Chapter 21 Not an Egyptian #4
“The way you’re breathing, you sound like you’re going to throw up—you should go outside and get some fresh air!” Claude told Jolanda.
“If I go outside, I could be raped or beaten to death,” Jolanda reminded Claude. Leo got out of his chair and was pacing around the table; he lightly touched Sol first, on one shoulder.
“No one will hurt you when we’re close to you,” Sol said to Jolanda. Little Mirror was bouncing on the balls of his feet; he patted Simon’s head.
“We lure the dishwasher and her thugs,” Simon told Jolanda. Leo had moved on to Zander, pulling the Soviet’s ear.
“If Jim was on crutches, like he was injured, and you were alone with just Jim and Claude—well, you get the idea, don’t you?” Zander asked Jolanda. Kleiner Spiegel put both his hands on Sergei’s shoulders.
“But we’ll know where you are—we’ll get there in time,” Sergei said. Sergei was sitting next to Jolanda, who sat with the palms of her hands pressed flat on the table, as if she alone kept the table from drifting away.
“What’s wrong with the table? Is the table levitating?” Claude cried.
“There are so many hard-ons under the table, Claude. I was worried the table was rising,” Jolanda told him. Claude looked under the table.
“I’m on crutches—just pretending to be injured, right?” Jimmy asked his teammates, all of them nodding. Little Mirror’s hands were on Claude’s shoulders. Claude had spotted no evidence of hard-ons under the table, which wasn’t rising.
“You look like you can run, Claude. Are you a good runner?” Leo asked him.
“It’s the only thing I’m good at—just running!” Claude lamented.
“Where will we be when Hildegund and her thugs attack us?” Jolanda asked. She was looking at Leo, the setup man. Jolanda flinched when Kleiner Spiegel held her wrists, the way wrestlers do.
“Between the Augustinerkeller and the Hawelka, but closer to the Hawelka—because the Dorotheergasse is a darker street,” Leo told her.
“The Eissler says a darker street is less conspicuous,” Sergei said.
“The Eissler means the Augustinerstra?e would be more conspicuous than the Dorotheergasse,” Zander explained to Jolanda.
“Annelies says Hildegund and her thugs have been hanging out around the Turnhalle and the Café Meisel,” Sol said.
“This means they know when Jim is with us—when you and Claude are alone,” Simon told Jolanda. Leo was too agitated to sit down.
“It won’t matter what they know when we eliminate them!
” Little Mirror cried. He was still bouncing on the balls of his feet when Jolanda pushed back her chair and stood up from the table.
The way Kleiner Spiegel danced in circles, Jolanda waited until his back was turned to her.
Then she bent her knees and lifted him; with her long arms locked around his waist, she bent over him and kissed his neck.
The suplay-meister was a Greco guy; he’d expected to be thrown, not kissed.
When Jolanda gently put him down, Kleiner Spiegel was speechless; he stood as still as a statue.
“Thank you, Leo—I love you!” Jolanda said. Jimmy and his teammates could see this meant almost as much to Little Mirror as her kissing him.
“I love you, too, Leo!” Claude cried, bursting into a flood of tears.
It was not unnoticed by Jimmy how Jolanda kept hugging Claude until Claude could stop crying.
“I want this to be over!” Claude kept saying, but Jimmy’s teammates knew the details of the setup required rehearsal; like wrestling, the setup needed more practice.
“We’ll be ready after Easter,” was all Annelies would say.
Easter was early that year, the last weekend in March.
Ash Wednesday was in the middle of February—in a Catholic country, noticeable by the gray smudges on the foreheads of one’s fellow passengers on the Stra?enbahn.
The roommates saw the ashy smear on Siegfried’s forehead after the Frau brought him home from Mass; the little soldier looked like he’d been singed by gunpowder.
While the Frau was busy burning sausages at the stove, the five-year-old beckoned Jimmy (with his toy shepherd) to where the boy sat at the kitchen table.
Whispering slowly, as if he were confiding to Claude, Siegfried said he’d been praying for a dog—a female German shepherd.
Jolanda and Claude had made plans for the long Easter weekend.
They wanted to take Hard Rain to the mountains to let her play in the snow.
In Zell am See, they’d found a Gasthof that welcomed dogs.
This was in the Kitzbühel Alps, accessible by train from Vienna.
Jimmy, of course, intended to stay in the city.
