Aloha, Mozart
Page 12
“You asked! I didn’t announce it.”
“Sorry.” His expression wilted into apology. “I’ve always had trouble with religion.” He cut his open-faced sandwich with his knife and fork. “We peasants are supposed to be docile and illiterate but wise— all that nineteenth-century kitsch. Don’t believe it.”
She smiled, forgiving him, and copied the way he assembled a sandwich not to be eaten by hand. His combination of friendliness and sparring appealed to her; not complicated by too much sensitivity, excitability, ego, all the flaws that haunted so many musicians. Or was he just showing off?
“Peasant kitsch,” she repeated. “Didn’t Hitler love that?”
Karl swallowed violently and leaned across the table to whisper, “Never say that name in public! People will think you’re an Israeli spy.” She almost laughed but his stark expression stopped her. “You arrived here by way of New York,” he went on, “a city full of Jews. That is a fact, not prejudice. Many Salzburgers think all foreigners are secret Jews who return to snoop for opportunities. We’re a neutral country, so spies are commonplace. Another fact.”
Maile stared at his chest, and felt her cheeks flush. At other tables a domino was slapped down with a sharp clack. A man let out a luxurious belch. Another lit his pipe and gave her a long stare. She imagined him calling her heretic, secret Jew. History previously tucked away in textbooks stirred with life.
She spread butter on her bread, a dab of horseradish, layered the thinly sliced meat and cut the sandwich into small pieces. The smoked ham was deliciously juicy. The black bread was both crunchy and moist. The wine had a pleasant nip, but she’d killed the conversation. Now Karl would give her the cold shoulder for being so loudmouth, so downright dumb.
He shot a glance at the pipe smoker, then thumped her stack of scores. “When can I hear you sing? Nobody gives up the isles of paradise to develop a minor talent.”
She snatched at the safe topic. “Honolulu has no opera house.”
“We have a glut of them. They hold up the economy. Otherwise, no military industry, no General Motors, not even a decent soccer team. We’re politically impotent, the shrunken remains of an empire, shaped like a little stomach. The national occupation is nostalgia.”
She eyed the off-center cleft in his chin, as neat and attractive as a dimple. His silence seemed to solicit a reply and she wanted to match his effortless sarcasm. “Is breast-beating a national trait as well?”
Karl gestured indifferently at the ceiling. “Americans are the world’s greatest idealists. They can’t believe a place like this is simply practical. Carmen. You are too rare to drown in some sweet lie about us.”
“Rare. What a romantic word for a cynic.”
“I mean don’t make stupid mistakes.”
She sat back, stung. “So, I’m just a dreamy little girl?”
“No, but for your own protection, you should look deeper.” He tapped the spines of her scores. “Music is the only thing in Austria that gets world recognition, and it’s justified. It’s also the key to everyone’s self-esteem. Which makes it dangerous. I can already quote reviews for Vienna’s fall season: ‘Von Wehlen’s masterful grasp of . . . ‘His powerful, enduring relationship to . . . ’ He’s our leading celebrity, born right here, like Mozart. Descended from the prince who halted the Saracen advance at the river.”
Maile knew of von Wehlen only as one prominent conductor among many. Karl’s point escaped her, but she saw an opportunity to needle him. “You sound jealous.”
“Be quiet a moment. I don’t expect someone from Hawaii to understand.” With the tip of his knife he lined up three crumbs on his plate. “Tiny country. One-sided economy. Ugly history. This makes every taxi driver, ticket taker, and goose woman in Austria a music expert. Middle-class people claim to be the ‘bearers of culture’ to the rest of the world.” He put down the knife. “Critics you can trust regard von Wehlen’s renditions of Wagner and Beethoven as superior. His Mozart is undeniably weak. Too forceful and rushed, no delicacy, no wit.”
“Doesn’t every musician specialize? I can’t sing Ravel.”
“Ah, you see . . . that’s it. Few Austrians will admit von Wehlen has a weakness. His most fanatic loyalists consider any criticism a form of treason.”
“That’s absurd.” Unsinn, she thought, good word in German.
