The 158-Pound Marriage

'Ja, it's slang. You won't find it in the dictionary.'

Nor are there words, I'm sure, for all the things Utch and I did in Vienna those first few weeks of November 1963. Are there words, for example, for the faces of Utch's ex-roommates in her Studentenheim on Krugerstrasse? Over a line-up of gleaming sinks, we three shaved each morning in the Herrenzimmer. Willy had a goatee which he avoided like his jugular; Heinrich had a mustache no thicker than the artery at his wrist. I watched their razors and whistled. After the third night I spent with Utch, Willy shaved off his goatee, tears in his eyes. After the fourth night, Heinrich emasculated his mustache. Then Willy emptied a can of shaving cream into his curly blond hair and leered over my shoulder, as my own razor shakily skimmed my throat. After the first week with Utch, I asked, 'These fellows down the hall, the ones I meet in the men's room each morning - you know them?'

'Ja.'

'Uh, what were they to you?' I asked.

And Utch would go on and on about her guardian Captain Kudashvili, about Frau Drexa Neff's steam room, about attending the memorial service for Stalin. And every morning while I shaved, Willy and Heinrich took off more hair. It was my second week in the Studentenheim when Willy shaved the furry ridge off his stomach and made strong strokes through the blond clump hiding his navel.

'Their demonstrations are getting worse,' I told Utch. 'I don't think they like me.'

So Utch told me about the Benno Blum Gang - especially the man with the hole in his cheek, her last bodyguard. The next morning Heinrich loomed over my shoulder in my mirror, and shaved a quick swath through the dark forest on his chest, slashing a hidden nipple in the process. His blood turned the shaving lather pink; he dabbed it on his eyebrows and grimaced at me.

'I think I'll grow a beard,' I said to Utch. 'Do you like beards?'

We went to the opera and the zoo; like the opera fans, the animals kept to themselves. She showed me the little streets, the famous Prater, the parks with their neighborhood orchestras, the gardens, Kudashvili's old apartment house, the Soviet embassy. But it was November; it was more fun indoors. Her room at the Studentenheim was almost anti-girlish; she was twenty-five, after all, and had inherited no mementos from her mother. She had grown up with a Soviet Army officer and, more recently, with dictionaries and art history. She had grown up a little with Willy and Heinrich too, though I wouldn't know this until later. She had a narrow single bed, nearly as firm and compact as Utch herself, but she allowed me to rest my head between her breasts.

'Are you comfortable?' I kept asking her. 'Are you all right?'

'Of course!' she said. 'Aren't Americans ever comfortable?'

In the mornings, I still had to brush m

y teeth; I could not avoid the Herrenzimmer altogether. As my beard grew, Willy and Heinrich grew balder, and I said to Utch, 'It's as if they're trying to suggest symbolically that my presence has deprived them of something.'

I heard more about the man with the hole in his cheek, another symbol. Utch had compressed him into all her bodyguards, into all her years of growing up in the occupation. The man had become Benno Blum; she dreamed of him; she swore to me that even now she occasionally fantasized him; he would appear in the windows of passing cabs or in the aisles of swaying Strassenbahns, no doubt lurking behind a raised newspaper. Once she saw him when she was conducting a tour in the Kunsthistorisches. He appeared like a fallen angel in the bottom corner of a huge Titian, as if he'd dropped out of the painting and, wholly out of grace, was waiting to be discovered.

For two weeks Utch kept her job and I had to trail behind her tours. But it was November; the tourists were going south or home; guides were being laid off. She said she liked the job because it was nonpolitical. In winter, she was often in the service of the Soviet embassy's M. Maisky. She had been the interpreter for a ballet troupe, a string ensemble, a mystic, a colonel out of uniform and several 'diplomats' with an undisclosed rank and purpose. Most of them had made Russian propositions to her. She had always thought of her future as narrow. 'I can either be a Communist in Vienna,' she told me, 'or I can be a Communist in the Soviet Union.'

'Or you can come to America with me,' I said.

'I don't think America's a very good place to be a Communist,' Utch said.

'But why are you a Communist?'

'Why not?' she said. 'Who else took care of me?'

'I'll take care of you.'

'But I don't know any other Americans,' she said.

Her room was full of plants; she liked the color green. We could talk and breathe hard in there all day and night and always have fresh oxygen. But it was November; some of the plants were slowly dying, too.

In the Herrenzimmer one morning Heinrich shaved his head. My beard had grown almost a half-inch. Heinrich's skull glinted at me. 'I think Utchka and I are going to live in America,' I told him. He didn't appear to understand English; he stared at me, filled his mouth with shaving cream and spat in the sink. His opinion was pretty clear. I turned back to my sink; I'd been getting ready to brush my teeth when Heinrich's shining dome distracted me. When I picked up my toothbrush, all the bristles were shaved off; Willy had done the deed while I'd been talking to Heinrich. I looked at Willy, standing at the sink next to mine; he was grinning at me, changing razor blades. He didn't appear to understand English either.

'That's funny,' Utch said. 'Willy and Heinrich have had about seven years of English in school. Sometimes they speak it to me.'

'Fancy that,' I said.

'Was ist "fancy"?'

So we went to the gold-edged, red-brocaded office of M. Maisky in the Soviet embassy. M. Maisky looked looses-kinned and old; he gazed at Utch the way a sickly uncle lavishes fondness and bitterness on a robust niece.

'Oh Utchka, Utchka,' he said. He went on and on in Russian, but she asked him to speak English so that I could understand him, too. He regarded me sadly. 'You want to take her away from us, dear boy?' he asked. 'Oh Utchka, Utchka, what would poor Kudashvili say? America! Unashamedly he weep would!' Maisky cried.

'He would weep unashamedly,' Utch corrected.

'Yes,' Maisky said, his old gray eyes aswim. 'Oh Utchka, Utchka, to think of all the years you grow that I have watched! And now this ...'