by Greg Baxter
This morning – Saturday, January 3rd – I was awoken by the sound of something scraping the street. People who are used to cold climates will think I am an idiot for not knowing immediately what this was. It had a burping diesel engine, and it came down the road slowly, twice. On the first occasion, it woke me, and I checked my phone for the time: it was not yet six. The sky was still dark, and the light in the street was blue – above the front door of our building there is a blue, illuminated sign for the office that is no longer open. I tried to go back to sleep. About half an hour later, the sound returned. It was extremely loud. I turned my light on and picked up Wittgenstein, but I was too tired to make the effort. The noise became so potent, so close, that I got up to investigate. I opened the curtains and looked out: the street was still glowing blue, and the sky was dark, but I could see that it had snowed during the night. The rooftops across the street were white, and the plants on the window sills, and all the parked cars. I stepped onto the balcony. I had nothing on but boxers and a T-shirt. I tiptoed: the stone surface was like ice. I leaned over the edge and saw that the vehicle – a snow plough – had cleared a narrow black path down the middle of the street.
I stayed outside a moment longer, arms crossed, bouncing slightly. I had the morning all to myself, it seemed. It would be hours before the city woke up. When I went back inside I put my headphones on and listened to some music Walter had recommended – Saint-Saëns. I lay in bed looking out the window, thinking of the day that was to come.
Walter had last night off work. He has worked every other night this week until five a.m. He is forty-two now, and he’s been waiting tables since he was nineteen. His new restaurant has two Hauben – a Haube is a kind of Austrian Michelin star – so he makes a lot in tips. Yesterday he slept until two, and we hung around the house until late afternoon; it was already dark when we arrived in the First District. I bought tickets for a concert at the Musikverein. Then, at his restaurant, we bought some nice wine for a dinner party his friend Wolfgang was throwing later that night. A few of his colleagues were drinking espressos and smoking cigarettes at the bar. The girls were wearing tight white button-down shirts and black trousers, and they had that air of high indifference one associates with waitstaff at a fancy restaurant. I wanted to introduce myself, but I was suddenly very ashamed at the state of my German, and hung back.
We had a few drinks in Loos Bar – a little place designed by Adolf Loos in 1908. It seats about ten people, and another ten can stand at the bar. When I was here in 2002, I drank there almost every night. Sometimes we would go for a midday pick-me-up, then back in for the evening, or start the evening there and pop back in at three or four for a nightcap. Last night, Walter drank two vodka gimlets and was tipsy. He’d had nothing to eat since waking up. I always know when he starts to get drunk, because he speaks English, or German with an American accent. He told me that to celebrate New Year’s Eve he gave a patron a blow job in the bathroom of his restaurant. He simply walked into the bathroom, saw a man having a piss in a stall, with the door open, and joined him. An hour later, the man left with his wife.
Walter has not had a homosexual boyfriend since 1992, when he lived for a few months in Texas. This sounds a little strange, but in Vienna there seem to be many straight men who experiment with other men – particularly macho Turkish men, says Walter. I believe he nurtures disenchantment in the same way that he takes care of the plants in his apartment, or the back garden in summer: he dusts them, mists them with a bottle, speaks to them, and maintains them in perfect condition.
He has started to dress conservatively in middle age – unripped jeans and ironed, long-sleeve button-down shirts. So when we are both dressed to go out, we look somewhat similar, except that he is a little shorter, and made of nothing but skin and bones: at five foot eleven, he weighs only sixty kilograms. He tends to skip breakfast – he is usually asleep – smokes cigarettes for lunch, works without food, and picks at ham and cheese when he gets home.
Walter is the only great-grandson of Octavian Augustus Fuchs – Herbert and Erika’s father – who does not look uncannily like Octavian: he looks like his mother, Heidi, and he is the only male descendant of Octavian who still has his hair. Of Octavian I know very little, only that he was a disciplinarian who, in his twenties, was a member of an exclusive club where the initiation rite was to be cut open with a sabre from the ear to the lip; then one stitched oneself up, so the scar would be coarse and jagged.
