The World as I Found It (24 page)

Once they were alone, Gretl managed to pry the truth from him. But almost as soon as he began, she broke in, saying, Please, don't be offended at this. But so you won't accuse me later of pretending to know after the fact what happened, let me tell you what I think it was.

Fine, he said bitterly, sure she would never guess. Tell me.

All right, she said, taking a breath. You somehow found yourself in the women's lavatory. Seeing him go white, Gretl hastily added, Lest you worry, nobody recognized you, and no one told me this. But I heard about a man in the ladies' room and — I don't know — I had a feeling.

But why a hunch about
me
? Why
me
? He was grasping the armrests, his head swaying back and forth. Do you even know what you're saying?

Ludi, she said, laying her hand on his arm. I'm certainly not suggesting you make a habit of it. But I
knew
— I just did. Knew even from how you looked when you got up — so chased, and nothing I could do. Why else do you think I kept Mining and Paul from going to the management to find you? I was afraid they might make the connection.

Oh, God, he moaned. You
told them?

I had no
choice
. Otherwise they would have made inquiries. They're upstairs now. They agreed it would be best if we spoke alone.

A long, anguished wince. He
was
sick now, pale and trembling sick, his voice stumbling, saying, It was a mistake … a horrible accident. You
do
know it was an accident, don't you?

Well, of course.

But Gretl agreed a little too easily, with that telltale squeak in her throaty voice. He could hear the gears churning now. Protesting in advance, he said, I'm telling you that it was an accident. Oh, I know, you'll say it was a dark wish — an unconscious wish to return to the womb or something.

Well, she said carefully, there are accidents and accidents.

I
told
you, I was distracted! I merely reached for the wrong door.

Distracted?
Her voice turned accusatory. Is that the word? Distracted to walk through a completely different door, a door on the opposite side of the hall, no less? And to walk not only through the wrong door but through a pink powder room filled with feminine settees and mirrors?
Distracted?

Is it necessary, he broke in breathlessly, is it necessary to make me feel any worse than I do already?

I'm sorry, she squeaked. I am. But tomorrow, I think we ought to talk about it — I do.

But you forget, he said bitterly. Tomorrow I'm to meet Fräulein Ketteler.

Gretl's eyes flew up. That's right! I'd forgotten about her.

Oh, I see! he said sarcastically. Now I understand, Herr Doktor. Those were
her
shoes I saw in the stall beside mine.

Shoes?
sleuthed Gretl. Whose shoes?

This was too much. He jumped up. Oh, yes! You really must go work for the shoe doctor.

Soul
doctor, you mean.

Oh! He winced. Soul — sole!
Good!
This is getting
good
, isn't it! And he started to laugh, a long, ripping, seasick laugh that boiled up out of him, until she cried,
Stop it!
And he did stop. He stopped with a hiccupping bump. But he still was not rid of it, that expectoration. It was not his stomach that was sick, it was his soul, his soul.

Gretl more or less managed to work a truce before he went off to bed. Feeling as if his pockets had been turned out, he moved like a sleepwalker across the glassy parquet. And then as he was gliding down the darkened hallway, he saw a crease of light beneath the door of the library, where his father was no doubt sulking, having again found himself too late with his useless medicine.

As he hesitated there, blurry and trembling as a flame, it occurred to him that he might undo the lock, might unfreeze the past and go to his father. Physically, it was possible. But to knock on that door with the vain expectation of explaining, apologizing or offering solace — this was impossible, and not just impossible but downright shameful: to do this, he felt, would be to expose some part of his father or himself as he had been tonight exposed, hobbled in that coven, with his trousers wrapped around his ankles.

