Winter Journey

Winterreise

oltan Wesselenyi opened the umbrella and sheltered under it. The solitary path crunched under his feet. He began to notice the soft murmur of the rain, like tears, on the umbrella, and his backache started to act up, as it usually did when it was humid. He knew there wouldn't be anybody there but, still, he moved right along because he didn't like to arrive late. But if he knew there wouldn't be anybody there, why was his heart racing?

In the past twenty-five years he'd been tempted to make this visit a dozen times. He'd never had the heart. He knew that near Schubert's tomb he would have found only Japanese tourists, photographing one another in groups of ten around the monument to Mozart, panning the whole area with their video cameras and running off, urged on by the guide, because the choucroute would be ready at seven. Nobody had told them that Wolf was behind Beethoven and beyond the Strausses was Schonberg.

When he got to the tomb of Alois Liechtenstein, his heart was pounding, and not because he'd been hurrying but because there was a remote possibility that he was coming to the end of a long and hopeless journey. Before looking towards the exact place, he held his breath for a few seconds in order to calm the beating of his heart. The rain began to fall harder, as if it wanted to be present at that special moment. Then Zoltan Wesselenyi looked over at Schubert's tomb and was surprised that it wasn't sepia as in the photographs.

For the first time in his life he'd cried in response to beauty: though he was sensitive, it would never have occurred to him that such a thing was possible. But to hear Margherita singing Gute Nacht in that pure, clear voice moved him profoundly. He didn't know that with the very first lines she was announcing what would happen:

But even when he heard it, no alarm went off. Maybe because he'd always heard it sung by a baritone and Margherita had a crystalline soprano. Or maybe because he was happy, they were happy, sitting in the sun, he on the bench and she on the ground, her head against Zoltan's knee and singing, so that he could hear:

They were silent for a long time. He started to cry silently, calmly. A cemetery guard walked discreetly, respectfully, behind them, looked at them perhaps enviously and walked on. Back then there were no groups of tourists in sweatsuits, shouting, chewing gum and trampling on the chrysanthemums.

"You have the most beautiful voice in the world, in life."

She said nothing and looked far away, with her gray eyes, as if she wanted to see to infinity. He insisted:

"Were you listening?"

"Yes."

"Everyone will want to hear you and I'll have to make them stand in line on the street."

She stretched out and looked at him, perhaps with pity. Then Zoltan realized that something was a little bit off.

"What's wrong, Margit?"

