"Um, that is Kurt Schoenbergian, sir, how can I be of help?" Kurt replied.

 "Well, we were told by Miss Martin that you may know the person she has described to us, as last seen with a school mate of hers, Anna Wagner." said Detective Grun.

 "Anna Wagner? What has happened to Anna Wagner?" said Kurt.

 "We are conducting an investigation regarding Miss Wagner and something which may have happened to her between yesterday afternoon when Miss Martin saw her and today, when she saw her again. She has suffered an injury and is now in hospital, the nature of her injuries is not completely known; she was not in good condition when Miss Martin saw her earlier today.  Miss Martin would like you to tell us the full name of the bus driver who works with the school, which I understand you are also affiliated with. He apparently is the driver with the company that Frau Doktor Fussan uses regularly at the Berna College. Do you know him?" asked Detective Grun, lighting a cigarette.

 Some little lights began dashing through Kurt’s head, he was reviewing his files of memories and all the times he had observed Hans, and how he had felt he was acting very odd the last few times he had driven the bus for the college, also including how he felt on the Grossglockner. He had ignored the smirk, but he had observed Sari take note of it. It was all bothering him now.

 "I believe his name is Hans Grotzel. I don't know much about him; other than he has been a good bus driver for the school, prompt, not a risk taker, it appears anyway. Is Hans mixed up with Anna Wagner, or whatever happened to her?" Kurt choked out, taking in a bit of the cigarette smoke. "Ah, excuse me, is Hans involved?" He repeated clearing his throat.

 The cigarette was put out and Detective Grun looked at Kurt differently. He asked him something which neither Sari or Kurt anticipated. He said, "Do you think Hans is someone who might take advantage of a student, a foreign student, someone vulnerable in a strange country?"

 "I, I cannot say I know him well enough, but I have had some rather curious reactions to him recently, it has been as if he was watching me or some of the people at the school. It was, well, it was uncomfortable, as if he was just, spying, I don't know. It seems hard to describe. I want to say that I have never seen him do anything wrong, there was no trouble that I know of."

 "What would make you say that, Herr Schoenbergian? Has there been any talk or has someone mentioned him; specifically regarding anything out of the realm of his job?"

 "You are asking me to repeat some gossip, I think Detective Grun. I am not sure that gossip serves anyone." Sari looked shocked. What did Kurt know about Hans?

 "This is about more than gossip Herr Schoenbergian. I think you know something that I need to know about. I am asking you to tell me anything you know, do you understand? Anna Wagner is in a hospital right now, she is an American citizen. We will be notifying the American Embassy shortly that she has been involved in a suspicious incident. When I receive information from the hospital regarding her condition, I must also notify the Austrian government authorities. This is serious. I need your full cooperation, if you have any light to shed on this man Han's behavior, you must tell us now."

 "Sir, I can only tell you that he is often with different young women, as I have observed him in various pubs on different occasions. I have a band and I am frequently out late at night playing in various places. My bandmates and I also go for a drink after our sets are over and I have seen him out that late with young women. I don't know who they are, but he is certainly not a stranger to the American students, in all the years I have been around the school, which has only really been a few, he seems to be with someone from the school, although they are not all from the school. I have never seen him with any girl more than once.  I don't know what else to say, I have never spoken to him really about anything except bus departures, and routes or things like that when I have been on a trip with the students. I think he may be married."

 Hans is not the only one who is married, and not the only one seen in bier halls with women from the college.  Kurt felt like he was backing himself into a corner, but he remembered who he was, and he was not Hans.

 “Detective Grun, I saw Hans earlier, just before I saw Sari being taken from the hospital in the police car. He was at the Tabak shop down the road from Augustiner Brau. I had stopped there to buy cigarettes. I think, well, he was actually arguing with someone in that tiny shop. It was hushed and I did not get a good look at the person, a man, I think. He was not looking very good, quite pale. I left as soon as I made my purchase, the shop owner must know them both, otherwise, I think he would have asked them to leave. I was anxious to get out of there before he recognized me, I wanted to avoid him.” Kurt added.

