It was the third time this week I'd awoke at 4:30 by Ignazia having sex upstairs with a seminary student.
Ignazia is my landlady. She was the daughter of a lay theology professor in Trieste before coming to Vienna to be a painter's model. She makes a side living by tutoring seminary students struggling with theology: then she ficks them.
Is she paid? Well, she's paid for the tutelage, but I doubt she charges for the rest as I doubt the students know her intentions when they first come to her, but once they find out her practice, they stay in her tutelage, and I suppose they get better grades in seminary.
As I have long since renounced my belief in Hashem, I do my best to resign myself to no similar treatment, but similar treatment is not why I'm here. I'm here to be the next Wagner, and making geschlechtlichkeit whomever that takes is what I would do.
Not that any person of influence would look at my short, beefy frame, my Jewish nose and Habsburg-like underbite, my heavy handed ambitions, my holier than thou belief in ars gratia artis and think: "Yes. That." But I came to Vienna to be the greatest composer since Wagner, the greatest dramatist, the greatest artist, and even if no one else believes I can do it, I believe it.
My time will come. Ignazia looks the other way on my pounding her piano, my hoarse moaning of unending melodies to my own libretto, and I look the other way at her dooming the future's saints to perdition. I'm not in the apartment most of the time. Rather, I'm in the coffeehouses writing my melodies and words, humming the melodies as I write them so all cultural Vienna will eventually recognize me as an institution of the coffeehouses: 'der komponist,'
The only problem is that they know me otherwise. When I'm not humming my melodies at tables, getting them embedded in Wien's unconscious, I'm playing violin in the corner: backup violinist in a cabaret band, and, to my shame, I'm good at it. I'm known as 'the fiddler', not the composer, and after it's done, every half drunk Herr Doktor and Herr Professor wants to bore me with their memories of gypsy geigers from their youths, while the beautiful girls always speak to my aging bandleiter: the 'legendary' Tamas Novak who's been Vienna's great upcoming cabaret singer-songwriter for thirty years. Everyone in Vienna knows Tamas Novak and his songs: so well do they know him that a dozen cafes pay us hunger wages to play our hits.
Then, for one year, I started my own cabaret project. To my astonishment, I did it pretty well, and at least the ugly girls went home with me. But if cabaret is my destiny then Vienna is my nightmare. For I am here for opera, not cabaret, and to opera I devote every dreaming hour of my muse. For opera did I, Avraham Ticoczki-ben-Rebbe Yaakov, became Istvan Tauber. For opera do I go to mass every day at St. Stephan's. Between you and me, dear melomane, I'm no Christian, nor am I even baptized, but there are many rich Catholics who may underwrite a genius like I suspect I am, but no one would underwrite me out of simple artistic liedenschaft, they need know me as one of them. Rich Jews would underwrite a Catholic well before rich Catholics would underwrite a Jew.
Nights are for work, but there is no opera in the daytime. There is no family or women for which to speak or come home. There is only opera, and there is only the coffeehouses. At six forty every morning a stagehand sneaks me into the Staatsoper, I go hide in the toilet, then at quarter of nine scurry over to section 1 of the Parterre like a rat--close enough that I can hear Mahler's commentary, far enough away that neither he nor singers can see me. Doubtless do some orchestra members do and minor-roled singers, but I'm one of a few who regularly rehearses this practice: all of whom are would be geniuses of the voice, the baton, the set design, but of course, I don't think any of them are particularly talented but me, and of course, they all think the same of the rest of us against themselves.
