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.
Katherina winced at the question. “You’re really getting into this demon thing, aren’t you? Maybe that’s the
problem. Maybe I’m a little more nervous than you because the two of you, for that matter, the whole rest of the cast, are playing sins, witches, and demons. I’m the only one who ends up being dragged off to hell against my will.”
“That’s a small price to pay for having the most glorious aria in the opera. I’d give a testicle to have a solo like that.”
“I admit the aria is fairly exciting. But it’s just Gretchen’s last words in Goethe’s Faust. They don’t even make much sense.”
“Oh, but they’re a wonderful admission that innocence is crap. We’re all going to hell so let’s wallow in it. The idea of surrender is such a turn-on. I’m sure it’ll be a turn-on for the audience too! You’ll be singing your heart out as humankind gives up its soul.” Gustav squinted through red eyes.
“That’s the problem, though. I don’t like being the spokesperson for the human race in damnation. I mean, I prefer to think the human race shouldn’t surrender.”
“That’s what I like about you, my dear.” Sabine laid her other hand on Katherina’s wrist. “You are such a good, sweet person, just begging to be sullied. That is sooo attractive.” She paused for a moment, then seemed to take a cue from her companion. “Listen, Gustav and I have been talking. We both think you are very…appealing. Why don’t you join us in our hotel and have another drink. The three of us can get to know each other better. I mean, you and I kind of know each other already, but there is so much more we can learn. You know that I can make you happy, and Gustav is dying to amuse you in his own special way. Just think of how much fun the three of us can have together.”
Katherina slid her hand out from under Sabine’s and stood up. “Thank you for the invitation. It’s flattering, in a sticky kind of way. Why don’t you ask Radu Gavril to join you? I’m sure he’d be pleased.” The look that Gustav and Sabine exchanged suggested that they were already considering the stage director.
“In any case, I think I’ll hang on a bit longer to what’s left of my innocence, or prudery, or whatever you want to call it. I’ve got a long day tomorrow, we all do, so I’ll say good night now.”
She dropped thirty marks on the table to pay for her dinner and turned away. By the time she was at the door, coat in hand, she realized this was the second time she had gotten up from a table to flee Sabine’s lasciviousness. It had done her little good the first time, though, since she had fallen prey anyhow. The thought sent a wave of excitement up from her groin to her chest, and then to her cheeks. But no, she told herself, she would not become someone’s conquest again.
XXIX
Scherzando
Dress rehearsal began and Katherina stood with the orchestra and the other singers behind the Witches’ Altar. They would perform before a small invited audience of music students brought up with special permission from Drei Annen. The students, who filled only the front half of the audience space, seemed delighted to be part of the artistic experiment.
Katherina had reached a compromise with the stage director regarding her costume so that she wore a flesh-colored bikini top under a loose gauze shirt. The step back from nudity was small, since her breasts were still largely exposed and her nipples visible through the fabric, but the layer of material gave her a sense of protection.
The Sins were costumed in Greek chitons, all carrying objects that marked their identities. Mephisto’s costume, however, stood out from all the others. For anyone with a knowledge of theater, the black tights under a trim black doublet, square cut at the neck and with puffy red satin sleeves, was an homage to the costume Gründgens wore in the famous Hamburg Faust. Gustav had also copied the white pancake makeup garishly offset by extreme V-shaped eyebrows and crimson red lips. His head was covered by a form-fitting black skullcap that reached to the back of his neck and was topped with a narrow curved red feather. He even wore the elevated-heel shoes that Gründgens’ Mephisto had used to add to his height.
In the midst of the rehearsal another detail of his costume caught Katherina’s notice, with such force that she almost missed her cue. His gloves. Black leather, with cuffs reaching halfway up the forearm, they were virtually identical to the gauntlet her father had brought back from Stalingrad.
The orchestra had already begun the overture and on his musical cue, a stagehand ignited the fire in the pit with a pleasant “woooff.” Katherina was relieved to see that it was a rather modest fire, fragrant and warming, not at all threatening to the actors moving around above it. Her fears and anxieties now all seemed foolish.
The Prolog in Heaven went quickly as Gustav sang his bantering with God and wagered for the soul of Woman. The voice of God was disembodied, a recording of a bass voice, projected from above at high volume. Katherina recognized some of the text, phrases taken verbatim from Goethe’s great work. She smiled at Mephisto’s wisecrack-compliment to God for being “mensch” enough to chat with the devil. The audience was attentive and agreeably tense, obviously waiting for the livelier parts they knew were coming.
