Hotel of the Saints (5 page)

“They live on old money, the Hilgers,” my father told me. “Inherited money from his grandfather. It's all invested in music stores.”

Those first few days around them, I barely noticed Herr Hilger except when he did something for his wife, like open a door or drape her white jacket around her tanned shoulders, careful not to touch her bare skin.
“Lovely manners”
my grandmother would have said about him. “So
attentive”
But one afternoon, when he closed his book, a biography of Chopin, and kept it in his hands as if still thinking about it, I noticed his eyes —sea-green and melancholy—and I studied his face, wondering about the source of his sadness.

Frau Hilger took my hands into hers and extended them to her husband. “Look, Elmar—doesn't our Christa have the hands of a musician? Those long wrists and fingers?”

He set down his book. Crossed his arms. Nodded.

“You ought to let her read some of your biographies,” she said. “You would like that, Christa, wouldn't you?”

I hesitated. The books I liked were Enid Blyton mysteries and sequels about two girls, Gisel and Ursel, who were good at sports. And the only music I listened to was
Schlager—
hits on the radio, many of them from America. Sometimes, when my best friend, Elsie, and I sang
Schlager,
we'd switch the words around but keep the melodies.

“Our Christa doesn't want to impose,” Frau Hilger said. “You know how considerate she is.”

“Of course,” he said. “Any book you'd like to look at, Christa.”

“He'll bring you one at dinner,” she promised, but that evening it was she who handed me a biography of Verdi.

“I saw
Aïda
before Christa was born,” my father told her. “I remember reading in the program that Verdi asked for the equivalent of a hundred thousand
Mark
before he wrote a single note for his opera. He received it too. And that was in the nineteenth century.”

“How much would that be worth today?” she asked.

“Easily seven … eight hundred thousand
Mark.”

Herr Hilger pressed his lips together, as if offended that anyone could discuss music in terms of money.

“What is Verdi's music like?” I asked him.

He regarded me gravely. “You'll need to hear it to understand. But you can begin by reading about him.”

I started the biography in bed and read on the beach during the following days, feeling quite grown-up. One night I dreamed that Herr Hilger was walking a white dog on the sidewalk outside my school and that I ran out to meet him; but when I woke up, I couldn't remember the rest.

In the meantime, Frau Hilger was dedicating herself to improving me. “Men don't need to be bothered with things like that,” she told my father when she took me to the beauty parlor and decided on a hairstyle for me that “will lift out your features,
Liebchen”
I'd been wearing it Farah Diba-style—parted in the middle and pulled back low across my ears—but she persuaded me that feathered bangs and a layered cut would bring out my maturity. As I watched myself change in the mirror of the beauty parlor, I felt as though I'd finally left childhood behind.

She bought me pearl earrings, a white suit with a short jacket, white shorts, white sandals. “White is the best color for both of us,” she whispered to me in the dressing room as she buttoned my blouse, and I felt startled by the sudden revulsion that flushed through my body and vanished before I could think about it. “Actually off-white,” she was saying as she closed the last button, “a shade of cream that's whiter than cream. Pearl-colored, really.” She insisted I needed underwear to go with my new clothes, and what she chose were not the pastel cotton panties my mother used to get me, but soft lace the hue of my skin. I liked the feel of nylons on my legs. Promised myself I'd never again wear knee stocking or socks.

Whenever my father offered to pay for the things she bought me, Frau Hilger would remind him how much this meant to her. “I never have the chance to mother a girl. Just for these few weeks… please, don't deny me that pleasure.”

Both Hilgers spoke to me as if I were their age, and soon I noticed that my father treated me differently too—with a certain politeness, almost. He'd ask my opinion instead of just making plans for us. And he stopped calling me
Kind—
child. I was sure it had to do with the way I now dressed. We still played
tennis most mornings, but he didn't rush at the ball the way he used to, and I began to win against him. At times he seemed bewildered, and I'd catch him watching me as if not understanding what was happening to us; but the expression would pass so quickly that I couldn't be certain it had even been there.

