Aloha, Mozart

by Williams, Waimea

  TEN MINUTES LATER, the registration form filled out, all unknown terms checked in Cassell’s, Maile set off to make herself an official resident. The twenty-four-hour deadline seemed like a bluff. How could that be accurately reckoned? With a vague sense of where the police station was, she entered a curving maze of side streets that soon ended at a cul-de-sac. A small figure in a bright green and silver uniform hurried away: the little man from last night. A good omen, she thought. People in dirndls and leather Kniehosen passed her. She back-tracked, got lost, and took out her tourist map. It had been folded and unfolded so often that wrinkles made the center portion difficult to read.

  “Suchen Sie die Polizeistation?” a man asked.

  Flustered, she realized it was again the little fellow in green. Up close, his looks disturbed her. He had a merry smile, but his sunken eyes were rimmed by dark purple discolorations. His skin resembled crinkly waxed paper. The backs of his hands were transparent, the blue veins like faded tattoos. He reminded her of a concentration camp refugee except for his spotless, theatrical uniform. His too-large cap shaded his forehead and made his macabre gaze all the more chilling. On the cap’s patent-leather bill, a line of meticulous silver embroidery spelled out DER ROSENKAVALIER.

  Maile let him direct her, thanked him, and made a zig-zag toward Rudolfsplatz and the Old City’s one traffic bridge. A stream of dented trucks with Italian license plates roared past on the main route from Hamburg to Rome, leaving a layer of stinking gray exhaust fumes at eye level. On the opposite side stood a row of low cement offices with a large sign, POLIZEIZENTRAL, cheap modern buildings. Maile had been inside a police station only once, to pay a parking fine, five dollars reduced to three because the judge recognized her from a hotel float in the Kamehameha Day parade.

  She dodged over the bridge through the traffic, pushed open the scuffed door of Polizeizentral, and bumped into a boyish brown-haired officer. “Grüss Gott, die Dame,” he said. He touched his cap to her with a grin that revealed a dead front tooth, yellow-brown. Beyond him the wide room was crowded with swarthy men in baggy clothes. Turkish and Greek laborers, the officer told her, applying for temporary immigrant status to haul garbage and sweep the streets. A lady like herself did not have to wait behind them.

  He escorted Maile to the head of a long line winding back from an open counter. The men shuffled aside, looking resentful, tired, bored. She avoided their eyes, feeling guilty that a fall outfit and high heels made her a Dame who got special treatment.

  An officer behind the counter asked, “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” She mumbled that she did. “Sind Sie Amerikanerin?” Yes. He sighed as if in mutual sympathy for the tedious business they faced. “Your credentials, please.” She handed over her passport, International Health Certificate, driver’s license, birth certificate, Mozarteum matriculation, and the signed registration form from her new landlady.

  He lined them up. She felt creepily exposed. “Ha-va-ee,” he said in surprise, and motioned to officers sitting at desks. Three came forward. Silently they examined everything, then one asked the others if Hawaii was a real place.

  “Natürlich,” replied the officer at the counter. “Bei Florida.”

  “Nein, im Pazifik,” another said. “Bei Tahiti.”

  The first officer asked Maile, “Ha-va-ee oder Ha-ee-tee?”

  They had Hawaii and Tahiti mixed up with Haiti, she realized— islands thousands of miles apart, in different oceans, as bad as confusing Austria with Australia. She burst into laughter.

  Their curious expressions closed down. The counter officer scooped up her papers and retreated to a desk where he and the others whispered to each other with angry little hissing sounds. She bit her lips, looked at her purse, at a lampshade dangling from a long cord, then back at the officers, and tried to telegraph, Please, it just slipped out. I’m sorry.

  They unrolled a wall map of the world as cracked as an old window shade. Each in turn scrutinized the Pacific. “Ach, Sopranistinen,” one remarked, “sie ziehen sich so an.” Sopranos dress like that. They took cigarettes from their breast pockets and left.

