Gibbin House

A Black Fairytale

There once was a poor child, had no father nor mother, twas all dead and not a soul left in the world. Everything dead, and so it went and searched day and night. And because there was no one on earth, it wanted to go to the heavens, the moon looking so friendly.

But when it finally got to the moon, twas a piece of rotted wood. And so the child went to the sun, and when it got to the sun, twas a wilted sunflower. And when it got to the stars, twere small gold gnats, stuck there, like red shrikes on a blackthorn bush. And when it went back to earth, twas an overturned harbor. And the child was all alone. And so it sat and cried, and there it sits still and is all alone.

…. Georg Büchner, Wozzeck

PROLOGUE

January 1, 1914

Dear Theo,

It’s late, but I know we are both awake and so I write, feeling as if my words are traveling towards you without my pen even touching the paper.

From my frosted window I watch a New Year’s Day dawn, and my mind can’t help curling itself around what the future holds in store for us.

Over again a memory creeps in of a book, the title escapes me now, which at the irregular age of nine, prompted me to ask my mother a rather pointed question. I wanted to know why it was that people fell as easily out of love as into it.

My mother’s predisposition to all things romantic I needn’t apprise you of; you know her. So you’ll understand when I tell you that I expected a talk about ‘exhausting passions’ and ‘fires consuming themselves’. Already at nine, I was wary of her nonsense. But to my amazement, she offered quite a different explanation; not overwrought, something so plain, in fact, that I had until we met every reason to believe it was true.

She began by saying that love was the act of living through a fellow human being. We did this in order to answer a personal deficiency which, though we often could not identify it, we felt the shame of. This deficiency created a void, and love was us fitting people into this cavity, to complement it or challenge its existence. Then for a time we could be soothed, mended, fortified or devastated from the inside out. The deficiency’s satisfaction took countless forms. But regardless, eventually demands changed, we evolved, for better or worse.

As such, falling out of love was not some sudden, tragic rupture, but simply the inevitable consequence of a person made redundant. Our natural evolution quelled love. It turned something once beautiful in our eyes crass over time, and inversely, made a face we might have ignored forever suddenly one day strike us with its intimate familiarity.

I think about her words now as I lay here, your voice and your face coming at me in waves and waves. For it seems to me that you exist outside this scheme. That had we met yesterday or twenty years from now, you should always be familiar to me on first sight, no matter who I became. To amuse myself, I test my resolution by painting you with lines and wrinkles, making you look even more ill-humored than you are wont to be (what a frightful thought, indeed). And yet, for all the qualities I malign, you continue ever, inescapably, the same.

How do we explain such things to ourselves? Such instant recognition? How can it be that I knew you from the onset? That you struck me though yours was a strange face in a throng of strange faces? I know you don’t have your handsomeness to thank. You carried it with too much entitlement to be attractive. Nor for the timidity of your words, which were in direct discord with your condescending eyes.

I just looked and knew you. You were immediate and urgent, the Fatamorgana that lures parched souls, driving their aimless steps in the desert. An ethereal likeness of someone in my past, not any one specific person or even a stranger I registered on the street one day, but rather something primeval. A face strung on a line pulling me through the current of my other lives. As if I had spent a thousand nights in previous centuries dreaming of it again and again, and it now stood shockingly in flesh before me.

How ignorant you must have been to all this when we first met; I treated you horribly, so afraid of this arresting sensation. For being near you, I felt less human and more like some liquid, the memory-laden fog rising off the stone of an old well.

Of course, I know that someday, sooner perhaps than I can predict, my face could fall away and I become that redundancy. It would be terrible, indeed, of me to hope that you remain flawed in the same way you are now, only in order that you may continue to care the same for me. But for my part, there is constancy, constancy not dependent on my inconsequential faults, but sprung from something outside of me, something transcendental, mythical, that resonates through me in unimaginable dimensions. For my part, I will always be there, facing you, so that neither of us must tread nor stumble. The water around us will seep into the ground the moment we speak. If I have no assurance of anything, I am sure of this.

