by John Irving
Ernst's pornography gave us headaches and dry throats. Frank used to say that even his eyes got dry when he read it; Lilly stopped listening after the first time; and I felt cold, sitting in Frank's room, the dead dressmaker's dummy like a curiously nonjudgmental schoolmistress overhearing Frank's recitation -- I got cold from the floor up. I felt something cold passing up my pants legs, through the old drafty floor, through the foundation of the building, from the soil beneath all light -- where I imagined were the bones from ancient Vindobona, and instruments of torture popular among invading Turks, whips and cudgels and tongue-depressors and dirks, the vogue chambers of horror of the Holy Roman Empire. Because Ernst's pornography was not about sex: it was about pain without hope, it was about death without a single memory. It made Susie the bear storm out to take a bath, it made Lilly cry (of course), it made me sick to my stomach (twice), it made Frank hurl one of the books at the dressmaker's dummy (as if the dummy had written it) -- it was the one called The Children on the Ship to Singapore; they never got to Singapore, not even one precious child.
But all it did to Franny was make her frown. It made her think about Ernst; it made her seek him out and ask him -- for starters -- why he did it.
'Decadence enhances the revolutionary position,' Ernst told her, slowly -- Frank fumbling to translate him exactly. 'Everything that is decadent speeds up the process, the inevitable revolution. At this phase it is necessary to generate disgust. Political disgust, economic disgust, disgust at our inhuman institutions, and moral disgust -- disgust at ourselves, as we've allowed ourselves to become.'
'Speaking for himself,' I whispered to Franny, but she was just frowning; she was concentrating too hard on him.
'The pornographer is, of course, most disgusting,' Ernst droned on. 'But, you see, if I were a communist, who would I want for the government in power? The most liberal? No. I would desire the most repressive, the most capitalistic, the most anti-communist government possible -- for then I would thrive. Where would the Left be without the help of the Right? The more stupid and right-wing everything is, the better for the Left.'
'Are you a communist?' Lilly asked Ernst. In Dairy, New Hampshire, Lilly knew, this was not such a hot thing to be.
'That was just a necessary phase,' Ernst said, speaking of communism and himself -- and to us children -- as if we all were past history, as if something vast were in motion and we were either being dragged after it or being blown away in its exhaust. 'I am a pornographer,' Ernst said, 'because I am serving the revolution. Personally,' he added, with a limp wave of his hand, 'well ... personally, I am an aesthete: I reflect upon the erotic. If Schwanger mourns for her coffeehouses -- if she is sad about her Schlagobers, which the revolution must also consume -- I mourn for the erotic, for it must be lost, too. Sometime after the revolution,' Ernst sighed, 'the erotic might reappear, but it will never be the same. In the new world, it will never mean as much.'
'The new world?' Lilly repeated, and Ernst shut his eyes as if this were the refrain in his favorite piece of music, as if with his mind's eye he could already see it, 'the new world,' a totally different planet -- brand-new beings dwelling there.
I thought he had rather delicate hands for a revolutionary; his long, slender fingers probably were a help to him, at the typewriter -- at his piano, where Ernst played the music for his opera of gigantic change. His cheap and slightly shiny navy-blue suit was usually clean but wrinkled, his white shirts were well washed but never pressed; he wore no tie; when his hair grew too long, he cut it too short. He had an almost athletic face, scrubbed, youthful, determined -- a boyish kind of handsomeness. Susie the bear, and Fehlgeburt, told us that Ernst had a reputation as a lady-killer among his students at the university. When he lectured on erotic literature, Miss Miscarriage remarked, Ernst was quite passionate, he was even playful; he was not the limp, low-key sort of lazy-weary, sluggish (or at least lethargic) talker he was when his subject was the revolution.
He was quite tall; though not solid, he was not frail, either. When I saw him hunch his shoulders, and turn the collar of his suit jacket up -- about to go home from the Gasthaus Freud, after a no-doubt saddening and disgusting day's work -- I was struck how in profile he reminded me of Chipper Dove.
