The Piano Teacher: A Novel (18 page)

People are enjoying themselves at the Prater. The little people at the amusement park, the lecherous people on the meadows; each group in its own way. At the carnival, the parents, who have filled their bellies and their children with wine or beer, with dumplings or roast pork, stick the kids on multicolored plastic ponies, elephants, dragons, automobiles; and the tots, spinning into orbit, chuck up everything they have choked down. They are roundly slapped because the food at the restaurant cost a pretty penny, and we can’t afford such treats every day. The parents keep their meals down, for their stomachs are hard, and their hands are fast when they rain down upon their offspring. This makes the kids move faster. However, if Mom and Pop have drunk too much, they may not be able to afford the rocking roller coaster.

In order to test their mettle and flaunt their get-up-and-go, the younger generation head for the electronic pleasures of the penultimate chip generation. These vehicles have names taken from space travel. Infinitely variable, they zoom through the air with the greatest of ease, wobbling, yet steered with painstaking
precision, and perhaps exchanging up for down. The cosmic ferry is an elevator consisting of two gigantic hulls of colorful metal. And indeed, you need courage to take your pleasure here. These rides are for teenagers who have been toughened by life but bear no responsibilities as yet, not even for their bodies. They can endure up when it’s down and down when it’s up. Meanwhile, back on earth, men are trying to impress their girlfriends by shooting for kewpie dolls. They take their prizes home; and years later, the frustrated wives can see how valuable they used to be to their boyfriends.

Things are more discordant in the wide green yonder of the wilder parts of the Prater. One area is ruled by flimflam. Big, beautiful, or viciously fast cars discharge passengers who are dressed for horseback riding. Sometimes they go without a basic necessity, the horse, so they can afford the costume to strut around in. Secretaries go broke here, because they also have to maintain elegant wardrobes at work. Bookkeepers work their butts off in order to place those same butts on some horse for one hour every Saturday afternoon. They work overtime to get out from under. Department heads and company managers are more relaxed about the whole business, because they can afford the pleasure, but don’t have to. Anyone can tell who they are anyway, and they can start thinking about their golf game.

There are probably more attractive riding areas, but nowhere else can one be gaped at and gawked at by so many innocent families with innocent children and dogs on leashes: Look at the horsie! say the children; and they’d like to ride the horsie themselves. If they nag too loudly, they get slapped. We can’t afford it. Instead, the little boy or little girl is planted on the rocking and rolling plastic horse on the merry-go-round, where he or she can keep whining and wailing. This is a good lesson for the children: they learn that most expensive originals have
cheap imitations. Unfortunately, a child remembers only the original and hates his parents.

There are also places in the Prater where horses race their asses off. They have to push themselves; their drivers can only do so much. The ground is strewn with empty cans, betting tickets, and other refuse that Nature cannot digest. She can just about handle the delicate tissues; the paper used to be a natural product, but it will be quite a while before it becomes one again. Paper plates, an inedible crop, cover the trampled earth. Four-legged lean machines, cunningly fed and marvel-ously muscular, zoom along under their blankets, faithfully guided. All they have to worry about is what tactic to win with in the third race; their jockeys or drivers will let them know in time, before they get a chance to lose.

When the light of day goes out, and the night comes out with lamps and work or with guns and brass knuckles, it is accompanied by people who have lost out on life, mostly women. And, very seldom, very young men; for when these young men grow older, they will be worth less to their Johns than to older women. Who, young or old, are, of course, worth nothing to the homosexuals. The whores hustle and the hustlers whore through the Prater.

Every Viennese, starting in infancy, is warned never to come anywhere near this area in the dark: boys to the left, girls to the right. You can find a lot of elderly women here, at the edge of their profession and at the end of their lives. Often one finds only their shot-up remains, dumped out of speeding cars. The police usually come up with nothing, for the culprit has long since returned to the orderly silence he emerged from. It could have been the pimp, but he’s got an alibi. This is where the hiking mattress was invented and first used. If you don’t have an apartment, a room, a one-night cheap hotel, or a car, then you have to have a transportable bed, which keeps you warm
and on which you can land softly when you’re floored by lust. Here, Vienna, in its boundless malice aforethought, puts forth its most beautiful flowers when a nimble Yugoslav or a quick locksmith, trying to get a freebie, dashes by, pursued by the foul-mouthed professional who has been cheated of her just reward. But there’s nothing the locksmith yearns for more than an extra wall, so that he and his girlfriend can conceal the raunchiness of their private lives. Books, a stereo system with speakers and albums, a TV, a radio, a butterfly collection, an aquarium, hobby implements and instruments, and goodness knows or doesn’t know what else can be shielded from prying eyes and stored safely. A visitor can see only the dark-stained rosewood partition; he doesn’t see the chaos on the other side. He may—and should—see the small home bar with its colorful liqueurs and the angrily glittering, endlessly polished glasses that are judiciously matched to those hues and shades. The glasses are carefully maintained during the early years of marriage. Later on, they get smashed by the children, or else the wife forgets to polish them because the husband always comes home so late after drinking outside somewhere. The mirrored bar slowly develops a coat of dust.

The Yugoslav and the Turk have a congenital hatred of women. The Viennese locksmith hates a woman only if she’s unclean or wastes money on makeup. This money can be spent on something more useful, more durable. He doesn’t have to pay for something as short-lived as hairspray; after all, when she’s with him, the woman will experience a pleasure she won’t find with other men. Simply by living his own life, he has created his own sperm, arduously and tediously. Once he’s dead, he won’t be able to produce any juice or tap any sap, to the great regret of various females. Often the locksmith can’t go to other women because he’s known in the neighborhood and pitilessly observed. But if he’s faced with an acute financial
crisis, say, overdue installments, he’ll risk getting beaten up or something even worse. His longing for variety in vaginas is not always consistent with his pecuniary desires and possibilities.

