In Praise of Older Women

by Stephen Vizinczey

  “So you walked all the way to Salzburg,” she said in a wondering tone, as if she wanted to understand the kind of kid I was. “You had to grow up quickly,” she added rather absent-mindedly and with a tinge of sympathy. Maybe she was testing her feelings toward the possibility of anything happening between us. She turned her face away from me, but not before I caught its faint expression of humbleness and surprise. Even after being a part-time prostitute, she must have despaired to find herself considering the offer of a twelve-year-old boy. Or so I interpreted her reaction. But while I thought I understood her, I couldn’t think of anything to say or do which would draw her to me. I wasn’t prepared, I felt as I had in school when the teacher called me up to the front of the class and I couldn’t name the capital of Chile. I wanted to get away, I was scared.

  But just at that moment she pushed me gently back on the bed and unzipped my trousers. She began to play with me with quiet, slow fingers, still sitting up straight and watching my face with a gleam of curiosity. Then she suddenly leaned down and held me in her mouth.

  I soon became weightless and felt like I never wanted to move again in my life. I was half-conscious of her serious eyes watching me, and later on I seemed to hear her voice calling me an immoral boy again. At last she shook me by the shoulder and told me to get up: she didn’t want the lieutenant to find me there when he came back. As I left the hut she admonished me to pray to God to save me from ruin.

  Perhaps I might have been able to wear her down if I had kept on pestering her at the shower doors of the various officers’ quarters which she visited. Yet, curiously enough, I didn’t try. Her impulsive gesture in delivering me from my misery on the lieutenant’s bed discouraged me from trying to catch women off their guard. I felt like a thief who has broken into a house — only to be surprised by the owner and sent off with a gift.

  Three

  On Pride and Being Thirteen

  No, thank you!

  — Edmond Rostand

  Back in the cadet school I had heard a lot about the dangers of sex. At masturbation time, after the lights were turned out in the dormitory, we used to scare each other with stories about boys who turned into imbeciles because they played with themselves or had intercourse with girls. I remember one tale about a kid who cracked up just from thinking about women. By the time I got to the American Army camp I had lost all my religious fears, but I still believed that if a boy had a very strong sex-drive, his other faculties would be stunted. And I worried a great deal about myself.

