The 158-Pound Marriage

'To get away?' I'd venture.

'From vut?'

It's ironic to think of it now, but before we met Edith and Severin Winter there was really nothing we needed to get away from. That summer in Maine we did not know Edith and Severin.

An example of the close-up lens occurs to me. I have several before-and-after photographs of the Cathedral of Reims. There are two close-ups, from the left doorway of the western porch, of the angel called 'The Smile of Reims'. Prior to the shelling of the cathedral, the angel was indeed smiling. Next to her, a forlorn Saint Nicaise held out his arm - his hand gone at the wrist. After the bombardment the angel called 'The Smile of Reims' was headless. Her arm was gone at the elbow and a chunk of stone was fleshed out of her leg from thigh to calf. The forlorn, forewarning Saint Nicaise lost another hand, one leg, his chin and his right cheek. After the blasting, his wrecked face described them both, much as her smile had once outshone his gloom. After the war, there was a saying in Reims that the joie de vivre in the angel's smile had actually attracted the bombs to her. More subtly, the wise people of Reims implied, it was her morose companion, that sour saint, who could not abide glowering alongside such ecstasy as hers; it was he who drew the bombs to them both.

It's commonly said in that part of France that the moral of 'The Smile of Reims' is that when there's a war on, and you're in it, don't be happy; you insult both the enemy and your allies. But that moral of 'The Smile of Reims' isn't very convincing. The good people of Reims haven't got eyes for detail like mine. When the angel has her smile and head intact, the saint beside her is in pain. When her smile and the rest of her head leave her, that saint - despite new wounds of his own - seems more content. The moral of 'The Smile of Reims', according to me, is that an unhappy man cannot tolerate a happy woman. Saint Nicaise would have taken the angel's smile, if not her whole head, with or without the help of World War I.

And that goddamn Severin Winter would have done what he did to Edith, with or without me!

'Haf patience,' Utch used to say, in the early rounds of her bouts with English.

OK, Utch. I see the close-ups of the shelling of Reims. The telephoto is still unclear. There's a long, broad view taken from the cathedral of the fired quarters of the city, but neither I nor the clever people of Reims have extracted a moral from it. As I advised, forget the wide-angle. I see Edith and Severin Winter only in close-ups, too. We historical novelists need time. Haf patience.

Severin Winter - that simple-minded ego, that stubborn Prussian! - even had some history in common with Utch, for all that it mattered. History occasionally lies. For example, the decapitation of the angel called 'The Smile of Reims', and the rest of the damage done to the great Reims cathedral, are considered among the human atrocities of World War I. How flattering to an angel! How bizarre for sculpture! That the loss of art should be considered as similar to the rape, mutilation and murder of French and Belgian women by the Boche! The damage to a statue called 'The Smile of Reims' doesn't quite compare to the shish-kebabbing of children on bayonets. People regard art too highly, and history not enough.

I can still see Severin Winter - that schmaltz lover, that opera freak - standing in his plant-festooned living room like a dangerous animal roaming a botanical garden, listening to Beverly Sills singing Donizetti's Lucia.

'Severin,' I said, 'you don't understand her.' I meant Utch.

But he was only hearing Lucia's madness. 'I think Joan Sutherland carries this part better,' he said.

'Severin! If those Russians had not tried to move the cow, Utch would have stayed inside her.'

'She'd have gotten thirsty,' Severin said. 'Then she'd have climbed out.'

'She was already thirsty,' I said. 'You don't know her. If that Russian had burned the barn down, she would have stayed.'

'She'd have smelled the barn burning and made a break for it.'

'She could have smelled the cow cooking,' I said, 'and Utch would have stayed until she was done.'

But Severin Winter did not believe me. What can you expect of a wrestling coach?

His mother was an actress, his father was a painter, his coach said he could have been great. More than ten years ago Severin Winter was runner-up in the 157-pound class at the Big Ten Championships at Michigan State University in East Lansing. He wrestled for the University of Iowa, and runner-up in the Big Ten was the closest he ever came to a major conference or national championship. The man who beat him in the finals of the Big Ten tournament was a lean, slick, leg wrestler from Ohio State named Jefferson Jones; he was a black with a knuckle-hard head, bruise-blue palms and a pair of knees like mahogany doorknobs. Severin Winter said Jones put on a figure-four body scissors so hard that you were convinced his pelvis had that strange spread of two sharp bones like a woman's pelvis. When he rode you with a cross-body ride - your near leg scissored, your far arm hooked - Severin said Jones cut off your circulation somewhere near your spine. And even Jones wasn't good enough for a national championship; he never won one, though he was the Big Ten champion for two consecutive years.