Goodnight, dear friend, and know that I am ever with you.

I.

PART I

For the Second Time an Upheaval

Vienna, July 8,1949

At the first sound of church bells ringing out nine o’clock from beyond the Schottenring, I ran faster than I ever had without my life depending on it.

The wait tonight had been excruciating, and I’m sure I could not have borne another minute of standing alone under the scaffolded Stefansdom’s fractured shadows. Mercifully released by the distant chimes, I broke into this furious sprint, through the vacant squares and cobblestone alleyways of the Innere Stadt, in search of my mother. Two patrolling soldiers near the Dorotheergasse momentarily halted my flight and glared at this suspiciously harried young woman. But being French, they quickly deemed me too meager to interrogate, and so I sped on, around another corner and down the abandoned corridor, until at last I held Café Hawelka’s tell-tale yellow light in my sights.

By the time I tore open the café’s heavy door, my thin bangs plastered my forehead, and I emanated that insidious stink again.

That foul stench of male musk – all day it had hung about me like a faint specter. Barely detectable inside a hot trolley car, but strident enough to remind me where it came from and to spark an undulating bout of nausea.

In the public washroom this morning I had tried to expel it. I had rinsed my hair and scoured every inch of skin I could reach, but my pores remained impregnated with that smell. I sensed him on my clothes, too, the same soiled skirt and blouse from yesterday I’d had no other choice but to wear again. They had only been in brief contact with him, but they had absorbed his musk like everything else. Each time I moved, it seemed infinite stores of it wafted off from within my skirt’s dense seams and creased pleats, the scent ripened by pitches in my body heat, as if I were an oil lamp and my clothes the wick, diffusing the air around me with his inescapable bile. How intolerable, I thought, to be as ever, perversely and through no fault of my own, a prisoner of my person.

Fortunately, the smell proved no match for Café Hawelka’s tawdry stench of stained velvet, dishwater, and stale tobacco. Sweet liberty, I breathed freely.

Now to find her through the curtains of nebulous smoke. My mother was not the easiest person to distinguish next to the ebony paneling of those corner banquettes. Her dark hair and thinning frame very nearly melted against the black background, and the effect of it never failed to elicit a shiver of anxiety.

Please be here or I’ll never forgive you.

But the instant I thought this, I knew I needn’t have worried. Her umber eyes had already fixed on me, and I felt them piercing through the haze.

My mother’s defiant stare – how unyielding it was, streaming from within her languid, almost Kashmir face, absorbing everything. She made an absolute art of looking like that, of stripping things down, tying them captive. It was the result of her determined wish to appear imperious. I never considered that she might actually be on the constant verge of breaking. To me, that stare constituted part of her characteristic indomitability and there was nothing like being enveloped by all that strength. To seek her out and bury my face in her soft chest, to hide away there, remained even at my age the ultimate comfort.

Should I have been ashamed of this? Lord knows, twenty-two was too old to hang on my mother’s apron strings. Adults are supposed to graduate on to other people’s strings. Yet, as far as I was concerned and after what I’d seen, people could keep their damned strings to themselves. I just wanted to lose myself in my mother’s arms.

Yearning for her cosseting embrace, I now wove past the tables in her direction. Each promising step intensified the loneliness I’d hitherto felt. Almost upon her, however, the terrible possibility occurred to me, that in touching her, I risked polluting her with the same stench I was trying to shed. She would recognize it, and then we would both be tainted by it, when all I wanted to do was forget. And so, when everything told me to lunge at her, I held firm.

Naturally, my mother immediately sensed my resistance, attune to the language of my every muscle. Instead of sliding aside to make room for me on the bench, as was her habit, my mother left me to pull out a chair across from her. Then she leaned over the table and extended her cheek for a kiss. I’d spent too many hours missing her to be satisfied with cursory gestures, but I grazed her face and forced myself back again, not realizing that this was just one more inch in the distance starting to settle between us.

