In the entry hall below, the front door was wrenched open so hard that the latch banged against the inside wall. Maile threw on a bathrobe, ran to the landing, and saw Frau Metzger stagger in, a market basket in each hand crammed with bags of sugar, flour, salt. A net of apples hung from one shoulder, and another net slung around her neck bulged with bread and jars of honey. The landlady looked up, panting. “Buy what you can,” she gasped. “Vienna will fall by noon!”
Office, Maile remembered. Contract. First thing in the morning! She washed and dressed in less than a minute, and got downstairs.
Radios all along Getreidegasse broadcast at full volume. Prague was on the lips of every announcer and passerby. She headed toward Sigmundsplatz and a side street that led to the Festival House and von Wehlen’s Būro. People shoved past her onto the main street, one man’s jacket misbuttoned, a woman’s braids flopping on her shoulders. Everyone carried string bags and baskets. Invasion, they said, Russkis. Tanks. Maile recalled old Life magazine photos of Soviet tanks invading Hungary, tight little streets full of civilians, soldiers shooting teenagers armed with rocks—cobblestones, she now realized, the same as the ones under her own feet. Tank cannons destroying whole buildings. Frau Metzger’s house would crumble like sand.
A wire grate screeched up at a tobacconist’s shop and men and women fought to get inside. Maile dodged them to run toward the Festival House. No guard stood out front. No workmen hung up new posters. She tried the door to the administration wing: locked, along with all other doors. “Bitte, aufmachen!” she called out.
At a second-floor window a curtain shifted but no one peered down. She went toward the back of the theater to find von Wehlen’s parking space, the gate for his car. A sawhorse manned by a police officer blocked the entrance to the alley. He lit a cigarette and turned up a transistor radio on the barricade. “Eintritt verboten,” he said. “Los, Nigger.”
She sucked in her breath as if he’d slashed her with a knife—not Negerin, not even Moor. The other word had made its way to an alley behind a theater in a small city in the middle of Europe. She wanted to claw his face with both hands, but fought down her hate. With the cold discipline of a performer she said, “I auditioned for Maestro von Wehlen. I have to sign a contract.”
The name evoked a startled blink of respect. The officer pinched off his cigarette and immediately took Maile to a backstage entrance. From there, without further difficulties, a security guard led her through a maze of corridors to the administration wing. She barely recognized the place where she’d gone for an interview on a quiet afternoon. Office workers crisscrossed the hallway, talking loudly over ringing telephones that went unanswered. The door to von Wehlen’s waiting room stood open. His secretary was surrounded by staff clamoring for attention.
Maile caught his eye and called out, “Excuse me!” The secretary glanced over with a frown. “Elvira,” she said.
People kept talking to him and over each other. After a moment he replied in English, “I beg your pardon, Miss Manoa. Please wait outside.”
A harried assistant asked if she would like a coffee, and showed her to an alcove with tables. He brought eine kleine Braune with a Kaiser roll on a porcelain tray. She could have eaten three omelettes. More staff streamed past complaining that international phone calls could not be made, telegrams could not be sent. The Rumanian baritone scheduled for tonight’s Don Carlo had checked out of his hotel. American war-planes from Berchtesgaden were on alert, trolley barricades had gone up in Vienna, a Dutch mezzo could be hired to replace . . .
Maile tried to believe that only the waiting-to-sign-a-contract part of this mad scene was happening; to forget that Jann would never speak to her again; to deny that the Festival House would be abandoned if the Russians crossed the Danube.
An hour later she was taken back to von Wehlen’s waiting room, where office workers still surrounded his secretary. “Bitte, meine Herrschaften,” he said. They stepped aside for her. He unlocked a file cabinet, pulled out a small orange card, wrote on it, stamped it, and handed it to Maile, saying, “Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock.” She saw Solistin at the top and her name at the bottom, partly covered by the Festival House seal. Valid for one day only.
From an overhead speaker came a low voice: “Būhne.” Everyone emptied into the hall. Maile followed them past a sign with an arrow pointing to the stage. Where, she was sure, he waited. Where she did not yet belong.
