The 158-Pound Marriage [antikvár]

1: The Angel Called The Smile of Reims' My wife, Utchka (whose name I sometime ago shortened to Utch), could teach patience to a time bomb. With some luck, she has taught me a httle. Utch learned patience under what we might call duress. She was born in Eichbiichl, Austria - a httle village outside the proletarian tovm of Wiener Neustadt, which is an hour's drive from Vienna - in 1938, the year of the Anschluss. When she was three, her father was killed as a Bolshevik saboteur. It is unproven that he was a Bolshevik, but he was a saboteur. By the end of the war, Wiener Neustadt would become the largest landing field in Europe, and the unwilling site of the German Messerschmitt factory. Utch's father was killed in 1941 when he was caught in the act of blovdng up Messer-schmitts on the runway in Wiener Neustadt. The local SS Standarte of Wiener Neustadt paid a visit to Utch's mother in Eichbiichl after Utch's father had been caught and killed. The SS men said they'd come to alert the village to the 'seed of betrayal' which obviously ran thick in Utch's family. They told the villagers to watch Utch's mother very closely, to make sure she wasn't a Bolshevik like her late husband. Then they raped Utch's mother and stole from the house a wooden cuckoo clock which Utch's father had bought in Hungary. Eichbiichl is very close to the Hungarian border, and the Hungarian influence can be seen everwhere. Utch's mother was raped again, several months after the SS left, by some of the village menfolk who, when