“You cannot call us ignorant.\u00a0 After all, we captured Berlin and Vienna and we know how to find the best restaurant in town.”<\/p>\n
\u2014Russian officer to Time<\/em> correspondents, 1945<\/p>\n _______________<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a>The previous tenant has left a suction cup leeched to an arm of rotting wood itself glued to a wooden block on the linoleum wall of my new shower.\u00a0 He left a lot of other shit, feminine objects, curling irons, and a bag containing seamless open-crotch body stockings and straps and a long black shaft, all in a pile by the front door that I haul down four flights of blue-lit stairs to the dumpster adjacent my building.\u00a0 Later, I watch from the concrete ledge that doubles as my balcony while scavengers cut open the bags\u2014one, in a long coat, pockets the dildo like a banana, another wearing several sweatshirts puts a tampon in her sock.\u00a0 On the shower wall, though, the protuberant vinyl remains.\u00a0 The first time I try to remove it, my fingers slide along its scummed cone and the non-serrated kitchen knife I apply to it only cuts into the wood, not the cup, and I realize I don\u2019t have any tools, really, besides a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.\u00a0 Before I go buy a crowbar and, I guess, a hammer, my landlord shows up to fix the dead outlets in my kitchen so I can plug in my travel adapters and microwave\u2014there\u2019s no oven in here, just a blank spot and closed pipe where it should be in the kitchen like the apartment\u2019s lost a tooth.\u00a0 All landlords in the city, I mean the ones who aren\u2019t Austrian, are Russian, or at least Eastern European, but no Turks.1<\/sup><\/a> Mine\u2019s name is Gregor, my favorite Russian name, and he enters at a mousy gait that contradicts his bulk.<\/p>\n When I\u2019d walked into his apartment-office on the first floor\u2014his blinds were drawn, big pots gargled on a kitchenette stove and someone on cassette was playing a balalaika medley of German classical music and American showtunes\u2014my first question was, in English, \u201cEnglish?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/a>Gregor looked up from the book he\u2019d propped against a toaster on the round-top checkered table, where he\u2019d been eating soup.\u00a0Deutsch<\/em>, he said.2<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n I produced, from the pouch I\u2019d worn over my neck (under my shirt) since JFK, the signed sublease agreement, which I\u2019d needed my old German teacher to translate for me, my letter of acceptance from the tour company to take English-speaking tourists on English-speaking tours, my type D visa, my work and residence permits, and my American passport, stamped in Amsterdam and again in Vienna.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t slept in thirty hours.<\/p>\n Gregor tapped the tabletop, and I set the small stack next to his book.\u00a0 After finding the sublease, he sifted through the other papers, looked at me a second time, and rubbed his forefinger and thumb together.\u00a0 I handed over first month\u2019s rent in the form of eight one-hundred Euro bills, which he folded and put in the breast pocket of his gray cardigan with the hand not full of spoon, and when I made a key-turning motion with my hand and said Die Schl\u00fcssel<\/em>?<\/em> <\/em>he pointed into his soup bowl.<\/p>\n Now, which is two days later, he comes to fix my outlets.\u00a0 While he\u2019s pulling the faceplates off, I find the index card I\u2019ve written questions on and ask him if there\u2019s any chance of my getting an oven.<\/p>\n He snorts. \u00a0Der letzte Mieter hat er gebrochen.\u00a0 Eh\u2014<\/em> he wraps his thick fingers around an invisible steering wheel and makes several turns, then draws a large box and places it gently where the oven ought to go.\u00a0 Then the spreading of the hands, raised eyebrows, down-titled head that say, Satisfied?<\/em><\/p>\n <\/a>Er hat auch auf meiner Dusche Dachpfannenmodelle ein St\u00fcck Holz verklebt<\/em>. \u00a0I motion with both arms for him to follow, pull aside the curtain in the bathroom, in which we both barely fit, and point at the wooden arm and block and suction cup,3<\/sup><\/a> put my hands together next to the whole unit, and pull them away from the wall.<\/p>\n <\/a>Gregor stares at the unit, says something in Russian,4<\/sup><\/a> and applies a pen knife to the cup, leaving a dimple but not puncturing the vinyl.\u00a0 The same knife he tries to wedge under the side, then under the block itself, but without success.\u00a0 He shoos me out of the bathroom, goes to his toolbox, and returns holding a battery-operated drill like an Uzi.