Lea would talk often about nuns. Of their rituals, their self-sufficiency. Their separation from our contemporary world may have appealed to her, but more than anything I believe she liked the idea of dissolving into those around her, of never having to be alone. Over the years I have thought about how I might have been a nun, had I lived two hundred years ago. And even today mysticism occasionally occupies my thoughts. I imagine the nuns as connected to another sphere, while I, walking the streets of the first district on a dark December night, can only pick up their songs wafting across the walls of the old convent and mingling with the few spare snowflakes in the air.
My relationship to Lea has changed over the years. So have my thoughts on isolation, and community, and all of that, as well as other things, like whether I believe in the mystical or supernatural, and whether I could live my whole life for just one single moment.
But let me first go back and explain. We were high schoolers, so-called Gymnasiasten, at what they call a Bundesoberstufenrealgymnasium mit Musikzweig, a high school with a special focus on music, in Vienna. Vienna. The city which in English bears a woman’s name. There were five of us. Four girls, one boy: Karo, Wolfie, Lea (she would come in later), me—and the boy, Joachim.
Karo and Wolfie (Wolfie’s real name, punitively, was Waltraud, but that is irrelevant to this story) shared one desk, and Joachim and I shared the other. We sat at the back of the classroom. Had things been up to me, I would have sat at the front of the classroom and not offered the three of them a second thought. But the prior semester I’d arrived in the classroom mid-year and dishonored, having failed a crucial exam, my third and last chance at securing a spot for the final exams that would have granted me entry to university. This was why I could not take my usual seat at the top of the class, as those seats were already taken by other ass-kissers, and no longer could I fulfill my usual plan of worming my way into teachers’ hearts until they let me pass their classes with minimal effort. Worse than that, my arrival also meant I was a whole year older than everyone, a most shameful attribute, signaling both freakish stupidity and incompetence. To top it off, Joachim was not just one year younger than me but two, having been placed in school at the age of five. In fact, he had been sixteen all the way into August, a month before all of us returned for class, making him the same age as my friends’ younger brothers.
Joachim started wooing me very soon after I joined the classroom. There is no other word for it. I was too baffled to find this flattering. His face confused me. Maybe because he was handsome, just not in a way that would have occurred to me. Even before suffering the shame of entering this junior classroom, back when I was one grade above him, I had been forced to stare at Joachim across the room during choir practice, as sopranos faced the baritones in the half circle, so that, while singing, my eyes wandered over his hunched shoulders, his shaggy hair, eventually landing on the wet orbs of his eyes, eyes that would inevitably roll their way towards me.
Girls, except for girls like me, were crazy about Joachim. He always had a girlfriend. He hadn’t been without one since before he’d turned fifteen. At his side, in the hallways, or smoking their morning cigarettes in the clusters of coats and backpacks by the Gymnasium’s front door, girls’ gazes turned towards him. I tried to understand the reason for this. Something about the rotation of his head on his neck, the tired exposure of his Adam’s apple, his long arms. It all made him appear much older for his age, with eyelids I considered cow-like, plump lips, the bristling jawline of a young man, and the infuriating dimple on his chin. But Joachim also wore his body like a suit he had just put on, as if he’d sprouted into this lanky form only recently. Worse than this mixture of childlikeness with adulthood was his confidence, his uninhibitedly bored expression, and while it never occurred to me that I might find him attractive, I found it hard to take my eyes off him. It’s strange now to think that Joachim wanted my attention, that my active disinterest in him could have somehow provoked him further.
