It was a huge table, taken from a church rectory, with heavy, handcarved legs and a dark walnut finish. And wide across. Wide enough for all the dishes of meat and vegetables and sauces and bread baskets. It filled the whole room. And all around it were chairs. Ten that matched and then two others taken from the kitchen table.
The table was a gift from Siegfried. Not really understanding the meaning of Thanksgiving, he thought it was important to give a gift. He wanted something to do with feasting but also something beautiful. So when he saw the table in a Port Hope antique store he bought it on the spot, providing that they could deliver it before the Thanksgiving meal.
“But that’s tomorrow!” the shop owner had replied. He had an English accent, but Siegfried could detect a bit of a cockney tone hidden under the posher accent the man had created for himself.
“Yes, and I did not try to talk you down in price, so if you want to make a sale you must see it is delivered sometime today. Or tomorrow morning. You can buy a big, fat turkey with all the money I just gave you.”
“And you can put a huge turkey on that big table,” he had countered.
“Well, you know, I am from Germany so I think we will be eating goose, instead. Not that we have Thanksgiving in Germany.”
“Nor us in England. But it’s a nice custom. Family all together. Fall harvest and all that.”
The table was delivered, much to Hilda’s delight. Things were moved out of the way and Hilda clapped her hands with joy as it was set up, filling the entire room. Every year, no matter where her children were, no matter if Siegfried was in Hamburg, wherever they were scattered, they would all return here, to this table, at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And she would stay with Siegfried, maybe even marry him, and together they could be an anchor on holidays for the children who roamed the world. There would always be the rectory table to return to. Thank Gott, finally she could rid herself of the knotty pine table and the matching bench. She would give it to John and his schoolteacher as a goodwill gesture. Just to get it out of the house.
They all sat down, the food came out, and they went around the table, each guest saying something of gratitude.
“Your turn, Siegfried,” Margaret said. She had just been grateful for her fiancé and their decision to have a child.
“This will sound very strange indeed,” Siegfried began, “but what I am grateful for is also something that was lost to someone else, so we must acknowledge both. I am grateful that Jack fell from the apple tree …”
NINE
GARETH SAT IN THE CLUB, sipping a bier, waiting for the opening act. That is what he was there for. He didn’t care about Die Toten Hosen, it was the first act that interested him. An act that had been getting press across Germany. They had just finished a tour of Europe and were back home, in Berlin.
Und nun freut sich der Underground-Club, eine unserer Lieblings-Acts BLEACH anzukündigen. Man kann sie auch mit Punk Opera spielen sehen, wo sie nächsten Monat eine sehr interessante Interpretation von Carmen machen werden. Lass es uns für Bleach aufgeben.
Gareth had learned enough German over the past six years to be able to read a newspaper and understand most of what was written. He had read somewhere that the twins were singing with an opera company, but had rekindled Bleach and were performing together again onstage. Gareth hadn’t seen them in the whole time he had been in Hamburg. He had been working and learning from Siegfried, painting in his spare time, and taking German lessons. He had made only one trip to Berlin in all that time, had gone into the theatre where the avant-garde opera company performed, and left the twins a note. As he heard nothing back from them, he let it drop, assuming that they had all moved on. So, he worked hard. Hard enough to be left for weeks at a time to run the oculary on his own. Siegfried was going to Canada more and more often to be with Hilda, and so the apartment and the business felt more like his than Siegfried’s. Even the clients had begun to ask for him and wanted his opinion. Hilda came once a year and stayed only three or four weeks, but Siegfried insisted that the apartment was hers and that it should be kept nice and neat at all times out of respect for her. It was already decided how he would arrange his business. The apartment would stay his and Hilda’s, now that they were married, and the business, including all the instruments and equipment as well as the clients, would be passed to Gareth when the time came. Gareth would pay rent on the apartment and the office once the business passed to him. At that time he would have all the profits, but, until then, he would live there for free and be paid a modest salary. Gareth was very happy with the arrangement. Of course, the frequent visits from his neighbour Sabine didn’t hurt, either.
