The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  To his not inconsiderable surprise he saw that it seemed to be a lady’s dressing-room: it was littered with women’s clothes and lingerie and filled with a delicate perfume. At the farther end there was another door. Von Yb, somewhat more tentatively this time, it must be admitted, opened it and could scarcely refrain from exclaiming out loud, so delightful was the picture that presented itself to his gaze:

  In the middle of the room, bathed in a rosy glow from a hanging lamp, was a four-poster bed, on which a beautiful, raven-haired girl lay sleeping in an aesthetic pose.

  After a few moments of ecstatic contemplation, von Yb returned, on tiptoe and totally confused, to his compartment.

  Fortunately, it was not long before the ticket-collector appeared, making his acrobatic way along the footboard. In reply to his question, he was told that it was the youngest granddaughter of the celebrated dancer, Taglioni, who had died of cholera in 1854, that she owned the Port Said Opera House and that she had hired this carriage, formerly belonging to the Sardinian royal family, for her own personal use. Von Yb was in the chamberlain’s quarters, added the shabbily dressed official, proffering a hand as hairy as a monkey’s.

  Scarcely had the guard – was that a satyr’s smile playing round his lips? – disappeared, than von Yb was overcome with an unprecedented lust for adventure. To prise a large box of chocolates out of his case and slip over to the door to the shrine of the sleeping beauty was the work of a moment. His heart was beating in time to the muffled rhythm of the wheels. He was already on his knees beside her bed, brushing her half-open lips with a fleeting kiss, when he realised that he had no idea what to do next.

  Just as he was about to stand up and slip out of the room, the fair sleeper, still only half-awake, wrapped her arms around him and whispered, ‘Oh … momognone mio . . . ’

  Von Yb closed his eyes in rapture. He thought he was in paradise. But the very next moment his sleeping beauty was no longer half, but fully awake and shattered the spell with a scream of indignation after which he was drowned in a raging flood of Italian oaths. Von Yb was stunned; the only escape from his sheepish embarrassment that he could think of was to offer the box of chocolates wordlessly to the fury. And it did indeed produce an effect. Pouting, the fair maid devoured the delicious confection, calmed down and demanded to know, with an accent that had a delightful Levantine tinge, what von Yb thought he was doing in her compartment?

  The latter maintained he had merely been looking for the way to the restaurant car for his usual bite of supper, but had strayed – it must have been the will of the gods – into her compartment and, whether consciously or unconsciously, he could not say, fallen down at her feet in adoration. Oh, if only he might hope! How gladly would he lay his life and his wealth at her feet! And, carried away by his unaccustomed ardour, he bent down towards her.

  Once more it was his fate to be cruelly disappointed. The object of his fond desires placed a firm hand against his chest, gave him a brief, searching look then pushed him away with a toss of her fragrant locks. What on earth was he thinking! Never! She was a virginal priestess of art and wanted to have nothing to do with men. She knew all about them! Added to that, he wasn’t even an artiste, one could see that at a glance; not a tenor, nor a lion-tamer, nor anything else.

  Was there no hope at all? asked von Yb. Even if he could never take her hand in marriage, was there not a place, any place, that would keep him close to her, might they still not be good friends?

  He was barking up the wrong tree there, was the angry reply. If that was his idea, then he would do better elsewhere, for example the Ziziani Theatre in Alexandria, Rue de la Porte, or the Palais de Danse in Damascus, or the Friponnière in Port Sudan! And so, goodbye!

  It cut von Yb to the quick that he had never been trained for a real profession such as opera singing, mime, or at the very least fire-eating. Sadly he departed, casting a yearning glance back at the belle dame sans merci, who had already taken up a silver-framed mirror and was carrying out repairs to a portion of her gums that seemed to have aroused her displeasure. Sighing, he staggered back to his compartment, where he spent the night alone with his torment and many starving fleas, the latter presumably the property of the Italian State Railways.

  A two-hour-long break for lunch in Mirandola gave von Yb the opportunity of admiring his unapproachable fellow-passenger as, in full dress and clouds of perfume, she took her meal, served by a snarling Arab in a white burnous and a pubescent Levantine girl with an amber complexion.

