Out of the Line of Fire (13 page)

Moments later I was comfortably seated four or five metres above ground on a thick, smooth bough with my back leaning against the arch of an adjacent branch. There, a short distance away, directly across from me, was Elena’s room, bathed in a soft light from her bedside lamp. I listened to the night fidget around me while above the sky seemed to breathe in slow, regular waves of luminosity. Behind me, in the distance, I could see the shape of the dimly lit church spire.

The bathroom light flicked off and almost immediately Elena appeared in the doorway. She was wearing her red bathrobe and had a towel wrapped around her head. She switched her radio on and I heard the opening bars to Debussy’s
L’Apr
è
s-midi d’un faune
reach out into the darkness towards me. She pulled up a chair and sat in front of her dressing-table. Her back was to me but I could see the reflection of her face and shoulders in the mirror in front of her. She undid the towel around her head and started drying her hair, cocking her head sideways as she did so. From time to time she stopped rubbing and shook her head. Her hair was not long and she was soon finished. She tossed her towel across to her practice rail and sat flicking strands of hair away from her face. She leaned forward pouting her lips, turning her head from side to side. She seemed to be examining her reflection intently in the mirror. Then her two hands appeared at her shoulders and, grasping the edge of her bathrobe, they pulled it slowly down behind her. The muscles of her back flickered into view. She pulled her shoulders back and her inflated ribcage and breasts suddenly appeared in the mirror. Gone was the shading of her tan into the modest paleness of the previous summer. Now she was evenly tanned all over. Obviously she had been spending her afternoons sunning herself on her balcony for some time. She sat there, her breath held, and rotated her body slowly. She drew her hands up over her breasts and across her nipples. Then, with the tips of her fingers, she lightly traced the outline of each breast against her ribcage below.

She stood and let her bathrobe fall away. She twisted from side to side again, shamelessly admiring her faultless body and then, like some miraculous vision, turned to face me, her hands on her hips. There in front of me stood an image of beauty incarnate. Young, lithe, achingly beautiful. She looked back over her shoulder at her reflection. I was trembling as I watched her arch back on her toes. I clutched grimly at the cool trunk beside me, afraid I might crash to the ground. She turned and sat on the side of her bed, still facing me. In the soft light her young body seemed suffused with an inner radiance. She ran her fingers through her hair and then let herself fall softly back onto the bed. She bent one knee up towards her and reached down along her body with her hands. It took me a few moments to realize what she was doing. When I did I suddenly felt that the whole tree in which I was sitting had begun to shake and that all Elena had to do was to look out and she would see the mantle of leaves outside her window inexplicably shimmering in the moonlight. I watched her gradually surrendering to her passion. It was as though she were struggling with an invisible assailant, someone whom she was trying simultaneously to embrace and repulse. Unsuccessfully she tried to stifle her own cries as her body twisted and writhed like a thing possessed. It was like something catastrophic, indescribable, alien, inhuman almost. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to concentrate, trying to work out what it really meant. When I opened them again Elena was sitting back at the mirror brushing her hair as though nothing had happened at all.

That night I lay for hours on my bed thinking about what I had seen before finally dropping off to sleep. When eventually I did, I dreamt I was sitting out in the tree again, watching Elena brushing her hair in front of her mirror. She was still wearing her red silk kimono-style bathrobe and all around me, as though it were issuing from the leaves themselves, I could hear the rhapsodic melody of Debussy’s music.

Then, in the moonlight at the far end of the house, I thought I glimpsed something move fleetingly through the shadows of the trees. I peered into the darkness. A silvery form flickered into view and was instantly gone again. I rubbed my eyes. Perhaps I was seeing things. I looked across at Elena. She was still sitting in front of her dressing-table mirror. I pinched myself to make sure I was awake. I was sure I was. I looked back to the end of the house just in time to see what appeared to be a faun-like figure glide noiselessly through a patch of pale moonlight and into the shadow cast by the balcony. I could see a pair of moonlit feet slowly making their way along the base of the wall of the house. Then, against a triangular patch of serrated-leafed ivy which in the moonlight looked as though it had been sculpted from hundreds of tiny sheets of burnished silver, appeared the phosphorescent shape of a naked youth. A soft mysterious light seemed to dance across his body and along the muscles in his arms and legs. He turned momentarily towards the garden and I glimpsed his face. It was, of course, Alexis.

