1920. It is the aftermath of the Great War and the Habsburg Empire — with its wide spectrum of cultures and languages — is breaking up into small nations. One day, Aurora wakes up in another country. She has not moved a single step, but her birthplace has a different colour on the new maps, her new country a different capital. Longing for the wider world they once belonged to, the man she loves has fled to Vienna, the heart of their vanished motherland. To join him in Vienna — which is now abroad — she needs a passport from her new capital, Bisanthe.
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Everything in her new country was so unlike what she knew back home. Even the name of the city Aurora was heading for sounded different, the German one-syllable Wien stretched into three: Vi-en-na, pushing it even farther away. Aurora rehearsed variations of the city’s name. Vienna had the ring of a mechanism that stumbled on some glitch. She tried the softer Wien, indulged in its soothing resonance.

She missed Vienna the way you miss a city you’ve left, not one you’re going to. In the face of new experiences, the place you come from now is, now isn’t. It keeps slipping in and out of your thoughts. And so did Vienna in hers. In intervals of oblivion a new city developed in her mind, whose contours Aurora kept expanding. The core from which it arose receded into the distance and dispersed to make way for a city of her own design. 

To citizens of the new nation-kingdom, Vienna meant no more than any other Western capital. Conversations, newspapers, broadcasts made it clear. Many projected onto Vienna whatever they’d heard about it: in their minds, it grew as just another city of dreams (or remains thereof). It meant everything but their homeland’s heart.

And where was the throbbing heart of Aurora’s journey, now? 

Where her place on the newly drawn maps?

As a matter of fact, Aurora didn’t know how many kilometres lay between her and Vienna. Until now, she had approximated the length of her journey by the numbers of train stations, towns and cities she would pass through, with their names in the many languages of the Empire. Time had come to approach the matter more closely. If she knew the distance, she could convert kilometres into steps, steps into days, to adjust her energy to the task of finding Hermann Zeller, who had fled to Vienna to join its legendary Arts & Crafts School. Where else would someone like him go to but the still magnetic centre of the extinct Empire? 

People did make journeys on foot to faraway places, didn’t they? Some walked as far as the western margins of Europe. From east to west they walked, rarely the other way around, as if guided by the instinct of migratory birds. Artists did it, poets, prisoners of war, restless men and even a few women.

Hermann would wait for her in Vienna as long as it took.

He would wait for her to appear, a wreath of cornflowers in her hands.

*

The Diplomatic Legation of the Habsburg Empire in Bisanthe, operated there, on a street called Vienna, until the end of the war. The Embassy of Austria was opened in 1920, at the same location.

Aurora asked for directions to the Legation rather than the Embassy. Some passers-by had no idea where that was. Others even ignored that Austria stood for the name of a new a country carved out of the Empire’s Hereditary Lands, or didn’t know what the word legation meant. So much the better, since the ideas some passers-by did have turned out to be vague or utterly wrong. 

An elderly lady with a grenadine hat and a used violin case under her arm at last informed Aurora that this was indeed the street, but its name had recently been changed. She pointed to a sumptuous building. The Embassy’s façade was obstructed by a truck-and-trailer, its function indicated in huge brown and gold letters on one side:

                     Eclipse moving trucks

“Everything around here has changed, things keep changing all the time! So confusing! We call it Embassy, now,” the lady added, “Legation sounds like a lesser office. Few see the difference, anyway.” 

She patted her violin case like an old friend’s shoulder, then tucked it under her arm:

“Before the war, I never missed a New Year’s concert here. But I prefer Legation. It sounds like a bond with our vanished homeland, something that still holds us together. Don’t you think so?”

She did, happy to meet someone who knew where she came from. She gave the old lady her arm, the sleeve of her coat on Aurora’s lighter than a shadow. They crossed the street and parted in front of the gates of the impressive building, which were wide open, alas not in Aurora’s honour. 

Sunlight passed through a glass awning and set on the marble stairs. Beyond the arched windows, trompe-l’oeil clouds animated a ceiling as powder blue as the one in the ballroom where Hermann told Aurora he’d paint a cloud for her travel on. 

At the end of the street, the elderly lady grew smaller, the violin under her arm larger. 

The shadow of a pigeon flashed across the macadam.

Aurora stepped into the courtyard, weaving through a busy stream of people, tried to make sense of it all. Young men with sweater sleeves rolled up, chairs on their heads, carpets on their shoulders, or round flat metal boxes in their hands rubbed elbows with ladies in tight skirts and twin-sets carrying typewriters, cans of paint, huge paper rolls. None of them paid any attention to Aurora’s courteous inquiries. None minded her presence either. 

