Work Text:
Vienna, 1899.
The air smelled of opium, wet paper, and stale perfume. The empire was slowly unravelling like an old, overly embroidered dress. Isolde von Dittarsdorf studied at an elite girls' boarding school, founded by nuns and sustained by donations from the Ministry of Culture.
Quiet. Solitary. Unnaturally cultured. She was the daughter of a cruel psychiatrist and a mother long dead. People looked at her the way they looked at a priceless chandelier: afraid to touch it.
Isolde never cried. She only sang. At night, it was said she could be heard from the hallways, intoning songs in languages none of the other girls understood. Greek, German, French, Latin, even Hebrew.
But one day, Klara Vingler arrived. She claimed to have been born in Kraków, but she carried a way of speaking that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Her hair was brown like coffin wood, and she had a smile that felt like a question. During their very first breakfast together, Isolde said:
"You are noise."
And Klara replied:
"And you… you are the room where it plays."
From then on, they were inseparable.
Klara—whom everyone called Kakania, mocking her accent and that peculiar name—possessed a dirty, brilliant, dangerous intelligence. She read Schopenhauer in secret, since the nuns claimed that, for young ladies in training like them, those sort of readings were "quite unorthodox". She wrote letters to herself in the third person, and she played with fire with her eyes wide open. Isolde fell absolutely in love with her, but silently, like everything she did. Her obsession grew like a delicate disease.
Kakania spoke with the others, laughed with them, but at night, she slept in Isolde’s bed. They told each other stories. They touched without touching. Sometimes, Isolde dreamed of tenderly strangling her.
In their fourth year, a scandal tore through the school: Theophil, Isolde’s younger brother, was found dead. He had been sent to the boarding school to accompany his sister "as punishment" for being too sensitive. They found him floating in the school lake.
At first, they called it a suicide. Then, an accident. But Kakania knew. Not entirely, not with words, but she knew from the morning after the discovery. Isolde had come down to the dining hall with cold hands and disheveled hair. Her gaze was dry, broken. She asked nothing. She didn't react. She just sat down, as if her brother had never existed. As if the boy who had once fearfully touched her knee and asked, "Will you protect me here too?" had been nothing but a fever dream.
At night, while the others prayed, Kakania returned to the room they shared and found it in darkness, with Isolde singing. Not a nursery rhyme, not a song for weeping. She sang as one sings in the opera, with her whole body, with a feverish fire. She stood before the mirror, dressed in a mourning blouse that wasn't hers, a dark stain on her wrist. Kakania stood in the doorway, motionless. Isolde didn't look at her. They slept together again that night. But something had shifted. Isolde clung to her like a sick dog smelling its own death. She muttered incoherent words in German, in Hebrew, sometimes in a language that was perhaps hers alone. Kakania held her, as always. But with fear.
The rumors grew. The nuns whispered. Some said Theophil had fallen in love with a girl. Others said he was bullied. One of the professors swore he had seen him alone in the school's north wing, where entry was forbidden. But all the stories were clumsy. Incomplete. Isolde didn't speak. She never did. And yet, every time someone mentioned her brother's name, Kakania felt Isolde look at her from the corner of her eye. As if every conversation wounded her. As if something inside her died and was reborn each time, in an infernal cycle.
The days followed one another with the same cadence of a rope swinging after a hanging. Slowly, with a kind of invisible echo. Isolde did not weep for Theophil. She didn't even allow herself the theatrical gesture of despair. But in her diary—a crimson leather-bound notebook that Kakania had found once among her things and never approached again—there was a torn page, and in its place, a line written in the childish handwriting Theophil used to have:
"Isolde, I don't want to be afraid of you anymore."
Kakania pretended she hadn't seen it.
Their relationship intensified in ways that had no name. Isolde barely ate, barely spoke. She only sang. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would wake up sweating, calling out for her brother, clutching Kakania’s neck as if she were sinking into an invisible sea. Kakania responded with caresses, unsure if they came from compassion or desire. And while the other girls played, discussed tarot cards, or made plans for summer vacations in the countryside, Kakania watched them with an strangely hollow smile, knowing she did not belong to their world. Her body was there, her voice too, but her soul... her soul slept in Isolde's bed.
One day, during natural sciences class, one of the girls—a spoiled blonde named Ottilie—joked:
"Maybe Theophil killed himself because his sister is a hysteric."
Isolde didn't even look up. But Kakania did. And Ottilie didn't speak again for the rest of that week.