  In retrospect, I find that my appetites were evenly overdeveloped. For one thing, I became a food-addict. Probably because I had been hungry for so long before the Americans took me in, I was eating more than I ever had in my life. There was a huge mess-hall, one side of which was taken up by the row of kitchen-helpers — between six and eight of them at each mealtime — who filled our canteens from their steel cooking-pots as we passed by. The round sunny pancakes with butter and syrup, corn-niblets, and ice-cream and apple-pie were my favourites. I also developed an insatiable appetite for money. During my first month or so in the camp, I watched with unceasing disbelief the cooks who poured into garbage containers the fat in which they cooked the hamburgers and steaks. They must have thrown out about twenty or thirty gallons of fat every day — gallons of flowing gold in starving Europe. I loved the Americans but they were obviously crazy. The day after my failure to seduce the Countess, I felt so unhappy about myself that I hit upon the idea of asking the chief cook to give me the fat instead of letting it go to waste. At first he didn’t want to bother, but when I told him I wanted to sell the stuff, he agreed. From that day on, whenever the soldiers were driving me into Salzburg to get them girls from the refugee-camp, they were also transporting my five-gallon milk-cans filled with fat. I sold them to various Salzburg restaurateurs and insisted on getting paid in American money. On the days when I had more fat than I could sell, I used to give it away to the refugees, and received ovations worthy of a Hungarian pope. After a while the chief cook (who never asked me for a cut) really got into the spirit of the thing and gave me every five-gallon can of meat, egg-powder, fruit or juice that had been opened and might spoil. Picking up the riches in the kitchen took about twenty minutes a day, getting to and from Salzburg and distributing them took another couple of hours. With two and a half hours of work a day I was earning about five hundred dollars a week. When the commander of the camp heard about my talent for free enterprise he became curious about me and often invited me over to chat. He was one of the most civilized people I ever met: a short, thin man with a pale face and a slight twitch in one eye. The GIs told me he had seen a lot of action in the Pacific and had been given this European assignment as a kind of holiday. He didn’t drink or play poker, and his chief recreation was reading: he seemed to know as much about Greek literature and mythology as the Franciscan fathers, and liked to talk about the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles. He owned several hotels in and around Chicago, and was anxious to get back home and put them in order, but he told me he was just as bored with business as with the Army. I used to tell him about my sharp dealings with the restaurateurs, which seemed to amuse him, and he made me give an account of how much money I earned each day. After he learned that I was losing hundreds of dollars on poker, he took my profits for safe-keeping. He had two children whom he missed very much, and he seemed to like to have me around, talking about anything that came into my head. But when I began to tell stories about the soldiers in the barracks, he cut me short: “Watch it! Don’t turn into a stool-pigeon. I don’t want to hear about it.” He often took me on his rounds, and I happened to be with him when he was looking over a German Army warehouse he had to dispose of. It was stuffed with summer shirts which had been manufactured for Rommel’s African Army, and then forgotten. There were two million of them, according to the inventory, and I asked the commander to give them to me. He didn’t think much of my chance of selling two million summer shirts, but he promised to let me have them and even to arrange transportation if I could find a buyer. I got on a jeep going to Salzburg and decided to look up the madam of a whorehouse I knew. She offered a thousand dollars for the lot, but I worked it up to eighteen hundred. Unfortunately, after we delivered the shirts and I collected the cash, the GIs who had driven the trucks sat down to play poker with me. I lost fourteen hundred dollars before deciding to give up the game once and for all.

  Anxious to improve myself, I found a music teacher in Salzburg who gave me piano lessons twice a week, for half a pound of butter an hour. I was studying German and trying to improve my English. Having given up my ambition to become a martyr, I was now dreaming about becoming a living immortal: I began to write a long verse-play about the futility of existence, hoping that it would be both a masterpiece and a hit. But I worked hardest of all studying Latin. For some reason I was convinced that I would never amount to anything if I didn’t know Latin.

  During all this time, I remained a virgin pimp. There were a few nice-looking and friendly whores who seemed to be fond of me, but I didn’t know how to proposition them for myself. Staring as pleadingly as I could, I hoped it would occur to one of them to ask me . But they never did. And although I wanted to make love so badly that I often had severe cramps, the gloomy after-effects of straight business deals were beginning to intimidate me. I noticed that the soldiers who took on whoever was available — hardly even looking at the woman — were frequently sullen or angry afterward. And while my dear Countess used to part from the young captain in a mood of high elation, she came out of the other officers’ quarters looking bleak. Whatever else sex was, it was obviously teamwork, and I began to suspect that strangers who were more or less forced on each other rarely made a good team.

  The woman who spelled this lesson out for me was Fräulein Mozart. She appeared in our barracks one bright Sunday in early spring, just after lunch, when most of the soldiers had already gone out for the afternoon. There were only three of us inside, two GIs and myself:
one of them was sprawled on his bed reading magazines, and the other was giving himself a shave with some difficulty. He had put the mirror on the window sill beside his bed, and the sun was getting in his eyes. I sat cross-legged on my bed, studying Latin verbs. Suddenly the door sprang open and our self-styled comedian from Brooklyn bellowed cheerfully into the room: “Here she is, boys — Fräulein Mozart!”

