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2003-05-12 - 8:50 p.m. Vienna Miraculously, we managed to get the last two tickets for a concert by the Vienna Boys’ Choir, that famed outfit where prepubescent boys performed seances for angels. A told me how the boys’ voices were most sublime just before they cracked, after which their careers as sopranos would be over. ‘That’s terrible,’ I said, ‘like having two deaths in one lifetime.’ As we walked into the glittering opera house, A said, ‘Will that be our fates too, we who lead double lives?’ Sarajevo There was a time when snipers, hiding behind one of these cracked walls, aimed rifles at the heads of people crossing the street. We saw buildings like wasps’ nests, shelled and crumbling, as you read from a brochure: "During the siege, people learnt that nettles and dandelions were edible. There were no roses, or tulips, or lilacs in the gardens." How real your voice sounded at that moment, A, how fragile, as all suffering ceased to be an abstraction. Mumbai Fortune-telling parrots, dancing monkeys selling balloons, and beggars humming the tunes to the latest Bollywood talkies. The city is congested enough with its people and its cars, but what gives it its true bustle is its swarming traffic of dreams. Buy a garland to be a queen, pay for a shoeshine and be a movie star. A, there are enough gods here to grant us our every wish, soothe all our fears, bless us through the delicate gesture of a thumb between the eyes. Rio The carnival made me nervous. On a giant float, a dancer dressed like a peacock drenched in silver shimmied to the music, as lactatory strings of fake emeralds shivered from her breasts. I edged closer to A, asking him how he could nod his head to the insistent, volcanic rhythms of the samba. ‘You get used to it like you get used to love,’ A told me, ‘first it sounds like thunder, but after a while it’s indistinguishable from your own heartbeat.’
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