The 158-Pound Marriage Read online

  'What about my mother?' he asked Edith.

  'Her modeling,' said Edith lightly, 'and the fact that she was naked nearly all the time.'

  'Of course I remember that!' he hollered.

  'Tell the story about her coat and the guard,' said Edith. 'That's an interesting story.' But Severin went back to eating.

  I know the story Edith meant. On weekends when Katrina would go modeling, Severin was out of school and had to come along. He sat in various artists' studios painting, drawing and pasting while the real artist attempted to render his mother. One of the studios was in the Russian sector, and the building had a guard. It was normal to tip the guard when he admitted you to the foyer, but Katrina, who had been coming there almost every Saturday for years would never tip anyone. With little Severin beside her, she would approach the guard. He would put his truncheon down and smile, and just as she was abreast of him, she would fling open her brown muskrat coat for just a few steps, until she was past him. 'Heil Stalin!' she'd say.

  'Guten Tag, Frau Winter!' the guard would say. 'Guten Tag, Sevi!' But Severin would never answer him.

  I think Severin thought about his mother too much. The first time I saw those erotic drawings and paintings Kurt Winter did of her, I'll admit I was startled. It was the first time I slept with Edith. She took me upstairs in their house; I had never seen the upstairs before. All of us had agreed to be very careful about the children, so Edith and I tiptoed and she peeked into their rooms. I saw the laundry in the upstairs hall. I went to look at the toothbrushes in the bathroom. Edith's nightgown hung on the back of the bathroom door; I brushed my beard against it, nuzzling it. I saw an open box of hemorrhoid suppositories (those would be Severin's surely).

  Edith's and Severin's bedroom was dark and neat. She lit a candle; the bed was turned back. For some days all four of us had projected this. Severin had quietly taken Utch home, and Edith and I had suddenly realized we were not just alone in the living room; we were alone in the whole house. Later, it surprised me that Utch claimed it never began that way. In her version she and Severin had been talking in the kitchen, and when they returned to the living room to join us they discovered we had gone upstairs, so it was then that Severin took Utch home.

  What's it matter? I looked at everything in their bedroom. I wanted to see clothes lying about, but there wasn't anything. There were books (Utch and I never read in bed), and evidence that candles were frequently burned - a few hardened puddles of dull, colored wax on the window ledge. I was surprised that Edith was playful when I undressed her; it seemed so unlike her, and I had the feeling that with Severin she roughhoused a bit in bed. I did not roughhouse. It was not until I lay beside her on Severin's high Baroque bed that I saw the goddamn paintings and drawings all over the walls - the erotic dowry Kurt Winter had given his wife for her journey to London. Even as new and exciting as Edith was to me, I had to look at those damn paintings; nobody could have stopped looking at them. At that time I didn't know the full story of Kurt Winter; Edith and I had done most of our talking about ourselves. 'What the hell!' I said. 'Whose ...' I meant who had painted them, but Edith assumed I meant the model.

  'That's Severin's mother,' she said. I thought it was a joke and tried to laugh, but Edith covered my face with her light body and blew out the candle so that I wouldn't see his mother any more that evening.

  We historical novelists are somewhat hung up on what if's of this world. What if Utch and Severin had met in those early years? What if her guardian had met Katrina Marek? (One night on the Schwindgasse, past the curfew hour, when Severin's mother was walking arm in arm with one of her admiring painters, who was always enough of a gentleman to walk her home when he'd kept painting her long after dark. Under the light by the Bulgarian embassy, Captain Kudashvili would have stopped them with his sad, official face. 'Your papers, please?' he might have asked. 'You must have special papers if you're out after the curfew.' And the painter would have groped for canvas strips, wet brushes, other signs of identification. And Kudashvili - politely, from all I've heard of him - would have asked Katrina to open her brown muskrat fur coat. Who knows how history could have been altered?)

  But Utch and Severin did not meet in those years. 'That's a frumped-up idea of yours, anyway,' Utch told me once. 'I mean, if we had met, we probably wouldn't have liked each other. You assume too much.' Maybe.