  Maile waited with increasing nervousness as the minutes passed. The room stank of unwashed hair, old shoes. Men muttered in languages she didn’t understand. A pulse at her temples throbbed into a headache: doomp . . . doomp. A ragged assault of sounds filled her mind: Ein Salamander sass, Casta diva, I Can’t Get, tok-tok. She reached for memories of calming music: a soft Mozart solo that exhaled melody with the ease of restful breathing: Et . . . in-carna—tus est . . . drawnout tones supported by subdued violins, flutes, harpsichord. What a master he was! Composing sacred music that had all the power and beauty of theater, music of such grace and purity that it went beyond church or opera to some higher goal. Her emotions soared out of the room into the cool air over the river.

  A policeman sauntered in through a side door and the immigrant workers stirred with collective weariness. Maile straightened up. One by one the other officers returned. They poked through file folders with a sense of unresolved hostility. Flick flick. A drawer was closed. Another clacked open. The old wall map was rolled up. Snap! Maile wanted to scream.

  At last an older official came out of a back office and spread her documents on the counter. He validated them with brisk thumps of a rubber stamp, granting her the usual residence visa. She would have to come back, he said, and do everything again if her address changed or her status changed from student to employee, the process being deregister, transfer, and reregister: Abmeldung, Ummeldung, Anmeldung. The terms slid easily off his tongue. After making certain she understood, he added, “To me you are just another foreigner. Like those.” He jerked his head at the Turks and Greeks. “With one difference. Americans often have a clownish attitude toward authorities. I dislike this intensely.”

  She despised him for taking her down a peg but kept a straight face and replied, “Jawohl, Herr Offizier. Danke schön.” She put away her papers. Walked toward the exit. Refused to acknowledge the stares that burned into her back. Opened the door and went out, thinking, We won the war.

  FRAU METZGER REGARDED her new tenant with nosy interest. Maile tried to avoid the landlady, but depended on her daily for information about buying food, locating public toilets, counting the change from a hundred-schilling note. Five hundred grams approximated a pound of bread; cold cuts were sold per deka, one tenth of a kilo; an apothecary was roughly equivalent to an American drugstore. Fortunately Maile discovered that she could always end a conversation by saying she had to practice. Frau Metzger gave in at once with an air of respect.

  Each time Maile worked in her room, she felt all her souls rolled into one. She belonged to art as surely as if she had sworn a formal oath. Her future was good, even excellent, if she worked very hard. Yet day by day her sense of wholeness eroded until she had to admit that she was a long way from being a fully formed soprano. As much as she wanted to fit in and not be an obvious outsider, she craved the opposite: recognition as a singer who moved listeners to tears, to reflect on love, death, desire. In truth, she was no more anchored in Salzburg than a cowrie shell on a reef, tumbled along with every wave.

  By now the clan knew where she was, although Maile felt certain it had shocked them. From halfway around the world she felt their claim on her, the grip of love impossibly knotted into shared responsibilities that kept most of them on the same island. Only she had ever shown an interest in the wider world. The others refused to think farther than Honolulu Harbor. Even if she could sit with Makua in his truck, like old times, nothing would change. Neither he nor anyone else in the family understood her operatic voice. When she’d used it for church solos, the aunties who came to listen always asked, “How come you sing so strong? Make soft, nice, like before.”

  Now her days were filled with odd, unexpected difficulties. Signs in curlicued Gothic script had to be deciphered letter by letter. The patronizing formality of shop clerks intimidated her. Housewives out on errands walked hand in hand as casually as
lovers and kissed each other on the lips when meeting or parting, all strangely thrilling, but mostly strange. She disliked the bold hairiness of their legs and underarms. According to Frau Metzger, each subdistrict of the Salzburg valley had distinctive styles of dress and hairdos: a ridge of braids, or double coils with a middle part, or a knot at the base of the neck was coupled with a particular cut of sleeve, the number of pleats in a skirt. The landlady could spot someone at a distance and say, “Gnigl, they’ve come to buy Mozart chocolate,” or “Berchtesgaden, some latecomers must have autumn squash for sale.”

