The Fist of God (43 page)

For some reason, December 15 in Vienna was quite warm. The sun shone, and the temperature rose. At the lunch hour Fräulein Hardenberg left the bank as usual for her modest lunch and decided on a whim to buy sandwiches and eat them in the Stadtpark a few blocks away from the Ballgasse.

It was her habit to do this through the summer and even into the autumn, and for this she always brought her sandwiches with her. On December 15 she had none.

Nevertheless, looking at the bright blue sky above Franzis-kanerplatz and protected by her neat tweed coat, she decided that if nature was going to offer, even for one day, a bit of
Altweibersommer
—old ladies’

summer, to the Viennese—she would take advantage and eat in the park.

There was a special reason she loved the small park across the Ring.

At one end is the Hübner Kursalon, a glass-walled restaurant like a large conservatory. Here during the lunch hour a small orchestra is wont to play the melodies of Strauss, that most Viennese of composers.

Without being able to afford to lunch there, others can sit outside the enclosure and enjoy the music for free. Moreover, in the center of the park, protected by his stone arch, stands the statue of the great Johann himself.

Edith Hardenberg bought her sandwiches at a local lunch-bar, found a The Fist of God

park bench in the sun, and nibbled away while she listened to the waltz tunes.

“
Entschuldigung
.”

She jumped, jerked out of her reverie by the low voice saying “Excuse me.”

If there was one thing Miss Hardenberg would have none of, it was being addressed by a complete stranger. She glanced to her side.

He was young and dark-haired, with soft brown eyes, and his voice had a foreign accent. She was about to look firmly away again when she noticed the young man had an illustrated brochure of some kind in his hand and was pointing at a word in the text. Despite herself she glanced down. The brochure was the illustrated program notes for
The
Magic Flute
.

“Please, this word—it is not German, no?”

His forefinger was pointing at the word
portitura
.

She should have left there and then, of course, just gotten up and walked away. She began to rewrap her sandwiches.

“No,” she said shortly, “it’s Italian.”

“Ah,” said the man apologetically. “I am learning German, but I do not understand Italian. Does it mean the story, please?”

“No,” she said, “it means the score, the music.”

“Thank you,” he said with genuine gratitude. “It is so hard to understand your Viennese operas, but I do love them so much.”

Her fingers slowed in their flutter to wrap the remaining sandwiches and leave.

“It is set in Egypt, you know,” the young man explained. Such nonsense, to tell her that, she who knew every word of
Die
Zauberflöte
.

“Indeed it is,” she said. This had gone far enough, she told herself.

The Fist of God

Whoever he was, he was a very impudent young man. Why, they were almost in conversation. The very idea.

“The same as
Aïda
,” he remarked, back to studying his program notes.

“I like Verdi, but I think I prefer Mozart.”

Her sandwiches were rewrapped; she was ready to go. She should just stand up and go. She turned to look at him, and he chose that moment to look up and smile.

It was a very shy smile, almost pleading; brown spaniel eyes topped by lashes a model would have killed for.

“There is no comparison,” she said. “Mozart is the master of them all.”

His smile widened, showing even white teeth.

“He lived here once. Perhaps he sat here, right on this bench, and made his music.”

“I’m sure he did no such thing,” she said. “The bench was not here then.”

She rose and turned. The young man rose too and gave a short Viennese bow.

“I am sorry I disturbed you, Fräulein. But thank you for your help.”

She was walking out of the park, back to her desk to finish her lunch, furious with herself. Conversations with young men in parks—whatever next? On the other hand, he was only a foreign student trying to learn about Viennese opera. No harm in that, surely.

But enough is enough. She passed a poster. Of course; the Vienna Opera was staging
The Magic Flute
in three days. Perhaps it was part of the young man’s study course.

Despite her passion, Edith Hardenberg had never been to an opera in the Staatsoper. She had, of course, roamed the building when it was open in the daytime, but an orchestra ticket had always been beyond her.

