“Don’t be unkind,” Frau Metzger murmured, then said more firmly, “There has been no improper behavior in this house. Certainly not with Karl. My tenant is here to take our culture back to her people. Our American consul received her at once.”
The other women agreed it was an important social connection but cautioned Frau Metzger that a sophisticated appearance was no guarantee of decency, that her tenant’s manners had been acquired here and were not the result of a proper upbringing. In fact, her presence endangered Frau Metzger’s reputation.
Maile stood frozen on the step. Her slightly brown skin was actually a layer of filth? Her dirty body was contaminating sheets and towels and Karl. She clamped her purse under one arm, about to brazen into the kitchen to ask how often they bathed or washed their braids— always shiny with grease—but a thorn of warning spiked through her anger. Never lose your sense of tact, Madame had said. Or was it Jann? Shouting at gray-haired women would fuel the worst kind of gossip: crude American, from the lowest class, trying to disguise herself as a diva.
Her fury collapsed. She crept back upstairs, too humiliated to look for a practice room to make herself into a countess. Salzburg’s formality no longer seemed charming but a shrewd mask to hide centuries of vicious prejudice. Foreigners were sly and little better than prostitutes unless they achieved artistic status. Odor? At home in Honolulu the smell of so-called honest sweat was not appreciated. Even her country relatives swam or bathed every day and scented themselves with crushed ginger petals.
Ten minutes later, from her upstairs window, Maile watched Frau Metzger and the women leave the house with their market baskets. Her miserable mood had turned back into balled-fists, pacing-around-the-room anger. She wanted sympathy, and was afraid that if she didn’t get it she would make a stupid, permanent mistake, squander her manners on a screaming fit. Proper behavior here was as valued as money. The only person she could complain to was Karl, but his family had no phone. Like most people, they got along without one and sent any message that couldn’t wait by telegram. Teachers even rescheduled lessons via telegram, an inexpensive convenience within the city limits—another custom that no longer seemed charming but hopelessly old-fashioned. She couldn’t imagine sending an idiotic plea: DEAR KARL FEELINGS WOUNDED STOP COME AT ONCE STOP MAILE.
She stalked downstairs to look for him. Halfway to the Mozarteum she realized that he might not be there. She’d have to take a bus out to Gaisberg, hike up a hillside she had never seen, asking all the way where the Holzer family lived. Even then he might not be home, and she would be trapped talking to his parents while they fed the chickens.
Closer to the conservatory she heard shouting, an unusual sound. Jean-Paul sat on the front steps with a younger French pianist, his page turner. Newspapers in several languages were draped over their knees. “The Sorbonne martyrs continue to inspire,” Jean-Paul yelled at anyone entering or leaving. “The triumph carries over to Prague!” Some students went past with curious expressions. Others shrank from him.
In uneasy embarrassment Maile started up the far side of the steps. Raw emotion on the street belonged in Manhattan. Jean-Paul thrust a newspaper at her. She glanced at a photo of a crowd, and a caption: Following the Vaculik manifesto, Prague Spring gains momentum.
“You Americans know the underdog,” he ranted. “Your Martin Luther King was shot dead, a Nobel laureate. You live with shame.”
She stepped away. “I’m only American on my passport. What’s so terrible about one more riot? In New York I got used to them.”
His expression turned into a sneer. “You are just a low Tahitian.”
“You stinking hypocrite! Aren’t Tahitians French citizens?” She grabbed the newspaper and flung it aside. “Pick up your trash. Police can fine you a thousand schillings during the Festival, and it’s a week in jail if you can’t pay.” A made-up threat, but it left him speechless, and she got into the conservatory before he came after her.
Algerian, Tahitian. If she didn’t become a star here, she would be just another foreigner, like the Turks and Greeks who swept the rail-road platform, men despised on sight because of their skin color.
Students in the main hall were crowded around the bulletin board. From the basement practice rooms came the bleeps, blaps, and booms of brass and percussion instruments, instant headache sounds. A French horn soared above the racket pouring up into the hallway.
