by Ursula Hegi
“It’s a fine quality to be impetuous,” Frau Hilger cautioned me as she closed the amber bottle. “But there are two occasions in a woman’s life when she needs to wait with her opinion. One is her first time with a man. Unless she is very discreet, it changes her status in the world. With the wrong perfume, it doesn’t help to be discreet. It’s obvious, there for everyone to smell. Remember—never buy until you’ve tested it on your skin for at least three hours.”
“Why three hours?”
“Because by then it has merged with your own scent. A good perfume—not the cheap, heavy stuff that overwhelms—but a good perfume is different on every woman.”
At dinner, I thrust my left wrist at my father and Herr Hilger. “Do I smell different from Frau Hilger?”
My father blinked. Glanced at Frau Hilger.
“We are wearing the same perfume,” I explained.
Herr Hilger bent toward my arm and sniffed the air above it. His smooth hair was brushed away from his forehead and curved around the back of his ears.
“You still like it, then?” Frau Hilger asked me, and when I nodded, she pulled the amber bottle from her purse. “For you to keep. I have another one. But remember—it is a woman’s perfume…. More than a hint of it would be unsuitable on a young girl.”
My friend Elsie would be far more interested in my perfume than in what I’d brought home from Italy last summer—the large black scorpion I’d found in a vineyard. While my father had grabbed my arm —“Careful, Christa, those things can be deadly”—my mother had darted forward and caught the scorpion in her sun hat. On our balcony she’d drowned it in red wine—“You need alcohol to preserve it”—and impaled it on a hairpin so that I could bring it to my school. My biology teacher still had the scorpion, fastened to a rectangle of wood. Smelling of wine and dust and sun and decay, the scorpion had its pincers extended and its tail with the poisonous stinger curved forward across its back, as if about to grasp its victim and deliver that dangerous sting.
When we took walks through Trieste, I liked it if Herr Hilger stayed by my side, letting his wife go ahead with my father. He talked to me about music as if I were an adult, and I wished Elsie could see me with him. I understood him so much better than anyone else. Once Frau Hilger was no longer around to fill each of his silences with words, he came forward with his deep voice. When I asked him which composer he admired most, he told me about Ludwig van Beethoven, who’d kept writing his music after he had lost his hearing.
“But how could he … if he didn’t hear the music he composed?”
“Oh, but he could feel it, Christa. He could.”
He said this in such a way that I knew his own life must have been at least as mysterious and tragic as Beethoven’s, and I longed for him to link his sturdy fingers through mine and tell me those secrets he wouldn’t tell anyone else.
One morning a package arrived for me by airmail from one of the Hilgers’ music stores. Inside was a portable record player and one single record. It had a glossy, night-blue jacket with the yellow emblem of the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft and gold lettering:
Ludwig van Beethoven
EROICA
Sinfonie Nr.3 Es-dur op. 55
Dirigent:
FERENC FRICSAY
Berliner Philharmoniker
“I wanted you to hear the most beautiful symphony ever written,” Herr Hilger said.
He and I listened to the Eroica on my balcony while my father and Frau Hilger took the train to Venice to photograph the mosaics in the Basilica di San Marco. Four times we listened to the Eroica, and when I told him, “Maybe each time people hear the Eroica, they do the listening that Beethoven couldn’t do for himself,” Herr Hilger nodded as if he’d just thought the very same thought. But then he added that Beethoven’s hearing had quite likely still been all right while he’d worked on his early symphonies.
I hummed the opening passage when we sat down for dinner at our usual table in the dining room without my father and Frau Hilger, who wouldn’t return from Venice until late that evening. We’d never see their photos of the mosaics, because their film had fallen into a canal, they would tell us.
That night, alone, as my hands followed the thin fabric of my new nightgown down my thighs and back up, I found myself in the soft place between my thighs, and I could hear the Eroica until my breath stopped and I fell back. Though I’d touched there before, it hadn’t been like that, and the following night my hand went back there again, and to the music.
