The Tobacconist Read online

  The Giant Ferris Wheel was visible from afar, but only when he was standing right underneath it was he fully able to appreciate the dimensions of this remarkable steel monster. The Giant Ferris Wheel wasn’t just big; it was gigantic. The clouds seemed to hang barely higher than the highest steel girder. The passengers in the topmost cabins were as small as insects, their arms and scarves barely discernible beyond a tiny wave or flutter.

  At the Eisener Mann pub he bought himself a glass of beer. The beer was cold and crisp, and when he blew on it gently the foam flew up in little snow-white clouds. There wasn’t a single woman in the bar, apart from an ageing waitress with sad, deep-set eyes. So he paid and headed off to the Mirror Maze. He wandered around its glassy corridors for quite some time without finding the exit, until at last a man in short trousers showed him the way out. Then he stood for a while in front of the aeroplane carousel, watching the planes zooming round in circles, until he started to get dizzy and went over to the Walfisch tavern, where he sat in the garden and ordered himself a glass of black coffee with whipped cream. The coffee was very black, and the cream tasted almost as sweet as it did in the Café Esplanade in Bad Ischl. The tall chestnut trees rustled quietly, the sun flashed through the leaves, and sparrows hopped about on the gravel. The people sitting at the tables seemed to have had lots of fun already: friendly, open faces all around. A confusion of voices had spread over the garden like an invisible flock of birds, with a solitary, bright laugh fluttering up from time to time. All this merriment made Franz feel rather bitter. He paid and went over to the pony carousel. The beasts were trotting round in circles, heads hanging, carrying children on their backs. A man with an enormous camera was taking pictures to sell to the parents later. There was a lot of laughing, hugging and kissing. The young mothers were almost more beautiful than their children; the young fathers stood proud and erect and gave the attendants tips. One of the ponies raised its tail with a snort and some droppings plopped into the sand. Its eyes reflected the blue autumn sky and, beyond it, the inkling of a freedom that contained neither children’s bottoms nor carousels. At the stall next door Franz bought two Hungarian meatballs dripping with fat, and, to cancel out the strong garlicky taste, an enormous stick of pink candyfloss. Immediately afterwards he was overcome with nausea, which he washed down with another mug of beer, then he went over to the Grotto Train, where he was the only adult to squeeze himself into one of the little blue wagons. Juddering slightly, the ride passed through fantastical landscapes blanketed in a thick layer of dust. Fairytale characters were standing, sitting, walking all around. Little Red Riding Hood trudged through the wood, the Frog Prince squatted on the edge of the well, Rumpelstiltskin leaped round the fire, and right behind him Rapunzel let down her flaxen hair from the window of the tower. Franz thought of home. Years ago, his mother had read these stories to him from a well-thumbed book. At the time he was so small that he could comfortably curl up in her lap and listen to the words falling down on him like soft, warm drops. As Franz was jolting slowly past Cinderella the first tears came, and by the time the ride circled the gingerbread house he was already sobbing into his hands. Hot waves welled up inside him one after another and shook him from head to foot. He thought of the cottage, the stove, the lake, his mother, and beyond the thick veil of his tears the fairytale landscape slid past in a single blurred stream of colour.

  When the young fairground attendant leaning with sleepy nonchalance against the exit saw Franz come juddering out of the gloomy grotto into the bright sunlight, doubled up and with tears streaming down his face, he flicked away his roll-up in a wide arc and summoned the fullness of his capacity for sensitive consolation: ‘Life ain’t no fairy tale, mate — but never mind, it’ll all be over anyway, one of these days!’

  Outside, Franz wiped his face with his sleeve a few times and blew his nose into the handkerchief, which in fact he had only brought for the purpose of wiping the chair or hot brow or whatever of some girl who might chance to appear. Slowly he walked on past the rides, past shooting galleries and food stalls, past the dodgems, past the Watschenmann punchbag, past Big Bertha the high striker, past the colourful Ferris wheel, past the Big Ghost Train. Somewhere deep inside him he felt another quiet splash, a last little wave of sadness; then it was over.

