Mephisto Aria Read online

  Katherina felt her jaw drop and she closed it again. She was being offered the opportunity of a lifetime.

  “Yes, of course I can. I am already familiar with it,” she lied. No matter. She could learn it. She felt something tugging her arm and realized von Hausen was shaking her hand.

  “Excellent. It’s settled then. I’ll have Salzburg contact your agent tomorrow. It would be lovely if you could manage to fly to Salzburg on Tuesday.”

  Katherina nodded energetically, prepared to agree to anything. Tuesday, Monday, in fifteen minutes, if necessary.

  Something moved in the distance and she glanced past von Hausen’s face back into the green room. Sabine was gone, but on the far side of the room, Gregory Raspin was smiling in her direction.

  X

  Affrettando

  “You were right after all, Charlotte,” Katherina said into the phone. “Things are really beginning to fall into place. Just imagine. Three engagements in three months: Tosca, Carmina Burana, and now Rosenkavalier. Does this mean I’m ‘arriving’?”

  Charlotte’s voice seemed even chirpier than usual. “I told you this would happen. You’re a great soprano and I’m a great agent. It was only a matter of time. Salzburg is a major step. If the right people hear you, and they probably will, a recording could be next. I’ll put out feelers with Deutsche Grammophon. Then, if we could just get you a broadcast, your career would take off like a rocket.”

  “It’s all happening so suddenly. I keep looking over my shoulder to see if I’m going to be hit by a bus or something.”

  Charlotte’s high voice made her chuckle sound almost like a giggle. “Oh, Katherina. You’re always making deals with the universe, as if every bit of good fortune had to be offset by a disaster. Just relax and enjoy it. You’re doing everything right. Just learn your role, be nice to everyone in Salzburg, and let me take care of all the rest, okay?”

  “I’ll do all those things. It’s good to have you on my side. If I need anything in Salzburg, I’ll give you a call.” Katherina hung up, then sat for a few minutes savoring the sense of accomplishment. She had worked hard, done everything she was supposed to, and success was the result. Charlotte was right, it was silly superstition to think that good fortune and bad fortune had to balance out. That attitude had come from her father, she knew. His cynicism was natural, she supposed, seeing that he had lived through so much horror and difficulty, but she wished now that he were still alive so she could both prove him wrong and make him proud.

  Well, if she could not talk to him, she could at least “listen” to him for an hour—and pay him a symbolic visit. She had finished reading all the war entries, things could only get better, and now she was curious again. The journal was where she had left it, on the table next to the sofa, so she settled in again and opened it. She had left off where he had decided to change his identity. Did he describe meeting his wife—her mother? The birth of their daughter? It occurred to Katherina there might be descriptions of her. It was time for another descent into the past.

  Berlin, October 7, 1945

  Schalk was as good as his word. I met him at the opera house and we made the deal. Ten days later he had new papers for me. Zeugnis, medical certification, Soldbuch identifying me as a field doctor with the Wehrmacht. An exact duplicate of my original German papers, but under the new name.

  I’ve nothing material to go back to anyhow. Family and house destroyed. Nothing left to claim, and under German law, Sergei Marovsky was a criminal. He’s one of the war dead now, and Sergei Marow, who suddenly exists, is a civilian registered in the British sector.

  I gave Schalk all the money I had, but he said he was more interested in my future services. Loyalty during the hard times, he explained. It’s a deal I’m willing to make.

  Berlin, October 17, 1945

  I’ve found a room with Herr and Frau Wengler, in exchange for work. Frau Wengler, who is old and weak, stands in the food lines while Herr Wengler and I forage. We scavenge for coal near the railroad lines, but it often isn’t enough. We have better luck with a handsaw in the bombed-out houses. We dig down under the brick and usually find wood left from the interior walls.

  I’ve begun to forage in the countryside on the Wenglers’ bicycle. I pedaled to the Autobahn and found I could grab hold of one of the wood-burning trucks. They don’t go very fast, so I can hang on to the rear and be dragged along for kilometers. The farms and villages outside Berlin are reachable now and have food to sell or exchange. I brought back potatoes and carrots.

