Chapter 16 Bad Paintings over Bullet Holes #3
“It’s not Siegfried’s fault that he’s Siegfried,” Claude strangely said.
Jolanda and Jimmy knew what Claude meant.
The boy’s pent-up frustrations were understandable.
Siegfried was blond and blue-eyed, a pale wraith of a boy; his mother and grandmother were heavyset, with brown hair and eyes.
Siegfried must have wondered where he came from, or where he belonged.
“It’s too bad you can’t adopt Siegfried, Jimmy—it would be a way out for both of you,” Jolanda said. At the time, the idea of anyone adopting Siegfried seemed unlikely to James Winslow—if not as far-fetched as Jimmy knocking up Mieke while Jolanda held Mieke’s head and talked to her.
At night, Jolanda locked her bicycle to a rack in the enclosed courtyard of the Schwindgasse apartment building.
Jimmy and Claude could tell that Jolanda liked carrying her bicycle pump with the pistol grip like a six-gun in a holster.
“The pump extends, you know—it’s like a club that gets longer,” Jolanda explained.
“It works well as a weapon. First you go for his eyes, and when he raises his hands to protect his face, you kneecap him—or you go for his balls,” Jolanda said.
She talked tough, but Jolanda was an inscrutable girl; Jimmy couldn’t tell if she was speaking speculatively or from experience.
When they were alone, Jimmy and Claude talked about it.
“I’m betting ‘from experience,’ as you say,” Claude said.
Sometimes, when he was half-asleep, Jimmy thought he smelled Jolanda’s cigarette smoke all the way from her balcony window, even when Jimmy thought his balcony window was closed.
The Holzingers’ apartment was on the second floor.
In the event of a fire, the Schwindgasse sidewalk wasn’t far below.
Jolanda worried that someone could climb into her balcony window from the sidewalk.
“A guy could reach the balcony if he sat on another guy’s shoulders, or he could stand on the seat of a motorcycle parked on the sidewalk,” Jolanda told Jimmy and Claude.
“I think I would hear you being raped, Jolanda,” Claude assured her. “I would go get Jimmy, who’s a wrestler. Jimmy would wrestle the guy into submission. Then you could beat him to death, or destroy his balls, with your bicycle pump,” Claude elaborated.
“Don’t try to make me look forward to it, Claude,” Jolanda said.
Most mornings, James Winslow would walk with Claude to a streetcar stop on the Opernring, but Claude and Jimmy took the Stra?enbahn in opposite directions on the Ringstra?e.
One afternoon, walking home alone, Claude had encountered some troublemakers—when he was crossing the Karlsplatz, near the Technische Universit?t.
It was unclear to Claude if they were students at the university.
They were young men with an Austrian predisposition to xenophobia, and Claude was small and furtive.
Claude may or may not have looked like a Parisian aristocrat, but he didn’t look Viennese.
Claude’s German was good, but when he spoke, you could hear his French accent.
From one of the aggressive young men, Claude had heard the Ausl?nder word.
(In Vienna, “foreigner” wasn’t said in a nice way.) One of the young men asked Claude if he was jüdisch, another one asked if he was homosexuell.
“The standard questions, the usual xenophobes,” Claude said.
Jimmy and Jolanda were very fond of Claude, but he was anxious all the time—for good reason.
As time went on and the weather got colder, Frau Holzinger started turning the heat down at night when she and Siegfried went to bed.
Claude, Jimmy, and Jolanda then went out together, usually to a Kaffeehaus on the corner of the Schwindgasse and Argentinierstra?e.
The foreign students needed a warm place to do their homework, or for James Winslow to write.
Jolanda toted her bicycle pump with the pistol grip in her six-gun holster.
She said Claude shouldn’t go out alone at night.
“I hope you’re not writing about my rejecting you, and how you want me all the time,” Jolanda said, whenever she saw Jimmy writing.
“That’s the ending—I’m not there yet,” the young writer replied. Now that Fr?ulein Eissler was Jimmy’s German tutor, he was wanting her all the time—he wasn’t wanting Jolanda the way he used to. (Jimmy still thought of Irmgard as a more realistic possibility.)
James Winslow’s first tutorial with Fr?ulein Eissler, in his bedroom at the Schwindgasse apartment, had caused quite a stir.
Fr?ulein Eissler had insisted on two-hour sessions on the late afternoons and early evenings of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
This meant that Jimmy’s tutorials chaotically coincided with the preparation and serving of Siegfried’s supper, where the mother and grandmother ate their fill along with the murderous five-year-old.
