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.
∞ Table of Contents | Blurb
∞ Author’s Foreword
Chapter 21
In the coming weeks, I continued to visit churches at random. At first, it felt like a duty or a calling.
It soon started to feel pointless…what was I even looking for? I couldn’t take apart the walls of the churches. I thought about being bold and attending confession to ask the priest if he knew anything about it. That was always something people did in mafia films. I mean, secrets were exchanged in the confession box. However, it wasn’t allowed during the lockdown. I was learning, in any case, how to be a better spy. I knew the dark parts of the city much more than the open ones.
I think this was why I enjoyed attending the churches, both for the walk outside with purpose rather than ambling around my neighborhood and for the solace and forgiveness of the church. I still wasn’t sure if the intermediary work I was doing would lead to good or evil. Although I had lost my faith over the years, I reasoned that all these church visits might help me not to be good or reach Heaven or any nonsense like that but to feel at peace with myself. I wasn’t knowingly doing any harm after all. I decided that I would do my best with any information that came my way, and that was all that I could do.
Occasionally, I would encounter a priest and awkwardly ask him if he knew Wolfgang. I didn’t ask about Krätzl right away as they were all likely to know him a little at least. It would only be significant if there was a reaction to Wolfgang’s name. The visits were especially awkward with the distance we had to keep and the masks we wore. But it was also less risky to ask them about Wolfgang than the painting. What if others knew of the painting and were trying to get their hands on it for evil, or at least for personal gain, which I guess was a kind of evil? I certainly didn’t trust priests to be good. I’m sure some of them were; Franz seemed like a good guy. I also knew, though, like everyone, about the riches taken from the poor and the problems with pedophilia in the Catholic church, and I recalled the story from Fred and Roger as well as other issues I saw as evil, like homophobia and refusing women the right to abortions.
Because I never expected much, I was surprised when one priest at a simple church in the fifteenth district who had replied, ‘No, no I don’t know this man,’ continued by offering me a talk, ‘Are you troubled by something?’
It was as if he could read my mind. However, I soon considered that most people in the world were currently ‘troubled’ by the pandemic and all sorts of things related to it. If he was trying to sound like a psychic, he could use this on anybody. Still, I guess I was feeling lost, so I replied, ‘Thank you. I am…in the middle of something,’ then I added quickly, ‘Not something bad! But I am a little confused by it all. I’m not sure how I got where I am.’
‘Hmm. This happens to all of us. Try not to focus on what got you here, but where you are heading. How will you get out and how will you do good by helping others?’
I remained silent for some time and closed my eyes.
My work here wasn’t selfish. My intuition told me that finding the painting would do some good in the world. Then I could disappear into abstract greatness. My self didn’t matter anymore. Isn’t this enlightenment? Paradoxically in the search to become someone meaningful, I had allowed myself to sublimate, hopefully without a trace except for this letter of explanation when this was all done.
As I opened my eyes, I spoke out loud, ‘Vielen Dank! Yes, you are right…’ my voice trailed off as I realized I was talking to nobody. The space before me was empty. I twisted around in the pew, but it looked like the entire church was empty. ‘Father? Are you there?’
There was no response nor any sound of movement or breathing in the void between the walls of stones.
My breath became quick and I couldn’t get enough oxygen from behind the mask. In a fit, I threw it off my face, leaving it on the floor to mark that I and this moment had existed, and ran out into the gray city evening.
I felt slightly better. There was more air and whoever had been talking to me was back in the church, whether some hallucination or a strange disappearing priest. Perhaps he had been afraid of the virus and retreated quickly after speaking. Or was I going mad?
But I could feel something else coming. A weakness, a fear, rather than a rage or aggression. I was retreating into myself. It was as if everything were created from my mind: the pandemic, this strange hunt for unclear reasons. Most of my conversations had been one-on-one; who had witnessed anything between me and Marija or Josef, or Fred and Roger, who functioned as one person in my brain? Who else had spoken with me about Marija’s death?
I began attacking outward for fear of completely incinerating in an implosion of reality. I kicked a tree, then a bicycle. I punched the hard ground. It all felt real, as did my throbbing knuckles.
The pain also snapped me awake. I remembered that you both had messaged me about Marija. Maybe we hadn’t been able to meet in person, but the texts should have been there on my phone. With fear, I opened up to our conversations and found the evidence I needed. A short discussion of this sad demise with you, Julie. Another with Gregoire about some work I had to do on a Zoom call that also mentioned my trip to Salzburg, without details of the trip’s purpose of course.
You both saved me. I knew you were grounded. Having you exist, even digitally, there before my eyes proved to me that I wasn’t in some kind of purgatory or mind simulation. The things that had happened the few months previously had been real.
⬩
It was now late March, but a huge snowstorm was starting in on the city. As I was making some soup for lunch, I got a call from a strange French number.
