Mephisto Aria (21 page)

Charlotte’s response was calm. “Well, dear, I have it here in front of me, and on page three, under ‘special conditions,’ it says specifically that you agree to all staging, including unusual props and partial nudity. How could you have missed it?”

“I’m sure it wasn’t in the draft he gave me. He must have inserted the clause in the new contract, the one he handed me to sign. That’s fraud, isn’t it?”

“Only if you can prove he did it. Do you still have the draft?”

“Not here. Besides, contracts are your business. I assumed you had your copy and the matter was settled.”

“Well, I do have it, and it has the nudity clause. Listen, it’s not such a big deal. You are their star. They’re not going to throw you out and get someone else just because you refuse to take off your shirt. Certainly not at this late date.”

“Are you sure?”

“Relax. Lots of opera singers have costume issues. Beverly Sills once cut hers in half and demanded a new one. Just tell him you overlooked the clause and that it’s a step farther than you’re willing to go. Period. How long would it take for them to make you a skimpy shift? Something flesh colored. We’re not talking the Queen of the Night’s costume here. I’ll give them a call tomorrow, but they are within their legal rights, so your main weapon is going to have to be your charm.”

“I suppose you’re right. I just have to stand up to them.”

“That’s my girl. Oh, by the way. I forwarded a package to you. Someone left it for you at the Salzburg hotel at the last minute and the staff apparently overlooked giving it to you. The hotel sent it to the Festspielhaus and they passed it on to me.”

“What is it?”

“I have no idea. It was in a box with the Pension Stein name on it. I just put another label on it and sent it on. You should be getting it in a day or two.”

“Were there any other messages for me? Any calls?”

“No. Are you expecting something?”

Katherina’s heart sank. “Nothing special. If anyone important calls, you can give them this number.”

“If you say so. But it’s hard to get through to you. I called several times and they always said you were unavailable.”

“Well, I suppose it’s true. They work us pretty hard.”

“Anyhow, listen, you’re settled in on this engagement, and we have nothing on the calendar until next month. I’ve got my other artists in place for a while so I’m taking a short vacation the day after tomorrow. You can call my assistant for anything you need, and of course in an emergency, she can reach me in Majorca. Otherwise, I’ll talk to you in a week.”

“All right, then. Have a nice trip.” Katherina hung up with a faint sense of abandonment.

XXVII
Molto Agitato

“You bastard!” Anastasia crumpled the tiny silk panties she had just found in the bathroom and threw them at her husband. “We haven’t been home more than two weeks and already you’re screwing your tarts again. In our bed! All that time in Salzburg trying to patch things up, that meant nothing. You are such a liar, Boris.”

“What do you want me to say? A man has appetites.”

“That can only be satisfied by some twenty-year-old who’ll let you fuck her to get a recording contract?” Anastasia snapped back.

“No, but by a woman of any age who seems to actually want to be fucked.”

“What are you talking about? I’m always there for you. For five years I’ve been there for you.”

“That’s a load of crap, and you know it. For five years, or at least the last three of them, you’ve been on one engagement after another. And even when you were home, you seemed always to just be doing your duty.”

“Don’t twist this thing around to blame me for your acting like a goat. You’ve been doing those girls for years, getting all the erotic enthusiasm you wanted, and I never complained. I kept waiting for you to grow up and realize that marriage was more than daily orgasms.”

“Don’t lecture me on what marriage is, Stasya. I never promised you anything except support for your career, and for five years you got what you needed from me. It was never a real marriage. Hell, it was a goddamn business arrangement.”

“It was enough of a marriage to make me pregnant, and now I need more from you than recording contracts. We discussed all that in Salzburg. I need a real family now to raise this baby.”

He picked up the scrap of red silk from the floor and folded it into his pocket. “You mean you want a nice docile house-husband who doesn’t demand sex too often. That’s not me, and you know it. Children were never part of our arrangement.”

“You want me to have an abortion? So things can go back to the way they were?”

“That’s your decision. But you know you can’t have everything—a glamorous career and a family. If you have an abortion I’ll pay for it. If you want to be a mother, I’ll send money, but I won’t come home at night to a screaming infant.”

