Mephisto Aria (17 page)

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.

XXII
Quartetto Giocoso

Katherina made her way gingerly along the slippery path that led down to the water and stopped at the edge. While light snow fell, she surveyed the pond. It was some two hundred meters in diameter, with a field of dead cattails poking up through the ice on the far side. On the near side, men were chipping with shovels at the irregular surface of the pond trying to smooth it. Behind them, where someone swept away the chips, a half dozen Salzburgers skated.

She followed the pleasant smell of wood smoke and frying sausage to a campfire on the slope. A handful of people sat on low benches in a circle around a rectangular fire pit. On one side of the fire, a grill held roasting sausages and onions. On the other side, a small cauldron hung from an iron tripod. In a handsome parka with a fur-lined hood, Magda von Hausen was just stirring it with a ladle.

“Ah, just in time for some Glühwein,” she said, ladling the steaming liquid into a cup and handing it to Katherina. “We have plenty of schnapps too, if you’d like something stronger to heat your blood.”

Katherina warmed her mittened hands on the cup before sipping the hot mulled wine. With no singing engagements for the next weeks, she could let herself enjoy the two excesses: going out in frigid weather and drinking scalding wine. In fact, the wine was delicious, and it went immediately to her head. “Well, you couldn’t have picked a better day, could you? Just a little snow falling and no more performances to worry about. The only way you could have lured us out of our nests.”

Magda ladled a second cup for herself. “That was the whole plan. We’ve done this every winter we could, though it’s not always cold enough. Of course, it’s especially fun when there’s snow.”

“I had no idea so many people still skated on ponds,” Katherina said, gesturing toward the skaters. Anastasia, she noted, was not there, but she recognized several of the others. Sibyl and her husband skated awkwardly together, and just on the other side of them were Anne and Chuck. They skated arm in arm, tilting toward the left, then toward the right, obviously hugely entertained.

“It’s like a Flemish painting,” Katherina added.

“Opera people venture out here only if someone gives them the skates. So we bought a dozen of them a few years ago, the kind that you can adjust to any shoe. It’s ‘ice-skating lite.’ You make a couple of rounds of the pond, and when your ankles begin to hurt, you come back for more Glühwein.”

“And there’s no danger of falling through the ice?”

“Heavens, no. The pond is frozen solid, and the water is only a meter deep anyhow.”

“We haven’t lost anyone yet.” Joachim von Hausen was just crunching through the snow with an armload of firewood.

Radu Gavril arrived right behind with a crate of wine bottles. “Not to the ice, anyhow.” He set the crate down in the snow.

“We lose a few to the Glühwein every year, but it’s painless.” Magda chuckled, emptying another bottle into the cauldron.

The men fed new logs into the fire, then accepted their portions of hot wine and sat down on one of the benches. A comfortable silence fell over the group as they sipped from steaming cups.

Katherina heard boots crunching on packed snow and allowed herself a glance toward the path. Finally. In a blue anorak and ski pants, Anastasia strode toward the group. A Russian Octavian, except for the blond hair that fell from under a fur cap. Boris appeared directly behind her, dispelling the fantasy.

Von Hausen stood up and held out his hands. “So glad you could come, both of you. We haven’t seen much of you otherwise.” He shook hands vigorously with Boris who, in sheepskin coat and hat, seemed more massive than ever.

The two new arrivals took their places around the fire. Boris picked up one of the double-bladed skates and turned it, running his gloved thumb along the edge. “Children’s skates?” he asked in a deep bass.

“Yes, of course. We’re all amateurs here.” Von Hausen handed him the other skate. “You’ll both take a turn on the ice, won’t you?”

“I don’t think so.” Boris dropped both skates back onto the ground. “No high-risk sports for me.”

“What about you, Anastasia? Give it a try. It’ll remind you of your childhood.”

Katherina wanted to add to the encouragement, but Anastasia seemed to be avoiding eye contact. It was awkward, even painful to sense that the woman she had been embracing for the last two weeks on stage would not even acknowledge her. She turned the wine cup in her hands, her heart sinking.

“Oh, that wasso much fun!” Anne and Chuck lurched gleefully in from the pond and dropped onto a bench. “I’m going to get complaints from a whole new set of muscles tomorrow, but it was worth it,” Anne said. Red-cheeked and merry, she pried off her skates and continued. “Snow is just magical, isn’t it? Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t love snow?”

