Alex seemed to sense that something was amiss. When Mama reluctantly stepped out to run an errand, he made no attempt to kiss Alma but only spoke to her earnestly. “You’re not yourself. Is something wrong?”
“Counterpoint,” she murmured. “I’m still struggling to wrap my head around it. How I wish I could compose as brilliantly as you, Alex.”
Her belief in Alex as a composer remained undiminished. She loved his music far more than Mahler’s, which bewildered and overwhelmed her as much as Mahler the man did. She remained convinced that Alex would one day establish himself as one of the greatest Austrian composers of their time.
“You’re worried about more than counterpoint.” Alex frowned. “Is it about us? Alma, if you’re having doubts or second thoughts, you have to tell me. Is that why you haven’t come round to see me?”
“Oh, Alex.” She stared at him, her eyes filling with tears. Mahler was barely acquainted with her, but Alex knew her inside out, from her darkest flaws to her highest aspirations to the depths of her sensual hunger. He loves me, every note of me. Yet she was terrified of telling him the truth. Since Mahler had taken her life by storm, she no longer knew what the truth was.
Alex traced her lips with his forefinger. Closing her eyes, Alma leaned forward to kiss him when the jangling doorbell sent a judder up her spine. She and Alex flew apart when Cilli bounded in, her hands clasped to her heart as if she had beheld a vision of all the saints.
“Gustav Mahler is here to see you, Fräulein!” the maid cried in rapture.
Alma leapt to her feet in shock.
“So that’s what you were keeping from me.” Alex shot her a bruised look.
“I wasn’t expecting him today,” Alma said lamely. Today was meant to be for us, Alex.
But her lover was already packing his briefcase and muttering his curt good-bye. Standing at her piano, Alma listened to the two men exchange the briefest of greetings, and suddenly Mama was back from her errand, showing Mahler into the parlor with great ceremony. He was dressed for walking in a tweed jacket, plus fours, and a red bow tie. He brought with him the smell of fresh air and open spaces.
“I hope you’ll forgive me for interrupting your lesson, Fräulein,” he said, shaking her hand with a warm grip. “I happened to be walking past and thought you might be in.”
Before she could hide her sheet music, he sat at the piano to examine her lieder. It was all she could do not to run out of the room in mortification. Run after Alex and explain herself, or try to.
“How fascinating, Fräulein Schindler. I must send you some of my lieder as well.” Setting her scores down, Mahler glanced around at the stark white walls hung with Carl’s paintings. “A fine example of the new architecture.”
“We only just moved in,” Alma said. Her voice sounded stilted and strange. “We’re still unpacking.”
“Alma, dear, why don’t you show the Herr Direktor around the house,” Mama said. “Take him up to your room if you like.”
“Oh, I would like that very much,” said Mahler.
Alma stared at her mother in disbelief. After Carl had made such a fuss over their meeting Mahler in his office, Mama was giving her permission to entertain the man in her bedroom? Maybe this was part of her mother’s secret plot to make Carl die of a heart attack. The thought made Alma smile in spite of herself as she led the way upstairs with the director of the Vienna Court Opera at her heels. Hauling a basket of firewood, Cilli brought up the rear.
“Green and white,” said Mahler, turning in a slow, contemplative circle around Alma’s room while Cilli busied herself making a fire in the grate. “Like a forest glade.” He peered at an oil painting of a woodland with a stream flowing through it.
“That’s by my late father,” Alma told him with pride. “Emil Schindler.”
Taking a step backward, Mahler nearly tripped over a pile of books on the floor. Her entire library lay scattered in stacks and open boxes, still waiting to be properly arranged in the new bookcase.
“Excuse the mess,” Alma said. “If I’d known you were coming, Herr Direktor, I would have tidied things up a bit.”
“Ah,” he said reverently, crouching with easy grace to stroke her volumes of Goethe and Heine. “We share the same taste in literature.”
“My father gave me Faust to read when I was only eight,” Alma told him.
An unexpected tenderness arose inside her to see him kneeling among her books. His hands, she noted, were beautiful and scrupulously clean, marred only by his bitten-down fingernails.
Flames began to leap and crackle in the hearth. Wiping her hands on her apron, Cilli winked at Alma and excused herself, leaving the door wide open for propriety’s sake. But that did not alter the fact that Alma and her greatest living idol were now alone together for the very first time. Her palms began to sweat. She didn’t know where to look.
“But this is simply decadent,” Mahler said, waving Schopenhauer at her. “And this”—he leapt to his feet while brandishing The Collected Works of Nietzsche—“should be burned.”
Alma watched in horror as he strode toward the fireplace as though truly intent on consigning Nietzsche to the flames.
“You can’t burn my book!” She thrust her body between Mahler and the fire. “It’s a gift from Max Burckhard!”
“All the more reason!” he cried.
“Herr Direktor Mahler,” she said crisply, her hands on her hips. “If your abhorrence of Nietzsche has any justification, you would do better to convince me with a rational argument instead of destroying my property.”