Whenever she heard me hum to myself, Frau Hilger would make sure to point out my talent for music, even if I was just humming that altered Schlager about Farah Diba that had been going around school before summer vacation. It followed the popular melody of “Marina, Marina, Marina, du bist ja die Schönste der Welt …”
Farah Diba, Farah Diba, Farah Diba,
du bist ja die Schönste der Welt.
Gib dem Schah ein Sohnchen,
sonst fliegst du bald vom Thrönchen,
genau so wie Soraya….
Farah Diba, Farah Diba, Farah Diba,
you are the most beautiful one in the world.
Give the Shah a little son,
otherwise you’ll soon get kicked off the little throne,
just like Soraya….
Soraya had been the Shah’s previous wife, a sultry woman with the saddest movie-star eyes I’d ever seen. Until two years ago, we used to sing the same song about her: “Soraya, Soraya, Soraya, du bist ja die Schönste der Welt …” Herr Hilger was a much better man than the Shah, who would have kicked Frau Hilger off his throne years ago for not producing a male heir. Frau Hilger couldn’t even have a daughter. But a daughter didn’t count any-how with the Shah: his very first wife had given him a daughter. Unless he had a male heir, there would be no coronation for him, though he’d been the ruler of his country for nearly two decades. The more I tried not to hum that melody around the Hilgers—after all, I didn’t want to remind them that they couldn’t have children—the more that melody seemed to live inside my throat.
“What are the words to that?” Frau Hilger asked me one afternoon when all of us were climbing the stone steps of the Roman amphitheater.
“I forgot,” I lied. “That’s why I just hum it.”
“Herr Hilger and I have been planning to go to Venice for a recital of Verdi arias. But since you have such a love for music, I want you to have my ticket. If your father doesn’t mind, I’ll keep him company here. Herr Hilger can take you to Venice on the train. I know he’ll enjoy the recital much more with you.” She glanced at my father.
Say yes, I wished. Yes yes yes …
He stroked his mustache.
“If s just a matinee,” she said. “They’ll be back before dark.”
Finally he nodded.
Frau Hilger pulled me close. “You and Herr Hilger have music as a common interest. And that is something to be nurtured.”
The day before the recital she bought me a pearl-white dress with a white-embroidered collar in a shop near the Piazza dell’Unità d’ltalia, and the following morning I wore that dress when I sat next to Herr Hilger on the train to Venice. We started out early, because Frau Hilger insisted we plan enough time to see the Palazzo Ducale and take a gondola. On the train were three black-haired girls my age, who stared at my light hair and whispered to each other rapidly. When they started laughing, hands over their mouths, I felt bothered and glanced at Herr Hilger, but he was looking out of the window. All at once it occurred to me that I’d never seen him touch his wife’s skin. What I wouldn’t understand until many years later was his passion for the chaste, romantic love that is never consummated—not even with his wife.
Outside the Venice train station, he bought two nut sticks from one of the street vendors. With our teeth we pulled the sweet, glazed nuts from the thin skewers and chewed them as we walked toward the Canal Grande, the sun on our faces. Arched bridges took us across the network of smaller canals until we reached the Piazza
San Marco, where an old woman in a black dress sold us maize. While I held the yellow kernels in my outstretched palms, waiting for the pigeons to come closer, Herr Hilger took photos of me.
“Try not to move, Christa,” he said.
The pigeons’ cooing was monotonous, seductive. When they landed on me, I wanted to shake them off, their wings, their beaks, their claws—they felt disgusting, tender where they rasped against my arms, my hair, my shoulders—yet I stood still for his camera. Five years earlier, I had stood in this same piazza with my parents, laughing and tossing maize to the pigeons. “Why don’t we ever see pigeons out at night?” I had asked my mother, and she’d told me the old women took the pigeons home in their black shawls at dusk.
