The Sleepwalkers

You'd picked Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers half out of genuine interest and half because it seemed like the sort of book that might actually justify itself in conversation. A dense, doorstop history of how Europe blundered into the First World War, which felt, at the very least, thematically appropriate for a degree you're supposedly here to take seriously. You're perhaps thirty pages in, making slower progress than you'd like through Clark's account of the Balkans in 1903, when someone settles into the chair across from you with the unhurried confidence of someone who has never once worried about being unwelcome anywhere.

"Clark," she says, nodding at the cover. "Rather ambitious, for an afternoon in a café. Most people here manage a novella at best."

You look up. Sharp red bob, an expression somewhere between amused and assessing, the kind of composed, effortless polish that suggests boarding school, or at least its aesthetic. Something about her tugs at your memory, though you can't quite place it.A flash of a registration office, a queue, red hair disappearing down a path before you'd managed to catch up. "Have we met before? You look familiar, somehow."

"Do I now?" She considers this with mild interest rather than concern, entirely unbothered by the question. "I couldn't say. I have one of those faces, apparently. I get told that rather often, usually by men attempting an opening line." A faint, knowing smile. "Was that your opening line, or an actual question?"

"Bit of both, honestly."

"Efficient of you." She extends a hand, brief and almost formal, the gesture trained rather than casual. "Lilly."

"John."

"John. Right." She glances back at the book in your hands. "So: The Sleepwalkers. Tell me you're not one of those tragic undergraduates who picked it because it's fashionable to have opinions about German war guilt. Though, the local historians here in Vienna surely have their own way of framing it."

"I'm hoping to have opinions eventually. Currently I'm mostly just confused about Serbian railway timetables."

"Ah, the railway chapter. Deeply unglamorous, and yet apparently essential to explaining how an archduke's assassination turned into four years of trench warfare." She says it with the crisp, unhurried cadence of someone genuinely fond of the subject rather than merely tolerating it. "Clark's whole argument, really, is that no one meant for it to happen. Everyone sleepwalked into catastrophe, quite convinced they were behaving reasonably the entire time. Rather horrifying, when you actually sit with it."

"That's a cheerful way to spend an afternoon."

"I contain multitudes." She settles back, entirely at ease, studying you now with more open curiosity. "What do you study, if you're the sort who reads five-hundred-page diplomatic histories for fun?"

"Political science. First year, technically, though it doesn't feel like it yet."

Something flickers across her face. A recognition, or the beginning of it. "You're joking. I'm reading the same thing. Same year." She tilts her head, reassessing you properly now. "I don't suppose you were at registration, by any chance. There was a rather infuriating queue."

"I might have been. I definitely remember a queue, and someone finishing considerably faster than seemed fair."

"That would have been me. I have a talent for bureaucracy, dreadful as that sounds." She laughs, short and genuine, something in her posture loosening slightly. "Well. Small world, apparently, if we've been circling the same buildings without actually meeting until a stranger's book intervened."

"Small world," you agree.

"So," she says. "Since we're apparently destined to share a lecture hall for the next several years... go on, then. Convince me you're worth sitting next to. What's your actual theory on how the war started? Everyone has one by page thirty, whether they admit it or not."

You spend the better part of an hour on it, trading half-formed theories, her dismantling yours with the brisk, affectionate precision of someone who enjoys the argument more than winning it, both of you drifting steadily further from the book itself and further into each other, the conversation loosening from academic debate into something considerably warmer somewhere around the second round of coffee neither of you actually ordered.

"Right," she says eventually, glancing at the time with visible reluctance, "I actually do have somewhere to be, unfortunately, which feels like rather poor timing on the universe's part." She stands, smoothing her skirt, unhurried even now. "Though I find myself disinclined to simply let this end here. Purely for academic reasons, of course, someone ought to keep arguing with me about July 1914."

"Purely academic," you agree. "Can I get your number, then? For the ongoing scholarly dispute."

"I suppose that's a reasonable justification." She's already producing her phone, entirely unsurprised, like she'd been expecting the question and had simply been waiting for you to catch up to her. "Don't waste it on something dreadful like 'good morning' texts. I've very little patience for those."

"Noted. I'll aim for something worthy of your standards."

"See that you do." She hands the phone back once you've typed your number in, holds your gaze a moment longer than necessary, something warm and a little pleased beneath the composure. "It was a genuine pleasure, John. Try not to disappoint me before the second conversation."

"I'll do my best."

"That's all I ask." She offers a small, satisfied smile as gathers her things. "You know, i am free this evening. If you want to take a walk along the Ringstraße... i wouls certainly love to acompany you." A quick scan with your phone, and you have her number saved. "You don't have to decide right now. I do enjoy a degree of spontanaity." She smiles and is gone a moment later, leaving you sitting there with a half-finished book and the distinct, pleasant sense that this particular afternoon has turned out rather better than expected.