\u00a0 As he drills into the cup\u2014why there, I don\u2019t know\u2014the apex depresses until Gregor is drilling into the wood and moldy sawdust is spraying the tub.\u00a0 His forehead is beaded with sweat and his lower lip is in his mouth.\u00a0 When he\u2019s stopped the drill and reverses the motor, the bit remains embedded.\u00a0 Gregor pulls on the drill, eventually with both hands and such force that I clear the doorway, but seems to have, on final examination, actually lost ground.\u00a0 He shouts, Ebanatyi pidaraz!<\/em> into the tub, which, I mean, your guess is as good as mine.<\/p>\n <\/a>He releases the bit from the drill and says he\u2019ll be back later to remove it, he promises\u2014promise auf Deutsch<\/em> <\/em>is Versprechen <\/em>which, if you break it down, like the same German instructor who translated my sublease once did, into prefix and stem yields ver<\/em> and sprechen<\/em>, the latter of which means \u201cto speak\u201d and ver<\/em>, or v\u00e9r<\/em> <\/em>(this is how it\u2019s pronounced, but German has no diacritics), descends from Old Norse and was used by kings to refer to the royal person we, so since Old Norse kings descended from divinity, Versprechen<\/em> translates to I-God Speak, and your soul is that much more damned if you break your promise.5<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n I don\u2019t expect him to return that night, and he doesn\u2019t.\u00a0 Three of the four other apartments on my floor house families, and in the fourth a slight man, who, when he goes out that night, carries with him a covered, freakishly gargling birdcage, and who by all indications lives alone.\u00a0 They don\u2019t speak English, either, if I judge the revving cadences the air vents pump into my studio.\u00a0 Tomorrow I meet one of my new bosses, another American who insists I call him Alex, and has said four times already how happy he is to have another American guide\u2014from Detroit, no less, but I\u2019m actually from Farmington Hills, which doesn\u2019t, if you know it, conjure up the image he probably has of where I grew up.\u00a0 I drink a beer in the shower before bed, and hang my latherer over the drill bit.\u00a0 When I pick it up again to use it, it\u2019s completely dry.\u00a0 In fact, the unit isn\u2019t wet, either\u2014I detach the shower head and direct a shot of water at the wood.\u00a0 For a few seconds, the water runs over it and down the side of the tub, but then not only does the dripping stop, the beads of water on the wood disappear entirely, as if the unit\u2019s absorbed them while I watch.\u00a0 Several more shots, each with the same result.\u00a0 I pour beer on it.\u00a0 Even the suds.\u00a0 Another test\u2014even piss.\u00a0 I turn off the water, get out, and close the curtain.\u00a0 The drain gurgles.<\/p>\n _______________<\/span> The next morning, I spend several minutes on my mattress, staring up at the cracked plaster ceiling, remembering a dream about being lifted out of a box of packaging peanuts by a giant suction cup run through a pulley by a bloody rope whose tensile snaps arc wide sickles of frothy red across the translucent vinyl.<\/p>\n <\/a>To my knowledge Gregor maintains the entire building and has a pretty Viennese wife.\u00a0 This much I gleaned last night from the kids next door, who speak English well.6<\/sup><\/a> (The children are Spanish, and since school has just ended, I hear them playing soccer with desperate school-free intensity in the early morning street, which is never busy in this district, although such inductive reasoning is wasted on their mother, they say, using the words loco<\/em> <\/em>and cuidado con lo que haces<\/em>.)<\/p>\n <\/a><\/a>When I do get out of bed\u2014the apartment faces east, so the sun has been sitting on my unshaded face several hours already\u2014and stand my mattress up against the wall, I resolve to let the unit go until Gregor has time to collect his bit, or until I go buy a hammer and crowbar, which I\u2019ve meant to do all along, and will probably do today.\u00a0 Gregor didn\u2019t finish the outlets, either\u2014one faceplate eyeball dangles by several wires.\u00a0 I throw water from the bathroom sink on my face\u2014the unit blankly watching my moving shape from the other side of the closed shower curtain\u2014put on jeans and a solid-color t-shirt, fill my pockets with coins, and lock the door behind me.\u00a0 FUCK OFF USA BUSH = IDIOT7<\/sup><\/a> is stenciled in red on the pay phone, which stands across the street from the S-Bahn8<\/sup><\/a> stop.\u00a0 Alex shouts my name into his mouthpiece when I call, and demands I join him for breakfast.