Chapter 16 Bad Paintings over Bullet Holes
“Your JFK has a bug up his ass about stopping Communist expansion—a Cold War thing Kennedy got from Eisenhower, Jimmy,” Jolanda said. The Dutch girl’s idiomatic English was better than Jimmy’s.
“American imperialism won’t work in South Vietnam. French colonialism failed, you know,” Claude told Jimmy, who didn’t know. (This was before November, when South Vietnamese President Diêm would be shot and killed in a CIA-backed coup d’état.)
Jimmy was mulling over why he’d never had a girlfriend.
It was embarrassing to be a twenty-two-year-old virgin—especially in Europe; the foreign cinema he’d seen gave James Winslow the idea that European women were more sexually experienced at a younger age.
Sex and depression went together in those women Jimmy remembered most vividly from those films. Jolanda’s gloom about the breakup with her girlfriend made her more attractive to Jimmy.
Weren’t writers predetermined to be attracted to depressed women? young James was thinking. As a writer, Jimmy believed in destiny. Weren’t gloomy girls his destiny? Weren’t the great love stories the doomed ones? he was wondering.
Besides, Jimmy was in Europe. The female American students at the Institute for European Studies didn’t strike James as inclined to sex, or to depression.
Those young women were more determined to have a good time socially, as many American students tend to be—whether they’re studying at home or abroad.
Furthermore, in the novel of his life, James Winslow was imagining he was supposed to meet a tormented European woman.
He hadn’t come to Vienna to engage in a doomed relationship with a melancholic American—not that Jimmy could have found one.
He was seeking experience and cynicism. European women were supposed to be experienced and cynical.
Or was this only what a young and na?ve American thought?
In Frau Holzinger’s Schwindgasse apartment, Jimmy didn’t have far to look for an angry and depressed young woman.
Irmgard, the five-year-old Siegfried’s unmarried mother, was certainly experienced and cynical.
She’d had the sadistically inclined Siegfried; there’d been no mention of Siegfried’s father, no hints of a virgin birth.
And the way Irmgard slept (or hurled herself) on the largest of the living room sofas—lying on her back with her knees splayed apart—young James couldn’t help but imagine her as inclined to giving herself over to moments of unrestrained abandon.
Irmgard was not a morning person. She slept in. She couldn’t have had a job, Jimmy thought. He rarely saw her when she was sufficiently dressed to go out. Irmgard virtually lived on the living room sofa, always wearing one of several well-worn dressing gowns.
Frau Holzinger made Siegfried’s early-morning Frühstück—the boy’s “breakfast.” Then the Frau marched the five-year-old off to kindergarten.
On occasional afternoons, James Winslow would see Irmgard wearing normal clothes—a young mother, not much older than he was, walking Siegfried on the Schwindgasse sidewalk.
Did Irmgard attract Jimmy? Yes, in her lawless way.
And Irmgard was a big girl—her size attracted him, though she wasn’t big in a healthy way but in an unruly way.
It was Irmgard’s sadness that affected Jimmy most deeply—as much as her underlying anger made him wary of her.
Jimmy didn’t once see Irmgard strike Siegfried, or lash out at him in a physical way, but when she stepped barefoot on one of the boy’s plaster soldiers, she would utter Siegfried’s name with frightening vehemence and condemnation.
This happened a lot. Irmgard was always barefoot, and the garlic-pressed soldiers were everywhere, not only in the living room but in the crowded kitchen, or in the narrow hall that led to the foreign students’ bathroom.
(Irmgard not only bathed Siegfried in this bathtub; she often took a bath with him.)
“Siegfried!” Irmgard would cry or hiss, whenever she trod on a beheaded or amputated plaster soldier.
Sometimes she would encounter one of the military casualties while lolling or trying to sleep on the living room sofa.
“Siegfried!” Irmgard would moan, as if she were reliving the pain of childbirth—or the anguish of whatever led to Siegfried’s birth.
The only TV was in the living room. Afternoon and night, it was on the movie channel, as if there were no news, no sports, no weather—as if in Austria there were only old movies, always in German or dubbed in German.
In Austria, why was every movie that wasn’t made in the German language dubbed in German?
Why had no one told James Winslow? Jimmy was a boy who loved subtitles—he’d grown up on subtitles.
He’d imagined he would improve his German by watching American movies and reading the German subtitles. Not in Vienna.
