Little Caesar (26 page)

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.

In the lobby of the former palace where we had set up camp, an Arab woman in a headscarf was waiting amid dozens of shopping bags, printed with the nouveau-riche constellation of Gucci, Prada, DKNY – but her posture was that of the stolid female vendor amid pyramids of colorful herbs in the souk at Aleppo. An Arab hurried by on his way to the elevator, his one hand clutching that of a monstrously fat little boy, the other holding bags full of McDonald’s happy meals. He had been out foraging to feed the nest. The royal households, the nobility, they all wasted away or were already extinct, now it was other people’s turn to populate the palaces: porno stars and Arabs who had brought their desert ways along with them. But we would never succeed in making this life our own, we would always feel the thrill and excitement of a successful burglary; the manners and natural-born insouciance of the original inhabitants of these houses were not ours to imitate. The rabble had been admitted to the palace gardens, had descended like a plague of locusts, and the original inhabitants had been driven off to ever-smaller reservations.

In the room I dialed Sarah’s number. Her cheerful voice, the summons to leave behind
something nice
on the answering machine. It was early in the afternoon there, we lived in different worlds, different times. It was the umpteenth time I’d called, she had never answered once. Silence breeds the greatest of disasters. I punched the repeat button and gave her the phone number of the hotel and our room number. It wasn’t the first time I’d done that. Maybe she had accidentally erased my earlier messages. Perhaps my letters had never arrived. I had left so triflingly, with no idea of the consequences. I hadn’t felt this coming. It was logical, but the heart knew nothing about that. I sat on the edge of my mother’s bed and waited for the phone to ring.

Around midnight I went to bed. It was two in the morning when my mother came in. She slid the doors closed quietly, and after a while the light shining through the cracks went out as well.

The scene changed. Now the creeping graduality of Prague. Making acquaintance with a people of despondent drinkers. Women with the most beautiful legs I’ve ever seen. A skin flick is made in Prague each day, it is the capital of European pornography. The first week of the new year and I still haven’t heard a word from Sarah. Every day I make plans to go back. I’m afraid of what I might find. I can’t count on things being as they were when I left, she told me that. That could mean anything, but not much good.

We travel from one gorgeous backdrop to the other. But this time the reality is moth-eaten. Hotel Europe is on the point of collapse.

‘They dreamed up those three stars themselves,’ my mother says. ‘I don’t even have a TV in my room. What a dirty mess.’

I see our own inevitable downfall in that, in that mess. That I revel in it does not seem like a good sign to me.

Our rooms are next to each other on the first floor. The hubbub of Wenceslas Square intrudes all day and all night. A little further along is a stand where they fry sausages and hamburgers, providing the dominant aroma in our rooms. I feel more at home in Hotel Europe than I did at the Imperial, but my mother acts as though she’s being taken to the cleaners. Rollo Liban is staying at a hotel down the street. She’s sure that it’s a much better place. The beds here are as hard as the expressions on the chambermaids’ faces. My mother sleeps poorly. There are little vertical lines above her lips, creases that can’t be disguised with powder, except when in a state of complete immobility. I see a few wrinkles running like the channels of a river delta from her décolleté to her throat. Here’s what I think: time stood still for her once she left the limelight, but now that she has come back to it the clock has started ticking again – and faster than ever. I fantasize about vampire-like creatures who screech horribly and turn to dust as soon as they are exposed to sunlight. When we checked in I heard her ask which floor the gym was on, a question the Czech girl at the desk did not understand.

‘Sports,’ my mother said. ‘Physical exercise.’

She imitated someone bicycling at an admirable pace, then rowing and running. This was understood, and the reply in sign language was that this was not available at the hotel. The girl behind the desk was pretty. She smiled at me while we stood waiting for the elevator.

I am bored in Prague, I count the passing hours. Atop my nightstand is an orange telephone with a real dial. In the café downstairs the pianist is busy destroying the collected work of The Beatles. The gray-haired musician has something professorial about him. Sometimes he strolls back and forth between the piano and the hall leading to the toilets in order to work the stiffness out of his joints. On occasion you actually forget he’s there. Only when he stops playing are you overcome by a sense of deep fatigue, because he’s been plugging your ears the whole time with a carpet of sound. It seems as though he plays from memory, songs he heard as a boy and which he is now trying to reproduce. There’s always someone who will sing along with ‘Yesterday’.