 “ I am wondering about something you said earlier, about feeling spied upon by Grotzel, what did you mean?” asked Detective Grun.

 “To be quite frank Detective Grun, I don’t know what I meant. I just felt something when we were on the last trip with the students. Since I was left in charge of the students, along with another teacher, it was my responsibility to make sure everyone made the bus, I was often sitting behind the drivers seat as a result of coming on the bus last. Hans seemed unusually interested in watching me while he was driving, and it appeared he was listening at times to any conversation I was having. I have never known anyone to be that interested in me. I think now, it might have been someone else he was interested in, but it is all speculation, based on instinct. I have no idea, and now I feel that I am making some paranoid statement. Pardon me.” Kurt remarked, glancing at Sari.

His glance was not lost on Detective Grun. “Can you tell me who the other person might have been, regardless of your speculation, it might be important now, who was it, perhaps Anna?” He said.

 “ I don’t know, it is just something that seems to be possible.” Kurt gasped almost, like he was realizing something for the first time. He had felt it was him being watched, yet perhaps it was not him, but Sari that Hans was interested in, and perhaps, well, he was watching and imagining Kurt somehow as an obstacle, that might explain some of the looks, but ah, paranoia seemed intent on fixing this in his brain.

 “Herr Burger, did you get all that? Can you read this all back so we may verify it? Do either of you have anything else to add to any of this?” Detective Grun asked.

 Sari and Kurt looked at each other. They almost spoke at once, Sari began, “ I have nothing else to say, except just how I feel. I believe that Hans was trolling for someone and Anna became the person he focused on, in a moment, when he was not successful with me. He seemed almost upset with me for not agreeing and my hair was standing on end. It could have been me. That is how I feel. I mean I don’t know if he had anything to do with what happened to her at all, but my instinct is telling me he did.”

 “ I understand that you must go by only the facts. There is after all nothing yet that clearly implicates Hans. My own feeling is there is something perhaps not quite right. I can definitely say that on the last trip to Prague, with the students, he was watching some people very closely. Almost like a person who is trying to eavesdrop on someone. I know it sounds ridiculous, perhaps even unprofessional of me, however, I think he was watching with some purpose.” Kurt finally said.

 “Well, that is interesting and if we can get into this a bit further, we might need to speak to both of you again, regarding those observations. Right now I think we have enough. We jave a name, we will do a check for anything on his record, and then try to find out where he was yesterday, and what he did today. We will send some people out to locate him now and see what that brings us. Anna Wagner herself mentioned a Hans, so it is not as if there is not some real connection here to what happened. I need to check on her condition now and we will handle the rest of this, you two may leave. If it is possible, please stay in the area, in case we have more questions. I would like to be able to include you in my reports and also if Hans Grotzel is not affiliated in any way with this case, we might need to go over the details again, to see if there is something that has been forgotten which we might find useful.”

 “Herr Professor, I leave Miss Martin with you then, please escort her to her housing or where ever she would like to go, if that is agreeable to you, Miss Martin?” Detective Grun said.

 “Yes, of course, I will, Miss Martin, if you please?” Kurt responded.

~ 

 Sari looked at him and said yes very quietly. Together they left the police station, got into the red Citroen and left. Kurt was in shock regarding everything he had just seen and also found himself saying and thinking. Sari was responding to the movement of the car, and feeling sick. She tried to open a window and could not get it down, then tried again. Kurt thought she was trying to open the door and pulled over in an instant. She threw the door open and threw up.

 “Oh Kurt, I am so sorry, I am so upset, I just think I am a wreck!”

 “Sari, are you serious, you have been through something today, something I don’t even know the complete story about and well, I am certain you are just reacting to the stress. I think we had better go somewhere and sit for a while, and calm down, both of us. I know we can get to Mondsee easily from here, we can go to a place I know, our band plays there sometimes. You probably need some food and just to sit and think a minute. Seewirt is a good place for that, it is not too busy at this time of day.” Kurt said.

Mondsee in the Salzkammergut, with the Drachenwand Mountain in the background, Austria. Wiki image. 

