Robert Menasse: Long Time No See

All this is, of course, not true, as I had to realize.

Not only because I once did come to see with my own eyes something I would never have thought possible. But that’s how it began.

As on every evening, I took my dog for a walk around the block. I had passed the Queen of Spades Bar countless times in the course of my evening outings, but it never occurred to me to go inside. Why I suddenly did go inside on that evening to have a beer, I don’t know. Maybe my diffuse longing for life was just then stronger than my fear, which for the most part factors in every disappointment and, therefore, avoids it, especially since it is so easy, as in the passing of a dubious joint in the outlying areas of Vienna, even if laughter from inside reaches the street. I must have given the impression of a blind man as I was standing there with my dog, peering helplessly with wide open eyes through my fogged up glasses. What I saw as through a slowly lifting fog, and couldn’t believe for the longest time, was a horde of drunken, bawling men standing around a table on which Miss Lechner performed a dance. Maria Lechner. I knew her as the epitome of all that was upright and demure since grade school. We sat in the same classroom. She never let me crib from her for fear that this might hinder her own progress in school. Even at the time of graduation, she still had two braids. Of course, she graduated with honors. Right after the final exams, half the class took a ride into town to celebrate. We were surprised that Maria Lechner wanted to join us – but then she was the only one who refused to dodge the fare for the streetcar, and we had to wait endlessly for her because she went somewhere to get a prepaid ticket.

All she had then was a soda with raspberry syrup. The one who seemed sluttish to us was Webora with her invariable sweet Martini. And sure enough she suddenly disappeared with Humer who had always ordered Ouzo anyway.

Later I happened to run into Maria Lechner from time to time, but until she was thirty she remained unswervingly the same ten-year-old girl. At twenty-four, she graduated from law school, at twenty-five, after a court internship, she passed the candidature exam for a judgeship and four years later the exam for assuming that post. Everything always went without a hitch for her, without conflict, without digression, according to the ideal timetable. Then she became a judge and I lost sight of her. And now, almost six years later, I was to see her again, drunk, dancing, screaming, and laughing, on a table, from which she was in constant danger of falling, while she sneeringly fended off the hands reaching out for her under the  pretext of giving her support, under the pretext of fending them off.

The music that filled the narrow, murky space of the bar came from a radio, as I noticed, for the end of the song was followed by the news.

German Democratic Republic. The destruction of the Berlin Wall had begun, said the announcer. The post-war order was in the process of dissolution. Through all the screaming and laughter the word “post-war order” could clearly be heard from the radio. Maria stood on the table, her hands akimbo. Suddenly she saw me and burst out laughing, either because she recognized me or because the men who helped her down from the table, she . . . no, because she recognized me for she came straight up to me. She had that frozen, shiny gaze, like glass eyes sunken in a soft mask that seems on the verge of dissolving at any moment. She stumbled and almost fell screaming around my neck. “Hey there, Holzer,” she said. “Long time no see.” My dog started to bark, I broke out in sweat, my eyes glasses, which almost seemed cleared up, began to fog up again. “This calls for a celebration,” she said, “but not here.”

I still remember the tight, pink sweater of the waitress, who suddenly stood in front of me very briefly, the image of a woman’s body of glass, filled with raspberry soda, the big black waiters’ money bag, which opened like a dark abyss, glinting on its bottom, an arm in a blue-white striped shirt that came from somewhere and was pushed away, I don’t know how or by whom. So much commotion directly around me, and I was completely numb.

Out in the street, Maria locked arms with me. Tell me! I suddenly had to laugh. I had nothing to tell.

The only thing worth mentioning about the life I had led so far is that it never was, in a strange way, worth mentioning. Once when I began to feel a certain pride that I might be living a more sensational life, I noticed all too soon that the banal cause of this pride was nothing more than rather a dumb, harmless student prank. At another time when I thought justified in the belief that I was getting into a combative, intense life, I noticed that I had placed far too much importance on inconsequential student skirmishes. When I dropped out of college, I took a job at a bank where I am still working today.

Since then, my life can more than ever be exclusively described in shamefully few words: punctuality, friendliness, and the kind of diligence that sees its objects multiply with the same harmonious pace as they are taken care of. I have no desire to write an autobiography, but the thought that, had I that desire, it would already be completed with the purchase of paper, since it would reasonably have to consist of empty pages, annoyed me tremendously.