When the rehearsal is over, I go to the coffeehouses to write. My work is usually done at Cafe Central: it's large, it's loud, it's where everyone goes to be seen, it's where everyone pontificates their work and comes armed with witticisms formed on the carriage ride over. Usually there is a great second-tier intellectual in the corner opining: the older generation of writers used to be seen there: Hofmannsthal and Freud used to be its denizens but now they're too big to be seen anywhere but the Grand Restaurant. The only one who still makes an appearance at Central is Peter Altenberg, and Altenberg is so hopeless at anything but writing that he lives quite literally within the cafes. It's said that he sleeps in the office of Cafe Museum and uses the place as his mailing address. The rest are long since too busy with actual work to be seen, but a series of witty younger intellectual flaneurs are regulars. Adolf Loos plays skat regularly with whomever has a few kronen, Friedell can often be perceived behind a mountain of goulash, Musil and Broch come and talk to no one but themselves over kirchwasser and Grand Marnier: they are far too serious for a frivolity like coffee. Chief of them all is a poet named Rilke, but he does not pontificate, he simply furiously scribbles--usually on napkins, as the others pontificate next to him: to say anything out loud would be not to save the best material for the page, and the greatest writers always preserve their material for point of maximum impact. Occasionally even Der Mahler makes an appearance along with more established types like Freud and Rudolf Steiner, but he has never noticed me: as either a scribbling composer nor a violinist who looks directly at him as I serenade some too attractive young couple at their table.
But the mediocrities beneath Steiner and Musil are almost better: more fun, more entertaining, more comprehensible, and in the ears of their public they distribute witticisms like Jesus does miracles.
Now, one should specify, I cannot repeat them, because they would utterly lose their cleverness outside the tabletalk of the cafes, and I am so busy trying to compose in my corner that I doubt I even remember much of that which is said. But I take it on faith that I laugh for a reason, and everyone makes a great show of laughing at the articulacy of these exceptionally articulate men, who clearly practice their witticisms in a mirror for months before they unleash them amid tabletalk repartee which twenty to eighty people hover above to overhear. Everyone makes a great show of laughing: particularly the ones who don't hear what was said.
But it was to the far newer Cafe Museum to which I retreated that night as Ignazia stripped yet another boy of the cloth on a journey to heaven. Like Cafe Sacher, Cafe Museum has these gorgeously comfy interconnected red booths which are perfect to sleep on, and such is the veneration they hold to our young artists that any artist between homes is allowed a space of couch once a week for a night's sleep: except Altenberg of course who sleeps in the office.
I went to the very far back, near to the bookshelves, where the light is dim, the couches are red and especially comfortable. I tried to fall asleep and couldn't, so I pulled a book down and lit a lamp.
It was then I heard a peevish voice in an accent of upper class Vienna that was clearly affected by someone whose natural speaking voice was lower class: "Turn out that light, we're here to sleep not read!"
And that is how I met Ioana. She spoke with perfect Viennese refinement except for that 'hard L' that is common to all the Jewish tongues of Europe, the one evolutionary byproduct of Yiddish which no Jew may eradicate no matter how desperately we assimilate. We shan't tell the goyim, they never hear, and most Jews don't even know.
But even with the Wienerin refinement her voice was utterly unique, after every sentence she unconsciously affixed an 'ah' to the ending consonant that took her voice up from chest to head voice: roughly between an octave and a thirteenth. It almost sounded Italian, only with a name like Ioana there is only one country from which she could hail, possessing a Latinate language so close to Italian it's a mystery how they're on opposite sides of the Empire.
I do not speak Romanian, but when I asked where she was from, she answered: "What consequence is that(ah)?" In a moment of weakness after a few glasses of wine I bought her she would tell me that she was from a small Carpathian town in Transylvania, a place of darkness and superstition, but Austria and Vienna is a place of light, a light she means to move into and create herself.
She had no ambitions to pay rent by being an artists model. Indeed she was no beauty, but she possessed a kind of adorableness artists would find charming for its utter oneness. A diminutive girl firmly affixed with a large square head. Black poodle-like frizz sat atop it that began scarcely above her eyebrows, along with a furrowed brow and a large bumped nose technically too close to eyes revealing determination of iron.
