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'Look, a bear,' the little girl said, holding her father's leg. Frank hit the bell a sharp ping! 'Luggage carrier!' Frank hollered.

I had to tear myself away from Ernst's description of the Tantric positions.

'The vyanta group has two main positions,' he was saying, blandly. 'The woman leans forward till she touches the ground with her hands, while the man takes her from behind, standing -- that's the dhenuka-vyanta-asana, or cow position,' Ernst said, with his liquid stare at Franny.

'Cow position?' Franny said.

'Earl!' Susie said, disapprovingly, putting her head in Franny's lap -- playing the bear for the new guests.

I started upstairs with the luggage. The little girl couldn't take her eyes off the bear.

'I have a sister about your age,' I told her. Lilly was out taking Freud for a walk -- Freud no doubt lecturing to her about all the sights he couldn't see.

That was how Freud gave us tours. The baseball bat on one side, one of us children, or Susie, on the other. We steered him through the city, shouting out the names of the street corners when we arrived. Freud was getting deaf, too.

'Are we on Blutgasse?' Freud would cry out. 'Are we on Blood Lane?' he would ask.

And Lilly or Frank or Franny or I would holler, 'Ja! Blutgasse!'

'Take a right,' Freud would direct us. 'When we get to Domgasse, children,' he'd say, 'we must find Number Five. This is the entrance to the Figaro House, where Mozart wrote The Marriage of Figaro. What year, Frank?' Freud would cry.

'Seventeen eighty-five!' Frank would shout back.

'And more important than Mozart,' Freud would say, 'is the first coffeehouse in Vienna. Are we still on Blutgasse, children?'

'Ja! Blood Lane,' we would say.

'Look for Number Six,' Freud would cry. 'The first coffeehouse in Vienna! Even Schwanger doesn't know this. She loves her Schlagobers, but she's like all these political people,' Freud said. 'She's got no sense of history.'

It was true that we learned no history from Schwanger. We learned to love coffee, chased with little glasses of water; we learned to like the soft dirt of newspapers on our fingers. Franny and I would fight over the one copy of the International Herald Tribune. In our seven years in Vienna, there was always news of Junior Jones in there.

'Penn State thirty-five, Navy six!' Franny would read, and we'd all cheer.

And later, it would be the Cleveland Browns 28, the New York Giants 14. The Baltimore Colts 21, the poor Browns 17. Although Junior rarely imparted any more news than this to Franny -- in his occasional letters -- it was somehow special, hearing about him so indirectly, through the football scores, several days late, in the Herald Tribune.

'At Judengasse, turn right!' Freud would instruct. And we would follow Jews' Lane to the church of St. Ruprecht.

'The eleventh century,' Frank would murmur. The older the better for Frank.

And down to the Danube Canal; at the foot of the slope, on Franz Josefs-Kai, was the monument Freud led us to rather often: the marble plaque memorializing those murdered by the Gestapo, whose headquarters had been on that spot.

'Right here!' Freud screamed, stamping and whacking with the baseball bat. 'Describe the plaque to me!' he cried.

'I've never seen it.'

Of course: because it was in one of the camps that he went blind. They had performed some failed experiment on his eyes in the camp.

'No, not summer camp,' Franny had to tell Lilly, who had always been afraid of being sent to summer camp and was unsurprised to hear that they tortured the campers.

'Not summer camp, Lilly,' Frank said. 'Freud was in a death camp.'

'But Herr Tod never found me,' Freud said to Lilly. 'Mr. Death never found me at home when he called.'

It was Freud who explained to us that the nudes in the fountain at the Neuer Markt, the Providence Fountain -- or the Donner Fountain, after its creator -- were actually copies of the original. The originals were in the Lower Belvedere. Designed to portray water as the source of life, the nudes had been condemned by Maria Theresa.

'She was a bitch,' Freud said. 'She founded a Chastity Commission,' he told us.

'What did they do?' Franny asked. 'The Chastity Commission?'