He looked up towards the balcony and whistled the three-note melancholy call of a nightingale into the night. Elena hesitated for a moment, listening intently. He whistled again, and Elena stood, turned and ran to the balcony.

Alexis, she cried. Alexis, Alexis. Oh, how I’ve longed for you.

Elena. My darling Elena.

[You have to remember, this
was
a dream.]

He looked around desperately for a moment.

Is there a ladder or something I can use to get onto the balcony? he called softly.

There should be a wheelbarrow by the wall I think. No, no…to the right a little.

My heart sank.

Yes. Here it is, I heard him say.

In the moonlight I could see Alexis’ half-aroused sex nodding heavily, like some thick-witted accomplice not quite sure what was going on but pretty excited about it nevertheless. Quietly he positioned the wheelbarrow under the balcony and like a giant ghostly cat hauled himself swiftly up and over it. They stood apart for a moment, bathed in light, before clasping each other in their arms. Elena’s bathrobe fell away as Alexis’ head bent to kiss her breast. At the very instant his lips closed over the dark bud of her nipple a large drop of rain splattered against my cheek. Within seconds it was teeming down. Elena and Alexis seemed oblivious to the rain as they stood there exultantly embracing each other. Finally Elena broke free and, taking Alexis by the hand, she pulled him through the open doorway into her room. She closed the doors and, unfortunately, drew the curtains.

I sat there in the rain for a few minutes, soaked and dazed by what had happened. Then I carefully lowered myself from one slippery bough to another and hung suspended for a moment or two before dropping into the garden below. I made my way back towards the front of the house. To my dismay the lounge-room light was on and through a small gap in the curtains I could see my mother sitting at the piano playing softly. Then she stopped and sat staring at the music, just staring. A shiver passed through my body as it registered the cooling dampness of my wet clothes.

On the porch I undressed and wrung as much water as I could out of them, then quietly I opened the front door. My mother had begun playing again and I could hear the sound of the piano faintly. For a horrifying moment, as I made my way noiselessly through the entrance hall, I imagined myself encountering my mother naked on the stairs. But in the event I made it back to my room without incident.

In the morning, when I awoke, I could have sworn that my clothes were still damp.

Why is it I can get
nothing
to stabilize, no order to coalesce? If only I could recall everything I had ever read. Instead, the more I throw myself into my work the less I remember. It’s as if in an effort to achieve a perfect tan I had spent hours out in the sun only to find that a week later I have begun to peel.

I sat ensconced in one of my Omi’s large, floral-patterned armchairs, disconsolate.

Although she looks much younger, my Omi, my grandmother, is in her seventies. She is small and grey-haired and has mischievous, unpredictable eyes. She is impatient and has a habit of finishing the sentences of the person she is talking to and then asking some apparently quite unrelated question. One often has the impression that a conversation with her is really a series of randomly connected fragments not subject to any prevailing sense of logic. People who do not know her well find this disconcerting.

On first appearances her apartment is light, open and stylish. In reality it is an impossible mixture of nineteenth-century Viennese conservatism and anarchic modernism. Most of the furniture she inherited from her parents and in its new surroundings it seems hopelessly caught between a sense of unquestioned cultural superiority and offended dignity as it unfashionably clings to memories of a quieter, more unified past. Any real sense of nostalgia however is completely banished by the chaotic splashes of colour which decorate the walls. My Omi is a passionate collector of modern art. It is an obsession with her. Unfortunately these pictures are also a source of constant pain to my father. They are tangible evidence of the undiscussed relationship that exists between my grandmother and Gerhard Liebermann, faculty colleague and Professor of Art History at my father’s university and twenty years my grandmother’s junior. We have no modern art works at home, nor does my father ever accompany us on our visits to the local museum.