No. She was an artist, very much so, and drew with Canaletto-like precision. Art to her, entirely representational, seemed a kind of math problem to be solved, and solve it she did continually. Her prolific art was not up anywhere in Cafe Museum, but I learned it was all around Cafe Museum's office: for this determination of iron was noticed by none other than Herr Altenberg himself, who loved no Viennese more than the young girls who'd just arrived with their heads full of innocent ambition, ambition which for a time was full of Herr Altenberg, only for Altenberg to invite a still newer girl into Vienna after six weeks of Ioana. It was only a matter of a few days before Ioana would get her art back.
Ioana had no money, Altenberg paid for everything. He had no money either, but Altenberg received charity based on his poems, and Ioana had Altenberg. But as of midweek she had Altenberg no longer, and while the manager was willing to extend a bit more credit to her, she was far too proud to accept food; thereby did my unimpressive remuneration paid for her handsome meal.
"What is your art like(ah)?"
"I'm a composer."
"Have I heard your music?"
"No."
"What do you do for money."
"I'm a Cafe Violinist."
"Here?"
"Sometimes."
"So I HAVE heard your music."
"I guess..."
"Why do you guess?"
"It's not my music. I just play violin for it."
"You make the music, it's your music."
"It's certainly not the music I want to make."
"Then why don't you do the music you want to make?"
"I do. Every day. But it's not the kind of music that can be played so easily."
"Why not?"
"It's a cycle of operas. That requires many musicians and money."
"How much have you written?"
"About twenty minutes of each opera."
"How many operas?"
"Eight."
"If you'd done one opera you'd be done with it by now."
"I want to do eight."
"What are the operas about?"
"The Old Testament."
"The whole thing?"
"A lot of it: Cain, Noah, Abraham, Samuel, the Maccabees."
"That's only five."
"Those are the five I've worked on most."
"I thought you wrote twenty minutes of each opera."
"More or less, give or take."
"You seem like the archetype that does not finish things."
"Opera is very hard to finish."
"You ought to pick one opera and finish it."
"I pick whatever I have the inspiration to write."
"That's the way lazy artists work."
"Am I a lazy artist?"
"I don't know you, but I don't know that you've written anything."
I seized my chance.
"Come to my house and I'll play you what I've written."
And she walked home with me.
We got to my third floor apartment and I lied to her that the steps were slippery so I could take her arm in mine. I opened the door; she broke out of my arm and walked straight to the piano.
"Let's hear it."
I played my soliloquy from Cain at Masada.
"Alright, let's hear the next one."
I played my aria of Abraham at the Cave.
"And the next?"
I played the ensemble number from Samuel the Prophet's Bar Mitzvah.
"Play me more."
"I've played you a lot. What do you think?"
"It's music."
"Yes...?"
"It's a beginning, what more should I say?"
"So you don't like it."
"I didn't say that. It needs to be heard many times before I can judge it."
"You didn't like it."
"When art is difficult you need to experience it three or four times before you can understand."
"I don't think it's difficult!"
The noise from Ignazia and a seminary student started again.
Suddenly it flashed before me that it was 8:30 and I needed to get in if I wished to see Mahler's first rehearsal of Tristan!
"I have to go to the opera."
"Do you work at the opera?"
"In a manner of speaking."
"What does that mean?"
"I don't have time to explain right now. I hope you come back very soon and I can explain more."
"Can I stay here and nap?"
"I would have to check with my landlord."
"Where is your landlord."
"...Y'know, I'm sure it's all clear, if you can fall asleep with the noise just lie you here."
And I left for the opera.
---------------
I did not think much of opera before Wien. After a childhood as a tavern violinist I heard violin sonatas and made myself a Brahmsian who dreamed in the chamber music I occasionally played after my weekly lessons in Iglau; for which I had to walk thirty miles. What I'd heard of opera was a banality next to the absolutes of cellular development in the Three B's.