And Margherita, Gute Nacht still echoing in her ears, explained that she had to leave Vienna at three that afternoon, which is when her train left, and she didn't want him to go to the station to say goodbye because she wouldn't be able to stand it. And she also said, Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, like a machine gun. And still she added, Let's say goodbye here, Zoltan. He was open-mouthed with astonishment. Anything was possible but that. He'd been living inside a dream bubble for twenty-eight days, and he'd been such an idiot that he'd never even thought that bubbles of hope always end up bursting in multiple deceptions. Twenty-eight days counted one by one, since they met at a Sunday afternoon concert, behind city hall. She'd just arrived in Vienna, alone, with her far-seeing gray eyes and her sweet laugh. He'd been there for a term, he missed Pest and he fell in love with the voice that asked him, is this seat taken? He didn't remember what they played, but he found out that Margherita was Venetian; no, she wasn't moldy from the Venetian humidity; she was trying to see if she could get into a voice class at the Hochschule, but it was hard to do, and if she couldn't, she'd go back home and that would be the end of it; she was twenty-two; she didn't like cod, not raw, cooked, dried or any other way; she knew Sota it ponte de Rialto, of course, but she hated it, sorry, because she was sick of the tourists; she was alone in Vienna; and so… sooo, yes, she liked him too. Zoltan could hardly breathe; he shyly answered the questions put to him by this woman who seemed still to be propelled by the momentum of travel and answered, Yes; me too; twenty-six; piano, conducting and German; equivalent to the tenth level of piano, yes; Budapest was many travel documents, passports and permits away, but only four hours down the Danube, though four hours were enough to make you feel very lonely; "Mintha szivembol folyt volna tova, / zavaros, blocs es nagy volt a Duna";' yes, foreigners always say that Hungarian is a hard language, but in Pest, Fonvod and Eger children and illiterates can speak it. Yes, Duna is Danube in Hungarian. The Danube has more names than any other river in the world, in life; yes, he often said "in life" when something was huge; oh no, really, my German is still pretty basic. No, 1 don't know Italian, unfortunately. When the concert ended she said Well, it was nice to meet you, but he said no, he wanted more and she answered, It would be better not to, we should go our separate ways. And Zoltan put his foot down and said, No, and she looked into the distance with her gray eyes and said without looking at him, You don't know me at all, and he answered, I've known you my whole life. And they didn't separate. In twenty-eight days they separated only when he left her at the door of the Hochschule and ran as fast as he could to the Konservatorium to be reminded that he'd have to dedicate thirty hours a day just to the piano to reach the level of the best students, which was the only level possible at the Konservatorium. And now Zoltan didn't feel homesick or sad, because he was walking through the Schubert-Ring or the Stadt-Park with happiness at his side and, as they wandered in no particular direction, he wondered how life could be so happy and Margherita, silent, looking away, penetrated the impossible with her gray eyes and, if she thought she was being looked at, smiled sweetly. He had to let the German classes go, because he needed all the energy left over from the piano to breathe and not die of happiness. And on the twenty-eighth day they were supposed to make a visit to the Zentralfriedhof, where Beethoven, Brahms and company are supposed to be buried. On the streetcar that was taking them to the cemetery she spoke very little, she was distracted, looking out the window and pressing his hand. It was the first day she hadn't been talkative, as if she'd grown up all of a sudden. She had seen infinity.

And now he, sitting on the stone bench, open-mouthed after having heard the most beautiful voice in life singing a song of unhappy love, had had his bubble burst. Why, Margit, why? And she explained, calmly, with almost deathly resignation, that she'd gone to Vienna not to study but to think. Because 1 wasn't sure if 1 wanted to get married.

"You're supposed to get married? You?"

"In two weeks."

"Married to whom?"

"To my future husband."

"You have…?" Zoltan's mouth was still hanging open.

"Yes."

"But you love me!"

"Yes. And him too. 1 have to marry him." She hesitated and said, "1 can finally see things clearly." And after a loaded pause, "I'm sorry.

Now it was Zoltan's black gaze that looked towards infinity. She didn't dare to reproach him; she'd let him get his hopes up because she wouldn't have missed those twenty-eight days of limitless dreaming for anything in the world.

"You're making a mistake, Margit."

"No. 1 know what I'm doing." She turned to him and put her hand on his knee. "And 1 know I've hurt you. But it's that 1…"

Zoltan made her stop by putting his hand flat over her mouth. And they sat for as long as it took for the shadow of the monument to Mozart to move silently from one side to the other. Suddenly the piano and conducting were of no interest whatever and Pest was no longer a place to be longed for. Suddenly Vienna had become the site of longing, because after three in the afternoon Margit would be gone from there, and the timid luminosity of December would become sad and the streets would no longer make sense because they would lose the trace of his beloved's step. When the shadow of the monument was on the other side, Zoltan, in a hoarse voice:

"We won't see one another again."

"No."

"Where will you be living?"

"1 don't know. Venice. And you?"

"Vienna will be unbearable.

"Go back to Budapest." She corrected herself right away. "1 mean… do whatever you think you should do…"

Zoltan covered his face with his hands and wept miserably. She let the minutes go by, unhurried, looking at the little puff of steam from Zoltan's breath, though it was almost time for her to leave for the train. He raised his head and tried one more time:

"Fine. But you don't know if you're making a mistake by marrying whoever this is."

"No. We never know if we're making a mistake until we're in it."

"So promise me something."

"What?" Margherita, cautiously.

