Mephisto Aria (2 page)

Katherina rubbed her face, dispelling the memory. “Thank you, Casimira. I won’t be needing anything else. Just some quiet.”

“All right, dear. Call us any time.”

Casimira and Thomasz left the house again, and Katherina closed the door behind them.

For lack of other occupation, she wandered into her father’s study, though she hesitated again in the doorway. It seemed an invasion of a place and a life that had always been private. She sighed inwardly. But death was the ultimate forfeiture of privacy, wasn’t it?

His small oak desk was tidy, as always. She could not remember it any other way. The shelves behind it held his well-worn books: hard-bound medical ones on the left side and light literature on the right.

Idly, not looking for anything in particular, she opened and closed the desk drawers. He kept a detailed account book and a folder of his bank statements and correspondences, of which there was little. His lawyer had the will, she knew, and her father did not seem to have left any urgent business undone. For that she was grateful.

She wandered around the room, touching books, familiar objects, then thumbed through his collection of record disks. She smiled wanly; he was the only person she knew who still listened to vinyl disks and did not mind having to clean them and the phonograph needle before every playing. The recordings were all familiar. Symphonies and operas and chamber music that she had heard over and over as a child. Some of the jackets were torn and taped together. She wondered which ones he had listened to on his last day. Which of them had inspired such melancholy that he had taken his own life?

Then it struck her, and she shook her head at her own obtuseness. A disk was still on the turntable and the empty record jacket still leaned against the cabinet wall beside it. She recognized it immediately. It was the new Munich recording, in the original French, with Joachim von Hausen conducting. Berlioz’ Damnation of Faust.

She tapped the On switch and the turntable arm lifted, pivoted a few degrees, and dropped gently onto the outermost groove. Choral parts played first, and Katherina sat down to study the handsome record jacket in her hand. Faust and Marguerite stood shoulder to shoulder. But Faust’s face was twisted in terror as he looked into Hell while next to him, gazing upward, Marguerite was radiant. More than radiant. It was Anastasia Ivanova, the stunning Russian singer who had defected from the Soviet Union five years before. Katherina remembered the rather sensational news and realized she had never seen Ivanova’s face up close. She studied it while she listened to the dark mezzo-soprano voice that poured from the speakers.

“Autre fois, un roi de Thule…”

Under the penitent’s shawl, the face was slightly Slavic except for the slender nose. Soft lines curved from the nostrils around the mouth that was wide and expressive. But most fascinating were the mist-gray eyes: full of expression and intelligence. At the corners, both eyes had faint lines, as if at the very moment of redemption, Marguerite squinted with a hint of skepticism. Worse perhaps, while she gazed upward toward divine grace, she emanated an unrepentant allure, a sensuality that belied the chaste remorse.

Yet her voice contained a powerful poignancy. Katherina could imagine her father, already despondent, being urged by the plangent melody into the abyss. It gripped her too, exacerbating her guilt and regret.

Brooding, she reached for the paper sleeve that had held the disk. As she grasped it, an envelope fell out.

The letter inside was on official government stationery, with letterhead: Liaison Committee for the Commemoration of Stalingrad. But most baffling of all, it was addressed to “Sergei Marovsky.” The postmark was recent, she noted breathlessly; he could even have received it on the day of his death.

But “Marovsky”? How could that be?

Mephistopheles was singing now, in a robust bass voice. “Esprits de flames inconstantes…”

She frowned at “inconstant” and focused again on the letter. It was in detached official language, but it did refer to him as a hero, a survivor of the gargantuan battle on the eastern front. She dropped the letter onto the desk again. It was simply too much for her to absorb, too much to learn about a man she had thought she knew. The ground beneath her seemed to have opened up.

Sergei Marow had once been Sergei Marovsky and he had fought at Stalingrad.

He had survived the most brutal battle of World War II, the battle that had seen the fall of an entire German army and reversed the direction of the war. Why had he not told his family?

