The Hotel New Hampshire (41 page)

“When you fart, Arbeiter,” Franny asked him, “do the seals in the zoo stop swimming?”

The other radicals were rarely a part of our group discussions. One spent himself on the typewriters; the other, on the single automobile that the Symposium on East-West Relations owned among themselves: all six of them, they could just fit. The mechanic who labored over the decrepit car—the ever-ailing car, useless in any getaway, we imagined, and probably never to be called upon for a getaway, Father thought—was a sullen, smudge-faced young man in coveralls and a navy-blue streetcar conductor’s cap. He belonged to the union and worked the main-line Mariahilfer Strasse
Strassenbahn
all night. He looked sleepy and angry every day, and he clanked with tools. Appropriately, he was called Schraubenschlüssel—a
Schraubenschlüssel
is a wrench. Frank liked to roll Schraubenschlüssel’s name off his tongue, to show off, but Franny and Lilly and I insisted on the translation. We called him Wrench.

“Hi, Wrench,” Franny would say to him, as he lay under the car, cursing. “Hope you’re keeping your mind clean, Wrench,” Franny would say. Wrench knew no English, and the only thing we knew about Wrench’s private life was that he had once asked Susie the bear for a date.

“I mean, virtually
nobody
asks me out,” Susie said. “What an asshole.”

“What an asshole,” Franny repeated.

“Well, he’s never actually
seen
me, you know,” Susie said.

“Does he know you’re
female
?” Frank asked.

“Jesus God, Frank,” Franny said.

“Well, I was just
curious
,” Frank said.

“That Wrench is a real weirdo, I can tell,” Franny said. “Don’t go out with him, Susie,” Franny advised the bear.

“Are you kidding?” Susie the bear said. “Honey, I don’t go out. With
men
.”

This seemed to settle almost passively at Franny’s feet, but I could see Frank edging uncomfortably near to, and then away from, its presence.

“Susie is a lesbian, Franny,” I told Franny, when we were alone.

“She didn’t exactly say that,” Franny said.

“I think she is,” I said.

“So?” Franny said. “What’s Frank? The grand banana? And Frank’s okay.”

“Watch out for Susie, Franny,” I said.

“You think about me too much,” she repeated, and repeated. “Leave me alone, will you?” Franny asked me. But that was the one thing I could never do.

“All sexual acts actually involve maybe four or five different sexes,” the sixth member of the Symposium on East-West Relations told us. This was such a garbling of Freud—the
other
Freud—that we had to beg Frank for a second translation because we couldn’t understand the first.

“That’s what he said,” Frank assured us. “All sexual acts actually involve a bunch of
different
sexes.”

“Four or five?” Franny asked.

“When we do it with a woman,” the man said, “we are doing it with ourselves as we will become, and with ourselves in our childhoods. And, it goes without saying, with the self our lover will become, and with the self of her childhood.”

“ ‘It goes without saying’?” Frank asked.

“So every time there’s one fuck there’s four or five people actually at it?” Franny asked. “That sounds exhausting.”

“The energy spent on sex is the only energy that doesn’t require replacement by the society,” the rather dreamy sixth radical told us. Frank struggled to translate this. “We replace our sexual energy ourselves,” the man said, looking at Franny as if he’d just said the most profound thing in the world.

“No kidding,” I whispered to Franny, but she seemed a little more mesmerized than I thought she should have been. I was afraid she liked this radical.

His name was Ernst. Just Ernst. A normal name, but just a first name. He didn’t argue. He crafted isolated, meaningless sentences, spoke them quietly, went back to the typewriter. When the radicals left the Gasthaus Freud in the late afternoon, they seemed to flounder for hours in the Kaffee Mowatt (across the street)—a dark and dim place with a billiard table and dart boards, and an ever-present solemn row of tea-with-rum drinkers playing chess or reading the newspapers. Ernst rarely joined his colleagues at the Kaffee Mowatt. He wrote and wrote.

If Screaming Annie was the last whore to go home, Ernst was the last radical to leave. If Screaming Annie often met Old Billig when the old radical was arriving for his morning’s work, she often met Ernst when Ernst was finally calling it quits. He had an eerie other-worldliness about him; when he talked with Schwanger, their two voices would get so quiet that they would almost always end up whispering.