Siegfried rarely relinquished his grip on the garlic press, not even when he was eating.
At 4 P.M., when Fr?ulein Eissler arrived, the narrow hall outside James Winslow’s bedroom already reeked of frying bratwurst; the sauerkraut was reheated, every night, in a double boiler on the stove.
“A bit early for Abendessen, isn’t it?” Fr?ulein Eissler asked Jimmy, on her first visit.
“There’s a five-year-old,” young James explained.
“Yes, I’ve just met Siegfried, and his garlic press,” Fr?ulein Eissler replied.
She was looking around Jimmy’s bedroom; she’d not yet taken off her coat. “Do the mother and grandmother always eat with the boy?” she asked. James nodded. “Does the mother ever get dressed?” Fr?ulein Eissler asked.
“Not usually,” Jimmy said. He was looking at his tutor’s small, pretty feet; she was barefoot and her toenails were painted a magenta color. Frau Holzinger made everyone leave their shoes or boots on the overlarge doormat at the entrance to the apartment.
“I’ll ask you to let me wear a pair of your socks, preferably white, while I’m here,” Fr?ulein Eissler told Jimmy.
She kept her coat on, still looking all around.
There was a queen-size bed with an ornate headboard, like one belonging to someone of Jimmy’s grandparents’ generation.
There was an enormous wardrobe closet, with floor-length mirrors on the double doors—perhaps intended for a fashion-conscious woman who changed her clothes four times a day.
There was a desk heaped with Jimmy’s homework and his writing notebooks.
(When he wrote at night, he was afraid the tapping of his typewriter’s keys would wake up Claude or Jolanda.) At the desk by the balcony window was a rigidly upright wooden chair.
Last, Fr?ulein Eissler assessed what she called the “settee” or the “love seat”—a straight-backed sofa for two, with uncomfortable wooden arms. By the uninviting sofa was a glass-topped table, too slippery for Jimmy’s writing notebooks and poorly lit.
Fr?ulein Eissler sighed, finally taking off her coat, which she put on the bed. Pointing to the settee and the glass-topped table, she said: “We’ll try doing this on the love seat, but I have my doubts.”
They’d no sooner sat down on the love seat than Fr?ulein Eissler noticed the large painting on the wall, to one side of the bed’s headboard.
This was a cheap painting you could buy in a tourist shop, a stylized rendition of the white Lipizzaner stallions in the Winter Riding School in the Hofburg—Vienna’s Spanish Riding School for classical dressage.
(The Lipizzaner stallions and their riders were a tourist attraction—one the IES students would go see, but James Winslow wasn’t interested in.)
“There must be something behind that awful painting—something Frau Holzinger is trying to hide,” Fr?ulein Eissler said.
She got up and peeked behind the painting.
“Bullet holes,” she said, showing him the holes.
“The Schwindgasse was in the Russian sector of occupation, after the war. Was Frau Holzinger’s late husband a soldier?
They were probably Nazis. I have friends I can ask,” Fr?ulein Eissler told young James.
“Sehr wienerisch, very Viennese—bad paintings over bullet holes!” she exclaimed.
Was this a common occurrence in the Russian zone of occupation?
James Winslow would ask his German tutor.
There was something merely teacherly, even perfunctory, in Fr?ulein Eissler’s answer.
In 1945, the Allies had determined the four zones of occupation in Vienna.
The Americans and British chose the best residential sections in the city.
The French occupied the shopping areas. The Soviets took the industrial neighborhoods, where the workers were, but they also settled themselves around the Inner City—near the embassies and government buildings, including the Schwindgasse.
Fr?ulein Eissler gave Jimmy the impression that it didn’t matter anymore, since the occupation was over.
The bullet holes hidden by the Lipizzaner stallions were the reason James Winslow and Annelies Eissler were standing next to his bed when they heard the knocking on Jimmy’s door.
Jolanda and Claude usually didn’t knock.
One of them would quietly open Jimmy’s door, which had no lock, and wiggle the fingers of one hand.
If Jimmy was asleep, or writing at his desk by the window, he never saw the inquiring hand.
Jolanda or Claude would quietly close his door and go away.
If Jimmy was naked, he would say, “Just a minute!” If he was available and presentable, he invited them in.
Now he recognized their figures behind the frosted glass—the headless Jolanda, the wraithlike Claude.
Young James understood the unaccustomed formality of their knocking on his door.
Those two must have wanted to get a look at his Jewish German tutor.