An Interpreter in Vienna | Chapter 19

Part IV: Agoraphobia

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 prose is a continuation of a letter written by Marie to her (official) employers in anticipation of Josef’s arrival at her door.

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Agoraphobia

noun: a fear of leaving one’s safe environment; an anxiety of having a panic attack or embarrassment in public 

Each person must, on some level, take himself as the celebration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.

-Teju Cole, Open City 

Chapter 19

When the lockdown came, I thought of the plague that comes to Germany in Nosferatu. The messenger comes with his warning drum — the drums of fate that remind us we shall all perish one way or another. As the townspeople naively come to their open windows, their visages slowly turn to terror as the proclamation is made that those suspected of disease shall be sent to the hospital. They then slam their windows shut. A doctor comes along to mark infected homes with a cross, but his passage is blocked by men carrying a coffin out from a home. The empty, stony streets echo each footstep as if a continuation of the drum of fate, not unlike the clicking of the clock all day long every day, reminding us where we are heading. There was little escape or little hope. 

On social media, I had seen videos circulating of people waiting for hospital beds in Italy, completely alone. They were going there to die without loved ones or any kind of human connection at all. And in China, the film director Chang Kai and his entire family had died, documenting the grief of this plague from his deathbed. As an artist, he captured the horror freshly from looking in at his own mortality. 

They had to lock us in. It all made sense.

From my position on the couch, I looked at the outline of the doorway between my living room and entryway. I had never looked at the odd shape before of angled sides and slightly unparallel walls reaching the floor, as if the entrance to a coffin. 

I returned to my computer, looking for information about Marija’s death. All I could find instead was a news briefing on her burial:

Bulgarian Ambassador Funeral to be Delayed

Following the abrupt demise of the honorable Marija Zellweber, née Petrova, a funeral and burial date has been set for April 4. Due to the current cold spell in Vienna, the ground is too cold for burial. The Ambassador’s body cannot be sent back to Bulgaria due to border crossings and the potential for virus contamination. 

No further information has been discovered about the nature of her death. 

In the ensuing weeks, the government expects bodies to flood the morgue. They have asked for families to consider cremation whenever possible and have noted that they may have to take cremation into their own hands without consent.

As I thought of Marija’s body in a frozen morgue, I could not sympathize with her. Instead, I recalled frightfully how similar we looked to each other. I imagined my face, my body lying there and became terrified.

With all the news about the virus and lockdown, her death would be buried in the news. The authorities would not bother to investigate and simply rule it an accidental death, meaning a suicide they did not want to label due to damnation by the Catholic church. 

⬩

In the end, socialism and a small, rich nation cushioned the pandemic for Austria. Everything was taken care of. Nobody really had to see the sickness and suffering, or the piles of dead bodies. They had enough space in hospitals to deal with the dead, to keep them off our minds. Most of the Viennese were in their countryside homes anyway, living not so differently from how they normally did. 

The first couple of days of lockdown, people were slightly friendlier on the streets and it sort of weirded me out. I would be walking in the neighborhood and someone would smile at me and say hello. I thought they were probably a pervert or someone looking for a friend. It seemed desperate. Or a bit creepy, like a secret psychopath trying to draw me in.  

Luckily that only lasted a few days. Everyone returned to the cold ignorance of others or the occasional grumpy complaint. There were not many people on the street anyway, so we kept to ourselves. Life was so much easier that way. 

They said we weren’t allowed to leave our neighborhood at first, but then we were, as long as it was by foot and we kept our distance from others. After a few days just huddled in my apartment with Ishmael or walking the small neighborhood circuit around Neubau, I decided to go out for fresh groceries and to go on a long walk. I had to escape the repetition of my days.

I went out and began gazing at others on the streets who gazed back at me from afar. We each kept a safe distance with our cold, stone eyes.

I started to crave living in a place where there were fewer people so I could have this sensation all the time, but I realized at least for the time being that I needed this job. Also, I needed the anonymity of the city. I could walk around and nobody knew where I lived. Nobody knew my name. I could blend into the buildings as long as I followed the rules of society. 

We never had this kind of anonymity in Brittany. The emptiness of winter meant we were even more visible. You couldn’t escape to a cafe or even the beach without someone who knew you seeing you and striking up a conversation, mostly out of kindness but probably just out of politeness and habit as well, or even boredom. It wasn’t until I lived in Paris that I knew true freedom. And in Paris everybody said exactly what they thought on the terraces, speaking with passion and moving their hands in animation of ideas. Tables were filled with opposing views, and if not, someone would often play devil’s advocate just to spark the debate further. Freedom here was a kind of expression of self, of life. I guess we had it a little bit in my hometown, too, this French way of thinking about the world. But the difference was that Paris is where the artists and philosophers, as well as the protestors and politicians, all go. New York City was a little like this, lots of opinionated people, but many didn’t listen as well. The conversations were more affirmations or self-expressions rather than dialogues. In Tokyo, debates were there but were more orchestrated and often the best ones, in my experience, happened late at night after lots of sake or Sapporo. It happened not just during my conversations with the international world there, but sometimes I would continue interpretation during social gatherings and not only observe but transmit the opposing views.

