Aloha, Mozart

by Williams, Waimea

  He yanked on a ribbon, snapping the branch, and tossed it aside. All he had to offer Maile was cow shit, hay harvests, two thousand years of tradition. No: he had music. But what if she had a fiancé in New York or Honolulu? Or she might take up with a wealthy student like Kazuo, who could offer a woman an entire world beyond Salzburg.

  AFTER THE WEEKEND in Munich, Maile’s thoughts were still dominated by impressions of Don Carlo and Lohengrin at Mūnchner Opernhaus. Even more memorable was Mozart’s Figaro at Prinzregenten, a Baroque architectural jewel once reserved for the Bavarian court. The productions at both theaters, supposedly second rank, with secondary casts, were much finer than anything she had seen in New York. Sets, costumes, props, lighting, and supporting roles were so excellent that the Met seemed like a tiny group of star singers backed by little else. America, she now realized, barely registered in the world of real opera. Nothing could equal being in Europe, where music had begun centuries ago and great traditions continued with full government funding. Yet Maile Manoa was still in the audience instead of on stage. Back in Salzburg, Mozart felt more like a legendary, intimidating presence than a man who had worked and eaten and slept just down the street.

  Winter descended on the city. Few buildings were equipped with radiators, and Frau Metzger didn’t trust Maile to use the large ceramic heating oven properly or thriftily. She came into her tenant’s room at dawn and during the day, whether Maile was there or not, to stoke the fire and monitor the coals. Maile knew better than to object.

  Being settled and an official resident had solved her immediate problems, but lately she found herself having strange experiences with doors. As she pushed down on a latch and stepped into a shop, everything around her gently vanished and she seemed to be entering her family’s home on a slope in a hot, cramped neighborhood below Punchbowl cemetery. Relatives were asleep in the living room, or cooking and chatting in the kitchen. Her brothers and sisters sat on the ripped couch with the newest infants. Boys and girls ran in from baseball practice, paper routes, hula lessons. In the backyard Auntie Lani bathed a half dozen small children with the garden hose, stripping off her mu‘umu‘u and yelling, “No shame, no shame!” at a neighbor peering at her through the banana trees. Maile caught familiar scents, ripe papaya, a ginger lei, a bucket of diapers soaking in bleach, but she remained an unseen visitor, invisible to everyone. Sentimental tears filled her ghost’s eyes. Then the real lives of the Manoa family rose up before her like a surf wave—too many people crammed into too little space in a city where good jobs were always in short supply. A typical mixed-blood clan that was worse off with each new generation, their days dogged by arguments about who let the gas tank go dry, or allowed the hundred-pound bag of rice to molder, or the sewer pipe to rust through; a family that could never afford tickets to see the Rainbow Warriors and had to watch the football championship from someone’s rooftop outside the stadium.

  Each time the vision slipped away, Maile felt torn. She wanted to go back, but on her own terms. When she’d demanded a chance to study in New York, Auntie Lani had replied, laughing, “E, we never get famous. Too old ar-ready, too fat. You go get famous.” At the time it had seemed like good advice: use your gift, work hard-hard-hard; be rewarded; come home.

  MAILE SHADOWED KAZUO at the Mozarteum and in town. She watched him going into a book store, exiting the Silver Fawn, visiting his tailor. On her part it was always, “Guten Tag wūnsche ich Ihnen,” I wish you good day. Then his reply, “Ach wohl, Fräulein Manoa, ich habe die Ehre,” Quite, Miss Manoa, the honor is mine. His phrases sounded starched and ironed, pleasingly theatrical, and frustrating.

  One icy afternoon in the conservatory’s foyer, Maile tried a new approach, sprightly, casual: Hello, what’s the latest? That didn’t work either, because Kazuo had turned himself into such an Austrian gentleman that she couldn’t find a millimeter of common ground unless she played a similar role. In his entire deportment—there was no other word for it—he outdid any local aristocrat she had overheard on the street: “Greet the Lord, Miss Manoa, and may I ask how you are this fine morning? I believe with a little good fortune coming our way, the weather will fulfill its early promise and not become tedious.”

