“Were you lonely? You should have… Stasya, look!” Katherina interrupted herself abruptly and took Anastasia by the hand, pulling her up from her chair. “It’s what you’ve waited for.” Katherina slid open the balcony door. Dazed, Anastasia allowed herself to be pulled gently out onto the balcony.
The bridge, the shop rooftops, the churches, the Festspielhaus were sprinkled with white powder, and the air all around them roiled with snow.
“It’s beautiful, but I’m sorry, it’s cold out here.” Anastasia hugged herself.
“Stay, please. I’ll keep you warm.” Katherina moved around behind her onto the higher step. She opened the heavy gray cape she wore and enfolded the other woman in front of her so that both of them stood within it. “Is that better?”
“Uh-huh,” Anastasia answered uncertainly. Then a breeze caught the tiny flakes, causing them to swirl in a wide funnel out over the river. “Ohh, you’re right. It’s like a fairy tale.”
“And you don’t have to be in Russia for it.”
The snow began to fall more thickly, spinning as it caught currents of air high on the hill. It glittered in a cascade of individual flakes directly in front of them, fell in sheets of gray-white specks out over the Salzach, and on the opposite bank, covered the old city and fortress in a soft gray mist.
They stood in the supernatural calm, cocooned within the cape, hearing nothing but their own breathing and the hiss of the falling snow. Warmth rose from the space between them and wafted in soft waves around Katherina’s throat. It smelled pleasantly of the faint residue of perfume and of Anastasia’s hair. Resting her head against the fragrant hair, Katherina whispered, “Like a sign from heaven, too much, almost, to be endured,” from the duet they had sung only an hour before.
Anastasia relaxed against Katherina’s embrace and murmured the next line from the song. “Where was I ever so happy?”
“How did she come to me and I to her?”
“I feel it, this world and the next, in this sweet moment.”
“Until death,” they whispered in unison, as they had sung it, but without orchestra and stage, the declaration became their own. They stood in silence for an agony of time, as if before a threshold where both were fearful. Then Katherina whispered, “Anastasia.”
Anastasia turned around inside the sheltering cape and inside Katherina’s arms. With eyes closed, she rested her cheek softly against Katherina’s and slid her hands around Katherina’s waist to her back. They stood in the gentlest of embraces without speaking, and with each breath Katherina could feel the rise and fall of Anastasia’s breasts.
Gathering courage, Katherina pulled the other woman closer and turned her own head just slightly. The corner of her mouth touched lightly against Anastasia, who did not pull away. She moved again, brushing her mouth across Anastasia’s and pressing, tentatively, on dry, uncertain lips.
The hissing curtain of snow around the balcony seemed to sequester them from the world, shielding them from judgment. Katherina withdrew the tiniest fraction, then covered the yielding mouth again, with slightly greater urgency. Anastasia’s lips were passive, waiting, but not resisting. No, not resisting at all. The coldness of their faces made the warmth of their mouths deeply comforting, like the fire they had just crouched over, sharing secrets. Katherina sensed a faint pressure of welcome, of timid invitation, and she lingered delicately at the edge of entry. Anastasia’s hands were at the small of her back, each fingertip seeming to draw her in. The warmth of her exhalation streamed across Katherina’s cheek, a whisper of acquiescence that came with the falling, then the rising of her chest.
Katherina became conscious of the entire length of Anastasia’s body pressed against her own, and the heat of arousal began like a small flame between her legs. She ventured farther in over gentle teeth, exploring. Still Anastasia stayed within her arms, breathing heavily, holding the pressure of Katherina’s leg between her thighs, her mouth pliant. For a long moment they stood in each other’s heat, the one imploring, the other considering, as if some great thing hung in the balance. Anastasia did not kiss back so much as she seemed to surrender, and Katherina was ablaze.
Then Anastasia broke the kiss and laid her cheek against Katherina’s again. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “Forgive me.”
“Of course you know. You knew on stage tonight. In the trio.”
“Yes, at that moment.” Confusion showed on her face. “But this is—”
The phone rang.
