In One Person

she exclaimed, as we walked up the Graben to the Kohlmarkt. There was a coffeehouse on the Kohlmarkt; I’d not been there, but it looked expensive.
    “There’s a place I know in my neighborhood,” Esmeralda said. “We could go there, and
then
you could walk me home.”
    To our mutual surprise, we lived in the same neighborhood—across the Ringstrasse, away from the first district, in the vicinity of the Karlskirche. At the corner of the Argentinierstrasse and the Schwindgasse, there was a café-bar—like so many in Vienna. It was a coffeehouse and a bar; it was my neighborhood place, too, I was telling Esmeralda as we sat down. (I often wrote there.)
    Thus we began to describe our less-than-happy living situations. It turned out that we both lived on the Schwindgasse, in the same building. Esmeralda had more of an actual apartment than I did. She had a bedroom, her own bathroom, and a tiny kitchen, but she shared a front hall with her landlady; almost every night, when Esmeralda came “home,” she had to pass her landlady’s living room, where the old and disapproving woman was ensconced on her couch with her small, disagreeable dog. (They were always watching television.)
    The drone from the TV could be constantly heard from Esmeralda’s bedroom, where she listened to operas (usually, in German) on an old phonograph. She’d been instructed to play her music softly, though “softly” wasn’t suitable for opera. The opera was sufficiently loud to mask the sound from the landlady’s television, and Esmeralda listened and listened to the German, singing to herself—also softly. She needed to improve her German accent, she’d told me.
    Because I needed to improve my German grammar and word order—not to mention my vocabulary—I instantly foresaw how Esmeralda and I could help each other. My accent was the only aspect of my German that was better than Esmeralda’s.
    The waitstaff at Zufall had tried to prepare me: When the fall was over—when the winter came, and the tourists were gone—there would be nights when there’d be no English-speaking customers in the restaurant. I had better improve my German before the winter months, they had warned me. The Austrians weren’t kind to foreigners. In Vienna,
Ausländer
(“foreigner”) was never said nicely; there was something truly xenophobic about the Viennese.
    At that café-bar on the Argentinierstrasse, I began to describe my living situation to Esmeralda—in German. We’d already decided that we should speak German to each other.
    Esmeralda had a Spanish name—
esmeralda
means “emerald” in Spanish—but she didn’t speak Spanish. Her mother was Italian, and Esmeralda spoke (and sang) Italian, but if she wanted to be an opera singer, she had to improve her German accent. She said it was a joke at the Staatsoper that she was a soprano understudy—a soprano “in-waiting,” Esmeralda called herself. If they ever let her onstage in Vienna, it would happen only if the regular soprano—the “starting” soprano, Esmeralda called her—
died
. (Or if the opera was in Italian.)
    Even as she told me this in grammatically perfect German, I could hear strong shades of Cleveland in her accent. A music teacher in a Cleveland elementary school had discovered that Esmeralda could sing; she’d gone to Oberlin on a scholarship. Esmeralda’s junior year abroad had been in Milan; she’d had a student internship at La Scala, and had fallen in love with Italian opera.
    But Esmeralda said that German felt like chips of wood in her mouth. Her father had run out on her and her mother; he’d gone to Argentina, where he met another woman. Esmeralda had concluded that the woman her father hooked up with in Argentina must have had Nazi ancestors.
    “What else could explain why I can’t handle the accent?” Esmeralda asked me. “I’ve studied the shit out of German!”
    I still think about the bonds that drew Esmeralda and me together: We each had absconding fathers, we lived in the same building on the Schwindgasse, and we were talking about all this in a café-bar on the Argentinierstrasse—in our flawed German.
Unglaublich
! (“Unbelievable!”)
    The Institute students were housed all over Vienna. It was common to have your own bedroom but to share a bathroom; a remarkable number of our students had widows for landladies, and no kitchen privileges. I had a widow for a landlady and my own bedroom, and I shared a bathroom with the widow’s divorced