Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  The mobile homes were surrounded by wrecked cars, half-hearted attempts at demarcation with fences and barbed wire. Dogs lay on the cold ground.

  ‘She’s the only one you have . . .’

  ‘I can’t leave her alone, not now. In this situation, I mean, now that she’s making movies again.’

  ‘And you have to babysit for her? Don’t you think she’s old enough by now . . .’

  ‘I’m afraid not. Sometimes she works herself up into such a state . . . She forgets who she is, even who I am.’

  ‘She seemed very sensible to me.’

  ‘You don’t know her. You have no idea.’

  I looked over. Sarah was staring straight ahead. Her nose looked big and hooked, it reminded me of a cartoon in MAD in which a prince and a shepherd girl, both very attractive, were portrayed from the front throughout the story until, in the very last frame, we see them in profile and it becomes clear that they both have hideously huge noses. I knew it: my mother’s poison, entering drop by drop.

  ‘All I was asking was whether maybe you don’t make yourself too dependent on her,’ Sarah said in a small voice. ‘That’s all.’

  Your heart, Ludwig, your heart. Where is it? Where did you hide it? I looked at the landscape to my right and remembered how we had left Alexandria, how I had forgotten to dig up my treasure; something of vital importance to me had been left behind – the way it would be now. Life appeared to me as an endless process of reduction. It wasn’t until then that I began to understand more about the answer I’d just given; although I had lost her any number of times, she was indeed the only one I had. There couldn’t be anyone else, we were the sole witnesses to each other’s lives.

  I saw a freight train in the distance, disappearing behind pale rock formations. Little eddies of dust across the flats. People felt free to dump mattresses and washing machines along the road. Antennae stood atop the hills.

  *

  When the buildings gradually began accumulating beside the road, forebodings of Barstow, she asked, ‘And what about us, Ludwig?’

  I laughed uneasily.

  ‘You’ll just have to go along, I guess.’

  But that convinced no one. The question remained hanging.

  ‘God, I don’t know,’ I said then. ‘I can’t split myself down the middle.’

  ‘But you’re going, is that for sure?’

  We drove into Barstow, the outskirts with their rolling streets. The conjecture of dismal lives. The end of yet another day. We drove in silence, crawling along, as though we had lost something.

  On a wall beside the tracks, the origins of Barstow were portrayed in words and images. The desert town had first been called Waterman Junction, and arose here when two railroads met at the Mojave River. At that junction, in 1886, a post office was built.

  A freight train roared by, its whistle screamed. Behind it, on the other side, the old hills withdrew in late, crimson light. The color sanctified them. Spotlights flashed on around the switching yard, only then did the final boxcar pass. The low sun fell beneath a pigeon-gray bed of cloud.

  We drove on. A sign along the way read BRINGING THE LIGHT OF JESUS TO A DYING WORLD. The road climbed, the traffic light turned red, and then we saw it, the sky burning over Barstow. Sarah parked the car in a lot in front of a garage, we watched in the certainty that a sunset like this surpassed our powers of expression. A narrow strip between the bed of cloud and the San Bernardino Mountains to the west, that was where the light was concentrated. It scorched the bottoms of the clouds, was tossed out in beams and sparked across the car roofs of Barstow. She turned the engine off, her face was bathed in red light. I put my hand on her leg.

  ‘Hey, hi, anybody home?’

  She shook her head. Her curls of molten copper. She said, ‘I always knew you would go away.’

  ‘You couldn’t have. I didn’t know that myself.’

  She nodded stubbornly.

  ‘I knew. Some people have things to stay for. Not you. You have things to go away for.’

  In December my mother and I moved from the wideness of the Pacific to the enclosure of a country that did not border on a single sea: Austria. My father’s native country. We were soldiers in summer uniforms, ambushed by the winter. We bought caps, scarves, gloves, and thermal underwear for me, because I’ve never been able to stand the cold. Some snow fell in Vienna, by Christmas it had melted again. We stayed at the Hotel Imperial, a marble quarry. The room was divided by double doors into two sleeping quarters; when I had to go to the toilet at night I tiptoed through her compartment to the bathroom. Whenever I thought about Sarah, missing her made me physically unwell. It chafed, an unrelenting homesickness. Every day I thought about going back, she called to me from across seas and mountains, but I plugged my ears because of a promise. A ball and chain, the dead weight of a conviction.

