Wonderful, Wonderful Times (3 page)

Anna is lurking in the background, lying in wait for half a roll that's going free. I brought you one too, says

Sophie, offering it. With fish and onions, how you like it. Great!

As soon as Anna has gobbled her half roll she goes out to the toilet and sticks a finger down her throat. Out they come again, the fish and onions, yurgh, only in reverse order. Anna contemplates what she has thrown up, then pulls the flush. She feels as if she consisted entirely of filth. No wonder. After all, she unceasingly brings the filth with her from home, like a magnet.

Once, when she was still a child, she watched Mummy in the bathtub. Contrary to her usual bathtime practice, Mother was wearing an old pair of white panties, which billowed out like a sail in the water. There were red stains on them. Revolting. A body such as that is simply an appendage to a person, and one that easily spoils. It isn't the main thing. Even though there is a lot you can buy to put inside the body or drape on it. Whenever Anna sees something white she promptly wants to stain it.

Anna's thoughts turn constantly and compulsively to unpleasant things that slip past the checkpoint in her brain. It's one-way traffic: the barrier's raised to let things in but doesn't let them out. That brain of hers is crammed with unpleasantness, and the emergency exit is nailed shut. Take (for instance) the humiliating memory of how a number of mothers complained about her to the teacher some years ago. Anna's sexuality had been issuing from her lips in the form of gross jokes (just as Rainer's sexuality too is only ever a matter for the mouth). Supposedly Anna's jokes had poisoned the childlike souls of various classmates. That was when Anna's difficulties in speaking first began. More and more often her tongue would say no, I'm not doing anything today.

Right now Anna is once again making stains. What she'd like best would be to see Sophie's surface area grubbied about like this. But it is made of the finest repellent material: the material repels dirt.

Another little example. Anna is fourteen years old. She is sitting naked on the floor, legs apart, trying to deflower herself with the aid of an old shaving mirror and a razor blade, to rid herself of a membrane that is supposedly down there. But she knows nothing about anatomy and cuts into her perinaeum by mistake. Which bleeds fearfully.

When Anna emerges into the open from the reeking school toilet, naturally it's snow-white Sophie who whirls past her first, burying her. Sophie the avalanche. Want to stop by at my place this afternoon? Okay.

Anna pumps away energetically and keeps it up for a long time, but there is no blood (as there was that time back then), no ink, no raspberry juice and no vomit.

Sophie slips nimbly past her and heads outside. Into the light. Where it is so light that Sophie no longer stands out, and disappears without trace.

HANS SEPP'S father was in the labour movement, and was killed at Mauthausen concentration camp. As if it had never witnessed such things, the light of the setting sun breaks brightly upon the Kochgasse windows, burning with a greater intensity than it has on leaving the sun. You have to close your blinded eyes for protection against the violence of Nature. The people who live here have experience in turning a blind eye to things.

Across the road there is a little shop selling knitting and sewing equipment. Brightly-coloured yarns and wools on little crocheted doilies; the pointed needles are inside the store. Touched by the things of everyday life, Hans the natural creature enters the council block where he lives with his mother. Obdurately he looks right through the old lady and her daughter (both of them wearing black work smocks); they are serving ladies who do handicraft work at home. Hans's mother does work at home too. In their untidy home she addresses envelopes. It's paid work, mind you.

There is also something natural about the potatoes and oranges and bananas at the greengrocer's. Anna and Rainer would be certain to compare these things with something they know from the artificial, man-made world of poetry, thinks Hans arrogantly. Nature is much more vitally present to me. I have my finger on the pulse of the age. I let things come and go, in and out of me. In Laudongasse the number 5 tram sets up an almost continuous squealing, approaching the stop by the baker's. I'm not yet spoilt by art and literature, thinks Hans.