Gareth watched as the spotlight came up on the shallow stage. Two women, no longer girls, walked out, dressed head to toe in white. Sheaths around their bodies, wrapping tightly across their chests and falling away from the waist to their ankles. On their feet were white boots, with pointed toes and copper studs running up the legs. Their hair was loose, in white cascading waves, and the only makeup they wore was a stain of matte red on their full lips. The light hit their eyes, turning them from the lightest blue to violet pink. Gareth inhaled slowly, counted to ten, held his breath, and only exhaled as they started to sing.
He assumed that it was Clara playing piano while Blanca stared out, hitting her tambour. The only big difference now was that they finally had their backup band. All male. All black. All excellent musicians.
The talking stopped. The club was quiet. People were listening. And so was Gareth.
“May I sit here?” a strikingly beautiful woman asked him. She seemed about thirty-five, well dressed in that too-hip-it-hurts German way. A small stud in her nose, another piercing through her upper lip. Gareth imagined that there may be a few tattoos on her body and possibly more piercings elsewhere, out of sight. Her dark hair, almost a jet black, was shorn close on one side and then layered so that it fell long, almost to her waist, on the other side, with a thick fringe hitting just above her arched eyebrows, emphasizing her sharp blue eyes. Ice blue, Gareth noted, with a shot of steel grey around the iris. Intense eyes, cool eyes, direct eyes.
“You are alone, yes?”
“Yes, I am alone,” Gareth replied. Alone in a faraway land where nobody really knows me. I have created myself anew and now here I am, in Berlin, alone. Watching two women onstage whom I met when I was six years old.
There are few parts of us that never leave us. Our red blood cells renew daily. Our liver renews, our skeletal frame is constantly renewing so that it is completely changed every ten years. Skin, hair, nails, they all renew so that there is no constancy with any of them. But the brain and the heart renew very slowly so that they are almost the same, changing very little throughout our lives. But then, there is the lens of the eye, which is with us from start to finish. It is the one part of our body that is never replaced or updated. After all this time, with one look of his unchanging eyes, the girls were back in his heart and would be ever present in his loyal, little-changed mind.
“They are very good,” the woman stated. “When did you hear of them?”
“I just came in for a beer. I guess I lucked out,” he lied.
“You will have a refill, yes? I will pay. You just say what you are drinking when the waitress comes over. I am Martina, by the way. Also known as the Punk Baroness.”
“Okay … I am Gareth … Just Gareth. No a.k.a.”
The woman waved over to the waitress to bring two more beers. Gareth drained his last one and watched the stage. Clara rarely looked out at the audience, so intent was she on the piano and her harmonies. Even if she did look up she would not see him. The light would be in her eyes and her vision was never very good. So when the song finished he shouted out “bravo” so loudly that the girls had to look in his direction. He knew that he would be no more than a blur, so he raised up his hand and waved in that familiar but awkward back-and-forth motion.
Clara left her place in front of the piano and went over to her sister.
She whispered in her ear and Blanca looked out at the audience with a look of bewilderment.
“This is a song Clara wrote years ago,” Blanca began. “We weren’t going to perform it tonight but my sister suddenly feels moved to sing this one. It’s called ‘The Sweetest Love.’ A ballad, so not quite our usual fare! It is about young love, imagined love. A love that was never to be.”
Blanca nodded to the band to let them know they could sit this one out. She struck the drum and Clara keened a high note. A note that could shatter crystal. Or glass eyes, Gareth thought. Then Clara began the first verse without harmonies, as a solo. It was her song, after all. As she sang out her feelings, the feelings of the eighteen-year-old girl she once was, Gareth could feel nothing but regret. He had run away because he could not bear to be with her and not tell her everything he knew. He couldn’t ruin her life by telling her that her uncle was a monster, but now, as he heard her song, he knew that his leaving was worse than telling her the truth. It was the choice of a boy, not the choice he would make now.