  All this in perfect German with Frenchified words in the Austrian style, atmosphère instead of Wetter, fade rather than langweilig. Kazuo dressed exclusively in custom-made clothes, a gray or brown traditional Austrian suit of cashmere, with green piping, silver stag buttons, and the requisite hat with a boar-bristle brush on the left side. Fall version followed by winter version. A Japanese-Salzburger who after three years at the Mozarteum enjoyed the reputation of an excellent performer and scholar, spoken of respectfully even by teachers. Among all the other students, Kazuo alone could afford a large record collection, fine meals. He ordered Festival tickets months in advance.

  Maile approached him once more, attempting to appeal to the sense of homesickness she felt, and was sure he did too. Her offer to share a pot of green tea was politely declined. He had no interest in haiku, sumo wrestling, bon dancing, or any of the other cultural activities she knew a little about from emigrant communities in Honolulu. He was Japan-Japanese, she concluded, a distant relation to the much friendlier Hawaii-Japanese she had grown up with. But her Japanese classmates in high school and college had dated only each other, and the intermarriage rate was one in ten thousand. Which led to another possibility: Kazuo considered her racially inferior.

  She had to admit that their gifts for music did not make them equals. Kazuo was not a man she wanted, he was someone she wanted to be, someone not reduced to a student’s thrifty little pleasures. Herr Hitachi ate pork tenderloin in champagne sauce at the Silver Fawn. He lived in a house with servants and a wine cellar. According to gossip, von Wehlen’s agent had been monitoring his progress for the last two years.

  Reluctantly Maile cultivated her social life at the Mozarteum. Students never went to each other’s rooms, which were guarded by relatives or landlords determined to prevent hanky-panky. Where did unmarried people in their twenties make love? Salzburg lacked Manhattan’s aggressive sex-as-competition, and she didn’t miss that, but hadn’t discovered something to replace it. No one at the conservatory owned a television set. Most movies were carefully neutral postwar German comedies or poorly dubbed Hollywood films, decades old. Often the high point of the day was a music broadcast in the radio room, with Maxi singing along with the famous tenor he would never become, Brenda flouncing in late, Marlise taking notes. Karl was often absent because of chores at home.

  THE ROSENKAVALIER RECEIVED word that the porter at the train station wanted to see him. Trudging through snow to the Bahnhof had no appeal, but he treasured his friendship with the former SS man. Many claimed to have worn the Reich’s most impressive uniform, although few had the blood-type tattoo to prove it. A shame, the Rosenkavalier often thought, that after the war a lack of education had reduced the porter to wearing a laborer’s smock.

  Train travel at this time of year was light and taxi drivers on the lookout for customers huddled at a standup café. The Rosenkavalier stopped to greet each in the routine hope of collecting useful information. None offered anything worth remembering with knots on his strings. At a storeroom the porter handed over a small black-framed death notice from a Viennese newspaper. “Gustav Sondergeist,” he said, “ten schillings.”

  At such times the Rosenkavalier regretted being unable to read, although he recognized the notice for what it was. “A high price,” he grumbled, but the porter refused to bargain, saying that a legacy was worth far more than ten schillings. The Rosenkavalier stalled, then feigned reluctant agreement and paid, secretly pleased because the amount would surely be returned fivefold, perhaps more. The two of them shared a celebratory cigarette.

  It took the Rosenkavalier two days to accost Dora Jann, once an athlete who thirty years ago appeared scandalously bare-legged to compete before large audiences. She was now in her fifties and no longer a natural blond. That afte
rnoon he caught sight of her shopping with her husband. The next morning she and a lady friend walked their dogs along the Salzach. Several hours later he spotted her alone, entering a spa. He lingered in the heated rear of the building where the trash was collected. At noon she emerged, looking pink-faced and relaxed.

  He trailed her to a cluster of pine trees off the promenade, caught up, and said, “Frau Professorin, bitte sehr.” Before she could reply he slipped her the clipping of the death notice. “Gustav Sondergeist,” he added. “You have my sympathy.”

