by Garret Weyr
On that brisk, sunny morning, Caroline hugged her daughter, kissed her husband, and left for Berlin, confident that she would see them again soon.
But in Berlin, there was a car crash, and Caroline Brooks died immediately. Not the sort of thing that anyone had planned for.
Alexander Miklós was now a famous poet and a man who would have to raise his daughter alone. And Maggie was now a child with no memory whatsoever of her mother. This was, Maggie felt, the worst part of the car crash. It was practically impossible to miss someone you couldn’t remember.
Whenever the topic of Caroline came up, Maggie was uncomfortable, as if she had done something wrong to be the sort of child incapable of missing her mother. She missed the idea of a mother, and that idea was formed from storybooks or by watching other children with their mothers. She’d glimpse a woman wiping a child’s face and wonder if her own mother had ever done that.
Maggie had seen so many women grab the hand of a child crossing the street that she assumed that Caroline had done the same at some point. But maybe not, for Alexander always had preferred to put his hand on her shoulder and murmur, Look both ways first.
She supposed she could ask her father: What kind of mother was she? After all, he believed in having a curious mind, and repeatedly said that there was no such thing as a stupid question, or one too small. But even seven years after her mother’s death, Maggie could see her father’s eyes tighten and his jaw stiffen if anyone mentioned Caroline. It was all right if he mentioned her first, but it was clearly upsetting if anyone else did. Maggie refused to cause him any pain just from curiosity about a woman she neither missed nor remembered.
Alexander often said that over time Maggie would come to know her mother through her paintings. Maggie thought, but did not say, that looking at paintings was not the best way to know a parent.
Caroline had been a loving mother for three years, but Maggie knew her only from photos. Or by what other people said. And people said a lot, but they mostly whispered things like Poor dear and So unfortunate and, most irritatingly, Such a plain child, yet the mother was a great beauty. Maggie didn’t think it should matter very much if she were plain or if her mother had been a great beauty. Her mother, beautiful or not, was dead.
Wonder if she has the mother’s talent, poor dear was another whisper Maggie often heard. She herself did not wonder, as she had seen her own drawings and understood that they were terrible. Actually, the poor dear doesn’t, Maggie longed to say in reply, but her father believed that being polite wasn’t simply about manners, but kindness.
“Rude words make everything worse,” he’d say. “Try and be kind.”
So no matter how irritated the whispered comments made her, Maggie never spoke up. She thought it was enough that she knew about her own lack of talent. In her sketches, no matter how careful she was, her figures were always potato-like lumps trying to be something other than potatoes.
As a rule, people do not enjoy doing things poorly, and Maggie was no exception. She would never be a painter and she had no wish to be a poet. While she knew her father loved his work, reading his poems often felt like using a very confusing map.
She liked to read, but knew she’d never enjoy a life spent at a desk. Her father sat countless hours at his, hunched over ink-stained papers or staring out of the window. Sometimes Maggie saw him simply staring into space as if he could see what no one else could.
“I’m not staring,” he told her once. “I’m either thinking or trying to think.”
“Doesn’t thinking just happen?” Maggie asked. For her it did, and she didn’t think she was doing it wrong.
“Yes, but when you’re writing a poem, thinking doesn’t always happen the way you want it to,” Alexander said. “So I stare because I’m trying to understand my thoughts.”
Maggie nodded as if she understood him perfectly. But all she really understood was that her father sat at his desk. A lot.
So she didn’t try writing a poem to discover if she was as bad at poetry as she was at painting. It was one thing to muck about with charcoal, paint, and paper. At least that was a bit fun. Sit down and try to think? That was not for Maggie, who preferred walking to sitting, and thinking to trying to think.
She didn’t mind sitting and reading, and would often do that by her father’s desk while he worked. Which was not to say that he worked so much that he had no time for Maggie. Alexander, in spite of never having planned to be a father, let alone a single parent, turned out to be a really great one. He had seen right away that if he was going to be in charge of Maggie’s basic requirements (meals, clean clothes, tidy rooms, and safe places to play), he would probably need some help.
Before Caroline’s death, Maggie had spent most of her time at home, in her mother’s art studio, or with a nanny. The art studio was now empty and Alexander had fired the nanny, whom he’d never liked. On a few occasions, he took Maggie to his office at the University of Vienna, where he was a professor, but that was neither fun nor safe for a little girl. She used his entire collection of poetry books to build a fort, and when she ran out of books she wandered into other people’s offices to find more. She only succeeded in annoying everyone and making a mess. Plus, when she’d tried to pet the cat who’d made a home in the poetry and literature offices, it had scratched her across the face. Four stitches, but no permanent scar.
So Alexander sold their apartment and rented a few rooms at the Hotel Sacher. The hotel took care of meals, clean clothes, and tidy rooms. She and her father settled happily into their new, if somewhat unusual, home.
Whenever Alexander had to be at the university, he hired one of his students to take Maggie out or one of the hotel staff to stay inside with her. In this way, both the hotel lobby and the city itself became playrooms where she could make a mess without annoying others. Nor could she cause herself any harm.