But here, everybody follows the rules. Although we were silently responsible - along with Switzerland and Italy all along the ski areas - for the seed of the terrible outbreak in Europe and although we were very slow to act (despite a rewritten history to the contrary), we still managed to keep the virus to a minimum. Some of it was luck: less population density, fewer factories or busy workspaces…but some of it was also just our ability to obey. 

We were robots of the state, following orders about masks and distance requirements. Everything was safe because we were happy to obey. We knew it was safest. And everyone will get some money and everyone can eat. 

I lived my daily life as normal except that the little work I had was all online. We used video which was somewhat challenging as an interpreter with the terrible local Wi-Fi, but they soon gave up on any sort of immediacy and instead sent me messages to translate carefully for our team and vice versa. It never took me very long but I was careful because, unlike the live interpretation, this was written and could be scrutinized for error. 

As I unconsciously moved farther and farther from home, I considered my surroundings. I imagined invisible horrors as sirens moved by. 

I noticed more of the grand doorways. The way they hide something inside. I imagined people lurking on the other side and peaking at me through the cracks. They might have the disease. They might be afraid of the disease. They might be dying of the disease at that very moment. 

They peeked out at me from every doorway. As I would move along the street, I thought of the many sets of silent eyes peering out silently, creating a series of film stills. I was the subject of the film: the foreigner walking the empty streets of the pandemic. I was awaiting my fate, and they wanted to witness it. 

I felt safer on the tiny side streets, less exposed to multiple views at once. I told myself that if just one or two pairs of Viennese eyes could look at me at once, I could handle it. I could escape without much struggle, or they would not even try to attack.

But on the more open boulevards, I felt vulnerable. I would witness empty trams floating by on the same schedule they had before when they were filled with commuters and tourists. I would imagine violent crimes taking place through those windows, witnessing them without the ability to stop or even yell for help. 

I heard many sirens on these large streets. Police and ambulances delivering the dying to the hospitals or separating contagions from one another. I considered what would happen if they witnessed me sneeze on the streets or take off my mask. I didn’t think they would stop to ask if I were alright or take me for medical care. I thought they would throw plastic over me and dump me in the back of the police car. If I did not suffocate, they would bring me to my apartment and put a padlock outside my door and a sign: Achtung! Covid Virus!

If one cannot face one’s faults, do they not become insular and cold? Do they not lash out at others for what they consider minor offenses? 

To be first part of an evil, even if simply by staying or through silent complicity, and then to be occupied by all sides of a cold and silent war. A war of ideology and science and power. An invisible war that was everywhere and nowhere. Who could be trusted in a situation like this? Of course, you would keep your four lifelong friends and forget about everyone else. You could watch these four closely to make sure they were not to be feared as well. In this way, you only had to spy on a small part of the population to keep yourself safe.

What if you find out your one friend is your enemy? Do you kill them? How does that affect you in the end? 

Although I was always partial to wintertime, I found the cold at this time of year to be particularly brutal. It was dark and gray. The moist freezing area penetrated layers of coats and scarves.

It is something about the energy in this city. The city doesn’t change but becomes uncanny — unheimleich, literally unhomely. After all, it was Freud who invented this philosophical idea and I was about to walk by his home in the ninth district of Alsergrund. He must have felt like a stranger in this city many times. As we all do. One can never be at home if there is never any warmth. 

The coldness becomes expected. And we start to act the way we once found so offensive. After all, everyone wants to blend in. Everyone wants to become a part of a community, even if that integration means adopting a standoffish persona. It can be fake, but it helps you to be accepted as a local. Acting impersonal and cold to feel accepted. I know it sounds paradoxical in nature, but I’ve figured out that it’s true. 

At this point after seven months, even with limited German, I had learned to do all the formalities to look local. I did not smile at people in the streets or give an appreciative wave when a car stopped for me. I did not cross the road if the green man did not come on. I did not try to pack my groceries at the register but took them swiftly over to the packing station so as not to wait thirty seconds of the next patron’s time. 

Neubau, Vienna March 2020 (photo by the author)

So you do this paradoxically to blend in. But the killer is that you will never be accepted. You will always be a stranger. You will always be the target of xenophobia. Even Christophe, the Austrian mountain man, felt he was an outsider to the Viennese. 

I know you both do it as well. 

I walked a circle onto the beautiful old streets with now abandoned cafes. Even at these terraces in the summer - when they are outside on the grand boulevards and you can sit and sun yourself with a coffee or a large beer - the energy is dead. Or at least flat. You start to get used to it. You think it is normal. You are brainwashed into ambivalence. You do not hear debates on the terraces; you do not hear funny stories; you do not see people stop and greet each other and decide to stay impromptu for a drink. I mean, I’ve seen it happen, but it always feels like a massive exception to the rule. And those partaking always look exposed as foreigners. In fact, they usually are. 