A baby bat lay flat on the ground. Its budding pink wings — the transparency of the skin between thumb and forefinger — had turned dark green and charcoal black at the edges. A soft shape on a bed of dust.

The embassy had visibly changed quarters. Some company was about to move into the building, she guessed from bits of conversation she caught in the busy courtyard. A man in a trench coat, briefcase under his arm, eventually stopped to listen to Aurora. He wrote down the new address of the Austrian Embassy on a piece of paper, ignoring her explanations. 

Around the corner, on Carol Boulevard, a taxicab approached and, unlike others that flew by her, stopped. She handed the driver the slip of paper and stepped inside confidently. Inside, the odour of clean leather and upholstery felt hospitable. 

The man proved to be more polite and knowledgeable than necessary. No matter how smart the driver, after a confusing morning you don’t want someone with a degree in philosophy giving you a tour of the city. You just want someone to get you safely where you need to go by the shortest possible way. But the more this driver talked, the less likely that seemed.

Despite the initial promise, the drive was beginning to feel like a fiasco. A route diversion confirmed Aurora’s fears. Street names and chaotic traffic patterns presaged a delirious trajectory, so much so that — with the car passing a Luna Park, its Ferris wheel spinning so slowly as if it weren’t moving — they might have already reached Vienna. But no, the taxicab was still winding its way through the city of Bisanthe’s erratic logic of growth. 

In the huge eye of the Ferris wheel Aurora is a small hesitant figure.

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Aurora carried with her a proper picture of herself, taken at home in the only portrait studio in Honigberg to survive the war. Hand-painted, mounted on cardboard, with Adler’s flourished signature in the right-hand corner.  

The croaky voice behind the desk at the Embassy’s new address informed Aurora that her best picture didn’t meet the requirements. And that she should please remember to fill in the rubric: profession. For three hours she had stayed in line. Like everywhere in the now expanded kingdom, administrations were being reshuffled. The Embassy didn’t yet have a photo studio, but there was one equipped with an automatic machine, the employee told Aurora, “in the immediate vicinity of our offices.” Vicinity sounded vague to her. Where she came from, things were orderly, information precise. Gestures meant care for others and respect for oneself. And now, here were these busy, imprecise people, here was her life in progress, chaotic, hanging by a thread from this travel booklet. 

A small geyser is boiling inside, in spite of which she adapts to the situation. 

In the lobby of the Embassy, she picks up a city plan from a fan-shaped stack near the exit. A red circle marked the location of the photo studio, which was indeed only a block away.

After all, things may turn out to be less difficult than they seem.

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On her way to the automatic photo machine, Aurora tried out possible answers to that other question raised by the Embassy employee. Profession: not a seamstress or a hat maker, and not exactly a painter either. 

What then?

A something else — to be defined.

Identity pictures came out of the fantastic automaton's mouth in fours.  

Four Auroras in one take, all looking the same, or close to. 

Four Auroras staring at her as startled as she was, all held together within the wavy contours of the photo sheet. Four strangers, or variations on a theme, in degrees of black and white. A mosaic of herself. 

Standing still and also moving, ready to go but going all the time. 

Going all the time

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At the corner of the street, a man held out his hand. She slipped hers into her purse to search for some coins. 

“Three thousand,” the man whispered, and produced a booklet from his pocket.

Aurora dropped her coins into his palm and crossed the street. There was no way she’d buy a forged passport, no matter how long it took to get hers. 

Back at the Embassy, she had to wait her turn again. In the line, people chatted about this and that. The chatter went on and on, as did the orchestra of typewriters behind the desk, their uneven flow suspended for an instant by the end-of-line jingle. Everyone had an idea of what their Empire had been, of where they stood now, where the world was going.

There was the habitation theory: 

“One big house, our Danube Monarchy! And look, now we live in tiny cabins! Where has the world of yesterday gone?”

And there was the fiction theory: 

“That Empire! a figment of the imagination! The Crown Lands, mere chapters in a novel!”

“Right! The great European novel! You talk like in books. See how far you can read into it, with these new obstinate na-ti-ons popping up from between the covers!”

Aurora listened and wondered: was it possible to be deprived of one’s homeland? To be a citizen of a fiction? 