  I underwent Vienna in a lucid kind of stupor. The ecstatic Christmas atmosphere weighed on me. As did the obsession with Mozart, Sissi and Klimt’s The Kiss. In the Innere Stadt I shuffled along amid droves of Asians and Arabs, tourists decked out with paper shopping bags and shoeboxes. In the streets to both sides of the hubbub the buildings rose up like box canyons. You were lowered to the bottom of the ravine and looked up past the steep walls of housing blocks, to the sky cut into squares above. Behind the walls was yet another inner city, an endless network of corridors leading to millions of closed rooms, to bedrooms, cellars, salons and attics, in all those spaces lived Man with his bacteria. In there, century after century, people had breathed, loved, laughed, died and wept, and not a one of them aware of the lives before or after them, in exactly the same spaces.

  *

  Darkness fell early. At nine I would dine with my mother. Perhaps Rollo Liban would be there too, he was producing the film about the Viennese Edelhure Josephine Mutzenbacher. The biography on which it was based, Josefine Mutzenbacher. Die Geschichte einer Wienerischen Dirne. Von ihr selbst erzählt, had long been considered authentic, but was later ascribed to Arthur Schnitzler and then to Felix Salten. The story had never lost its appeal to the imagination. This was not the first film to be made about her, but it would be the most ambitious – and the most expensive.

  My feet carried me on and on. From the open window of a tall and narrow Greek Orthdox church, pinned in between two houses, came the sound of choral music. It rained heavens.

  The table at the Restaurant Imperial was set for two. Rollo Liban had arrived in Vienna that morning, my mother said, but had lots to do. We sat beneath a portrait of the old Kaiser, the city’s fourth icon.

  ‘Adolf Hitler stayed here too,’ I said. ‘After the Anschluss.’

  My mother looked up from her menu.

  ‘You can say whatever you like about Adolf Hitler, but he was a vegetarian.’

  ‘I read somewhere that, despite the good cooking here, he stuck to rabbit food.’

  ‘In any case, the vegetarian menu doesn’t amount to much,’ my mother said. ‘I think I’ll order fish, just this once.’

  ‘You had fish yesterday, too.’

  ‘That was just a little bite.’

  ‘And on the plane.’

  ‘That was chicken. And only because they’d already passed out all the vegetarian meals.’

  ‘You could have taken pasta, that was nothing but cream with a few chunks of ham.’

  ‘You know how I feel about pork, Ludwig.’

  ‘The prosciutto on the melon is pork, isn’t it?’

  She shrugged, irritated.

  ‘An appetizer. Who cares. Do you know what you’re going to order?’

  Rollo Liban came in later, maneuvering his large body around beneath the low ceiling like an oversized cupboard. I stood up and shook his hand, to make sure no-one would think we were family. He ordered a cheeseburger with onion rings. The waiter shook his head gently and said with a forgiving smile that that was not on the menu.

  ‘I can get a hamburger in Mecca, in Havana and Hanoi, so why can’t I get a hamburger
in Vienna?’

  Sometimes, when he spoke, it sounded like he was spitting out a fly.

  ‘In Vienna, certainly,’ the young waiter said, ‘but . . . Wait just a moment, I’ll ask the cook.’

  That was how Rollo Liban got his hamburger with cheese and onion rings, of which I was jealous more than a bit. He took the hamburger in both hands and didn’t speak a word till the thing had been devoured. We remained silent along with him. It was your classic kind of restaurant, wainscoting, the tables close together. People here spoke in a hush, you acted as though you didn’t notice the others but heard everything they said. Liban must have found my presence irksome, irksome and expensive, but his behavior reflected none of that. He was indifferent as a tractor. He seemed to consider me one of my mother’s perks, and seldom spoke to me directly. He did ask, ‘And you, what do you do around here all day?’

  To which I answered truthfully, ‘Nothing.’

