The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  His companion was hurrying up. He could already hear the screech of the sirens, the clank of the cranes. At most there could be one row of houses between him and the so-called sea.

  ‘Flee!’ It was like a flash of lightning in von Yb’s tormented brain. ‘Contract or no contract – flee!’

  The screeching and clanking grew louder and louder, filling him with dread. He was still following his new mistress, who was striding along even faster. She was about to turn the final corner.

  Then von Yb, that model of punctiliousness, turned on his heels and ran, still clutching, crumpled up in his hand, the large banknote, the earnest of his contractual obligation. As if the devil himself were after him, he tore up one street, down the next and came to a halt, before he realised where he was, outside the railway station. He rushed onto the platform, onto the Vienna coach of the waiting express, and into the lavatory and safety.

  The signing-on fee was just enough to get him to Vienna. After an uncomfortable journey, he arrived there somewhat bent, having spent the whole journey crouched behind the lavatory-pan, and hurried home. It was days before he was anything approaching his usual self again.

  But that was when the torment began. Poor von Yb started every time the doorbell rang. In his imagination he could hear the footsteps of the men sent to seek him out, von Yb the swindler who had misappropriated his signing-on fee. Breach of contract – this he knew from the experience handed down in the family by a long line of civil servants – breach of contract was no laughing matter. On the advice of the family lawyer, a gloomy gentleman with dark spectacles who told him in no uncertain terms how serious his situation was, von Yb left his splendid apartment and rented a number of cheap rooms in different parts of the town, scurrying from one to the other like a startled animal.

  His social life was non-existent. Only the night-watchmen and members of the drinking classes staggering home in the early hours would see him flit timidly round the corner with a pensive shake of their heads.

  Soon he was generally known as ‘the scurrier’ and then, when word got round that he had been to Italy, as ‘Signor Scurri’.

  The whole of Vienna, from the humblest purveyor of roast chestnuts to the emperor himself, knew of the dreadful predicament of this once highly respected gentleman. And it was not only the metropolis that bewailed his pitiful fate, in Brno, Graz and Olomouc as well he was the subject of sympathetic comments, even the occasional tear. As he still had a considerable income at his disposal, they could hardly organise a collection for him. Austria’s keenest legal brains were systematically racked to try and find a solution to this special case of a buffoon in breach of contract. Experts in international law and reciprocal arrangements, specialists in extradition treaties and theatre contracts gathered together and, under pressure from public opinion, this assemblage of illustrious minds was allocated one of the empty rooms in the Imperial and Royal Academy of Sciences, where they could meet daily to discuss von Yb’s wretched situation and, it was to be hoped, his deliverance.

  It gradually became the done thing for anyone who wanted to make a name for himself in Vienna to slip into the magnificent baroque meeting chamber at around four o’clock in the afternoon, whisper a few discreet words to the attendant and then join one of the groups that were concerning themselves with von Yb’s situation. Here and there a hoary-headed old greybeard would be leaning against a globe, deep in thought. In the middle of the room a number of scholarly profiles were sitting around a table, brooding over piles of black folders containing all the relevant files. In the corner an expert with furrowed brow shook his head to himself as he took a wad of cotton-wool out of his ear, placed it in an amber cigarette-holder and proceeded to light it. And almost every window had a complement of four frock-coats, standing with their backs to the room, staring out into the gloomy street whilst their fingers performed silent piano sonatas behind their backs. That alone made twenty-four first-class minds, but in total it was more than that who assembled there, day in, day out. Then, amid suppressed coughs and the soft chink of coins slipped into the attendants’ open palms, they all left the ornate splendour of the stucco’d hall, where nothing was resolved, apart from the occasional dispute as to which umbrella was whose.

  Thus it was Signor Scurri’s dismal lot to eke out his days in obscure hideouts, sometimes even, when he felt the furies of fraudulence too close upon his heels, in rather dubious hotels. As he scurried in through the door, he would be allocated one of the rooms with a sympathetic nod.

