Chapter 18 Sharing a Bed
It hadn’t occurred to Jimmy that Claude would step barefoot on the bra in the dark—on his way to take a whiz in the WC—or that when Claude turned on the hall light and saw what he’d stepped on, the sight of such a salacious brassiere would cause him to piss in his pajamas.
(Jimmy and Jolanda slept soundly through Claude’s traumatic encounter.)
On Saturday morning, either Frau Holzinger or Siegfried was the first to find the fallen bra. Surely the Frau would have known whose bra it was. She’d no doubt returned it to its rightful owner. Even Claude could tell it was way too big a bra to be Jolanda’s.
The commotion Jimmy heard in the hall, the dialogue he woke up to, was not about the bra.
“Nicht Dienstag, nicht Mittwoch, nicht Donnerstag,” Frau Holzinger was saying.
(“Not Tuesday, not Wednesday, not Thursday,” the Frau was bitching.) “Samstag ist ungewohnlich,” she complained. (“Saturday is unusual.”)
“Kennedys Tod ist auch ungewohnlich,” Jimmy heard Annelies say to his landlady. (“Kennedy’s death is also unusual.”) Jimmy could see Annelies in the panel of frosted glass on his bedroom door.
“Trotzdem ungewohnlich,” he heard the Frau say, but he couldn’t see her; she was probably preparing Siegfried’s Frühstück in the kitchen. (“Still unusual,” the widow Holzinger had said about Fr?ulein Eissler’s impromptu visit to the Schwindgasse on a Saturday morning.)
Annelies pointed to herself in the oval of frosted glass.
“Ich bin ungewohnlich,” she said, referring to herself.
(“I’m unusual,” she said, opening Jimmy’s door.) She stuck one bare foot in his bedroom, wiggling her painted toenails.
“Are you decent?” Annelies asked. It was an old-fashioned thing to say—like something Jimmy’s grandmother might have said, though Constance wouldn’t have wiggled her toes.
“Yes! Come in!” Jimmy cried. He got out of bed in the T-shirt and sweatpants he’d slept in. He was worried that his breath was bad; he hadn’t brushed his teeth. And Jimmy could see himself in the double-door mirrors on his wardrobe closet; he looked terrible.
“You’ve had a visitor—her perfume is furchtbar,” Fr?ulein Eissler said, shutting his bedroom door in the Frau’s inquisitive face. Annelies opened the balcony window. “That means ‘terrible,’ ” she told him.
Jimmy hoped the terrible smell was just Irmgard’s perfume, and not the result of his spraying her underarm deodorant on his typewriter keys—the unwise commingling with sausage smells from the enduring bratwurst. Jimmy simplified his explanation of Irmgard’s visit—her overpowering perfume, her account of the phone call from Jimmy’s mom—but he got bogged down in Irmgard’s story about the bullet holes.
In citing the moral of the story, Jimmy quoted what Irmgard had said to him: “Never rent a room to a Russian, unless you have rats and you want to get rid of them.”
“That’s not the moral of the story, Jimmy,” Annelies said.
“The moral of the story is that every household should have a drill.” She was sitting on his bed, pointing to her painted toenails.
“Socks, please,” she said to him, as if she’d decided to stay awhile.
“You seem okay,” she told him, while he fetched the socks.
“It’s not every day your president is assassinated,” she went on.
“Right now, you’re the only American I know in Vienna—I thought I’d check to see how you were doing. ”
“I’m fine,” Jimmy told her, but that was when they both realized he was kneeling on the floor by his bed, where he was putting a pair of his white athletic socks on her pretty feet.
“This is strange, Jimmy—the kneeling is more than a little subservient for the usual student-tutor relationship,” Fr?ulein Eissler said.
“I’m okay with it if you are,” Jimmy told her.
Of course Annelies knew all about Honor Winslow’s hopes to extricate her dear James from the draft, thus saving him from the war in Vietnam. Esther must have informed her of the pregnancy plan. Jimmy’s German tutor already knew he was supposed to knock up someone.
“Leave your bedroom door open, Jimmy,” Annelies told him when he went to the bathroom to brush his teeth and wash his face.
When he came back, she’d gotten under his bedcovers and was lying with her head on his pillow—as if she’d taken off all her clothes.
After Jimmy closed his bedroom door, Annelies got out of bed—with all her clothes on, he noticed.
Annelies told Jimmy she just wanted to be sure the Frau had seen her in his bed.