“We’re a poor country. Von Wehlen is our one international figure. Austria will always crave a replacement for Emperor Franz Josef.” Karl formed a triangle with the crumbs. “Herr Maestro controls the so-called Berlin-Vienna-Salzburg axis of music. That makes him untouchable, more important than our president, than the richest winemaker. Everything he performs or produces is a success.”
Karl refilled their glasses. Maile sipped from hers, fascinated by his words, slicing to the bone, revealing information no tourist ever heard. He went on, “Most Austrian music expertise is a mask for bitterness. Twenty-three years after the Reich, people are still seething because they were defeated, and the last time they had a feeling of power was under you-know-who. Von Wehlen is a perfect substitute.”
“Because he’s a musician.”
“Even better, one who interprets our holy Mozart.”
Karly put their empty plates and glasses into a tin tub at the back of the room. They left, the door closing behind them and the iron ring falling in place with a clang that bounced off the high walls. Maile asked him how local people found their way on dark streets with few lights or signs. “Like this,” he said. He reached up to run a finger along a date etched on a marble plaque: 1742, the height of a disastrous flood. Farther on he pointed out a mummified fish, the last sturgeon caught in the Salzach. At an intersection a low stone hay crib inscribed with a crest stood out in the gloom. She was still confused by the turns he took, but soon they arrived at Frau Metzger’s building.
“Nun also,” Karl said in mild surprise. “My godmother lives here. I’ve never been invited inside, the Church and all that. Well. Have a pleasant evening.” He walked off with his cased horn bouncing lightly against one leg.
Maile slipped into the chilly entryway, as black as a burial cave. Cheap-apartment fear attacked her and she groped along the wall, slapping the cold plaster until she touched a metal box and snapped on a switch. Wan yellow light spread overhead. A timer began ticking, kikkik-kik: good for fifteen seconds. She rushed up the stairs, digging for her key, dropped a score halfway to the top, snatched it up and found the key just as the timer stopped and the bulb clicked off. In the blackness she lunged at her door, couldn’t locate the lock, then did, then couldn’t get it open, fought with it, and finally fell into her room and flipped on a lamp.
Light. She was in Salzburg. Here there was no elevator. No gold watch band.
FRAU METZGER VISITED her husband’s grave with a steady appearance of devotion. She still regretted that he had been so old when they married, forty-eight to her eighteen, with the strength of his manliness already waning, so that he could only give her one child. Twelve years later all able-bodied men were called to serve in the Army of the Reich, but not a butcher by then in his sixth decade. Manfred Metzger was assigned a flock of sheep, along with a pistol and orders to shoot anyone caught stealing an animal of any age and in any condition. Both the meat and the wool were military property. He considered himself lucky. Josephina was humiliated; rather than being in uniform at the front, her Ehemann was down by the river protecting muttonchops.
The bus ride to the little cemetery outside the city took the entire morning, but Frau Metzger never missed her twice-monthly visit. She had a horror of being gossiped about as a widow who shirked her duties—and to a man who had, after all, left her a house in town and enough money to avoid working for the rest of her life.
At the cemetery gate she crossed herself, did so again at the gravesite, clasped her hands to recite a Hail Mary and a Glory Be, and thumped down a bouquet of daisies. “So, Manfred,” she said, her usual greeting. “Where’s your pistol now?”
A few sprightly weeds grew around the headstone. She crouched to yank them out, the stems like wire that made green stains and red stripes on her fingers. She decided to leave the real cleaning for All Souls, just two weeks away, when everyone came to scrape lichen off the names of the dead and make each grave as neat as a window box.
“Well, Manfred,” she said, straightening up, “my Hawaii-Mädchen has turned out to be a perfect lady. What you think does not matter because this is entirely my business.”
She continued, filling him in on the latest: von Wehlen’s fall premiere in Vienna this week had been a worldwide triumph; her knees were doing well in the fine autumn weather; their son had not written recently from Cape Town; the house was in good order, roof tiles repaired, a rotted window frame replaced. As usual she quickly ran out of news—talking to her dead husband was never as interesting as her weekly Kaffeeklatsch with friends—yet she felt bound to keep Manfred informed.
