Klaus for company
Thursday, February 21, was Klaus Sulzenbacher Day in Kitzbühel. Klaus, brother of our old friend Peter from the Kogler bar, had just come home from the world championships in Val di Fiemme a Weltmeister and Vizeweltmeister in the Nordic Combined: a world champion and a vice-world champion. He had won the silver medal in the individual event, and a gold with the Austrian team. In the Olympic Games in Calgary in 1988, Klaus won a silver for himself and a bronze with the team; over the last three years he had also won two World Cup titles. Klaus was the real thing, a ski champion of Austria, the Tyrol, and Kitzbühel, and the townsfolk of his native village were coming out tonight to honor him.
They set up a small reviewing stand in the Vorderstadt, the medieval heart of the old town, underneath the timber roof and wooden eaves of the Cafe Praxmair and its painted pastel neighbors. Kitzbühel is a town of champions, and they were all there on the reviewing stand for Klaus, the great names of the past: Leitner and Hinterseer; Huber; Klaus’s uncle Christian Pravda, silver and bronze medalist at the 1952 Winter Games; and the incomparable Toni Sailer, triple gold medalist at Cortina and a seven-time world champion in the fifties. Representing the ski school was Toni’s brother Rudi, and dragooned into special duty for the day, perhaps four dozen of his ski instructors, all bearing candles while forming a semicircle in front of the reviewing stand. Most of the instructors I recognized; few of them were Kitzbühelers, or even Austrians. Instead it was almost all foreigners, the good folk of Houses Pravda, Oberhauser, and the Kogler bar: Tip Walker, John Collins, Ricey and the rest of them. In the center of the platform was of course Klaus, and with Klaus, his mother, Fini, or as we knew her, Finny. Finny was the mother and sister of champions: the mother of Klaus, the sister of Christian Pravda. It was her brother’s name which was on the front of the small green cottage next to her home, but only four of our crowd actually lived there in Pravda: the senior members of the foreign instructing corps, Tip, Scott Sloane, Steve and Kathy. The others lived in Finny’s home, Haus Sulzenbacher, which Finny and her husband Heli, with something like six children, had made over as a shrine to their not-quite-eldest Klaus, whose medals, trophies, awards and image, in the form of paintings, photographs, and posters, were simply everywhere: one could not shower or sleep in Haus Sulzenbacher without Klaus for company. In the living room was a video recorder and an extensive if limited collection of tapes—mostly Nordic Combined meets and races—along with a few more unusual choices that the youngest brother Peter Sulzenbacher had managed to slip in: tapes of The Young Ones, offbeat British comedies and dumbass American ski movies. Peter and Finny didn’t get along, and he wasn’t at home much. It was not a serious breach; they could hardly have been said to quarrel. Mostly Finny yelled at Peter, and Peter ignored her. Tony, one of the Americans boarding in Haus Sulzenbacher, told me of times when Finny would pursue Peter up the stairs, shouting at him, while the whole time Peter was continuing his conversation with Tony: asking him how he was doing, where he would be skiing today, whether he was going out tonight, and if so, where.
The joke was, Finny didn’t like Peter because he wasn’t a world champion. Peter liked to stay out late, drink beer, smoke a little, and listen to underground thrash music from England or the United States. It was Tony’s joke, mother disliking son because he wasn’t a world champion, but Tony could be obsessed on the subject of Finny, Tony and Scott both, grown men who couldn’t believe she would treat them like children. “She tells me where to hang my towel,” Tony said. “She tells me not to use too much toilet paper, or take long showers. She tells me to make my bed.” Tony and Scott dipped often into Finny impersonations, when they spoke in a high, squeaky, accented voice which Tony described as the particular sound of crazy Austrian women: “Klaus is a nice boy. I don’t like Peter. Peter isn’t nice. Peter isn’t a world champion.” Peter was close to his brother, but today, Klaus Sulzenbacher Day, Peter wasn’t on the reviewing stand with Klaus and Finny. He was down in the crowd, with us, the ausländer ski bums. Wearing civvies, not his instructor’s red jacket, he held in his hand not a candle like the rest of them but an oversize can of beer, and he whooped and hollered each time his brother’s name was mentioned by one of the many speakers on the podium, whether the mayor of Kitzbühel, the president of the Kitzbühel Ski Club, the representative of the Austrian ski federation, or the man from the Land in Innsbruck. With him was an Australian I vaguely knew, Louie, who wore some kind of outback leather hat over red hair kept in a ponytail. A few weeks ago I had watched a tape of the Super Bowl at the Biwak with Louie at my side telling me and a South African girl how weedy the athletes were for wearing helmets and pads, not at all like Australian-rules football players. Louie had a job taking pictures of holiday skiers on the top of the Steinbergkogel but had quit, “to ski and get pissed every night, you know, mate?” Louie seemed like an idiot but harmless; still, he had come close to ruining my Super Bowl, and I wondered now if he was equally ruining Peter’s Klaus Sulzenbacher day. From the look of Peter, skunk-drunk and his face glowing red, I thought, Probably not.