“What’s Ernst write?” Franny asked Susie the bear.

“He’s a pornographer,” Susie said. “He’s asked me out, too. And
he’s
seen me.” That quieted us all for a moment.

“What sort of pornography?” Franny asked, cautiously.

“How many sorts are there, honey?” Susie the bear asked. “The worst,” Susie said. “Kinky acts. Violence. Degradation.”

“Degradation?” Lilly said.

“Not for you, honey,” Susie said.

“Tell me,” Frank said.

“Too kinky to tell,” Susie said to Frank. “You know German better than I do, Frank—
you
try it.”

Unfortunately, Frank tried it; Frank translated Ernst’s pornography for us. I would ask Frank, later, if he thought pornography was the start of the
real
trouble—if we had been able to ignore it, somehow, would things have gone downhill just the same? But Frank’s new religion—his
anti
-religion—had already taken over all his answers (to all the questions).

“Downhill?” Frank would say. “Well, that is the eventual direction, of course—I mean, regardless. If it hadn’t been the pornography, it would have been something else. The point is we are
bound
to roll downhill. What do you know that rolls
up
? What starts the downward progress is immaterial,” Frank would say, with his irritating offhandedness.

“Look at it like this,” Frank would lecture me. “Why does it seem to take more than half a lifetime to get to be a lousy teen-ager? Why does childhood take forever—when you’re a child? Why does it seem to occupy a solid three-quarters of the whole trip? And when it’s over, when the kids grow up, when you suddenly have to face facts ... well,” Frank said to me, just recently, “you know the story. When we were in the first Hotel New Hampshire, it seemed we’d go on being thirteen and fourteen and fifteen forever. For fucking
forever
, as Franny would say. But once we left the first Hotel New Hampshire,” Frank said, “the rest of our lives moved past us twice as fast. That’s just how it is,” Frank claimed, smugly. “For half your life, you’re fifteen. Then one day your twenties begin, and they’re over the next day. And your thirties blow by you like a weekend spent with pleasant company. And before you know it, you’re thinking about being fifteen again.

“Downhill?” Frank would say. “It’s a long
up
hill—to that fourteen-year-old, fifteen-year-old, sixteen-year-old time of your life. And from then on,” Frank would say, “of course it’s all downhill. And anyone knows downhill is faster than uphill. It’s
up
—until fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—then it’s
down
. Down like water,” Frank said, “down like sand,” he would say.

Frank was seventeen when he translated the pornography for us; Franny was sixteen, I was fifteen. Lilly, who was eleven, wasn’t old enough to hear. But Lilly insisted that if she was old enough to listen to Fehlgeburt reading
The Great Gatsby
, she was old enough to hear Frank translating Ernst. (With typical hypocrisy, Screaming Annie wouldn’t allow her daughter, Dark Inge, to hear a word of it.)

“Ernst” was his Gasthaus Freud name, of course. In the pornography, he went by a lot of different names. I do not like to describe the pornography. Susie the bear told us that Ernst taught a course at the university called “The History of Eroticism Through Literature,” but Ernst’s pornography was not erotic. Fehlgeburt had taken Ernst’s erotic literature course, and even she admitted that Ernst’s own work bore no resemblance to the truly erotic, which is never pornographic.

Ernst’s pornography gave us headaches and dry throats. Frank used to say that even his eyes got dry when he read it; Lilly stopped listening after the first time; and I felt cold, sitting in Frank’s room, the dead dressmaker’s dummy like a curiously nonjudgmental schoolmistress overhearing Frank’s recitation—I got cold from the floor up. I felt something cold passing up my pants legs, through the old drafty floor, through the foundation of the building, from the soil beneath all light—where I imagined were the bones from ancient Vindobona, and instruments of torture popular among invading Turks, whips and cudgels and tongue-depressors and dirks, the vogue chambers of horror of the Holy Roman Empire. Because Ernst’s pornography was not about sex: it was about pain without hope, it was about death without a single memory. It made Susie the bear storm out to take a bath, it made Lilly cry (of course), it made me sick to my stomach (twice), it made Frank hurl one of the books at the dressmaker’s dummy (as if the dummy had written it)—it was the one called
The Children on the Ship to Singapore
; they never got to Singapore, not even one precious child.

