everything?”
I tried to remember. “I think so,” I said. “Do you want to do more?”
“Not especially,” she said. “I just wanted to have done it all once,” she said. “If we’ve done it all, you can go home—if you want,” she added. She shrugged. It was not Mother’s shrug, not Franny’s, not even Jolanta’s shrug. This was not quite a human movement; it was less a twitch than it was a kind of electrical pulsation, a mechanical lurch of her taut body, a dim signal. The dimmest, I thought. It was a nobody-home sign; it was an I’m-not-in, don’t-call-me-I’ll-call-you signal. It was a tick of a clock, or of a time bomb. Fehlgeburt’s eyes blinked once at me; then she was asleep. I gathered my clothes. I saw she hadn’t bothered to mark the spot where she stopped reading in Moby-Dick ; I didn’t bother to mark it, either.
It was after midnight when I crossed the Ringstrasse, walking from the Rathausplatz down the Dr. Karl Renner-Ring and into the Volksgarten. In the beer garden some students were shouting at each other in a friendly way; I probably knew some of them, but I didn’t stop for a beer. I didn’t want to talk about the art of this or that. I didn’t want to have another conversation about The Alexandria Quartet—about which was the best of those novels, and which was the worst, and why. I didn’t want to hear about who benefited the most from their correspondence—Henry Miller or Lawrence Durrell. I didn’t even want to talk about Die Blechtrommel, which was the best thing there was to talk about perhaps ever. And I didn’t want to have another conversation about East-West relations, about socialism and democracy, about the long-term effects of President Kennedy’s assassination—and, being an American, what did I think of the racial question? It was the end of the summer of 1964; I hadn’t been in the United States since 1957, and I knew less about my country than some of the Viennese students knew. I also knew less about Vienna than any of them. I knew about my family, I knew about our whores, and our radicals; I was an expert on the Hotel New Hampshire and an amateur at everything else.
I walked all the way through the Heldenplatz—the Plaza of Heroes—and stood where thousands of cheering fascists had greeted Hitler, once. I thought that fanatics would always have an audience; all one might hope to influence was the size of the audience. I thought I must remember this perception, and test it against Frank, who would either take it over as his own perception, or revise it, or correct me. I wished I’d read as much as Frank; I wished I’d tried to grow as hard as Lilly. In fact, Lilly had sent off the efforts of her growth to some publisher in New York. She wasn’t even going to tell us, but she had to borrow money from Franny for the postage.
“It’s a novel,” Lilly said, sheepishly. “It’s a little autobiographical.”
“How little?” Frank had asked her.
“Well, it’s really imaginative autobiography,” Lilly said.
“It’s a lot autobiographical, you mean,” Franny said. “Oh boy.”
“I can’t wait,” Frank said. “I bet I come off like a real loon.”
“No,” Lilly said. “Everyone is a hero.”
“We’re all heroes?” I asked.
“Well, you all are heroes, to me,” Lilly said. “So in the book you are, too.”
“Even Father?” Franny asked.
“Well, he’s the most imagined,” Lilly said.
And I thought that Father had to be the most imagined because he was the least real—he was the least there (of any of us). Sometimes it seemed Father was less with us than Egg.
“What’s the book called, dear?” Father had asked Lilly.
“Trying to Grow,” Lilly had admitted.
“What else?” Franny said.
“How far’s it go?” Frank asked. “I mean, where’s it stop?”
“It’s over with the plane crash,” Lilly said. “That’s the end.”
The end of reality, I thought: just short of the plane crash seemed like a perfectly good place to stop—to me.
“You’re going to need an agent,” Frank said to Lilly. “That will be me.”
Frank would become Lilly’s agent; he would become Franny’s agent, and Father’s agent, and even my agent, too—in time. He hadn’t majored in economics for nothing. But I didn’t know that on that end-of-the-summer evening in 1964 when I left Fehlgeburt, poor Miss Miscarriage, asleep and no doubt dreaming of her spectacular sacrifice; her expendable nature was virtually all I could see when I stood alone in the Plaza of Heroes and recalled how Hitler had made so many people seem expendable to such a mob of true believers. In the quiet evening I could almost hear the mindless din of “Sieg Heil!” I could see the absolute self-seriousness of Schraubenschlüssel’s face when he tightened down the nut and washer on an engine-block bolt. And what else had he been tightening down? I could see the dull glaze of devotion in Arbeiter’s eyes, making the statement to the press upon his triumphant arrest—and our mother-like Schwanger sipping her Kaffee mit Schlagobers, the whipped cream leaving its pleasant little moustache upon her downy upper lip. I could see the way Schwanger braided Lilly’s pigtail, humming to Lilly’s lovely hair the way Mother had hummed; how Schwanger told Franny that she had the world’s most beautiful skin, and the world’s most beautiful hands; and I had bedroom eyes, Schwanger said—oh, I was going to be dangerous, she warned me. (Having just left Fehlgeburt, I felt not very dangerous.) There would always be a little Schlagobers in Schwanger’s kisses. And Frank, Schwanger said, was a genius; if only he would consider politics more thoughtfully. All this affection did Schwanger shower on us—all this with a gun in her purse. I wanted to see Ernst in the cow position—with a cow! And in the elephant position! With you know what. They were as crazy as Old Billig said; they would kill us all.
I wandered on the Dorotheergasse toward the Graben. I stopped for a Kafee mit Schlagobers at the Hawelka. A man with a beard at the table beside me was explaining to a young girl (younger than him) about the death of representational painting; he was describing the exact painting wherein this death of the whole art form had occurred. I didn’t know the painting. I thought about the Schieles and the Klimts that Frank had introduced me to—at the Albertina and at the Upper Belvedere. I wished Klimt and Schiele were able to talk to this man, but the man was now addressing the death of rhyme and meter in poetry; again, I didn’t know the poem. And when he moved on to the novel, I thought I’d better pay up and leave. My waiter was busy, so I had to listen to the story of the death of plot and characterization. Among the many deaths the man described, he included the death of sympathy. I was beginning to feel sympathy die within me when my waiter finally got to my table. Democracy was the next death; it came and went more quickly than my waiter could produce my change. And socialism passed away before I could figure the tip. I stared at the man with the beard and felt like lifting weights; I felt that if the radicals wanted to blow up the Opera, they should pick a night when only this man with the beard was there. I thought I’d found a substitute driver for Fehlgeburt.
“Trotsky,” the young girl with the bearded man blurted out, suddenly—as if she were saying, “Thank you.”
“Trotsky?” I said, leaning over their table; it was a small, square table. I was curling seventy-five pounds, on one arm, on each of the dumbbells, in those days. The table wasn’t nearly that heavy, so I picked it up, carefully, with one hand, and lifted it over my head the way a waiter would raise a tray. “Now, good old Trotsky,” I said. “If you want an easy life,” good old Trotsky said, “‘you picked the wrong century to be born in.’ Do you think that’s true?” I asked the man with the beard. He said nothing, but the young girl nudged him, and he perked up a little.
“I think it’s true,” the girl said.
“Sure it’s true,” I said. I was aware of the waiters nervously watching the drinks and the ashtray sliding slightly on the table over my head, but I was not Iowa Bob; the weights never slid off the bar when I lifted, not anymore. I was better with weights than Iowa Bob.
“Trotsky was killed with a pickax,” the bearded fellow said, morosely, trying to remain unimpressed.
“But he’s not dead, is he?” I asked, insanely—smiling. “Nothing’s really dead,” I said. “Nothing he said is dead,” I said. “The paintings that we can still see—they’re not dead,” I said. “The characters in books—they don’t die when we stop reading about them.”