  Our barracks were long and narrow, with twenty-four beds on each side and a space of six feet or so between the two rows. My bed was toward the far end of the room, and when the newcomers entered I was able to slip to the very back without being noticed. I sat down on the floor behind the last bed, with only the top of my head showing, and hoped the others would forget about me so I could watch. Fräulein Mozart was a big Austrian blonde. Milky, massive, stolid. She wore a dirndl skirt with flowers on it and a sleeveless black blouse. She walked in as if there was nobody in the room; and, indeed, the two soldiers near the door did not greet her nor even seem to notice her entrance; though her escort made quite a scene. He was a short man with thick, dark eyebrows and close-cropped hair, and he was swinging his hips and clapping and rubbing his hands as he repeated his victory cry: “How about that , guys — Fräulein Mozart!” He followed along behind her, making broad circling motions with his hands in the air to emphasize her contours. But his comrades paid no attention: the GI behind Life magazine didn’t look up at all, and the other turned his lathered cheek from the mirror only for a second, then back again, squinting into the sun.

  “The best piece you’ve ever seen!” Brooklyn insisted, unzipping his trousers with a flourish.

  Fräulein Mozart slowed down, hesitated. I thought she found the presence of the others and her escort’s behaviour embarrassing. Then she spoke, in a manner that showed me I had been mistaken.

  “Which is your bed?” she asked brusquely.

  Brooklyn pointed it out to her: it was toward the middle of the room, ten beds or so away from me. As casually as if she were alone, Fräulein Mozart began to undress, tossing her blouse and brassiere on the bed next to Brooklyn’s. He stopped swinging and clapping his hands and just stared at her. Then she took off her skirt and unfastened her long blonde hair and began to comb it with her fingers. There she stood, naked but for her underpants, and all I could see was her broad white back and sturdy buttocks. I tried desperately to picture what Brooklyn was seeing from the front, as he sat on the edge of the next bed, very still now, tapping his foot softly. The other soldiers still didn’t take any notice of her. This was utterly incomprehensible to me.

  “If either of you guys are interested, I’m charging two pounds, ten dollars or four hundred cigarettes.”

  She must have been visiting the British camp nearby and obviously didn’t need me to translate. The soldiers didn’t bother to answer. Just as she was tossing her panties in her partner’s face, the reader of Life looked up to ask, “Where’s the kid?”

  I ducked my head under the bed and held my breath, but then I heard Fräulein Mozart’s flat, even voice: “There’s a kid down there at the back of the room.”

  And her back had been turned to me all this time.

  The men were still laughing as I walked out the door. I waited for her outside the barracks, kicking stones and hating the world. It was now or never, I was fed up. Fräulein Mozart emerged in about twenty minutes. Stepping up to her I realized that I only came up to her breasts, so I quickly stepped back again. I offered her a thousand cigarettes. She looked at me impassively and I thought she hadn’t understood.

  “I’ll give you a thousand cigarettes.”

  “What for?” she asked, slightly puzzled.

  I decided to appeal to her in her native tongue. “Fräulein, Ich möchte mit Ihnen schlafen.”

  “Sure,” she answered, without any visible reaction. “But I charge only four hundred cigarettes.”

  I was pleased that she didn’t want to overcharge me, even though I had offered the five cartons voluntarily. It gave me hope that we would be able to get along. I was sure of it when she herself suggested a place: the forest between the camp and the nearest village. Evidently Brooklyn had refused to drive her back to Salzburg and she had to go to the village to catch a bus into the city. I went back to the barracks to pick up the cigarettes and a blanket, walking slowly and casually because I didn’t want the soldiers to ask any questions. Brooklyn was lying on his bed, naked, smoking and reading the comics. It took me about three minutes to collect my things, and I broke out in a sweat imagining that another GI had picked her up in the meantime, or that she had simply changed her mind and walked away. After all, she hadn’t even smiled at me. But I was lucky: she was waiting.

  We walked out of the camp through an opening in the wire fence. As peace and order were reestablished, women were barred from the barracks; so while just as many women came to the camp as before, now they didn’t pass through the gate.

