“I’m Odiane,” she said, her voice warm and low as she offered me her hand.
I took her dry fingers in my damp ones. “Are you a girl?”
Odiane laughed, but my mother reached for my elbow and pinched it. “Orly! That’s not polite. Odiane, please forgive my daughter.” She turned back to me. “Odiane is a pianist. And a composer.”
“Pleased to meet you.” I curtsied, hoping it might make up for my rudeness. I didn’t know that girls could dress like that. I didn’t know that women could stand that way.
The bell chimed while we were still drinking, and we had to finish quickly before the lights went down. I wanted to follow Odiane back to her seat, but she and the blond woman quickly disappeared in the throng.
“Mutti, how do you know her?”
“I told you. From work. She’s a mezzo.”
“No, Odiane.”
“Ah.” My mother glanced down at the program in her lap. “She lives with Ilse.”
“They’re sisters?”
“More like roommates, I think.”
I thought about this. I wondered if Anneliese and I could be roommates. “Why does she dress like that? Odiane, I mean?”
“Some women like to wear trousers. Even the First Lady in the United States sometimes wears trousers. And Marlene Dietrich, the film star. Though I don’t recommend that you start. Frau Fessler would not approve.”
“Do you think Odiane wears trousers all the time? Are there girls who do that?”
My mother took my hand. “Erdnuss, you’ll find a bit later in life that there are all kinds of girls.”
* * *
• • •
“LISTEN TO HER,” my mother said, rapt, when Rose Merker was onstage. “Just listen.”
But I could not absorb anything other than the massacre unfolding before me. Near the end of the opera, three of the characters sang about their visions of heaven. Which sounded nice. But then at the very end, the soldiers were all shouting: “God wants blood!”
By the final act, my right foot was asleep and I had to limp out of the opera house. The sky was a painting, smudged blue and black on one of the longest nights of the year. I was grateful to be outside, away from the sadness still ringing in my ears, despite the frigid air that numbed them. The shops and cafés around the plaza radiated light and life, letting out bursts of cinnamon- and chocolate-scented air every time a door opened.
It was a treat to be allowed out so late. Elegant women in long gowns swept past us, on their way to assignations at the Café Sacher or the Imperial Hotel. I looked around for Odiane and Ilse, but they had vanished. Men in long, dark coats began emerging from the back of the opera, carrying instrument cases. My mother wrapped her scarf twice around her neck. Vocal cords worked best when they were kept warm.
“What do you think angels look like?” I asked my mother, my mind adrift in a kind of fugue state. “I think they look like that woman in the blue coat, with the furry hat.”
My mother looked where I was pointing. “Angels have such expensive tastes?” She smiled. “I don’t know if I believe in angels. For that matter, I am not so sure I believe in heaven.”
“But everyone believes in heaven.” So many of the Catholic children in our neighborhood, on the playgrounds, referred to heaven as if it were the country next door. Anneliese believed in heaven.
“Not Jews,” said my mother firmly. “Jews don’t believe in heaven.”
“We don’t?” I thought about this. “So what happens when we die?”
My mother turned to me then and crouched down to hug me, even though it meant that her dress dragged on the ground. “Liebling. What do you say to some hot chocolate?”
“At Café Sacher?” Visions of that chocolate cake were already dancing in my mind. I was easily distracted.
“What about Café Sperl?” Café Sperl was one of the oldest in Vienna and my mother’s favorite. She liked the fact that the waiters still wore the same suits they wore when she was a child, that the café still had the same marble tables, the same crystal chandeliers. She started going there when she was small, because it was close to the Theater an der Wien, where her parents would take her to performances.
I hesitated. It was a long walk to Café Sperl. “Come on, we’ll take a taxi,” said my mother, smiling.
As soon as one of the familiar, tuxedoed waiters had greeted my mother and settled us on one of the soft, embroidered banquettes, I returned to my preoccupations. “Do you really not believe in heaven, Mutti?”
“I think maybe I am afraid to believe in heaven, because then I will have to believe in hell.” She turned her face from me, as if checking to see who could overhear us, the glow of a chandelier turning strands of her hair into a rosy dawn. The elderly couple to our left continued to dig into their strudels, and the table on our right was vacant.
“Do no Jews believe in it?”
Her eyes found mine again, their dark centers reflecting my pale face. “I’m sure many Jews do believe in a kind of afterlife. But your father and I are focused on the life we are in. Because no one knows what happens after this one. So why not think about what we have?”
“But what if we are wrong and there is a heaven and hell?” I stroked my fingers across the cool marble of the tabletop.
“Then we are wrong. But as long as we do our best in this life, we don’t have anything to worry about.” She picked up a menu and glanced at it, though she must have known it by heart. “Now, Topfenstrudel?”
I nodded, accepting the change of topic. Topfenstrudel, with its layers of pastry and soft cheese dotted with raisins, was one of my favorites. We never had Topfenstrudel at home; it was too tricky to make. The emperor’s cook once said that you have to stretch the dough so thin you can read a love letter through it, and my mother didn’t have that kind of patience.
Because she was in a generous mood and I was, after all, about to turn six, my mother let me take three small spoonfuls of the whipped cream on the top of her Franziskaner and dab it into my hot chocolate. “Would you like to go hear your father play one day this week?” she asked, as if this were not a rhetorical question.
“Oh, Mutti!” I sat up straighter than ever before. “And you too? The next time?”
“The very next time.”
It wasn’t until my mother had finished her Franziskaner and I was halfway through the strudel did I remember, with a tight feeling in my chest, the very end of the opera. “Is it true what the soldiers in the opera said about God?”