Chapter 15 Over the Phone #2
James Winslow would remember Bruges, in northwestern Belgium.
(Perhaps the ship from Scotland had landed in Oostende?) Bruges was a medieval city; there were lots of canals.
Young James was excited to be around people who weren’t speaking English.
He tried to talk to a young chambermaid who spoke Flemish; they discovered they both spoke bad German.
She was pretty, but she was missing an eyetooth.
(To a New Hampshire boy, this made her look like a pretty hockey player.) They kissed on a bridge over one of the canals.
That was all, only a kiss. Jimmy Winslow would remember Bruges and the Flemish chambermaid who kissed him—his first foreign experience in a foreign country.
The IES students traveled along the Rhine.
The historical river came with consequences—lots of cathedrals, many lectures, more tuning-out.
Did they travel by boat, by train, by bus—all three?
James Winslow wouldn’t remember. On their way to Vienna, Jimmy made two friends among the IES students.
One was a handsome and entertaining Jewish boy from Chicago.
The other was a Cornell student who’d grown up in Ithaca; like Jimmy, he wanted to be a writer.
Their German was better than Jimmy’s; he would learn from them.
Two American friends were enough, Jimmy decided.
The Institute for European Studies arranged for their students to board with families in Vienna.
James Winslow wanted to distance himself from his fellow American students.
He wanted to meet his family and see where in the city he would be living.
Most of all, he was looking forward to meeting his Jewish German tutor.
Regarding how to contact Fr?ulein Eissler, Esther had been unusually explicit to Jimmy’s mother.
“Tell the kid to call Annelies as soon as he has settled in with his family in Vienna,” Esther had written.
As a writer in the making, James Winslow had written Fr?ulein Eissler’s phone number everywhere.
He’d even carved her phone number with a knife on the case carrying his portable typewriter.
The IES students had teased Jimmy about lugging his old Underwood with him, but you wouldn’t ship a typewriter in a steamer trunk, would you?
And if young James bought a new portable typewriter in Vienna, wouldn’t it have a German keyboard?
(Such was the would-be writer’s thought process that led him to tote the battered typewriter through Europe.)
Along the Rhine, Jimmy wrapped a leftover chunk of sausage in wax paper.
He saved the sausage in the Underwood—in the hollowed-out area where the typewriter’s keys were nestled closely together.
(The bratwurst in Germany may have made a more enduring impression on him than the lectures.) The smell of sausage would linger eternally on the keys of James Winslow’s little typewriter.
He believed that once he was settled in with his family in Vienna and arranged his things in his room, he would find a way to deodorize the Underwood.
He didn’t anticipate how long it would take him to get accustomed to Frau Holzinger’s family in the widow’s apartment on the Schwindgasse.
Jimmy’s sausage-smelling typewriter would wait.
And young James didn’t know he would be sharing the Holzingers’ apartment with two other students—not fellow Americans, not from the Institute for European Studies.
They were foreign exchange students, studying at the University of Vienna—a young woman from the Netherlands, a young man from France.
Jolanda Lammers was from Amsterdam. A tall, thin girl—her angular face was handsome in a boyish, defiant way.
A breakup with her girlfriend had precipitated Jolanda’s coming to Vienna.
(Jolanda was very attractive to Jimmy, in her unapproachable way.) Claude Guilbert was from Paris, where he’d tired of his aristocratic family’s matchmaking.
Claude’s parents, in league with his uncles and aunts, were always introducing him to the marriageable daughters of other Parisian aristocrats.
(Jimmy tried to refrain from suggesting Claude should meet Chantal Beaudette.) Naturally, Claude and Jolanda were fluent in German; their classes at the university were in German.
And those two spoke excellent English. To young James, Jolanda and Claude were models of European sophistication.
They shared a pair of rooms adjacent to the Holzingers’ kitchen.
There was no door between their two rooms—just a narrow doorway, with a curtain.
Jolanda had the room with the window, overlooking the Schwindgasse sidewalk.
She was trying to give up smoking, Jolanda explained.
“When I need a cigarette, I exhale out the window,” she told Jimmy.
“I can still smell the smoke through the curtain,” Claude said.
“I can hear you when you beat off, Claude,” Jolanda told him.
“I hear you sometimes, Jolanda,” Claude said.
“I hear Claude every time,” Jolanda told Jimmy.
Claude and Jolanda had been in residence with the Holzingers for only a week before James Winslow arrived, yet those two already resembled a long-married, contentious couple.
In one area, Claude and Jolanda were united; they agreed about the dysfunctional nature of the Holzinger family, and they’d learned the house rules.
(Jimmy thought Claude and Jolanda were the best thing about his year abroad, so far.)
“We foreign students are allowed to make local calls from the landlady’s phone in the living room,” Claude told Jimmy.
“Frau Holzinger usually hangs around and listens to your call,” Jolanda added. Claude nodded.
Frau Holzinger didn’t speak or understand a word of English, as young James discovered when he asked her if he could use her phone in the living room to call Fr?ulein Eissler.
Jimmy confused the word for “private tutor” (Hauslehrerin) with the word for “landlady” (Hausbesitzerin).
He’d asked his landlady if he could use her phone to call his landlady.
After this confusion was cleared up, Frau Holzinger lingered in the living room during Jimmy’s first conversation with Fr?ulein Eissler, who spoke English with precise deliberation and a strong Austrian accent.
“We will spend six tutorial hours a week together—three times a week, two hours at a time,” Annelies Eissler began. “It will work best for you if we do it three days in a row,” she said.
