The 158-Pound Marriage

by John Irving

  He never reached the steps. Edith jumped up and ran to him while he was still on the sidewalk. 'Where did you find that?' she cried; she seized him by the jacket. She had her face toward him, away from us, so that we couldn't see whether she was angry or happy. She shook the jacket, then hugged him. It was imperceptible, but I think he steered her to the car - or maybe she turned toward the car herself and he simply supported her. She sat in the passenger seat in severe profile, so I couldn't read her face. Severin bounced into the driver's seat and waved to us hurriedly; I don't think he actually looked at us. 'Later!' he called. Edith never moved as he drove off.

  'Severin will not easily relinquish the driver's seat,' Edith told me later.

  'How do you feel about that?' I asked.

  And Edith said, 'I always felt, from the first, that he was a pretty good driver.'

  A firm believer in the past, Severin Winter dug up his old letter-jacket and stole our scene before we could have it.

  3

  Scouting Reports: Utch [134-pound class]

  ON 9 JULY, 1945, the Allies quartered the city of Vienna for occupation. The Americans and British grabbed up the best residential sections, the French took over the markets and the major shopping areas, and the Russians (who had long-term, realistic plans) settled in the worker-industrial districts and within the Inner City, nearest to the embassies and the government buildings. During the carving of the great game bird, the dinner guests revealed their special tastes.

  Everyone knows that the Soviets could not quite work in Vienna what they had worked in Berlin; perhaps not everyone knows how hard they tried. Sixteen out of twenty-one districts had Communist chiefs of police, a kind of Russian magic. During the ten-year occupation, as many as a third of the anti-Soviets in Vienna ended up missing; perhaps they never understood whose zone of occupation was whose and got lost. Whatever, Chancellor Figl was prompted to confess: 'We have had to write down against a very long list of names simply the word "disappeared".' More magic.

  Unless you were a Communist, or were untroubled by rape and machine-gunning, you would not have chosen to live in the Soviet zone of occupation. Utch, of course, had no choice. Only seven years old, she had good reason to be a Communist; if her guardian Captain Kudashvili was not a hero to many of the good women of Eichbuchl, he was at least her savior. If not her father, he was at least the available midwife who'd delivered her from the cow where she'd been kept so safe.

  Captain Kudashvili, of course, moved into a district in the Russian zone, the fourth. It is fortunate for Utch that he was an idealist. He had never seen a postwar orphanage before. Utch had never seen Vienna. The day that Captain Kudashvili walked up Argentinierstrasse (the orphanage was near the Sudbahnhof) was the first day she could remember being outside a barracks or a barn. I imagine that if you've spent two days inside a cow, being outside anywhere is uplifting. And the buildings along the Argentinierstrasse were so ornamental that they reminded her of her mother's stolen books.

  Utch had her birth certificate pinned to the lapel of her coat. Kudashvili had given her a dead soldier's scarf; it wrapped around her neck four times and still dragged on the sidewalk. When they got to the orphanage, Utch somehow knew she'd been brought here to stay. Kudashvili had been telling her, of course, but she didn't understand Russian yet.

  Inside the building they were holding a demonstration of a generation gap - the gap being the generation that was missing. There were grandparents galore, giving children away; it was the parents' generation that had lost (and been lost in) the war. Utch remembers that Kudashvili was the only member of his generation there; everyone stared at him. One old woman came up to him and spat on his chest, but that was because of the Russian uniform. One grandmother was trying to free herself from five or six children. An orphanage attendant was restraining one child, and another attendant was handling two, but there was always two or three the grandmother couldn't get free of. Just as she'd get to the door, one of them would get to her and cling. All her grandchildren were screaming, but it wasn't the screaming ones who impressed Utch, it was the children who'd already been left. They were not crying; they were not even moving. They were mute voyeurs, and Utch somehow inferred that they would never have any expressions on their faces again.

  Kudashvili was trying to sign something, but Utch grabbed his writing hand. She wouldn't let go, she bit him, and she tried to tie him up in the long scarf he'd given her. Kudashvili did not protest; it's possible he never had his heart set on the idea of an orphanage anyway. He picked her up and carried her out of there. To this day, she claims that she shouted, 'Auf Wiedersehen!' to everyone.

