Mephisto Aria (20 page)

Since the singers had rehearsed the vocal parts thoroughly in Drei Annen, they performed them only at half voice with the piano, pulling in a random colleague to stand in for the audience member. Radu seemed satisfied.

He turned his page again. “Let’s move on to Gluttony. Thomas, you’ll start the baritone while the witches distribute doughnuts and gelatin. The orchestra will be at full volume, so at the beginning of the third verse, I want you to start the food fight. Just mime it right now. We’ll have real gelatin on performance night.”

He signaled the piano and the team rehearsed all three scenes. Even without the pleasure of a gelatin fight, Katherina had to admit, it looked like it would be fun.

An hour later, Radu called the next sin. “All right. Pride. That’s your first aria, Katherina. Mephisto will spot audience members for you, so you should move toward them. Make eye contact, reach out and touch people.”

“The witches will bring up more people to the rock to make a pile for you to mount on. Mephisto will help you climb them, where you’ll sing the climax of the aria. Are the volunteers ready?” Four young people, music students from town, as Katherina learned, moved to the center of the Witches’ Altar. The scene had to be rehearsed several times while Katherina learned how to sing at the same time she clambered over the unstable bodies.

“We’ll work on this again tomorrow.” Radu looked at his watch. “Let’s move on to Greed.”

“Here the idea is to get the audience angry and ready for the two final scenes. Katherina, on your duet with Barbara, you go with the witches into the crowd and reach into people’s pockets. Whatever you find, wave in their faces before dropping it on the floor. We’ll also have handfuls of coins to throw.”

The duet worked well musically, with the feigned annoyance of the music students a lively foil. But would a real audience, caught off guard by the singers’ abuse, react with the same docility? Katherina had misgivings. Soon, however, Radu’s confidence in staging their movement and his frequent laughter swept them away.

It was midafternoon by the time they had rehearsed Sloth and Pride, and Katherina was muscle-sore. Radu’s energy was unflagging. “Wrath. That’s you, Matti.” A bulky, bearded man nodded. “You and Katherina will circulate during this duet, punching and slapping the audience. Just hard enough to get them riled. The vocal range is from forte to fortissimo. The orchestra will be pumping out the rhythm. Bump pah boom, bump pah boom.” He imitated the bassoons.

“All right, witches, students, take your places. We’ll run through it from the bass entrance. Matti, are you ready? And let’s pick up the pace. We’ve still got some big sins to commit.”

It was four in the afternoon when Radu finally announced, “All right. This is the climax of the opera.”

Katherina rubbed her neck, imagining a hot bath back in her hotel.

“Mephisto?” He addressed Gustav, who gripped a gardener’s rake in place of the scythe he would carry in the performance. “This is where you begin the Dance of Death. The witches will herd people into a line behind the seven sins. The line will follow you around the hall while the chorus sings the Dies Irae. Lead them around once and return to this spot. By then, Woman will be up on the Witches’ Altar.

“Katherina, this is where you sing your big aria. The orchestra will diminuendo so your entrance can be heard. The conductor will be behind you, so you’ll have to listen for the A-flat chord to start. Mephisto will be right below you and will approach while you sing the first four measures. Ready?”

He called to the pianist, “Two measures before the beginning of the aria.”

Katherina knelt on the rough, slightly tilted rock of the Witches’ Altar, supporting herself on her hands. At the sound of the chord, she began. “Es wird Tag! Der letzte Tag! Der Hochzeittag!”

Mephisto climbed up behind her, a leg on either side of her on the rock. Katherina sang the words of the tormented Woman to the empty air over the pit.

“Die Glocke ruft! Krack, das Stäbchen bricht!” She sang of the flashing of the executioner’s blade and of a bell ringing out a death knell. “Es zuckt in jedem Nacken die Schärfe, die nach meinem zuckt! Die Glocke!”

Mephisto grasped her by the shoulders and tried to cajole her to flee on horses that waited. Quickly, before the dawn. “Meine Pferde schaudern, der Morgen dämmert auf!”

Katherina threw out her arms, appealing to the heavens, to the angels to save her soul. Her last note was a sustained tremolo of terror. “Mir graut’s vor dir.”

