“Harry?”
“Yes, Nicholas?”
“I’m not really one.” Little Nicholas was fast becoming a pain in the ass, but I created a smile and looked his way. My eyes touched first on his plate and stopped. He’d ordered a Wiener schnitzel. He’d been eating it for ten minutes. But his food looked exactly as it had when first served: golden meat uncut, slice of lemon sitting on top; french fries piled high and smoking; a fat tomato half, a splat of red, off to one side. I’d seen him eat that tomato in one big bite. Seen him shove it into his mouth and one cheek bulge out. But there was the tomato, the meat was whole … his glass still filled to the top with black Coca-Cola. Instinctively my hand came up, palm out, as if it were trying to keep him away.
The boy reached down and brought up the paper on which he’d been drawing. It was of me exactly as I was at that moment: hand up just so, fingers splayed, mouth open, tongue at the gate of teeth ready to rush out and protest.
“You!” Shock rippled down my body, but rippled back up as laughter and understanding. It was Venasque! He’d come once as a pig, why not show up next as a little boy over lunch in Vienna?
How like him to tease, to draw me in my future, but wait till the present to stick it in my face.
“What’s up, old man?”
The drawing became animated. Alive. Turned its head this way and that, smiled, spoke to me. It spoke to me.
In German.
But I don’t speak German. My moment of truth had finally arrived! Epiphany!
Spoken to from beyond the grave …
but I couldn’t understand a fucking word of what was being said.
Everything around us was frozen, as if in a snapshot. A woman across the room, her head thrown back in midlaugh, a waiter serving asparagus, a man bending over to pick up his dropped napkin … Nothing moved. There were no other sounds in the restaurant. No
other sounds in the world. Only the picture and me and the smiling boy holding up a piece of paper were alive. Even his “parents” held their fixed positions.
“Er musste jedes Gramm an Kraft und Mut zusammennehmen, um nicht auf der Stelle zu sterben.”
“I don’t understand. Don’t do this! Please don’t play games, Venasque!”
It did no good. He’d always done things his way. Whatever truths or information he had for me were hiding in a Black Forest of umlauts and verbs at the end, guttural
r
’s and a vocabulary that sounded rough and convincing at once.
However, I knew too that he was never malicious or misleading. Like any superior teacher, there was meaning and great value in his actions no matter how bizarre or obscure they seemed at first. “Whatever you learn quickly is rarely important, Harry. It might help get you through the day, like memorizing someone’s phone number, but it doesn’t help you figure out life. Not usually, anyway.”
“Mom, after lunch can I take Harry to the flea market?”
Reality returned. The restaurant was once again noise and movement; asparagus was served with a yellow flourish; the woman dipped her head and finished her laugh.
“Sure, if he wants to go.”
Ten minutes later the boy and I were out on the street together hand in hand, walking the Ringstrasse toward the Opera. His parents had been very calm about letting little Nicholas go off and play tour guide alone with an almost-stranger.
When I asked about that, Walker got an amused, there’s-more-to-this-than-meets-the-eye look and said only, “Zack knows what he’s doing.” Maris said nothing.
“How come your parents let you go around alone like this? You’re pretty young.”
He swung our arms back and forth, the way children do. “Did you like my drawing?”
“Yes, but I didn’t understand what it was saying. I don’t speak German.” As if he didn’t know that! Instead of answering, he swung our arms back and forth, back and forth.
I had to assume it was Venasque holding my hand, having fun playing in the skin of a precocious child. I so believed in him and his beneficence, his concern for his students’ well-being and progress. If not, if he
hadn’t
been choreographing all of the demons and fairies flying around and through my life then, designing the false leads, trapdoors and fata morganas that shimmered on the horizon, I would have been very, very scared. Faith is that—you stop worrying and go on with your business.
The Ringstrasse was old-time lovely; enormous trees cast shadows across freshly painted benches. Flower stalls, clean hot-dog stands, no car honked its horn. There was no litter, no graffiti.
“You don’t like it here, do you, Harry?”
“No, not much.” I looked at the kid, unsurprised he’d read my mind. “It’s beautiful, but it’s finished. They’ll put up more buildings or take some down, but it’s like rearranging furniture in a house you plan to live in for the rest of your life. Cities have to have the feeling of incompleteness for me to be happy in them. Places like Vienna are perfect museums that’re happy with their permanent collection. Other cities are still trying to figure themselves out. That’s for me!”
As if to support what I’d said, Nicholas led us past the spanking-clean Opera House, Café Museum, and Secession Museum, which was covered with scaffolding and workers restoring Olbrich’s oddity to its original condition.
On to the
Naschmarkt,
Vienna’s open-air market. What a difference! Exotic and redolent, it gargled and spluttered with life and alien
noise like a shortwave radio when you spin the dial across the channels. People pushed and yelled at each other in German, Turkish, Croatian. Children whined, dogs ran underfoot, bags were brusquely, expertly filled with Albanian “Paradise” tomatoes, Cretan goat cheese. One store, as large as a phone booth, sold only Hungarian paprika. Its aroma was the gift of the day.
A rude place, no one had time for you here beyond a purchase and quickly counted change. Next! But life held sway here, process, the ignored flow and stumble of people getting through, choosing the best bunch of carrots, checking a list to see what’s needed next.
How do you design buildings for this life? Do you try to contain it? I thought of marathon runners and the people who race up alongside, offering them water or a slice of orange. Was that how to do it—give what’s essential but stay the hell out of the way?
“That’s the flea market down there, see?”