  November 1, 1945

  It was inevitable, I suppose. The victors have set up a military tribunal in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. They’re trying the leadership of the Nazi party, the SS, the SD, the Gestapo, the SA, and the High Command of the German Armed Forces. The charges are crimes against peace (I wonder what that means), wars of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

  Victor’s justice. Plenty of loathsome Germans in the dock, to be sure. Mass murderers and accomplices of mass murderers. They are drenched, up to their filthy necks, in blood. Not only for the industrial-scale slaughters of Jews and Gypsies, Slavs, and dissidents and homosexuals, but for ripping away civilization altogether, making us all savages for five years.

  But who will try the victors for their savagery? The British and Americans who roasted 200,000 civilians in Dresden? The Americans who bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Who will—some day—try Stalin and Churchill and Truman for their blood thirst? Probably no one. Their history books will change the whole story to a tale of good and evil, removing the nuances. No army or nation ever says, “We were monsters, but we won.”

  January 1, 1946

  Everyone lives from day to day. Last night Wengler exchanged a load of firewood with the neighbor for some schnapps. A foul homemade brew bartered from some farmer. It didn’t take much to make us all drunk. I went outside to clear my head and it was snowing again, a bad sign for the New Year. I can’t see a snow-covered field without remembering snow drifting down on the frozen Volga, blowing over lines of men as far as the eye could see, marching into captivity. Soldiers, wounded boys falling by the roadside, covered by snow while they’re still alive.

  The flakes dissolved on my arm, all around me countless snowflakes falling. Like the millions lost. All of them loved by someone. Snow is my shame and accusation. I spent the first hour of the New Year in mourning.

  March 30 1946

  I’ve found work at the Johannes hospital. Doctors of any sort are scarce and they’re glad to have me. Very different from war hospitals; no battle wounds or trauma to treat. Patients arrive with pneumonia, typhoid, diphtheria, but we have no medicine. And they are so undernourished they can’t recover. Children and the old die quickly of dysentery, tuberculosis, jaundice, and even the young women look old and haggard.

  Wards crowded and dirty. Hygiene impossible with dust and dirt everywhere, on everyone’s clothing. So little plumbing in the city; people bring their filth with them into the hospital. No soap to launder the bedding, no bleach to wash the floors.

  Schalk has begun calling in his payments. Private appointments for his “clients,” men with political ambitions in the new regime, and their women. I do the occasional abortion for their girlfriends, or treat their syphilis, and they supply the penicillin themselves. God knows where Schalk gets it for them; we have none in the hospital. He’s a master of exchange and he uses some war-proof currency.

  I wonder if I dare ask him… No, not yet.

  April 2, 1946

  Berlin has no food but concerts everywhere. In schools, garages, sport halls, living rooms, any place with a roof. During daylight hours when the streets can still be traveled. People arrive by the odd streetcar—a few are still in service—or by bicycle, by foot, sometimes from far away. Germans, Russians, refugees. It distracts from the hunger, and the misery.

  I even ventured into the Russian sector to the Admiralspalast. Streets festooned now with red banners and portraits of Sta
lin. The Russians trying to incorporate Eastern Germany, and Berlin, into the Soviet block. The audience had a scattering of Russian officers, whom I carefully avoided, a few British, many Berliners. We paid in cigarettes, eggs, bread, potatoes. The hall was freezing and we sat in coats and hats. The singer, Lucia Berning, wore a heavy woolen shawl over her concert gown, and when she sang, we could see the steam rise from her mouth. She sang a few Schubert lieder and then popular songs: “Mack the Knife,” “Pirate Jenny,” “Falling in Love Again,” “Lili Marlene.”

  Went to talk to her afterward. She’s very small. Dark hair. Fine nose, eyelashes black and long over bright blue eyes, lips like a Renaissance cherub. An echo of the one who haunts me.

