a table set among the fine pebbles of the café yard, directly under a magnificent old chestnut tree. Wind filtered through its leaves, sounding them like brittle wind chimes, and I watched the resulting lozenges of sunlight dance underneath the sheltering branches. Dappled sunlight caressed us. Father was weaving gossamer threads of cigar smoke above our heads and draining large draughts of wine from a chilled glass.

  The autumn day was still fine, and I wore the shiny gray lederhosen that were the Austrian national uniform for children in the summer. Father, ordering a second glass of wine, removed his heavy jacket and rolled up the sleeves on his white shirt (to which he had shed the constricting celluloid collar after he had come home for lunch). His forearms were massive. I remember them clearly—sinewy and thick as they rested against the tablecloth gaily embroidered with green bunches of grapes on the vine. His rough hands cupped the frosty glass of wine. His were the arms and hands of a laboring man, for that is what he had been for many years until working himself up to the position of foreman of his transport crew and began wearing ties to work. From track layer, he now directed other men in the laying and maintenance of track. Herr Wotruba and Father had been very good friends, both of them employed by the Municipal Transport Company. Hearing of Herr Wotruba’s death, Father could only shake his head in wonderment. It was not the mystery of death that Father could not accept, but the stupidity of the man for not having set his brakes securely. Father was a meticulous man in his work habits. To be run down by one’s own tram was not only a great tragedy, it was also bad form!

  “This is the life, no, son?” Sweat glistened on his brow. One bead broke away from the rest, traced a rivulet down his brow to his eyelashes where it hung suspended like a crystal in a ray of the mottled sunlight, then dropped gracefully to his cheek and slithered down his stubbly cheek and neck, and thence into his shirt.

  “Sitting here like proper kings on a Saturday, eh? What a life!”

  We were miserable. We both wanted to be back in the flat, at the window, surveying the world at arm’s length. Out in the midst of it as we were at this café, one was never quite secure enough of oneself to take stock of things.

  Father ordered another wine. It was more than I had seen him drink before. He made a joke of it with the waitress, about how he had worked up a thirs
t walking. She had a mole next to her mouth with one hair sprouting from it. She did not smile but asked if the child wanted another raspberry soda. I declined.

  After the wine arrived, we watched the passing scene in silence. The café was situated near a fountain that had partly clad maidens gripping enormous fish to their stone breasts, and out of the gaping mouths of the fish—carp, I believe—spouted heavy streams of water. This splashed and rippled into the fountain. Around these statues grew reeds as if in a marsh at Lake Neusiedl to the southeast of Vienna. In the spring, ramps were laid from the lip of the steep-sided fountain across the water to the base of the statues in the middle. Here baby ducks would practice their swimming under the tutelage of watchful hens. But the ramps were long gone now; soon, in fact, the water would be drained and wooden covers set in place over the entire fountain to protect the statues from the winter cold.

  I listened to the splash of water in the fountain and smelled the sweetness of the air.

  “There’s a fine figure,” Father said beneath his breath.

  I turned to see what he was looking at and saw three fine figures: a man, his wife, and their black standard poodle. I was unsure which figure Father had referred to. One had from them the immediate impression of wealth. It was not, however, the kind of wealth Herr Braunstein paraded; the couple made him look a hayseed by comparison. The man was wearing a moss-colored linen suit; his finely woven straw hat was floppy but elegant, not in the least bohemian; and his mustache was full and seemingly proud of itself the way it curled up on each side of his nose. One knew instantly that this fellow was from the best society; that he belonged probably to the fancy gambling clubs on Kaerntner­strasse; that he attended the trotting races at Freudenau; and that he most likely sent his male heir to the best gymnasium where he would learn from the best teachers and associate with only the best boys.

  The woman wore a dress of silk that shimmered in the sunlight as she walked. It clung to her curves and was cut daringly short at the knee. Her slightly bobbed blond hair was topped by a saucy yet elegant brimmed hat of a shiny blue material reminiscent of a duck’s back.