AUSTRIA-HUNGARY 1898
THE OPERA WAS REACHING a crescendo, and I couldn’t hear a single note.
Still, it was enough just to be there, the opera house packed to the rafters, the rich current of electricity in the air, the warm bodies in their best gowns, the noiseless thrum of it all.
Mutter nudged at my shoulder, and when I turned to face her, she mouthed, ‘Excuse me, Tobias, can you let me out? I need the bathroom. Danke.’
Leaving the show during such a climactic moment would’ve been a criminal act for anyone else, but we’d been here every night for a month – my father was the star of the show.
No sooner had she left the back row than an unfamiliar body slid into the seat beside me. There was a subtle ripple in the atmosphere, a shift in the heat of the air, as I turned to face him.
His eyes were a murky hazel, his features narrow and pointed, and ash-blonde curls fell around his face in waves. He wore a navy sack coat with a matching waistcoat, a high-collared white shirt and tall top hat. Resting beside him on the velvet seat was an ornate wooden cane topped with gold. His right foot bent inwards at a harsh angle, the muscles on the leg severely atrophied.
‘Are you enjoying the music?’ he asked inanely. As I read his lips, I picked up that the German was accented; he was Hungarian, perhaps, or Bohemian. I’d become proficient at lip-reading over the roar of the machinery in the cotton mills of Girangaon, and it served me well now.
‘No,’ I said flatly, watching his face. ‘I’m profoundly deaf. The shapes made by their mouths look lovely, though.’
A flash of awkwardness slid across his face. ‘Ah.’
‘It’s fine.’ I gestured down to my own sharply cut tuxedo; the winged shirt collar and neatly pressed red pocket square, the careful embroidery of a silver dove I’d stitched around the breast pocket. ‘I’m here for the fashion.’
In all my lives, I’d been poor more often than I’d been wealthy. Needless to say, I far preferred the latter, not just because I loathed being cold or hungry or vulnerable, but also because money could buy clothes . Fin de siècle Vienna was particularly perfect for me, because my mother was an esteemed costumier on the operatic scene, having trained at the Académie de l’Opéra National de Paris before moving to Austria-Hungary with my father. She was now a revered pioneer of the women’s fashion revolution, eschewing wasp-waisted dresses in lieu of more comfortable – but still beautiful – cuts.
Even though it was considered a peculiar fascination for a young boy, I’d been following her around since I was twelve, pins pressed between my teeth and sweat on my brow as I lifted heavy underskirts backstage, loving every moment of my apprenticeship. Mutter always said the atmosphere was pure chaos, but since my own world was entirely quiet I could disappear into the beads and boning, the luxurious fabrics and intricate embroidery, the glittering jewels and dramatic waistcoats, the sharp tailoring and silky bolts of crêpe de Chine.
‘How did you get tickets?’ I asked the boy I assumed to be Arden. The production of Der Ring des Nibelungen had been sold out for months.
He grimaced. ‘My father. He’s a decorated hussar in the Honvéd. And by decorated , I mean he committed horrific atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and they love him for it.’
A kind of pacifistic despair bolted through my chest. ‘The bloodlust never stops being celebrated, does it?’
‘Stimmt. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps, and has spent my whole life bitter that I’m …’ He gestured to his cane, and the malformed leg beside it. ‘Part of me is glad I won’t live past eighteen. I can’t take his resentment much longer.’
‘How lovely that you’re so well adjusted to death and murder,’ I snapped, and a heavy-browed woman in a pink blancmange dress glared at me from along the row. Lowering my pitch to a serpentine hiss, I added, ‘I, for one, will miss this life. The future I could’ve had in it.’
‘It does suit you.’ He looked me up and down, from the Maison Spitzer topcoat to my deeply polished shoes.
‘Vielen Dank,’ I muttered, the words dripping with sarcasm.
‘What’s your name? Your here name, I mean.’
‘Tobias. You?’