  April 8, 1946

  I’ve been to all of Lucia’s concerts, and she seems happy to see me. The last time I gave her a package of ersatz coffee and sugar, and I’ve promised to bring her some coal. No one else is looking after her. She’s frail and of course malnourished, and I can’t understand how none of the sicknesses that have swept through Berlin have gotten her. She is just as hungry as the rest of us, but when we were sitting a few days ago outside the clinic eating our precious bread, she fed a small portion of hers to some sparrows. I said it seemed wasteful, and she answered, “Don’t you want the birds to return? It’s their land too.” I agreed, and asked how, in the middle of squalor and defeat, she managed to be almost cheerful. “Not cheerful,” she said. “Just grateful for surviving. You could show some gratitude yourself and spend a few crumbs on the poor sparrows.” Just then one of the birds landed on her palm, but by then a little bit of my heart was there too.

  April 25, 1946

  I visited Schalk again. I’d been treating his friends for weeks so I thought by now I had credit with him. I asked him to get me some fresh meat so I could give it to Lucia. He got it, of course, but in return I had to do an abortion on a young woman for him. He said she was eighteen, but she looked fifteen. Or forty. There’s no way to tell in these hard times when no one is a child anymore. This one wouldn’t talk, just came and went silently. I have no compunctions about terminating a pregnancy, but in this case, I couldn’t escape the feeling of being complicit in something awful, though I didn’t know in what.

  Lucia showed up at the clinic again. We see each other a lot now and she has offered to mend my torn jacket for me. Although battlefield surgery taught me to use a needle and thread better than any seamstress, I was touched that she offered. I’ve decided “Lucia” is too opera-heavy for her, tiny thing that she is. I call her Lucy.

  May 14, 1946

  Finally, Lucy let me come home with her. On a street where every house has been blasted, her building had lost its top floors, but two stories were left. Miraculously, there was still plumbing, and they ran a cable down the street to a line for electricity during the hours when the grid was on.

  We talked about her background and mine. Her father a socialist, killed by the Nazis, her mother a Volksdeutsche killed by Russian troops invading Berlin—the soldiers I arrived with. My parents killed by Allied bombs. Plenty of guilt to go around. She shares a kitchen and bathroom with two old gentlemen, brothers, I think. I saw them when I passed their room in the morning. They just nodded.

  Lucy’s room was small and cold, and we lit a candle. We shivered for a while until we got used to being in each other’s arms. There was no talk of love, or passion. The world has just fought a war with passion and we’ve had enough of it. We settle for solace, a little warmth at night.

  Katherina held the journal open on her lap to the May 14 page and brooded on the entry. It was strange to read about the courtship of her parents. It seemed emotionless. Was it the difficult times that rendered romance a luxury? Was her father simply incapable of expressing his feelings? Or did they both have some emotional deficiency that she had inherited?

  It would explain the lack of excitement in her relations with men, the disconnect between her heart and her sex. All through school, she had no shortage of good comrades, men whose strength and laughter she found endearing. But none had ever swept her off her feet. And the very few she had been intimate with had stirred only the minimum of physical response.

  What did it mean, then, that Sabine Maurach had reached a part of her that none of her lovers at university had? Sabine, whom she didn’t even much like.

  Was her emotional coldness an effect of childhood guilt? From the knowledge that her feverish embrace had transferred a deadly infection to someone who loved her? Was she crippled by the knowledge that she had killed her own mother?

  Plagued by self-doubts, she fell into troubled sleep.

  Katherina had the dream again, the recurring nightmare she had suffered while recovering from the sickness. It was of a performance she had to give, but only after she had paid some terrible price. Again and again she dreamt of having to exchange something precious for stage success. This time the negotiation was with Sabine. And when Katherina tried to step out on stage, she opened her eyes in her own childhood bedroom.

  She breathed slowly, letting herself waken fully, then turned on the light beside the bed to clear her head of the terrible images. The dream had appeared so often in her youth that she knew its pattern, but now she seemed to understand its source. It was the “every good is paid for” fixation of her father that had become her own. The dramas of his life had been radically different from hers, but his part in them seemed frighteningly familiar. It was as if the same mentality lived in them both, that they had, in effect, been in two different operas but sung the same role, and it was one that involved guilt.