You get used to the bad energy and then you start emanating it yourself. It comes out of your nostrils and blends with the cigarettes. 

Finally this year they banned smoking indoors. It was the last Western European place to hold out. And for what purpose? We were each on our own again anyway and would welcome the toxic stench of cigarettes instead of the silent, invisible, and odorless virus.

 When home does not feel like home anymore.  When the familiar suddenly is strange. This is what had happened to all of my surroundings during the lockdown. Not my actual home, my apartment, but the public spaces in Vienna. I felt like I had traveled in time or split into a parallel universe where people no longer inhabited the streets: the virus did. It was lurking, waiting. The police and military also represented the virus. They waited on street corners to catch bad behavior or drove slowly around town behind closed windows and face masks, making announcements on megaphones to keep moving and to stay apart from one another. They were not viruses nor human; they were authoritarian manifestations of power disguised as socialists looking out for our welfare and our health. 

But it was a facade, just pretense: I saw how they would approach someone, possibly a vagrant, with mask, gloves, trepidation. They were just as afraid as the rest of us. Dissembling as authority but only in uniform and layers of protection. They, too, did not recognize this space and these people before them. They were only trying to survive. When a society behaves out of survival instincts it only becomes more selfish, narrow-minded, and dehumanized. The only motivation for action now was one’s survival, and I wondered if the underworld webs were continuing to weave their evils or if they had been abandoned for this instinct. 

I became a strolling spectator like Baudelaire’s flaneur but not in a romantic way. That dreamy transcendence had worn off. Instead, I was the epitome of otherness with a disconnect between reality and my perception of it. At once, I was experiencing things in a surreal manner and realizing this subjectivity to what was truly mundane. 

I stood at the gate of the playground, staring at the police tape that marked the territory. It looked like a murder scene. As if someone had chopped off another’s head whilst coming down the slide. Or candy had been laced with arsenic for children to find. But the tape was protecting us all from these virus-spreading children. They touched everything and salivated freely, bringing contagion home to their grandparents and killing them. 

I dared not enter that gate. The police cruisers slowly made their way around, all the officers hiding behind masks. My dog would bark every time they came near, and he was barking now. Sure enough, they rounded the corner, this time on bicycles. I continued, looking straight ahead, knowing that they did not greet laypeople. All I could hear was the March wind. Like cremated ashes, small flakes of snow began drifting through the streets. What was once a beautiful sight was now the ominous sign of a city facing death. 

I wandered the lonely city streets in a labyrinth of longing. 

⬩

Finally, back near my flat, I tied Ishmael to a post near the grocery store. For a moment, I wondered if I should bring him safely home first, not trusting that people in their current state would leave him here unharmed. I realized, though, I didn’t have much energy left and would be unlikely to make it back out for the supplies I needed to stay alive. After securing supplies for several days, I made my way back. 

Suddenly I didn’t recognize my street anymore. I knew I was on it because of the turns I had to take, but it had taken on a life of its own. It’s as if the emptiness had created demons lurking invisibly all around. Ishmael began barking either at the demons or the way I was hesitating, which caused certain denizens to bring their faces to their windows. I should have welcomed the human connection, but I only felt I was a target of their stares and hurried along home in fear.

There was a safety in retreating to small spaces where others were not allowed to enter. I took the stairs up to the seventh floor, trying to get a little more exercise before many hours at home. Ahead of my passing through the fourth floor, someone closed the door slowly while cackling. 

Inside and safe, I looked out at the flats across the way. Most of them were dark or had their curtains drawn. But I could see several families and couples doing things together: playing a board game, cooking, watching something on television. Then I caught the eye of an old woman who was also looking out. She gazed back steadily and motioned shhhh with her finger over her mouth.

I drew my curtain and thought about what I would do the rest of the day. There was some work to do, thankfully, and I would take time to make a soup from scratch.

I hadn’t heard from Josef again. Part of me wondered if I ever would.

I opened my phone to look at his messages and could see that he was online. At least he wasn’t dead, I thought. Was that a good thing? 

I hesitated. Should I leave a message about the funeral? Could he have missed it? 

It was stupid but I did it anyway: Did you see this? And I attached the link. A sad face seemed trite so I left it at that and threw my phone to the other side of the room, afraid of the reply, or no reply at all. 

Barely five seconds passed before I heard the vibration on the floor. I forced myself to wait two full minutes before going over to pick it up. As my count reached 120, I lunged for the phone:

Thank you, Marie. Yes. You must come to Pest when the border opens. I will be in touch

Suddenly my life had direction again. What else did I have to look forward to besides this secret meeting? Even if he meant to use me as a pawn in his spy game, or even to kill me — the thought crossed my mind — it was something to propel the plot of my life that until this point had been completely flat.  

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To be continued…

Find all the published chapters in the Table of Contents.