[80] Back to where the sun is silent

I don’t know how to be poor. Too late for me, okay. But I know what being broke is like, and when we return to the Dream City, Emma tells me we have to stop using the purple fund. The afternoon we return, I tack a drawing on the poster wall at the Frauenhuber where she likes the stuffed peppers too much, a streetscape of the crowd on Procession Street that I made while we were walking to visit her grandfather, and I sign it clearly, and when I go back the next day, the sketch is gone and the owner hands me a ten kroner note. That kind of money, you have to spend it right away on more stuffed peppers for Emma. The owner asks me to tack up another one, but I tell him, sorry, no. The next ones are for the Marzipan, which is true. I can always scrape by that way if I have to – tack up a signed drawing at a house where they know me, and then someone buys it with his folding change.

Winter is almost gone – I don’t like winters much. Life isn’t something you’re supposed to like. The world doesn’t care whether you like it or not, but you can carve out corners of it where some good moments don’t feel like an escape. When we return that spring and go see the cottage Gus has told us about, I wonder, ‘What was he thinking?’ It isn’t the cottage itself, which is two hundred metres above a path behind the nerve asylum, surrounded by tough earth like iron, with no fence and never a garden. The door has been broken from its hinges and the three rooms are full of scrap, broken pottery, sacks hooked to nails – the last people used it as a potting shed. Then I look out back and see a glass house, all the sheet panes still intact. Then I walk to the edge of the garden and feel the east wind on my face, the smell of pine boughs from below, and when you look down through the trees between two hills, there’s no Dream City. You expect to see it all from up here. Walk one hundred metres either way from the property and you would, but from this spot, this place … nothing. And the owner – a banker in the city, Gus would have made his daughter’s portrait or something – will let us stay in it for almost nothing and for as long as we want, if we fix it up before winter.

I expect three months to do it, which is about right. A month into it, we’ve rousted the sparrows and mice and moved in, and grandfather and I are doing the carpentry, starting with the roof, and then the plaster, and Emma’s doing twenty years’ worth of scrubbing floors and walls, over and over – bird lime goes direct to the hands if you let it.

The lunatics have found us. This was their clubhouse and rainshelter for a long time. They’re holding a quorum outside every morning, tripping over lumber, holding tools in the air for us, clapping whenever we look at them, crying when I saw lumber. Emma and I watch them constantly and trade notes every night, not out of any need to explain them, only that one day it will be worthwhile to start predicting them. The future might be theirs, who knows. We really want to know what makes them different from us. It isn’t until we compare them with Emil (more later) that we start to grasp it. They used to be themselves inside, and the world was outside them, but somehow they’ve lost the membrane that separates them from the world. Their self/notself barrier has disintegrated so that you can see what going on inside them unfiltered and they’ve lost the difference between themselves and the world they’re in. There was a time when men and Gods spoke face to face. Now these ones only answer the Gods inside them, cruel or benevolent. I wonder if it’s possible to yearn for the state they’re in, but really, I can’t imagine it. Clear-headed misery must be better, but if that’s so, there must be a limit to misery beyond which delusions make more sense.

Strange, they all remember their name, but that’s it. They tell us that, but they can’t tell us anything else. When they try, it comes out like word salad in a dozen languages – this is the Imperial Nerve Asylum – and what you see in their eyes is confusion so long and deep that they wouldn’t know themselves again if they ever met again. Without language there can be no rules. That’s the point of language, you know – it tells people how to think together. It isn’t something people think with. Words are how people structure themselves, and here I am, living by my own. ‘I don’t break society’s rules,’ I’ve already told her grandfather. ‘I’m not a rebel like that, I live as close to the laws and authorities as anyone else in this city. It’s just when I’m working, I expose the laws so that others can break them. It’s more useful. And I’m a slave to more of my own language rules than any of the people out there who live inside a language they can share.’

After two months, we’re almost beginning to forget what was here before us, and Emma is discussing curtains and paint colours with anyone she can corner for five minutes, when Emil appears at the door. We haven’t seen or heard from him since Prague. I don’t know exactly how he knows we’re back. I don’t know how he knows we were married three months ago. Well, he’s a gossip handler, so he would have traded something for this. His grey serge suit is rumpled from the climb, his powder-blue tie flapping in the wind that’s always blowing here. Emma’s looking beautiful in her dust-covered muslin smock and leather boots without stockings, her hair tied back with a strip of cotton.

