XV Mesto. XVI Grazioso

XV Mesto

Inexplicably depressed, Katherina climbed the stone steps to the pension in the dark. She was in Salzburg, she reminded herself, the opera capital of Europe, in a starring role. Everything she ever craved. Why wasn’t she euphoric?

She was tired, of course, after a day of rehearsing, and the steps seemed steeper than usual. She panted, and inside her thick scarf her exhalations came back moist, warmed with her own heat.

Mercifully, the heavy oak door of the pension was unlocked so she did not have to fumble for the key. At the sound of the front door closing, Frau Semmel appeared in the entrance to her office holding a long white box. She was beaming.

“Isn’t it wonderful? These arrived just a little while ago. You have an admirer, dear. ”

“An admirer? ” Katherina repeated, dumbfounded. Her heart pounded. For the minutest fraction of a second, she hoped it might be from… No. She had just met the woman. But no one else seemed likely. Her manager never made such gestures, she had no family, and no one in the general public knew where she was staying.

Baffled, she unfastened the ribbon and opened the carton.

“White roses! ” Frau Semmel exclaimed, hovering next to her. “And even before opening night. Romantic, nicht wahr? ”

Tied to one of the stems was a little white envelope. The card inside was succinct. Frau Semmel read it out loud over Katherina’s shoulder, as if to assist her.

“Sorry they are not silver. Yours truly, Gregory Raspin. ”

Her room seemed smaller than before, the crucifix over the headboard larger. She sat down on the edge of the bed, confused.

She’d gotten flowers many times before—but never before a performance. It was a good sign, probably, that her career was advancing toward stardom. Performance offers, quality roles, fervent fans. Everything was falling into place. So what was causing her vague malaise?

Katherina stared at the white roses, still in their box at the foot of her bed. That was the answer. Gregory Raspin was paying court to her in the guise of the rose cavalier, if only for the length of a metaphor. He had stepped into the role that belonged to Anastasia. Dignified and debonair as he was, the thought of him wooing her in place of Anastasia was—distasteful.

She plucked one of the roses from its box, holding it by its head, velvety and fragrant and fraught with suggestion. She recalled the rose duet she had rehearsed that morning. The weaving of her voice with Anastasia’s, not in banal and comfortable harmonies, but in a complicated back and forth through subtle dissonances. How skillfully Strauss suggested resolution, tantalizingly brief, before he pulled them apart again, leaving them to strain to be reunited until the whole duet climaxed in unbearable sweetness. Like courtship itself was supposed to be.

But Strauss, for whatever reason, had intended his rose cavalier to be sung by a woman. For a man to presume the role was, ironically, a travesty. Or at least the travesty of a travesty.

Detlev was right. Opera was its own world. Everything was allowed, as long as it was beautiful. She got up from the bed and stared out the window at the dark Salzach below.

Thoughts turned in her head like sea birds. Morality plays, the devil as sex, flirtation, identity, Raspin’s reduction of the human being to a bundle of urges. She wasn’t sure what it was, the discussion, the unwanted sight of Anastasia’s husband, the unwelcome flowers, but she was morose. Her vision clouded and the spark of a dreadful memory glowed brighter—of the last night of her childhood.

She turned from the window and swept her eyes across the room to her canvas shoulder bag where the journal lay. Had her father recalled that night as well? Had he recorded it?

She fished the journal from the bag and leafed through it, skipping the entire 1950s. An important decade for Germany, she knew, but she would read those pages later. Finally she found the entries for the terrible week that had destroyed her childhood. They were all brief, scarcely a paragraph each, but their very brevity seared her.

May 14, 1960

Two new private patients this week. A sign of the times, that people now can afford the luxury of dermatology.

Katya’s birthday is tomorrow. We offered to have a party for her but she said she’d rather we took her to the opera. Strange taste for an eleven-year-old, but she’s been obsessed with singing since we took her to see Figaro last winter at the Staatsoper. The only tickets available on short notice were for Gounod’s Faust, the one opera I would have preferred not to see. I explained the story of Faust to her, but she’s too young to know what that means in real life. So I simply told her that all good fortune is paid for in the end. I don’t think she understood.