‘Ferenc.’ Studying me intently, he quirked his thin, purplish lips. ‘Which you feels the most like you?’
The question caught me off-guard. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Girl? Boy?’ There was something hawk-like in the search of his eyes. ‘There’s a German activist, Ulrichs, who talks of a third gender, though he seems to use the notion purely to explain men who love men.’
I leaned back in my seat. It was something I’d given great thought to over the centuries, while navigating ever-shifting and perpetually confusing gender norms, but I didn’t quite know how to articulate it.
‘I don’t feel like any of them,’ I said slowly. ‘I don’t feel, in my heart, that I’m a boy. But neither do I feel like I am inherently a girl. My soul isn’t rooted to any of them. I’m just me. No particular body feels more “right” than the other, nor more wrong. They’re just vessels. And with you … it doesn’t matter to me how you look, what form you take.’ I tapped the top of his cane. ‘You’re just you.’
It was true. Even though he was here to kill me, my heart burned for him. I wanted to nestle my face into his neck, to breathe in the papery soft skin there. I wanted to talk, to touch, to share. To revel in the only soul on earth that truly understood me. I wanted time – which, for an immortal soul, was a curious thing to be lacking.
We had been so in love, in our previous life. We’d worked in the cotton mills of Bombay, whispering sweet nothings in earthen Marathi as we walked back to our chawls each night. We had grown up side by side, Arden a long-haired girl with a fiery temper, me a scrawny-limbed boy with bad lungs. We had shared every meaningful moment of our lives, from early childhood to adolescent rebellion.
On the night she’d killed me, rage against the abominable British had simmered in every cracked pavement, in every muttered conversation held beneath the roar of machinery. Fat chimneys jutted into the lilac sky, chuffing out a thick smoke that smudged the dusty night around us. The whole of Girangaon’s factory district was fragrant with the scent of pav bhaji. The day before our eighteenth birthday, the streets were being set up for Sharad Navratri, and a gaggle of travelling dancers had practised their tamasha beside us.
As Arden withdrew the inevitable knife, her final words had been: ‘Until we meet again, my love.’
But here in the Viennese opera house, Arden’s reappearance didn’t feel like love. It felt like a cruelty, a farce, a writhing pit of frustration from which I longed to clamber free.
Arden visibly mulled over the idea that I felt no connection to a physical vessel. ‘You really don’t have a preference?’
‘No,’ I said, clipped. ‘Do you?’
He removed his hat and peered into the bottom as though about to pull out a white rabbit. ‘I think I prefer being a boy, but I couldn’t say why, exactly. It almost defies language, the way it’s impossible to describe the exact taste of a strawberry.’ Then he said something else, but his face was tilted too far around for me to lip-read.
Glancing up, I noticed my mother returning from the bathroom, her pearl-beaded periwinkle gown sliding along the parquet floor. A cord of grief yanked through me, letting loose a furious geyser of anger. Anger at the situation, at Arden, at what was soon to happen. What always happened, no matter what I did, no matter how far and fast I ran.
‘You’re procrastinating,’ I muttered, with a sudden leap of panic. I didn’t want my mother to see this.
He shrugged, replacing his hat atop perfect pale curls. ‘There’s no particular urgency to proceedings. We don’t turn eighteen for another three months.’
‘So would you like to spend that time falling in love, only to destroy me anyway?’ I asked, the temperature in my voice rising. ‘Or shall we get it over with now?’
‘Evelyn –’
‘Nein. Do you even care what you take from me over and over and over again?’ My mother was almost at the end of the row. I shot her a final look of love; a goodbye, and a thank-you, and an apology. The air in the opera house was pulled taut by my father’s denouement. ‘I’ve always believed our souls find each other, somehow, but that was wrong. You don’t have a soul.’
Emotion twitched at his jaw. ‘You don’t know what you’re say–’
‘Oh, verpiss dich.’
I pulled out the gold pistol tucked in my breast pocket and shot Ferenc neatly in the head.