  Everyone had their own group, Maile realized, and merely saying hello involved a bewildering range of manners. Little girls curtsied, boys bowed. A man doffed his hat or touched the brim or used a variety of nods and bows. Women were greeted by their husband’s titles, Frau Professor, Frau Doktor, Frau Ingenieur. Nobody ran, yelled, or smoked cigarettes in public. Only peasants in the open-air market spat and swore and laughed loudly, scratched their necks, crotches, whatever itched. Well-dressed people did not carry packages but were followed by a delivery boy in a white smock. Above all, clothes seemed to announce who you were and what you did. Dirndls in cheap or more expensive cotton—with long versions in silk and brocade for evening—indicated that one was working class, middle class, or upper class. Traditional silver and garnet jewelry meant upper-working or lower-middle class. Men wore lederhosen shorts, higher-priced knee britches, soft suede jackets and fine wool suits with oak leaves on the lapels and cuffs. Roughly clad farmers were easy to spot.

  Maile continued to see the Rosenkavalier out and about in the city. Usually he appeared at dusk, carrying an armload of flowers. She avoided him on Getreidegasse as he went from hotel to hotel and café to café, selling leftover roses that would last a few more hours, moving along the dark streets as lithely as a dancer, his footsteps as neatly executed as a court mazurka. No waiter bothered him. He never pushed himself on a potential client but presented his flowers first to a lady, for viewing, then appealed silently to her escort. His smile was an eerie twitch. He accepted any currency, smoothly approached the next couple, and within minutes he had covered an entire café or wine bar, and he was gone. Local residents out for the evening ignored the doll-like man passing swiftly toward the next lighted cluster of people. He was rumored to know everything that happened in Salzburg after nightfall. Maile felt there was something terrible about his eyes, then scolded herself for thinking he had a sinister nature, for imagining too much.

  Finally one evening she asked Frau Metzger about the odd little man in the green uniform. As forthcoming as the landlady was on most topics, her attitude turned curiously stiff. “Ach, him,” she said with an annoyed shrug. “A former peasant. Beneath your concern and mine.” All she offered was her vision of the “true” Cavalier of Roses, from the Richard Strauss opera that evoked Austro-Hungarian grandeur at its height, the title role played by a slim youth in white satin who bore an aristocratic gift of love, a silver rose on a long silver stem. As a proudly middle-class Bürgerin, Frau Metzger asserted that a bumpkin turned street peddler would never dare assume a Mozartian name in the city of Mozart’s birth. However, because Strauss’s great work was forever associated with Vienna, the self-named flower seller was a proper joke on people from the capital, who looked down their noses at provincial Salzburg. The Rosenkavalier indeed!

  7

  BY THE TIME Karl came up from the basement practice rooms, the halls were deserted and his stomach growled. He lived at home but spent all his time at the Mozarteum unless an emergency on the farm forced him to skip classes. His talent and emotions were equally committed to piano and French horn, although he knew that making a career meant choosing one instrument or the other. Out front he looked for his bicycle. The only sign of it was a damp track leading away from the rack. Borrowed again, he figured, by the head of the Prague activist group, to check on an empty building behind the Puch factory for their next meeting. They had to be careful: Austria’s neutrality meant arrest for any citizens caught meddling in international affairs. He headed for the bus stop, sullenly certain that dinner would be cold when he got to the farm.

  At the riverbank a woman on the footbridge stood gazing toward the Old City. The dense line of buildings was tinted with a dusky layer of deep yellow as the mid-fall day prepared to fade into twilight. In pockets where the sun had dimmed, curving Baroque domes and church spires were black silhouettes. Above and beyond them, the walls of the fortified castle rose like a mountainous island. In the distance, the Alps formed a lordly ring.

  Some tourist, Karl thought peevishly, in love with our so-called atmosphere. Then the woman brushed back a strand of hair in a gesture he had seen before. The singer from Hawaii. He was used to serious musicians being loners, although he sensed that this woman might actually be without friends. Most Austrians only tolerated familiar glamour—nothing too exotic, danke.

  Maile walked on into the Old City and the air suddenly turned cool where so many packed buildings cut off the light. No streetlamps shone down. Gray rows of cobblestones winding off through narrow slots between tall houses seemed like pathways in a dense forest. People headed home from work, opening their doors with long ornate keys fished from shopping baskets.

