The White Body of Evening (27 page)

“I’m sorry. Just humour us for a while.”

He kissed her hand and said nothing, noticing a waiter standing silently beside them.

“Chambre séparée?”
he asked with starched formality.

“Yes please,” Laura said enthusiastically. Paul looked doubtful. He wondered if he’d heard him correctly and if Laura had understood.

When they remained sitting, the waiter had to wave them on. The man opposite smiled at Paul as Laura leapt out of her chair. The waiter led them through the dining room and down another hallway, presenting them with a white door and a gilt handle. Laura smiled and opened it, grabbing Paul by the cuff and dragging him in.

There was something immediately disturbing in the room’s silence. It was cold and Paul could smell a trace of gas, mingling with perfume and stale smoke. It was all red velvet and gold. In the middle of the room was a cushioned couch surrounded by ferns draped over it to simulate a tropical canopy. There was a full-length mirror opposite and an ashtray perched on a stand. Nothing else.

Laura turned to him, biting her lower lip with embarrassment, then stretching it into something between a smile and a grimace, as if she’d just taken a wrong turn and led them to a dead-end.

“I think we had better go,” she said, nodding as if he had suggested it.

“Yes,” he said.

He took her hand as she walked past him to the door. She turned and he kissed her quickly on the lips. Even in the dim light of the room he could tell she was blushing. Her neck had suddenly rashed and she clutched it, trying to hide the discolouration.

“It’s so depraved,” she said. “Who would have thought?”

“Indeed. Who would have?”

They made it back to the table just as Eleanor was reappearing. They all sat down together, Laura looking flustered, but Paul quietly pleased. Their unexpected brush with the other reality lurking behind the glittering façades of glass and gold promised her to him. They both knew it. He wondered how many trivial conversations and strolls around the Ringstraße lay between them and the
chambre séparée.
He was restless, but also found something wonderfully beguiling in the deferral. As long as he never lost sight of the still, silent room he could wait and wait with the pleasure of his expectations growing steadily beneath the formality.

When the time came Paul didn’t even sit the entry exam for the Academy. He had tried to sketch in his room, but was unable to concentrate on his work, unable to shut out the city around him, and finally acknowledged that he had nothing worth submitting. He was annoyed with himself, but only mildly. Every day it seemed, he was walking with Laura and her mother, feeling trapped by the littleness of their conversation, yet glimpsing a wider field to which he and Laura might finally escape. He was happy to have company so constantly, yet he tightened up when, in this or that café, he could sense the animated discussions about literature and art going on around them. Yet he loved the subtle, seductive quality of being with Laura in a museum. The decorative grandeur of the spaces, the furtiveness of their glances, the play of concealment and the transport of meaning into the manner of their appreciation, filled him with excitement. When they went to the opera or the theatre the things they saw all had a terrific suggestiveness for him that he tried to impart to her. The cruelty of Strauss’s
Salome
fired his imagination. He saw Laura showering the severed head with kisses, pushing her tongue into the dead mouth, closing her eyes, drifting into a mad trance with the taste of something bitter leaking through the skull. Back in his room the phantom-train of sleep slowly trained her innocence towards a shameless collaboration in the debaucheries that never failed to grip him in the dead of night.

Laura, pleasingly, began to learn German from a tutor. She sat in a café and went over grammatical rules and then studied the vocabulary in the newspaper. Later she would stumble through a few phrases with Paul, proud of her progress, and soon knew enough to discover the crude codes in the back page advertisements of the
Neue Freie Presse.

“Fraulein Willing. Call at number 69.”

She looked at it for a moment and then smiled.

In his apartment she glanced over some of the pamphlets on his desk, opening them at random and seizing on the start of a new paragraph.

“Fort mit der Schamhaftigkeit, die die körperliche und geistige Gesundheit der Völker seit fast zwei Jahrtausenden untergräbt!”
She read it slowly, tripping over each syllable. She read it again to herself and then looked up at Paul, puzzled.
“Was bedeutet Schamhaftigkeit?
Oh, of course, it comes from shame. What about
untergraben?”

He watched as the sense of the sentence sunk into her. She furrowed her eyebrows.

