On our way back to the Studentenheim Utch drew her breath in, dug her nails into my wrist and screamed - but the vision she thought she'd seen had disappeared down the escalator that underpasses the Opernring. She thought she'd seen the man with the hole in his cheek. We historical novelists know that the past can be vivid; it can even seem real. 'But it is so real,' Utch told me. 'He actually seems to age between the times I see him; I mean, he now appears like I think he would look if he were ten years older than when the Russians left. He's grayer, he's bent a little bit over - you know.'
'And the hole itself?' I asked. 'Does it ever change?'
'The hole's a hole,' Utch said. 'It's an awful thing. You think at first it's a shadow, but it doesn't move. You think it's some kind of dirt, but it goes in - like a door that's open. And the eye is pulled a little toward the hole, and the cheekbone is funny on that side of his face.'
'A nightmare,' I said.
We discussed the frequency and occasions of the vision. Did he appear at times, such as now, when she was breaking away from her past - when, say, she was freeing herself from her history - as if the vision were the psychological part of herself that was reluctant to abandon her past?
No, not necessarily; she didn't believe there was any pattern to it. She shrugged; she did not try hard to figure such things out. I suggested the man was a father-replacement. After all, he had been provided by Kudashvili for her protection; since she couldn't ignore that Kudashvili was dead, she had replaced him with the most vivid protection-symbol in her life. For years she had followed the arrests of the Blum Gang in the papers, and I told her that if she had ever seen a photograph of the man with the hole in his cheek - captured at last, or killed - she would probably have felt a great loss.
'Not me,' Utch said. (Years later, she would say, 'Psychology is better suited for plants.')
She did exercises like a man - sit-ups and push-ups and others. Captain Kudashvili had done them, of course. I certainly liked watching her do them.
'How do you say "We're married" in German?' I asked.
'Wir sind verheiratet,' she said.
I went down the hall to the Herrenzimmer, but Heinrich and Willy weren't at their sinks; it was not the shaving hour. One of them had left a can of shaving cream on the glass ledge. I shook up the contents, imagining writing with lather the full length of the mirror: WIR SIND VERHEIRATET! but there didn't seem to be enough left. When the man with the hole in his cheek stepped out of the crapper stall behind me, the shaving cream can went off in my hand.
He was quite old, and the hole was just as Utch had described it. I couldn't tell if it was black because it was bottomless, or because his flesh had somehow stayed scorched. That terrible raw hole drew your eyes, but you couldn't stand looking at it.
'Wir sind verheiratet,' I told him, because that's what I'd been prepared to say.
'Yes, yes, I know,' he said tiredly, impatient with me. He moved slowly to the row of sinks and leaned on one, staring at himself in the mirror. 'So,' he said after a pause, 'she tells you about me - I know by how you stare.'
'Yes,' I said, 'but she thinks you're a fantasy. So did I.'
'Good, good,' he said. 'Just as well. The job is over. You are going to take her away, and I am too old and too poor to follow her anymore. America!' he cried out suddenly, as if something hurt him. 'I wish someone is taking me to America!'
He looked at me. He didn't look like a gangster or hired killer or bodyguard or spy anymore; he looked like a seedy jeweler who spent nothing on his health or clothes, but only on expensive rings and necklaces for women who always left him. He would better have spent his money on an elaborate brooch to hide the hole; what he needed was a kind of cheek pin. Of course, it would be complicated to attach. I did not think he wore a gun.
'What do you think of my English?' he asked.
'Pretty good,' I said.
'Ja, it is,' he said. 'She learns it, so I learn it. She walk around that old museum, I walk around it too. She go out for Strassenbahn rides at the worst times, I try to go after her. Most of the time she never see me, but a few times I am careless. I get old,' he said. 'That is what happens.'
'Why do you follow her?' I asked him. 'Are you still working for the Russians?'
He spat in the sink and shook his head. 'Russians and Americans are the same,' he said. 'I promise Kudashvili. I tell him I look after her until she goes to live with him. How do I know Kudashvili is going to be killed? I make a promise: I look after his Utchka. But no more. Who is thinking she takes twenty-five years to get married?'
'My God,' I said. 'You should have told her.'