I told that story to Herr Hilger when we ate our lunch of scaloppine di pollo in the restaurant of an eight-hundred-year-old palazzo. Our table was by a window that opened out to a small side canal, where painted boats unloaded crates of fruits and vegetables.
“My mother said the old women let the pigeons loose again in the morning … to lure back the tourists so that the women can sell their maize.”
“That means the pigeons keep the old women alive,” he said, and smiled at me.
It was the first time I’d seen him smile. It changed his whole face, took away that tired and sad expression. And it was because of something I had said. His green eyes were lighter than usual, and I felt certain he would always be my friend from now on. I’d have two best friends, Elsie and him. I imagined him leaning toward me … raising one hand to my face, and—
“What is it, Christa?” he asked.
My fantasy had stopped, and I didn’t know what was to come next, just as I didn’t know that I would never see the Hilgers after that summer.
“Verdi abandoned music,” he said. “Right after his wife and two children died. For one entire year he did not compose. He was still a young man. Just think—what a loss it would have been…. His most significant works, Aïda and Otello, came decades later, Aïda when he was almost sixty, Otello when he was in his mid-seventies and everyone thought he had long since retired.”
While he told me the story of Aida, water gushed out intermittently from the sides of the buildings that lined the canal and merged with the gray waters of the canal. “The length of a good flush” Elsie would say. I wanted to tell that to Herr Hilger, but I didn’t because it would have been childish.
He ordered zuppa inglese for me, biscotti for himself. “Verdi is the only composer I know of who has my allergy,” he confided when I offered him a taste of my rum-custard cake.
“What kind of allergy?”
“Certain foods make us itch.”
“Really?”
“Anything with milk.”
“Even cheese?”
“Cheese, ice cream … If I even just had one spoonful of your zuppa inglese, I’d get itchy all over.”
“You can’t have ice cream? Not ever?”
He shook his head. “Sometimes it gets so bad that my neck and arms are chafed from where I’ve scratched myself. My first piano teacher told me that Verdi’s hands were sometimes raw….”
I saw myself covering his sore hands with clean white gauze … holding them in mine, waiting for them to heal while we listen to Verdi’s music.
Though he was silent, I knew by now that there were always words beneath his silences, and I wasn’t surprised when he said them aloud. “An entire island … Do you know there is an entire island for the dead here, Christa? It’s called San Michele. There’s something really beautiful about that.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“An island that belongs to the dead. And close by is another island, Burano, where lace is made. Fine, beautiful lace … much of it for bridal veils.”
“I was there with my parents.”
“Death and love so close together…”
I shivered. “My mother bought a lace tablecloth on Burano. We saw a bride and groom come out of a church. Both had very large noses.”
Once again, Herr Hilger smiled his rare, splendid smile for me.
“I wondered what their children’s noses would look like, but my mother said to be kind.”
“You’re already one of the kindest people I know, Christa.”
“Really? Sometimes my parents say I’m selfish. And stubborn.”
“That’s not how I know you.”
When we took a gondola to the gilded concert hall, oil slicks shimmered on the water and trembled as we passed through them. In the molten gray of the water, they adjusted themselves again, spreading into their original shapes.
“I’m so delighted that Christa appreciated Verdi,” Frau Hilger told my father the next day, as we all headed to the market.
“It was the most perfect day of my life,” I said.
My father raised his eyebrows.
But Frau Hilger patted my arm. “It means the world to Herr Hilger to share his love for music.”
She walked ahead with my father, and the two of them chose prosciutto and salametti, pimento-stuffed olives, figs, slices of casaba melon, and almond macaroons for the picnic she was planning for us by the lighthouse. When I stopped to look at a necklace, the thin vendor in the red shirt, who’d sold me an enameled mirror for Elsie only a few days before, began his friendly barter, one hand already reaching for my hair.
“Half,” he said, dangling the tiny multicolored glass beads in front of me. “My uncle make on Murano, island of glass. I sell you for half original price. You let me stroke sun in your hair again….”
