In those first secret months of our courtship we felt as if we existed outside of time. We’d snatch stolen hours together, one eye on the clock, and then go back to our separate lives, obliged to keep hidden the changes we were effecting in each other. To carve our own alternative timeline—a future where we could be together, not at the expense of family honor or cultural fidelity but in some kind of harmony with those broader obligations—required sacrifice and compromise, and more patience than either of us felt we possessed in those urgent days of love’s first flushes. But we got there, and though the last seven years have not been without their challenges, we’ve shared a happiness neither of us ever really expected, given where we started from.
And so, the sun dipping over the rooftops, its light draining from the sky so that our dusk resembled their dawn, we felt the presence of Jesse and Celine and of the twist of fate that would part them. In grasping the imaginative cord that joined us we were also communing with the version of us that didn’t make it, because time had ran out for us as it had for them. An unexpected gravity immobilized us. For half an hour I couldn’t move, and I didn’t want to leave.
I breathed in the anguish and gratitude that seemed to dapple the air, that I might take it with me when we left, like a store of fat to see us through a winter yet to come. Should things get tough, we’d have those reserves to draw on. In this way, a fragment of Vienna that exists only as pixels will nourish us just as much as the hours we spent waltzing in a warm, high room overlooking the park, or listening to a string quartet play Mozart’s Spring in the vaulted nave of the Annakirche.
So far, our pilgrimage had been a strictly private affair. Out of mild embarrassment, or a sense of protecting something sacred, we hadn’t breathed a word of it to anyone else, even that young European couple on the terrace of the Albertina who looked, after all, with their careful posing and the hushed intimacy of their conversation, as if they might have been there for the same reason as us. There was safety in keeping our fantasy between ourselves, just as there was safety in keeping our love secret in the early days when the world might have taken it from us. And so it was with some anxiety that we climbed the steps to Windmühlgasse, a quiet street just beyond the Ringstrasse, and approached Teuchtler Schallplattenhandlung, a small record shop informally known as Alt & Neu for the sign that hangs above its door, illuminated like a beacon of retro comforts in an otherwise digital world.
At first glance we assumed the shop to be closed, and took turns to pose dolefully for photographs beneath the sign. Perhaps it was better that we’d come too late; going inside would have meant confessing to something for which we might have been mocked or misunderstood. I pictured Jack Black’s character in Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity, a gargoyle of vinyl snobbery, seizing on our tourist whimsy as soon as we walked through the door and mercilessly heckling us for it.
I’d embarked upon our journey with no pretensions that the movie’s romanticism would be reciprocated by the citizens of Vienna; in fact, I’d supposed that if the film meant anything to them at all it would be as a millstone, the way The Godfather is to the people of the eastern half of Sicily, who lament the conflation foreigners insist on making between them and the Mafia clichés that still haunt the west side of the island, and which their less proud and scrupulous shopkeepers continue to feed with their racks of unofficial merchandise, T-shirts and aprons and fridge magnets and bottle openers all plastered with the leering face of Brando as Vito Corleone. Surely there exists no more vocal an enemy of cliché and sentimentalism than a record shop owner; particularly the owner of a record shop which has become inextricably associated with a film that so artlessly wears its heart on its sleeve.
But then we met Philip.
He made no assumptions about the reason for our visit. He merely saw us loitering outside and invited us in, leaving us to browse the shelves of vinyl unmolested. The place was cozy and cluttered as the best record shops are; four or five customers shuffled quietly around the rows, while another, a long-haired man in his twenties, chatted casually with Philip as he listened via headphones to a record on one of the bank of turntables on the counter. Uzma and I were silent. A moment later our fear that Philip might be in militant denial of the position his store held in movie folklore was dispelled. We saw the two framed Before Sunrise posters, one hung behind the counter and the other on a door at the back where we’d hoped to find a listening booth. Displayed prominently, too, the sleeve of Kath Bloom’s “Come Here”, the song which has become synonymous with the scene in which it appears.
Jesse and Celine wander into the same record shop in which Uzma and I were now standing. Celine selects a Kath Bloom album and leads Jesse into the listening booth. The needle is gently lowered and a plaintive, faintly kitsch acoustic ballad begins to play. Standing close together in the tiny booth, they listen, Celine with self-conscious hesitancy, Jesse with barely-contained amusement at the ingenuousness of her choice. Their eyes wander to each other, away, back again, awkwardly exploring, risking, averting; a wordless courtship playing out over the course of the song. It’s a sweet little scene, and one you’d expect Uzma and I to be far too worldly and cynical to attach any weight to now. Except we’re not cynical. Such moments still speak to us.
