Vienna Dolorosa is a must read!
Vienna Dolorosa
March 12, 1938
by
Mykola Dementiuk
1. Friska Bielinska
THE BRIGHT MORNING SUN streamed through the lace curtains and moved across the large room and bed until a bright sliver of beam slashed over and warmed Frau Friska Bielinska's lips and nose and eyes. Frau Friska awoke and cursed.
She moaned and cursed again and turned on her side, but the opposite window facing the rear courtyard, though sunless, was also glowing in morning brightness. Having been left open in the night for air, it now let in the clamorous day sounds of plates and dishes clattering day sounds of plates and dishes clattering in the café -kitchen across the courtyard.
Is it breakfast they're serving? Lunch?
Frau Friska covered her eyes with the crook of her elbow and eased back to sleep, suddenly jerking upright at the clash of a plate stacked atop another and laughter from the café.
She yawned and glanced at an ornate gold clock and cursed again -- almost eight a.m.
"Scheisse! she groaned and spun her fist against her nose and mouth. She glanced at the beside her. He was sleeping peacefully, his lips slightly downturned, a stream of dried white saliva lacing from a corner of his mouth and down his chin, oblivious to the brightening room, the clamorous café sounds, or the cursing and shifting Friska.
She studied the boy's soft face and pulled off the bobbed black wig which had shifted off his head and lay matted in smeared makeup, lipstick and saliva at the side of his face.
Frau Friska tossed the wig on a chair and rose from bed. She shivered and tugged at her twisted loose panty, pulling it out of her crotch and ass, and aligned the satin material over her stiffened groin. She quickly crossed the room and shut the double rear courtyard windows. The café clatter grew muted and dull, peaceful. Frau Friska glanced up at the sky -- blue and cold. She pulled the curtains shut, crossed her arms over her bare chest, and rubbed her shivering shoulders. She turned to the warm sunny window facing the street.
Vienna was a slow-moving city; early-rising but moving at a pace seen in other cities more at the relaxing close of the day than at the busy start. Yet in the past week and a half the city had erupted into a bustle of movement and activity unlike anything Frau Friska experienced since she had left Berlin five years earlier. At the time the Berliners seemed to dwell in a constant frenzy of street activity: street patrols, street demonstrations, street battles, street harassments.
With the coming to power of Adolph Hitler and his National Socialist Party, the first clear manifestation of their power and authority was on the streets. Berlin started to systematically get rid of the elements that by nature, instinct, misfortune, or choice flock to any large cosmopolitan center and become as much a part of the city as the streetlamps and paved streets. Gaudy prostitutes and perfumed homosexuals were beaten, abused, abused, and arrested; drunkards and addicts dropped in their stupors and were disposed of in alleys and back lots; Leftists, Reds, trade unionists, and homeless unemployed tramps were openly savaged and slain on the street; Jews, Gypsies, and Eastern Slavs were fair game to anyone -- government officials, Party members, or any outraged citizen who happened to come upon in the streets, building hallways, stored and shops, or even in their dreams.
Frau Friska considered herself fortunate to have been arrested and deported in the first wave of expulsions from Nazi Berlin and Germany. But being Ukrainian one never knew. Will it be the same in Vienna and Austria?
She shivered and lifted a lace curtain, draping it over the front of her bare chest. She squinted out the sunny second-story window. A group of teenage boys dressed in Austian Brownshirt uniforms stood before the museum entrance across the cramped Inner City street as one of their comrades leaned against a shuttered storefront gate, doubled over and vomiting. The other boys seemed to ignore their stricken friend, merely lolling about as though waiting for him to tie his shoe or straighten his tie and rejoin their group.
Fray Friska glanced up at the museum building: three-storied, gray and nondescript, of significance only that it was a confirmed residence of the Mozart on his hectic flight across Austria from dunning creditors and unpaid landlords, and where, it was said, he composed one of his masterpieces. Which one was a bit unclear and unconfirmed since he carried so much in his head and seemingly composed at will wherever he sat and brooded, drank and played billiards, laughed and made love. A small commemorative bust of Mozart frowned in a niche above the doorway, looking irritative and angered by the flapping corner of a massive red, black, and white Nazi flag striking the top of his head and brow.
