On Exile, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Female Despair
Vienna stands still. It is the Feast of Corpus Christi and also the first day of my period. Not Catholic, I have no sense that today, a Thursday in May is a public holiday in this country. For hours I will not know what the holiday is. Reckless in practical matters, I usually only deal with this monthly occurrence when I am faced with it. I rarely prepare, for anything.
Only a few stray tampons in my bag, not absorbent enough. No pads. Awoken at barely six in the morning by cramps and the big damp blood stain under my body. I think, with relief, about the nearby supermarkets and pharmacies, which will open in an hour: hygiene products, painkillers, chocolate biscuits.
The big supermarket down the street—closed. The smaller one on the other side of the block—also closed. The pharmacies, whose opening times tend to be esoteric, even when it’s not a holiday—profoundly closed.
I walk back down my street and go to the bakery which is open until midday. I get a melange to go and thank the red-cheeked girl who makes it for me. I am wished a happy holiday and I wish one back, still unclear on what it is that we are celebrating. I walk past the door of my apartment building, straight towards the tram. The city’s central train station will have an open supermarket. It will only take me 10 minutes to get there, and I can use the bathroom there if need be.
I drag myself onto the escalator to begin my laps around each floor of the train station, which is also a mall, as these things often are. The supermarkets, all three of them—bathed in light, people-less. Closed.
Hopeless, after thirty minutes of hobbling around the many floors of the station, I head to the tram; I can feel the blood starting to well around the oversaturated bullet of cotton inside me. Then, I see it, the white-on-red sign. Austria’s travel-necessities chain: newspapers, chargers, gummies and chocolates, tissues, painkillers, and feminine hygiene products. All the things only a traveller might need on a holiday. I take a box of biscuits with the chocolate pasted on top of them, tampons and pads, the most absorbent kind of each. The woman behind the register smiles at me with sympathy as I pay, the blood continues to well. In the tram, I do not sit down.
Once at home, I learn what today’s holiday is with the aid of the internet. How fitting, that on the day of the Most Holy Body and Blood, my period finally came. I do not feel feastly, but certainly relieved; nearly two weeks behind schedule.
The following days sink into the surface of the blood-stained fitted sheet. Something inside of me breaks. The cramps, which feel like a fibrous piece of wood scraping my insides, leaving splinters, a symptom of that. The painkillers G. ordered for me from across the ocean do little to relieve the pain. As the sun makes its daily journey across the sky, I track the time by the change of light in the bedroom.
By Monday, the pain is gone and I am somehow a new, more numb version of myself. An unknown woman.
There was a lot to notice in Vienna, but what kept catching my eye, so that it seemed to be everywhere, was Ingeborg Bachmann’s name. It was on the awnings of film theaters, advertisements across the city, and in the bookstores. It had been orchestrated by the marketing gods so that rolling out simultaneously were a biographical picture about the writer, Ingeborg Bachmann—Journey into the Desert (dir. Margarethe von Trotta, 2023) and a thousand-page tome of correspondence between her and Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch, with whom she was in a turbulent relationship between 1958-1962, titled We did not do well (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2022). Ingeborg Bachmann was one of the most renowned German-language poets and prose writers of the 20th Century; still comparably little-known in the English-speaking world outside of certain literary circles. I found amusing the blockbuster treatment her name was being given here. The movie was not yet out in cinemas, but the book pulled me to itself every time I entered a bookstore.Its title, quoting one of their exchanges, suggested a kind of rueful reflection on a relationship-in-ruins that I could not look away from. The first few letters, which I read repeatedly as I stood hinging my neck over the volume in a series of bookstores, progress quickly from notes of admiration from afar to home-wrecking passion.
I was more familiar with Bachman as a silhouette literary history than I was with her work; a devoted reader of Max Frisch and another Swiss writer, her friend Fleur Jaeggy, I regarded her with the sort of warmth the one reserves for a yet unknown friend-of-a-friend, of whom those around you speak highly. I knew the general outlines of her biography: her 1926 birth in the Carinthian city of Klagenfurt, her Nazi father who was a schoolteacher (or schoolteacher father who was a Nazi), her lifelong repudiation of fascism, her early romance with the poet Paul Celan, her time at the University of Vienna, her study of Heidegger, her study of Wittgenstein, her failed romance with Frisch, her many friendships, the crush Henry Kissinger had on her, her travels, her teaching, her barbiturate addiction. Finally, her death in 1973, with which many essays about Bachmann start, even when they refuse to, or describe it as something out of her own works: devastation, pills, cigarettes, a bedsheet set on fire. I had read about it first in Jaeggy’s story “The Aseptic Room,” obliquely—she recounts conversations she and Bachmann had about life, age, time and then, with characteristic economy, ends the piece: “Every day I went to Sant’ Eugenio, the burn unit. Twice I entered a room that needed to be kept aseptic.” In another story within the same collection, I Am the Brother of XX (tr. Gini Alhadeff), Jaeggy gives the only characterization of Bachmann one needs to know before attempting a close read of her work in the quest to decipher it and, by extension, her, before delving into her correspondence with her lovers: “to Ingeborg, indiscretionwas unforgivable.” Though this—her personal life—seems to be the fascination of Bachmann’s readers. I do not blame them; when a woman states that she is unknown, as does the narrator of Malina, on numerous occasions, one’s first instinct is to prove her wrong.