Dove's hands never looked like a quarterback's hands, either -- too delicate, again. And I could remember seeing Chipper Dove shrug his shoulder pads forward and trot back to the huddle, thinking about the next signal -- the next order, the next command -- his hands like songbirds lighting on his hip pads. Of course I knew then who Ernst was: the quarterback of the radicals, the signal caller, the dark planner, the one the others gathered around. And I knew then, too, what it was that Franny saw in Ernst. It was more than a physical resemblance to Chipper Dove, it was that cocksure quality, the touch of evil, that hint of destruction, that icy leadership -- that was what could sneak its way into my sister's heart, that was what captured the her in her, that was what took Franny's strength away.
'We all want to go back home,' I told Father. 'To the United States. We want America. We don't like it here.'
Lilly held my hand. We were in Frank's room, again -- Frank nervously boxing with the dressmaker's dummy, Franny on Frank's bed, looking out the window. She could see the Kaffee Mowatt, across the Krugerstrasse. It was early morning, and someone was sweeping the cigarette butts out the door of the coffeehouse, across the sidewalk, and into the gutter. The radicals were not the nighttime company of the Kaffee Mowatt; at night the whores used the place to get off the street -- to take a break, to play some billiards, to drink a beer or a glass of wine, or get picked up -- and Father allowed Frank and Franny and me to go there to throw some darts.
'We miss home,' Lilly said, trying not to cry. It was still summer, and Mother and Egg had departed too recently to permit our dwelling for long on phrases that concerned missing anyone or anything.
'It's not going to work here, Dad,' Frank said. 'It looks like an impossible situation.'
'And now's the time to leave,' I said, 'before we start school, before we all have our various commitments.'
'But I already have a commitment,' Father said, softly. 'To Freud.'
Did an old blind man equal us? we wanted to shout at him, but Father didn't allow us to linger on the subject of his commitment to Freud.
'What do you think, Franny?' he asked her, but Franny continued to stare out the window at the early morning street. Here came Old Billig, the radical -- there went Screaming Annie, the whore. Both of them looked tired, but both of them were very Viennese in their attention to form: they both managed a hearty greeting we could hear through the open summer window in Frank's room.
'Look,' Frank said to Father. 'For sure we're in the First District, but Freud neglected to tell us that we live on just about the worst street in the whole district.'
'A kind of one-way street,' I added.
'No parking, either,' said Lilly. There was no parking because the Krugerstrasse seemed to be used for delivery trucks making back-door deliveries to the fancy places on the Karntnerstrasse.
Also, the district post office was on our street -- a sad, grimy building that hardly attracted potential customers to our hotel.
'Also the prostitutes,' Lilly whispered.
'Second-class,' said Frank. 'No hope for advancement. We're only a block off the Karntnerstrasse but we'll never be the Karntnerstrasse,' Frank said.
'Even with a new lobby,' I told Father, 'even if it's an attractive lobby, there's no one to see it. And you're still putting people between whores and revolution.'
'Between sin and danger, Daddy,' Lilly said.
'Of course it doesn't matter, in the long run, I suppose,' Frank said; I could have kicked him. 'I mean, it's downhill either way -- it doesn't matter exactly when we leave, it's just evident that we will leave. This is a downhill hotel. We can leave when it's sinking, or after it's sunk.'
'But we want to leave now, Frank,' I said.
'Yes, we all do,' Lilly said.
>
'Franny?' Father asked, but Franny looked out the window. There was a mail truck trying to get around a delivery truck on the narrow street. Franny watched the mail come and go, waiting for letters from Junior Jones -- and, I suppose, from Chipper Dove. She wrote them both, a lot, but only Junior Jones wrote her back.
Frank, continuing with his philosophical indifference, said, 'I mean, we can leave when the whores all fail their medical checkups, we can leave when Dark Inge is finally old enough, we can leave when Schraubenschlussel's car blows up, we can leave when we're sued by the first guest, or the last -- '
'But we can't leave,' Father interrupted him, 'until we make it work.' Even Franny looked at him. 'I mean,' Father said, 'when it's a successful hotel, then we can afford to leave. We can't just leave when we have a failure on our hands,' he said, reasonably, 'because we wouldn't have anything to leave with.'
'You mean money?' I said. Father nodded.
