They are back in their box, in the back row again, waiting for Die Walküre to start.
‘The notes do say it’s always been the most popular one with audiences,’ she says. ‘So that’s promising.’
‘Right,’ he says, slumped in his seat already.
‘A band of warrior women, you’ll like that. And there’s a wild man of the woods, he’s Siegmund.’
‘Siegfried?’
‘No, Siegmund. As opposed to Siegfried, who’s in part three. Yes, confusing. Anyway, he falls in love, Siegmund does, with his long-lost twin sister Sieglinde.’
‘That’s enough, thanks.’
‘Give it a chance.’
‘I don’t know why you’re making excuses for it. It’s inexcusable.’
At the first interval he races ahead to queue for drinks. As she dawdles on the stairs she is still caught in the music of that last scene, a door flung open and moonlight flooding in on its tide. Mond, she thinks to herself: moon. In her mind’s eye she sees the delicate and powerful moonlit scenes from early that afternoon, a roomful of paintings by Caspar David Friedrich in the Alte Nationalgalerie. In the rooms after that there had been a higher than usual incidence of antic skeletons, deathbed scenes and funerals. ‘They’re a bit samey after a while, aren’t they,’ Adam had said. ‘Let’s skip them.’ Surprised by the luxurious emptiness of the gallery, they had also found its attendants strenuously zealous compared to their counterparts in London. As soon as she had stepped into the first room a man in uniform had stopped her and mimed reproval with his wagging finger – her handbag on its shoulder strap must not be worn hanging to one side but must be slung across the front of her body. He had also demanded to see their tickets, the first of five attendants to do so in these almost-empty rooms during their visit of less than an hour.
Finding a space now at one of the high circular tables near the bar Tracey leans against the edge and turns on her Kindle. She is half listening to the conversation opposite. Business types, they look, so it will be client entertainment; an English couple with their German host.
‘You have been to Covent Garden?’ asks the woman, rather loudly and slowly, as though to a deaf person.
‘Yes, yes,’ the German replies. ‘It is very fine!’
‘And did you see many differences between there and here?’
‘Not many. But one thing I was shocked – the people putting their coats under the seats.’
‘That is true,’ says the other man. ‘It’s compulsory to check in at the cloakroom here, isn’t it. But we like to make a quick getaway, you see!’
‘It’s sort of Heavy Metal meets the Pre-Raphaelites, isn’t it,’ she says as Adam appears beside her.
‘More like Snow White meets the Odyssey,’ says Adam. ‘It’s a mess.’
‘I was meaning the audience more than the opera,’ says Tracey in a lower voice. She points out a number of Wild Men around them. While the women have short hair or sensible bobs, even the young ones, it is the men who monopolise the attention with their ponytails and beards.
‘And do you see how little colour they use? They’re all in blacks and browns and greys, the women as well as the men.’
‘Less frivolous than us,’ says Adam, scanning the room briefly.
‘But there is one bright colour they go for. The women, the ones who wear colour at all. Look – do you see? – it’s that harsh scarlet that looks no good on anybody: sex-shop red.’
‘Yes, you’re right,’ he says, following her gaze.
‘Red Riding Hood chic,’ she says, referring back to the shop window they had paused at that afternoon on their walk back to the hotel from Museum Island.
‘Extraordinary’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Talk about bedtime stories.’
The window of the sex shop had displayed a mannequin clad in short scarlet hooded cloak and thigh-high patent leather boots, a wicker basket over her arm and a six-foot-high cardboard cut-out of a leering wolf behind her. In the top corner of the window was a black-and-white photograph of a smiling woman in flying helmet and goggles. Oh, I’ve read about her, Adam had said. She’s a national institution, she really was in the Luftwaffe during the war, a proper Valkyrie; then she set up this string of sex shops and made a fortune.
Nothing much seems to be happening, she thinks now as she gazes at the stage. Half an hour into the second act and Adam is already asleep. There is a lot of self-justification and browbeating in this bit, the Kindle has revealed, and not a lot of action.