In Max Frisch’s memoir Montauk (tr. Geoffrey Skelton), wherein he recounts, at the foot of old age, each of his failed relationships, the foreword in the English translation of which mischaracterizes Ingeborg Bachmann as a “Swedish poet,” I found a most moving tribute to her, a tribute of the sort one could only wish to receive someday:
I think of Ingeborg and her attitude toward money…And the way she spent it—not as a reward for work done, but as something from the privy purse of a duchess, if often an impoverished one. She was used to doing without things—money was just a matter of luck … She did not even notice the radio stations, which were always after her, paid her much too little, and with an air of absent-mindedness she would sign publishing contracts that did the publishers little honor. She never calculated on others’ being calculating. She bought shoes as if for a millipede. I don’t know how she did it. I cannot remember her ever regretting money being spent: a high rent, a handbag from Paris which was ruined on the beach. Money vanishes, whatever you do … To give her presents was a joy. She radiated pleasure.
Earlier in the book, he describes their entire relationship, ending with the last time they spoke to each other face to face, in 1963. In a café in Rome she told him that she had found his diary in an apartment they had shared once. That she had read it and burned it. “We did not show up well at the end, either of us.”
He too describes Bachmann as secretive; she did not let him into many parts of her life, sometimes physically steering him away from streets that she decided they could not walk down together. They never publicly acknowledged their relationship, though of course, everybody knew. There is only one known picture of them: the shot is framed by a doorway, as if taken secretly from the next room over; he stands at the center of the photograph, owl-like in his thick glasses, a smoking pipe protruding from his mouth. His eyebrows are slightly raised, as he listens to her, either in surprise or in agreement. She stands in profile, at the right edge of the picture, arms crossed, her face—large, expressive features that look like they are carved from wood—in motion, her signature bob neat, bangs swept carefully to the side. Maybe there is another photo of them, somewhere; if only this was enough for the public. But it is not: all correspondence of hers that comes to light needs to be published, perhaps to compensate for all of that she didn’t publish. A biopic needs to be made, imagining what the relationship, outside of that photo, looked like.
I had ended up in Vienna the previous September, because on the Friday that G. and I decided to leave Georgia, it was the cheapest place in Europe to travel to by plane that day. We had planned to go to Armenia, but a few days prior, Azerbaijan had invaded Artsakh, after subjecting its Armenian population to a nine-month-long blockade, famine et al. G., whose grandfather was from Artsakh, did not want these to be the circumstances of my first trip to Armenia. Instead we travelled from Tbilisi to Borjomi, where, after taking a sip each of the sulfurous water from the springs and wandering the park littered with creaky fairground equipment from the nineties, without the requisite hiking gear, there was not much left to do. I got sick and drank tea with pine cone jam, sappy in flavor, while continuing to work remotely in my American job. In the evenings we ate takeout khachapuri. The Airbnb belonged to a basketball player, and the bed, as advertised, was extra-long. Neither of us are very tall, but remarking on the quirks of each new room we shared had become a routine. And therefore the length of the bed was relevant.
My cold persisted and I was glad to have an excuse not to partake in the obligatory tourism of being in a Grand European Capital, staying in yet another new bed, this one in a hotel room in the 7th district. I used to visit family in Vienna, but I did not know the city well, and could only say that I had seen all of the main sites and had little enthusiasm for seeing them again; this was G.’s first trip to Vienna. He was restless as I stayed put in the hotel bed, and so he would take on to the streets on a city bike, ride around for the larger part of the day, and bring home a styrofoam box of kebab and shredded vegetables for me to eat. He didn’t much like the city, he told me—it seemed to him conserved, like a Habsburgian museum, a little dead, a little like a city just for display.