  He sank into a joyless decline, and on those few occasions when his mind was a little freer from worry and dread, they would be replaced by the torment of the great unresolved question of his life: had he actually seen the sea or not?

  It was a question which von Yb, for whom there was no hope of improvement, never resolved. Given the knowledge of spatial relationships at that time, he could not know that one cosmic dimension can penetrate to within an arm’s length of another.

  On his death-bed Achatius von Yb, known as Signor Scurri, presented a curious sight: beneath his incredibly wrinkled forehead, his eyes were opened wide, and the yellowed index finger of his right hand, bearing the old family signet ring, was pointing fixedly up in the air, like someone who has just seen the light saying, ‘Aha!’

  The Head

  Karl Hans Strobl

  It was completely dark in the room … all the curtains closed … not a glimmer of light from the street and quite still. My friend, myself and the stranger were holding each other by the hand in a quivering, convulsive clasp. A dreadful fear was about us, within us…

  And then … a gaunt, gleaming white hand came through the darkness towards us and began to write with the pencil that was lying ready on the table where we were seated. We could not see what the hand was writing, but we could feel it inside … as it was being written … as if it were there before our eyes in letters of fire…

  It was the story of the hand, and of the man it once belonged to, that the gleaming white hand was writing on the paper in the deepest midnight darkness:

  ‘I am walking up the steps covered in red cloth … and … I do after all have a strange feeling in my heart. Inside my breast something is swinging back and forth … a huge pendulum. But the rim of the pendulum disc is as sharp as a razor-blade and each time the swing of the pendulum grazes my chest I feel a keen pain … and it takes my breath away, and I want to groan out loud. But I bite my teeth together, so that no sound can pass, and clench my fists, tied behind my back, so that the blood spurts out from under the nails.

  Now I am at the top. Everything is prepared, all they are waiting for is me. I am calm as they shave my neck, and when it is done I ask for permission to speak to the people for one last time. It is granted … I turn round and see the endless mob, a sea of heads thronging round the guillotine, all those dull, stupid, animal faces, some with expressions of vulgar curiosity, others of obscene lust, human beings en masse, making a mockery of all that the word human stands for, and I find the whole business so ridiculous that I am forced to laugh out loud.

  Disapproving lines appear in the officious expression of my executioners … how damned insolent of me not to take the matter seriously, tragically even … but I had better stop teasing these good souls and begin my speech:

  ‘Citizens,’ I say, ‘citizens, it is for you that I die, for you and for Liberty. You have misunderstood me, you have condemned me … but I love you. And as proof of my love, hear my testament. Everything that I possess, shall be yours. For example …’

  And I turn my back on them and make an unmistakable gesture…

  From all around comes a roar of outrage … with a sigh of relief I quickly lay my head in the opening … a rushing, hissing noise … all I feel is an icy burning in my neck … my head falls into the basket.

  Then I feel as if I have put my head under water and it has filled my ears. The noises from the outside world that reach me are dark and muddled, at my temples is a droning, buzzi
ng sound. All across the area where my neck has been sliced through I feel as if large quantities of ether were vaporising.

  I know that my head is in the wicker basket, my body up on the scaffold, but I have not yet the sense of complete separation; I feel my body fall onto its left side, the feet kicking feebly, my clenched fists, tied behind my back, twitch slightly, my fingers stretch out convulsively and then retract. I can also feel the blood flowing out of the stump of my neck, and as it empties I can sense my movements becoming weaker and weaker, and also my awareness of my body weakening, darkening, until below the cut in my neck all gradually becomes blackness.

  I have lost my body.

  In the complete darkness below my cut-off neck I suddenly sense red spots. The red spots are like fires on a dark, stormy night. They dissolve and spread like oil on still waters … when the edges of two of the red spots touch I can feel a light electric shock in my eyelids and the hair stands up on my head. And now the red spots are beginning to rotate, faster, ever faster … a multitude of wheels of fire, blazing, molten sun-discs … they twist and swirl, drawing long tongues of fire behind them, and I have to close my eyes … but I can still feel the red wheels of fire within me … between my teeth I feel as if every gap is packed with dry, glassy grains of sand. Slowly the flaming wheels pale, the whirling slows down, one after the other is extinguished and everything below the cut through my neck goes black for a second time. This time it is for ever.