Several scenarios offered themselves. Had he been in captivity and released among the few lucky ones in the first year? Maybe he had been one of the tiny number of wounded soldiers who were taken out by air before the final defeat. Was it even possible he had been among the pathetic handful that survived years of captivity in Russia?

She read the letter to the end, but it gave no more information about the man, only the commemorative event to which he was invited in the coming February.

Her mind spinning, she laid her head in her hands. That he had never talked about his war experiences had not seemed odd. Few people spoke of them. As a child, she had grown used to hearing adults reminisce about the hunger of the years of occupation right after the war and, less often, about the air raids and the fires during the war itself. But now that she thought about it, she had never heard the men talk about the battlefront.

And why should they? No one wanted to boast about fighting for National Socialism. In a global campaign that had become genocidal and had annihilated whole cities on both sides, individual acts of bravery held little meaning.

But Stalingrad was different. The whole world spoke of Stalingrad in hushed tones. Stalingrad was Armageddon, a cataclysm where whole armies threw themselves at each other in the bitter winter of 1942–43, where men were reduced to savagery, to cannibalism, to daily hand-to-hand slaughter of the enemy. No matter that the German advance was one of pure aggression. To have survived Stalingrad was to have emerged from the mouth of hell and to have, in some sense, been purged of the national guilt.

She got up to pace again, needing to think, circling the room, trailing her fingertips along the furniture. His oaken armoire stood in front of her. She opened the door cautiously, as if not wanting to disturb his spirit that still dwelled in the row of worn suit jackets, all brown or gray. The slightly shabby attire of an old man who no longer went out very much.

To occupy idle, nervous hands, she removed the jackets and laid them on the rug in several piles. One pile for Tomasz—the two men were about the same size—one for charity, and the third to be discarded. A mournful job, and yet to do nothing but sit wondering would have been worse.

A leather satchel lay on the bottom of the wardrobe. Old leather, cracked with age, but a handsome bag. Maybe she could rescue it with leather oil. She took hold of it, surprised at its weight, and dragged it out onto the floor.

It was locked, but the lock was old and flimsy and she forced it easily with the point of a scissors. Dust flew up into her face as she pulled the two sides apart exposing a crumpled rucksack.

She tilted the satchel on its side to slide the rucksack out and only then did she see the faded lettering on the side. Russian letters.

War booty? Cellars and attics all over Germany held articles brought home from the front and then forgotten. She stared at it for a moment, as if it were a strange brown animal curled up at her feet, while on the record player Berlioz’ chorus lamented of damnation.

Finally she knelt down and undid the rucksack’s buckles. The leather strap was dry and pieces of it crumbled to reddish-gray dust between her fingers. Something bulky and soft was inside, and she slid it out.

A light brown tunic and dark trousers were neatly folded and tied around with a belt. The belt buckle held an unmistakable insignia, the hammer and sickle. She slipped the tunic out and unfolded it. A Russian soldier’s uniform. She stared, dumbfounded. The name stenciled onto the inner yoke of the tunic was Marovsky.

Sergei Marovsky had been in the Red Army. Realization struck her and brought another wave of tears. If that was so, the pistol with which he had shot himself was probably his own.

She glanced around the study, a room that now belonged to a stranger, and everything that was once familiar seemed to mock her. Even his music, which poured from his antiquated record player, seemed filled with mystery.

She reached into the rucksack again. There was more.

Under the uniform was a notebook held together by a frayed cotton cord. She broke the cord easily and leafed through the lined book, the sort that school children used. Its pages were covered with text, each section precisely dated, in her father’s neat script.

The first entry was headed February 20, 1943. My god, she thought. Sergei Marovsky, who never said a word about the war and the occupation, had kept a journal.

She set it aside carefully and peered at what had been tucked into the front. A few sheets of folded paper, with a string threaded in and out of the spine to create a sort of booklet. It was badly soiled, with water stains along the edges and grime in every fold. The entries were also dated, and most of the text, though smudged, was legible. Not comprehensible, though. The cursive script was in Russian Cyrillic. The smattering of the language that she had picked up as a child extended little beyond mastery of the alphabet. She could make out only the dates, all in February 1943, and the word “Stalingrad” in the heading.

