Marie first saw bluish-gold clouds swimming before her eyes, almost like rays of light through the surface of a placid lake...and all at once, the sensation of drowning fell sharply upon her. She couldn’t breathe, there was no air in her lungs, there was no hope of reaching the surface, and she started to give up when, rather abruptly, she found herself lying rather unceremoniously on the rumbling floor of a railcar. The grey, rainy tone persisted in what little detail she could see around her; a strong sensation of vertigo faded in and out, and there was a faint ringing in her ears.
As clarity re-established itself in the world, she noticed her sole travelling companion kneeling expectantly beside her. His eyes were unfocused, following the passing of trees by the windows to her right; she briefly tried to follow his lead, but her vision simply couldn’t keep up so soon, and she felt rather like a child staring up at the clouds on a windy day and losing all frame of reference to the stable ground that one’s mind betrayed. She closed her eyes, trying to regain equilibrium, and then on instinct tried rising up on the palms of her hands, but the effort was too much, and she sank back to the floor with a forced exhalation.
“Miss?” The boy’s voice fell through the fifth-octave F that continued mercilessly to torment her, inspiring the miasma of light-headed colours to ripple nauseatingly against her closed eyelids. There was a hint of happiness in it, as well as a bit of the same disorientation she felt. “Are you alright?”
Marie nodded her head ever so slightly, still afraid to open her eyes. She was pleasantly surprised that she didn’t instantly feel sick, and adventurously squinted at the ceiling. When it didn’t start spinning again, which was highly encouraging, she nodded a little more vehemently, trying to sit up. He held out his right hand to her, and she hesitantly took it in her own, resisting the urge to groan from the dull, tingling pain that ran up and down her spine as he pulled her the rest of the way up to sitting.
She felt brief annoyance that she had been so completely disgraced by the accident and subsequent unconsciousness before him. Not that he seemed the type to think of it in such a way; she studied his expression, and didn’t see anything indicative of dislike towards her, or the satisfaction that people seemed to wear when they had made her blush. There was honest concern, most of all; the kind of raised-eyebrow curiosity she often felt on her own face.
“Are you sure you’re alright?” he asked again. “I was afraid you would have had a concussion.” Marie felt herself smiling; it wasn’t often that a complete stranger had helped her up like this, short of out of respect for her family. She at least assumed this one didn’t actually know who she was, outside of perhaps seeing her around the school on occasion. With a sigh, she leaned against the seat behind her. “Thank you...do you have any idea what happened, er...?” It occurred to her that she didn’t know his name, either.
“My name’s Hanschen, Hanschen Fliegersen.” He raised a hand to eye level in a salute of some kind or another, smiling nervously. “And yours? Pardon me for asking,” he hastily added.
“Marie Wagner,” she replied forcedly. She was kind of worried that letting him know who she was might prompt him to change his demeanour towards her, as so many others did; often, finding out she was a titled member of old nobility had a rather adverse effect on conversations, and honestly, she was getting tired of dealing with people who lost all sense of wit and sometimes their ability to speak for fear of tripping up before a countess. She didn’t like the attention, didn’t like the flatness it inspired in people’s tone when speaking to her, and she certainly didn’t like being reminded that she was the only one left in the line to keep the title.
“Oh...” he trailed off, almost absentminded, as though he remembered something about the name, staring out of the coach’s windows at the dark trees that flew by regularly now. Marie cringed to herself, knowing that he would probably connect her name with everything he had heard about the college’s benefactors, and then eventually with her actual family. “You’ve got an amazing voice, you know.” He blushed slightly, and Marie breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you...I’m guessing you’ve been to some of the school concerts in your spare time?” She felt a little more at ease with him now that he had, whether deliberately or unknowingly, averted the subject of her social standing, and smiled a little on one corner of her mouth.
“Oh, absolutely. I want to be in the school orchestra, because of the great music you perform,” he said enthusiastically; she noticed that he didn’t say “you all”, whether out of grammatical conscience, or maybe because he was really talking about her, personally. “I very much enjoy classical music, but I don’t think I have the ability to make it into the orchestra – I’m in the wind ensemble now,” he added. There was some relief in knowing he not only didn’t recognize her by her name as someone important, so to speak, but also in that he did recognize her by her music, one of the few things she really enjoyed being a part of.
“You know there’s a concert coming up...this coming Thursday, if I recall correctly.” She smiled endearingly at him, hoping the look would suffice as an informal invitation. The odds weren’t terribly great that he was particularly interested in her, but all the same, she didn’t make it a habit of literally asking members of the opposite sex – or anyone for that matter – to social events like this.
