by Kate Hewitt
“Edelweiss!” Johanna exclaimed. “Where did you find it?”
“Growing where it always does, on the mountains,” Manfred replied with a smile. Carefully he tucked a sprig of the flower with its yellow clustered heads and velvety white leaves into each of the necklines of his daughters’ dresses. “Now you are not the Eder Sisters, but the Edelweiss Sisters! Soon to be a sensation.”
“What nonsense,” Hedwig muttered, but she was smiling, and Lotte laughed, the sound as clear as a crystal bell.
“The Edelweiss Sisters!” Lotte exclaimed. “Yes, indeed.”
“We’ll be late,” Birgit said, and Johanna clucked in impatience.
“Then let us be off.” Manfred clapped his hands lightly and they left the kitchen, heading down the stairs and out into the busy street, a steady stream of festivalgoers heading towards the Festspielhaus on Hofstallgasse, just half a mile away, while they were going to the Elektrischer Aufzug restaurant on Monchsberg, where their competition was to be held.
Lotte was prancing ahead, winsome as ever, entranced by the carnival atmosphere. Many of the festivalgoers wore country costumes of leather lederhosen or dirndl dresses—while others wore sleek gowns or dapper suits. The mood was buoyant, carrying them all along with its infectious excitement. As Johanna paused to re-tie her apron, a sleek Daimler nosed out of a narrow side street into the square ahead of them, the pale face of the woman inside eyeing the crowd with sophisticated indifference.
“All right, Birgit?” Manfred asked with a smiling glance for his middle daughter, who as usual lagged a little behind, twisting her hands in her apron.
“Yes, Papa.” She gave him a quick smile that lit up her face and made her almost pretty. Manfred patted her arm. He had a special affection for the daughter whose soul was so much like his own.
Ever since Birgit had left the convent school at seventeen they had worked side by side in the shop; of his three children she alone showed interest in the intricate mechanics of a clock, the coils and springs and gears that together were able to mark time. He only wished she could find a way to be truly settled in herself, with a purpose that was perhaps far from their little shop.
Johanna walked alongside Hedwig; save for his wife’s graying hair they could have been sisters, so clearly were they cut from the same durable cloth. His hope for Johanna was that she might find something to soften her; love, perhaps, as it had done her mother.
As for Lotte, his laughing, lovely youngest daughter? She was as light on her toes as a ballet dancer, tilting her face to the sky without a care, arms flung out as she reveled in life’s simple pleasures. What could Lotte possibly need? Manfred smiled just to look at her.
There was so much to be thankful for, on a day like this—when the air was as crisp and clear as water, and the sky was a deep cerulean blue that hurt your eyes to look at it, and yet still you did, drinking in the color along with the air, as well as the mountains. Who could fail to gasp or at least murmur a hushed “wunderbar” at the beauty of the mountains that ringed Salzburg, the crown of glory that had kept her protected for a thousand years and more?
It was a day for reveling and remembering the good things, for there had been far too much uncertainty across Austria in recent months—the uprising in February between fascists and socialists that had led to hundreds of deaths, and then in May a bomb had exploded in the Festival Theatre right here in Salzburg. In July the chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss had been assassinated by Austrian Nazis in an attempted coup, which had thankfully been suppressed in a matter of hours. Such uncertainty made every day precious.
The family turned onto the Hofstallgasse, joining even more people heading towards Festspielhaus where the festival’s major performances would take place—Bruno Walter conducting Mozart’s Don Giovanni as well as the eminent Arturo Toscanini’s debut.
Another few minutes and they finally arrived at the Elektrischer Aufzug, an impressive edifice of timber and stone, with views encompassing the old town as well as Salzburg’s ancient fortress perched above the city. Lotte exclaimed over the lift that sent them soaring upwards while Hedwig could not keep from frowning and clutching at the sides.
The restaurant itself was paneled in wood and inset with mirrors, so it seemed much bigger than it was, the tables removed so more chairs could fit, and nearly every one of them was already filled.
“I did not expect so many people,” Hedwig murmured in dismay, and Manfred gave her a comforting smile.
