Chapter 20 Not Like Donna Reed #3
Leo Spiegel had introduced the Israeli and Russian freestyle wrestlers to the Café Meisel on W?hringer Stra?e, where all the wrestlers went after practice.
The Greco-Roman guys weren’t much fun to socialize with.
The wrestlers who were competing had to weigh in, so they weren’t drinking.
Leo was more fun; he always went to the Meisel after practice.
Even the wrestlers who weren’t competing or weighing in drank only beer, and not a lot.
But two beers were enough to make Little Mirror tell funny stories.
The beer drinkers laughed; the water drinkers were determined to be bored.
“When I was competing, I drank coffee—too much coffee,” Leo said.
“It made me want to throw everyone—anywhere, all the time!” This seemed entirely plausible to the Soviet and Israeli wrestlers and Jimmy.
They were glad Leopold Spiegel had switched to beer; they wouldn’t have wanted to socialize with him when he was wired on Viennese coffee.
The ambiance at the Café Meisel was much improved by the wrestlers who drank beer.
Sometime before the new year, Zander and Sergei said they would take Sol and Simon and Jimmy to a nightclub they knew in the Favoriten district, near the Wien Südbahnhof—the Vienna South Station.
Favoriten was the tenth district of Vienna—formerly in a Soviet-occupied sector, a workers’ district.
The nightclub was called Die ?gypterin. “The Egyptian” referred to the nightclub’s belly dancer.
Zander and Sergei doubted that she was Egyptian—she was Turkish, the Soviets said.
Belly dancers had used the stage name “Little Egypt” since the 1890s, but this belly dancer was too big to be called little.
“Calling the belly dancer ‘The Egyptian’ gives the girl some degree of anonymity,” Sergei said. The Favoriten district had a higher-than-average Muslim population for Vienna.
“The so-called Egyptian is Turkish,” Zander insisted. The Favoriten district had a sizable Turkish population. The former Red Army wrestlers had spotted some wrestlers’ mangled ears on the Turkish men watching the belly dancer. The Turks were good wrestlers, the Russians had told Jimmy.
Sol and Simon asked about the ambiance at Die ?gypterin. “Maybe a belly-dancing club in the Favoriten district isn’t the safest place for a couple of Jews,” Sol said—no Jewish-penis jokes now.
“We’re just ex-wrestlers, Sol—we’re all the same,” Zander told his workout partner. It was exactly what the Soviet had said to Jimmy.
“How big is the belly dancer?” Simon asked about The Egyptian.
“She’s in our weight class,” Sergei told his workout partner. A big girl, seventy-five kilos or 165 pounds. The Israelis said they’d test the ambiance.
Meanwhile, Hard Rain had improved the ambiance at the Kaffeehaus Nachtmusik.
Dagmar said her clientele loved having the good-natured dog visit their tables.
Dagmar’s disposition was also improved by her new dishwasher.
In his late thirties, and missing one ear, Walter was an inventive handyman.
He sized up the situation with Hard Rain and built a doghouse in the alley.
The shelter for the shepherd was enclosed in a pen—at some distance from the garbage cans, and large enough to contain a bathtub.
Walter was a fix-it man with a just-in-case mindset.
He said he didn’t want Hard Rain to be embarrassed; in the event of thunder and lightning, Walter wanted her to have a place to go.
Hard Rain liked her doghouse, and she preferred her pen to being chained up.
The German shepherd smelled better, because she was no longer sniffing around garbage cans.
Dagmar took her to a pet-grooming place on Argentinierstra?e, where Hard Rain had a dog shampoo, and she had her ears cleaned and her toenails clipped; she even got her teeth brushed.
Yet Hard Rain stared with uncertainty at the oddly disconnected bathtub in her pen—that is, when she chose to look at the tub at all.
At times, the shepherd seemed to purposely overlook or ignore the bathtub.
Jolanda and Claude and Jimmy could tell that Hard Rain was anxious about the bathtub in the Schwindgasse apartment.
When the roommates would sneak the dog along the hall, on their way in or out of the apartment, the door to the bathroom was usually open; the glance Hard Rain gave to the bathtub was both ambiguous and disconcerting.
“If only the poor girl could tell us her thoughts,” Walter said.
Walter had been “a child soldier,” Dagmar told the foreign students.
He’d been captured by the Americans and had spent the end of the war in an American POW camp.