“Pfft!” one man exclaimed, and to add conviction to his statement, he blew air into his empty pastry bag and crushed it between his palms: “the Turk, the Russ, the Habsburg: three empires have melted like snow! One after the other. No more of this supra-national stuff.”

Did he say super-natural? Could the former citizens of the Empire have been turned into a bloodline of spectres in a flash? 

“Listen here, gentlemen,” another tried to make his point, passing Aurora, the only woman in the line, “this New Austria is nothing but a pathetic relic of the black-and-yellow outfit, our Empire, ripped apart long before the Great War, back in 1867, with that blasted Compromise the Habsburgs made to survive as a Dual Monarchy: a solution for some, the root of trouble for others.”

“Leave poor orphan Austria to its own devices! This is not about Austria, new or old, or the extinct double-headed eagle of our coat of arms. It’s about Europa, don’t you see? That’s the ship we’re on now. Sailing to who knows where.”

 “More or less,” muttered a young man who had taken a few steps back from the crowd, as if to avoid being contaminated by confusing ideas.

“Let me tell you something, guys: it’s all about geography.”

“More rather than less,” the man at the edge of the crowd pursued his line of thought.

 “Why go to Vienna when everyone in the Greater Kingdom of Levante is now looking to Paris or America? ”

“Who’s everyone? Speak for yourself!”

“The land of the heart — ”

“Split from the start —”

“A mirage —”

“The nation is where you are born. Full stop.”

“Nothing but an illusion, that’s what this New Austria is!” said one, a thick book under his arm from which he must have picked his words. “That’s where we are going to, or through, fellow involuntary citizens of this or that new nation.”

Going all the time

This Great-er Kingdom of Levante, her new country now! 

It is and it isn’t. 

Belonging? What to? What for?

There are no fixed points in space

She doesn’t feel not home here, but she isn’t at home either. 

Because where is Hermann? Where are the colours they squeezed from plants in the fields of Seven Mounts to paint or to dye textiles? Her birthplace had been part of a wider world. What turn was her journey taking in this confusing confection of smaller worlds, broken off her former homeland, their names so eerie, their boundaries so narrow?

And that missing rubric: profession! She couldn’t quite figure out the right words for it. Colour business came to mind, and she wrote that on the form. It sounded somehow consequential. No one had the time to ask her what that meant, exactly.

At the desk, scissors in hand, the Embassy employee picks one of the four glossy paper Auroras at random, severs it from the lot, and hands her the photo sheet with the remaining three. The woman then glues the Aurora which had left a square hole in a corner of the sheet to the first page of the passport, next to the legal stamp, adorns it with a seal, and thrusts it under the slit of the desk window. 

Here they were, in her hands, the credentials that Aurora Nan’s life hung on: a booklet, some 9x13 inches large, with lilac pages, a pale gryphon watermark on each of them, and 

                                     Pasport for abroad 

printed on the cover (where did the other s from “passport” slip?). It included a visa for Austria, which was abroad now. 

The three other pictured pieces of herself turned out not to be superfluous. A visa was required, the employee explained, for each of the countries she had to pass through — each of them no longer a part of the larger world she had been born in. For each, she had to fill in a form and attach a photo. Then, wait for an answer.

So much waiting. 

So much paper. 

So much palaver.

Visas, vistas, was-ist-das — 

No fixed points

Letters of transit

It all hangs by a thread —

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She kept the card Angel Nicola had given her at the Bisanthe train station. 

The time had come for Aurora to make good use of her fellow traveller’s calling card, her stay in the capital having turned out to be longer, her savings insufficient to travel abroad, and this despite her new country’s currency, grain and petrol doing so fantastically well for a marginal kingdom on the international stock exchange. She had to find a job. 

Lacking a reliable map to find the address, Aurora trusted her intuition. The awning at the entrance to an imposing building told her that it was none other than the former Legation, in whose place some company was moving on the very day she went there to pick up the passport she needed to reach Vienna. Meanwhile the main gate had been cleared of boxes, the dust that coated the slabs swept away by the wind and rain, the bat’s tiny body along with it. 

Mister Angel Nicola, Managing Director of Nautilus & Co., was wearing white gloves that concealed his cat-eye cufflinks. He was about to leave the office. His back was turned to the door, his left arm slipping down the sleeve of his coat as if it were made of water. As he picked up his hat, this young woman — awkward, but elegant — took him by surprise, her head slightly tilted to the right, the air of someone who seemed to belong there, despite a fast heartbeat flushing her cheeks. He stared at Aurora, considered the kind of attention the young woman commanded:

“How has life in the city been treating you, Miss Aurora?”