Yes, Fricka is fidelity and she’s a bore, an uptight bore, but she’s got right on her side. Unfortunately. Whether or not you live by the same code of honour as each other (thinks Tracey), whether you are mutually exacting, keeping each other up to scratch or – more commonly – one-sidedly so, like Fricka and Wotan; this is the question.
Fricka’s noble wounded look is cutting no ice, is it. Being hurt and good is not enough. Righteous indignation is a mug’s game. Oh (she thinks) but I want to feel simple generous warmth again and the desire to give!
This music is like dreaming; it’s like a waking dream, the way her thoughts are wheeling round the sky, hoch in der Luft, and the way time is swelling and expanding. Where are her old greedy self-pleasing daydreams? Dreams come first, before anything can happen you have to dream things into being. Desire is the motor so listen to it, she tells herself sternly; it can be damped down so hard over the years that it gets hopelessly lost.
Now Fricka is giving Wotan a hard time. Nag, nag, nag. What a thankless role. The whole institution of marriage is a bit Prussian, isn’t it; an oath of fealty; the public regulation of the private life. Under contract! Signed and sealed and silenced. Yes, loyalty inevitably seems to involve silence (she thinks) and perhaps that’s what music is for – it’s emotion in the air.
Beside her Adam gives a little snore.
Wotan is a bore too, though. He wants his cake and eat it. Now he’s boring on to Brünnhilde, a long screed of self-absorbed self-justification. On and on, he’s worse than Fricka. And Brünnhilde’s got to take it. She’s his daughter; she’s supposed to respect the arbitrary authority of this mixed-up old bully.
Adam’s father had been jealous of his boys and rivalrous, enraged by any little successes they had had and furtively savage in the ways he cut them down to size.
Where was Adam’s mother when all this was going on? ‘She should have protected us from him,’ he had once said. ‘Not him from us.’ Yes, that’s an undersung part of the duty of parents, thinks Tracey now: each must, as necessary, protect their children from the other.
All gone, now, though, their parents, and really it did not seem that there was very often an easy way out of this world.
‘That was a bit sudden,’ says Adam as they make their way to the bar area. ‘Wotan just waved his arm at the end there and that other one fell down dead. The one in the leather greatcoat.’
‘Oh, you were awake for that bit, were you?’ says Tracey. ‘It was pretty boring, though, that whole act, to be honest. Except at the end, then suddenly it was mayhem in the last three minutes.’
‘Yes, it got quite noisy then, didn’t it. That’s what must have woken me up.’
‘He’s gone off the rails, Wotan, he’s in deep trouble. Here’s our table and here are our drinks. Good idea, ordering them ahead. Shall we do a bit of speed-reading now on the Kindle to help with the last bit?’
‘OK, as long as you keep clicking on.’
‘“Hojotoho! Hojotoho!”’ Tracey reads aloud. ‘“A flash of lightning breaks through the clouds, revealing a Valkyrie on horseback. From her saddle hangs a dead warrior.” That’s right, that’s what they do, isn’t it, swoop down on battlefields and scoop up dead heroes to bring back to Valhalla.’
She looks up and catches the eye of the young woman opposite her at the table.
‘We need a translation,’ she explains, holding up the Kindle. ‘We cannot understand the words.’
‘No more can us!’ replies the
woman to laughter from her group. ‘The words of Richard Wagner, we cannot know what they mean!’
They look merry and nervous and friendly, this little group in their thirties, on a night out enjoying themselves.
‘Let’s get this straight,’ says Tracey. ‘Brünnhilde is Wotan’s daughter, right?’
‘Yes!’ the group replies.
‘And Siegfried is his grandson?’
‘Yes, yes!’
‘It’s incest?’
‘It is incest.’
‘So they’re doomed,’ says Tracey to general laughter.
‘It is, what do you say, interbreeding,’ one young man explains earnestly.
‘The Habsburg jaw,’ says Adam, thrusting out his chin and baring his lower teeth at him.
The young man recoils in alarm.
‘Everybody knows this bit, it’s famous,’ whispers Adam into Tracey’s ear as they lower themselves into the third act. ‘They used it in Apocalypse Now, it’s the bit where they go in with the helicopters.’ On the warpath, thinks Tracey; death as sexy. No, it’s not, it’s really not. It’s never sexy. The dead are nowhere. They’re nothing.