Anastasia ran her fingers through her hair searching for new terms, trying to reframe the dispute. “Look, infancy doesn’t last forever.” She heard the whine in her own voice and hated it, but it was the only argument she had left. “We can hire help. A lot of opera singers have children. In a couple of years we can go back to this loose arrangement you are so fond of.”

“Listen to yourself. You still don’t see what I’m talking about. Our marriage has been theater the whole time, a contract we both agreed on and benefited from. I’m sorry this accident happened, but pregnancy was not in the contract.” He stormed out of the apartment and slammed the door behind him.

Anastasia stared, speechless, at the closed door. Betrayed. She fumed, less at Boris than at herself. All those quiet conversations in Salzburg with him, all those promises, though she realized in retrospect that Boris had simply repeated that he would support her no matter what. It was on that promise alone that she had made a painful sacrifice. For the word “support” she had closed a door to what might have been real happiness. But it was obvious now that all he had ever meant was money—the one thing she no longer needed from him.

She glanced over at the open score of Carmen that she had been reading and sighed. Boris had a point. She did want everything. How could a daughter of someone who named herself Olga Adrianovna Romanova not be ambitious? It was that very ambition, after all, that had enabled her to escape the grinding drudgery of Soviet Russia.

Singing with the Bolshoi fulfilled the dream of every music-loving child in Russia, and she had been happy—for a while. But the thrill did not last long. Within the first year, reality set in and she saw that it was a workplace like any other, subject to Soviet rules, overseen by commissars. New employees had to fill out questionnaires to prove they were good communists. The embarrassment of having a faintly Romanov mother, by then deceased, could be offset by producing evidence of a good communist father who fell in the Battle of Kursk, and of Uncle Georgi, who fought at Stalingrad.

But she hated living in the dormitory, since as a single person she did not qualify for an apartment, even a shared one. And she was decidedly single, having never felt the slightest interest in any of the men who courted her.

There were no contracts, only a monthly salary and a work assignment. Like any factory worker with a quota to fulfill, she could be assigned at any time to replace another singer. She could not tour, not even internally, without permission from management. And foreign engagements, even if she was invited to them, were like mountain peaks that she could reach only after she had battled her way through bureaucratic jungles.

It seemed like she was always poor. No matter how much fame she acquired, she earned honors, not money. Not until her last year in Moscow was she finally granted the coveted title “People’s Artist of the USSR,” which entitled her to a tiny rent-free apartment and permission to travel abroad. Like a bird released from a cage, she sang in Bulgaria and Finland, relearning the old operas in new languages. And she was always under the eye of KGB to guarantee her return to Moscow. Then came Paris, where she’d had enough.

But Boris was right. Her legal identity as Frau Reichmann meant nothing. Like her Romanov names and the pretty roles she was hired to sing, it was all theater. What was left of her behind all the masks? Was there anything still of Anastasia Ivanova? What was real?

The answer was obvious now. The baby was real, and she wanted it.

She wanted something else too, something authentic and untainted that had offered her genuine love. But she had already thrown that away, hadn’t she? Overwhelmed with regret, she broke into tears.

What would she do now? She had to take stock. Humbled, she asked herself what pieces were left to pick up. What other things had she neglected that might still be saved?

Then she remembered an envelope of pages in Cyrillic.

XXVIII
Trio Lascivo

The décor of the Drei Annen Gasthof, which Sabine had chosen for supper, was in an Alpine motif. A shelf above the bar held ice picks, spikes, hammers, and a variety of boot crampons. The oak walls were hung with poster-size black-and-white photos of mountain climbers in the early part of the century. Posing in simple wool trousers tucked into leather boots and with cotton ropes looped around their shoulders, they all looked pitifully underequipped for scaling anything more than the modest peaks of the Harz Mountains.

In the dearth of other available social life, Katherina had finally agreed to join Gustav and Sabine there for a post-rehearsal supper.