"If things don't work out…, I'll leave you an address and…"

"No." She cut him off. "1 don't want to go behind my husband's back."

"1'm your husband!"

"1 don't want to go behind anybody's back."

"You've been going behind my back!" Without looking at her, "What did you do, all those days at the Hochschule?"

"1 went in one door and out the other." She said it straight out, but with a kind of gentle humility.

"And then?"

"1'd walk. Think. Until you came."

Zoltan looked away, incredulous, and he didn't say, You shouldn't have lied to me, and she didn't respond, which was a way of accepting that he was right. The sun, saddened by the news, disappeared silently behind a thick layer of white clouds, and the shadow of the monument was extinguished. They didn't notice.

"So promise me something else."

She looked at him, curious, and waited for him to continue.

"Promise me that… twenty-five years from now," he looked at his watch, "on the thirteenth of December at twelve noon… we'll meet in front of Schubert's tomb."

"Why?"

"After twenty-five years everything's over. But, if we're alive, we can say if we've made a mistake."

She thought it over for a while and then sighed.

"See one another so we can say if we've made a mistake," She smiled from far away. "Fine," she decided.

"Do you promise?"

"1 promise."

"Swear it."

"1 swear."

Neither of them had the energy to say anything else. The trip back to Vienna on the 72 was even more silent than the trip out. The first snow was threatening to fall from the recently clouded sky. Strangely, it hadn't yet snowed, and the Viennese were casting suspicious glances at the sky as they walked. Margherita got off the streetcar silently, without turning her head, and although they'd gotten to the end of the line, Zoltan kept on looking from the streetcar as she went away, barefoot in the snow, working the hurdy-gurdy, the alms plate quite empty, alone and sad as well.

The rain was streaming down on Vienna's Zentralfriedhof and splattering on Zoltan's umbrella. He stood motionless, looking ahead of him; there was no one in front of Schubert's tomb. Do you really think anybody would be silly enough to honor a pledge made twenty-five years ago? Maybe she's dead. Maybe she lives in Canada. Zoltan didn't want to admit that what bothered him the most was that she might not have come because she hadn't remembered. He knew that forgetfulness was the most painful death.

Zoltan went up to the tomb. A bunch of red roses, destroyed by snows and bad weather, an anonymous tribute, made a note of color against the darkened stone. Layers of old snow were being melted by the rain that tempered the early winter chill, which would turn to cold eventually, though not as slowly, the meteorologists recalled, as a quarter of a century ago when it had been so unseasonably warm.

Anna had died five years ago and he hadn't visited her grave even once. Poor Anna, who never knew that though he loved her tenderly, Zoltan's obsessive gaze passed right over her and focused on the precious memory of Margit, the woman I've been unable to get out of my head because she was framed in just twenty-eight days of breathless love.

Zoltan Wesselenyi had been incapable of leaving Vienna after Margit had disappeared. He rented an apartment in the Donaustadt, on the banks of the Danube, to be able to weep and watch the water flow in the Donau, which would become the Duna. He played a couple of memorable recitals at the Konservatorium and became close friends with a couple of fellow students, especially the youngest student in his year, a phenomenon, a music machine who never made a mistake, always tense, his eyes bright, his body almost vibrating. He would say to him, Hey, Peter, music is supposed to make us happy. If happiness grabs you, give up music. And Peter stared at him without understanding or taking his advice, and he called Zoltan a coward, as did the other students, when he decided to stop studying piano on the very day when Herr Reubke was about to tell him that, if he kept on improving at this rate, he would accept him as a student for the following year. But his hands were clenched with sorrow and his soul was dry, and the effort of the classes left him exhausted. So as not to be overwhelmed by unhappiness, he didn't give up conducting, though he knew he'd lost the spark that helps to make the gestures more beautiful and precise, and that allowed him to understand a score at a glance. He went to his classes but he no longer enjoyed them, except for musicology, which allowed him to go through old papers, from centuries before Margit, which was a way of running away without having to go back to Pest emptyhanded and hopeless. To make a living he hired himself out as a rehearsal pianist in a little opera theater in Stockerau, met Anna in the office there, married her, and didn't stop thinking about Margit for a single moment in his life.

