This Lime Tree Bower My Prison

Our building, a huge gray, three-story structure with multiple angles and corners, houses nine spacious apartments. For a city known for its low crime rate, residences have an inordinate amount of physical security--sturdy, high fences and locked gates, and high screens of mature trees. A 6'-high fence of gray stone, cement, and green metal bars surrounds our building. We enter first through a locked gate near the street. From there we walk past overgrown, knee-length weedy flowerbeds down a brick walk dappled with brown slugs and gorgeous gray-white snails until we reach our building's lobby entrance, a small foyer holding the apartment mailboxes. Proceeding through through this door to another locked door, we ascend to the third floor and another lock, this one on our own door.

Although we notice signs of life in our building such as umbrellas leaning against doorjambs, an elevator door hissing closed, or a morning newspaper on a mat, we have laid eyes on none but our neighbors down the hall, whom we met the day we arrived, when the two of them burst upon us and asked our names. They are from Syria, the man told us, and have lived in Vienna for 50 years; I am guessing that they are Jewish and, although I would not say they were refugees, they most likely emigrated because of the religion I imagine them to have (as I enter the second tier of speculation). The husband speaks thickly accented English; it is unclear whether his wife speaks it or any other language, though she is excellent at nodding. Although he asked our names, he did not offer his or his wife's, and when I requested their names he seemed not to understand. Both are elderly, frail, and elfin; he stood under the hallway light with wild bouffant white hair and bright blue eyes full of energy, and she by their doorway in the shadows--with a high, multicolored, feral-looking hair-do, she stood in a floor-length housedress, wearing an expression that was welcoming yet made me think there might be a cauldron in her kitchen. Their faces are ridged with friendly ruts and wrinkles. "Haff a trink of vine viss us," he said as he shut the door in parting. Other than a moment two weeks later when he was hanging a sign on the apartment building door about a broken lock, neither Linda nor I have seen either of them since. We know they are there only by the small, fetid bags of citrus carcasses that they set outside their door for long periods before conveying them to the trash bin in front of our building. It's quiet and the building often has a deserted feel to it. In Vienna it is against the law to make noise in your residence that can be heard outside it after 10 p.m. on weekdays and, with the exception of Saturday morning, throughout the weekend. We can live with that.

The Rest of the Social Gallimaufry

Now and again the tram rides present an opportunity to make a new acquaintance, but nothing yet that I want to take advantage of. I ride the same ram line often enough that I am beginning to recognize a number of my fellow passengers. On Sunday when Linda and I were heading down to see the Hapsburg palace apartments, I recognized a woman whom I had seen on three previous occasions. She is tall and slender, aged 73 (as she told another passenger in my hearing); she looks prosperous and is fashionably dressed. She always sports a hat, and on this late-morning ride she had on a large straw flophat, its brim fashionably contoured in accenting curves, and sunglasses, looking like Norma Desmond in the 1940s(?) movie Sunset Strip. Her habit is to sit on one side of the car and ask the nearest young man across the aisle to open the tram window above her head. This is always the opening in her conversational gambit. Her English is fluent, and when she strikes up a conversation with a non-local rider, it is in that language since, it seems, most European and Asian visitors here know at least some English and use it if they don't know German. Her questions, punctuated with deep uh-uh-uh-uh forced laughs, soon become plentiful and personal--as in asking their ages and those of family members, why people are in town, and what their occupations are; she talks about her children, who live in distant cities. I suspect she rides the tram in and out of the town center several times a day; upon arrival at Schottentur station, she wanders the nearby rose garden--where I have twice seen her--returns home, and a bit later once again gets the tram to the center. She wears a set of diamonds on her left hand and is, I am guessing, a widow--and obviously lonely. Seeing her makes my thoughts drift not just to Sunset Strip but to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? ...and to other people desperate to re-create a past that those around them can never share. My thoughts drift, too, to people I have run into at other times in my life, including a 50-ish woman at Embassy Rome who used to tell any stranger in line at the cafeteria about her divorce and miscarriages. I am sorry for them, but I will never make eye contact with her or her avatars.

And...

I shall probably blog little about our American acquaintances and potential good friends to be made here, because, in part, they seem to be in a separate compartment from our experience of the local culture, even as they are very much a part of our Vienna world. I am inclined to leave them their privacy. But not wishing to leave that part of our experience a total blank...

On Saturday, we met several of Linda's co-workers and their families at a dinner and Austrian wine - tasting event hosted by two couples. We have also met one of Linda's counterparts from another Embassy office, and with her we enjoyed an "Italian" restaurant in the city center. (We have had some additional good leads on good restaurants and will follow up on them in the weekends ahead.) I must also mention two new acquaintances who have been our cultural, social, and culinary guides. When we arrived on July 23, our sponsors were assiduous in making sure we settled in as comfortably as possible. They drove us to large grocery, electronics, and housewares stores to get supplies, and they showed us some of the eccentricities involved in local shopping and getting around on public transportation, as well as sharing restaurant dinners with us on a couple of occasions. We could not have asked for a more generous, thorough introduction to our new lives here.