“I love you.”
“We’ll have time, Hanna. More than enough. I promise you.”
“Don’t talk. Come.”
A brilliant, spectral, happy, sorrowing fugue. The organ stops all movement. For a moment so brief. Only a moment. The dance of death is a hymn of happiness. Listen. Don’t stop listening. Johannes Brahms. Who worked for ten years on this funeral file of voices and tones, this wreath that cannot be touched, this Deutsches Requiem. He found the title in a forgotten notebook that had belonged to his teacher, Robert Schumann. Now almost a pizzicato. It dies, ends. The dancers return to their places in the procession. Their voices are silent as the horn speaks. The march. The lament. An effort to recapture the dance.
“Why?”
“It’s like learning to remember you.”
The procession has created its own memory. First that of the corpse they carry on their shoulders. Now memory of the procession itself, its grave pace, its lament, its dance. Even what is happening in this moment is memory. The orchestra begins to recover all the loose threads. The voices, dispersed for a little, unite. What they have been is reviewed and remembered and then they burst forth with the jubilation of trumpets: a plea for resurrection, the will to be born again. The brasses that formerly were sad now are gay in a great double fugue of faces rising toward the light, voices set free but nevertheless prescient of a grieving horn that proclaims desire and denies its fulfillment.
“No, Franz, not this way. It’s not what I want.”
“Forgive me.”
“Forgive you for what? Desires are never evil.”
“No, they say that an intention alone can damn you.”
“That’s foolish. It’s like music, Franz. Only when you play it and hear it does it become music. Isn’t that the point? I love you. But I want time to love you…”
Rest. Acceptance. Serenity. Enjoyment. A last, quick affirmation. Before resignation again. No one will understand it. Johannes Brahms. After ten years composing it, he performed it for the first time in the cathedral at Bremen. The Weser with its intertwining yellow fogs. Its mirror of oil and gasoline. An eleventh-century cathedral. Crude, clean. A stone skeleton. Iron. Ships. Textiles. Tobacco. Sugar. Bremerhaven.
“I was in Germany when I was a little boy.”
“I’ve never been to Germany.”
A moment of rest. Solitude. The voice of a man, a man alone who sings above all of them: mein Herz. From his heart. He sings, with his heart open, the lament: “He passed like a shadow.” The choir repeats that grief from afar. Merely repeats. Then begins to grow, led by him, his solitary voice lifting it to a summit of weariness, exhaustion. The choir collapses. His voice revives it. He offers new words: “My life.” My life is your life.
“No, I have nothing to complain about.”
“Will you wait for me?”
The orchestra, light, isolated, stripped of all excess, transposes the melody from instrument to instrument. The voice of the man, grief and liberation, despair and faith, dominates, creating an oasis in death’s desert, convoking the brilliant brasses. He asks that everything be forgotten, even this death that unites them. So that they can be. In order to be. They will not understand. No one will understand. In order to be. Requiem.
“Goodbye. Goodbye, Franz. Write to me. Franz, Franz, don’t forget me.”
“Let me go now, Hanna. I have to go. I’ll write to you.”
A German requiem. The liturgical words are not used. No. Those words pray for the dead who confront the horrors of the Last Judgment. These are words of consolation. They try to reconcile the living to the ideas of suffering and death.
“Who are you? Tell me, I’m asking you.”
“Excuse me. I musn’t be late. Let me pass.”
Bach: Actus Tragicus. Cantata 106. Bach asks the love and aid of the Redeemer who leads dead souls to a better world. But not Brahms. This is a German requiem. Never pronounce that name: Christ. Don’t even think of Him. That’s for those who believe. But the voice of the Redeemer is still here. The Fourth Movement. Sweetness. The eternal dialogue between male and female. Life accepted. An intent to humanize everything. To make pain and death ours. To name them and see them so that they can be what we possess. Everything will pass, will pass. Be comforted.
“I’m sorry. We don’t have that name.”
“Excuse me. Heil Hitler!”
And man will abide. Will labor. Make love. Thus. As always. Will be again what we were before. We shall labor. Raise the burned buildings. Sing with our mugs of beer tapping a table. Weep over our misfortunes, the misfortunes of others. Love our wives, our parents, our children. Hope. And be pitied. We deserve to be pitied. For now we are weak. Ah: the mother. The voice of woman. The Fifth Movement. It corresponds to the Third. It’s the response to the Third. Union with the voice of man. The woman’s solo, reminding us again of our loss, comforting us with tenderness.
“Put her on the list.”
“And the boy?”
The male solo is confirmed on a different level. The mother too sustains the pace and power of the march. She gives a tender dignity to might and justice. She tells us: “We also suffered, understood, proved ourselves. Let us go forward.” She prepares us for a new effort. She comforts us. No eagles now, no fire, only the voice of our mother who comes into the field and picks us up, leads us home again, secretly promises us return and resurrection. Softly she tells us that we have been defeated. A horn is heard. The choir is asking for judgment.
“Yes. Yesterday at six in the morning.”
“And he too?”
Now the voice of the man states days of wrath. Dies irae. Dies illa. Solvet saeclum in favilla. Teste David cum Sybilla. The choir is not sure. Death, defeat, and rejection have weakened it. But the man’s voice soars again, dominating, giving the choir wings and strength. And as the choir supports him, he allows himself a moment of gentleness. The choir lifts him on its wave and carries him to the last movement. The First Movement again. March, processional, march, processional, and the eagles reappear on the golden standards, the black flags again unfurl. They were men, they were ours. We shall not allow the judgment of other men to be made against them. They are our dead. Let them rest. Though they have died, we live.
“Franz, Franz! They’re playing Brahms’s Requiem tonight in the palace garden!”
“I’ll get our tickets. Wait for me there.”
He who would touch our coldness will burn his fingers. Our tears are fed by a frozen heart.
“For over a thousand years the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia were part of the territory of our people. Czechoslovakia, having evinced its inherent powerlessness to survive, has fallen prey to its own dissolution. The German Reich cannot tolerate continual disturbances in these areas.”
“Hanna, my love, my love, my love.”
* * *
Δ You turned off the radio, laughing: “Brahms in Holy Week. That’s lack of respect.”
“How will we manage tonight?”
“I’ll think of something. Why?”
Isabel laughed and tickled Javier’s ear.
On the plain stood the blackened ruins of old haciendas. Burned lifeless walls, fields that afterward had not been tilled again. High walls without windows, with open holes. Towers of dark brick. Old wooden gates that had passed through fire. Cane presses, abandoned, rusty. Abandoned high-wheeled carts. Burned-out stables, grain rooms, vague memories of patios. Empty fields. The towers of the old haciendas ruined, alone.