Hanschen returned the smile, nodding distantly. “I knew I’d heard about it, but I hadn’t really thought it too much through. I think I’ll have some free time that evening...it’s like the rest, at 20:00?” She shook her head. “No, actually, we’re performing excerpts from Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ as the closing piece...it’s going to be pretty lengthy, so Professor Kasparkova made the decision to start at 19:00 this time.” Jaroslav Kasparkova was a grizzled music veteran who had been shipped from Czechoslovakia as long ago that he had conducted the national orchestra when the country was still called Czechoslovakia; he had also appointed one of his long-time correspondents in Wien, Stefan Metternich, as the director of the chorus and the wind ensemble. The two often disagreed on stylistic matters within the music, but generally settled the differences in one of two ways – through competing in whose musical performances were more perfect (though each had a different definition of this adjective), or “peacefully” through their communal, hidden stash of various alcoholic beverages that would occasionally find their ever-replenishing way into the student body – or so most of the students who incurred these charges would lead their carekeepers to believe.
Hanschen nodded to her, somewhat belatedly. “I should be able to make that. I take it you’ll be doing some solos?” He smiled as though something were funny, and though it didn’t actually unnerve her, she felt a little off balance. “Yes...you probably know what parts, don’t you?” Another nod. “I listen to his Requiem on a fairly regular basis...some parts of it are good for concentration, some are good for relaxing, and some are good for feeling just angry at the world, haha.” She shook her head at him, laughing a little to herself. “So, are you one of those people who likes to have a soundtrack to their life?” His grin grew a little as her remark seemed to put him at ease. “You too?”
She declined to say, though she really couldn’t contain a smile at this point, choosing instead to look over his head at the rain still striking the windows. It occurred to her that they’d been so caught up in casual conversation, she’s never gotten round to asking him what had happened to throw them together like this. “Hanschen?” “Yes?” “Do you have any idea what happened earlier?” He shook his head in a manner that seemed to say that he was sorry he’d failed to find out. “No, I don’t...I guess I’ll ask the driver when we get into Regensburg.” He looked nervously at his watch, silver on black that was extremely beat up and time-worn. “Which...we should be doing in a few minutes here.”
The forest was thinning greatly now against the still-unchanged backdrop of rainy grey. Rows of houses began appearing on either side of the rails now, and though she couldn’t see it from her position on the floor she knew the river Donau would be coming into view soon. The train rattled slightly as they gradually braked more and more.
The two of them sat silently in the car as the city of Regensburg enveloped the rails, mid-rise office buildings of steel and glass piercing high enough into the sky to be lost amongst the fog that hung perhaps a dozen metres above the streets devoid of cars on this mid-Sunday. The station sat on the outskirts of the city, shortly after the rail line passed below one of the A-highways secondary to the Autobahn. Marie raised herself to her feet, Hanschen doing the same almost simultaneously. She felt a little unsteady on her feet, but the nausea and immediate pain had faded away into nothingness, and the train had barely stopped when she picked up her bag from her original seat and headed out.
She flashed a smile at him as she skipped out of the door, her objective in mind. He looked half-heartedly as though he were about to try to follow her, but then hesitated, instead waving goodbye from the center of the coach with a semi-smile on his face. She slid the coach's door open to the left with a squeal of old, wet and rusted metal. The wind flung her hair across her face, and the driving rain left streaks of moisture at an angle across her glasses.
Marie lifted her head against the cold downpour, pulled her jacket tightly forwards, and walked purposely towards the station exit. The driver called out to her above the sound of the locomotive's exhaling steam and the rain hissing off of the hot boiler, but she kept walking.
She reached the street within a moment; she could have waited beneath the awning for one of the city's many buses to arrive, but in a way she didn't want Hanschen to come looking for her. It wasn't anything personal, but to be honest she just wanted to be alone.
She walked westward up the sloping Bahnhöfweg for about ten minutes, the row houses and occasional grey stone bank or office building rising to either side of the street before a lone black Volvo taxi found her, wipers flashing furiously to and fro as the rain fell still harder. "Sieben-zehn Altenkirchstrasse, bitte," Marie said softly to the driver, handing over a small handful of Euro coins that glinted dully by the cab light, closing the door behind her. "Danke. Fünfzehn minuten, Fraulein." She nodded, and off they went.
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