  It's clear they led different lives. In March of 1953, for example, Utch attended a funeral. Severin was not there. It was a memorial funeral; the body was not in Vienna. She remembers the hearty mournfulness of the Soviet Army chorus and Kudashvili weeping; lots of Russians wept, but Utch thinks to this day that Kudashvili wept more for whatever the Soviet Army chorus evoked in him than for the deceased. She herself didn't weep a drop. She was fifteen and already had the beginnings of the bosom that would later stun so many. She thought that memorial funerals were a rather nice way to die, considering the other kinds of dying she had known.

  Severin was fifteen too; he was out with his mother and the former Olympic warriors from Yugoslavia, and they were drinking themselves sodden and hollering themselves hoarse with happiness. There was little chance of crossing paths with Utch that day. Though it was a public and crowded beer hall, Katrina left her coat open a little during the celebration. It was the first time Severin got drunk enough to throw up. I'm told that the Russian radio station played Chopin all day.

  The death that had provoked both celebration and mourning was, of course, the death of Iosif Dzhugashvili - a Georgian, better-known as Joseph Stalin - who, speaking of what if's, was himself a figure surrounded by a horde of what if's.

  What if, for example, Utch had gone to Russia? And if the world were flat, as the poet says, people would be falling off all the time. The poet knows that people fall off all the time as it is, and Captain Kudashvili was one. It surely was his intention to adopt Utch legally and take her with him to the Soviet Union. But we historical novelists are aware of how carelessly good intentions are regarded.

  Kudashvili and the occupying force of the Soviet Army left Vienna in 1955. The day they left is called Flag Day in Austria now; very few Viennese were sorry to see them go. Utch was seventeen; her Russian was excellent; her German was native; she was even making progress with her English, at Kudashvili's suggestion. He was making arrangements for her to become a Russian. He thought she should be a translator, and though German was useful, English was more popular. He wrote her from Russia, closing his letters with: 'How goes Utchka's English?' They would live in the great city of Tbilisi and she could go to a university.

  Utch had moved out of the Schwindgasse apartment, but she still brought her laundry - considerably out of her way - to old Drexa Neff. In the new Studentenheim on Krugerstrasse, Utch was happy, because for the first time people didn't know her as der Kudashvili's 'something' or a Russian spy. It took her about three months after the Russians left to realize that she was attractive to other people. She realized that it was enviable to have breasts like hers, but that she had to learn what to do with them, and that her legs were the most peasant part of her and she had to learn how to hide them. That she liked the opera and the museums is to Kudashvili's credit; that her clothes were strange is probably his fault. She was the top-rated student at the language school, which was then a part of the Diplomatic Academy, but at times, between letters from Kudashvili, she wished that her second language was English or French instead of Russian. Most of all, she liked walking alone in Vienna; she realized that her view of how the city really looked had been colored by the fact that she'd always seen it in the company of the Benno Blum Gang. She did not miss them, especially her last escort among them, a short bald man with a hole in his cheek. It looked like an impossibly large bullet hole, except that if it had been a bullet, something would have had to come out the other side. It was a crater about the size of a ping-pong ball, like an extra eye socket below one of the man's real eyes. It was gray-black-pink on the edges, and deep enough so that you cou
ld not, so to speak, see the bottom. Der Kudashvili had told her that the man had been tortured during the war with an electric drill, and that the hole in his cheek was only one slow wound among several.

  Since her new liberty, Utch read more than the Communist-supported newspaper. There was something every week about Benno Blum's Gang; every week they captured another old-timer. Benno's boys had a popularity second only to the unearthed executioners and experimenters from the death camps. She did not harbor any great nostalgia for her old protectors.

  She felt guilty that she did not miss Kudashvili as much as she thought she would, and she made her weekly trips to the Soviet embassy with a little uneasiness, though she signed all the necessary immigration forms and many times gave the oath that she was a member of the Communist Party. She supposed she was, but it occurred to her that she was going to Russia for Kudashvili's sake, not her own. That's the point about Utch: she never once thought about not going. Kudashvili had loved her and made himself responsible for her. He had not left her in Eichbuchl; he had not left her among those blank-faced children in the orphanage; she owed him.