At first, he was simply nice to me. At the tram stop every morning—we came from the same odd corner of Vienna, just us, none of our other classmates—he waited for me to arrive, even when I told him I would be late, that he should leave without me, that I wanted time alone with my book. Sometimes he would text me: “Come on! If you come NOW we can go together!” As if that were a good thing. In those days I was preoccupied with being solitary. Whenever I was not at the opera house or at school, I spent my time wandering. One of my preferred walks took me from the Danube Canal near the Vienna River up all the way into the depths of the Roßau, where the trams curved around a street called Porzellangasse and, if, on certain days in winter, the light had a certain sharp quality, you could almost imagine you were in Saint Petersburg, in Russia, the Saint Petersburg I knew from the large fold-out photographs of a book I had found discarded in the cafeteria at school and now dreamed myself into. Three or four seasons earlier I had fixated on a Soprano, Irina Vasilevskaya, who happened to have come from Saint Petersburg, and after my preoccupation had faded there remained only this mystery of a faraway city, with palaces that looked like brightly colored Punschkrapfen, where the nights in winter lasted forever.
How strange, then, to receive such positive attention from a handsome, cool, usually indifferent boy. I had now been in school long enough to understand that coolness did not age out. It simply hung around, avoiding people like me, and sliding into people like Joachim, Karo, and Wolfie, while slowly they grew up, graduated, and stepped into their lives. But Joachim, despite having been a mysterious receptacle for this coolness, stood by me as if I were cool too. When Karo and Wolfie made their jokes about me, about how insufferable I was and a know-it-all, he told them to stop. In the hallways he sped up or slowed down so that no matter how hard I tried to get rid of him, he walked by my side.
After class, he would leave school with me and follow me around on my walks through the city.
“Go away,” I said more than once. “I want to be alone,” and he’d say only: “Why?” As if he knew that I was up to something, which I was!
“Don’t you want me with you?”
There was a girl who worked in the bookstore under the Basilisk, and I wanted to go see her, and I didn’t want him with me. When one day I did not manage to throw him off, the worst thing happened: the girl, named Magda, whom I loved, held me back and made a remark about the attractive boy I had come with.
How to tell her I was not interested in this stupid boy, but in her? It was clear no one thought I had reached sexual maturity, least of all me, who’d had sex twice, once with a guy in my parallel class and another time with an Australian tourist, a scientist who had just spent a year in Antarctica. My lack of experience as far as men went is not what bothered me. It was more that I had never been with a woman, really been with one—the time I had fingered my childhood best friend on her brother’s pull-out couch did not count—and as I turned seventeen and then eighteen, I felt plagued by my inexperience. I had tried with girls my age. But girls my age did not interest me as much as Magda in the bookstore. Parallel to Magda I maintained a romantic fixation on my friend Stasi, a mother and housewife and most importantly a trained singer, whom I joined at the opera house several times a week, which is why I never did any schoolwork and wound up repeating a year. And, of course, there was also Lara, another one of my older, unrequited loves, a former one, who took one look at Joachim during a Britten concert at the Konzerthaus before shaking her head at me: “…that you could be this repressed when you have such a piece of cake right by your side.”
“So, you like the girl in the bookstore,” Joachim said with disinterest on the day he met Magda.
“Magda,” he muttered.
More than disinterest, his tone was tinged with mockery—not at my preference for girls, but at the object of my desire. I realized he had found her a drag.
“What a drag!” he said out loud. “ You really think she’s good?”
I thought of Magda’s lip gloss, which glistened like Carrie Fisher’s in the original Star Wars trilogy, the wrinkles by her eyes, the guileless smile she threw at me that made me melt.
“Yes,” I said. “ I think she’s good.”
“She doesn’t appeal to me at all,” Joachim said.
How I hate him even now. And it is not fair to hate him. He is dead, after all. He died even younger than Mendelssohn or Mozart, the same age as Schubert. I am very sorry he is dead, most of all for me, who will never see him again. But he would never love me again anyway, and what was the love I wanted from him? It is entirely unclear.
That day at the bookstore, we ordered two mélanges from the café across the street from the Basilisk. Then we looked up at the Basilisk, as if waiting for it to give us something to say. It was early fall and still warm enough to drink our coffee on the sidewalk. This was a time when Joachim’s hair was long and for whatever reason he had dyed it red. He was wearing a black-and-yellow shirt. With his shredded Converse, I knew he was trending toward being a punk, but he reminded me of a cartoon bee from a German children’s program. There was also a certain resemblance to a character named Pumuckl, a little Kobold, a goblin from another television show. When I, a few years prior, had chopped off my hair, I had also looked like Pumuckl. I had not found myself attractive like that. Nobody had. But Joachim for some reason was a handsome Pumuckl.
