“You’re hurting me,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to.”
“You want to, all right,” she said, but she let me go. She looked at her watch; she shrugged again. She walked down the stairs to the lobby with me; I said good night to her again. When I went to my room and she went out on the Krugerstrasse, Screaming Annie was coming back in—with another victim. I lay in bed wondering if I could fall soundly enough asleep so that the next fake orgasm would leave me alone; then I thought I’d never make it, so I lay awake waiting for it—after which, I hoped, I’d have plenty of time for sleep. But this one was a long time coming; I began to imagine that it had already happened, that I had dozed off and missed it, and so—like life itself—I believed that what was about to happen had already taken place, was already over, and I allowed myself to forget it, only to be surprised by it moments later. Out of that soundest sleep—right when you’ve first fallen off-Screaming Annie’s fake orgasm dragged me.
“Sorrow!” Frank cried in his dreams, like poor Iowa Bob startled by his “premonition” of the beast who would do him in.
I swear I could feel Franny tense in her sleep. Susie snorted. Lilly said, “What?” The Hotel New Hampshire shuddered with the silence following a thunderclap. Perhaps it was later, actually in my sleep, that I heard something heavy being carried downstairs, and out the lobby door, to Schraubenschlüssel’s car. At first I mistook the cautious sound for Jolanta carrying a dead customer out to the street, but she wouldn’t have bothered about trying to be quiet. I am just imagining this, I said in my sleep, when Frank knocked on the wall.
“Keep passing the open windows,” I whispered. Frank and I met in the hall. We watched the radicals loading the car through the lobby window. Whatever they were loading looked heavy and still; at first I thought it might be the body of Old Billig—the radical—but they were being too careful with whatever it was for the thing to be a body. Whatever it was required propping up in the backseat, between Arbeiter and Ernst. Then Schraubenschlüssel drove whatever it was away.
Through the window of the departing car, Frank and I saw the mysterious thing in silhouette—slightly slumped against Ernst, and bigger than him, and tilting away from Arbeiter, whose arm was ineffectually wrapped around it, as if he were hopelessly trying to reinterest a lover who was leaning toward someone else. The thing— whatever it was—was quite clearly not human, but it was somehow strangely animal in its appearance. I’m sure, now, of course, that it was completely mechanical, but its shape seemed animal in the passing car—as if Ernst the pornographer and Arbeiter held a bear between them, or a big dog. It was just a carload of sorrow, as Frank and I—and all of us—would learn, but its mystery plagued me.
I tried to describe it (and what Jolanta and I had seen on the fifth floor) to Father and Freud. I tried to describe the feeling of it all to Franny and Susie the bear, too. Frank and I had the longest talk about Schwanger. “I’m sure you’re mistaken about the gun,” Frank said. “Not Schwanger. She might have been there. She might have wanted you to not associate her with them, and so she was hiding from you. But she wouldn’t have a gun. And certainly she would never have pointed it at you. We’re like her children—she’s told us! You’re imagining again,” Frank said.
Sorrow floats; seven years in a place you hate is a long time. At least, I felt, Franny was safe; that was always the main thing. Franny was in limbo. She was taking it easy, marking time with Susie the bear—and so I felt comfortable treading water, too.
At the university, Lilly and I would major in American literature (Fehlgeburt would be so pleased). Lilly majored in it, of course, because she wanted to be a writer—she wanted to grow. I majored in it as yet another indirect way of courting the aloof Miss Miscarriage; it seemed the most romantic thing to do. Franny would major in world drama—she was always the heavyweight among us; we would never catch up. And Frank took Schwanger’s motherly and radical advice; Frank majored in economics. Thinking of Father and Freud, we all realized someone ought to. And Frank would be the one to save us, in time, so we would all be grateful to economics. Frank actually had a dual major, although the university would give him only a degree in economics. I guess I could say that Frank minored in world religions. “Know thine enemy,” Frank would say, smiling.
For seven years we all floated. We learned German, but we spoke only our native language among ourselves. We learned literature, drama, economy, religion, but the sight of Freud’s baseball bat could break our hearts for the land of baseball (though none of us was much interested in the game, that Louisville Slugger could bring tears to our eyes). We learned from the whores that, outside the Inner City, the Mariahilfer Strasse was the most promising hunting-ground for ladies of the night. And every whore spoke of getting out of the business if she was ever demoted to the districts past the Westbahnhof, to the Kaffee Eden, to the one-hundred- Schilling standing fucks in the Gaudenzdorfer Gürtel. We learned from the radicals that prostitution wasn’t even officially legal—as we had thought—that there were registered whores who played by the rules, got their medical checkups, trafficked in the right districts, and that there were “pirates” who never registered, or who turned in a Büchl (a license) but continued to practice the profession: that there were almost a thousand registered whores in the city in the early 1960s; that decadence was increasing at the necessary rate for the revolution.
Actually what revolution was supposed to take place we never learned. I don’t know if all the radicals were sure, either.
“Got your Büchl?” we children would ask each other, going to school—and, later, going to the university.
That, and—“Keep passing the open windows”: the refrain from our King of Mice song.
Our father seemed to have lost his character when our mother was lost to him. In seven years, I believe, he grew to be more of a presence and less of a person—for us children. He was affectionate; he could even be sentimental. But he seemed as lost to us (as a father) as Mother and Egg, and I think we sensed that he would need to endure some more concrete suffering before he would gain his character back—before he could actually become a character again: in the way Egg had been a character, in the way Iowa Bob had been one. I sometimes thought that Father was even less of a character than Freud. For seven years we missed our father, as if he had been on that plane. We were waiting for the hero in him to take shape, and perhaps doubting its final form—for with Freud as a model, one had to doubt my father’s vision.
In seven years I would be twenty-two; Lilly, trying to grow and grow, would grow to be eighteen. Franny would be twenty-three—with Chipper Dove still “the first,” and Susie the bear her one-and-only. Frank, at twenty- four, grew a beard. It was almost as embarrassing as Lilly’s wanting to be a writer.
Moby-Dick would sink the Pequod and only Ishmael would survive, again and again, to tell his tale to Fehlgeburt, who told it to us. In my years at the university, I used to press upon Fehlgeburt my desire to hear her read Moby-Dick aloud to me. “I can never read this book by myself,” I begged her. “I have to hear it from you.”
And that, at last, provided me with the entrance to Fehlgeburt’s cramped, desultory room behind the Rathaus, near the university. She would read to me in the evenings, and I would try to coax out of her why some of the radicals chose to spend the night in the Hotel New Hampshire.
“You know,” Fehlgeburt would tell me, “the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the world is a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness. It is quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naïve,” Fehlgeburt told me, on one of our walks to her room. Frank would eventually take the hint, and no longer accompany us—though this took him about five years. And the evening Fehlgeburt told me that American literature was “quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naïve” was not the evening I first tried to kiss her. After the line “ideologically naïve,” I think a kiss would have seemed out of place.
The night I first kissed Fehlgeburt we were in her room. She had just read that part when Ahab refuses to help the captain of the Rachel search for the lost son. Fehlgeburt had no furniture in her room; there were too many books, and a mattress on the floor—a mattress for a single bed—and a single reading lamp, also on the floor. It was a cheerless place, as dry and as crowded as a dictionary, as lifeless as Ernst’s logic, and I leaned across the uncomfortable bed and kissed Fehlgeburt on the mouth. “Don’t,” she said, but I kept kissing her until she kissed me back. “You should go,” she said, lying down on her back and pulling me on top of her.
“Now?” I said.
“No, now it is not necessary to go,” she said. Sitting up, she started to undress;