\u00a0 I\u2019m to meet him in Stephansplatz, via the 39 S-Bahn and the U2 metro, take a left and right this way and that\u2014\u201cNot being able to find Stephansplatz is like walking east from Ottakring and not finding the Donau,\u201d I say, and wait for Alex to laugh until I realize he hung up as soon as he\u2019d finished giving me directions.\u00a0 It\u2019s Saturday morning, so I wait for the train alone.\u00a0 Already the heat, the worst, humid kind, refracts the sunlight over the pavement, producing that wave effect, that mirage, and my breath sticks to my face while I wish for rain.<\/p>\n In Stephansplatz, a cobbled plaza watched over by St. Stephen\u2019s (Stephansdom) white cathedral\u2014one of the stops, I think, on the basic tour I\u2019ll be giving at first\u2014there are many caf\u00e9s.\u00a0 From the center of the plaza, you can see umbrellas clustered like tents in the corners, and among one of these clusters, in front of its corresponding indoor caf\u00e9, I meet Alex.\u00a0 His slight gut bulges through his polo shirt, and he has close-cropped curly hair, a face free of worry lines, crooked teeth.\u00a0 He pumps my hand, asks if I want coffee, answers his own question, orders it for me, all while standing, then sits and gestures, beaming, to the open seat next to him.\u00a0 \u201cSit down, setz dich<\/em>!\u00a0 Sit down!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCouldn\u2019t have found a place with some A\/C, Alex?\u201d\u00a0 I pull the chair around the side of the aluminum table and sit.\u00a0 Other people are looking over their magazines at us.\u00a0 \u201cAnd\u2014coffee?\u00a0 If this weren\u2019t breakfast, I\u2019d say beer, ice cream, anything\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019ll cool off this afternoon.\u00a0 A storm\u2019s coming in.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo no tours today.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cTours this morning.\u201d\u00a0 The waiter, dressed in black pants, a white shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and a black vest, brings me my full cup, saucer, sugar cookie, and small water glass, and rushes back indoors.\u00a0 \u201cThis afternoon, we\u2019ll see.\u00a0 Doubtful, but you\u2019d be surprised.\u00a0 Tourists bring umbrellas and expect discounts.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEspecially if they bring their kids.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen do I start?\u00a0 Or where, maybe I should say.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ll be in a classroom for two weeks, learning the basics of our general tour, which\u2014\u201d he ticks these off on ten smooth fingers\u2014 \u201cwill include the Burggarten, the Leopold, here, the Stadtsoper and surrounding area, the National Library, the Hofburg palace, and three or four other places along the way.\u00a0 You\u2019ll have a script that you need to stick to, but when people ask you questions, naturally, you can improvise.\u201d\u00a0 Our waiter returns.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t even looked at the menu\u2014if there\u2019s a special today, I\u2019ll order that, and there is, so I do.\u00a0 I suspect Alex will pay.\u00a0 He orders toast and marmalade, then continues.\u00a0 \u201cWhile that\u2019s going on, you\u2019ll shadow a total of ten tours to get a feel for the route.\u00a0 After that\u2019s done, you\u2019ll go into the advanced part of the training, during which you\u2019ll<\/em> be shadowed by a native German speaker who will evaluate both your tour and any interactions you have with people outside the tour during it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow long does this go on?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnother two weeks.\u201d\u00a0 He breaks his own cookie in half and dips it into his coffee.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t want it, but I sip mine.\u00a0 \u201cAnd everyone has to do it?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes.\u00a0 I sense incredulity.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, I thought part of the reason I\u2019d been hired is I\u2019m already fluent in German and have spent a great deal of time in this city.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was.\u00a0 You wouldn\u2019t believe the inquiries we get from the States\u2014kids who think we\u2019re a study abroad program, ask straight up how much travel they get to do, and the best\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd even so, I\u2019ll spend one third of my time here in training?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou thought we\u2019d just hand you a flag and a group of twenty people to lead around and send you on your way?\u201d<\/p>\n Well, no.