Wonderful Wonderful Times

He tells her to pour it out, but not to be so stingy as the last time, after all, he gets quite decent tips. Even if it's fundamentally humiliating. But things have changed, and incompetence is making the running. Drinking brings the gift of forgetting and is good for the gastric juices. Seeing how rarely there's meat on the table. Herr Witkowski gives a comforted snuffle, looking forward to his good coffee, which he will take with a massive amount of sugar. There are good things in life, there really are, as long as your expectations aren't too high. Of course he could demand a good deal if he cared to. Since he's entitled to it all.

Today he even gets more than usual. Because he cried so much.

CAFESPORT IS another scene. A scene, because that is where the artists and intellectuals go to be seen. Taking part is what matters, not winning. It is like sport, which is where the cafe got its name. Many have already lost their faith in Art, in spite of the fact that it was they alone and no one else who were predestined for it. They practise Art because it earns them nothing and they are therefore unsullied by filthy lucre. If they did earn anything from Art they'd gladly be sullied. But they would never have recourse to an ordinary middle-class profession, not because they can't master one but because the ordinary would master them and there would be no time left over for Art. You can't express yourself aesthetically, man, if some boss is expressing himself by means of sports cars and villas at the expense of the afore-mentioned artist. Anyone whose cigarette is only a single notch above the cheapest is immediately a target for cadgers.

At the table where the Holy Foursome are passing their time today, two other people are busy trying to prove Pythagoras's theorem by purely graphic means and failing in the attempt. As far as Rainer is concerned, mathematics belongs in the realism sector and is therefore uninteresting to him. If they were discussing literature he would long since have butted in and annihilated somebody, which he has a right to do.

Elsewhere some Greeks are sitting round, practically pushing their dark heads into each other as they joke about women and occasionally chat one up. All this happens close by the Ladies, just where the women have to pass by.

Whenever something is said that isn't to Rainer's taste, and at other times too, irrespective, he will stand up abruptly and stride thoughtfully off into a corner, where he stares about blackly till Sophie or Anna solemnly fetches him back. What's up? Tell me, please, please. You get on my nerves, stupid cows. I have other concerns, at a different level, the level I live at. You bore me rigid. Please, please come and sit down again, Rainer. You lot don't understand anything at all, how can anyone take action together with people like that, they'll run away from everything because they're cowardly mediocrities. Rainer wants the others to get their hands dirty on his behalf so that his can stay clean. Let the others take action for him. He'll keep clear. But he'll egg the others on. And he'll take his share of the money, he needs it to buy books. He sees himself as a spider in the background of their net. But he's going to go about things without the safety net of petty middle-class security. He will pull that net away from under the others' backsides so that they have to rely completely on each other and on him.

Rainer gapes at the cigarette butts, scraps of paper, red wine stains and crumpled paper handkerchiefs (and other, worse things) on the floor and waits for the inevitable nausea. Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn't. Right now, this very moment, nausea has seized hold of him at last, so that he drops the pen with which he was about to jot a line of a poem in his notebook, the ink squirts out, wasted. Now, was that nausea or wasn't it? No, on the whole it probably wasn't. The place looks as philistine as it always has done. You could hardly say that space looked even slightly heavier, thicker or more compact. But (like Sartre) he has realised that the past does not exist. And the bones of those who have died or been killed, even those who passed away in their beds, have an altogether independent existence of their own and are nothing but a little phosphate, calcium, salts, and water. Their faces are merely images in Rainer himself, fiction. At this moment he has a very strong sense of this. It is a loss. But he doesn't tell anyone that Jean-Paul Sartre had already sensed that loss in exactly the same way before him, he pretends the loss is his own.

Hans, who lost his father, is not thinking of phosphate, calcium, salts and suchlike, which is what his father is now, instead he is humming an Elvis hit, without the lyrics because they are in English, which Hans never got to grips with. Generally speaking, there are few things he has got to grips with. Though he'd be happy enough getting to grips with Sophie.

Another scene is the jazz club. Rainer wants the others to commit crimes. When the musicians take a break he strolls over to the saxophone and tries out a few fingerings he thinks are right, though maybe he wouldn't produce a single note if he were to blow in it. All that counts is that the people who see him imagine he can play the saxophone. When the musicians return he hastily lays it down so no one will smash his gob in for damaging a musical instrument. Then he orders a raspberry soda, the cheapest drink there is (they haven't bagged a wallet yet!), and starts a poem (he'll write the beginning today and the end tomorrow). Nothing out there can distract him from it. It doesn't matter what she looks like. Even Sophie has to accept this. Though one isn't as severe in respect of her, because she is the woman one loves. Love is only a small component in Rainer's life, because he knows that Love can only ever be a small part, Art makes up the rest. In the poem, Rainer expresses contempt for all fat people, with their poncy flash rings, nothing but money-making in their heads. True, he's never seen people like that close up. Sophie's father is on the slim, wiry side, really. He is a sporty type too. Rainer would not care to despise the father of the woman he loves, so it's fine that he does not need to. He has the image of fat rings on white fingers from Expressionism, which has been forgiven and forgotten. He despises them all, day-tripper obesity, caryatids in tails, it wasn't for that that his mother pushed him out of her (so he writes and so he feels, intensely). But his mother would also protest at the thought of having pushed him out for these good-for-nothings in Cafe Sport and Cafe Hawelka. She did it so that he could have a decent education. Which he at present doesn't care a shit about.

Even in here, in the unvarying gloom, Rainer is wearing his fashionable diamond-shaped perspex sunglasses. His hair is combed right into his face. This is supposed to be a Caesar haircut, but he does not look as if he were from ancient Rome, he looks as if he's from modern Vienna, which is incessantly whispering that he should go on helping to rebuild his home town and make it more and more beautiful. This, however, he has no intention of doing. Vienna, the City of Flowers: a perennial favourite for school essay-writing competitions, Rainer has already won a prize twice, once he won a rubber plant, the second time a handsome fern which has already died because loving Mummy watered it to death, ferns tend to prefer it dry, as the nursery gardener confided to the young essay-writing competition winner. (He came third, but so did nine other high school pupils.) The advice was ignored. His school always participates in things of this kind and then shows off about it afterwards. All those flowers, springtime blossoms and others, burgeoning in every corner, on every square, are now decidedly improving the city's appearance, fresh greenery, replacing the foreign uniforms that vanished when the Treaty was signed. At last. Even the Russians, the worst of all, vanished too, though as a rule they do nothing of their own free will, they prefer forcing others, particularly women, to do inexpressibly awful things. They enjoy that. Now they're gone, and the Nazis, both the neos and the old guard, can come out of their grey nesting boxes into the daylight again, like flowers. Hail fellow, well met.