Then Mephisto forced her down onto the rock surface. Kneeling on one leg over her prostrate body he sang her damnation in a high-pitched fortissimo.

Radu shook his head. “We need much more terror. In case you don’t know your Goethe Urfaust, there are no angels here. This is where Gretchen is doomed and damned. Blooie. Kaputt.” He chuckled. “Here Mephisto has the last say, so put some guts into it. Don’t worry about getting a few scratches.”

“As for Mephisto…” He addressed Gustav. “Don’t be afraid to be a little rough. Enjoy your victory. This is your message, the cold, terrible truth of the world. And to underscore your victory, right after ‘meine Pferde schaudern,’ you should rip off her gown. We’ll set it up so that it comes off easily.

What?” Katherina jerked her head toward him. “He’s going to tear off my costume? In front of hundreds of people?”

“Yes, exactly. As you sing your last line, ‘Mir graut’s vor dir,’ you will be nude.”

Corporal Pavel Platinkov was very fond of both dancers and drink. Neither one was much of a liability during his deployment as a border guard at the Brockenberg base. Though his experience with ballerinas had been limited to a single brief and tumultuous affair with a student at the Minsk Ballet School, he harbored the notion that all dancers were open to his attentions. Since ballet was generally not available during his military deployment to the Brocken garrison, he made do with his other favorite thing: vodka. To be sure, he was careful to consume only during off-duty hours. It was rarely to excess, but when it was, his comrades generally kept him out of trouble. They found him congenial in spite of his gawky behavior and his extremely long nose, which had earned him the nickname Vulture.

He happened to be on duty at the security gate when the troupe of civilians passed through and took up position in their newly built shelter over the Brocken Stone. He had no idea what the arrival meant, and when he heard that the visitors were rehearsing some spectacle that involved dancers, he immediately petitioned to attend. Permission, he was told, was contingent on whether troops would be allowed contact with the civilians at all, a decision that had not yet been made.

It was thus that both of his weaknesses fell upon him at the same time, on the second day of rehearsal. While off duty, instead of keeping to the barracks or confining himself to forest outings, which were approved, he consumed a significant quantity of vodka with his comrades and went off-limits to the Brocken Stone.

Pavel and his friends stood partially concealed by a truck, trying to get a glance of the dancers through their binoculars. Finally they did spot one whose peregrinations brought her close enough to examine in the field glasses. She retreated quickly, however, and further study of her seemed hopeless. In any case, Pavel Platinkov was by now quite drunk and needed to relieve himself. It was at this moment that a well-dressed civilian, who had been watching the rehearsal from within the circle, approached the delinquent Russians. At that exact moment, unfortunately, Pavel was relieving himself, although, because his back was turned, this was not evident. When he felt the firm clap of the stranger’s hand on his shoulder, he spun around so suddenly that the full stream of his urine splattered on the stranger’s shoe.

The civilian looked down at his reeking foot for the briefest second and then, with the hand that had lain on Pavel’s shoulder, slapped him sharply across the face.

Reeling from the blow and his own inebriation, Pavel staggered backward. Furious, he regained position and threw himself on the man and would have done him serious damage, had his comrades not pulled him off.

They dragged him back to his barracks where, later in the day, he was called before his sergeant. The gentleman in question had obviously filed a complaint, and for the two violations of going off-limits and attacking a civilian, Pavel was broken in rank from corporal to private, sentenced to punitive bathroom duty, and confined to barracks.

While he scrubbed toilets, stone-cold sober, Pavel had one sole thought. Revenge.

XXVI
Brockengespenst

Though Katherina’s legs ached from kneeling on the cold rock, and she almost staggered, she left the performance site the minute rehearsal was concluded. Dazed and furious at the thought of being tricked, she was in no mood to banter with the others. The young ones seemed to cluster adoringly around the frenetic Radu, and she had no patience for that. She wanted nothing more than to get back to the hotel, have a bath, and telephone her agent.

There had been no mention of nudity in the contract, of course. Staging details were never part of a business agreement. But if that was the case, could she be forced to disrobe against her will? Whose decision was it in the first place, she wondered, if not the stage director’s? And what would happen if she refused?