  A timid attempt to make further advances got no farther than the connecting door, which was locked. Then the obliging guard offered to cause a slight derailment of the train, in the course of which von Yb would have the opportunity of rescuing the fair maiden; it would, however, cost at least five hundred lire. Von Yb rejected the offer with a shake of the head.

  Shortly after sunset the guard’s head reappeared against the lurid evening light with a reduced price of three hundred lire, but met with the same cold reception as before. He had no more success with his final offer of one hundred lire shortly before they entered the notorious Montegiove Tunnel, where smoky oil-lamps in front of decaying pictures of saints bore mute witness to countless accidents.

  It was well on into the night when von Yb finally arrived in Genoa. Exhausted and alone in an exaggeratedly high-roofed, two-wheeled carriage with rattling windows, he drove through the narrow alleys that squeezed between the tall, dark houses. A ragamuffin with a coloured lantern on a long pole walked in front of his conveyance, which took von Yb to an old-fashioned hotel which, although respectable rather than luxurious, had been warmly recommended.

  He immediately went to the restaurant, which was lit by a few hissing gas-lamps. He could hardly keep his eyes open as he ate his dinner; hot waves of sleep washed over him, almost obliterating consciousness, and the few weary waiters took on almost ghostly form against a background that disappeared into darkness.

  When he had finished his meal he called over the maître d’hôtel and asked, half asleep as he was, whether it would be possible to have a quick look at the sea. The head waiter replied with a nod and ordered one of his underlings to guide Herr von Yb. They passed through several gloomy corridors before reaching a door which the boy had difficulty opening. To von Yb’s surprise – he had expected to step out into the street – they entered a fairly spacious storeroom where various herbs, empty wine bottles and all sorts of other junk were kept.

  Where did they go now? von Yb asked the boy, who had lit the lamp.

  The answer was odd: they were there. And the youth in his black tie and tails led him over to a small receptacle with a lid.

  Von Yb immediately categorised it as a rubbish bin. His young cicerone took off the lid, and when von Yb gave him a questioning look he was told that the sea was in the bin.

  It struck von Yb like an electric shock. He felt as if he were undergoing a dislocation of his personality, of his environment or of reality itself. What he saw beggared all description: within this mundane receptacle glowed the deepest, most luminant blue of an infinite abyss.

  There was no doubt about it, that was the sea. His mind was thronged with words: Poseidon, Thetis, the sombre tones of Medusa. Just as he was about to exclaim, ‘Thalatta, thalatta!’ an inner voice thundered, ‘Don’t get carried away by your classical scholarship! It’s crazy! That cannot possibly be the sea! Just think, infinity in a rubbish bin!?’ – ‘But why not, why not?’ whispered Satan, whose telephone line has a connection to every human mind. ‘Don’t listen to the voice of so-called reason; it never learns anything new and will only allow you to accept the most banal facts as true, you poor soul …’

  Unsure of himself, von Yb looked round in some confusion, and saw the ancient maître d’hôtel with the Franz-Josef whiskers, who had followed them on silent, if somewhat flat feet and now, with much confidential clearing of the throat and an almost embarrassed wave of his serviette, began his tale, ‘Yes, your honour, it is the sea. I know
exactly what you feel, Your Honour, even though I am only a simple waiter. It is the sea, the genuine sea. Not the vulgar kitsch that is passed off as the sea to your common-or-garden tourist. I would never try to cheat your honour with anything like that, I, who had the honour of serving under your honour’s grandfather in Radetzky’s army in ‘49! I was company cook in Freydenplitz’s Horse. Lively lads from Carinthia, all of them. We would have all gladly given our lives for the colonel. But fate decreed otherwise …’