I take after my father. He is a correct man, friendly without being effusive, with a quiet, fearful wife, my mother. I’d rather have taken after my grandfather.

In 1968, I was just fourteen, he told me for the first time about his life. In February 1934 he participated, as socialist, in a workers’ uprising. Later he fought with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Then he immigrated to England and came back with the British army as liberator. Wasn’t a victory either, he said. Why? Look around and you’ll see what I mean. And we never got any credit for all the years of fighting, not even a pension. Today it’s just enough to sit on a park bench. Am I supposed to feed the pigeons? Those ghastly critters.

When my grandmother became seriously ill, the two swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills together. I was seventeen then and almost flunked out of school.

I no doubt got my self-image at that time from the contempt I felt for all those in whose lives everything always went smoothly, harmoniously and without problems that they always came up with the right answer but never with the question. As a result I despised almost everybody, especially Maria Lechner. I was surprised how much I enjoyed meeting her again. Now, at thirty-five, she was suddenly an eighteen-year old in whom the simple euphoria one might feel about being allowed to smoke showed itself in a grotesquely exaggerated form. But it had a pull that, I must say, immediately excited me in an indefinable way, fearful and tense as I was, and carried me along. And when, after hopping from bar to bar, we went to bed together, I had the feeling of having only then been made a man by Maria. I mean this with regard to the strange ideal image which society has of masculinity and femininity and which in the area of sexuality ideally culminates in a desire I knew only from porno movies and which seemed unattainable to me in my own life. Maria served me with desire in a way, while I myself was able to unleash in Maria the most surprising ecstasies, so that I – I can’t put it any other way – was suddenly a different person.

And I also saw the world now with different eyes. Amazed I wondered how it had been possible that the world could have become so unquestionably matter-of-fact to me, how I could have been satisfied with what it offered – this regularity, this assiduous self-sufficiency, this smooth functioning generally without reward, without any pleasure.

Of course, I immediately developed a certain obsessiveness for Maria. We were two people thrown into the straight and narrow, who had suddenly discovered that the ecstatic abandon and folly of the carnival season, which I never had experienced in an ecstatic way either, could be recreated anytime without consequences. How many joints there were in this town and how many pleasures for us to savor! And how many places for love. Never was it necessary to say: I love you. And never was it necessary not to say: I don’t love you. For we weren’t lovers, but colleagues so to speak, colleagues who cultivated a common interest, namely the creation of exceptions.

Exceptions which became the rule. We arranged excesses by appointment, consumed pleasures offered in a marketplace that was calculated just carefully as the transactions of the bank where I worked. And suddenly, all these stimuli produced ever new longings: for a vacation, for health food and fruit juices, for a good television program.

When I woke in the morning, my face was bloated and my eyes were swollen. Two aspirin for headaches soon became as much a habit as a breakfast egg used to be. I hardly ever managed to read the paper anymore before going to work. My eyes skimmed the lines without absorbing what I was reading. Walking through the city park on my way to work, I was overcome by fear of being choked to death by the flock of pigeons whirling like giant, gray flakes around old women with bags of birdfeed.

When I went to pick up Maria last Friday evening, she first wanted to watch the television news before going out. It’s fantastic, she said, every day something unexpected is going on now. Soviet Union, GDR, Czechoslovakia. Just look at this, she said. She seemed tired and exhausted. During the national news, she started to talk about what an unbelievable case, as she called it, came before her today in court. It’s really a bit much sometimes, she said, the things she has to put up with.