When we discovered that the listening booth was no longer there—we’d later learn, in chatting with the long-haired man, that it had been a prop constructed for the scene, by his father no less—our disappointment must have been visible, for Philip looked at us directly then, and in a benign tone asked if we were here because of the movie.
Of course we were. There was no hiding it. I felt a rush of shame. But then something rather wonderful happened. Philip’s face split into a wide, warm grin, and with its encouragement I began to ramble about how much the film meant to us. Philip seemed genuinely delighted.
“Then you must have your song,” he said.
There was safety in keeping our fantasy between ourselves, just as there was safety in keeping our love secret in the early days when the world might have taken it from us.He turned to the woman behind the counter and gave her an instruction in German. With a deliciously sour and disparaging expression—she must have indulged this request a thousand times—she reached down and retrieved a copy of the Kath Bloom album, and slapped it on the turntable. The strains of “Come Here” filled the shop, and Uzma and I—because it felt right, and expected, and because we were guests in their city, and because, though we hadn’t known it until that moment, it was what we’d come here to do—slow danced, our eyes tightly closed, disappearing into each other for the duration of the song.
I remember thinking as we danced, making a public display of our private sweetness, that we’d made our own luck, and that other people could see that and were generously disposed to us because of it.
When it was over, we opened our eyes to find Philip beaming down at us; unprompted, and with obvious pleasure, he proceeded to direct us in a 15-minute photoshoot, staging cutesy recreations of Jesse and Celine’s visit. We pretended to browse the same racks they had browsed, stood where the listening booth had been, the doorway to the storeroom in which it had been built left open to expose the border between movie magic and workaday real life. At Philip’s say-so the other customers made room for us; the woman behind the counter turned out to be just as sweet as him, slipping free records into the tote bag I’d bought as a souvenir. Goodbyes when they came were made several times over. Philip followed us out onto the street and took more pictures of us standing arm in arm under his sign.
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time,” I said.
“All I’ve got is time,” he smiled, and I wondered if he might be a minor angel, placed here to shunt doe-eyed couples towards their little epiphanies. There were hugs and waves and finally we left him, braced against the cold, to follow his directions down to the Café Sperl and another tryst with a mythology of our own making.
By now I’d forgotten all about Stefan Zweig’s Vienna and had fallen irretrievably for Linklater’s vision of the city. At the Café Sperl the two briefly merged. Never mind that Zweig had in fact favored its rival venue, the Café Central; the Sperl had changed little aesthetically since its 1880 inception, and epitomized the Viennese coffeehouse culture of which I’d wanted to partake. Picture parquet floors and marble table tops, and billiards tables fanned with the day’s newspapers. Red and gold jacquard adorned its banquettes, its Jugendstil patterns worn to a shine by generations of locals and tourists alike. We were still high from events at the Alt & Neu, and quickly brushed aside the disappointment of finding that the booth in which Jesse and Celine had sat was occupied. Taking the next booth along, we ordered the requisite coffee and apfelstrudel, which arrived on individual silver trays, borne by a waiter who remained oblivious to our history.
In the movie, Jesse and Celine stage imaginary phone calls home, in which they confess to a friend that they’ve “met someone.” Jesse plays the role of the friend in Celine’s conversation, and vice versa: this conceit provides a protective layer of irony through which an illuminating candor emerges. By adopting a persona, one can tell a truth which might otherwise remain buried in caution and restraint.
Such was our courtship: a daily series of conversations, spanning several months, in a café near Uzma’s London office, conducted in the hour between the end of her working day and our boarding the train home to Luton—a town 40 minutes away where we both still lived but where we couldn’t risk being seen together, its conservative Muslim community watchful for breaches in its code of relations, among its daughters and sisters especially. We’d talk out our future in a booth not so different from the one we now shared in the Sperl, and then we’d ride the train back to our discrete realities, chaste and quiet among the commuters, any of whom might have been spies for a regime that decreed our two worlds should and could not mix.