I laughed and glanced at my father, but he did not shake his head as he usually did. Frau Hilger’s face was set into her red-red smile, and the air was hot, dusty. Around me all movement, all sound, had ceased, and I suddenly found it hard to breathe with the vendor’s bright beads so close to my eyes. I turned toward Herr Hilger, waiting for him to stop all this, but his eyes were glinting as though he were the one ready to touch me, at last, and knew it was what I wanted too—as I did, as all of us must have known I did, collaborators forever in that one long moment before I gripped the vendor’s brown hand and placed it on top of my head, letting his fingers sink into my hair, giving up part of myself to defy the three adults as much as to please them, and I wished I were already years away from what felt so terribly confusing, but then the weight of the necklace fell on my throat. I no longer recall who paid for the necklace and fastened it around my neck—all I know is that I couldn’t bear it against my skin, that I slipped it off when we reached a fish seller’s stand, and that, when I dropped it into a metal pail filled with slippery scales and heads, the familiar clamor of the market rose around me once more as if someone had flipped up a switch.
Stolen Chocolates
My first love has tripled in size. I didn’t recognize him, though I noticed him when he entered the Greek restaurant, because the waiter replaced his armchair with a piano bench before he let him sit down. He was with a woman who wore apple-green silk and was heavy too, though not nearly his weight.
“Vera,” he called out across the restaurant, and hoisted himself from the piano bench. His bulk drifted toward me as if carried by the scent of the exotic spices, surprisingly agile, fleshy hands leading.
I glanced behind me, searching for an escape or some other woman named Vera, though I know it’s not a common name. All through school, I was the only Vera in my class.
“Vera, sweetie, it’s me—Eddie,” he said as if accustomed to identifying himself to people he hadn’t seen in a long time. His suit looked expensive, made to order, and in the amber glow of the fringed ceiling lamps, his hair was blond and curly as ever.
“Eddie,” I said, trying to reconcile this man with the image of the wiry boy I’d followed around the neighborhood at fourteen. I would wait at the end of his street for hours, heart pounding, just to get a glimpse of him, and when he finally started noticing me, he blotted all the questions and uncertainties I’d felt up to that day about my future. Whenever he helped m
e with my chores in my grandparents’ grocery store, I rewarded him with stolen chocolates that we ate until we both felt as though we were about to explode.
“We will always be together,” we said the afternoon he kissed me. “We will always be together,” we promised each other in our letters for nearly half a year after his family moved to Cleveland.
“You look good, Vera. Real good.” The voice was the same, though the fat had changed his features and stretched his skin so tightly that there wasn’t space for a single wrinkle. “How long has it been?”
“Almost thirty years, Eddie.”
“How’s the food here?”
I felt ill at the thought of him squeezing anything else into that body. “I sold them the restaurant.”
“It was yours?”
“No, no. I’m selling real estate now. The new owner, Mr. Fariopoulos, gave me a bonus—two hundred dollars’ worth of meals.”
“I hear their buffet is famous. All you can eat for twelve ninety-five.”
“I usually just order a vegetarian dish.”
“My first wife died seven years ago.” He said it as if her death had been the result of being a vegetarian. He motioned to his table. “Bonnie over there—we got married the year after.”
“Sorry about your first wife. And congratulations on —”
“I don’t like weddings.”
“Okay.”
“But that’s what we’re in Albany for. Another wedding. My cousin’s boy. Come, sit with us.”
I hesitated.
“You’re probably waiting for someone.”
“Not really.”
“No argument, then.” One hand on my elbow, the other balancing my plate and wineglass, he led me toward his table like a trophy, his hips brushing dangerously close to other tables.
Certain that everyone was staring at us, I felt ashamed of my embarrassment to be seen with him.
He introduced me to his wife, Bonnie. “This is Vera.” He beamed. “You know, the Vera of my youth.” He made me sound mysterious and glamorous, and I wondered what he’d told his wife about me.