Maile descended the stairs in a murderous mood and was assaulted by brawling thunder. Light bulbs in wire nets cast a feeble yellow glow on a stone corridor as forbidding as a catacomb. Kettledrums hit a sforzato, a blast of vibrations like sheets of metal crashing onto cement. She gritted her teeth, feeling stupid for prowling in the basement, and turned to escape. A melody swooped down on her—dah, da, di-di-di-di da-da-da-da, DAH! She chased it and banged on the door.
Karl jerked it open as if angry at being interrupted. His final tone still surrounded him. His forehead glistened. The veins in his hands stood out. “You look tense,” he said dryly.
She barged in, bumping him out of the way. He lowered his horn in exasperation and shut the door. The room made her feel squashed, a low-ceilinged, whitewashed brick slot as chilly as a restaurant meat locker. He stepped over to a music stand and wiped his horn with a cloth. She wanted to throw herself on him and cry like a child. From adjoining rooms came the dulled roar of other instruments. She looked down at her hands, light tan. After two years away from the islands her color had faded and she thought furiously that tourists in Hawaii were obsessed with getting a tan but couldn’t bear the idea of being born with one. Salzburgers didn’t swim. The only locals with sun-browned skin were peasants. Her eyes stung, and a tear splashed onto her wrist.
“Du, Maile,” he said. “You’re crying.”
“Am not.” She killed off her feelings. “I’ve just got to talk to you.”
“‘Ich muss,’” he corrected her. “Or ‘Ich möchte.’ In German, you don’t say ‘I’ve got—’”
“Shut up. Pack your horn.”
He squinted in puzzled resentment, then slipped his instrument into its case. They left the basement through a back door. Outside on the street she couldn’t bear to describe the conversation about sheets, odor, men on her stairs at night. Karl pried, coaxed. She couldn’t open her heart to him, but refused to let him go.
The old bus they took from the center of Salzburg swayed onto a country road. Riders held baskets with plums, carrots, skinned rabbits with heads and feet still covered in fur. Karl tried to lift Maile’s gloom with gossip and little jokes. When those had no effect, he put an arm around her. She still refused to talk. He peeled an orange for her. She ate it all before realizing that she hadn’t shared a single bite.
“You’re hungry,” he said.
She looked out the window, thinking she was selfish, that’s what. One stingy, greedy bugga, big-time. At home no one would have put up with dragging a man away from work, pushing her battered feelings on him as if he were to blame, then refusing to speak. By now Auntie Lani would have cornered her. “You, Maile-long-face, how come, how come?” Teasing and concern until she gave in. Laughs and a kiss when she finally smiled. She ached for someone to ask, “E, howzit,” and ruffle her hair, the constant, sweet touching of relatives, their gentle attention to anyone sad, hurt, angry, or sick.
Passengers got off the bus until finally only Karl and Maile were left. Cabbage leaves and mashed strawberries littered the aisle. At the last stop they stepped down onto a road choked with weeds. He led her up a beaten path to a meadow above his family’s farm, said he’d bring food, and hiked toward the house. She kicked off her shoes, relieved that she didn’t have meet his family.
To the east the city was a violet-gray pool with the castle at the center. Above it spread a bright blue cloudless sky. Farther uphill a wooden fence wound into a forest. She sat down in a field of pink wildflowers. To the north stretched the dimples of steep meadows, with distant cows grazing in the deep grass as if float
ing through a placid sea of green. Below them an orchard sloped toward a pond partly hidden by tree branches trailing into the water. The landscape felt like a calm spirit telling her to let go, her miserable mood had gone on long enough. But if she explained everything, she would look bad no matter how she phrased it.
Soon Karl appeared, carrying a tray. He strode up to her announcing, “Guten Appetit!” and showed off an array of sliced cheese, smoked chicken, a heap of pickles, cherry jam, asparagus. Everything looked wonderfully homemade, right down to the crusty bread and soft butter. She snatched at a chicken leg.
“Oh, no!” He whisked the tray out of reach. “First you tell me what’s gnawing your innards.”
“Come on, Karl.” She glowered. “I’m famished.”
“You’re an orange ahead of me.” He balanced the tray with one hand, flipped a pickle into the air, and caught it between his teeth.