But even with the head of hair, Walter looks older than he is. This is the effect of twenty-five years of heavy drinking and cigarettes, and twenty years of drugs – daily use. I have seen pictures of him as a teenager, when he was angelic, but even then his eyes say he is going to live without happiness. No matter how many faces there are in a photograph, his eyes are the ones that attract your attention.
I had a coffee at a café near the entrance of the Hofburg. I sent Clare a text saying I was bored, which was unfair, considering I had left her on her own and gone in search of adventure, but she wrote back to say that I should find some pretty American students to play with. I liked the idea, except I caught a glimpse of myself in a window: alone, and with nothing to do again, I looked a bit sinister.
I left the café and booked a room for myself and Clare – she is coming for a few days shortly – and then had a drink in Santo Spirito, my favourite bar in the city. Santo Spirito is an old, out-of-the-way wine bar on the Kumpfgasse, not far from St Stephen’s Cathedral, that plays nothing but loud classical music. If you request Wagner, you are thrown out – this is what Walter told me, and the bartender confirmed it. It was empty because it had just opened for the evening, and I had a few glasses of wine while trying to improve my German with Wittgenstein. I considered the sad fact that Wittgenstein, a philosopher I struggle to understand in English, was my only companion in the city. I was too ashamed to send anyone a text telling them I had come all this way to feel sorry for myself, so I packed up, hopped into a nearby restaurant for a cheap schnitzel, and was home before nine. I opened a bottle of wine and made some spaghetti Bolognese for Walter, in the hope that pasta might fatten him up a little, and listened to some more of Walter’s music – Bruckner.
Today is Sunday, and Walter is drinking with colleagues at their Christmas party, which will go on all night. It snowed in sunshine all day, which was beautiful, since I had never seen anything like it, but I didn’t leave the apartment. Dieter and Heidi are away today, so for a few hours I played music so loud it could be heard up and down the street – I had cracked two windows to let in fresh air – and sat very still on the couch. I turned the music off briefly to watch ski jumping on television from Innsbruck. Now it is night.
After a very forgettable guided tour of the city – I wanted something different to do, and a refresher course on Viennese trivia – I decided to buy a book in German that was not Wittgenstein. I went into a bookshop near the Stephansdom and told a girl who worked there I was looking for a great book by any Austrian author, and she recommended Peter Handke. This is like giving an Austrian man, with bad English, a copy of Ulysses. So now I have a book I can barely make sense of, and I am reading it in Viennese cafés, having no idea whether I like it or not, since I have only bursts of understanding. I suppose I could read newspapers, or children’s books, if improving the language were really that important to me. But I don’t want to read newspapers, and I am too impatient for simple books. There was a time I could have made enough sense of Handke to translate him. I flip the pages anyway, so that I look like I’m making progress.
I had plans to take another tour, but by the time I got to town I had lost the desire. I only wanted to travel around in streetcars and walk the streets, and maybe get my head shaved – Walter says it is a good idea, and sympathetically adds that it would not look much different.
Café Diglas: a seat in a booth at the back. The Viennese are eating cakes. I have the best view in the place, staring down the long row of packed tables. White tabletop
s without tablecloths, luxurious red chairs, large and delicate chandeliers. There are two Viennese women in the booth next to me. They are speaking too fast for me to make sense of anything, so I observe their mouths, their tongues. I would like to lean over their table and be licked by them. I want to spend the afternoon rolling around in their breasts. I think about the shape of Clare now, six months pregnant, and I have a raging desire to pull my dick out and politely ask the women to feast on it. Cakes arrive, and they accept them routinely, without breaking the conversation, merely moving their arms out of the way so that the waiter may place the cakes gently on the table. And the women begin to eat between sentences. I request the bill and begin to pack up. The café has assumed a rapidity all of a sudden, and everyone seems to be departing. It is inexplicable, but I decide to be part of it.