  It was one of the first clear, warm days of the year: the sun was dazzling and the earth, dark-wet from the melted snow, gave forth the smells of spring. The village of Niederalm was about a mile and a half away, and we didn’t have far to go before reaching the forest. We were walking on a narrow side-road covered with pebbles. Fräulein Mozart was wearing flat-heeled shoes and walked with long easy strides, so that I had to trot to keep up with her. She never said a word or even looked toward me — it was as if she were walking alone, though she slowed down after a while. I thought of putting my hand on her bare white arm, but since I would have had to more or less reach up for it, I abandoned the idea. I looked to see if her breasts were shaking as she walked, but she wore a tight brassiere and they were as motionless as her face. However, they were large and round. I wanted her to know how much all this meant to me.

  “Du bist die erste Frau in meinem Leben.”

  “Gut,” she answered.

  After this exchange we marched on silently. The blanket was getting heavy and I was looking forward to spreading it on the ground. I was certain that once on the soft blanket beside me she would be kinder.

  When we reached the forest — one of those small woods around Salzburg which look as well-groomed as a park in the middle of a city — I ran ahead and found a small enclosed clearing behind a rock. I put down the blanket and, proud of having found such a romantic secluded spot, I offered it to her with an exalted gesture. She sat down on the blanket, opened her skirt (it came apart on the side) and lay back. She wasn’t comfortable, so she twisted her body around with a grunt. I sat down beside her and tried to see through her buttoned-up blouse and tight brassiere, then watched her bare belly and the shadow on her panties where her hair showed through the thin white silk. I put my hand on her firm thigh, feeling it in wonderment. Breathing deeply, smelling the pine forest and the wet earth, I fancied that however unimpressionable she was, however often she might have been with a man, she must share my excitement. Overcome, I buried my head in her lap, and I must have been motionless for some time, for she told me to hurry up . At last there was some feeling in her voice — a feeling of get-it-over-with impatience.

  “Mach’ schnell!”

  I was terribly offended.

  Without another word, I got up and began to pull my blanket from under her. I couldn’t have touched her for all the pleasures of paradise.

  “Was wollst du?” she asked, with perhaps a faint trace of annoyance.

  I told her I had changed my mind.

  “Okay,” she said.

  We walked together to the edge of the forest, where I handed her the cartons of cigarettes. She turned toward the village, and I walked back to the camp, carrying my blanket.

  Four

  On Young Girls

  Your boyhood remember?

  Would you go back, ever?

  Would you go back, ever?

  I would not — I would not.

  — Sándor Weöres

  During all my wanderings through two decades and two continents, I’ve found nothing more pathetic than the univ
ersal misery of young boys trying to charm young girls. Even here, at the University of Saskatchewan, I seem to spend most of my time between lectures listening to male students complaining about their misadventures with female students. I tell them that girls are just as maddening in sexy old Europe as they are in Saskatoon, but it doesn’t make them feel any better. In fact, this is what first gave me the notion to write this book. If neither my casual advice nor my lectures in logic can help them, maybe my personal testimony will.

  I also think of the boy I once saw at the O’Keefe Centre in Toronto. I had gone to see Richard Burton’s Hamlet , and after the performance I was making my way through the crowded lobby beside a teenage couple. The boy must have been about seventeen, and his girl looked slightly younger. From the way she put her arm through his and leaned heavily against him as they moved along, I had the impression that they were “going steady.” She was giggling in a high-pitched voice, attracting the attention of the dozen or so people next to them, which may have been her intention.

  “Oh, Richard Burton!” she breathed loudly, closing her eyes and swooning on her escort’s arm. “He’s absolutely fabulous! He could have me any day!”

  This public declaration of the fact that the boy against whom she was leaning with such unfeeling familiarity meant nothing to her, that he was an inferior substitute for her true ideal, did not fail to embarrass the young man. He turned white, then red. I could see that he was trying to get away from the people who had heard her remarks, but it’s difficult to advance in a crowd with a rather plump girl on your arm. He was trapped among us. The girl had no idea of the incongruity of her behaviour and seemed to enjoy our curious glances. Perhaps she thought we were picturing how absolutely fabulous she would look leaning against Richard Burton.