Someone apparently thought that red and fluorescent green would be the best colors for the stairwell. The pillars on each floor are circled by plaster garlands, ending in a wreath. Nicotine-colored moisture runs down the walls. It is a clash of styles and influences, the good old Louis-the-Something hotel style, Art Deco, the impoverished fashion of the socialist workers’ paradise and the stagnation of a hotel that falls short of the demands of the modern age. The carpets are grimy, the decorative picture frames cracked, we are witnessing a monumental demise. The hotel is so tired, it is begging for attention, for a renaissance.
On our floor is a set of stairs, six or seven steps, that suddenly disappears into a wall — this is where the ghosts come out at night. It is glorious and sad, this hotel, a royal grave left unplundered.
We are sitting at a table in the Titan restaurant. From the speakers come songs by artists forgotten everywhere in the world except here. Joe Cocker. Barbra Streisand. In the middle of the restaurant is a table set for forty, but no one is seated at it.
‘As though someone was going to throw a party, but changed their mind,’ my mother says.
The whole thing has given her the giggles. The waiter hands us the menu. In a plastic folder is a sheet of paper bearing the words JULY SPECIAL. My mother asks for the January special. The man says it’s the same as this one. I order the July special. While she tries to decipher the menu’s English, she asks, ‘Have you talked to your girlfriend yet?’
‘She’s not my girlfriend anymore. You know that. It’s over.’
‘Well it doesn’t have to be so definite, does it? You two are so theatrical.’
‘I can’t reach her. Not since we left. I’ve talked to her answering machine so often that it must be full by now. I left the number in Vienna, the one here, slowly, so that she could write it down. But she hasn’t called back or left a message.’
‘Something could have gone wrong that you don’t know about, sweetheart. It’s possible.’
‘She may be chaotic, but her principles are like cast iron. I left, these are the consequences. That’s what she’s trying to tell me.’
My mother sniffs in disapproval.
‘Love isn’t a principle. Love should be accommodating and compassionate. You can’t determine the course of love, that’s what Khalil Gibran says. Love itself determines the course of events for you, if it thinks you’re worthy. Not the other way around.’
‘Gibran, the spiritual snake-oil merchant.’
‘Maybe she’s not the kind of girl you can leave alone.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘There are girls like that. You can’t leave them alone.’
‘What are you saying exactly?’
‘That things happen.’
‘Such as?’
‘I think you can figure that out for yourself.’
‘Oh, thank you.’
‘She plucked at her hair the whole time. That says something as well.’
‘What?! What for Christ’s sake. .’
The waiter comes out of the kitchen, chewing on something. My July menu is served. A whole duck. Tucked away beneath it is a bed of red cabbage, white cabbage and, the great blunder of Czech popular cuisine, a pile of noodles. Boiled strings of dough. Sometimes made from potato flour, sometimes wheat. Resignedly, my fork putters about between the duck, the cabbage and the starch.
‘I’m not sure this is really cheese,’ I hear her say across the table.
The chef ’s salad, always a risky thing to order. You want to look the other way, but the bright light from the electric candles overhead reveals everything in its nakedness.
‘When was the last time you smiled?’ she asks.
I look up.
‘Or said something nice to me?’
‘You have journalists for that, don’t you? Talk show hosts?’
‘I’m so tired of this, Ludwig. Really, so very tired. I don’t have to take it anymore. I must be crazy to have let this go on so long. That you blame me for living my life, that’s your business, but I don’t want to listen to it anymore. Do it somewhere where I’m not around.’
Dinner has come to a halt. It takes a little while for my mother to pull herself together.
‘I’ve thought about this for a long time, Ludwig, but I think it would be better if you went away. Lead your own life. You’re twenty years old, you. .’
‘Twenty-one,’ I murmur.
‘You’re old enough to stand on your own two feet. I’ll give you money to help you get set up, but I don’t want this anymore. This sour old man who comments on everything, on everything I do. I get a knot in my stomach every time I see you. It makes my stomach hurt.’
I barely hear what she’s saying, until she asks, ‘What are you doing here, for heaven’s sake? You follow me around like a vicious little dog. Why, Ludwig?’
‘To save you,’ I say. ‘To keep you from making a complete mess of things.’
Her shrill laugh, almost hateful.
‘To save me? Do you have some kind of Messiah complex or something? Please, stop it. Save me? It’s been a long time since I’ve felt as down as I have ever since you. . Go save yourself, buddy.’
*
And so came the unexpected end to my European tour with her. She weeps, again, and I remember the words from the shredded Bible I had found on the street: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh; I have done precisely the opposite. She tosses her knife and fork into the bowl of chef ’s salad and pushes back her chair with a screech. The people at the next table look up as she leaves the restaurant, bent over, wrapped in her sorrow. Then they look at me. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.
I went back to Los Angeles. From one defeat to the next. Between the airport and her house I died of misery. It was a stroke of luck that I hadn’t returned her key before I left. The apartment had not been abandoned, as I had feared, but seemed barely occupied either.
‘Hello, Dylan,’ I said to the fetus.
I stood motionless amid the chaos. I had left this paradise of my own accord, my return was a clandestine intrusion, a breaking and an entering. The apartment seemed to have been left in a hurry, but then it had always seemed that way.
‘Where’s your mother, Dylan?’
The answering machine showed a blinking number 20. I tossed a T-shirt over it. The daylight was fading slowly, I sat on the edge of the bed and thought about the state of inertia in which I found myself. Shadows were crawling out from the objects in the room. Even putting on water for tea seemed like an effort from which I might never recover. After a little while I fell back on the bed, my hands folded behind my head. If I craned my neck I could see the photo of the fetus. I drifted in and out of sleep.
‘I was in Vienna, Dylan,’ I said. ‘Not your kind of place. Austria is a completely racist country. I was in Prague too. In fact, I can’t remember seeing a single black person. Maybe if I’d paid more attention.’
The black coach in Vienna, the rattling sound of hoof beats. Der Tod, das muss ein Wiener sein.
‘Life is strange, Dylan. I’m trying to reconstruct the train of thought behind the stupid mistake I made by leaving your mother — what was I thinking? What kind of idea could be weighty enough to make you leave the sanctuary of love? I should make a sacrifice, I haven’t forgotten about that. Maybe a self-sacrifice, to show her what that is. To set an example. You and I are both sons, we both know how difficult all that can be. What we basically need is a mother who gives herself away for us. But giving yourself away isn’t exactly in my genes. I should know, because I tried. The sacrifice was not accepted, more or less as I’d predicted. I thought maybe it would bring us closer, that we would belong together again if one of us had the courage to forget his own self-interest, without restrictions, without conditions, all those things that make a sacrifice look more like a transaction. The sacrifice didn’t create the orderliness I was looking for. All it brought was more distance and chaos. It wasn’t the right time or the right place and, more fundamentally, we’re not the right people. It might be my fault for expecting results. I took it to the market and hung a price tag on it. I wanted harmony. But that calls for dedication, and that’s exactly what she doesn’t have. I was going to show her how it was supposed to work. I didn’t take myself into account. By leaving your mother, I scotched my own desires. But scotching your desires isn’t the point. That’s not a sacrifice, that’s self-castigation.