Aloha, Mozart

by Williams, Waimea

  A SPANISH HELDENTENOR sang with great conviction. Brenda performed well for a mezzo whose immature voice would take another decade to develop fully. Jean-Paul tore a fingernail on Tschaikovsky and had to drop out. The Soviet pianist proved to be an ice-cold technician, note-perfect and no warmth. Kazuo stunned everyone with his fluid bowing style, emotional range, and tasteful touches of humor, yet at six that evening the registrar announced, “A unanimous decision for first prize: Miss Maile Manoa, United States of America.”

  She swam forward through applause, the judges a blur of shapes, and she shook hands with each one. Nothing felt real until she turned to acknowledge the clapping of her fellow musicians. Her people. Nobody else understood what they all went through for the sake of a single piece of music, working alone hour after hour, spending years building nerve, never certain it would hold for the few minutes of a performance that decided one’s future.

  The applause continued and her dizziness turned to clarity. Some participants looked bitter. Others clapped in dutiful slack-wristed relief that weeks of tension had finally ended. She bowed at the crucial moment before the applause started to shrink. When she straightened up, a hot silence flowed over her, a current of desire from the audience, a powerful longing she had often felt, but now everything was reversed. They wanted to stand where she stood, to be the one different from all the rest of them. They wanted her magic, the only thing that could not be taught.

  She stepped off the stage, a queen joining her court, and the Mozarteum contestants surrounded her, demanding her autograph. “Beer at the Red Horse,” Brenda yelled. “Winner pays!”

  East Bloc competitors were hustled away by the Communist matron and the Soviet chaperones. A Spanish student shouted condolences at them in fractured German. Teachers came from behind the screened-off gallery, their expressions ranging from casual to grim. Maile scribbled her magic name on sheet music, posed for photos with the French harpist and a Dutch baritone, traded addresses and promises to write with a half dozen others, everybody breathless, colliding in a sea of emotions, speaking in phrases and thick accents no one understood, reverting to their own languages.

  She jumped when Kazuo touched her on the shoulder. One of her long hairpins pinged down onto the floor, and he retrieved it and said with careful formality, “You brought great honor to my family.” He blushed violent pink. “Do forgive me, your family.”

  Professor Jann walked over to announce with theatrical gravity, “I assert a privilege.” He raised an eyebrow, assumed an exaggerated operetta stance, and offered Maile an arm. “You may claim Miss Manoa in an hour,” he told the others. “However, celebration begins with champagne at the Silver Fawn.” To her he said, “I admit to reserving a table on the advice of a withered Gypsy in the marketplace.”

  The restaurant of her dreams! Maile almost shouted in delight, but played her part and curtsied in her daytime dress, knees poking sideways like a clumsy servant girl’s. “Why, of course, sir, the Fawn before the Horse.”

  The students laughed wildly, still unwinding. She promised to join them later and pay the bill. The circle around her dissolved as they picked up instruments, grabbed scores, looked for a misplaced cap, then hurried away in a pack. Teachers, judges and relatives headed for the door.

  Maile took Jann’s arm, curling her fingers over his jacket sleeve. A secret erotic charge went through at being allowed to touch him. Workmen pushed the grand piano off the platform. They brought in the archbishop’s reception throne, and a priest covered it with a velvet cloth. She looked around at the burgundy brocade walls, feeling her triumph still filling the room.

  Jann guided her out into the entry hall. “After the prize concert,” he said, serious now, “you will have all the trimmings. Flowers, photographers, press reviews. If you perform as well as you did today, your life will become a lot more complicated. I do not intend to lose you to that kind of attention.”

  “Of course not,” she murmured, thinking, Erster Preis. Mit Einstimmigkeit, My-lee Ma-no-ah.

  “Enough about the future,” Jann said, chiding himself. He tucked her arm tighter against his side. “My dear, how wonderfully you sang of love. Love lost, the hope of regaining it.” They continued out on the purple-blue-red carpet as he described being a young man in love for the first time, hearing the same aria sung to perfection by the immortal Delia Grazia, what a lasting impression it made. Certain singular performances had the power to sustain joy and enrich the spirit. Such memories were cherished for a lifetime.

