XXI Decrescendo

It was well past midnight but Katherina lay awake, staring into the darkness. She replayed every moment of the embrace through her mind, ending always with Anastasia’s words, “Forgive me. ” Katherina kept seeing the fear on her face. Or was it regret?

She had taken a huge risk kissing her, and it had proved a mistake. The embarrassment, then the humiliation, of surrendering Anastasia to her husband had drained away the pleasure of the evening’s stage success.

Finally she dozed, her father’s voice sounding at the back of her troubled mind. “Nothing is given. Everything is paid for. ”

She slept fitfully, fragments of nightmares keeping her from rest. A line of phantoms formed before her dreaming eyes. Her mother, then her father, then Detlev; all wandered off one by one into the fog, abandoning her. She shivered, until, at the sound of her name, she pivoted and saw another figure on the opposite horizon. Gregory Raspin.

She awoke with a start. As if fleeing the dismal landscape of her unconscious, she got up. To clear her head, she opened one panel of the window. Snow still fell silently on the empty pre-dawn street below. The cold air roused her, and she closed the window again, fully awake. There was no way she could return to sleep now. She might as well continue reading the journal.

She was nearly at the end, and the later entries were more widely spaced. But now that she had begun to digest the fact of her father’s “disposition, ” as she decided to call it, she wanted to know more about it. What was life like for a homosexual in 1960s Germany? What did her father think about it all? Katerina thumbed through the journal with curiosity that she realized bordered on the prurient.

But the remainder of the journal was devoid of introspection and was simply a series of accounts of meetings with men at the Insel: Germans, Italians, Turks. He went there more or less twice a month and almost every time he was with a different man. Finally, he no longer noted their names or appearances, and his accounts of the meetings with them became dreary. It seemed that he had begun to find them dreary too. No longer shocked, Katherina read quickly, superficially. Then, the final brief entry that ended the journal brought her up short.

August 25, 1965

I am where fate and my own nature have brought me. It’s senseless to speak at this late date of regret. I had the gift of Lucy and then Katya. I only hope I haven’t failed them. Still, a question always burns at the back of my mind. What might life have been like if we could have stayed together, my precious Florian?

There were four more performances of Rosenkavalier in Salzburg and, emotionally, Katherina was in free fall.

Boris had stayed in Salzburg, and though he still resided at the Hilton Hotel, he was suddenly the doting husband. On non-performance days, the couple was usually absent from the hotel, and after performances, Boris picked Anastasia up from her dressing room, rendering her unavailable to anyone else.

Octavian remained, however, and so Katherina embraced the woman she desired four more times, though only in the form of a boy in silver-white coat and breeches, or in hunting green. Octavian was always ardent in her arms, and for two and a half hours of the performance, they acted out love.

Katherina discovered what she had missed in her thirty-three years of life: not sexual excitement or even tenderness, but romantic obsession. Now she suffered under it, in full force. She woke every morning wondering where Anastasia was sleeping, ate breakfast imagining Anastasia across the table, walked along the Salzach with Anastasia’s phantom at her side.

Her heart quickened when they were on stage together, when the rose duet finished and the scene of their gradual infatuation began. It was mind twisting, to sing a role that replicated her own experience. The audience was titillated to see her feigning romance with a woman dressed as a boy, when in fact, it was the very falseness that she feigned. For she loved and lusted after Anastasia.

She grasped that now and felt desire with a ferocity she had never imagined. Each day in feverish fantasy she let herself seize Anastasia, undress her, ravish her, take every part of her in her mouth, set her groaning, thrashing with want—and each evening she sang with Viennese sweetness of attar of roses in the lightest of embraces with Octavian.

And since she could not give herself to Anastasia, she gave herself to the role, to the thrilling, shimmering, immoral ecstasy of the music.

Was it her overheated imagination, or did Octavian sing with more ardor than before, glance at her a moment longer, court her more urgently than in the first performance? It was demonic, trying to separate theater from reality.

Then, in the last moments of the last act in the final performance, when both of them were physically and vocally spent, something happened. The orchestra played the final musical fillip of the opera while Sophie and Octavian exited arm in arm through the center stage. In the forty seconds, in which a “Moorish child” ran on stage looking for a handkerchief, they stood in the darkness at the edge of the stage set.

Always before they had simply caught their breath after the exhausting final duet and then stepped out toward the waiting stagehands. But this time Anastasia pressed suddenly against her and whispered into her ear, “Oh Katherina, I am so sorry about everything. If only you knew how much I’ve wanted it to be more. ”

A stagehand stepped toward them and reached out a hand. Anastasia was startled, then smiled at him and hurried away to join the other singers for the curtain call. Katherina followed, bewildered.

Surely there would be a moment later, when they could talk. Backstage, at the hotel, anywhere. Only a moment.

As always, Boris waited in the dressing-room corridor. He glanced at Katherina from under his thick eyebrows and nodded once, acknowledging her. She tried to read his expression, but there seemed to be none. Did he resent her as much as she resented him? No, of course not. She was nothing to him. He had no idea.

Boris’s glance shifted away from her to linger for a moment on Gregory Raspin, who stood talking to Joachim von Hausen. His attention seemed riveted on the two men. Was he planning a new recording with the conductor? Presumably that’s how things went. You saw someone backstage, exchanged a few words, and things developed. But Boris made no attempt to talk to von Hausen, who turned and strode toward Katherina, hands outstretched.

“Ah, Katherina, my lovely Sophie. ” He kissed her lightly on both cheeks. “We were fantastic tonight, weren’t we? And you, my dear, were glorious. ” He stood back, holding her by her upper arms. “You are coming to my ice-skating party tomorrow, aren’t you? ”

“Well, I’m—”

“Of course, you’re coming. The whole cast is invited. I shall be deeply, deeply wounded if you don’t. ”

“But I don’t have any ice skates. ” She stated the obvious.

“Of course you don’t, my dear. No one does. We’ll take care of that, so there’s no excuse. ”

“The whole cast will be there? ” Katherina asked. “Hans, Sibyl, Radu…Anastasia? ”

Gregory Raspin had joined them. “Yes, Madame Marow. Everyone but me. I have business to attend to, so you must celebrate for both of us. ”

A line of opera fans was beginning to approach and Katherina let herself be drawn toward them, relief spreading through her.

She smiled radiantly. “Yes. I’d love to, ” she said, suddenly buoyant.

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