'She hates me,' he said. 'It's unfair, of course. So once I work for Benno Blum, so what? So then I work for Kudashvili. Does she think him an angel?'
'Come tell her now,' I said. 'Come let her see that you're real. But you better let me say something first, or--'
'Is you crazy?' he asked me. 'It's all finished. She never see me again, why let her see me now? She thinks I'm a dream. You tell her she's not going to dream me anymore. That is the truth. You marry her, now you look after her.'
'Oh, I will, I will,' I told him. He seemed even more sincere than our minister. My pledge to him seemed more charged than my marriage vows. But suddenly he sagged against the sink, took a short, sick look at himself in the mirror, turned away sobbing and slumped against the row of crapper stalls, weeping softly.
'I am lying to you,' he said. 'All these years I hope she sees me just once without screaming and shaking like she see a monster. When she is younger, she look at my face as if it doesn't really bother her - just that she is sorry for me, that such a thing happen to me. She is a sweet little girl, I must tell you.'
'What did you lie about?'
'I watch her get into that mess with those two boys. I think one time I am going to kill them both! I think another time I am going to kill you,' he said, 'but you are so hit by her - I can see. I am hit by her like that, too.'
'You're in love with her?'
'Ja!' he choked, 'but it's over, finished! And you better not ever say a word to her about this or I am hunting you down wherever you go to live. Even if it's Oklahoma,' he said, 'I am finding you and cutting your eyeballs out.'
'Oklahoma?'
'Never mind!' he wept. 'I take care of her. Kudashvili himself never do it any better! He say to me once that he is going to watch her every minute until she marries the right sort of man, and I say, "What are you going to do if she falls in love with the wrong sort of man?" And he say, "Kill him, of course." Now there is a love that is pretty strong, I must tell you.'
'Love?' I said.
'Ja!' he shouted furiously. 'What do you know about it? All you care about is fucking!'
He pulled himself together, smoothed his suit and tucked his shirt in tight. I had been wrong; I saw the gun when he straightened his tie. It had a horn handgrip, bluntly protruding from a high chest-and-shoulder holster of green leather.
'If you ever tell her about me,' he said, 'I am hearing it across the world. If you do not take care of her good, I am feeling my pistol cock, I am feeling it in my lungs. The way I feel,' he said, 'I can dream that you die and make it so.'
I believed him; I think I still believe him. As he walked past me to the door, the long overhead light tried vainly to penetrate his ghastly hole.
'Goodbye,' I said. 'And thank you for looking after her.'
I must have looked untrustworthy, because suddenly he seemed to need to convince me. He walked down the row of sinks, turning all the faucets on full, then up the row of stalls, flushing all the toilets. He flushed the long urinal too, and the Herrenzimmer roared with the rush of water. When he drew his gun, I thought I was about to join Benno Blum's awesome statistics.
'Put down that shaving-cream can,' he ordered. I set it on the sink beside me; he took quick aim and blew it, spinning, down the line of sinks; it landed in the last one, bobbing in the filling bowl, a hole drilled neatly in its middle. What was left o
f the shaving cream spurted and then flowed and then dribbled from the hole. One by one, the toilets stopped flushing; one by one, he shut off the faucets in the sinks while the shaving-cream can bled on.
'Auf Wiedersehen,' he said. He shut the door behind him. When I peeked out in the long hall, he was gone. No Heinrich, no Willy, no Utch to see him go.
Back in Utch's room, I hugged her, told her I would never hurt her, told her that she would always be safe with me. 'I'm going to live with you, yes,' she said, 'but I'm not going to be guarded by you.' I didn't elaborate.
There remained only one last thing to do. We rented a car and I drove Utch to Eichbuchl, the town she'd been born in - twice, so to speak. She had not been there since Kudashvili had taken her away.
On the outskirts of Wiener Neustadt, where Utch's father had been caught sabotaging Messerschmitts, we drove past the vast, untouched ruin of the Messerschmitt factory. Barbed wire circled it. Messing around in that debris was verboten because so many bombs had been dropped there, and not all of them had gone off. Two or three times a year one of them exploded; probably cats and squirrels and prowling dogs set them off. It was feared that if the place was not enclosed, children would play there and blow themselves up. Leveling the ruins was slow and risky work; it was not a job for bulldozers. The great shell sat by the roadside as lifeless as a gutted ship. On the far side of town the long, pocked runway lay unused - the largest landing area in Europe even now, bigger than Orly or Heathrow. It would be a simple matter to repair the runway surface, but the people of Wiener Neustadt were against it; they had heard enough planes overhead.