His mother also gazes into the reflection of the setting sun. As she does so, her head and heart are occupied with social democracy, which has often been a disappointment to her. If there are many more disap-

pointments she will try the Communists. Where did you get that pullover, Hans? That cashmere wool is a class or two higher than what our budget will run to. Mother sets fire to a thread and can tell from the stench that it's real wool. Hans (returning home from the Elin Union, the firm where he is being trained to be an electrician) promptly informs her that he was given the pullover by his friend Sophie, whose parents are rich. He is still the man and she the woman. And things are going to stay that way. He'll see to that. If you go on like that you'll betray the cause of the workers without realising you're doing it, says Mother. Hans goes into the kitchen, the only room that is heated, and pours a glass of milk so that he will still be able to go in for a lot of sport. He sleeps in a tiny closet, Mother in the cold living room. Screw the working class, long live rock 'n' roll. It's the class you belong to. Not for much longer, if I can help it, I'm going to be a gym teacher or maybe something even better, who knows.

At that moment a fresh swarm of workers pour out of the number 5 that has just arrived, into the side streets. Stale and fuggy stairwells suddenly come alive. The mothers of families dive for apartment doors to welcome their breadwinners home. They snatch their shabby briefcases, battered cooking utensils and thermos flasks away from them; or (in the case of Superior People) relieve them of attache cases plus newspapers, remnants of Superior People's trout, greasy paper, etc. And the homecomers change into the down-at-heel socks they wear at home and which until recently they were still wearing to work. These people know what having to scrimp and save is like, even if they don't all need to. You can't always go buying something new if you still have the old thing. The first clips have been administered to children's ears and their ill-treated voices are uplifted in shrill chorus. No, Karli can't go out again today, I said no. Round the corner, in Beserl Park, dogs go for a leisurely prowl in the grass,

and crap a little here and there. War invalids, who at one time were out and about in the streets, watch them with interest, thinking of the time when they were still somebody, on enemy territory in a foreign land, somebody they no longer are.

They crack the leads like whips, which makes no impression on the dogs. No one obeys the one-time soldiers any more, nor do they have anyone whose every word they can themselves obey. Authority is unfortunately a thing of the past.

Hans gobbles up several rounds of bread and margarine and checks his quiff in the old shaving mirror which supposedly belonged to his murdered father. Don't get started on your concentration camp stories again, I've had them up to here.

Across the road, the woman who keeps the knitware shop lets the blind half down. Behind it, bending forward, is a customer, still talking about a new pattern. The era of embroidered pictures on every wall is just dawning and will soon be in full swing. Scarcely have people acquired the hard-won bare essentials than they are already starting to think of the unnecessary luxuries. It'd be best if they didn't even trouble to ponder the necessities of life. If you don't have the cash you get your sunshine from things you don't really need. Or else the daily grind is grey.

You haven't been to the group evenings for four weeks. They could use you just now to stick posters up (Mother to Hans). Piss off (Hans to Mother). She treats him to a long quotation from a book, dry as paper.

Till well into the fifties, the situation of the working people was even worse than at the time of the great economic crisis in 1937. This period is considered part of the notorious post-War phase. Productivity was increased, which was tantamount to aggravating exploitation, but at the same time food was in distinctly short supply. At the time when the action of this novel

takes place, though, everyone is already much better off and the way is clear for a
wirtschaftswunder
(a German notion familiar from numerous films featuring kidney-shaped fifties tables and cocktail cabinets, and from numerous blondes with big busts propped aloft in wired C-cups). Everyone hails it with loud cheers of welcome. There are always some people, though, in whom the way is never clear for anything, let alone wonders. They keep on opening their doors, but all that comes in is the cold from outside. Frau Sepp is one of these unfortunates.

In faltering tones she tells her son about that decisive year, 1950, for the umpteenth time. It gets on his nerves. In 1950 she said goodbye to her next-to-last hopes. (Today's emphasis is on Olah's drunken bands bursting into factories, beating, butting and thumping, forcing the strikers to resume work. Olah, commander of the strikebreaking posse, is in the SPO National Assembly, and so on and so forth, blah blah blah.) Frau Sepp overlooks one point: that her son, in inverse proportion to her own hopes, has for some time been nurturing false hopes, hopes which he himself believes to be realistic. Hans is a young, healthy fellow and relies on his fists, just as those Social Democrat officials Probst, Koci and Wrba relied on theirs when they crushed the strikes. Hans has learnt that you don't have to be an official of the beloved workers' party to bash things down, there's a more straightforward way of doing it, and (above all) you can do it solely for yourself. At some point you'll start accumulating a fortune, a fortune which will go on getting bigger and bigger.