  I am filled with a pleasant lethargy, an easy-going lack of responsibility, my eyes are heavy. I cannot open them any more and yet I can see everything around me. It is as if my eyelids were made of glass, transparent. I see everything as through a milky-white veil with a delicate tracery of pale pink veins over it, but everything I see is larger, clearer than when I still had my body. My tongue is paralysed; it lies in my mouth, heavy and sluggish as a lump of clay.

  My sense of smell, on the other hand, is a thousand times sharper, I not only see things, I smell them, each one different, with its own characteristic odour.

  In the wicker basket beneath the blade of the guillotine there are three other heads apart from my own, two male and one female. The woman’s head has rouged cheeks with two beauty spots, powdered, coiffured hair with a golden arrow stuck through it, and two dainty diamond earrings in its tiny ears. The heads of the two men are lying face down in a pool of half-dried blood; across one runs the poorly healed scar of an old wound, the hair on the other is already sparse and grey.

  The woman’s head has its eyes screwed tight and is motionless. I know that it is watching me through its closed lids…

  We lie like that for hours. I watch the sunlight edge its way higher up the scaffold of the guillotine. Evening comes and I begin to feel chilly. My nose is stiff and cold and the chill of evaporation I feel on my neck is becoming unpleasant.

  Suddenly raucous shouting; it comes nearer, quite near, and all at once I feel a powerful hand grab me by the hair and lift me out of the basket. Then I feel some pointed object pushed into my neck: a spearhead. A mob of drunken sans-culottes and harpies has fallen upon our heads. A giant of a fellow with a puffy red face is brandishing the spear with my head on it high above the frenzied, jeering, screaming throng.

  A tangle of men and women is fighting over the jewels from the woman’s head. They writhe and roll, kicking and punching, biting and scratching.

  Now the fight is over. Shouting and cursing, they separate, each one who has secured a part of the spoils surrounded by a jealous crowd…

  The head is lying on the ground, begrimed and mutilated, showing the marks of the grasping hands, its ears torn by the violence with which the rings were ripped off, its exquisite coiffure dishevelled, the powdered strands of deep blond hair trailing in the dust. One nostril has been slit open by a sharp blade, its forehead shows the mark of the heel of someone’s shoe. Its eyelids are half open, the blank, glassy eyes staring straight ahead.

  Finally the crowd sets off. There are four heads stuck on long poles. The fury of the crowd is directed mainly at the man with grey hair. That man must have been particularly unpopular. I do not know him. They spit and throw lumps of filth at him. There, a handful of mud from the street thumps into his ear … What is that? Did he not twitch? Slightly, imperceptibly, with one muscle only, visible to me alone?

  Night comes. They have arranged us heads on the iron bars of a palace gate. I do not recognise the palace, either. Paris is big. In the courtyard armed citizens are camped round a huge fire … Scabrous songs, jokes, roars of laughter. The smell of roast mutton reaches me. The fire gives off a costly fragrance of rosewood. The wild mob has dragged all the furniture from the palace out into the courtyard and is now burning it, piece by piece. The next to go is an elegant sofa with delicate scrollwork … but they hesitate and do not throw the sofa on the fire yet. A young woman with coarse features and wearing a loose bodice which reveals her full, firm breasts, is insisting on something with the help of vigorous gestures.

  Is she trying to persuade them to let her have the elegant sofa, has she suddenly felt the desire to see what it is like to be a duchess?

  The men are still hesitating.

  The woman points at the bars with our heads on the spikes and then back at the sofa.

  The men hesitate, finally she pushes them aside, draws one of the armed men’s sabres, kneels down and uses the blade to lever out the little enamelled nails with which the heavy silk covering is attached to the wooden frame. Now the men are helping her.

  Again she points to our heads.

  One of the men walks over rather hesitantly. He looks for the one she wants. Then he climbs up the iron bars and takes down the maltreated, violated woman’s head.