The Fist of God

They were almost beyond price. Season tickets for the opera were handed down from generation to generation. A season’s
abonnement
was for the seriously rich. Other tickets could be obtained only by influence, of which she had none. Even ordinary tickets were beyond her means. She sighed and returned to her work.

That one day of warm weather had been the end. The cold and the gray clouds came back. She returned to her habit of lunching at her usual café and at her usual table. She was a very neat lady, a creature of habit.

On the third day after the park she arrived at her table at the usual hour, to the minute, and half-noticed that the one next to her was occupied. There was a pair of student books—she did not bother with the titles—and a half-drunk glass of water.

Hardly had she ordered the meal of the day when the occupant of the table returned from the men’s room. It was not until he sat down that he recognized her and gave a start of surprise.

“Oh,
Grüss Gott
—again,” he said. Her lips tightened into a disapproving line. The waitress arrived and put down her meal. She was trapped. But the young man was irrepressible.

“I finished the program notes. I think I understand it all now.”

She nodded and began delicately to eat. “Excellent. You are studying here?”

Now why had she asked that? What madness had gotten into her? But the chatter of the restaurant rose all around her. What are you worrying about, Edith? Surely a civilized conversation, even with a foreign student, could do no harm? She wondered what Herr Gemütlich would think. He would disapprove, of course.

The dark young man grinned happily.

“Yes. I study engineering. At the Technical University. When I have The Fist of God

my degree, I will go back home and help to develop my country.

Please, my name is Karim.”

“Fräulein Hardenberg,” she said primly. “And where do you come from, Herr Karim?”

“I am from Jordan.”

Oh, good gracious, an Arab. Well, she supposed there were a lot of them at the Technical University, two blocks across the Kärntner Ring.

Most of the ones she saw were street vendors, awful people selling carpets and newspapers at the pavement cafes and refusing to go away.

The young man next to her looked respectable enough. Perhaps he came from a better family. But after all ... an Arab. She finished her meal and signaled for the bill. Time to leave this young man’s company, even though he was remarkably polite. For an Arab.

“Still,” he said regretfully, “I don’t think I’ll be able to go.”

Her bill came. She fumbled for some schilling notes.

“Go where?”

“To the opera. To see
The Magic Flute
. Not alone—I wouldn’t have the nerve. So many people. Not knowing where to go, where to applaud.”

She smiled tolerantly.

“Oh, I don’t think you’ll go, young man, because you won’t get any tickets.”

He looked puzzled.

“Oh no, it’s not that.”

He reached into his pocket and placed two pieces of paper on the table.

Her table. Beside her bill. Second row of the orchestra. Within feet of the singers. Center aisle.

“I have a friend in the United Nations. They get an allocation, you know. But he didn’t want them, so he gave them to me.”

The Fist of God

Gave. Not sold, gave. Beyond price, and he gave them away.

“Would you,” asked the young man pleadingly, “take me with you?

Please?”

It was beautifully phrased, as if she would be taking him.

She thought of sitting in that great, vaulted, gilded, rococo paradise, her spirit rising with the voices of the basses, baritones, tenors, and sopranos high into the painted ceiling above. ...

“Certainly not,” she said.

“Oh, I am sorry, Fräulein. I have offended you.”

He reached out and took the tickets, one half in one strong young hand, the other half in the other, and began to tear.

“No.” Her hand came down on his own before more than half an inch of the priceless tickets had been torn in half. “You mustn’t do that.”

She was bright pink.

“But they are of no use to me.”

“Well, I suppose ...”

His face lit up.

“Then you will show me your Opera House? Yes?”

Show
him the Opera. Surely that was different. Not a date. Not the sort of dates people went on who ... accepted dates. More like a tour guide, really. A Viennese courtesy, showing a student from abroad one of the wonders of the Austrian capital. No harm in that ...

They met on the steps by arrangement at seven-fifteen. She had driven in from Grinzing and parked without trouble. They joined the bustle of the moving throng alive already with anticipatory pleasure.

