A Preparation for Death

by Greg Baxter

  I quit Wittgenstein for a while and bought Henry Miller in German – Der Wendekreis des Krebses, a title not quite as romantic as Tropic of Cancer. I have read the book enough times to understand the gist, even when the words are out of reach. Walter also has a copy of the book in English, which I gave him in 2002, to mark our time here. I read and write down words I know I want to know: Ungeheuer (monster), Unflat (squalor), krumm (lopsided), uneben (uneven), blinzeln (blink), and Dirnen (trollops). Miller somehow does not suit Vienna. Wittgenstein is blue; Miller is another colour. The words in Wittgenstein have a diminishing effect on me, a vanishing effect. Miller electrifies. He vomits. Then there is Handke, who suffers, who hates Austria. I try to let each vocabulary exist at the same pitch, and interweave them, so that I am always disappearing and trembling and desiring and suffering and hating. I accumulate the language of essence only. Yet all this has started to bore me, since I feel that existing in this way is something I have already accomplished, and may not be an end. I have grown weary with the weight of language, and it only makes me more of myself. The only thing that seems different now – different enough to justify so many weeks in Vienna – is my interest in music, which I play not as background noise while I read or eat or tidy up my room, but without distraction, loudly, as loudly as Walter’s speakers will play it, sitting very still, or lying down, or on my headphones in the city: I am perfecting the art of strolling around, watching the city unfold by alleyways, the slow and rolling film of altering perspective – to music; music that suits this city more than any other.

  The book is finished. This is just an exhale, a lingering glance, an experiment in superfluousness. I have always dreamed of a book with a last chapter that was unnecessary, that went on too long, that took place somewhere else, with other people, and left the old story to flap about in the breeze. I am not in search of a self. I am leaving one behind. I plan to cast the self who came here into oblivion – the author of this book, who has nothing more to say. I leave it here, in the cold, in this record, which is the sum of my experiences in the city, so that it may prowl around as long as it likes, sit and talk with Walter in his apartment for eternity. This morning I woke a little later than usual. Walter had gone to his physiotherapy. I washed the dishes that were left over from the night before and turned on some music – Maria Callas singing Verdi, Puccini, Rossini. I took a bath – I have not mentioned that I am starting to take baths now. I made a cup of green tea, which helps settle my stomach, and sat in the living room for a very long time, without movement, and watched the smoke from my cigarette settle in the still air of the room. The self I shall leave behind will be doing this forever.

  The desk in my room has become cluttered with remembrances – programmes from concerts, exhibits, receipts, unfolded clothes, and my books: I have now officially given up reading, and I feel reborn because of it. Dieter and Heidi gave me a picture of Herbert, which I have leaned against one of the twenty potted plants. Our eyes are still alike – according to Clare – but the uncanny similarity has vanished. My face has broadened a little and I look like Octavian now – though who knows what Herbert would have looked like if he had reached my age? I have also learned that he did not die in Carinthia, as I remembered Maria telling me, but in Southern Tyrol, which is now a part of Italy. I can’t sleep late: the mornings have been sunny recently, and the light ignites the room, and slowly I begin to boil under the duvet. I throw it off. I lie on my back, play music, and stare at the haze – the absolute stillness of everything. If there is any water left in my glass, I finish it. I check the time on my phone. It is always earlier than I wish.

  The other evening, I met an old friend named Michi. He’s a politician – a socialist – in Wiener Neustadt, a little town about forty-five minutes by train to the south. We first met in 1995, when I was living in Germany. He was the boyfriend of an Austrian girl I knew from Texas. He spent a few days showing me around, talking about the possibility of a just and equitable society, and denouncing greed and unnecessary wealth. He is very small, which somehow suits the intensity with which he speaks about injustice. We met again in 2002, and I spent a night with him and a bunch of historians, politicians and intellectuals in Wiener Neustadt. I remember a room full of wild hair and huge beards dripping with beer suds. At the time he was starting his own publishing house, a non-profit venture that would publish books nobody else would – local history, political dissertations, and so on. It is flourishing now, and he, alone, has written something like a dozen books for it. They never make any money, and everyone works for free.

  We met in Café Westend, which is at the top of the Innere Mariahilferstrasse, and would have had a view of the city’s main train station, Westbahnhof, if it weren’t concealed in a building site. The café was large, pleasantly run-down, and sparely decorated. Michi waved from his booth. He wears nothing but black – black trousers, black shoes, black shirt, and black suit jacket, even in summer. I had forgotten that, and I felt a little stupid in my blue shirt, jeans, and hiking boots. We shook hands and sat down and he ordered me a beer. His life had gone largely unchanged since we last saw one another, except that he had married his long-term girlfriend, so I spent the first half-hour catching him up on mine. He scratched his head afterwards. Crazy, he said.

