it was a really good question. Then he sort of looked up at the ceiling, and said it reminded him of something his uncle had said, like fifty years ago, in Vienna. He said, ‘If men have to die, they might as well die believing there’s a reason.’ Don’t you think that’s really beautiful?”
“Whatever is he thinking about in there? He’s just staring out of the window. He hasn’t moved.”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ve been stirring up a lot of memories. But don’t you think that’s a really beautiful thing to say?”
“Is it? I don’t know that it’s beautiful, exactly. I mean it seems to imply that there actually isn’t a reason. That doesn’t strike me as a particularly happy thought.”
“Oh sure. But I’ve asked that question before, you know? This friend of my dad who’s a general, a couple of guys who were out in ’Nam. . . I got a lot of stuff about doing your job, just being a pawn in the game, stuff like that. Your father’s really something else. He’s like a philosopher.”
“He’s unusual, I’ll give you that.”
Mickey turned again to look at his father, and she joined him with a reverent contemplation of her own. For her the mystery still lacked the power to distress. Then she grabbed his arm suddenly, alive with a new topic.
“Hey, you want to hear something funny?”
“Please.”
“When I went out, just a little while back, I met this young guy in uniform, I mean really young, he looked like he should still be in school. Maybe he’s a guard or something.”
“Probably a policeman, if it’s the same one who checked my passport. I don’t think railway staff carry guns, even in Germany.”
“I meant maybe a border guard.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Anyhow, he looked so young and shy and everything, and I asked him to tell me the way to the bathroom, and he just looked so embarrassed. He didn’t say a word. And he turned really red. Don’t you think that’s cute? Just because I asked for the john?”
“I don’t think that was the reason, Pet. He speaks hardly any English. He wouldn’t know where to begin with you.”
“Oh really? Oh, well. I guess I’ll go back in now. We ought to get some sleep, some time. It’s too bad you didn’t reserve some beds.”
“No point, honey. They only do singles.”
Mickey kissed his wife on the mouth, and left her to daydream about the double bed to come. At the door of the other compartment, with the other woman in his life still hidden by the blinds, he turned to catch a long-range view of Elspeth. She was leaning against the wall, still holding her notebook, with an absent smile on her face and one ankle gently stroking the other, up, and down. Mickey smiled. He was looking forward to that room as well, and he didn’t give a damn about the view.
2
The train was moving faster now, hitting its stride at top speed, and grabbing a few seconds’ lead on the timetable. The speed in the darkness seemed reckless, then unreal, as though the rails must arc wildly into the sky to take up the time, with Vienna still nine hours away. It couldn’t take that long to cross little Europe at such a rate.
It had been thirty-nine years since Herbert Christie had seen Vienna, although it seemed longer, for he had never quite been able to believe in the defeated, starving capital with its four foreign masters in the aftermath of war. The place had looked not so much damaged as incomplete, as though a rough copy of the city he had known in 1934 had been hastily and haphazardly erected for his personal deception. He had not seen Vienna, in a Europe still technically at peace, debauched by swastikas, neither had he known the Vienna that sent its men to the war, only to watch them bring it home with them. Destruction, invasion, these were things he had seen elsewhere, while the streets and cafés of his memory remained intact. They shared the private immortality of people whose deaths he had not witnessed, his parents, grandparents and many friends, who lived forever on the list of those he would visit again, one day, when he had the time. Thus the dozens of the living who waited for a visit or a letter from Herbert shared their status in the mind of their friend with others whose loss was too painful to acknowledge.
Now Herbert was going to make one of those visits. The Viennese, he knew, had repaired their city, with much foreign help. He had been told that the place felt now very much as it had before the war, that he could look forward to finding again, in all its bright complexity, something he had lost when he was nineteen, if only he could dare to believe in it.
But belief was the problem, accepting that desire and reality could be one. The present so quickly became the past, and memory, romanticised and stripped of detail, became more precious than the truth itself. Accepting reality was the real leap of faith.
She was back. Herbert remained still, listening to the door open and close, the two footsteps, the body settling itself on the seat opposite him, a waking prisoner counting off the sounds and the seconds before he must face the lights again. The pages of the notebook turned, the pen clicked ready. This was it.
“Ah! Elspeth. I’m sorry, my dear, I. . . I was miles away. Where were we?”
She showed no sign of fatigue, this girl. She was bright and eager for more. She had even adjusted her make-up.
“Well, ah. . . I think we’ve covered everything outside of the central theme. . .”
“The central theme?”
“I mean of the book. I’m sure I’m looking at a book here. But the guts of it will be you, you know, coming back to Vienna after all these years, and climaxing with your uncle’s will, and how it ties in with what happened back then. The rest of your career will be kind of a build-up for that. So let’s talk about Vienna.”
“Well, we can, of course. . . but there’s lots more, you know, that I haven’t told you, much more about Burma, and Berlin, Malaya, Korea. . .”
“I really want to get into Vienna now. We can always go back, later on. I just want to know, like, where I am, when we get there. Is that OK?”
“Of course, of course.”
“OK. . .”
She referred again to her notebook, to the pages at the back where she kept the questions. Herbert braced himself. This was going to be the hardest part, the part he didn’t want to disturb. He wanted to see the place again before he brought its memory into the light. Memories were gossamer to the touch, no matter how powerful.
“OK. So, you were, what, twenty?”
“It was February of 1934. I was nineteen, nearly twenty, yes.”
“And why did you go there?”
“Oh. . . my parents thought it would be good for me. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was thinking about the Church, but I wasn’t really sure. It would have meant Oxford, probably, and my mother wasn’t keen. I don’t know. Anyway, it was arranged that I should go and stay with Uncle Wolf. He lived in Vienna, an uncle by marriage, the aunt died before I was born . . . that’s neither here nor there . . . Wolf was considered to be, I suppose, the family intellectual.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yes. So off I went.” He reached into the small bag he’d brought with him from the other compartment, and produced a fat brown envelope. “Actually I found something that might interest you. Wolf’s letter, inviting me to stay, with a lot of helpful information about the neighbourhood. In fact my father had written to him, but. . . It is in English.”
“Oh, wow!”
She took the packet of paper as though it were an orphaned chick, and looked, for a long moment of awe, at the postmark. Herbert sat back and took a break. He had glossed over that, at least. He would not have to return, now, to that dreadful year after school