And Wolfie stands in place and watches them vanish up the path and through the tree line onto the carriage street. For another day he will wander the city. Two years ago he had spent every day at this bench, a roll and a piece of ham on one side of him, his newspapers on the other. He had been wearing this same coat, but it had been blue and white checks back then, before the delousing machines in the city shelters leached the colours together. All morning he has been wandering, today without company. Through the winter he was surrounded by strangers, packed in with them in the shelters beyond the Outer Orbit, a different one every few nights. Those places don’t let you stay long. The city tramps are supposed to keep moving, and the people he’s moved with all winter have been a tribe that won’t admit him on his own terms. They don’t know how to behave around a tax inspector’s son from Passau. When he identifies himself, they laugh at him, they knock him down, they steal his boots. Poverty has turned them into stupefied beasts, and he hasn’t the physical power to defend himself. So he has been toughening himself against their ridicule and its consequences, except on days like this, when he sees his own history raw in every shadow the world casts on him. Slowly over the winters in this city he has filled up with loathing for them. The people around him this winter have been feeding his dream thoughts, for that is what his life is now, a waking dream stuffed with the words he polishes and the music he sets them to, and with rage at all the others who would silence his words and deafen his music. Throughout his days alone he is the half-god son of a warrior princess, and while he is, the world around him recedes from him, turns featureless and unpeopled, incorporeal, and he is its all-knowing king of that emptiness, which he can now fill. The people who disturb that world are not him, and he is not them. He is his own mother: burning enchantment flows in his breast, anguish and awe flame through his being, his senses falter and swoon. When he walks, it is to the rhythm of the music he hears. When he remembers the world from here in the empty park, all its events are about him. He is always reciting a song of the world to himself, and every character who sings to him, just to him, is a worshipful hero.
Some days he succeeds in forgetting who he is and what brought him to this. Some nights he remembers coming to this city, circling the Great Boulevard and imagining himself as its creator. Then he wakes and looks around and the vituperation he hears frightens even him. When he notices others’ pain, he begins to feel his own, doubly unbearable. How do you make a world that need not touch you? He is still learning.
He had once spent all his days on this bench with its view of the middle-distant city, watching the dogs that wealthy people walked here, watching children strolling with their nannies, reading the newspapers he collected from dustbins on his walk to this hill. The past few years have filled him with all the words he will ever need. Now he stares down at the palace at his feet and practises his stare. There, that man walking up the path towards him with his newspaper and furled umbrella. He’s too far away for their eyes to lock. Let’s see if he can make him look. He doesn’t know how he does it. He only knows it is a gift he has. He sits perfectly still and opens his eyes wide and aims them at the approaching man, who is wearing a dark cloth coat over his lawyer’s suit, rimless eyeglasses over greying blond hair. The man dismisses him with a flip of the hand. Wolfie gasps and imagines chasing him up the path, screaming, but he hasn’t finished polishing his words, and if he let them out too soon, they would be stillborn.
He has eaten poorly all winter, so the spring sun does little to warm him. He is also exhausted from the walk to this place. Bored, he stands up for a moment and watches the park begin to fill with strollers, groundskeepers, couples arm in arm. At the foot of the hill, beyond the Pleasure Palace, the courtyard is empty. On legs tottering with fatigue he follows the zigzag path towards the Great Eastern Road that leads to the Siberian Station. He glances into a dustbin, but the scrap of bread he sees has been pressed into the bottom of the bin by a wine bottle. His fingers cramp at the thought of touching it. He plunges into the line of trees until, soon, his back is to the palace.
The next three kilometres are downhill. His legs carry him like stilts down into the crowds, without his volition. The crowds spill onto the road where they can, dodging carters and hansoms, but he stays to the pavement and senses people parting way for him. Some days people just sense his rage, but some days he would rather not frighten anyone, would rather isolate himself with his anger and join the crowd for as long as they don’t notice him. He barely senses that he’s walking. He feels as if he’s standing still and the world is passing him. The crowds thicken, yet they also part way for him. His head down, he sees no faces, and the sounds he hears are masked by his own inchoate thoughts. When he’d come to the capital, it had been through the Linz Station, with his suitcase full of freshly laundered clothes and a cakebox full of his mother’s cream biscuits, and he had taken this same walk to look for a rooming house – the city’s station neighbourhoods are full of them. Today he stops in an alcove across from the tracks, his shoulders hunched and his hands cupped over his groin, and reads the journal headlines that have been posted in a tobacconists’ window. Nothing … only the Free Press and the other liberal paper. He’s ashamed to put his hands in his pockets, knowing there would be nothing there. So, having worked up the nerve, he passes down a curving sidestreet and enters a staircase, climbs it to the third floor, and pushes open a door without ringing the bell. He has never entered this office before, but he has stood in its doorway often enough. A man with a long white beard and the guarded look of someone who reasons only with himself glances up from his papers and blinks and purses his lips as the visitor’s smell hits him. This is a tramp, no more, a bridge sleeper who’s wandered from the canal. Younger than most, that’s all. His eyes are lowered, his hands over his groin, and he’s trembling from the cold on the first warm spring day.