She told herself it was hard not to want him. He seemed to know what to do and say. He seemed to care about Anna and he did not even know what had happened to her yet, well, she really didn’t know either. She just knew the part she saw and the look on Anna’s face, the confusion and the whole collapse to the floor. Oh, she had to stop thinking about it. She would be sick again.

 Once inside small inn, they went into the dining room. As soon as they were seated, Sari left to go to the rest room. When she came back, Kurt had ordered her a glass of red wine, and he got himself a weiss bier. She had hardly sat down and the ober came with some bread rolls and cheese plate. She asked him for some water, which made him wrinkle his nose a bit, but as she still looked green in the face, he thought better of it. Kurt assured her that the red wine was a good choice, that it would calm her and settle her stomach.

 She believed him, and he again turned out to be right.

 After some time of silence, while they gathered their thoughts about the days events, Kurt finally spoke, “Please if you can tell me, I still don’t know what happened, only that Hans was perhaps involved as you saw him with her yesterday. I know nothing else.”

 The ober brought a second glass of wine, she had needed it, she drank again, then told Kurt everything that she had experienced, everything she had told the police before he had joined them. He was silent and felt some confusion. What could Hans have done? “I am trying to imagine what happened in those intervening hours and I am not sure that either of us know enough about Anna or Hans to draw any real conclusions, I hope the police can get to the bottom of this and we know soon the extent of her injuries. I wonder if I should call Frau Doktor Fussan or simply let the police take care of it. I am thinking just them do their routine. We should call the hospital and see what we can find out. I am not sure they will tell us anything.” Finally he took a breath.

 Sari stared at him. She was formulating something in her mind about Kurt and his thought process. She felt defensive of Anna and very angry and suspect of Hans. She did not think she was sensing that same thing from Kurt. “ Kurt, I am confused about something, would you feel the same about Hans if Anna was me?”

 Kurt’s eyed grew wide and his nostrils flared, “What do you mean? Of course I would be devastated, crazy in fact. I would tear him apart if I thought he did something to you. What do you mean?”

 “Well, you made it seem that somehow Anna was doing something that perhaps she should not have, and he was as innocent as he was going along with her. I told you that he had tried to meet with me and I rejected him. I told you his reaction; he was angry, but controlled. Now something, something has happened to Anna, and yet you seem to think we don’t know enough about her. Are you trying to say that she brought this on herself?”

 “No, of course not. She did not bring this on herself.”

 “It sounds like that is what you meant to me. Is that what you think of me, that I am asking for it, perhaps with you? Whatever the hell it is?” raged Sari. Her voice was climbing a bit and the ober came back, Kurt ordered another round. The bread and cheese was almost gone, so he ordered some goulash too now. It would keep up with the alcohol they were both drinking and an early dinner would make up for no lunch but snacks.

 “Sari, I misspoke. I was just trying to say that we don’t really know anything. We both feel something wrong with Hans, and you seeing them together, and what I have seen in the past makes me wonder if he is in the habit of being with women and then moving on, or if this was somehow different, or what….we have both sensed so much from him over the last several weeks, that we could not even say to each other. At least that has come out. I think he has been spying on us and I think he is thinking he knows something.”

 “Kurt, what difference would that make to us, ah, the student teacher thing, but what, is that really it or is there something else, do you think he has something else?”

 “Well, Sari, I did not intend to have this discussion here with you, now, like this. But, yes, I think he somehow is trying to see what kind of situation he can catch us in for some no good purpose, it is the way he has been acting. The smirking on the Grossglockner.”

 Sari winced, so he had seen it too. Okay, now they had to be open with each other. “Look, he has nothing on us. Really. We are both adults and there is something that you don’t know about me…”

 Before she had a chance to explain, he was repeating almost the same line, “ There is something that I need to tell you, something that you do not know, not a lot of people know, and believe me there is a reason, a good reason for it.”

 He almost seemed to be asking her to understand something before she even had the chance to understand what it was he was trying to tell her. Finally in a surge of emotion, his heart racing and his face deep red with shame, he told her. “I am married.”