“Three days in a row,” young James repeated. He was already infatuated with Fr?ulein Eissler’s voice.
“That way, it’s more intense,” she said.
“More intensive?” Jimmy asked her—what he thought she meant.
“More intensive und more intense,” Annelies Eissler insisted.
Her voice was giving him a hard-on in his landlady’s living room, where Frau Holzinger frowned at him—as if she doubted this was a local call.
She was a doomed-looking widow, James Winslow was thinking—the way he would describe her in writing, he thought.
Evidently, Frau Holzinger didn’t like her foreign students to make complicated calls—not even locally.
“And where would our tutorials take place—where would I meet you?” Jimmy asked his Jewish German tutor.
“Where you sleep,” Annelies answered. Her voice had a possibly derisive tone—as if she’d said, In your dreams, James Winslow was thinking (or writing). Was Fr?ulein Eissler mocking him, or had he just misheard her? “You have a room, don’t you? I presume you sleep somewhere,” she said.
Jimmy was watching the widow Holzinger. The Frau was fussing with the ancient and soiled antimacassars on the arms and headrests of the sofas and chairs.
No one liked the living room. Jimmy and Claude and Jolanda were welcome to use it, but up to now the foreign students went there only when they needed to make a call.
Frau Holzinger herself didn’t appear to like the living room, although she was often in it, despairing over the shabby furniture—or despairing over Irmgard, her unmarried daughter.
The daughter was a single mother who seemed angry and depressed.
She was often sleeping on one of the sofas, lying on her back in such splayed disarray that Jimmy more than once imagined she’d been raped and murdered there.
Her five-year-old son, Siegfried, sadistically slaughtered his armies of plaster soldiers on the living room rug.
Young James and his fellow students would be wary of new casualties during their discomforting phone calls—their discomfort caused by Frau Holzinger’s impatience for the calls to be fertig (“finished”).
Across the hall from Jimmy’s bedroom was a bathroom, which he shared with Jolanda, Claude, and Siegfried.
Siegfried’s depressed and angry mother bathed him in the bathtub.
As the widow Holzinger had explained, the foreign students’ bathroom was the only one with a tub.
The Frenchman was morbidly afraid of Siegfried.
In addition to the ceaseless carnage caused by the boy in the living room, the foreign students found his decapitated (or otherwise amputated) soldiers in their bathtub.
The enterprising child used a garlic press to maim his soldiers.
For some reason, the garlic press made Jimmy more afraid of Siegfried’s unmarried mother, Irmgard.
There was a toilet, solely a water closet, farther along the hall from Jimmy’s bedroom.
James, Jolanda, and Claude were allowed to make coffee or tea in the Holzinger family’s kitchen, where they also kept beer in the fridge.
Where the Holzingers slept was off-limits to the foreign students, who knew there was another bathroom in the Holzinger apartment.
But the students never saw it; they only knew it didn’t have a tub.
As a foreign student, Jimmy was allowed to have visitors in his room.
“Up to a point,” as the Frau had told Claude and Jolanda.
But young James was uncomfortable at the prospect of having his German tutorials in his bedroom.
Jimmy asked Annelies Eissler if she thought the institute had a classroom to spare—a room at IES.
But she refused to set foot in the Institute for European Studies—at that time in Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Platz.
Jimmy had just arrived in Vienna; he didn’t know who Karl Lueger was.
Der schone (“the handsome”) Karl, once mayor of Vienna, was a former leader and the founder of the Christian Social Party.
Karl Lueger’s populist and anti-Semitic politics were praised in Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
In Fr?ulein Eissler’s opinion, Lueger’s Christian Social Party had been an influence on Germany’s National Socialism.
“The handsome Karl was a model for the Nazis,” was the unambiguous way Jimmy’s Jewish German tutor put it.
“Der schone Karl has a square named after him—fuck Lueger-Platz!” Fr?ulein Eissler cried.
Although Frau Holzinger didn’t understand a word of English, the eavesdropping widow could hear Jimmy’s tutor screaming on the phone.
There was a statue of the handsome Karl in Lueger-Platz, and a section of the Ringstra?e was named for the Judenhasser—the “Jew-hater,” as Annelies called him. She wasn’t equivocal in her remarks.
The historian William L. Shirer would write of Karl Lueger: “His opponents, including the Jews, readily conceded that he was at heart a decent… tolerant man.” Annelies Eissler conceded no such thing.
She cited two Jewish writers who sounded equivocal about Lueger. Amos Elon noted: “Lueger’s anti-Semitism was of a homespun, flexible variety—one might almost say gemütlich.”
Fr?ulein Eissler translated gemütlich as “good-natured.”
Stefan Zweig, who grew up in Vienna when Lueger was mayor, had this to say: “His city administration was perfectly just and even typically democratic.”
Fr?ulein Eissler loathed Lueger, unequivocally.
“He voted for a bill to restrict the immigration of Russian and Romanian Jews—how ‘perfectly just’ and ‘typically democratic’ is that?” Annelies asked.
“Und Lueger created a pun, in reference to all the Jews in Budapest—he called the Hungarian capital Judapest. How ‘flexible’ and ‘good-natured’ is that?”
All this was said before Jimmy met Fr?ulein Eissler in his bedroom on the Schwindgasse. James Winslow was a young American writer who hadn’t written anything yet. He was just a kid. Like a kid, he was falling in love with his Jewish German tutor over the phone.