  Michi is thirty-eight, and now that his party is in the ruling coalition he has hope that things will change for the better. I wonder at his determinedness – politically I have none at all. In another bar, a little while later, over a plate of chicken schnitzel, I told him that I never had my own political position on anything, except contempt. He said that is a type of politics. I disagree, but I knew what he meant. I did not have the German to keep up with him. And anyway, I knew that arguing would prove his point. I proved mine, or tried to, by telling him he was right.

  Walter does everything with a cigarette in his mouth, it seems, and a cup of coffee or tea near by, and he is usually a little drunk and stoned before noon, though he conceals his morning drinking. He’s off work now, because of his neck. This morning we watched the downhill skiing. Austria finished second and third, and Switzerland was victorious. Oh well, he said, the slalom is tomorrow.

  He proposed a Spaziergang – a hike to get some fresh air and exercise, and of course to get a view of the city from high up. This is a hike we seem to make every time I’m in Vienna, except that this time much of the trail to the top was ice, so after a chest-incinerating ascent through the wealthy streets of Ober St Veit we had to claw our way, branch by branch, up the steep slopes through the forest. Since the woods are not evergreen, you could see limitlessly through them, thin brown trunks and leafless branches, and the sunlight blazed crisply off the icy earth. When we got to the top, Walter smoked a cigarette and we tried to identify different churches in the distance. The air was almost white. In the summer, Walter and his parents rent a little bit of land on the hillside to grow vegetables. Many small plots are for rent. He tells me, as we walk beside the spot, which was all ice and sludge, that on nice days in June, July and August, there are dozens of people digging around and tending and gathering. Walter says he wants to move to the countryside and do nothing but work on his garden, to have his elbows in the earth. I ask him if he’d miss anything in the city – the sauna, perhaps, though he can live without sex for long stretches, and concerts, and the shrimp dish at Umar Fisch.

  I cooked enchiladas that afternoon for Walter and his friend Martin, a hairdresser. Martin had been out until six a.m. the previous night, and had two hours of sleep before going to work. He looked as though vampires had been feasting on him for a week. He ate with his face an inch away from the plate. After his last bite, he stood up, walked to the bedroom, and did not return. Walter was heading into town with his friend Carolin for a piano concert in the Musikverein: Beethoven, Scriabin, Prokofiev, Chopin – and Carolin was supposedly friends with the pianist, and everyone was heading to a restaurant in the Eighth for a post-concert party. Walter wore a very conservative black suit,
white shirt, and red tie. He said he needed the red because all the colour had seeped out of his face.

  I took a nap, and when I woke up, Martin was sitting on the couch across from me, watching a blank television screen. I poured myself a glass of wine – I didn’t want to show up to the party cold sober – and Martin gave me a haircut. He clipped it without a guard, and afterward I was shocked at the sight of myself. It had never been so short. It was, effectively, gone. Do I look like a neo-Nazi? I asked. Lazily he said anything is better than being bald and letting your hair grow – he is bald also. Then he went back to sleep. After an hour of staring at myself in the mirror, I grew a little more accustomed to the sight.

  I took the U4 to Pilgramgasse and the 13A bus to Laudongasse – if I had stepped off the bus and walked ten feet further, I’d have seen the restaurant that Onka owns. But now that Onka seemed not to want to see me, for whatever reason, I didn’t want to do damage to my memory of the place, or of her. I stepped into Dionysus, the restaurant where the party was being held, and I expected a great deal of commotion – the pianist surrounded by young women, the owner delivering bottles of champagne to every table, scandal, quarrels. Perhaps even some singalong tunes played on an old piano. If I were a concert pianist who could sell out the Musikverein, I’d have expected nothing less. Instead, one half of the restaurant was empty. Walter was at the bar by himself smoking a cigarette, because he and Carolin were at a non-smoking table. Seeing Walter smoking by himself in a conservative suit in an empty restaurant on a Saturday night made me very unhappy. The pianist was not there, he said. Maybe he would come later. Carolin and I said hello – we had met briefly the previous March – and we sat down with a handful of dreadfully boring people who refused to talk to us. I asked them if they had liked the concert and they said it was nice, and then went back to each other. I looked at Walter and he shrugged. I have no idea who they are, he said. Carolin explained, but I wasn’t listening. I was trying to get the attention of a blonde waitress with a beautifully long, crooked nose, so I could start drinking.