Throughout the meal, inconspicuously, she hoped, Katherina had been studying Gustav’s face. Something about it was not quite right. Or rather, something was just too right, as if someone had designed him. It was not merely that his eyebrows were partially plucked and then drawn in again in a V shape, which rendered him deliberately diabolical. There was something else. Then it came to her. It was his lips.

They were too full and curly, an artist’s rendition of sensuous lips that in fact rarely, if ever, occurred naturally. She had seen lips like that only once before, in photos of a famous movie made from an even more famous play.

“Gründgens,” she said suddenly.

“Excuse me? Gründgens what?” Sabine asked, her fork raised halfway to her mouth.

“He knows what I mean.” Katherina still stared at Gustav. “Don’t you? How did you do it? Not the eyebrows. Those are easy to change, but how did you get the lips so perfect? You took his name too, didn’t you?”

“What are you talking about?” Sabine apparently did not like to have anything in the conversation that she was not getting.

Gustav smiled with sexually explicit lips. “You have a good eye, Katherina. I’m impressed. It’s just a few injections. Approved, oh, maybe a year ago for use. It’s good, isn’t it?” He sipped at a tiny glass of schnapps, then licked his lips as if to display them in motion.

“More than good. The resemblance is nearly perfect, as much as I can recall from pictures. Gustav Gründgens died in the sixties, I think. Why did you do it?”

“I wanted this role. It suits my voice exactly, not to mention my career. All I needed was the look. With the face of the greatest Mephisto to have ever walked the German stage, how could I miss? And for the chance to perform on television, I’d have done a lot more. Injected anything, slept with anyone, knifed anyone in the back.” He raised one of his already-well-tilted eyebrows. “As it turned out, at least the knifing part was not necessary.”

Sabine reentered the conversation. “You think sleeping with me got you the role?”

“No, that I’m doing just for fun,” Gustav said, leaving the more risqué question unanswered.

Katherina moved the conversation as quickly as possible away from sex. “It’s an opera, not a movie, after all. You probably would have gotten the role anyhow on the basis of your voice.”

“Maybe so. But I don’t think the audition counted all that much. It’s really a soprano’s opera. The high points are all yours, though when you do your final aria, I’m right there and the camera will be on both of us.” He signaled the waiter to bring him another schnapps.

“I have the feeling it’s mostly going to be on me. Remember, I’ll be half nude. Obviously the decision-makers are going for the sensational. I don’t like it, and I plan to protest, when I work up the nerve.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the sensational.” Sabine shrugged. “I say the wilder the better. Why does opera have to be fat ladies standing in place and singing tunes that everyone already knows by heart?”

Katherina shook her head. “I’m not making a case for stand-and-sing opera. But the idea of stirring the audience to a frenzy frightens me a little. It’s potentially explosive. We don’t even know how they’ll get an audience up here. It’s a military zone, and I don’t see them inviting hundreds of white-haired German opera lovers inside for an evening. Don’t you have any misgivings about the whole thing?”

“Not at all.” Gustav pursed his Gründgens lips. “Aside from the fact that they’re paying us like kings, I trust Radu, and Friedrich and Gregory. They have a revolutionary vision, and I’m perfectly willing to get down in the mud, or rather snow, and pour my guts out for them. As Sabine said, ‘the wilder the better,’ and with her, that’s pretty wild.” He glanced sideways in a way that went past suggestive into the lewd. Noting that Gustav had referred to their patron by his first name, Katherina tried to keep the subject on the opera.

“You don’t think they’re playing with fire?”

Gustav laughed. “Are you joking? The fire’s the best part. That big crackling bonfire that’ll be blazing along the whole time just inches away from us. It’s ingenious, absolutely primordial. All that’s missing is a human sacrifice, but I don’t suppose they’ve auditioned anyone for that.” He laughed again and Sabine laughed with him as he downed his third glass of schnapps.

“And all that talk at the end about being rough with me,” Katherina continued. “Just how rough do you plan to be?”

The lewd expression returned. “It’s so delicious that you’re the innocent one. That practically gives me a hard-on, getting you to surrender that way. Don’t worry. I’ll only be as rough as you like me to be. But rough can be good. Have you ever tried it rough?” The ridges where his eyebrows would have been rose in two arcs.