Then there was an explosion and the windows trembled. They could hear crying and shouting, but the shell had gone into another building, not theirs. There came another blast, louder than the first, and this time the windows of the bedroom shattered.

Thinking she should help, Lena went through the apartment and out into the corridor, which was filled with smoke and dust. There was a man lying, bleeding, at the far end. She saw Rudolf and Niklas running towards him. Then there was no floor beneath them, and they were gone.

Rudolf had been wrong about how he might die, and he was wrong about what happened to him afterwards. The fighting lasted less than a day and the Government allowed friends and family to collect the bodies of the dead.

A funeral was arranged by Rudolf’s family in Klagenfurt and Lena took the train from Vienna. She managed to offer some consolation to his father without admitting that she had shared an apartment and sometimes a bed with Rudolf. While the coffin was lowered into the ground she could think only of the jolly young man who had waved to her on his crutches in the hospital. She imagined the crutches in there with him … his bright blue eyes … and the floor of the corridor disappearing beneath him.

Afterwards, she read everything in the papers. They named many of the dead, including Rudolf, a ‘promising young lawyer’, though estimates of their number varied from two hundred to six hundred. More than a thousand, it was agreed, had been wounded. The leader of the Social Democrats was forced into exile; the Government began legislation to outlaw the party and all the trade unions. Red Vienna was dead, and only the Fatherland Front remained; it was, said one newspaper, the final triumph of the old Catholicism. Lena found it hard to believe that the corridor with the flimsy doors, the women-only bedroom, the pea soup and the wheezing accordion had been part of something that was going to be called history.

She had believed that Rudolf loved her, but was too diffident to make his feelings clear. Her desire to help him, and to ease her loneliness, had led to misunderstandings and dismay, to confusions lasting years. Yet when she thought of him now, buried in the Catholic cemetery of his home town, she felt resigned. The country he had loved seemed set on some twisted course that, for all she knew, could entangle the rest of Europe. Dead Rudolf had at least been true to his beliefs. What she chose to remember of him was not any marginal deceit or unacknowledged self-interest, but his high spirits and his spontaneous kindness to a fifteen-year-old girl.

Two days after the funeral, she took the train for Vienna.

5

Anton Heideck was sitting in his apartment, smoking a cigar and staring out of the window with his boots up on the desk, when he received a telephone call from the editor of the magazine for which he had written his article about the Schloss Seeblick.