May 16, 1960

An expensive mistake; I should have known. We didn’t even get through the performance. Katya was restless through the whole first act and complained of a sore throat. Her forehead was hot, so I put my arm around her and told her we could leave at the end of the act. She half fell asleep resting against Lucy, and at intermission we took her home. She was coughing by then, and crying. We gave her aspirin and let her sleep with Lucy, and that seemed to calm her. Dawn is breaking now. When she wakes up, I’ll take her to the clinic. The specialists there will probably confirm that it is just a bad cold and we’ll put her to bed for a week.

May 17, 1960

Diphtheria. I should have suspected it, but she had no lymph-node swelling. There’s been an outbreak in the city. The next morning Katya’s throat was swollen nearly closed and she couldn’t stand up. By the time we got a diagnosis and medication, she was in respiratory distress. They’ve given her antibiotics, but she’s unconscious. I sat by her bed all afternoon and it seems like she’s breathing a little easier now, but I’m ashamed that I waited a whole night before getting her to the hospital. How much harm did I do my daughter in those twelve hours?

May 19, 1960

Katya is breathing better and is no longer in critical condition, but she’s still delirious. She rambles on, semiconscious, about ghosts. And as if that’s not enough disaster, Lucy has fallen sick too. The symptoms are the same, just as violent, but Lucy’s heart has never been strong. The doctors are doing all they can, but meanwhile we are all in hell.

I pray to the God I don’t believe in—let them recover. Don’t make them be my payment.

Katherina’s throat tightened and her eyes teared up. She knew what was coming as she turned the page.

May 25, 1960

Dear God. Lucy has died. Heart failure. She was the warmth and light of this family, and now she’s gone. I force myself to keep going but I can barely walk from room to room.

I plod on, for Katya’s sake. The antibiotics seem to be working and she’s pulling through. The illness has deranged her, though. She’s conscious, but when I told her—as gently as I could—that her mother had died, she barely reacted. She just turned her face away and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t think he’d do it. ”

Katherina closed the journal on her lap and dropped back against the bed pillow, letting the tears flow. She had not wept for her mother in years, but the brief entry in the journal made her recall the whole force of her childhood bereavement. Strange that her father had not understood that guilt and grief had weighed on her even more than it did on him. She was, after all, the cause of the death, infecting her mother the night she lay coughing in her arms.

She did not remember saying the words that he recorded, but she knew they had to be true; they were the logical outcome of the dream. And in over twenty years, she hadn’t forgotten the dream.

In her fever, she had dreamt she was on a stage behind a curtain that was about to go up. On the other side she could hear the buzzing of a huge audience waiting for her to perform. Everything in her told her she had to sing, but she couldn’t even take a deep breath to begin.

A man approached her, handsome in white tie and swallowtails. The conductor, she thought. He was supposed be with his orchestra, but had come to find out why the curtain had not risen. Claudia Martin, dressed as Cherubino, in blue satin knee pants, stood right behind him.

“Help me, ” Katherina begged. “I can’t breathe. ”

“Of course I’ll help you, but you have to pay for that. What are you willing to give up? ”

Her chest heaved as she tried to suck in air. “Anything you want. ”

“I want the one you love the most. ”

“Yes, I agree, ” she’d said, gasping. “Just help me. ”

“Very good. ” He nodded and walked away.

At first she was disappointed because nothing happened, but then she discovered she could take a deep inhalation. She waited for the curtain to part, and when it did, she opened her eyes to the white walls of a hospital room and the somber figure of her father. That must have been when he broke the news to her.

Bitter memories. She was sorry now she had made herself relive them.

Soft tapping on the door wrenched her from her reverie. Katherina glanced at her watch. Nearly midnight. Who would bother her so late at night? She set the journal aside and got up from the bed.

