A Glove Shop In Vienna (7 page)

‘I thought it might be something like that,’ I said heavily. ‘I just thought it might.’

Six weeks later at the beginning of the spring term, we received notice that our Charter had come through. Peckham was triumphant, but like all men who have battled through and won, he found that victory brought problems.

There was, for example, the sudden, curious decimation of his staff. Davies, who was twenty-six, said he felt he was getting too old for experimental work and left to join his brother on a hill farm in Wales. Blackwater accepted an offer from a firm of strawberry growers, and it was generally understood that I had been called away to do Nature Conservancy work in the Hebrides.

But in a way it was Sir Henry’s letter that disconcerted Peckham most. Sir Henry found himself compelled to decline the flattering offer to be Torcastle’s first Chancellor. He had, he said, long harboured a great desire to retire from the world and end his days in prayer and meditation, but had forced himself to remain at his post in order to foster those values — respect for life, conservation of the environment and so on – without which mankind was doomed to perish. A recent encounter with one of Peckham’s own students, however, had shown him how completely the youth of today could be trusted to carry on just these ideals. He was accordingly leaving to join the ashram of Shri Ramananda in Jaipur and wished the new university every success.

‘Must have been Vernon Hartleypool, I suppose,’ said Peckham, puzzled. ‘He had quite a long chat with him, I know.’

But it is of Pringle that I think, always, when I remember my last days at Torcastle. Pringle the survivor, crouched over his tank, shielding something with his hand.

‘I want you to understand, James,’ he is saying, ‘that this is a
happy
beetroot. A very happy beetroot indeed!’

She had not expected it to be so beautiful.

In Vienna, in her luxurious villa in Schonbrunn, she had read about the ‘Green Hell’ of the Amazon. Now, standing by the rails of the steamer on the last day of her thousand-mile voyage up the ‘River Sea’, she was in a shimmering world in which trees grew from the dusky water only to find themselves in turn embraced by ferns and fronds and brilliantly coloured orchids. An alligator slid from a gleaming sandbar into the leaf-stained shallows; the grey skeleton of a deodar, its roots asphyxiated by the water, was aflame with scarlet ibis.

She was bound for a city which even in the few decades of its existence had become a legend: fabled Manaus with its rococo mansions, its mosaic sidewalks and exquisite shops… A city of unbelievable luxury and sophistication thrown up by the wealthy rubber barons in the mazed and watery jungle to rival the capitals of Europe which they had left behind. And in particular – since she was a singer – for the prime jewel in the exotic city’s heart: the Opera House, the Teatro Amazonas, the loveliest, they said, in all the Americas.

Only a few years ago her journey would have been a fitting one. Lured by unimaginable fees, Sarah Bernhardt had acted there and Caruso sung before an audience whose jewels would have put Paris and London to shame. But now, in the autumn of 1912, the good times were over. Faced by competition from the East, the ‘black gold’ that was rubber had crashed as spectacularly as before it had risen. Fortunes were lost overnight; the spoiled and pampered women who had lived like princesses in their riverside
fazendas
returned to the countries from which they came; the men, according to temperament, shot themselves or prepared to begin again. And to the Opera

House there came now only second-rate companies — people who were glad to get an engagement anywhere.

Yet the woman who stood by the rails, her blonde head under the lacy parasol bent in attention to the river, was not – and never could be – second-rate. Nina Berg was an opera singer of distinction and quality who in her native Vienna had been accorded the homage which the Russians reserve for their dancers, the British for their sportsmen and the Austrians for those who sing. ‘Is she beautiful?’ an eager student had once asked Sternhardt, the famous
regisseur
who directed her. ‘At second sight,’ the great man had answered, paying tribute to her stillness and the gentle reflection in her blue eyes.

From this hard-working and intelligent woman, youth had stealthily crept away. At first she did not heed its passing: venerable
divas
abound in the opera houses of the world. But now, far too soon, hastened by an unexpected illness and an operation that had gone awry, her voice was going too. And with her voice would go all the rest: the villa, the money, the adulation and protection of men… She would become a singing teacher in a little dark courtyard somewhere, one of the tens of thousands of musicians who had never achieved their goal, or passed it, and now watched young girls scrape fiddles or sing arpeggios.

Well, so be it! But why, having accepted her fate, had she decided to come on this trip? Why, when she had been warned of the danger if she sang again, had she decided to appear in this doomed wraith of an opera house? And why, oh why, had Kindinsky chosen
Carmen
– one of the few operas she did not like — for her farewell?

Jacob Kindinsky, sitting sad-eyed and perspiring in a deck-chair, watching her, could have told her why: because Carmen was a part that suited neither her temperament nor her voice and he did not choose to be dismembered by seeing her bring to her last Violetta or Mimi her unique quality of bewilderment at the loss, the inexplicable passing of happiness. It was bad enough, thought Jacob, to have to come to this unspeakable place – seemingly full of boa constrictors and electric eels, not to mention a fish that he dared not even contemplate which entered one’s orifices when one was bathing and became, by means of backward-pointing spines, impossible to dislodge… Bad enough to be broiled alive and in the end, in all probability, not even
paid
, without having to submit to Nina’s devastating empathy with those doomed and great-hearted girls. Whereas in the role of Carmen, singing opposite that Milanese bullock, Padrocci, who was now snoring under the fan in his cabin; keeping abreast of the ludicrious
tempi
which that clown Feuerbach would imagine to be ‘South American’, she would be compelled into the routine, heel-tapping, fan-clicking performance — and Feuerbach’s imbecile crescendos would drown those heartrending breaks in her top notes.

And Jacob, who could hardly bear what was happening to Nina, found himself wondering for the first time in years if they had done right – he, Sternhardt who had become her
regisseur
and Fallheim, the director of the Academy, when they had sent that boy away. Jacob had been with Fallheim at that last interview when they had finally persuaded him that he was harming Nina and standing in her way. He had never forgotten the look in the boy’s eyes, but he had forgotten his name. Stefan? Georg? Karl?

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
!”