  The old waiter wiped a tear from his eye with his serviette before he continued, ‘A Piedmontese bullet went right through your honour’s late grandfather at the Battle of Mortara. It shattered my ankle whilst I was riding my steed through a hail of bullets, slicing up a Verona salami on my little portable chopping board to comfort the wounded. The bullet killed my packhorse, Schackerl, the dapple-grey who had twice been awarded the silver medal for bravery, the one that used to carry the so-called mounted coffee-urn on his broad back … And when I was discharged, as I was a war invalid, they gave me the sea as a kind of gratuity. Everyone was given something: one man a roundabout, another a licence for a barrel-organ, someone else the lease on a state tobacco shop, or a tame monkey in a French general’s uniform. Yes. And I got the sea. The very same one the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf is supposed to have had and that was afterwards kept in the treasury of the shrine at Mariazell. But they didn’t like it there.’

  Von Yb’s head was spinning; he had difficulty in staying on his feet.

  ‘Would your honour like to take a turn along the beach?’ the waiter asked.

  He took the unresisting von Yb by the arm and promenaded him round the garbage bin a few times. There was such a strong, fresh, tangy breeze blowing out of it that von Yb’s hand went up involuntarily to hold onto his hat.

  ‘Have a good look at it, your honour,’ said the man with the Franz-Josef whiskers. ‘Admiral Tegetthoff sailed his first ships on that as a boy.’

  The strange dread, which all the time had kept von Yb fixed in a state between dreaming and waking, now seemed to grip him by the throat and take his breath away. He had to get away from here as quickly as possible, get away from the disturbing sound of that sea, from the mysteriously compelling sight of that blue abyss in the apparently harmless guise of a rubbish bin…

  Like a man possessed, von Yb tore himself away and rushed out into the dark street. Tegetthoff … Mortara … Emperor Rudolf … the shrine at Mariazell … a blue abyss … the impressions of the last few minutes were rushing around inside his weary brain. Or was it merely himself, rushing along between the tall, dark houses of midnight Genoa?

  He was brought to a halt by a shadowy, seething mass of bodies and, against his will, forced to look on as a massive, herculean silhouette disentangled itself from the silently grappling sailors, grabbed a Chinese stoker by one leg, swung him round in the air, in spite of all his wriggling, and smashed him against a door that glistened like bronze in the moonlight. It shattered with a splintering crack, and the wretched stoker was swallowed up by a black, yawning cavity. From a dimly-lit kitchen came the sound of sizzling fat and through another von Yb could see a hunchbacked writer dip his pen in the ink and scribble away. Farther along, a contralto of mature years struck the pose of a tragic mother as she practised an aria, whilst on the top floor grey, dripping washing was being hung out to dry, a task that had clearly been interrupted earlier. Suddenly a hysterical screaming rang out, a clattering and cursing, then a tangle of half-clothed figures erupted through the shattered door, and before von Yb had recovered from the shock, two pretty, full-bosomed girls with sparkling eyes had seized him and dragged him off.

  Von Yb never could, or would, describe precisely what had happened next. All he would say was that he had the feeling he was being quite well looked after. He could also remember a dream that kept recurring obstinately in which he was back in the Middle Ages as a palfrey being gently ridden by a lady round a flower-strewn meadow full of gushing streams.

  He felt he had slept for several days and finally woken in a strange house. He was still somewhat the worse for wear but decided to set off straight away to see the sights of Genoa and … and … His head started to spin again and it was only with difficulty that he managed to remember what it was he had really wanted to see: the sea.

  But he did not get that far. The two girls would not let him leave until he had paid a certain sum of money, which they counted out for him down to the last ha’penny on their nimble fingers. A sum which seemed rather high to him.

  He looked for his well-filled wallet in his coat, he searched through every pocket and found nothing, nothing at all. The smiles gradually disappeared from the faces of the two girls, to be replaced by a businesslike seriousness.

  When Herr von Yb, who was punctiliousness itself in money matters, tried to leave to fetch the money from his hotel, he found himself grabbed and detained by the two delicious creatures, who suddenly seemed to develop muscles of steel. They rolled up their sleeves and dragged the flabbergasted Herr von Yb down some dark steps and locked him in a musty cellar which smelt outrageously of sick poultry. The mildest of the insults they screamed through the bars sounded suspiciously like ‘swindler.’ He would not see the light of day, they shouted, until he had written a letter to his bank in Vienna that they would dictate to him! With that, they disappeared.