His eyebrows shot all the way up his forehead. “Very well, then!” He opened the book and began to read, his voice dripping with contempt. “‘The weak and botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.’” Mahler snapped the book shut and peered at her over his spectacles. “Do you not agree that this is a cold and pitiless philosophy? When a man is weak, you must do him a favor and kick him down? How can an innocent girl like you even sleep in the same room as such a hateful book?”
The two protruding veins on Mahler’s temples, zigzagging like lightning bolts, stood out even more prominently when he was in a passion. Cilli could have saved herself the effort of kindling a fire—Mahler himself seemed to be made of pure flame. Everything about him burned and gave off sparks, every single one of his raven-black hairs seemed to stand on end. To think her decorous green and white bedroom walls could contain as elemental a force as Gustav Mahler.
Alma snatched the book from his hand, flung it on her bed, and stared into his eyes. He seized her hands and pulled her close. Then they were kissing, flame feeding upon flame. We are both so fiery, we shall consume each other. She tasted his tongue and teeth. His arms wrapped around her, molding her body against his until she felt his muscled flesh beneath his clothes. My God, under all that tweed, he has the body of an athlete! She swallowed a cry to feel one particular muscle spring to vigorous life. Abruptly, they sprang apart, both of them panting.
“Herr Direktor Mahler,” she said in alarm.
“After kissing me like that you must call me Gustav.” His eyes shining and soft, he took her hands once more. “I never expected to fall in love with you like this, so suddenly. I’ve never felt this way about anyone. You are so intoxicatingly modern. So free-spoken. So uninhibited. Truly, there’s no other woman like you.”
His praises sent her soaring. The shackles of gravity fell away as he held her in his reverent gaze.
“If you think I rush things,” he said softly, “consider my years. Past the age of forty, there seems little point in hesitating when I feel for someone what I feel for you—this kind of passion happens only once in a lifetime. I want to marry you, Alma.”
Surely this is a dream, she thought. A beautiful, fantastical dream. In real life, things never happened this fast—their first kiss and his proposal within an hour of his first visit to her home. Did his intensity prove the measure of his love? Alex had held back for
more than a year before their first kiss. Oh, Alex, what have I done?
“I think we should go for a walk,” Gustav said, as though not trusting himself alone with her in her room for another second.
Hand in hand, they walked down the stairs, where Cilli was busy polishing the bannister. In the hallway below, Mama was arranging hothouse lilies in a blue and white Chinese vase while little Maria played at her feet. As her mother glanced at them, Alma felt herself flush. Gustav’s hair was in wild disarray and his bow tie askew, and Alma could only imagine how disheveled she appeared. Yet Mama seemed completely unruffled.
“Herr Direktor,” she said pleasantly. “I do hope you’ll stay for dinner. We’re having chicken paprikash. And Max Burckhard.”
“To be honest, Frau Moll, I’m not fond of either one,” Gustav said. “But I shall happily accept all the same. May I please use your telephone? I must tell my sister I won’t be home for dinner.”
“I’m afraid we don’t have one,” Alma said.
Gustav seemed flabbergasted that this brand-new domicile, designed with such self-conscious modernity, lacked the most essential mode of modern communication.
“There’s a telephone in the post office in Döbling,” Mama said helpfully.
“I shall walk you there,” Alma told him, grateful to have some practical task to relieve her from the awkwardness of standing in front of her mother with Gustav Mahler’s kisses still burning on her mouth.
Bundling up against the biting wind, Alma and Gustav set off downhill. Alma could think of nothing to say. She still couldn’t get over her astonishment that she was walking unchaperoned at Gustav Mahler’s side. He wants to marry me! I hardly know him! Likewise, Gustav seemed lost in meditative silence. The only sound was their feet crunching the snow.
Though Mahler was a short man, his stride was so swift that Alma nearly had to sprint to keep up with him. Every other minute, he tripped up on his shoelaces, which kept coming untied. She never thought to see him like this and had to smile.
“Here, allow me,” she said, stooping to tie his laces with stout double knots that would not easily come unraveled.
At the post office, she couldn’t help but laugh when he confessed he didn’t remember his own telephone number. He had to call the opera to get his number before he could phone his sister to tell her he would be out late that evening.
On their hike back up to the Hohe Warte, Alma decided she didn’t mind his silence. It gave him the air of a deep thinker, of an artist who spent half his life submerged in his private realm of rumination. The winter twilight was beguiling, the setting sun bathing the snow-covered rooftops and trees in a rosy glow while the church bells rang for vespers. Icicles glittered from the eaves of suburban villas. Everything sparkled in diamond brilliance.
“Before I met you, my life seemed so fixed, so preordained,” Gustav said, his breath misting in the cold air. “But then you appeared with all your vivacity. I never met anyone who was so perceptive and so life loving at the same time.”
Alma gripped his hands, feeling their warmth through the slippery leather of his gloves.
“But marrying a man like me won’t be easy, I’ll warn you. I am a creative soul. I am—I must—be free.”
A sense of suffocation descended on her to hear him speak again of marriage as a foregone conclusion before she had given him her consent. If any lesser man had spoken to her like that, she would have protested in the strongest language.
“I, too, love my freedom,” she said pointedly. “It’s essential to me. Don’t forget that I am an artist’s daughter and have always lived among artists. I am an artist myself!”