Frau Friska also frowned. She liked the bust of Mozart: it was more boyish and innocent than the usual stolid Viennese depictions of the composer as some immature stunted genius imprisoned in the body of a boy and straining to break free and grow up. If only he had lived to be a man, went the common interpretation, what beauty he could have created then! Frau Friska didn't think so; being a beautiful boy and not cursed by age was beauty enough.
She sighed and looked away from the bust to the young boys; she started, certain one of the boys just averted his eyes from examining her in the window. Frau Friska stepped back and let fall the curtain.
She turned to the sleeping boy, his flattened blonde hair shimmering and gleaming in the beams of sunlight streaming the bed. She crossed the room and lifted the bulky goose-down cover; the boy's morning erection was stiff and solid, the crown on his puffed penis neatly outlined and stressed in the tight satin panties he wore.
Frau Friska moaned, tottering slightly, then fell on the bed and pulled down the front of his panties, gulping the stiff penis in her mouth. It filled her cheeks, and it was a lot better than lapping on the limp dick the boy couldn't get up last night.
A hand touched her thigh; Frau Friska squinted and saw the boy yawning at her and straining his hand to reach her leg. She moved up on the bed. The boy reached into her loose panties and circled his cold fingers around Frau Friska's erect penis, gliding it out of the loose panty leg and leveling it in his palm and on his wrist. He slid and pulled the hairless sheath back and forth; Frau Friska quickly ejaculated. The boy took a bit longer, finally coming in her mouth and bucking his groin in her face.
2. Helmut
BY THE TIME HELMUT HEARD THE FOOTFALLS from Frau Friska's apartment upstairs he had been up for hours, supervising the morning staff -- the porters, the maids. He never liked what he felt was the pretense of playing boss, making his work assignments sound more like suggestions than commands, but there was little he could do but take over the hotel operations; Kurt, the usual morning man, had marched off the night before into the torchlight demonstration moving along the nearby Ringstrasse and had not come to work yet. He was probably still rousing up Jews, beating up beggars, cheering on speakers, or sleeping it off from too much exuberance, too much violence, or at the least, too much hastily drunk beer.
Helmut glanced across the lobby to the front door and saw the boy vomiting before the Mozarthaus. It was a good thing Kurt was gone; he would certainly have marched over to the boys and berated them for disrespecting their uniforms, their youth, their Fatherland, their Fuhrer ... no, better Kust was off marching and boasting elsewhere.
Still, Friska must have had her reasons for keeping Kurt on at the hotel; Helmut would have let him go the first time he appeared in his ridiculous country-bumpkin lederhosen and white knee-stockings getup, emblematic of Party membership when all Nazi symbols were banned. In the past few days Kurt had come donned in the quickly legalized Brownshirt, leather chest-strap and swastika regalia which seemed to be worn now by the majority of Viennese males.
Helmut detested all uniforms and the change of personality that went with them. As much as they represented authority, the greatest dullard or layabout, be he soldier, cop, or public official, once in uniform could wreak havoc regardless of legality or simple morality. The Great War had been staged and waged by men in uniform, and their blindness and incompetence had not only destroyed millions of lives but also the empire and dynasty which had ruled over those lives for generations. Now new uniforms were on the march. Helmut sighed; each time a new idea, a new life, a new hope, and promise is offered by men in uniforms, it can only mean death for those in civilian dress.
Helmut turned away from the puking boy and flipped a page of the hotel registry book. It had been fairly quiet but stressful night. The registered guests retired early, and only one of Frau Friska's personal clients showed up. Kaufmann the Jew. He had bolted out of the hotel at dawn but returned a few hours later and now was pacing nervously in the dining room at the far end of the lobby.
Throughout the night some disheveled-looking couple or individual -- or at one point, about three a.m., an entire family -- pounded on the closed front door and demanded a room or at the least a refuge in the lobby from the chaos a few blocks away. Helmut finally dimmed the lobby lights and armed himself with a small revolver he once found in a vacated room. Though it contained only three rounds, he kept vigil left anyone break through the glass door and gain entry.
