by John Irving
A problem arose when Playboy accepted the story; they were very interested in who Edith Winter was -- and had she written anything else? Peter Mat-son, my agent at the time, had warned me that this might happen, and that Playboy might not look upon being fooled with good humor. The confession was made: I was the author of "the zitism story," as it was called; if there were hard feelings, they weren't lingering. Playboy published "Brennbar's Rant" -- in their December 1974 issue -- as a story by John Irving. Edith Winter was thus denied the only opportunity she was given to publish her own work; I had created Brennbar and his rant for her-- in the end, I felt I had robbed her of something.
When I saw the illustration that accompanied "Brennbar's Rant" in Playboy, I sincerely wished that Edith Winter had been the author of the story -- the illustration was so utterly tasteless and disgusting. A woman's breast with a thumb and index finger pinching her nipple, only it is not a nipple but a pimple -- pus and all. "Gross!" said my son Colin; he was nine at the time. For a while, the picture made me want to disown the story, which was foolish because the story was not to blame.
Today I can point to "Brennbar's Rant" as my opinion of political correctness -- before there was any political correctness so-called. I can also point to it as an example of my opinion of popularity before I was popular, for in the story Edith Winter says, "Popularity is probably the greatest insult to an intelligent person." Edith was wrong. Popularity is only an insult to those people who presume they are more intelligent than the person who is popular. But "Brennbar's Rant" was written in 1973; I didn't know much about popularity then.
THE PENSION GRILLPARZER
My father worked for the Austrian Tourist Bureau. It was my mother's idea that our family travel with him when he went on the road as a Tourist Bureau spy. My mother and brother and I would accompany him on his secretive missions to uncover the discourtesy, the dust, the badly cooked food, the shortcuts taken by Austria's restaurants and hotels and pensions. We were instructed to create difficulties whenever we could, never to order exactly what was on the menu, to imitate a foreigner's odd requests -- the hours we would like to have our baths, the need for aspirin and directions to the zoo. We were instructed to be civilized but troublesome; and when the visit was over, we reported to my father in the car.
My mother would say, "The hairdresser is always closed in the morning. But they make suitable recommendations outside. I guess it's all right, provided they don't claim to have a hairdresser actually in the hotel."
"Well, they do claim it," my father would say. He'd note this in a giant pad.
I was always the driver. I said, "The car is parked off the street, but someone put fourteen kilometers on the gauge between the time we handed it over to the doorman and picked it up at the hotel garage."
"That is a matter to report directly to the management," my father said, jotting it down.
"The toilet leaked," I said.
"I couldn't open the door to the W.C.," said my brother, Robo.
"Robo," Mother said, "you always have trouble with doors."
"Was that supposed to be Class C?" I asked.
"I'm afraid not," Father said. "It is still listed as Class B." We drove for a short while in silence; our most serious judgment concerned changing a hotel's or a pension's rating. We did not suggest reclassification frivolously.
"I think this calls for a letter to the management," Mother suggested. "Not too nice a letter, but not a really rough one. Just state the facts."
"Yes, I rather liked him," Father said. He always made a point of getting to meet the managers.
"Don't forget the business of them driving our car," I said. "That's really unforgivable."
"And the eggs were bad," said Robo; he was not yet 10 and his judgments were not considered seriously.
We became a far harsher team of evaluators when my grandfather died and we inherited Grandmother-- my mother's mother, who thereafter accompanied us on our travels. A regal dame, Johanna was accustomed to Class A travel, and my father's duties more frequently called for investigations of Class B and Class C lodgings. They were the places, the B and C hotels (and the pensions), that most interested the tourists. At restaurants we did a little better. People who couldn't afford the classy places to sleep were still interested in the best places to eat.
