Strangers in Vienna

by Angela L.

  A young man from the front row walked up the stairs to the stage and handed the girl who played Grete a big bouquet of flowers, making her smile as if she had just received the Nobel Prize. Now that was true happiness.

  “Come on, beautiful,” Alaric whispered to me and got up from the stairs.

  I froze after hearing him call me beautiful, then I felt my cheeks getting red as I followed him out of the opera house.

  “Where are we going?” From outside, I could still hear the audience’s cheers roaring nonstop.

  “Usually when the show ends, the guards go in to take a look around. They would have noticed us sitting on the stairs and figured we both snuck in,” he explained. “I know because I got kicked out once,” he confessed, shamelessly.

  We swiftly ran out the doors while the crowd was busy applauding the actors and actresses. We turned two corners and hid in one of the narrow hallways that was dimly lit, so we were basically invisible to the people walking past us.

  I leaned against the wall and ran my hand across the aged white wallpaper. I turned my head and looked down at the end of the hallway where there was a set of stairs that led to who knows where.

  “We should get out of here,” I said, afraid that the guards would spot us.

  “Not yet. There’s something that I want to do first.” He grinned and sat down on the ground. I knew that grin. It was his mischief grin. I hated that grin. “You want to join later?”

  “Sure.” I sat down along with him with our backs leaned against the cool, smooth walls.

  “Great. So what did you think of the opera?” he asked me while stretching his arms and legs out.

  “It’s pretty good. Wish I understood German, though,” I said. “Fritz seems like a moron and I felt bad for Grete.”

  “How so?”

  “Fritz seems to be so blinded at finding that stupid ‘distant sound’ that he forgets about Grete. Grete on the other hand has no control of her life, being tossed away by Fritz, and gambled away by her father, and when she did have it all as a queen, it was gone in a second, and then she was back to where she started.”

  “I guess you can see it like that, but…that’s just how the universe works. Grete was just dealt a bad set of cards. And when the universe deals you a bad set of cards—”

  “I swear, if you finish that sentence with that cliché ending ‘it’s up to you to determine how to use them,’ I’m going to punch you.”

  “Shush. Patience, Kaffee Mädchen.” He began to finish his previous sentence. “And when life deals you a bad set of cards, you put on your poker face, act like there’s nothing wrong, and win the game of life like what Grete did. She escaped and ran off with the strange old woman in promise of a better future because she had nothing behind her, and in the end, she was reunited with that composer.”

  “So, what? Screw the universe? What if you can’t win? What if you lose?” I asked him.

  “I don’t think it’s possible to lose. Sure, we may screw up along the process, but in the end, we’ve all lived. We’ve all felt the pain, the loss, as well as the joy and excitements. Grete may have lost everything, but in the end she was united with her lover and along the process of losing everything, she experienced life as a queen. I call that a victory moment. Basically, no matter what hand life deals you, there’s going to be a big possibility that you’ll screw up, but along with it comes the lessons, the realization of who you are. Happiness. Victory. ”

  “What if you screw up and there’s no lesson, no happiness and whatever? Like…Romeo and Juliet. They died. There was no victory for them.”

  “They died loving each other. The universe tried pulling them apart and failed. Sure, they messed up with the whole plan of faking each other’s death, but if you think about it, they died loving each other, going against the universe and all that. Victory.

  “Come here,” he said and dragged me up again. I realized the audience’s roar of clapping had stopped. We went back into the opera house, now empty, and walked down the flight of stairs to the first floor.

  Alaric walked up onto the stage and from behind the curtains he pulled out his old violin case and unbuckled it from its side.

  “What are you doing?” I looked around, making sure no guards were here to kick us out.

  Alaric didn’t answer me. Instead, he started playing his violin.

  I watched him under the bright spotlight from the front-row audience seats. Like that night on the streets, he was so absorbed in his music. His fingers danced along the strings as his other hand held the bow and moved it gracefully as if it were lighter than a feather.

  Maybe this was why the actors and actresses never broke down on stage. They were too focused, too in the moment, to be bothered by the audience. It was as if the stage was their entire world and only the crew was its population. And the only point of living was to act until the last line of the play was spoken.

  Somewhere in the midst of the song, my heart started beating faster, like a dozen bass drums that played alongside his melody.

  Was this love?

  It couldn’t be love. Because if it was love, it scared me. But at the same time, I felt invincible, and I wasn’t sure how that worked.

  I knew I was falling for him hard but…what I was feeling, it created doubt in me because my brain knew that in the end, I would be back in Missouri with a broken heart over a guy who I’d only known for a few days.

  It wasn’t fair. I wanted to freeze time at this exact moment but, unlike a record button, you couldn’t press pause in life. The song had to keep playing.

  As his body swayed to the rhythm, I could see all his sorrows and his contentment through each individual note that strung up the melody. “What do you think?” Alaric said, his voice echoing around every corner of the room. I knew he was asking about the music, but instead, I wanted to tell him just how wonderful he was—how he made my heart sink and how gorgeous he looked under the stage lights.

  “How do you do that?” I asked him instead of answering him.