  Soon she was lost on twisting, darkening side streets as empty as the warehouse district in Manhattan after sundown. She couldn’t decide if Frau Metzger’s building was around a corner to the left, or somewhere to the right of the saint’s statue in a wall niche.

  Someone walked behind her; quiet footsteps, too close. She clamped her music scores to her chest and spun around on the edge of panic. In German a tall blond man asked with a hesitant smile, “Would you care to go for a glass of wine?” He wore a rough suede jacket, linen shirt, leather knee pants. Carried a French horn.

  He offered his hand stiffly and said, “Holzer, Karl Holzer.” In the fading light she noticed his eyes, pale silver-gray. Unearthly, a color she had never seen before. Snow eyes.

  “I found Honolulu on a world map,” he said, “twenty thousand kilometers away! You’re like Gauguin in reverse, but I can’t imagine traveling that far for anything, not even music. That takes guts.” He clapped a hand to his stomach. “Sorry! I’m being a peasant.” His expression collapsed into rueful embarrassment.

  Honolulu, kilometers, Gauguin. She told him her name. He was almost as tall as Professor Jann. The hard leanness of his face was softened by a spray of boyish freckles across his forehead, nose, and cheeks. She felt a sudden eagerness to talk with someone her age, to be with a man.

  “Ja,” she said, “ein Glas Wein.”

  Side by side, they entered a deserted passageway and fell into the uncomfortable silence of a couple who had agreed to go somewhere but didn’t know each other. The upper floors of stone and timber buildings merged into the black sky. The width of the street shrank until she had to walk hip to hip with him, then he stopped at a thick wooden door and pulled on its heavy iron ring. The pleasing aromas of hot food wafted out.

  They stepped into a large natural cave with a plank floor and cabinets built into rounded walls. The ceiling was an uneven dome covered by miniature stalactites and chalky white swirls. Candles provided the only light for customers at small tables. At the back stood a row of casks and a butcher block with a ham roasted to crusty perfection, alongside a wheel of black bread two feet wide.

  “Carmen,” Maile said, delighted. “Second act, smuggler’s den.”

  Karl glanced around with a wry expression. “That’s Spain. And Bizet was French.”

  “Never mind, imagine a seacoast in the background. Baskets of oranges. Daggers and fortune-tellers.”

  “Ach, Americans.” He snickered. “You have a belief in fantasy we Austrians lost centuries ago. We’re all cynics.” She frowned, bridling at the criticism. “Don’t be offended,” he added. “Americans appreciate things we take for granted.” He walked off to fetch a carafe of wine, tumblers, and a platter of black bread and ham.


  Maile put her scores on a table, brought plates and utensils, and concentrated on getting along with this European. As they sat down, Karl poured the wine, handed her a squat tumbler, and regarded her with serious intent. “If we drink together,” he said, “we must address each other as Du. You are an honored guest in Austria because of the journey you made to get here.”

  He raised his glass in silence, a moment of ceremony that touched her. He had the muscular lips of a horn player. His chin was marked by a small cleft, slightly off center. Shaggy blond hair fringed his fore-head. His alert expression suggested intelligence, humor.

  They drank and she lowered her glass slowly to savor the moment. From now on they would speak to each other with the intimate form of “you,” a soft, generous word: Du. Dooo. It deepened any relationship. Was used by family members and students, because of what they shared, was found in love poems set to music by Mozart, Schubert.

  Karl’s look of amusement returned. “Du, My-lee. A peculiar name. What does it mean?”

  She had been thinking in English and forced a reply in German. “It’s a plant. A vine.”

  “I never heard of someone named for a plant.”

  A bit defensively she explained, “Not just any plant. At home maile grows only in the mountains. It’s sacred to the hula goddess.”

  “The dance, you mean? But a goddess?” His brow furrowed. “Everybody here is named for a saint. We have been Catholics since the third century. So . . . you’re a pagan.”

  “My whole family belongs to the Congregational Church,” she snapped. “The only Catholics I know are Filipino. They’re new to the islands.”

  “You’re a Protestant, then. I wouldn’t announce it here. That’s the same as being a pagan.” He grinned and forked a slice of bread onto his plate along with a curl of ham. “Our priests will sniff you out as a heretic.”