The Hotel New Hampshire

bat; he was limping his blind way on the floor above us—he was visiting one of the whores.

“Which one does he see?” I asked.

“Old Billig,” said Susie the bear.

“The old for the old,” Franny said.

“It’s sort of sweet, I think,” Lilly said.

“I mean it’s Old Billig tonight,” said Susie the bear. “He must be tired.”

“He does it with all of them?” Frank said.

“Not Jolanta,” Susie said. “She scares him.”

“She scares me,” I said.

“And not Dark Inge, of course,” Susie said. “Freud can’t see her.”

It did not occur to me to visit the whores—one or all. Ronda Ray had not really been like them. With Ronda Ray, it was just sex with a fee attached; in Vienna, sex was a business. I could masturbate to my imagination of Jolanta; that was exciting enough. And for love … well, for love there was always my imagination of Franny. And in the late summer nights, there was also Fehlgeburt. Moby-Dick being such a monster of a reading experience, Fehlgeburt had taken to staying later in the evenings. Frank and I would walk her home. She rented a room in an ill-kept building behind the Rathaus, near the university, and she did not like crossing the Karntnerstrasse or the Graben alone at night, because she would occasionally be mistaken for a whore.

Anyone who mistook Fehlgeburt for a whore must have had a great imagination; she was so clearly a student. It was not that she wasn’t pretty, it was that her prettiness clearly wasn’t an issue—for her. What plain good looks she had—and she had them—she either suppressed or neglected. Her hair was straggly; on the rare occasions when it was clean, it was simply uncared for. She wore blue jeans and a turtleneck, or a T-shirt, and about her mouth and eyes was the kind of tiredness that suggests too much reading, too much writing, too much thinking—too many of those things larger than one’s own body, and its care or pleasures. She seemed about the same age as Susie, but she was much too humorless to be a bear—and her loathing for the nighttime activities in the Hotel New Hampshire surely bordered on what Ernst would have called “disgust.” When it was raining, Frank and I would walk her no farther than the streetcar stop on the Ringstrasse at the opera; when it was nice, we walked her through the Plaza of Heroes and up the Ring toward the university. We were just three kids fresh from thinking about whales, walking under the big buildings in a city too old for all of us. Most nights it was as if Frank weren’t there.

“Lilly is only eleven,” Fehlgeburt would say. “It’s wonderful that she loves literature. It could be her salvation. That hotel is no place for her.”

“Wo ist die Gemütlichkeit?” Frank was singing.

“You’re very good with Lilly,” I told Miss Miscarriage. “Do you want a family of your own, someday?”

“Four hundred and sixty-four!” Frank sang.

“I wouldn’t want children until after the revolution,” Fehlgeburt said, humorlessly.

“Do you think Fehlgeburt likes me?” I asked Frank, when we were walking home.

“Wait till we start school,” Frank suggested. “Find a nice young girl—your own age.”

And so, although I lived in a Viennese whorehouse, my sexual world was probably like the sexual world for most Americans who were fifteen in 1957; I beat off to images of a dangerously violent prostitute, while I kept walking a young “older” girl to her home—waiting for the day I might dare to kiss her, or even hold her hand.

I expected that the “timid souls”—the guests who (Schwanger had predicted) would be drawn to the Hotel New Hampshire—would remind me of myself. They didn’t. They came occasionally in buses: odd groups on organized tours—and some of the tours were as odd as the groups. Librarians from Devon, Kent, and Cornwall; ornithologists from Ohio—they had been observing storks at Rust. They were so regular in their habits that they all went to bed before the whores started working; they slept right through the nightly rumpus and were often off on a tour in the morning before Screaming Annie wrapped up her last orgasm, before the radical Old Billig walked in off the street—the new world shining in his old mind’s eye. The groups were the oblivious ones, and Frank could sometimes make extra money by marching them off on “walking tours.” The groups were easy—even the Japanese Male Choral Society, who discovered the whores as a group (and used them as a group). What a loud, strange time that was—all that screwing, all that singing! The Japanese had a great many cameras with them and took everyone’s picture—all of our family pictures, too. In fact, Frank would always say it’s a shame that the only photographs we have of our time in Vienna come from that one visit of the Japanese Male Choral Society. There is one of Lilly with Fehlgeburt—and a book, of course. There’s a touching one of the two Old Billigs; they look like what Lilly would call a “sweet” old couple. There’s Franny leaning on the stout shoulder of Susie the bear, Franny looking a little thin, but sassy and strong—“strangely confident” is how Frank describes Franny in this period. There’s a curious one of Father and Freud. They appear to be sharing the baseball bat—or they appear to have been squabbling over the bat; it is as if they’d been fighting over who was up next, and they’d interrupted their brawl only long enough for the picture to be taken.

I’m standing with Dark Inge. I remember the Japanese gentleman who asked Inge and me to stand beside each other; we had been sitting down, playing crazy eights, but the Japanese said the light wasn’t right and so we had to stand. It’s a slightly unnatural moment; Screaming Annie is still sitting down—at that part of the table where the light was generous—and overly powdered Babette is whispering something to Jolanta, who is standing a little back from the table with her arms folded across her impressive bosom. Jolanta could never learn the rules to crazy eights. In this picture, Jolanta looks like she’s about to break up the game. I remember that the Japanese were afraid of her, too—perhaps because she was so much bigger than any of them.

And what distinguishes all these photographs—our only pictorial record of Vienna, 1957-64—is that all these people familiar to us have to share the photographs with a Japanese or two, with a total stranger or two. Even the photograph of Ernst the pornographer leaning against the car outside. Arbeiter is leaning against the fender with him—and those legs protruding from under the grille of the old Mercedes, those legs belong to the one called Wrench; Schraubenschlüssel never got more than his legs in a picture. And surrounding the car are Japanese—strangers none of us would see again.

Might we have known, then—had we looked at that photograph closely—that this was no ordinary car? Who ever heard of a Mercedes, even an old one, that needed so much mechanical attention? Herr Wrench was always under the car, and crawling around in it. And why did the one car belonging to the Symposium on East-West Relations need so much care when it was so rarely driven anywhere? Looking at it, now, of course … well, the photograph is obvious. It is hard to look at that photograph and not recognize that old Mercedes for what it was.

A bomb. A constantly wired and rewired, ever-ready bomb. The whole car was a bomb. And those unrecognizable Japanese that populate all of our only photographs … well, now it’s easy to see these strangers, those foreign gentlemen, as symbolic of the unknown angels of death which would accompany that car. To think that for years we children told each other jokes about how bad a mechanic Schraubenschlüssel must be in order to be constantly fussing with that Mercedes! When all the while he was an expert! Mr. Wrench, the bomb expert; for almost seven years that bomb was ready—every day.

We never knew what they were waiting for—or what moment would have been ripe for it, had we not forced their hand. We have only the Japanese pictures to go on, and they make a murky story.

“What do you remember of Vienna, Frank?”” I asked him—I ask him all the time. Frank went into a room to be alone with himself, and when he came out he handed me a short list:

1. Franny with Susie the bear.

2. Going to buy your damn barbells.

3. Walking Fehlgeburt home.

4. The presence of the King of Mice.

Frank handed me this list and said, “Of course, there’s more, but I don’t want to get into it.”

I understand, and of course I remember going to buy my barbells, too. We all went. Father, Freud, Susie, and we children. Freud went because he knew where the sports shop was. Susie went because Freud could help her remember where the shop was by shouting at her in the streetcar. “Are we past that hospital-supply place on Mariahilfer?” Freud would cry. “It’s the second left, or the third, after that.”