One has the impression that her apartment belongs to a much younger woman: someone, perhaps a successful independent businesswoman in her forties, who has consciously yoked together these disparate elements in the hope of creating some shocking new decorative harmony, someone who has just popped out for a moment and whose return is imminent. The presence of my little grey-haired grandmother seems then to add yet another contradictory note to the overall design.

The self-willed, chaotic personality of her youth has mellowed into an energetic, sharp-witted pragmatism. She remains the only person who can constantly outmanoeuvre my father in an intellectual discussion, who, to her glee and his exasperation, is able to reduce everything to the original and irrefutable status of their relationship as mother and son. She simply refuses to accept that the world is accessible to rational debate and, given that this is so, maintains that it is patently absurd to conduct any argument according to mutually agreed-upon rules of logic. To her, causative effect is an illusion—‘ergo’ simply does not exist and should be banished from the language. You can’t burn the cake at both ends, she is fond of saying.

What is worse, however, is that she used to turn up uninvited to official university functions, announce who she was and, if she thought my father was being particularly unbearable, she would wander from group to group explaining to them how, when my father was a little boy and Wittgenstein and Moritz Schlick came to dinner, he used to get them mixed up.

Guten Abend, Herr Doktor Professor Schlick, he would say looking up at Wittgenstein with his hand outstretched.

Schlick thought this was a tremendous joke.

See, he would say laughing. What did I tell you Ludi? What did I tell you! Ah Theochen, Du bist mir wirklich lieb [Ah, my little Theo, I think you’re really sweet].

And look at him now, she would say. Calls himself a logical positivist, bah!

Poor old Moritz.

You can imagine how infuriating this was for my father.

She is also an incredible snob and at times she peppers her language with wildly colourful and occasionally obscene French, English, Italian and even Russian phrases. Sometimes, particularly when she wishes to annoy my father, she will impersonate the family’s former Jewish housekeeper.

As I sat there she stood opposite me looking at the image of a large print in a chrome frame newly hung over the mantelpiece. It consisted of a series of broad black brush strokes against a white background. She wanted to know what I thought of it but I wasn’t really interested, my mind was elsewhere. She walked back up to it and made a minute adjustment to the way it was hanging. I had half an urge to lift my head to smell one of the flowers amongst which I seemed to be sitting. I could hear her chatting away in the distance. I had to get myself out of myself, I thought. Out of what was becoming an obsession.

Pardon, I said.

Mother well.

Yes, she’s fine. You asked me already.

She laughed and turned to look at me.

How about some coffee? she said after some moments.

Sure.

A few minutes later she returned from the kitchen carrying an ornate silver tray with two delicate china cups full of black coffee. In the centre of the tray was one of her outrageously flamboyant creations for which the name cake was just not appropriate. I had to laugh.

Wow, that’s incredible, I said. What’s it called?

Jugendstilkuchen. I got it from my new art-deco cookbook. Do you like it?

It’s fantastic, I said.

This cheered me up somewhat and as I sat there talking to my grandmother I became aware that she wasn’t saying anything of real consequence at all. Instead she seemed to be waiting for me to pluck up enough courage to broach the subject of what had so obviously been bothering me. But how on earth could I tell her about what had led to my life becoming permeated with a sense of strange and relentless erotic presentiment—that I could be sitting on a bus staring absent-mindedly out of the window when the fleeting glimpse of a tanned calf muscle or the momentary arch of an eyebrow would suddenly send a succession of vivid and disturbing images racing through my mind. And just at the moment when I thought one of these crises had passed I would glance innocently across at the patterned trunk of a plane tree and off I’d go again. But I felt that if I didn’t tell someone soon, I would go mad.

Now Wolfi, the cake, you hardly touched it. You got something the matter with you. A boy your age should eat. Aren’t you happy?

Oh Omi, I think I’m going crazy, really, I’m going crazy.

Only two things drive a boy your age crazy. Either you got a girlfriend who don’t love you or you don’t got a girlfriend who loves you.