The 158-Pound Marriage

'Come tell her now,' I said. 'Come let her see that you're real. But you better let me say something first, or--'

'Is you crazy?' he asked me. 'It's all finished. She never see me again, why let her see me now? She thinks I'm a dream. You tell her she's not going to dream me anymore. That is the truth. You marry her, now you look after her.'

'Oh, I will, I will,' I told him. He seemed even more sincere than our minister. My pledge to him seemed more charged than my marriage vows. But suddenly he sagged against the sink, took a short, sick look at himself in the mirror, turned away sobbing and slumped against the row of crapper stalls, weeping softly.

'I am lying to you,' he said. 'All these years I hope she sees me just once without screaming and shaking like she see a monster. When she is younger, she look at my face as if it doesn't really bother her - just that she is sorry for me, that such a thing happen to me. She is a sweet little girl, I must tell you.'

'What did you lie about?'

'I watch her get into that mess with those two boys. I think one time I am going to kill them both! I think another time I am going to kill you,' he said, 'but you are so hit by her - I can see. I am hit by her like that, too.'

'You're in love with her?'

'Ja!' he choked, 'but it's over, finished! And you better not ever say a word to her about this or I am hunting you down wherever you go to live. Even if it's Oklahoma,' he said, 'I am finding you and cutting your eyeballs out.'

'Oklahoma?'

'Never mind!' he wept. 'I take care of her. Kudashvili himself never do it any better! He say to me once that he is going to watch her every minute until she marries the right sort of man, and I say, "What are you going to do if she falls in love with the wrong sort of man?" And he say, "Kill him, of course." Now there is a love that is pretty strong, I must tell you.'

'Love?' I said.

'Ja!' he shouted furiously. 'What do you know about it? All you care about is fucking!'

He pulled himself together, smoothed his suit and tucked his shirt in tight. I had been wrong; I saw the gun when he straightened his tie. It had a horn handgrip, bluntly protruding from a high chest-and-shoulder holster of green leather.

'If you ever tell her about me,' he said, 'I am hearing it across the world. If you do not take care of her good, I am feeling my pistol cock, I am feeling it in my lungs. The way I feel,' he said, 'I can dream that you die and make it so.'

I believed him; I think I still believe him. As he walked past me to the door, the long overhead light tried vainly to penetrate his ghastly hole.

'Goodbye,' I said. 'And thank you for looking after her.'

I must have looked untrustworthy, because suddenly he seemed to need to convince me. He walked down the row of sinks, turning all the faucets on full, then up the row of stalls, flushing all the toilets. He flushed the long urinal too, and the Herrenzimmer roared with the rush of water. When he drew his gun, I thought I was about to join Benno Blum's awesome statistics.

'Put down that shaving-cream can,' he ordered. I set it on the sink beside me; he took quick aim and blew it, spinning, down the line of sinks; it landed in the last one, bobbing in the filling bowl, a hole drilled neatly in its middle. What was left o

f the shaving cream spurted and then flowed and then dribbled from the hole. One by one, the toilets stopped flushing; one by one, he shut off the faucets in the sinks while the shaving-cream can bled on.

'Auf Wiedersehen,' he said. He shut the door behind him. When I peeked out in the long hall, he was gone. No Heinrich, no Willy, no Utch to see him go.

Back in Utch's room, I hugged her, told her I would never hurt her, told her that she would always be safe with me. 'I'm going to live with you, yes,' she said, 'but I'm not going to be guarded by you.' I didn't elaborate.

There remained only one last thing to do. We rented a car and I drove Utch to Eichbuchl, the town she'd been born in - twice, so to speak. She had not been there since Kudashvili had taken her away.

On the outskirts of Wiener Neustadt, where Utch's father had been caught sabotaging Messerschmitts, we drove past the vast, untouched ruin of the Messerschmitt factory. Barbed wire circled it. Messing around in that debris was verboten because so many bombs had been dropped there, and not all of them had gone off. Two or three times a year one of them exploded; probably cats and squirrels and prowling dogs set them off. It was feared that if the place was not enclosed, children would play there and blow themselves up. Leveling the ruins was slow and risky work; it was not a job for bulldozers. The great shell sat by the roadside as lifeless as a gutted ship. On the far side of town the long, pocked runway lay unused - the largest landing area in Europe even now, bigger than Orly or Heathrow. It would be a simple matter to repair the runway surface, but the people of Wiener Neustadt were against it; they had heard enough planes overhead.