Frau Hilger liked to put one arm around me, squeeze me gently, and I'd smell her light perfume. One morning, when I told her I liked the scent, she said it was from Paris and took me to her bedroom. From the bureau next to the narrow bed, she picked up an amber bottle. With the glass stopper, she dabbed a few drops on my left wrist.

“Wear it for three hours before deciding if you like it.”

“But I love it already,” I told her.

And I did. I still do. Over the past thirty years—while Farah Diba gave the Shah his long-awaited son and three more children; while she stood tall with her tiara during his long-awaited coronation; while I studied music in Berlin; while I married and divorced and married and divorced once again—I've tried different perfumes, of course, but I've never found another scent that suits me. Still, I don't think of it as mine.

“It's a fine quality to be impetuous,” Frau Hilger cautioned me as she closed the amber bottle. “But there are two occasions in a woman's life when she needs to wait with her opinion. One is her first time with a man. Unless she is very discreet, it changes her status in the world. With the wrong perfume, it doesn't help to be discreet. It's obvious, there for everyone to smell. Remember—never buy until you've tested it on your skin for at least three hours.”

“Why three hours?”

“Because by then it has merged with your own scent. A
good perfume—not the cheap, heavy stuff that overwhelms—but a good perfume is different on every woman.”

At dinner, I thrust my left wrist at my father and Herr Hilger. “Do I smell different from Frau Hilger?”

My father blinked. Glanced at Frau Hilger.

“We are wearing the same perfume,” I explained.

Herr Hilger bent toward my arm and sniffed the air above it. His smooth hair was brushed away from his forehead and curved around the back of his ears.

“You still like it, then?” Frau Hilger asked me, and when I nodded, she pulled the amber bottle from her purse. “For you to keep. I have another one. But remember—it is a woman's perfume…. More than a hint of it would be unsuitable on a young girl.”

My friend Elsie would be far more interested in my perfume than in what I'd brought home from Italy last summer—the large black scorpion I'd found in a vineyard. While my father had grabbed my arm —“Careful, Christa, those things can be deadly”—my mother had darted forward and caught the scorpion in her sun hat. On our balcony she'd drowned it in red wine—“You need alcohol to preserve it”—and impaled it on a hairpin so that I could bring it to my school. My biology teacher still had the scorpion, fastened to a rectangle of wood. Smelling of wine and dust and sun and decay, the scorpion had its pincers extended and its tail with the poisonous stinger curved forward across its back, as if about to grasp its victim and deliver that dangerous sting.

When we took walks through Trieste, I liked it if Herr Hilger stayed by my side, letting his wife go ahead with my father. He talked to me about music as if I were an adult, and I
wished Elsie could see me with him. I understood him so much better than anyone else. Once Frau Hilger was no longer around to fill each of his silences with words, he came forward with his deep voice. When I asked him which composer he admired most, he told me about Ludwig van Beethoven, who'd kept writing his music after he had lost his hearing.

“But how could he … if he didn't hear the music he composed?”

“Oh, but he could feel it, Christa. He could.”

He said this in such a way that I knew his own life must have been at least as mysterious and tragic as Beethoven's, and I longed for him to link his sturdy fingers through mine and tell me those secrets he wouldn't tell anyone else.

One morning a package arrived for me by airmail from one of the Hilgers' music stores. Inside was a portable record player and one single record. It had a glossy, night-blue jacket with the yellow emblem of the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft and gold lettering:

Ludwig van Beethoven
EROICA
Sinfonie
Nr.3
Es-dur op.
55
Dirigent:
FERENC FRICSAY
Berliner Philharmoniker

“I wanted you to hear the most beautiful symphony ever written,” Herr Hilger said.

He and I listened to the
Eroica
on my balcony while my father and Frau Hilger took the train to Venice to photograph
the mosaics in the Basilica di San Marco. Four times we listened to the
Eroica,
and when I told him, “Maybe each time people hear the
Eroica,
they do the listening that Beethoven couldn't do for himself,” Herr Hilger nodded as if he'd just thought the very same thought. But then he added that Beethoven's hearing had quite likely still been all right while he'd worked on his early symphonies.