“It is good they are here. An audience is important.”
She watched helplessly as her daughters were shepherded towards the makeshift stage by someone who seemed important; smiling, Manfred put his arm around her and led her to the seats that had been reserved for them, close to the front.
“Where are they going?”
“Backstage, to get ready. Don’t worry. They’re excited!” He squeezed her arm, his expression one of fond amusement, while Hedwig looked uneasily about.
The restaurant was filling up, the air buzzing with conversation and laughter as everyone chatted and studied their programs. Hedwig glanced at the sheet Manfred had given her, and the sight of The Eder Sisters Trio halfway down the page gave her a sensation like vertigo, a tipping over, as if everything were sliding, and she did not know how to right herself.
Manfred put a hand on her arm. “It’s about to begin.”
And so it was. They listened in silence to several acts, applauding as necessary, impressed by the voices of even the most obvious amateurs. As the competition was sponsored by the Association for National Costumes, everyone was in traditional dress, singing folk songs, and Hedwig felt herself relax. She knew many of the songs, and the clothes, when not worn by cosmopolitan Viennese, felt familiar and friendly. She began to enjoy herself.
And then their daughters came on the stage—three lovely young women in dirndls and checked aprons, with bright hair and rosy cheeks, and Hedwig felt as if she were looking at them with new eyes. Johanna, so tall and strong, twenty years old and such a hard worker; Birgit, who could look so friendly when she stood up straight and met people’s gazes; and Lotte, lovely Lotte, only sixteen, with skin like dew and eyes as blue as the sky above, longing only to please and entertain, seeming almost of another world. Who could fail to love Lotte?
And then their voices—so sweet and lovely, soaring above, the harmonies twining together, the sound of innocence, of purity. Surely everyone was as moved as she was. Hedwig’s heart beat painfully with love and she glanced at Manfred with a fierce look of pride and joy. He smiled back so tenderly that her eyes stung.
“Aren’t we lucky?” he murmured as he took her hand in his. “Aren’t we blessed?”
Hedwig could only nod.
The Eder Sisters did not win; they did not even take a prize, but none of them minded that. It was enough that they had sung at all, and at the end of the competition it seemed all anyone could talk of was the surprise late entry to the event, the von Trapp Family Singers, who had amazed the audience with their complex harmonies, as well as performing as an entire family—not merely three daughters, but nine children, and the mother as well! Even Hedwig had been impressed.
“Maria von Trapp used to be a nun at Nonnberg Abbey,” Lotte remarked dreamily as they walked back to the house on Getreidegasse through a violet twilight, the air as soft as silk, a balmy caress on their heated skin. Festivalgoers had returned to their houses and hotels to change into evening dress to spend the rest of the night at the city’s finest restaurants or supper clubs, and the streets had, for the moment, emptied out.
“And then she was sent to the von Trapps as a governess to one of the children—there were seven then—who was ill. She ended up marrying their father, who is a baron,” Lotte continued. “Isn’t that romantic?”
“It is not very sensible,” Hedwig replied with her usual bluntness. “What does a nun know of children? And what of her vows?” Hedwig had grown up with a faith as solid and immovable as her husband’s; there
was not a Sunday in her life where she had missed attending mass, or an evening where she had not said the rosary on her knees before bed.
“She was only a postulant, not a full nun or even a novice,” Johanna replied, with a look for Lotte that was both fond and a bit reproving. “Really, it’s not such a shocking story. And she has since had two children herself, so she must know something about them. I spoke to her at the intermission. She was actually very interesting, in her own way.”
“Well, it is of no consequence to us,” Hedwig replied firmly. “We should hurry. The cakes might spoil in this heat.”
“Did you like it, Papa?” Lotte asked as she twirled ahead of them, her skirt flying out, her golden hair catching the last of the sun’s rays. “Wasn’t it wonderful? All that lovely music… it sounded like heaven, to me.”
“You were wonderful,” Manfred replied with a laugh, “as I expect you know very well. I hardly need tell you, but I will, and no doubt more than once. My edelweiss daughters. You must keep those sprigs, as a reminder.”