"You're always sad."

"It's from watching the Duna go by. It makes me melancholy."

"Let's go to Budapest. Your mother would be delighted."

"No. We went there for Christmas. 1 don't want to spoil her."

"Then let's move."

"No. 1 want to see the Duna from the balcony."

"What are you thinking about?"

Poor Anna. All the times she asked, not once was he brave enough to tell her that he was thinking about a woman who was both real and a fantasy. He preferred to keep quiet and hold in his sorrow for as long as he could. And Anna was troubled by her husband's dejection, which had no natural explanation. After a few years, Zoltan was supplementing the rehearsal playing by doing research for Professor Bauer of the Vienna Musikwissenschaftzentrum, and earning a pittance which he didn't know how to spend.

He was the delicate one, but it was Anna who died unexpectedly. She was the one who was energetic, never got sick, went to great lengths to avoid conflict. And one day her head hurt, Zoltan, it hurts so much 1 can hardly see, and in the hospital everyone was very reassuring without ever looking them in the eye and, without more ado, they admitted her. She never left, poor Anna, l cried for her only when she died. A quick death, as if she didn't want to bother those who would stay behind in sorrow, a discreet exit from a woman who had loved him and respected his mysterious unhappiness without insisting on complicated or perhaps impossible explanations.

And after she died, Zoltan never went back to her grave. He went on looking at the Danube from his balcony, his pipe in his hands and his memory of Margit tinged with a profound feeling of guilt because in fifteen years of marriage he'd never laughed or made the slightest effort to laugh, and maybe the lack of laughter at home had helped to form the clot in Anna's brain. Anna, who for so many years had acted as if life were good, everything's fine, one day Zoltan will get over whatever it is and everything will be different, we'll walk along the Prater, we'll go to Heiligenstadt to look at the pretty houses and pretend they're ours, and we'll have chocolate ice cream in Graben, like everybody else.