Because of that disconnect between the pact we were building around a Farringdon café table and the separation enforced on us by our hometown’s bigotry, we often felt that we were actors playing a part. A happy ending to our story seemed a distant possibility, and so we assumed the heavy costume of the star-crossed. Everything was weighted and precarious. It meant that every word counted. We convinced each other through talking that ours was a future worth gambling on, just as Jesse and Celine talk themselves into each other’s hearts. It’s another habit we share in common.
Those conversations are behind us now, and our words no longer carry the weight of prophecy. When we leaned towards each other across the Sperl marble, imaginary phones pressed to our faces, it was a caper and no more. We’d achieved the comfortable silence of the long in love.
On our last day in Vienna we had one remaining location to explore. The Zollamtssteg is an historic steel footbridge spanning the Wien river which connects the Landstrasse and Innere Stadt districts. Its appearance in Before Sunrise comes early and is brief; Jesse and Celine cross the bridge on first leaving the Westbahnhof to begin the walk that will change both their lives. Halfway across they meet two local men and ask them for advice on things to do and see in the city. The men are hobby actors who invite them to the play they’ll be appearing in that night, in which one of them has the part of a pantomime cow.
In reality the station and the bridge lie on opposite sides of the city, several kilometers apart; the filmmakers twist and condense both space and time in order to tell their story. We left the nearest U-Bahn station at Landstrasse as the temperature began to dip. The air crackled with the threat of snow. Spotting the distinctive green arches of the bridge in the distance, verdant as summer love against the sky’s cheerless grey, we hurried across the road. Only when we drew nearer did we see that the bridge had fallen into a disenchanting decline. The boardwalk had been replaced by concrete and the arches were covered with graffiti. The U-Bahn tracks clattered below us with the passing of a train, and below them the river flowed sluggishly, winter slowing the current and graining our view out to the high rises that abutted the mouth of the river. Suddenly we felt as bleak as the day appeared, and as we waited for somebody to come along who’d take our picture I wondered if this was Vienna’s intention: to restore to us a wider sense of realism, so that when we came later to reflect on the trip any moments of magic we’d enjoyed might be preserved and enhanced.
Or had it all been a mirage? Was I trapped between two seasons—the summer of the movie and the winter of my own life, a slow freeze that would descend as marriage expended its passion like a balloon inexorably deflating? How long would Vienna sustain us? We dug our hands into our pockets and stamped our feet. Home was calling us, and we had Christmas presents to wrap.
Presently a man approached us, making his way across the bridge, and I asked him if he’d be kind enough to photograph us. He agreed, neither reluctant nor enthusiastic.
We convinced each other through talking that ours was a future worth gambling on, just as Jesse and Celine talk themselves into each other’s hearts.“I suppose you know about the movie,” I said.
“Of course,” he said, with a reticent half-smile. It was cold and he probably had somewhere to be, and I couldn’t coax delight from him, even though we’d come to expect it of everyone we met in this mysterious city, a place we knew without discussion we’d return to someday, in the summertime. His tolerance was all we required of him. As lovers we are unique and we are commonplace. In this fact I find great consolation. I only ever wanted to be at large in a world that found my happiness unexceptional.
Six weeks home; Christmas has been and gone, and a New Year has begun. We’ve talked little of these experiences, preferring to absorb them into our story as skin acquires new color from the sun’s unselective gaze. Perhaps we’ll sit down and share exactly what Vienna meant to us once we’ve adjusted to the imperceptible ways in which it has enriched us. Meanwhile, our old routines press on. Uzma goes to work, in her new office in a different part of London. I stay at home and write, in the house we share in St. Albans, a small, safe city half an hour’s drive and a world away from the town in which we first met. In the evenings I walk the five minutes from home to the station to meet Uzma off the train. Sometimes I still get butterflies as I wait for her to emerge through the throng of people converging on the turnstiles. I’m never far from another insight into my good fortune.
On the way home tonight, waiting to cross the road outside the station, a sudden impulse seizes me and I take Uzma in my arms. We waltz on the pavement as the buses wheeze by, a light rain falling. Our steps are stiff with the bashfulness of new students versed only in the basics; my heart clenches at the sound of Uzma’s laughter; it’s as if we’ve only just met.
“Who needs music anyway?” a stranger comments in passing.
And he’s right: it’s the little romances inside us that make us all tick, whether the world can hear them or not.