Helmut studied the guest book. Of the six names only one sounded Germanic (or Aryan, as the current nominative would have it), von Belse. The rest were typical Jews: Blumfeld, Orehstein, Hessell, Wassermann, Gottlein. Not one of them was due to check out till Monday morning, having reserved their rooms for the entire weekend. Who could foretell this would also be the weekend Hitler decided to march on Vienna and annex all of Austria, putting an end to all talk of independence, plebiscites, sovereignty, self-rule?
Helmut looked back at the puking boy -- young, probably thirteen or fourteen, his shirt-front stained with vomit -- then glanced at the pacing Jew Kaufmann in the dining room. Wipe off the vomit, take off the uniform, slip on a dress, and what have you got? Something for old men to play with.
Helmut frowned, shaking his head, and bent down over his registry book. Outside the vomiting boy gagged and spat out a few more times, then shuffled to rejoin his comrades. In the adjoining lobby room Kaufmann stroked his stubbled chin and glanced nervously at Helmut.
3. Wanda and Suze
WANDA QUIETLY OPENED THE DOOR, peered into the cubicle, and saw the covered figure in the same position it had been in for almost an hour. She frowned, knowing that the pansy Herr Kaufmann left the room at dawn before anyone was up, but she shut the door behind her and walked up the carpeted hall. Fifteen more minutes, she thought, then she'd have to wake the boy up.
It had been an easy morning; only one cubicle occupied, the rest as clean as she had prepared them the day before. But there was Frau Friska's apartment to tidy up -- she couldn't enter until after nine -- and that would take at least an hour to do if not more. She probably wouldn't be done till almost eleven o'clock.
She cursed, then spun around and strode back down the hall. I've got someone in bed, too, she mumbled, flinging open the cubicle door.
"Guten Morgen!" she shouted and swooped into the room, snatching at a towel on a corner bedpost and grimacing at a large bowl of spoiled water on the end-table and a pair of crumpled, brown-stained panties on a nearby chair.
Idiots! she mumbled, and leaned over the bed, poking the covered figure on a raised shoulder.
"Her, get up!" she said, then turned and tossed the dirty panties into the bowl of water. The figure had not moved. Wanda suddenly shivered. She looked at the open door and glanced about the room.
"Hey!" she said again, quietly though, prepared to explode in anger if the jesting figure sprang up at her in laughter. She leaned over and daintily picked up a corner of the blanket. "Wake up!" she snapped, flinging the blanket off and taking a step back.
The figure remained still, turned on its side, one arm under its head, the other draped beneath the overly large bosom, its long white dress demurely tucked into and under the knees, the outline of heeled shoes molded under a corner of the blanket still covering them.
"Suze," Wanda smiled faintly, and saw the glimmer of a belt buckle peeking from under the long blonde wig. She walked quickly around the bed and faced Suze from the front. She stared in horror and raised her hands to her cheeks.
The child's face was blue and puffy, its mouth twisted open, its eyes bulged out, its brow permanently wrinkled as though straining for comprehension. The belt buckle locked the throat, bulging flesh dripped over the leather strap, its end disappearing somewhere in the strands and folds of the blonde wig and pillow.
Wanda darted from the room.
4. Kurt and the Jewess
THE FRINGES OF THE RALLIES on the Ring and Kartnerstrasses, bored with the droning do-nothing speechifying and pointless cheering, quickly broke off into splinter groups with their own provocateurs and rousers, fanning out across Vienna in search of beer, women, Reds, and Jews.
The crowds blocked the paths of automobiles, trolley cars, hapless pedestrians. They checked identity papers, clothes styles, nose lengths, word pronunciations, and beat up any resister as a Jew-loving anti-German Bolshevik pervert. Everyone on the street was fair game, for if they were not participating in the celebrations in support of Austrian unification with Germany, what were they doing riding or walking the streets if not hurrying to some Jew cabal? No, a fist in the face or a boot in the groin was a sure way to put a halt to any conspiracy.
