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“Oh, I am sorry, Fräulein. I have offended you.”

He reached out and took the tickets, one half in one strong young hand, the other half in the other, and began to tear.

“No.” Her hand came down on his own before more than half an inch of the priceless tickets had been torn in half. “You mustn’t do that.”

She was bright pink.

“But they are of no use to me.”

“Well, I suppose ...”

His face lit up.

“Then you will show me your Opera House? Yes?”

Show him the Opera. Surely that was different. Not a date. Not the sort of dates people went on who ...

accepted dates. More like a tour guide, really. A Viennese courtesy, showing a student from abroad one of the wonders of the Austrian capital. No harm in that ...

They met on the steps by arrangement at seven-fifteen. She had driven in from Grinzing and parked without trouble. They joined the bustle of the moving throng alive already with anticipatory pleasure.

If Edith Hardenberg, spinster of twenty loveless summers, were ever going to have an intimation of paradise, it was that night in 1990 when she sat a few feet from the stage and allowed herself to drown in the music. If she were ever to know the sensation of being drunk, it was that evening when she permitted herself to become utterly intoxicated in the torrent of the rising and falling voices.

In the first half, as Papageno sang and cavorted before her, she felt a dry young hand placed on top of her own. Instinct caused her to withdraw her hand sharply. In the second half, when it happened again, she did nothing and felt, with the music, the warmth seeping into her of another person’s blood-heat.

When it was over, she was still intoxicated. Otherwise she would never have allowed him to walk her across the square to Freud’s old haunt, the Café Landtmann, now restored to its former 1890 glory.

There it was the superlative headwaiter Robert himself who showed them to a table, and they ate a late dinner.

Afterward, he walked her back to her car. She had calmed down. Her reserve was reasserting itself.

“I would so like you to show me the real Vienna,” said Karim quietly. “Your Vienna, the Vienna of fine museums and concerts. Otherwise, I will never understand the culture of Austria, not the way you could show it to me.”

“What are you saying, Karim?”

They stood by her car. No, she was definitely not offering him a lift to his apartment, wherever it was, and any suggestion that he come home with her would reveal exactly what sort of a wretch he really was.

“That I would like to see you again.”

“Why?”

If he tells me I am beautiful, I will hit him, she thought.

“Because you are kind,” he said.

“Oh.”

She was bright pink in the darkness. Without a further word he bent forward and kissed her on the cheek. Then he was gone, striding away across the square. She drove home alone.

That night, Edith Hardenberg’s dreams were troubled. She dreamed of long ago. Once there had been Horst, who had loved her through that long hot summer of 1970 when she was nineteen and a virgin.

Horst, who had taken her chastity and made her love him. Horst, who had walked out in the winter without a note or an explanation or a word of farewell.

At first she had thought he must have had an accident, and she called all the hospitals. Then that his employment as a traveling salesman had called him away and he would call.

Later, she learned he had married the girl in Graz whom he had also been loving when his rounds took him there.

She had cried until the spring. Then she took all the memories of him, all the signs of his being there, and burned them. She burned the presents and the photos they had taken as they walked in the grounds and sailed on the lakes of the Schlosspark at Laxenburg, and most of all she burned the picture of the tree under which he had loved her first, really loved her and made her his own.