It wasn’t until we moved into a studio apartment in a quiet residential street of the 16th district, when it became clear to us that Vienna, with its central quarter’s throngs of tourists, is not for looking at, but for living in: the produce was fantastic even at the gas station mini market, the rents reasonable, the streets calm, and the trash separated to G.’s liking. We didn’t have much of a plan insofar as how long we should stay there, so we were making it up as we went. G. would have to go back to the US soon, to find a job to replace the one from which he had been laid off at the start of the summer—money had run out already. I, it was slowly becoming clear, would have to be somewhere that is not the US for at least a year—my old visa had run out, and a new one declined, but my employer had offered to keep me on while I waited for spring and the employment visa lottery that came with it and, if things went well, went through the application process that would take me into the next fall. There were no other offers made that would allow me back into the US, so I continued working on an askew schedule, from midday to eight in the evening. My country of origin, Russia, did not seem like a suitable destination for an array of reasons, most, if not all, related to the war it had perpetrated in Ukraine. My displacement figured as a kind of exile, or at the very least this was the more elegant thing I preferred to call my unwilling digital nomadism. The question now was where I would spend the year; I wondered if I had accidentally moved to Vienna.
During the weekdays we did our best to fit in as much as we could before midday, which often entailed a large Viennese breakfast, at a coffee house, usually consisting of coffee, orange juice, a bread roll, ham, cheese, butter, jelly, and a boiled egg; we were charmed by what the coffee house represented as a Viennese institution, namely a stately public living room, of varying levels of dilapidation, where a ordering a cup of coffee buys you unlimited time. We’d run errands—G. would need to mail something, I would need pants and tops with long sleeves, the contents of the carry-on suitcase out of which I had been living for the past months no longer responsive to the season. On the weekends, we’d have even longer, more leisurely Viennese breakfasts and take long walks or bike rides to one museum or another. We spent hours in the Leopold Museum, strolling carefully so as to not miss anything, to take in fully the Gesamtheit of the Gesamtkunstwerk. At the Sigmund Freud museum, where I last went when I was fifteen with my mother, G. and I giggled our way to the exit, where the firm German voice of the attendant instructed: “Please, come to an end.”
We spent as much time looking at the Secession Building as we did inside, the building’s rigid, well-maintained outlines in stunning contrast with the reserved bombast of its Jugendstil flourishes, chief of which is the large golden floral orb sitting atop the building, refracting the light such that, looking at it long enough, one could begin to believe that the cosmos beams into it. At this time, the facade also bore a banner—an image by the Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridniy of Saltivka, the Kharkiv neighborhood in which the artist grew up, now destroyed by bombs. The buildings in it seem intact, but are obstructed by a krater-like black spot. Two floors above Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, for which we had come, we watched the video-installation to which the banners outside corresponded—a walk through bombed-out Saltivka, where a voiceover recites Ridniy’s memories of childhood sites that no longer exist. Real exile, of a particularly violent kind.
Some evenings we went out for dinner. With what seemed like most restaurants in the city serving an identical menu, traditional Viennese fare, we had joked, glibly, that Vienna is about eating a schnitzel in a beautiful building—dependable, if not predictable.
Still unsure if I was just visiting, I embarked on an unassertive apartment search. I struggled writing to realtors and landlords because I had never spoken the German of emails or of housing, most of my fluency relegated to a time before I turned eleven years old. Nevertheless, my existence in Vienna felt fluid, like I really lived there, which meant one thing: that I should get a manicure.
I had found a salon that seemed to do really good work. I called to make the appointment, in German—the voice on the other line had a Slavic accent, but, so as to avoid being presumptuous, I continued speaking German, and the appointment was made for two days later. I arrived a few minutes late, as I usually do to such things, and walked in speaking hastily in German, apologizing. The receptionist looked at me, smiled apologetically before asking to speak English. I switched to English, and everything was settled for a brief moment, until I realized that around me everyone was Ukrainian, speaking Russian between themselves, snippets of conversation about lives no longer led in Kyiv reaching me. The nail technician to whom I was assigned spoke no English, and so the receptionist began translating her questions to me from Russian: what shape did I want my nails? Did they need to be cut? Which color? I felt bad for making the receptionist labor in vain, so I decided to not betray that my mother tongue was the very language from which she was doing me the service of translating. This was a decision I came to regret quickly: it was difficult to pretend that I do not understand what is going on around; I put my phone away, so that if any messages in Russian, from contacts with Russian names came up they would not blow my cover, and, most of all, I struggled with being translated to at every inflection point of the procedure.
