II Doloroso

Katherina taxied directly to the morgue, as if confronting her father’s body would provide some explanation. The attendant led her along a corridor of white tile into a room of steel tables. The faint odor of decomposition and the stronger pungent smell of cleaning agents assaulted her. Only one table, to the left of the door, held an occupant, draped in a green cotton sheet. She hesitated for just a moment, knowing who it was and not wanting it to be so.

The attendant uncovered the cadaver to the chest and backed away. “His housekeeper has already identified him, ” he said. “But the police may want your statement too. You can stay with him as long as you’d like. ”

Katherina brought her hand automatically to her heart as she caught sight of the mortal remains of her father. But for the slightly blue lips, his sunken face was colorless. The jaw that fell back in the relaxation of death held beard stubble, giving him a look of shabbiness he did not deserve. She tried to convince herself it was a stranger. His head was wrapped in surgical gauze, which mercifully concealed the gunshot entry and exit wounds, though she could not help but imagine the mess they had made of his skull.

Suicide. She struggled to understand him. What could have brought him to that extreme? She yearned to talk to him, for just a moment, to ask why he had chosen that evening, the night of her great success, to abandon her.

She adored both parents but, even before her mother’s death, had always felt she was her father’s daughter: solitary, introspective, musical. She had inherited his cynicism and even looked like him.

Her earliest recollections were of their quiet conversations, mostly the undoing of the nonsense other children taught her. She had absorbed his little lessons on their trips to the zoo on winter days, when almost no one was there but the two of them. Holding her hand as they stood before the animal cages, he disabused her both of religion and of fairy tales. Cinderella and religion, he said, told the same lie, because they made you believe that someone good would always rescue you. But there was no rescue, not without payment.

He had lavished attention on her, but in a curious emotionless way, like a doting teacher rather than a father. No matter what she asked for, voice lessons, concerts, clothes, he gave them to her, though in postwar Germany everything was hard-wrought. Her mother had been an open book, a gentle, uncomplicated person. But even in their most tender hours, Sergei Marow was opaque.

She wept quietly, grasping his cold right hand—the hand that had held the pistol that sent him from the world.

Katherina climbed out of the taxi in front of the house in the Schlossstrasse. A lovely old brick structure in the Wilmersdorf suburb of Berlin that had withstood World War II, it seemed a luxury when they moved into it during the 50s. East Berlin, a few kilometers away, became a foreign land, all the more so in 1961, when the Wall was built. After a year, they added an office space to one side, to house her father’s modest but slowly growing dermatological practice.

She let herself into the house. “Tomasz? Casimira? Is anyone here? ” No one answered. She set down her suitcase and wandered from room to room.

The house was immaculate with every object in its place, which she found somehow disquieting. No one lived here any longer who might create disorder. Deliberately, she tossed her coat over the staircase banister and climbed the stairs to her old room.

Pensive, she stood at the window, gazing down into the frost-covered garden looking for the gardener and housekeeper. Their cottage, which had also been added to the house, made the property seem like a miniature estate. Even now the grounds had a sort of elegance, derived from the gardener’s constant maintenance.

Tomasz and Casimira Mazur had lived here since her mother died, and she was grateful that they were here now. She had no idea what to do with the house, so their presence—and the stipend from her father’s financial estate that she would see to—allowed her to postpone any decisions.

“Katya! ” A familiar voice called her by her childhood name and she turned around to the warm face of the housekeeper. The gray-haired woman embraced her unreservedly. As always, she smelled of cooked potatoes.

Tears welled up, but Katherina cleared her throat. “Thank you so much for taking care of things, Casimira. I’d be lost without you. ”

“Liebchen. You know, we’s all family here. But come on now. Dry your face. There’s an ‘in-queerey, ’ of course, and the detective is already here. We was showin’ him around the basement, but he’s in the kitchen now lookin’ to talk to you. ”

In fact, the detective already stood in the doorway behind Tomasz. “Walter Froelich, Berliner Polizei. ” A portly balding man in a dark green suit came forward and shook her hand, his grip loose and impersonal. “I am sorry to bother you in this difficult hour, Frä ulein Marow, but there are questions I must ask. ”

“Of course. ” Katherina blew her nose in a tissue and composed herself.