She could have strangled him. He tantalized her with lunges and retreats, his pale eyes glinting, two chips of ice. She grabbed and missed—grabbed again, missed again, both of them as stubborn as bullying children—until finally her story about sheets was traded for slices of chicken on buttered bread. She loathed him for dragging it out of her. Worst of all, he didn’t seem upset, chewing hungrily and looking almost cheerful. “My godmother,” he said, “is a reminder that we actually lead the world in two things. Culture and jealousy.”
Maile gave him a sulky stare. “Don’t start in on the Austrians.”
He shrugged. “Glamour makes people here uncomfortable, that’s all. Especially women whose finest entertainment is a weekly Kaffeeklatsch.”
“Glamour?” She felt reduced to a word, but was also tired of being angry.
His eyes went shy. He examined a piece of cheese with a concentration that shut her out, ate the cheese, then lay back with his horn case propped under his head. “My liver has to relax after a big meal,” he said. “Yours, too. Later we’ll take a walk.” He patted his solar plexus as though comforting his organs and closed his eyes.
She suppressed a groan. Frau Metzger also talked about her liver as if it were a temperamental friend who had to be coddled. Local students gravely mentioned weird illnesses: circulatory disturbance, egg poisoning, catarrh—all valid excuses to cancel a voice lesson. Karl breathed more and more slowly as his entire body gave in to the luxury of sleep.
At last Maile knew she had no more anger to spill, no energy left to criticize. Her hunger was satisfied, her story told, and she sat in the shade of a large tree on a pleasant afternoon.
Sometime later she felt a hand on her shoulder, rocking her awake. She opened her eyes, dazed, and saw Karl tucking his horn under one arm. The tray had disappeared. “Come,” he said, sounding urgent. “We have to get there before twilight.” He held out her purse.
She felt limp after falling into a dead sleep during the day. Across the meadows the low sun cast a blazing light. The orchard and the pond next to it were dense pockets of purple shadows. “What’s the hurry?”
“It’s a kind of pet. I promised my mother to release it tonight. She thinks it’s evil, a shrunken devil.” He pointed at Maile’s high heels. “Can you walk without shoes?”
Barefoot on a reef, she thought, alert now. “I’ll take off my stockings.”
He didn’t turn aside when she pulled up her skirt to unsnap her garters, but he stood watching, as she knew no American would, and his stare intensified as she slipped one nylon and then the other down over her knees, her ankles, then the moment she had her shoes and bag in hand, he headed off. She sprinted to catch up.
At a quick pace they went downhill into the shadowy light of the orchard. The perspiration of sleep dried quickly on Maile’s face and neck, leaving her skin taut. Fallen apples in the grass gave off the musky smell of fermenting fruit. She trampled them deliberately so the pulp burst and oozed between her bare toes.
Beyond the last tree Karl said, “Be very quiet now.” He put down his horn. She set her things alongside it. He crept toward the pond and a weather-beaten shed covered in moss. Under the eaves he poked at a crack and pulled out a smooth round stick resembling a perch from a bird cage. She eased up beside him. He put a finger to his lips, opened the shed door, leaned in, careful and silent, and drew back with something hanging from the stick.
“It’s a girl bat,” he whispered. “I think so, anyway. She’s so young I can’t quite tell.”
Maile peered at a perfect fox face smaller than the tip of her fore-finger, at shiny brown fur with a pale orange tint, at tiny folded black wings. The bat yawned and opened its eyes, revealing two dots of deep yellow and a bright pink throat. Its tongue rose with a barely visible flutter. Teeth no larger than grains of sand.
“She’s thirsty,” Karl murmured. He knelt at the edge of the pond and dribbled drops of water off a fingertip into the bat’s mouth. It hung upside down, blinking and rustling its wings. He explained in an undertone that young bats didn’t always know where to roost at night after feeding. If not under cover with their backs shaded, warmth from the morning sun stunned them. They dropped to the ground, where they died of thirst or were eaten by larger animals. As a boy he’d found a bat and learned how to care for it. Be sure it’s not rabid, and even then don’t touch it and leave your scent. Scoop it up in a piece of bark. Give it just enough water to recover. Hang it up like a miniature pair of trousers in a cool, dark place. Let it escape when it’s ready.