Staff crowded past her talking about rearranged performances, cast lists, costumes, sets, props. She tucked the card away, frightened by the thought of what could happen between now and nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Until the contract was signed she was no one’s soprano, no longer Jann’s, and not yet von Wehlen’s.
She went back to the Old City’s narrow streets where Salzburgers going in both directions bumped into each other. Their arms were loaded with toilet tissue as well as fine chocolates. A British couple argued about selling their Festival tickets for half price, and debated the best route to the German border. Maile worried that buying bread would somehow bring on disaster. A radio at a magazine kiosk blared local updates: Nonntaler hospital on alert, police petitioning to carry guns, veterans on twenty-four-hour river watch.
“Fräulein Manoa!”
A short way ahead she saw the young son of the fruit grocer carrying a wooden flat of peaches, weaving to avoid an old man grabbing at them. The boy shouted that he had a message for her under this load just in from Gaisberg, thank the saints he’d seen her so he didn’t have to deliver it. She yanked out a protruding piece of brown paper before the boy disappeared into the crowd, the old man at his heels.
The note in pencil read: Come stay with us. The countryside is safest at a time like this. You have my love. Karl.
The plain words flooded her with guilt. Since leaving the meadow last night, she hadn’t given him a single thought, let alone written a note or figured out how to send it. He had been slipping away from her ever since the contest, and she’d let it happen. Compared to him, she was a beast of selfishness. She hurried off to find the nearest bus stop. Maybe Karl had been waiting for her to come since early morning. He regretted their last argument. He was no longer flaunting some grand sense of justice. He loved her.
The crowds thinned as she left the center of the Old City. The river promenade was empty and she crossed the footbridge alone. The water under it flowed on unchanged but ominous now, a route for invasion, boats of armed men, rafts with artillery. On the opposite side no cars drove past, no porters delivered handcarts of groceries. The bus schedule inside a glass case bolted to a pole was covered by a notice: PUBLIC TRANSPORT IS SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, 21.VIII.68.
She slapped the pole in frustration. The metal rang dully. Her palm stung. She felt suddenly hungry, then not, then had a fierce urge to smoke a cigarette. To jump into the Salzach, swim hard, and get to Karl that way.
Down the street at the Mozarteum, a piece of white paper on the front door fluttered in the breeze. She suspected it was a notice that classes were also suspended, but she wanted to read it anyway. As she started to cross Schwarzstrasse, a man in gardener’s clothes emerged from a villa farther on. He dragged two large suitcases out to the sidewalk. Kazuo followed him, clutching a violin case to his chest.
“Miss Manoa,” he shouted, “my plane! It is the last one!”
“What?” she shouted back, but had heard clearly.
The gardener hauled the luggage across the street and vanished among the thick trees outside Mirabell Garten. “May we meet in better times,” Kazuo shouted, bowing down and up like a marionette.
“Wait,” she said as he too disappeared among the trees. Stubbornly she repeated it, louder, knowing he would not stop to hear about her audition. He was leaving, like the others, and would go all the way to Japan, in the Pacific Ocean. Her ocean.
Once more the street was quiet. She lingered on the steps of the Mozarteum. The entire building seemed to be empty. The notice on the door read, CL
OSED, PRIZEWINNER’S CONCERT CANCELLED. Karl and Kazuo and Jean-Paul and Brenda and Marlise and Maxi and Frau Metzger would not sit in the audience tonight, along with agents and theater scouts. The student conductor’s shivery downbeat would not worry her. There would be no huge bouquet of roses at the end, no review in tomorrow’s paper: Frau Maile Manoa, Mozart aus Hawaii.
JANN HAD TO make the decision every time he entered his front room, or visited a friend who had a similar cabinet with his favorite cognac. So far this morning he had resisted taking a drink because of vanity: when the city was evacuated, he would not be a wobbling drunk, dependent on his wife. Staying spit-eye sober was a matter of safety, yet his thoughts were so chaotic and trivial he wondered if unawares he had consumed an entire bottle of alcohol. Would the Russians breach the border or stop on the Hungarian side, as in ’56? Could he still get money from the bank? If he and Dora fled, was taking her beloved schnauzer an unacceptable risk? If he boarded up the house, would his framed Rilke manuscript be stolen by marauders?