“Why did you wave at her?” the Punk Baroness asked him.
“No reason. I guess I was just swept away by the moment.”
Gareth got up, excused himself, and left the club. He walked for blocks until he reached the small gallery where his paintings were hanging. They were almost entirely new works. All done since he had arrived in Germany. Only one painting was shipped from home. And on that painting Gareth put a red dot, placing it carefully between the two young girls who sat on a rock in Lake Ontario, beckoning a mother they didn’t know. He would have it delivered to the twins the next day. By that time, he would be back on a train to Hamburg.
The beautiful woman from the club entered the small theatre and turned on the rehearsal lights. The illumination highlighted the dust floating in the air. Probably not good for the singers, she thought, but what else can we afford? She could be more commercial, perhaps, appeal to a larger audience and cast her net wider, but that would go against everything she believed in. And what she believed in was the power of punk. Her carefully contrived black hair, her piercings in her nose and her upper lip, her tattoo of the tower tarot card on her inner thigh, all spoke to her unshakable belief in the power of punk. It was an uprising for her. A movement. But a movement does not have to throw out all that is good. And so her company, Punkarie, was created, taking what was great about the old world order and turning it inside out. It was perfect, punk and opera together. All the great stories with their over-the-top plots of love and betrayal combined with ideologies concerned with individual freedom and anti-establishment views. She looked for operas with themes of individual liberty and anti-authoritarianism. She, herself, had a DIY ethic, believing in nonconformity, anti-collectivism, and, mostly, not “selling out.” For those reasons her company remained small and true to its vision. Operas like Carmen and La Bohème appealed to her. But performed with electric guitars and aggressive drums instead of the usual orchestra with its organized sections.
When the Punk Baroness had first seen the albino twins, she knew that she had lucked out. They were doing an apprenticeship with the Deutsche Oper Berlin, singing in the background as villagers and maids at night and training their voices during the day. The Punk Baroness saw them in peasant-wear, singing in the chorus of villagers in a production of Don Giovanni. She knew the opera by heart, having grown up in a wealthy family who prided the arts above all else. She knew exactly what to expect from the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and yet her love of opera could not stop her from attending. The Punk Baroness secretly had season tickets to the opera, but always went alone. The Deutsche Oper Berlin did surprise her, not because of its directing or staging, but by the casting of two eye-catching albinos. How could anyone look elsewhere? She went to Tosca and The Marriage of Figaro that season, and there they were, in the background, uncomfortable in the period clothing and yet upstaging everyone else onstage with their presence.
She did not meet them backstage at the opera house, though. She met them, quite by accident, at a dimly lit club, under the arches of the S-Bahn. Bored with singing chorus and small roles, the twins had begun to sing in underground clubs, slowly building a following in Berlin. Martina, the Punk Baroness, was intrigued by them and began to follow them from club to club, finally wooing them away from the Deutsche Oper, with promises of more artistic expression with her grassroots rebel opera company. They were opera-trained women who understood her ideology. Eye-catching, talented, unlike anyone she had seen or heard before. It was fate.
Martina enjoyed the crossover from their following to her audience, but it still wasn’t enough to keep the company afloat. The truth was that she had been financing it herself and she was running through her savings quickly, so she agreed to do an extensive tour for which the company would get a considerable government grant. They would have to play in university theatres and music schools across Germany. Was it selling out, or was it simply surviving?
“It’s about time you two got here. Just because you did a good show last night doesn’t mean you can show up late.”
“Sorry,” Clara replied.
“Machts nichts.” The Punk Baroness shrugged. They were her stars, and she would keep them at almost any cost. How unique the two were. And their voices, together, were unworldly. But they would not be performing together in this next one; they would share the lead, alternating the role of Carmen.
“I would very much like to do an opera of Antigone after this. So on point, politically. No one ever does the one Honegger and Cocteau wrote as an opera.”