I was mostly mute for the nearly two hours that the manicure took. The technician, a young woman with sharp, focused features and a smooth dark-blonde ponytail, buzzed away at my cuticle with an electric nail file, its rotating tip bearing dangerous resemblance to something more suitable for intricate wood-carving projects. As I sat there, I listened to the women around me speak to each other—comparing notes on the bureaucratic dealings they are newly navigating in this adopted home of theirs; discussing who left whom behind; complaining that packages never get delivered—the postmen don’t even try to ring the bell, they just assume that nobody is home. Once the manicure was done and my nails were bright red, I gave my technician a slow, drawn out “thank you” with exaggerated nods, quickly paid for the service and ran out. It was the best manicure I had ever gotten, even if my habitual femininity still felt a little bit out of reach.
During this time, about two weeks into our stay in Vienna, nearly three months into my “exile,” I had started feeling increasingly alienated from this reality I was inhabiting. The lack of a life that required maintenance, of social obligations, of needing to be somewhere other than “online” at a particular time, caused a threatening weightlessness in a gravitational field that was slowly receding. While G. was still there, we could approximate giving our days shape, parting and coming back together throughout them, but as his departure loomed, my agitation grew, amplified by the month’s hormonal surges. We started fighting. I said terrible things.
One night, when my despair felt like it was overflowing, I badgered G. for answers. What is the point of all of this, I asked: of being together across citizenship lines, where I could not access him when I wanted, my passport the obstacle; of making no plans to change that; on wasting one’s youth on emigration and its isolations; of living in general, when fulfillment of any sort seems inaccessible, even with all of one’s privileges considered. As I had started picking up my pace in descending down the rungs of this spiral, G.’s phone buzzed with a string of texts that would cause his eyes to widen. It was not said explicitly, but this much was obvious immediately: a friend of his had committed suicide. It was stunning but not surprising. The friend had been living and teaching at a university in Moscow when the war started; that spring he got married and moved to Berlin with his wife. There, haphazard prescriptions to manage his depression interacted with recreational drugs. He was very upset about the war in Ukraine, and much of what he transmitted into the world had to do with absolving a guilty Russian conscience. All of this, I thought, is war: the bombs, the rapes, the mutilated bodies beamed into our homes through the internet, the manyfold, layered suffering. And the many indirect repercussions, the ripples—they were war too: what I was experiencing was war, this friend’s death was war.
I snapped out of my own spiral quickly, and tried, as best I could to comfort G. The next day was spent in a haze, many phone calls, clumsy attempts at condolence. Our time at the studio apartment in the Ottakring was up, and we moved once again—to a first-floor flat in Mariahilf, on the first line of the Wien’s left bank, which also means that it was by the road, which we walked up and down. The days stretched endlessly; G. settled into the stages of grief that are dominated by disbelief, but we tried to go on normally until he left—it was decided that he would join his brother, their friend’s wife and a few others in Berlin. Then, just two days later, October 7th came, and personal tragedy was compounded by that of the gruesome carnage that populated the screens into which we could not help ourselves but to peer, constantly; the genocidal response that would become the war in Gaza loomed. By now, the feeling of each breath bloated with horror, while everything around appeared normal, was no longer strange.
On the day G. left we had gone to get a last coffee house breakfast, at Café Jelinek—a shabby joint, it’s wallpaper stained with soot or some such, the green upholstery threadbare, the air a little sticky, flies circling. We were both unsettled—by all that was going on, by parting for an indeterminate amount of time—we shot each other concerned looks, as we dragged out our coffees and poked at the pastry. In one of the booths by the tall window sat a round white-mustached man in khaki shorts which on his body looked like lederhosen, white trouser socks, and brown oxfords. He was reading the newspapers—the ones that the coffee house keeps for its patrons. Every now and again he would get up to pick up a different newspaper, going through five or so. He did not seem perturbed by what he was reading. Next to him sat a wicker basket filled with plastic food containers. I wondered what it must be like, to be him, to live like this every day.
I came back to Vienna after three weeks in Paris, where I had spent too much money and realized I had no hope of finding an apartment. In fact, I would not find an apartment that entire year, instead moving around based on where there was a free, couch, free room, free apartment, or house where I could stay. Vienna was the only place I travelled gratuitously, but even then I came under the pretense that I wanted to, after all, find an apartment. This search was thwarted immediately by the disorder of travel. I was staying at an apartment I found less than charming—it reminded me of the Soviet block buildings I knew from my childhood, fragrant in all the wrong ways, raw, damp, and dusty, somehow threatening with its pallid light bulbs, dangling from the ceilings on just short, tense wire. Unable to bring myself to cook, I subsisted mostly on cornichons, walnuts, cold cuts, and boiled eggs; and I needed to admit to myself that I was really only there to see the Ingeborg Bachmann movie.