It is lighting-up time and the current is surging into the first street lamps. That current was created by Hans single-handed. Not the Almighty. But you've always liked your work, admonishes Mother. There's better things in life, and I know what they are, too, counters Hans briskly.

To think that that is what your father died for. So what, he didn't have to die on my account (Hans).

Imagine there were just one more person here, Mama, you couldn't swing a cat. But Hans, there are people who have more room than they need to live in. There's a cosy little bench in Helenental, and old villas in the Hietzing part of Vienna. Which is where Sophie lives. One way or another I'm going to get in there too, swears Hans. Tenderly he folds up the expensive cashmere pullover and puts on the mended cardigan he's had since childhood. He's looking after things for later (something you have to learn early, because when you're young there's always a later, but when you're old it's all over), and later he'll be saving for later still, so that he has something for that rainy day which hopefully will never come.

Now, as if at a signal, evening cooking commences all over the building, and smells both nasty and pleasant fill the stairwell, settling into the flaking plaster, where they meet old acquaintances for a chat: cabbage and
sauerkraut,
potatoes and beans. A second shift of clouted kids howl through the doors. Daddy's tired. His nerves are bad. Psst, be quiet, or else his nervous insulation will tear good and proper.

Hans has a vision of glistening china, silver cutlery, and a prevalent muted atmosphere in both actions and words. In tone and bearing you never make a slip, you'd sooner slip your hand into someone else's pocket. Hans has an ideal because he is an adolescent. Adolescence and ideals go hand in hand. What they produce are resolutions involving love, which is always selfless. For which reason you can help yourself to as much as you can get.

Hans reports that Rainer said that in Nature the strong crush the weak. It's logical, isn't it, which of the two I want to be. Who is this Rainer (Mother's uneasy query). You drive me up the wall with your stupid questions, snaps the son cantankerously, and he pushes off, although he hasn't even had anything decent to eat, which is another need that young people

have. As so often, potato goulash was on the menu today.

Mother stands there in the darkened room, her back aching from writing, swaddled in the dark and battered furniture about her. Which is an indication that she has achieved nothing in life. Which is her own fault. All of the guilty are perpetrators and all perpetrators are guilty. She is also swaddled in the human tea-cosy of the murdered, the hanged, the gassed, those who were shot and those who had the gold teeth torn from their mouths.
Servus,
Hansi, sleep well (that was her husband's name and it is also her son's). Her Hans, who is already a grown lad and thus no longer a Hansi, is just leaving the house. A pity Papa couldn't see him grow up. But strangers always mattered more to him than his own family. Now Mama has to watch out on her own. It's tough for a boy if he doesn't have a father, you read this all the time, it doesn't matter so much to a girl. People cleverer than Hansmother have said that, so it must be true. And the sun does not laugh at this because the sun has just tramped off for good. All that is left of the Kochgasse are the bright circles the lamps carve out of the darkness of the houses. That doesn't mean that what you cannot see does not exist. If it is not over and done with, forgiven and forgotten, it is still there. It is still there, the setting for many fates of no particular interest. To avoid all that, Hans is heading off for a more interesting fate, and is wholly absorbed in it.

Autumn always did have a good deal on its conscience. Especially when someone still young in years is responding sensitively to it. Old people are forever thinking of death, young people do so only in autumn, the season of universal decay in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. Rainer maintains that in autumn nights he puts forth the wings of a magic all his own. Then later, bleeding cats on chains lick the caterwauling from their mauled fur. This is a poem. Rainer's mind involuntarily turns to women whenever he thinks of autumnal decay, his mother (for instance) is decaying without let up. A woman always wants to have something shoved into her, either that or she's giving birth to a child, which comes out of her. That is Rainer's image of Woman. There's an effusive stench of light, says Rainer, in the poem about autumn. It's not quite over, but very nearly. As in his mother's case. Father's still a go-getter. But Mother's all no-ever. More than she loves him, Mother loves his sister. Her need is greater (she says) because her soul is in greater danger. His father, on the other hand, prefers him, because he is the Son and Heir and will perpetuate his name.