  I don't think that Severin ever realized what was rare about Utch. She thought that doing something because of a debt was perfectly natural. It was unthinkable that you wouldn't do it; it was unwarranted to complain. And that thought has a complicated sister: when you don't owe anybody anything, you're free. Seventeen years old, Utch wasn't free; what's more, she didn't think it cause for self-pity. She was falling in love with Vienna, but when Kudashvili was ready she would go to Russia.

  It was the good people of Budapest who freed her. On 25 October, 1956, a lot of people's good intentions were upset. The Hungarians did not feel that because Russia had liberated them from the Nazis they owed the Russians anything as unreasonably large as their country. The Hungarian revolution must have been something of a wonder to Utch; from her peculiar point of view, the notion of 'dying for one's own freedom' must have seemed like a terrible self-indulgence. It must have confused her; the refugees streaming across the border seemed almost like another war. Into Vienna, unstuck on barbed wire and unexploded by the former minefields, came a hundred and seventy thousand Hungarians. They were still trickling across two days later, when Vienna celebrated its first Flag Day. It was the first anniversary of the official end to the occupation. Kudashvili had been back in Russia for a year.

  The week after Flag Day, Utch went to the Russian embassy and discovered that all her immigration papers had been returned - rejected. She asked why, but no one would tell her anything. She went back to the Studentenheim and wrote Kudashvili. She had not heard from him when, less than a week later, she received a message from the Russian embassy that a M. Maisky wished to see her.

  M. Maisky took her to lunch at a Russian club near the Graben. After the first course, he told her the news. Captain Kudashvili had been sent to lend his assistance at the disturbance in Budapest, and during a nighttime investigation of a university building, he had been shot and killed by an eighteen-year-old sniper. Utch cried with remarkable control through the main course and dessert. M. Maisky produced a photograph of Kudashvili. 'This is for you, my dear,' he said. He also produced the slight portion of Kudashvili's leftover wages, which the captain had designated were to go to Utch in the event of his death. It amounted to four thousand Austrian schillings, or one hundred and sixty American dollars. Maisky thumbed through a thick file, which was Utch's life story up to 1956. He said her life had been a model of suffering under fascism, which made Captain Kudashvili's rescue of her all the more meaningful - and his death all the more tragic. But he wanted Utch to know that she still had the Communist Party, and sometime in the future she could go to Russia if she wanted to. She shook her head; she was confused at the number of uses the word 'fascism' could be put to. The Russian embassy, Maisky was promising, would help her in any way they could. Utch's translation ability, for example: when there were Russians in Vienna who were in need of an interpreter, he would try to break Utch into that circuit, 'though they're a very jealous and competitive group', he warned her.

  'Keep up with your English,' M. Maisky told her. 'That's what he would have wanted you to do.' Utch knew they had read all her letters, but she also knew that a little Russian money for translating would be helpful. She thanked M. Maisky for lunch and went back to the Studentenheim, where she lived - almost alone - until 1963.

  In those seven years her English got better, her Russian got practice, and her native German was spoken almost exclusively to two boyfriends who were both in love with her and were roommates down the hall. It took almost three years of knowing them before she decided to have sex with one of them, and when she saw how this affected the other, she had sex with him too. Then she stopped having sex with both of them because it seemed to hurt them, but they continued to court her, perhaps waiting for her to make another decision and start the cycle again. They remained roommates. But Utch decided that it was impossible for her - at least at that age - to make love to more than one person at a time, and she found a third young man, altogether outside the old friendship (he was an understudy for a great tenor in the Vienna Opera Company), and made love to him for a while. When her two old boyfriends discovered her new affair, they waylaid the tenor-understudy one evening in the maze of scaffolding supporting St Stephen's Cathedral and told him they'd tear out his vocal chords if he saw any more of her without proposing marriage to her. This may seem quaint, but Utch didn't find fault with her old boyfriends' adolescent behavior. They were hurt, and they were going to hurt the tenor-understudy if he didn't pay for something. Utch always felt that there was no reason for any kind of hurting that anyone could stop, so she told the tenor-understudy that he'd better propose to her if he wanted to see her again. He changed opera companies instead, which she thought was a perfectly decent way of not hurting anybody, and she warmly declined the renewed, invigorated courtship from her old boyfriends. 'No, Willy, nein, Heinrich,' she told them. 'Someone would get hurt.'

