THE GREEN KING (part 25)
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The Photographer
from Salzburg
As of that
morning, the presidency of the innere Stadt, the inner City of Vienna enclosed
by the Ringstrasse was in the hands of the United State Army, which was in
charge of security for one month. On Karntnerstrasse, in front of the well-lit
door of the Military Police station, it was an MP from Kansas who sat down next
to the driver. The three other members of the International Patrol – an
English, a Frenchman, and a Russian – squeezed in the back.
The car started
for the forth watch of the night, in the direction of St Stephen’s Cathedral,
whose two towers were just becoming visible in the first light of down.
They drove
slowly, in the middle of the empty street. It was June 19, 1945, and it was now
5:50 A.M.
The jeep
reached Franz-Joseph Quay. On the opposite bank of the Danube canal, beyond the
half –destroyed Bats of Diana and the sea of rubble left by the war, they could
see, against the pink sky, the back skeletal circle of the Prater’s Big Wheel.
They turned left, went along Gonzagagasse and the south. They could now see the
baroque splendours of the Bohemian Chancellory.
They could also
see the boy.
The English saw
him first but remained silent. He was sulking. He couldn’t bear the bitter
smell of the Frenchman’s tobacco; he despised the American, who exasperated him
with his never-ending stories of baseball London, before June of 1944; he
detested the Russian, who wasn’t even Russian, since he had slanted eyes,
Mongolian features, and the intellectual vivacity of a pudding. As for the
driver, who was Austrian, and worse yet. Viennese, his constant cynicism and
especially his refusal to concider himself a defeated enemy made him
unbearable.
TO BE CONTINUED
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I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
I LOVE YOU…
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