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à Vienne... |
My
young Austrian girlfriend (S.) enjoyed working in the local
and assumed her responsibilities as manager with enthusiasm.
The unhappy little girl that I'd met in the street, had blossomed
into a happy, elegant young woman. She began rebuilding her
relations with her family, her mother and little sister at
least, and took them from time to time to a restaurant in
the neighborhood and was proud to slip her little sister occasional
pocket money.
Her father
(F.), a brutal factory worker, hated foreigners. He once saw
us together in my car in the Mariahilfer Strasse and referred
to her from then on, in conversations with her mother, as
"the whore".
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Since leaving home two years
earlier, she hadn't once seen her father. She was so terrified
of him that the idea of meeting up with him by accident was a continual
nightmare. I was the only man in her life; a hero of sorts,
psychologist and boyfriend. At twenty, she was a filled with
fantasy, infantile preoccupations and jealousies. She was psychologically
weak and incapable of making important decisions alone and was often
overcome with self-doubt and guilt. Leaving her in charge of the
locale sometimes left me feeling a little insecure, but I
knew that this could be good for her and help her grow, and I hadn't
the heart to take away from her the only responsibility that anyone
had ever had the confidence to offer her. She was gentle, sentimental
and innocent.
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I wanted to give her a reward
worthy of her efforts at the locale. We decided that she would begin
her university studies starting in the fall. I went with her to
buy her some new clothes and settle a few things concerning the
club. I had an errand to do later and she volunteered to do all
the paperwork at the chamber of commerce. She was carrying all the
papers relative to the nightclub and, as I later found out, the
entire 65,000 shillings I'd left in the glove compartment
of my car to pay back the Turks who had loaned me the money for
the lease takeover. (Those same Turks would later put a price on
my head; 10,000 shillings to the first good man who could bring
me back alive to explain the mishap). In the metro, she "lost" the
papers to the club.
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