With reverence, and a touch of dread, she laid the pages carefully on top of the notebook and resumed emptying the rucksack.

The last item at the bottom was a cloth bag sewn shut. Both thread and fabric were badly disintegrated, so she simply pulled the bag apart. She stared, perplexed, at what fell onto her lap. A black leather glove. It was filthy, and the cracks in the leather were filled with grayish grit.

Not a glove exactly, she realized on closer examination. A gauntlet, with a cuff reaching halfway up the forearm, of the sort that had not been worn for centuries. Ah, it was for a costume, she could see that now. Inside the cuff, in block letters, it read, Stalingrad Opera.

Katherina had been kneeling and now she rocked back and sat on the rug. The sheer weight of the revelations exhausted her, and there was no one to ask for an explanation. Tomasz, perhaps? Unlikely. Master and gardener had always been only cordial, even after many years. It was impossible to imagine her father would confide private things to Tomasz that he did not even tell his family.

The music had stopped. The first disk had come to an end and, half in a trance, she got up to turn it over. She dropped again into the desk chair as Anastasia Ivanova began to sing the most poignant of the Faust arias.

“D’amour l’ardente flame consume mes beaux jours” flowed along the back of Katherina’s mind as she tried to make sense of the discoveries. How were they related? A hidden identity, a heroic and possibly horrifying past, and finally an invitation by the German government.

The letter; maybe it held more clues she had overlooked. But no, it was the simplest of invitations, in the dry formal language of the German government. In the spirit of glasnost, a commemorative concert in Volgograd, built on the ruins of Stalingrad. A concert by invitation only, for politicians and for survivors, both Russian and German.

Then she noticed the penciled words, barely legible at the bottom. It seemed to her now that while her father had listened to the Berlioz recording, he had read the letter and then scribbled at the bottom of the page.

Letters, apparently written by a trembling hand, formed the words, “Florian, forgive me.”

III
Malinconico

Night fell finally, and the shock of discovery had muted to burning curiosity. Tomasz and Casimira, as she expected, knew nothing about another family name, and Katherina declined to inform them of the journal. Clearly, if there were answers to the mystery of her father, she would have to look for them in his writings.

Tentatively, as if before a hazardous venture, she settled onto the sofa and studied the slender volume. The few Cyrillic pages tucked in the front were a puzzle and would have to wait for a translation. She thumbed through the rest of the journal. Though written in a variety of pens and pencils, sometimes hurriedly, other times with precision, all the entries were in the same legible hand. She hesitated again, as she had before her father’s study, reluctant to intrude even farther into an obviously private domain. But then she asked herself, Why does a man write things down unless he wants someone to read them?

She wiped her hand once again over the cover, brushing away dust, and folded it back to the opening page. She was not prepared for the shock of the first entry.

February 20, 1943

I cut off Georgi Adrianovitch’s legs today. More precisely, I assisted at their amputation. But when he regained consciousness, it was me he saw, and he screamed. Finally we calmed him down and got him to understand that it was an exchange he had to make, his deal with the devil. He bought his life, and a trip home, but he paid with his legs. I could sympathize. I’ve made a deal too, but I paid with my soul.

I’ve started my journal again, this time in German. If it’s confiscated or captured, all that anyone will find are the broodings of a coward. No military information here, not a word about Stalingrad.

Commander Chuikov needs me for only half an hour every day; the rest of the time he’s ordered me to the field hospital. I’m assigned to gangrene amputations. Cutting away dead flesh suits my state of mind. I’m dead myself.

Georgi Adrianovitch was a special case, a Stalingrad hero, wounded twice before and sent back to the front. Not this time. He has a new row of shiny medals for his chest, but no legs. And this is me now, with legs but no heart. No more writing pretty phrases in Russian. That was the Sergei of Stalingrad.

Katherina laid the journal aside for a moment and rubbed the bridge of her nose, as if that could dispel the confusion. Then she read the entry a second time, trying to absorb it.