The White Body of Evening (26 page)

His eyes wandered over the posters on the wall as he tried to ignore the smell and let Bressler concentrate on the manuscript. They were posters for the theatre. Strange, corpse–like forms, in which lines seemed to twist out of shape in response to some inner tension or aggravation. A skeletal woman with deep-set eyes and rotting teeth cradled a flayed body. In another, a man’s profile shuddered so violently it threw off an after-image around it, as if the whole picture were vibrating.

Bressler glanced up at Paul as his eyes wandered over the illustrations.

“I devour you men and women. Half-waking listening children, the wild loving werewolf within you,” he said in a chant. “Kokoschka,” he added, and returned silently to the manuscript. “You can leave this with me? I’ll give you a receipt. You know, there will be no money. Quite the contrary, I may need to ask for your assistance. A small subvention.”

Paul waved off the sense of warning in his voice, as if money meant nothing to him. Winton’s gold can pay for it, he thought sardonically. He wrote his address on a separate sheet of paper and handed it to Bressler.

“Who is the author?” Bressler asked. “Or are these your own poems?”

“No, they are my father’s.”

“Father?” Bressler raised his eyebrows. “Well then. And he is still living?”

“No. He drowned himself.”

“Well. That’s all to the good. I’ll see what I can do for you.”

Paul stood up to leave.

“These are very theatrical, you know,” Bressler said. “Staged scenes, concealment, curtains. Did your father enjoy the theatre?”

“To my knowledge he never went.”

“I have a theatre not far from here. You might be interested. Do you know much about Vienna?”

Paul knew next to nothing, and virtually nobody. Only Klessmann, he thought, the classic nobody, the original man of the crowd. The whole city was still a mystery to him. Every passer-by, every animated café conversation, every wonderful edifice or monument merely reminded him of how little he belonged.

“I’d planned to sit the Art Academy exam,” Paul said.

“The Academy. A very conservative place. There are other options. Kokoschka went to the Arts and Craft School. I could introduce you if you like. There is something of him in these poems, I think. Expressionist.”

Bressler pressed the manuscript into a briefcase and led Paul up the stairs back out onto the street, where he blinked at the winter sun as if he had never seen it before. Opposite them a young woman was hunched over the ground, coughing with such violence that her whole body shook. She was pretty, Paul thought. Bressler noticed him staring.

“Could you guess how many men in this city have syphilis, Herr Walters?” Bressler said, folding his arms over his chest and waiting for an answer. “One in five. And could you guess how many have tuberculosis?” he asked after a few more steps. “One in five. Or something like that. Now, I am sure you haven’t come such a long way merely to encounter these Viennese plagues. At least wait until I see your father into print.”

They walked along Siebensterngasse. It was late in the afternoon and the sun soon vanished behind thick, grey clouds, plunging the city into premature darkness.

“I hope your ambitions are not too grand, Herr Walters,” Bressler said. “Vienna has become a place of small achievements.
Kleinkunst.
We like to think of ourselves as the world in miniature. Everything seems to be shrinking. People won’t read a novel if they can read an essay. They won’t watch five acts if they can watch one. Soon we’ll have nothing but anecdotes. It’s the pace of modern living. These days it’s only the extremely rich or the extremely poor who have enough time to loiter in our cafés. I myself can seldom manage it. For everyone else, time has contracted too thoroughly. Why spend an afternoon if you can get the same result, read the same paper and gulp the same coffee in an hour or a minute or a few seconds. It is the beginning of the end.”

Outside a Wirtshaus Bressler shook Paul’s hand, then raised his briefcase and tapped it portentously as he made his way in. “Business, you understand.”

Paul lingered for a moment, looking in at the workers drinking beer in a room thick with cigarette smoke. It was a grubby-looking scene. The men were rough and the women they cavorted with wore loose blouses, hanging down around their shoulders. Smoke, spilt beer and congestion. It seemed to Paul much cruder than anything he had seen in Melbourne, where good old Victorian morality still had a powerful enough hold on the city to keep its vices under wraps until they could be pursued with a secret, furtive pleasure.

He reached the Ringstraße and stood gazing at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Was it possible to feel crushed by so much monumentality? If it were a city of small achievements now, that said nothing for its past. Paul felt its weight press on him. All he’d ever do here is look at things, he thought. The poverty of the streets through which he’d followed Klessmann was as picturesque to him as the buildings of the Ringstraße were grand. He looked at both with the tourist’s pitiful longing for the beautiful and the sublime.

How many times had he rehearsed his response to Vienna? In a letter to Hamish he’d rattled on about the endless, grating friction between authority and rebellion, mind and body, the order of the man-made world and the chaos of nature, as if one needed a city of this scale to realise such things. How false it all sounded to him now as he made his lonely way through the mute splendour of the city, bustled by its traffic, withdrawing into himself, defeated by his own illusions. He couldn’t write to Ondine like this. He couldn’t possibly fool her. And he wasn’t about to confess his unhappiness. On Herrengasse he caught his reflection in a window and imagined himself exposed to the impersonal gaze of the city. He’d become a type: the Australian abroad, the
faux
bohemian longing for culture, eager to shake off the dust of the new world. He saw himself realised as a caricature in some satirical
feuilleton.

Back in his hotel he flipped through a copy of
Die Fackel
and was baffled by its busyness, the profusion of detail, names, scandal, the sense of a world that one was supposed to recognise behind the mask of satire. He lit a cigarette and read a paper, flinging it down after a while out of boredom. He wished again that Klessmann would show up to commandeer his room. He felt lost without the daily routine of being rudely brushed aside. He would have given anything to answer awkward, tactless questions about his mother and father. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, and remembered how enthusiastically he had chanted
“Ich bin hier”
only a few weeks earlier. Now he felt a numbness in his cheeks, a lethargy stealing over him. “Nothing, nothing, nothing,” he repeated to his reflected image. He felt impotent – bereft of ideas, bereft of inspiration.

