That was the thing with Giuliana, he’d understood: she said it right out. Always.

It was as if she could reach right in and say exactly the thing he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, put into words. She had learned that growing up, he was sure. Her father had walked out when she was four. Her mom had been a waitress, a cleaner, and some kind of higher up at the old folks place in Weiz. Too proud to go back to some place near Milan, the mom had stayed and made a new life, that of a single mom, with an Italian accent that could only remind all she met in the small town where they had been stranded that she was from an inferior society. You didn’t get many chances with a background like that.

Felix got by the lights near the schule and was soon in sight of the huge chestnut trees that hid much of the library across from the school. He began to add up the years people spent in schools of one kind or another. He thought of Vikki, a perpetual student in the making. If he was up at all, he was maybe in some cafe in Graz. He was probably chatting up a girl. Now that the spring was here, he might even be up on the Schlossberg at that cafe near the top, looking for unattached female tourists of a certain age.

It would be only later in the day that his friend would be arguing in that mocking way he had about how people were addicted to work, or how Austrians were boring, dutiful. Cowed that was his word. That required beer, probably at the Parkhaus in the evening, the restaurant in the city park that had just been rebuilt and had returned to popularity, pretty well instantly, with the melange of bohemians, disguised civil servants, artsies that Graz brought together with ease. As long as someone was paying for the beer, of course.