And later, lying in bed, stifled under blankets and his own burden of darkness, Wittgenstein saw something else he had overlooked downstairs, namely, his father's love. It was a love so turgid and disfigured as to be almost unintelligible, but still it was there, struggling like a spring shoot to dislodge a winter of snow. And what of that chest of medicinals? he thought. This seemed a relatively new development. Was it crude insurance so his father would be ready this time to snatch his flesh from the flames? But this, too, was smothering, and again Wittgenstein wondered why he should feel pricked and besmirched by the blackthorn of his father's thwarted love. And then he remembered how as a child he had gone through a period in which he feared toe-snatching elves and giants, nights when he would cry out,
Wasser, Wasser, bitte
. His kindly old Iglauer wet nurse, who slept in the next room, would dutifully bring him his water cup, soothing him as he gulped it down. But one night, when it came to his father's attention, Karl Wittgenstein told the nurse that
he
would bring the boy his water. One glass his father gave him, one glass with a scolding that he was not to cry out again, so big a boy as he. His father must have waited outside the door, because when the boy cried out again, he appeared in the darkness with another glass, beading and sparkling in the liquid darkness. Wittgenstein could distinctly remember his father's gleaming white collar points as he came forward with that glass of liquid succor, saying, You want
water?
Here is your
water
! and throwing it cold in his face.

It taught him. The child learned. Never again did he call out in the night, and so it was now, when the man would neither ask for forgiveness nor offer it.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
was more of the same. Asleep around four, up at eight. Down at nine to the invalid's breakfast, bland and milky. Saying,
Ja
, to the concerned mother, wringing her napkin, Much, much better. Then propping himself up for his father, who it seemed could levitate with his expectant eyes. Eating the good, good food, and happily, to show his newfound wellness. Talking the bland, bland news to appear happy and voracious, so they could see he was committed to a definite course in life and, yes, ready, too, to meet Fräulein Ketteler — and all the while wondering why they did not foist her on his brother Paul, that feather-bedder sitting at the end of the table, distinct and erect of posture, with his single boiled egg.

Then it was off to the doctor, rousted out this Saturday to inspect the sickly scion. Directed to the waiting automobile, where the chauffeur, puffing steam and stamping his freshly polished boots, grasped the silver handle, then carefully tamped shut the black door. Joy to the world. Piles of old snow and the fog snared in the bare branches as they motored round the drive, past the manger, with the empty crib still waiting for the ceramic Christ child from Florence with the queer moorish skin and chipped nose. Then past the two brass angels standing on the gateposts, and down the Allegasse, where over imposing walls could be seen other vaultlike homes with wreaths on their doors. But on this street there were also a few like the Feines and Schupps who did not go along, who did not mark their doors for the wraiths of Yule and so were thought by their neighbors to be closed and somber, somehow vaguely
forbidding
.

A few blocks later, the rubber tires were thumping on the cobbles of the Ringstrasse, that great gyre in the heart of the city that had been built over what formerly had been its fortifications. Begun with the emperor's proclamation in 1857, the Ringstrasse was now, some fifty years later, lined with heavyset buildings bedecked in the polyphonous, often cacaphonous strains of historicism, Greek and Roman, then a
Götterdämmerung
of neo-Gothic and Baroque — heavy, heavy brick and stone already soaking up the coal soot and pigeon streaks of days. In that city, all was embellishment. Having razed one fortress, they had erected another. These walls and steeples were really the ramparts of Germanic, cosmopolitan
Kultur
struggling to remain ascendant over a racial cauldron brimming with Czechs, Ruthenes, Slovaks, Slovenes, Poles, Serbs, Croats, Romanians, Italians, Hungarians and Diaspora Jews. Beauty upon beauty, delirium upon delirium, the stones rose up in a lapidary confection, with piers giving way to columns, columns rising to spandrels and spandrels vaulting to imposts and roofs of beaten copper where stood the three Fates, winged cherubs and basilisks spewing rainwater.

Beautiful, improbable city, where the electric trams perambulated around an architectural circus wreathed with trees and iron-cupolaed kiosks splattered with bills clarioning every conceivable offer and entertainment. Sitting in the rear of the car, Wittgenstein saw but blankly the incomprehensible weave of this coat of far too many colors. But still, life happened along, switching like the tail of that indolent dray horse clopping just ahead, carelessly dropping his burden. And didn't Wittgenstein want to ooze down the seat as they passed the Musikverein from which he had fled the night before. Then on past columned Parliament, whose roof was piled like a necropolis with deities and winged chariots. In the fountain, amid stone waves and leaping dolphins, various sages tried with oars as useless as lollipops to steer a course through that brimming Styx. And standing powerfully over them all, holding forth a bronze-headed spear, was Athena, protectress of the polis and — to Wittgenstein's still smoldering eyes — the sworn avenger of ladies' toilets.

