‘Udo Hoff?’
‘The painter.’
‘Ah. Yes, that does – yes. Udo Hoff.’
‘Have you a telephone? Are you in an hotel?’
‘No to both. I’m renting rooms. I’ve no idea how long I’ll be staying.’
‘You must come to the studio. Write your address down. I’ll send you an invitation to one of our parties.’
She handed him a scrap of paper from her bag and Lysander wrote down his address. A little reluctantly, he had to admit, as he wanted to be alone in Vienna: to resolve his problem – his anorgasmia, now it had a name – himself, alone. He didn’t really require or desire any kind of social life. He handed the scrap back.
‘Lysander Rief,’ she read. ‘Have I heard of you?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘And I’m Hettie, by the way,’ she said, ‘Hettie Bull,’ thrusting her hand out. Lysander shook it. She had a very firm grip.
5. The River of Sex
‘Why am I troubled by this encounter with HB? Why am I also vaguely excited by it? She’s not “my type” at all, yet I already feel somehow drawn into her life, willy-nilly, her orbit. Why? What if we’d met at a concert or a house party? We wouldn’t have thought anything of each other, I’m sure. But because we met in the waiting room at Dr Bensimon’s we know something secret about each other, already. Does this explain it? The wounded, the incomplete, the unbalanced, the malfunctioning, the ill seek each other out: like attracted to like. She won’t leave me alone, I know. But I don’t want to go to Udo Hoff’s studio, whoever he is. I came to Vienna to avoid social contact and told hardly anyone where I was going, just saying “abroad” to people who pressed for details. Mother knows, Blanche knows, Greville knows, of course, and a handful of essential others. I want to treat Vienna as a kind of beautiful sanatorium full of perfect strangers – as if I had consumption and had simply disappeared until the cure was effected. I don’t think Blanche would like HB, somehow. Not at all.’
There was a barely audible knock at his door – more of a scratch than a knock. Lysander put his pen down and closed his notebook, his Autobiographical Investigations, putting it in a drawer of his desk.
‘Come in, Herr Barth,’ Lysander said.
Herr Barth tiptoed in and shut the door as softly as he could. For a man of significant bulk he tried to move unobtrusively and with as much discretion as possible.
‘Nein, Herr Rief. Not “Come in”. Herein.’
‘Verzeihung,’ Lysander apologized, drawing up an extra chair to the desk.
Herr Barth was a music teacher who came, moreover, from a long line of music teachers. His father had seen Paganini play in 1836 and, when his first son was duly born some years later, had called him Nikolas in honour of the event. As a young man Herr Barth had taken the identification to heart and wore his hair long and grew his cheek whiskers in the Paganini style, a homage he had never abandoned. Even now, approaching his seventies, he merely dyed his long grey hair and his whiskers black and still wore old-fashioned high collars and long coats with silver buttons. His instrument was not the violin, however, but the double bass – which he had played in the orchestra of the Lustspiel-Theater in Vienna for many years before he took up the family profession of music teacher. He kept his old double bass in its cracked leather case propped against the wall at the bottom of his bed in his small room at the end of the corridor, the smallest of the three rooms that were rented out in the Pension Kriwanek. He claimed to be able to teach any instrument that ‘could be carried or held in the hand’ to a level of competence – whether strings, woodwind or brass. Lysander was not aware of any pupils seeking out this offer but had happily accepted Herr Barth’s diffident suggestion, made a day after he had moved into the pension, that he help Lysander improve his German – for the sum of five crowns an hour.
Herr Barth sat down slowly, flicked away the strands of hair resting on his collar with both hands and smiled, wagging an admonitory finger.
‘Only German, Herr Rief. Only this way will you advance in our wonderful and beautiful language.’
‘I’d like to practise numbers today,’ Lysander replied – in German.
‘Ah, numbers, numbers – the great trap.’
They duly practised numbers for an hour – counting, dates, prices, change, adding, subtracting – until Lysander’s head was a reeling Babel of figures and the dinner bell rang. Herr Barth only paid for board and breakfast so he excused himself and Lysander crossed the corridor to the panelled dining room where Frau Kriwanek herself was waiting for him.
Frau K, as her three lodgers referred to her, was a woman of rigid piety and decorum. Widowed in her forties, she wore traditional Austrian clothes – moss-green dirndl dresses, in the main, with embroidered blouses and aprons, and broad buckled pumps – and projected a demeanour of excruciating politesse that was really only endurable for the length of a meal, Lysander had quickly realized. Her world admitted and contained only people, events and opinions that were either ‘nice’ or ‘pleasant’ (nett or angenehm). These were her favourite adjectives, deployed at every opportunity. The cheese was nice; the weather pleasant. The Crown Prince’s young wife seemed a nice person; the new post office had a pleasant aspect. And so on.
Lysander smiled blandly at her as he took his accustomed seat at the dining table. He sensed the years falling from him: Frau K made him feel he was in his adolescence again – younger, even, pre-pubescent. He became unmanned in Frau K’s presence, strangely cowed and respectful; he became someone he didn’t recognize – a man without opinions.
He saw there was a place set for a third party – the other lodger in the pension, Lieutenant Wolfram Rozman, apparently absent or late. Dinner was at eight o’clock, sharp. Frau K approved of Lysander – he was nice and pleasant, and English (nice people) – but the lieutenant, Lysandser instinctively felt, did not meet with Frau K’s full approval. He was not pleasant, perhaps not even nice.
Lieutenant Wolfram Rozman had done something wrong. It wasn’t exactly clear what, but his presence in the Pension Kriwanek was a form of disgrace. It was a regimental matter, Lysander had learned from Herr Barth. He had not been cashiered but had been temporarily expelled from barracks over this scandal, whatever it was, and forced to live here until judgement was delivered and his military fate decided. Lieutenant Rozman didn’t seem unduly concerned, Lysander had to admit – apparently he’d already been in the pension for nearly six months – but the longer he stayed the more Frau K found him not a pleasant man, incrementally. Even in the two weeks Lysander had been witness to their exchanges he had detected a marked sharpness in address, an increase in frosty formality.
In fact, Lysander liked Wolfram – as he’d been invited to call him almost immediately – but he studiously kept this opinion from Frau K. She smiled her thin smile at him now and rang the bell for service. The maid, Traudl, appeared almost at once with a tureen – containing clear cabbage soup with croutons – in her hands. This was the first course of dinner in the Pension Kriwanek, summer or winter. Traudl, a round-faced girl of eighteen who blushed when she spoke and blushed when she was spoken to, plonked the tureen down on the table hard enough for two splashes of soup to leap out and land on the immaculate white nap of the tablecloth.
‘You will pay for the cleaning of the tablecloth, Traudl,’ Frau K said evenly.
‘With pleasure, Madame,’ Traudl said, blushed, curtsied and left.
Frau K said grace, eyes closed, head level – Lysander bowed his – and served them both clear cabbage soup with croutons.