But all it did to Franny was make her frown. It made her think about Ernst; it made her seek him out and ask him—for starters—why he did it.

“Decadence enhances the revolutionary position,” Ernst told her, slowly—Frank fumbling to translate him exactly. “Everything that is decadent speeds up the process, the inevitable revolution. At this phase it is necessary to generate disgust. Political disgust, economic disgust, disgust at our inhuman institutions, and moral disgust—disgust at ourselves, as we’ve allowed ourselves to become.”

“Speaking for himself,” I whispered to Franny, but she was just frowning; she was concentrating too hard on him.

“The pornographer is, of course,
most
disgusting,” Ernst droned on. “But, you see, if I were a communist, who would I want for the government in power? The most liberal? No. I would desire the most repressive, the most capitalistic, the most
anti
-communist government possible—for then I would thrive. Where would the Left be without the help of the Right? The more stupid and right-wing everything is, the better for the Left.”

“Are you a communist?” Lilly asked Ernst. In Dairy, New Hampshire, Lilly knew, this was not such a hot thing to be.

“That was just a necessary phase,” Ernst said, speaking of communism and himself—and to us children—as if we
all
were past history, as if something vast were in motion and we were either being dragged after it or being blown away in its exhaust. “I am a pornographer,” Ernst said, “because I am serving the revolution.
Personally
,” he added, with a limp wave of his hand, “well ...
personally
, I am an aesthete: I reflect upon the erotic. If Schwanger mourns for her coffeehouses—if she is sad about her
Schlagobers
, which the revolution must also consume—I mourn for the erotic, for it must be lost, too. Sometime after the revolution,” Ernst sighed, “the erotic might reappear, but it will never be the same. In the new world, it will never mean as much.”

“The new world?” Lilly repeated, and Ernst shut his eyes as if this were the refrain in his favorite piece of music, as if with his mind’s eye he could already see it, “the new world,” a totally different planet—brand-new beings dwelling there.

I thought he had rather delicate hands for a revolutionary; his long, slender fingers probably were a help to him, at the typewriter—at his piano, where Ernst played the music for his opera of gigantic change. His cheap and slightly shiny navy-blue suit was usually clean but wrinkled, his white shirts were well washed but never pressed; he wore no tie; when his hair grew too long, he cut it too short. He had an almost athletic face, scrubbed, youthful, determined—a boyish kind of handsomeness. Susie the bear, and Fehlgeburt, told us that Ernst had a reputation as a lady-killer among his students at the university. When he lectured on erotic literature, Miss Miscarriage remarked, Ernst was quite passionate, he was even playful; he was not the limp, low-key sort of lazy-weary, sluggish (or at least lethargic) talker he was when his subject was the revolution.

He was quite tall; though not solid, he was not frail, either. When I saw him hunch his shoulders, and turn the collar of his suit jacket up—about to go home from the Gasthaus Freud, after a no-doubt saddening and disgusting day’s work—I was struck how in profile he reminded me of Chipper Dove.

Dove’s hands never looked like a quarterback’s hands, either—too delicate, again. And I could remember seeing Chipper Dove shrug his shoulder pads forward and trot back to the huddle, thinking about the next signal—the next order, the next command—his hands like songbirds lighting on his hip pads. Of course I knew then who Ernst was: the quarter back of the radicals, the signal caller, the dark planner, the one the others gathered around. And I knew then, too, what it was that Franny saw in Ernst. It was more than a physical resemblance to Chipper Dove, it was that cocksure quality, the touch of evil, that hint of destruction, that icy leadership—that was what could sneak its way into my sister’s heart, that was what captured the
her in her
, that was what took Franny’s strength away.

“We all want to go back home,” I told Father. “To the United States. We want America. We don’t like it here.”

Lilly held my hand. We were in Frank’s room, again—Frank nervously boxing with the dressmaker’s dummy, Franny on Frank’s bed, looking out the window. She could see the Kaffee Mowatt, across the Krugerstrasse. It was early morning, and someone was sweeping the cigarette butts out the door of the coffeehouse, across the sidewalk, and into the gutter. The radicals were not the nighttime company of the Kaffee Mowatt; at night the whores used the place to get off the street—to take a break, to play some billiards, to drink a beer or a glass of wine, or get picked up—and Father allowed Frank and Franny and me to go there to throw some darts.