After Anna's death, which happened at about the same time as Professor Bauer's retirement, Zoltan Wesselenyi threw himself desperately into research in order to forget Margit completely, and especially to forget that irritating far-off appointment, which kept his wounds from healing. Also, he was sick of sight reading for second-rate singers worried about their sore throats, who neither looked at him nor thanked him, because the rehearsal pianist is just part of the piano, who always has to be ready, with no sorrows or secret hopes of his own, no need to go and take a piss. He was sick of repeating the same piece ten thousand times, sick of the dirty green of the walls of the rehearsal room where he toiled six hours every day except for Saturdays and Sundays when there was a performance. He was sick of thinking that music was an activity as sad as he was, and he left the little theater without looking back, as Margit had done with him. After devoting a few years to research, he managed to wrap the memory in anesthetic gauze, and he had the two lucky breaks that gave him the prestige he now enjoyed in the field of musicology. He made two finds without setting a foot outside the Musikwissenschaftzentrum of the city of Vienna. One torrentially rainy day, going through a pile of official newspapers from the beginning of the century, he found the slightly mildewed but perfectly legible score of an unknown Lied by Schubert, in his own hand, which bore the title Der Mauersegler and was dated 1820. With the score was a note from one Mattias Holbein, a tavern keeper from Grinzing, which certified that he had received the score as payment for a night that the seraphic Schubert had spent carousing in his establishment in the company of an impulsive and unidentified young lady. And that the composition was written in his presence in less than an hour, the day after the revels, when the musician found himself short of funds. The ineffectual city employees had misfiled the paper, surely with the intention of cementing the prestige of an unhappy Hungarian musicologist a century and a half later on a torrentially rainy afternoon. The other, much more recent, find, was more significant, because it resulted in changes to many preconceived notions about musical historiography. Among the papers that the organist Kaspar Fischer had bequeathed to the city of Vienna when he died there, at a great age, in 1828, was a score in his hand of a diabolical Contrapunctum on the unheard-of theme B-flat, A, D-flat, B, C.The development of the seven variations of this theme was canonical, complete, intelligent, full of ideas, lyrically forceful, confident in the manner of the great masters, and it spoke to the listener in a pan-tonal language eighty years before Schonberg began to think of such things. That masterpiece placed Kaspar Fischer, the author of no other known composition, born in Leipzig but for forty years the humble organist of the Franziskaner-Kirche in Vienna, among the enlightened, among the prophets and geniuses that every art must have from time to time, and it rescued him from an oblivion that would have been terribly undeserved. And it gave Zoltan Wessellyeni a bit of professional prestige, which in fact he did not seek. Too bad Anna hadn't lived to see it. Another stroke of luck broke in on his prayers the day he was playing with Fischer's theme, B-flat, A, Dflat, B, C, the BADESHC theme that had no meaning: he'd been making anagrammatic combinations of the notes when he came on the order D-flat, B-flat, A, C, B.He couldn't relate the letters to one another because the ringing of the telephone distracted him from his obsession. A lucky call: Herr Kreutz informing him that he'd come across a copy of the unobtainable first edition of Laforgue's Voyage d'hiver. Naturally, he bought it without haggling over the price, and as he was paging through it, curious to see if it made any reference, however oblique, to the unpublished Lied, he came across a kind of bookmark made of very worn leather of an indefinable yellowish color, embossed with a zoological figure. Who knows how long it had been there. The bookmark was placed exactly at the page containing a sepia-colored photo of Schubert's tomb. Immediately the anesthetic gauze dissolved, and all the memories came tumbling down on him. In the photo was a group of people: Gaston Laforgue in the middle, straight as an arrow, covering half the tomb, looking intently at the lens, as if doing so were the most important job in the world; the editor, Schaaf, holding onto his arm; two other men, to whom no reference was made; and a woman, looking away like an absent lover. He stared at the tomb, and Margit's face filled the eyes of his imagination. Not for six more years, Margit, wherever you are. For a few moments he thought that the dreaming woman wasn't part of Laforgue's group: it was Margit, looking for him in the place where they were to meet, sixty years before they knew one another.

The months melted into one another slowly, insipidly, rather meaninglessly, and the prestigious musicologist received the praise, awards, honors and admiration of his colleagues with intimate indifference. Whenever he could, he avoided trips, ceremonies and speeches. He preferred to sit by the window that told him if it was raining or snowing, if the leaves were falling or if it was sunny, to rescue what others had forgotten, he who was incapable of forgetting, as he waited impatiently for time to pass. Peter visited him more than once in the midst of files and scores, and they would talk about music and discoveries, and Zoltan would ask him what it was like always having to be perfect on stage, and Pere Bros, who didn't want to get into it, would answer vaguely, Well, you know, and neither of them would ask for details because modesty prevented one of them from explaining why he was always nervous and the other why he was so sad. But because Zoltan was older, one day he made up his mind and asked, Peter, are you happy, and when he answered, Yes, sure, Zoltan understood it was a lie. That's why he came out with, if someday music doesn't make you happy… we can talk. If you want. And as he said it he was thinking of Margit's harmonious voice.

Zoltan took off his glove and laid his hand flat on the wet seat of the stone bench. As if he expected to feel still the warmth of Margit from twenty-five years ago. Beethoven had no flowers on his tomb. There was a solitary pot with a proud cyclamen at the foot of Brahms's. Who took care of bringing flowers to other people's graves? And was somebody, nowadays, bringing flowers to Anna's? He moved closer to Schubert's grave with the intention of reading the inscription on the stone. Then he realized he couldn't because his eyes were filmed with tears. Until then he hadn't realized that he'd begun to cry when he saw she wasn't there. "In the snow 1 search in vain for the footprint left behind, when arm-in-arm the two of us would cross the meadow's green," he thought. Had he known it, he would have sung to himself

In his own baritone voice, as written, but without the life that Margit gave to it.