  From the conversation that followed between them, I deduced that Prague would be our next stop. My position was not really very different from that of a lapdog; I went where they went, no one asked me a thing. He talked about the way the second Lilith film had been received, which was very well indeed. It was a conversation with blank spots, the code language of parents. I excused myself and left the table.

  The Maria Theresia Bar beside the restaurant was a shadowy space, brothel-like with its red velour and heavy curtains, its fabric wallpaper. The barman stood in a globe of light, polishing glasses. The object of my special attention, however, was the pianist. He marched blankly from melody to melody. You could imagine him standing at a tram stop with his attaché case, on his way to work in an insurance office on the thirteenth floor. His immovability was impressive. I drank a glass of beer and talked to the barkeeper about the lack of customers – a subject which dictated that the conversation be short. The words fell dead to the floor between us. From the walls, yellowed Habsburgs stared at us in abhorrence. We spent another half-hour looking past each other, the barman, the pianist and I, each from inside his own aquarium, then I went upstairs. I climbed the stairs past the stone Danube nymph-in-a-niche, and looked back down the stairwell. It was broad enough for two coaches to pass each other. The kind you couldn’t descend without imagining a crowd down below, waiting for you with uproarious cheers, or with a guillotine.

  Above the nymph was a state portrait of Franz Joseph in uniform, one hand on his waistcoat, his gaze fixed on a point outside the frame. The high ceiling was a patchwork of gilded coffers. The candelabra was unlit.

  At the royal suite I turned right and went to our room. My mother was lying in bed, flipping through a hotel folder. I disappeared into the bathroom and heard her say, ‘I don’t understand why they put us in this room. Just look at all the things they have. If you ask me, they only gave us a Deluxe Junior . . .’

  A few minutes later I closed the double doors and crawled into the freshly made bed. The pillow propped up beneath my arm, I began my third letter to Sarah, on hotel stationery.

  Our farewell had been torment. She said she would never see me again. I remained noncommittal about everything important.

  ‘Then it’s over, Ludwig. You can’t just come back some day and expect everything to be the way it was. That’s impossible. That’s not fair.’

  I tasted tears in a kiss, but couldn’t allow myself any feelings, otherwise my entire plan would be scotched. I had withdrawn from the course of events.

  ‘Isn’t your girlfriend coming along?’ my mother asked at LAX.

  ‘She has to work.’

  ‘That’s a pity. Couldn’t she get some time off ?’

  ‘Who knows.’

  ‘Are you two still getting along?’

  ‘It’s over.’

  Her so-called sympathy was too meager to measure. In response to my ongoing silence she said at last, ‘Just remember what my father always said: there are plenty more fish in the sea.’

  I wrote to Sarah about my love, about the loss. That I had wanted to make the goodbye quick and painless, but that it had been neither. That I begged her to wait for me until I returned from my mission. If no country is home to you, than I shall make my home in love. I signed it Odysseus and switched off the reading light. On the other side of the door, Calypso was snoring.

  At breakfast she asked about my plans. Not for today, but for the time to come. She avoided the word future. There had been that morning in Los Angeles when I had told her that I would go with her to Vienna.

  ‘If you like,’ she’d said, and asked no further questions.

  Now the moment had arrived to ask those questions, of an early morning along the Ringstrasse in Vienna, our eyes still puffy with sleep and with a day stretching out before us for which they were predicting rain and an afternoon high of two degrees.

  ‘In early January we’re going to Prague,’ she said. ‘What are your plans?’

  I looked past her, at the girl replenishing the buffet. She had said we, without including me. I hadn’t shared with her my thoughts about my life as sacrifice. My mother didn’t understand that I was her homecoming. I wavered, thrown off balance by her question, the need to adopt a stance.

  ‘To watch after you,’ I said then.

  ‘Being together has to be enjoyable, Ludwig,’ she said, ‘you have to contribute to each other’s joy in life . . .’

  I put my empty eggshell back in the egg cup, upside down.

  ‘But you don’t give me that feeling at all. Are you listening?’

  I tapped my spoon against the eggshell. It resulted in an interesting web of fractures.