Now Joachim licked the foam and sugar off his spoon and threw the spoon back on the table. “ I think I have to break up with my girlfriend.” (This girlfriend of his was a very pretty girl who lived on my street. She bore a certain resemblance to Magda, as she was gentle and smiled a lot. Once she and Joachim stopped by my house to chat with me through the intercom, but I soon excused myself. The thought of letting them into my world was exhausting.)
“Yes, I think I need to break up with her. I’m not doing so well, you know. I haven’t been sleeping, it’s awful. I can’t eat. I’m in love with someone else. It’s very bad.”
And then I noticed that indeed his eyes were bloodshot. He had always had beast-of-burden-like circles under his eyes, but now they were accentuated. “ It was particularly bad when I got back from Morocco . . . I could barely look at her.”
A few weeks earlier, when Joachim had gone to Morocco for his summer vacation, I had run into his girlfriend at our tram stop. “ Joachim is in Casablanca?” I’d said, because there was not much to say to the pretty girlfriend, and she had simpered: “ Yes, I miss him so much.” The idea of missing Joachim had struck me as inane.
“You see, just before I left for Morocco, something happened. Lea. I saw this girl, Lea, again. For the first time in over a year. Wolfie’s old friend. Lea. They’d gone to kindergarten together. Now she goes to the other Musikgymnasium, the one on Neustiftgasse. Lea showed up at this house party once, just when [his girlfriend, I’ve forgotten her name] and I were getting together, but Lea did not act like she wanted to be with me, she ran away into the garden and stayed there for hours to avoid me, she said she needed time, so I went with [his unfortunate girlfriend] instead.”
Later that winter, once my friendship with Joachim and Lea had permitted me entry to Wolfie’s gatherings—where for some reason we would all take off our clothes, crank up the heat, drink Schnapps, and sit in the bathtub—Wolfie and I sat naked on her bed one night. Her piercings were the only thing upon her body, apart from her red hair. Even her pubic hair was red. Wolfie flicked the ash off her cigarette and said: “ Is that not the stupidest thing you could imagine? Being in love with one girl and getting together with another, one you are incredibly not in love with. Only Joachim would do that.”
Now, as we were sitting under the Basilisk, Joachim said, almost as a whisper, “ I had thought [his girlfriend’s] reserve meant there was more there, that there was more to come from her.” He lifted his mélange to his lips to take a sip. “ But there wasn’t.”
Over the next few days, I heard a lot more about this Lea. It sounded like she was pursuing Joachim. He showed me her complicated, intense text messages. In one she responded to his late text with, “it’s impossible to interpret your silence, it fills my insides with cold” or something like that, followed by lyrics from a Belle and Sebastian song, which left wholly unclear whether she had forgiven Joachim for his silence or was punishing him with coldness. Her messages were never very clear. In fact, I never quite understood what Lea was saying, even later when she was messaging me. But these messages sounded like she liked him, because only if you like someone does their silence fill you with cold, and the use of lyrics indicated, I thought, that she wanted Joachim more than Magda, Lara, or Stasi had ever wanted me. I looked at Joachim’s face, the eyes that could shine warmly and sweetly, the goblin expression he had, and imagined being in love with him. It did not seem impossible, for someone like this Lea.
“Clearly, she’s into you too,” I said. I was getting exasperated with Joachim. Why did he have two girls and I none?
“Why don’t you just break up with your girlfriend and get back with Lea?”
“Because.” Joachim showed me his teeth, without smiling, and his knee twitched. “Because she says she can’t be in a committed relationship right now.”
That was funny. They were seventeen. They were not adults. Joachim looked like a cartoon goblin. “Nobody is in a relationship at seventeen,” I said. “Either you have got something with someone, or you don’t.”
