'You think about me too much,' she repeated, and repeated. 'Leave me alone, will you?' Franny asked me. But that was the one thing I could never do.
'All sexual acts actually involve maybe four or five different sexes,' the sixth member of the Symposium on East-West Relations told us. This was such a garbling of Freud -- the other Freud -- that we had to beg Frank for a second translation because we couldn't understand the first.
'That's what he said,' Frank assured us. 'All sexual acts actually involve a bunch of different sexes.'
'Four or five?' Franny asked.
'When we do it with a woman,' the man said, 'we are doing it with ourselves as we will become, and with ourselves in our childhoods. And, it goes without saying, with the self our lover will become, and with the self of her childhood.'
' "It goes without saying"?' Frank asked.
'So every time there's one fuck there's four or five people actually at it?' Franny asked. 'That sounds exhausting.'
'The energy spent on sex is the only energy that doesn't require replacement by the society,' the rather dreamy sixth radical told us. Frank struggled to translate this. 'We replace our sexual energy ourselves,' the man said, looking at Franny as if he'd just said the most profound thing in the world.
'No kidding,' I whispered to Franny, but she seemed a little more mesmerized than I thought she should have been. I was afraid she liked this radical.
His name was Ernst. Just Ernst. A normal name, but just a first name. He didn't argue. He crafted isolated, meaningless sentences, spoke them quietly, went back to the typewriter. When the radicals left the Gasthaus Freud in the late afternoon, they seemed to flounder for hours in the Kaffee Mowatt (across the street) -- a dark and dim place with a billiard table and dart boards, and an ever-present solemn row of tea-with-rum drinkers playing chess or reading the newspapers. Ernst rarely joined his colleagues at the Kaffee Mowatt. He wrote and wrote.
If Screaming Annie was the last whore to go home, Ernst was the last radical to leave. If Screaming Annie often met Old Billig when the old radical was arriving for his morning's work, she often met Ernst when Ernst was finally calling it quits. He had an eerie other-worldliness about him; when he talked with Schwanger, their two voices would get so quiet that they would almost always end up whispering.
'What's Ernst write?' Franny asked Susie the bear.
'He's a pornographer,' Susie said. 'He's asked me out, too. And he's seen me.' That quieted us all for a moment.
'What sort of pornography?' Franny asked, cautiously.
'How many sorts are there, honey?' Susie the bear asked. 'The worst,' Susie said. 'Kinky acts. Violence. Degradation.'
'Degradation?' Lilly said.
'Not for you, honey,' Susie said.
'Tell me,' Frank said.
'Too kinky to tell,' Susie said to Frank. 'You know German better than I do, Frank -- you try it.'
Unfortunately, Frank tried it; Frank translated Ernst's pornography for us. I would ask Frank, later, if he thought pornography was the start of the real trouble -- if we had been able to ignore it, somehow, would things have gone downhill just the same? But Frank's new r
eligion -- his anti-religion -- had already taken over all his answers (to all the questions).
'Downhill?' Frank would say. 'Well, that is the eventual direction, of course -- I mean, regardless. If it hadn't been the pornography, it would have been something else. The point is we are bound to roll downhill. What do you know that rolls up? What starts the downward progress is immaterial,' Frank would say, with his irritating offhandedness.
'Look at it like this,' Frank would lecture me. 'Why does it seem to take more than half a lifetime to get to be a lousy teen-ager? Why does childhood take forever -- when you're a child? Why does it seem to occupy a solid three-quarters of the whole trip? And when it's over, when the kids grow up, when you suddenly have to face facts ... well,' Frank said to me, just recently, 'you know the story. When we were in the first Hotel New Hampshire, it seemed we'd go on being thirteen and fourteen and fifteen forever. For fucking forever, as Franny would say. But once we left the first Hotel New Hampshire,' Frank said, 'the rest of our lives moved past us twice as fast. That's just how it is,' Frank claimed, smugly. 'For half your life, you're fifteen. Then one day your twenties begin, and they're over the next day. And your thirties blow by you like a weekend spent with pleasant company. And before you know it, you're thinking about being fifteen again.
'Downhill?' Frank would say. 'It's a long uphill -- to that fourteen-year-old, fifteen-year-old, sixteen-year-old time of your life. And from then on,' Frank would say, 'of course it's all downhill. And anyone knows downhill is faster than uphill. It's up -- until fourteen, fifteen, sixteen -- then it's down. Down like water,' Frank said, 'down like sand,' he would say.
Frank was seventeen when he translated the pornography for us; Franny was sixteen, I was fifteen. Lilly, who was eleven, wasn't old enough to hear. But Lilly insisted that if she was old enough to listen to Fehlgeburt reading The Great Gatsby, she was old enough to hear Frank translating Ernst. (With typical hypocrisy, Screaming Annie wouldn't allow her daughter, Dark Inge, to hear a word of it.)
'Ernst' was his Gasthaus Freud name, of course. In the pornography, he went by a lot of different names. I do not like to describe the pornography. Susie the bear told us that Ernst taught a course at the university called 'The History of Eroticism Through Literature,' but Ernst's pornography was not erotic. Fehlgeburt had taken Ernst's erotic literature course, and even she admitted that Ernst's own work bore no resemblance to the truly erotic, which is never pornographic.
Ernst's pornography gave us headaches and dry throats. Frank used to say that even his eyes got dry when he read it; Lilly stopped listening after the first time; and I felt cold, sitting in Frank's room, the dead dressmaker's dummy like a curiously nonjudgmental schoolmistress overhearing Frank's recitation -- I got cold from the floor up. I felt something cold passing up my pants legs, through the old drafty floor, through the foundation of the building, from the soil beneath all light -- where I imagined were the bones from ancient Vindobona, and instruments of torture popular among invading Turks, whips and cudgels and tongue-depressors and dirks, the vogue chambers of horror of the Holy Roman Empire. Because Ernst's pornography was not about sex: it was about pain without hope, it was about death without a single memory. It made Susie the bear storm out to take a bath, it made Lilly cry (of course), it made me sick to my stomach (twice), it made Frank hurl one of the books at the dressmaker's dummy (as if the dummy had written it) -- it was the one called The Children on the Ship to Singapore; they never got to Singapore, not even one precious child.
But all it did to Franny was make her frown. It made her think about Ernst; it made her seek him out and ask him -- for starters -- why he did it.
'Decadence enhances the revolutionary position,' Ernst told her, slowly -- Frank fumbling to translate him exactly. 'Everything that is decadent speeds up the process, the inevitable revolution. At this phase it is necessary to generate disgust. Political disgust, economic disgust, disgust at our inhuman institutions, and moral disgust -- disgust at ourselves, as we've allowed ourselves to become.'
'Speaking for himself,' I whispered to Franny, but she was just frowning; she was concentrating too hard on him.