For her part, my mother leaned one olive elbow against the marble top and like a teenager rested her chin on a cigarette-clenched fist. The other arm she stretched out to stroke my fingers. She felt the sweat on them.

You ran here.

Of course I had. Had she expected me to just come strolling in? Had she not run too? Eager to assure and embrace me the first chance she got? My mother’s obtuse observation irritated me.

She read the petulance in my shrug.

Today has been miserable, Ançanut. I know that and I’m sorry.

Why was she apologizing? It needn’t have been so bad, not the last couple of hours, anyway. If she’d met me after her shift at six, like she always had before, I think I might have put the whole thing behind me. Her closeness had a way of making things fade away. And today, of all days, she ought to have insisted on being by my side. I could not fathom what was making her act so strangely, so removed.

Did you go to the pictures like I suggested?

I nodded sadly.

Indeed, I’d gone to the cinema. I’d gone, having foolishly hoped the whole day through that she meant to find me there. That she couldn’t really mean to protract my isolation. That at the end of empty hours plodding the city’s glaring, crumbled sidewalks, there was solace. How could it be otherwise, I had kept telling myself, standing at the entrance to the cinema, my mind anticipating her at every turn? I even saw her surprising me by stepping out from behind a column. It was the sort of thing my Papa had been used to do. But as our actual meeting time approached, I knew I’d let myself be carried away, because of how ardently I needed her beside me. I needed her to fill the hollowness I’d sensed in me since the previous night. Empty space that hurt like the force of a vacuum. Then again, maybe it was always there, this hollowness, expanding all these years, too dull to notice. And now it had become too large to fill with anything of my own.

And what did you see? she continued obliquely. The one you liked the placard for last week, about the red ballet shoes?

I shook my head and pulled a creased ticket stub from my purse. The title was near impossible to read, as I had a terrible habit of rolling any paper into curls until the fibers from the pulp disintegrated. The broken ink hinted at the film, The Winslow Boy.

My mother smiled briefly at the little square in her hand without really taking in its contents. She was staring at it intently and at the same time not seeing it at all. She did that all the time now.

I don’t remember this one.

I tossed a dismissive wave of the hand over my shoulder to let her know it was an old film. They only played it in the British zone to gift the newly stationed officers there a taste of home.

Despite my distractions, I’d liked the picture. About a father coming to his son’s rescue. It was bittersweet in the way I understood. Besides, I hadn’t wanted anything remotely florid or fanciful today. My usual penchant for stories of ballet slippers and gypsy lovers had been beaten out of me, obliterated. I recoiled at the very thought of such voluptuous things, and unaware of what I was doing, I pulled the collar of my blouse close together, as though to shield myself from them.

My mother seemed to read all these deliberations in the seconds it took for them to flit across my face. She locked me in a kind yet discomfited gaze. I, in turn, listlessly tipped over the spoon atop her cup.

I forgot to order your coffee, Anka, didn’t I? I’ll tell Moritz to bring us another.

No. I’d waited so long to be sitting here with her, I couldn’t bear the idea of losing sight of her again. Let the coffee wait.

Very well, she sighed, delicately beginning to nibble at her upper lip. Her nervous habit was one of the very few dainty mannerisms she exhibited. She was otherwise not given to affectations, her brand of femininity rather archetypal, cardinal, and more encompassing than a collection of studied flirtations. I could tell she was about to say something I might not want to hear.

I suppose you have to know where I went tonight.

I raised a brow in agreement.

Anka, I called on the Hasbargens.

The unexpected news gave me a start.

Now, I knew you wouldn’t like the idea of my going to see them. It’s why I didn’t tell you. But they’re decent people and they care about your future. And what with their understanding of legal matters...

Legal matters?

