by Daša Drndic
In the Gerbeaud cake shop the walls were covered in silk wallpaper, the little tables were made of marble, the lights crystal. In the Gerbeaud everything around hummed with an elegance that suited Printz, Printz liked elegance, it was an elegance from another age, past. The air smelled of chocolate, Printz found himself in chocolate nirvana and he thought that he was going to faint.
I’m going to faint, he said. To himself. To the waitress he said: Four slices of Gerbeaud torte and three glasses of cold milk. His hands lay on the marble surface of the marble Kaffeetisch. I’ve got nice hands, he said, also to himself. And I’m tired.
Printz left Budapest. The tourists sang. The tourists were also leaving Budapest, they were returning to the town on the confluence of two polluted rivers, returning from their excursion, from their shopping trip. They were happy, you could see, because they were singing. Budapest is a beautiful city. Printz heard shells falling over there (Vukovar?), he saw bombers flying over there, they seemed close, they were not going far, the woman beside him in the bus said, The Hungarians have excellent cheeses and cheap salami, no worse than what they produce in the breakaway republics.
When Printz got home, Rikard repeated: Don’t be an idiot, you can’t leave, we can’t leave Ernestina.
Herzog would not dream of going secretly to where there was a war. Herzog would not dream of going to any battlefield, because Herzog did not know how to hold a gun, because he had dodged the army when it was still peacetime and because he did not want to leave his Rottweiler. I’d die without my Rottweiler, that is what he said. Herzog was fat and said nothing. He invited guests for a beer and nibbles. Matilda said: My Herzog is a man of morals, he does not get involved.
That was 1991. Or 1992? It took Ernestina another three years to die. Perhaps more? Then it was too late.
I’m stuck now, said Printz.
Printz drinks his milk and goes to the bathroom. He picks up some nail scissors and starts making holes in his body, all over his thighs and belly, on his shoulders, behind, as far down as he can reach. He uses the little scissors to perforate and twist as though his body was a field, as though he was preparing a large, quiet expanse of land for cultivation, for seeds. Blood pours out of the little craters, of course. Printz watches. I’ll keep piercing until milk starts pouring out of me instead of blood, he says. I’m full of milk. I drink too much milk. Then Printz goes into Rikard Dvorsky’s bedroom and says: Don’t worry, I’ll make dinner.
Rikard Dvorsky does not look around, he sits motionless in the pink armchair, looking out of the window. Printz repeats don’t worry, it’ll be all right, but Rikard Dvorsky whispers: I think I’m going to die. And dies.
Rikard Dvorsky is dead, Printz announces to the dirty window and goes on looking into the urban distance.
Printz has no idea what to do.
I’ll sell my microscope, it’s an expensive microscope and valuable.
We need to get money together for another cremation.
I’ll sell these pictures on the walls.
Printz gets drunk. Printz drinks that day and the next. He drinks a lot and for a long time. Printz is first half-conscious, then unconscious. It is white wine, bad wine, that Printz drinks. Then he vomits.
The formalities of the cremation of Rikard Dvorsky are carried out by Herzog, dedicatedly and pedantically. The cremation leaves no impression on Printz.
It’s all old hat, we’ve been there before, concludes Printz.
The urn is placed in the depot, right next to Ernestina. Now both urns are waiting. Waiting to go to their hometowns, to a different country.
Small animals move into Printz’s head. He looks after his little animals; feeds them and settles them to sleep. Sometimes they are alive and they move, sometimes they are like porcelain figures and stand still, stiff.
Like me. I sometimes stiffen on purpose.
All Printz’s little animals are the same size regardless of what kind they are. So there is a grotesque disharmony in Printz’s head.
What disharmony? There’s no disharmony.
Cats, small cats, big as dogs, small dogs. Small rhinos, as small as small birds, like snakes, lions, bugs.
Bugs? What bugs?
Cicadas.
Don’t mention cicadas. Cicadas are a special kind of bug. They eat roots. For three, sometimes four years, they live under ground and travel toward the light. When they catch sight of the sun, cicadas sing, fall in love and die.