It was underwhelming. The movie laid it on thick: a woman-poet, too complicated for this world and this is why her life is a journey to both the figurative and literal desert, where she will sit, smoke a cigarette and say things the real woman-poet had said in one of her last interviews: the first thing between a man and a woman is fascism. This was the line the movie had been working towards. The withdrawn despair and isolation that Vicky Krieps usually portrays well had the quality of cardboard, lacking the amusement that those who loved Bachmann said she had. Both Frisch and Bachmann are portrayed as ordinary people, perhaps with the noble intent of humanizing them, but one does not become a writer of their caliber by being an ordinary person. The film blames Frisch for her death, as we learn from the dream sequence that makes up the first few scenes, evil phone calls and laughter; Krieps’s Bachmann wakes from the dream, reaches for a pill and lights a cigarette in bed.
The other great Austrian woman writer, Elfride Jelinek, had once adapted Malina into a screenplay for the 1991 film by Wener Schroeter, Isabelle Huppert playing its heroine, the unnamed writer. It too starts with a dream sequence, which represents the second chapter of the book, The Third Man, the third man—third to Malina and Ivan, both the beloved of the unnamed writer–being her father. I have never successfully finished watching this film; every time I try I fall asleep. But I know it is much better, because Elfride Jelinek understood one thing about Bachmann: that her life is inextricable from her writing.
Now that I had seen the movie, there was not much else for me to do in Vienna and I went on with the rest of my days there, about half-a-week’s worth, in corresponding fashion. I got another manicure, at the same place. This time, my technician spoke English, I still pretended not to speak Russian, committed to reaping what I had sown. I had requested that my nails be painted black, and as she was doing so, I said, so as not to be silent the entire time: “Just in time for Halloween.” The technician, likely Orthodox Christian, looked at me with curiosity and asked, “You celebrate?” I decided that, perhaps, my commitment should be to silence.
I spoke on the phone with G. every night, one of which was spent without sleep, talking to him out of an attack of jealousy, as I was gearing up to continue roaming Europe in solitude.
It was on this trip that I read Malina for the first time. I had carried the book with me from the US, where it had been on my shelf for three years; for all those three years I intended to read it, but at every attempt I could not penetrate the text. Now it finally stuck: this was a book made for solitude. It had quickly become the center of my reading during those first months of exile, which amassed into what I privately began to call my personal canon of female despair: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, First Love by Gwyndoline Riley, The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, and now Malina. To retell the book’s plot is to say very little about it—the narrator, an unnamed writer or an unknown woman, as she signs her correspondence, or “Myself,” as she names herself in the list of characters at the start of the book, is in two concurrent relationships with two men: Malina, with whom she lives, and Ivan, with whom she is having an affair. She is supposed to be writing a book, but instead spends her time flitting about the apartment, writing and sending letters, waiting for letters, smoking a lot, playing chess, running to Ivan, running back to Malina, running from Malina, running from Vienna, running back to Vienna, going to one coffee house, going to another. In the end, after a fight between the unnamed writer and Malina, Ivan calls their house; Malina picks up and tells him that “there is no woman here,” that “there was never anyone here by that name,” the unnamed writer disappears inside a wall. “It was murder,” she tells the reader in the final line of the book.
Roaming through form and genre, wherein a play turns into a fairytale, into an epistolary novel, into a crime novel, into a requiem, the book transcends literature as the narrator does the self in the extreme, anxious precision, with which she dissects every movement of her soul and the forces that constrict it. It’s a legibility that is obstructed by how closely it invites the reader to regard it. She is at the same time with her own particular biography: born in Klagenfurt, living in Vienna, in love or, at the very least, in feeling, with these two men; and she is universal. A negative space of a woman, within whom desire battles with the obligations of her gender.
When texting about it with G., I joke that “this one is for the girls,” he takes umbrage and tells me he doesn’t really think of books that way. I drop the jokes and tell him that I like the idea of a devoted literature for women, that it is hard to imagine that, as a man, one could locate their mind in Malina, that the book speaks the language of a woman’s consciousness, or perhaps it creates that language. Just as I like the idea of there being a man’s literature, thinking of Roth, or Bellow, or Updike, or Frisch, for that matter. G. tells me that engaging with literature should be like borrowing someone else’s consciousness; I don’t disagree but tell him that there are different levels of remove one can feel with the borrowed, that there is a level at which one is always aware that it is someone else’s consciousness one sits with, and that in which one forgets that it is not their own. That sometimes you read something and you forget that there’s something else behind it, that it’s like oh yes, of course, this is what the world is like. That there is something almost divine in that, as if the text always just was. G. doesn’t know much about the religious experience, but can identify with what I have said. We speak of Fleur Jaeggy and he asks me to recommend a book of hers that is “suitable for the fellas.” I recommend him The Water Statues, her one novel that isn’t about a girl and the cruel aftermaths of her upbringing, but about a wealthy and lonely man named Beeklam, who keeps a collection of statues in his flooded basement. A book dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann. I wanted him to notice all of the windows in the book—as an architect, he would appreciate them. He tells me that mostly he’s curious to read Jaeggy because she is an influence on me; he sends me a picture of his cat drinking water from the sink of our apartment in Brooklyn.