I balked, mortified at what she seemed to be suggesting. All I wanted was to erase the memory of what had happened, and here she was, drawing others into it. Moreover, the Hasbargens. The Minnesotan military couple for whom I tended house, and who were so healthy and clean and robust, and so…American. How could they ever look at me the same way again? Why could we not just go back to ignorance?

Anka, she insisted, reading my resistance. We can’t ignore it away. We must face it down. And in this case, we must accept that we can’t do it on our own.

But why? I implored with my fists on the table.

My mother bit her lip harder in a mixture of guilt and resolve.

Ançanut. You can’t stay there anymore. Which means we have to figure our way out of this. You see that, don’t you?

No. I didn’t. After all, what was there to figure out? The days when life resembled anything near normal were long gone. Regret was like using the eye of a needle for a telescope. Best to accept what had happened, close our eyes and move on. Ultimately, we were just two more in a throng of millions, stumbling through the ruins. What right did we have to be spared our share of misfortune?

Anka! My mother was losing her patience with me now. I was prolonging her delivery of unpleasant truths. Listen, they’ve agreed to have you stay with them until Mr. Hasbargen arranges your travel permit.

I didn’t feel my lip drop, but she gave me one of those jerky nods with which mothers tell their children to close their mouths.

Mr. Hasbargen guarantees me it shouldn’t take long, not more than a couple of weeks, he says.

Travel permit? The direction of my mother’s reasoning started to become clearer. It alarmed me.

They would have liked to take you in altogether, they say, were it not for the fact that the husband is being reassigned next month. Frankfurt or French Morocco, I forget. The Americans are laboring under the impression the whole world is in need of a cultural reeducation… She broke herself off to sip the dregs of her cup, while I simply stared ahead.

They’re expecting you tonight. I’ll come by with your things after work tomorrow. I won’t have you setting foot in that place again.

The idea of never returning to Gröninger’s attic was a bright prospect, but it did not quell my other worries. What did she mean by my travel permit? Where was I going? And why did she continue to refuse mentioning herself?

My mother patted my hand.

The Hasbargens can’t take us both in, clearly. It’s not as if we’re strays off the street. She avoided my eyes. I’ll remain where I am…up there, for now.

The thought of her alone up there sickened me, and it was all I could do to control the sudden sting of tears.

I know you don’t want to hear any of this, my mother’s voice grew terse. But you must trust me…

I’d never hesitated to before.

While your travel permit comes through, we’ll have to schedule your journey to London.

London? What for?

An old friend of ours lives there now. He was a professor of art history here when we were young. We kept in contact over the years, so he knows all about you. In fact, he’s been looking forward to meeting you since you were born.

I turned away.

His name is Alfred Deisler. She was adding yet another to a growing list of names I’d never heard until recently.

…he has a very nice home, apparently. Ten years ago he tried to talk us into moving to England, to live with him. We didn’t, of course, because I didn’t want to leave the Banat. And so Papa didn’t want to go either, no matter how much Alfred insisted…and now I know I should have never thought twice about it…

Her dark eyes glassed over. The things you’ll go mad thinking about…

I squeezed her hand.

Anyway, I’ve called him, and he can’t wait to see you.

Us, you mean? My eyes jabbed at her for confirmation.

No, just you.

A swell of panic flared in my stomach. Me, go alone to live with some man, some stranger? It was preposterous. She could not mean it; surely she would change her mind tomorrow.

And there’s no sense in arguing, because I’ve already written to tell him you’re coming. It’s for the best.

No, no, no! My body trembled. It was one thing to start a whole life over again, for the second time in four years. I had soured enough on Vienna that I could be brought around to planting new seeds elsewhere…but only as long as she was there. What she was proposing here…she could not be serious!

But I am, Anka. Her firm mien terrified me, and I kept shaking my head like some malfunctioning automaton.

This is your chance for a new start. If I’d been less selfish, I’d have given it to you years ago.