And yet. And yet here they all are, held in the music of a dead man. Making something out of nothing, she thinks, something that didn’t exist before; that’s what this is. Babies are how most people do it, but they don’t last. Death is the opposite: it makes nothing out of something and it lasts for ever.
How brave it had been of her father when, given a week or two to live, he had spent them ringing round to close his various accounts. ‘Very messy, probate,’ he had explained. He was a practical man and had wanted to make things easier for her mother once he’d disappeared. ‘You’ll have to wait seven to ten working days,’ the Nationwide girl had told him, reacting at first with incredulity and then with shock at the other end of the phone when he had explained why that might not be possible.
These warrior maidens are impressive creatures, Brünnhilde and Waltraute and the rest, noisy and vigorous (thinks Tracey, watching them as they leap around and wave their weapons). But in the end they’re good conformist girls. They’re doing what their dad tells them to do. They’re warlike, yes, but they’re never going to end up in charge and they don’t want to be in charge or even imagine being in charge. Loyalty, deference, obedience – these are their values. When it comes to it, though, is loyalty even a virtue? Or is it just a brainless self-abrogation, a slavish abandonment of responsibility? It’s a matter of belonging, perhaps. But where’s the intrinsic virtue in being loyal to your team or your father? It all depends on what you’re being loyal to; it’s no use at all if you’re being loyal to the wrong cause.
The way this music tells you how to feel, brooking no opposition (she thinks), it’s like the way film music goes to work. Here they are again, those gorgeous phrases from before, rising, swelling, imposing their own rhythms; and here’s that other theme, overwhelmingly beautiful, drawing up from the depths your own long-lost childhood feelings of entrancement and grandeur. The sound is vibrating through your body, invading your nervous system (she smiles uneasily at this thought). It is like being in love: fascinating. Something powerful is in the air, you can’t see it or touch it but it has taken control at the wheel.
It’s over. She starts to come down with some reluctance from the ravishing music of the last twenty minutes or so, and nudges Adam to open his eyes. Wotan has punished his favourite daughter for disobedience by striking her unconscious and surrounding her with fire. All round Brünnhilde little jets of flame had sprung up like the rings on a gas hob, she tells him on the way down the stairs; but, oh dear, some of them had gone out again before they were supposed to and the stage had finished in a shroud of dry ice.
‘The Valkyrie costumes were a disgrace,’ says Pauline once they are all packed into the minibus for the trip back to the hotel. ‘Those poor girls! Nazi uniforms, biking leathers; ridiculous.’
‘Such a lazy cliché,’ says Olive. ‘I quite agree.’
‘And the pole dancing didn’t work either, did it,’ says Clive. ‘They definitely looked out of their comfort zone there.’
‘Was it supposed to be like Torsten’s facing up to the past?’ says Tracey. ‘Though if so it wasn’t followed through. I mean, if the Valkyrie were the SS then Wotan should have been Hitler.’
‘Fricka as Goering,’ scoffs Howard. ‘Erda as Goebbels.’
‘Torsten really didn’t approve, did he, of having women in charge,’ says Tracey.
‘Yes, he was very scathing about the Minister of Defence being a woman,’ says Pauline. ‘I read somewhere she’s a doctor and she has seven children.’
‘Seven!’ says Tracey. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Personally I find it rather reassuring,’ says Olive. ‘There are no mothers to speak of in the Ring of course. Certainly not any good ones. Though in the end redemption is achieved by the Eternal Feminine.’
‘The what?’ says Adam.
‘Ah,’ says Olive gravely, turning her head to look at him. ‘It’s Goethe.’
‘Clive and Howard were both teachers,’ says Tracey, combing her hair at the bathroom mirror. ‘At the same school. And Olive used to teach piano before arthritis got into her hands.’
‘What about Pauline?’ says Adam beside her.
‘She started in retail, she told me, then she set up some sort of mail-order business later on. She’s interesting.’
‘You think everybody’s interesting.’
‘No I don’t. It was a good day though, wasn’t it?’