“Let the old Judenhasser imagine what she will,” Annelies said.
He’d already told Annelies what a Jew-hater Irmgard was.
“I hate Irmgard for hating you,” he’d said to Annelies, but she surprised him.
“You shouldn’t hate her. Siegfried’s mother is a sad story,” Annelies told him. “The Judenhass comes from Frau Holzinger’s generation—hate the Frau, not Irmgard,” his Jewish German tutor said.
Annelies was thinking ahead, but where she was going wasn’t evident from where she began.
For example, she suddenly said: “When the Institute for European Studies asks you if you’re sleeping with me, please tell them the truth—say you aren’t.
But leave out how I tricked Frau Holzinger into thinking we were sleeping together.
” Annelies took off his socks. It was clear she was leaving, her mission accomplished.
“Okay,” Jimmy said. The interrogation she predicted would happen before Christmas.
The dean of students at IES—Jimmy liked her, but he could never remember her name—called him in to discuss the issue.
Jimmy had followed Fr?ulein Eissler’s instructions.
He’d pointed out to the dean that Frau Holzinger and her daughter (“an angry unmarried mother”) were Jew-haters, which Annelies also told him to say.
After all, there were Jewish students in the Institute for European Studies.
What if one of the IES Jewish students had been a boarder in the Holzinger apartment?
Naturally, the dean pointed out that Frau Holzinger had seen Fr?ulein Eissler in Jimmy’s bed, under the bedcovers, but Annelies had prepared him for this line of questioning.
Jimmy told the dean how the Frau turned down the heat at night, and she often left it turned down on weekends.
Jimmy wrote under his bedcovers at night, he told the dean.
On the Saturday morning after JFK was killed, it was cold in Jimmy’s bedroom; Annelies got under the covers because she was cold.
“And when Fr?ulein Eissler visits me, for our tutorials, she always puts on a pair of my socks,” he said to the dean.
(Jimmy left out the kneeling, and the fact that he put the socks on his Jewish German tutor’s feet.)
It got a little warmer in the Schwindgasse apartment in the evenings after that.
The Frau still turned down the heat, but only a little, and she did not leave the heat turned down over the weekend.
Jimmy’s friendship with Jolanda and Claude was steadfast; they still went out together in the evenings to the Kaffeehaus Nachtmusik, but Jimmy didn’t have to write under his bedcovers anymore.
Fr?ulein Eissler had made her point. The Judenhass was still palpable in the Schwindgasse apartment, especially on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays—before, during, and immediately after his tutorials with Annelies—but the Jew word was scarcely mentioned.
Neither Frau Holzinger nor Irmgard uttered “die Jüdin” as a virtual synonym for Fr?ulein Eissler’s name; their Jew-hatred was held back.
“There’s still something I need to show you,” Annelies told Jimmy. “One night, we’ll go out together. It’ll be late.”
“How late?” Jimmy asked her, but Fr?ulein Eissler was moving on.
“As late as it is when Irmgard goes out at night, whenever she goes out—as late as that, or later,” Annelies answered.
“Okay,” Jimmy said. His tutor didn’t wait to change the subject.
The wrestlers at Turnhalle Leopold were wondering where he was, she now told Jimmy.
Leo (“Little Mirror”) himself had asked her about him.
The freestyle wrestlers, the two Soviets and the two Israelis, had been looking forward to meeting the American.
Solomon was the Israeli in Jimmy’s weight class.
He used to compete at sixty-two kilos (136.
6 pounds), Annelies told Jimmy, but she said the former Haganah fighter was heavier than that now.
(“So am I,” Jimmy told her.) Jimmy had been waiting for the Christmas break before he ventured to the gym on W?hringer Stra?e, he explained to Annelies.
Claude and Jolanda would be going home for Christmas, and Jimmy’s fellow IES students were spending the holiday in Kaprun—a ski resort in the Austrian Alps.
Young James would be alone in Vienna for half of December—a good time to work on his novel, and to meet his fellow wrestlers, he told Annelies.
Fr?ulein Eissler didn’t think the freestyle wrestlers would be going anywhere for Christmas.
The other Israeli was Simon; the bigger of the two Haganah graybeards had to weigh at least seventy-five kilos, she told Jimmy (more than 165 pounds).
Simon’s only workout partner was Sergei, the bigger of the two Soviets.
The former Red Army wrestler in Jimmy’s weight class was Zander, Fr?ulein Eissler said.