past carriages. All the time he repeated hotly, and in half voice: “I am Mozart. I am Mozart!” He wanted to cry it to the trees... and where is all my music? Now people looked at him as if he were crazy. He ran past the slow procession of wagons, carriages, supplicants, priests, and visitors moving toward the Residenz, muttering, “I am Mozart, and someday all will know it. No, I am not crazy. I am Mozart.” By the time he crossed the bridge he was shouting. Two priests passing him, followed by a bevy of choir-boys, shook their heads. Flushing, he went on his way, swinging his music portfolio, through the city that was his birthplace.
I now fell again over Munich that first day of December, gradually filling the crevices of the houses, and piling high where cold pigeons huddled above the doors of the Residenztheater in which Mozart’s opera had been given so briefly. It clung to the hems of the somber cassocks of priests who hurried to mass, and it weighed down the black skirt of Sophie Weber as she mounted the creaking wood stairs of her family’s building, heavy basket on her arm.
The little parlor, with its portrait of Fridolin, still draped with a sagging and long-dried garland of dark leaves, was deserted; music was piled on the table nearly a foot high. When one of the sisters wanted to find a certain piece to give a clavier lesson or to sing at a wedding, she would scatter the pile across the table and then gather the pieces together carelessly. The deep red sofa still had a tear from their move from Mannheim a year and a half before; no one had bothered to mend it. It had been spring when Mozart had departed for his work in Salzburg, and with the dissolution of the Thursday musicales, the house was devoid of any masculine presence. I’ll be back for your fourteenth birthday, he had promised Sophie, but that would come within two months, and his letters to them made it seem unlikely. What his letters to Aloysia said, Sophie did not know. There was no further mention of suitors, and their mother’s book was no longer anywhere to be found, though one day the girls had torn the house apart looking for it. Still there were letters back and forth from Thorwart, who was now in Vienna, and the four sisters dreaded that their mother still had her plans. The two younger girls had long decided that whoever their mother chose would be quite dreadful, no matter what his lineage, and that anything that divided them as much as a city would be unthinkable.
Sophie heard her sisters’ voices from the kitchen. “Where’s that girl? Didn’t she come in with the bread? Sophie, where are you?”
Aloysia, Josefa, and Constanze were sitting as close to the fire as they could without singeing their long skirts. Josefa’s long, thick back bent slightly as her needles roughly poked the hose she was knitting. Aloysia raised her face from embroidering a purse. “Is anything happening outside?” she asked.
Sophie put down her basket, wiped her nose, and cleaned off the moisture that had formed on her spectacles. “It’s three weeks to Christmas. And they captured a thief; I saw it posted.” She began to unpack the meat, which was wrapped in an old bit of music for a mass.
“Mon Dieu, you think the strangest things are newsworthy. You’re concerned the poor man left a needy family. What else?”
“I saw a poor little kitten crying in the snow. I should have taken it home with me. Maybe I’ll go back and see if it’s still there.”
Aloysia dropped her embroidery to her lap and turned toward her youngest sister, her face flushed with the fire. “You’ll do nothing of the sort; you know cats make me sneeze. Anyway, it’s time you’re back; we’ve been waiting for you for our morning coffee. Mother’s gone out.”
They were drinking their coffee when they heard the jangle of the house bell below. Aloysia pushed away her cup and ran to the parlor window, from which she could see the snowy hats of two men standing by the house door, one heavy and of medium height, the other somewhat scrawny even under his coat. “It’s Uncle Thorwart,” she quietly called back to the kitchen. “He’s come from Vienna; Mama said he might.” Thorwart’s appointment by the court to be their male guardian had worn further on them; he had