  Outside at the top of the staircase, the world was dark and cool. A breeze from the river drifted across the empty cathedral plaza, drawing them toward it in an agreeable silence. As they descended the steps, Maile saw what looked like an abandoned heap of clothing at the bottom. Karl sat hunched with his knees drawn up, his jacket slung over his back. One shirt cuff was sloppily rolled, the other hung loose.

  “Excuse me a moment,” she said to Jann. He nodded and walked off to wait by a streetlamp on the plaza.

  Karl didn’t stir. His posture made Maile want to weep, or embrace him, but she also despised him for being in such an obvious place, and making such an obvious bid for sympathy. Worse, they had never talked about what would happen to them if he or she won. If they’d both lost, at least they would share something. Now her victory separated them.

  Gently she touched his shoulder. He glanced up, muttered, “Congratulations,” and stared again at the cobblestones.

  “Thanks,” she said, relieved to hear him speak. “Your performance was beautiful. Schubert just decided to hide from you for a second.”

  He shoved her hand away and kept his eyes on the ground. “I wanted to be the Wanderer, the one who leaves everything behind. Like you, I admit. Coming here from the Pacific. Risk, right? For art, right? Well, I failed.”

  “One blank measure is not failure.”

  “I had it every time I rehearsed.” He pounded his knees, still not looking at her. “That passage was never a problem.”

  “And it won’t be in the future. You put wonderful feeling into the entire piece, that’s undeniable. You were the Wanderer, from the very first phrase. Everyone felt it. When you finished, I saw you standing on a cliff like a hero.”

  “Christ, don’t be such a fool. Perfection is all that counts until you’re famous. Then you can have a bad day and it’s chalked up to deep insight.”

  “Would you rather be some robot who delivers every last note and bores the audience to death?”

  “Go sing for von Wehlen. He weighs each tone on a jeweler’s scale.”

  The last was said with such hostility that she felt afraid for him. Instead of concealing self-pity, she sensed that his words exposed something more dangerous—doubt that he possessed the crucial degree of nerve, that he could take the next risk, that he loved music enough to go on no matter what.

  She reached for his hand, knowing there was little chance he would accept anything from her, but they had yearned for the same things. He had given her comfort, advice, the wine cave when she was still a stranger in the city, the bat on a moonlit night.

  “Come have something to eat,” she coaxed. “Let’s drink brandy til dawn.”

  He leaned away from her with the weariness of an old man. “I’m quitting the Mozarteum,” he mumbled, then in a sudden explosion of energy, he grabbed his jacket and scrambled to his feet, saying, “I’ll catch you yet.” He strode away into the black shadows along the palace wall.

  Soon she couldn’t hear his footsteps. She rejoined Jann on the plaza. He walked beside her, hands clasped at his back.

  She wondered miserably if musicians could ever truly love each other. Maybe they only had surges of passion that fed their own music. Maybe Karl was on his way to an old sweetheart, some neighbor girl who’d showed him her ripe apples one fine day when both of them were fourteen. They’d have a farmhouse full of babies, a happy life of love and work and growing old together. Maile loathed him, and loathed the girl, an ordinary sort who
could offer a man relief instead of rivalry, cotton socks instead of sleek nylons. He would spend the rest of his life sinking between her thighs, taking revenge on Miss Maile Manoa from Honolulu for being the Wanderer.

  A heavy mist spilled down from the castle into the dark streets and obscured spots of light farther on. The Dom bells tolled to mark the passing of another hour. In silence Maile approached the Silver Fawn beside Jann. The maître d’ swept open the door and greeted him with, “Ja, der Herr Kammersänger Doktor Professor,” as though reading a row of medals on his chest.

  She stifled a nervous laugh and stepped forward.

  Inside, Jann looked around with the calm of a veteran musician who had experienced countless celebrations in his honor. The restaurant’s one large room was decorated with vases of roses and Biedermeier cabinets that gave it the exclusivity of a private home. Waiters in mauve silk jackets and britches angled around a silver sculpture in the center that depicted Bacchus with grapes in one hand and a fawn in the other. Slim ladies ate melon for dessert. Men smoked pencil-thin cigarillos. Maile felt starved and brimming with excitement, and knew that she had to conceal both.