\u00a0 I had assumed some sort of training was in order, but I\u2019d passed their inane entrance exam, their application process, their interviews with their American liaisons; I\u2019d spoken in German on the phone with him, demonstrated my knowledge of Viennese landmarks.\u00a0 \u201cI guess not.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re not just here to party, are you?\u00a0 Find yourself a European girlfriend?\u201d<\/p>\n The way he says girlfriend\u2014girrrlfriend, like a nine-year old\u2014tells me he’s teasing, but I say, “I’m too hot to get mad at that.”<\/p>\n \u201cHey, listen.\u201d\u00a0 He leans across the table, almost spilling his cup.\u00a0 \u201cThere\u2019s no fucking around on these tours.\u00a0 These people pay a lot of money to feel like they\u2019re getting to know this place, and they will seriously fuck our shit up if you dick around, so I\u2019ll seriously fuck you<\/em> up if you do.\u201d\u00a0 He adopts the De Niro accent of an American who\u2019s missed cursing among equals.\u00a0 \u201cYou don\u2019t like training?\u00a0 Don\u2019t need this job?\u00a0 Fuck off, then.\u00a0 I\u2019ll tell them you got cold feet, decided to see Europe, get married.\u00a0 You\u2019ll see how well-lubed the EEA\u2019s revolving door is as far as non-citizens like ourselves are concerned.\u201d<\/p>\n Alex is married to a Hungarian surrealist who now holds American citizenship and lives in New York.\u00a0 \u201cOf course I\u2019ll do the training.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGoddam right you will.\u201d\u00a0 He raises his cup in a half-empty Prost, junge<\/em>.<\/p>\n Our food arrives shortly after\u2014the special turns out to be a snake river of honey over two symmetrical pieces of toast, a boiled egg on a throne, fruit arranged like synchronized swimmers in a white china bowl with crimped edges\u2014and while we eat Alex tells me about what he does to cope with being an American in Europe\u2014”Truth, the Hungarian wife helps, when she’s here, but when she\u2019s not?\u00a0 Lots of vineyards”\u2014and the questions most Americans ask on tours\u2014”I have not yet answered one actually interesting question.\u00a0 I’m dying for someone to bring up Hugh Bettauer”\u2014and invites me to Schwedenplatz, \u201csometime,\u201d to a bar called Cactus, which he says is \u201clike a Viennese Coyote Ugly.\u201d\u00a0 I will say I\u2019m amused to learn from Alex that the Hungarian enjoys her American citizenship in New York so much he has trouble getting her to return phone calls.<\/p>\n We eat quickly\u2014Alex needs to get to the office on the first floor of one of the buildings on the Opernring, where I\u2019ll meet him on Monday morning.\u00a0 The bells of St. Stephen\u2019s announce nine o\u2019clock, people in mid-sentence lean closer to their companions\u2019 faces, and, to the west, a long ridge of dark clouds hunches over and fiddles with its belt.\u00a0 It\u2019s been a long time coming, it knows, and it hopes we won\u2019t mind.\u00a0 Everything worth doing, it says, is worth doing slowly, and as it says this it sends a parabolic breeze that would look, if we could see on the molecular level, like a smile.\u00a0 Alex hands me a twenty-Euro note.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m sure you can handle the rest,\u201d he says.\u00a0 As he pushes his chair out, he looks west.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019d start for home if I were you.\u201d\u00a0 He flashes me a peace sign at waist level, makes eye contact with our waiter, who is wiping his face in the doorway, and points at me.\u00a0 I pay the check with Alex\u2019s twenty and a few two-euro coins, and leave for the hardware store in Hernals.\u00a0 The clouds darken and correct their posture.<\/p>\n _______________<\/span> I take as little time in the hardware store as possible\u2014a crowbar and hammer don\u2019t require much finesse to purchase in any country\u2014and, having traveled west to get there, rush even farther west toward the storm, which has still not yet begun, to arrive home, spine sore from the new hammer and crowbar hitting it from inside my backpack as I run.\u00a0 I remove the straps and carry them upstairs to my door, which I had left locked, but is unlocked and ajar.\u00a0 Across the kitchen, through the entryway to me, the wind that\u2019s no longer a parabola, that is now a sine wave, blows through a window I need to shut.\u00a0 I set down my bag and unzip it slowly.\u00a0 I take out the crowbar.\u00a0 Someone has turned on the bathroom light, is in the bathroom, on the floor\u2014Gregor, his torso draped over the side of the tub, head resting on his cheek like he\u2019s fallen asleep.\u00a0 The towel I\u2019d used last night is bunched up near his shoes, and his right hand is extended toward the wall, is impaled on the bit he\u2019d left in the wooden unit.