We found the village of Eichbuchl past the monastery at Katzelsdorf where Utch's mother had borrowed books. There were lots of new houses in Eichbuchl - weekend places, belonging to doctors and lawyers from Vienna. The peasants were still there, but like peasants everywhere throughout history, they were a part of the landscape - the background of the place. You had to look carefully to see what it was that they actually did. In Eichbuchl they grew apples, raised bees, butchered a frequent pig, an occasional calf. They made their own sausage; they grew their own vegetables; they hunted pheasant, rabbit, deer and wild boar. Everyone had a potato cellar with apples in it, and potatoes and cabbages and beets; everyone had a vineyard plot and made his own wine; everyone kept a few chickens and ate his own eggs; two people had their own cows and everyone got milk and cream from them. There was just one Gasthof, one place to drink, one place to eat the one dish a day on the menu. The day we stopped there, it was Serbian bean soup, black bread and wine or beer. It was mid-afternoon. There was what looked like a barn a little way up the one-street village road, but Utch did not want to look at it; nor did she want to ask anyone about Frau Thalhammer's little girl who'd impressed a Russian officer.
The old lady who ran the Gasthof did not appear to recognize her or her resemblance to her mother. She was only mildly interested that I was an American; another American had been there about eight years ago; I was not her first. In the Gasthof, some old men were playing cards and drinking wine. Utch looked at them quietly; I knew she was thinking about the stalwart village menfolk who had raped her mother, and I said, 'Go on, introduce yourself. See what they say. Isn't that why you wanted to come?' But she said she simply didn't have any feelings anymore. The men were so old that they were not the men in her mind. Everyone who looked like the men in her mind was her own age now, and innocent then; everyone who would have been the right age then was too old and innocent now.
She picked at her soup and added, 'Everyone except that one.' She fixed her eyes on one of the cardplayers - old like all of them, yes, but rougher and stronger-looking. He was not a pitiable old man; his arms were thick and muscled, his shoulders and neck were not stringy. He had a tough, aggressive jaw and his eyes moved quickly, like a young man's. Also, from time to time, he looked with interest at Utch. I wanted to leave but Utch had to watch the man; she thought she might work up the nerve to speak to him.
The man seemed to be discomforted by the way Utch looked at him; he fidgeted in his chair as if Utch made him itchy or his legs were cramped. When he stood up I realized that the crutches hooked on the back of the long bench were his; he had no legs. When he lurched out from behind the table of cardplayers, I understood why his arms and neck and shoulders were so young. He swung his way toward our table, a stumped puppet, an amputated acrobat. He balanced on his crutches in front of us, swaying slightly, sometimes inching the tip of one crutch forward or backward to keep himself steady. The handgrips of the crutches were worn smooth, the armpit pads sewn from old bed quilts. Initials, names, etchings of faces and animals were engraved on the dark, oiled crutches - as complex and historical as the archways of some cathedrals. He smiled down at Utch.
She told me later that he asked her if he was supposed to know her; was she back for a visit? 'Everyone grows up so fast,' was the way he put it. She told him no, she was visiting for the first time. Oh, he had misunderstood, he said. When he left, Utch asked the lady who ran the place how he had lost his legs. The war; that was all the old lady would say. The Russians? Utch asked. The old lady admitted that it might have been on the Russian front; that was a popular place to have lost limbs.
But when we were outside the Gasthof, one of the old cardplayers came up to us. 'Don't listen to her,' he told Utch. 'He lost his legs right here in the village. The Russians did it. They tortured him because he wouldn't tell them where his wife and daughters were hidden. They did it to him on a cider press. He never told them, but they found them anyway, of course.'
Why such an old man would want to tell strangers such a story is beyond me, but Utch claims her translation of the dialect was accurate. We drove out of Eichbuchl before it was dark, Utch crying softly in the seat beside me. I stopped the car near the river, just to hold her and try to comfort her. The river was called the Leitha, a clear, shallow stream with a pebbled bottom - very beautiful. Utch cried for a while, until, of all things, we found ourselves staring at a cow. It had lazed away from the herd down by the river, and grazed up to the roadside. It looked at us curiously. 'Oh my God,' Utch sobbed.
