William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

He walked past the big café — Café Landtmann — and realized that in all these months of passing it he’d never once gone in and so retraced his steps. It was roomy and plain, a little faded and grander than the cafés he chose to frequent — a place to come in the summer, he thought, and sit outside on the pavement. He took a seat in a booth with a good view of the traffic whizzing by on the Ring, lit a cigarette, ordered a coffee and a brandy and opened his notebook. Autobiographical Investigations by Lysander Rief. He flicked through the pages, full of notes, descriptions of dreams, a few sketches, drafts of poems — it was another legacy of his stay in Vienna. Bensimon had urged him to continue writing in it as part of his therapy. “It may seem a bit banal and inconsequential,” Bensimon had said, “but you’ll come back to it once a few months have gone by and be fascinated.”

The café was quiet, caught in that lull between the bustle of lunch, the great Viennese punctuation mark in the day, and the first arrival of those seeking coffee and cakes in the afternoon. Waiters polished cutlery and folded napkins, others flapped out clean linen tablecloths or leaned on their serving stations, gossiping. From somewhere in the rear came the ceramic clatter of plates being stacked. The maître d’ combed his hair discreetly, using a silver tray propped against the wall as a mirror. Lysander looked around — very few customers — but then his eye was caught by a man a few tables away, wearing a tweed suit and an old-fashioned cravat tie, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar. He was in his late fifties, Lysander guessed, and had fine greying hair combed flat against his head; his beard was completely white and trimmed with finical neatness. Lysander put his notebook down and sauntered over.

“Dr Freud,” he said. “Forgive me for interrupting but I just wanted to shake your hand. I’ve been most successfully treated by one of your ardent disciples, Dr Bensimon.”

Freud looked up, folded his newspaper and rose to his feet. The two men shook hands.

“Ah, John Bensimon,” Freud said, “my other Englishman. We’ve had our disagreements, but he’s a good man.”

“Well, whatever they may be I’ve had the most rewarding psychoanalytical sessions with him. I know how much he respects you — he refers to you constantly.”

“Are you English?”

“Yes. Well, half. And half Austrian.”

“Which explains your excellent German.”

“Thank you.” Lysander took a polite step backwards ready to take his leave. “It’s an honour to shake your hand. I won’t keep you from your newspaper further.”

But Freud seemed not to want to let the conversation end. He stayed him with a little gesture of his cigar.

“How long have you been seeing Dr Bensimon?”

“Several months.”

“And you’ve finished?”

“I feel — let’s say — as far as I’m concerned my psychosomatic problem is a thing of the past.”

Freud drew on his cigar, thinking. “That’s very swift,” he said, “impressive.”

“It was his theory of Parallelism that finally made all the difference. Remarkable.”

“Oh ‘Parallelism’,” Freud almost scoffed. “I’ll make no comment. Good day to you, sir. I wish you well.”

The great man himself, Lysander thought, going back to his seat, pleased he’d had the courage to approach him. Definitely an encounter for the memoirs.

♦

He hadn’t seen Hettie for four days and he was missing her badly. In fact, he calculated, he hadn’t seen her for a week…It was the longest period since the affair began that they had been apart. He scribbled a note to her and decided to go at once to the Café Sorgenfrei. Perhaps there would be something there from her, also. Out in the streets it was cold but not freezing and the new year’s snow was turning to slush, the tyres of the passing automobiles splattering the brown muck on the legs of pedestrians who ventured too close to the roadway.

Watching the passing motor cars carefully, Lysander wondered, not for the first time, if he should learn to drive. Perhaps that could be another part of his Viennese education — then he realized he could hardly afford the price of driving lessons. He had just paid Frau K his next month’s rent in advance and found himself left with only just over a hundred crowns. He’d cancelled his German and French classes until further notice and had telegraphed his mother once again for more money. It made him feel inadequate — why should his mother be subsidizing his love affair with Hettie, he thought. He admitted to himself that he’d been living these last weeks in a self-imposed decision-free limbo, happy to drift in the here-and-now. The problem was — and he had to face it as his money ran out and a return to London beckoned — that he was finding it very hard to imagine a future without Hettie. Was this the beginning? Sexual infatuation shading into love? And yet, during all the weeks of the affair, despite all the endearments and confessions of powerful emotion on both their parts, she had never once spoken of leaving Hoff.

What to do?…he pushed his way through the swing door of the Café Sorgenfrei and elbowed aside the heavy velvet curtain that kept the draughts out. Grey strata of smoke hung in the air and made his eyes smart as he approached the bar to hand over his envelope. There was the young barman in his puce waistcoat — what was his name? — and his preposterous dragoon-guardsman’s whiskers.

“Good afternoon, Herr Rief,” he said, taking Lysander’s letter. “And we have a little package for you.” He reached below the bar and drew out a flat parcel tied with string. Lysander felt a small surge of joy. Bless Hettie — they must have been thinking of each other, simultaneously. He ordered a glass of Riesling and took the package over to a table by the window. He opened it carefully to see that it contained a libretto. Andromeda und Perseus eine Oper in vier Akten von Gottlieb Toller . The cover was a colour reproduction of Hoff’s poster — Hettie in all her nakedness…He riffled through the pages, imagining a note would fall out and when nothing did he then turned back to the title page to look for an inscription. There it was; “For Lysander, with all my love, Andromeda.” And below that in a series of distinct lines, he read,

There are times when I am wholly confident in the destiny of HB

But there are other times when I find that I am

not completely honest

Superficial

Facing-both-ways

Cowardly.

Lysander wondered why, given his reduced financial resources, he had decided to pay the two-crown supplement to have dinner that night with Frau K and Josef Plischke. Perhaps he just wanted some company, however trying and mediocre. The main course — after the cabbage soup with croutons — was Tafelspitz , a boiled-beef stew of ancient lineage, Lysander thought, concocted days ago and allowed to simmer endlessly on a stove in the invisible kitchen. And still the gravy was watery and the meat sinewy and stringy. Plischke ate with enthusiasm, complimenting Frau K on her cuisine in a tone of leaden sycophancy that drew Frau K’s most pleasant thin smile from her.

As they chatted, about some aerial demonstration this summer at Aspern with a dozen flying machines, Lysander mentally did his accounts — he had telegraphed his mother two days ago asking for another £ 20. With luck that should arrive in his bank tomorrow and, with further luck and careful husbandry, that amount should keep him going for another month or two. He decided not to think what might occur beyond that time when his money would run out yet again. Perhaps he should try and find a job himself — maybe teach English to the Viennese? But two months more in Vienna meant two months more of Hettie. He realized, with a small shock of self-awareness, that he was beginning to define his life around her –