 Well, you could have knocked her off her fanny but as she was sitting on the upholstered wall bench and he was on the chair across from her, she wasn’t going to get knocked off too far. She sat perfectly still and took a breath. She looked at him, deep into his eyes and saw all the discomfort and somehow that made her less angry and more interested in his reasoning why he would be with her when he was married. She had heard some pretty good lines from men in the past, but in her experience, she was usually too smart for them, and had never fallen under their spell, she always felt for the other woman involved, the wife, and more for herself to ever get involved, try as some of them might, it was her age showing in this conversation, her real life experience, the stuff that perhaps really did set her apart from the other students.

 “Okay, you are married. Can you explain what you are doing here with me? Maybe not right now, but yesterday perhaps, when you were wrapping your legs around me and breathing every moment in unison with mine, is this the Austrian welcome that every American girl gets?” Her anger was flaring, her indignation, her sense of self, she then had calmed, and looked at him with some kind of care or pity and then, bingo, it was all gone in another random fire moment. “This dam well better be good.”

 Once again he thought of his mother. So much of how she conducted herself was like his mother. She had dignity, she had compassion, but she was not to be toyed with. “Please, forgive me for insulting you in this way.”

 Good start, she thought. 

“ I married a woman that I thought I loved to live with her in the same apartment. She married me to do the same, and to keep her job. In this country it is not like yours. We are a religiously tired government and we do not get to live together without marriage if we are not related. We do not get to live together, and if somehow it happens and it is found out you are out of your apartment and out of your job, typically if you are a woman, living in sin. You cannot be trustedthey say, especially with small children whom you might badly influence, if you are a teacher or something like that, it usually really affects the women, not the men. No one asks us men, or cares generally, unless they are looking for a reason to get rid of you in the first place.”

 “Oh.”

 “I have no excuse for my behavior, no one knows at a school, it did not come up in the interview. Inge, who is my wife, and I have had a pretty casual kind of arrangement. She had promised me it was just all for the legal situation, but she has worked over time to make it more a marriage. I have rejected that, and found it easy to do so with the band and my commitments. I have not been exclusive with her. I was in the beginning, but I think we have both let this go on too long. I don’t know what I am doing anymore. I really don’t. I found you and I could not believe what I had been missing in my life.”

 “Oh, just stop it. What do you take me for?” she was raging again. She did not want to hear that she was different or special and now he needed to change his life. She was not really thinking she was in it for much more than a beautiful, magnificent time waster while she was here, remembering why she was suddenly here. She too was not being truthful, and she decided to keep it to herself. It was not necessary and besides, it might make him freak out, that she might report him back to the schools in the U.S., that he was somehow contributing negatively to the school through his indiscretions. Well, that was not true or necessary, so she kept her mouth shut.

 “Okay, Kurt, okay. I see. I understand. Okay. This has not gone far and we can stop it right here, right now, no harm. I am tired and upset. I am worried about Anna, worried that Hans might keep doing whatever he is doing, and you, well; you were there for me today when I needed someone. I have no ill will. The world really is a shit place and right now, I am getting drunk, getting tired and would really like to sleep this day off. I would be completely lying if I said I was not disappointed. I would like nothing better than to erase what you just said, and have you take me somewhere to be alone, to make love. I really mean that. I am so not believing this, the rug in one 24 hour cycle has been ripped out from under my feet and I am feeling so angry and so selfish and so….”

 Kurt got up and moved toward her, sitting on the bench he took her hand for the first time since the night before. She did not pull away and began to cry. He held her and rested his cheek against hers and whispered to her, “ I take it all back, I turn back the clock, it is all one half hour ago and the words, are now unsaid, please forgive me.”

 “Kurt, I know that what I am going to say is very wrong, but the clock is turned back, the words are unsaid. Can we go and be alone somewhere, here, now, I need you.”

