An Interpreter in Vienna is a response to Graham Greene's The Third Man and a psychological thriller serialized on The Matterhorn each Saturday. This epistolary novel is written by Marie to her (official) employers in anticipation of Josef’s impending arrival at her door.
∞ Table of Contents | Blurb
∞ Author’s Foreword
∞ Podcasts about Layering Fiction
Xenophobia
noun: dislike or prejudice against people from other countries; fear of outsiders
-Well, we usually go to France or Belgium or perhaps Germany, said Gabriel awkwardly.
-And why do you go to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own land?
-Well, said Gabriel, it’s partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change.
-And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with—Irish? asked Miss Ivors.
-Well, said Gabriel, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.
Their neighours had turned to listen to the cross-examination. Gabriel glanced right and left nervously and tried to keep his good humour under the ordeal which was making a blush invade his forehead.
-And haven’t you your own land to visit, continued Miss Ivors, that you know nothing of, your own people and your own country?
-O, to tell you the truth, retorted Gabriel suddenly, I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!
“The Dead,” Dubliners, James Joyce, 1914
Chapter 1
It’s really hard to pinpoint what the strangeness of Vienna is. Once you get past the fairytale buildings, Sacher-torte, epic classical concerts and operas, and equestrian shows by the Spanish Riding School, there is another layer that most tourists will miss, happily oblivious to others’ reactions or what goes on in the side streets and private spaces.
It all started with a feeling of xenophobia when I moved here. I was the object of it. We all were; all of us who were not Viennese. Even the Austrians from Tyrol or Carinthia; they, too, were outsiders infiltrating their language, way of life, food, living spaces, privacy. We were a threat to their tidy joy.
I was afraid of them as much as they were afraid of me. My languages whipped around them like leather on horsehide. Their cold eyes pierced me like daggers.
At first I thought it was all just a lot of misunderstanding. I had to understand their culture, immerse myself. But the deeper I went, the farther away the end of the well seemed to be and though I felt myself repulsed, I also felt myself drawn in, becoming the thing I hated.
I am a calculated outsider. The Viennese are still happy to leave me out, just let me be. I imagine the same is true for you both as diplomats, even after so many years.
⬩
I am from the little town of Le Conquet in Bretagne, the farthest west you can be on mainland Europe. And here in Vienna, I am the farthest East you can be in ‘Western’ Europe. You can drive there in less than a day, but it feels like a different world.
I came here for work. But I also thought I would make some interesting friends and maybe find a partner. When I realised this wasn’t possible, I changed my goal to become someone extraordinary. I soon began to feel shame for having wanted anything else, realising that there are many things greater in the world than friendship. The Viennese understand; they enthusiastically maintain a mere four friends.
The Cold War only ended thirty years ago. Did it ever really end? Even though the Austrians weren’t directly involved, they were a vessel for communication and exchanges of knowledge that could result in policy changes and even deaths. Due to the 1955 Austrian State Treaty, they are still quietly neutral, quietly complicit with many exchanges of information.
Before that, Hitler made his home there. The beauty of the city entranced him; it had to be his. It became a space of performance where even the music was fake, hiding secrets of bigotry or espionage. Then the city was divided into those quadrants after the war. Several simultaneous occupations of the neutral city, guaranteeing its future as a city of spies. What else did they expect would happen with such a strange system? How could you trust your neighbors with so many borders and layers to a society already traumatized from genocide and evil haunting its interiors and many platz alike?
Their buildings have been used up like reluctant whores. When you look at their beauty and majesty, they seem masked in gothic despair. One feels the fear and anxiety dripping from the vestibules and statues. The longer one looks at them, the more collective pain one feels. It is as if they are turning you slowly to stone yourself as you inhabit the city spaces. The threatening majestic, threatening lion outside the natural history museum, afraid of things more powerful than itself…the Baroque Plague Column, with gilded angels tumbling on top of each other and enclosing something like carrion.
Even before I was aware of what was going on around me, I felt an eerie presence. My skin eventually took on a much greyer hue. Escape was felt only in leaving the city, but this became impossible during lockdown.