  As they were seated, the maître d’ nodded across the room to a wine steward, who brought a bucket of iced champagne to Jann’s table, popped the cork, and filled two glasses with the smooth precision of a bird gliding into their orbit and out again.

  “Countess Almaviva.” Jann raised his glass. “To your continued success.”

  Maile touched her glass to his, feeling blessed. Delicately she took a moistening sip of champagne. He gave her a subtle look of amusement. She put down the glass and sat back in a more relaxed frame of mind.

  “A close contest,” he said. “I had it down to three possibilities. The tension among the teachers in that shut-off gallery was agony. Worse, I believe, than when we were still active on stage.”

  With the generosity of victors, they discussed Kazuo’s performance, the harpist’s dainty appeal, the tenor doomed by his comically mispronounced German. They sympathized with competitors from the East Bloc, never allowed out at night unless they won top honors. Karl’s rendition of Schubert was not mentioned, but Maile felt it on the edge of the conversation, his frightening loss a reminder of how fragile they all were. Every performer, from student to world-famous professional, dreaded an onstage memory lapse. A few seconds of paralyzing fear could shatter years of work.

  People began leaving for Festival performances and Jann said, “I dare not keep you from your friends.” From his jacket he took a brown leather box, nicked and scuffed with age. It fit into the palm of his hand and had been polished so often that the lid had the high gloss of lacquer. “Your monetary award comes from Vienna and will not arrive for a few days. Tonight a winner deserves more than mere handshakes.”

  He opened the box to show her a wooden locket carved in the shape of a miniature book. A black velvet ribbon was threaded through a tiny gold circle embedded in the wood. “Years ago a teacher gave this to me after I sang my first Giovanni. It had been passed down to her from a nineteenth-century singer, and so on back to where it cannot be traced.” He clicked open the little book, took out a tiny piece of paper, and unfolded it. “This has no value as such—it has never been proven—but my teacher believed, and I believe, that these notations are from the hand of Mozart. He had a peculiar way of flagging an eighth note. You see, here . . .”

  The oval scrap, smaller than a postage stamp, was covered in a fine network of wrinkles. On the left, the curl of a treble clef; in the middle, two notes, one dotted, one flagged. Jann explained each pen stroke, then refolded the paper, returned the book to the case, and held it out to her. “You must pass this on to someone else when you are my age.”

  She couldn’t speak. He didn’t seem to mind.

  “Now, put it in a safe place,” he said, “and let me offer a final toast.”

  AT THE RED Horse, Maile descended the cellar stairs into a din of clanking plates and arguments over soccer scores. She felt light-headed from the champagne, twice as hungry as before, and she hurried down to throw herself into the rest of the evening.

  The basement was as wide as a meadow. Hundreds of Austrians filled rows of heavy trestle tables. At their feet dogs gnawed on ham bones tossed to them by their owners. Stocky waitresses in tightly laced dirndls fetched beer from chest-high kegs lining the walls. Students from the contest sat at a center table drinking from liter mugs.

  They spotted Maile working her way toward them, and stood up to cheer and shout that their credit was about to run out. She arranged for a tab payable at the end of the week, then ordered another round and a dozen roasted chickens. Minutes later everything arrived at once: waitresses with dripping steins, men hefting a wooden plank with a row of crisp-skinned birds topped by slabs of bread. Contestants pulled off legs and wings, yelling jokes and congratulations from both ends of the table.

  When the scraps were cleared away and more steins arrived, no one was allowed to touch them until kisses were exchanged across the table. The French harpist obliged with Jean-Paul. Brenda pecked the Dutch baritone on his nose. Kazuo leaned forward to give Maile a drunken smack on the lips and asked, “Where is Karl, the bah-stahd?” She scooped a glob of foam off her beer and smeared his cheeks as everyone hooted and beat their fists on the table.

  “Karl ‘n’ Maile’re getting married,” Brenda yelled at Jean-Paul. “Where’s my ring, cheapskate?”