"I shall not have dubious food tested on me," Johanna told us. "This strange employment may give you all glee about having free vacations, but I can see there is a terrible price paid: the anxiety of not knowing what sort of quarters you'll have for the night. Americans may find it charming that we still have rooms without private baths and toilets, but I am an old woman and I'm not charmed by walking down a public corridor in search of cleanliness and my relievement. Anxiety is only half of it. Actual diseases are possible -- and not only from food. If the bed is questionable, I promise I shan't put my head down. And the children are young and impressionable; you should think of the clientele in some of these lodgings and seriously ask yourselves about the influences." My mother and father nodded; they said nothing. "Slow down!" Grandmother said sharply to me. "You're just a young boy who likes to show off." I slowed down. "Vienna," Grandmother sighed. "In Vienna I always stayed at the Ambassador."
"Johanna, the Ambassador is not under investigation," Father said.
"I should think not," Johanna said. "I suppose we're not even headed toward a Class A place?"
"Well, it's a B trip," my father admitted. "For the most part."
"I trust," Grandmother said, "that you mean there is one A place en route?"
"No," Father admitted. "There is one C place."
"It's okay," Robo said. "There are fights in Class C."
"I should imagine so," Johanna said.
"It's a Class C pension, very small," Father said, as if the size of the place forgave it.
"And they're applying for a B," said Mother.
"But there have been some complaints," I added.
"I'm sure there have," Johanna said.
"And animals," I added. My mother gave me a look.
"Animals?" said Johanna. "Animals," I admitted.
"A suspicion of animals," my mother corrected me.
"Yes, be fair," Father said.
"Oh, wonderful!" Grandmother said. "A suspicion of animals. Their hair on the rugs? Their terrible waste in the corners! Did you know that my asthma reacts, severely, to any room in which there has recently been a cat?"
"The complaint was not about cats," I said. My mother elbowed me sharply.
"Dogs?" Johanna said. "Rabid dogs! Biting you on the way to the bathroom."
"No," I said. "Not dogs."
"Bears!" Robo cried.
But my mother said, "We don't know for sure about the bear, Robo."
"This isn't serious," Johanna said.
"Of course it's not serious!" Father said. "How could there be bears in a pension?"
"There was a letter saying so," I said. "Of course, the Tourist Bureau assumed it was a crank complaint. But then there was another sighting -- and a second letter claiming there had been a bear."
My father used the rearview mirror to scowl at me, but I thought that if we were all supposed to be in on the investigation it would be wise to have Grandmother on her toes.
"It's probably not a real bear," Robo said, with obvious disappointment.
"A man in a bear suit!" Johanna cried. "What unheard-of perversion is that? A beast of a man sneaking about in disguise! Up to what? It's a man in a bear suit, I know it is," she said. "I want to go to that one first! If there's going to be a Class C experience on this trip, let's get it over with as soon as possible."
"But we haven't got reservations for tonight," Mother said.
"Yes, we might as well give them a chance to be at their best," Father said. Although he never revealed to his victims that he worked for the Tourist Bureau, Father believed that reservations were simply a decent way of allowing the personnel to be as prepared as they could be.
"I'm
sure we don't need to make a reservation in a place frequented by men who disguise themselves as animals," Johanna said. "I'm sure there is always a vacancy there. I'm sure the guests are regularly dying in their beds -- of fright, or else of whatever unspeakable injury the madman in the foul bear suit does to them."
"It's probably a real bear," Robo said, hopefully-- for in the turn the conversation was taking, Robo certainly saw that a real bear would be preferable to Grandmother's imagined ghoul. Robo had no fear, I think, of a real bear.
I drove us as inconspicuously as possible to the dark, dwarfed corner of Planken and Seilergasse. We were looking for the Class C pension that wanted to be a B.
"No place to park," I said to Father, who was already making note of that in his pad.
I double-parked and we sat in the car and peered up at the Pension Grillparzer; it rose only four slender stories between a pastry shop and a Tabak Trafik.
"See?" Father said. "No bears."
"No men, I hope," said Grandmother.
"They come at night," Robo said, looking cautiously up and down the street.
We went inside to meet the manager, a Herr Theobald, who instantly put Johanna on her guard.