His benevolent smile faltered for a moment, along with his step, as his gaze fell on a rowdy gang of boys across the street, jostling each other and laughing loudly. A few daringly wore swastika armbands, the red and black visible even in the dusky light. One of them was daubing paint onto a brick wall. Manfred could make out Blut und Ehre. Blood and Honor.
One of the boys glanced over at the little group and then sent his arm shooting out like a challenge. “Heil Hitler,” he called, his tone one of both good humor and veiled threat; the Nazi party had been outlawed in Austria for a year, but it didn’t seem to deter its proponents very much.
Manfred dropped his gaze as he put his arm around his wife and continued on without replying. Johanna’s glance swept over the boys with their short blond hair and bright eyes with a look of consideration; Birgit’s lips twisted as she turned away. One of the boys snared Lotte’s gaze with a bold look of his own and she flushed and hurried to catch up with her father.
“Come, girls,” Hedwig called sharply, although they’d all already turned away from the scene. “It’s getting late.”
As the shadows lengthened and the sky grew dark, the little family hurried towards Getreidegasse and the waiting cakes while Lotte began to sing the last verse of “Die Lorelei,” Birgit and Johanna gamely taking up their parts, their voices rising with melancholy beauty up into the oncoming night.
“The boatman in the small ship is gripped with wild pain,
he does not look at the rocky reefs, he only looks up into the heights.
I think the waves devour boatmen and boats at the end…”
Chapter Two
Johanna
Salzburg, August 1936
The kitchen was stifling. Johanna had rolled up the sleeves of her blouse, but it still stuck to her shoulder blades and perspiration beaded between her breasts. Her mother was baking bread, and Johanna, of course, was helping.
Johanna could not remember exactly when the lines in her family had fallen as they did—Birgit helped her father in the shop, she helped her mother in the house, and Lotte… what did Lotte do? Lotte laughed and sang and made everything brighter, and no one begrudged her for it, because she was Lotte, and she decorated all their lives with grace and cheer.
And, starting in September, she would be a student at the Mozarteum, to study voice and theory and composition, their little lark spreading her wings at last.
“Johanna, the oven,” Hedwig commanded, and wordlessly Johanna went to the oven and stoked the fire, shoving a few sticks of wood inside before closing the door. Her mother’s kitchen had to be, she sometimes thought, the most old-fashioned in all of Salzburg.
There were no modern conveniences for Hedwig Eder; she based her kitchen on the one of her childhood, and stepping into the large, square room, one might think they’d stepped into a Tyrolean farmhouse. It was furnished with a wooden table and benches, and an old-fashioned cooking range, while bundles of dried herbs and ropes of onions hung from the ceiling alongside well-used copper pots and pans. She had grudgingly allowed her husband to buy an icebox only a few years ago, for it was hardly practical to keep food in an icehouse or stream as she might have done back at her home in the mountains.
Still, Hedwig insisted on doing everything as she had done it as a girl—whether it was baking bread, or dying cloth, or drying herbs, or bottling jam. Modern methods were to be disdained, and as for buying something in a shop…!
It was bad enough that she had to get her milk from the wagon that came down the street every morning with its rattling cans, just like everyone else did in Salzburg; if she could have managed it, Johanna thought she would have kept a cow in the courtyard. And in all these domestic endeavors, Johanna was her helpmeet.
It was a role she’d taken on with the same determined pragmatism her mother possessed, working alongside her in silent solidarity, finding satisfaction in the small yet significant achievements of a golden loaf of bread, a freshly starched shirt, a polished table. She had never been particularly interested in school learning, despite her father’s love of books and music; Johanna preferred the practical and tangible to the obscure or abstract.
But four years on from finishing at the convent school all three girls had attended, unmarried and without any prospects of changing that state, Johanna had started to feel stifled in a way that had nothing to do with the hot kitchen.