Very soon after that conversation came Joachim’s text message, one night at ten o’clock: “I broke up with [ . . . ]. I’m at Wolfie’s in the second district. Please come.”
“I’m in my pajamas,” I texted back. I was watching a video recording of my favorite violinist performing Brahms. “Listening to Brahms’ violin concerto: so good.”
“Please, you have to come.”
And later he texted again: “it sucks so extremely that you’re not here.”
That did it. Never before had Joachim said that anything sucked extremely because I was not there. I put my clothes back on and left the house. It took me much too long to find Wolfie’s house, and because it was cold, I had to wear my embarrassing red wool tights, and, considering I didn’t think I would have anything exciting happen soon, I was also wearing a pair of red-and-white striped undies with brown bloodstains in the crotch area. I was embarrassed by my legs and that I had chosen to wear a skirt. I felt embarrassed by everything, how late it was, that I was coming out to be with this horde of teenagers.
“Here,” I said to Joachim when I arrived and handed him my MP3 player. “Check out the violin concerto . . . if you have a laptop here, I want to show you the part where Anne-Sophie Mutter comes in . . .”
“You only like Mutter because you think she’s hot,” Joachim said. “Oh Mutter,” he repeated, in a voice like Falco’s.
I repressed the urge to slap him. It was true, I didn’t usually distinguish between instrumentalists and conductors, not on a musical basis. I struggled in general with the acquisition of musical expertise, something that came to Joachim as easily as breathing. Indeed, it often felt like I lost all musical skill or knowledge around him. For instance, there was this one time when we, squeezed into the backseat of a friend’s car with the radio turned up, had argued over the broadcast of an unfamiliar opera. I had guessed it was by Haydn, Joachim guessed it was by Salieri. After half an hour of music, the radio host confirmed that it was, in fact, Salieri.
We sat on Wolfie’s bed and listened to the violin concerto. Joachim had never been this degree of attentive with me; he usually dismissed my suggestions after a minute or two, but now he threatened to listen to the entire nineteen minutes of the first movement. I quickly realized the situation. He and Lea were playing bait and switch. At one point he looked up from the video on the laptop, and, following his line of vision, I saw the outline of a girl disappearing through the double-winged front door. He turned away and pressed his lips together. I stood and picked up my jacket.
“I want to meet this Lea,” I said.
Lea stood in the corner of the courtyard with Wolfie and the other girls, shielded by the old ivy-covered balconies above. She was wearing a hoodie, Joachim’s hoodie. The hood was up, so at first I couldn’t see her face. Once she had lowered it, I noticed she looked much younger than I had expected, more harmless, like a teenaged actress playing an orphan child. There was a tiny mole on her lower eyelid, beneath the pinpricks of dark eyelashes. If she was attractive then, you should see her now. She is a beauty, one of the most beautiful women I know, and though well into her thirties, she looks as young as she did then, and here is the auspicious outcome I am revealing to you right now, that Lea and I are still friends, very good friends. We are no longer attracted to each other, and I can say easily that I love her. In fact, I will dedicate this whole story to her right now.
Lea and Wolfie were smoking with their shoulders hunched.
“Servus,” I said to them, as a greeting, and Lea returned the greeting: “Servus.”
Echoing her, I overheard Wolfie repeat the greeting, but with a more Viennese drawl: “Servas . . .”
As I came towards them, Lea took a step to the side to make space for me. I realized Lea was welcoming me in. She might have even wanted to get to know me, which neither Wolfie nor Karo had ever done. And really, as I stood there, Wolfie threw her own cigarette to the ground, stomped on it, and walked away. I waited to make eye contact with Lea. We did not speak. Since I did not smoke, all I had was the possibility of conversation, but suddenly my imagination ended there. I yearned to go back and sit with Brahms and Joachim upstairs. Instead I pondered what Lea and I could talk about. Not unlike the Basilisk in the first district, I remembered that there was another legend in this neighborhood, of a gate to hell and another fabled creature. But I did not know more than that.