  Dora Jann blinked in shock. The clipping made no mention of the deceased’s career as a leading sports official for the Reich. She still understood that the Rosenkavalier knew too much about things that could never be revealed. Her professional relationship with Sondergeist had become personal after she publicly congratulated another runner at the ’36 Olympics, the splendid Schwarzer, whom the Fūhrer himself had refused to acknowledge. Sondergeist shielded her from arrest and certain execution, and in exchange she became his mistress for a decade of living in terror and shame. Germany’s defeat freed her from physical obligation, but the former sports official’s continuing silence about how she’d spent the war years became a lifelong debt. Now the cost of maintaining that silence was being passed on.

  “Is Herr Kammersänger doing well?” the Rosenkavalier inquired. The pink color of Frau Professorin’s cheeks had faded. He watched her tear the clipping into scraps and waited in the full assurance that an aging woman who had managed to marry well late in life would not deny him what he asked. “A hundred schillings,” he said.

  She opened her purse.

  “Every month,” he added. “In an envelope, if you please. I will seek you out.”

  AS CHRISTMAS EVE approached, Maile saw no animated window scenes, no advertising banners, no tinsel-laden trees. In all of Salzburg there was not a single Santa Claus. Children’s Advent calendars had tiny windows to open each day to reveal details of a Nativity scene; pastry shops sold confections made only once a year, rich hazelnut tarts and crushed almond cookies that melted on the tongue. Government buildings were hung with thick braids of pine branches. Karl was again hired for Tūrmbläser, a tradition so old no one could say if it had begun five hundred years ago, or went back to the introduction of Christianity in the third century. Each Sunday in December, at sundown brass players climbed the towers of four churches to send out call-and-response fanfares.

  Maile had missed this before because of class trips to Vienna, but on Christmas Eve she made sure to be in her room and experience at least something of the season. She waited at the cracked-open window, swathed against the cold, her breath forming a thin plume drawn out over the sill. Ahead in the darkness, the city’s rooftops and towers were dim outlines against the black sky. She imagined Karl at the top of a tower, huddled next to a cluster of huge bells, his horn wrapped in the heavy wool blanket each musician got in addition to a fee. One year, he’d told her, his horn had cracked nevertheless, and the city replaced it at a cost of ten thousand schillings. Four hundred dollars. Such governmental generosity amazed her, but he considered it an occupational expense.

  The street below was quiet, dark bluish-gray on both sides where hard-packed snow lined the fronts of shops. A man and a dog passed by, silent black forms moving with liquid grace. High above the city a distant sound broke the stillness: a tone unfurled, one and then another, long solemn notes from a trumpet and a French horn. Two more instruments joined in to form a quartet, the tone of each layered over the previous tone, building and holding. They formed a simple melody that went out into the night with the force of light advancing, of sound made visible. As the first fanfare began to fade, from a more distant tower came the response, as if to say, I hear, and I pass the message on: a king is coming. And so it went until the call had circulated among four towers and four quartets, and returned to the first, where it was acknowledged with a brief repetition that trailed off into silence.

  Maile stayed at the window despite the cold. The air outside still held the sense of an ancient command announcing the arrival of a ruler, of someone with mana so great that messengers were sent in advance to proclaim him. Her spirits stirred with a memory: Tūtū describing conch shells blown like thunder at the port of Nāwiliwili when Prince Kūhiō came for an official visit in the 1920s. At the time Tūtū was a young mother, Auntie Lani and Makua little children. “The monarchy gone thirty years by then,” Tūtū had said, “but the sky and the winds and the waters, they remembered our ruling chief. Still yet, that sound is there.”

  The ice-tipped air reached deeper into the room. Maile shivered and shut the window before more heat from the ceramic tiles of the Kachelofen seeped out. If the coals in the oven were allowed to die, the room would chill within an hour, and reheating took ten start-up logs and two days.

  She hurried down to the street and met Karl at the Dom as he exited the tower. They drank spicy hot wine at an outdoor stand, which she liked so much they shared a second cup. He described other traditions in a remote village high above the Salzburg plain: people who made bark costumes to celebrate winter magic, bear magic, wolf magic. These villagers, primitive by town standards, also carved instruments out of wood—tuba, trumpet, flute, some with crude valves—and played a strange and awful kind of music.

  “You’re not making this up?” she asked.

