Outside, it had warmed up a little. Norah had planned to go and get Austrian number plates for her car and, if that didn’t take all day, to look for some furniture afterwards. She unbuttoned the grey winter coat she was wearing over a black woollen dress. It was mild, almost springlike; the sun shone in a deep blue sky. All was brightness in this city. No shadows anywhere. She paused for a moment to watch the crowds of people ploughing their way down the pedestrian precinct, lured out by the glorious weather.
Norah soaked it all in: shoppers, tourists, police, neon signs, pigeons, cigarette ends, paper cups, the smell of deep-frying, the clatter of heels. A man touting roses, the distant clip-clop of hoofs from the tourist carriages, fountains, balloon-sellers, ice-cream cones and popcorn, smartphone zombies and con artists. She could feel herself being swallowed up and tried to get along more quickly, but it was useless; an enormous tour group even pushed her back a little. Norah abandoned all politeness and began to elbow her way through, holding the bag with the vehicle papers close to her body. She dodged a rickshaw cyclist who, for reasons best known to himself, seemed to think it a good idea to chauffeur his passengers through this mayhem. Then she realised that her phone was ringing. She fished it out of her bag and gave a start when she saw the screen. Alex. They hadn’t spoken since Norah had moved out—she’d stayed in a hotel for a few weeks before coming to Vienna, and neither of them had made any attempt to get in touch. Norah stared at the screen, feeling cold. Should she pick up or wait for her voicemail to kick in? Then it was too late; Alex had given up. Norah slid her phone into her coat pocket and raised her eyes.
The old woman she had seen begging earlier was standing right in front of her, so tall that Norah had to look up at her. She reached into her bag and pulled out her wallet to put a few euros in her dish.
‘You bring death,’ the woman said, her husky voice calm.
Norah frowned. ‘What did you say?’
The woman seemed not to hear.
‘Flowers wither,’ she said. ‘Clocks stop. Birds fall dead from the sky.’
Her grave stare was still fixed on Norah. Her hair was darker, her eyes brighter and her wrinkles deeper than Norah had realised. The pale turquoise of her irises was flecked with specks of red, like the tiny particles of blood in the yolk of an egg.
It suddenly occurred to Norah that the woman was mentally ill.
‘On February 11 you will kill a man called Arthur Grimm in the Prater,’ the woman continued. ‘With good reason. And of your own free will.’
Norah didn’t know what to say. She had just opened her mouth to speak when someone or something rammed into her from behind, making her stumble and drop the papers she was carrying. A few loose sheets slipped to the ground and she stooped to pick them up.
By the time she had straightened back up, the woman had vanished. Norah looked about her in bewilderment. A group of Chinese tourists shoved past her, then a young couple with a pram. Where had she gone? Desperately scanning the street, Norah pushed her way between two football fans in Rapid Vienna scarves. The woman was so tall she ought to have stood out above the crowd, but she was nowhere to be seen; it was as if the earth had swallowed her up. Shame, thought Norah, she looked like a woman with a tale to tell.
But it had been slightly unnerving.
4
A supermarket, a bookshop, a university building, a drugstore, restaurants, antique shops, a dolls’ hospital, a shop selling guns. On a house wall, a row of posters, each printed with a single huge letter, spelt out the words: ARE YOU SURE? Norah tried to fix everything in her memory. This was her neighbourhood now—this was home. But it would be a while before she stopped feeling like a tourist.
She looked up. The tram wires cut through the blue of the sky, making beautiful geometric patterns, like shattered glass. The houses were grand and imposing, just like all over the city. What was going on up there, behind those windows? Were people arguing? Watching TV? Cooking? Watering their flowers, committing adultery, committing murder?
As a child, she had often wished for x-ray eyes so that she could see through walls and find out what was happening on the other side—what kind of people lived there and what they got up to. These days she was sometimes glad not to have to know the distressing details—to see only the gleaming facades.
•
Her new flat was big and empty. No Alex, no dog—only echoes and shadows and bare walls. She’d tried to call Alex back, but hadn’t got through. Part of her was glad. She clapped shut her laptop, unable to concentrate on the notes she’d been trying to make. An old, dark thought had been stirring in her all day, and now there was no ignoring it.
She decided to ring her friend Sandra. Back in Berlin, Norah would simply have dropped in on her; she’d lived only a few streets away. And in the years before Berlin, Norah would have numbed the thought with drugs. But all that was a thing of the past; she’d been clean for ages.
Sandra didn’t pick up. Norah let her eyes wander over the moulded ceiling, the spotless parquet, the cardboard boxes, her few belongings—and all of a sudden she noticed a buzzing sound. She felt it rather than heard it, somewhere between her diaphragm and her breastbone, and it was a moment before she could put a name to it. These last few years she’d been alone so little she’d almost forgotten the feeling. It was loneliness—deafening loneliness.
She had to get out. Out into life. That always helped when gloom threatened to descend. Norah glanced at her phone and wondered who else she could ring. In Berlin it would have been easy to find someone who’d go out for a drink with her, but it was different in Vienna, where there was really only her best friend Max and his husband Paul—and her old mate Tanja, of course, but she was in Hamburg just now. Max had been thrilled when Norah had told him she was moving to ‘his’ city. She tried his number. Voicemail.
She thought of going out by herself, but didn’t have the nerves to face the comments and pick-up lines that a woman alone in a bar would be bound to attract. Her chest felt as if it were about to burst. She sat down, checked Facebook and Twitter, and tweeted.
Anyone else out there who can’t sleep?
#sleepless in Vienna
She waited for a few minutes, but no one replied.
Then she gave up and zapped her way through the TV channels until she found a documentary about indigenous foxes that she liked the look of.
Norah sat up with a start. She couldn’t have slept for long—the same documentary was still showing on TV—but she felt that vague confusion that comes over you when you wake from a deep dream. Dazed, she sat up, wiping sweat from her forehead. Floorboards creaked overhead; her upstairs neighbour was still awake. What was her name again? That’s right, Theresa.
How strange life was. Norah had left everything behind to start over in another country, and the past had caught up with her on her very first day in the new city.
Rubbish! It was only a stupid coincidence that her new neighbour looked the way she did. Didn’t people say that everyone has a doppelgänger somewhere? And how often in the past years had Norah thought she’d seen her, in a passing train, an airport lounge, a pavement cafe?
But it wasn’t only the similarity between Theresa and her that had made Norah think of her on and off all day. It was also the words spoken by the woman with the begging bowl.