Night Games: And Other Stories and Novellas (27 page)

That fall Clara began her first engagement in Detmold. Baron von
Leisenbohg-then still a ministry official-used the first Christmas vacation to visit Clara in her new locale. He knew that the medical student
had become a physician and had married in September, and so had new
hopes. But Clara, honest as usual, informed the baron immediately upon
his arrival that she had in the meantime begun an intimate relationship
with the tenor at the Court Theatre. And so it happened that Leisenbohg
could take from Detmold no other memories than a platonic ride through
the city park and a supper in the theatre's restaurant in the company of a
few of Clara's colleagues. In spite of this he repeated his visit to Detmold
several times, admired Clara's considerable artistic progress while there,
and had hopes for the next season, since the tenor had already signed a
contract with the Hamburg Opera. But even in that next year he was dis appointed, as Clara saw fit to succumb to the courtship of a Dutch wholesale merchant named Louis Verhajen.

When Clara was called to the Dresden Court Theatre in the third
season, the baron, despite his youth, gave up a very promising career in
the state service and moved to Dresden. There he spent every evening
with Clara and her mother-who knew how to keep a convenient obliviousness in regard to her daughter's relationships-and entertained new
hopes. Unfortunately the Dutchman had the inconvenient habit of writing letters announcing his imminent arrival the next day, and of indicating to his beloved that she was surrounded by a network of spies,
threatening her with various painful manners of death if she were unfaithful to him. But since he never actually came, and Clara slowly became more and more apprehensive, Leisenbohg decided to bring an end
to the affair no matter what the price; and he traveled to Detmold so that
he could handle it personally. To his great surprise, the Dutchman declared that he had written his threatening love letters only out of chivalry,
and that actually he would welcome nothing more than to be relieved of
any further obligations to Clara. Blissfully happy, Leisenbohg returned to
Dresden and informed Clara of the agreeable outcome of his visit. She
thanked him heartily but rejected his very first attempt at a closer intimacy with a vehemence that shocked him. After a few short and urgent
questions she finally admitted to him that during his absence no less a
personage than Prince Kajetan had been seized with a passion for her and
had sworn to inflict harm on himself if she did not accept him. It was natural that in the end she had had to give in to him in order not to plunge
the ruling house and the country into deepest despair.

With a broken heart Leisenbohg left town and returned to Vienna.
Here he began to cultivate his connections again, and it was not in the
least due to his continual efforts on her behalf that Clara received an
offer from the Vienna Opera for the coming year. After a successful guest
performance, she began her regular engagement that October, and the
gorgeous basket of flowers from the baron that Clara found in her
wardrobe on the evening of her first performance seemed to express a
plea and a hope simultaneously. But the enthusiastic sponsor who waited
for her after the performance was destined to find that he had once again come too late. The blonde singing coach-who also had a reputation as a
composer of songs-with whom she had studied in the last few weeks
had been given rights by her that she was unable to retract for anything in
the world.

Since that time, seven years had passed. The singing coach had
been followed by Herr Klemens von Rhodewyl, the bold jockey; Herr
von Rhodewyl by the choir director Vincenz Klaudi, who sometimes
sang along with the operas that he directed so loudly that one couldn't
hear the singers; the choir director by Count von Alban-Rattony, a man
who had gambled away his Hungarian properties in a card game but later
won a castle in Lower Austria; the count by Herr Edgar Wilhelm, composer of ballet scores that he paid dearly for, of tragedies for which he
rented the Jantschtheatre, and of poems which were printed in the most
beautiful script in the silliest aristocratic paper of the Residenz; Herr
Edgar Wilhelm by a man named Amandus Meier, who was only nineteen
years old and very handsome-and owned nothing except a fox terrier
who could stand on his head; and Herr Meier by the most elegant man in
the monarchy: Prince Richard Bedenbruck.

Clara never tried to hide her affairs. At all times she kept a simple
bourgeois home in which only the man of the house changed from time
to time. She was extraordinarily beloved by the public. Higher circles
were pleased that she went to mass every Sunday and to confession twice
a month, wore a picture of the Madonna that had been blessed by the
pope as an amulet on her breast, and never went to sleep without saying
her prayers. There was seldom a charity event in which she did not participate as a sales girl, and aristocratic ladies as well as ladies from Jewish financial circles were happy to be able to offer their wares under the
same tent as Clara. She always had a charming smile for the youthful
fans who waited for her at the stage door. She divided the flowers that
she received among the patient crowd and once, when the flowers had
accidently been left behind in the wardrobe, she said in the charming Viennese dialect that suited her so well, "My goodness, I forgot the salad
up in my little room! Please come again tomorrow afternoon if you want
some of it." Then she climbed up into the carriage, and putting her head out of the window while driving away, called out, "You'll get coffee
too!"

Fanny Ringeiser was one of the few who had found the courage to
accept this invitation. Clara got into a lighthearted conversation with her,
asked about her family affairs as affably as an archduchess, and liked the
refreshing and enthusiastic girl so much that she asked her to come back
soon. Fanny accepted the invitation, and soon she succeeded in establishing herself as an important part of the artist's household, a position she
knew how to keep, for despite all the intimacies that Clara revealed to
her, she never allowed herself equal intimacies in return. During the
course of the years Fanny received many marriage proposals, mostly
from the circle of the young sons of Mariahilfer industrialists with whom
she usually danced at balls. But she rejected them, since she regularly fell
in love with Clara's current lover.