How many have I hit? Kurt wasn't sure; sometimes two or three in rapid succession, often egging other beaters on, but always getting a good last kick in the chest or head of a slumped sagging body. Still, the first time his flesh struck flesh was but a limp, hesitant slap on the cheek rather than a solid blow to the face. The slap was hard enough, and surprising enough to have pushed the old Jew face slightly to the left where someone's more solid fist was able to strike and shatter the frail cheekbone and crooked nose, but Kurt knew he'd better be more careful. The time of indecisive slapping was over; the millennium of clenched fists had arrived.
Kurt happened to be at the rear of the mob when they came upon and surrounded an old Jewess near the Westbahnhof rail station. Yet it was hard to tell how old and Jew actually was, since they all dressed slovenly and beggarly. Whatever youthful faces they may have exhibited beneath their caftans and kerchiefs, their massive hats and shawls, were prematurely wrinkled by poverty, worry, fear, and paranoia. Just the fact that they were Jews made them seem aged and youth-less; any race carrying the burden of history, claiming to have been a witness at the start, would clearly exhibit the classic certainty of that history, the passage of time and inevitability of age. Yet this was also the classic fear of the Gentiles: that if the Jews have experienced History at its dawn, they might also be a witness to its end, an end out of control of Gentile hands.
Kurt succeeded in forcing his way through the mob, snatching at a few remnants of the old Jewish woman's belongings which had been rifled and scattered through the crowd, a few of the men laughing and pawing the women's frayed undergarments, holding them up to the streetlights and ridiculing the under-washed menstrual stains, commenting on the stretched curves of yellowed petticoats and shifts, and tossing aside other ragged clothes and items they accused her of trying to pilfer out of the country.
The woman sank to her knees, sobbing quietly, almost unresponsive to the taunts and snapped insinuations flung at her. She clutched at a small broken sewing kit which had been pulled out of her bag and crushed underfoot, a few on the needles with short colored threads still looped in place in a purple velour-backed compartment. The woman had seen the case grabbed out of her bag, snapped open, and discarded to the ground. It had no particular meaning to her, no value as a memento or heirloom, but she suddenly seized with its importance and a desperate need to reclaim it, even yelping as though in pain as a gray metal thimble shot out from the case at the stomp os someone's booted heel.
Kurt pushed his way to the front of the crowd, pawing and laughing at the heavy linen stockings which had passed through the crowd, viciously tugging at the thigh-length hose and finally ripping them to shreds. The Jewish was now on her hands and knees, reaching for something on the ground as a few small boys in short pants and jackets darted around her and kicked her up-raised behind.
"Like a dog!" someone laughed, and Kurt also dropped to the ground, snatching at whatever the woman was reaching for, then spun behind her and hiked up her skirts and petticoats and began his torso into her bottom.
"This is how Jew-dogs fuck!" he slobbered, howling and yelping, and pounded into the woman.
The crowd picked up the chant of a small boy dancing around the pair. "Fuck the Jew! Fuck the Jew!"
Kurt ejaculated, but few in the mob recognized his sudden spastic shivering as sexual release. Kurt yelped and ground himself into the woman's covered buttocks as if he had penetrated deep into her, the just as suddenly bolted from her. He laughed self-consciously but acknowledged pats on the back as he melded to the rear of the crowd.
He did not wait to see or hear what other indignities the woman suffered but branched off into another group moving toward the Westbahnhof rail station up the street. His hat covered his semen-wet groin, his penis as hard and stiff as it had been since he first joined the demonstration and slapped his first Jew.
He opened his hand and gazed at a small metal thimble. A thimble? He shook his head, flinging the useless object away in disgust.
5. Petya gets dressed
THE BATHROOM WAS LARGE AND SPACIOUS (at least larger than anything Petya had ever experienced), the large enamel toilet bowl and sloped gray metal tub in one corner of the room, the upright sink and vanity table in another. Plush dark carpet remnants lay strategic spots on the floor, and one could pace about the room, stepping from throw rug to throw rug, moving from toilet to sink to tub to table without landing once on the bright white floor tiles in between. A frosted-glass, curtained window faced the front street.
