Arnim peered in with a coy smile. “News from the Scimitar’s highest level reached my ears,” he said. “Champagne is a wonderful betrayer of Festival House secrets.”
The sight of him startled her. “Has something gone wrong?” She stepped outside.
“Not unless a Soviet tank division is rolling down the autobahn and no one has informed me.” He gave her a mock salute. “I’ve come to escort you. I promise to watch the time.”
At a brisk pace they went through courtyards and alleyways to Furtwängler Garten. The sunny little park was deserted except for an elderly woman dozing on a bench with a dachshund puppy curled in her lap. “Twelve minutes remaining,” Arnim said. “I congratulate you on your contest triumph.” He bowed over Maile’s hands and kissed one, then the other, his black hair falling forward. Her wrists tingled at his touch.
He straightened up. “Someday I shall prove myself worthy of the marvelous soprano from the Pacific who would have thrilled Wolfgang himself, however, at the moment I can only bristle with envy. For years I have struggled to gain a Festival audition.” He stepped toward the old woman, flung out an arm, and sang, “Mein lieee-ber Schwaaan. . .”
His thin voice was a tuneless screech. The dachshund tumbled to the ground, barking frantically, and its owner snapped awake. Arnim sang another line to her, proclaiming himself Protector of Brabant. The woman gave him a baffled stare, gathered up the puppy, and hurried away.
“Ach,” Arnim sighed. “My audience.”
Maile looked at him in shock, an idiotic amateur who wailed in public at the first available stranger. He flicked at the bench with a silk handkerchief and gestured for her to sit. She perched on the edge like a nervous bus passenger. “Come with me tonight to the lakes,” he whispered. “I am your Siegfried. There is a ravine, a waterfall, raw nature—”
She pulled away.
“My dear diva,” he declared, “I beg pardon. Of course you have other concerns at present.” He checked his watch. “I am told that being alone with Herr Maestro, even briefly, has a strange effect on people.”
Hand in hand they skirted an open market. From an ironmonger’s shop came the sound of hammering, the sizzle of metal plunged into water. A man stepped outside and something at his back flashed in the sunlight. Maile shaded her eyes against the glare, then stopped dead at the sight of Karl. He carried a scythe. His shirt had been washed so often the armpits were shredded. Karl looked from Maile to the darkhaired stranger holding her hand, dressed in the latest gentlemen’s casual wear from Milan, and he said, “By the five wounds of Christ.”
Arnim gave him an annoyed glance, as if he hadn’t quite heard and couldn’t be bothered. “If you do not mind,” he murmured, taking Maile’s elbow.
Karl stepped in front of them. A scruffy three-day beard covered his cheeks.
“See here,” Arnim said with polite insistance.
“New friend, Maile?” Karl asked.
“Meet my. . .” she said, struggling to sound indifferent. “This is ...”
Karl smirked and extended his right hand. Arnim made no move to take it. Maile stared down at a mass of blisters healing into calluses, the palm tough and scored with brown cracks, then Karl looked down as well, withdrew his hand as if concealing evidence, and walked off.
“Come back to the Mozarteum,” she said. He kept going, the blade glinting, mocking her. “Schubert!” she shouted.
Arnim tugged her toward the Festival House. “How,” he asked with irritable emphasis, “do you know such a son of the land?”
“He’s a pianist,” she insisted.
“With those hands? Pardon my skepticism.”
“He played beautifully at the competition.”
They crossed Hofstallgasse, Arnim scolding, “Slowly, now. You must not rush in like a tardy office worker. And do choose your friends with more care. One who uses a scythe does not enhance an artistic image.”
“He’s a musician, not some amateur.” She went ahead to speak to a Festival House guard and stepped inside.
VON WEHLEN’S WAITING room had the same intimidating elegance as the archbishop’s palace except that everything was modern: black-and-white domino carpet, black leather chairs, chrome lamps, black abstract sculpture on a white marble table. Maile’s hands were damp and her pulse was racing. Five minutes seemed like barely enough time for introductions. She looked at an onyx wall clock and watched the dying seconds of the minute now passing.