'You've already sunk the money in here?' Franny asked him.
'They'll be starting the lobby before the summer is over,' Father said.
'Then it's not too late!' cried Frank. 'I mean, is it?'
'Unsink the money, Daddy!' Lilly said.
Father smiled benevolently, shaking his head. Franny and I looked out the window at Ernst the pornographer; he was moving past the Kaffee Mowatt, he looked full of disgust. He kicked some garbage out of his way when he crossed the street, he moved as purposefully as a cat after a mouse, but he looked forever disappointed in himself for arriving at work later than Old Billig. He had at least three hours of pornography in him before he broke for lunch, before he gave his lecture at the university (his 'aesthetic hour,' he called it), and then he would face the tired, mean-spirited hours of the late afternoon, which he told us children he reserved for 'ideology' -- for his contribution to the newsletter of the Symposium on East-West Relations. What a day he had ahead of himself! He was already full of hate for it, I could tell. And Franny couldn't take her eyes off him.
'We should leave now,' I said to Father, 'whether we're sunk or unsunk.'
'No place to go,' Father said, affectionately. He raised his hands; it was almost a shrug.
'Going to no place is better than staying here,' Lilly said.
'I agree,' I said.
'You're not being logical,' Frank said, and I glared at him.
Father looked at Franny. It reminded me of the looks he occasionally gave Mother; he was looking into the future, again, and he was looking for forgiveness -- in advance. He wanted to be excused for everything that would happen. It was as if the power of his dreaming was so vivid that he felt compelled to simply act out whatever future he imagined -- and we were being asked to tolerate his absence from reality, and maybe his absence from our lives, for a while. That is what 'pure love' is: the future. And that's the look Father gave to Franny.
'Franny?' Father asked her. 'What do you think?'
Franny's opinion was the one we always waited for. She looked at the spot in the street where Ernst had been -- Ernst the pornographer, Ernst the 'aesthete' on the subject of erotica, Ernst the lady-killer. I saw that the her in her was in trouble; something was already amiss in Franny's heart.
'Franny?' Father said, softly.
'I think we should stay,' Franny said. 'We should see what it's like,' she said, facing us all. We children looked away, but Father gave Franny a hug and a kiss.
'Atta girl, Franny!' he said. Franny shrugged; she gave Father Mother's shrug, of course -- it could get to him, every time.
Someone has told me that the Krugerstrasse, today, is mostly closed to all but pedestrian traffic, and that there are two hotels on the street, a restaurant, a bar, and a coffeehouse -- even a movie theater and a record store. Someone has told me that it's a posh street, now. Well, that's just so hard to believe. And I wouldn't ever want to see the Krugerstrasse again, no matter how much it has changed.
Someone has told me that there are fancy places on the Krugerstrasse itself, now: a boutique and a hairdresser, a bookstore and a record store, a place that sells furs and a place that sells bathroom fittings. This is utterly amazing.
Someone has told me that the post office is still there. The mail goes on.
And there are still prostitutes on the Krugerstrasse; no one has to tell me that prostitution still goes on.
The next morning I woke up Susie the bear. 'Earl!' she said, fighting out of sleep. 'What the fuck is it now?'
'I want your help,' I said to her. 'You've got to save Franny.'
'Franny's real tough,' said Susie the bear. 'She's beautiful and tough,' said Susie, rolling over, 'and she doesn't need me.'
'You impress her,' I said; this was a hopeful lie. Susie was only twenty, only four years older than Franny, but when you're sixteen, four years is a big difference. 'She likes you,' I said; this was true, I knew. 'You're at least older, like an older sister to her, you know?' I said.
'Earl!' Susie the bear said, staying in disguise.
'Maybe you are weird,' Frank told Susie, 'but Franny can be more influenced by you than she can be influenced by us.'
'Save Franny from what?' Susie the bear asked.
'From Ernst,' I said.
'From pornography itself,' said Lilly, shuddering.
'Help her get the her in her back,' Frank begged Susie the bear.
'I don't normally mess with underage girls,' Susie said.
