Clara in Vienna: a visit to the Volkstheater
She strode gingerly through the rush hour of tourist footfall, as though feeling her way through a stranger's abode in the dead of night, afraid of clattering into some hitherto unnoticed heirloom. Her hair—straight, shoulder-length, mousy brown—fell neatly around a pair of dark, tan-framed sunglasses, which she presently raised slightly, affording an unfiltered view of the Volkstheater, its towering neo-renaissance façade flanked by gently fluttering tribands. The next moment, eyes straining under staring sun, Carla lowered again her glasses and watched the familiar postcard of gently gradated orange reimpose itself on the scene.
"Do you ever imagine growing up at a different time, in a different place?", Bartholomew asked, the brevity of his pause thereafter exposing the inquiry as incomplete. "I mean, not just imagine, but feel, like, a real pang of nostalgia for a life you never lived?". The pair had met at the intersection of Burggasse and Sankt-Ulrichs-Platz and, unconvinced by the pedestrian-looking café nearby, embarked on a half-hour circumambulation thereof, in a vain attempt to find somewhere preferable. It was still three years before Clara would meet Mikal.
"All the time", Clara replied, with an immediacy so sarcastic sounding that she drew a slow, deliberate breath and repeated herself with a self-conscious sincerity of tone. "But what should I do with this feeling? I don't know...", she continued. "Instinct tells me never to let it go, but lately it just makes me kind of sad".
Three weeks after her twenty-third birthday, Bartholomew would bring Clara back to this café and reveal to her that he had met another woman. It was amusing, Clara thought, that someone so pathologically opposed to clichés now cowered behind the comfort of their easy emotional shorthand. Resenting an acute sense of embarrassment, she smiled weakly and nodded gently through the ordeal and, at its climax, dutifully reciprocated the sentiment that the pair should stay in touch. Some five years later, he would dial the ghost of her phone number and be informed by an impassive, automated voice that it was no longer in service.
