But Ulrike doesn’t notice their gazes. She is struggling to think. Her thoughts keep unraveling. The transition from her previous state to this wasn’t something that can be described, like giving a report of a bicycle trip, which would include departing home (around 10:30) and arriving at a destination, for example downtown Salzburg, perhaps the apartment building located at Rainerstraße 13 (around 11:05). Such an account might also include some description of what one might have thought along the way; the landscapes, and the moment when the industrial ugliness of the suburbs gives way to the beauty of the old world, Alpenstraße to Hellbrunnerstraße, and the Salzach River appears. The moment when you can abandon the dust and noise of the motorway and turn toward the river, onto the bicycle and pedestrian path, when you can momentarily switch to the hardest gear. When you can accelerate on the gentle downhill as fast as you’ve ever gone!
Ulrike rings her bell in irritation, cursing aloud: some moron is in her way again. And this is her way. The left bank of the Salzach, where she can see the familiar fussy cream-cake landscape that stinks of the time when they still lived on Herbert-von-Karajan Platz, before her father’s clothing company went bankrupt. Where, on a hot summer day, horse shit assaults your nose. The shit of the horses that pull the carriages of tourists around. Shit ground into the asphalt, which the horse shit cleaners brush onto shit platforms welded to the front frames of their bicycles. Such positions did indeed exist in Salzburg: the professional guild of horse-drawn-carriage-following bicycle horse-shit cleaners.
But there is more in cream-cake Salzburg, especially on the left bank of the Salzach. There are windows with glass cases filled with bottles of Champagne seasoned with nuggets of twenty-three karat gold. And then there’s the Mozart Santa Claus. He’s the real one. There are chocolate Mozartkugel balls in enormous violin-shaped packages. There are Mozart masks. Mozart magnetic buttons. Mozart wigs. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: the powdered-wig freak Ulrike feared more than anything else as a child. Buskers dressed as Mozart terrified her. And of course this became a family joke that always made Ulrike cry. Be good or Mozart will come and get you! Be good or Mozart will come and play the “Turkish Rondo” over and over! Ulrike simply can’t help riding along the left bank of the Salzach. Her entire classical Viennese childhood is there, a bright frenzied time kept moving by the wheels of wealth. Coins spin, bills crinkle, the bank card swishes, howls, and whines. A new fur muff for the winter for Mother, a posh car for Dad. Ulrike gets almost anything she can think of to want, until the bankruptcy comes, until they move away from Herbert-von-Karajan Platz.
Ulrike always rides to the Makartsteg. The bridge is covered with love locks, including Ulrike and Hanno’s: Ulrike ♥ Hanno 16.8.2012. Together, hand in hand, they flung the key into the mud at the bottom of the Salzach, and then only a few months later Ulrike learned that she was a traitorous whore.
The Makartsteg Bridge is full of people. Ulrike walks her bike to the other side of the river, climbs back on the saddle and heads for the riding path. The newly serviced gears shift so well! And the man with the beard who fixed it a couple of days ago was so nice. He even gave her a little bag of valve stem caps for free. Not boring black ones, raucous red and white like polka dots . . . It’s hot . . . her shirt is wet . . . her back is covered in sweat . . . She has to get in the shower, but Hanno wants to fuck . . . goddamn it, in the shower . . . Hanno wants to come in the shower with her . . . Hanno wants to fuck of all places in the bathroom with the orchid-patterned tiles . . . now, when her parents are away . . . otherwise he wouldn’t dare . . . He can’t get it up if her mother is running water in the kitchen . . . if her father is rustling the Salzburger Nachrichten in the living room . . . He wants to fuck standing up in the shower, even though it’s so uncomfortable . . . Ulrike braces against the wall, rising on her tiptoes so their genitals will be almost at the same level . . . just so Hanno can calm down and get it over with . . . Damn it . . . Ulrike is slipping . . . Can Hanno hold her up if she falls, if her feet slip out from under her? . . . Is she falling? Is she hitting her head on the tile floor? . . . Is she breaking her neck . . . in the middle of fucking?!
Ulrike unfolds her legs from the lotus position and switches to sitting on her knees. She shakes Hanno and the apartment at Rainerstraße 13 out of her head, banishing from her mind the bathroom with the orchid tiles, and the water. Not like that. She didn’t die like that! She’d spent so little time with Hanno lately. They’d tried