His gut told him that this time the Russians would overrun Austria. Twelve years ago, Soviet troops massed in Bratislava had seen the flat Danube lands ahead, virtually undefended because of Austrian neutrality. Now again they were so close, and taking Vienna would be too tempting to pass up. Or orders within the Red Army could be misinterpreted. Whole regiments might spill over the frontiers before mistakes were even noticed.
As soon as he convinced himself that life as he knew it was over, his thoughts swung in the opposite direction: the Soviets wouldn’t dare chance a war with NATO. Austria was, quite frankly, a poor country and not a battle trophy. A third of it was too mountainous to be conquered.
Most nerve-wracking of all, beyond politics, facts, speculation, his daily routines had been disrupted to the point where he had no idea what to do with himself. He repeatedly went to his closet to straighten a row of jackets, spacing each one with care. Halfway through breakfast an imaginary scene staggered through his mind: pulling off Dora’s clothes to mount her like a crazed soldier-invader deaf to her screams. From his front window he could see a public nuisance ignored by rubbish collectors: a split keg—honey or syrup—lying on a sidewalk and attracting an ever-larger cloud of flies.
Worst of all, Maile was a stone in his heart. Why had he done the inexcusable? Giving in to his overwhelming attraction and “declaring himself,” as used to be said, although that poetic term hardly applied to his crude approach. The futility, the stupidity! Comedy all the way back to the Greeks featured a decrepit suitor pursuing a beauty decades younger. He still relived the encounter—their bodies pressed together by the force of his embrace, the scent of her hair—and he pictured himself lifting her in his arms and carrying her into his bedroom.
These fantasies had to stop. Yesterday afternoon, before all their lives were thrown to the winds, Balthazar von Gref had come by and offered to be Maile’s patron for the next year. Then, long after dark, word of her successful audition at the Festival House came in the form of a note delivered at an unacceptably late hour by that loathsome little man in the green uniform who lived off rumors, yet had to be paid because his facts were never wrong.
“SOCIALISM WITH A face?” Karl’s father bent over a lamb that lay on the ground in front of him. “What a bag of witch shit.” He spread the lamb’s hind legs with a wooden bar and reached for a coil of rope.
“A human face,” Karl said. The argument was hours old but he still felt defensive. At dawn the entire family had driven their animals to the highest pastures to conceal them from Russian army scouts coming to seize anything edible. The weather was now uncomfortably humid. His mother, sister, and several cousins were back down at the farm, while he and his father stopped to kill the lamb. It bleated pathetically, one foreleg crushed by a fall onto rocks. Too injured to save.
“You said new-style Communism would work. You even said it would triumph. Talking like some poet.” The lamb struggled as its legs were tied. “Jesus Christ,” Karl’s father muttered, “I’m doing this backwards.” He loosened the rope, turned the lamb on its side, knelt on its thighs, and pulled a knife from his belt.
Karl picked up a chipped enamel bowl. His note to Maile had left in the predawn darkness with their usual load of summer peaches trucked into the city. The driver brought news of an impending invasion, then waited for Karl to run to the house for paper and pencil. Now he wondered if she would come up the path any minute and see him holding a bowl of blood. The idea was humiliating. Could she even find her way this far up the mountain? He had never imagined a Soviet military takeover of Austria, a Warsaw Pact ally.
The blade slid into the lamb’s neck. Its mouth dropped open as if in surprise, but it made no sound. Karl watched a dark streak run down over the dirty wool and pushed the bowl in place. “Agnus Dei,” he said.
“Hold still,” his father mumbled. “Don’t blaspheme.”
Karl stifled a smirk. As the lamb lay quietly bleeding to death, he sucked in a breath, bothered more by the harsh, rusty smell of blood than by the sight of it. He picked out bits of fluff as the bowl filled, each time pausing to wipe his sticky fingers on his trousers. The red smears merged with other stains on his lederhosen. His father didn’t think there was much chance of seeing soldiers today in Gaisberg. The real danger, he insisted, would come after the army had settled in and needed to be fed. Squads would scour the countryside to strip farms of everything that could be carried off, including tools and women—which made frightening sense to Karl. He felt a sudden desire to be far away, in some clean place where he could curl his entire body around Maile and protect her from perils seen and unseen.
