The Little Book Read Online Free PDF

brew bitter and offensive, but when Kolschitsky thought to add sugar and sweet whipped cream to the mix, he created a new Viennese addiction. In the years that followed, Kolschitsky’s establishment, the Blue Bottle, became the gathering place of the intelligentsia, and in time it spawned numerous imitators. At the close of the nineteenth century, in a city with a longstanding housing shortage, clean, well-lighted places to congregate were highly valued.
    Two hundred and some odd years after that final siege by the Turks, Wheeler Burden, new to Vienna himself and with no place to go, found the famous descendant of Kolschitsky’s coffeehouse, Café Central. For a vagrant, it was a godsend. And from his first day, he staked out his territory. He was tired of walking and was beginning to feel lost and out of place. The moment he entered he knew he had found a home. The air was warm and carried the rich fragrance of fresh coffee. The tiled floor and marble tables were the prototype from which so much of the American sense of first class derived. Everywhere he looked were well-dressed, intellectual-looking men and a scattering of women, either in groups or alone, reading the abundant newspapers or talking animatedly. “There were no fewer than forty-five newspapers in Vienna,” the Haze would say, “and a well-appointed café, of which there were too many to enumerate, would subscribe to all of them. And for the small price of a cup of sweetened coffee or mineral water one could pass an entire morning catching up on the news.”
    Wheeler chose a table and sat, picking up the newspaper in front of him. A friendly young man at an adjoining table motioned to him. “Are we English?” he asked with a thick Germanic accent.
    “American,” Wheeler replied.
    The group of four at the table laughed and poked each other with good-natured elbowing that reminded Wheeler of his mean-spirited schoolmates his first year in private school in Boston. He smiled back guardedly, “But I speak German,” he said in their language.
    The young man looked at him cheerfully. “Then you must have heard us,” he said. “My friends insisted you were English. I thought you were French, and von Tscharner there”—he pointed to one of the smiling faces—“thought you were a Czech nationalist. We see Americans so rarely here in our men’s club,” he said, gesturing to the expansiveness of the café.
    “Except for your famous countryman Mark Twain, who seems to be filling our newspapers these days,” one of the young men added cheerfully. Wheeler was reminded suddenly that the famous writer had indeed moved with his family to Vienna for a year and a half sometime around the turn of the century.
    “You are our first unfamous American,” another said. “We didn’t know what to make of you.”
    “Perhaps tomorrow you will join us.” He held out his hand. “My name is Ernst Kleist. I am the would-be world-renowned painter of the group.”
    Wheeler took the hand. “My name is—” He paused. “Harry Truman.” Why he said it he was not sure, but the words were out before he could stop them.
    “Would you join us then, Mr. Truman? There is always one or another of us at this table. We do have our business to do, believe it or not, to make livings or earn our degrees, but we gather here whenever we can.”
    He gestured to his friends. “Those are the new generation of Viennese, a quartet.” He laughed. “We represent the four points of the great Viennese intellectual compass. Karl Claus there is the visceral one, a writer. You know how they are. Always finding connections. He engages the world through his feelings and is forever finding and defending causes.” The young man at Kleist’s left smiled and stuck out his hand, acknowledging the description.
    “Von Tscharner here is the tinkerer, the pragmatic one. He is our architect, redesigning the atrocious inner city. For him, if it works, it is good.” The young man named von