  But just after he had taken the firm decision to sink the rest of the afternoon in large quantities of beer and other drinks and was about to enter the shady beer garden of the Stiller Zecher, another, far bigger, hotter, wilder wave seized him, washed over him and shook him to the core. Directly in front of him, perhaps ten metres away, a face rose up into the sky: a girl’s round face, bright and laughing, framed by a halo of straw-blonde hair. It was the most beautiful face Franz had ever seen (and that included the many brightly painted cover-girl faces in Otto Trsnyek’s stock of magazines). High above him, dizzyingly high, this face hung there for a moment, a rosy dot in the blue expanse of the sky, let out a shriek of delight, then immediately swooped down, hair flying, only to rise again a second later. This second was precisely what it took for Franz to grasp that he was standing in front of a swing. An enormous swing whose boats were pitching up and down like ships on the high sea. A wooden sign above the entrance announced, in sweeping brushwork: THE MIGHTY ASSAULT BOAT! HIGHLY AMUSING! FOR ALL AGES! EVERYBODY HAS FUN! EVERYBODY LAUGHS! PLEASE COME ABOARD! Franz decided he would not move. Motionless, eyes still glued to the girl’s face as it swooped up and down, he waited until the boats had stopped swinging and the passengers came stumbling out, laughing and squealing. When the girl (flanked by two female friends, though he was aware of these only as formless, faceless, insignificant shadows) finally came walking towards him, he mustered all his strength to wrench himself out of his self-imposed rigidity, clenched his fists in his trouser pockets and stood in her path with a decisiveness that flared up suddenly from the unexplored depths of his soul, lending his words — or so it seemed to him at that moment — an almost luminous emphasis. ‘Good afternoon, my name is Franz Huchel, I’m originally from the Salzkammergut and I would like to ride the Ferris wheel with you!’

  Interestingly, the girl did not laugh along with her friends, but observed him for a while, like a visitor at the zoo observing an animal of an almost-extinct species. Finally she rested her gaze on his flickering eyes, from which the resolve had long since faded, and said, ‘Ferris wheel no, but can we go shooting, please?’

  To be precise, she didn’t say ‘can we go shooting’ but ‘ken vee go shootink’. There was a discernible flattening of the vowels common among the many people of Bohemian origin who lived in Vienna. A Bohemian girl, then, thought Franz, though he was unable to derive anything useful from the thought. He wordlessly offered her his arm to escort her to the big shooting gallery. Happily, her two friends said goodbye immediately, and swiftly attached themselves to the broad shoulders — decorated with an impressive array of medals — of two rather merry Austrian army officers.

  At the shooting gallery a balding man with a scarred head and vacant expression explained the rules. You could choose whether to aim at targets, balloons or colourful Turks’ heads. If you shot a hole in a Turk’s face you got a few extra points; if you hit a specific spot on his forehead his turban clapped open, tipping forwards with a dull wooden sound, and you got a free round. You could win candy canes, paper roses, or a bunch of real lavender. Out of the corner of his eye Franz saw the Bohemian girl lean forwards, put the rifle to her cheek and curl her finger over the trigger. The finger was short, rosy and round. In fact, everything about her was round: the little ears, the nose, the domed forehead, the arched eyebrows, the big, brown eyes. Her gaze was levelled calmly at the black centre of the target. He would have liked to immerse himself in that gaze, those eyes, to dive head first into bliss. He was reminded of the wooden rain barrel at home, right beside the entrance to the cottage. The water in it was different to the water in the lake. It was brownish and cloudy and smelled a bit funny. The young Franz had once been unabl
e to resist it any longer — out of curiosity, and because it was so hot, in mid-August, at the end of the summer holidays. He had carefully flicked every one of the thin-legged water striders off the surface of the water, taken three deep breaths, and finally plunged his head and half his upper body into the barrel. Inside, it was pleasantly cool. Tiny particles were suspended in the water like dark snow, and the bottom was covered in a thick layer of leaves that had already half turned to mould. He stretched out his arms and stirred up the leaf mass with his fingers. It felt horrible. Slimy and cold, but also nice, in a way. He shuddered as his fingertips encountered something soft, plump and hairy. The body of a dead rat materialized through the thick veil of floating particles. It must have slipped into the barrel fairly recently, and hadn’t been able to climb back up the mossy wall by itself. It was lying on its side, its body almost entirely preserved except for a deep, black, gaping hole where the left eye should have been. Franz began to scream, and the rat disappeared behind the fat bubbles of his breath. He surfaced, scrambled out of the barrel and started running. Still screaming, he ran around the house, across the meadow and down to the shore, where his mother was hanging large pieces of linen on the line between two birch trees. He crept under her skirt, clasped her knees and knew that he would stay down there for the rest of his life, or at least until the end of the summer holidays, sitting in safety between his mother’s slender thighs.