He kissed her and held her arm very close as they continued on their way. “It shall be a spring wedding. Why should we wait longer?” He spoke as though her repartee and their kiss had settled everything. Perhaps, she thought, it had.
When they reached the house, they crept back up to her room, where they kissed and kissed until Alma thought she would lose herself completely, hot wax in his hands. Not until this day had she experienced the kind of grand passion described in French novels. This was a revolution. With Alex, she had been the seducer, the wooer, but now she understood what it was to be swept away by the sheer power of a man’s decisive and unwavering desire for her. Alma and Gustav let go of each other only when they heard her mother sounding the dinner gong.
Mama was graciousness itself, for Gustav Mahler was the most distinguished guest they had ever received at their table. But Carl simmered resentfully, and Burckhard’s eyes were frozen in a livid glaze. He had brought a huge bouquet of pink roses for Alma. Mama had set the flowers at the center of the table, where they stood out like an injured appendage in the austere blue and white dining room. As Alma took her seat and unfolded her linen napkin, Burckhard fixed her with a wounded look.
“I thought you were a vegetarian, Herr Direktor,” Burckhard said thinly, as Cilli served the chicken paprikash.
“I am,” Gustav said, contenting himself with a single bread roll until Cilli brought him a raw vegetable salad.
“How can a grown man survive on rabbit food?” Cilli shook her head.
Alma feared it would be the most uncomfortable dinner of her life, the undercurrent of her and Gustav’s ardor and Burckhard’s and Carl’s bitterness plain for all to see. But Gustav rescued the evening with his wit and charm. Sipping water while the rest of them drank wine, he discussed Schiller, whom he adored, whose plays and poetry provided him with as much sustenance, he declared, as the food on his plate. Alma could barely eat, she was in such awe of this man who was as steeped in literature as he was in music. Even Carl seemed mesmerized, as though hanging on Gustav’s every word.
“What do you think of the Russian novelists?” Carl asked him.
“I am a disciple of Dostoyevsky,” Gustav replied. “He’s a writer of the greatest compassion and humanity. For how can one be happy when a single being on earth suffers?” He let his rhetorical question hang in the air as if to forever silence Burckhard’s Nietzschean brutalism.
Gustav then looked across the table and smiled into Alma’s eyes until she felt as though the solid flesh of her body were dissolving into a million fluttering butterfly wings. Though she had grown up surrounded by writers, artists, and architects, Gustav possessed the finest mind and the most riveting character of any man she had ever encountered. He was incandescent with genius. Destiny and fate were already binding them together, her youth to his wisdom. I can no longer live without this man. He alone can give my life meaning.
After Gustav kissed her good-bye, Alma raced back up to her room to locate her book of Schiller’s poetry, which she had hitherto regarded as hideously dull. But Gustav had turned those words to gold, revealing their meaning to her for the first time. She sat up in bed, chanting the poetry under her breath until she was finally calm enough to sleep. Joy, beautiful divine spark—this kiss to the whole world.
17
My dear Alex,
You haven’t written or come to visit because you have deduced everything about Gustav Mahler and me. You’ve always been able to read my most secret thoughts even from afar. I hope you also know how deeply I have loved you. You fulfilled me completely. Then Mahler came and everything changed.
On my knees, I beg your forgiveness for the evil hours I have given you. Some things are beyond our power. Perhaps you have an explanation for that, you who know me better than my own self.
I shall never forget the joy you’ve given me, and I hope you shall never forget it either. Dare I ask for your continued friendship, that you visit me once more as my colleague and teacher? Please answer me without reserve. My mother has promised not to read your letters.
Most of all, please forgive me. I no longer know myself.
Your Alma
What wretchedness, what loss. Alma wept as she sealed the letter. Would Alex even speak to her again? Her world was crumbling into chaos, everything collapsing and forming anew.
Gu
stav visited her every evening after he was finished at the opera. He stayed so late that he missed the last tram and was obliged to walk all the way home to his apartment on the corner of Auenbruggergasse and Rennweg across from Belvedere Castle. But the long trek didn’t seem to bother him. He set off whistling like the young wayfarer in his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen song cycle he had sent to her. Alma watched from the gate as his slender form receded down the steep lamplit streets.
One evening, when they sat alone at her piano, Gustav told her of his childhood in Bohemia. His late father had run an alcohol distillery. The man was a brute and had made his wife’s and children’s lives a living hell. Out of fourteen children, only Gustav and three other siblings survived—his sisters, Justine and Emma, and his brother, Alois, who had immigrated to America. Eight siblings died in childhood. As a little girl, Justine had turned death into a game by lying in her cot pretending to be a corpse while a ring of candles burned around her. His sister Leopoldine died of a brain tumor at twenty-six, and most wrenching of all, his beloved brother Otto had committed suicide.
Listening to this litany of hardship made Alma idolize Gustav all the more. What he had been forced to struggle against!
“I’ve had to stagger on all my life,” he told her, “with clods of earth tied to my feet.”
The following day, Gustav’s score for Das klagende Lied arrived with the post.
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