When Maggie was old enough to go to school, Alexander enrolled her in one and then, just as quickly, took her out. He was horrified by the rules that served no purpose and the boring nature of the schoolwork. She came home one day with a teacher’s note saying that a book he’d given her to read was inappropriate for a child. He threw the note away—and that turned out to be Maggie’s last day at school.
If Alexander had needed help keeping his daughter fed, clean, and safe, he most certainly didn’t need help to teach her. She had lessons in the morning at home with her father, and while he taught her math, Latin, German, English, and history on a daily basis, he also made sure to teach her whatever she found interesting.
There was only one small gap in her education: Maggie had no idea how to make friends.
She saw friends everywhere in Vienna. People her age playing in a park or walking home in small groups after school. In the cafés, she saw old men arguing while playing chess, or young men laughing loudly over coffee and cake. She saw women talking on the streetcars and sidewalks and in parks and cafés. They talked and talked and talked, yet Maggie never overheard anything that sounded important enough for so much discussion.
Talking seemed to be the key to all the friendships she saw, and Alexander himself talked (as well as laughed and argued) when he was with his friends. Maggie could talk in almost three languages. Her best was English, which she and her father spoke at home; then German, which she spoke with everyone else; and some French, which she studied when her father thought she’d practiced enough German for the week.
If talking is all it takes, I can make friends, she thought. She was quite confident, but quickly discovered that something else was necessary. Whatever it was, she was missing it.
The year she was eight, she tried several times to talk with kids she saw in the park. Prepared to use her best German, she approached a group playing football and said, “How do you do?”
The children, three boys and two girls aged about eight to ten, stopped what they were doing and stared at her. Maggie wondered if she shouldn’t introduce herself. “I’m Anna Marguerite, which is
a little silly, so people call me Maggie.”
“Do you play?” asked one of the girls, although she spoke very quickly, so it sounded like “Dojyaplài?”
Maggie was quiet for a bit longer than the group considered normal. Dojyaplài? Her mind was sounding it out.
“You deaf?” one of the boys asked loudly and slowly.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. Do you play! Got it. “No, I’m not,” she said to the boy.
She considered which German verb tense would best explain to the girl that she had often wished to play football. Maggie had imagined playing it so often that she thought she could play really well. In fact, she was dying to race across the park, keeping the ball safely between her feet while also magically letting it get ahead of her. But by the time she looked up with a detailed, perfectly composed answer, the group had run off and was playing in the distance.
The next time, she sought out a different group and had a well-prepared answer to Do you play? but no one asked if she could. One of the kids said yes, her name was rather silly, and another wanted to know where she lived.
“The Hotel Sacher,” Maggie said.
“Why do you live in a hotel?” a girl about Maggie’s age asked. They smiled briefly at each other.
“That’s weird,” one of the boys said. “No one lives in a hotel.”
“It is weird,” another boy said.
Now Maggie was nervous in a way that had nothing to do with German verb tenses. “My father is the poet Alexander Miklós, and he thought it best,” she said. Her chest was tight and her arms gripped against her sides. She could hear how stiff and unpleasant her voice was, but she couldn’t make herself use polite, friendly tones.
“You’re weird,” the first boy said.
Perhaps if Maggie had been at school surrounded all day by other children, she might have known to shrug and laugh. But while she had often heard people talk about her dead mother, her famous father, and her own plain looks, no one had ever before said anything unkind directly to her.
“You’re very rude,” she said. “I don’t think I care to know you.”
All of the kids began laughing, and the girl Maggie had smiled at called her a weirdo. The German, verrückter Typ, made it sound even worse.
As she grew, Maggie began to understand that the way she and her father lived was not considered normal. It wasn’t simply living in a hotel that people found so strange. It was that Alexander wanted her to study whatever she liked best, to develop independent thoughts, and to play freely. When other grown-ups described Maggie’s education, they used words like unusual and odd, questionable and judgment.
But Maggie enjoyed spending her days learning about what interested her. If she liked something, Alexander bought her books or took her to see what it was that had caught her attention. As a result, she learned a great deal—about Europe’s wars (for she loved swords and cannons); kings, queens, and emperors (palaces and jewelry); and how stained glass was made (cathedral windows).
Maggie much preferred her afternoons with hotel staff, who were willing to do jigsaw puzzles or play games with her, to those spent with Alexander’s graduate students, who were only interested in discussing her father or poetry. But she appreciated that because of them, she could go anywhere she wanted in the city.
What she liked to do most was get on a streetcar and ride it to its end. Sometimes, she’d want to search a new neighborhood for a Konditorei that had the best-looking display of cakes. Sometimes she’d want to walk all the way home from a new neighborhood. Or, if the weather was poor, she’d happily ride the streetcars in any direction at all.
Riding the streetcars in this random manner drove the graduate students crazy, and the greatest moment of Maggie’s young life was when she turned nine and Alexander decided that she could go out on her own wherever she pleased and do as she liked. Every Monday morning, he gave her a weekly pass for Vienna’s buses, streetcars, and subways, which were called the U-Bahn.