Autumn arrived with the smell of rotting leaves, burning candles, and, of course, the incessant trail of soot that characterized the place. The classes grew increasingly dull, the boarding school colder. Isolde walked like a ghost, wearing a black ribbon around her neck and gloves even inside the classroom. No one dared ask her why. But Kakania knew.
That night, amidst whispers, Isolde confessed something that didn't sound like a confession at all:
"Sometimes I think he speaks to me from within. That I… am not myself. That there is something else… something more than me. As if my body were an estate too old. You know? I think I have rooms that are locked."
Kakania said nothing. She only kissed her forehead. It wasn't a sweet gesture. It was like marking her with an invisible seal. Isolde trembled.
"Will you stay?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Even if... even if I open that room."
It was in November when everything shattered. During an inspection of the north wing, the nuns found Theophil’s bloody shirt hidden behind an antique organ. No one understood why it was there. The questions revived. The students whispered. Kakania couldn't sleep. And one night, Isolde got up in her sleep. Or so Kakania thought at first. She followed her, barefoot, down the damp hallway. Isolde murmured in an invented language, stroking the walls, and upon reaching the music room, she knelt before the piano and began to play. She played a melody that Theophil used to repeat clumsily. The very one he played the day before he died. Kakania wanted to leave. She couldn't. Something in that scene bore the weight of an epiphany. A soft, poisonous panic.
"Was it an accident?" she asked in a low voice, as if speaking to God. "Did you push him?"
Isolde didn't answer. But a tear—the only one Kakania would ever see her shed—fell onto the ivory of the keys.
Days later, the Mother Superior summoned her. She had heard things. Suspicions. But Isolde, with an unsettling calm, denied everything. No one could prove a thing. The shirt disappeared. The nuns spoke of a cover-up. Of witchcraft. Kakania did not intervene. She only held her that night, whispering:
"I believed you before I knew the truth. Now... I just understand you, Isolde."
The last page of Isolde’s diary—which Kakania read when it was handed to her without a word—read:
"I took him. To the lake. Under the pretext of taking a walk. It was as if he were on his knees, begging me to kill him. Theophil was already burning. Agonizing. My actions were noble; I helped him. I only remember the water. And his screams. I think I was happy in that instant. I don't know what that means. I don't know who I was. Is it because of the hysteria the doctors say I have? Has it been… the same reason my father looks at me as if he loathes me? Klara... I don't want to be alone again."
And she wasn't.
Winter arrived. The boarding school fell silent beneath the snow. No one spoke of Theophil again. Nor of the shirt. The students forgot. The nuns prayed harder. And in the room at the end of the west hallway, every night, Isolde and Kakania remained together. There was something venomous about it, yes. But also something indestructible.
Like a pact made in a collapsing mind.
Epilogue
Austrian Empire, Vienna. March 1903.
The boarding school still exists, but the nuns are gone. It is administered by the State now, staffed by educated young ladies who do not believe in demons. They replaced the chandeliers with electric bulbs and painted the walls a dingy white. They called it "progress." They called it "light." No one remembers Theophil. No one asks about Isolde. And yet, every time a new girl gets lost in the corridors, she claims to hear a song drifting from the locked wing. A melody without lyrics, resembling a liturgical chant sung by a voice far too human. The teachers say it is the wind. Isolde no longer sings. But she still talks in her sleep. Sometimes in Latin, sometimes with Theophil’s voice. Sometimes with mine.
The other women of the world do not know her. They couldn't. They do not know what it is to love something that doesn't love you back the way it should, but is still yours—more yours than the body you inhabit when you sleep. I take care of her. I feed her. She lives beside me. When the fever visits her, it is I who change her sheets. When she strikes her head against the walls, repeating the same phrase in different languages that no one ever taught her ("you didn't drown, I held you under"), it is I who hold her hand until it stops hurting.
I do not need pity, nor I do want redemption. I only write this so I do not forget what I saw. What I know. Isolde killed him. I knew it. And still, when she told me "don't leave me," I didn't hesitate.
There is something deeper than guilt. Darker than the truth. It is the love that doesn't choose, that doesn't negotiate. The kind that burns without direction. The kind that kills without meaning to. The kind that remains.
And if one day she takes me with her—because I know she will, I feel it in her gaze when she trembles—I will not stop her. I will not resist. We will die together. Like girls in love who never learned how to speak to the world. Like lies that loved each other with the strength of a truth that never needed to be proven.
—
Klara Vingler.