\u00a0 A film of blood covers most of the tub\u2019s flat surface area, and a small amount has dripped from his face down the outside of the tub.\u00a0 I pat the cheek facing the ceiling, nothing, cup my hands under a running sink and throw water on his face, start pulling his hand off the bit, trying to tug gently, all without success because, more than impaled on the bit, his hand seems stuck to the wood.\u00a0 I plant one foot on either side of him, my hands around his wrist.<\/p>\n I help him down the stairs and knock on his apartment-office door, which Angela (I presume) answers.\u00a0 And she is beautiful, her dark hair put up, crooked mouth slightly ajar at the sight of her bloody husband with a hole in and almost all the skin missing from the palm of one hand, and the other arm draped over an unfamiliar man who\u2019s half-smiling apologetically, as if the two of us are drunk.\u00a0 Gregor and I had worked up frightening momentum on the way down the stairs, increased by the fact that his unconsciousness disposed him to pitch forward at odd intervals and leave flecks of drool on the walls, banisters, and my shirt.\u00a0 I said \u201cknock\u201d on his door, but actually Gregor\u2019s head banged into it, and I pounded with my fist a few times as much like his forehead as I could.<\/p>\n <\/a>Angela grabs a set of keys from somewhere out of sight while I juggle her husband, and she and I take Gregor to a rusted Volvo sedan where she opens a door and we plunger the poor man into the ripped front passenger seat and swing his legs around under the dash, and without thinking I jump in the back as Angela closes Gregor\u2019s door and runs around the front of the car, opens her door, is in her seat before the door has finished protesting, and starts the car, shifts into first, and kicks off the parking break in one fluid motion.\u00a0 Through all this, from discovery to Volvo, Gregor hasn\u2019t done anything but grunt, and bleed, and drool, and now his head rests against the window, his eyes tracking one passing shape, then another.9<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n The ER techs don\u2019t let Angela or me into the area where they\u2019re working on Gregor, nor do they give Angela enough information to slow the rate of her questions, which are relatively coherent under the circumstances, and not directed at me.\u00a0 Someone in scrubs that look like dentists\u2019 office wallpaper appears and leads her away to fill out forms. \u00a0Sind Sie der Sohn<\/em>, a woman asks, and I say, in English, No, I\u2019m a tenant in his building.\u00a0 Really, there was no reason for my coming.\u00a0 Now Angela asks me, in the hallway between the waiting room and the ER, what exactly did happen, then in English, It\u2019s all right, they just need to know whether to give him a tetanus shot.<\/p>\n I describe the bit and the unit and how who knows what it was used for, and while I\u2019m speaking I realize that Angela and I didn\u2019t say a word on the way to the hospital, a solid fifteen minutes during which we breathed the eeriness of three people, two with smeared blood on their clothes and faces, one barely conscious, waiting to turn left at an intersection next to another car while the wind sways power lines, picks up dust and paper and the thousand cigarette butts along every street grate, while the rain waits for its moment to quench the pavement, to blow through the open window I hadn\u2019t closed.\u00a0 The nurse takes notes on the things that matter to her and says something in German to Angela that I don\u2019t catch but that relaxes the latter\u2019s face.\u00a0 The nurse nods at me and leaves us, Angela translates: He\u2019ll be fine.\u00a0 He needs a transfusion and he severed a nerve.\u00a0 Surgery soon.\u00a0 She looks around for a women\u2019s WC and points me toward the men\u2019s.\u00a0 Get his blood off you.<\/p>\n The storm begins while we\u2019re at the hospital.\u00a0 Long bands of electricity snake along the S-Bahn lines, saplings along the street are uprooted, lifted, dragged down the street.\u00a0 Cars pull to the sides of the road, and try feebly to then pull farther over as the saplings approach.\u00a0 Most bounce off, or scrape the car doors, but one becomes airborne just before it reaches one car and pierces its windshield.\u00a0 From the window I see shapes moving in the backseat, and a brave trio of orderlies, who must have been watching, too, from downstairs, run, faces turned against the rain, to the car and open the driver\u2019s side door, out of which a limp arm drops.\u00a0 Angela turns away.\u00a0 \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t be so close to the window.