by Dan Vyleta
In the May of 1940, Neurath succumbed to pneumonia and died after protracted hospitalisation. With his death, the janitor’s supply of animal matter dried up for good. By this time the two men had produced some four hundred kilos of horsemeat salami. They had stored them by suspending them from the beams of the janitor’s workroom ceiling: a forest of sausages hanging like wind chimes across the expanse of the room. The janitor liked to walk among them, his shoulders brushing the waxed pieces of string they had used to tie off each length of gut, and savour the smell. In one corner stood the old bathtub they had used to mix the meat. In wistful moments, deep in his cups, he would sit in it and talk to the dog.
He dreamed of it sometimes. In his dreams the dog was always licking his hands. It had licked them when he’d given it the piece of liver he had spiked with arsenic, unperturbed by the strange taste. First though, he had fetched the knife; had cut the dog loose from where Speckstein had tied it up in the yard; had held on to the rope and led it down into his cellar; the old dog panting, struggling to keep pace. On the stairs it had lost control of its bladder: crouched and pissed, joints so stiff it whimpered when it moved. Downstairs, in his workshop, on the old newspapers he had spread out upon the floor, it’d accepted the liver and licked his hands; shivered, fell over, the blind eye cloudy, rolling once between its red, infected lids. He had thought it dead, or dazed, and thought it best to cut its throat. He pricked it, fumbled, found the dog come back to life, its gap-toothed mouth clamping round the jacket he then wore. They fought like two men in a bar brawl, each struggling to pin the other with his weight. Only one of them had a knife. He thrust and slashed and then he hacked, found the soft side of the belly, dog guts spilling near his face. In his dream there rose the smell of dog shit, oozing, spreading, fresh from the tap. He wrapped the beast in an old blanket and carried it out like a bag of trash. A heave and a push sent it sailing over the gate into the Pollaks’ abandoned yard. On the way back into the building, he ran into the trumpeter: his jacket torn and bloody from the fight. They passed each other without speaking. In his dreams, sometimes, the fat man smiled and put a cornet to his firm and puckered lips. A single note, high and bleating, it always whistled him awake. He would sit up then, raise his hand to his nose, and sniff it for the telltale smell of Walter.
In the spring of 1944, Frau Vesalius dropped by for a visit. She and the janitor had seen each other on and off, enough so as to remain friendly, and she wished to trade an old pocket watch for however much sausage the janitor would think it worth. When she came to call at his ground-floor flat – huffing a little, having grown stouter with the years – he received her in his undershirt and thrown-on trousers. He smelled of cigarettes and idleness; the rotten fumes of half-fermented wine. His workshop had long been converted into a bomb shelter. The remaining sausage was stored under his bed. They sat down at his kitchen table and he poured out two glasses from a clay bottle. It wasn’t long before he complained of not being able to sleep.
‘Why not?’ she asked.
‘I dream,’ he answered, and told her about the dog.
She never even flinched. ‘Why did you do it?’ was all she wanted to know.
The janitor waved one hand in a gesture meant to encompass many things: the dog’s rheumatic, painful stumbles; the telltale trail of urine that would follow its passage up and down the building’s flights of stairs.
‘It was old,’ he said, ‘and I was sick of cleaning.’
She shrugged, poured herself another glass of wine.
‘You got away with it.’
He nodded. ‘Yuu knew. And Beer. They never talked.’
‘The doctor?’
‘Yes. He came down here one morning and he knew everything. How I’d gone looking for Lieschen and found Grotter’s body in his bedroom; left the front door open for someone else to call it in. First thing he says to me is this: “I know you killed the dog,” he says. “Down here. In this very room.” He said you heard it through your pipes.’
‘My pipes?’
‘Your radiator pipes. They lead back here. He said they carried up the sound.’
‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘I remember telling him that. But I had no idea. What else did he say?’
‘Not much. All he wanted to know was did I have a bathtub full of blood? I showed him the workshop and he stood there, shaking his head. “Well,” he said, “you scared the little girl.” And then he left without another word.’
They drank some more, and the janitor sold Vesalius four pounds of sausage. On the way out, he held on to her hand and would not let her go.
‘I still don’t know what all that fuss was about,’ he said, drunk and tired and defeated. ‘After all – it was only a dog.’
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘It was only a dog.’
She pulled herself loose from his hand and stumbled drunkenly back into the street. Night was falling, and in the distance she heard the first of the air-raid sirens raise its howl at the moon. She quickened her pace, hoping to arrive home before she’d have to take refuge in an unknown shelter, her feet slipping on the rain-slick cobbles, rushing, cursing, stumbling to be safe.
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features
About the author
Author Biography
Not My Mother’s Tongue
About the book
Birth of Twin
Go Ahead and Judge It by Its Cover
Read on
Viennese Love Letter
About the Author
Author Biography
Dan Vyleta
BORN IN GELSENKIRCHEN, GERMANY, Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. After spells in Great Britain, the United States, Austria and Germany, he now calls Canada his home.