Blast this ruddy chance, I pounded on the table. I didn’t want it, or whatever this nightmare of an arrangement was – stuck with yet another good-for-nothing boor, in some godforsaken place, millions of miles away! I wanted to be with her, I needed her!

Don’t be a child, Anka.

Her cold words struck me like a man’s blow across the face. A child? How could she say this to me?

Furthermore, how could she ask something so unthinkable of me as to leave her? She, the only person in the world with the ability to read my face and decode my cryptic gestures, because she had invented them? What did I care about cruelties on the outside, about having to nod and toss my head about like a simpleton in front of others as long as I had her as my refuge, to remind me that my thoughts and feelings were real? That I existed?

You must come!

We can’t possibly afford it, Ançanut. Mr. Hasbargen and I added it up, the cost for the fare and custom duties. And the permit isn’t free. Besides, you know I can’t leave a paying job. To lose our only source of income would be irresponsible. Please… her voice finally splintered.

NO.

Just for the time being, be brave. You’ll see there is a world beyond this place, beyond me.

There wasn’t. I refused to accept the notion. She was everything. She was the line of my horizon, the edge of my universe.

I promise I’ll follow you.

Furiously, I snatched the cigarette out of her fingers and inhaled so deep, I nearly vomited. She was lying. This was a dream, Café Hawelka, Uncle August, all products of my perverse imagination.

In the next second she had pulled me to her, olive arms with astonishing strength cradling me and kicking up like dust a trace of that vile male musk. And for the third time in my life, I would have given anything to scream.

London, July 29, 1949

My protests were in vain. Three weeks to the day I found myself aboard the Canterbury, a rusty old tanker creaking and moaning its way across the English Channel.

At the bow of the ferryboat, with icy brine spraying upwards, I stood looking at the grey skies and wide, interminable stretch of sea. It made me think of a map in my parents’ old atlas, the political one that had depicted Western Europe like a technicolor patchwork blanket, perfectly contained in its immensity. The English Channel had been barely visible on it, as the lines marking that negligible thoroughfare between France and England almost bled together. Had it not been for the more evocative geographical illustrations of the British Isles in later sections, I might easily have dismissed the Dover Strait as an incidental ink blot, an immaterial printer’s mistake. It wasn’t.

All morning the Channel preened with its massive depth, strong currents and roar of black waves, while on board, Belgian grandfathers deluded enthralled little boys with tales of intrepid swimmers and coast lines that were visible on a clear day. But I couldn’t see it that way. To me, the Channel was what I imagined it had been to strategists during the war: 45 km of insurmountable distance.

Having made myself sick with trying to hold the misted-over Continent in my sights, I retreated to a cold bench inside the passenger lounge and gathered myself in a pitiful pile of sparse belongings. There I drifted off through sleeplessness.

...

At long last, London. By this point in the late afternoon, coffee, cigarettes, and apprehension had burned an acid pit into my stomach. The stale air of the station, a massive but dimly-lit depot with iron ribs bracing its vast ceiling, streamed through the open window and gave me an additional chill. What a madhouse, I thought, peering out through the spotty glass at the throng of bobbing hats. My compartment in contrast was so soothingly empty - everyone in it had joined the other passengers in jamming the aisles ages ago. People on arriving trains couldn’t help themselves. For me, the novelty had worn off around Innsbruck on day two.

Remember, this is the last time.

I smoothed over the stray wisps of my chignon and rose reluctantly. But before going through the trouble of pulling my burgundy suitcase out from the overhead bin, I stared outside again to assure myself of the station’s name on the large information boards.

In reality, I knew where I was. The porter’s announcement that we were approaching Victoria Station had rung periodically in the aisle for the last twenty minutes. I’d thought of little else as we’d sluggishly advanced past this city’s sooty row houses, burned-out factories, and minutely partitioned backyards. But a week of traveling on trains has the curious effect of keeping one from taking reality at face value. Everything one hears collapses into echoes, and words become deceitfully amorphous shapes. One feels perpetually on the fringe of discovering that one is not oneself, and my disorientation was such that I felt at any moment sure to fall straight through the ground.