When it was his turn Klaus stepped up to the microphone to say a few word of thanks. It was the first time I had seen him in the flesh—he was always away from Kitzbühel in winter, competing and training—and I was struck by how very tall and thin he was, not like a skier at all. He had short spiked blond hair, and he was shy before the crowd, shy before the small boy and girl who approached to present him with flowers and, in the girl’s case, a peck on the cheek. He wasn’t used to speaking in public, with lights and cameras and microphones incessantly on him, and his voice, while pleasant and clear, was not always steady. He finished his speech, smiling broadly; next to him Finny was beaming. She likes Klaus, I thought, Klaus is a nice boy. Klaus clearly is a very nice and likable young man, and in Kitzbühel they adored him. Most stores had his poster in their window, the same poster that was now being distributed on the square of the Vorderstadt to children and adults alike. It was a good poster: Klaus standing dramatically in front of a snow-capped mountain in the distance behind him, in his hands the crystal globe of the FIS World Cup. I took one for myself.
When it was over I walked home with my neighbors John Collins and Susan Rowland of the Kogler bar. I had seen them comprising part of Klaus’s honor guard, bearing candles; these they snuffed out in a snowbank and stuffed in their pockets. They told me that their apartment had been raided this morning by Rudi Sailer, director of the ski school. Not the police: Rudi Sailer. Director of the Ski School. Apparently the Billa supermarket down the road from where we lived had complained about ausländer ski instructors stealing from its shelves, and Rudi had gone to make inspection. Of all the foreign instructors, none lived closer to the Billa than those from Kogler, so—naturally—they were logical suspects. Susan awoke this morning to the sight of Rudi Sailer going through her closet. “What do you think he was expecting to find?” she said. “A can of soup?”
For Rudi, it had been a busy day. Just a few hours after that he had had to fire Peter Robahr, the lone Scandinavian of Haus Sulzenbacher. Peter had not been showing up for work in this, one of the busiest weeks of the season. He had also been working black, arranging to give private lessons on his own and depriving the ski school of income. The evening before, at the ski instructors’ ball at the Tenne, Rudi had confronted Peter and told him to report to his office at nine o’clock the next morning. This Peter had failed to do, and when he arrived home in the morning he found Rudi and Finny Sulzenbacher waiting for him, Finny cataloguing for public benefit all Peter’s known faults, failures, and omissions during the time he had lived in her house. She had seen Peter leaving the house late for work, leaving to go skiing on his own, or not leaving at all. He had worn his red instructor’s jacket when forbidden to and failed to wear it when he should have. Now that he was fired, Finny wanted Peter to leave her home immediately. Peter refused to leave until the next morning.
When I saw Peter later that evening, he was at the upstairs bar in Big Ben’s with Gina, and he asked me to buy him a beer because he had been fired. “Finny?” I asked.
“Finny is a witch,' he said grimly. “I’m going to do something to her. Like burn her house down.”
Peter however would leave quietly and later, we heard, would find a job instructing in St. Anton, in the Arlberg. St. Anton year after year is full of Swedes, and Swedish-speaking instructors were always needed. The last time I saw Peter, he was in the pub called Oskar’s with two friends just arrived from Stockholm. I asked where he had been sleeping. “I haven’t,” he said.
“Where did you sleep the night before?”
“I didn’t,” he said, and he asked me to buy him a beer.
Pete—not Peter Robahr or Peter Sulzenbacher but Pete from Salt Lake City—was an American living on the top floor of Haus Sulzenbacher, where he shared a room with Tony and Kelvin. One night, or early morning, Pete came home drunk, crashed his way through Haus Pravda and out the back, and on his way to the rear door of Haus Sulzenbacher (“the servants’ entrance,” in Tony’s words), he fell into a pile of ashes and dirtied his hands. The next morning, Finny, all aflame, burst into the bedroom, demanding to know whose handprints had soiled her stairwell. Marching over to Tony, still asleep in his bed, she demanded to see his hands.
“Show me your hands! Show me your hands! I think you did it!” Scott Sloane, telling the story, assumed the voice of all crazed Austrian women.