His debut novel, Pavel & I, has been published in thirteen countries and translated into eight languages. He is also the author of Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1895–1914, a historical monograph that explores tales of criminality and anti-Semitism at the turn of the last century.
The Quiet Twin, which was written in Sackville, New Brunswick, is his second novel. It was published to international acclaim and was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Visit his website at www.danvyleta.com.
Not My Mother’s Tongue
NOT EVERY JOURNALIST will broach it. Some are too polite, I suppose. Others suspect a trick of some sort and refuse to play along. It will not have escaped them that I speak with an accent. As accents go, it is a hard one to place. Northern British vowels bump into soft German Vs; my O in ‘south’ has acquired a touch of a Canadian vowel shift; and my wife insists that I have taken to saying ‘prawblem’, a sure sign of too much American TV. The thing is, I am susceptible to the speech patterns that surround me. Each leaves its mark. I learned my English in a German school. The first class, I remember, focused on greetings. There was a special hand motion to indicate the rise and fall of intonation. We were doing what language teachers call a ‘group drill’.
‘How Are You?’ we sang in unison.
‘Fein Sank You.’
We had yet to learn how to handle the ‘th’.
To cut to the chase, though: what in the world possessed me to write in a language other than my mother tongue? Strictly speaking, that wasn’t German either. My family are Czech. Bohemians. From Prague. I learned Czech first, and then switched, growing up, trying my best to blend in with the German world that surrounded me. Like many an immigrant child, I wished above all to belong. It left my Czech stunted, a kitchen language used primarily for fielding my grandmother’s continuous demands that I should eat. Eat more, that is. I was raised on bread, butter and cold cuts. For health, you see. The Czech word for enough is dost.
But I still owe you an answer. Why settle on a tongue that is not your own? To write novels, no less. Was it chutzpah, the need to brag? A belated ‘fuck you’ to Herr Menzel who dared to give me a C?
The answer is that Engli
sh is my own, never mind when I acquired it. I chose it the way one chooses a spouse, which is to say I fell in love with it, courted it, proposed and was accepted. I wrote my first cheque in English; met my life’s companion in English. I can no longer remember a day when I did not think, and dream, in English. There was never a question in my mind that I would write my books in anything else.
Which is not to say that it doesn’t make a difference that I grew up on the rhythms of two other tongues. There used to be, in anti-Semitic pamphlets of the nineteenth century, the claim that Jews had no organic connection to the language of their ‘host’ nations and hence were unable to produce genuine literature. It was a charge levelled at Heinrich Heine, for instance, the author of some of Germany’s most enduring poetry. A variation of the claim sometimes hovers over discussions of writing by those who, like me, were not born with their language of expression (the technical term is ‘exophones’; once you start digging you will find we are a dime a dozen, a whole legion of upstarts taking over your tongue!).
It is true that for many of us our relationship to our adopted language is not territorial. Mine is an English that I cobbled together from the many places I have lived and the books I have read, a transnational quilt. It limits me in some respects, and it opens avenues. The Quiet Twin is set in the Austria of 1939, amongst speakers of Viennese German. My (northern, ‘Prussian’) German would struggle to capture the time and place. I have spent years in Vienna, and I am familiar with its patter; I may be able to imitate it, but it does not belong to me. In English, by contrast, I was free to create a language precisely suited to its purpose, neither British nor Canadian, inflected with the rhythms of German grammar and that joy of expression peculiar to those reluctant Habsburg sisters, Austria and Czechoslovakia. In English, then, it came alive, this city of a bygone era, spontaneously and without effort, spilling out with every chapter that I wrote.
As a writer, one cannot receive a greater gift than that.
‘Not My Mother’s Tongue’ copyright
Guardian News and Media Ltd 2011.
Reprinted with permission.
About the book
Birth of Twin
IT IS HARD TO DATE A NOVEL. Like insight, a book emerges both in an instant and draws on observations made decades ago and seemingly forgotten. Memory is a carpet bag with hidden pockets; is a shallow ocean with a deep and muddy floor: you can dig for months and find nothing, and then cut your feet, idly wading, on a shard of Grecian urn.
The Quiet Twin’s first chapter, in which a young doctor visits a patient late at night and finds her obsessing over a neighbourhood murder, rolled off my pen in one piece, written longhand into a notebook. I was working a summer job in Princeton, New Jersey, at the time, and dreaming every night of the Canadian Rockies, where I was going on a road trip as soon as the job was done. All that winter and spring, I had been reading Chekhov. The many doctors who litter his stories and visit patients, often with that resignation peculiar to their office, must have rubbed off somehow. I remember sitting in a café I had grown to like for its cheap, delicious espresso and writing away with a pen that seemed to be forever running out of ink, two young girls at the table next to me, craning their necks to see what I was doing. Already the novel’s main characters were as real to me as people I had known for years, and yet I did not know enough about the book to realise that it was set in 1939. I left the notebook at home when I set off to travel the month after.