“Like life in the city, Sir. Thank you!” 

“No formality, please! Call me Angel.”

On the telephone, when she called to make the appointment (which he seemed to have forgotten about), his voice had been more distant, deeper. Now it sounded soft, as it had on the train, and quite familiar.

A good job is hard to find in a hectic city, a changing country, he pointed out when she told him the reason of her visit. He might have something for her, if she liked the movies, as he imagined a young woman like her would. Her intentions, she assured him, had nothing to do with aspiring to be a movie star! Just a stint in his company, or elsewhere, to help her on her journey. 

“Still keen about going to Vienna?”

“As ever, if not even more.”

Having clarified this aspect, he made a call to postpone his business appointment and they went to a Café across the street. The waiter’s conversation was long and didn’t make much sense to her. When the coffee finally arrived, lukewarm and too bitter for her taste, Angel asked Aurora if she could read the fortune in the grounds.

“Yours or mine?” she replied, with a confidence she hadn’t considered part of her repertoire.

“Say, the one you can guess better.”

“You see, Angel, I can make out exactly what you can: dark brown lace, specks and blanks, like black eyes of dominoes, in random patterns. Who else but you can tell what’s at the bottom of the cup: not some map of fortune, but some hope that we are having a hand over the future,” she smiled, then cleared her voice, as if to round out the lines of her argument, “No, it wouldn’t be fair to make up a story out of specks and blanks. Not that I couldn’t, if you insisted.”

“Never mind! That’s not why we’re here,” he said, curious, really, about how she’d made her way through the city.

Aurora finished her coffee and considered for a moment swirling the cup in her palm after all and flipping it upside down to let the grounds dry, more for the ritual’s sake than to look for anything in them. But she didn’t. Instead, her eyes followed the light as it changed the colour of the building they’d come from, then returned to Angel’s thin fingers with well trimmed nails, pleating and un-pleating the damask napkin. Angel placed the fan-shaped napkin on the sugar bowl, halfway between his cup and hers:

“I’ll see about an office position for you in the company.”

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Her temporary job at Nautilus & Co. consisted of opening and closing drawers, filing cabinets, doors. 

In addition, Aurora typed letters, copied commercial orders, sorted and placed them in boxes, and the boxes in walnut filing cabinets left behind by the Legation. With her neat handwriting, she covered cream-coloured satin paper cards, invitations for movie launches and parties, on which she occasionally pencilled a little figure or an illuminated letter. In the company’s offices, corridors, or in the backyard, everybody was busying themselves with something. What kind of job each of them had wasn’t quite clear, but they performed it the best they could, never short of good humour.

One day, the tip of her shoe struck a coin hidden in the ornaments of the carpet: an egg-shaped head and a drooping moustache. Gott erhalte! she greeted Emperor Franz Joseph with a smile, flipped the coin, then placed the thaler in a drawer. The person from whose pocket the silver coin had dropped might reclaim it anytime, even if by now it wouldn’t buy them anything.

*

In the attic of the film tinting company, a collection of maps had been left behind by the Legation’s staff. She might like to have a look at those maps and related miscellanea, Angel said, before the collection was sent where it belonged to (where exactly was left open). He produced a piece of paper and unfolded it as slowly as he had folded the damask napkin in the café: 

“Here is the Empire in figures: 300.000 square kilometres, 30.000 million people, 31 religions. Looks like they tried to play a lucky number, your dear Dual Monarchy!” He dropped the note in her hand: 

“See if you can check these numbers!” 

Up there, legs crossed on her shawl, spread over layers of dust, Aurora returned to the Empire to see it all, to see where she came from, perhaps where she was going. 

No two maps were alike, each a different combination of shapes, colours, names. Some showed the Empire at one point in time, whole or in parts, self-standing or surrounded by other neighbouring bodies of land, some of which appeared now as enemies, now as peripheral constituents, with dotted or broken outlines intimating the treacherous stability of borders. 

From bits and pieces emerged a world other than the one pictured on the imperial map that populated walls, books and minds throughout the other Empire’s lands, each of its populations on a different patch of colour. Not a colossal well-knit assemblage, as some had thought of it, but a system of veins and intersections. A living thing: expanding, contracting, shifting, its changeable shape a conundrum for whoever was in charge of its survival. In this larger picture, landlocked in the midst of a continent, the Habsburg Land looked more like a versatile knot, securing connections across other imperial borders with other shapes, other colours. 