Meanwhile Pete was at the washstand... washing his hands, with no recollection of the evening at all. Tony confessed he was never so frightened in all his life. “Show me your hands!” He just shot them right in the air.
“Yeah, I did it,” he said. “Sure I did it. Fuck you, Finny.” He swore never to speak to her again.
We were sitting at a table outside Big Ben’s with our beers, enjoying the early spring weather—Tony, Pete, Kelvin and his friend from Australia, and me. Pete, listening to music through earphones, had his feet up resting on an empty chair, and he sat with his eyes closed behind dark sunglasses, ignoring the conversation around him, about him. A Swedish instructor we knew came by and punched Pete on the shoulder, startling him from his Walkman-induced stupor.
“Who had the black hands? Who had the black hands?” he cackled in his hideous voice. Strolling away before being answered, he laughed wildly. “What was that? What was that?” Peter exclaimed. By now all Kitzbühel knew about the black hands. Finny had telephoned the ski school to complain about them.
It was early March, and the weather was fine: warm and sunny, with a gentle breeze, and the chance of snow: zero. Already the snow was disappearing, and with it, Kitzbühel’s skiing. The two hundred tourists still arriving each weekend from England for Kitzbühel’s vaunted spring skiing were being taken instead to the glaciers at Kaprun or Stubai, or Lienz in the East Tyrol, an hour’s drive away by bus. Evenings we would see the punters in the bars and cafes and ask them how the skiing was: Good, they said. Better than Kitzbühel’s. By now the only snow left in Kitzbühel was a flat strip eighteen hundred meters up in the Horn’s Trattalm bowl, and a slightly steeper incline below the Waldelift on the Hahnenkamm. There was no work left for instructors, and soon there would be no work for me. When I reported to the shop each morning they had me clean the rental boots with soapy water before they were taken to be stored in the basement cellar of Kitzbühel’s newspaper, the Anzeiger; but it was too nice to be stuck inside cleaning boots and I gave my departure date. Sitting at Big Ben’s, I was asked where I might go, and I said, thinking aloud: Switzerland. Maybe Zermatt, then Chamonix in France. I still wanted to ski. I listened to the others—this was now the most interesting part of Kitzbühel conversation, where people would go now the season was done, as in December it was which job you had and where you lived, what your perks and benefits were. Tony too was thinking of Switzerland, but Davos, in Grisons, where he had friends. Pete would go to visit relatives in Graz, as part of his two years’ travel before returning home to America and life as a responsible citizen. As for Kelvin, he would be flying straight to London to look for work. Twenty-nine years old and a qualified diesel mechanic, he wouldn’t mind at last doing some work he was trained for, he said.
About the only thing left to do in Kitzbühel those days was to have picnics. Or watch ski movies at Peter Sulzenbacher’s. But we had seen over the winter plenty of ski movies; which were really no different from porn movies: something to watch for maybe five minutes, perhaps, but very quickly after that excruciatingly boring. As Tony said, ski movies were always the same, “movies of people skiing.” Better to have picnics. We had been having a lot of picnics recently at Haus Pravda, and there would be another tonight, for residents and friends; for Anthony, leaving on the midnight train to Vienna and from there home to Sydney; and for Steve Stewart, celebrating his thirtieth birthday. Peter Sulzenbacher had promised to stop by, and he did; so too did his father Heli, bearing two bottles of good Austrian wine, his family’s present to Steve on his birthday.
Tony left four days later. When he left, he left without saying goodbye and he owed the Sulzenbachers twenty-four dollars for three nights’ unpaid accommodation. Heli was upset, Pete told me.
“It's not what it looks like,” I said. “He didn’t want to see Finny. It wasn’t the money. Knowing Tony he’ll probably send it along in the mail. He just didn’t want to see her.”
“It isn’t the money,” Pete said. “It isn’t that at all. He didn’t say anything. He should have said goodbye.”
He added, “It hurt Heli, that he didn’t. Heli’s really a terrific guy, you know.”
He didn’t have to tell me: I knew. I remembered, among other things, the two bottles of wine, and the sweet taste they lent our small picnic those three nights ago. I knew Heli was a terrific guy. It ran in the family, on the male side: Peter was a terrific guy, Klaus too: Klaus whom I didn’t know but could clearly tell was terrific. I had known, known for a long time in fact, like everyone else in Kitzbühel, this about the Sulzenbacher men. It was just that everything they did was somehow offset by her, and that left the bad taste in everyone’s mouth, which not even Heli’s good wine could recompense.
(1993)
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