While she was delighted to be free of her father’s poetry-obsessed students, Maggie found that she missed having someone with whom she could share her discoveries or observations. Silly things, like This Konditorei has the best almond cake, but also somewhat more serious matters. Like when she was forced to acknowledge that she had walked so far from the tram stop that she was lost. Her German was good enough to ask a stranger the best way back to the last streetcar she’d been on, but being lost embarrassed her. Vienna was her own city, after all. What sort of ridiculous person got lost in her own city?
After being hopelessly turned around and not at all certain of the way back, Maggie came to see that getting lost just meant discovering a new way to get home. By the sixth time this happened, she knew not to panic, to try and find her way to a familiar landmark, or to ask an older person as politely as possible for directions. She was always glad to get home, but mostly Maggie was happy to know that, thanks to her father’s questionable judgment plus his unusual and odd ideas about education, she had learned both how to get lost and how to find her own way.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IS IT FUN?
FOR HER ELEVENTH BIRTHDAY, ALEXANDER GAVE in to Maggie’s begging to stay up late with him in the evenings. That was when he met his friends at the Blaue Bar. The bar was in the hotel lobby, and where Maggie often had lunch if Alexander had to be at the university earlier than normal. Sometimes she would just wander in and nibble from the dishes of nuts. Every so often, Kurt, the old bartender, would let her help cut up the lemons and limes.
According to Alexander, Maggie had taken her first steps in the Blaue Bar one night while he and Caroline were having cake and coffee at the end of a long day. Maggie had no memory of that, of course, and simply loved the bar because it was beautiful. Dark blue velvet covered the chairs and the bar stools. Even the walls were covered in light blue velvet with gold overleaf on which hung burnished lamps.
Alexander met his friends there very late every evening, after the Opera was done, so that the singers could join the city’s painters, sculptors, musicians, and poets. They were the sorts of people who liked to talk and smoke and argue about things Maggie found hard to understand. But she liked how excited they all got about their discussion.
That wasn’t, however, why she wanted to stay up late in the bar. One reason was because she hated how, as soon as she fell asleep upstairs, Alexander left their rooms to go downstairs. She wanted to be included in this part of her father’s life.
But the main reason Maggie wanted to be at the Blaue Bar late at night was the dragons. Once a week, at around two in the morning, a group of the city’s dragons gathered at the bar, laughing and talking. Even though Maggie had now lived at the hotel for seven years, she’d only ever seen them there twice. They would loudly ask Kurt to bring them pitchers of fermented Apfelsaft, which was, as far as Maggie could tell, apple juice mixed with vinegar. It smelled so terrible that she could not bring herself to even try it, but she loved watching the dragons stand around the bar, jostling each other for position.
When she started coming to the bar every night with her father, she tried to stay up, but usually fell asleep next to him on the blue velvet banquette or curled underneath the table. The floor was covered in a beautiful soft rug and the heavy marble table made a canopy, blocking out light and sound. Almost every week, she missed the dragons because she was asleep.
Finally, one night the dragons were still there when her father woke her. Maggie wondered how it was that twenty dragons could fit in the small Blaue Bar when the ones she had seen elsewhere in the city were almost as big as the bar itself.
“They scale to size,” Alexander told her. “That way they are never too big or too small to fit with their surroundings.”
When getting into her warm bed as the sun was beginning its rise, Maggie would think how lucky she was to live in Vienna, where the world’s last dragons lived, and to have a father who let her see every bit of the city, no matter the hour.
Over the years, G
risha had come to love his new home. It wasn’t his forest or, for that matter, any forest, but he was, at long last, a flesh-and-blood dragon again. If not as free as he’d been before Leopold’s spell, he was far freer than he’d dared to hope while he was a teapot. His castle had plenty of sunny spots, and the people who visited were thrilled to have a dragon there to answer their questions.
He and Kator, who lived in another castle on the Danube, often visited each other. They would sit and sun themselves or, on cold, rainy days, watch the slate-gray river go by and talk. They were careful not to talk too much of home or their early years in Vienna, but Kator had a lot of battle stories. Between those stories and the ones of people Grisha saw at his castle, they always had something to discuss.
“How do you notice these things?” Kator asked, after Grisha recounted a story about a woman whose open purse revealed a water bottle, an umbrella, a sweater, Band-Aids, paper napkins, and a very mashed piece of cake.
“I’ve had lots of practice watching people,” Grisha said. “You could do the same at your castle.”
“People only interest me on the battlefield,” Kator said. “Off of it, I much prefer the company of dragons.”
Kator was not alone in this sentiment. All the dragons loved the weekly gatherings at the Hotel Sacher. Grisha found these nights to be precious beyond all others. He only wished that the dragons could meet at a more reasonable hour than two in the morning. It wasn’t that he was tired then (created by magic for battle, dragons needed very little sleep), but he loved watching the city’s sky in the hours before sunrise. When you have lived most of your life as a prisoner, you come to crave the outside as if it were the best chocolate in the world.
However, two in the morning it was, as the Department of Extinct Exotics—known as the D.E.E.—had made an agreement with the hotel manager that the dragons would not come until the bar was closed to the general public. The D.E.E. was tasked with overseeing the dragons’ lives and controlling their interactions with the general population.