The fame of conductors no longer mystified her, their immense salaries, the exaggerated respect they commanded. If singers joked about the silent baton—What does it sound like?—a soprano couldn’t lead a Beethoven overture past the first measure. One page of an orchestral score had up to sixty instruments on twenty staff lines with a half dozen clefs. A conductor had to grasp what amounted to a complex math problem, and use tempo, cues, and volume to create art. Werner von Wehlen knew dozens of scores by heart. He dominated all the artists around him, building a vast, ordered tapestry of sound while he remained mute, a figure of immense power and sensuality.
She glanced around the anteroom, searching for any touch of color. A flat glass box on a wall had a display in yellowish brown. She got up to examine it: rows and rows of small pointed objects, perhaps a hundred, similar to arrowheads, vaguely animal-like. Not quite art, not quite natural history. Bird’s beaks, she realized. Neatly detached from the skulls and arranged in horizontal lines. Songbirds? Extinct birds?
From an overhead speaker she heard a man’s voice, “Frau Manoa, bitte sehr.”
An inner door opened with a soft rush of air. She entered a larger black-and-white room. Von Wehlen sat behind a desk of burnished steel. He wore a soft black turtleneck sweater. No watch or ring. His thick silver hair was combed straight back. His skin had the taut sheen of a swimmer’s. A potently attractive man, coolly aware of it.
He motioned her to sit, and in the same moment the sound of a soprano filled the room, accompanied by piano. “Wo-hin floh—en...”
Maile sat forward, shocked to hear her own voice. Her singing, a tape from the contest, she realized, although recording anything had been forbidden. Von Wehlen braced his elbows on the desk and conducted to himself with light movements of one hand. Making a tape on the sly no longer mattered, she was terrified of mistakes he might hear. She wanted to be anywhere except in his private office as he quietly absorbed her best effort.
When the andantino section concluded, he signaled with a wave. The tape stopped. “Only two other sopranos have mastered those initial phrases,” he murmured to himself. “A delicate agony of love in doubt. The listener is elated.” He raised a forefinger. She heard a soft whirr, then the andantino section replayed. He listened, signaled, and the sound cut off. “The transition to allegro fails,” he said. She shriveled into her chair.
He put the tips of his fingers together and focused on her. “Your gift is a combination of raw talent and naiveté, which will fade quickly, and high intelligence, which can be formed, and appearance, which is not to be underrated. I like young musicians for all those reasons. In your rendition, I hear an important emotion: the ability to hate. This interests me. You?”
Everything about him stunned her. She didn’t like the question but knew it was a test. Cautiously she replied, “All emotion interests me, Herr Maestro.”
“Why hate in particular?”
She clenched her toes inside her shoes. “It’s a mirror.”
“What kind of mirror?”
“A reflection of transforming love. Denial is another form of recognition.” She cringed to hear herself straining to speak like a philosopher.
“You are pretending, although it is rather successful.” He seemed tempted to smile. She wasn’t sure if he had praised her or condemned her. “Anyone,” he said, “who relinquishes her country to travel a great distance for the sake of music possesses admirable fanaticism. That trait is more important than talent. Beautiful music is luxurious trivia. Its secret resides in the arousal of fe
ar.” He paused with deliberate drama. “Turmoil in the East Bloc makes listeners twice as sensitive. Have you noticed?”
“No, Herr Maestro.”
“Good. Only a student trying to impress me would agree. Musicians from alien cultures like the Pacific exist only to validate European culture. We must move with the times even if our composers never intended singers to be Africans or Asiatics. Your skin color is light enough to be acceptable. One aria on tape proves nothing. You must audition for me. This will take place before your Mozarteum concert.”
From an overhead speaker, a male voice: “Herr Maestro, bitte sehr. Studio Eins.”
Von Wehlen rose and gave her a final examining stare. He walked toward a back door that slid aside as he approached it.
She felt as if he’d slapped her: validate our culture, Mozart never intended, light enough to be acceptable. Yet, despite all that—an audition.