The Lied ended, and he realized that he couldn't hear rain on his umbrella. Water was dripping from the wet trees, but not from the clouds. He held the umbrella aside: only in his eyes was there rain. He closed the umbrella. He still wasn't able to read the inscription on the stone. He wiped his eyes with his handkerchief, and as he bent down, he felt another twinge of backache. That's when he became aware of the swishing. But he was putting on his glasses in order to be able to read the inscription at the foot of the tomb without straining. The swishing grew louder. Zoltan turned around, his glasses down on his nose, a little irritated with whoever was interrupting such an intimate moment. A gray-haired woman wearing an awful yellow raincoat and operating a motorized wheelchair stopped behind him, as if waiting her turn. She had a bunch of white carnations in her lap. Zoltan turned back to the inscription. He lowered his head, raised his chin and read SEINEM ANDENKEN DER WIENER MANNERGESANGVEREIN and his mouth fell open. He straightened up and turned around, his mouth still open.

"Zoltan," said the woman in the yellow raincoat.

The gray hair, the deep, gray gaze, the clear skin. Margit, love, my love, 1 thought you wouldn't come, how fast these twenty-five years have gone by because we're together again as if nothing else has happened.

Zoltan, his mouth still open, removed his glasses.

"Margit." He went up to her and had to lean down to her. "Margit," he repeated, to assure himself of the miracle.

They didn't put carnations on any tombs. She piloted the chair to the stone bench and he followed her, breathing hard. Zoltan sat on the wet surface and they were silent for a long time, as if they both had to recharge the batteries of their memories.

"1 made a mistake," she said after a long silence.

"That's what 1 thought."

They didn't look at one another for fear of the fine, sharp pain of sight.

"And what have you been doing all this time?"

"Going to bed early." Zoltan slowly put his glasses in their case and the case in his overcoat.

"Have you been happy?"

"No. But that wasn't an option. 1 got married. My wife is dead and I'm very sorry for not having figured out how to be happy with her."

Margherita handed him a white carnation, as if that gesture could console him in his sorrow.

"Poor woman," she sighed.

And they were silent. The monument to Mozart offered no shadow to show the passage of time.

"And you?"

"We separated after two years."

Now he looked at her, upset, surprised.

"Why didn't you come and look for me?"

"1 did. But 1 didn't know where to look. 1 went to Budapest, downriver, like you said." Margherita's eyes were wide open, but she was looking at her own story, not at the tombs. "How could 1 find you if I didn't even know your last name? At the Liszt in Pest everybody's called Zoltan."

"1 can't believe it." Zoltan's voice was quietly desperate.

"1 couldn't find a trace of you. Not a trace. And 1 ended up living here to be near… the memory of you. Where do you live?"

"You've been living here?" he cried, hurt.

Now Zoltan looked right at her. Her gray eyes hurt him and showed how painfully sharp a look can be.

"For the last twenty years. I stopped singing and stopped having anything to do with music because…"

He interrupted her. "You've been living in Vienna for twenty years?"

"In Heiligenstadt. Thinking of you."

Zoltan stood up and exhaled, incredulous. He sat down again.

"In Heiligenstadt," he said, to confirm it.

"Yes."

"In a pretty house." He shook his head, perplexed. "Anna used to say…" He shook his head again to mean he had nothing more to say, he gave up, she should talk.

"Yes, it's a pretty house. Near Beethoven's. But after the accident 1 moved downtown, to a building with an elevator."

Now Zoltan focused for the first time on the wheelchair. He opened his mouth to say something, but his same thought obsessed him.

"Twenty years sharing traffic lights and the ferris wheel at the Prater."

"I've never gone up there. 1 didn't know you were here."

"Twenty years. Did you get married again?"

No. But I've found…" She stopped and changed the topic. "1 looked for you until…"

"Why did you leave me," Zoltan interrupted her, deeply wounded, "if you were going to miss me so much?"