  The man shudders with horror, but he seems to be acting under some kind of compulsion. It is as if that young woman by the fire, the young woman in the red skirt and open bodice, has hypnotised all the men around with her savage, sensual stare, like some beast of prey. His arm held out stiffly, he carries the head by the hair back to the fire.

  With a wild screech of delight the woman grabs the head. Twirling it round, she swings it three times over the blazing fire.

  Then she squats down and takes the head in her lap. She strokes it caressingly over the cheeks a few times … all the men have gathered in a circle around her … now she is taking one of the little enamelled nails in one hand and hammer in the other, and with a light blow she drives the nail right into the skull.

  Another tap of the hammer, and another nail disappears into the luxuriant hair.

  As she hammers, she hums a song. One of those terrible, strange, sensual folk songs, full of ancient magic.

  The bloody monsters around her are silent and pale with horror, their eyes staring aghast at her out of dark sockets. And she hammers and hammers, driving nail after nail into the head, all the while humming her strange, old charm to the rhythm of the hammer blows.

  Suddenly one of the men gives a piercing cry and jumps up. His eyes are bulging, his mouth is covered in foam … he throws his arms backwards, twisting his body to either side as if in painful convulsions, and from his mouth come piercing, animal cries.

  The young woman hammers on, singing her song.

  Then another jumps up, howling and swinging his arms around. He grabs a brand from the fire and jabs it into his chest, again and again, until his clothes begin to glow and thick, stinking smoke spreads all round him.

  The others sit there, pale and motionless, and do nothing to stop him.

  A third jumps up, and now the same frenzy grips the rest. A deafening noise, a screaming and a wailing, a screeching and a howling and a roaring, a tangle of flailing limbs. Any that fall do not get up … the others continue their stamping over their bodies…

  In the middle of this orgy of madness sits the young woman, hammering and singing…

  Now she has finished; she sticks the head covered with tiny enamelled nails on the end of a bayonet and holds it high above the howling,
leaping mass. Then someone scatters the fire, the burning wood is pulled out and thrown in a shower of sparks into the blackest corners of the courtyard … it grows dark … grunts of lust and a wild scuffling, as if from some furious struggle. I know that all these crazed men, these wild beasts, have thrown themselves on the one woman, biting and clawing at her…

  Everything goes dark before my eyes.

  Did consciousness remain just long enough for me to witness all these horrors? Dawn comes, dark and indistinct, like the fading light on a dull winter’s afternoon. Rain falls on my head. Cold winds tousle my hair. My flesh becomes loose and weak. Is it the beginning of decomposition?

  Then there is a change. My head is taken to a different place, to a dark pit; there it is warm and quiet. Light and clarity return to me. There are many other heads with me in the dark pit. Heads and bodies. And I notice that the heads and bodies are joining up again, as well, or as badly, as they can manage. And with the contact they rediscover their language, a soft, inaudible language in which they think to each other.

  I long for a body, I long to be finally rid of the unbearable coldness where my neck is cut, such a coldness that it almost seems to burn hot. But I look round in vain. All the heads and bodies are joined together. There is no body left for me. But eventually, after a long, laborious search, I find one … right at the bottom, hiding in a corner … a body that is still without a head, a woman’s body.

  Something inside me rebels against uniting with this body, but my desire, my longing overcomes it and, impelled by will power alone, I approach the headless body and see that it too is striving to reach my head; and now the two cuts touch with a mild shock and a feeling of gentle heat. One thing stands out above all: I have a body once more.

  But strange … after the initial feeling of comfort is over, I sense the enormous difference between my two components … I feel as if completely different fluids are meeting and mingling, fluids that have no similarities with each other. The woman’s body, which my head now crowns, is slim and white, and its skin has the marble coolness of an aristocrat who bathes in wine and milk and uses costly oils and lotions. But on its right-hand side, covering the hip and part of the stomach, is a strange drawing, a tattoo. Composed of fine, extremely fine, blue dots is a pattern of hearts, anchors and arabesques with the elaborate initials I and B intertwined and repeated. Who can the woman have been?