It was a proceeding concerning the appointment of a trustee. I asked her what that was. In plain language, it’s a proceeding to have someone declared mentally incompetent, she said. For someone who suffers from a mental illness or is mentally impaired and therefore incapable of carrying out everyday tasks without the danger of injury to himself, a trustee has to be appointed either at the request of the person or officially. Well, just imagine: an eighty-nine year-old man constantly wanders blind around the First District, bumps into people, stumbles, almost runs people over, in short, he becomes a public nuisance.  The man came to the attention of the police due to repeated tip-offs at the precinct, complaints, even charges, or altercations in the street forcing passing police officers to interfere, and so on. The problem arose mostly from the fact that the man was not marked as a blind man, as by an armband, nor did he use any of the aids which enable the blind to move about the street independently, like a cane or a seeing-eye dog. Such a seeing-eye dog is very practical, as you know since you have one yourself, she said with a grin. To make a long story short, as it turned out, the man wasn’t blind at all. He was not registered as a blind man and, during an interrogation by an officer at the central precinct, he admitted that his sight was unimpaired except for a certain farsightedness due to age. He was reprimanded, but soon thereafter he continued with his pretense of disability, that’s how it is noted in my file, continued with his pretense of disability, which caused regular disturbances of the public peace. Thereupon, the police petitioned the court to initiate proceedings. Since no charge of fraudulent intent, such as subreption of disability payments, was made – he didn’t even beg from people in the street, on the contrary, he ran them over – no criminal proceedings were initiated. And suddenly this file lands on my desk at the family court, and I am asked to decide whether a trustee should be appointed. It’s with this kind of hair-raising nonsense I am expected to waste my time, said Maria.

I asked her why the man pretended to be blind.

Exactly, she said, that’s what I wanted to know too. So, I set a date for a hearing, and that was today. You know, the man is just a troublemaker to my mind. Guess what he said. I am well aware, he said, that disability is the most sought-after privilege in Austria and therefore, the ultimate aspiration of every Austrian. But he didn’t want to pass himself off as an invalid nor did he want any other privilege. Let alone any hand-outs. For this reason, he didn’t accept the so-called honor donation, those four thousand shilling, which the government of the Republic of Austria accorded the survivors of the persecution of the Jews. Simply put, he said, he just didn’t want to see all this anymore, what one sees when walking through the streets with open eyes. It was, he said, a natural, healthy reflex for him to shut his eyes to it. I asked him what was so terrible about what there was to see. Thereupon he started to tell me about his life in painful detail. I tried to interrupt him, but he just kept on talking. I told him that he should answer my question. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do, he answered.

I asked Maria what it was he was talking about.

What do I know, she said, he just babbled, his whole life he want to related to me. You can imagine, I mean, it’s well known that things were very difficult for this generation. But I just can’t bear these old men anymore, who like talking about the war, or about the civil war.

Which civil war? I asked. First Republic or Spain?

What do you mean? Oh well, Spain. Yes, I think he also wanted to tell me about Spain. I really don’t know. What it comes down to, he fought a lot of battles. So I asked him once more: What’s so terrible about what you saw? Is it the images of the past you still can’t get away from?

The television was still on. Just then the commercials began between the weather report and the cultural news. I was highly irritated and felt like getting up and turning the set off, but I was afraid to interrupt Maria.

No, said the old man, it’s the images of the present. I don’t understand what you mean, I said. Shouldn’t he be happy that we live in peace time and no longer in those times of political confusion and terrible misery? And just imagine what he said then. He said: Don’t you see it, Your Honor? No, I said, I don’t see what’s supposed to be so terrible. To which he replied: Your Honor, I’d like to adapt better to the present in my old age, and that’s why I close my eyes so I don’t have to see it.

That’s what he said? I asked.

Yes, said Maria, the man is sick in the head.

And what did you do?

Nothing. All I was asked to do was to determine whether grounds for a trusteeship existed. They don’t exist. After all, I can’t appoint a trustee for him as a seeing-eye dog. The man is probably back running blind around town. A nut case, what can you do?

I leaned back in my chair with eyes closed. Maria’s voice echoed in my head while a detergent commercial thundered forth.

Can’t we turn the damn tube off? I asked.

No, wait, she said, I want to see the cultural news.

I was no longer able to exchange another word with her. Of course, she noticed soon that something had snapped, even if she obviously did not understand why.

We went out to eat, but didn’t say a word, except when we ordered. I drank faster and more than usual. Maria looked at me probingly. When she finally asked me what was the matter, I didn’t understand right away. I wasn’t all there. I expected to see a balloon coming from her mouth when she spoke and having to read what she said rather than hearing it. But I didn’t see the words. What’s wrong with you? she asked again.

I made no reply. When the rose vendor entered the place, Maria leaned far over the table toward me. She touched my arm and said: Give me a rose and leave me alone!