Yet it was old American movies on Austrian television that brought Irmgard and Jimmy together, in a misleading and unsatisfying fashion.
Maybe their tortured relationship was born of mutual misunderstanding.
This could have led to shame or self-loathing.
But in the beginning, it didn’t appear that their confusion amounted to more than a language problem.
James thought Irmgard’s English—her vocabulary, in particular—was pretty good.
Her English was better than his German, though there was something willfully wrong with her word order.
Jimmy suspected Irmgard was deliberately speaking English with German word order, but it wasn’t always accurate German word order.
Was she being obstinate, or trying to be funny?
Was she baiting him to correct her? (He didn’t take the bait.) It was just awkward, at first, but Jimmy made the mistake of imagining there was something romantic about the awkwardness.
Disquietingly, Jimmy’s bedroom door had an elliptical panel of frosted glass.
The bottom of the glass panel was waist-high to the average adult.
When little Siegfried was passing Jimmy’s bedroom in the lighted hall, Jimmy couldn’t see the top of the boy’s head in the egg-shaped panel, but Siegfried would hold his hand above his head, scraping one of his plaster soldiers (or the garlic press) against the glass.
Even when Jimmy wasn’t looking at the door, he knew when the little executioner had passed.
If Jimmy didn’t see the small hand clutching the condemned soldier or the makeshift guillotine, Jimmy heard the plaster or metal scraping against the glass.
Frau Holzinger was a squat, blurry presence when she was shuffling in her slippers past Jimmy’s panel of frosted glass.
His fellow foreign students passed as quickly and were as easy to recognize; they went briskly about their business, spending as little time as possible in the Frau’s Schwindgasse apartment.
Claude passed furtively, as if the French aristocrat had stolen something and was fearful of being caught.
The very tall Jolanda—too tall for her head to appear in the frosted-glass panel—seemed more depressed and more defiantly lesbian when she was headless, and she struck Jimmy as even thinner and more physically fit without her head.
Jolanda was a cyclist. She said her bicycle pump had been stolen too many times; she no longer left it attached to her bicycle.
A machinist in Amsterdam made a protruding hand grip for the pump—a pistol grip.
Jolanda carried her bicycle pump in a holster for a handgun, hanging from the belt on her jeans.
Through the frosted-glass panel on Jimmy’s bedroom door, he could tell if Jolanda was wearing her bicycle pump in the holster or not.
As for Irmgard, there was no mistaking her for anyone else.
Irmgard wasn’t as tall as Jolanda; only the very top of Irmgard’s head was above the panel of glass.
And Irmgard always paused at Jimmy’s door; she squared her broad shoulders to the egg-shaped panel and leaned face-first against the door.
When she opened her mouth, her breath fogged the glass.
The first time this happened, James expected her to say something or to knock on his door, but she didn’t.
Before Irmgard moved on, she turned her body in profile to the glass oval, where she paused again.
Notwithstanding the loose fit of Irmgard’s dressing gown, the contours of her big breasts were clearly defined through the frosted glass.
What was James Winslow to make of this? Naturally, it aroused him, while at the same time Jimmy could imagine Irmgard as akin to the witchlike Valkyries—the scary maidens of Odin who select the soldiers to be slain in battle and escort them to Valhalla.
And from the beginning, Irmgard used the du word with the foreign students.
Sie was the formal or more respectful word for “you”—du was more familiar, or the word one would use to address a child.
Because he’d heard her say “du” to Claude and Jolanda, Jimmy didn’t think Irmgard was being either disrespectful or flirtatious when she said “du” to him.
It was late one night when Jimmy saw her big body pressed against the oval panel on his bedroom door; he watched her out-of-focus face come into view, her breath fogging the frosted glass. “Schl?fst du?” Irmgard asked, surprising him. (“Are you sleeping?”)
“Nein, ich schreibe,” Jimmy answered. (“No, I’m writing.”)
“Mochtest du mit mir ins Kino gehen?” Irmgard asked. Before he could reply, she translated herself into English, being weird about the word order. “Would you like with me to the movies go?”
“Ja, gern,” Jimmy said quickly. (“I would like.”)
“Jetzt,” she said, standing up straight and showing him her breasts in profile before moving away. (“Now,” she’d said.) At first, Jimmy had thought Irmgard meant going out to the movies, not watching a movie on TV.