My Time in Space by Tim Robinson Read Free Book Online

little lovely in my life!’ (two formulae that have found a permanent home in our own speech patterns). The opera house, recently restored from bombed-out ruins to its original nineteenth-century pomp, dominated the quarter, in the perspective we learned from Karl. We would run down Bösendorferstrasse at the last moment to get standing-room tickets, and in the intervals mingle with the elegant on the cheap; sometimes we even gobbled a slice of Sachertörte and a glass of champagne in the crush and chryselephantine splendour of the bar, where we knew nobody and Evelyn Lear once gave me a magnificent look for staring at her admiringly.
    But even the gilt ceilings of the opera house’s public spaces had been shadowed by the horrible murder of a girlchild somewhere in the backstage labyrinths; the perpetrator was condemned to life imprisonment with the proviso that each year he spend the anniversary of his deed in darkness – a notion that might have figured in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Despite all its brave resurrection of chandeliers from ashes, Vienna was macabre. Outside the charmed circle of the Ringstrasse, the most impressive monuments of the Vienna we now began to explore were not baroque churches and museums full of Austro-Hungarian loot, but Karl Marxhof and Friedrich Engelshof, long blocks of workers ’ flats with gun-slit windows, which had been shelled by the Dollfuss regime, and vast Hitlerite concrete air-raid shelters thatstill cast a grey-green gloom of defeat over certain streets. This unhappily historic city, so far from the touristic dream, no doubt had its say in the disturbed images I was producing at that time, which, I was further troubled to find, appealed to Nelly; ‘ torturous ’ was her term for them.
    Even after we decided we had to insulate ourselves from Nelly’s underworld, and had moved into an implacably bourgeois apartment in Sankt Elisabeth-Platz, Karl remained a friend and a source of the unexpected. He would drag us to a nightclub where he hoped to be allowed to stage a strip-show he had devised, in which a prostitute behind bars seduces the policeman in charge, to the screech and clang of musique concrète by Varèse (one of the records we had carried off from Mehmet, in fact). Once, he called with a pair of gloves for M which his dog had found in the street, and offered to teach her the ‘Prinzess Striptease’ (distinguished by the performer’s keeping her gloves on to the last). Another time he invited us out with two cancan dancers, La Goulue and Valentin le Désossé, those rubbery icons of Toulouse-Lautrec’s day, reincarnated as a cheery north-of-England couple; on the way home Valentin danced down the deserted street before us twining himself lovingly around lamp-posts. Although Karl never made it as a dancer he did find his rich masochist, and moved into his house for a while. But soon they quarrelled, Karl took off for America, there was a question of theft, and the police came to interview me about him; I suggested that there was no need to take him and his lover too seriously, but they politely informed me that they would decide what was to be taken seriously. We heard only once more from Karl after that; he was in San Francisco , where I am sure he has long since gone down into the furnace of AIDS.
    Respectable as our new apartment was, with its great tiled stoves, the stained-glass in the bathroom door saying ‘Teue Rechts und sheue Niemands ,’ and its pleasant outlook onto the market stalls and pretty church in the square, it had its sinister notes. There were bullet-scars in the masonry by the front doorsteps, and hidden behind the laurel bushes two inscriptions vividly reminded one of the history that had agonized around this very corner: a scrawl in German saying ‘We will fight until we die’, and a stencilled notice in Russian stating that the house had been searched and found free of arms. In this Cold War city unstably encamped on the ruins of