We First Met in Salzburg

We first met in Salzburg, your mother and I

We were then from two different parts of Europe.
One touristy summer, we ended up in Salzburg
In a cheap hostel for pilgrims and student backpackers.

I saw your mother’s name
A peculiar name
A familiar name
A common Malay girl’s name
Juxtaposed against a backdrop of tedious Eastern European surnames.

It piqued me, your mother’s beautiful name
On the hostel registrar
On the yellow crumpled paper
Your mother’s name, it piqued me greatly
It sent shivers
Cold, sharp shivers
For some reason I have yet to fully understand.

A Malay girl
Of all things dear and holy and precious and fine
Of all places
Of all kinds of circumstances and states of being
A Malay girl
Here, in Salzburg
In this hostel
In this young man’s journey.

I just had to see her
I just had to see her
With my own eyes
That such a girl, a Malay girl
Existed.

Oh, God Almighty!
That such a girl - existed!

Later that night, I waited for your mother at the dining hall.
I sat across the central stairs
A spot across a field of chairs
Through baroque walls and mason pillars
So that I would be able to see her coming down from her room.

I looked at every single one of them
The ethnic details of their face scrutinized.

How is a Malay girl a Malay girl?
She is hard to define, but you can tell.

As I moved from one face to the next
I adjusted the limits of her profile.
I made room for infrequent scenarios;
She may be of mixed parentage
Her father a white man, an Irish bricklayer,
Her mother from Penang, the daughter of a nasi kandar restaurateur;
She may be of Lebanese descent
With blue eyes and blonde curls;
Or maybe a Dutch teen named after an exotic Javanese dancer
In an art film, whose character her mother found truly inspiring.

I waited until people started leaving
And the nuns had stopped serving food.
But there was no Malay girl in the dining hall that night.

There was only this deranged, lonesome man
Frustrated,
Duped,
Haunted,
By a Malay girl’s name.

Taking comfort over cold hard unleavened bread
Dipped in bland lentil soup.

His body
His mind
Ravaged
By the trekking across the Altstadt, the Old City of Salzburg
And the search of meaning
Along the blue icy calmness of the Salzach, the Great River
That carries with her
The summer tears of the Alpine Mountains.

The disconcerting noise of spoons, forks and ladles
Clanking against wooden bowls and metal plates.

I was pulled back down to the cold hard floors of reality.

I was exhausted
I was hungry
I was malnourished
I smelled like fish
I had not had a proper shower since Munich three days ago.

Forget it, man.
It was a nice warm thought,
A fleeting joyful remedy,
A thoroughly fantastic hope.
Now
You need to get through this and leave
You need to get over the girl and live.

Honestly, I thought that that was the end of that;
That in fact there was no such Malay girl staying in that hostel;
That there was no point in going on with this foolish ghost hunt.

That Life
As was the panic at the Residenzplatz
Is random
Like the many foreign faces that I saw.

She was merely a name.
Your mother was not there
She must have been somebody else
In Salzburg or elsewhere.

This entry is a subsection of an epic poem which was initially written to be a novelette (a short novel). Written in Bintulu in stages between July 2006 and February 2007. This entry is a condensed version, published for this weblog.