Mephisto Aria Read online

  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.”

  III

  Malinconico

  Night fell finally, and the shock of discovery had muted to burning curiosity. Tomasz and Casimira, as sh
e expected, knew nothing about another family name, and Katherina declined to inform them of the journal. Clearly, if there were answers to the mystery of her father, she would have to look for them in his writings.

  Tentatively, as if before a hazardous venture, she settled onto the sofa and studied the slender volume. The few Cyrillic pages tucked in the front were a puzzle and would have to wait for a translation. She thumbed through the rest of the journal. Though written in a variety of pens and pencils, sometimes hurriedly, other times with precision, all the entries were in the same legible hand. She hesitated again, as she had before her father’s study, reluctant to intrude even farther into an obviously private domain. But then she asked herself, Why does a man write things down unless he wants someone to read them?

  She wiped her hand once again over the cover, brushing away dust, and folded it back to the opening page. She was not prepared for the shock of the first entry.

  February 20, 1943

  I cut off Georgi Adrianovitch’s legs today. More precisely, I assisted at their amputation. But when he regained consciousness, it was me he saw, and he screamed. Finally we calmed him down and got him to understand that it was an exchange he had to make, his deal with the devil. He bought his life, and a trip home, but he paid with his legs. I could sympathize. I’ve made a deal too, but I paid with my soul.

  I’ve started my journal again, this time in German. If it’s confiscated or captured, all that anyone will find are the broodings of a coward. No military information here, not a word about Stalingrad.

  Commander Chuikov needs me for only half an hour every day; the rest of the time he’s ordered me to the field hospital. I’m assigned to gangrene amputations. Cutting away dead flesh suits my state of mind. I’m dead myself.

  Georgi Adrianovitch was a special case, a Stalingrad hero, wounded twice before and sent back to the front. Not this time. He has a new row of shiny medals for his chest, but no legs. And this is me now, with legs but no heart. No more writing pretty phrases in Russian. That was the Sergei of Stalingrad.

  Katherina laid the journal aside for a moment and rubbed the bridge of her nose, as if that could dispel the confusion. Then she read the entry a second time, trying to absorb it.

  Apparently, Sergei Marovsky had been a front-line surgeon with the Red Army. That explained the uniform. Well, no. It didn’t so much explain it as add another layer of mystery. How had a German citizen become a Soviet doctor? Had he defected to the Russians? If so, why had he never mentioned it? What had happened at Stalingrad? Most unfathomable of all was how he could have served Vasily Chuikov. Even she knew he was the commander of the Russian troops that had invaded Berlin with the savagery of a Mongol horde. And how, after all that, did this Doctor Marovsky metamorphose into a soft spoken-German dermatologist with a tiny practice in the suburbs of Berlin? So utterly illogical. The journal seemed like a piece of fiction, and if she closed it, reality would return. Except that her father would still be dead, and the Russian uniform would still be lying unfolded on the floor.

  “Katya, there’s a telephone call for you.” Casimira stood in the doorway wiping her hands on the dishtowel she seemed to always have. “She says she’s your agent.”

  Katherina followed her back to the living room and lifted the handset. “Charlotte? Yes, the interment is tomorrow. After that I suppose I’ll stay here for a few days to put things in order.” She looked around a living room that was already immaculate.

  “You want me to do what? Carmina Burana? I don’t know.” She shook her head, though there was no one in the room to see it. “I can’t think about a concert right now.”

  Charlotte Lemke persisted. She pointed out that the engagement was three weeks away, in Hamburg—an easy train ride from West Berlin, had an undemanding part with only three rehearsals, and paid a good fee. More importantly, she went on, it was with Joachim von Hausen, who was conducting the next season in Salzburg. What’s more—Charlotte tossed her last card on the table—in three weeks Katherina would prefer to work any place at all rather than stay at home staring at the walls in deep mourning.

  Katherina glanced back toward the study where a performance that Joachim von Hausen conducted had hypnotized her for an hour. He seemed a witness to the family mystery now.

  “All right. Tell them I’ll do it.”

  IV

  Affannoso

  Clasping his hands in front of him, the minister droned, “Vater unser, Der Du bist im Himmel…”

  Katherina glanced around at the circle of people gathered at the grave. She recognized all of them: her father’s colleagues from the hospital where he had worked on Fridays, musician friends, various neighbors. None was called Florian. A man stood off in the distance, elderly and distinguished, but was not part of the funeral party and he wandered among the other tombstones.

  Katherina had debated briefly whether to invite people at all to the interment. There was something so archaic about a public burial. But she also decided that ceremony and a symbolic joining of friends’ hands negated some of death’s terrifying arbitrariness. Besides, not to have a public service with parson and prayer would have suggested shame at her father’s suicide. She was not ashamed. Suicide was a tragedy, not a sin. They were not in the middle ages.