If Edith Hardenberg, spinster of twenty loveless summers, were ever going to have an intimation of paradise, it was that night in 1990 when she sat a few feet from the stage and allowed herself to drown in the music. If she were ever to know the sensation of being drunk, it was The Fist of God

that evening when she permitted herself to become utterly intoxicated in the torrent of the rising and falling voices.

In the first half, as Papageno sang and cavorted before her, she felt a dry young hand placed on top of her own. Instinct caused her to withdraw her hand sharply. In the second half, when it happened again, she did nothing and felt, with the music, the warmth seeping into her of another person’s blood-heat.

When it was over, she was still intoxicated. Otherwise she would never have allowed him to walk her across the square to Freud’s old haunt, the Café Landtmann, now restored to its former 1890 glory. There it was the superlative headwaiter Robert himself who showed them to a table, and they ate a late dinner.

Afterward, he walked her back to her car. She had calmed down. Her reserve was reasserting itself.

“I would so like you to show me the real Vienna,” said Karim quietly.

“Your Vienna, the Vienna of fine museums and concerts. Otherwise, I will never understand the culture of Austria, not the way you could show it to me.”

“What are you saying, Karim?”

They stood by her car. No, she was definitely not offering him a lift to his apartment, wherever it was, and any suggestion that he come home with her would reveal exactly what sort of a wretch he really was.

“That I would like to see you again.”

“Why?”

If he tells me I am beautiful, I will hit him, she thought.

“Because you are kind,” he said.

“Oh.”

She was bright pink in the darkness. Without a further word he bent forward and kissed her on the cheek. Then he was gone, striding away The Fist of God

across the square. She drove home alone.

That night, Edith Hardenberg’s dreams were troubled. She dreamed of long ago. Once there had been Horst, who had loved her through that long hot summer of 1970 when she was nineteen and a virgin. Horst, who had taken her chastity and made her love him. Horst, who had walked out in the winter without a note or an explanation or a word of farewell.

At first she had thought he must have had an accident, and she called all the hospitals. Then that his employment as a traveling salesman had called him away and he would call.

Later, she learned he had married the girl in Graz whom he had also been loving when his rounds took him there.

She had cried until the spring. Then she took all the memories of him, all the signs of his being there, and burned them. She burned the presents and the photos they had taken as they walked in the grounds and sailed on the lakes of the Schlosspark at Laxenburg, and most of all she burned the picture of the tree under which he had loved her first, really loved her and made her his own.

She had had no more men. They just betray you and leave you, her mother had said, and her mother was right. There would be no more men, ever, she vowed.

That night, a week before Christmas, the dreams ebbed away before the dawn, and she slept with the program of
The Magic Flute
clutched to her thin little bosom. As she slept, some of the lines seemed to ease away from the corners of her eyes and the edges of her mouth. And as she slept, she smiled. Surely there was no harm in that.

The Fist of God

Chapter 13

The big gray Mercedes was having trouble with the traffic.

Hammering furiously on the horn, the driver had to force a passage through the torrent of cars, vans, market stalls, and pushcarts that create the tangle of life between the streets called Khulafa and Rashid.

This was old Baghdad, where traders and merchants, sellers of cloth, gold, and spices, hawkers and vendors of most known commodities, had plied their trades for ten centuries.

The car turned down Bank Street, where both sides of the road were jammed with parked cars, and finally nosed into Shurja Street. Ahead of it, the street market of spice sellers was impenetrable. The driver half-turned his head.

“This is as far as I can go.”

Leila Al-Hilla nodded and waited for the door to be opened for her.

Beside the driver sat Kemal, General Kadiri’s hulking personal bodyguard, a lumbering sergeant of the Armored Corps who had been attached to Kadiri’s staff for years. She hated him.

After a pause, the sergeant opened his door, straightened his great frame on the sidewalk, and opened the rear passenger door. He knew she had humiliated him once again, and it showed in his eyes. She alighted from the car and gave him not a glance or word of thanks.