by John Irving
The customer who'd passed out when Screaming Annie finished the Krugerstrasse came to. He was awfully embarrassed to find Freud, me, the New Hampshire family, Screaming Annie, her daughter, and Babette all looking at him. At least, I thought, he was spared the bear -- and the rest of my family. Late as usual, Old Billig wandered in; she'd been asleep.
'What's going on?' she asked me.
'Didn't Screaming Annie wake you, too?' I asked her.
'Screaming Annie doesn't wake me up anymore,' Old Billig said. 'It's those damn world planners up on the fifth floor.'
I looked at my watch. It was still before two in the morning. 'You're still asleep,' I whispered to Old Billig. 'The radicals don't come this early.'
'I'm wide-awake,' Old Billig said. 'Some of the radicals never went home last night. Sometimes they stay all night. And they're usually quiet. But Screaming Annie must have disturbed them. They dropped something. Then they were hissing like snakes, trying to pick whatever it was up.'
'They shouldn't be here at night,' Freud said.
'I've seen enough of this sordidness,' the New Hampshire woman said, seeming to feel ignored.
'I've seen it all,' Freud said, mysteriously. 'All the sordidness,' he said. 'You get used to it.'
Babette said she'd had enough for one night; she went home. Screaming Annie put Dark Inge back to bed. Screaming Annie's embarrassed male companion tried to leave as inconspicuously as possible, but the New Hampshire family watched him all the way out of the hotel. Jolanta joined Freud and Old Billig and me at the second-floor landing. We listened up the stairwell, but the radicals -- if they were there -- were quiet now.
'I'm too old for the stairs,' Old Billig said, 'and too smart to poke my nose where I'm not wanted. But they're up there,' she said. 'Go see.' Then she turned back to the street -- to the gentle occupation.
'I'm blind,' Freud admitted. 'It would take me half the night to climb those stairs, and I wouldn't see anything if they were there.'
'Give me your baseball bat,' I said to Freud. 'I'll go see.'
'Just take me with you,' Jolanta said. 'Fuck the bat.'
'I need the bat, anyway,' Freud said. Jolanta and I said good night to him and started up the stairs.
'If there's anything to it,' Freud said, 'wake me up and tell me about it. Or tell me about it in the morning.'
Jolanta and I listened for a while on the third-floor landing, but all we could hear was the New Hampshire family sliding every object of furniture against their doors. The youthful Swedish couple had slept through it all -- apparently used to some kind of orgasm; or used to murder. The old man from Burgenland had possibly died in his room, shortly after checking in. The bicyclists from Great Britain were on the fourth floor, and probably too drunk to be aroused, I thought, but when Jolanta and I paused on the fourth-floor landing and listened for the radicals, we encountered one of the British bicyclists there.
'Bloody strange,' he whispered to us.
'What is?' I said.
'Thought I heard a bloody scream,' he said. 'But it was downstairs. Now I hear them dragging the body round upstairs. Bloody odd.'
He looked at Jolanta. 'Does the tart speak English?' he asked me.
'The tart's with me,' I said. 'Why not just go back to bed?' I was perhaps eighteen or nineteen on this night, I think; the effects of the weight lifting, I noticed, were beginning to impress people. The British bicyclist went back to bed.
'What do you think is going on?' I asked Jolanta, nodding upstairs, toward the silent fifth floor.
She shrugged; it was nowhere near Mother's shrug, or Franny's shrug, but it was a woman's shrug. She put her big hands in the deadly purse.
'What do I care what's going on?' she asked. 'They might change the world,' Jolanta said of the radicals, 'but they won't change me.'
This somehow reassured me, and we climbed to the fifth floor. I hadn't been up there since I'd helped move the typewriters and office equipment, three or four years ago. Even the hall looked different. There were a lot of boxes in the hall, and jugs -- of chemicals or wine? I wondered. More chemicals than they needed for the one mimeograph machine, anyway -- if they were chemicals. Fluids for the car, I might have thought; I didn't know. I did the unsuspecting thing; I knocked on the first door Jolanta and I came to.
Ernst opened it; he was smiling. 'What's up?' he asked. 'Can't sleep? Too many orgasms?' He saw Jolanta just behind me. 'Looking for a more private room?' he asked me. Then he asked us in.
The room adjoined two others -- I remembered that it was once joined to only one other -- and its furnishings looked substantially different, although, over the years, I had not seen a single large item carried in or out; just those things I assumed Schraubenschlussel needed for the car.
