The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [77]
She considered the letter, which continued to feel heavy in her hand, but less with obligation than with portent. She thought about what Anna had said about her “gift” and how she could have been describing the musical landscapes that Maria had inhabited for as long as she could remember but that had seemed so foreboding and unattainable at her parents’ funeral. She knew she was still adrift but was more determined, even if the thought of finding something she might not recognize frightened her almost as much as not getting there at all.
22
Original Stories from Real Life
VIENNA, 1864. Though it was February and the temperature outside well below freezing, Lucien was not deterred as he trotted down the spiral stairs of his apartment building, two steps behind Eduard. He knew that, despite the cold, stepping out into the open air—where the winter sun refracted through the mist to create an almost perpetual twilight of orange and pink pastels—would be like stepping into a dream. It was one of his favorite things about Vienna, and something he often thought about when he was inclined to miss Paris.
Still, there was a limit to how fast he liked to move in the morning, and Eduard was testing it. “Please, slow down just a little—you’re making me dizzy!” he begged as they circled closer to the foyer.
“I know—I’m sorry,” Eduard said and stopped in front of the door to wait. He quickly placed a finger on Lucien’s lower lip in lieu of a kiss. “I told you—I don’t want to be late.”
Lucien lightly bit the finger, shook his head like a dog, and then just as quickly let it go. “Okay—that’s better—on y va.”
Outside, they continued at a brisk pace past the university—where Eduard was an adjunct professor—toward the center of the city, making a detour around a vast field adjacent to the Ringstrasse, where the new parliament buildings, all in different stages of construction, could have been mistaken for ruins. After crossing into the old city, they walked past the Spanish Riding School, where Lucien insisted they spend a few seconds admiring the horses—steaming after their morning exercises—before continuing on to Grabenstrasse, where a strip of yellow tents extended in either direction in the center of the wide thoroughfare.
“Is there anything else I need to get?” asked Lucien as he withdrew from his pocket a list that they—along with Heinrich, Eduard’s longtime domestic and cook—had made in anticipation of dinner that night, to celebrate Lucien’s third anniversary in Vienna.
“I don’t think so”—Eduard shook his head—“but if you see anything that looks good—”
“Pomegranates, perhaps?” Lucien joked, knowing that these were Eduard’s favorites, but were no longer in season.
“If you love me you’ll find them,” Eduard replied with a wink, before he doffed his hat and turned toward Kärntnerstrasse—which led directly south to the site of the new opera house—leaving Lucien in the growing throngs at the base of St. Stephen’s.
Now on his own, he meandered through the tents, which in this corner of the marketplace were filled with barrels of strange gourds, dried lemons, coriander seeds, cinnamon sticks, and other spices. After buying a few things—bartering down the prices like a true Viennese—he went back to the street and paused in front of a plague monument to consider the tower of writhing bodies and skulls; in Vienna, death was honored the way Paris paid tribute to military victories, a distinction Lucien realized he had come to appreciate as he turned to orient himself by way of the cathedral rooftop. Looking up, he ignored the shouts and cries of the surrounding merchants and allowed himself to be momentarily hypnotized by the vibrating mosaic of orange and green against the pale white sky.
AS HE WALKED back to the apartment, he was struck by how three years in a foreign city could feel at once so fleeting and so epic. Like a tourist, he was always discovering unmapped streets, dusty bookshops with rare prints and old editions—sometimes in strange Eastern languages he didn’t even recognize