Joey felt his father felt — in the thirties waiting for catastrophe — the way Vienna felt to its artists and writers in the century’s early years, waiting for catastrophe, too — loathing the city as Karl Kraus did and fearing war, or bored with the Zeit’s complacent Geist as Georg Heym was, who wanted the greasy peace to end and welcomed strife and chaos that would clean the sewers and give swift passage to the shit of life. Sharing Karl Kraus’s apprehensions gave his father’s cheap violining a little class and his motives, so mysterious, some respect. Nita said his father said he smelled the carnage coming. Musil smelled it. And I smell it now, Joey told his mother. Ach, it’s my manure, she laughed, showing him her hands.
A man, Miriam said, should change his coat, if he must, only to do the world’s business, not for his family or for his friends to whom he is fastened by feeling. That is not so easy to do, Joseph answered, because she was actually asking a question. Hard or not, that’s what Rudi ought to have done. Ought, Joey exclaimed. Ought? You, too, don’t forget, Mother, were supposed to be as converted as Rudi was — Joey laughed because he needed the practice — you were supposed to be a newly pregnant Jewish mother. But I was the same, Miriam insisted, the same, the same, all Rudi did was change my name — and even then only my name when it was written, not when I heard it spoken to me, not when I thought about myself, not when I remembered my life or his once or twice tenderness to me concerning which I say no more, no more, no more, because, though I now stand silent, I stand on my own path, amid my own rocks and grass, my tears do not spill from a false face, and I do not get my flushed forehead from a paint box but from kneeling on the ground.
At first Professor Skizzen thought the world would not put up with our monkeyshines for another hundred years and would throw mankind aside as a mistake the way it had so many other species, a rejection we no doubt deserved; but now he feared for the world — a world that was alone in the universe as far as he knew — the only earth — which he cared for more than he cared for himself.
10
Augsburg Community College was not a community college. It received no support from either state or city. Its misleading name came from a settlement called the Augsburg Community, a Utopian farm founded in 1822 by some heretical Lutherans most of whom ran away like unhappy slaves within the founding year, leaving two buildings and a few inadequately fenced fields. Utopia had not lasted long enough to fail or allow its tenants time to grow at least an imposing pumpkin. Two families remained behind, hoeing a plot, scavenging berries, and feeling more like squatters than founders. Much is made, in the history of the school, of the early struggles and the eventual success of these sweaty settlers. God smiled upon them, and they built a stone barn. God smiled again, and up went a spire. The two farms became four, ten families turned into a town, and the town, before everything fell down, became a college — the town square the college quad, the stone barn a dorm. There were more reassuring miracles here than Jesus had performed, not excluding Lazarus or the baking of loaves and the seining of fishes.
For a brief spell it served as a finishing school for milkmaids and put the name AUGSBURG ACADEMY on stationery it could scarcely afford. On warm days girls, aspiring to be ladies, in flowing white garments, could be seen dotting the lawns with sketch pads and easels. Local youths liked to imagine the academy was a huge whorehouse where every attending girl was free, easy, and scrumptious. To support this myth, they made up others, relating stories of fleshy revels that everyone enjoyed though no one bothered to believe. The faculty comprised old men whose privates were presumed to be long past erection and maiden aunts whose charges had died and left them unemployed. The academy’s sole published catalog began, “In a quiet sylvan environment” and bragged that in its precincts even the offspring of deer were safe. All that remained, now, of those daisy days were a few signs, one in a parking lot, another, directional, toward a stream that had dried up, and a third, partly hidden by shrubs, that read, confusingly, AUGSBURG COMMUNITY ACADEMY. After a short time the finishing school returned to Lutheran arms and virtue’s camp where no one gave its coeds the compliment of slander.
Augsburg Community College did not pay its students for their chores. If you clerked in the bookstore, mowed the lawn, or washed the dinner trays, you might get a break on your board bill or free books in exchange, a slight reduction in your tuition, a cut in your room rent, or, more likely, a waiver of student fees. Joey hoped to get out of phys ed, but he couldn’t cut a deal. We’ve given you a room, that should be quite enough, he was rather severely told. He didn’t know America that well, and at first accepted the system as standard, only to find out later how unusual it was to have half the student body on work-study, which included painting, sweeping, and tuck-pointing. An answer to the question, What’s your major? might be Latin and lawn care. Augsburg, Joey decided, was either a very progressive artsy-craftsy school or a license-plate prison.
So he never had any money to speak of and was living, in consequence, a good Lutheran life. His innocence forbade him to notice how often the poorer pupils augmented (only they called it Augsburging) their income by doing favors for those better off, another clever way Augsburg had of readying its students for the world. Some stole exams; some altered records; some sold sections of themselves for sex; some swiped candy from the commissary. Joey thought he was being original, acting like a criminal, when he slipped a few small packages of flower seeds from the groundskeeper’s shed; easy enough to do, the door was often open, and guarding a few ageratum packets was no one’s urgency.
Joey didn’t know which to feel worse about — his empty pockets or his criminal pursuit — but he needed a token gift for his mother’s birthday, and he was confident a few small packages of seed would not be missed. Untutored pilferator that he was, he did not consider that the seeds could be out of spritz and as old as Nita’s memories. His gift was meager, his mother forgave him that (there were exactly half-a-dozen common annuals, all edgers); it was also a surprise to her habits, since she had shown no interest in either their dismal yard or absent garden; but she understood her son’s circumstances and did appreciate the gesture the way the cliché said she should, so she let only her eyebrows rise when she undid the thin green string and pressed flat its flimsy wrapping. The seeds went in a dresser drawer where, if they were lifeless, they grew even more inanimate.
Among the flaws in Joey’s character, which, at this age, he was quick to reveal, was his adolescent’s demand for praise and reassurance before doing anything more meritorious than exist. Everyone he knew was as stupid as a brick, and he pitied his plight: that he had to pretend to be another brick packed in a stack stuck among them.
Joey practiced keening on the organ — faithfully, which meant religiously — and tried to carry away a few things from his classes; but his teachers were largely wizened one-note relics from the bottom of the barrel, bent by holy poses into zeros. He believed that the world despised them whenever it thought about thinking of them at all; they despised one another; mostly they despised themselves. They were noticed because they were so unremarkable, and this Joey took note of: do not fall so low as to be treadable, because people tend to watch where they step, curse when they stumble, and tromp upon supines and other grovelers. Never fail, merely pass. Slip by. Don’t miss the class photo but, if short, find a place in the middle of the back row. However, he did learn from the texts each course required — even the shabby ones, used ones, out-of-date ones, boring ones, schoolbookish, double-columned ones with dictionary-sized archival photos spotted about like illustrations of things no longer made and for uses no longer remembered — he learned not to highlight every other line or deface margins with doodles or smart remarks, dog-ear pages or enlist a paper clip or rubber band to do the work of a ribbon, because these practices reduced the books’ resale value. And you would never have any further use for Amo Amas Amat, the Latin first reader, or A Concise History of Lutheran Thought, required for all students, or Biology for Believers, a junior elective. Copies circled endlessly like stratospheric trash.