Schraubenschlussel was in the room, and Arbeiter -- the ever-working Arbeiter. It must have been one of the large battery-type boxes that Old Billig and I had heard fall off a table, because the typewriters were in another part of the room; clearly no one had been typing. There were some maps -- or maybe they were blueprints -- spread about, and there was the automobile-like equipment one associates with service garages, not offices: chemical things, electrical things. The radical Old Billig, who'd called Arbeiter crazy, was not there. And my sweet Fehlgeburt, like a good student of American literature, was either home reading or home asleep. In my opinion, just the bad radicals were there: Ernst, Arbeiter, and Wrench.
'That was one hell of an orgasm tonight!' Schraubenschlussel said, leering at Jolanta.
'Another fake,' Jolanta said.
'Maybe that one was real,' Arbeiter said.
'Dream on,' Jolanta said.
'You've got the tough one following you around, eh?' Ernst said to me. 'You've got the tough piece of meat with you, I see.'
'All you do is write about it,' Jolanta said to him. 'You probably can't get it up.'
'I know just the position for you,' Ernst told her.
But I didn't want to hear it. I was frightened of them all.
'We're going,' I said. 'Sorry to disturb you. We just didn't know anyone was here at night.'
'The work backs up if we don't occasionally stay late,' Arbeiter said.
With Jolanta at my side, her strong hands hugging something in her purse, we said good night. And it was not my imagination that -- just as I was leaving -- I caught sight of another figure in the shadows of the farthest adjoining room. She also had a purse, but what she had in her purse was out -- in her hand, and trained on Jolanta and me. It was just a glimpse I had of her, and her gun, before she slipped back in the shadows and Jolanta closed the door. Jolanta didn't see her; Jolanta just kept watching Ernst. But I saw her: our gentle, mother-like radical, Schwanger -- with a gun in her hand.
'What do you have in your purse, anyway?' I asked Jolanta. She shrugged. I said good night to her, but she slipped a big hand down the front of my pants and held me a moment; I'd hopped out of bed and into some clothes so fast that I'd not taken the time for underwear. 'You going to send me out on the street again?' she asked me. 'I want just one more trick before I call it a night.'
'It's too late for me,' I said, but she could feel me growing hard in her hand.
'It doesn't feel too late,' she said.
'I think my wallet's in another pair of pants,' I lied.
'Pay me later,' Jolanta said. 'I'll trust you.'
'How much?' I asked, when she squeezed harder.
'For you, only three hundred Schillings,' she said. For everyone, I knew, it was three hundred Schillings.
'It's too much,' I said.
'It doesn't feel like too much,' she said, giving me a sharp twist; I was very hard at the moment, and it hurt.
'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, Sc
reaming 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 Schraubenschlussel'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 Schraubenschlussel 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 Gurtel. 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 Buchl (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 Buchl?' 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 naive,' 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 naive' was not the evening I first tried to kiss her. After the line 'ideologically naive,' 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, an
d 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; she did it the way she usually marked her place in Moby-Dick -- uninterestedly.
'I should go after?' I asked, undressing myself.
'If you want,' she said. 'I mean you should go from the Hotel New Hampshire. You and your family. Leave,' she said. 'Leave before the fall season.'
'What fall season?' I asked her, completely naked now. I was thinking about Junior Jones's fall season with the Cleveland Browns.
'The Opera season,' Fehlgeburt said, naked herself -- at last. She was as thin as a novella; she was no bigger than some of the shortest stories she had ever read to Lilly. It was as if all the books in her room had been feeding on her, had consumed -- not nourished -- her.
'The Opera season will start in the fall,' Fehlgeburt said, 'and you and your family must leave the Hotel New Hampshire by then. Promise me,' she said, halting me from moving farther up her gaunt body.
'Why?' I asked.
'Please leave,' she said. When I entered her, I thought it was the sex that brought her tears on, but it was something else.
'Am I the first?' I asked. Fehlgeburt was twenty-nine.
'First and last,' she said, crying.
'Do you have anything to protect you?' I asked, inside her. 'I mean, you know, so you don't get schwanger?'
'It doesn't matter,' she said, in Frank's irritating fashion.
'Why?' I asked, trying to move cautiously.
'Because I'll be dead before the baby's born,' she said. I pulled out. I sat her up beside me, but she -- with surprising strength -- pulled me back on top of her; she took me in her hand and put me back inside her. 'Come on,' she said, impatiently -- but it was not the impatience of desire. It was something else.