It was as if an axe fell between them, severing the fragile tendrils that held them.
“I’m sorry,” Anastasia breathed. “No one would call this late unless it was important.” Inside the room she caught the phone on the fourth ring. Slightly bewildered, Katherina pulled her cloak around herself and followed her.
The call was short and Anastasia set the phone down finally. “My agent, calling from New York. She’s gotten me an offer from the Met and couldn’t wait to tell me.”
“New York. That’s wonderful.” Katherina wanted desperately to step back into the embrace, but the moment was gone. She took a step forward, longing for touch, for anything, but Anastasia took a step back. Katherina searched for something tender to say, to at least return to that mood.
Someone knocked. A male voice sounded dully through the door. Anastasia’s look of panic told all.
Defeated, Katherina drew her cloak around her. “I guess I should go now,” she said, and opened the door.
Boris Reichmann stood massive in front of her, filling up the door frame, arriving to claim his wife. A man in his late fifties, he had a full head of graying hair and a well-trimmed black beard. His small eyes over ruddy cheeks registered surprise and slight annoyance, and Katherina remembered the late hour. She felt suddenly criminal.
“Sorry, I’m just leaving,” she apologized awkwardly, and stepped past him into the corridor. Behind her, she heard the door close. She could not remember ever hating anyone as much as she hated Boris Reichmann at that moment.
XXI
Decrescendo
It was well past midnight but Katherina lay awake, staring into the darkness. She replayed every moment of the embrace through her mind, ending always with Anastasia’s words, “Forgive me.” Katherina kept seeing the fear on her face. Or was it regret?
She had taken a huge risk kissing her, and it had proved a mistake. The embarrassment, then the humiliation, of surrendering Anastasia to her husband had drained away the pleasure of the evening’s stage success.
Finally she dozed, her father’s voice sounding at the back of her troubled mind. “Nothing is given. Everything is paid for.”
She slept fitfully, fragments of nightmares keeping her from rest. A line of phantoms formed before her dreaming eyes. Her mother, then her father, then Detlev; all wandered off one by one into the fog, abandoning her. She shivered, until, at the sound of her name, she pivoted and saw another figure on the opposite horizon. Gregory Raspin.
She awoke with a start. As if fleeing the dismal landscape of her unconscious, she got up. To clear her head, she opened one panel of the window. Snow still fell silently on the empty pre-dawn street below. The cold air roused her, and she closed the window again, fully awake. There was no way she could return to sleep now. She might as well continue reading the journal.
She was nearly at the end, and the later entries were more widely spaced. But now that she had begun to digest the fact of her father’s “disposition,” as she decided to call it, she wanted to know more about it. What was life like for a homosexual in 1960s Germany? What did her father think about it all? Katerina thumbed through the journal with curiosity that she realized bordered on the prurient.
But the remainder of the journal was devoid of introspection and was simply a series of accounts of meetings with men at the Insel: Germans, Italians, Turks. He went there more or less twice a month and almost every time he was with a different man. Finally, he no longer noted their names or appearances, and his accounts of the mee
tings with them became dreary. It seemed that he had begun to find them dreary too. No longer shocked, Katherina read quickly, superficially. Then, the final brief entry that ended the journal brought her up short.
August 25, 1965
I am where fate and my own nature have brought me. It’s senseless to speak at this late date of regret. I had the gift of Lucy and then Katya. I only hope I haven’t failed them. Still, a question always burns at the back of my mind. What might life have been like if we could have stayed together, my precious Florian?
There were four more performances of Rosenkavalier in Salzburg and, emotionally, Katherina was in free fall.
Boris had stayed in Salzburg, and though he still resided at the Hilton Hotel, he was suddenly the doting husband. On non-performance days, the couple was usually absent from the hotel, and after performances, Boris picked Anastasia up from her dressing room, rendering her unavailable to anyone else.
Octavian remained, however, and so Katherina embraced the woman she desired four more times, though only in the form of a boy in silver-white coat and breeches, or in hunting green. Octavian was always ardent in her arms, and for two and a half hours of the performance, they acted out love.