“The Red Army is in the Czechkei, and a million soldiers are predicted by spring! Father Meyerhof insists nothing will happen, but Frau Guschelbauer says the Cossacks are coming again, just like in ’45, and this time they will grab Salzburg by the neck.”
The memory made her shiver: the Red Army flooding into Vienna, just five hours away. Soldiers not even human, godless heathens, burning churches, tearing out city water pipes to send back to the Soviet Union, trainloads of pipes, a documented fact. Now, every day, there was a greater and greater threat that the same beasts would swarm down the autobahn to Mozart’s city. Not quite yet, winter was on the way and armies didn’t like ice, but surely when the first stretch of fine weather came in late March.
She recited a hasty Our Father, the words tumbling out in an automatic, comforting rush: Vater unser, God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with the world. For good measure she made the sign of the cross over the gravestone—may it remain undisturbed—and walked downhill to the bus stop, humming to herself.
AT THE MOZARTEUM’S administration office, Maile received an unexpected message that instantly excited her. The top of the page had the letterhead of the American consulate: “Dear Miss Manoa,” she read in English. “We haven’t met and I’d like to see someone from Hawaii again. Please come by at your convenience.” Signed with an illegible scrawl.
“Salzburg has consulates?” she asked the registrar.
“Fourteen,” he replied, “for a population of fifty thousand. The Festival gives us international importance.”
“I see,” she said. The idea of visiting a consulate by invitation was irresistible. She couldn’t imagine who had once known someone else from home. During the midday ban on practicing in homes she casually asked Frau Metzger about the many consulates in Salzburg.
The landlady huffed as though explaining the obvious. Diplomacy had been an Austrian specialty for centuries. The Festival attracted an elite audience from all over the world, and although most Konsulate were active only from June to August, their guest books contained the signatures of Toscanini, the Danish king, Olympic athletes, Prominenten who had visited Salzburg since the Festival was established at the hands of none other than Richard Strauss.
Maile went upstairs to eat a sausage and cheese roll. She changed into a fresh suit, neatened her hair, and waited until two o’clock, to be safely past lunchtime, before setting out to pay her visit. Along the Salzach an imposing row of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century villas faced the river, private homes behind thick hedges. Every third or fourth gate had a heavy brass plaque inscribed in two languages. FRANCE FRANKREICH, CCCP UDSSR, incomprehensible lettering for Greece, Thailand. She spotted an American flag at the entrance to a three-story mansion with marble banisters carved into a series of dolphins. Pots of fall chrysanthemums formed an ascending pattern of purple and golden brown.
Pili crouched under Maile’s ribs in a fit of nerves. She told herself that no one in Salzburg knew anything about Papakōlea, that she had the finest teacher at the Mozarteum, in the entire country, Sir Jann, who taught only one advanced student at a time.
She stepped into a foyer paneled in mahogany the color of black coffee. A receptionist in a blue suit like a stewardess uniform glanced up from a desk. Maile held out the letter. “Oh, yes,” the woman said. “Please sign our guest book.”
Maile wrote in her best script, then looked around at rooms opening out from the foyer; garlands of roses carved on the wooden paneling, Alpine landscapes in ornate gold frames. Only a portrait of President Lyndon Johnson with the Stars and Stripes in the background reminded visitors that they were on American territory.
The receptionist handed over a mimeographed page, saying, “Before I forget. This’s important for Americans, ’specially with Soviet troops camping on our doorstep. I’ll be right back.” She went off down a hallway.
Maile studied the paper, entitled, “Just So You Know.” The first two paragraphs concerned visas and work restrictions that meant no waitressing, no odd jobs, no selling Tahitian Gardenia perfume. In fact, only music. She turned her attention to the next paragraph.
3) Interference with Austrian internal affairs is strictly forbidden, i.e., no picketing or public speaking on political issues which concern either the United States or Austria. In private conversation, extreme tact is mandatory.
The last word offended her. She wasn’t about to lecture fellow students on LBJ and the war.
4) No participation, active or passive, in satirical productions, cabaret and the like. If apprehended in such activity, you have 24 hours to leave the country and a permanent ban on returning.