‘Well, what is it?’ the man asks.
‘This is the newspaper, sir?’
‘We’re the central office of Ostara. What do you want?’
‘Issues 4, 7, and 26,’ Wolfie says, stuttering his prepared story. ‘They’re the last I don’t have. To complete my collection, do you see?’
His woodsman accent makes the editor look twice. That awful, smelly coat used to be a suit jacket, his trousers were expensive once. The boots are working man’s castoffs. In speaking, he’s raised his head so that his almost-white blue eyes glimmer.
‘We can help you there,’ the editor says, and rings a desktop bell so that Wolfie jumps. A printer’s devil enters through the back office, grimaces at the visitor, and walks towards the front of the desk to roust him while Wolfie leans back to protect himself.
‘No, no, no,’ the editor says. ‘Find me copies of issues 4, 7, and what was the last one?’
‘Twenty-six, sir,’ Wolfie says.
‘Bring them here. He wants to complete his set.’ This is about making easy points before one’s Maker, by being kind to the utterly vanquished. Even the cruellest man would seek luck this way. But my god, the smell of him … The editor blows his nose to protect himself from it.
‘You believe in our cause then?’ he says.
‘It isn’t a question of belief,’ Wolfie says. ‘You write things in your newspaper that I’ve always known. Your exposition of pure German blood and the return of the Hyperborean gods one day just reverberates in me, sir. Yes, I would have said the same things except that sometimes you have thought of them first. My father was a tax collector in Passau, right on the border with Germany. I’ve seen from experience what it means to be separated from one’s true homeland.’
‘You’re an educated man,’ the editor says, to find out what he will say next.
‘Deeply, sir, if by education you mean the only real one – and by that I mean the school of my own experience. Oh yes, I’ve read deeply enough, but it’s difficult to find materials that reflect the truth of one’s experience. That’s why I always read your journal so eagerly. I have some questions for you about –’
‘And how long have you been in the capital.’
He wishes he hadn’t asked. But it isn’t the question that angers Wolfie – it’s the interruption. He looks up from his chest and his eyes flair so that suddenly one doesn’t notice the clothes or the smell. All one sees is the animal coldness of his stare. The editor leans back in his chair.
‘The proto-humans you described in issue 33, sir. I think it’s of profound importance that you believe they’re still in our midst. I’ve walked around this city many times, sir, and I’ve looked at all the poor people, and I tell you they seem to be of two types. Yes, only two. There are the poor who are suffering from the –’
‘May I ask a question of you, as a self-educated man.’ And he pushes his rolling chair back a little. This has gone on almost long enough. This tramp must be part Czech, just going by his face, and being part Czech there’s probably some Jewish blood in him too. He had been starting to gesticulate, to look him in the eye as his confidence grew.
‘If you insist, sir.’
‘What has made you poor? What is the cause of your condition?’
‘I was trying to tell you – Germany is living next to a corpse. It’s too late for the empire now, which is dying from the poison of its own corrupted blood. It’s blood has been corrupted, do you see? In the lead article in the issue 46, you wrote something that I had difficulty grasping about the different effects of Semitic greed on –’
‘What is your name?’ the editor asks.
Wolfie falls silent. The editor opens his desk drawer and nods to his assistant. He sees that the assistant has pulled on a pair of long-sleeved gauntlets. Wolfie has assumed the posture of a horribly sad man, yet his eyes are outraged, even though all the while his voice is soft, polite, even reasonable.
‘I don’t like telling people my name, sir. When you tell people, that’s the first step before they control your thoughts.’
‘I’ll tell you what. Here’s two kroner, enough for a year’s subscription. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? But you mustn’t come back for more before then. So …’
Wolfie stares at the money, which the editor has pushed across the desk. His face turns dark at the affront. The editor tosses his head slightly and picks up his handkerchief to cover his mouth while the assistant walks around the desk to throw Wolfie out. Wolfie walks quickly out of the door before anyone can touch him and half falls down the stairs and into the street.
In the distance he hears the commotion of Hail Mary Street, the lines of shoppers on the sidewalk, and walks towards the quietest place he knows in the middle of the day, Sevenstars Lane. He walks down its curve, the tight-packed houses leaning over him, the sun vanished from the early afternoon. All the windows are shuttered. There might never have been life here. Though it’s quiet, he shudders at the memory of nighttimes here, when he was new to the city and the lights from the windows let laughter through and unhid women’s stares. As if that matters now. He has yet to find the world he lives in, but he’s incapable of inhabiting the one he sees. He walks slowly without looking. While he stares at the ground he can cool his thoughts in the muted city sounds and let the music swell through his mind.