‘Bonjour?’
‘Bonjour Madame Thibaut. C’est vous?’
‘Yes, it is. Who is calling?’ I continued in French.
‘This is the hospital. Are you the daughter of Céleste Thibaud?’
My hand tightened its grip on the phone, ‘Yes…’
‘Your mother has been admitted to the COVID ward of the hospital. I’m very sorry to tell you this. So far, she is ok, but she is taking some oxygen. We are monitoring her as closely as we can, considering the recent influx of people.’
‘Ok, thank you. How can I get information? Does she have her phone?’
‘She does, but she might find it difficult to use. We will update you once a day. If you need to reach us, you can try this number I’ve called you on, but please be aware it may be difficult to get through.’
‘Merci madame.’
She hung up without any further information. So that was it. My mom was in a hospital, and I was not allowed to cross the border. Even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to get into the hospital. Maybe she would be discharged soon, I reasoned.
I tried messaging her though she was not so responsive on her smartphone. There was only one check; perhaps the phone was switched off.
On Austrian television, they showed the frozen Danube, which I learned to be a rare occurrence these days. It had been very cold for the last couple of weeks, but a river doesn’t freeze all that well ever, and a teenager had dropped through and died last night. They could impose lockdowns and quarantines, but other dangers still existed.
I turned off the TV and thought of my mom. Maman. What was she thinking or feeling? I tried to enter her skin, thinking that somehow I could help by taking her pain. But I couldn’t imagine without more information.
Was she afraid? Or was she holding onto love? Why hadn’t I stayed longer at Christmas? We had barely had time to talk.
I tried to push the thoughts from my mind. She was on oxygen, not dying. And the French hospitals were good.
I watched the snow coming in clumps like ashes from all the dead bodies.
And then I tried to tell myself: no, your mind is not taken over by darkness. This is beauty. This is truth beholden to you.
Instead, I conjured Klimt’s beautiful scenes of Japonisme. I imagined the scene out the window as one of these paintings, mundane as it might be of a few plain apartment buildings and the simple church steeple. It transformed before me. Colors emanated from the grays and falling white. I felt like one of those people with synesthesia.
I checked the weather in Bretagne to find it was snowing there, too, although perhaps not as heavily. Its presence joined my reality with that of my mother, who I imagined looking out her hospital window at the changing seasons of life and thinking of me in Austria.
This gave me comfort even if it were a trick used on myself. What are our emotions anyway but choices of perception?
I turned the television back on, seeking some distraction that wasn’t so morbid. It was then late enough that the news was over. On the same channel, there was a special performance of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Of course, it was a recording from before. I wondered what the musicians were doing now and if they watched these performances, too. I imagined it was something designed to soothe the masses into harmonious obedience. I had turned it on in medias res and it was hard to grip onto a melody; rather the various string sounds merged into soft waves moving up and down while most of the winds held their instruments on their laps in poised positions, except for the bassoons who were humming along like humpback whales under the surface.
The melody changed, though; rather, I could finally hear a melody emerge from these harmonies. A single clarinet began playing a richly hopeful tune. It wasn’t quite optimistic but perhaps joy with the knowledge of sadness. As the player’s fingers moved through slow trills, I could hear her keys and the imperfections of the breath. This gave it a fully human quality, much more than the cuckoo clock. These players were following a score, a conductor…but they were breathing individuals, telling stories.
I listened until the applause when a voiceover came on to tell us it had been Beethoven’s Sixth. After applause, the conductor addressed the audience briefly to say they would be playing Luigi Dallapiccola’s Piccola Musica Notturna. He told us that Dallapiccola’s twelve-note system was a special embodiment of freedom in his eerie music that spoke for humanity’s freedom of expression. He had used his music to oppress tyranny. First, there had been the question of cultural identity, when his small hometown in Istria was swallowed up by the Austro-Hungarian Empire then the fascist views of Mussolini came after Dallapiccola had married a Jewish woman. His music attempted to give people hope for a better world.
I listened with my eyes closed on the couch and Ishmael lying on my belly, as I imagined I had done many times with my mother as a baby. Together, we fell asleep there in the cold night and the TV eventually shut itself off.
To be continued…
Find all the published chapters in the Table of Contents.
The sense of almost hallucinatory isolation is well captured, Kate. I can't imagine how much more difficult lockdown was for single people.
"She hung up without any further information. So that was it. My mom was in a hospital, and I was not allowed to cross the border. Even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to get into the hospital. Maybe she would be discharged soon, I reasoned. I tried messaging her though she was not so responsive on her smartphone. There was only one check; perhaps the phone was switched off."
You capture so well the helplessness so many of us felt during the pandemic, with sick loved ones elsewhere in the world with no way of getting to them (or of getting back if we did). Marie is more isolated than ever...