The boy’s name had been Paul — Paul Varlov — and Nina, now watching with her customary quiet attention, a flock of green and orange parakeets had not forgotten it. It was, she could have said (without hysteria, without hyperbole) stamped into the marrow of her bones.
He had been twenty-three — a Russian father, a Hungarian mother, educated by some whim in an English public school and when Nina met him, a student at the University of Vienna. In him, nations and causes bubbled and boiled; just to touch him was to risk burning, he was so terribly alive. With his too large, too dark eyes, his high cheekbones and olive skin, he was an outlandish figure among his phlegmatic classmates, yet everywhere he went he was surrounded by friends who clung to him like puppies, lapping at his obsessions: the novels of Dostoyevsky, the Brotherhood of Man, the fate of the pigeons on the Stefan’s Dom… He made speeches on Freedom for Hungary, waving his searingly beautiful hands; swam the Danube; discovered the Secessionists, made yoghurt in his landlady’s button boots…
Then, standing at a Mahler Concert, he found himself next to a girl, golden-haired and gentle, with a sweet wide mouth and tender eyes.
Nina was twenty, studying piano and singing at the
Academy. Paul’s friends parted to let her through and closed again behind her. She was home.
Her innocence, at that time, was total. She believed herself to be an indifferent student — seeing in the extra work, the harsher criticism that her professors handed out to her, only evidence of her own inadequacy. Everyone else in the Academy knew of her promise, but not she.
Now, in any case, she forgot her studies; forgot everything except the glory of being alive and loved by Paul. The selflessness and modesty that were her hallmark enabled her to respond completely to his passion. Uniquely, for someone so young, she never got in the way of her own happiness.
So it was spring in Vienna… In the Prater, the violets; on the slopes of the Wienerwald, the greening larches. And everywhere, in the cafes, the parks, floating from the windows of the grey, stone-garlanded houses — music. Sometimes the friends came, unexacting and affectionate as spaniels; sometimes they were alone. Their love was so immense it spilled over to embrace the children bowling their hoops in the Tiergarten, the waiters in restaurants who paused, leaning on their brass trays, to tell them the stories of their lives. They stood, marvelling, their fingers interlaced, before the quiet Durers in the Albertina, adopted an ageing llama in the Kaiser’s zoo, danced to the open-air bands under the linden trees…
One night from a deserted garden in Grinzig, Paul pilfered for her an early, perfect, snow-white rose. They were the first roses, he told her, the white ones, sprung from the tears of the angel who had been compelled to lead Eve from Paradise. He would find them for her always, he said, and when she laughed and spoke of winter he said there could be no winter while they loved. That night she stayed with him. She was a Catholic — it was mortal sin. For the rest of her life, when she heard the word ‘joy’, it was to the memory of that sin that she returned.
If Paul had one characteristic above all others, it was a high intelligence. There was no moment when he did not understand that what was between him and Nina was a God-given gift, entire, enduring and sublime. And young as he was he began, without a second’s hesitation, to undergo the paperwork and practicalities which would make possible their marriage. It was now that the Academy began to sit up and take notice. Nina was sent for and informed of her potentially glorious future as an opera singer. She was surprised and pleased that her voice was good and told them, with her gentle smile, that she was going to marry Paul Varlov and go abroad with him. The Principal, horrified, sent for Sternhardt, the opera’s famous regisseur who had earmarked both the voice and, when the time was ripe, the woman.
Nina, serene as a golden lotus, stayed firm.
So they turned on Paul. He had not known of the future that awaited her. To be a singer in Vienna is to be a little bit divine. Aware of this, wanting only what was right for her, Paul listened.
And so, into the Eden that those two had created, their elders introduced the poison-apple of self-sacrifice. Benign, experienced, twice his age, they bore down on the boy, keeping their visits secret from Nina — emphasising again and again her promise, her glittering future, the life of an acclaimed and dedicated artist which awaited her and which marriage and childbearing and poverty would put for ever out of reach.
Paul was only twenty-three. The call they made was one to which youth has always rallied: the sacrifice of happiness, of life itself, for a high ideal. After weeks of sleeplessness, he lost his fine perception of the truth and reached out, blind and despairing, for their poisoned fruit.
One day Nina, going to his room, found the friends grouped like figures in a pieta — and on the pillow, his last gift to her: a single, long-stemmed, snow-white rose.
She never saw him again.
The clanging of the ship’s bell made Nina turn. They had come to one of the sights of Amazonia: the ‘Wedding of the Waters’ where, at the confluence of the two rivers, the leaf-brown waters of the Amazon flowed, distinct and separate, beside the acid, jet-black waters of the Negro to within sight of Manaus.
Responding to the bell, there now emerged Padrocci, the tenor, in crumpled mauve pyjamas, the ludicrous Feuerbach with his moustache cups, the dishevelled members of the chorus, all to peer over the rails and exclaim.
‘Oh, God,’ thought Jacob Kindinsky, indifferent as always to the marvels of nature. ‘What scum is this that I have brought to sing with Nina?’
But as they steamed up the Negro, past the neglected and once-splendid planters’ houses, past sheds where ocelot and jaguar pelts hung out to dry, he heard her draw in her breath.
‘Look, Jacob! There it is!’
He looked. A dazzling, soaring dome of blue and green and gold surmounted by the Eagle of Brazil… a glimpse of marble pillars, a glittering pink and white facade… The Teatro Amazonas would have been lovely anywhere — here in the midst of the steamy, dusky jungle it was staggering.
And the fading opera star, the little Jew who loved her, turned and smiled at each other, for after all there was no disgrace here. This place would make a fitting ending to their pilgrimage.
A few hours before curtain-up, the thing happened which Jacob had known would happen. Nina, unpacking in her sumptuous but already mildewed dressing-room, asked for a white rose.
‘Nina, we are in the Amazon? he cried. ‘You have seen the flowers! They are probably full of dead birds they have eaten for their dinner.’
‘Please, Jacob.’
So it ended as it always ended… As it had done in Berlin in a blizzard which had cut off all supplies to the city; in Paris with the streets sealed for some visiting dignitary so that Jacob, with an hour to spare, found himself begging for a single bud from a bad-tempered gardener in the Tuileries; in Bucharest where every available rose had been pounded into attar for the tourist trade.
‘You cannot wear a white rose for Carmen,’ Sternhardt had yelled at her years and years ago, when he had at last persuaded her to try the mezzo role. ‘Carmen wears red flowers always — scarlet, crimson — she is a gypsy!”
But Nina, who stood so patiently while they fitted her costumes, who would put herself out for the most insignificant member of the chorus, only said very quietly that if they wanted her to sing Carmen they would have to find her a white rose. And as with Carmen, so with Violetta (whether or not she was the Dame aux Camellias), with Mimi and Gilda and Butterfly.