The 158-Pound Marriage

'I want a Mokkacremetorte,' Utch decided; she tugged me along.

'There's too much Torte in this city,' the minister confessed, 'but do you know what I miss the most?'

'What's that?'

'Hamburger,' he said. 'It's just not the same as back home.'

'Hamburger is cooked in the barbecue pits, right?' Utch asked.

'Oh, listen to her!' our minister cried. 'Oh, you have a winner there!' he told me.

On our way back to the Studentenheim Utch drew her breath in, dug her nails into my wrist and screamed - but the vision she thought she'd seen had disappeared down the escalator that underpasses the Opernring. She thought she'd seen the man with the hole in his cheek. We historical novelists know that the past can be vivid; it can even seem real. 'But it is so real,' Utch told me. 'He actually seems to age between the times I see him; I mean, he now appears like I think he would look if he were ten years older than when the Russians left. He's grayer, he's bent a little bit over - you know.'

'And the hole itself?' I asked. 'Does it ever change?'

'The hole's a hole,' Utch said. 'It's an awful thing. You think at first it's a shadow, but it doesn't move. You think it's some kind of dirt, but it goes in - like a door that's open. And the eye is pulled a little toward the hole, and the cheekbone is funny on that side of his face.'

'A nightmare,' I said.

We discussed the frequency and occasions of the vision. Did he appear at times, such as now, when she was breaking away from her past - when, say, she was freeing herself from her history - as if the vision were the psychological part of herself that was reluctant to abandon her past?

No, not necessarily; she didn't believe there was any pattern to it. She shrugged; she did not try hard to figure such things out. I suggested the man was a father-replacement. After all, he had been provided by Kudashvili for her protection; since she couldn't ignore that Kudashvili was dead, she had replaced him with the most vivid protection-symbol in her life. For years she had followed the arrests of the Blum Gang in the papers, and I told her that if she had ever seen a photograph of the man with the hole in his cheek - captured at last, or killed - she would probably have felt a great loss.

'Not me,' Utch said. (Years later, she would say, 'Psychology is better suited for plants.')

She did exercises like a man - sit-ups and push-ups and others. Captain Kudashvili had done them, of course. I certainly liked watching her do them.

'How do you say "We're married" in German?' I asked.

'Wir sind verheiratet,' she said.

I went down the hall to the Herrenzimmer, but Heinrich and Willy weren't at their sinks; it was not the shaving hour. One of them had left a can of shaving cream on the glass ledge. I shook up the contents, imagining writing with lather the full length of the mirror: WIR SIND VERHEIRATET! but there didn't seem to be enough left. When the man with the hole in his cheek stepped out of the crapper stall behind me, the shaving cream can went off in my hand.

He was quite old, and the hole was just as Utch had described it. I couldn't tell if it was black because it was bottomless, or because his flesh had somehow stayed scorched. That terrible raw hole drew your eyes, but you couldn't stand looking at it.

'Wir sind verheiratet,' I told him, because that's what I'd been prepared to say.

'Yes, yes, I know,' he said tiredly, impatient with me. He moved slowly to the row of sinks and leaned on one, staring at himself in the mirror. 'So,' he said after a pause, 'she tells you about me - I know by how you stare.'

'Yes,' I said, 'but she thinks you're a fantasy. So did I.'

'Good, good,' he said. 'Just as well. The job is over. You are going to take her away, and I am too old and too poor to follow her anymore. America!' he cried out suddenly, as if something hurt him. 'I wish someone is taking me to America!'

He looked at me. He didn't look like a gangster or hired killer or bodyguard or spy anymore; he looked like a seedy jeweler who spent nothing on his health or clothes, but only on expensive rings and necklaces for women who always left him. He would better have spent his money on an elaborate brooch to hide the hole; what he needed was a kind of cheek pin. Of course, it would be complicated to attach. I did not think he wore a gun.

'What do you think of my English?' he asked.

'Pretty good,' I said.

'Ja, it is,' he said. 'She learns it, so I learn it. She walk around that old museum, I walk around it too. She go out for Strassenbahn rides at the worst times, I try to go after her. Most of the time she never see me, but a few times I am careless. I get old,' he said. 'That is what happens.'

'Why do you follow her?' I asked him. 'Are you still working for the Russians?'

He spat in the sink and shook his head. 'Russians and Americans are the same,' he said. 'I promise Kudashvili. I tell him I look after her until she goes to live with him. How do I know Kudashvili is going to be killed? I make a promise: I look after his Utchka. But no more. Who is thinking she takes twenty-five years to get married?'

'My God,' I said. 'You should have told her.'

'She hates me,' he said. 'It's unfair, of course. So once I work for Benno Blum, so what? So then I work for Kudashvili. Does she think him an angel?'