  “I visited the village some years ago.” He hadn’t intended to reveal this, but she looked curious, not about to laugh. “Actually,” he went on, “those people are distant relatives. Rock-poor, superstitious. I’ve heard of witches being stoned. Police don’t investigate because the roads are impassable in winter, closed for weeks.” He felt on thin ice, exposing his humble background, but her interest seemed to be deepening. “Only blood relations matter in places like that,” he said. “And hospitality. If you went tomorrow as a traveler, they’d give you everything on their supper table.” He turned to her, his emotions beginning to tumble.

  She stopped walking to look at him. He seemed hesitant, she thought. His lips were slightly parted. They now stood on a dark, narrow street in an icy stillness that conveyed a sense of owning the night and the city and the world beyond. In the dim light she made out his pale eyes, thick blond fringe, horn player’s full lips, the off-center chin cleft—all familiar, and yet new.

  “Maile,” he said with quiet intensity. His expression turned into a stare of desire he could no longer control, and he bent to press his mouth to hers. She gave in as though anticipating the moment, welcoming it. He embraced her with passionate awkwardness, his cased instrument in one hand swinging at her back, the blanket hanging over his shoulders mashed between them.

  She slid her arms around his heavy jacket to pull him tighter against her body. How long has it been, she wondered, how terribly long? Some forgotten bit of pleasure grabbed on the run in Manhattan, and nothing since then in this beautiful place except toiling through unfamiliar music, language, food. They kissed and kissed, their breath smoking as they snatched gulps of air, their cheeks and foreheads fever-hot. Under layers of clothing she sensed her bare skin, aroused, but here there was no soft evening breeze, no beach, no grassy yard.

  She stepped back from him and felt a rush of cold air between them. “There’s no place to go, is there?”

  He stood motionless, delighted by the question, although he had only a lame reply. “A ladder. That’s what men use in the countryside to get to a maiden’s bedroom.”

  She pictured the vaudeville setup, the tiptoeing lover, the rung-by-rung climb ending in a headfirst disappearance through a second-floor window. His arms were still around her waist, more loosely. Her hands were at her sides. She exhaled with a little laugh of defeat. They walked on.

  “There’s one more event you can’t miss,” he said. “Stay awake for me. I’ll be back at ten o’clock.”

  When Karl arrived hours later, Maile realized it was an unusual effort on the part of a born-and-raised Austrian. Just coming in by bus
took an hour. Salzburgers were all at home. Meeting him downstairs, she was instantly reminded of their wild kiss, yet his expression and mood were calm. “What about your family?” she asked. “It’s all right for you to be here?”

  He smiled. “You’re a guest in Salzburg. They understand that.”

  His reply recalled Kauai hospitality, unspoken rules no one questioned or had to explain. They walked down Getreidegasse through lightly sifting snow. Pairs and small groups of people joined them from side streets. All were silent. Elderly women in black scarves and shawls emerged from doorways, walking by themselves or arm in arm, until a small informal procession had formed, everyone headed in the same direction. On Dom Platz a fresh layer of snow covered the wide expanse of cobblestones. Every ground-floor window of every building displayed a tall lighted candle as thick as an organ pipe, capped by a dot of flame with a faint yellow halo.

  The procession crossed the dim plaza to Sankt Peter’s church, with its graceful curved onion spire. Next to it a high wall, the wrought iron gates in the center opened wide. One after another everybody passed through the gates into a cloud of light. Maile saw that they had entered a small enclosed cemetery open to the sky. Beside each tombstone or green marble mausoleum was a miniature pine tree covered with tiny lighted candles. A thousand flames illuminated the cemetery’s winding paths and the people lining them. Specks of glinting snow fell into the light, onto the trees, the ground.

  From the direction of the church came a low sound of chanting: Venite, venite adoremus. A monk in a hooded robe and holding a lighted taper led the way from the church into the cemetery. He was followed by five more monks with candles, only the tips of their beards visible, and their hands, the hands of old men. In a deep hypnotic tone they repeated the phrase: Come, let us adore. Slowly they circled through the cemetery as people stepped aside for them to pass, then the monks filed out, still chanting, Do-mi-num. The onlookers lingered in silence, then they too filed out, dispersing into the plaza and going their separate ways.