Chapter 22 In the Future #6
“No! You might end up liking it!” Mieke told Jolanda.
This made Mieke and Jolanda laugh. Jimmy laughed, too.
Even Jimmy knew enough to know that Jolanda was in no danger of liking it—not to mention the funky smell.
On their third morning together, Siegfried sniffed and wrinkled his nose.
The five-year-old thought it was a Hard Rain kind of smell, but it was a semen smell—or so Jolanda said, after she sent Siegfried to wake up Claude and Hard Rain.
“I think it’s semen and me—it’s both of us together!
” Mieke declared. “It’s why I can’t wait to take a bath—it’s the stuff running out of me! ”
“Semen and Me—it’s a good title,” Jolanda told Jimmy and Mieke.
“It’s a first-person novel by a woman,” Mieke said. This was how Jimmy and Mieke learned they were both trying to be fiction writers; like Jimmy, Mieke was writing her first novel. Jolanda didn’t want them to know.
“Just don’t fall in love, you two. It would kill me to lose both of you,” Jolanda told them.
“Losing either of you would kill me—or losing Claude!” Jimmy cried. Hard Rain, racing in the hall, ran into Jimmy’s bedroom. Siegfried was crying; Hard Rain had knocked him down when they were racing. Claude had heard the losing Claude exclamation all the way from the kitchen.
“What about losing me—why would you ever lose me?” Claude was wailing. “Hard Rain didn’t mean to knock you down,” the three lovers heard Claude say; he was trying to comfort Siegfried.
“I’m taking a bath—the semen-and-me smell is getting to me,” Mieke whispered to Jimmy and Jolanda. The smell was getting to Hard Rain, too; the poor dog was sneezing her brains out.
“All of you remain calm!” Jolanda screamed, just for the hell of it.
Jimmy thought it was the happiest day of his life—he just hoped this wasn’t the end of it.
The rest of it, the legal rigmarole, reminded Jimmy of Dickens; he thought his grandfather would get a kick out of it.
While Claude and Jolanda stayed in Vienna, Jimmy and Mieke took the train from the Wien Westbahnhof to Amsterdam.
They left at seven in the morning; they wouldn’t get to Amsterdam before eight or nine that night.
They must have changed trains three or four times; Jimmy wouldn’t remember.
The whole time, Mieke and Jimmy just talked about the novels they’d read—the ones that had made them want to write novels.
In the morning, the couple went to the civil registry office in the town hall—“het Stadhuis,” Mieke called it—to get their marriage license.
Mieke explained that the announcement of their intended marriage would be made public for six weeks, to be sure there were no formal objections to it.
“I’m not a bigamist, Jimmy. Are you?” Mieke asked him.
In six weeks, Jimmy would be back with Mieke in Amsterdam, in the same registry office—in the presence of four witnesses, two for each of them.
It would be a simple civil ceremony. The witnesses could be family or friends; if needed, the witnesses could be civil servants of the town hall, or random people off the streets.
Claude and Chantal promised they’d come from Paris to be Jimmy’s witnesses; Mieke’s mother and Jolanda would be Mieke’s witnesses.
Mieke’s mother was “in on it,” Mieke had told Jimmy.
Jolanda’s mother and father were “not yet informed,” as Mieke put it.
If Jimmy had intended to live in Amsterdam, he would have needed a residence permit in order to get married.
But since Jimmy intended to live in the United States, this requirement didn’t apply to him.
The legal minutiae of everyday life were not on Jimmy’s mind on the long train ride back to Vienna.
He was more concerned for Mieke, all alone in Amsterdam, where she would wait to see if she missed her period—and only if Mieke missed her period could she go for a pregnancy test a few weeks later.
Jimmy knew it would be an anxious six weeks for Mieke.
And meanwhile, back in Vienna, there weren’t that many weekends remaining before Jimmy and his roommates parted.
At Fr?ulein Eissler’s prompting, the three roommates made plans to do something with Siegfried and Hard Rain on one of their last weekends.
First they took Siegfried to their café on the corner of Argentinierstra?e, so the boy could meet Dagmar and Hard Rain’s “other family.” Then the roommates went with Hard Rain and Siegfried to the Stadtpark.
They didn’t know the rules for dogs, but they had Hard Rain on the short leash in her Seeing Eye harness, and they walked close to the perimeter of the park.
Some filmmakers were shooting a scene in a movie.
