After a while Jacob came over to stand beside her. He must make her speak, listen, anything.
‘You never asked where I found your white rose,’ he said.
She flinched, but as always answered gently. ‘No. Where did you get it?’
‘It was quite an adventure,’ said Jacob proudly. ‘I think perhaps it was the only white rose in Amazonia. I tried everywhere and then I met an Indian who had been employed as a gardener on one of the great estates. The man who owned it had left — he’s gone bankrupt and faces a prison charge too, poor devil. But the Indian swore there was a special place there, where the owner used to grow a white rose. Apparently he made a great fuss about doing it — it’s very difficult to grow roses here.’
Nina’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. ‘What was it called, this place?’
‘Roccella. An Italian built it after some palazzo in —’
He broke off for Nina had clasped his shoulders. She was looking at him as if he were wreathed in unutterable majesty and her eyes were the eyes of a young girl.
‘Again, Jacob, please. Tell me again what happened there. Everything.’
Not all great loves, faithfully kept, end in tragedy. Nina returned, found Paul hunched and despairing by the riverside, saw his face as he watched her come towards him… and knew why she had been born. His prison sentence was minimal. She waited. They returned to Roccella to begin again. Nor had they been in any way mistaken: each found in the other, and was to do so always, the ‘incomparable remedy’ they had sought.
No, if there was a tragedy, it was that of Jacob Kindinsky who had adored Nina and now returned to Linz. But a passerby, seeing him on his verandah above the Danube, spooning sour cream on to his blintzies and listening to the clink of the till as his wife chatted to the customers in the shop below, might think that as a tragedy it was… well, endurable. Soon, too, he is going to write a book that will take the operatic world by storm. He has the title ready: The Diva with a Rose.
A Little Disagreement
Because I have been married with great content (and to the same woman) for twenty years, I am often asked questions. Questions which imply that there is some formula for married happiness; a recipe for success. And when this happens and I am forced into an answer, I tell the questioner a story. The story of Tante Wilhelmina Ziegelmayer and her husband Uncle Ferdi, in Vienna, before the war.
And I begin at the end. With Tante Wilhelmina’s death-bed, to be exact, which took place on a Tuesday evening during that socially grey period when the Opera Ball is over for another year, the holy statues wear their Lenten shrouds and a wind straight from the plains of Hungary bites eastward into the city.
On a dull, cold Tuesday in early March, then, Tante Wilhelmina (who actually was no relation to me at all; I was the housekeeper’s son and still a child) clutched her heart, shrieked, turned purple — and sent for the hairdresser.
In life, Tante Wilhelmina, prematurely retired from the chorus of the Opera, took little interest in her appearance. Death, however, was a different matter. Now, as she lay gasping on her pillows in a nightdress of lilac crepe de Chine, she nevertheless managed to give precise instructions to Herr Kugelheim.
‘You will, of course, make absolutely certain that I am dead. You know how to do this?’
Herr Kugelheim, ancient, bandy-legged and servile, clutched his curling-tongs and muttered something about mirrors.
‘Then two low curls on the forehead. Low, and a plaited chignon in the nape. Have you got that?’
I, meanwhile, had been sent to fetch the cats. Wotan and
Parsifal presented no problems. Huge, neutered tom-cats, they were perfectly prepared to finish their cream at the foot of Tante Wilhelmina’s bed. Siegfried, however, was another matter. Siegfried’s operation had not been a success and he was absent on the tiles.
By the time I had returned from an unsuccessful search, most of the relatives sent for by my mother had arrived, and in hushed whispers were assembling in the bedroom. It is naturally with hindsight that I see the grouping as having the weight and dignity of a Delacroix or Titian. In the centre, of course, lay Tante Wilhelmina, the lamp falling on her ravaged features and heaving breast. Behind her, the hairdresser; across her feet, the cats. At the back of the room, in shadow, a respectfully doleful row of servants. Leaning against the wardrobe, a creaking cousin, male, from Plotz…
Kneeling by the bed itself, hiccuping with grief, was Tante Wilhelmina’s adopted daughter, Steffi; a blonde, kind, silly woman, her trusting sea-cow eyes brimming with tears. By the window Steffi’s husband, Victor Goldmann, a Jewish violinist from the Philharmonic, surveyed the scene like a flayed, El Greco martyr.
Tante Wilhelmina stirred and groaned. Silence fell. A waiting silence.
As though on a cue that only she could hear, my mother now stepped forward.
‘Gnadige Frau,’ she said, leaning over Tante Wilhelmina, ‘if you will forgive the impertinence, I think the Herr Professor should be sent for. I think your husband should be here.’
Then: ‘If you… insist,’ said Tante Wilhelmina, speaking with great difficulty. ‘I… don’t wish it… personally. But if… you insist.’
A sigh of relief seemed to pass round the room. Tante Wilhelmina stretched out a failing arm and reached for the note-pad on her bedside table. ‘I AM DYING,’ she wrote in indelible pencil and underlined each word.
My mother tore off the paper and handed the message to me. At a nod from her, I ran downstairs and knocked on the door of Uncle Ferdi’s study.
Uncle Ferdi had been sitting there quietly, his bald head gleaming in the lamplight. Now he peered at the note through gold pince-nez, blew softly through his moustache, sighed, nodded — and followed me upstairs…
And if all this seems a little odd, the explanation is very simple. Tante Wilhelmina and Uncle Ferdi had been married for thirty years. And for twenty-nine of these, they had not exchanged a single word.
No one knew what Uncle Ferdi had done, only that it was very, very bad. That somehow he had hurt and humiliated Tante Wilhelmina to such an extent that she had never been able to forgive him. There had been no scandal, no break-up. They lived under the same roof and when she wanted anything she sent him notes, first through Steffi (adopted from an orphanage mainly for the purpose), later through me. But from that day to this no word had passed between them.
And now, with Uncle Ferdi sitting sadly in the big carved chair which had been placed in readiness for him, the deathbed could begin.
I was ten years old and very nervous. A bit ghoulish, too, as I leant against my mother’s skirts. What would happen? Would she scream or gasp or… rattle? Would there be blood?
Well, what happened was that Tante Wilhelmina forgave people.
She forgave everybody. She forgave the maids for not dusting behind the piano and she forgave the creaky cousin for doing her out of a barrel of rollmops during the First World War. She forgave her sister-in-law for filching her recipe for lungenbeuschel and she forgave my mother for not appreciating Wagner. She even (and this took some time) forgave me.
After that came Steffi.
What she forgave Steffi for was not marrying a Jew, for in those days Hitler was just a faint, foul cloud on the horizon. What she forgave Steffi for was getting it all so wrong. And it is true that the intricacies of Jewish orthodoxy seemed to be quite beyond poor Steffi, who cooked gefilte fish on days of strictest fasting and was once seen trying to remove her husband’s hat on the way to synagogue.