But then I went to Vienna. I wasn't trained enough for the Hochschule, where you had to play violin concertos by Beethoven and Mendelssohn in audition that I'd never even heard. But then I'd Mahler, then I'd heard Mildenberg, Schoder and Slezak. I'd heard Selma Kurz do the roles of Mimi and Violette in the Italian music at which I'd been taught by my Iglau teacher to yawn, and I fell in love. I heard Marie Guntheil-Schoder in trouser roles like Cherubino and Leonore, and had reactions I thought impossible beneath. I heard Leo Slezak in the heroic roles of Otello and Lohengrin, and felt such glory and martial righteousness I practically felt the urge to stand and salute the Emperor. I'd pass by Kurz's table every day at Cafe Mozart, and one day she'd complimented my violin playing. My Dame knew who I was!
Perhaps she saw me in the Parterre once or twice, but I was not there for her, I was there for Der Mahler: the art himself. I'd before thought conductors a mere lieutenant in the composer's army. On my once-in-a -lifetime excursions to Budapest and Prague I looked at the provincial kappellmeisters like Slanski and Mader, and thought them musical bureaucrats: ticket inspectors giving rubber stamps so stars may shine.
I had some intimations from hearing Zemlinsky and Blech of what was possible, but then, der Mahler: Der Freischutz's devilry, the heavens of Figaro and Zauberflote, the tears of Fidelio, and then there was Der Ring: every opera of which I'd left short of breath, my ears ringing, my vision altered, my blood coursing, my brain of absent thought. When Mahler's assistant Schlesinger conducted Mozart and Verdi, I heard to the orchestra with delight, but I was listening to and watching the stage. When Mahler conducted, I watched and listened only to him as he drew out sounds with heaven storming focus. His arms moved faster than a horse and more flexibly than an olympic gymnast. Every gesture was histrionic yet precisely chosen for the musical mood at hand. He drew out from the orchestra attacks of such precision as hit our bones, melodies of such passion we rose inches from our chairs, expressive vulnerability to draw tears and turbulence of such anger that we felt the protest of the world itself. We'd never heard orchestras so loud, we'd never heard them so soft, yet always every instrument heard, every detail sounded. Some might prefer the more unaffected poetry of Schlesinger or Mahler's predecessor Richter, very fine musicians both, but such listeners were old quibblers who had grown tired of artistic truth. To hear Mahler was to be conscious of the smallest detail in the third oboe, yet it was also to be conscious of the miraculous whole: the form, the thing-in-itself. We were better people for having heard Mahler: nobler, purer, smarter, more compassionate. What need was there for Christ or Yahweh, we had our God and he enlightened our path to nirvana itself.
And yet somehow, there was no Tristan for me. Tristan und Isolde, the work that made opera into music and music into music no longer; a world not of expression but of transfiguration. When Beethoven is played, we are transformed into our full selves. When Tristan is sung, we are transformed into something more than human beings: to hear Tristan is to hear the world beyond, the dimension where we become our souls, or music itself; we experience our physical being come to nothingness.
Now, I should specify. I've never heard Tristan und Isolde: not in the theater at least. I'd played parts of it on the piano, not particularly well and never the whole thing. I'd crooned the famed Liebestod two octaves down as my voice trembled from ecstasies released by those dissonant harmonies. Opera friends would come over and we'd act through whole scenes, non-opera friends would come over and feign interest until they fell asleep. But every time Mahler performed Tristan I had to work, every time he rehearsed I was sick. This work about love's transcendence of the material world was denied me as the material world forever demanded me.
Yet here Mahler was, in his final months as director, one last Tristan revival, and here had I my chance to hear the cry of the world itself.
And there I sat in the Staatsoper, looking directly at Him, awaiting Der Mahler to give the upbeat of the famed theme of a chord whose root no two musicologists agree upon.
He raised the baton, the instruments raised instantly. He stood there for seven seconds without moving:
"Too loud."
"But Herr Mahler."
"TOO LOUD!"
Herr Doktor Rose, Der Mahler's konzertmeister and brother-in-law, knew how to speak to him.