“It’ll be a good time to write,” he’d told Fr?ulein Eissler.
“You and your writing, Jimmy. You’re a Pferd mit Scheuklappen,” Annelies said. (A “horse with blinders.”)
According to Dagmar, her mother’s dog with balls showed no sign of dying soon—nor did her mother.
Dagmar had stopped flirting with Jimmy, who assumed her interest had been feigned or fleeting, but Jolanda said the widow manager’s hopes were dashed on the night she got a look at Fr?ulein Eissler.
“Dagmar knows she can’t compete with a hottie like Annelies,” Jolanda told Jimmy.
Claude shed more light on Jolanda’s observation.
The night Anneliese picked up Jimmy at the Kaffeehaus to go see the prostitutes, Dagmar had asked Claude and Jolanda who the pretty woman was.
“Oh, Annelies is Jimmy’s German tutor—he’s gaga about her,” Jolanda told the widow manager.
“If they’re not already fucking, they soon will be. ”
When Claude gave Jolanda away, Jimmy asked her why she would say such a thing to Dagmar.
“I didn’t like how she was flirting with you, Jimmy.
I don’t think she was sincere enough about it,” Jolanda said.
At times, Jimmy’s junior year abroad would be lonely and confounding, but he made two friends who’d be his friends for life.
Claude and Jolanda made Jimmy’s foreignness bearable.
It would help him to see himself as a horse with blinders—a good analogy for a working novelist, Jimmy realized.
As things would turn out, Claude and Jolanda wouldn’t get to go to Zell am See for the long Easter weekend. (Not with all the practicing.)
March in Vienna didn’t feel like spring.
“No thunderstorms today,” Claude kept saying every day, for the first week of March.
For a while, Dagmar didn’t play “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” at the café.
Jolanda and Dagmar said they needed a break from the Bob Dylan song.
Jimmy and Claude missed hearing it. Who knew what Hard Rain thought about it?
When the Soviet med students brought the wooden crutches to the Turnhalle Leopold, they made sure Helene and the hairdressers saw them. “Who are the crutches for?” Helene had asked them.
“Injuries happen—the crutches are just in case,” Sergei said.
“Knee injuries are inevitable,” Zander told Helene.
“Animals!” a hairdresser, washing a lady’s hair, called out to the Russian wrestlers, who knew the hair-washing used up the hot water.
The choreography with the crutches required rehearsing.
It was easy for Jimmy to learn how to use the crutches like someone with a knee injury.
The passing off of one crutch to Claude on a dead run took more time.
Like Hard Rain, Claude didn’t like the feel of the wrestling mat—either in socks or barefoot.
As for swinging one crutch like a baseball bat, Claude had never swung a baseball bat; he had to practice the grip.
Annelies wanted Jolanda to practice getting her bicycle pump out of the holster when the holster was down around her ankles.
“If one of the thugs pulls your jeans down, the holster won’t be where you’re used to it,” Fr?ulein Eissler told her.
Unlike Claude and Hard Rain, Jolanda liked the feel of the wrestling mat.
In front of the wrestlers, she was brave about lying on her back on the mat—with her six-gun holster and her jeans down around her ankles.
Jolanda accepted this as part of the rehearsals; the wrestlers would see her flopping around on her back in her panties.
But Jolanda drew the line about the wrestlers seeing her when she was sitting on a toilet in one of the crapper stalls with no doors.
“No looking and no listening!” she called from the wide-open locker room.
When Jimmy and Fr?ulein Eissler went together to the Turnhalle Leopold, they got dark looks from Helene and her hairdressers.
Annelies didn’t resemble Jimmy’s usual workout partners—not that Claude and Jolanda looked like wrestlers.
When it was finally time to act out Jimmy’s knee injury, Helene and her hairdressers had grown used to Annelies—they’d even stopped giving the hairy eyeball to Claude and Jolanda.
Helene and her hairdressers were used to the way the wrestlers screamed when they were taking cold showers.
There was never any hot water at the end of the day, not after the hairdressers had been washing hair since the morning.
But the way Leo had coached Jimmy to scream was a higher pitch of agony than Helene and her hairdressers had heard before.
There was also the sound the ice machine made in the locker room when the wrestlers used it—the ice scattering on the bathroom tiles, where Hard Rain chomped on the fallen cubes and Jimmy just kept screaming.