The first sin, Envy, threaded his way through the audience awkwardly, until the listeners understood that reaction was expected of them. But soon, Katherina’s Woman and her dancer “demon” found willing participants who sang their quickly learned refrain with the verve of children chosen for the school play. On cue, the rest of the audience joined for a final repetition, and the opera moved on swimmingly.
The next chorus began sleepily and then was joined by Katherina and the sin of Sloth, as they swept through the crowd drawing in singers to the main melody. Those who were completely tuneless politely held back, letting the more musical carry the sound. It was becoming fun and the audience began to sway, apparently loving it.
At the third sin of Gluttony, people seemed to not believe their good luck. Katherina and the demon began their duet while the dancers threw out doughnuts and balls of lemon gelatin, trying to elicit a rebellion. The response was playful. The audience seemed anxious to please and did not step far over the line of propriety. It was not so much a food fight as a food disagreement.
Pride worked beyond all Katherina’s expectations. Mephisto and two dancers chose their audience “bodies” very carefully and drew them to the Witches’ Altar. With the pulsing of the woodwinds in the orchestra behind them, they formed their little pyramid with the dancers and Katherina sang her first aria kneeling precariously, but successfully, on their backs.
By the time they arrived at the sin of Greed, Katherina was buoyant. She was embarrassed that she had ever doubted the showmanship of the three men in charge of the production. It was a charming opera, innocent and playful, and the giddy audience obviously thought so too.
Even Wrath, with the huge Finnish bass slapping people around, never moved the audience “victims” beyond faint annoyance. How could she have ever thought it would be otherwise? The raucous, rhythmic music merely stirred the audience to a loud mumbling, as they tried to sing along.
Lust, which had worried her most of all, was no worse than some Salome performances she had seen. She had to feign group sex with some of the demons, but it was all obviously play-acting, and though it was difficult to sing lying down, the scene worked marvelously. Even the audience, caught up in the ritual chanting of the chorus, cheered them on joyfully, but did not try to intrude in the lustful pantomime on the rock. How silly she had been to doubt the good manners and restraint of the German opera public.
Before she knew it, the single-act opera was nearly over. The orchestra struck up the Dies Irae theme, and Mephisto was already leading half of the audience in a snaking line around the periphery of the hall. Everyone was swaying now and clapping their hands in the air. Mephisto handed off his scythe and climbed up behind her, straddling her in his high-heeled boots.
She sang her heart-rending final aria, fighting off the well-rehearsed embrace of Mephisto, and though she did scrape a knee on the rock surface, his manhandling of her was only “stage-rough” and measured. It would make a great show, after all, she thought.
If th
is was Dionysian opera, she was for it. If all went well, she would have world coverage and a huge fee—while having the time of her life.
“It’s a bloody disaster,” Gregory Raspin said, striking the table with the flat of his hand. “I commissioned a Dionysian sacrifice and you gave me a Volksfest. The audience all but ran out and polka’d.”
“It’s certainly not what we planned,” Radu agreed. “It has no edge to it at all. So, where do we go from here?”
“The audience is the problem,” Diener growled. “They’re like sheep. Bland, dull-witted sheep. There is no blood left in them. What’s happened to the German character? If this whole endeavor isn’t to go down the toilet and make a laughingstock of us all, we have to find a way to set them on fire.”
“I agree. It’s the audience,” Radu added. “The pathetic fools we had yesterday don’t have a single carnal thought.”
“I think I have a remedy. A remarkably obvious one.” Gregory Raspin took out a leather-bound notebook and fountain pen and laid them on the table. “I spent all last night analyzing the problem.” He tapped the notebook, suggesting it was the repository of his ideas.
The other two men looked at him expectantly.
“I had originally thought to bring up an audience from Salzgitter or Nordhausen, with special emphasis on young people. We would give out champagne and schnapps before the performance, to break down their inhibition. I had already agreed with the East German government and the Russians to let some of the border troops attend. I thought it would do no harm. But I was a fool. The solution was right here in front of me. What’s more excitable than a drunken soldier away from home?” Raspin took out a ballpoint pen and jotted a few lines in his notebook.
Radu Gavril nodded. “I see what you mean. As long as they’re not under close supervision, they behave like all young men do when they’re let loose.”
“Exactly. The Russians especially would suit our needs. We saw in 1945 what they’re capable of. We’ll just give them all the liquor they want before the opera starts, and in the Gluttony scene we’ll give them even more.”
Mephisto Aria Page 17