Anastasia Ivanova stood in the corridor in her winter coat and fur hat. Her cheeks were still red from the frigid night air. “I’m sorry if I disturb you, ” she said, cold lips slowing her speech and thickening her Russian accent. “I saw your light…”

XVI Grazioso

“No, not at all. Please come in. ” Katherina’s mood changed instantly, as if the room had suddenly grown lighter.

Anastasia swept in bringing some of the night cold with her, and she waited for a moment just inside the doorway. She seemed nonplussed, as if she had not expected anyone to answer the door.

Katherina slipped the heavy woolen coat off Anastasia’s shoulders and laid it across the foot of her bed, brushing away the box of roses. She gestured toward the one chair next to the gas fireplace. “Sit down. I’ll turn up the flames. Is everything all right? ”

Anastasia sat down delicately and bent toward the blue and yellow flames, rubbing the warmth into her upper arms. “Yes. Well, no, ” she said, then started again. “My husband’s here. ” She hesitated again. “He’s staying at the Hilton Hotel. We were separated, you see. I knew he was flying to Vienna this week, but he surprised me by stopping here first. ”

“I see. ” Katherina could think of no other response. She wished she had something to offer, wine or chocolate, but she had nothing, so she simply sat down next to the other woman.

“We’ve been married for five years, ” Anastasia went on, “but most of that time I’ve been performing. You know, touring, recording in London and New York, staying every place but home. ”

“I guess it’s hard to be married and maintain an opera career. So much traveling. You have to really be in love to keep it going. ”

“In love? I have the feeling that love is a myth kept alive by novelists and librettists. At least it’s never struck me. But Boris has always been a good companion. He was a godsend after I defected. That was the most difficult year of my life and he pretty much saved me. ”

“Yes, I remember the newspaper headlines. It was at the Paris airport, wasn’t it? Very dramatic. Did you plan it that way? ”

“I didn’t plan it at all. I had been chafing at the restrictions at the Bolshoi for years, at the shabby housing, the political denunciations, the constant sense of being watched by KGB, all that. But I had no relatives or friends in the West. I had no idea how to defect. ”

“So what made you do it? ”

“Snow. ”

“Snow? But there’s almost never snow in Paris. ”

“There was that winter. I had just performed in Boris Godunov, and the morning I was supposed to fly back to Moscow I woke around 3: 00. I looked out of my hotel window and it was snowing over Paris. It was like a revelation. I watched for an hour, a million thoughts in my head. Then it finally dawned on me that snow did not belong to Russia. All of those wonderful feelings and associations I had with snow I could have in Paris too. Or Munich or Oslo or New York. My mother had already passed away by then, or I would have telephoned and told her. But this realization was in the eleventh hour. Literally. A short time later, I was picked up and escorted by the Bolshoi ‘colleagues, ’ who were obviously there to make sure I got on the plane. But as fate would have it, the flight was delayed—because of the snow. That’s when I decided. ”

“What did you do? ” Katherina was awestruck.

“I was terrified. My heart was pounding so hard I thought I would pass out. But then I saw two security guards strolling by, and I ran over and begged them to protect me. I told them I was being forced to get on a plane against my will. I don’t know what made them act. I suppose a combination of French pride, chivalry, and the chance to rescue a pretty woman. In any case, they took me to security headquarters and called their captain. He called his superior, and the superior called his, and so forth. All this time, the two ‘minders’ were shouting about kidnapping and international agreements. There was a lot of confusion, but after an hour or so, I was taken in a police car to the Ministre de l’immigration, where I asked for asylum. ”

“And they said yes? ”

“They said they would relocate me while my case was considered. But of course the press picked the story up and it was a coup for the West to have gotten a Bolshoi singer, so I was safe from deportation. It took a lot longer to figure out just how I was going to live. Moscow, of course, froze my bank account. That’s when Boris showed up. I had met him at a reception after one of the performances. When he heard the news he stepped in and took care of my financial needs, found me an apartment, and hired protection from the KGB. I owe him a lot. In any case, a year later, we were married. ”

“And that marriage worked? ”

“We were happy enough. I provided him with glamour, an increase in record sales, while he provided me with safety and comfort. He was, and is, a decent man. You know, the kind who watches soccer matches on the weekend. ”

“That sounds boring, but also endearing, ” Katherina lied. In fact, it sounded stupefying.