Oh, get yourself together, I implored. I grabbed my suitcase and crocheted handbag, and stumbled out onto the mob.

Now, I don’t know what I expected when I finally alighted the platform at my destination. Fanfare? A driver in uniform holding up a banner with my name on it? Did I really believe I would be the conquering heroine, an Ingrid Bergman being fetched in a fancy car?

Needless to say, no fanfare greeted me, only the tumult of indifference. I hauled my things to the front of the train platform and planted myself as much as I could in plain sight. And then I waited.

Seek out a handsome light-haired gentleman in his seventies.

That was about the extent of my mother’s instructions before I left Vienna; the ‘handsome’ part was pure conjecture, of course. She hadn’t seen Professor Deisler in twenty years. She’d only figured he must be still good-looking, because he’d been a dedicated dandy in their youth: blond, impeccably manicured, with the most correct posture she claims to have ever seen on anyone. In other words, a real life aesthete, straight out of Schnitzler.

But that was twenty years ago. Would he look the same now, this professor? The Belle Epoch of my mother’s Vienna was a bygone era, and the feminine sort of vanity Austrian men had taken pride in, well, for obvious reasons it had gone quite out of fashion. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure how well to rely on his recognizing me. All he had, as far as I understood, was a confirmation card with a photograph of a pale and gauzy, insignificant girl, a starved wood nymph in looped braids. Physically I near looked the same, apart from my hair now upswept and a shade darker. But the girl in the photograph looked happy. He could not possibly connect the present person to that image. Thus I accepted that I had to do the recognizing.

But what an onerous task - soliciting the attentions of a stranger. The idea of having to examine every elderly man walking by and looking expectant and available made my skin crawl. I felt small and pathetic, and I resented my mother for forcing the whole thing on me.

What made it worse was that so many men responded to my stupid, doe-eyed look.

Was I Ms. Weatherton?

Ms. Havishaw?

Renata’s girl?

Gloria?

Ms. Prigg?

The Misses from the agency?

No?

Dreadfully sorry…

For over half an hour it went on, me shaking my head and staring blankly when their English became incomprehensible.

What a lot of long-lost nieces and foreign maids this afternoon required claiming, I marveled. And how unenviable for these girls that they fit my description. My sympathies went out to them, at least until one after the other walloped me from behind with a piece of luggage, flung in elation of being found. Their enthusiasm remedied my commiseration quite quickly.

When after a second half hour, however, the platform cleared, only to be refilled by a new host of passengers, I began to worry.

I knew I’d reached the correct station, so where was this Alfred Deisler? My mother said she’d wire him with the time of my arrival. He was not so elderly as to be senile, surely. Had I possibly misunderstood the instructions? Had Professor Deisler intended me to go to the house directly? I carried his address with me, but no local currency to pay a cab or a trolley. My English was rudimentary, which hardly mattered as I couldn’t very well make a phone call. The frustration of having come so far, more than twelve-hundred kilometers, only to falter now overcame me. I could not fail after all that. And yet, the thought of moving one more inch, unguided and alone…I wanted to kick something, kick hard until my heel ripped right through the concrete. Instead I felt my body give way and sink on to a bench. It seemed there was nothing left to do but sit there, picking absently at a scuff on my shoe while I helplessly cried my heart out.

Fräulein Anka?

The sound of my own name startled me. I glanced up bewildered.

The man standing before me was tall with slightly rounded shoulders and neatly combed silver hair. And true to my mother’s description, with his very fine, tailored coat, he was about the best-dressed man I’d ever seen up close. The whole effect was gentlemanly, stately, and even the air about Alfred Deisler smelled of elegance; I think it was vetiver. Only his eyes, a look of intense earnestness in them, interrupted the otherwise sweeping effect.

