“Literature is for dreamers,” Old Billig would tell poor Fehlgeburt. Old Billig the radical, I mean. Old Billig the whore liked dreams; she told Frank once that dreams were all she liked—her dreams and her “mementos.”
“Study economics, dear,” Schwanger told Fehlgeburt—that’s what Miss Pregnant told Miss Miscarriage.
“Human usefulness,” Arbeiter lectured to us, “is directly related to the proportion of the whole population involved in decisions.”
“In the power,” Old Billig corrected him.
“In the powerful decisions,” Arbeiter said—the two men stabbing like hummingbirds at a single small blossom.
“Bullfuck,” Franny said. Arbeiter’s and Old Billig’s English was so bad, it was easy to say things like “Take it in the ear” to them all the time—they didn’t get it. And despite my vow to clean up my language, I was sorely tempted to say these things to them; I had to content myself, vicariously, by listening to Franny speak to them.
“The eventual race war, in America,” Arbeiter told us, “will be misunderstood. It will actually be a war of class stratification.”
“When you fart, Arbeiter,” Franny asked him, “do the seals in the zoo stop swimming?”
The other radicals were rarely a part of our group discussions. One spent himself on the typewriters; the other, on the single automobile that the Symposium on East-West Relations owned among themselves: all six of them, they could just fit. The mechanic who labored over the decrepit car—the ever-ailing car, useless in any getaway, we imagined, and probably never to be called upon for a getaway, Father thought—was a sullen, smudge-faced young man in coveralls and a navy-blue streetcar conductor’s cap. He belonged to the union and worked the main-line Mariahilfer Strasse Strassenbahn all night. He looked sleepy and angry every day, and he clanked with tools. Appropriately, he was called Schraubenschlüssel—a Schraubenschlüssel is a wrench. Frank liked to roll Schraubenschlüssel’s name off his tongue, to show off, but Franny and Lilly and I insisted on the translation. We called him Wrench.
“Hi, Wrench,” Franny would say to him, as he lay under the car, cursing. “Hope you’re keeping your mind clean, Wrench,” Franny would say. Wrench knew no English, and the only thing we knew about Wrench’s private life was that he had once asked Susie the bear for a date.
“I mean, virtually nobody asks me out,” Susie said. “What an asshole.”
“What an asshole,” Franny repeated.
“Well, he’s never actually seen me, you know,” Susie said.
“Does he know you’re female?” Frank asked.
“Jesus God, Frank,” Franny said.
“Well, I was just curious,” Frank said.
“That Wrench is a real weirdo, I can tell,” Franny said. “Don’t go out with him, Susie,” Franny advised the bear.
“Are you kidding?” Susie the bear said. “Honey, I don’t go out. With men.”
This seemed to settle almost passively at Franny’s feet, but I could see Frank edging uncomfortably near to, and then away from, its presence.
“Susie is a lesbian, Franny,” I told Franny, when we were alone.
“She didn’t exactly say that,” Franny said.
“I think she is,” I said.
“So?” Franny said. “What’s Frank? The grand banana? And Frank’s okay.”
“Watch out for Susie, Franny,” I said.
“You think about me too much,” she repeated, and repeated. “Leave me alone, will you?” Franny asked me. But that was the one thing I could never do.
“All sexual acts actually involve maybe four or five different sexes,” the sixth member of the Symposium on East-West Relations told us. This was such a garbling of Freud—the other Freud—that we had to beg Frank for a second translation because we couldn’t understand the first.
“That’s what he said,” Frank assured us. “All sexual acts actually involve a bunch of different sexes.”
“Four or five?” Franny asked.
“When we do it with a woman,” the man said, “we are doing it with ourselves as we will become, and with ourselves in our childhoods. And, it goes without saying, with the self our lover will become, and with the self of her childhood.”
“‘It goes without saying’?” Frank asked.
“So every time there’s one fuck there’s four or five people actually at it?” Franny asked. “That sounds exhausting.”
“The energy spent on sex is the only energy that doesn’t require replacement by the society,” the rather dreamy sixth radical told us. Frank struggled to translate this. “We replace our sexual energy ourselves,” the man said, looking at Franny as if he’d just said the most profound thing in the world.
