That
Girl and Her Sister
Blogs
from Across the Pond
Vienna
Ah,
Vienna.
City
of Music. City of Dreams.
We
get the music but the dreams are more elusive. At least for me.
We
stay in a charming little artist’s room on the third floor of a quaint
apartment building at the end of the tramline. It was advertised as: Little
Room “Old Vienna” (Calm). The steps wind up in a spiral, floor to floor like a
bell tower’s staircase. The apartment is truly a little room. The shower is in
the same room as the kitchen, as the dining room, as the living area. The
toilet is a shared one out in the hallway. In the loft, the beds are pressed
next to each other—two mattresses, two comforters, two pillows. We get to the
beds by means of a rickety wooden ladder.
Jesse
says of our apartments, “Berlin had the best light. Prague was the most
comfortable. And Vienna is the most charming.”
She
lights incense and I pour myself a glass of wine. We’ve just managed to buy a
bottle before the grocery store down the street closed. Everything closes early
here. Like seven o’clock early. Seven o’clock in the evening on a Monday night
early.
But
we’re home for now. Settled in. Back where the words are spoken in German. Here
in Vienna. Here in Austria.
Eventually,
we climb the ladder and tuck ourselves in for bed. Tomorrow will be our first
full day in this city and we’ve got a lot to see. I read for a little while and
then turn out the light. I’m heading into dreams when a voice cuts through the
darkness.
A
man’s voice from the apartment below. It sounds like a phone conversation. Well, that can’t go on forever, I think
as I try to block out the sound. But it does. Eleven o’clock. Midnight. One. Sometime
before two in the morning, the voice quits. And silence brings peace and sleep.
We
have breakfast at Café Central. A monolithic building with palatial decorating
and an elevated atmosphere. Jesse and I had read that cafes were the thing to
do in Vienna and we have a list of them to visit. Café Central is famous for
being a meeting place for past figures such as Sigmund Freud and Leo Trotzki. We’ve
made it just before the rush and a good thing too, as reservations are a norm
for this fancy cafe. At first I feel underdressed. I wish I had some deep
philosophy to discuss or political change to suggest for the betterment of the
world, but instead Jesse and I sit across from each other in companionable
silence. While we wait for our breakfast, I eavesdrop on the conversation the
four bright young things sitting next to us are having. They’re from England, and
they’re talking about past New Year’s exploits, drunkenness, parties, being out
in the cold. One of the girls tells a story which includes the line, “My mum
was throwing blankets over us. We were literally like corpses.”
I
sit with my Viennese coffee in hand and thrash around the idea of what it would
mean to be literally like a corpse. How cold is that? How rigid? Shivering or
not? What if the corpse was still warm? Then it would not be literal.
Figurative.
Literal. Imaginative. These are the thoughts I’m having. Not as elevated as the
ceilings of Café Central. I sit there and parse words and meanings in my head
while I have my breakfast. Jesse sits across from me and has hers.
Vienna
is a maze of streets and buildings tall as the clouds, grand as the mountains.
I let Jesse handle the map and we tour the city on foot by her direction. By
the time we come to St. Peter’s Church I’m ready to sit and rest for a while. We
gaze up at the domed ceiling and the elaborate artwork. Take in the saints and
the painted, gilded stories. There are little square fliers on the pew backs
advertising a free cantata. Jesse notes down the details. I lean back and let
her. We’ve been sitting there on the wooden pew for a short space of time when
suddenly music fills the room. Deep, reverberating notes from the organ whose
pipes are stretching up towards the ceiling behind us.
It’s
Bach. The music, not the organist. And it feels magical. No, not magical—holy,
sacred, spiritual. A true interaction with art. To be here in this majestic
place hearing this music is like stepping in to the presence of the holy. Jesse
had only just said that that was what she wanted. To be in the presence of the
holy, of what is holy.
I
close my eyes.
The
music plays, song after song, for about thirty minutes. And then, the practice
is over. The silence hangs thick with the memory of every song ever played in
this place. It’s overwhelming.
Our
souls filled with the echoing notes, we leave the church and go back out to
explore.
Ah,
Vienna.
