Chapter 20 Not Like Donna Reed #2
“I’m just trying to tell him not to go to Vietnam—he should listen to his mother,” Irmgard said to Jolanda and Claude. (James Winslow wondered if explaining the entire situation to Hard Rain would have been easier.)
Fr?ulein Eissler just sighed when Jimmy told her everything; he also showed her the postcards he’d received.
There was no comprehending the picture postcards Jimmy sent in return.
The one of the Soviet War Memorial in the Schwarzenbergplatz seemed especially ill-suited to the issue under consideration, but it was in Jimmy’s neighborhood—at one end of the Schwindgasse.
The Heldendenkmal der Roten Armee, the “Heroes’ Memorial of the Red Army,” was built to commemorate the seventeen thousand Soviet soldiers killed in action during the Vienna Offensive in World War II.
German prisoners of war and Austrian construction workers built it.
Over the years, increasingly, the monument would be attacked by acts of politically inspired vandalism, but James Winslow would send the same picture postcard to his mother and to Chantal.
“I think I see your point about there being no end of moms around,” Jimmy wrote to Honor. “And I appreciate your offer to maim me—I may take you up on it,” he wrote to her.
“Please don’t come here to get knocked up—just come here to meet Claude,” Jimmy wrote to Chantal.
Given the context—such a solemn postcard of the Soviet War Memorial—James Winslow shouldn’t have sounded so cavalier. And he would worry that the monument to the slain Soviet soldiers somehow suggested, falsely, that Jimmy had a newfound affinity for becoming a soldier.
With Claude and Jolanda going home for Christmas, it was no wonder Jimmy started wrestling again.
There were too many unanswered questions: to sleep or not sleep with Dagmar; to knock up or not knock up Chantal; to submit or not submit to his mom’s mutilations.
At least the wrestling would be familiar, or so Jimmy thought.
He wondered how Leo Spiegel at the Turnhalle Leopold had befriended Fr?ulein Eissler, or how she knew the two Israeli freestyle wrestlers.
“We’re Israelis, Jimmy. I knew Sol and Simon in a previous life,” was all Annelies had said.
Fr?ulein Eissler didn’t say how she knew about the Russians’ knees. Little Mirror must have told her; Leo would know. The Soviet wrestlers were familiar with the Smillie knife, and not only because they were med students; they’d both had the surgery.
As Annelies explained, the gym was a short walk from the Medical University of Vienna, and the medical library, where there was a complex of clinics and pharmacies.
With the university students around, that part of W?hringer Stra?e had some coffeehouses; there was also an Italian restaurant and a Hungarian one.
From the street, the gym didn’t look like a gym.
It was actually in the basement of a hairdresser’s shop.
Helene, the hairdresser, was tired of being asked where the gym was.
“Unten,” Helene told Jimmy, when he first inquired.
(“Downstairs,” she’d said, pointing to the basement stairs.) Helene and her team of hairdressers gave wrestlers the evil eye.
It was a grievance to the hairdressers and the wrestlers that they shared the washing machines and the dryers, which were in the basement with the wrestling mats.
Downstairs, the cement walls were heavily padded.
The showers, the lockers in the changing area, the urinals, even the crapper stalls—were not enclosed.
The Turnhalle Leopold was one giant room.
The washing machines and the dryers were set apart from the mats at the far end of the basement, away from the stairs.
You had to walk across the wrestling mats to get to them.
The hairdressers resented that they had to take off their shoes when they walked on the mats.
The wrestlers disliked having hairdressers in their wrestling room—especially the hairdressers who watched them take showers, or stand at urinals, or sit in crapper stalls.
The naked wrestlers weighing themselves were also exposed to the hairdressers.
Kleiner Spiegel, the eponymous Leopold, weighed only fifty-eight kilos, not quite 130 pounds.
Leo wasn’t competing anymore, but he’d kept himself in shape.
Greco-Roman wrestling was better known in Austria than the freestyle kind, but any kind of wrestling was unpopular in Austria, and not only with Helene and her hairdressing gang.
For Jimmy’s sake, since his German was subpar, he and the four other freestyle wrestlers at the Turnhalle Leopold spoke English to one another.
As a minority, those five sought to assert themselves for having chosen, in their minds, the superior style of wrestling.
To freestyle wrestlers, no holds below the waist, no trips, no leg dives—no legs at all—was an absurdly limited or restricted way to wrestle.