Petya quickly removed his panties and stockings and left them in a heap on the floor on top of the white dress he'd worn and discarded the night before. He went to the vanity table and glanced in the mirror, remembering his grotesque image of the night before, the lipstick blotted about his mouth, his painted eyes and brows in Harlequin peaks and points, his usually curly hair pressed flat to his skull. Frau Friska had fixed his attempts.
He examined the vanity table-top. Jars, bottles and canisters of makeup stood neatly in a row, with creams and powders next to them. He went to the sink: a silver straight-edge razor lay on a small shelf next to a wet shaving mug.
Petya looked at his clothes on the floor and snatched them up, folding the damp panties, straightening the stockings and dress and draping them over the cushioned backrest of a small chair before the table.
It had been exciting to be pampered and disrobed of his boy-clothes, adorned in girlish panties, camisole, dress, lip rouge, eye-darkeners, and black wig. But once made up as a girl, he couldn't get it up as a boy, frightened and resisting the flustered Frau Friska as though guarding some make-believe virginity the new unfamiliar clothes had forced him to assume.
Still, he was grateful Frau Friska hadn't kicked him out but let him spend the night, dressed as a girl, cradled in her arms. It would have been difficult to return to the Danube canal or Leopoldstadt. The Brownshirts and marching crowds were everywhere, and he knew he'd be a much of a target as any Jew or degenerate they promised to rid the city of.
Petya had heard snatches of speeches, listened to the rumors, stared at the illegal posters, and concluded that Anschluss not only meant Austrian unity with Germany but also an end to his way of life.
Hitler had promised to put every German citizen to work, and Petya had immediately began toying with French identities; but knowing only a mispronounced word or two, he knew it would be ridiculous if not dangerous to profess as such, the French being enemies of the Germans for generations.
Maybe Czech or some other Slav name. He chose Petya, having heard it in some Russian film and thinking that if he were arrested once more, he'd be deported East rather than tossed into prison. Twice in the past year he had been picked up along the Canal in police raids to rid the Inner City of crime and perverts, and both times he had been sentenced to the boy's reformatory in Ems. Each stay at the reformatory provided him with new names and places to see back in the capital city -- the Redl Hotel reaching his ears only a week before as he was released to make his way back to Vienna.
Petya stepped into the empty tub and sat down, turning on the hot and cold metal taps. Frau Friska had demanded he wash even before entering her quarters last night -- not that she actually told him he smelled, but the look of disgust on her face was enough to dissuade him from any arguments. It was certainly a relief to be rid of the dirt and stench of a week of hiding and sleeping along the road on his way back to Vienna.
Not that he had to be so careful or cover his tracks too much, since he was only a day or two ahead of the first German armies Hitler finally sent into Vienna. The roads were already strewn with crushed flowers, sagging banners, empty wine bottles, raucous Brownshirts, over-exuberant celebrants, looting children, laughing whores, farmers on horseback, and villagers in regional dress. All streamed along the roadways to the capital city of Vienna, not one of them paying the least interest to a reform school juvenile.
Petya turned off the taps and sank beneath the water, holding his breath as long as he could, then bounded up, panting for air and briskly scratching and rubbing his face. The makeup easily smeared and came off in the warm water, though he had to force a washcloth into the corners of his eyes and lips to remove the thick mascara and lipstick.
He dunked a few more times under the water, finished washing and stepped out of the tub, snatching at a large damp towel off a rack near the tub. A pair of similar towels were folded and stacked on a small stand at the side of the rack, but Petya hesitated soiling any of them and instead wiped himself with the already used one, catching a waft of Frau Friska's fragrance as he toweled his head and face.
He replaced the towel on the rack and went to the vanity table, staring at his naked reflection as he neared the mirror. He frowned at hid folded panties and stockings; does she expect me to wear them all day?
