The Memorist

Chapter 20

Vienna, Austria

Saturday, April 26^th-3:03 p.m.

“You must be exhausted. Let me drop you off at your hotel,” Sebastian suggested when they were back on the street.

“I can’t imagine that I’d be able to go to sleep. I think I’ll just walk around for a while.”

“When was the last time you had something to eat?” He pointed to the café up ahead that she’d noticed when they’d parked earlier.

“Thanks, but you’ve done enough. I can’t take up any more of your time.”

“Your father would never forgive me if I let you go off alone on your first day in Vienna. Let me at least buy you a cup of coffee. It will do you good.”

The idea of coffee did appeal to her and the truth was Meer was far too anxious to go back to an empty hotel room.

As they walked to the corner, Sebastian described the café society of Vienna, keeping up a steady monologue she was sure he offered as a distraction. “Everyone has a café they frequent either near their home or their office. It’s a daily routine. One is almost expected to sit at a table and linger for hours over a single cup of coffee and a piece of strudel.”

Sebastian held open the door and Meer stepped inside Café Hawelka. Immediately the fragrant atmosphere enveloped her. It was a scene from another century. Waiters in black frockcoats with white aprons bustled about carrying silver trays, reflecting ad infinitum in the large wall mirrors that expanded the small space. The heavy rust velvet drapes with white lace half curtains underneath gave the room a sense of both intimacy and opulence.

Once they were seated at a marble-topped table, Meer looked around at the reddish-brown ceiling and smoke-stained walls. Taking it all in, she felt wistful for an era she never knew.

“What would you like?” Sebastian asked.

“An espresso.”

“Nothing to eat? Well, at least we have to order Mrs. Hawelka’s homemade Buchteln. They are wonderful little jam-filled pastries, and you need to eat something.”

“You’re doing a very good impersonation of my father.”

Sebastian smiled and nodded toward the waiter, who came over and took their order in a very officious manner.

“He’s very formal,” she noted after he left.

“All the waiters are. They go to school and train for years before they earn the title of ‘Herr Ober,’ ‘Mr. Waiter,’” Sebastian explained. “There are actually twenty-seven hand motions required to prepare the tray correctly with the glass of water, coffee, sugar, napkin, spoon, etcetera.”

Meer’s fingers brushed the velvet upholstery. “How old is this café?”

“Usually there’s a history and a list of luminaries who frequented each café on the back of the menu.” He reached for it and read out loud: “There’s been a café or bar operating at this address since the 1780s.”

While he read, the waiter returned with the coffee, glasses of water and cookies, making a show of dressing the table with the refreshments. Sebastian thanked him and then continued where he’d left off with the history of the café. Sipping her coffee, Meer listened while she watched the patrons interacting and the waiters moving around the room almost like male dancers in a ballet. Snippets of conversation filled the air but instead of the foreign language reminding her she was an outsider-a stranger far from home-it was welcoming.

“There’s a timelessness about this place,” she said when Sebastian finished. “Not just this café, everything about Vienna.”

“I travel a lot with my work and Vienna is special that way. Maybe it’s that the love of music, theater, art and philosophy remain alive here in ways it hasn’t in other cities.”

“Listening to you, I feel like I’m back at school.”

Sebastian raised his eyebrows. “Compliment or criticism?”

“Compliment,” she said a little uncomfortably. What was it about him that confused her? “You mentioned work, what do you do?” she asked, trying to find some neutral ground.

“I am the principal oboe for the Vienna Philharmonic.”

He was a musician? Before she responded, Sebastian voiced exactly what she was thinking.

“Your father told me you played piano and were going to be a composer before you left Juilliard. He said you haven’t written music in years.”

“Is there anything he didn’t tell you?” She backed her chair away and stood up. “You know, I think I’m going to take a walk. Thank you for everything you did today. Can I pay you for the coffee before I go?” She opened her bag.

“No.” Sebastian took his wallet out, pulled out some bills and put them on the table. “You’ll get lost. I’ll take you.”

“I won’t.” She wasn’t thinking, just trying to escape. “I’ll be fine, I know where I am.”

“You do?”

She was confused by her own words. “We’re on the same street as the auction house and since I know where that is on my map I’ll have a landmark. I’ll be all right, really. You’re not my warden.”

“No, of course not. You’re certainly not in jail.”

But he followed her out into the street anyway. God only knew what her father had asked of Sebastian but clearly she wasn’t going to be able to shake him until she was ready to go back to her hotel room.

He walked with her to the corner and out on the Graben and explained that this same wide avenue had been Vienna’s main shopping street for centuries. Lined with popular boutiques, the array of stores bewildered her. Narrowing her eyes, she tried to see something that wasn’t there.

“You are disappointed? Is it because you have all these stores back in New York?”

“No, it just looks too new.”

“Would you rather walk to see some of the older sights? There are so many. Especially for music aficionados. Mozart’s house, or Beethoven’s. Or Strauss’s or Mahler’s.”

“Beethoven’s house is still standing?”

When she was seven, Meer had been playing in her mother’s antiques store one afternoon after school when an elderly man who spoke with an accent brought in a clock that played Beethoven’s music and she’d fallen in love with that song. But when she started piano lessons, curiously, the only pieces she couldn’t play were Beethoven’s. As soon as her fingers executed more than a few bars of the maestro’s music, her dreads attacked.

“Yes, would you like to see it?”

Suddenly all she wanted to do was get away from this street and all the shoppers and Sebastian’s kindness and go back to the hotel and sleep. “I would, but not today. I think my jet lag just caught up to me.”

“And the shock, I’m sure. Let me drive you back to the Sacher.”