\u201d<\/p>\n _______________<\/span> She drives me home after dark, after Gregor is bandaged up and the rain and wind have slowed, and she asks if I would like tea, and says he would want her to offer.\u00a0 I decline, say I have a bathtub to clean, and she offers me her hand to shake, which, after I do and start upstairs, strikes me as odd.\u00a0 The blood in the tub hasn\u2019t quite dried, but the unit is spotless.\u00a0 Some blood has run down the bit and collected on the inner cone of the suction cup.\u00a0 I retrieve the hammer and crowbar from my backpack and try the latter first, but can\u2019t find a gap in which to leverage it, and begin to hit the block gently, then harder when gently doesn\u2019t work, cracking the tiles around it, then switch to the hammer, start hitting the unit\u2019s arm, on the end of which the blood in the cup has begun to inch toward the wood, or the other way around, and I dent it, I swear I do, and I begin shouting at it, begin saying things I wouldn\u2019t otherwise like You fucker and Get the goddammed motherfucking hell off and as I say the \u201coff\u201d in that last one, with a sound like stone grinding on stone the arm splits lengthwise and one side detaches from the block on the wall and I can see a hole that goes farther into the wall than the light does, but both arms remain attached to the suction cup so the other remains stoically upright and extended, but in any case the water and the blood don\u2019t gush out like maybe I\u2019d thought they would\u2014they\u2019re somewhere else, or in the wood, or are the wood, and I\u2019m panting over this when there\u2019s a knock at the front door and I go to open it, hammer still in hand, hair in my face, eyes wide, Angela on the other side holding a plate of babka.<\/p>\n _______________<\/span> <\/a>1<\/sup> Turks have a hard time of it in Vienna, or at least as hard as the States\u2019 imported workers.\u00a0 In Vienna, supposedly as many as 200,000 Turks live, and from what I\u2019ve gotten out of my neighbors, it seems these Gastarbeiter<\/em> were wanted until Austria\u2019s economy skidded during the mid-70s and previously distasteful menial labor became appealing under the circumstances.\u00a0 These are times when legislation like the <\/em>Aliens Employment Act <\/em>passes.\u00a0 When the recession ended in the mid-80s, Austrians were prepared to make up with the workers they\u2019d even paid to leave, but only under certain conditions, e.g., Turkish women couldn\u2019t get work permits if their husbands already worked in Austria.\u00a0 These husbands, I\u2019m sure, work in many different fields\u2014some non-naturalized Turks have even run for office with the Greens and the Socialists\u2014but the only ones I\u2019ve seen run d\u00f6ner kebap stands and pizzerias in the First District and always ask when they hear me speak English to myself if I\u2019m Canadian. \u2191<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a>2<\/sup> He slathers his accent on the word, but then so do I, and we can fit a two-minute conversation into ten minutes well enough.\u00a0 But even so, we\u2019re both silent unless one of us needs the other\u2019s direct action, and when we\u2019re not trying to understand each other\u2019s German we use universal gesticulation, which usually devolves into pointing. \u2191<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a>3<\/sup> It can\u2019t possibly be a seat, and it isn\u2019t even positioned to encourage sodomic impulses, which anyway the unit\u2019s material seems to discourage.\u00a0 Whatever is interesting about it was attached to the suction cup, which appears to have been expendable relative to the dismounting of the entire object. \u2191<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a>4<\/sup> Gregor\u2019s last names are \u041d\u043e\u0432\u0438\u043a\u043e\u0432 and Novikov, and his first name isn\u2019t only Gregor, but Grigori, Grigory, Grigoriy, and \u0413\u0440\u0438\u0433\u043e\u0440\u0438\u0439, too.\u2191<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a>5<\/sup> The real story (probably) is, ver<\/em> can have both positive and negative effects on the direct object of the stem, depending solely on the capriciousness of the German language.\u00a0 It means that you will<\/em> do or become the direct object, do<\/em> or become<\/em> the direct object independent of your will, or you won\u2019t<\/em>.\u00a0 So the word presently means, Maybe I will, maybe I won\u2019t, which is all a promise really means, anyway.