It is funny how quickly we assume ownership of that which is not ours at all. On the last day of the trip, I took myself to Café Landtmann, the coffee house, where in Malina the unnamed writer meets with a Bulgarian who has a strange disease, for whom she has compassion but whom she is not able to help. It is the most perfect version of a coffee house. Stepping inside you are met with a glass pastry case, the cakes and tortes neatly lined up, their glazes glistening in the dramatic light of the vitrine. There are three rows of tables lining the long, rectangular rooms, with each table framed by upholstered benches, a brown textile with a salad-colored leaf motif. The room was lit by a row of chandeliers with neutral lampshades that had a soft golden glow; there were tall mirrors, like in a ballroom, and the large arched windows were framed with thick sheaths of emerald curtains, like bangs on a woman’s forehead. The booths lining the sides of the room pinched between themselves small booths for just one person, facing outward into the room. The waiters wore formal white jackets and were the picture of politeness. I ordered a melange and a yoghurt with müsli and berries, which looked festive—rich purple mass in a pedestaled glass bowl, red currants, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries laid out like a mosaic.
As I sat there I watched the people cycle through the coffee house. There were as many locals, by whose attire one could see if it was the Burgtheater or the Rathaus that brought them here, both nearby, as there were tourists. A woman came in and sat down in one of the single booths, ordered a Mont Blanc, the swirl of chestnut vermicelli piled high in the pastry; she consumed it in a measured manner, as if performing a task at work, and left. There were the mother and daughter, both peering into their phones, dutifully fulfilling a point on the agenda of their voyage to Vienna, and the large group of Americans, the men in light sport coats, the women in easy sweaters—they spoke loudly about the betrothal of the two younger members of their party.
I departed from the gentle din of the room, and stood looking at the side of the Burgtheater across the street, its baroque exterior housing two figures in its ledges: Love and Hate, just a window separating them. There were the sounds of people talking, of hooves against cobblestone off in the distance, the hum of the trams and the static noise of cars. Vienna was a radio playing softly in the background—I could not hear what was being said, but it was pleasant company, the sound of life coursing the city. This was not the Vienna of Malina, which sounds like the sudden thuds and gusts of wind, like the shrill, metallic ring of a telephone or the trigger-like click of it being hung up; sometimes the Vienna of Malina is silent. I could go to the same places, but it would not be the same city. For it to be such, I would have to know it. Maybe it’s better to never really know anything.
I did not move to Vienna in the new year, or anywhere for that matter, continuing to bounce around.
The third time I came back was in May. In Paris, a novelist from New York had told me about a website offering dwellings to rent all over the world, but exclusively to academics—visiting lecturers, visiting researchers, those on sabbatical. It was cheaper than Airbnb, and these were the people with good taste and rent-stabilized apartments. I designated myself an “Independent Scholar” and, over video call, told an Italian man, an economist, that I was looking to go to Vienna to write a study of Ingeborg Bachmann. Reluctantly, the economist agreed to let me rent the apartment. It took two calls and too many emails.
For a sensible price, the one-bedroom in Margareten, the fifth district, a former working-class neighborhood, from which one could take a pleasant 45-minute walk into the center, was mine for a month and some change, until mid-June. The apartment was in a building with one of those characteristically beautiful Viennese vestibules with Art Nouveau tiling and a broad staircase, its banisters curving with animated elegance. The apartment itself had high ceilings, lots of light, and walls on which a hundred years or more of paint and wallpaper were left on display in patches of patina. This all gave it wonderful character, along with the vintage wooden furniture which, a piece of paper stipulated, in unison with the economist’s WhatsApp messages, were not to be touched with greasy hands.
