Chapter 17 A German Shepherd Named Hard Rain #2
“Do you mean the dog will be with you and Hildegund? Do you mean Hard Rain is in the same room where you have sex?” Claude asked Jolanda.
“Jesus Mary Joseph, Claude—I mean, does the Frau allow dogs at all? And if I ask the Frau, and she says no—then what?” Jolanda cried.
“Well, in the first place, the dog should not be in your room when you and Hildegund have sex! Hard Rain should not see that—the poor dog shouldn’t watch!” Claude declared.
“For Christ’s sake, Claude! Dogs don’t care if people have sex—dogs aren’t interested in people fucking!” Jolanda said.
“The poor dog!” Claude cried. “I’m still adjusting to a German shepherd named Hard Rain,” he said, for no known reason.
“We can chain the dog to the bicycle rack in the courtyard. It’s enclosed and Hard Rain will be safe,” Jolanda reasoned.
“The poor dog!” Claude cried. “The courtyard is cold—Hard Rain will be abandoned with a bunch of bikes!”
“Hard Rain is abandoned in an alley with a bunch of garbage!” Jolanda shouted. “Maybe the dog could stay in one of your rooms when Hildegund is visiting me,” Jolanda said.
“I’ve never slept with a German shepherd,” Claude told them.
“You never cease to surprise me, Claude,” Jolanda said.
“I just mean that Hard Rain is a big dog,” Claude pointed out.
“What if Hard Rain has to pee or something?” Jimmy asked.
The only issue was thunderstorms, or so Jolanda was told.
When there was thunder and lightning, Hildegund had said, Hard Rain cowered in a bathtub, where she would shit her brains out. As Jolanda put it to Jimmy and Claude: “In a thunderstorm, it’s best to leave the bathroom door open—to be sure Hard Rain has access to the Holzingers’ only bathtub.”
“Wait, wait, wait!” Claude said to Jolanda. “Your new girlfriend lives with a bunch of barbarians, and her dog has diarrhea in a bathtub during thunderstorms?”
The new girlfriend designation was a hard one for Jolanda to hear. It was clear to Jimmy and Claude that Jolanda was still missing Mieke.
“Winter is just beginning. Winter takes four months, or more,” James Winslow reminded his roommates.
“Thunder and lightning aren’t the usual winter weather,” he said.
He knew nothing about the winters in Vienna.
James Winslow couldn’t have explained why the idea of hiding a German shepherd in the Holzingers’ apartment appealed to him.
“I usually break up with a new girlfriend before two or three months,” Jolanda told Jimmy and Claude.
“I just never expected to break up with Mieke, but I had no idea she wanted to try it with a guy!” Jolanda lamented.
The three friends agreed that it wouldn’t work to chain Hard Rain to the bicycle rack in the courtyard.
Hard Rain was a friendly dog, but she was still a German shepherd. People are afraid of German shepherds.
Therefore, Jimmy and Claude said they would take turns concealing the German shepherd while Jolanda was having sex with Hildegund. This is the kind of thing roommates do for one another when they’re in their twenties—when thunder and lightning might be months away, a remote possibility.
After Claude and Jolanda had gone to their rooms—likely long after they were asleep—Jimmy was still writing, under his bedcovers.
In the novel he was beginning, the easy part was reimagining his grandfather as the main character.
Thomas Winslow’s benevolence as a teacher extended beyond the classroom; he was a good teacher as a father and a grandfather—he was always teaching.
In James Winslow’s first novel, the character of the beloved English teacher is a confirmed bachelor.
In an all-boys’ school, there are some faculty wives and students who think such men must be nonpracticing homosexuals.
In the novel Jimmy was writing, there would be no evidence to support such knee-jerk homophobia.
The bachelor English teacher is as asexual as Honor Winslow.
In the novel, he’s called Tom or Teacher Tom.
He seeks out the students who are lost or depressed.
He saves them with Dickens. Teacher Tom knows which Dickens novel will lift their spirits.
That night, under his bedcovers in Vienna, young James settled on the title for his first novel—The Dickens Man, he’d decided to call it.
Then Jimmy had gone to the WC down the hall; later on he’d washed his face and brushed his teeth in the bathroom across the hall from his bedroom.
He was in bed with his lights off, but he was wide awake when Irmgard came home.
She’d turned on the hall light; her big body was recognizable through the panel of frosted glass on Jimmy’s bedroom door.
He could see she was undressing herself in the hall.
She was not stripping for him—he could tell.
She was just getting undressed before she went in the bathroom, where Jimmy could hear her drawing a bath.
He got out of bed and quietly opened his door, just a crack—enough to get a look at the pile of clothes in the hall.
The clothes were redolent of the overpowering perfume Irmgard had been wearing; there was not a trace of baby powder in the strong fragrance.