A long walk behind the Rathaus, up Florianigasse, into the Eighth District, then a right, in search of Laudongasse – the memory of 2002. I find it, but it is emptier than I remember. I have my headphones playing very loudly now – I am giving Mozart a chance, even though he is somehow too perfect for me, a perfection so clean and alien that it seems to have no personality. Yet the violins are going; they are tearing open little fissures in the universe. It is like watching a great battle from a long distance, and very high up; whereas someone like Tchaikovsky puts you in the trenches, with bayonets in your neck. I catch the number 5 because I see two black-haired teenage girls hop on – they are both in black jackets and dark blue jeans. I stand so close to them that I can smell the shampoo in their hair. We all jingle-jangle up the road, with the deep clang of the streetcar bell and the little automated voice telling us what the next stop is, and if there are connections. The girls get off somewhere, but I stay on until Café Hummel. I sit down for a bite to eat and a Melange. In March 2008, Walter and I drove up to a spot in the hills outside the city, where there is a stone circle, and where the beginning of spring is celebrated with bonfires and Bach’s St Matthew Passion on loudspeakers. There was a full moon, or nearly, over the city that night, glowing yellow-white. Now I am watching streetcars go by – the 33, the 5, the 2. There is nothing at all to this connection, but somehow the two moments link, they move by each other on the street like the 5 going toward Westbahnhof and the 33 heading back to Laudongasse.
Walter and I went to the Konzerthaus to hear the Budapest Festival Orchestra play Brahms and Prokofiev. The tickets cost twelve euro each: our seats were nosebleeds. I nearly fell asleep during the first Brahms piece; it was nondescript, and I was very tired. I was also dehydrated, and my throat was sore, so I kept clearing my throat. The woman in front of me turned her head every time I made a noise, and I felt so enraged by this that I slammed my knee against her seat every time she turned her head. The second piece was Prokofiev’s second violin concerto, and a beautiful Japanese woman in a glittery silver dress – the soloist – woke me up. I also preferred the Prokofiev. Preferred is inadequate. I felt rather shocked by it. It was erratic, impulsive, imperfect. But I am not qualified to discuss music. I am merely equipped with ears. I watch the world-class musician with the same bewilderment that a caveman might feel after getting struck down by an automobile. The concert played on – another, much better, Brahms piece – and Walter began to perform little head bops at all the big moments. He began to conduct very subtly with his fingers. The musicians were bouncing in their chairs. They attacked their own noise. The conductor leaped and beat at the air. The concert house was suddenly thick with sound. I felt that if I stuck my tongue out, the sound might taste of gunpowder. And then it ended. The orchestra played a raucous Hungarian dance by Brahms for the encore, and we stormed the cloakrooms, a thousand of us, all at once, and filed out into the blue, icy night. A man with a violin case went by us in a dirty overcoat. He was shaggy, and it seemed to me that there was ice on his beard. I loved the sight of him. To me he was the last genius on earth. I imagined that he had played in the fourth or fifth row of some philharmonic, maybe twenty years ago, and quit in order to compose something new, a last symphony, a symphony that would murder music forever. And I imagined that he had not written a note of it yet.
Clare arrived for a long romantic weekend, and has now gone. The city has grown exponentially colder. My skin is so dry that I am scratching it off myself. My elbows, thighs, calves and waist have long claw marks that bleed: I wake myself up in the night scratching. Walter’s love life has become rather tumultuous and full of possibility, and as a result of that and a dozen other things – his work schedule, his drug habit, his belief that he has stopped existing, or has not existed for twenty years – he has developed a very bad pain in his neck, and goes around the house like a crippled hunchback. He is taking medication and gets massages from his mother, who was a nurse. The sight of Walter in pain tends to bring everyone around him down, not because he complains but because he becomes so disappointed in himself. And you cannot help but feel that you have somehow contributed. Today – a sunshiny Monday, with snow glowing on rooftops – he can barely walk. I saw him boiling the kettle for a hot-water bottle, and while he was waiting he began to collapse slowly – his knees could not take the weight – and only stood half-upright again when I appeared behind him to ask if I could help.
In 2002, when I spent four weeks in Vienna, I made very good friends with a woman named Onka, a beautiful, large-breasted restaurant owner ten years older than me, half Swedish, half Austrian. She is, now, in an unhappy relationship, Walter tells me, and she has not returned the call I made to her. During that visit, I spent almost every waking hour with Walter (who was unemployed) or Onka, or both – and Walter’s brother Michael was often around, and a band of A-list gay men who wrote and starred in cabaret and drag shows. I am thinking of Lucy McEvil in particular, Austria’s most famous drag queen, who lives in the hills outside Vienna, in a house she calls Villa Valium: she has nothing but vodka in the house, and a few fine foods to nibble on.
