The Sunday glow of the city was piercing. Naturally, I had known since the previous night what it meant: Vienna had surrendered and stood ready as a bride to receive the groom. A noisy stag party had taken place, a boisterous bridal shower, and this was an hour of the most delicate reflection. Vienna took one last look at itself in the mirror.

And yet it was frozen. A completely transparent block of ice encompassed Vienna and its spring air:

the Old German neo-Gothic town hall with the cast-iron knight on its spire, from which a long red flag with a black swastika in a white circle was now licking down like a devil’s tongue with a pill marked “poison.” The slender octagonal tower of the Minorite Church over the lilac clusters of the Volksgarten. (I am not mistaken: For what’s important here isn’t the botanical question of whether it’s possible that lilacs would be blossoming in Vienna in March; rather it’s a question of heraldry. Thus, the papal tiaras of the blossom candles most certainly stood white and yellow in the green balls of the chestnut trees on the Ring: the Vienna of hand kisses and fiacres bade a proper farewell to Straus, Strauss, and Hofmannsthal.) The grille-toothed titanic maw of the Castle Gate, which only yesterday had gargled with rickety taxis, grief-wrinkled fiacre nags, and bicyclists with chamois “shaving brushes” on their hats, was now caught in a gaping yawn, as if it were trying to swallow all the stony lion-clubbing and angel-cloud-billowing drama of the castle and the Michaeler Church into the void of the Heldenplatz behind it. The Graben with the kidney-shashlik skewer of the Plague Column and the tower of St. Stephen’s Cathedral looming so spectacularly over prosperous façades . . .

heading down the Spiegelgasse, I turned off to the New Market, and there was the flower woman.

She was the exemplar of the Viennese flower woman, as round as a barrel and (not just because of the cold) wreathed and wrapped in untold layers of petticoats, vests, jackets, coats, shawls, as well as scarves crisscrossing her bosom and back; bluish red like a tulip bulb and with fingers sprouting like fat root ends from her knitted wristlets.

She had left her baskets of primrose, violet, and narcissus posies, and they stood there tempting any dog’s leg, while she ran—no, rolled—in a drunken zigzag across the empty square. Only Raphael Donner’s smooth fountain nymphs, so beautiful and motionless in their slender grace, were watching her twirl and whirl and swirl, while she flung up her sleeve stumps with the root ends, as though trying futilely to take wing—and she shrieked, croaked, panted, “Heil! Siegheil! Siegheil!”. . . and although Viennese flower women have voices like Anatolian mule-drivers, she sounded very woeful, indeed stifled in the resonance of the huge void, like the lament of a hare drowning in a rain barrel.

Only then did it dawn on me that something extraordinary had occurred: an era had come to an end.