'It's OK,' I said. 'It's just a cow.'
The cow stared at us blandly, stupidly; all history looks pretty much the same to cows.
Finally Utch laughed out loud - I suppose because she had to. 'Goodbye, Mother,' she said to the cow. Then I drove us across the wooden-plank bridge, over the Leitha, where all the other cows looked up at us as we rattled the bridge. 'Goodbye, Mother!' Utch yelled as I drove faster. November was everywhere. The vineyards were plucked clean; the root vegetables were stacked inside the cellars; the cider was surely pressed.
Utch cried most of the night in her room full of plants at the Studentenheim and I made love to her whenever she wanted me to. For a couple of hours she was out of the room, and for a while I thought that she was taking a hot bath down the hall. But when she came back about dawn, she told me she'd been saying goodbye to Heinrich and Willy. Well, goodbyes were clearly in the wind; we were leaving the next day.
In the Herrenzimmer I said goodbye to Willy and Heinrich. They were polite, quiet, up to no mischief. I said I was sorry about what had happened to their shaving-cream can, but they refused to accept apologies of any kind. 'You've got a good beard going,' Willy told me. 'Why do you want to shave?'
Then we were in the cab, heading for Schwechart Airport. A cold gray day for flying, a poor ceiling. At the airport I bought an international Herald Tribune, but it was a day old. It was 22 November, 1963. We were waiting for an evening plane. The loudspeaker at the airport made announcements in German, French, Italian, Russian and English, but I didn't listen. In the airport bar I recognized lots of other Americans. Many of them were crying. I had seen strange things in the last two days, and I had no reason to expect that the strange things would cease. Like everyone else, I watched the television. It was a video-tape replay. The reception was lousy, the narration in German. I watched a big American convertible w
ith a woman climbing out of the back seat and on to the trunk behind to help a man hop up over the rear bumper and climb into the car. It didn't make much sense.
'Where is Dallas?' Utch asked me.
'Texas,' I said. 'What happened in Dallas?'
'The President is dead,' Utch said.
'What president?' I asked. I thought she meant the president of Dallas.
'Your President,' Utch said. 'You know, Herr Kennedy?'
'John Kennedy?'
'Ja, him,' Utch said. 'Herr Kennedy is dead. He got shot.'
'In Dallas?' I asked. Somehow I couldn't believe that my President would ever even go to Dallas. I stared at Utch, who wasn't even familiar with Kennedy's name. What must she think of this place she is going to? I wondered. In Europe, of course, they kill their aristocracy all the time, but not in America.
In front of me a large, befurred woman bawled her head off. She said she was a Republican from Colorado but she had always liked Kennedy, even so. I asked her husband who had done it, and he said it was probably some dirty little bastard who didn't have a decent job. I saw that Utch was bewildered and tried to tell her how extraordinary this was, but she seemed more concerned for me.
When we changed planes later that night in Frankfurt, we found out that whoever they thought had shot Kennedy had himself just been shot by someone else - in a police station! We saw that on television too. Utch never blinked, but most of the Americans went on crying, outraged and scared. For Utch, I suppose, it was not at all unusual; it was the way they would settle scores in Eichbuchl. Nobody had taught her to expect any other part of the world to behave differently.
When we landed in New York, some magazine had already printed the picture of Mrs Kennedy which was to be around for months. It was a big color photograph - it was better in color because the blood really looked like blood; it showed her stunned and grieving and oblivious of her own appearance. She had always been so concerned about her looks that I think the public liked seeing her this way. It was the closest thing to seeing her naked; we were voyeurs. She wore that blood-spattered suit; her stockings were matted with the blood of the President; her face was vacant. Utch thought the photograph disgusting; it made her cry all the way to Boston. The people around us probably thought she was crying for Kennedy and the country, but she wasn't; she was reacting to the face in the photograph, that grief, that look of being so totally had that you just don't care anymore. I think that Utch was crying for Kudashvili, and for her mother, and for that terrible village she came from, which was just like any other village. I think she empathized with the vacancy on the face of the President's widow.