⬩
I still remember the day I arrived. It was about thirty-eight degrees1 in the middle of August and I thought I was going to die of heat. Escaping the hot box apartment I had been brought to by a taxi—seventh floor, flat roof, no curtains, completely urban surroundings—I simmered on the streets of Neubau in the seventh bezirk, wandering to find sustenance. Everyone seemed to be elsewhere…perhaps finding solace by swimming or just shut up dark within their flats. The few on the streets were sweating and aloof, maybe drunk. Nobody nodded or showed any other form of acknowledgment despite the scarcity of humanity around them.
As it was a Sunday, everything was closed. I managed to find a little sushi shop where everything was permanently half-price and drank a long glass of saki while I waited for the food. There was no air conditioning but a large silver fan blew on my back as if trying to propel me into forward motion. The salmon was sliced translucently thin, and I ate it up with a second glass of saki, helping me to forget about my discomfort and loneliness. The Chinese man who ran the shop laughed a lot as if he were unhinged and gave me a third glass of saki on the house while he sipped on plum wine, looking out at the empty streets.
Eventually the only thing to do was leave: ‘Auf Wiedersehen!’
‘Auf Wiedersehen…’ the man echoed without looking in my direction.
I returned to my hot apartment to collapse.
The next day, when I went to the neighborhood municipal district office to get my Meldezettel certificate2, I encountered the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of Austria. You have to register your address officially. It was a post-World War II thing, supposedly to protect you or I guess allow the police to find you. I thought maybe since I lived alone, it could be so they would locate me if I hadn’t shown up at work and was dead after falling and knocking my head in the shower. An Algerian acquaintance told me she kept an empty apartment for the purpose of dissembling her true abode. She said there was no way she was telling them where she lived; ‘Look what happened to the Jews!’
At the foreboding government building, I waited in a line that went out the door. Everyone was registering something. Nobody was allowed an appointment. Nobody was smiling or chatting about the weather with each other. We baked under the sun, using official documents as shade.
Finally, my turn, I tried to explain what I wanted in weak German I had learned at the language school in New York. Then I asked for English when I was affronted by an Austrian dialect that made little sense to me. The woman changed from a blank expression to an animated one. She was barking at me. She kept saying the same thing in what I later learned to be Wienerisch, louder and louder, as if it would help me understand.
The woman behind me said, ‘She wants to you to fill out this form and wait for your number.’
It seemed like simple enough directions to motion with hands or even say in English. I thanked both women, wanting to get what I came for, and went to the high-top linoleum tables to fill out the form. There were plastic chairs in rows facing nothing. I guess if I had to look at that view every day for my job I would be pretty grumpy, too.
The form was all in German. I wasn’t sure why at nearly twenty years into the twenty-first century it couldn’t have been online so I could’ve had help filling it out beforehand or used the translator on my computer. They wanted a lot of information, and I couldn’t use a translator on my phone because you needed the Meldezettel to get a SIM card. Looking around, more than half looked like immigrants who were similarly lost.
Eventually I was called in and the man inside did not look up as he barked out my number, telling me to sit in the chair. But after looking at the information on my form, he looked up and said, ‘English? Sorry, my French is very basic.’
‘Yes, thank you!’
‘Ok, this is all you need. I’ll give you the Meldezzetel with a gold seal. Don’t lose it! And if you move, you have to come back to change the address, even if you leave the country, ok?’
‘Yes…’
‘I know it’s weird. It is what it is, ok? It’s not like we’re going to war or anything.’ He laughed a little too easily. ‘Ciao!’
⬩
On the way back, I got off the tram a stop early to have a coffee. During these early days, I would walk home in different ways to understand the neighborhood I lived in. After the paralleled main streets that moved out like star beams from the ring road all around the city, there were the different connecting side streets to investigate where buses did not travel and sometimes even cars could not go. Many have old stoned pavement. Several have hidden shops: a basement with glassworks, locally sewn baby clothing, a bio market with fresh eggs and goat cheese every day, leather crafts, a tiny office for the Viennale film festival. The streets are bounteous. Each one has a name I’d never heard before, sometimes of a historic person who has a plaque nearby.
I sat on the terrace of J. Hornig Kaffeebar on the corner of Siebensterngasse and Kirchengasse and looked out. The streets have slight curvatures that all the building fronts follow in perfect parallels that beautifully undulate like manicured trees do in France. The tram wires line the street like a net, holding us in from the sky. The ding-a-lings from tram drivers not wanting to run people over and noises of the espresso machine remind the patrons of its old Europeanness.