“There was a nun who lived in this building,” Lea said, pointing up at the balconies above. “She threw herself out into this courtyard and died. Right over there. She would not have been given a Christian burial, so her family made up this story about the Basilisk in the sink. But imagine her bravery. Her despair after years of faith. She did that thing that gets you straight to hell, the one thing she’d always worked to avoid . . .”
“Or maybe that’s why she did it. She knew there wouldn’t be a hell.”
Lea lifted the cigarette to her lips and nodded. “That’s still pretty badass.”
She exhaled and looked up at me. There was a statue-like expression on Lea’s face, the haunted look a character might have. She was shorter than me by about a foot. She was barely older than Joachim, which was still substantially younger than me. And yet somehow she seemed already wearier, worldlier, as if she had been married before, held secrets, or had the ability to distinguish good from bad sex. A new feeling came to me, different from any other, so filled with hunger and emptiness that my very substance seemed to leave my body and my lungs grasped at something, anything, to keep for themselves. I did not know the point of cigarettes then. I did not know what any of that was about. But it was starting to make sense.
Later, during those few times we were in bed together, Lea would sit up and say that she needed a cigarette. Then she would pull on a sweater, one of my sweaters—sweaters for prim girls like me, the kind of sweater girls like her would never wear—and she would have absolutely nothing on underneath. She would go sit on my windowsill, just above my bed, and from there she would blow smoke into the courtyard. I do not know where I would go in these moments. Did I lay there and look at her? I do not remember. It seemed to me that the walls of my room had become her. This face and its features reflected over and over in the windowpanes around her. Laying there, thinking these thoughts, I felt as if I had no body at all. I remembered the feeling that this must, this must be a moment to be had over and over again, that the moment must not end. That was the feeling Lea gave me. It turns out Lea has a way of making girls feel like this. I have spoken with others, with straight girls even, who feel this way about Lea.
There she and I stood and whispered in the courtyard, and then, shockingly, Lea began to hum the opening notes of the trumpet part in the Tuba mirum of the Mozart Requiem. It is incredibly low to hum, and self-determined, like a doorbell, like the opening notes to Beethoven’s Fifth. Joachim and I had been listening to the Tuba mirum earlier that day, sharing a pair of headphones at our desk. We had agreed we were particularly fond of the tenor part, which shoots out of nowhere in its urgency (an ejaculation, I had thought), interrupting the baritone: “Mors stupebit et natura! Cum resurget creatura…”
I sang these words in response to Lea, these most anxiety-filled, jizzy cries. I looked at the cobblestones and at the ivy and thought, to think that it’s this courtyard, this Pawlatsche and not another, in this November rain, that I will remember forever. Then without saying much of anything at all, Lea and I walked away, into the drizzle. We crossed the Ringstrasse and bought a bag of roasted chestnuts off a vendor. Then we turned around and walked back down Wollzeile, and into one of its cobbled side streets, away from our friends. We walked down Schönlaterngasse and heard a choir of male voices rehearsing beyond the wall. I pictured them as monks in brown capes with shiny bald heads. Where were the women?
“They’re just beyond there,” Lea gestured. “There’s a convent right down there…”
We had left our friends behind and not told them where we’d gone. When Joachim found us later that night, he walked off with Lea to argue with her, only returning to walk me back to the tram, and said he’d known “this” would happen. “This?” I asked. He meant that I had gotten along with Lea. There was elation in his voice, and certainty.
“I used to love a woman here,” I said to Lea right before Joachim found us, as we were walking on Schönlaterngasse. I pointed to the bookstore under the Basilisk.
“You don’t love her anymore?” she said.
I looked at Lea. She put her cigarette to her lips and dragged on it. The tip lit up. Magda disappeared inside me and never reemerged.
“I don’t,” I said.
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From All Girls Be Mine Alone by Sophie Strohmeier. Published by Joyland Editions, October 14, 2025.