"Three generations traveling together!" he cried. "Like the old days," he added, especially to Grandmother, "before all these divorces and the young people wanting apartments by themselves. This is a family pension! I just wish you had made a reservation -- so I could put you more closely together."
"We're not accustomed to sleeping in the same room," Grandmother told him.
"Of course not!" Theobald cried. "I just meant that I wished your rooms could be closer together." This worried Grandmother, clearly.
"How far apart must we be put?" she asked.
"Well, I've only two rooms left," he said. "And only one of them is large enough for the two boys to share with their parents."
"And my room is how far from theirs?" Johanna asked coolly.
"You're right across from the W.C.!" Theobald told her, as if this were a plus.
But as we were shown to our rooms, Grandmother staying with Father -- contemptuously to the rear of our procession -- I heard her mutter, "This is not how I conceived of my retirement. Across the hall from a W.C., listening to all the visitors."
"Not one of these rooms is the same," Theobald told us. "The furniture is all from my family." We could believe it. The one large room Robo and I were to share with my parents was a hall-sized museum of knickknacks, every dresser with a different style of knob. On the other hand, the sink had brass faucets and the headboard of the bed was carved. I could see my father balancing things up for future notation in the giant pad.
"You may do that later," Johanna informed him. "Where do I stay?"
As a family, we dutifully followed Theobald and my grandmother down the long, twining hall, my father counting the paces to the W.C. The hall rug was thin, the color of a shadow. Along the walls were old photographs of speed-skating teams -- on their feet the strange blades curled up at the tips like court jesters' shoes or the runners of ancient sleds.
Robo, running far ahead, announced his discovery of the W.C.
Grandmother's room was full of china, polished wood, and the hint of mold. The drapes were damp. The bed had an unsettling ridge at its center, like fur risen on a dog's spine -- it was almost as if a very slender body lay stretched beneath the bedspread.
Grandmother said nothing, and when Theobald reeled out of the room like a wounded man who's been told he'll live, Grandmother asked my father, "On what basis can the Pension Grillparzer hope to get a B?"
"Quite decidedly C," Father said.
"Born C and will die C," I said.
"I would say, myself," Grandmother told us, "that it was E or F."
In the dim tearoom a man without a tie sang a Hungarian song. "It does not mean he's Hungarian," Father reassured Johanna, but she was skeptical.
"I'd say the odds are not in his favor," she suggested. She would not have tea or coffee. Robo ate a little cake, which he claimed to like. My mother and I smoked a cigarette; she was trying to quit and I was trying to start. Therefore, we shared a cigarette between us -- in fact, we'd promised never to smoke a whole one alone.
"He's a great guest," Herr Theobald whispered to my father; he indicated the singer. "He knows songs from all over."
"From Hungary, at least," Grandmother said, but she smiled.
A small man, clean-shaven but with that permanent gun-blue shadow of a beard on his lean face, spoke to my grandmother. He wore a clean white shirt (but yellow from age and laundering), suit pants, and an unmatching jacket.
"Pardon me?" said Grandmother.
"I said that I tell dreams," the man informed her.
"You tell dreams," Grandmother said. "Meaning, you have them?"
"Have them and tell them," he said mysteriously. The singer stopped singing.
"Any dream you want to know," said the singer, "he can tell it."
"I'm quite sure I don't want to know any," Grandmother said. She viewed with displeasure the ascot of dark hair bursting out at the open throat of the singer's shirt. She would not regard the man who "told" dreams at all.
"I can see you are a lady," the dream man told Grandmother. "You don't respond to just every dream that comes along."
"Certainly not," said Grandmother. She shot my father one of her how-could-you-have-let-this-happen-to-me? looks.
"But I know one," said the dream man; he shut his eyes. The singer slipped a chair forward and we suddenly realized he was sitting very close to us. Robo, though he was much too old for it, sat in Father's lap. "In a great castle," the dream man began, "a woman lay beside her husband. She was wide awake, suddenly, in the middle of the night. She woke up without the slightest idea of what had awakened her, and she felt as alert as if she'd been up for hours. It was also clear to her, without a look, a word, or a touch, that her husband was wide awake too -- and just as suddenly."
