Mephisto Aria (8 page)

I even ventured into the Russian sector to the Admiralspalast. Streets festooned now with red banners and portraits of Stalin. 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 parks 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.

Lucy was in agony, I could see, but she was so weak she just moaned. It was an hour of horror as the foetal shoulder presented instead of the cranium. Lucy screamed while Weidt forced it back and tried to turn it.

The baby presented, not the cranium, but its face, already gray. Blood trickled from the tiny nostrils. Bright blue eyes opened wide, seemed to look at me, begging for life, then closed again. Lucy was moaning, deep, desperate moans. Weidt pushed the forceps around the face, lacerating it, and slowly extracted the baby. A boy, fully developed, perfect.

Suffocated.

Weidt applied oxygen, trying to revive the infant, but nothing helped. “Natal asphyxia,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

I held Lucy’s hand, both of us sobbing, until the afterbirth came.

Katherina closed the journal and let it fall to the floor. Another revelation. She’d had a twin. A brother who lived for just a moment. Why had they never told her? She tried to imagine him, the child who had been the focus of all their hope. She could not conjure a face, only wide imploring eyes before death snatched him away at the very entrance to life.

But it was the last line of the entry that struck her like a blow. In clear script, as if her father had written it with loving care, were the words, “We named him Florian.”

XII
Salzburger Festspiel

Katherina stared out of the train window at the winter landscape just before the Austrian border. The air was frigid, but no snow had fallen and the hills, meadows, and woodlands of Bavaria were various shades of gray.

It was good to get away from Berlin. Too much was unresolved, confused, churning in her head. Too much hinted of wrongdoing, shame, absurdity. What did a stillborn infant have to do with a suicide thirty years later? Why ask forgiveness from a child who never lived? She no longer knew her own family, what she came from or who she was.

Well, Sabine had known her all right. Had known something very important, for about fifteen minutes, and then never called again. The journal and Sabine’s conquest had been like blows from two directions. Katherina felt suspended, thrown from the safe space she had inhabited her whole life, and not yet landed in any new place she understood.

The journal had become an obsession, like a mystery she could not put down. She had read the early entries with morbid fascination but the stream of revelations had overpowered her; she needed time to absorb them lest they drown her.

She had resolved to stop reading at least for a few days, to clear her head and focus on the Salzburg engagement. Meanwhile, she carried the journal with her in her music bag like a talisman charged with the presence of her father, even while she no longer knew who he was.

More urgent matters demanded attention now. For the last week she had studied the Rosenkavalier score day and night until she knew every note and syllable of her part. Now she needed to integrate the stream of music in her head into a stage performance with other singers.

More importantly, she needed to hear the other voices, to rehearse the ensembles: the several duets and the spectacular final trio. She hoped the sheer force of will was enough to accomplish in seven days what the rest of the cast had been doing for a month. Yet, the pressure was in its own way a blessing; it took her mind off her personal problems.

She pulled her charcoal gray cape up higher on her shoulders. An expensive cloak, an extravagance, really, that she had allowed herself as a form of solace. With its hood and sweeping width, it was a bit theatrical, but blissfully warm, and there was no harm in an opera singer dressing like…an opera singer.