15
SHORTLY BEFORE TWO o’clock Maile found her way to Kreuzritterweg. The tree lined street of Baroque-style homes had display gardens laid out in perfect symmetry. She kept recalling Herr Maestro’s words and picturing his office, the steel desk, the sound system. He reminded her of no one. A great artist with such a demanding schedule literally did not have a minute to spare, yet he had asked questions and listened carefully to her replies. Had not invited her to audition, he’d demanded it. Which meant that he and Jann must be in contact with each other, she thought, about her. She had won the contest for Jann and could now present him with the gift of more success, a von Wehlen audition. Perhaps something can be worked out. Jann’s exact words.
Number Eight was an impressive stone villa. Her thoughts reversed and she approached the door in fear that Jann would tear into her for going to the Festival House. If he knew, and he might not know. Not yet. He and Baron von Gref were old friends and no doubt both considered von Wehlen hopelessly compromised. Soul of a Nazi, even today.
Jann heard the door knocker drop, brass on brass, a sharp tak. He gave the mirror in the foyer a final critical glance. He wore his hair in the current fashion, much longer than the styles of ten years ago. Appropriate for a man in his sixties? He ran a hand over his jaw; too much cologne? Maile had only seen him in a suit and tie, never an open-necked shirt and summer slacks.
She greeted him with a look of nervous uncertainty. That was expected, he felt, from someone who was still officially a student. Smoothly he invited her in, a spider disguised as a gentleman at leisure—this meeting so calculated, the invitations from Konsort Wien and Rappresentazione waiting, Dora at the veterinarian with her schnauzer. He reminded himself that seduction was an art, not a crime against nature.
Maile paused to look around the front room. Her impression was of a beautiful stage set made to be lived in: long magenta silk curtains, walls lined with books, a dark green armchair and hassock, watercolors of costumes for Boris Godunov; an antique ivory chess set, warriors with scimitars, the queen veiled. She had never been inside such a home, not in Hawaii or New York. Gradually she realized that no one else had come in to be introduced. No sounds came from other rooms. Only the two of them were here.
He gave her time to enter his private world, filled with mementos of his finest roles and fiercest battles. She seemed appreciative but edgy. “My dear,” he asked, “would you care for tea?” In the kitchen, water simmered on the stove, a tray of dainties stood waiting. “Sherry, or perhaps a glass of wine?”
She turned to him with an expression of longing, of needing to speak, or perhaps of agitation—he wasn’t sure, but it was a vulnerability that delivered her to him. He put both hands on her shoulders and said, “At your orchestral rehearsal I heard a certain maturity. A sharp reminder that our relationship will end soon.”
She regarded him with surprise. “I only remember being terrified.”
“You have reached a certain plateau.” He heard his tone intensify, and he struggled to hold back. “You will never again be as dependent on me.” She stared up at him, slipping under the spell of his praise. He overflowed with emotion that had haunted him all week, all month, since last fall, when she had arrived to belie every cliché: no Pacific Island pleasure girl, no exotic servant eager to please, no pampered beauty expecting easy assignments, no gifted student throwing prima donna fits before she had the right. The urge no man could control came over him with its familiar heat. He pulled her against him, and felt her breasts pressed to his chest, his groin at her waist. He wanted to swoop her into his arms and bear her like a gift to the little side room with the vase of roses from his own garden. In dizzying elation he waited for her to raise her arms to embrace him, to consent with her eyes to a kiss.
Maile was electrified by the invisible shift from professor to lover, in his home among the things he treasured. She wanted whole worlds from him. At the Mozarteum, for a long, long time, she knew now, the tension of passion had hovered between them. Fulfilling it would be natural, like the final phrase in an aria. She had idealized Herr Kammersänger from her first sight of him in his studio. From that day onward he’d offered her slivers of his soul. Now he would show himself to her in his bedroom. They would undress. The pleasure and assurance of mutual seduction filled her. She pictured white chest hair. The thought of it pushed her forward into reality, and memories of everything that had happened today; a collision of messages, possibilities, the certainty of again being summoned to the Festival House.
