I say, “Please don’t believe what you hear: there, no ‘quiet songs implore you.’ It’s dead silent in Vienna. Music needs sky to rise into, and there’s no sky there. Above Vienna is a vault of iron and glass, a train-station ceiling over the Danube city that isn’t even on the Danube but on a sewer-like side channel of that river of waltzing waves. The city’s character is the inevitable consequence of this geo-political situation. Vienna is the last exit on the Nibelung line, its rails petering out soon after Fischamend. To be sure, Germany’s number two river of destiny was and is imbued with a tenacious attraction. Before and during my time, it pulled one Balkan-wards, and a correspondingly high number of expressive, artistic values had already drifted in the same direction. Schubert had long since transferred his activities to the Gellert Spa in Budapest; Haydn fiddled for the Telekis in Transylvania; Mozart—today en route to a long-term guest appearance in the Palestinian protectorate as a public-relations agent for the Bösendorfer piano factory—was at that time sojourning in the valleys of Kirtschaly where Richard Strauss cultivated roses. In the meantime, the eastward undertow of the cultural province had drawn Richard Wagner to the racially impeccable Linz, from where he directed operations. The Rhine Maidens, born in the Bohemian forest, built the Café Vindobona under the cast-iron ceiling of the Hauptbahnhof, much to the comfort of travelers to be sure, but unfortunately not to the promotion of the arts, as originally expected. Music, which rises, soon condenses on the volkishly antiseptic tiles and trickles down to coalesce on the folkloristic station mosaics to the tune of the Fiakerlied or the Radetzky March, or drains off into the Danube Canal in accordion chords of Schrammel music. The river swallows them in accord with its official duty as effluent drain, from time to time unofficially, at the end of the work day, and in pond-like aplomb, merely belching up a few bubbles of primal Viennese sound, the uatch-ewop-guop-shmoatz of a Heuriger song which, in strict adherence to the bylaws of the Schrammel guild, may only be performed by cleft palates.”

I banish the last crepuscular sun beam from the imperial town, sweep its corners free of chestnut blossoms and countesses and expand the night, give it echoing room above its well-still waters whose stony banks I clamp together with the heavy clasps of the bridges. I weave mist over their dark depths in which the five pale stars of each embankment lantern float like milky, suddenly luminescent colonies of water lilies.

And for good old Schwab who listens with bated breath, right there in the middle of the mind thus prepared to accept it, I place an enhanced copy of myself (or himself?)—like the egg of an ichneumon wasp that will hatch a murderous larva—projected in perspectival regression back into the purer element of boyhood, of the pale waterlily moons of Endymion to whom was given eternal youth but not immortality. . . and yet we have passed the threshold to the next, less pure phase of life, afflicted by wild dreams. No longer is it the beautiful boy; it’s me—me as I sit here like a Norn hunched over my magic box—but less impure of course, absolved of fourteen botched years of my life, not the twenty-nine-year-old of the here and now, Hamburg on the Elbe, in the half-standing villa of a merchant king—but rather me transported into the magic illumination of times gone by, purified in the mythic fountain of youth: orphaned prince of the blood, torn from the royal fatherland he has forgotten like a castaway in lotusland—a fifteen-year-old with my features, but ennobled and refined, a skinny adolescent with my character, but without the wolfishness, dreamy and bewildered, knowing and innocent, pious and disappointed and grieving from the beginning of time, wearing a wreath of Maytime confidence yet with dismay at the suffering world already in his eyes: a desperate lad in his thin schoolboy coat, driven out into the night by the bestial rectitude of his dutiful relatives.