The study of Ingeborg Bachmann was not entirely just an invented pretext to finagle a housing opportunity. Malina had impressed itself on me and left me unsettled in how easy it lent itself to projection onto my own life. G. had gotten me the book of correspondence between her and Frisch, which I had taken to reading in a piecemeal manner, as a palate cleanser between other books, albeit a harrowing one: not even 20 percent of the book in the relationship had gone from fawning and wondrous, to constant attempts to prevent and repair the results of its steady crumblings, which, likely anyone who would choose to read it would know, would be in vain. The rifts in my own relationship, that with G. were growing, though neither of us was able to acknowledge that this was the case, unwilling to mar the few weeks we had together after four months of being apart. We went on with our days taking care of each other; mostly he took care of me, doing grocery store runs, cooking us meals, while I worked. I had taken to reading, too, the collection of poems by Bachmann, given to me by a friend before I had left America. The poems were sharp and alarming, projecting from the depths of self. “Tomorrow I will stick my heart in my head/ and wear a red hat/ the entire town will see me/ sounding the alarm upon your street / The entire town will see me.” They encapsulated contradictions that Ingeborg Bachmann had come to represent to me: impulse combined with reason, the outwardness of feeling as both threat and fear. I had hoped that the “study” would be an opportunity to write about something other than myself for once, to write with purpose again, to engage in a form of apprenticeship by immersing myself in the work and the world of a writer whose brilliance, that of her anxious precision, was out of reach.
Instead, I worked my day job, not clocking out as diligently as I clocked in, and went on walks with G. every night. The duration of my exile was coming up on a year, and I was growing increasingly resentful of my life’s suspension. Other than seeing G. and, occasionally, friends or friends-of-friends, if they or I were passing through town, little attached me to a sense of my own self, besides my computer’s screen. I had come to hate my job for the dimension of vicariousness it imparted upon my days and for keeping me from writing, but it was the only thing that offered me a pathway to returning to life in New York, to the apartment G. and I shared, where I moved in two months before departing for Europe, an absence that was not intended to be longer than three months. A year later, G. still did not trust me enough to want to get married. The longer it carried on, the less trustworthy I felt myself to be.
Children, too: he wanted them and they would need to be considered relatively soon; I wasn’t sure, definitely not ready, and felt similarly to the narrator of Malina, terrified by agglomerations of them on playgrounds and otherwise and preferred the idea of “propagating myself with words.” I was sure I wanted to be with G., a man I loved like I have not anybody else before and could not imagine being without, and I was sure I wanted to write. Children would likely make the latter impossible, given the finances, my flagging reserves of life-force, and the emotional toll such a thing must take on one’s life. Female relatives kept telling me that the desire to procreate would awaken in me when the time comes, but if not my prime child-bearing years, then when? It’s impossible to know, as it is impossible to predict whether or not you will experience horrible postpartum depression, and become one of those women who drowns their child or throws it out of a window; even the slim possibility of such a thing alone is enough to dissuade me from having children. But I did not want to deprive G. of fatherhood and so, was preemptively mourning the life I had wanted, and tried to orient myself towards the life I should want.
I continued living out of different permutations of my carry-on suitcase, finding that what seemed appropriate in one city rarely translated well in the next, the worn brown horse-bit loafer losing its slightly ironic flair as it stepped from the streets of Florence onto those of Vienna, the crisp pin-striped button up from London losing all attitude when worn in the relaxed manner for which I had bought it and instead looking either unintentionally disheveled, or, when buttoned up properly and combined with the loafers, like I sold luxury real estate for a living. I tried to shop for something that didn’t feel like wearing someone else’s skin, largely without success, until, at a thrift store I came across a beige pencil skirt. It maintained a comfortable distance from my curves, grazing but not clinging to them, confirming that I have a body but concealing what it looked like; to complement it, I got an oversized shirt, also beige, with large breast pockets where at different times, I would put keys, money, lighters. I felt like a tourist in my new outfit, which is exactly what I was now permanently, no longer at home anywhere. In it, I could go to a church or on a hike, to a museum or a safari, to breakfast or to dinner, to a work meeting or a bar. It was anonymous and ideal for a woman who no longer knew herself or wished to be known by anybody else.
On his birthday, G. only learned where we were going as we got on the train. I was in much better spirits and we spent the four hours of the journey in giddy excitement, having würstl with kren while everyone we knew was having a hot dog or two in honor of Memorial Day. We walked around and rode the tram a lot in Prague, ate meats and drank beer. We went to see Villa Winternitz, the only one of the villas designed by Adolf Loos—his last—that was open to the public that weekend. The villa was commissioned by a Jewish lawyer, Dr. Josef Winternitz, and his family. They lived there for nine years; in 1941 it was confiscated by the Nazis, and in 1943 the entire family was sent to Theresienstadt and then Auschwitz. The men of the family died in the gas chambers, the women returned to Prague, but never to the villa. The villa, later seized by the communists, belonged to the city of Prague and, until 1997, was a kindergarten.