There was a knock outside the apartment. Klessmann, he thought. He could’ve almost hugged him. He rushed to the door, pulling it open to find a stranger, wrapped in a fur, staring back at him out of the half-light of the hallway. She was beautiful, he thought. A long pale face, glistening red lips, sparkling brown eyes and fine eyebrows. She wore a fashionable hat, with a broad brim, tilted to one side, which set off the elongated elegance of her face.

She took a bold stride past him, through the anteroom into the apartment, removing her hat and floating it about theatrically as she turned to face him.

“Surprised?” She was ready to explode with happiness. She had to purse her lips and tense her cheeks to keep it all inside her. “I’ve run away.”

It was Laura Thomas, but it was only the slight nasal edge in her softer accent that gave her away.

“Aren’t you pleased to see me?”

Paul took her hands and kissed the leather gloves she was wearing, making her laugh uproariously. He watched her eyes survey the apartment. She stretched her arms out as she turned, as if to test its dimensions, and then nodded approvingly.

“I think you’ll find me a better conversationalist these days,” she said as she sat down on his chaise longue.

“I think you’ll find me a much worse one.”

She glanced at a pamphlet next to her.

“Der Proze
Riehl,”
she read haltingly, looking at the cover as she leant back on a cushion. “I love it here, Paul.”

“Where did you leave your mother?” He sat down beside her and took her hand.

“Oh, don’t be silly. I didn’t really run away. She’s downstairs in that lovely foyer.”

Paul smiled to himself.

“Do you think I’m an idiot?” she asked, smiling as well.

He kissed her hand again.

“Mother is waiting. I thought you could walk us back to our hotel. What have you been doing?”

He thought about Klessmann. His time in Vienna had been all Klessmann. It seemed to Paul that he had no tangible experiences of his own. All he really knew of the place was the obsessive invalid, his strange habits and his disconcerting twitch.

“I met a very odd bloke in Hamburg, and we travelled here together,” he said.

“Another artist?” Laura asked.

“I suppose you could call him that.”

If Europe had transformed Laura, the same was true for her mother, but in the opposite direction. Eleanor Thomas looked older and crabbier than Paul had remembered. She wore a smock-like dress and had powdered her hair white as if it were the fashion. She waddled with the heaviness of her dress as they made their way out onto the street.

“You see, Paul, I’ve successfully worn Mother out,” Laura said. “She’s brow-beaten and subservient, aren’t you? I told her that if we couldn’t come here by Christmas I’d have to come alone. Of course we are later than I wanted to be. I thought it wretched that you’d be alone for Christmas. I imagined you starving in some garret, nibbling chestnuts by candlelight. Of course I didn’t realise that you were so well off here.”

“Stop it, Laura,” her mother insisted, “you’re babbling. She has babbled since we arrived in London, Paul. Talked my ear off. Ran me off my feet. I’m not as young as I once was.”

“You don’t say,” Laura said with feigned astonishment and a gentle laugh. She linked arms with her mother and drew her closer as they walked.

They ate dinner in a restaurant on the Kohlmarkt after shivering through the twilight streets. Eleanor’s eyes rested approvingly on the velvet upholstery and the pink marble of the tabletop as she flattened her dress behind her and sat down. They had an alcove to themselves, surrounded by large wall mirrors composed of individual panels that reflected and multiplied each of them to infinity. The chandeliers dangling from the ceiling filled the room with a soft yellow light that caught the gilt frames and furnishings. A potted palm tree in the middle of the room and some ferns artfully arranged in the corners gave the place the ambience of an exotic garden.

As they ate, Laura described the galleries she’d seen, and the young Englishmen and Americans, masquerading as artists, she’d met copying paintings in the Louvre. One of them acted as a guide for them, pointing out which works were worthy of their attention. She laughed as she described him, putting her hand over her mouth and blushing.

“He was very gentlemanly,” Eleanor said.

“Oh, he was a pompous twit. Of course I told him that we know artists in Vienna, where the whole thing is taken a bit more seriously. That slowed him down a bit. And his paintings,” she added, raising her eyebrows, “I couldn’t believe he had the courage to try selling us one.”

Laura and her mother exchanged affectionate taunts throughout dinner. Paul had never seen Laura look so wonderful. Surely she could see how idle he had been. The best he could offer them was a glorified tour. As the conversation ran on ahead of him, his thoughts wandered back to the folly of his plans and the despair he’d felt the moment before her arrival.

But he was happy she had come. When he could do so without being obvious, he let his eyes rest on the faint freckles running from her nose onto her cheeks and fading under her pale skin. He made an effort to look animated and to focus on the trivial currents of conversation flowing around him, picking up the drift with a comment here or a nod of the head there. Laura and her mother could talk tirelessly. They were staying for the winter and had planned to travel further when the weather got warmer. By then he’d be exhausted by the chatter. He thought he might have to coach Laura into a quieter, slightly more reserved manner. When she noticed the conversation getting too obscure she gave him a look of pained sympathy that told him to grin and bear it for her sake.

Slowly his mood improved under her benign influence. He wanted to touch her under the table, to push his hand up under her dress and rest it on her thigh, to see if she could keep a straight face. He noticed a man in the next alcove looking at her approvingly. Perhaps he was taken with her lightness of manner, which was so pleasingly out of place. The woman next to him looked dour by comparison. She barely spoke, edging around her food with a mild disdain for it as her partner’s eyes continued to drift towards Laura.

After the meal Eleanor excused herself. As soon as she was out of sight Laura took Paul’s hand.