"I've always been like that. But 1 never knew why."

"And now?"

"Now 1 know."

"Why?"

She picked up the bunch of carnations, looked at it and put it back on her lap, uncomfortable.

"How's the piano?"

"1 quit. 1 became a rehearsal pianist."

"You were very good."

"Yes, but 1 didn't have…" He stopped. "You haven't explained why you left me if you were going to miss me so much."

She said nothing. As if it were hard for her to be honest with Zoltan. After a long pause:

"It's that… it scares me to hold onto happiness. It burns, I'm afraid it'll explode."

He put his hand between hers, to hold onto.

"Here. It won't explode."

But instinctively she opened her hands and let him go.

"I've come here many times," she said, to hide her agitation. "But it's been a while… I've found…"

"1 never have. Ever, until today." He looked around, as if asking the wet surroundings to be a witness. "1 couldn't have stood it."

Margit said nothing and decided to change the subject.

"Do you have children?"

"No. 1 have memories. Can 1 ask you to lunch?"

"It's… This is a little… 1 have problems…" She pointed to the wheelchair as if it were to blame."… with bladder control. 1 don't like to be away from home for too long."

"We'll do whatever you say."

She thought for a few seconds. It seemed to Zoltan that the woman's gray eyes were regaining the penetrating power of her encounters with the mysteries.

"Let me go to the bathroom. Then…" She smiled. "Then we'll see."

Zoltan stood up and she went to his side. A few drops started to fall. They went towards the building at the entrance, where the restrooms were, in silence. Outside the bathroom, she turned the chair towards him and looked into his eyes.

"Wait for me here."

"I've always done what you say." He looked at her seriously. "Why shouldn't 1 do it now?"

She winked a gray eye and disappeared through the door to the handicapped section. Zoltan turned around and sighed. He wasn't satisfied; he was shaken. He smelled the white carnation Margherita had given him. He breathed in the scent hard, optimistically. If he'd been able to achieve some kind of serenity over the years, now the whole thing was falling down around his ears. The drops were coming faster now. He put the carnation in his buttonhole with impulsive coquetry and, his hands free, opened the umbrella and once again heard the patter on the fabric. But now it sounded sweet to him because there was hope in it.

After a few minutes the rain stopped as it had started and he closed the umbrella again. Then the vibration of the phone told him that the world was still turning. Peter's distant voice woke him from his dream.

"Hey, Peter," he said indifferently, "what do you want?"

"No, nothing, just thanks for the book about Fischer. I've only been able to flip through it, but you can tell it's amazing."

"Come on." Inexcusably impatient. "What's wrong?"

"1 can't play. And 1 can't not play. 1 think about you a lot. I'm sad, Zoltan."

"Listen, right now 1'm…"

"I haven't slept in six months because I'm so upset. I need some rest. And you told me…"

"Listen, why don't we talk some other time?"

"If music keeps you from being happy, quit music, you told me."

"Listen, we'll talk about this, all right?"

"I've seen Schubert." Peter's desperate voice.

"Schubert?" Instinctively, Zoltan looked towards the tomb. But he went back immediately to watching the door to the handicapped stalls.

"Peter, listen. 1…"

"Fine, fine."

"Call me some other time, all right?"

"I love you. With all my heart. Remember that."

Peter hung up, too brusquely perhaps, and Zoltan had to do the same, thoughtfully. What had he wanted to say? Just as he was about to conclude that Pere Bros had big problems, he was distracted by a chubby individual coming out of the men's restroom, whom he hadn't seen go in. He concentrated on his door and forgot about his friend's distant lament because the throbbing of his recovered hope blocked it out. He couldn't act like a big brother when his heart was exploding. He started walking back and forth in front of the restrooms, patient and impatient, thinking about important things like, for example, it was inexcusable that in their time together he still hadn't asked her what had happened, why she was in a wheelchair. What's that about an accident, Margit, what happened to you?