  By midnight Walter was yawning, and we decided to get our coats and have a drink somewhere else. I put on my coat and stood at the bar and smoked a cigarette with Walter, while Carolin and the owner – a Kurd – chatted about the smoking ban. He said it was a good idea, since he didn’t smoke – except that he was chain-smoking. Nobody made anything of this. We were on our way out when Carolin’s eyes opened very widely and she shouted, Maestro! I turned to see the pianist arrive. A corner of the restaurant stood up to applaud and shriek praise. I was closest to the door, and inexplicably he stuck his hand out at me. I shook it. Servus, Carolin, he said. Carolin tried to get to him, perhaps to kiss his hands, but he was already moving to the table that was applauding him.

  I woke late on the Sunday, and Walter called Lucy McEvil to see if we could have some coffee at Villa Valium. She said to come by anytime – on weekends she was performing on stage in a very camp version of Lady Windermere’s Fan, but during the week she mainly wrote and composed and worked in her garden.

  We walked. It takes about thirty minutes to hike up to her place in Baumgarten, in Hütteldorf. She was outside in the garden when we arrived, holding a little spade and an axe. Lucy’s real name is Martin, though nobody but the bank refers to her as Martin. She is very tall with long arms, long legs and long fingers. She moves very slowly and sweepingly. She is not a transvestite – she is an entertainer. Outside of entertaining, she dresses like a man. But everyone still calls her Lucy, and still refers to her as she.

  I had forgotten so many details about the place – that, from the outside, it looks like a disused garden shed, that it has no hot water, no heat at all, and that Lucy bathes herself in the garden with a hose, even in winter. She heats the place with a wood-burning stove, and cooks by moving pots and pans on and off the heat. The toilet is next to the sink, and there is nothing but a little saloon-style swinging door separating you from anyone else in the house. The ground floor is no more than ten feet by fifteen feet, and there’s a bedroom upstairs with a small balcony, from which, at night, when you can see the lights, Vienna blinks like a vast metropolis, even though it is not one. She has decorated it, inside, with an impressive collection of kitsch and costume jewellery and pictures of herself. And yet, with all this kitsch and decay, there is an atmosphere of delicacy and elegance about the place – though perhaps this comes only from her. In the basement, there is a cold room full of hundreds of bottles of vodka, which she can drink like lemonade.

  Lucy made us tea, and we listened to an interview of her that played recently on ORF. And then some live recordings of her in various venues around the world. She cooked us some salmon and salad, and we ate around her little couch. She has an extremely smooth and deep voice that could put you to sleep if it did not say so many outrageously filthy things. I sat with my back to the window, but opposite a gigantic vanity mirror where she applies make-up and puts on wigs and jewellery, and – for the nights she is to entertain, or stand on stage, or sing, or DJ – transforms herself into a woman of such unquantifiable beauty that heterosexual men buy her nonsensically expensive presents in the hope of sleeping with her. The salmon was simple but full of flavour. I could not believe she cooked anything – there was no empty surface to work on. She seemed to do all her preparation in the air. After a while we took a walk around her garden, which slopes down fifty yards or so. In the spring and summer you can barely walk through it, because it is so overgrown, but in winter you can see the underlying order. Half of her plants are poisonous, and that is precisely the way she thinks of herself. Walter asked her for some gardening tips, since he plans to do some rearranging of his parents’ garden this year.

  Slowly we said our goodbyes – we will see her again on Thursday at Motto, where she DJs once a month. Walter seemed a bit more relaxed after our hours of tea, conversation, and walks in the garden. We went home and Walter slept for an hour – his ten days off because of his neck had come to an end, and he had to be in work the next morning. We had dinner reservations at eight-thirty, so Walter and I went to St Peter’s Church for the free twenty-minute organ concert at eight. We sat in the back row. Clare and I had done this when she was here, but in the afternoon. The church was dark, except for orange spotlights shooting through the dome, and candles burning around us. The organist played a fugue by Bach. When we walked out Walter breathed very deeply through his nose. That night, after dinner and a few drinks at the bar up the road, I came home and listened to some Bach that Walter recommended – cello and violin suites. I went to bed and played it on my headphones until I fell asleep.

  Walter left for work this morning – it is Monday – and at lunchtime, after the first few hours of work, he sent me a text saying his neck was as bad as it had been ten days ago, and that he was at the doctor’s.