The detective took out a tiny voice recorder and held it inconspicuously in one hand. “Since the deceased left no note, I must ask you, do you know of anyone who might have wished him harm or, at the very least, triggered the…act? Someone who stood to gain from it? ”

“No, he never spoke of anything like that. But of course I was not usually here. Tomasz and Casimira would be in a much better position to answer that. ”

The detective turned his attention to Casimira. “Did you notice anything different on the day of his death, or shortly before? Any strange people in the neighborhood? ”

“No, sir. Only a black dog, a big raggy poodle loose on the street. Sign of the devil, some folks say. ”

Katherina winced. “Casimira, where do you get those medieval ideas? It was probably just some stray. ”

“I’m sure you’re right, Katherina dear. But you never know, do you? They’s all kinds of things—”

The detective ignored the little side discussion and moved on. “What about letters or telephone calls? ”

Casimira shook her head. “The telephone didn’t ring that day at all. Herr Marow got his own mail every morning. ’Course I checked his desk. Nothing there but the electric bill. ”

“Did he say anything to you that might have suggested something was bothering him? Anything out of the ordinary that had happened to him recently? ”

“No, sir. ” Tomasz rubbed his cheek, recalling. “But he was real quiet that day. Just sat in his study all afternoon, with the music going. Then, some time during the night, when we was sleeping, he went out and…and shot himself. The noise woke us up, and then we found him in the snow. We called an ambulance right away. The police was here too and they took the weapon. ”

“Yes, I have examined it, ” Froelich said. “An old Russian sidearm. ” To Katherina, “Did you know that he owned this pistol? ”

“I had no idea. If it was Russian, I would assume it was a war souvenir, taken from the enemy. I don’t know how else he would have a gun, least of all a Russian one. ”

“Suicide with the enemy’s gun. That would be ironic, wouldn’t it? ” Froelich said softly. Then, resuming official procedure, “Have you examined all the likely places for a note? And the less likely places? Desk drawers, wardrobe, coat pockets, the floor under his bed or desk? ”

Casimira’s chin went up. “I keep a clean house, sir. They’s nothing on the floor. We checked the drawers and Herr Marow had only one coat. Its pockets were empty. ”

The detective raised an open palm, as if to placate her. “All right. We’ll leave it at that. It’s possible that something may turn up later. In the mail, for example. ” He drew a business card from a side pocket and laid it on the table. “Please keep me apprised of anything unusual. ”

He clicked off the tiny tape recorder, signaling the end of the interview, and Tomasz led him to the door.

Katherina followed the housekeeper out of the kitchen. “Casimira, do you know if my father was seeing a doctor? ”

“No, dear. Not for a long time. He was as healthy as any man his age. But the last day he did seem depressed. Moody, like after your blessed mother died. Come to think about it, he mentioned her. ”

“Really? What did he say? ”

“That her death was his fault. Don’t know why he said that. It wasn’t nobody’s fault. Tomasz and me, we didn’t arrive here ’til she was gone half a year already, but we knew it was the diphtheria. That was the year of the epidemic. We was just glad you made it through. ”

Katherina dropped her eyes at the mention of the double disaster that had been visited upon them. It was a wound that had never closed.

Casimira went on. “Then he talked about the war, and about people who came home alive, but all broke inside. ‘Soulless, ’ I think he said. ”

The housekeeper began dusting while she talked, moving around the room and wiping already clean surfaces with her dishtowel. Katherina watched the woman who had stepped into the role of caretaker for both her and her father. She had been a godsend, a calm, efficient presence around the house, cleaning up after them, sensing where she was needed.

Casimira had instinctively found the middle place between housekeeper and parent, and had seen to a child’s physical needs without trying to meet the emotional ones, unless invited. And she was almost never invited. For all her kindness, she could not fill the void that opened up the day Katherina’s childhood ended and guilt began. For Katherina remembered the last warm embrace of her mother, that feverish night. The embrace that killed her.

Katherina rubbed her face, dispelling the memory. “Thank you, Casimira. I won’t be needing anything else. Just some quiet. ”

“All right, dear. Call us any time. ”

Casimira and Thomasz left the house again, and Katherina closed the door behind them.

For lack of other occupation, she wandered into her father’s study, though she hesitated again in the doorway. It seemed an invasion of a place and a life that had always been private. She sighed inwardly. But death was the ultimate forfeiture of privacy, wasn’t it?

His small oak desk was tidy, as always. She could not remember it any other way. The shelves behind it held his well-worn books: hard-bound medical ones on the left side and light literature on the right.

Idly, not looking for anything in particular, she opened and closed the desk drawers. He kept a detailed account book and a folder of his bank statements and correspondences, of which there was little. His lawyer had the will, she knew, and her father did not seem to have left any urgent business undone. For that she was grateful.

