AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"The man who looked at you?" Mother asked.
"That man who told my dream," Grandmother said. Now a tear made its way through her furrows of face cream. "That was my dream," she said, "and he told everyone. It is unspeakable that he even knew it," she hissed to us. "My dream--of Charlemagne's horses and soldiers--I am the only one who should know it. I had that dream before you were born," she told Mother. "And that vile evil magic man told my dream as if it were news.
"I never even told your father all there was to that dream. I was never sure that it was a dream. And now there are men on their hands, and their knuckles are hairy, and there are magic wheels. I want the boys to sleep with me."
So that was how Robo and I came to share the large family room, far away from the W.C., with Grandmother, who lay on my mother's and father's pillows with her creamed face shining like the face of a wet ghost. Robo lay awake watching her. I do not think Johanna slept very well; I imagine she was dreaming her dream of death again--reliving the last winter of Charlemagne's cold soldiers with their strange metal clothes covered with frost and their armor frozen shut.
When it was obvious that I had to go to the W.C., Robo's round, bright eyes followed me to the door.
There was someone in the W.C. There was no light shining from under the door, but there was a unicycle parked against the wall outside. Its rider sat in the dark W.C.; the toilet was flushing over and over again--like a child, the unicyclist was not giving the tank time to refill.
I went closer to the gap under the W.C. door, but the occupant was not standing on his or her hands. I saw what were clearly feet, in almost the expected position, but the feet did not touch the floor; their soles tilted up to me--dark, bruise-colored pads. They were huge feet attached to short, furry shins. They were a bear's feet, only there were no claws. A bear's claws are not retractable, like a cat's; if a bear had claws, you would see them. Here, then, was an imposter in a bear suit, or a declawed bear. A domestic bear, perhaps. At least--by its presence in the W.C.--a housebroken bear. For by its smell I could tell it was no man in a bear suit; it was all bear. It was real bear.
I backed into the door of Grandmother's former room, behind which my father lurked, waiting for further disturbances. He snapped open the door and I fell inside, frightening us both. Mother sat up in bed and pulled the feather quilt over her head. "Got him!" Father cried, dropping down on me. The floor trembled; the bear's unicycle slipped against the wall and fell into the door of the W.C., out of which the bear suddenly shambled, stumbling over its unicycle and lunging for its balance. Worriedly, it stared across the hall, through the open door, at Father sitting on my chest. It picked up the unicycle in its front paws. "Grauf?" said the bear. Father slammed the door.
Down the hall we heard a woman call, "Where are you, Duna?"
"Harf!" the bear said.
Father and I heard the woman come closer. She said, "Oh, Duna, practicing again? Always practicing! But it's better in the daytime." The bear said nothing. Father opened the door.
"Don't let anyone else in," Mother said, still under the featherbed.
In the hall a pretty, aging woman stood beside the bear, who now balanced in place on its unicycle, one huge paw on the woman's shoulder. She wore a vivid red turban and a long wrap-around dress that resembled a curtain. Perched on her high bosom was a necklace strung with bear claws; her earrings touched the shoulder of her curtain-dress and her other, bare shoulder where my father and I stared at her fetching mole. "Good evening," she said to Father. "I'm sorry if we've disturbed you. Duna is forbidden to practice at night--but he loves his work."
The bear muttered, pedaling away from the woman. The bear had very good balance but he was careless; he brushed against the walls of the hall and touched the photographs of the speed-skating teams with his paws. The woman, bowing away from Father, went after the bear calling, "Duna, Duna," and straightening the photographs as she followed him down the hall.
"Duna is the Hungarian word for the Danube," Father told me. "That bear is named after our beloved Donau." Sometimes it seemed to surprise my family that the Hungarians could love a river, too.
"Is the bear a real bear?" Mother asked--still under the featherbed--but I left Father to explain it all to her. I knew that in the morning Herr Theobald would have much to explain, and I would hear everything reviewed at that time.
I went across the hall to the W.C. My task there was hurried by the bear's lingering odor, and by my suspicion of bear hair on everything; it was only my suspicion, though, for the bear had left everything quite tidy--or at least neat for a bear.
"I saw the bear," I whispered to Robo, back in our room, but Robo had crept into Grandmother's bed and had fallen asleep beside her. Old Johanna was awake, however.
"I saw fewer and fewer soldiers," she said. "The last time they came there were only nine of them. Everyone looked so hungry; they must have eaten the extra horses. It was so cold. Of course I wanted to help them! But we weren't alive at the same time; how could I help them if I wasn't even born? Of course I knew they would die! But it took such a long time.
"The last time they came, the fountain was frozen. They used their swords and their long pikes to break the ice into chunks. They built a fire and melted the ice in a pot. They took bon
es from their saddlebags--bones of all kinds--and threw them in the soup. It must have been a very thin broth because the bones had long ago been gnawed clean. I don't know what bones they were. Rabbits, I suppose, and maybe a deer or a wild boar. Maybe the extra horses. I do not choose to think," said Grandmother, "that they were the bones of the missing soldiers."
"Go to sleep, Grandmother," I said.
"Don't worry about the bear," she said.
And then what? Garp wondered. What can happen next? He wasn't altogether sure what had happened, or why. Garp was a natural storyteller; he could make things up, one right after the other, and they seemed to fit. But what did they mean? That dream and those desperate entertainers, and what would happen to them all--everything had to connect. What sort of explanation would be natural? What sort of ending might make them all part of the same world? Garp knew he did not know enough; not yet. He trusted his instincts; they had brought him this far with "The Pension Grillparzer"; now he had to trust the instinct that told him not to go any further until he knew much more.
What made Garp older and wiser than his nineteen years had nothing to do with his experience or with what he had learned. He had some instincts, some determination, better than average patience; he loved to work hard. Altogether, with the grammar Tinch had taught him, that was all. Only two facts impressed Garp: that his mother actually believed she could write a book and that the most meaningful relationship in his present life was with a whore. These facts contributed greatly to the young man's developing sense of humor.
He put "The Pension Grillparzer"--as they say--aside. It will come, Garp thought. He knew he had to know more; all he could do was look at Vienna and learn. It was holding still for him. Life seemed to be holding still for him. He made a great many observations of Charlotte, too, and he noticed everything his mother did, but he was simply too young. What I need is vision, he knew. An overall scheme of things, a vision all his own. It will come, he repeated to himself, as if he were training for another wrestling season--jumping rope, running laps on a small track, lifting weights, something almost that mindless but that necessary.
Even Charlotte has a vision, he thought; he certainly knew that his mother had one. Garp had no parallel wisdom for the absolute clarity of the world according to Jenny Fields. But he knew it would take only time to imagine a world of his own--with a little help from the real world. The real world would soon cooperate.
6
THE PENSION GRILLPARZER
When spring came to Vienna, Garp had still not finished "The Pension Grillparzer"; he had not, of course, even written to Helen about his life with Charlotte and her colleagues. Jenny had kicked her writing habit into yet a higher gear; she had found the sentence that had been boiling in her since that night she discussed lust with Garp and Charlotte: it was an old sentence, actually, from her life long ago, and it was the sentence with which she truly began the book that would make her famous.