  ‘Today I’m going to the Capuchin Crypt,’ I said. ‘I believe virtually all the Habsburgs are buried there, the whole shooting match. A sepulcher. A tourist attraction. Living people looking at dead ones.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do with you, Ludwig, when you’re so . . .?’

  ‘How late will you be coming back from your activities? Will we be dining together?’

  ‘Why would you want to? You don’t seem to derive any pleasure from it. You almost never talk to me, you never smile. I find it . . .’

  She wept. Foul play. I felt the urge to do the same. Before leaving the breakfast room, I laid my hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Hang in there,’ I said.

  ‘Go away, you. You disgusting . . . cynic.’

  *

  I crossed the ring to Heldenplatz, then through the arches to Hofburg. In a daze, I wandered past the inviolate, dead-as-a-doornail remains of an empire, petrified and sunken beneath its own weight.

  The enormity of it! The countless tons of stone!

  The perpetrators of this rank self-aggrandizement all lay in the Capuchin Crypt, domes buried beneath a church on Neue Markt, the final resting place since 1633 to the Austrian Habsburgs. After paying admission, I descended into that underworld. Sober cross vaults, the walls in pale plaster. Almost one hundred and fifty of the deceased were interred here in an equal number of sarcophagi, from newborn children to doddering emperors. Grand dukes, counts, countesses. Princes, princesses, emperors, empresses. I pictured in my mind’s eye how they were carried in here amid the murmur of mourners, the shuffling monks and the wavering light of torches. A book I bought at the entrance described how that went. The funeral official knocks on the door of the crypt with his staff and asks to be admitted. The monk on the other side of the door asks who it is who wishes to enter. The official calls out the name and most important titles of the deceased, resumés that sometimes took a while, grand duke of this or that, lord of that and the other, knight in the order of so and so, et cetera. But the door remains closed, the voice says: We know no such person.

  Again the official knocks on the door. The question is repeated, there follows a summary of the dead person’s secondary titles, the minor titulature.

  We know no such person.

  The ritual repeats itself, again the official announces the name of the deceased, followed by the words a poor sinner. The door to
the crypt is opened.

  *

  A route had been set out amid the sarcophagi. Eagles spread their wings atop coffins of lead, tin, bronze or copper, crowned skulls grinned at passers-by. Scenes from the life of the deceased were portrayed in haut-relief: a wedding, a coronation, a battle. They had succumbed to inbreeding, crib death, epidemics, venereal diseases, fevers and hunting accidents. Their hearts were removed and kept elsewhere. The eyes, brains and entrails were interred in yet another chapel.

  The vanitas symbolism of skulls and bones became less profuse with time, as the empire reached its end the sarcophagi became less ornate. I saw coffins containing Ludwigs, a certain Ludwig Joseph of whom the booklet noted only that he was the son of Emperor Leopold II, and a Karl Ludwig, father of Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and brother of Franz Joseph I. The editors had apparently seen no reason to make special mention of them.

  In a nearby coffeehouse I read about the enlightened Emperor Joseph II, who had opened the royal gardens at Schönbrunn and the Prater to the public. A distressed noblewoman had complained to him, ‘But Your Majesty, if you allow the people into the royal gardens, our kind of people can never gather there again!’

  ‘My dear lady,’ Joseph had replied, ‘if I wished to always be among my own kind, I would spend my days in the Capuchin Crypt.’

  The air outside was cold and biting, with a strong odor of manure. I was walking through a dark gallery along Augustinerstrasse when suddenly a horse-drawn carriage came racing past. The coachman wore a broad-rimmed hat, a black, heavy cape draped over his shoulders. The black coach was empty, the rattle of hooves echoed from the walls. That is Mr. Death, who rides the streets of Vienna.

  That evening I took a walk along the Danube and went into a few of the big hotels. All of them had a pianist in the lobby or the bar, surrounded by the workings of the hotel, ghosts in the machine. There would be work for me here, I knew that. Something appealed to me about the idea of being a harmless parasite, living off the rich, chipping off bits of their monolithic capital. I sensed what my role would be – creating the impression of being a lost prince, stirring them up to acts of compassion.