the university? How interesting.’
‘At the university,’ the girl says and goes back to colouring her triceratops purple.
‘My dad travels a lot. To Japan. And Singapore. And Hong Kong. I get presents. My mum stays at home,’ says the next boy.
Of course it’s only businessmen, doctors and other highly educated people who can afford to pay for private lessons here. I turn to the last boy.
‘And what do your mum and dad do?’ I ask.
Dismayed, the boy stares at me.
‘They write books,’ he says at last.
‘What are the books about?’ I ask.
The boy hides his face behind his hands before crying: ‘About love!’
I try to conceal my smile and change the subject so the boy can recover. The children’s natural curiosity, honesty and joy make me forget to count the minutes until the lesson finishes, and when it’s time for them to go we’re all sad. A few seconds later they run out of the room and I know I’ve already become a distant memory to them.
Since Rebecca is at Jakob’s parents’ place the whole weekend and Leonore’s rehearsing, there’s half a Saturday and a whole Sunday still to fill. In my head I’ve made a schedule of jolly little activities. I walk slowly to the first district and look in the windows of the exclusive boutiques. I count the number of women wearing real-fur coats on Kohlmarkt (four) and the number of dark-skinned people (one, selling Die Presse) I can see in under a minute. On the wide, pedestrianised street called Graben I see three young women doing market research for Samsonite. I slow my pace and peer into the Persian-rug shop alongside them. When one of the women asks if I would be interested in answering some questions, I feign surprise, then nod and grin.
‘Do you own a suitcase with wheels?’ the woman asks in German.
‘Yes I do,’ I reply.
The woman puts a little cross by one of the rows on her sheet of paper.
‘Do you own more than one suitcase with wheels?’
‘No I don’t.’
‘Do you know the brand of the suitcase you own?’ asks the woman.
‘No, sorry,’ I reply and smile widely.
I love taking part in market-research surveys. And filling out questionnaires. The knowledge that my life can be divided up into simple categories relating to how much I earn, what kind of place I live in and how many foreign holidays I take a year gives me a sense of security and satisfaction. The fact that there are no grey zones, that everything really can be broken down into black and white. Once, after I’d had a particularly difficult student at Berlitz, I went into the nearest bank and filled in a withdrawal slip just to calm myself down.
‘Thank you very much,’ says the woman. ‘Have a nice day.’
‘Was that all?’ I say, trying to hide the desperation in my voice.
But the girl has already approached another couple.
I go to one of the few cinemas in Vienna that shows films in their original language. The film doesn’t start for another hour and a half so I read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in the foyer, and realise I’m in the wrong European city for becoming an author. I should immediately move to Paris, drink cheap red wine and spend all my time wandering around hungry. After the film I rent a DVD on the way home, and buy some food.
On Sunday I try to sleep in, but fail. Instead, Optimus and I lie in bed and stare at one another. I go to a Kokoschka exhibition in the Museum Quarter and then the cinema again. I eat dinner at McDonald’s and hope none of my students will see me. I make a constant effort not to look at the time to see how many hours I have to endure before I can go to bed and begin my working week again.
While I’m eating my Big Mac I start thinking about how I ought to write a historical novel set in England. It would be about a young orphan girl who becomes a governess at a big spooky mansion. Slowly, she and the dour master of the house fall in love, but there’s a big twist: the master’s wife is still alive – locked up because she’s batshit crazy. Locked in the attic! Once again, the hairs on my arms stand on end when I think what an incredible story it’s going to be.
Fuck you, Charlotte Brontë.
I pour sugar into my coffee cup a little too fast and some lands on the table.
‘Oops,’ Stephan says, smiling.
I brush the sugar off the little round metal table and smile back. You should always smile on a date. And be sexy. And fun. I try to think of something fun and sexy to say about sugar, but my head’s empty. Brown sugar – like sensual little sun-kissed grains of sand – hahaha! This is the first date I’ve been on in almost a year. On my last date, I went out with a doctor who I never heard from again.
‘I’m so sick of the warm weather,’ Stephan says, nodding at the blue sky outside. His accent is so strong it sounds like ‘ze wuarm wezzer’.
The café is in one of the museum galleries and it’s pleasantly cool. Around us, the muted voices of the other customers can be heard. Outside it’s so warm that the tarmac on the streets has turned soft and the air is vibrating. Over the last week, two of the horses and one of the drivers of the coaches that always stand in front of the Hofburg have collapsed from the heat. One of the horses even died.
‘Me too,’ I say. On a date you should always agree with the other person. If you don’t, you should come up with charming-yet-convincing counter-arguments that show you are independent but not – God forbid – dogmatic.
‘The whole of Vienna gets so dusty and suffocating,’ Stephan continues. ‘You can’t breathe.’
‘A bit like … a gas chamber,’ I mumble, as I realise my cultural faux pas halfway through the sentence. With Austrians you are, after all, only two generations from some pretty terror-inducing events.
The man sitting in front of me is a prince. Not symbolically, and definitely not in terms of appearance: Stephan really is a prince. Even though the Austrian aristocracy was officially abolished after the First World War, Austrians have continued to use their titles as if to show how meaningless the rest of the world’s opinions are to them. Stephan is descended from the house of Deyn-Hofmannstein, and his family own a castle in Steiermark. We started talking to one another when Leonore and I were at Loos Bar last weekend and after three days I rang him even though I only had a vague, alcohol-blurred memory of him. But because I’d typed ‘Prince Stepfam! PIRNC!!!’ and his number in my phone I saw it as a sign I should make a little more effort with my love life.
It was my idea to meet at 11 a.m. at the Natural History Museum to show how alternative and spontaneous I am, rather than in the evening at some bar. But now I’m regretting my decision, and wishing this coffee in front of me were something alcoholic and that it was quarter to twelve at night rather than in the morning. So far, our date hasn’t been the slightest bit alternative and spontaneous, just clumsy and uncomfortable. The Natural History Museum is