The roommates and Siegfried stopped to watch.
Naturally, Siegfried was confused. Why would they shoot the same scene again and again? Siegfried kept asking.
A young man has a telescope on a tripod. He wants his girlfriend to look in the telescope, but she is upset by what she sees. She slaps him; she leaves him alone with the telescope. The young man is more interested in what he sees in the telescope than he is in his girlfriend. That’s the scene.
It would have been better if Claude had never tried to explain the purpose of a telescope to Siegfried, but Jolanda and Jimmy didn’t pay close attention to what Claude said to the five-year-old.
The filmmakers were finished shooting. They had a lot of equipment, which Hard Rain had been sniffing.
Maybe Siegfried was the only kid around—not that Jimmy would remember.
One of the filmmakers asked if Siegfried would like to look through the telescope.
To everyone’s surprise, Siegfried wanted no part of the telescope.
Jolanda and Jimmy wondered what Claude had said to make a magnifying optical instrument sound so terrifying.
Jolanda and Jimmy looked through it. There was a park bench at a distant corner of the Stadtpark, across the Stubenring from the Wollzeile.
The face of a young woman sitting on the park bench was as close as one’s reflection in a bathroom mirror.
“Nicht die Zukunft!” Siegfried said. (“Not the future!” the boy begged—he was afraid of seeing the future.)
“Jesus Mary and the cuckold, Claude!” Jolanda screamed. “What did you say to him?”
In German, it was a small mistake for Claude, but it made a big difference to Siegfried.
Claude had said the Zukunft word when he meant Entfernung.
A telescope lets you see “in the distance”—a telescope “brings the distance closer,” Claude meant to say, but he’d said the future, not the distance.
A telescope lets you see “in the future”—a telescope “brings the future closer,” Claude had told Siegfried, frightening him.
“Nicht die Zukunft!” the five-year-old had cried. (“Not the future!”)
(Siegfried didn’t want to see his dog die, the boy told Jimmy later.)
In the Stadtpark, Jolanda had tried to calm Siegfried down. “Die Entfernung, nicht die Zukunft,” Jolanda kept telling the five-year-old, but Siegfried would not go near the telescope, where the future might loom.
Claude felt awful for his mistake; he himself would always be afraid of the future.
The night after that misadventure in the Stadtpark, Jimmy persuaded Irmgard and Frau Holzinger to let Siegfried sleep in his bed with Hard Rain.
Jimmy slept in Jolanda’s bed with Jolanda, and Claude left their bedroom door open.
Siegfried slept peacefully through the night; he had no telescope nightmares.
“Everyone wants to sleep with this dog,” was the way Irmgard put it.
It meant a lot to Jimmy that Irmgard had thanked Fr?ulein Eissler for her part in the gift of Hard Rain.
Those last few weeks, Jimmy and his roommates slept with their bedroom doors open; this allowed Hard Rain to come and go.
When Irmgard came home from work and had her bath, she always sang to the dog in the bathroom.
The widow Holzinger remained convinced that Hard Rain was the ghost of the German shepherd she’d once known; yet the Frau was no less kind to the dog because of it.
It was Jimmy’s final impression that the distinction between Jimmy’s mother and Jimmy’s mother’s friend remained murky to Frau Holzinger, who persisted in speaking of Chantal with a reverence reserved for mothers.
The academic year finished differently at the University of Vienna than it did at the Institute for European Studies.
Claude and Jolanda had been done a week before Jimmy.
They’d gone home, to Paris and Amsterdam, leaving Jimmy alone in the Schwindgasse apartment.
Jimmy was glad that Jolanda and Mieke would be together, waiting for the results of Mieke’s pregnancy test. (It was good news for all concerned that Mieke had missed her period.)
Jimmy went one afternoon to the Turnhalle Leopold, but Sol and Simon didn’t show up at wrestling practice. Jimmy just drilled moves with Leo, who told him the Israelis were packing for a long trip.
“A trip where?” Jimmy asked Little Mirror, who seemed sad.
“They’re Israelis, Jim—they go where they have Israeli business,” Kleiner Spiegel said, giving Jimmy a hug and a lift, but not throwing him.
“Where are they going, Leo?” Jimmy asked again. The little throw-meister shrugged—as if it didn’t matter where anyone went these days.
“I heard it was Argentina, Jim—maybe they’re going to Argentina,” was all Leo said about it, giving Jimmy another hug and lift.