  “Do what?”

  “Play like you’re the last violinist in the world.”

  Alaric laughed. “It’s not hard. I guess you can say it comes naturally to me. I think of past memories. The painful ones, the exciting ones, the memorable ones,” he said. “It’s like Fritz’s mysterious ‘distant sound,’ aka his feelings. He’s trying to find them, but he doesn’t realize that they all revolve around Grete.”

  “I want to write music like that, like…I’m the only musician in the world,” I said, smiling as I pictured myself under the bright spotlight on a large stage, playing my song in front of a full stadium of cheering and supportive fans.

  “You can, but you’re blocking out your emotions. You’re living in ignorance. Find the pain, feed off of it, and create something absolutely beautiful.”

  “What if I don’t want to embrace the bad memories?”

  “Then you can live in ignorance, but in the end, you’ll only be cheating yourself,” he said. “Whatever you’re ignoring, you’re ignoring a part of what makes up…you.”

  “That’s not true.” I didn’t know if I was denying him or trying to convince myself to deny him.

  “Well…I believe in you, Skyler,” he whispered and walked toward the edge of the stage with only half a foot between us.

  It felt weird hearing those words, I believe in you, and in a way it felt like a hole inside me was suddenly filling up.

  He leaned in and placed a loose strand of hair behind my ear.

  I could hear his breathing clearly. I closed my eyes and waited.

  Nothing.

  I opened my eyes and realized he had stopped midway, teasing me. He was grinning mischievously. “Come on, I have one last place to show you.”

  “Um, where?” I said, embarrassed, as I tried to get over the fact that I had thought he was going to kiss me.

  Like always, he didn’t answer, which made me even more curious. I followed him past the red curtains on t
he stage.

  There was a door in the corner backstage where all the old costumes were tossed away in two bins. A Santa Claus statue looked as if it had been used as a prop a decade ago, judging from the thick layer of dust that lay on his shoulders. I could feel the statue staring at us, and it sent shivers down my spine.

  Alaric pushed the rusty handle and the door opened to a set of ladders that led up.

  “Where does this lead?” I asked.

  “To someplace spectacular,” was all that he said.

  I was going to ask what this “spectacular place” was, but I didn’t because I knew he was never going to give me a straight answer. My shoes made hollow clanging noises as they banged against the metal ladder. When we reached the top, there was another door. I pushed it open, and cool wind attacked my face.

  Chapter Ten

  (July 29, 1992, in Vienna)

  “Whoa,” I said after a minute of processing where we were.

  We were on the roof of the Staatsoper with Vienna’s starry sky above us.

  “We are definitely not allowed to be here,” I said.

  “Technically, you weren’t allowed to go into the Staatsoper. You ended up watching an opera,” he said. “Whoever follows the rule ‘not allowed’ will never have a taste of adventure in their life.”

  I sat down near the edge and looked across. Lights shone up around the rusted green statue of Apollo on the flying horse, leaving him in a glamorous spotlight under the night sky. Some tourists still stood around the statue, trying to take one last picture with it before heading off into Vienna’s night life.

  We lay down. I shivered once my back touched the cold roof.

  I looked up and was greeted by a sky flooded with tiny sparks that seemed to outshine the lights cast from the statue of Apollo.

  “I’m guessing you come here often?” I assumed he must have spent a lot of his time here to find out the passageway to the roof. It was nice, sort of like a secret hideaway place.

  “Yeah…I love this opera house. It’s the place of music, the arts, where I can feel at home,” he explained and yawned.

  “You ever thought of performing here?”

  “All the time,” he said. Something sad and regretful hid between the sounds of his voice that made me want to comfort him.

  “What happened?” I whispered.

  He shrugged. “I tried out one time. They said I was too young and that they needed a mature violinist. I don’t think they took me that seriously. It just didn’t work out in the end.”

  “Well, screw them,” I said, my voice suddenly sounded fierce and punchy.

  “What?”

  “You’re talented, and we both know it,” I said with determination.

  “Thanks,” he murmured and managed to smile a little. “That means a lot.”

  “Hey, the Big Dipper,” I said pointing at the sky.

  “Every time I hear the words the Big Dipper, I imagine a huge dipper filled with milk and a child in the sky dipping cookies in it.”

  “What? That’s so random,” I said.

  “Sorry.” He shook his head. “Look, there’s the Ursa Minor…and Leo. There’s Orion. You can see its belt.”

  “Wow. How do you even know all of this?” I looked at him. All I knew was the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper.

  “My dad used to take me and my brother stargazing. Of course, that time I was only five and to me, they were just sparkling little things in the sky that were far from my grasp,” he explained. “It’s funny, I guess. I used to feel so big when I looked up in the sky, like I could crush any of those stars with just one step. Now…now it just feels like I’m only a small puzzle piece under the universe.”

  “A small puzzle piece that still hasn’t found where it fits,” I murmured to myself.

  “Yeah. You get it,” he said, looking at me. “Kaffee Mädchen, what would you wish for—?”

  “Why do you keep calling me that?” I asked. I only understood the coffee part.