  He heard a plop as she fired and hit the mark. She did a little skip on the tips of her toes and squealed with delight, but immediately brought the gun back into position. Franz tried to swallow away the dryness in his mouth. He had just noticed the tip of her tongue between her front teeth: a little pink animal that ventured cautiously out into the open, briefly, damply, touched the upper lip before darting back into its cave, then promptly reappeared, feeling its way around the row of teeth that shimmered like a string of pearls, interrupted by a dark gap in the middle. Never would he have believed it possible that one day the gap between a pair of Bohemian teeth would stir him like this. Juices were surging so violently around his body that for a moment he feared he would lose his inner stability and collapse at her feet like an empty sack. There was another plop, and one of the Turks lost his turban. ‘Boom, dead!’ the girl cried, and Franz could only look on helplessly as her upper lip puckered ever so slightly. With a gentle nudge of her hips she prompted him to take aim. He obeyed, but his hands were shaking; furthermore, he was bothered by a painful erection that he was trying to hide by pressing his loins as close as possible to the planks of the shooting gallery. He too made a plop, but the shot went wide. The girl laughed, the shooting gallery attendant laughed, and even the Turks’ heads seemed to be baring their golden teeth on his account. Although the sun had now disappeared behind the tops of the fairground rides, he was sweating. The sweat ran down his back in a thin rivulet and gathered in the waistband of his underpants. He squeezed an eye shut and fired again. Plop. Missed. He would have liked to run away, far away, to his room at the back of the shop, home to his bed beside the lake, or just back to the grotto train to circle the dusty fairy-tale gloom in solitude for the rest of his days. Then, suddenly, he felt her hand on his behind. She had put down the gun and was smiling at him. ‘You no can shoot, but you got nice ass!’ she said, and at that moment he realized he was lost.

  They went over to the Schweizerhaus, where a band was playing in the pub’s spacious garden and colourful Chinese lanterns glimmered at the tops of the trees. They ordered two mugs of Budweiser from a moustachioed waiter, and two potato fritters that crackled gently as they bit into them. The hot fat squirted out and dripped onto the tablecloths. The girl spoke to the waiter in Czech, and as Franz listened to the strangely dark intonation of their language he contemplated the puckering of her upper lip with the absent expression of a man in a dream. She laughed, and the moustache laughed, and before Franz could send him away to fetch another two beers she leaned across the table towards him, put her hand on his cheek and kissed him in the middle of his forehead. ‘We dance now!’ she cried, and Franz’s face lit up like the lanterns in the chestnut tree above him.

  Arm in arm they passed through the rows of tables to the dance floor, and when they felt the rhythmic quaking of the boards beneath their feet she turned to him, put one hand on his shoulder, circled his waist with the other, and started to sway in time to the music. Franz couldn’t dance, and didn’t like to do so. At home he had always declined to shuffle around in circles with the plump country girls, their breasts almost bursting out of their dirndls, grinning up at him out of shiny moon faces. He’d always avoided the Sunday morning gatherings at the Goldener Leopold, too; even at the lake festival in summer he’d always sat on the sidelines, motionless and silent, lost in thoughts that flew far out over the surface of the water. But now he was dancing. At first his movements were a little stiff and hesitant, but soon they became softer, smoother and freer, until at last, in a moment of blessed mindlessness, he let himself go, let himself fall into the arms of this round Bohemian queen, let himself drift and be rocked and swayed by her. He felt her hand wander slowly round his hip and land on his behind again. He looked into her eyes, saw her smile, saw that slight puckering of her upper lip, saw the gap between her teeth. And when he felt her bosom pressed against his belly he finally abandoned all attempts to hide his erection, which by now had swelled to monstrous proportions.