Jimmy waited in his room, in the dark, until he could hear the bathtub draining. Then he turned on the lamp on his writing desk, by the window. When Irmgard emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in towels, Jimmy opened his bedroom door and saw her. She was picking up her clothes.
“Can I ask you about something? I must show you,” he told her.
“Ask me what—show me what?” she said, stepping into his room.
Jimmy was wearing just a T-shirt and some sweatpants when he struggled to remove the bad painting from the wall beside the headboard of his bed. Irmgard had to help him with the painting.
“Oh, the bullet holes. Is that all?” Irmgard asked.
She’d thrown her clothes on his bed. She’d told him most of the story before Jimmy realized there was nothing wrong with her word order in English.
“Never rent a room to a Russian, unless you have rats and you want to get rid of them,” was the way Irmgard began the story.
The Russian was kept awake because there were rats crawling between the walls.
There were rats all over the neighborhood; the rats had overrun the apartment building when Irmgard was a little girl.
“I was not much older than Siegfried when the Russian was living here,” Irmgard told him in perfect word order.
“The Russian shot the rats through the wall?” Jimmy asked her.
“Of course not! The Russian made three perfectly placed bullet holes,” she told him.
“Why didn’t he use a drill?” young James asked her.
“This is a family without a father, Jimmy—fathers are the ones who have tools. The Russian had a gun; that’s how he made the bullet holes,” Irmgard explained.
The Russian inserted some tweezers in two of the holes; the third hole was used to insert what looked like a sugar cube, which was held by the tweezers.
The sugar cube was actually rat poison. “You knew when the rats had taken the poison, because the tweezers fell back inside the bedroom,” Irmgard explained.
“Did the rats die between the walls?” Jimmy asked her.
“Of course not! The rats would have smelled awful. The poison made the rats thirsty. When the rats went outside to drink some water, they exploded in a puddle—they died outdoors,” Irmgard told him, while she was gathering up her clothes.
“Your word order is perfect. It wasn’t perfect before,” he pointed out.
“I’m tired of playing games, Jimmy—my English isn’t bad,” Irmgard admitted.
“Your mother called earlier, to speak to you. She said my English was pretty good. Your mother asked me if you were going to the gym. She wanted to know if you were wrestling. I said I didn’t think so, but I didn’t really know.
Your mother wants you to keep wrestling, you know,” she added.
“Ich wei?. I know,” Jimmy said. “I thought she might have called because Kennedy was killed. That would have been a better reason for her to call me.”
“Your mother asked me if you ever thought about Vietnam—she said you should, now that Kennedy is gone,” Irmgard told Jimmy.
“I said I didn’t think so, but I didn’t really know,” she added.
Jimmy couldn’t think of what to say, as he and Irmgard struggled to put the painting back on the wall over the bullet holes.
“Your mother asked me if you had a girlfriend, Jimmy,” Irmgard told him.
“And you said you didn’t think so, but you didn’t really know,” Jimmy ventured to say.
“Your mother asked me who I was, and I told her what my circumstances were—Siegfried, and so forth,” Irmgard said, pausing there. She was picking up her clothes again—this time, from Jimmy’s bed.
“I hope my mom didn’t ask you if you would be my girlfriend, and if you would consider getting pregnant again and giving me your baby,” young James asked Irmgard.
“I just said I didn’t think so, Jimmy,” Irmgard told him.
“I’m so sorry, Irmgard. My mother is determined to keep me from being a soldier—she’s completely obsessed about it,” Jimmy said.
“I don’t blame her, Jimmy, but it can’t be me,” Irmgard told him. She stopped in the hall, looking back at him—not a warm or welcoming look.
“Thank you—I guess now I know everything,” Jimmy said to her.
“No, you don’t know everything, Jimmy, but you know enough,” Irmgard said. Once more, there was nothing amiss with her word order. She was done playing games with him; there would be no more moviegoing in the living room, Jimmy could tell.
Back in his bedroom, Jimmy saw her black bra; it had fallen from her armful of clothes at the foot of Jimmy’s bed.
He’d had limited experience with bras. There was a distinct plunge between the cups, and a push-up aspect to the cups themselves.
He could feel there was some underwiring involved in the uplifting.
It suffices to say that Irmgard’s bra was no mere undergarment.
It was a bra that was meant to be seen, a bra you were supposed to see someone take off—or so Jimmy imagined.
James Winslow was tempted to take her bra to bed—its fragrance, its feel, inspired fantasies.
But if Irmgard was done playing games with him, as she’d put it, Jimmy sincerely tried to be done with her and her Judenhass.
Irmgard’s hatred of Jews—her anti-Semitism, or whatever you called it—made Jimmy hate her.
He was deeply ashamed of his ongoing desire for her, which seemed to contradict his hatred.
Irmgard had turned out the light in the hall, but there was sufficient light from Jimmy’s bedroom for him to see where her black bra ended up—where he threw it, in the hall, halfway between the bathroom and the WC.