Chapter 18 Sharing a Bed #3
Claude said the French had some good downhill skiers.
Even Jolanda was somewhat interested in the Winter Games.
“The Dutch skate—not me, but other Dutch people do,” she said, sighing.
Jimmy and Claude were worried about Jolanda.
They could see it wasn’t going well with Hildegund.
While Jimmy and Claude had grown attached to Hard Rain, Jolanda had lost interest in her tattooed dishwasher.
What would happen to Hard Rain when Jolanda dumped the dishwasher?
(This is what Jimmy and Claude were also worrying about.)
It was Claude’s turn to have nightmares with Hard Rain.
Jimmy was alone in his bed when he woke up knowing it was preternaturally cold in his room; he could feel a draft from the balcony window by his writing desk.
There was a nearby streetlight on the Schwindgasse.
Jimmy could see the ghost sitting at his writing desk—she was smoking, blowing her smoke out the window, which was open a crack.
Maybe other bullets had been fired in Jimmy’s bedroom; perhaps this young woman, the smoker, had been a victim.
Jimmy just watched her for a while. She was a young ghost, lost in her thoughts.
Jimmy just felt sorry for her. It was hard to tell how tall she was when she was sitting down, but Jimmy eventually recognized her.
Not wanting to startle her by saying her name, he rolled over in bed to get her attention.
“I’m sorry I woke you up,” Jolanda said; she flicked her cigarette into the street and closed the window.
“I thought you were trying to quit smoking,” Jimmy told her. Jolanda was cold and shivering when she got into bed with him. Jimmy knew nothing sexual was desired or intended. Jolanda just wanted to get warm, and she didn’t want to go back to her room—to her tattooed dishwasher.
“I’d almost stopped smoking before you and Claude met me, but the smell of smoke on Hildegund and Hard Rain makes me miss smoking,” Jolanda told Jimmy.
“Now I’m smoking again, and I hate Hildegund.
She’s cruel, and she makes love like she’s washing dishes—like she’s just doing it to get the job done.
That said, I usually have better reasons when I dump someone,” Jolanda added.
“Those are good reasons,” Jimmy told her.
“I always need better reasons!” Jolanda cried. “And if I dump the dishwasher, we lose the dog. I love the dog! It’s Hildegund I want to dump, not Hard Rain,” she said.
“I love Hard Rain, too,” Jimmy told Jolanda.
They were lying in bed, hugging each other, when Claude came in; he had Hard Rain with him.
The dog jumped on the bed and burrowed her way under the covers, inserting herself between Jimmy and Jolanda.
Claude told them he’d first thought Jolanda was Fr?ulein Eissler.
“For Christ’s sake, Claude—Annelies is small, and I’m big! She’s also pretty, and I’m not,” Jolanda said.
Jimmy guessed it wouldn’t be a good time for Jolanda to hear he’d first thought she was a ghost.
“It’s really cold in here,” Claude told them, shivering, “and Hard Rain and I have been frightening each other like crazy.”
“For Christ’s sake, Claude—if you’re cold, get in bed with us!
” Jolanda told him. All three of them were under the covers with Hard Rain when Hildegund barged into the bedroom, looking for her dog—or looking for her dog and her girlfriend, and finding all of them.
“I don’t like you anymore,” Jolanda told the dishwasher.
As usual, Hard Rain didn’t want to get out of bed and venture into the cold and darkness.
Why would she? The dog didn’t make a move toward Hildegund.
Hard Rain put her forepaws on Claude’s chest, with her long nose poking in Claude’s ear on the pillow.
“You don’t love her enough,” Claude said to Hildegund. Under the circumstances, Claude could have meant Jolanda, but both Jolanda and Jimmy knew what Claude meant: Hildegund didn’t love Hard Rain enough. The tattooed dishwasher didn’t deserve to have a dog like Hard Rain.
“Ausl?nder,” Hildegund said, with her middle fingers raised to Claude and Jimmy.
(“Foreigners,” she’d called them.) “Ausl?nderin,” said the tattooed dishwasher, pointing only one index finger at Jolanda—a “female foreigner.” Hildegund held out the short leash and harness to Hard Rain, who reluctantly got out of bed and allowed Hildegund to hook her up—the same short leash and harness used for a Seeing Eye dog.
When Hard Rain was hooked up, she didn’t look happy.
“Typisch ausl?ndisch,” Hildegund told them as she left, leaving Jimmy’s bedroom door open. (“Typically foreign,” she’d called them.)
“You xenophobic asshole!” Jolanda called after her. To be foreigners was a bad thing to the Viennese, as the foreign students were learning.