“Away with the shamefulness?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“What is this?” She turned to the red cover and then flipped through it again. “Tell me what the rest of it says,” she demanded as she opened the pamphlet back to the page from which she’d been reading and handed it to Paul.

He looked at it and shrugged his shoulders as if its contents were of little import to him.

“Nature gives women sensuality –
Sinnlichkeit
– which is the fountain at which men can renew themselves, intellectually speaking.” He looked at her, studying her response.

“Go on please,” she said, sucking in her lower lip.

“The founders of morality have…” He broke off, pretending to translate in his head, but deciding to give her his own loose summary. “The founders of morality have corrupted human sexuality, dammed it away, and as a result both beauty and mental vitality are drying up. Under these circumstances, under such repression, all a man can do is canalise the flow of female sensuality, and his brain is empty and uninspired as a result.”

He watched her turn the thought over in her mind.

“It was written by a man called Karl Kraus, about the hypocrisy of modern morality and the way it makes us suffer the repression of our sensual selves.”

Laura thought about the
chambre séparée.
Red velvet, deep shadows, fern leaves and gold. She recalled the detail of the room obscurely. She couldn’t remember its dimensions or its arrangement, but the trappings stayed with her. Something inexplicable had winked back at her out of the light and shadow. Once, after an idle stroll, she found herself staring through the window of the same restaurant, momentarily mesmerised by the reflected glitter within.

As spring set in they all took longer walks through the Prater, looking at the panoramas and the sideshows, and spent lazy afternoons sitting in garden cafés planning trips to Prague, Budapest, Italy and the Alps. Occasionally Paul felt anxious at the thought of frittering away so much time, at feeling his ambition leaking away, choking in the silt of these endless diversions. Every now and then Laura would return to one of her pet themes: the Balzac novel in which the struggles of the artist were so vividly described. It merely reminded Paul of just how completely he had drifted from his own ideal. It occurred to him to look for Klessmann again, but he didn’t know where to start. He wasn’t even sure whether he would still be in Vienna.

“Look at that, Paul,” Laura said, seizing him with one arm, her mother with the other, and dragging them both after her.

They were in the Prater, walking towards the Australian Panorama. It was too fantastic to believe. Paul had heard about whole African villages transported to European cities and exhibitions. Even Melbourne had imported a band of Maoris. But to see something like this in the middle of Vienna hardly seemed possible. They mingled with a crowd of spectators gathering around a large, enclosed area that housed a makeshift desert terrain of hard red earth and some huts made out of mud and straw.

“We could tell them a thing or two,” said Eleanor. Laura had the good sense to nudge her mother into silence as they edged through the throng to see the inhabitants of the enclosure huddling around each other, protecting themselves from the mocking eyes peering in through the bars.

“Sie sind wie Tiere,”
said a woman standing next to them, wearing a neat summer frock with a blue shawl draped over her shoulders. “
Tiere, die unter der Erde graben.”

Paul was stunned. He looked at Laura, who had turned pale, and took her hand.

“Barbarian,” Laura said under her breath.

“Genau,”
said the woman in the summer frock, nodding.

“I mean you, you stupid, stupid woman.”

She didn’t understand her.

In front of them a pair of middle-aged men were talking quickly about the anthropology of the Stone Age, and the savage fear of incest.

“It’s horrible, Paul,” Laura said. “How can they do that?”

Paul couldn’t answer her. He had a vivid image of Les Collins in his mind and regretted that his book on the Kulin had never come to pass, but he was at a loss for words.

Then Laura snapped, “Why don’t we have anything to say? We just look at it and feel bad and then walk away and soon forget about it! What kind of society puts people in cages in order to speculate on world history?”

“Laura!” Eleanor seemed to rebuke her for the ability to express an independent thought.

“It’s cruel, Mother.”

For the second time she had the feeling of having led them down a cul-de-sac. Was she expecting the three of them to stand up and take responsibility for the cruelty, to shout down the crowd of onlookers or, more heroically, to put an end to the spectacle?