Petya glanced at the makeup jars on the vanity table; he knew there were men who dressed as women -- the private clubs in Leopoldstadt were filled with them -- but they were obvious, grotesque in appearance, dressing in apparel which did nothing to reveal their innate femininity but instead exaggerated their ugly maleness: a mustachioed face under a blonde-tressed wig, a too-short, too-tight dress atop a male's knobby knees, woolen sock and boots. If by lucky chance the body conformed to the compactness of a woman's smaller frame, the silk hose seams were aligned, the shoes form-fitted, the makeup and wig proportioned in place. It was almost inevitable that the entire image would be perverted by that constant male-exaggeration of the female shape: the longing for a gargantuan bosom created pads and pillows puffed up at the chest and rising to the shoulders and face or curving downward to the erection-risen skirt at the groin, creating a monstrous obese pregnant belly rather than a handful-proportioned female breast.
It wasn't so much that these wanted to be women, but to create themselves as the unattainable woman they could never have or find, a woman that existed only in their imaginations and masturbatory fantasies, in their lusts to escape themselves and the reality of their male existence. Being men, that saw women as something existing solely for the pleasure of men. Making themselves up as women and having themselves chosen as women by other men -- being courted, wooed, girlishly resisting but leading-on until finally won over, hastily disrobed, their pleasure spent, their lust sated -- they could step back into their pants and become the pleasure-seeking men once more: the conquerors, the self-assured, the masqueraders, the abusers, the ultimate enjoyers.
Even at the reformatory in Ems there were boys who instinctively took on female roles, acting submissive, compliant, servile, some going as far as adorning their faces with saliva-tinted lead pencils, using dyes of shredded blotters, smearing on tints from sodden book covers. They became girls for the other boys, yet once released from the reformatory naturally reverted to their boy-identities, which were as deadly and dangerous as those of any other street urchin.
Petya had once participated in an attack on one such boy in the reformatory, pummeling his head and ejaculating in his mouth, the boy's darkened eyes blackened even more by Petya's fists, his blushed red cheeks cracked and broken by other blows, his tinted mouth colored in blood and pinkish semen. Petya picked up a jar of makeup: it would be easy to take the jar and post to the boy at Ems; use the hotel as a return address? In case the boy got out?
There was a double tap on the door. Petya quickly set down the small makeup jar and snatched up his panties; the door opened before he could step into them.
Frau Friske Bielinska, slim and petite in a demure but shapely black skirt and bolero jacket, came into the room. Her white ruffled blouse enhanced her small, rounded bosom, and a black pageboy hairdo tucked behind her ears framed the contours of her narrow high-boned face. She wore low-heeled shoes, her hose-darkened legs hairless and smooth -- unlike the hairy Austrian look. She looked as naturally feminine as any woman one could imagine or pass on the street.
Frau Friska smiled faintly, looked about the bathroom, and held out a pair of short pants she carried on a hanger in her upraised arm; a pair of fresh white boy's undergarments and a brown shirt were folded over her other forearm. "Leave those," she said, gesturing to the panties and handing Petya his new clothes.
He took the garments and stepped into the warm cotton drawers, sliding them up his legs. Fray Friska walked about the room, the rolled up a sleeve and reached into the soiled tub to pull out the plug. Petya blushed as he heard the dirty water gurgle and suck itself out, but he continued dressing, pulling on the brown shorts and knee-high white woolen socks.
Frau Friska wiped her hands on the wet wall towel then pulled it off the rack and tossed it into a corner hamper, replacing it with a fresh white one from the nearby stack. She turned and looked at Petya. He was almost dressed, buttoning up the front of his Brownshirt, a child's equivalent of an Austrian Nazi uniform, the brown color they donned when all Nazi insignia and paraphernalia was banned by the just-ousted Schuschnigg government. She knew he's blend right on the streets.
Frau Friska stepped to the vanity table and picked up the small jar Petya had moved. She put it next to a dark-colored jar and studied the red-faced Petya, then moved to the door.
"There are new shoes out here," she said, nodding to the living room, and scrutinized him once more.
Petya tucked in his shirt in his short pants and slung a suspender up his shoulder.
"Don't steal anything, alright?" she said finally, but she smiled and stepped quickly out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.
Petya's face was as red as Frau Friska's red lip rouge. He glanced at the vanity table and cursed.
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