“Lucky Walter,” Dagmar had said. Like Hard Rain, Walter couldn’t (or didn’t) tell anyone his innermost thoughts—nor did the new dishwasher speak of his missing ear.
Claude couldn’t stop obsessing about how Hard Rain would react to a thunderstorm. “For Christ’s sake, Claude—we’ll find out when it happens! There are worse places to shit than in a bathtub, you know,” Jolanda said.
“It might be the mildest February in sixty years,” Claude warned them.
“The thunder and lightning might not wait for spring—there could be a thunderstorm this winter! I just was thinking: What if Hildegund is the one who shits her brains out in a bathtub? What if Hildegund wanted us to keep the bathroom door open for her, not for Hard Rain?”
“There are no words for what a diehard optimist you are, Claude,” Jolanda told him.
That said, Claude had spontaneously set something in motion with Siegfried—he’d kindled in the five-year-old a burning desire to have a dog.
This hadn’t escaped the attention of Irmgard or Frau Holzinger.
The boy had been talking in his sleep about a Hündin—specifically, a female German shepherd—and Irmgard had discovered that Siegfried was sleeping with the family photo of that other German shepherd.
The Frau was worried that Siegfried had somehow sensed the restless ghost of that long-dead dog in the Schwindgasse apartment.
“You and your ghosts,” Irmgard said to her mother.
“That German shepherd was a female,” the Frau reminded her daughter. Jimmy had understood only this much of their German.
It was difficult for Jimmy to understand Frau Holzinger and Irmgard when they were arguing, but Claude and Jolanda translated what Irmgard told the Frau: “Siegfried doesn’t want that German shepherd—he doesn’t want your old, dead dog! Siegfried wants a new, alive Hündin!”
It was dinnertime in the Holzinger household.
Jolanda, Claude, and Jimmy were pussyfooting their way in and out of the kitchen.
Siegfried wasn’t contributing to the conversation; the five-year-old was silently eating his supper.
That was when Irmgard stepped in front of Claude, stopping him from leaving the kitchen.
“Siegfried says you gave him the idea of having his own dog,” she said to Claude.
Siegfried, mouth full, just pointed the garlic press at Claude and continued eating.
With agonizing slowness, Claude began speaking his German for toddlers.
“When I was a boy, I wanted a dog—not just any dog, but a female German shepherd,” Claude began, in such a desperate-sounding voice that Siegfried stopped eating.
“If I’d been allowed to have a dog, I might have turned out differently!
” Claude cried, while Jolanda seemed to choke back a sob.
Jolanda was gagging, or suppressing vomit, or perhaps she was acting.
This may have been a more emotional moment than the Holzingers were used to having in their kitchen.
There was a respectful (or utterly disbelieving) silence.
Jolanda was still recovering from the strained sounds she’d made; Siegfried had resumed eating.
The widow Holzinger was seeing her old, dead dog—the German shepherd in the photo Siegfried slept with.
Irmgard, Jimmy could tell, wasn’t troubling herself to imagine how Claude might have turned out differently if he’d had a dog.
Yet Irmgard Holzinger stood stone-still.
Claude had given her the idea that things might turn out differently for Siegfried if the five-year-old had a female German shepherd.
“Hausaufgaben,” Jimmy said, excusing himself as he left the kitchen.
“Homework,” he’d said, taking hold of the choked-up Jolanda by her hand.
Claude—clutching the neck of his beer bottle, as if he were strangling it—followed them.
They’d gone to the kitchen only to get some beer from the fridge; normally, the foreign students knew better than to invade the Holzingers’ space during the supper hour.
That night, the roommates took Fr?ulein Eissler’s advice: they went to the Augustinerkeller and tried to have fun, instead of doing their homework.
But three guys were looking over Jolanda in an uncomfortable way; she thought she recognized them.
Jolanda said she might have seen them with Hildegund.
“Those guys are friends of the dog beater—of the ink addict’s asshole husband,” was the way Jolanda put it.
The roommates left the Augustinerkeller and went to the Café Hawelka.
It seemed to suit them: to leave a bigger, noisier place for a smaller, quieter one.
They also liked the smaller, quieter street where the Hawelka was—the Dorotheergasse—although, when they were walking home, Claude claimed he saw the three guys from the Augustinerkeller.
Maybe those guys were following the foreign students, or so Claude feared, but Jolanda and Jimmy didn’t see them.