One of the middle-aged men turned to them quietly. He had a head of jet-black hair, a neatly trimmed beard and a silver pince-nez. He spoke as if he were explaining something quite complicated by way of justifying the display. Paul couldn’t quite catch the detail above the noise of the crowd. Laura just shook her head. After a moment the man turned to one of the men inside the enclosure.

“What are you earning a day, my man?” he asked.

“None of your damned business,” the crouching man answered, poking the ground with a stick.

“They are acting,” the man with the pince-nez said patiently.

Paul looked more closely. It was hard to tell, but he guessed the people in the enclosure were wearing body paint. My God, he thought, is everything a trick?

“They are actors from Berlin,” the man explained. “They do a different part of the world every day or so. Yesterday it was America. All money and humbug. Very funny. Can the conscience of the Antipodes rest a little easier?”

As if he had verbalised the transformation that was occurring in Laura at that very moment, she began sobbing and flung her arms around Paul, hiding her head on his shoulder. He could feel her chest heaving and heaving until she gradually regained some equilibrium. Eleanor Thomas had tactfully turned away.

Everything seemed farcical to Paul. They were lost in the surface of things, a prey to the most blatant kinds of deception and manipulation. He was becoming agitated. Laura still clung to him, wiping her tears away with the back of her hand, brimming with both relief and embarrassment. She looked at the figures in the enclosure. Of course they were actors. How could she not have seen it?

As they walked away she bit her lip. Did it matter that they were actors? How did it change the sense of inhumanity? The question puzzled her. It was as if something had happened, and then, suddenly, it hadn’t. None of it was true. Or was it? Could it all be true despite the fact that they were actors? She felt as if she were being blown along by a breeze, about to be lifted up into the air and tossed about capriciously. She clutched Paul’s arm as if it might help her ground herself. Would she ever go back to the country to live out her life on the land? She hoped not, but for the first time in her life she had no sense of where the wind was going to drop her. Nothing seemed certain, and no one was what they seemed to be, least of all herself.

P
aul had never ceased to think about Bressler. Every time he walked by the Café Central he went in to look for him. Once he found him deep in conversation with other coffee-house notables, but couldn’t summon the courage to approach him in the guise of an unwanted interruption. Bressler had waved through the smoke and nodded to him with a confident twist of his nose, as if to suggest that the wheels were in motion.

One afternoon, Paul was sitting by the window of his room writing a letter to Hamish and considering where he and Laura might travel with the arrival of summer. There was a knock at the door. A porter handed him a parcel accompanied by a short note from Bressler inviting him to meet Otto Eisner, a well-known reviewer, at the Café Central the following afternoon. Paul tore off the paper to find a thin volume, brown letters on fawn-coloured cloth. His hands trembled as he opened the unturned pages and ran his fingers over the first lines. Strangely, Paul found that it didn’t evoke the memory of his father. Instead, he saw Klessmann working away day after day, then vanishing into the obscurity of some far-flung suburb as dusk fell over the city. His excitement at finally having the book in his hands turned into the fear that somehow Klessmann might resurface to take his share of the credit or to accuse him of misappropriation. Was that why he had taken the notebooks? Paul had to admit that he had done much more than merely translate. But hadn’t Klessmann himself typed his father’s name on the title page?

That evening Paul showed Laura the poems and explained to her the secret of his father’s notebooks. She could make out words, sometimes phrases here and there, but she needed Paul to explain each poem in its entirety if she were to understand it. Eleanor was sitting opposite them on a stool, pretending to busy herself with a letter to her sons, so Paul was reticent.

“Perhaps later,” he whispered.

“Why?”

“Because my father was not always decent.”

The next day Bressler slapped him on the back and ushered him through the smoke to meet a table full of journalists, writers and other coffee-house hacks in the arcade’s court. Otto Eisner would have been about forty-five. His hair, perhaps once unruly, was brushed down flat over his forehead. He had full lips, a flat nose and, behind his spectacles, eyes with a slight purplish tinge around their lids. He shook Paul’s hand and gestured to a seat with an open palm. Regulars at other tables couldn’t help but turn their heads as they noticed the hitherto friendless Australian joining a table that was the envy of obscure writers and artists all over Vienna.