  As they walked back down the Argentinierstrasse into the fourth district, Kudashvili unpinned Utch's birth certificate from her coat lapel and put it in his leather folder with his own papers. On his chest, under his medals, the old woman's spittle shone like a gob of cold chicken fat. Kudashvili cleaned himself with a handkerchief. He removed one of his medals and pinned it on Utch's coat lapel. She has it to this day: a Medal of Excellence, signifying - as nearly as anyone has been able to tell me - Captain Kudashvili's valorous participation in the defense of the great city of Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine. But perhaps that's only a symbol.

  So Utch went back into the fourth district with her guardian, Captain Kudashvili, and for the ten years that the Allies occupied the city of Vienna she shared the captain's quarters with an occasional housekeeper, baby-sitter and laundress named Drexa Neff. Frau Neff didn't care for the Russians any more than most of the Viennese, but she did care for Captain Kudashvili. She was a sarcastic old woman whose husband had left her before the war and who'd had some fun when a young Austrian boy who was too sickly to be a soldier had paid her twenty shillings a week, when he picked up his mother's laundry, for doing something extra to him in the steam room.

  Drexa Neff scolded and teased Utch, but she took care of her. Kudashvili protectively walked Utch to school every day, and Drexa Neff was at school to meet her and walk her home. When the other kids would bully her, Drexa Neff would tell her to say to them: 'Captain Kudashvili is a moral man, even though he is a Russian, and a moral man is more than some of you can call your fathers, if you have a father left ...' Which, of course, Utch never said.

  It was Drexa Neff who prepared Utch for becoming a Russian. Drexa thought school was a waste for Utch. 'Ja, but did they teach you how to do it in Russian today?' she'd ask after school. 'Because that's where he'll take you, Liebchen, if he doesn't leave you here - and der Kudashvili is too moral a man to leave you just anywhere, you should already know.' So Utch paid attention to her guardian and learned the Russian language from him, as well as a game called Telephon. She learned never to go outside without first phoning 06-036-27. In those days there was no direct dialing; Utch would have to tell the operator the number. She learned it by heart: 'Null sechs, null sechsunddreizig, siebenundzwanzig.' It was Captain Kudashvili's office number; she never knew where it was, and the captain never answered the phone himself. She would call and then wait in the apartment or the laundry where Drexa Neff steamed and talked.

  Usually, two men came for her. They were never other Russians; they were never in uniform. But they were working for the Russians. Utch remembers that they were very watchful. Sometimes they would follow her at a short distance instead of walking beside her, and whenever someone spoke to her, the two men would come up very suddenly and whoever had spoken to Utch would say that he was very sorry.

  It was much later, of course, when she realized who the men were and why she needed to be protected. Most people in the Russian sector needed protection, but Utchka was 'that Russian captain's daughter, or something', and needed to be protected from the anti-Soviets. The men who were her bodyguards were members of the most notorious criminal gang in Vienna: the Benno Blum Gang, a cigarette-smuggling ring and black marketeers of the precious nylon stocking, to mention only their lighter trades. What they were really responsible for was the 'disappearance' of that fa
mous one-third of the anti-Soviets in Vienna. They were allowed to flourish in their petty crimes, protected from the police in the Russian zone for the services they rendered the Russians in return. They killed people. It is likely Captain Kudashvili was in partial charge of them, and of course it's likely that people in Utch's neighborhood knew this. Any Viennese knowing her story would not wish her harm, but she was a link to Kudashvili and they certainly wished him considerable harm. The Benno Blum Gang smuggled more than cigarettes and nylon stockings; they transported people - forever. Utch may have been the best-guarded child in the fourth district.

  Severin Winter, who has never enjoyed being a runner-up, has said that Utch was not the best-guarded child in the fourth district; he claimed that he was. Of course, he was being protected from the Russians, not by them; his situation was more typical. His mother had brought him back from London at the end of the war; she still had many of Kurt Winter's paintings left, and many had been left in Vienna. She came looking for Kurt Winter, on the slight chance she'd really find him, and insisted on reoccupying her old apartment on the Schwindgasse, even though her friends told her that it was in the Russian district. She insisted. Where else would her husband look for her?