Katherina discovered what she had missed in her thirty-three years of life: not sexual excitement or even tenderness, but romantic obsession. Now she suffered under it, in full force. She woke every morning wondering where Anastasia was sleeping, ate breakfast imagining Anastasia across the table, walked along the Salzach with Anastasia’s phantom at her side.
Her heart quickened when they were on stage together, when the rose duet finished and the scene of their gradual infatuation began. It was mind twisting, to sing a role that replicated her own experience. The audience was titillated to see her feigning romance with a woman dressed as a boy, when in fact, it was the very falseness that she feigned. For she loved and lusted after Anastasia.
She grasped that now and felt desire with a ferocity she had never imagined. Each day in feverish fantasy she let herself seize Anastasia, undress her, ravish her, take every part of her in her mouth, set her groaning, thrashing with want—and each evening she sang with Viennese sweetness of attar of roses in the lightest of embraces with Octavian.
And since she could not give herself to Anastasia, she gave herself to the role, to the thrilling, shimmering, immoral ecstasy of the music.
Was it her overheated imagination, or did Octavian sing with more ardor than before, glance at her a moment longer, court her more urgently than in the first performance? It was demonic, trying to separate theater from reality.
Then, in the last moments of the last act in the final performance, when both of them were physically and vocally spent, something happened. The orchestra played the final musical fillip of the opera while Sophie and Octavian exited arm in arm through the center stage. In the forty seconds, in which a “Moorish child” ran on stage looking for a handkerchief, they stood in the darkness at the edge of the stage set.
Always before they had simply caught their breath after the exhausting final duet and then stepped out toward the waiting stagehands. But this time Anastasia pressed suddenly against her and whispered into her ear, “Oh Katherina, I am so sorry about everything. If only you knew how much I’ve wanted it to be more.”
A stagehand stepped toward them and reached out a hand. Anastasia was startled, then smiled at him and hurried away to join the other singers for the curtain call. Katherina followed, bewildered.
Surely there would be a moment later, when they could talk. Backstage, at the hotel, anywhere. Only a moment.
As always, Boris waited in the dressing-room corridor. He glanced at Katherina from under his thick eyebrows and nodded once, acknowledging her. She tried to read his expression, but there seemed to be none. Did he resent her as much as she resented him? No, of course not. She was nothing to him. He had no idea.
Boris’s glance shifted away from her to linger for a moment on Gregory Raspin, who stood talking to Joachim von Hausen. His attention seemed riveted on the two men. Was he planning a new recording with the conductor? Presumably that’s how things went. You saw someone backstage, exchanged a few words, and things developed. But Boris made no attempt to talk to von Hausen, who turned and strode toward Katherina, hands outstretched.
“Ah, Katherina, my lovely Sophie.” He kissed her lightly on both cheeks. “We were fantastic tonight, weren’t we? And you, my dear, were glorious.” He stood back, holding her by her upper arms. “You are coming to my ice-skating party tomorrow, aren’t you?”
“Well, I’m—”
“Of course, you’re coming. The whole cast is invited. I shall be deeply, deeply wounded if you don’t.”
“But I don’t have any ice skates.” She stated the obvious.
“Of course you don’t, my dear. No one does. We’ll take care of that, so there’s no excuse.”
“The whole cast will be there?” Katherina asked. “Hans, Sibyl, Radu…Anastasia?”
Gregory Raspin had joined them. “Yes, Madame Marow. Everyone but me. I have business to attend to, so you must celebrate for both of us.”
A line of opera fans was beginning to approach and Katherina let herself be drawn toward them, relief spreading through her.
She smiled radiantly. “Yes. I’d love to,” she said, suddenly buoyant.
XXII
Quartetto Giocoso
Katherina made her way gingerly along the slippery path that led down to the water and stopped at the edge. While light snow fell, she surveyed the pond. It was some two hundred meters in diameter, with a field of dead cattails poking up through the ice on the far side. On the near side, men were chipping with shovels at the irregular surface of the pond trying to smooth it. Behind them, where someone swept away the chips, a half dozen Salzburgers skated.