 Kurt had really never met anyone like this in his life. He could not imagine what had just happened except that he would not leave her and Inge, well, Inge for all her plotting and planning and coercion be damned and he meant that. He would no longer live half a life, even if Sari was gone from him tomorrow, it was not right to live like this anymore. He was stealing his own life from himself and Inge, well, if she thought about it, she was doing the same. No, these rules were wrong. All of it was wrong. He did not want to play the games any more. He did not want to find random comfort with women who crossed his path, he wanted someone who fit with him, who wanted him, who actually cared about him, who spoke his thoughts, mirrored his desires, not someone he had to work at living with, who was in essence, an absent roommate.

 “Sari, I will go and make the arrangements. Try to eat a little more, the bread too, you will feel better. We will both get some sleep and the rest of all this, Anna, and everything, we will sort out in the morning. There is no school, no worries tomorrow. I will be back in a few moments. Do not worry, here take my coat and put it on your lap, you will feel warmer and soon I will be back.” He left to rent a room and to make a few calls, one to Bodel to tell him where he was if Inge was looking for him, and what to say. He never had to explain anything to him, they were close since childhood and like brothers. He also called Sari’s student house to get Cathy her roommate. He did not want them frantic if she did not come home. When Cathy came to the phone he told her that Sari was with him, not to worry, it had been a stressful day; she would be back tomorrow and explain everything. He said they had been drinking and decided to stay the night in Mondsee. He did not really know Cathy, but Sari had told him how much they got along, since they were not from her school, he could be frank, he knew that they knew about him too. She had said it the other night. The other night now seemed a lifetime ago. Cathy was surprised but thankful for the call. He told her to expect to hear from Sari or see her by noon or so. She promised not to worry.

 When it was all done, he came back to her, her eyes were closed and she wore his coat over her chest like a shield. He gently woke her up and took her hand. He helped her up and they went upstairs to the room he had just rented. As he unlocked the door, she looked at him and saw the same man that she had seen the night before. When she looked in the small Venetian mirror inside, she saw the same woman she was the night before. It was all going to be okay, they both felt it.  

 In the night, after they had slept and erased what they could of the day, she reached over to him, lying there beside her on top of the sheets of the bed, still clothed. He woke and she smiled at him, stroking his cheeks and hair and sighed. He responded to her in kind and the night ended much like the night before had begun, completely in each other’s arms and beyond the imaginary boundaries of a piece of paper. While many may wag their heads at this, Kurt thought and unbeknownst to him, Sari did too, if the fabulous Mirabell Palace could be built by Archbishop Wolf Dietrich of Raitenau for his Jewish mistress, Salome Alt, in 1606, and their ten surviving children, then, this kind of love may find it’s way too. Never underestimate a historian or a politician for justification.

 In the morning, it was again time for reality, but not before a shower together, and some very intentional lovemaking. While they both knew they were on thin ice, in so many ways, the half hour had been erased and they blissfully believed that, they very much needed to. They managed to drag themselves out by check out time, had some breakfast, albeit late, in the restaurant and were on their way. It was a short ride back, and it was then that he told her he had called Cathy. She was surprised, but grateful for his thoughtfulness. She had not even considered doing it; her mind was so full of other things. So now they had spent the night together. He told her he would call the hospital and find out what he could about Anna’s condition. He told her that he would call her later in the afternoon and they could decide what if anything they needed or wanted to do.

 When he pulled up in front of the student house, he leaned over and kissed her. She hugged him and looked at him and said, “Whatever happens, however all of this turns out, I am thankful for you, that you were there for me, that we could be together. Sometimes in life, people get thrown together for a reason. They might not understand it now, or even appreciate it later, but in that moment it is right.”

 “Sari Martin, I believe those are words to live by, and I think for the first time in my life, I understand something, that I have long missed, I cannot really believe it is true, but you feel like a part of me, like a piece long missing. I don’t know if it will all go missing again, but you have given me some courage, something that I have been missing, and you have opened the door to the place I have been hiding in. I will not forget this moment. I have found myself again with you.”

 Sari, wiped her eyes, and his too. She knew what he was telling her, it was all right, it was not promise, nothing; but it was a beginning for him. Kurt knew too that whether it continued with her or not, he would be forever grateful for the person who opened the door and let in the light.