'We want you to help her, not mess with her,' I said to Susie, but Susie the bear only smiled. She sat up in her bed, her costume disheveled on the floor of her room, her own hair like bear hair with its stiff and erratic directions, her hard face like a wound above her ratty T-shirt.
'Helping someone is the same as messing with someone,' said Susie the bear.
'Will you please try?' I asked her.
'And you ask me where the real trouble began,' Frank would say to me, later: 'Well, it didn't start with the pornography -- not in my opinion,' Frank would say. 'Not that it matters, of course, but I know what started the trouble that got to you,' Frank would tell me.
Like the pornography, I don't wish to describe it, but Frank and I had only a very brief picture -- we had only the quickest glimpse of it, though we saw more than enough. It started one evening in August, when it was so hot Lilly had woken up Frank and me and asked for a glass of water -- as if she were a baby again -- one evening when it was too quiet in the Gasthaus Freud. There were no customers to make Screaming Annie scream, there was no one even interested enough to grunt with Jolanta, to whimper with Babette, to strike a bargain with Old Billig, or even look at young Dark Inge. It was too hot to sit in the Kaffee Mowatt; the whores sat on the stairs in the cool, dark lobby of the Gasthaus Freud -- now under construction. Freud was in bed, asleep, of course; he could not see the heat. And Father, who saw the future more clearly than the moment, was asleep, too.
I went in Frank's room and boxed the dressmaker's dummy around for a while.
'Jesus God,' Frank said, 'I'll be glad when you find some barbells and you leave my dummy alone.' But he couldn't sleep, either; we shoved the dressmaker's dummy back and forth between us.
There was no mistaking the sound for Screaming Annie -- or for any of the whores. The sound seemed to bear no relationship to sorrow; there was too much light in the sound to have anything to do with sorrow, there was too much of the music of water in the sound to make Frank and me think of fucking for money, or even of lust there was too much light and water music for lust, either. Frank and I had never heard this sound before -- and in my memory, which is a forty-year-old's memory now, I do not remember another recording of this song; no one would ever sing quite exactly this song to me.
It was the song Susie the bear made Franny sing. Susie went through Franny's room to use the bathroom. Frank and I went through my room to get to the same bathroom; through the bathroom door we could peek into Franny's room.
The head of the bear on the rug at the foot of Franny's bed was at first unnerving, as if som
eone had severed Susie from her head when she'd first intruded. But the bear's head was not the focal point of Frank's and my attention. It was Franny's sound that drew us -- both keen and soft, as nice as Mother, as happy as Egg. It was a sound almost without sex in it, although sex was the song's subject, because Franny lay on her bed with her arms flung over her head and her head thrown back, and between her long, slightly stirring legs (treading water, as if she were very buoyant), in my sister's dark lap (which I shouldn't have seen) was a headless bear -- a headless bear was lapping there, like an animal eating from a fresh kill, like an animal drinking in the heart of a forest.
This vision frightened Frank and me. We didn't know where to go after seeing this, and for no reason, with nothing on our minds -- or with too much on them -- we stumbled into the lobby. There all the whores on the stairs greeted us; the heat and their own boredom, their inactivity, seemed to make them unusually glad to see us, although they always seemed to be pretty glad to see us. Only Screaming Annie looked disappointed to see us -- as if she'd thought, for a moment, we might be 'business.'
Dark Inge said, 'Hey, you guys, you look like you seen a ghost.'
'Something you ate, dears?' asked Old Billig. 'It's too late for you to be up.'
'Your hard-ons keeping you awake?' Jolanta asked.
'Oui, oui,' sang Babette. 'Bring us your hard-ons!'
'Stop that,' said Old Billig. 'It's too hot to fuck, anyway.'
'Never too hot,' Jolanta said.
'Never too cold,' said Screaming Annie.
'Do you want to play cards?' Dark Inge asked us. 'Crazy eights?'
But Frank and I, like windup soldiers, did a few awkward turns at the foot of the stairs, reversed direction, made our way back to Frank's room -- and then, like magnets, we were drawn to Father.
'We want to go home,' I said to him. He woke up, and took both Frank and me into his bed with him, as if we were still small.
'Please, let's go home, Dad,' Frank whispered.