“I don’t. I hate it,” someone said, and Katherina looked around. “Sorry,” Radu amended. “I didn’t mean to bring down the mood.”

“What could you possibly hate about that?” Chuck thrust his thumb toward the idyllic scene on the pond.

“Not ice skaters, of course.” In the all-white landscape, Radu’s eyes seemed even redder than usual. “Just snow. Put it down to an old man with bad war memories.”

There was an awkward moment. Then von Hausen said, “We all have war memories. You have to let go of them.”

“I agree,” Chuck added. “I don’t have ’em, but my father fought on Omaha Beach. One of the lucky ones that made it back. But that’s old news, from forty years ago.”

“You were on the Eastern Front?” Katherina asked Radu, her curiosity piqued.

He nodded. “In the winter of ’43, I was an eighteen-year-old in the Romanian army—20th Infantry Division—fighting the Russians just west of the Volga. They were the most terrible months of my life. It wasn’t just the fighting. I’m talking about the snow.”

Sitting across from him, Boris nodded faintly but said nothing. Katherina wondered where he had been that winter.

“It was deep and hard to wade through, and when you sweated, the sweat froze inside your uniform. There were nights when it was minus twenty-five degrees. In the forests the bark of trees burst. You could hear it sometimes—a sharp crack. In our engines, the oil became a glue that brought everything to a stop. Wounded soldiers froze to death a few minutes after they fell. Even when we escaped the guns, every day was a fight to survive. We had to hack through our food with saws. And the snow never stopped.”

He stared into the fire, clutching his warm wine cup. “One evening, my rubber boot soles snapped. I knew my feet would freeze that night and if they did, I’d die. So I went back to where I had seen a dead Russian and took his footgear. Valenki, they’re called. Big thick felt things they wore. They saved my life.”

Katherina listened to the old soldier and wondered where her father had been on the day that the young Romanian had pilfered a dead man’s boots. Was he crouched behind a wall in Stalingrad shooting at Germans? Random chance, that Radu Gavril found life-saving footgear while Sergei had snatched up a costume gauntlet from the Stalingrad Opera. What possible reason could he have had for saving it?

“My father also fought at Stalingrad,” Katherina blurted out suddenly, then instantly regretted it. What was she thinking? Now she would have to explain what side he fought on, and why. A question to which she had no answer. She poked the fire, nervously while all eyes turned toward her.

“Oh, Kätchen! Stasya! You’re both here!” Detlev skated to a sudden stop at the edge of the pond next to the campsite and clapped his gloved hands. Hans Stintzing stopped just behind him with slightly less grace.

Katherina was reprieved. “Yes, we got here only a little while ago.”

“Well, you just put on some skates right now and get on out here. I’m not letting you sit this one out, you two!”

“Don’t make us climb up there and drag you out,” Hans threatened in his rich bass voice.

Katherina seized the moment. “All right. I will, but only if Anastasia does too.” She dropped a pair of skates between them and began to buckle one on herself. Anastasia hesitated for a moment, exchanging glances with her husband, then accepted the skates. In a few moments they were on the ice, Detlev and Hans urging them away from the shore.

“There now. Aren’t we having great fun?” Detlev cajoled, obviously pleased with himself.

Hans skated alongside Katherina, stumbling occasionally, humming one of the waltzes from Rosenkavalier. She elbowed him amiably. “I see that you ice-skate pretty much the way you fence.”

“Mamselle,” he said, using one of Baron Ochs’ expressions, “I am not skating, just as I was notfencing. I am acting like I am skating. That is all an opera singer ever needs to do.”

“Hans, honey. I think the ladies would like a little time alone,” Detlev interrupted gently. “Sooo, we’ll skate around the pond with both of you because we all look fabulous, but then we’ll take you back to the far side and leave you on your own, n’est pas?”

“That’s a wonderful idea.” Katherina half glided where the ice was smooth and minced delicately whenever they hit lumpy patches. “Hmm. Not so easy to be an ice ballerina, is it?”

Anastasia also seemed to be concentrating on her feet. “It didn’t look this difficult in all those Breughel paintings,” she muttered. “Do you think they had better ice in the sixteenth century?”

“Painters are liars too,” Detlev said. “Do what Hans and I are doing. Pretend to ice-skate.”