The color of the little bat’s fur was as delicate as the blush on an apricot. Maile wanted badly to stroke it but knew he was right; certain animals were wild things and could only exist apart from humans. Karl squinted at the setting sun. After a moment he said that the rays were probably no longer dangerous although it was best to wait a little.
The huge, glowing disc receded behind the Alps encircling the valley and left the distant city and its hills adrift in a lavender haze. The air around the pond cooled rapidly. The moss on the roof of the shed turned a deeper green and faded into a soft outline. Karl held the stick at arm’s length, the bat suspended like a furled leaf. He inscribed a slow, wide arc left to right, then reversed direction, moving faster. The tiny wings sprang open. The bat let go to sail away over the pond with a chittering sound, dipped low toward the water, and glided upward and out of sight.
Maile watched the sky above them turn a glossy blue-black. Constellations appeared, none familiar, then the line of stars called Nā Kao slowly pierced the darkness, a school of stingrays with glimmering darts at the ends of their tails. On the horizon a wide curve of white eased its way higher, the upper rim of a large summer moon. It seemed to be escaping from a battlement of wooded mountains. At a smooth, stately pace it separated itself from the lower hills and slopes where clumps of ground fog lay motionless. Hina of the moon always looked around as she climbed and spread her reflection, overlaying all other light below with her own, silvering the grass, flowers and trees, the fences and slopes. Her brightness crept toward the dark ring of the pond where they stood. Something moved on its surface, a sudden white slash making ripples that widened into larger circles until absorbed by a fringe of foam at the edge. All was calm except for an occasional twitch on the water’s skin; an insect, a fish, a spirit.
“On a night like this,” Karl said, “gods went into the forests searching for a woman visible only by moonlight. They never found her.” His voice was like a subtle current of air. He opened his instrument case. “For years my only goal was Bayreuth. Siegfried has a famous horn solo, performed flawlessly just three times since 1876. The names of those musicians are engraved on a marble plaque.” He picked up the instrument and flexed his fingers over the brass key tabs. “I wanted my name etched on that stone, but as of tomorrow I’m concentrating on the piano. So farewell to the dragon slayer. I’ll leave him in the forest.”
Raising the horn, he took a deep breath and tensed his lips into a firm line. Lightly and decisively he began to play a hunter’s call, buoyant staccato notes that ended on a sus
tained tone, du, du-du-du, du-du-du, du-du-du-duuuuuu . . . He kept his eyes on Maile and repeated the line in a hush. The melody sank to the bottom of the horn’s register, a tone so low it had the faint rumbling of a heap of coals in an oven. She stepped closer to feel the sound. His posture stiffened, and again he played the hunter’s call, a denser run woven with embellishments. Once more the last note dropped into pretended sleep, as if prey had been sighted and stealth was necessary. Slowly he woke the music, enticing it into a full, round tone that expanded like a balloon, rising to repeat the original melody. The notes came faster and faster, locked in a race, rushing toward capture and elation. He broke the final phrase to draw a ragged, gasping breath, but finished with a splendid blast at the top of the scale, a gigantic tone that leaped into the air and flew out across the night.
Maile stared ahead at a distant ridge, feeling the sound leave them, wanting to ride it up to the moon. She ran forward and heard a splash. Water, she felt water around her ankles. In confusion she raised her skirt, then pulled it off over her head, along with her blouse and brassiere. She stepped out of her panties, threw her clothing on the grass, and waded into the pond’s silver sheen. Her hair unraveled, spilling down her back. Karl stripped off his clothes to wade in beside her. They stood thigh-deep, lapped by wavelets, staring and listening; Hina had taken the sound into her cool radiance. He stepped behind Maile, planted his hands on either side of her waist, and lifted her bodily onto his shoulders. She stretched out her arms and showed herself to the moon, intoxicated with bliss.
11
ALL MORNING AT the conservatory Karl and Maile spied on each other with a new hard edge of intimacy. He refused to say what work he had chosen for the competition but insisted she sing her contest aria for him: “I want a personal performance on a stage.” She demanded he play his contest piece for her on a concert grand, his real instrument, so he claimed, or was she simply supposed to take it on faith that he was brilliant in two fields?
Aloha, Mozart Page 18