Although my emotional state is governed by a woman with dark, curly hair who doesn’t return my calls, my senses are wide open to the melancholy beauty of the Hotel Europe. Of the way it must have looked when it opened its doors in 1889 I can only dream. It must have been a jewel. Now it smells like an old people’s home. I love wainscoting and wooden ceilings. Hanging from the balustrades are plastic baskets with artificial plants – only on the fifth floor, where the poor people and students live, are the plants real; there they are whipped to a pallor by the wind, gasp for breath between the balusters. The potting soil is covered with a white, moldy film.

The floors are all built around a skylight. You look down to the first floor, where our rooms are. The light, by the time it gets down there, is weak, like at the bottom of a well.

Someone apparently thought that red and fluorescent green would be the best colors for the stairwell. The pillars on each floor are circled by plaster garlands, ending in a wreath. Nicotine-colored moisture runs down the walls. It is a clash of styles and influences, the good old Louis-the-Something hotel style, Art Deco, the impoverished fashion of the socialist workers’ paradise and the stagnation of a hotel that falls short of the demands of the modern age. The carpets are grimy, the decorative picture frames cracked, we are witnessing a monumental demise. The hotel is so
tired
, it is begging for attention, for a renaissance.

On our floor is a set of stairs, six or seven steps, that suddenly disappears into a wall – this is where the ghosts come out at night. It is glorious and sad, this hotel, a royal grave left unplundered.

We are sitting at a table in the Titan restaurant. From the speakers come songs by artists forgotten everywhere in the world except here. Joe Cocker. Barbra Streisand. In the middle of the restaurant is a table set for forty, but no one is seated at it.

‘As though someone was going to throw a party, but changed their mind,’ my mother says.

The whole thing has given her the giggles. The waiter hands us the menu. In a plastic folder is a sheet of paper bearing the words
JULY SPECIAL
. My mother asks for the January special. The man says it’s the same as this one. I order the July special. While she tries to decipher the menu’s English, she asks, ‘Have you talked to your girlfriend yet?’

‘She’s not my girlfriend anymore. You know that. It’s over.’

‘Well it doesn’t have to be so definite, does it? You two are so theatrical.’

‘I can’t reach her. Not since we left. I’ve talked to her answering machine so often that it must be full by now. I left the number in Vienna, the one here, slowly, so that she could write it down. But she hasn’t called back or left a message.’

‘Something could have gone wrong that you don’t know about, sweetheart. It’s possible.’

‘She may be chaotic, but her principles are like cast iron. I left, these are the consequences. That’s what she’s trying to tell me.’

My mother sniffs in disapproval.

‘Love isn’t a principle. Love should be accommodating and compassionate. You can’t determine the course of love, that’s what Khalil Gibran says. Love itself determines the course of events for you, if it thinks you’re worthy. Not the other way around.’

‘Gibran, the spiritual snake-oil merchant.’

‘Maybe she’s not the kind of girl you can leave alone.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘There are girls like that. You can’t leave them alone.’

‘What are you saying exactly?’

‘That things happen.’

‘Such as?’

‘I think you can figure that out for yourself.’

‘Oh, thank you.’

‘She plucked at her hair the whole time. That says something as well.’

‘What?! What for Christ’s sake . . .’

The waiter comes out of the kitchen, chewing on something. My July menu is served. A whole duck. Tucked away beneath it is a bed of red cabbage, white cabbage and, the great blunder of Czech popular cuisine, a pile of noodles. Boiled strings of dough. Sometimes made from potato flour, sometimes wheat. Resignedly, my fork putters about between the duck, the cabbage and the starch.

‘I’m not sure this is really cheese,’ I hear her say across the table.

The chef ’s salad, always a risky thing to order. You want to look the other way, but the bright light from the electric candles overhead reveals everything in its nakedness.

‘When was the last time you smiled?’ she asks.

I look up.

‘Or said something nice to me?’

‘You have journalists for that, don’t you? Talk show hosts?’

‘I’m so tired of this, Ludwig. Really, so very tired. I don’t have to take it anymore. I must be crazy to have let this go on so long. That you blame me for living my life, that’s your business, but I don’t want to listen to it anymore. Do it somewhere where I’m not around.’

Dinner has come to a halt. It takes a little while for my mother to pull herself together.

‘I’ve thought about this for a long time, Ludwig, but I think it would be better if you went away. Lead your own life. You’re twenty years old, you . . .’

‘Twenty-one,’ I murmur.

‘You’re old enough to stand on your own two feet. I’ll give you money to help you get set up, but I don’t want this anymore. This sour old man who comments on everything, on everything I do. I get a knot in my stomach every time I see you. It makes my stomach hurt.’