As she limped past the soldiers standing guard before the entrance, they seemed to laugh at her, though it could have simply been her grim mood. Sullen, she made her way carefully along the frozen path leading down to the train station. The night sky was beginning to thicken with mist and the air was damp on her face. She formulated phrases of complaint to make to Charlotte or to whoever was responsible for the oversight. Anastasia, she was sure, would not have tolerated such staging.

Finally she reached the station itself, a looming gray-black shadow guarded by another detachment of Grenzpolizei. She was the first of the opera team to arrive and submit her identification once more to scrutiny. The pass-control guard motioned her out onto the station platform to wait. She was sorry now she had stormed off without the others. She did not relish the thought of standing there alone with idle soldiers and so she wandered to the far track along the ridge where, that same morning, she had been able to look over the entire valley.

She sat down on one of the viewing benches and pulled her scarf up over her nose and mouth. The stone bench was cold where she sat, but the rest of her was warm inside her cloak. Below her feet, clouds drifted across the dark valley and lifted toward the ridge. Between them, patches cleared momentarily and revealed other, lower mountain peaks, black in the distance. She stared dreamily at the ragged clouds that blew past her, gauzy variations of the white tree “witches” far below, and drowsiness overtook her. She relaxed, letting herself doze; the train would arrive in a few minutes and the noise would waken her. Her thoughts, of staging details, of sacrificial altars, and of flying snow-witches jumbled in her fading consciousness and she let her head fall forward.

The crunch of footfall on snow awakened her suddenly. Sleep-dazed she stared into the fog that had gathered over the valley. It was a wall of gray, so dense it threw back shadows. She tried to make sense of the terrifying images that suddenly appeared.

Something alien and monstrously long moved toward her on spindly legs, some otherworldly creature, shadowed on the screen of mist, a sphere of light like a halo around its head. The monster wavered, phantomlike, approaching her as from another world. She cringed.

“I’m sorry if I frightened you,” a familiar voice said gently.

“Mr. Raspin. No, I was just dozing, I think, and I only saw your shadow.” She rubbed her eyes. “You had a halo.”

He sat down next to her on the bench, and the gray giant suddenly shrank. “The fog does strange things, doesn’t it?” Raspin pointed up at the ball of light that still shone on the fog over both their heads. “It’s called the ‘Brockengespenst.’ Look, the halo is just the station light being reflected back on the water droplets. Apparently it’s fairly common here.” He lifted an arm that was reflected long and ghostly on the mist in front of them. “You see? Nothing to be alarmed at.”

“No, of course not. So silly of me.”

“It does throw people. But after a few more foggy nights like this one, you’ll become an expert.” His voice became lighter. “How was the rehearsal? Did Mr. Gavril explain our new approach to you?”

“Mr. Diener did. A Dionysian opera, he said. But listen, whose idea was it for me to appear half-nude at the end? On a freezing mountain top, that seems ridiculous, and completely unnecessary.”

“It lasts only a moment, so there’s nothing to be anxious about. And you won’t be cold. There will be a roaring fire right below you. The staging committee thought it would add to the dramatic value. You see, Fernsehen DDR will be filming the performance for broadcast on the real Walpurgisnacht at the end of April. That’s what we’re focusing on. That very dramatic moment is crucial. I can assure you, you won’t mind it at all when you’re caught up in the opera. The whole project is groundbreaking: the broadcast timing, the location, the agreement with the East German government. Your name will be known all over Germany, east and west.”

“I’m sure the staging committee knows what it’s doing, in light of all that, but why must the ending be so…well…demeaning?”

“Demeaning? Ah, but you are taking it far too personally. The opera is about damnation, after all. About ruin, the wickedness of the world. It’s not a happy-ending story. The final aria Woman sings is an admission of all human guilt, and once she sings that, she becomes a sort of sacrificial lamb. It is an ancient and very honorable role.”

“You’re sure that’s what the composer had in mind?”

“Absolutely certain. You see, I am one of the composers. The opera is a collaboration between myself and Mr. Diener.”

“And the final aria?”

“Is from my pen. It is my aria, every word and note.”

Katherina was still furious. “Charlotte, didn’t you read the contract? Why do I have an agent if something like this slips through? Yes, of course I read it myself. There was nothing in it about nudity.”