  He stiff-armed his stein and intoned, “To Herr Three-Seconds!”

  Others knocked their steins against his, sloshing beer onto the table, into their laps, shouting, “The execution of Schubert!”

  They savaged Karl and competed to tell their own stories about a single mistake that had ruined a performance and haunted them for months, years! So Maile, winner, don’t feel bad for him, just hope he doesn’t get a memory lapse in bed: ha, ha! She tried to be a good sport, for his sake, grinning until her jaw ached.

  Finally they left to prowl through the heart of the Old City. Everyone waded into the archbishop’s fountain, splashing and shrieking until policemen ordered them out under threat of arrest. Jean-Paul was carried off by two friends so drunk that they kept dropping him. Brenda broke a high heel and flung it into the river. Kazuo insisted she take his shoes, which fit, and he walked off in his socks whistling the Toreador’s aria.

  Long after midnight Maile climbed the stairs to her door. Her key went into the lock without a struggle. In the dark room she slipped out of her clothes and underwear, pulled apart her chignon, shook her head, and stood naked with her hair flowing over her shoulders and back. She lit the candles on the music stand. Between them she set the leather box Jann had given her, and took out the wooden locket on its velvet ribbon.

  Had she really deserved to win? All the contestants, she knew, had attended special music schools or taken private lessons since childhood. It didn’t seem possible that she had outstripped them after studying for less than three years. Winning one small yet important contest might have been sheer luck, and nothing was more fickle. Luck could desert her next time. Success was just seconds away from failure.

  Carefully she opened the little book. The bit of paper inside slipped out as if it had a life of its own and fluttered to the floor. In the darkness at her feet it looked like a snowflake that could melt in an instant.

  14

  CAFÉ SCIMITAR WAS again full, but not overcrowded as on the day of the storm, and Baron von Gref sat by himself. When Maile was brought to his table, he repeated apologies made in his telegram: due to a pressing business trip, he had to rescind the invitation to visit his home. “Of course,” he added, “I would not leave without speaking to you in person.”

  The pleasure she felt at seeing him again was familiar now, the thin monk’s fringe, the glasses, the paunch, all agreeably professorial except for his beautiful dark blue suit. With a mischievous look he said, “I shall not be tedious about my hobby, just one map.” He opened a nautical chart of Captain C
ook’s voyages through the Pacific. “This explorer commanded the finest technology of his day, fully equipped ships riding ten meters above sea level. Your navigators traveled thousands of kilometers in open canoes.”

  The mention of this came as a sudden and painful reminder of her lost life with Tūtū. “Yes.” Maile spoke quietly, hoping to deflect questions about ancient Hawaii.

  “Their methods remain a mystery to modern scientists,” the baron remarked, and pointed to various islands and routes, then sighed and slid the map aside to reveal a newspaper clipping faded to the color of tea. “This has to do with a more important topic than my hobby.” She looked at a photo of the Festival House decorated with dozens of Nazi banners: streamers from roofline to sidewalk, rectangles draped over the entrance, bouquets of miniature flags at eye level. The display was so florid she thought it bordered on satire but the caption was dated 1938.

  “After the facade was primped in this manner,” von Gref explained, “Toscanini refused to set foot inside. I thanked him, although to this day—thirty years later, mind—many here will not mention his name.” He gave her an examining look. “If Hawaii had nothing to do with such matters, in Salzburg you will face them. Especially as a prize winner.”

  “I see,” she said uncertainly.

  “That is a brave response. However, a foreigner come to us from a great distance, is not able to ‘see.’ Allow me one example of a well-known detail Austrians never discuss. In 1945 Salzburg’s honored son Werner von Wehlen fled ahead of the Allied advance. He had been a National Socialist for more than a decade. American soldiers found him hiding on a farm in Italy and sent him back across the border, a trip of several days standing up in a truck with twenty other prisoners. No doubt an unforgettable experience.”

  She pictured the glamorous conductor covered in road dust, hair lank, clothes filthy—a captured Nazi. She tried to feel surprise, to assume a shocked expression, but it was no use pretending. Last fall, soon after arriving here, in the wine cave Karl had suggested such a background.