The sheets came in many sizes and were spongy, light brown spotted and haloed. Some were printed on rough paper made from salvaged clothes, mounted on canvas, or on a thin plaster base. Tattered, crumbling. Others were so worn from folding that you could see through the Empire’s fabric. Could paper be darned to hold the map together? 

Within marbled cardboard covers, the portfolios contained topographical maps, cadastral, border, and astronomical maps, and an assortment of printed or handwritten notes. 

As Aurora took them out one by one, her heart racing, the tips of her fingers happened upon an embossed double-headed eagle, an imprint of her birthplace. In separate sheets came portions of the large-scale Josephinian Land Survey, initiated in the seventeen-hundreds by Maria Theresia and continued by her son, Joseph, to determine the imperial contours, explore and draw the vast dominions of the Habsburg House, the better to know its expanse and the more effectively to defend it. Started off in the border provinces, the operation moved inwards, as marks on preliminary drawings of the never-completed map led to believe. Each margin was itself a node of roads, streams, and mountain passes, that cut into the border lines, so that the whole Empire looked like a combination of slip knots and open spaces. Its coherence, a riddle.

Sheet after sheet, Aurora followed the location of kidney-shaped habitations and adjoining gardens or land, marketplaces and postal stations (occasionally signalled by a red horn, faint as a watermark), of customs check points, road networks, waterways, and mountain passes. Numerous mountain passes.

On one such sheet, someone took the time to draw a little figure again and again — a man walking along a wavy path that carried him, like a horse its rider, from one settlement to another — and to mark, in now barely legible print, the hour of the day when he started his journey and when he would reach each of its stations. Alone in the immense space of a small portion of the Empire, and a rare human presence in the abstract world of maps, this man, engaged in the simple pursuit of indicating the time it took to walk from one location to another, locked eyes in Aurora’s mind with a small figure of Herman walking towards Vienna. 

It was getting dark. She rose, opened the roof window to let in the last of light, and went back to see what she could still make out of the treasure in the attic.            

Better fleshed out than the tiny traveller, notable historical figures adorned some of the prints. Set in elaborate frames within the maps, they introduced versions of the Empire with its transient borders. 

In its quest for precision, the Crown had also set up joint imperial ventures that brought together cartographers from all over the world, willing to go as far as Peru or Lapland to determine the shape of the Earth, measure meridian areas, scrutinize the sky to observe the transit of Venus, or calculate the distance from the Sun to the Earth. The metre had been established as the basic unit of measurement in Europe, and it was supposed to be a tenth of a million of a quarter meridian: the distance between one of the Poles and the Equator. Knowing the exact distance from one point to another mattered if one was to embark upon life-changing explorations.

Suddenly, numbers cropped up everywhere. A note detailing the mechanics of borders stated that, at the time when the gigantic map was in the making, the frontiers of the Empire covered more than eight thousand kilometres. 

But the distance from where she was at present to Vienna, what exactly was that distance?

Before she left the company, Aurora climbed up the rickety ladder one more time. 

Paper and dust. 

Now, as she leafed through the maps, what they brought evidence of touched her less than their endearing textures: the landscapes of shape and colour with their feel of brocade or taffeta, the water networks that looked like elaborate embroidery or like furrows printed on a face. 

Some maps made no more sense than the dark spots on the bottom of a coffee cup. Others were simply stunning, as if, entranced by the beauty of the land, the mapmakers had tried to capture some of it within the disembodied codes of cartography, double-crossing their limitations. She ran the tip of her fingers over surfaces that felt like linen woven by grandmother’s hands, like a patch of earth warmed by the sun, or what she imagined sea sand would feel like:

Adorian, Solis, Reps, Shenk, Marienburg — names of cities lost in time

Galicia, Lodomeria, Pocutia — realms that vanished not so long ago

Ghost names, effaced or replaced by others, in one language or another.
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And this is where she came from, here —
— Honigberg/Mount of Honey, in the Seven Mounts province, on the southeastern border of what remained — on this compilation of maps spread across a dusty floor, waiting to be relocated to some unknown destination — the land where she was born — in the heart of Europe
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— and here, a palm’s length to the southeast of a borderline not long ago erased from the new maps of Europe: the city of Bisanthe, capital of her new country, where she waited for her travelling papers, one thousand and sixty-seven kilometres away from Vienna —

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