Every time she thought it was ending, it began again. She couldn’t understand what had brought the crying on. She had wanted to come to Vienna. It was her idea, her chance. She stood up and puffed out her cheeks. The tears would make her feel better, probably. She rubbed her eyes with a towel she pulled from her bag and looked into a mirror on top of the chest. The skin of her forehead was clear where she pulled back her hair, the different strands of auburn and straw, pushed a comb into one side and re-tied it all with a new ribbon, a purple one. Her reflection smiled at her, holding her eye, and she turned to unpack.

The best part about life in Vienna was the friendship of Rudolf. They had dinner not just on Fridays but on Tuesdays as well. After a few weeks, he invited her to a meeting of Rebirth in an upstairs room near the Café Central. Lena sat on a chair at the back, one of the few women among the earnest young men; but because of all the time she had spent with Rudolf she understood what they were discussing.

It was the Social Democrats who, despite being close to them politically, were the biggest problem for Rebirth. Vienna had become a socialist island within the shrunken country of Austria; the Social Democrats who ran the city had built large and popular developments to house the workers. They were no longer expected to live six to a room in a damp basement in the middle of the city, but were offered space in modern blocks with laundries and kindergartens. The new dwellings were away from the centre, the largest being on the edge of Döbling, whose older, stucco-fronted streets now seemed to belong to another century. To Rebirth’s irritation, the new housing with its dental clinics and lending libraries had given the Social Democrats a powerful grip on popular affection.

It was not that Rudolf and his colleagues disagreed with what the Democrats had done; it was just that it left so little room for Rebirth. All they could offer in addition was a religious element – an insistence that healthy living conditions were not merely a civic entitlement but part of a spiritual journey. Such ideas had been well received in the aftermath of the war, when people had looked for something radical to explain the trauma the world had been through; but it was becoming harder to sell. The division between Vienna and the rest of the country, which held to its old Catholic beliefs, meant that any talk of religion risked being associated with rural ignorance. It was atheism alone that had provided good water closets and on-site hairdressing.

Afterwards, Lena drank white wine with Rudolf and one or two of the others. There were vineyards in the city itself, she discovered, which was why the wine was so cheap. Carina would have liked Vienna, she thought. Within a few weeks, she knew her way round the city, even the lesser parts, beyond the Prater and across the Danube. Nowhere was too far to walk; and as she came to know the streets, her old home began to seem like another country. There was no point in writing to her mother because she couldn’t read. The person she cared most about was sailing a foreign sea and she was resigned to never seeing him again.