The Kingdom of Back(71)
Woferl pointed to the people. “They are like colorful birds,” he said, and I thought of the opera we’d attended together so long ago, where I’d seen Hyacinth playing cards from a balcony seat.
My gaze swept the squares, searching for his sharp smile in the throngs, listening for the off-key notes of the kingdom in between the music that filled the streets. But nothing seemed out of the ordinary yet.
We found lodgings that night on the second floor of a house in the Weihburggasse, at the courtesy of Herr Schmalecker, a goldsmith. He greeted my father with a wide grin when we stepped out of the carriage, then immediately started to help him bring our belongings inside. I stared at the house. It was finer than our own in Salzburg.
“It is splendid to see you, Herr Mozart!” he said to Papa. “What a time to stay in Vienna, don’t you think? The city has been like this for several days already.”
Papa smiled back at him. “You are most gracious, sir. We will not forget this kindness.”
“No need to thank me, the pleasure is all mine. Do you think it such a burden for someone to host the Mozarts?” He laughed heartily, as if amused by his own joke, and my father laughed along with him. I smiled quietly next to my mother, while Woferl watched them move the luggage.
We dined with Herr Schmalecker’s family that night. I spent my time moving my slices of baked chicken around with my fork, my thoughts clouded with visions of Hyacinth. Outside we could hear the sounds of merriment continuing late into the night, but in the living room it was quiet, except for Herr Schmalecker’s booming voice.
“How long will you stay in Vienna this time, Leopold?” he asked my father. I glanced to Papa. He looked tired, although he kept a civil tongue.
“We’ll stay until the marriage, and perhaps several weeks after.”
“How splendid!” Herr Schmalecker laughed loudly. “I saw the princess-bride in public a day ago. She stood on the palace balcony with the majesties. What a lovely one. She”—he paused to wave his fork at my father—“and the youngest one, that little Antonia, will make the best children, I tell you.” I looked to Herr Schmalecker’s side. His wife, a frail young creature with pale, dusty skin, sat eating her supper without a word to her husband. Two of his children played together with a bit of carrot underneath the table, and a third child slept at the table with her head tucked in her arms.
Papa did not tell Herr Schmalecker to speak of the princesses in more proper terms. If Woferl had said something similar, he would have surely sent him away to bed without his supper. I concentrated on the festive sounds outside and continued to pick apart my food.
The celebrations intensified as the days passed. On one occasion, Woferl and Mama and I accompanied our father to see the opera Partenope, and on another we attended a ball to toast our happiness for the princess-bride. I sat in the balcony and spent most of the time distracted, my eyes darting frequently to the seats around us. That slender figure. Those glowing eyes. I searched and searched for him until I was exhausted.
We went out daily, perhaps so that Papa could distract himself from wondering when the court would call for us to perform. Woferl practiced religiously on the clavier and violin when we stayed in our rooms. He continued to compose, this time starting on a new symphony that kept him up late into the night and sometimes early into the morning.
I continued to compose too, but I always waited to begin my work until the house had fallen silent, lest my new work end up again in Papa’s hands. The noise from the festivities helped me to conceal my soft movements—my feet on the cold floor, the dipping of a quill into its inkwell, the faint scratching on paper. As I wrote, the composition I’d been developing grew louder, changing from its soft opening into something harsher, as if the noise from outside had agitated it. My hands shook now when I added to it, so that I had to stop at times to rest and steady myself.
The days passed by. Hyacinth did not appear. I slept poorly, always alert for some glimpse of his shadow moving through the house or his figure waiting in the city’s alleys.
Then, finally, in the second week of our stay, he came to me.
* * *
In the first days of October we attended another opera, Amore e Psiche, a romance of sorts between the love god Eros and a mortal beauty. We watched the princess Psyche hunger to see her lover’s face, only to be punished for her desire with death.
Papa leaned over and used Psyche’s mistake as a chance to warn me. “Do you see, Nannerl?” he said. “This is the danger of desire.”
He meant the danger of desire for Psyche, not for the god Eros, who had been the one who wanted her all to himself.
I stayed quiet while the young actress on the stage pressed a hand against her forehead and sank to the stage floor, her dress spilling all around her. My jaw tightened at my father’s words. It was not fair, I thought, for a god to tempt a maiden and then condemn her for her temptation.
I do not know if it was my thoughts, my silent disapproval, that conjured him. Perhaps it was the tightness that coiled in my chest at Papa’s reaction. As the opera entered its third act, a man in a dark suit stepped into our box. I looked instinctively at him, but my mother and father didn’t seem to notice his presence at all, as if he were merely a shadow that stretched from the curtains. Beside me, Woferl shifted, but he did not turn his head.
The man leaned down toward me until his breath, cold as fog, tickled my skin. I did not need to look up at his face to know that I would see Hyacinth’s familiar eyes.