going to call New York? From Vienna? Bloody hell.”
“Well, I could just call his office and have him call me right back. Is that OK?”
“I think that would be a good idea.”
“There was something your father said a while back. . . I know I have it here. . . I really wanted to show you. . .”
She pulled the silly designer notebook out of her handbag, and started flipping through the pages, while Mickey waited, without interest. He was annoyed at having been caught unawares by Elspeth, at having missed her approach. He most enjoyed looking at her from a distance, with her pent-up bobbing gait, and the blood of a dozen races playing glorious merry hell with her face and figure and hair. At close range her beauty was lost in the detail of its parts, like the face of the moon. Still, at least she always looked happy.
“It doesn’t matter, Pet. I’ve probably heard it before.”
“Oh, here it is, right here.” Mickey sighed, and looked back at his father. No change. “Mickey? You want to hear this?”
“Sorry Pet. Go on, I’m listening.”
“OK. So I was asking him about war, right? And I said, you know, did it ever bother him, to be all the time mixed up in killing people and all that real destruction . . .”
“Good grief.”
“What? You think I shouldn’t have asked?”
“Well. . . Oh I don’t know. Why not? You’re a journalist, after all.”
“Right. And I’m family. I think it’s OK. Anyhow, he said 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?”
