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We took the tram and met our friends in front of the town
hall. We had made lunch reservations at a tavern right next
to the government building, not far from the university and
the cafés where Kurt had spent so many hours. It was the
kind of detail Kurt appreciated: he would quit his bachelor
student life and enter the married state all in the same
neighborhood, without disruptions to his routine. Not that
his familiar universe hadn’t changed. The façades were
plastered with Nazi flags, and the heavy boots that tromped
constantly through the buildings had made most of his
friends flee. We were clinging, I realize now, to a Vienna
that had vanished. It would take us both a while longer to
realize it.
We led our meager procession up the steps of the town
hall. My parents and my sisters, who had overdressed, felt
awkward in the presence of the stolid, bourgeois Rudolf.
They kept their silence.
I had invited neither Anna nor Lieesa to my wedding. I
would have liked to query redheaded Anna about my blue
vel- vet coat, in which I’d been caught once or twice in a
downpour. She might have come with me to choose the
little hat I wore, absolutely simple, gray with a ribbon, my
one extravagance given our precarious finances. I borrowed
a brooch from my sister, and I could have tapped Lieesa for
her husband-catching stole. It had brought me luck, before
the moths attacked it, as they attacked our memories. But
my girlfriends inhabited two separate compartments of my