“There.” Her mother took the round, golden loaves of bread from the oven, a look of almost grim satisfaction on her face. “They are done.” She glanced at the clock that hung above the door, and Johanna reached for the small copper pot they always used to make coffee—every afternoon Johanna would bring a tray down to Birgit and her father before sitting down with her mother at the kitchen table to drink their own, usually in fairly companionable silence.
Sometimes Lotte would join them, although more often she would take her coffee to the sitting room with a book, and leave Hedwig and Johanna to their quiet. Their places, Johanna was realizing more and more, were marked and always had been, but today she was determined that it was going to be different.
She waited until the coffee had been made, the tray of cups and saucers, accompanied by glasses of water, delivered to her father and sister, who were bent over their work in the back room, squinting at the bits of metal that Johanna found so tiresome.
“Thank you, mein schatz,” Manfred said with an affectionate smile and Johanna dipped her head, too nervous now to make a reply. It wasn’t like her to be nervous; she was direct to the point of bluntness or even awkwardness, so sometimes her father would laugh that one never had to ask Johanna to “Rede nicht um den heissen Brei herum,” or “stop talking around the hot mash.” “Our Johanna will dump the mash on your head!” Manfred would laugh, his eyes twinkling and Johanna would smile, taking it as a compliment, as a sign of her strength.
And she needed that strength now.
Upstairs her mother was already sat at the table, her normally straight back slightly slumped with fatigue as she sipped her coffee in the afternoon sunlight. She’d eased her shoes off, for her ankles had swollen in the heat, her thick-knit stockings gathering around them in elephantine wrinkles.
As Johanna paused in the doorway, she was suddenly accosted by how old her mother looked—her hair, scraped back into its usual tight bun, held far more gray than blond, and there were deep wrinkles etched into her forehead, her ruddy cheeks a spiderweb of broken veins, her body’s solid form softened.
She’d never been a beautiful woman, but her husband had been devoted to her all his life. Five years younger and four inches shorter than his wife, Manfred had met her on a walking holiday near Innsbruck. Many times Johanna had heard him tell the story of how he’d seen her mother herding goats across a meadow and fallen straight in love. It seemed to Johanna both romantic and absurd, that someone like her mother, so plain, so stolid, could have had a man as gentle and charming as her father fall in love with her on sight, an
d yet she did not doubt the truth of it; she saw it lived out every day.
“It is a good day’s work,” Hedwig said as Johanna joined her at the table. It was what she always said, as if a script had been written and her mother was following it, line by painstaking line.
“Yes, a good day’s work,” Johanna repeated dutifully. She picked up her coffee cup and then put it down again without taking a sip. “Mama—”
Hedwig’s eyes narrowed at her meaningful tone, the change of the script. “What is it?”
Johanna took a deep breath and lifted her chin, giving her mother as direct a look as her father praised her for. “I want to go to school.”
“What…!” Hedwig expelled the word like a breath. “You’ve already been to school.”
“I know that very well,” Johanna replied. “I’ll be twenty-three in December. I mean I want to go to secretarial school, Mama. To learn shorthand and how to type and useful things like that.” In truth she did not exactly know what she would learn; she had seen the leaflet at the Volksbibliothek, advertising a secretarial course for young women, but the advertisement had only offered vague promises of decent wages and “respectable office work.” It had been enough to fire Johanna’s soul.
Her mother shook her head slowly, more in confusion than outright refusal, which gave Johanna at least a little hope. “Why would you want to do this?” she asked, sounding genuinely bewildered.
“Because I want to work. I would bring in money, you know. It could be useful—”
“We do not need money,” Hedwig retorted quickly. “Not like that. You do not need to do this thing on our account, Johanna.” She sounded reproving as well as relieved, as if bringing in a few schillings for the tin above the range was all Johanna aspired to.
Johanna took a sip of her coffee as she fought down an entirely expected rising frustration. She’d known her mother, so traditional and set in her ways, would resist the idea. In her mother’s world, women did not work in offices with men. They baked bread and stitched shirts and took pride in a polished teapot or a well-swept floor. They stayed at home until they married, and then they moved to their new home, with their husband, and did the same as before there. It was how it had always been and how it always would be, world without end, amen.