It is beautiful: light flooding the rooms through large windows, stairs painted a raspberry hue against the icy blue of the walls, a floorpan wherein the spaces of the house fold neatly into each other, and all of Prague visible from the terrace. As we stood there, clouds gathered and heavy drops of rain started falling.
At the train station we held each other for a long time before we went our separate ways. I waited for my train to Vienna as I watched his torso float downwards, out of view, on the escalator, to the metro; this would take him to the airport. The next time I would see him would be a reconciliation after a break up, which would be followed by another, and then another one again.
Back in Vienna: Corpus Christi, the bloody mattress, the switch.
At the height of this breakdown, I dragged myself out to the Kunsthistorisches Museum; I remember sitting on a bench near it, in my unknown woman’s outfit, crying to my father. I told him that I could not do it anymore, this state of exile that would go on for however-long; that I would be coming back to Moscow; I was ready to give up, to commit suicide by hometown. At the ticket counters of museums, all year, I had been asked where I was from, “for statistics,” and I would always say that I was from America. “Moscow,” I said quietly to the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Inside, I found God, depicted in the renaissance paintings: God on an orb in the sky, God as a head in the clouds, God as a dove keeper in the clouds with an orb.
My last two weeks in Vienna were spent quietly, in places where I could dissolve into the city. I took to haunting museums and coffee houses, the neighborhood restaurants where G. and I would go to. I was no longer intent on moving to Moscow. I went to get a manicure another three times; I no longer pretended not to be Russian also, after a failed attempt to make an appointment in any other language. After that, the receptionists only spoke Ukrainian to me, and I would respond to the questions I understood and ask to repeat those I didn’t. During my appointments I sat in silence, only greeting and thanking the technicians to whom I was assigned. I tipped the American way. The city did not seem to mind my doing this; all of my interactions were smooth as pebbles, no foothold into anything that would qualify as ties to a place. Strictly business.
Only once was my ghostly existence punctured. I had gone to see Heldenplatz, Thomas Bernhardt’s 1988 play, at the Burgtheater. During intermission, I stepped outside to smoke. I debated fleeing to Café Landtmann, when a young man in a t-shirt approached me to ask me what it was that all of these people were taking a smoke break from. I told him, and he asked me if it was any good, looking for conversation. I shrugged, because I couldn’t yet tell, because I felt many of the local references were lost on me. Not unjustly, he took this to be an unwillingness to engage, and promptly left me to finish my cigarette, but for a moment I was surprised to have commanded this momentary attention, in my anonymous beige skirt and anonymous beige shirt and my hair pulled back and all of my ghostly absence.
I regretted staying for the entire four hours of the play. I wanted to walk home, but there was a torrential downpour. I got soaked just running across the street to the tram, in which I stood wet, under its sallow light. Occasionally I noticed someone’s eyes on me; nothing unusual for a wet young woman alone after dark, anonymity washed away by the particularity of her situation.
The Bachmann study never came to fruition, but in the final days of my time in Vienna I decided to go to Ungargassenland, the “claustrophobic kingdom” established by Malina’s narrator. “An intoxicated land” where only two houses were to be found—Ungargasse 6, where she and Malina live, and Ungargasse 9, where her other lover Ivan and his children live. It took me barely a twenty minute U-bahn ride to the Landstraße, and a five or so minute walk until I had made it to this bowed street. On my way to number 6, I passed a hospice. Hospiz Österreich said the plaque on its wall.An old lady sat outside on a foldout stool, watching the street; she was dressed in raggedy, fuzzy clothing, her wrinkles so deep they obstructed her face. As I walked by, she shouted after me a familiar hello in Russian: Здравствуй! Not unlike how my own grandmother greets me still. I did not register immediately and picked up my pace in order to avoid the truck that was parking at the same time, and as I stood at Ungargasse 6, the tone of recognition in her voice, her recognition of me, began to haunt me.
At Ungargasse 6, there is an Indian restaurant now; next door there is a tall arched entryway with an ornate gate and buzzers for the apartments, one of which, in the minds of pilgrims such as myself, says the name Malina. Ungargasse 9 houses the offices of a software company. I did not turn back to speak to the woman. I walked around the block back to the U-bahn, and in 20 minutes I was back in Margareten.
The blood stain did not come out of the fitted sheet, so the last thing I did in Vienna was go to IKEA. Walking around in search of an identical replacement for the bloodied DVALA, I was struck by the lived-in quality of the displays, how all of them suggested spaces inhabited by real people, gone to fetch something in the next room, back in a minute—a cushion slightly askew, a wine glass on a coaster, misplaced reading glasses. I thought about how this, a place without real walls, would be perfect for disappearing into.
I found the sheet I needed and left.
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