WHEN NIGHT FELL, Prague was reported “under control,” with a million Soviet troops advancing outward in all directions. Since early morning Frau Metzger had listened to the radio in the hope that some great saving event would occur, but in midafternoon she took off her daytime dirndl, always laced up as tight as a corset. Clad only in a nightgown—shocking, like a real Schlampe—she went on cooking and pickling and salting down pork butts as she had done in 1956. By evening her breathing was labored. Worse, cancer had invaded her left knee, making it weaker and weaker. Each time it bumped against her right knee, she feared that the cancer would spread. She sat at her kitchen table and tearfully massaged both knees. When she stopped to wipe her eyes, she felt the cancer jump off the ends of her fingertips and slip into her skull.
Upstairs, Maile sat on the floor with her back against the piano. A disease seemed to have spread through the city, an unpredictable epidemic that distorted everything. The room darkened around her. She wanted to hold on to the light, to stop time and return to the safety of Professor Jann’s teaching, his pride in her, so hard won month by month, but she had erased all that for the sake of an orange card. The Mozarteum’s concert hall stage was empty when it should have been filled with musicians dressed in black, responding to the concert master’s tone that signaled them to tune up. Only an idiot would believe that the world was still in order, that the Festival House would open tomorrow morning so she could sign her contract and workers could continue mending costumes and arranging the curls on wigs.
She pulled the blanket off her bed and wrapped it tightly around her shoulders. Death seemed to be bearing down on the city, a red mass moving with the terrible, deliberate force of a lava flow: the Soviet army, only as far away as the hour’s drive from Honolulu to the North Shore.
Frau Metzger’s voice shot up the stairs. “Komm schon ’runter!”
Maile jumped to her feet, shedding the blanket.
The kitchen was dark, the back door open. The landlady waited outside with a finger to her lips. Two skinny gray braids snaked down the front of her rumpled nightdress. She stood on a small cobblestone square that resembled a miniature prison yard surrounded by the blind walls of three neighboring buildings. “You have money,” she whispered. “I know it came from Vienna.” In one hand she clutched a small metal box. “I make a hole out here. It’s safe, I
did this before.”
Maile had hidden her prize winner’s cash in the piano upstairs. Banks were shut down. With Russian troops approaching the Danube in tanks, she knew that Austria’s tiny peacekeeping force wouldn’t last two minutes if Soviet generals gave orders to invade. But burying currency under cobblestones was like a bad joke in an operetta.
“My money is safe,” she said.
“Well! Then be of use and guard the front door. Do not answer the bell.”
Maile felt a twitch of curiosity about what was in Frau Metzger’s box—a deed, garnet jewelry, a saint’s bone? “All right, all right,” she said.
At the kitchen window, in the last gloomy light she watched the landlady pry up cobblestones with a crowbar. On the kitchen counter, news trickled from the radio, turned down low: border traffic to the west backed up ten kilometers, waiting time twenty hours; seventy Czech refugees at Mariahilf Youth Hostel.
Frau Metzger dug out the oily dirt, put the box in a hole the size of a cheese loaf, replaced the stones in order, tamped the dirt around them, made the sign of the cross, and kissed the rosary now hung around her neck. The sight of such diligence filled Maile with anxiety that she was not doing enough. Was in fact doing nothing. Within hours looters could storm the house, set it on fire, burn her piano before she could save the cash. A money belt! She had to make a money belt to strap on next to her skin.
The doorbell rang, its metallic rattle piercing her like a rifle shot. Frau Metzger rushed into the kitchen, ordering, “Don’t open! Ask first.”
Maile went to the entrance and demanded, “Wer ist da?” A vaguely familiar voice replied, something about the Festival House. She cracked open the door. A man pressed a paper roll into her hands and reconfirmed her appointment tomorrow morning.
Aloha, Mozart Page 28