We found the village of Eichbuchl past the monastery at Katzelsdorf where Utch's mother had borrowed books. There were lots of new houses in Eichbuchl - weekend places, belonging to doctors and lawyers from Vienna. The peasants were still there, but like peasants everywhere throughout history, they were a part of the landscape - the background of the place. You had to look carefully to see what it was that they actually did. In Eichbuchl they grew apples, raised bees, butchered a frequent pig, an occasional calf. They made their own sausage; they grew their own vegetables; they hunted pheasant, rabbit, deer and wild boar. Everyone had a potato cellar with apples in it, and potatoes and cabbages and beets; everyone had a vineyard plot and made his own wine; everyone kept a few chickens and ate his own eggs; two people had their own cows and everyone got milk and cream from them. There was just one Gasthof, one place to drink, one place to eat the one dish a day on the menu. The day we stopped there, it was Serbian bean soup, black bread and wine or beer. It was mid-afternoon. There was what looked like a barn a little way up the one-street village road, but Utch did not want to look at it; nor did she want to ask anyone about Frau Thalhammer's little girl who'd impressed a Russian officer.

The old lady who ran the Gasthof did not appear to recognize her or her resemblance to her mother. She was only mildly interested that I was an American; another American had been there about eight years ago; I was not her first. In the Gasthof, some old men were playing cards and drinking wine. Utch looked at them quietly; I knew she was thinking about the stalwart village menfolk who had raped her mother, and I said, 'Go on, introduce yourself. See what they say. Isn't that why you wanted to come?' But she said she simply didn't have any feelings anymore. The men were so old that they were not the men in her mind. Everyone who looked like the men in her mind was her own age now, and innocent then; everyone who would have been the right age then was too old and innocent now.

She picked at her soup and added, 'Everyone except that one.' She fixed her eyes on one of the cardplayers - old like all of them, yes, but rougher and stronger-looking. He was not a pitiable old man; his arms were thick and muscled, his shoulders and neck were not stringy. He had a tough, aggressive jaw and his eyes moved quickly, like a young man's. Also, from time to time, he looked with interest at Utch. I wanted to leave but Utch had to watch the man; she thought she might work up the nerve to speak to him.

The man seemed to be discomforted by the way Utch looked at him; he fidgeted in his chair as if Utch made him itchy or his legs were cramped. When he stood up I realized that the crutches hooked on the back of the long bench were his; he had no legs. When he lurched out from behind the table of cardplayers, I understood why his arms and neck and shoulders were so young. He swung his way toward our table, a stumped puppet, an amputated acrobat. He balanced on his crutches in front of us, swaying slightly, sometimes inching the tip of one crutch forward or backward to keep himself steady. The handgrips of the crutches were worn smooth, the armpit pads sewn from old bed quilts. Initials, names, etchings of faces and animals were engraved on the dark, oiled crutches - as complex and historical as the archways of some cathedrals. He smiled down at Utch.

She told me later that he asked her if he was supposed to know her; was she back for a visit? 'Everyone grows up so fast,' was the way he put it. She told him no, she was visiting for the first time. Oh, he had misunderstood, he said. When he left, Utch asked the lady who ran the place how he had lost his legs. The war; that was all the old lady would say. The Russians? Utch asked. The old lady admitted that it might have been on the Russian front; that was a popular place to have lost limbs.

But when we were outside the Gasthof, one of the old cardplayers came up to us. 'Don't listen to her,' he told Utch. 'He lost his legs right here in the village. The Russians did it. They tortured him because he wouldn't tell them where his wife and daughters were hidden. They did it to him on a cider press. He never told them, but they found them anyway, of course.'

Why such an old man would want to tell strangers such a story is beyond me, but Utch claims her translation of the dialect was accurate. We drove out of Eichbuchl before it was dark, Utch crying softly in the seat beside me. I stopped the car near the river, just to hold her and try to comfort her. The river was called the Leitha, a clear, shallow stream with a pebbled bottom - very beautiful. Utch cried for a while, until, of all things, we found ourselves staring at a cow. It had lazed away from the herd down by the river, and grazed up to the roadside. It looked at us curiously. 'Oh my God,' Utch sobbed.