He was distracted by a couple his age with a young, pretty girl, maybe their daughter. They'd just come through the gate and he deduced from their gestures as they looked at a map that they were looking for the tombs on his side. He felt envious of them. He followed them with his eyes as they went in the right direction. He looked, almost annoyed, at the restroom doors. Of course, if she couldn't manage, poor Margit… It was starting to rain again. He examined the sky and his watch and exhaled with some impatience. Instead of opening the umbrella again, he opened the door to the bathrooms and stepped into a corridor with two closed doors.

"Margit?"

Nobody answered.

"Margherita?"

He pushed hard on one of the doors. The stall was empty.

"Margit?" His voice more rattled.

He pushed the other door. That stall was empty too. Now he shouted.

"Margit!"

Back in the corridor, he realized that there was another door in the back wall. He ran to it. It opened onto the lobby. He asked the guard if he'd seen a lady in a wheelchair, wearing some yellow thing, and the guard, showing a tooth broken by life, said, Yes, a lady with gray hair, very elegant, very beautiful. And Zoltan, grasping his wrist, Exactly! And the guard: Well, she just left in a taxi that was waiting for her. Going where? To Vienna. Is there a taxi stand? Not here. Farther on, where the bus stops, there is. The best thing is the streetcar, if you want to go back to Vienna.

Zoltan hadn't heard the last part because he'd started running desperately in the direction of Vienna, hoping to catch a stray taxi.

He heard the bell of the 72 when he was almost at the stop. He got on and went to the front, to calm his impatience.

He made the trip with his eyes open and his lungs aching. They didn't pass any taxis, the windows of the streetcar were steaming up, and he was coming to terms with a new loss. Two taxis crossed their path and Margit was in neither of them. When they got to the end of the line, next to the Ring, Zoltan, all hope gone, didn't get off the streetcar as he'd done on the day she left him forever for the first time. Despondent, he started to cry and the lively smell of the white carnation in his lapel came to him in a cruel whiff. Margit had sunk out of sight again. Margit, whom he knew only as Margherita, who always ran away from happiness and now lived in a downtown apartment, in a building with an elevator.

The conductor glanced at him in the rearview mirror, but decided not to look for trouble just yet. Zoltan straightened up and, with a deep sigh, leaned back against the seat. Then he leaned his head towards the steamy, dirty window, as if he were a night owl coming back from an especially hard night, his tie askew, the cheery carnation hanging from his buttonhole, his eyes bleary as an alcoholic's. Because the music to Thou hast not to hear my steps, and 1 close softly. 1 write for thee above the door to the house "Good night" was playing in his head, he shakily wrote Good night, Margit on the steamy glass, so you know 1 thought of you. Through the letters, Zoltan glimpsed the old man walking barefoot on the icy ground, his hurdy-gurdy in his hand, recalling distant moments of happiness, and he started to sing, to the indignation of the conductor, who now stood up angrily with the intention of kicking that drunk off his streetcar. Zoltan sang from the deepest sorrow, in his insecure baritone voice, Old man of the stories, shall I walk with thee? When I sing my verses, wilt thou play with me? He let the tears fall from his eyes as he looked unseeing through the letters written on the glass at a piece of the city that would be even more unbearable now, though he knew he would not leave it. As the conductor was telling him to behave and get off the vehicle, from the depths of his forgotten memory came a B-flat, A, D-flat, B, C that he'd carried inside for years, Kaspar Fischer's theme urging him to look forward, be brave, believe himself capable of remaking the future, as if it were the main theme of his Hymn to the Ability to Live without Thinking about Beloved Margit. He rejected the idea as he yielded to the conductor's appeals and got up fromhis seat. He couldn't emulate a prophet like Kaspar Fischer; he was just a person.

Then he understood that there was no choice, that he couldn't leave Vienna, that life is not the road or even the destination, but the journey, and when we disappear it's in the middle of the trip, wherever that may be. It was his bad luck that his lot was a hard winter journey that had left his soul in ruins.