‘You’ve come for lunch,’ I tell him. ‘We were expecting you.’

‘You were not.’

‘We were expecting you sometime,’ I tell him. ‘Bound to happen. A little bird told you. The grapevine. Word on the street. Poke around in the dark corners. Scrape your shoes, come in.’

‘Paul,’ Emma says. ‘Don’t.’

‘If I’d known Paul was expecting me,’ he says. ‘I would have brought a house-warming gift.’

‘You mean you weren’t sure if you’d find us here?’ I smile. ‘Did you ever imagine that, Emma?’

‘Enough, Paul. You’re correct,’ his mouth says with a twist. ‘I knew you were here. It’s quite a view. When are you returning to the city?’

For Emil, that’s as direct as he knows. Emma for once is cautious around him and lets me do the talking, not that there’s much to add. Emil’s thoughts are going: Mommy and daddy know you’re here. And I’m here today to learn if Emma’s roped to a tree with her legs staked up at the moon while Paul raffles her off to a naked Chinaman. And daddy wants to know if you’re coming to dinner.

It’s their mommy I’ve never met. The next Friday afternoon, we descend to the train station in the last of our good kit and carrying four bottles of Count Freddie’s Élite Tokay. By the time the train pulls into the Tirolean Station, we’ve finished one each. We’d better let a cab carry us, which gets us early to their apartment block. With half an hour to wait, Emma suggests that we finish the other two bottles right away because its easier if you’re already hallucinating the first time you meet her. So we’re sitting in the carriage gate drinking wine from two paper bags when her mother comes home, which is hilarious, I don’t know why, the way her eyes take us in. Emma tries to stand up, which strikes me as even funnier. So I get her up on my shoulders and carry her upstairs while she jokes about marriage nights and thanks God we’re legal now, let me tell you. Inside their door, I take out our marriage licence to show her mother and offer her half of it right there. We tour the apartment, which both of us take very seriously, Emma riding piggyback. She shows us the piano right away, which I start learning to play. Emma thinks that’s the funniest thing she ever heard and she sits on my lap while we compose a concerto for four elbows. Can the night get better than this? Now we climb onto the soundboard and play her mommy a harp serenade, with a screaming finale. By this time, the second downstairs maid is telling us that mommy thinks we’d better lie down for an hour. Of course, I say, let’s all lie down together, and it’s absolute hell trying to get her mommy to join us under the Turkey carpet. She’s a slippery one in all that silk, and we never quite succeed, so instead we roll her up in it, carry her to the kitchen pantry, and lock her in. Okay, then. Emma and I disappear into her old bedroom for a half-hour of forwardness, and then another half-hour, and we come out as God made us. By then the guests are gathering in the formal parlour, fat ones, thin ones, young and old. And that’s all I remember, sorry. I’m sure there was something else after that but Emma will never tell me what it was. I was a bottle ahead of her is the last thing I know. Three nights later I’m racking myself trying to hallucinate what must have happened next. Something dark and shiny and slippery, I tell you, because I remember the feeling that it happened, but what did we do, actually? What was its name? Two dozen people there, mostly not our crowd, but some were our crowd, and I still can’t get any of them who will tell me what it was. When I ask Emma three nights later, all I get from her is a triumphant smirk and a roll of one shoulder, just enough to loosen her blouse, and a two-hour swim across the floor of the cottage where we’re staying by then, that ends with her on top of me wiping her breasts across my face, sharing the laugh her smile permits. Her laugh changed while we were in Prague, when I think about it. It stopped sounding like a cough, and she stopped covering her mouth when she did. Now it sounded like this long trill, and it’s spread to her eyes, as if she’s been practising in front of a mirror.

So I’ve got all the pieces gathered now. You have here a wealthy syphilitic coward married to an aging nymphomaniac bully. And a son who yearns to crawl under any nightshirt in town. Nothing new there, in the Ninth Quarter. Rough trade seeker, that’s Emil – I’d read him soon enough. They try me with their stares, that kind – something about me promises pain. Pain takes good eye-hand coordination, which you’re born with or not. It isn’t something you can just start inflicting, and I have to tell you, when it comes to pain, Mrs Aaronson is the genius, though raising her own victims, keeping pain within the family, that’s cheating somehow.