  Severin, whose perceptions often ran parallel to Utch's, surprised us one evening when we were all trying to talk about what our relationship meant to us. At least Edith and I were trying; Utch rarely said much about it and Severin had just been listening in his irritating, bilingual way. Edith and I said that it wasn't the sex so much that made our mutual agreement so exciting; it was the newness of meeting someone - that old romance was eight years old, more or less, for all of us - that was so enhancing.

  'No, I think it's sex,' Severin said suddenly. 'It's just sex, and that's all it can be in a thing like this. There's nothing very romantic about hurting anybody.'

  'But who's getting hurt this way?' Edith asked him. He looked at her as if there were some information between them that was too special for Utch and me to hear, but he'd said nothing to Edith before about 'hurting'. We'd all agreed that if any of us suffered for any reason from our quarternion, the relationship would end. We'd all agreed that our marriages and children had priorities. And here was Severin (feigning martyrdom?) casting his ambiguities among us as carelessly as gerbil food. We'd all agreed that the relationship was good only if it was good for all of us - if it enhanced our marriages, or at least took nothing away.

  And we'd all nodded our heads - of course, of course - when, in the beginning, Severin seemed to think it was necessary to say, 'Sexual equality between two people is a difficult thing, and among four ... Well, nothing's really equal, but it has to feel pretty equal or it can't go on. I mean, if three of us are having a good time and one of us is having a bad time, then the whole thing is bad, right? And the one person who blows it all shouldn't be made to feel that it's his or her fault, right?' Yes, we had nodded.

  'If you're unhappy, we should stop it,' Utch told him.

  'It's not that, exactly,' he said. 'Everyone else seems so happy with it.'

  'Well, it's supposed to make people happy,' Edith said.

  'Yes, sex is,' Severin said.

  'You call it what you
want to; I'll call it what I want to,' Edith said. He always seemed uncomfortable about her independence of him.

  'Ja, I think it's just sex too,' Utch said. I was surprised at her, but then I thought that she was just trying to help him out. He was always so insistent on setting himself apart from the rest of us.

  'Look, Severin, if you're unhappy, we'll stop the whole thing right now,' I said. That was his loose phrase: 'the whole thing'. I asked him, 'Are you unhappy, Severin?'

  But if Severin had ever been questioned by God, he'd have found a way to evade Him. 'It's not that simple,' he said. 'I just don't want any of us getting in over our heads.' I know Edith was insulted by that. She'd already told him how much in control of herself she was.

  'I think we're all pretty stable, Severin,' I said. 'Nobody's going to leave anybody, or run off with somebody else.'

  'Oh, I know that,' he said. 'I don't mean anything like that.'

  'Well, what do you mean?' Edith asked him; he was exasperating to her.

  He shrugged her off. 'I guess I feel that I have to do the worrying for all of us,' he said, 'because no one else seems worried about anything. But let's give it time; everything takes time.' I felt angry. He seemed so insensitive - to Utch, for example. His way of reducing our relationship to 'just sex' must have hurt her feelings a little. And since he clearly behaved as if he were unhappy, I know that Utch must have had bad thoughts that it was her he was unhappy with.

  Edith laughed. 'Well, we certainly don't have to worry,' she said. 'You're doing enough worrying for everyone.' I laughed; Severin smiled, but his smile was nothing I'd care to wake up to. Utch said later that she'd been angry with Edith for using a tone toward Severin that you might use toward a child, but I felt he'd deserved it. As if Severin were out of the room, Edith told us that we mustn't worry if Severin appeared unhappy sometimes. 'He's more unhappy than us, anyway,' Edith said lightly, 'and it's a mistake to think that he's unhappy because of anything. I think we're all just happier people than Severin,' she said, and looked at him - for confirmation? He'd said the same thing about himself once, but now he seemed sullen when Edith said it - as if, typically, he never took anything he said seriously, but had to believe Edith.