"Herr Mahler, I'm sure the orchestra played wrongly, but we have no idea what we played."
"You must play the silence and the silence is TOO LOUD!"
There it was, the transcendent insight we all prized and put our lives on hold so we could hear the man who made Beethoven and Wagner's flesh become spirit.
What an artist. What a man.
-------------
From Vienna's Wagner temple I returned in that state of unprecedented ecstasy ready to conquer the world. I had to write more. I had to write an opera like Tristan. Ideas flashed through me for how to set the Burning Bush, the Ten Commandments, Jacob's Ladder of Angels, all I had to do was get to the piano. No Ioana or Ignazia was worth this. I had to throw Ioana out before I lost this music in me.
Ioana was drawing on my bed.
"I'm sorry Ioana I need you to"
"You don't dare stop a fellow artist while she's mid-inspiration."
"But I need"
"I thought you said you write at the cafe in front of other people all the time."
"Yes but I have to play the piano to work it out first."
"If it's real inspiration you can play it in front of me."
"But you might judge it badly."
"I didn't judge you last night, why would I judge you now?"
"Yes you did!"
"How did I judge you?"
"But you said"
"I said that it's music and I need to hear it a few more times before I judge it."
"That's a judgement!"
"So you need everyone to like your music?"
"No but I don't want anyone there the first time I play it."
"Painters always want someone there to draw, but composers never want to be heard while they create!"
"You should talk to Ignazia, she's there to be drawn."
"I don't need Ignazia."
She held up a drawing. It was me.
"What do you think."
"It's art."
"Your humor is elementary."
"It's good, I liked the stuff in the Cafe office better."
"You can hang it up in your apartment if you like."
"It's art."
"Must you joke?"
"Yes."
"I just drew a picture of you and the best you can say is it's art?"
"I guess you don't like it when people don't praise your art right away?"
"Will you just sit down and play your piece?"
And that's when I realized, I didn't have any ideas, just the grand desire to make them. I figured if I improvised at the piano uninterrupted for an hour, I may come up with one or two good ideas and make a real scene from there.
I sat down, played for that full hour and thought of nothing but the ecstasy I'd just heard in Wagner's music drama as Ionna continued to draw. I had almost no memory of what I played.
"Your piano playing is surprisingly wonderful."
"It is?"
"Yes, you played wonderfully. Liszt, Schumann, Wagner, Berlioz and Bruckner."
"I played other composers?"
"Mostly."
"There was nothing original?"
"There were parts I didn't recognize."
"Did I play music by those composers exactly as it was written?"
"Sometimes."
"But the parts that weren't them, it sounded like them?"
"Yes."
"That much?"
"Not completely."
..."I need you to leave."
"Istvan!"
"When Mahler composes he gets a hut in the forest and even the cows are stripped of their bells!"
"Do you like his music?"
"Often not, but it's not for me to judge a great artist like Mahler."
"And yet you want me to judge you?"
"I'm not a great artist. Not yet at least."
"So the art of a great artist can't be judged, but the art of a young artist must be judged right away and judged well?"
I didn't want to admit that I saw her point.
"Istvan, you're obviously a gifted musician who appreciates great music, but it costs time and work."
"It does."
"Most of us aren't Mozart, we have to work for years."
"I AM working."
"Are you if you're not finishing anything?"
"You don't know what I've done."
"Have you done anything but these opera scenes?"
"No."
"Why don't you finish one of them?"
"That's not how my mind works. I get an idea and have to follow it."
"No woman would say that."
"What would they say?"
"That they have a half hour to work on art every week and they'd better do something they can finish."
"And that's a Schande."
"This is why I'm in Wien. My mother is a seamstress, my father is a woodworker, they do amazing things, but they never got to have their own ideas. They didn't even think it was a possibility. They just made beautiful pattern after pattern."
"Isn't that art?"
"It is if your cafe fiddling is art."