The ancient Greeks adored cicadas. They kept them in little cages.
The Romans did not adore cicadas. The Romans were irritated by cicadas. They killed them and fed them to ants.
Printz is still sleeping on the narrow camp bed next to the dining table. He does not want to lie in the Dvorskys’ halved marital bed, which is empty now that Rikard has gone too. Printz reads and visits exhibitions. He looks for Maristella.
Maristella has gone. Maristella is now in a different country. Printz does not wish to know that.
Printz changes his clothes increasingly rarely. Printz has a lot of holes on his body. When the old holes heal, he makes new ones with scissors. He is waiting for milk to come out of him.
Leave me alone. Leave me.
He is full of craters, he is scabby.
He studies the year of his birth.
It was not a good year to be born, no.
It was 1946.
It was the year Charlotte Rampling was born, she has small tits and yellow eyes like a cobra, dangerous eyes. She was born at the same time as me.
Printz keeps company with newspaper sellers because he has no friends anymore, some have died, some have got lost, some have left, their contacts were not killed, and he had washed Ernestina and then walked with Rikard on a small wet mountain, on a hill, in fact. In the next-door country, Maristella is preparing an exhibition to which Printz will go, certainly, he will try. Over the counter, Printz tells the women selling newspapers, I’ve brought you a cup of coffee and a silk dress, for the stage. Then he hands the items to them. The newspaper sellers smile and take them, because newspaper sellers like it when clothes shimmer. Most of all they like clothes with sequins and blouses shot through with silver and gold thread, but there are no more of those, Printz has given them all away. The shop assistants are not interested in Rikard’s clothes, at night Printz had put Rikard’s suits beside the trash can, one by one, then from the window he watched who took what. When he hands the shop assistants his small gifts (Ernestina’s actually), Printz says I haven’t got any cigarettes and they give him some. Sometimes Printz brings the shop assistants a crystal glass, or rather two, for what would they do with one. He brings Ernestina’s jewelry, the remains of Ernestina’s jewelry, most of it was taken by Herzog and Matilda. Printz has two such shop assistants, in case of need. The assistants love Printz. Printz tells them stories that they do not entirely understand but which sound both nice and terrible so they are a bit afraid. The assistants like that, that ticklish secret fear because they know it is harmless, because they are behind the counter, protected.
In the elegant Vienna hotel, very elegant, the most elegant Vienna hotel, called Sacher, in which everything is chocolate brown like Sacher torte and stuffy in the style of the Habsburgs, Charlotte Rampling meets the torturer of her life, Dirk Bogarde, who is not called Dirk but Maximilian like that unfortunate archduke and admiral of the Austrian navy, later emperor of Mexico, whom Juarez in the town of Querétaro forces to surrender and in 1867 has him court-martialled, then he is condemned to death and shot. But that, such a tragic death does not happen to this Max, no. Charlotte is called Lucia, because, given that this is 1957 and in real life Charlotte Rampling is only eleven and at eleven there is no way that she would do everything that Lucia does with Maximilian in room 421. The Sacher Hotel is just opposite the Opera House at 4 Philharmonikerstrasse. That is why both of them, both Charlo
tte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde have different names and both of them live lives that are not their own, but pretend that they are, convincingly, pretty convincingly, yes.
I was in Vienna, officially and secretly, not in the Sacher Hotel but the Kummer Hotel, which is at 71a Mariahilfer Strasse and is less elegant than the Sacher Hotel although it is still fairly elegant. This is a digression.
Never mind, says the shop assistant benignly, as though wanting to comfort Printz.
