“Come back again!” cried Herr Theobald, miserably, as we got into our car.
Mother sat in the car with her eyes closed and her fingers massaging her temples; this way she seemed to hear nothing we said. She claimed it was her only defense against traveling with such a contentious family.
I did not want to report on the usual business concerning the care of the car, but I saw that Father was trying to maintain order and calm; he had the giant pad spread on his lap as if we'd just completed a routine investigation. “What does the gauge tell us?” he asked.
“Someone put thirty-five kilometers on it,” I said.
“That terrible bear has been in here,” Grandmother said. “There are hairs from the beast on the back seat, and I can smell him.”
“I don't smell anything,” Father said.
“And the perfume of that gypsy in the turban,” Grandmother said. “It is hovering near the ceiling of the car.” Father and I sniffed. Mother continued to massage her temples.
On the floor by the brake and clutch pedals I saw several of the mint-green toothpicks that the Hungarian singer was in the habit of wearing like a scar at the corner of his mouth. I didn't mention them. It was enough to imagine them all—out on the town, in our car. The singing driver, the man, on his hands beside him—waving out the window with his feet. And in back, separating the dream man from his former wife—his great head brushing the upholstered roof, his mauling paws relaxed in his large lap—the old bear slouched like a benign drunk.
“Those poor people,” Mother said, her eyes still closed.
“Liars and criminals,” Grandmother said. “Mystics and refugees and broken-down animals.”
“They were trying hard,” Father said, “but they weren't coming up with the prizes.”
“Better off in a zoo,” said Grandmother.
“I had a good time,” Robo said.
“It's hard to break out of Class C,” I said.
“They have fallen post Z,” said old Johanna. “They have disappeared from the human alphabet.”
“I think this calls for a letter,” Mother said.
But Father raised his hand—as if he were going to bless us—and we were quiet. He was writing in the giant pad and wished to be undisturbed. His face was stern. I knew that Grandmother felt confident of his verdict. Mother knew it was useless to argue. Robo was already bored. I steered us off through the tiny streets; I took Spiegelgasse to Lobkowitzplatz. Spiegelgasse is so narrow that you can see the reflection of your own car in the windows of the shops you pass, and I felt our movement through Vienna was superimposed(like that)—like a trick with a movie camera, as if we made a fairy-tale journey through a toy city.
When Grandmother was asleep in the car, Mother said, “I don't suppose that in this case a change in the classification will matter very much, one way or another.”
“No,” Father said, “not much at all.” He was right about that, though it would be years until I saw the Pension Grillparzer again.
When Grandmother died, rather suddenly and in her sleep, Mother announced that she was tired of traveling. The real reason, however, was that she began to find herself plagued by Grandmothers dream. “The horses are so thin,” she told me, once. “I mean, I always knew they would be thin, but not this thin. And the soldiers—I knew they were miserable,” she said, “but not that miserable.”
Father resigned from the Tourist Bureau and found a job with a local detective agency specializing in hotels and department stores. It was a satisfactory job for him, though he refused to work durinq the Christmas season—when, he said, some people ought to be allowed to steal a little.
My parents seemed to me to relax as they got older, and I really felt they were fairly happy near the end. I know that the strength of Grandmother's dream was dimmed by the real world, and specifically by what happened to Robo. He went to a private school and was well liked there, but he was killed by a homemade bomb in his first year at the university. He was not even “political.” In his last letter to my parents he wrote: “The self-seriousness of the radical factions among the students is much overrated. And the food is execrable.” Then Robo went to his history class, and his classroom was blown apart.
It was after my parents died that I gave up smoking and took up traveling again. I took my second wife back to the Pension Grillparzer. With my first wife, I never got as far as Vienna.
The Grillparzer had not kept Father's B rating very long, and it had fallen from the ratings altogether by the time I returned to it. Herr Theobald's sister was in charge of the place. Gone was her tort appeal and in its place was the sexless cynicism of some maiden aunts. She was shapeless and her hair was dyed a sort of bronze, so that her head resembled one of those copper scouring pads that you use on a pot. She did not remember me and was suspicious of my questions. Because I appeared to know so much about her past associates, she probably knew I was with the police.
The Hungarian singer had gone away—another woman thrilled by his voice. The dream man had been taken away—to an institution. His own dreams had turned to nightmares and he'd awakened the pension each night with his horrifying howls. His removal from the seedy premises, said Herr Theobald's sister, was almost simultaneous with the loss of the Grillparzer's B rating.
Herr Theobald was dead. He had dropped down clutching his heart in the hall, where he ventured one night to investigate what he thought was a prowler. It was only Duna, the malcontent bear, who was dressed in the dream man's pin-striped suit. Why Theobald's sister had dressed the bear in this fashion was not explained to me, but the shock of the sullen animal unicycling in the lunatic's left-behind clothes had been enough to scare Herr Theobald to death.
The man who could only walk on his hands had also fallen into the gravest trouble. His wristwatch snagged on a tine of an escalator and he was suddenly unable to hop off; his necktie, which he rarely wore because it dragged on the ground when he walked on his hands, was drawn under the step-off grate at the end of the escalator—where he was strangled. Behind him a line of people formed—marching in place by taking one step back and allowing the escalator to carry them forward, then taking another step back. It was quite a while before anyone got up the nerve to step over him. The world has many unintentionally cruel mechanisms that are not designed for people who walk on their hands.
After that, Theobald's sister told me, the Pension Grillparzer went from Class C to much worse. As the burden of management fell more heavily on her, she had less time for Duna and the bear grew senile and indecent in his habits. Once he bullied a mailman down a marble staircase at such a ferocious pace that the man fell and broke his hip; the attack was reported and an old city ordinance forbidding unrestrained animals in places open to the public was enforced, Duna was outlawed at the Pension Grillparzer.
For a while, Theobald's sister kept the bear in a cage in the courtyard of the building, but he was taunted by dogs and children, and food (and worse) was dropped into his cage from the apartments that faced the courtyard. He grew unbear-like and devious—only pretending to sleep—and he ate most of someone's cat. Then he was poisoned twice and became afraid to eat anything in this perilous environment. There was no alternative but to donate him to the Schцnbrunn Zoo, but there was even some doubt as to his acceptability. He was toothless and ill, perhaps contagious, and his long history of having been treated as a human being did not prepare him for the gentler routine of zoo life.
His outdoor sleeping quarters in the courtyard of the Grillparzer had inflamed his rheumatism, and even his one talent, unicycling, was irretrievable. When he first tried it in the zoo, he fell. Someone laughed. Once anyone laughed at something Duna did, Theobald's sister explained, Duna would never do that thing again. He became, at last, a kind of charity case at Schцnbrunn, where he died a short two months after he'd taken up his new lodgings. In the opinion of Theobald's sister, Duna died of mortification—the result of a rash that spread over his great chest, which then had to be shaved. A shaved bear, one zoo official said, is embarrassed to death.