When they were with one another—when there were no Greco-Roman wrestlers around—the two Israelis, the two Soviets, and Jimmy called the Greco-Roman guys “wrestlers without legs.” Fr?ulein Eissler didn’t approve.
“You make the Greco-Roman wrestlers sound like amputees, Jimmy,” Annelies told him.
When he’d referred to her as his German tutor, the Israeli wrestlers, Sol and Simon, just looked at each other in disbelief.
Even the former Red Army wrestlers, Sergei and Zander, seemed to know more than Jimmy concerning Annelies Eissler’s line of work.
“We bet the Eissler is working for Wiesenthal, or for the Mossad,” Sergei said; he and Zander looked at Simon and Sol for confirmation, not at Jimmy. Sergei and Zander didn’t say they’d ever seen Fr?ulein Eissler entering or leaving the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna.
“Most Israelis stand with Simon Wiesenthal—we’re all Nazi hunters, in our hearts,” Sol said; he didn’t mention the Mossad.
“We assume you and Zander are working for the KGB, when you’re not too busy with your medical studies,” Simon told Sergei, who was his workout partner.
Sergei and Zander just laughed; they’d heard they were supposed to be working for the KGB before.
Even Helene and her hairdressers had accused them.
As Jimmy had expected, the former Red Army wrestlers were in a league of their own; they were technically superior to him.
Fr?ulein Eissler had been right to say they were older than the average med students.
Like the Haganah graybeards, Sergei and Zander were in their late thirties.
Who knew what their previous commitments to the Red Army had entailed?
And Annelies had been right to say they were still in shape.
From the start, those two took it easy on Jimmy.
He just drilled moves with Sergei, the bigger one—no live wrestling.
Sergei was a gentle bear. And when Jimmy wrestled with Zander, he could tell Zander held himself back.
The Russians warned Jimmy to be wary of Leo, the little Greco coach and the owner of the gym.
Little Mirror liked to invite the new guys in the wrestling room to do some pummeling and hand-fighting with him.
“It doesn’t end there. After the pummeling and hand-fighting, Leo locks up, chest to chest or chest to back, and he throws you on your head,” Zander warned Jimmy.
“The Greco guys call him a Wurfmeister. Leo is a ‘throw master,’ and Leo is a kidder, Jim—he just likes to fool around,” Sergei said.
“Er wirft. ‘He throws,’ Jim,” Zander told him. “Leo is a compulsive thrower—he can’t help it. Throwing is just fooling around to Leo.”
Therefore, Jimmy politely declined Leo’s invitations to do some pummeling and hand-fighting with him.
Once or twice, Little Mirror surprised Jimmy.
Leo slipped behind Jimmy and locked his hands low on Jimmy’s waist, at his hips, lifting him off his feet before returning him to the mat and letting him go.
“You see? No suplay. Kein Werfen. ‘No throwing,’ Jim,” Little Mirror said, smiling.
“Du wirfst. ‘You throw,’ Leo—I know you do,” Jimmy told Leo.
“Ich werfe. ‘I throw,’ it’s true—but not you, Jim!” Kleiner Spiegel said.
“You can trust Leo, Jim,” Sol said. “When Kleiner Spiegel saw you in the shower, he saw your Jewish penis.” Jimmy liked the Jewish-penis jokes.
“Leo knows your heart is in the right place, Jim,” Simon said. Jimmy liked how the wrestlers called him Jim; it made him feel like a grown-up.
When Jimmy complained to Zander about his limitations as a wrestler, Zander would say: “We’re just ex-wrestlers, Jim—we’re all the same.
” But in the Turnhalle Leopold, the wrestlers weren’t all the same.
There was Leo, born to throw, and there were the two Red Army wrestlers; those three knew what they were doing. The rest of them were “all the same.”
The Israeli wrestlers were no better, technically, than Jimmy, but they were strong and super fit. Even in his late thirties, Sol could outlast Jimmy.
From their first workout, Jimmy made sure he knew which knee was Zander’s bad one. Jimmy was certainly familiar with the scar from Zander’s meniscectomy. Sergei had two bad knees; both had the Smillie resection scars.
“I know twice as much about the Smillie knife as Zander knows, Jim,” Sergei said, smiling at Zander. The Soviets definitely knew more than James Winslow did—not only more about wrestling and knee surgeries.