Michael, in 2002, was single and overlascivious. He used to stroke slim glasses of drink in crowded bars and moan and whimper, and accelerate until he came. Sometimes he did this in the middle of the day, in cafés, with children around. You never saw anything like it, him wiping his brow afterward, and a child staring at him in horror. Now he is in a stable, exclusive, and very sweet relationship with a young eastern European man. He does not go out anymore, and I have only seen him once since I arrived. I asked Walter if he wants the same thing – a kind of marriage, even something that allows for sex with other people. We were at the bar up the road from the apartment in Ober St Veit. It was empty except for me, Walter, and the voluminous blonde barmaid, who has a mole on her upper lip. All our nights out together, this time, seem to take place in this empty bar. The worst music imaginable is played there. He could not really answer the question. All the answers are easy to say, but none of them are true, he said.
Yesterday I bought a little Moleskine notebook – incredibly overpriced, but small enough to carry in my pocket. I was sick of carrying a bag around with the old notebook, and I’d started writing German words I wanted to remember on my hand. With Clare away, I was spending time with Wittgenstein again. I try to memorize my favourite words in his book, but it will be difficult to put them to use without forcing them into unlikely contexts. My list includes words like unwägbar (imponderable), willkürlich (arbitrary), mannigfaltig (variegated), die Öde (barrenness), beunruhigen (to trouble), das Bestehen (existence), bildlich (figurative), die Täuschung (illusion), and isoliert (isolated). I haunt the little alleyways of the First District coming up with sentences to use these words in – words that choose me, and nicht das Umgekehrte (not the other way around). The cold loosens its grip a little, and I turn down the collars of my pea coat and take my gloves off. The language absorbs my identity into it; somehow I solidify into the form that is the imponderable calculation of relationships of meaning and use, and the past, and of memory. And the more solid I become with language, the more imponderable I am.
Rea
ding the section in Wittgenstein on his association of fat with Wednesday and thin with Tuesday, I realized that I associate all my memories of Vienna with the colour blue. In fact, I have painted blue into my description of the city, even when it does not exist. The light outside my window, for example, is absolutely white; I imagined the blue. Yet without the association, the memory is ungraspable. No other colour works. If I think green at the same time I think Vienna, I can think of specific green things: the roofs of some buildings, especially the Jugendstil underground stations, or the gardens I have visited. But if I think blue, my mind floods over the image of the city all at once – main streets and alleyways, tall buildings in fog, music, packed nightclubs, Walter, drag shows, Onka, eating Käsekrainer on the street.
I have discovered that if you want to see the most beautiful women in Vienna – and there are beautiful women everywhere – one thing to do is take the U4 from Schwedenplatz to Hietzing at rush hour. There are probably a handful of other stretches of underground they move in, but this one is the one I know. I put my headphones on and blast my new Prokofiev – for instance – and stand at one end of a railcar, and look upon them. This is prurience, but also, and more so, awe, admiration, pain. Then I come home and cook Walter some dinner, so he can relax and recuperate. He is deteriorating, and never smiles. Some nights I return to the city, and some nights I stay in and listen to music – there are very few CDs left to copy.
Living in a kind of interdependence with Walter, recording my days as if they mattered, going to concerts in the cheap seats, smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, drinking anonymously, slowly assembling an identity in German – my time here is an imperfect glance at a life I will never know. My time here dissipates. It seeps through a drain. The thought of work again, of small-mindedness, of the manufactured emergency of news – I don’t know how I am supposed to go back to that. When Clare was here, on the first night, she began to describe the state of mind at home, the panic of financial meltdown, loss of jobs everywhere, how dismal and unhappy life had become. It had been more than three weeks since I’d read a single line of news about Ireland, or anywhere else, and I had to ask her to stop. She wanted to stop, she said she could not bear to go on about it, but the news had its teeth in her. Few people really understand how the news is made; if they did, they would never pick up a newspaper again. After four days here, everything that she had worried about seemed less important than the act of eating a nice breakfast, or a night out at the symphony.