‘You couldn’t pay us, honey,’ a woman at the corner sings out. When he looks up, she blows him a kiss while two of her friends grimace and laugh. Safety gone, he gasps through an open mouth. He spins around and walks back up the lane the way he’d come, but now a crew of hod carriers are coming down it and force him to the kerb.
‘Doesn’t open till nine,’ one of them winks at him, and the other two men laugh. The labourer’s stare is inhuman. Not cruel, not ridiculing. Wolfie, to him, is someone who only used to exist. He can’t bear the crowds anymore, but once he leaves this lane they will surround him. He has four hours before the shelter line-ups form, four hours of maddening impatience. He takes an avenue towards the city centre, with no choice but to think about the people who can see him now. Though he’s repelled by other tramps, at least no one will notice him among them. It’s on the shopping streets, walking through the crowds of shoppers and shopkeepers, lunch-hour clerks, that he feels most exposed. He’s incapable of forgetting who he was, who he wanted to be. All the other destitute people have learned to forget, but he will not. He vanishes whenever he can into the world he expected to make for himself, but that world shatters when people glance at him. He strides stiff-legged down the hill, across the southern boulevard, past the opera house, which he doesn’t look up to see, along the winding lanes of the Inner World, feeling the eyes of passersby on him and lacking the courage to lash out at them. Finally, he stumbles down a set of steps behind Greek Street and comes to an ancient church above the canal. There’s a little garden here, he can just squeeze through the wrought-iron fence, and a tree beside a shrine to St Thomas where he can’t be seen from the street. He found this place weeks ago, in the winter, and now, with the snow disappearing, he sometimes uses it as a shelter from the city. A nesting place, of the sort every tramp makes. A hiding place for the phantasies that are all that stop him from imploding into dust.
But he isn’t alone there today. He ducks under the tree’s lower branches and steps behind the statue and sees a little doll with blond hair and wearing a christening dress. She’s sitting in the place he wanted, on a piece of carefully folded burlap, her torso leaning against the angle of the stone, and beside her are a tin plate and a knife and fork, the scraps of a childhood world. He looks up, searching for windows that would let people see him, and finds one. Looking about him, he finds a different alcove, stone on two sides, a statue on the other, that would allow him to keep his head and torso out of the approaching rain. He tries the angle of the stone, leaning the same way the doll is, presses his head into the two walls, and tightens his coat around his throat. He doesn’t know how long he closes his eyes. Only that when he wakes up, the doll’s owner is staring at him from three paces away.
‘You don’t live here,’ she says with a child’s weightless anger.
‘How do you know that,’ Wolfie says, gulping back the fear that is a reflex to his waking moment.
‘Because we live here,’ she says. ‘This is our house.’
For an instant he thinks she’s referring to the doll, but then he sees that two other girls have joined her. Two blondes and a brunette in neat little coats, their shoes shining and hair combed carefully.
‘Children, who are you talking to?’ a woman calls. ‘Come out now.’
He begins to feel panic, and begins to feel tears. If he got to his feet, the woman who is with them would see him, and how would that end? With scolding ridicule at best, a cry for the police at worst. For all he believes in authority, he is frightened of it this year. So he stays in place and waits for the next thing to happen.
‘There’s a man,’ one of the girls calls.
‘Who? For heaven’s sake. Girls, come away. Bring your doll with you, Josephine. I told you that wasn’t a good place.’
‘Mrs Braun, he’s staring at us.’
Wolfie stands up. The woman gasps. ‘Get away from him, the three of you! Do you want to get lice?’
Before the girls can respond, Wolfie is on his feet and running ahead of them for the gap in the fence. The woman gapes at him.
‘I was doing nothing, I tell you!’ he wants to shout. Instead he scrambles through the bars and brushes past her towards the back of the church. Once he’s rounded the corner he can see the canal again, the crowds blocking it from him, the clusters of shopkeepers, the floating barges. He comes through the alley where a cart almost knocks him over, and crosses to the benches, but they’re all taken. This is where the homeless gather, where the police leave them alone most hours of the day, this is where society has trained itself not to see them. He stares at the backs of the other tramps, some of them are swigging from bottles, some of them are mumbling to themselves, some of them are sprawled with broken postures, their heads back. He finds a space just off the tow path on the other side of the bridge, the Isle side, in the darkening light where a little grass is struggling to grow between the cobblestones and lies down on his stomach with his eyes shut, pretending it’s already dark, and waits for his empty belly to waken him. I should have killed one of them, he tells himself. All these people, and every one of them deserves to die for something that was done to him.