Five minutes later, he was mounting the stairs to Dr. Friedhof's office. He hated doctors, and it was an excruciatingly long visit, which did not fail to make him feel any less criminal. After the usual ahhhing, thumping and groin poking, Dr. Friedhof inserted his stubby hand in a greased glove and thoughtfully plumbed the patient's rectum before sending him off, suspiciously sound, with a homily about overwork and a prescription for paragoric.

Once out, Wittgenstein was hardly anxious to rush back home for more. Discharging the driver, he started walking. Two blocks later, with a sense of rising impatience, he jumped a tram, which slowly whirred around the Ring, past the Stadtpark, over the Danube Canal, and then up to the Praterstern, where, above the holiday crowds, he could see the park's giant Ferris wheel, a familiar sight that now conjured a gurgling deep in his bowels that Dr. Friedhof had dislodged but not seen.

So he was walking, but now it was a different walk, a feral, hungry, faintly feline walk. Down he passed through the dirty, slushy snow, down the wide cobbled avenue of the Praterstern, past the untold people, open mouthed as groupers. Ahead was the great iron Ferris wheel. Moaning like a loom, it gravely rose up, astonishingly swift, the glassed-in cars swinging out, the people pointing and waving in that one whooping instant at the apogee — then sinking down so swiftly that, as he watched, he had the glutted sensation of having swallowed himself.

He continued on. Cinders crackling underfoot. Dried, the sap of the summer. Brittle, the winter twigs. The Sacher restaurant was still open inside, but closed and withered was its vinous trellis garden. This was another place he found forbidden, but in a different way. Here in midsummer, he would see wealthy officers and ladies drinking and eating the rich, dark
Sachertorte
under shady thatch arbors filled with the strains of lugubrious violins, a sound that to him suggested the odor of melons left too long in the sun. One look and he would turn away, repulsed, expelled.

On he walked through the snow, through the vestiges of the old season. The sour-smelling outdoor
Bierstuben
were closed, as was the Wurstel Prater, the children's amusement park, where tarps cloaked the merry-go-round, the Velocipede and the Ghost Train. Then on past the closed Panopticum, its canvas façade painted with ghastly pictures of the wax figures inside. If only he could have fastened on something, some diversion. But there was nothing now. The roving clowns and witches, jugglers and Gypsies, the puppet shows — all were gone. No sharp smells of burned almonds or stringy Turkish taffy. No cracks from the shooting gallery or whoops from the games of strength or skill. Like smoke he hung in the air, ready to be moved by the slightest breeze, when he heard the clop of hooves. Wearing greatcoats and black-billed shako hats, two young officers, bloods both, trotted by on horseback. Wittgenstein watched as they passed two pretty lower-class girls, seamstresses or shopgirls, most likely — good for an adventure. Then came the treatment. Reining their mounts so they clopped a sideways prance and champed at their snaffles as the bloods tipped their hats, hoping to snag an eye.

As at the Sacher Garden, Wittgenstein felt that he was peering into another world — an impossibility. And walking on then, he saw his life as an imprisoning
form
. From that gray, organizing sky, his life was falling like a stray snow crystal, a piercing sliver of the same crystal logic. But why was he
this?
he wondered. Why caught in this structure, tied with these invisible sutures? Unlike him, these folk could go home and be themselves; they could live an easy, seemly, unmeditated life in accordance with rules that more or less held, and held always. They did not see these hungry spirits treading the broken snow, panting with smoking breath. No, it was not
you
, Wurstel Prater, nor you, Ferris wheel. It was not you, Herr Vendor, selling bags of stale crumbs to feed the wintering geese on the chill pond, nor, heaven knows, was it you, innocent children, out today for a walk with your nanny —

No, it was you, scowling Herr Kollege, saber scarred and swaggering with your vituperative cane, away for a few hours from your brothers in the dueling fraternity. It was you, Game of Strength — you, the burly sausage maker or bricklayer. And it was you, too, away for an hour from your wife and family, away from the privation and anxiety of Christmas. Yes, and if you weren't so slight — if you were darker, rougher, more menacing — it well might be you, young man, swatting your leg, mystically nodding about something that could be had, and had fast, among these shrouding firs …