  The clock read 3:00 a.m. No matter. She switched on the light and reached again for the journal, realizing that she was hooked. Looking for references to herself now, she opened the precisely dated volume and leafed through it until the year of her birth.

  XI

  Piangevole

  June 25, 1948

  Just when Germany was beginning to recover, disaster has struck. I was on a train to Magdeburg when Russian soldiers boarded, demanding exit visas. No one had them, of course, because they didn’t exist until that moment. The soldiers pushed us back into our seats and barked, “Pass geben!” and “Nicht reden!” and I didn’t dare ask what was going on in Russian, for fear of drawing attention. I just sat in helpless fury like the others.

  After an hour of confusion, the train finally reversed direction, taking us back to the Hauptbahnhof. We found out that the whole city was blockaded. No traffic at all toward the west. I’m sure the same thought occurred to everyone. The west is where most of our food comes from. What will the British and Americans do? Their front-line soldiers have been sent home, while Berlin is still crawling with Russian troops.

  Hoarding has begun again, and ration cards—and hunger.

  August 14, 1948

  Will it work? The British and Americans are trying to supply the city by airlift, but their planes are too small and too few to carry everything a city needs. They arrive haphazardly and are subject to weather. Yesterday in heavy fog, a C54 carrying coal crashed and burned at the end of the runway. The one landing right behind it blew out its tires trying to avoid the burning wreck. A third had to touch down on a small side runway and skidded in loops. The whole airfield was in chaos. It feels like war again.

  September 20, 1948

  Lucy is pregnant. It couldn’t happen at a worse time. Food is rationed again and the black market is back overnight. Lucy has stopped giving concerts, though I can see it breaks her heart. Her health is poor and it’s a strain for her to go by foot to all the halls and stages. When we go on the train to the east zone to get produce from the farmers, she can’t carry any weight. Routes toward the east aren’t blocked, but you have to travel farther and farther out from the city to find anything, and in the winter, it’s grueling for her.

  November 8, 1948

  Most of the available coal goes for industry and there’s little left for heating. People go out at night and cut down the trees in the park
s for firewood. People are pulling up the grass and mixing it with their potato ration, just to have a little more in their stomachs. Schalk delivers whatever I ask for, but I hate the counter-favors. He sends me his other “clients” for special medical treatment, usually for syphilis. Some of them are very young, which sickens me. How do twelve-year-old children get syphilis?

  December 19, 1948

  The planes roar into Tempelhof in an endless stream, one every three minutes. They arrive so close together now you can’t separate the engine sounds. It’s all just one long drone, soft, then loud, then soft again. At first we couldn’t sleep, but we’ve gotten used to the great dark wasps that bring in food and coal. I’ve volunteered to help unload the flights. There’s no payment, but they feed us a hot meal afterward along with the airmen. The G.I.s are huge, sleek and well fed, the way victors always are. Some of them very handsome. A few have been arrogant, but most are cheerful, open, and friendly in a superficial way. They all chew gum, their jaws constantly moving up and down, like they never finish eating. Except for “Kommen Sie hier, Fräulein,” none of them speak German, so conversation is impossible.

  May 11, 1949

  The blockade is lifted. A great embarrassment for the Soviets, who had to back down. The supply planes are still arriving, though. I suppose because no one can be sure the whole thing won’t be reversed. As soon as fresh food was available, I used all our food coupons to buy milk, meat, and vegetables for Lucy, though it may be too late to help her or the baby.

  May 15, 1949

  Three years as a battlefield medic did not prepare me for this. I stood by, helpless, while Dr. Weidt attended. I argued for a caesarian section but Weidt said ether was “too scarce to waste on childbirth.” So my poor Lucy suffered twenty hours of labor before the first baby was delivered. A girl. But the long labor caused hemorrhaging in the second infant.