  For a while von Yb tried to escape from his gloomy thoughts by declaiming to himself Goethe’s immortal poem of ‘the land where the lemon-trees grow, where through the foliage dark, golden oranges glow’ in a variety of intonations. In the long run, however, even the most punctilious of scholars will be seized with despair when incarcerated in a disused chicken-run, and thus Achatius von Yb ended up staring wild-eyed at the sturdy if mildewed door that shut him off from the glories of Italy.

  One day, after he had stared at it for a particularly long time, the miracle occurred. The door opened and, with the graceful step of the Goddess of Love herself, in walked his fair companion from the train journey, the dream-vision from the Pullman car. With a charming smile she approached, inspected the poor prisoner from head to toe through her lorgnon and maintained both her smile and her silence.

  Bright red with shame, von Yb tried to think of an excuse to explain his presence here. Perhaps some reference to fascinating architectural features? But he was forestalled. The beautiful owner of the opera house in Port Said was looking for new singers for the chorus; she had heard, to her dismay, of the unfortunate situation that had befallen some distinguished visitor and recognised her former travelling-companion through the keyhole. She had come to bring him his freedom, more than that, even, to grant his deepest wish. No, not her hand in marriage, not that, but the place close to her that he had asked for so fervently. To put it in a nutshell, she was going to engage him. There was the contract, he only needed to sign. Then, however, he would be hers for the rest of his life.

  ‘I am yours already!’ cried von Yb in wild enthusiasm as he went down on one knee before her. ‘But, my dearest, how can I serve you? I am a scholar, highly respected, it is true – I even have several honorary doctorates – but I am neither an actor nor a singer.’

  ‘It is nothing like that that I have in mind,’ was the amiable reply. ‘It is something else. You know that in the south we like to fill the intervals of bloody tragedies with comic interludes. In my opera house, for example, we put the torture scene from Tosca on the open stage; every time it is greeted with thunderous applause and has to be encored. After that, of course, we need some comic relief … Let’s not beat about the bush, any more. I want to use your undoubted talents as a buffoon to cheer up the audience during the interludes.’

  Von Yb froze. He couldn’t believe his ears. ‘Buffoon?’ he stammered. ‘No. Impossible. Consider: a distinguished scholar … honorary doctorates …’

  ‘Very well,’ replied the vision, completely unmoved. ‘Then you will stay here until the end of your days. Or rather, till the end of your money. T
hey will squeeze every last penny out of you and then make sure you disappear, as has happened before to many an innocent traveller in this city with all its dark secrets. I would have bought your freedom and taken you with me, but as you don’t want to come, adieu!’ And she turned to leave.

  What else could the unfortunate von Yb do but call back the pitiless mistress of the Port Said Opera and sign the paper which, with a smile on her lips, she held out for him.

  As he put pen to paper, his brain seemed to be rent by an inner thunderclap. A buffoon! A buffoon for his whole life! And not even a chance of promotion, there was no career structure in buffoonery, no post of senior buffoon. If his grandfather had known, Arbogast Caspar Ferdinand von Yb, Lord of Upper and Lower Yb and member of the Upper House of the Estates of Carniola! Achatius gnawed at his bloodless lips.

  Meanwhile the other signatory had inspected the document through the long lashes of her almond-shaped eyes. She gave a satisfied nod and handed her new recruit a banknote of a fairly high denomination: his signing-on fee. Then she indicated he should follow her. They were to go straight on board ship.

  Von Yb went out into the street, with a sigh of relief, in spite of everything, keeping close behind his fair employer, who was leading him through dark alleyways towards the harbour.

  Suddenly the thought flashed through his mind that now he would at least see the sea. For a few seconds he felt that fate had treated him kindly. But was it really the sea he was heading for? Was it the real sea? He felt dizzy, just as he had when the waiter with the Franz-Josef whiskers had taken him under his wing.