  Katrina Marek had not been an actress in London during the war, and she never returned to the stage again. She had been an artist's model in London, and she took that up in Vienna in 1945. She was quite well known by the time Severin was marched off each morning to a boys' academy. She did not want her son to forget his English. 'It's your ticket out of this old horse stable, this greasy Kuche,' she told her son, and she insisted that he be marched each day out of the Russian sector, into an American sector and the American school, and then back home to the Russian zone. It was a feat of beating red tape few could have pulled off, but Severin had escorts who knew the ropes. Friends of his mother, Severin's escorts were the two most sought-after male models of any in Vienna. Severin claims they were nearly as popular as his mother in Guetersloh's classes at the Vienna Academy. Katrina had met them when a painter had asked her to model with them at a joint session. They were, of course, Zivan Knezevich and Vaso Trivanovich, the wrestlers from the '36 Berlin Games. In the years of the occupation of Vienna, Vaso and Zivan were still young and strong. They were also former Chetnik guerrillas, and their abiding contempt for the Russians made their daily sorties in and out of the Russian zone very satisfying to them.

  But Severin Winter is full of shit if he wants me to believe that two ex-wrestlers would ever have been a match for the Benno Blum Gang. It is fortunate for him that their paths did not cross. Those former athletes would have been found bloated in the Danube, nylon stockings over their faces and twisted round their necks - a Blum Gang specialty.

  It's a wonder, though, that their paths did not cross - Utch off to school each morning with the captain, or out to shop with Benno Blum's hired murderers carrying her chocolate; it's a wonder that she didn't once pass on the street that short, dark, athletic boy in the company of his wrestlers. Perhaps they simply don't remember it. It's likely they saw each other at least once, because for ten years Utch lived in a second-floor apartment next to the Bulgarian embassy, directly across the Schwindgasse from the Marek second-floor apartment. They could have looked in each other's windows.

  And they used the same laundress. At least once, while Utch sat listening to Drexa Neff or helped her stack the clean clothes, surely Severin must have walked into the steam, flanked by his wrestlers, and asked if his mother's laundry was ready.

  'She didn't have much laundry,' Winter said. 'Her dress was quite informal.'

  Such understatement. Katrina Marek went out modeling each morning in her calf-length brown coat of muskrat fur, the gift of the American painter she had modeled for in London. It had a collar that rolled up above the top of her head, and beneath the coat peeked the bottoms of her thigh-high orange stockings. They were the same stockings - that is, the same orange, if not the same pair - that the model wore in Schiele's Vally with Red Blouse (1913) and Woman with Purple Boa (1915). Katrina Marek had several pairs. Her workday laundry was characteristically light. Central heating was rare in Vienna; when she wasn't modeling, she kept her muskrat coat on. Under the coat, she wore orange stockings and nothing else.

  'Mother would dress when she came home,' Winter said. 'Or if it was late, she might not bother.'

  Utch remembers hearing about Katrina Marek, but she can't remember ever seeing her. 'Was she tall?' she asked Severin. 'A blonde, yes? I remember her. She had a very thin face--'

  'She was short and dark,' Winter said, 'and her face was as broad as yours.'

  But he couldn't visualize Captain Kudashvili either, although he swears he heard the name every day. 'Ja, of course, der Kudashvili. He was the sergeant of the block, the General of the Schwindgasse. "You watch out, you mind your manners," the mothers would tell you, "or der Kudashvili is taking you away." Oh ja, he was blonder than a German's German, he was as fat as a Russian's bear. He wore elevator shoes.'

  'He never did,' said Utch. 'He was tall and lean, with a long sad face and a mustache like black wool. His eyes were gray-blue, like a revolver.'

  'Oh, that one!' Severin Winter cried. 'Of course I remember him.' But he didn't; it was just his clever tooth talking again.

  But why couldn't they remember! Children were scarce. Out of rarity, alone, all the children must have looked at each other. Children stare at each other - even now, when there are so many.

  'There was a lot of forgetting going on,' Utch told me.