\u00a0 But I\u2019m just a tour guide. \u2191<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a>6<\/sup> His wife is very beautiful, she wants everyone to call her Angela, she goes door to door collecting rent from people who haven\u2019t brought it by, but she is nice to everyone and once near Christmas even brought everyone sweet babka with apples, have you\u00a0seen Gregor\u2019s blackened thumbnail, he got it fixing our ceiling fan, even though we put it in ourselves, where are you from, Gregor can speak English he\u2019s just bad at it and embarrassed, but sometimes he drinks and stomps up and down the stairs and says \u041a\u043e\u043b\u0443\u043c\u0431\u0438\u044f! \u042f, \u0432\u0430\u0448 \u043f\u0440\u0435\u0437\u0438\u0434\u0435\u043d\u0442! and then repeats it in English (\u201cColumbia!\u00a0 I, your president!\u201d) until he tires himself out. \u2191<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a>7<\/sup> If you spent any time in Vienna, or the EU in general, during the Bush administration, you learned three things: Bill Clinton was more popular than the current president, restaurants\u2014particularly those run by Turks\u2014might not serve you if they asked (and they did ask) whether you favored the Bush administration and you answered in the affirmative, and, even after Bush vacated the White House, the vestiges of European hatred for the man remain. \u2191<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a>8<\/sup> Vienna\u2019s public transit system is, as you\u2019d probably expect, punctual, rather clean, and stops at midnight.\u00a0 Busses, however, run 24 hours a day (after midnight on routes different from during daytime hours).\u00a0 Its central stops\u2014especially Karlsplatz, directly beneath the Stadtsoper, where you can get seats for \u20ac2\u2014is patrolled by body-armored cops carrying automatic weapons.\u00a0 This is not overkill\u2014lining the main corridor of this stop are what Americans call \u201ccreepers\u201d or \u201ccritters\u201d\u2014meth-heads who seem oblivious to foot traffic, who likely have slammed thereabouts, and almost seem to be waiting in line for something.\u00a0 It\u2019s the closest thing to an opium den you will see on your way to a cathedral.\u00a0 The metro also runs more or less on time, and the U4 from Heiligenstadt to H\u00fctteldorf is even air conditioned, but the street-level cars have to obey traffic signals and are ventilated only by tiny, horizontally- and inwardly-opening windows. \u2191<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a>9<\/sup> First you learn to look out windows.\u00a0 Someone familiar ties you to a seat like one quarter your crib’s size and climbs into a chair closer to the front of this room that seems built to hold these seats.\u00a0 Maybe turns to look at you, or doesn’t, or maybe reaches back with one arm to verify you haven’t freed yourself, and the room shudders till something under and ahead of you locks into a low hum.\u00a0 The steady earth through the window brings itself wherever the room turns, but in different shades of green, brown, shapes that don’t have names yet, or have names like this room, which isn’t any particular kind of room\u2014just room<\/em> with more surfaces, more tactile impressions that you express in terms the familiar in the front chair can instinctively grasp the essence of but lacks the wherewithal to probe their intricacies.\u00a0 Just as instinctively you could understand “bonds” if you heard it often enough while bound, but clearly understand your stymied reach by the time you begin to cry out and the familiar searches frantically with the only hand in view to put a rectangle into a slot above glowing segments on black plastic.\u00a0 More sounds, more words, all alien, but outside your window, more colors, and sometimes the room stops moving, and you’re somewhere else for a broad moment but then off again.\u00a0 What you see out the window, or the rate at which you see it, that becomes how fast you think, how much you process.\u00a0 Your entire life might depend on how fast your familiar drove, while the sounds, that condescending way all people speak to babies, like enthusiasm\u2019s the only thing anyone has in common with an infant, enthusiasm and that stupefying tone\u2014none of that matters or even registers.\u00a0 Your eyes swallow every blur.\u00a0 The alternator squalls like a blind rat and then it\u2019s the stop sign, the semi cab, hairy arm out the window, a kids\u2019 entertainer clapping his hands one-two-three to major thirds on cassette. \u2191<\/a><\/p>\n “You cannot call us ignorant.\u00a0 After all, we captured Berlin and Vienna and we know how to find the best restaurant in town.” \u2014Russian officer to Time correspondents, 1945 _______________ The previous tenant has left a suction cup leeched to an arm of rotting wood itself glued to a wooden block on the linoleum wall 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\n_______________<\/span><\/p>\nPeter Jurmu<\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"