While I sit here waiting for him, I remember many days when I felt free on that terrace or somewhere else in the adjacent square, even if the city wasn’t always friendly to me. I would look out at the old buildings with marble facades and grand entryways. I used to feel hopeful and look at all the amazing people in my neighborhood, even if I was an outsider to them. Why should they want to befriend me, really? I was in their space without their language and without much to offer them. They seemed content as they were.
I interacted simply by observation. I liked to put on my sunglasses while sipping espresso and just look off into the distance, secretly listening to their conversations and checking out what they were all doing on the terrace. Some were on their phones, some working on laptops, others just sitting peacefully, seemingly doing nothing. Their sartorial choices were typically monochrome, except for blue jeans, especially in the winter when everyone was covered head to toe by a long frumpy black or gray jacket and a black or gray hat covering modestly-coloured hair. Because it is the ‘hip’ neighborhood, local denizens at least sometimes carried interesting tote bags or had piercings or funky T-shirts once the coats were off.
I remembered the ones that I saw and the ones who came back, and I could see that the waiter remembered us, too. He was from Iceland, trying to become a translator, so we had a bit to talk about. He was a friendly face and he preferred speaking English to German. He learned my order, replacing the minute of consumer exchange with his latest translation work or even the odd word in Icelandic. ‘Kafi means coffee. Leyndarmál is secret.’
There was never any dissonance though, with him or the other patrons. I mean later, too. There was never a friendly debate or a spontaneous encounter or an eruption of laughter.
Instead the peace and freedom continued without objection. A safety of being that nobody dared to penetrate.
⬩
While I was out buying some groceries, the church bells came again in the evening, warning us all it was time to go home for dinner. They were regular during the day, but they would go a little berserk at seven in the morning and just before dinner time. At noon on Saturday, they also warned us not to do any more work that day or on the holy day. Apparently, this meant I couldn’t even use my washing machine. I did a load early on my first Sunday after arriving, and the old guy who lived downstairs came up to tell me it wasn’t allowed. The machine was in my flat, not some shared space, but the vibrations had penetrated his ceiling. I was shocked into silence and obeyed but upset with myself that I hadn’t declared its ridiculousness or pretended I was Jewish or Muslim with a different sabbath in order to argue a point. Even in the few grocery stores open on a Sunday, cleaning products were cut off from purchase. Alcohol was freely displayed and available, but police tape sectioned off the detergent and paper towels as if they were the scene of a murder, or as if they should not be allowed to cover one up in one’s home, I guess.
The bells started to take a chillier tone than on arrival. I remember them singing out to me at first, marking my inclusion in a common experience. Looking back now, they seem a knell. Reminders of tragedies in the past and warnings of the present.
On that evening before going home, I visited the little church on the corner where the bell tower I could see from my flat window was located. The smell reminded me of childhood trips to my grandparents’ place in Avignon. The only times I went to church were with them; the last time when my grandmother died. There was a tiny old woman dressed all in black in the first pew, gazing up at the Trinity. White tendrils fell over her collar and minuscule shoulders.
I walked quietly down the middle aisle, planning to sit a while. I’m not really sure why, but I thought it might help me find some peace, like the others seemed to have. Before I could reach the pew I had in mind, the old lady turned her head as if possessed and said, ‘Grüß Gott’, which means praise God and is the way they greet you in Vienna. But what was odd was the way she said it as a question.
I responded with the same words, but my accent, especially then, was clearly foreign.
She immediately looked warily at me, as if protecting something, and shouted: ‘Rauss hier! Lassen Sie mich in Ruhe!’ which I knew meant that I should leave her in peace.
I ran out in shock, slamming the huge wooden door behind me. I turned briefly to ensure it was sealed as if it were the entrance to a crypt. I imagined the woman inside as a zombie, bumping continuously against the lock, trapped with other spirits of the past.
To be continued…
That’s over 100 in Fahrenheit.
If you’re moving to Vienna, you’ll want to read all about it here.
I like not only the description of a city new to the narrator but also the tone of your writing. It is both intimate and dispassionate! I'm not sure how you achieve that. I am fascinated by your observations. I spent a short time in Vienna and had some strange, unsettling experiences. I'd like to share those with you one day.
I'm loving the rich portrait of a foreigner's life in Vienna, the bureaucracy, the bells and the bewilderment. Great stuff.