She wandered around the room, touching books, familiar objects, then thumbed through his collection of record disks. She smiled wanly; he was the only person she knew who still listened to vinyl disks and did not mind having to clean them and the phonograph needle before every playing. The recordings were all familiar. Symphonies and operas and chamber music that she had heard over and over as a child. Some of the jackets were torn and taped together. She wondered which ones he had listened to on his last day. Which of them had inspired such melancholy that he had taken his own life?

Then it struck her, and she shook her head at her own obtuseness. A disk was still on the turntable and the empty record jacket still leaned against the cabinet wall beside it. She recognized it immediately. It was the new Munich recording, in the original French, with Joachim von Hausen conducting. Berlioz’ Damnation of Faust.

She tapped the On switch and the turntable arm lifted, pivoted a few degrees, and dropped gently onto the outermost groove. Choral parts played first, and Katherina sat down to study the handsome record jacket in her hand. Faust and Marguerite stood shoulder to shoulder. But Faust’s face was twisted in terror as he looked into Hell while next to him, gazing upward, Marguerite was radiant. More than radiant. It was Anastasia Ivanova, the stunning Russian singer who had defected from the Soviet Union five years before. Katherina remembered the rather sensational news and realized she had never seen Ivanova’s face up close. She studied it while she listened to the dark mezzo-soprano voice that poured from the speakers.

“Autre fois, un roi de Thule…”

Under the penitent’s shawl, the face was slightly Slavic except for the slender nose. Soft lines curved from the nostrils around the mouth that was wide and expressive. But most fascinating were the mist-gray eyes: full of expression and intelligence. At the corners, both eyes had faint lines, as if at the very moment of redemption, Marguerite squinted with a hint of skepticism. Worse perhaps, while she gazed upward toward divine grace, she emanated an unrepentant allure, a sensuality that belied the chaste remorse.

Yet her voice contained a powerful poignancy. Katherina could imagine her father, already despondent, being urged by the plangent melody into the abyss. It gripped her too, exacerbating her guilt and regret.

Brooding, she reached for the paper sleeve that had held the disk. As she grasped it, an envelope fell out.

The letter inside was on official government stationery, with letterhead: Liaison Committee for the Commemoration of Stalingrad. But most baffling of all, it was addressed to “Sergei Marovsky. ” The postmark was recent, she noted breathlessly; he could even have received it on the day of his death.

But “Marovsky”? How could that be?

Mephistopheles was singing now, in a robust bass voice. “Esprits de flames inconstantes…”

She frowned at “inconstant” and focused again on the letter. It was in detached official language, but it did refer to him as a hero, a survivor of the gargantuan battle on the eastern front. She dropped the letter onto the desk again. It was simply too much for her to absorb, too much to learn about a man she had thought she knew. The ground beneath her seemed to have opened up.

Sergei Marow had once been Sergei Marovsky and he had fought at Stalingrad.

He had survived the most brutal battle of World War II, the battle that had seen the fall of an entire German army and reversed the direction of the war. Why had he not told his family?

Several scenarios offered themselves. Had he been in captivity and released among the few lucky ones in the first year? Maybe he had been one of the tiny number of wounded soldiers who were taken out by air before the final defeat. Was it even possible he had been among the pathetic handful that survived years of captivity in Russia?

She read the letter to the end, but it gave no more information about the man, only the commemorative event to which he was invited in the coming February.

Her mind spinning, she laid her head in her hands. That he had never talked about his war experiences had not seemed odd. Few people spoke of them. As a child, she had grown used to hearing adults reminisce about the hunger of the years of occupation right after the war and, less often, about the air raids and the fires during the war itself. But now that she thought about it, she had never heard the men talk about the battlefront.

And why should they? No one wanted to boast about fighting for National Socialism. In a global campaign that had become genocidal and had annihilated whole cities on both sides, individual acts of bravery held little meaning.

But Stalingrad was different. The whole world spoke of Stalingrad in hushed tones. Stalingrad was Armageddon, a cataclysm where whole armies threw themselves at each other in the bitter winter of 1942–43, where men were reduced to savagery, to cannibalism, to daily hand-to-hand slaughter of the enemy. No matter that the German advance was one of pure aggression. To have survived Stalingrad was to have emerged from the mouth of hell and to have, in some sense, been purged of the national guilt.

She got up to pace again, needing to think, circling the room, trailing her fingertips along the furniture. His oaken armoire stood in front of her. She opened the door cautiously, as if not wanting to disturb his spirit that still dwelled in the row of worn suit jackets, all brown or gray. The slightly shabby attire of an old man who no longer went out very much.