Now, he’s looking for a woman who doesn’t look as if any other man would think of protecting her. She’ll be very grateful to him, for the locksmith is a chunky hunk of a guy. He’s chosen a typical loner in the realm of the senses, a crone. A Bohunk or a Turk often can’t risk it because the women often won’t let him get anywhere near them. At least no nearer than a stone’s throw. If a woman does take one on, she can’t ask for very much money, because her work isn’t worth very much anymore. The Turk, who is not worth as much to his employer as the sum on his paycheck, is disgusted by his sexual partner. He refuses to slip on a condom, for the female is the pig, not the male. And yet, like the locksmith, the Turk is attracted to a fact that cannot be shrugged off, however disagreeable it may be: the female. Turkish men don’t like women; they never suffer their company willingly. But since women are a fact, what can you do with them? What’s the first thing that crosses a man’s mind?

The locksmith will treat his fiancee decently for at least one week. He describes her as clean and hardworking. He tells his friends that he’s never embarrassed to be seen with her, and that’s saying a lot. He can take her to any nightspot; undemanding as she is, she asks little of him. She gets even less and scarcely notices. She’s a lot younger than he. She comes from a disorderly home and therefore appreciates an orderly one. He has something to offer her.

You can’t talk about the Turk’s private life, for it doesn’t exist. He works. And after work, he must be stored somewhere, to be protected against the elements; but no one knows where. Evidently in the streetcar, for which he doesn’t buy a ticket.
To the non-Turkish world around him he is a cardboard figure, the kind you aim at in a shooting gallery. In case he’s needed for work, he is pulled out and set in motion; someone shoots at him, and, whether hit or not, he vanishes at the other side of the gallery, then revolves invisibly (no one sees him, but there’s probably nothing worth seeing). He moves along behind the papier-mâché background, ending up at the starting point. He then reenters the scenery (the artificial cross on the mountain peak, the artificial edelweiss, the artificial gentian), where Viennesse coziness, rearmed, is already waiting for him. The marksman has been stirred up by his wife in her Sunday best, by the local tabloid, and by his teenage son, who would like to outshoot Dad and is only waiting for him to miss. The hit will be rewarded with a small kewpie doll. There are other prizes: Aaron’s rod and goldenrod. But whatever the prize, it is geared toward the woman, who waits for the victorious shooter and is always his greatest prize. She knows he is making his effort only for her sake, and if he fails, then he is angry only for her sake. Either way, she’ll have to stew in his juice. A deadly argument can develop if the man can’t stand the thought of having shot and missed. The woman only makes matters worse if she tries to comfort him. She has to pay for it when he lunges straight into the main course, screwing her with no appetizer to whet her appetite. He gets roaring drunk, and if she refuses to take his cock tonight, he’ll beat up on her like there’s no tomorrow. The police car arrives, the siren screams, the officers jump out and ask the woman why she’s shouting. She should at least let her neighbors sleep if she can’t sleep herself. Then they give her the address of the women’s shelter.

Erika, a small skiff hunting for prey, weaves loosely through the area, which stretches across the entire green portion of the
Prater. This has recently become her new happy hunting ground. She is widening her scope, because she is long since overly familiar with the wild game in her own neighborhood. Coming here requires courage. Erika wears solid shoes, so that if push comes to shove—that is, if someone finds her out—she can escape into the bushes; into dog turds; into empty, phallus-shaped plastic bottles containing the liquid remnants of venomously dyed kiddie lemonade (each flavor touted on TV by a different species of singing animal); into piles of greasy paper once used for mysterious purposes; into paper plates smeared with mustard; into filled rubbers still vaguely maintaining their former cock shape. Erika, nervously anticipating, tries to scent prey. She draws air in and blows it out again.

The Praterstern, that large square where she gets out of the trolley, isn’t dangerous. Granted, a couple of horny men mingle with harmless pedestrians and strollers; but even the elegant lady can visit the Praterstern informally, although the area isn’t all that fashionable. All sorts of mysterious things can happen here. For instance, if the foreigners standing around by themselves are not hawking newspapers, they might reach into their plastic briefcases and pull out a man’s sport shirt with fancy pockets (straight from the factory), stylish women’s dresses (straight from the factory), children’s toys (straight from the factory), albeit slightly damaged, boxes of cigars (straight from the factory), small electrical and electronic parts (straight from the factory or a burglary), transistor radios or record players (straight from the factory or a burglary), cartons of cigarettes (from goodness knows where). And the vendors peddle them, calling discreetly. Despite her simple clothing, Erika looks as if her extra-large shoulder bag had been specially made, or at least specially brought here, to take in and conceal from public eyes a tiny factory-fresh tape deck of uncertain nationality and
working order, in brand-new plastic wrapping. But along with lots of necessities, her bag contains the most important thing of all: a good spyglass. Erika looks fully solvent: Her shoes are genuine leather and sensibly soled; her coat neither shrieks nor conceals itself beyond recognition, it calmly and expensively drapes its wearer, proudly carrying its world-famous, albeit unseen British label. This coat can be worn for a lifetime if it doesn’t get on your nerves first. Mother urged Erika to buy it, for she advocates as little change as possible in life.