Eleven years later, Max and Lucia meet by chance in the Vienna Sacher Hotel because there is peace in the world then. It’s a story like a fairy tale, completely made up and full of subdued light. Max is the night porter and Lucia is classy, she has a rich husband with the English name Atherton and she travels everywhere with him. Max and Lucia meet and immediately remember everything that happened in the concentration camp all that time ago, when Max was an SS officer and Lucia a Jewess. In the camp Lucia sang and danced and Max fucked and tortured her, then she whipped him because Max was a complex personality who made love with both sexes, receiving and inflicting pain. And now, in Vienna, in the Sacher Hotel, they remember all that with such nostalgia that they want to repeat everything that happened then, they want to do it again, to do more, this time perhaps a bit more cruelly, a bit more terribly, aware that there are no great dangers anymore because the world is at peace. There are no more terrible gifts reminiscent of the story of Salome and John the Baptist. None. And so, Lucia and Max put on little dislocated performances in peacetime Vienna, which arouse them sexually because Lucia is rich and free while Max is nobody, in fact an ordinary night porter even if in a deluxe category hotel.
Who is Salome? asks the shop assistant.
Sometimes stories get mixed up in Printz’s head, some characters enter them and others depart. Dirk Bogarde is not Maximilian anymore, but Herman who in reality is called Dragoš. The shop assistants listen anyway, they click their tongues and ask: then what happened?
Printz says: Then Herman coaxes Lucia to stay in Vienna forever, to stay with him so that they can spend the rest of their lives whipping each other, wrapped in chains and black leather straps. “I’ll show you the most beautiful city in the world, my world,” says Herman. “I’ll show you the last remnants of the Holy Roman Empire, the last dream of the greatness of a united Europe. I’ll take you to the Prater, from high up we will watch the people below and see what only eagles see. That is the secret of contempt. In the evening, we’ll drink an aperitif in the Loosbar and then go to dinner in the Drei Hacken. I’ll take you to the Spanish Riding School and to lunch at the Opera.”
The Opera is opposite the Sacher Hotel, says Printz, then continues:
“We’ll order music,” Herman does not stop coaxing Lucia. “We’ll order Lehar, I shall open my arms wide and say: C’est la vie! You’ll meet my friends from various phases of my life. They drink good wines from private vineyards and still live in a youthful K und K style. Vienna is for those who long for greatness, and that is us, Lucia, you and I.”
Lucia looks at Herman and is not certain whether that is exactly what she wants, although she does know that she will not agree to absolute incarceration in room 421 of the Sacher Hotel, no way.
“We shall protect Vienna from the influx of foreigners and thus expiate our sins. The infection of the degenerate Jewish plague is spreading through the world, my dear Lucia,” says Herman, then he tears his shirt open and orders: “Whip me!”
1946 was the year Amanda Lear was born, and Fassbinder. Aleksandr Gorshkov, the figure skater, was born. Printz enters all this into the remaining pages of the plucked black notebook. These are his topics for his new friends. He collects subjects, he collects little stories in exchange for free newspapers, free cigarettes, for the occasional grandchild. He knows the free gifts will soon stop.
Liza Minnelli was born, Alexander Shaparenko (USSR, Olympic gold for kayak, 1972), the Mongolian wrestler Bakhaavaa Buidda was born.
Printz makes a list of the dead and executed in 1946. That year, 1946, there were a lot of executions. On his list there are few actors or singers, few researchers or sportsmen, but a lot of previously dangerous people. On the list are also those whom Printz loves, and he makes up tender stories about them, touching and filmic, so that the newspaper sellers shed tears.
I like it when they cry, I like that.
Printz does not know why he is replacing one list, his parents’, that everyday, consumer one, with another, his own. He does not know. On Printz’s list from 1946 there are: Alfred Jodl, general, hanged; Hermann Göring, Nazi, Reichsmarschall, poisoned himself with cyanide in prison; Wilhelm Frick, German war criminal, hanged; Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Austrian Chancellor in 1938, hanged; August Borms, Flemish collaborator, executed; Alfred Rosenberg, German war criminal, hanged; the Yugoslav general Dragoljub Draža Mihailović, collaborated with the Nazis, hanged; Fawzi Husseini, high Arab functionary for Palestine, killed; Clemens von Galen, Bishop of Münster, antifascist, died of natural causes (at 68); Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Austrian Nazi, hanged; Gertrude Stein, American-French poet and writer, died; Fritz Sauckel, German war criminal, hanged; H.G. Wells, writer, died (79); Ion Antonescu, Romanian fascist prime minister and dictator, killed; Joachim von Ribbentrop, German war criminal, hanged; Hans Frank, German war criminal, hanged; Julius Streicher, German leader, hanged; Wilhelm Keitel, German field-marshal, hanged.