That
night, in our apartment, the voice begins at ten o’clock. Not again, I think. Who can
he be talking to? I scramble down the ladder and look out the window at
him. He’s sitting on the balcony with a computer in front of him, smoking
cigarettes—the click of his lighter accentuates his conversation, the glow of
his computer and his cigarette radiate out, lift up toward the stars. I close
the window up tight, get my earplugs, and go back up the ladder to bed. With
the earplugs in my ears his voice is fainter, but still there, a constant
droning. He talks until something like five o’clock in the morning. How can anyone have that much to say? I
wonder.
“It’s
like he’s in the same room with us,” Jesse says the next day. Our room is small
for two people. Three is definitely a crowd.
“Who
can he be talking to that long?” I ask her.
Then
it hits us, “Maybe he’s a writer.” The pauses between his sentences, his German
paragraphs, aren’t always long enough for a response.
“Maybe
he’s dictating his book,” I say. After all, that’s how I write, most of the
time. I almost forgive him for keeping us up. If he’s a writer. But still. I
like my sleep. I had wanted to see what kind of dreams Vienna gives.
“That
free concert is tonight at seven,” Jesse says, a day later, on Thursday when we’re
walking along the Danube. “We should go.”
“Okay,”
I say.
We
go out the opposite side, and then wander for what feels like days in the mouse
maze of the city. There’s some outdoor concert going on—that was what we were
deflected from going to, I suppose. Maybe we had to have tickets. We wander,
and rush, and wander a millions times past St. Stephens, that impressive cathedral,
but never by St. Peter’s. “It should be right here,” we both say. Jesse
consults the map and I try to find an answer with my phone. Somehow, by a turn
of the street, by a miracle of drifting, we end up at St. Peter’s. Finally and
with a half hour to spare.
As
we make our way to a seat, out of the corner of my eye I see a sign that says:
No tourists. But we’re too intent on our arrival to pay attention. We’re not
tourists, we’re concert goers.
Other
people come and take their seats in front and around us. I begin to suspect
that maybe we’re here too early. Maybe there’s a service before the concert.
Well, we can sit through that. No problem. But then the service doesn’t start. The concert will be late at this rate, I
think. How strange. We sit longer. I watch those that come in. They’re dressed
in dark clothing and I wonder if we’ve crashed a funeral. We sit patiently on.
Seven o’clock comes and goes. Around 7:10 or 7:20, the priest begins the mass. Jesse
and I look at each other. Mass. One of those square fliers is on the pew bench
in front of us. But I can’t see well enough to read the fine print from where I
am. Oh well. We stay for the entire service (what else could we really do?),
rising when the others’ rise, singing along in German to the hymns, repeating
the chanting lines after the priest like a Greek chorus. We know enough to not
join the line to take communion. I sit writhing inside with hilarity, telling
myself to not smile manically with humor, to not laugh out loud. What a
hilarious mistake. Mass. When it’s all over and the priest has blessed us to
leave, we grab one of the fliers and look.
“That’s
tomorrow,” I say, seeing the date.
Jesse
consults her notebook. “Oh, I had the date and day wrong. I thought the ninth
was today.” We laugh. Shrug.
Ah
Vienna.
“Well,”
I say as we sit at a pub and have a late dinner, “at least we can say we’ve
been to a German mass now.”
It’s
rained softly all day and is still gently raining when we get home, when we go
to bed. Our downstairs, night-talking writer stays inside. I sleep the sleep of
the exhausted and bless the rain.
On
Friday, the day of the concert, we go and see Vienna’s Anker Clock where
figures from different eras parade across the face of the clock accompanied by
period music at the stroke of twelve, we visit the Belvedere, the Shönbrunn
Palace. As the day diminishes, we look at each other.
“We
should try for the concert, shouldn’t we?”
This
time the metro exit is not blocked by terrifying, goddesslike police officers and
we emerge into the open air from the right stairwell. However, we’re still lost
in the maze of this extraordinary city. I can’t bear to think of wandering the
way we’d done the night before. So I stop and ask a carriage driver for
directions with my one halting German word, “Entschuldingung, Saint Peter’s?”
He
takes me by the arm and turns me around and then in English he gives me precise
and perfect directions. I thank him in English and German and all but give him
a kiss on the cheek.
In
less than five minutes, Jesse and I once again walk through the doors of St.
Peter’s church.
“We’re
spending a lot of time here,” I say.
“It’s
our church now,” Jesse says.
The
cantata begins. Bach fugues. The voices and the instruments ride over one
another, fill the church to the brim, echo slightly, resound. This is
spiritual. This is art. This is holy.
This
is Vienna, the city of music.