Professor Alfred Deisler gave me a tentative smile.

Anka Pietraru?

I nodded dumbly. This seemed instantly to cut a taut wire in his face and provoke a shower of rather effuse Austrian affectations.

"Fräulein! My grace in heaven, sweet child! Is it really you, at long last!"

A brightened Professor Deisler sighed and pressed a fine hand to his breast. I half expected him to bow. Instead he stepped back to admire me. I flushed.

To think after all these years, I’m finally having a look at you!

The hand at his breast trembled as though he were contemplating the appropriateness of reaching for mine. It occurred to me he was rummaging for some precedent in social behavior to direct him. What was the prescribed etiquette for meeting the daughter of a cherished friend, to whom one hadn’t spoken in two decades, but for whom one was prepared to turn one’s life upside down?

I finally stretched out my hand to put Alfred Deisler out of his chivalrous misery, but he still struggled. He appeared intent on pulling me into an embrace, but settled on a light kiss across my fingers. It was a kind but awkward gesture, and I could not have made things easier by speedily retrieving them. Poor professor, he no doubt attributed my skittishness to the lingering effect of my recent ordeal. But truth be told, in that moment all I was really thinking about was how grubby my fingers were.

Well, Professor Deisler heaved, a touch embarrassed. Let’s best get you home, shall we?

I assented with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. I’d had enough of train stations to last me a lifetime.

He next took my suitcase. By the by, please do accept my apologies for having left you waiting, dear Fräulein, he said with near breathless remorse as he led me off the platform. The last thing I ever intended was to give you a fright. You see, I came directly from my office, not realizing I’d left the arrival time your Mama had sent in my other jacket. And then, to add to the confusion, I read the timetable incorrectly. I had you coming from Brighton, which is another direction entirely. I confess, in my old age I rather think it’s not new glasses I need, but a whole new brain!

Professor Deisler smiled self-effacingly when the cleverly ironic response his comment begged for did not come.

Right, well, first thing we get to Hampstead, we’ll send your dear Mama a wire, telling her you’re arrived, what do you think?

Oh yes!

Encouraged by the spike of energy, he let out a swell! and punctuated it with a little wink.

Still, I can’t say just what a relief it is to finally have you here in one piece, Fräulein Anka, he added as we walked on. What with these constant derailments in the news, and all this fuss about controlling the borders.

Indeed.

You’d think, he leaned his head gently into me, as in great confidence, that part of the point of winning the war was to give people the freedom to move about the place. And now it seems more impossible than ever…

Professor Deisler shook his head at the magnitude of what he’d just said and motioned towards Victoria Station’s airy main hall. From there we wove past the queues at the newspaper kiosks and snack shops, past travel agents and ticket booths, to a broad tile-encased stairway which, he informed, connected to the underground system. I just nodded mechanically the whole way. I was losing track of where I was headed and momentarily delighted in the sensation of being led.

The pleasant feeling did not last long. Within minutes we stood in a harried transit hub with innumerable turnstiles. Beyond them lay an eerie microcosm, a labyrinth of descending corridors. Step by step, grimy mosaic walls wound tightly around us, and the further we pressed along the flights of narrow stairs, the more I felt like a blind mole in her tunnel, delving into the very bowels of the city.

Owing to Professor Deisler’s tardiness, we ended up riding the North Line train at rush hour. This was a new phenomenon for me. There is, as it happens, no real rush hour in Vienna – after all, who’s moving about with much urgency when you’re getting your papers revised at every corner and no one has a job? And mass mobilization in the Romanian backwaters of the Banat, that’s something I never saw as a girl, unless you count our annual Church Christening processions. No, this collective human impetus was new, and part of the claustrophobic impression London’s Underground maintained with singular commitment.

Against all odds, we somehow managed to wedge into the car.

Now, I’m not versed in English