  Yes, and much of it was hers. She must have been uncomfortable about her guardian captain's job. Drexa did not make things easier for him. At supper, Kudashvili allowed her to eat with Utch and himself, despite Drexa's babble.

  'Well, Captain, you must have heard,' Drexa would say. 'Old Gortz is gone - the machine-parts store up Argentinierstrasse? He owned it for years.'

  'Gortz?' Kudashvili would say; his German was better than he let on.

  'Just disappeared,' Drexa would say. 'Overnight. His wife woke up and the bed was empty. She woke because suddenly she felt cold.'

  'Men are poor weak creatures, Drexa,' Kudashvili would say. 'You have to marry a good one if you don't want him to run away.' And to Utch he'd say, 'You're going to be lucky. You won't ever have to marry anybody until you want to.'

  'Ja, Utchka will marry a czar!' old Drexa would cackle. She knew that was old Russia, but she liked it when the captain raised his black eyebrows at her.

  'The czars are gone, Drexa.'

  'Ja, mein Hauptmann, and so is Gortz.'

  'You must have known what was going on,' Severin said once to Utch.

  'I knew what was going on before too,' Utch answered.

  'So, what's the difference between one Gestapo and another?' Winter asked.

  'Kudashvili took good care of me,' she said.

  We were sitting in our living room late one evening, after dinner. It was often awkward when all four of us tried to have a conversation; by then, it was Edith and I who talked to each other, and Utch and Severin. Still, if such things are ever going to work, it must be thought of as a relationship between four people, not two couples. The whole point was not to be clandestine, but it was Severin who would never give the four of us a chance. He would either be sullen and say nothing, or he would get into these long family-history harangues with Utch and expect Edith and me to listen. He was uncomfortable, so he tried to make us uncomfortable too. Sometimes, at their house, he'd appear holding Utch's coat out to her immediately after supper, in the middle of a fairly relaxed conversation. He'd say suddenly to her, 'Come on, we're keeping them from talking about their writing.' That was a habit at his insistence too; somehow he always took Utch home, or stayed with her in our house, and I would end up with Edith in their house. He made a Prussian routine out of our relationship, and then made fun of it for being a routine! 'Exasperating,' he said one night when the three of us were very much aware that he hadn't said a word all evenin
g. 'We're just biding time before we go to bed. Why not forget the dinner part and save a little money?'

  So we tried it a few times, and he seemed to enjoy the coldness of it. I'd arrive at their house after dinner and he'd slip out of the backdoor as I came in the front. Or when he came to our house first, he sat around with his coat on, mumbling 'Yes' and 'No' until I left to see Edith. Then he would take his coat off, Utch told me.

  But it didn't have to be that way, or like other times when he'd consciously set out to bore us all, engendering a monologue at dinner which he'd carry to the living room afterwards with every intention of making us all fall asleep. One night he talked so long that Edith finally said, 'Severin, I think we're all tired.'

  'Oh,' he said. 'Well, let's call it a night, then. Let's go to bed, then,' he said to Edith! He kissed Utch goodnight and shook my hand. 'Another time, then. We've got lots of time, right?'

  I remember the endless evening which began with his saying to Utch, 'Do you remember the riot at the Greek embassy in 'fifty-two?'

  'I was only fourteen,' Utch said.

  'So was I, but I recall it very clearly,' Severin said. 'A horde of rioting Communists attacking the Greek embassy; they were protesting the execution of Beloyannis.'

  'I don't remember any Beloyannis,' Utch said.

  'Well, he was a Greek Communist,' Severin said, 'but I'm talking about the attack on the Greek embassy in Vienna. The Soviets wouldn't let the police send an armed force to break up the riot. The funny thing was that the rioters were brought to the embassy in Soviet Army trucks. Remember now?'

  'No.'

  'And even funnier is that the Soviets disarmed all the police - in our sector, anyway. They even took away their rubber truncheons. I always wondered if that was Kudashvili's idea.'

  'I forget a lot,' Utch said.

  'So does Severin,' Edith said.

  'Like what?' Winter asked her.

  'Your mother,' said Edith. Utch and I chewed our food quietly while Winter sat looking as if he was remembering.