What a year to be born! Terrible. The Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, famous for his composition La vida breve, died.
Printz notes that in 1946, the first auto-bank was established, in America of course; natural cloud was made into the first artificial snow, also in America; at the Paris fashion show, the first bikini was displayed. Those are cheerful details, oh yes. Printz’s shop assistants will like that. The first electric blanket was produced, retailing at 39.50 US dollars. But Printz knows: when he was born, there were anti-Jewish demonstrations in Poland, 39 people died while he was being born; Churchill (in a manic phase) advocated the establishment of the United States of Europe, after the earthquake in Japan, there were 1086 dead, while he, Printz, was being born. The Emperor Hirohito announced that he was not a god after all, Klement Gottwald became prime minister of Czechoslovakia. The United States condemned to death 58 guards from the Mauthausen camp, 46 SS officers from Dachau and detonated the first atomic bomb near Bikini, having previously dropped one on the atoll itself. Yugoslavia adopted a new constitution and became a federal republic, the USA recognized Tito’s Yugoslavia while Churchill (in a depressive phase) gave his famous speech about the Iron Curtain. For the New Year festivities, December 28, 1946, Rikard purchased, in the co-operative store, biscuits, chocolate and cheese, figs, 5 Unra packets and sweets for 873 dinars. Printz refuses to suckle. That is how 1946 ends.
It does not end, says Printz.
Printz paces round the stump of Rikard’s flat, he has no idea what to do with himself. He circles around the table. Perhaps he is thinking. Two months have passed since his father’s death. Then he asks:
What are the rhinos doing? and goes out.
There are no rhinos, it is cold.
Naturally, the zoo is deserted and white. Somehow transparent.
Printz goes to his secret lair, behind the west wall of the fortress, he bends down and peers in.
It’s dry inside.
Then he goes in and sits amongst the trash. It’s not bad, thinks Printz, it’s dry. It’s dry, he says out loud. Then he goes home.
Herzog is waiting at the door. Matilda too. They are waiting together. The Rottweiler is not there, it is probably eating. They do not say welcome home, especially not Matilda. Matilda is wearing pink slippers which glisten because they are made of pink satin, with a pompom made of feathers, a feather-duster, on the front, also pink, and the feathers jiggle, and the front of the slipper is pointed, the slippers are pointed like the shoes of the secret police in postwar socialis
m. Printz thinks they are ugly slippers, especially those pink feathers.
You’ve got ugly slippers, he says.
Matilda has big feet. In these slippers she looks exactly like Cinderella’s sister, that wicked sister who shoves her foot into the small glass shoe, which does not fit her, only because Matilda is fat and her foot is fleshy. How joyful glass shoes are! They are transparent, they do not carry secrets, they fit in your hand because they are usually small and delicate, those glass shoes, miniature shoes in fact, out of a fairy tale. A little inattention and they are gone. Glass shoes cannot be mended, when they break, that is it. How would it be if we were like that, made of glass, wonders Printz, how would it be then?
Glass?
Transparent. With colored glass organs, various colors, multi-colored inside. Yellow spleen, red heart, brown liver, nerves — violet, gray, white, thin threads that form a web that prevents one seeing into the depths. I’d like to be like that, made of glass. I would like to have been blown by a blower twisting me over white fire. That my history, the history of my birth was this: hot and soft to the point of incandescence while the blower forms me; I bend and curl, contracting, coming into being, dripping the occasional glass tear, in fact a tiny ball, yes, a tiny ball, balls that stiffen as they fall, set and clink. Oh, how I would love to drip, to cry like glass, oh. Blown glass dies in water and remains lovely forever, shaped, clean, odorless. In water it yelps, sizzles, and dies. Glass people, yes, with veins and arteries of little blue and red glass tubes, hollow, through which nothing flows, nothing at all. Because glass blood does not exist, let us not deceive ourselves.