“Das geht bei uns nicht,” Frau Holzinger would say to Jimmy or Claude or Jolanda—if one of them left an opened bottle of beer in the fridge, or an unrinsed coffee cup in the kitchen sink. (“That doesn’t go with us,” the Frau would tell the foreign students.)
Fr?ulein Eissler told Jimmy that anti-Semitism in Austria was part of “a larger xenophobia.” She’d also teased the foreign students, in a nice way, about their habit of hanging out at the Kaffeehaus Nachtmusik.
“No one goes to that dreary café. Not even the Polish Reading Room types,” Annelies said.
She’d meant this as a joke. (No one was ever seen entering or leaving the Polish Reading Room on the Schwindgasse; no one saw who went there.)
Jimmy, Claude, and Jolanda lived within walking distance of the K?rntner Stra?e, Annelies had reminded them.
They should be hanging out at the Café Hawelka; they should go have fun at the Augustinerkeller.
“You should go where other young people go!” Annelies urged them.
Naturally, Claude was afraid of being beaten up; places where other young people went had not been kind to him.
As for Jimmy and Jolanda, they had little confidence in their ability to meet other young people—or little desire to.
Besides, they had homework to do. You couldn’t do your homework, or try to write, at the Café Hawelka; too many people were talking and having a good time there.
Jimmy and Claude and Jolanda needed a lugubrious place, where the only conceivable conversation concerned the insanely limited but randomly heterogeneous music selections.
Fr?ulein Eissler had also exhorted the foreign students to “make an effort to save Siegfried.” They could have “an international influence” on the isolated boy, she’d said.
The xenophobic Judenhass of Siegfried’s mother and grandmother would either stop with Siegfried or be continued by him, Annelies had told them.
“You could inspire this kid to think globally,” she had assured them.
But what could they do? the foreign students were wondering.
Jimmy loved Annelies, and his roommates were increasingly impressed by her.
Yet saving Siegfried seemed beyond them; the atrocities he’d committed with the garlic press might have marked the child as a future war criminal.
Siegfried seemed a sullen, uncommunicative five-year-old.
What if Irmgard’s anger and depression had been passed down to the boy?
How could three foreign students save Siegfried?
On the morning when Jimmy and his roommates were left together in his bed, with Jimmy’s bedroom door flung open—the cold, dark morning when the tattooed dishwasher had labeled them “typically foreign” and taken Hard Rain away from them, back to the barbarians—Jimmy, Claude, and Jolanda had fallen into a deep and despondent sleep.
They’d wasted the first three months of their study-abroad year; they’d failed to engage very much with anyone other than themselves.
James Winslow was most of all embarrassed by what made him unique in Fr?ulein Eissler’s eyes, and in the eyes of his two roommates—his mom’s commitment to keep him out of Vietnam, which included his knocking up someone.
More embarrassing, the best option of that happening (in Jimmy’s mind) was Claude’s idea that Jimmy should impregnate Mieke—the girlfriend Jolanda had broken up with—while Jolanda held Mieke’s head and talked to her.
No wonder Jimmy was embarrassed! In such confusion and despondency, Jimmy, Claude, and Jolanda were lying asleep in one another’s arms, with his bedroom door wide open, when Frau Holzinger made her early-morning march to the kitchen to prepare Siegfried’s breakfast. The Frau didn’t wake them; she’d surely given them a disapproving look in passing.
Those three didn’t hear what she’d muttered to herself, the usual admonition: “Das geht bei uns nicht.” The first thing the students heard was the harsh sound of Frau Holzinger grinding her coffee beans.
In the foreign students’ bedrooms, even if their doors were closed, the coffee grinder was their wake-up call.
The Frau did fuck all for Siegfried’s Frühstück until she got the coffee going.
Claude was whimpering when Jolanda kicked him under the covers.
“It sounds like Siegfried is grinding his soldiers with the coffee beans,” Claude said, moaning.
But when the three had opened their eyes, they saw Siegfried standing beside the bed, just staring at them.
The boy was doubtless unfamiliar with seeing three adults in bed together.
He stood as resolutely as a soldier—the garlic press held tightly in one little hand.
In his other hand, the silent soldier was holding what looked like an airmail letter.
“Guten Morgen, lieber Brieftr?ger,” Jolanda addressed the child. (“Good morning, dear letter carrier.”)
“Ist Post für mich da?” Claude asked him. (“Is there any mail for me?”)
“Nein, nur für Yimmy,” Siegfried said, handing Jimmy the letter. (“No, only for Yimmy.”)