  Pious Catholics that they were, Tomasz and Casimira had lowered their heads and closed their eyes during the prayer, moving their lips along with the pastor’s recitation. But Katherina did not pray for her father and knew she would not meet him in the hereafter. The only part of him that “lived after” was that part that lived in her. When she brooded, listening to music, a bit of him nestled in her mind. She felt her gentle mother too, whenever she was girlish or fussed over small soft things, but mostly it was her father whom she could sense looking out at the world through her eyes. Yet now she wrestled with the contradiction, that she could sense him that way and yet not know him.

  “…denn Dein ist das Reich und die Kraft und die Herrlichkeit in Ewigkeit. Amen.” The minister finished, and the men donned their hats again against the increasing wind. The pallbearers stepped forward quickly and took hold of the ropes to lower the casket into the ground.

  When it reached the bottom of the pit and the ropes were drawn out, Katherina limped on cold feet to the pile of sod. Snow had begun to fall during the ceremony and the pile was already covered with a dusting of powder. The handful she grasped was a mixture of dirt and ice. She leaned out over the grave and murmured to the coffin, “Who were you, then?” She crumbled the dirt through her fingers and shuddered as the heavier lumps thumped onto the casket lid.

  The snow became heavier, and crystals soon covered the casket in the grave pit. Katherina shivered with the cold and with the thought of her father being consigned to so awful a place. She called up childhood memories of him, the bulwark of their little family.

  He had been attentive, though given to bouts of melancholy, which he often cured by listening to music. Throughout her childhood, he had taken her and her mother to concerts, cultivating her taste in music. Curious, she recalled for the first time in years that the terrible sickness had struck her at the opera. Though it had happened twenty years before, she remembered now precisely that it was Gounod’s Faust.

  It was a strange evening. As the three of them took the Strassenbahn to the opera house, her father talked about the libretto, rambling on about guilt and retribution. Faust, he said, was the story of all ambition. Nothing good was ever gained without payment. And everything could be taken away again. “Like that,” he said, and snapped his fingers for emphasis. The warning made no sense to her then, but it had stayed with her.

  Someone coughed, signaling that the ceremony was over. The others all had thrown down their handfuls of sod, and the gravediggers had arrived with their shovels to finish the job. She thanked the minister, shook hands mutely with all the visitors, and began the walk back to the car with Tomasz and Casimira.

  She touched the gardener’s sleeve. “Tomasz, did my father kn
ow anyone named Florian? Someone he might have quarreled with, or who might have visited him recently?”

  Tomasz thought for a moment. “Not that I recall. ’Course he might’ve had friends we didn’t know. Not many people visited. He was kind of, you know, solitary.”

  Katherina shivered again, numb from standing in the cold and from the emotional strain. As she left the cemetery grasping Casimira’s arm, she glanced around to see if the distinguished-looking stranger had found the tombstone he was looking for, but he had disappeared.

  Tomasz and Casimira followed her into the house, wiping damp shoes on the mat in the entryway. “Shall I make tea, dear?” Casimira asked.

  Katherina understood that the offer was simply a way to delay leaving her alone, but, in fact, she did not feel like talking. There would be things to discuss in the coming days: whether and when she might move back permanently, how to finance the continued maintenance, when to meet with the lawyer. But not now. The shock of a family suicide had dissipated, and fatigue had dulled her mourning. Now she felt something else, the hint of anger. It had nibbled at the back of her mind while she made the funeral arrangements, but now she felt cheated, doubly bereft, for Sergei Marow had both died and robbed his daughter of himself. A stranger lay in the family plot, someone who’d had a different name, worn a different uniform, done battlefront surgery on Russian heroes.

  And yet, she was intrigued. Who was Sergei Marovsky? Was he someone she might have liked? There was only one way to find out.

  Casimira still stood with the kettle in her hand, waiting for an answer.

  “Oh, no, thank you. I’d really like to be alone for a while. I’ll be fine.” Katherina kissed her on the cheek and nudged her gently toward the door.

  Strange how there are different kinds of quiet, she thought. Her father’s house was not just soundless now, it also held no expectation of sound. He would not stride through the door with the mail or stand in front of her talking, jingling the change in his pocket, as he liked to do. She remembered that about him now, that he sometimes played with coins, rubbing his fingers over them absentmindedly, as if reassuring himself that he had them. He was otherwise neutral about money, neither a big spender nor particularly thrifty. He simply seemed to be glad that there was money in the house to take care of things. Did that attitude come from the postwar years, when trade was the main currency?