She looked up, shocked: who made these rules? They were Russian, Communist. Americans were also warned to carry their passports at all times. Police could ask for identification without explanation, and lack of documents could result in arrest and jail. “It’s their country,” the handout concluded. “Respect how they do things and you’ll get along just fine.”
When the receptionist returned, Maile followed her down the hall, thinking, Jail. Permanent ban on returning. A U.S. citizen who even watched an antiwar comedy routine in some nightclub could be thrown out of the country.
“The consul will see you now,” the receptionist said.
Maile hadn’t expected to meet the head man himself, and cautiously entered a room with walls and ceiling tipped in gold-leaf. The large Persian carpet under her feet had red tree branches filled with tiny blue birds. Glass cases displayed swords, dueling pistols, medals, medieval helmets. She thought it was a setting fit for a Renaissance duke, but the man who stood up to greet her looked as shrunken and haunted as an old alcoholic.
“Well,” he said. “Hawaii. I’ll be damned.”
The Honorable Edwin Casey wore a brown suit and maroon tie. He emerged from behind his black marble desk as carefully as a recent invalid. His sparse gray hair was neatly combed, his fine hazel eyes half hidden under trembling lids. “No one from Honolulu’s ever lived in Salzburg,” he said. “My chauffeur is some distant relative of your landlady’s cousin. That’s how news gets around when most people don’t have phones.”
One of his eyelids twitched. He held it down with a pinky finger, an automatic gesture. “Haven’t been in the islands since my discharge in ’45,” he said, “but never forgot the natives, most warmhearted folks on earth. Took us GIs surfing and canoeing. Had us eat with their families. Left me with a permanent soft spot for Hawaii.” He winked fiercely and the twitching stopped. “You’re here to study music?”
“Yes,” Maile said. “Sir,” she added, wondering if this strange man just wanted to reminisce.
Casey smiled. “In college I memorized the first five minutes of Beethoven’s Fifth but tell the truth could never play a single instrument so anybody’d want to listen.” From a silver box he took out a cigarette, lit it, and inhaled with a f
aint groan of relief. “Not much action here during the winter. I’ll be mostly in Vienna then come summer that fellow von Wehlen shows up here and I play host for the big shots. I don’t sprechen the Deutsch. You?” Maile nodded. “Good,” he said. “I’d like to invite you and repay that island hospitality. Maybe you could sing a tune or two.” He grinned and showed her to the door.
Outside on the river promenade, Maile imagined a diplomatic reception, a scene from a movie. She pictured herself being escorted inside wearing the black beaded gown. Mr. Casey wanted her to sing. Fantastic! But not until next summer. Would he even remember? Her savings might not last that long. Gone before the Festival even opened.
She headed for her Italian language class, no longer feeling important because she’d signed a guest book like Toscanini. Von Wehlen was just another prominent musician far above her in the professional world. At the reception, if it ever took place, Mr. Casey only needed a translator, one step above a caterer. Nothing about her life had changed. She’d simply traded a routine of hard study in Manhattan for the same routine in cheaper, safer, more beautiful surroundings. Earning money outside of music was illegal. She had to build a career in little Salzburg and would not see Hawaii again anytime soon.
FRAU METZGER PRIMPED her complicated braids, smoothed her autumn dirndl of plum-colored wool, picked up a large willow basket, and went out for her second shopping trip of the day. Getting fresh opinions on anything heard, overheard, announced on the radio, or seen in print was as important as buying fresh rolls. Her earlier rounds to the bakery, the pharmacy, and vegetable market were a routine established before the war.
During the past week, the women she encountered criticized a pregnant Munich Opera diva still singing in her seventh month, and scoffed at the menu for a local aristocrat’s banquet. They considered Josephina Metzger daring to have a tenant from Hawaii, eine echte Exotin, like an Apache or a maharajah. The men she dealt with discussed Red Army maneuvers just across the Czech border, slowing down now with snow on the way, although no one believed Soviet news bulletins. She heartily agreed that Russians were a Tartar horde ignorant of civilization, closer to wolves than humans. And if America was home to blackamoors who played jazz music, Austrians were fortunate that the U.S.A. Army in nearby Germany had warehouses full of bombs to threaten the U.S.S.R.