Her arms did not rise to embrace him. He waited an instant, still hoping, but whether in surprise at his touch or in courteous rejection, she didn’t move at all. With an inward shudder of humiliation, he released her and stepped back, a small motion that felt as painful as a violent break. “Of course we are not finished yet as student and teacher,” he said. “Sit down, I have news for you.”
They eyed each other awkwardly, still retreating from the edge of sexual intimacy. He seated her at a small table and brought a tray with pastries, sherry, tiny glasses, and two telegrams. Konsort Wien. Rappresentazione. He promised to keep her informed.
Maile sipped her sherry, didn’t like the taste, and took a bite of Doboschtorte. “Delicious,” she murmured. Jann nodded, his expression neutral. He doesn’t know, she thought. No idea where I went before coming here. Her stomach stirred, sick with dread. It was impossible to have things both ways.
She forced herself to say the only thing that mattered. “Today at noon I had an interview at the Festival House with Maestro von Wehlen. He asked me to audition.”
Jann lowered his chin and adjusted his gaze as if taking aim at a target. “Soon?”
“Tomorrow or the day after, when he has time. Before Friday.”
Silently Jann went to a cabinet, poured himself a glass of cognac, and drank it off. Maile gripped the arms of the chair, rigid with embarrassment. He glared and set the glass down, his neck stiff. “You should not see me like this,” he said. “Not because of drunkenness. You cannot possibly understand, you are too young. Does nothing occur to you?”
She shook her head dumbly.
“If you audition well and he hires you for even a single concert, you will join the elite circle of international soloists. At your prize concert you will appear as von Wehlen’s soprano. Naturally,” he added, “you fear betraying me.” He pursed his lips in bitter amusement. “Perhaps I am being taught my own lesson: no teacher, however advanced, can possess a student, however advanced. I can no longer dictate important decisions to you. These you must make yourself.”
He walked over to the front door, opened it, and gestured for her to leave.
Outside on Kreuzritterweg, her head felt full of waves that surged and broke, surged and broke. If von Wehlen hired her, there would be no slow climb through the lower ranks of mediocre theaters. A voice teacher could never give a singer the opportunities that a conductor had at his fingertips. Yes, the difference between the two men was much more than that, but was she responsible for other people’s history? How much did their wars matter to her? In Tūtū’
s day, ninety percent of Hawaiians had been wiped out by foreign diseases, the survivors doomed to poverty. Should Austrians feel sympathy for Polynesians?
THE ROSENKAVALIER FINISHED his afternoon café rounds and crossed the river to the Mozarteum. Once a year, by prearrangement, he went to a rarely used delivery door. On his way to the back of the building, he always paused to look up and recall the unforgettable sight of three hanged men. Not at the front of the conservatory, which would have been too public; instead the bodies tucked away but still easily accessible for viewing. How clever to have them executed here, a testament to the power of der Führer, who loved the arts but tolerated no deviation from his laws. Life had never regained that high standard.
With a sense of nostalgic disappointment, the Rosenkavalier lowered his gaze and knocked on the prescribed door at the prescribed time. The registrar’s assistant passed him an envelope containing fifty tickets to the Mozarteum prizewinner’s concert. Sales had been brisk. Seats at twenty schillings allowed every pensioner and shopgirl to attend. The Rosenkavalier disliked dealing in such small change, although soon the concert’s soloist would audition at the Festival House. Arranged without his assistance, but such a significant invitation didn’t mean witch shit unless a contract was signed. Then the Mooress could be approached with a claim that he had laid the groundwork. She wouldn’t dare make inquiries and risk revealing a connection to him— yet he’d only be paid if she auditioned successfully. Singers were pissy, as breakable as glass figurines at a summer carnival. They failed all the time.
“Eh!” The Rosenkavalier snorted in disgust. He pocketed the tickets and walked off toward Maxglan to deliver a payment to the mother of a tenor’s baby, provided by the tenor himself after drawn-out negotiations. By the time that was done, the second seating of café customers would be in place.
OUT WHERE THE bus line ended and the green hay fields rose steeply from the road, Karl paused to wipe sweat from his forehead. He gripped the scythe again, swung in perfect, angry rhythm, and a row of stalks fell with a whish that ended in a clang. He scowled.
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