As the novel took shape, I began to see in its physiognomy traces of a complex and mixed parentage. In the corridors and stairwells of the apartment building in which the story is set, I discerned both my years of living in Vienna and that summer, years ago, when I first watched Rear Window, Hitchcock’s wonderful movie about a journalist whose broken leg chains him to his apartment and turns him into an obsessive observer of his neighbours’ lives. Teuben, my novel’s villain, I had met somewhere: I could picture him clearly, down to the peculiarities of his gait, but neither then nor since have I been able to recall where it was that I had seen and spoken to this man. Add to this the imprint of the years I spent in archives, digging around in crimes committed long before I was born; some of the dust I then imbibed I now regurgitated as sentences and scenes.
I cannot say I was overjoyed when it became clear that my story led me into a Vienna branded by the swastika. Writing about the Nazi past, it strikes me, carries with it the weight of responsibility, and I was afraid of shouldering its burden. But in the end I felt I had no choice: like a journalist, a novelist must follow his or her story, wherever it may lead. It is a curious fact that as one lives with a book one writes, one enters into a relationship with it that involves much prodding and cajoling. Manuscripts, I find, are possessed by a mulish obstinacy that proves increasingly difficult to dislodge as they fatten on their steady diet of words. As it was, the story came alive when set in 1939; it would shake off any other year I tried to foist on it. And through the weeks and months of writing, the book increasingly became my means of exploring something about the compromises and temptations implicit to life under a murderous regime, about the helplessness experienced by its victims and the self-delusions open to its perpetrators. It is wrong to think of writing as an act that places existing insight onto the page. Rather it is the magic of the form we call the novel that it confronts its author with situations, emotions, realisations that he or she struggles to capture, not always, it is hoped, in vain.
There is, incidentally, in no passage of the book any hint of the Rockies. I trust they will surface, unsuspected, ten years from now, and force their bulk into my writing, irate like a moose in rut. And I shall argue with them, tell them crossly to ‘git, or else’, until at last, chastised, wiser, I will accept their presence and begin to listen to what they have come to teach.
Originally published in The Afterword,
National Post
Go Ahead and Judge It by Its Cover
WRITERS ARE AESTHETES. We want our children to be beautiful. When my editor for The Quiet Twin first raised the question of a cover, therefore, I found myself casting around for pictures to share with the people involved in its design. It was less the hope of providing a concrete image that prompted my search than the hope that I would be able to communicate something about the emotional flavour of the book I had written. Almost at once I found myself drawn to a collection of police photographs dating from between the turn of the last century to the mid-1950s, which was shut away in a box at the back of my closet. These pictures were amassed during a period of my life when—as a research student in history—I was hunting down all things connected to criminal activity in Vienna prior to the advent of colour photography. I own boxes and boxes of photos and photocopies, along with shelf-fuls of specialist literature, that I take care to hide from view when my landlord visits; he might not care for my mug shots of murderers, nor for the black-and-white photos of their victims, crumpled on apartment floors, or laid out on coroners’ slabs. Nobody wants a whack-job for a tenant; it might be a struggle to convince him I am merely a writer.
Back then, I was working on a book that sought to analyse the stories about crimes and criminals that the Viennese told one another a hundred or so years ago. I found the pictures in court files and newspapers, in libraries and archives, in dusty corners of antiquarian bookstores. When I dug them up again to look for ideas for a book cover, I recognised each of them at once and was amazed, in fact, at how accurately I recalled them. Clearly, these snapshots of crime and death had left their mark on me and become part of my pictorial vocabulary.
It is not easy to give the reader a sense of the pictures. It would be wrong to describe them as murky. The corpses and crime scenes depicted in them have crisp, hard edges. One can have no doubt as to the reality of the things one sees. But within this crispness there sits a patchwork of shadows that seem as though stitched on. One wants to pick at them with a fingernail and peel them off; see what lies hidden underneath. There is a voyeuristic qua
lity to many of the pictures. Often the photographer seems to be standing in the doorway, on the threshold of things. One sees what one is not meant to see. Not one of the victims had time to clean up their bedroom before the police came knocking.
Not all these pictures are gruesome. Some show spaces rather than people: the street corner where a robbery took place; the sparsely furnished living room of a murdered prostitute, whose washing still hangs from a line; the inner courtyard of a tenement block where a man has thrown his wife out of the window of their third-floor bedroom. This last picture would not let me go: I recognised it as the courtyard in which The Quiet Twin was taking place; recognised the shape and arrangement of its many windows and the plain, dirt-smeared walls. In Vienna, many houses, including some of the council-built tenement blocks for workers, have elaborate facades overloaded with ornamentation, resulting in a meringue of mouldings and statues, of mosaics and reliefs. It is in the buildings’ courtyards that plainer, dirtier walls predominate, strewn with little windows behind which are lived the private lives of ordinary Viennese: in close proximity to one another, and within a context of social diversity ensured by the architecture itself—for the rooms located in the rear and side wings of such buildings do not have any windows out onto the street and consequently command much lower rents than the grandly bourgeois apartments at the front.