  They danced until their feet were burning. Each song was a little more sentimental and a little more heartrending than the last: ‘You’re My Lucky Star,’ ‘Merci Mon Ami,’ ‘I’ll Dream Of You Every Night,’ ‘Paris, You’re The Most Beautiful City In The World,’ ‘My Heart Only Ever Cries Out For You,’ ‘O Marita,’ and so on. After about the tenth song the musicians, needing a beer break, left the stage and headed for the bar. The girl was still glued to Franz’s overheated body, and all of a sudden he felt her lips on his ear. ‘Have drunk, have danced — what we do now?’ she whispered, and Franz didn’t need a mirror to know that he was smiling like a blissful idiot and his face was as red as a beetroot.

  ‘I still have two and a half schillings,’ he said, his voice cracking slightly. ‘That’s either four mugs of beer, a couple of rounds at the shooting gallery, or two turns on the Ferris wheel!’

  The girl stepped back and looked at him. It was a look of incredulous astonishment, and for the briefest of moments it seemed to Franz that her warm brown eyes had hardened. Like amber, he thought — like the two drops of amber he had seen once in first grade, in the local history exhibition in Bad Ischl, but darker and bigger and with no insect embedded in them. A second later, though, her eyes were shining again; her features relaxed, and she started to laugh. It was short laughter, high and sharp, like her shriek of delight at the top of the swingboat. She gave Franz a hug and a smacking kiss on the cheek. ‘Back soon, sonny boy!’ she said, turned, and walked off. Mesmerized, Franz watched her bottom swaying in rhythm with her steps, just as it had swayed earlier to the rhythm of ‘Merci Mon Ami.’ Like the little fishing boats gently rocking, he thought, and saw her disappear into the wooden barracks that housed the toilets. He went back to the table, sat down and ordered two more mugs of beer.

  It was about half an hour before he finally realized that she had left without him. Perhaps she had walked through the garden, screened by the constant bustle of all the customers coming and going; perhaps she had simply slipped out through the rear exit beside the kitchen. At any rate, she was nowhere to be found. He walked up and down the rows of tables several times, asked every single waiter if they had seen her, looked for her indoors in the empty dining areas, and even entered the ladies’ toilet, to indignant screeches from its occupants. But the Bohemian girl had gone.

  He gulped down the beer, which was warm by now; slurring, he called for the bill and left the beer garden, where the music had started up again a while ago and couples locked in close embrace were swaying in time to ‘What Is It Beats So Softly In Your Breast?’ Head hang
ing, hands buried deep in his trouser pockets, he walked through the stream of fairground visitors, which was already considerably thinner than before, and only raised his eyes again when he stood directly underneath the Giant Ferris Wheel. With his few remaining coins he bought a ticket and climbed into the last cabin, the only customer for the last circuit of the evening. As the gondola set off, jerking slightly, and rose slowly up into the air, the light-dappled city unfurled beneath him. The bustling Prater far below. There was St Stephen’s Cathedral. The Votive Church over there. In the distance was the Kahlenberg, a dark, hilly outline against the night sky. Franz laid his cheek on a worn wooden window frame and closed his eyes. And when the cabin reached the highest point and the wheel stood still for a moment and Franz felt the gentle rocking beneath his feet and heard the wind whistling outside, he clenched his fist, drew it back, and punched the boards of the cabin so hard that two doves that had settled down hours ago to sleep on the gondola roof flew up in alarm and vanished in the dark expanse of the night.

  The next morning, in his little back room, Franz was woken by an unaccustomed racket. Outside, the shop door was wrenched open and slammed shut again several times, bells jangling madly, and there was furious shouting. Franz recognized Otto Trsnyek’s angry voice, interrupted by the hoarse bass of the master butcher, Rosshuber, and repeatedly drowned out by the hooting of a small crowd. He climbed out of bed and slipped on his clothes as fast as his pitiable state would allow. His head hurt, and the knuckles of his right hand were painfully swollen. The memory of the previous evening stared back at him from the mirror, pale and hollow of cheek. He spluttered into his wash bucket, gargled with soapy water, dried his face and went outside. A small mob had gathered in front of the tobacconist’s, and in the middle Otto Trsnyek and the master butcher were squaring up like a pair of fairground wrestlers.