  “It means coffee girl,” he said.

  “Why can’t you just call me Skyler?” I almost said Demi.

  “Kaffee Mädchen suits you more and…” He paused and smirked at me as if he knew something I didn’t.

  “And what?”

  “Nothing.” He chuckled. “Forget it.”

  “What? Say it,” I said, curious.

  “Fine. I know Skyler isn’t your actual name.”

  “Wait, what?” I said. “Yes, it is.” He knew all this time, but he didn’t say anything?

  “It’s all right. I don’t need or want to know your real name. Already got one for you, Kaffee Mädchen,” he said.

  “That doesn’t bother you at all?” I asked him. If I didn’t know his name, I would have been so curious. It was like reading a book and being the main character without even knowing your own name. Your identity.

  “Nope. Knowing a person’s name isn’t enough. Useless, actually. You have to know who they are,” he said.

  “But a name identifies the person,” I said.

  “A name is just like a face you use to separate from others. It’s not who you are; it’s just a label. A mask, you could say,” he said. “Last year, when I went on a road trip with my buddies, we hitchhiked around Germany for weeks. I forgot every one of their actual names, but I still remember the nicknames that we made for each other, and I will never forget their stories and how that person made me feel or what they did.”

  “Yeah. I get you. When I read books, I sometimes forget the title or who wrote it. All I remember is the adventure it took me on, and how it made me feel when I desperately needed to escape my life. Because in the end, a name would always be just a name, but it’s the story behind it that makes all the difference.”

  “The name Kaffee Mädchen at least reflects some part of you,” he said. “It tells me you’re bitter.”

  “You’re so annoying.” I laughed.

  “See? Bitterness.” He nudged me.

  “Argh,” I groaned. This felt like the perfect moment for a shooting star to pass. But of course, that would never happen. Sadly, it was reality. “If there was a shooting star, what would you wish for?”

  “I wouldn’t wish for anything.”

  “Wait, seriously?” I was extremely surprised. “Not even for you to be healthy again?”

  “Nope. The universe may have put my death date sooner rather than later, but I‘m living it hard.”

  “You’re pretty positive for a walking dead man.”

  “I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  “Wow. You’re a glass-half-full kind of guy, huh?”

  “If it was the other way around, I would lose my sanity."

  I looked at him as he stared up into the stars. The glimmer that I saw yesterday night was back in his eyes. I couldn’t place what it was, and then I realized.

  That glimmer.

  It was life.

  Chapter Eleven

  (July 29, 1992, in Vienna)

  When I turned to my side, I realized his name was carved on the cement floor. I traced my fingers on the letters and got dirt on my fingertips.

  “Oh. I carved that the second time I came up here,” he said after he noticed me.

  “You’re horrible at carving.” I laughed. It looked like it had been done by an eight-year-old.

  “You try carving with only a tiny metal scrap that you randomly found on the ground,” he said and got up. “Here.”

  “What are doing?” I asked and watched him walk to the corner. He bent down and got something off the ground.

  He didn’t reply. From behind him, I could hear the scratching sound of the metal scrap against the cement floor.

  He moved away so that I could see his masterpiece.

  “‘Alaric and Skyler. July twenty-ninth, 1992.’” I read out the words.

  “Yep. If you ever come back to Austria again and visit the Staatsoper Opera House, you’ll know that your name will always be here.”

  “My name...”


  “Mmm-hmm?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I wanted to tell him my real name, but he didn’t care because all that mattered to him was the girl he knew in Austria, not Demi back in Missouri.

  His face turned to me and stared deep into my eyes as if he was trying to search in the deepest corners of my soul.

  “You seriously can’t come with me? I’m going to Italy in a few days. It’ll be an adventure of a lifetime that you can tell your grandchildren one day,” he said.

  “Guess I’ll have to let go of this one,” I said sadly.

  “Has anybody ever told you you’re absolutely beautiful?” he whispered suddenly.

  “What, you think I am?” I chuckled.

  “Yes.”

  “You should stop screwing around with people and start saying things you actually mean,” I snapped at him. I sounded like an insecure brat, but at the same time I didn’t feel like getting my feelings toyed with.

  “And you should start believing me because when I call a girl beautiful, I mean it,” he whispered back and took a strand of my hair and placed it behind my ear.

  “I have to get back,” I said, avoiding the fact the he could possibly have feelings for me, knowing that Marcel was going to freak if I didn’t show up again.

  “Wait,” he said and pulled me back down suddenly.

  “What?” I asked.

  “There’s one last thing that I need to do before you leave,” he said.

  “I’m guessing you’re not going to tell me, like usual?” I said.

  He grinned. Then he kissed me.

  He kissed me.

  His lips were like ecstasy as they pressed against mine, and as each movement passed, I felt myself get high on his taste.

  “Goodbye, Kaffee Mädchen,” he said, pulling away.

  Wow.

  “You did that to make me stay, didn’t you?” I said softly.

  “I have my ways,” he said, biting his lower lip like a cute puppy. “Honestly, I’ve wanted to do that since I met you.”