“Boring, for sure. I can’t tell you how many matches I had to listen to. Berlin versus Munich, Warsaw versus Cracow, Leningrad versus Moscow. Unfortunately, he also has an appetite for champagne and young women, and that got worse over the years. So just before I left for Salzburg, I told him he had to choose between them and me. It was all up in the air until he showed up here and now it seems like we might try to get things working again. ”

Katherina felt a string of reactions, one devolving into the other: sympathy for Anastasia’s flight from the Soviet Union, revulsion for a husband who had obviously exploited her, and finally disappointment at realizing that Anastasia wanted nothing more than reassurance that she should reconcile with him.

“That sounds reasonable enough, if that’s what you want. ” Katherina wondered if the dreariness was evident in her voice.

“The problem is that I want everything. I’ve spent my adult life developing my voice, but I want a home and children. Don’t you? ”

“Yes, I suppose so, one day. But for the moment, singing is more important to me. ”

“You mean the fame? That only lasts so long. ”

“No, not the fame. ” Katherina searched for words. “There is something that can happen on stage and nowhere else. ” Her glance drifted back to the fire. “I mean the moments when you are in perfect voice and your partner is too, when the orchestra is flowing all around you, and everything is working. You feel suspended and you can sense the audience suspended with you because they know it’s perfect and you all share something…magical. ” She shrugged faintly. “I don’t mean to suggest that as a substitute for family. But it’s all I have, and for now, that’s enough. ”

“Oh, I’m sorry. That’s right, you just lost your father. I read about it in the paper. ” Anastasia laid her hand on Katherina’s forearm. “You must have him on your mind a lot. ”

“I do. I’m reading his journal now, and I’m learning how very little I knew him. But please, let’s not talk about him. Your problems are here and now. With your husband, I mean. What will you do? ”

“Dither, probably. And talk. There are so many uncertainties, I just don’t know yet. ” Anastasia glanced at her watch. “Oh, Lord, one in the morning. It’s time we both got some sleep. ” She stood up and gathered her coat where it was lying next to the flower box.

“Oh, white roses, ” she observed. “An admirer, even before the performance. Should I be jealous? That he didn’t send them to me, I mean? ”

“I wish he had. I’m not sure how I feel about this kind of admiration. They’re from someone named Raspin, who apparently is a Salzburg patron. He showed up at a concert performance I had too. ”

“Gregory Raspin sent them to you? That’s no small thing. His company is a major sponsor of festivals all over Germany. ”

“You know him? ”

“I know of him. He sort of collects people. Von Hausen is one of his proté gé s; rumor has it that Raspin got him the post as conductor of the Berliner Staatsorchester. He is very influential and if he likes you he can advance your career. ”

“That’s good to know, I suppose. But I never heard of him before. ”

“Well, you have a chance to get to know him here. He’s invited the principals to supper at the Goldener Hirsch tomorrow night. I’m sure everyone will accept. ”

“Will you go? ”

“I don’t know. If Boris is still here, I’ll have to be with him. ” Anastasia stood in the doorway now. “Thank you for putting up with me so late at night. It’s nice to have someone close by to talk to. ”

She leaned in, smelling of carnations, and gave Katherina a light kiss, though only her cheek, not her lips, touched Katherina’s face. “Read your father’s journal, ” she said, “and be glad you had a father. ” Then she turned away.

Katherina closed the door softly and sat down again in the room that now seemed empty. The flowers were still on the bed, and as she lifted the bouquet a thorn pricked her thumb. “Damn! ” she whispered, staring at the tiny dome of red that swelled up on her thumb. Gregory Raspin was beginning to get on her nerves.

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