"I hope this is suitable for the child to hear, ha ha," Herr Theobald said, but no one even looked at him. My grandmother folded her hands in her lap and stared at them -- her knees together, her heels tucked under her straight-backed chair. My mother held my father's hand.
I sat next to the dream man, whose jacket smelled like a zoo. He said, "The woman and her husband lay awake listening for sounds in the castle, which they were only renting and did not know intimately. They listened for sounds in the courtyard, which they never bothered to lock. The village people always took walks by the castle; the village children were allowed to swing on the great courtyard door. What had woken them?"
"Bears?" said Robo, but Father touched his fingertips to Robo's mouth.
"They heard horses," said the dream man. Old Johanna, her eyes shut, her head inclined toward her lap, seemed to shudder in her stiff chair. "They heard the breathing and stamping of horses who were trying to keep still," the dream man said. "The husband reached out and touched his wife. 'Horses?' he said. The woman got out of bed and went to the courtyard window. She would swear to this day that the courtyard was full of soldiers on horseback -- but what soldiers they were! They wore armor! The visors on their helmets were closed and their murmuring voices were as tinny and difficult to hear as voices on a fading radio station. Their armor clanked as their horses shifted restlessly under them.
"There was an old dry bowl of a former fountain, there in the castle's courtyard, but the woman saw that the fountain was flowing; the water lapped over the worn curb and the horses were drinking it. The knights were wary, they would not dismount; they looked up at the castle's dark windows, as if they knew they were uninvited at this watering trough -- this rest station on their way somewhere.
"In the moonlight the woman saw their big shields glint. She crept back to bed and lay rigidly against her husband.
"'What is it?' he asked her.
"'Horses,' she told him.
"I thought so,' he said. 'They'll eat the flowers.'
'"Who bu
ilt this castle?' she asked him. It was a very old castle, they both knew that.
"'Charlemagne,' he told her; he was going back to sleep.
"But the woman lay awake, listening to the water, which now seemed to be running all through the castle, gurgling in every drain, as if the old fountain were drawing water from every available source. And there were the distorted voices of the whispering knights -- Charlemagne's soldiers speaking their dead language! To this woman, the soldiers' voices were as morbid as the eighth century and the people called Franks. The horses kept drinking.
"The woman lay awake a long time, waiting for the soldiers to leave; she had no fear of actual attack from them -- she was sure they were on a journey and had only stopped to rest at a place they had once known. But for as long as the water ran she felt that she mustn't disturb the castle's stillness or its darkness. When she fell asleep, she thought Charlemagne's men were still there.
"In the morning her husband asked her, 'Did you hear water running, too?' Yes, she had, of course. But the fountain was dry, and out the window they could see that the flowers weren't eaten -- and everyone knows horses eat flowers.
"'Look,' said her husband; he went into the courtyard with her. 'There are no hoof prints, there are no droppings. We must have dreamed we heard horses.' She did not tell him that there were soldiers, too; or that, in her opinion, it was unlikely that two people would dream the same dream. She did not remind him that he was a heavy smoker who never smelled the soup simmering; the aroma of horses in the fresh air was too subtle for him.
"She saw the soldiers, or dreamed them, twice more while they stayed there, but her husband never again woke up with her. It was always sudden. Once she woke with the taste of metal on her tongue as if she'd touched some old, sour iron to her mouth -- a sword, a chest plate, chain mail, a thigh guard. They were out there again, in colder weather. From the water in the fountain a dense fog shrouded them; the horses were snowy with frost. And there were not so many of them the next time -- as if the winter or their skirmishes were reducing their numbers. The last time the horses looked gaunt to her, and the men looked more like unoccupied suits of armor balanced delicately in the saddles. The horses wore long masks of ice on their muzzles. Their breathing (or the men's breathing) was congested.