“No kidding,” I whispered to Franny, but she seemed a little more mesmerized than I thought she should have been. I was afraid she liked this radical.
His name was Ernst. Just Ernst. A normal name, but just a first name. He didn’t argue. He crafted isolated, meaningless sentences, spoke them quietly, went back to the typewriter. When the radicals left the Gasthaus Freud in the late afternoon, they seemed to flounder for hours in the Kaffee Mowatt (across the street)—a dark and dim place with a billiard table and dart boards, and an ever-present solemn row of tea-with-rum drinkers playing chess or reading the newspapers. Ernst rarely joined his colleagues at the Kaffee Mowatt. He wrote and wrote.
If Screaming Annie was the last whore to go home, Ernst was the last radical to leave. If Screaming Annie often met Old Billig when the old radical was arriving for his morning’s work, she often met Ernst when Ernst was finally calling it quits. He had an eerie other-worldliness about him; when he talked with Schwanger, their two voices would get so quiet that they would almost always end up whispering.
“What’s Ernst write?” Franny asked Susie the bear.
“He’s a pornographer,” Susie said. “He’s asked me out, too. And he’s seen me.” That quieted us all for a moment.
“What sort of pornography?” Franny asked, cautiously.
“How many sorts are there, honey?” Susie the bear asked. “The worst,” Susie said. “Kinky acts. Violence. Degradation.”
“Degradation?” Lilly said.
“Not for you, honey,” Susie said.
“Tell me,” Frank said.
“Too kinky to tell,” Susie said to Frank. “You know German better than I do, Frank—you try it.”
Unfortunately, Frank tried it; Frank translated Ernst’s pornography for us. I would ask Frank, later, if he thought pornography was the start of the real trouble—if we had been able to ignore it, somehow, would things have gone downhill just the same? But Frank’s new religion—his anti –religion—had already taken over all his answers (to all the questions).
“Downhill?” Frank would say. “Well, that is the eventual direction, of course—I mean, regardless. If it hadn’t been the pornography, it would have been something else. The point is we are bound to roll downhill. What do you know that rolls up? What starts the downward progress is immaterial,” Frank would say, with his irritating offhandedness.
“Look at it like this,” Frank would lecture me. “Why does it seem to take more than half a lifetime to get to be a lousy teen-ager? Why does childhood take forever—when you’re a child? Why does it seem to occupy a solid three-quarters of the whole trip? And when it’s over, when the kids grow up, when you suddenly have to face facts … well,” Frank said to me, just recently, “you know the story. When we were in the first Hotel New Hampshire, it seemed we’d go on being thirteen and fourteen and fifteen forever. For fucking forever, as Franny would say. But once we left the first Hotel New Hampshire,” Frank said, “the rest of our lives moved past us twice as fast. That’s just how it is,” Frank claimed, smugly. “For half your life, you’re fifteen. Then one day your twenties begin, and they’re over the next day. And your thirties blow by you like a weekend spent with pleasant company. And before you know it, you’re thinking about being fifteen again.
“Downhill?” Frank would say. “It’s a long up hill—to that fourteen-year-old, fifteen-year-old, sixteen-year-old time of your life. And from then on,” Frank would say, “of course it’s all downhill. And anyone knows downhill is faster than uphill. It’s up—until fourteen, fifteen, sixteen—then it’s down. Down like water,” Frank said, “down like sand,” he would say.
Frank was seventeen when he translated the pornography for us; Franny was sixteen, I was fifteen. Lilly, who was eleven, wasn’t old enough to hear. But Lilly insisted that if she was old enough to listen to Fehlgeburt reading The Great Gatsby, she was old enough to hear Frank translating Ernst. (With typical hypocrisy, Screaming Annie wouldn’t allow her daughter, Dark Inge, to hear a word of it.)
“Ernst” was his Gasthaus Freud name, of course. In the pornography, he went by a lot of different names. I do not like to describe the pornography. Susie the bear told us that Ernst taught a course at the university called “The History of Eroticism Through Literature,” but Ernst’s pornography was not erotic. Fehlgeburt had taken Ernst’s erotic literature course, and even she admitted that Ernst’s own work bore no resemblance to the truly erotic, which is never pornographic.