  I set out early in a kind of grey rain-snow with my headphones. It has been so many days since I’ve read a book that my German is starting to regress. I don’t watch television apart from the skiing, because Walter likes to watch it – and now seven weeks have gone by since I even glanced at a newspaper. I left Walter sitting in his kitchen smoking cigarettes and drinking tea. His head had once again sunk into his chest, and he had not slept because of the pain.

  I took the U4 to Karlsplatz but took the exit to Bösendorferstrasse and bought some CDs at Haus der Musik. After that, I only wanted to walk around some of the empty narrow streets and exorcize language from my appreciation of Bach, to continue to rearrange the way my brain studied music. This was impossible. Thoughts came raining out of the back of my brain. I wished I could reach in through my mouth and extract them. When I leave, and there is only the permanent self of my past in Vienna, I would like to think that he, that self, may exist in a condition of sound and sight alone, a figure in gloomy weather, sunshine, night, and snow.

  I hiked up to Schloss Belvedere, first around the grounds that face Upper Belvedere. There were only three other people there, and the
y were taking photos of each other taking photos of each other with three different cameras. I walked around the large, empty fountain, then down through the gardens toward Lower Belvedere. The gardens are being revitalized, according to small displays staged all around the paths as a sort of apology. There was nobody around but some Asian tourists and a few construction workers smoking cigarettes around bits of dug-up earth. Beyond Lower Belvedere, Stephansdom was looming hazily above the centre of the city – and somehow with the sight was the implication of all my comings and goings there, and my dispensability. But these words come now; when I saw the tower flashing in and out of the blowing-sideways haze, I merely felt like I had seen what I had come to see. My Bach ran out, and I felt it would ruin the experience to play it again.

  And now I am sitting in Kleines Café beside a beautiful Taiwanese woman and an ugly, short American man. It is impossible not to eavesdrop, because they are speaking in English – I have surmised that she is a professional concert violinist and he is a struggling, broke, untalented violinist. She is about to start a tour of Asia, and he tells her he is getting old and has no accomplishments. What’s an accomplishment? she asks. Something you do that you can make a career out of, he says. I have been here for an hour and he has done nothing but complain. He has a voice that is just one octave away from crying. The waitress brings him a Melange – in Kleines Café the Melange comes with a large amount of whipped milk on top – and he says, like a little child who has lost his toy, in a German that is brutally Americanized in accent, But I ordered my Melange without whipped cream. (Aburr ick habbuh meinuh muhlonj ohne schlawg buhshtellt.) She says, irascibly, that it’s not whipped cream, but milk – that’s the way it is served. Okay, he sighs – that sigh could have killed a thousand sunflowers on a hillside. And then he tells the Taiwanese girl that he needs to reduce his fat intake, and milk has a lot of fat. Send it back, the girl says. No, he says. Never mind. Sighing again. He says he has trouble with women because he respects them too much. It is good to respect women, she says. He tells her he does not have the patience to practise music and study it at the same time. She says it is necessary, if one is to become a musician. He is bald but lets his hair grow out at the sides and back, and a little patch at the top. She has long black hair and wears a white jumper. She is the most beautiful girl I have seen in days. She moves her empty espresso cup around impatiently. The complaints go on and on. His posture is hunched and ashamed. Today, he says, all he could do was clean the floor of his apartment, which is small, and which he hates. Well, she says – and what is she supposed to say? – cleaning your apartment can be therapeutic. He shrugs. There is a girl he likes, but she doesn’t like to meet on weekdays, only on weekends, and she gets too drunk. You should teach her how to enjoy weekdays, she says. No, no, I can’t. I don’t want to change anyone. If I love someone, I must respect her decisions. I want to haul him up by his collar and toss him through the window. To have this beautiful woman in front of him and despair. To complain away the hour. To blame women for his shame – to blame respect for his distaste of them. Perhaps he thinks she will take pity on him, love him for the sweetness he wears to conceal his identity, the envying, hating, self-pitying man whose only sincere realization is that he wants more than he can have. And he has turned this into a philosophy. The things he said! About reading that having positive thoughts led to success, except that he could have no positive thoughts. The fact that his bow was responsible for the sick sounds that came out of his violin. You should buy a new bow, she says. But I have no money, he says. No wonder you won’t make a musician, I want to say. I want to break my chair over his back, throw him through the window and strangle him in the street. And then take his place opposite the violinist and say, Let’s start over.