Hard to imagine a more frantic, colorful scene than where we were, but one roiled only a few feet away. In a giant parking lot adjoining the
Naschmarkt,
Vienna’s Saturday flea market was in overdrive by the time we got there. Thousands of people milled and looked, bargained and dealt in an irresistible thunder of language and noise. Everything was for sale, everyone had something to say.
Flea markets remind us of how narrow and fixed our values are: What unimaginable things can have meaning to people! A man bought a bent and rusty 1983 Nevada license plate for one hundred schillings. One woman did a brisk trade selling single used, unmatchable shoes, and empty record album sleeves. Astonished, I turned to Nicholas and asked, “How much do you think she charges for that stuff?” He said nothing, but a moment later the thought came that valuing something meant understanding it better than the next guy. To me, it was absurd buying an old license plate—but what if the man who bought it knew better? Knew more about it, even if that knowledge seemed spurious or even insane to me. And even if it was
worthless, didn’t his wanting it make his imagination broader and grander than mine?
“Like language.”
“Huh?” I looked at Nicholas, although my thoughts were five miles away.
“Like language. Listen to all this!” We stood in the midst of the flowing crowd. Putting up small hands, he gestured broadly around us. “How much of it do we pay attention to, even when we understand? It’s just noise, like junk, like old license plates. But that’s wrong, Harry, ’cause no matter what language, there are things being said
above
the noise. Come here.”
He took my hand and led me to a building nearby that turned out to be a subway station—Kettenbrückengasse. Without stopping, Nicholas started to climb up the side of it and I went right up after him. With all the commotion of the flea market, only a couple of laughing punks noticed. A subway glided to a stop below us. Standing on one of the three graduated roofs, I looked down and watched the doors of the dirty silver train open.
“What am I doing?”
How many times had I said that when I was with Venasque? How often had I climbed out on “limbs” with him, ostensibly to get a better view or perspective of what was troubling me at the moment. We climbed to the second roof, then over the edge to the third a few feet higher. Train tracks directly below to our left, the bedlam of the flea market in front of us.
“Close your eyes and listen, Harry.”
“For what?”
“Your mother’s voice.”
“Listen to
that
for my mother’s voice?”
“Start with her. Close your eyes.”
I closed them. I opened them. “My mother’s voice?”
“Do it!”
For a while I heard James Brown, but not Mom. Someone just below us kept playing his song, “I Feeeeeel Good …” over and over. The air was so full of sharp smells (cooking meat, smoke, metal, old clothes) that I sniffed more than listened.
That changed. Somehow the noise suddenly moved a step closer. As if one moment it was out there, the next
here,
inches away, close enough to feel its breath on my face. Although my eyes were closed, I felt a kind of vertigo. My brain didn’t even have to click in before my stomach wailed, “Get back!” Only here it wasn’t fear of falling from a great height, it was because noise had so totally invaded and taken over. Perhaps we need five senses because singly they’re too intense and concentrated. Hearing alone, for example, would drive us mad. Life lived only through sound. That’s what vertigo is—suddenly life goes only through the eyes and it’s too much.
I’d been told to concentrate on one, and for the few pitiful seconds I could do it, it was a terrifying look over the edge. Was life just keeping common things like this at bay; the sound turned down, gloves on so we don’t have to touch it directly?
“Maybe God is volume, Harry.”
The first thing I saw on opening my eyes was a hot dog that’d been immaculately conceived in Nicholas’s hand.
“What do you mean? Like sound, or size?”
Chomp chomp. He shrugged. “Part of what you were thinking was right, but only part.
“Hey! Here comes another train! Come on, jump!”
Suddenly the boy leapt off the station roof, down twenty feet to the top of a subway car pulling into the station.
I ran to the edge, but wasn’t about to take
that
plunge, Venasque or not.
“Jump down!”
“No way!”
There was a “beep” and then the car doors slid shut with a hard clunk. Nicholas crouched down, still holding his hot dog. Stuffing the rest of it in his mouth, he brushed his hands off and waved to me.
“Don’t be surprised!”
The train started out of the station.
I cupped hands around my mouth. “Surprised by what?”
“That all the words are God!”
He was gone. I was on a roof in Vienna thinking about God, how to get down, and what I was going to tell the boy’s parents.
That last question was answered ten minutes after I’d climbed down, found a telephone booth, and called the Easterlings to tell them their child had last been seen playing hood ornament on top of a moving subway car.
“Hello?”
“Nicholas?”
“Hi, Harry.”
“You’re home already?”
“I can’t talk now, Harry. My favorite cartoon show is on.” He hung up. I heard my coin drop down into the belly of the telephone.
NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS, EARTHQUAKES, LOVE
triangles, dead shamans, showering dogs, and magical children (among other things)
can
take their toll on one. Despite them, I walked back to the hotel that afternoon feeling vibrant but composed. Life is best when it’s surprising and you’re looking forward to what’s next. I was convinced expectation is the best we can ever hope for. I knew we were going toward something momentous in Saru. Already enough mystery and purpose had revealed itself on the way there to indicate it was a hell of a lot more than building yet another rich man’s tower.
“Christ, Harry, where’ve you been? We’re having dinner tonight with Prince Hassan, the Sultan’s son.” Fanny was lying naked on the
big bed watching a tennis match on television. She didn’t look like she was in an extreme hurry.
“I thought we were supposed to meet him in Zell am See.”
“We were, but he’s flying over to have dinner with us. I guess there’s a Saruvian restaurant in Vienna?”
In the midst of taking off my hat, I stopped when I heard
that.
“It’s not called the ‘Bazz’af,’ is it?”
“Yes, I think so. Why are you yelling?”