She followed the pleasant smell of wood smoke and frying sausage to a campfire on the slope. A handful of people sat on low benches in a circle around a rectangular fire pit. On one side of the fire, a grill held roasting sausages and onions. On the other side, a small cauldron hung from an iron tripod. In a handsome parka with a fur-lined hood, Magda von Hausen was just stirring it with a ladle.
“Ah, just in time for some Glühwein,” she said, ladling the steaming liquid into a cup and handing it to Katherina. “We have plenty of schnapps too, if you’d like something stronger to heat your blood.”
Katherina warmed her mittened hands on the cup before sipping the hot mulled wine. With no singing engagements for the next weeks, she could let herself enjoy the two excesses: going out in frigid weather and drinking scalding wine. In fact, the wine was delicious, and it went immediately to her head. “Well, you couldn’t have picked a better day, could you? Just a little snow falling and no more performances to worry about. The only way you could have lured us out of our nests.”
Magda ladled a second cup for herself. “That was the whole plan. We’ve done this every winter we could, though it’s not always cold enough. Of course, it’s especially fun when there’s snow.”
“I had no idea so many people still skated on ponds,” Katherina said, gesturing toward the skaters. Anastasia, she noted, was not there, but she recognized several of the others. Sibyl and her husband skated awkwardly together, and just on the other side of them were Anne and Chuck. They skated arm in arm, tilting toward the left, then toward the right, obviously hugely entertained.
“It’s like a Flemish painting,” Katherina added.
“Opera people venture out here only if someone gives them the skates. So we bought a dozen of them a few years ago, the kind that you can adjust to any shoe. It’s ‘ice-skating lite.’ You make a couple of rounds of the pond, and when your ankles begin to hurt, you come back for more Glühwein.”
“And there’s no danger of falling through the ice?”
“Heavens, no. The pond is frozen solid, and the water is only a meter deep anyhow.”
“We haven’t lost anyone yet.” Joachim von Hausen
was just crunching through the snow with an armload of firewood.
Radu Gavril arrived right behind with a crate of wine bottles. “Not to the ice, anyhow.” He set the crate down in the snow.
“We lose a few to the Glühwein every year, but it’s painless.” Magda chuckled, emptying another bottle into the cauldron.
The men fed new logs into the fire, then accepted their portions of hot wine and sat down on one of the benches. A comfortable silence fell over the group as they sipped from steaming cups.
Katherina heard boots crunching on packed snow and allowed herself a glance toward the path. Finally. In a blue anorak and ski pants, Anastasia strode toward the group. A Russian Octavian, except for the blond hair that fell from under a fur cap. Boris appeared directly behind her, dispelling the fantasy.
Von Hausen stood up and held out his hands. “So glad you could come, both of you. We haven’t seen much of you otherwise.” He shook hands vigorously with Boris who, in sheepskin coat and hat, seemed more massive than ever.
The two new arrivals took their places around the fire. Boris picked up one of the double-bladed skates and turned it, running his gloved thumb along the edge. “Children’s skates?” he asked in a deep bass.
“Yes, of course. We’re all amateurs here.” Von Hausen handed him the other skate. “You’ll both take a turn on the ice, won’t you?”
“I don’t think so.” Boris dropped both skates back onto the ground. “No high-risk sports for me.”
“What about you, Anastasia? Give it a try. It’ll remind you of your childhood.”
Katherina wanted to add to the encouragement, but Anastasia seemed to be avoiding eye contact. It was awkward, even painful to sense that the woman she had been embracing for the last two weeks on stage would not even acknowledge her. She turned the wine cup in her hands, her heart sinking.
“Oh, that wasso much fun!” Anne and Chuck lurched gleefully in from the pond and dropped onto a bench. “I’m going to get complaints from a whole new set of muscles tomorrow, but it was worth it,” Anne said. Red-cheeked and merry, she pried off her skates and continued. “Snow is just magical, isn’t it? Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t love snow?”
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