Severin Winter never came close to a national title. The year he was runner-up in the Big Ten, he was placed sixth in the national tournament. He was pinned in the semifinals by the defending national champion from Oklahoma State, and pinned again in the second round of the consolation matches by a future geologist from the Colorado School of Mines. And in the wrestle-off to decide fifth from sixth, he lost another convincing decision to Jefferson Jones of Ohio State.

I once spent some time trying to interview the wrestlers who had beaten Severin Winter; with one exception, none of them remembered who he was. 'Well, you don't remember everyone you beat, but you remember everyone who beat you,' Winter was fond of saying. But I discovered that Jefferson Jones, the wrestling coach at a Cleveland high school, remembered Severin Winter very well. Altogether, over a three-year period, Winter had wrestled Jefferson Jones five times; Jones had beaten him all five.

'That boy just couldn't get to me, you know,' Jones told me. 'But he was one of those who kept coming. He just kept coming at you, if you know what I mean. You'd break him down on his belly and he'd work like a stiff old dog to get back up to his hands and knees again. You'd just break him down on his belly again, and he'd get up again. He just kept coming, and I just kept taking the points.'

'But was he, you know, any good?' I asked.

'Well, he won more than he lost,' said Jones. 'He just couldn't get to me.'

I sensed in Jefferson Jones an attitude I'd often felt radiating from Severin. A wrestler's ego seems to stay in shape long after he's out of his weight class. Perhaps their history of cutting weight makes them tend to exaggerate. For example, to hear Winter describe the exploits of his ancestors is to be misled.

His mother was the Viennese actress Katrina Marek. This much of his story is true. Katrina Marek's last performance in Vienna's Atelier was on Thursday evening, 10 March, 1938. The papers claim she was an 'astounding' Antigone, which seems a suitable role for her to have played at the time; she would have required loose garments for her costume, for she was eight months pregnant with Severin. The Friday performance was canceled due to her failure to show up. That would have been Black Friday, 11 March, 1938, the day the Anschluss was decided, the day before the Germans marched into Austria. Katrina Marek knew the news early and got herself and her fetus out of the country in time.

She took a taxi. Apparently, even this much of Winter's story is true. She actually took a taxi - herself, her fetus and a portfolio of her husband's drawings and paintings. The paintings, oil on canvas, had been taken off their stretchers and rolled up.

Severin's father, the artist, didn't come. He gave Katrina the drawings and paintings and told her to take the taxi to the Swiss border, to take a train to Belgium or France, to take a boat to England, to go to London, to find the two or three painters in London who knew his work, to ask them to find a theater in London that would employ the Austrian actress Katrina Marek, and to show the drawings and the rolled-up canvases to anyone demanding proof of who she was. She was to say, 'I am Katrina Marek, the actress. My husband is the Viennese painter Kurt Winter. I am Viennese too. You see, I am pregnant ...' But clearly, even dressed as Antigone, anyone could see that.

'Don't drop that baby until you're in London,' said Kurt to Katrina. 'You won't have time to get it a passport.' Then he kissed her goodbye and she drove out of Vienna on Black Friday, the day before the Germans drove in.

Incredibly, in Vienna alone, the first wave of Gestapo arrests took seventy-six thousand. (Katrina Marek and the unborn Severin Winter were boarding a train in St Gallen, bound for Ostend.) And the father who stayed behind? To hear Severin tell it, his father stayed behind because he was devoted to the revolution, because there was still something a hero could do. Someone, for example, drove the daring, criminal editor Herr Lennhoff across the Hungarian border at Kittsee - after having been turned away by the Czechs. Another taxi was used. Kurt Winter could have been reading Lennhoff's editorial about the German Putsch as late as noon and still have gotten away with it; Hitler was in Linz only at noon. 'That was cutting it close,' Severin Winter has admitted. The first time he told the story, it sounded as if his father was the driver of the cab that drove Lennhoff to Hungary. Later this became confused. 'Well, he could have been the driver,' Winter said, 'I mean, he needed a big reason to stay behind, right?'