I hummed the opening passage when we sat down for dinner at our usual table in the dining room without my father and Frau Hilger, who wouldn't return from Venice until late that evening. We'd never see their photos of the mosaics, because their film had fallen into a canal, they would tell us.

That night, alone, as my hands followed the thin fabric of my new nightgown down my thighs and back up, I found myself in the soft place between my thighs, and I could hear the
Eroica
until my breath stopped and I fell back. Though I'd touched there before, it hadn't been like that, and the following night my hand went back there again, and to the music.

Whenever she heard me hum to myself, Frau Hilger would make sure to point out my talent for music, even if I was just humming that altered
Schlager
about Farah Diba that had been going around school before summer vacation. It followed the popular melody of
“Marina, Marina, Marina, du bist ja die Schönste der Welt …”

Farah Diba, Farah Diba, Farah Diba,
du bist ja die Schönste der Welt.
Gib dem Schah ein Sohnchen,
sonst fliegst du bald vom Thrönchen,
genau so wie Soraya….
Farah Diba, Farah Diba, Farah Diba,
you are the most beautiful one in the world.
Give the Shah a little son,
otherwise you'll soon get kicked off the little throne,
just like Soraya….

Soraya had been the Shah's previous wife, a sultry woman with the saddest movie-star eyes I'd ever seen. Until two years ago, we used to sing the same song about her:
“Soraya, Soraya, Soraya, du bist ja die Schönste der Welt
…” Herr Hilger was a much better man than the Shah, who would have kicked Frau Hilger off his throne years ago for not producing a male heir. Frau Hilger couldn't even have a daughter. But a daughter didn't count any-how with the Shah: his very first wife had given him a daughter. Unless he had a male heir, there would be no coronation for him, though he'd been the ruler of his country for nearly two decades. The more I tried not to hum that melody around the Hilgers—after all, I didn't want to remind them that they couldn't have children—the more that melody seemed to live inside my throat.

“What are the words to that?” Frau Hilger asked me one afternoon when all of us were climbing the stone steps of the Roman amphitheater.

“I forgot,” I lied. “That's why I just hum it.”

“Herr Hilger and I have been planning to go to Venice for a recital of Verdi arias. But since you have such a love for music, I want you to have my ticket. If your father doesn't mind, I'll keep him company here. Herr Hilger can take you to Venice on the train. I know he'll enjoy the recital much more with you.” She glanced at my father.

Say yes,
I wished.
Yes yes yes …

He stroked his mustache.

“If s just a matinee,” she said. “They'll be back before dark.”

Finally he nodded.

Frau Hilger pulled me close. “You and Herr Hilger have music as a common interest. And that is something to be nurtured.”

The day before the recital she bought me a pearl-white dress with a white-embroidered collar in a shop near the Piazza dell'Unità d'ltalia, and the following morning I wore that dress when I sat next to Herr Hilger on the train to Venice. We started out early, because Frau Hilger insisted we plan enough time to see the Palazzo Ducale and take a gondola. On the train were three black-haired girls my age, who stared at my light hair and whispered to each other rapidly. When they started laughing, hands over their mouths, I felt bothered and glanced at Herr Hilger, but he was looking out of the window. All at once it occurred to me that I'd never seen him touch his wife's skin. What I wouldn't understand until many years later was his passion for the chaste, romantic love that is never consummated—not even with his wife.

Outside the Venice train station, he bought two nut sticks from one of the street vendors. With our teeth we pulled the sweet, glazed nuts from the thin skewers and chewed them as we walked toward the Canal Grande, the sun on our faces. Arched bridges took us across the network of smaller canals until we reached the Piazza San Marco, where an old woman in a black dress sold us maize. While I held the yellow kernels in my outstretched palms, waiting for the pigeons to come closer, Herr Hilger took photos of me.

“Try not to move, Christa,” he said.