‘It was OK. Yeah. The East and the West, and seeing what’s left of the Wall.’
‘Twenty-five years ago,’ she says, ‘I was holding Matthew, he was two months old. I was feeding him and watching it on television, the Wall coming down. Now he’s twenty-five and it seems like the blink of an eye. I can remember my life before them, the boys, pretty much the same amount of time. I’ve still been childless for longer than I’ve had children. Just. Same goes for you.’
‘Mmm,’ says Adam, who is now cleaning his teeth.
‘Everybody was so happy, do you remember? Without breaking eggs! The first time in history!’
‘Mmm.’
‘Do you remember where you were? I know you were out.’
‘Training session,’ he says, spitting into the basin. ‘Another lifetime. Hung my boots up now.’
‘But if that’s the blink of an eye, twenty-five years, it’s only four blinks to be back at the start of the First World War. When our grandparents were children.’
‘Come to bed,’ says Adam from the bathroom door.
‘Remember how when the boys were little the best bit was always having a solid weight to sit on your lap and put your arms round? Do you remember?’
‘You put yourself and what you wanted first, always,’ says Tracey, lying in bed in Adam’s arms.
‘That didn’t mean I didn’t love you.’
‘I suppose that’s true.’
‘I still do.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’d have done a lot better if you’d been more like me.’
‘We wouldn’t still be married if I’d been more like you.’
‘You must have really wanted to stay married, then!’
‘I thought I could change it.’
Adam heaves a gusty sigh.
In the night she wakes and stares into the dark. As aches and pains stay with old soldiers, reviving fifty years on with changes in the weather, so these thoughts rear up to meet her in the small hours. I was frightened of doing harm, she thinks; I didn’t realise I’d end up harming myslef instead. Wide awake now she decides to take her notebook and phone off to the bathroom for another small-hours session with the notes and Google.
INFORMATION: The world’s first voluntary monuments to national shame include the Holocaust Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005) on a five-acre plot in plain sight of the Reichstag (meeting place of the Bundestag/German parliament). Across t
he road in the Tiergarten are three more such memorials, much more modest in scale, to groups hunted down by the Nazis: to homosexuals (2008), the Roma (2012), and the disabled (2014).
QUOTATIONS: Einstein in Berlin in 1919 compared Germany to ‘someone with a badly upset stomach who hasn’t vomited enough yet’. The last line of Kurt Weill’s Berlin is, ‘We do not matter and you can die without worrying about a thing.’
ODD FACT: With the noble solemnity of the Valhalla motif in mind, Wagner commissioned a new instrument to be made: the Wagnerian tuba is somewhere between a trombone and a French horn.
VOCABULARY: Blick – glance; Ruhe – grief; verdorren – wither; Waldmann – Man of the woods (hunter, forester). Blut und Eisen – blood and iron; Blut und Boden – blood and soil; Totentanz – dance of death. Vergangenheitsbewältigung – the struggle to come to terms with the past; that’s much too long, thinks Tracey, how are you meant to get to grips with that one. Whereas Das Kopfkino – the skull cinema, the thought-pictures which unroll in your head when you’re daydreaming – that one will come in useful, that’s what’s going on during this week’s lengthy stretches of music.
DONNERSTAG/THURSDAY
‘Forty-eight hours of food like this,’ says Trevor, eyeing the substantial piece of beef on his plate with pleasure, ‘and it’s straight onto the antacids.’
The group is seated at a large table in the Reichstag’s restaurant with a panoramic view towards the east.
‘It’s good though,’ he adds. ‘Yes, they like their meat in Germany, don’t they.’
‘Not all of them,’ says Adam. ‘Wagner and Hitler, they were both vegetarian.’
Denise, whose vegetarian option sits wilting in front of her, looks glum.
‘They’re all fascinated by their digestion,’ says Howard. ‘Like the French. But whereas the French worry about their livers, with the Germans it’s their bowels.’
‘Regularity!’ says Olive. ‘That was the word they used to use when I was a child. You had to be regular in England before the war. They were obsessed. Oh, the dreaded syrup of figs!’
‘They call it detoxing now,’ says Tracey. ‘Cleansing the intestine.’
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