To occupy idle, nervous hands, she removed the jackets and laid them on the rug in several piles. One pile for Tomasz—the two men were about the same size—one for charity, and the third to be discarded. A mournful job, and yet to do nothing but sit wondering would have been worse.

A leather satchel lay on the bottom of the wardrobe. Old leather, cracked with age, but a handsome bag. Maybe she could rescue it with leather oil. She took hold of it, surprised at its weight, and dragged it out onto the floor.

It was locked, but the lock was old and flimsy and she forced it easily with the point of a scissors. Dust flew up into her face as she pulled the two sides apart exposing a crumpled rucksack.

She tilted the satchel on its side to slide the rucksack out and only then did she see the faded lettering on the side. Russian letters.

War booty? Cellars and attics all over Germany held articles brought home from the front and then forgotten. She stared at it for a moment, as if it were a strange brown animal curled up at her feet, while on the record player Berlioz’ chorus lamented of damnation.

Finally she knelt down and undid the rucksack’s buckles. The leather strap was dry and pieces of it crumbled to reddish-gray dust between her fingers. Something bulky and soft was inside, and she slid it out.

A light brown tunic and dark trousers were neatly folded and tied around with a belt. The belt buckle held an unmistakable insignia, the hammer and sickle. She slipped the tunic out and unfolded it. A Russian soldier’s uniform. She stared, dumbfounded. The name stenciled onto the inner yoke of the tunic was Marovsky.

Sergei Marovsky had been in the Red Army. Realization struck her and brought another wave of tears. If that was so, the pistol with which he had shot himself was probably his own.

She glanced around the study, a room that now belonged to a stranger, and everything that was once familiar seemed to mock her. Even his music, which poured from his antiquated record player, seemed filled with mystery.

She reached into the rucksack again. There was more.

Under the uniform was a notebook held together by a frayed cotton cord. She broke the cord easily and leafed through the lined book, the sort that school children used. Its pages were covered with text, each section precisely dated, in her father’s neat script.

The first entry was headed February 20, 1943. My god, she thought. Sergei Marovsky, who never said a word about the war and the occupation, had kept a journal.

She set it aside carefully and peered at what had been tucked into the front. A few sheets of folded paper, with a string threaded in and out of the spine to create a sort of booklet. It was badly soiled, with water stains along the edges and grime in every fold. The entries were also dated, and most of the text, though smudged, was legible. Not comprehensible, though. The cursive script was in Russian Cyrillic. The smattering of the language that she had picked up as a child extended little beyond mastery of the alphabet. She could make out only the dates, all in February 1943, and the word “Stalingrad” in the heading.

With reverence, and a touch of dread, she laid the pages carefully on top of the notebook and resumed emptying the rucksack.

The last item at the bottom was a cloth bag sewn shut. Both thread and fabric were badly disintegrated, so she simply pulled the bag apart. She stared, perplexed, at what fell onto her lap. A black leather glove. It was filthy, and the cracks in the leather were filled with grayish grit.

Not a glove exactly, she realized on closer examination. A gauntlet, with a cuff reaching halfway up the forearm, of the sort that had not been worn for centuries. Ah, it was for a costume, she could see that now. Inside the cuff, in block letters, it read, Stalingrad Opera.

Katherina had been kneeling and now she rocked back and sat on the rug. The sheer weight of the revelations exhausted her, and there was no one to ask for an explanation. Tomasz, perhaps? Unlikely. Master and gardener had always been only cordial, even after many years. It was impossible to imagine her father would confide private things to Tomasz that he did not even tell his family.

The music had stopped. The first disk had come to an end and, half in a trance, she got up to turn it over. She dropped again into the desk chair as Anastasia Ivanova began to sing the most poignant of the Faust arias.

“D’amour l’ardente flame consume mes beaux jours” flowed along the back of Katherina’s mind as she tried to make sense of the discoveries. How were they related? A hidden identity, a heroic and possibly horrifying past, and finally an invitation by the German government.

The letter; maybe it held more clues she had overlooked. But no, it was the simplest of invitations, in the dry formal language of the German government. In the spirit of glasnost, a commemorative concert in Volgograd, built on the ruins of Stalingrad. A concert by invitation only, for politicians and for survivors, both Russian and German.

Then she noticed the penciled words, barely legible at the bottom. It seemed to her now that while her father had listened to the Berlioz recording, he had read the letter and then scribbled at the bottom of the page.

Letters, apparently written by a trembling hand, formed the words, “Florian, forgive me. ”

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