..."Well my parents had no artistic abilities."
"They didn't understand?"
"They were peasants."
"What did they do for a living?"
"I don't want to say."
"Why not?"
"Please don't ask me."
"Is it because you think I don't know you're Jewish?"
"Of course I'm Jewish, so are you."
"I'm not, but half my town was."
"How are YOU not Jewish."
"My grandfather used to beat up Jews in the street."
"And you want me to let you be in here while I write my Old Testament operas?"
"Part of why I left was because I didn't like how Jews were treated."
"How do you want Jews to be treated?"
"Like equals."
"Equal to what?"
"Everybody else."
"Everybody else? Like Romani gypsies? Like Albanian Muslims? Like women?"
"That's why I'm here."
"I thought you were here for your artistic ambitions."
"I'm here because Wien is the only place where a good life is possible."
"What do you think is a good life."
For the first time I saw her smile.
"A place where women are allowed to make art and judged like men. A place where Jews and gentiles look at each other's art as equals and influence each other: a Viennese artist can make art that looks Romanian, Austrian, Hungarian, Jewish and feminine."
And she looked directly at me.
"A place where people can come together as intellectual equals."
She came closer to my face.
"A place where partnerships of equals are possible. Equal rights, equal responsibilities (closer), equal conversations (closer), equal intimacy (closer)."
And I kissed her.
"CE FACI?!"
"I just thought..."
"WHAT DID YOU THINK?"
"I just thought you were saying I was that..."
"HOW DID YOU THINK I MEANT YOU?"
"You looked at me, you were talking about an equal partner, you were..."
"WE WERE TALKING ABSTRACTLY!"
"Alright... I'm sorry."
"WHAT INDICATION DID I GIVE THAT I MEANT SOMETHING ROMANTIC?"
"I don't get it."
"EQUAL PARTNERSHIPS DOES NOT MEAN YOU MAY KISS ME!"
"I'm sorry. Let's start over."
She didn't leave my room.
--------------------
I went back to Cafe Mozart: "TAUBER!"
I went over to Karl's table.
"Here he is, Alfred. The fiddler who wants to be a composer."
"I know him Karl, he IS a composer."
"What has he written?"
"What have you? The same half-thought-through witticisms you pontificate here."
"They're published!"
"Because you SELF-publish them."
"Why shouldn't money buy a literary career?"
"It shows you Istvan, we can pretend it's all about the transcendent geist, but we artists are all whores to money like everybody else. Come, have a seat with us."
Alfred bought us three shots of apricot brandy.
"To the whores of art my friends! Long may we trade on our profession's appeals!"
I got up to compose in the corner.
"Tauber, please, a real artist works in commotion. Come join us here and keep writing."
"What does his music sound like."
"It sounds like music."
"Is it any good?"
"Who am I to say? I'm a writer."
"A writer who writes about who's good and bad."
"Istvan, sing some of it for us."
After a few minutes I was sufficiently relaxed to sing thanks to the brandy, but insufficiently tipsy to not be reluctant. Unwillingly I launched into the love arias of Caleb for Rahab.
"That was kind of beautiful."
"It sounds like the tenor aria in Cosi fan tutte."
"How would you know? You never go to the opera."
"Because I have no ear for music."
"Yet you write about it with such... authority."
"The unperceptive are the perfect judges of art. They're never encumbered by what they may have missed."
---------------
There are always musicians who play outside. Would that they had my gigs: most of them are better than me and want them more. They play Strauss waltzes in that particular way you can't describe: the second beat is always played a little bit early, but more importantly, the rhythm always bends through rubato, as though the music is being discovered as it's played. I suppose it would be the easiest music to improvise, but you can't make much of a living from improvising music that doesn't go on a page.
