Vienne

Vienne enters the story as a destination that Adèle can revisit through travel and memory, but it also becomes the imagined setting for Stefania’s independent future. The city’s most vivid promise is a restaurant at the corner of Weihburggasse and Rauhensteingasse: an ambition that turns Stefania’s years of cooking for others into the basis of a business bearing her own name.

A destination within Adèle’s travels

Stefania and Adèle have grown up together and, in Stefania’s telling, have never been separated. Stefania even accompanied Adèle and Petro on their honeymoon, which took them to Krakow, Budapest, and Vienne. Petro objected to her presence and yielded only after Adèle pleaded for several nights, unable to imagine leaving without Stefania. During the month-long trip, Stefania continued to arrange Adèle’s care: she secured soft-boiled eggs for the two women, searched each morning for fresh cream for Adèle’s coffee, and dressed, groomed, and buttoned her clothes. Travel broadened Adèle’s experience without releasing Stefania from service.

Vienne also belongs to the pattern of restorative travel remembered by Adèle. When her father was alive, she went almost every year to Carlsbad, and in other years to Dora or Yaremche; Stefania accompanied her on these journeys as well. The stated purpose of taking Stefania along was to restore color to her waxen complexion, but the narrator wryly notes that someone still had to carry out the chamber pots. The contrast reveals how a servant’s presence could be framed as care for her while also ensuring the continuation of intimate household labor.

A city in the imperial travel network

Vienne appears as a point of departure and return in accounts of movement across the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. A route described by a priest’s wife follows two Viennese travelers, Fritz Engländer and Jan Hofmann, on a planned four-thousand-kilometer journey lasting exactly three months. They left Vienne on August 12, passed through Bohemia, Moravia, and Galicia, continued into Bukovina and other regions, and were expected back in Vienne around November 20. The itinerary makes the city a hub within a wider imperial geography, while its elaborate recital reaches Stefania as she works: carrying dishes and lamps, heating water, and scrubbing the terrace.

The same imperial geography appears in Ernest Thorn’s account of his youth as a traveling magician. At sixteen, he set out on foot with a bundle of colorful scarves, rabbits, pigeons, and ingenious devices, moving among the diverse lands of the monarchy. His story places Vienne among the places and routes that make itinerant work, performance, and cultural exchange possible. Such mobility, however, is not evenly shared: the wealthy can travel for health or pleasure, while Stefania’s journeys remain bound to tending the people she accompanies.

The imagined restaurant

Velvele’s proposal gives Vienne a future-facing significance. He tells Stefania that he has saved a small amount of capital and can sell and arrange things, while she can cook well enough to rival Franz Sacher at his restaurant in Vienne, at the corner of Weihburggasse and Rauhensteingasse. Their proposed partnership would combine his commercial skill with her cooking, and the restaurant would carry her name. Vienne is thus not just a celebrated culinary address; it becomes the measure of Stefania’s skill and the imagined place where that skill might belong to her rather than to a household that consumes it without naming its labor.

The proposal is linked to a concrete plan of departure. Velvele has ordered two tickets for the Taormina, a transatlantic ship due to leave Hamburg on March 13, and says that Stefania’s place would be in the women’s section. He calls the offer professional, acknowledges that he bought the tickets without asking her, and urges her to take time before deciding. The destination of this voyage is the New World, not Vienne, but the restaurant plan in Vienne gives the proposed escape its economic shape: Stefania is invited to imagine herself not merely as a cook, but as a named partner with a future of her own.

At the book’s close, Stefania says she will sail with Velvele from Hamburg aboard the Taormina, in third class and in the women’s section. Vienne remains the place of the proposed restaurant rather than the ship’s destination. Its significance rests in that distinction: it stands for a possible claim to authorship and livelihood, while the actual voyage carries the hope of beginning again elsewhere.