The twins looked blankly at the Punk Baroness. Antigone, Honegger, Cocteau! What was she on about this time?
“You must have studied the story in school. Even the French saw the play as a stance against tyranny, which is why Jean Anouilh adapted the Greek original. Surely you know it?”
The twins shook their heads.
“Well, there are two sisters, princesses actually, although not your usual princesses. They are the daughters of Oedipus. You have heard of him, yes?”
The twins both nodded, indicating that they had heard of the king who, unknowingly, fell in love with his own mother and took over both her bed and her kingdom.
“You would play the two sisters, Antigone and Ismene, but all the better if they are twins, I think! A young princess who breaks the law because of her ideals and is willing to die for her beliefs and her sister who tries to save her from her fate. Death. It is the perfect punk opera! Anti-establishment Anti-gone! It’s feministic.”
“How does she break the law?” Clara asked.
“Oh, she buries her brother instead of leaving him outside to rot where everybody can see it.”
“Leaving bodies out to rot is a stupid law. Not very sanitary. Who came up with that?” Clara persisted. She had taken to challenging Martina whenever she could. Clara often felt left out of the creative process, that Martina’s closeness to Blanca put her outside of the decision-making.
“Their evil uncle Creon,” the Punk Baroness replied.
Always an evil uncle, Blanca thought. An evil uncle who tries to keep control of everything and ultimately causes death and suicide. Didn’t the Punk Baroness understand that she was done with evil uncles? They hadn’t run away from Canada to be reminded of evil uncles! Why did she tell Martina anything? Nothing was sacred, everything was potential art with her. She used everything; nothing was sacred.
“Doesn’t sound like much of a story,” Blanca suggested.
“There is so much more to it. Scapegoating. Making an example in order to manipulate. Read the play, you’ll see. I don’t care if it’s the original Greek or the more modern French version. They are both good. In the meantime, we are doing a quick tour of some universities and schools to keep us going. A performance and workshops.”
There was to be no discussion about the tour, no matter how much the twins protested. Clara had her best pout on about it. Why couldn’t they just stay in Berlin and make something of Bleach instead?
Berlin was becoming such a mecca for music, it seemed crazy to her to be jumping in and out of vans and singing to people whose courses demanded it. Voluntary audiences seemed far more receptive than the compulsory ones.
“Oh, and that came for you.” Martina nodded at a large narrow package, wrapped in brown paper, the kind used for shipping packages.
“For me?” Clara asked.
“For both of you. I think it is from the man who was at the club last night. I remember him from a few years ago. I saw him when he left that letter for you, Clara, at the box office. Remember?”
“What letter?” asked Clara.
Blanca looked at the Punk Baroness and tried to signal to her to hush, but it was too late. Clara was piecing it all together, realizing that Gareth had reached out to her years earlier and that she hadn’t responded because her sister had kept it a secret. She could feel a tingly heat rising from the lowest parts of her being, through her guts, past her solar plexus, until it gripped her heart and reached for her throat.
“Why, Blanca? Why would you keep that from me?” she accused.
Blanca couldn’t answer her sister. Where would she start? All she knew was that Gareth was a link to their past, a past that they had to put to death and bury. She believed that they could create a new reality. Isn’t that what Esther had said? That they could be anything they put their imaginations to. And hadn’t Esther done just that herself?
“I wanted a new start for us. I was trying to protect you,” Blanca stammered.
“Everyone wants me to be safe, but no one wants me to be happy!” she yelled at her sister. “You lied to me and you lied to him! And you lied to yourself, too! Did you really think you could run away from who you are? Doesn’t matter where you go, you will always be what you are!”
Clara walked over to the painting, ripped the paper away, and gasped. There they were as children, on a rock in the water, hands reaching out. And there was a woman, from behind, with long red hair, caught in the lake air, walking toward them. And waves that seemed to crash up and out of the canvas.
Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack Page 25