Today, Albertinaplatz had an accordion player running through all the major Strauss waltzes: Blau Donau, Kaiser-Walze, Wienerwald, Kunstlerleben, Roses aus dem Suden, and then he hit a few minor ones: if I didn't have to play them, I'd have guessed he made them up on the spot. He did not play them straight: the rubato was perfect, applying suspense to every harmonic delay of the cadence, applying excitement to every harmonic surprise. I was in such heaven as though snuff had been injected into my veins. With every half-cadence I swooned and shuddered in the same way I did when I was a bandleader.
I told him "du hast grosse rubato", he didn't understand, I repeated it, he still didn't understand. Finally I went "Dein rubato, es ist grosse," then sang two bars of Roses aus dem Suden: his eyes lit up as he smiled and nodded--he understood.
"Wo kommst du?" I made a sign for footsteps with my fingers.
"Armenia."
Vienna takes refugees of all kinds, and short of Jews, nobody was more desperate to leave their homes than Armenians. So desperate that within a few months they obviously learned the Viennese style better than the Viennese. It's asked of the Philharmoniker "how they keep their unique sound?" the answer is "fill the orchestra with Hungarians and Romanians and gypsies."
Within two seconds of that last part I heard behind me: "What is rubato?" I turned behind me and there was an Eastern European lady my age of indeterminate accent: dirty blonde hair, intense eyes, straight teeth.
"No. Sing it!"
I just had, but I sang it again and she understood at once.
"You are the violinist at the cafes."
My once a year recognition by someone who isn't a Herr Doktor.
"I love your playing."
"Oh?"
"I love the violin."
Alle wetter... this is rare.
"I always wanted to play it, but no one knew how to play in my town."
"A town in Austria-Hungary without a violinist?"
"It's like a town in Poland without a rabbi."
This lady had the Eastern European humor you rarely get from Germanics or Ioana.
"I love Strauss waltzes but I miss the music of my home country."
"Where is home."
"Vienna, but it used to be Bulgaria."
"A cheerful Bulgarian?..."
"You're funny."
"I know."
"A confident Jew!"
"How do you know?"
"How many gentiles play the violin?"
"You're funny too."
"Where are you from?"
"I don't want to tell you."
"Jews never do."
"A town in Bohemia, Jihlava."
"Never heard of it."
"It has a two sided sign that says 'Wilkommen zu Jilhava.'"
"I come from Sofia, it should have the same sign."
"What did you leave?"
"Factories."
"Where do you work?"
"At the oper."
"I've never seen you there."
"I work in the gift shop. You can't afford it."
"I really can't."
"Do you go to the oper?"
"All the time."
"I've never been."
"But you work there!"
"I like Cafe Music."
"How did I never see you there?"
"Tamas always comes up to talk to me."
"Mein Gott, I do remember you."
"He's aggressive."
"I know."
"You should say something."
"I need the money."
"What's your name."
"Istvan."
"No, what's your real name."
"Istvan."
"Your real name, Jew."
"OK. Avraham.
"Do you want to get lunch?"
I took her to the marble of Cafe Frauenhofer where I knew none of my musical colleagues would be to talk to her.
Iliana asked if I could pay. I couldn't afford it but I did.
"I love this cafe."
"It's a great place."
"I had a tryst with the manager."
Scheisse.
"He doesn't work here anymore."
das Relief.
"I know that guy. He's kind of an arschloch."
"Huge arschloch. Got fired for dumping the wife of the owner."
"That's a joke, genau."
"Not even a little."
"How are men so confident here."
"You're confident."
"In some ways."
"How are you most confident?"
"I'm going to be the greatest composer since Wagner."
"I believe you."
"I'm going to write the greatest opera since Der Ring."
"I don't know what that is but I believe you."
"I'm going to be remembered as the 20th century's Beethoven."
She went over to my booth and moved in for a kiss, then stopped.
"Ne moga. I can't do it."
"You can't..."
"I can't do it. Not again. I have a daughter and a mensch at home."
"Oh..."
"Are you sure?"
"I can't."
"Can I come to the gift shop?"
"It's better if you don't."
And she left without paying the bill.
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