Clara loved Prince Bedenbruck for more than three years with the
same faithfulness but with deeper passion than his forerunners, and
Leisenbohg, who despite his numerous disappointments had never given
up hope, began seriously to fear that the happiness he had yearned for for
ten years would never be his. Always, whenever he saw someone fall
from her graces, he broke off with his current lover in order to be ready
for her at any moment. He did the same thing after the sudden death of
Prince Richard, but for the first time more out of habit than conviction.
Clara's pain seemed so limitless that everyone was forced to believe she
had given up the joys of life forever. Every day she drove to the cemetery
and placed flowers on the grave of the deceased. She had her lightcolored clothes put into the attic and locked up her jewelry in the hardestto-reach drawer of her desk. It took much persuasion to convince her to
abandon the idea of leaving the stage forever.

After her first successful reappearance on the opera stage, her lifeat least on the surface-resumed its usual course. The circle of her former acquaintances reassembled. The music critic Bernhard Feuerstein
appeared again with spinach or tomato stains on his jacket, depending on
the menu of previous dinners, and to Clara's open delight complained
about colleagues and directors. Once more she allowed herself to be courted by Prince Richard's two nephews, Lucius and Christian, Beden-
brucks from the other line, in a way that did not obligate her; a French
ambassador and a young Czech pianist were introduced into her circle;
and on the loth of June she once again went to the races. But as Prince
Lucius, who was not without poetic talent, expressed it at the time: only
her spirit had awakened, but her heart was still asleep. Yes, whenever any
of her younger or older friends dared to intimate that there was such a
thing as tenderness or passion in the world, every smile disappeared from
her face, her eyes darkened, and sometimes she lifted her hand in a peculiar gesture of dismissal meant to apply to everyone for all time.

Then in the second half of June it happened that a singer from the
North named Sigurd Olse sang Tristan at the opera. His voice was bright
and strong, if not completely noble; his figure was almost superhumanly
tall, though inclined to fullness; and though his face while not singing
lacked expressiveness, as soon as he sang his steel-grey eyes lit up as
though from a secret inner fire; and through his voice and his intense
look he seemed to hold everyone spellbound, especially the women.

Clara sat with her other currently unoccupied colleagues in the box
of the theatre. She seemed to be the only one who was not moved by his
singing. The next morning Sigurd Olse was introduced to her in the director's office. She said a few kind but almost cool words about his performance of the day before. He visited her that same afternoon, without
her having invited him. Baron Leisenbohg and Fanny Ringeiser were
there. Sigurd had tea with them. He talked about his parents, who were
fishermen living in a small Norwegian city; of the wonderful discovery
of his singing talents by a traveling Englishman who had landed on the
remote fjord in a white yacht; of his wife, an Italian woman who had died
on their honeymoon while on the Atlantic and who was buried at sea.
After he took his leave, the others remained silent for a long time. Fanny
scrutinized her empty teacup, Clara went to the piano and propped her elbows up on the closed lid, and the baron brooded silently and anxiously
about why Clara, during the story of Sigurd's honeymoon, had not made
that peculiar gesture with which she had dismissed all intimations of the
continued existence of passionate or tender relationships on earth since
the death of the prince.

In his further guest engagements, Sigurd Olse sang Siegfried and
Lohengrin. Each time Clara sat unmoved in the loge. But the singer, who
otherwise did not associate with anyone except members of the Norwegian delegation, appeared at Clara's every afternoon, seldom without
meeting Miss Fanny Ringeiser, and never without meeting the Baron von
Leisenbohg.

On the twenty-seventh of June he appeared as Tristan for the last
time. Clara sat unmoved in the loge of the theatre. The morning afterward she drove with Fanny to the cemetery and laid a huge wreath on the
grave of the prince. That evening she gave a party in honor of the singer,
who was scheduled to leave Vienna the next day.

Her entire circle of friends was there. The passion that Sigurd had
conceived for Clara was a secret to no one. As usual, he spoke a lot and
excitedly. Among other things, he told of how, during his journey by ship
to Vienna, an Arabian woman married to a Russian prince regent had
read the lines of his hand and had prophesied that he would soon enter
the most fateful epoch of his life. He believed in this prophecy strongly,
as indeed superstition was stronger in him than the ability to make himself interesting. He also spoke of the well-known fact that the last year,
just after landing in New York, where he was supposed to make a guest
appearance, he had-despite the large penalty he had to pay-immediately reboarded the ship to return to Europe, merely because a black cat
had walked between his legs on the landing pier. Of course he had
grounds to believe in such mysterious connections between incomprehensible signs and the fate of men. One evening in London's Covent
Garden Opera House, his voice had failed because he had neglected to
say a certain magic formula he had learned from his grandmother. One
night in a dream a winged genius in a rose-colored leotard had appeared
to him and had foretold the death of his favorite barber, and indeed, the
unlucky man was found hanging the next morning. In addition, he always carried with him a short but content-rich letter which had been
handed to him by the spirit of the late singer Cornelia Lujan in a spiritual
seance in Brussels, a letter which in perfect Portuguese contained the
prophecy that he was destined to be the greatest singer in the Old and the
New World. He recounted all these things now; and as the spiritual letter, written on the rose-colored paper of the Glienwood firm was passed from
hand to hand, the whole company was deeply moved. Only Clara was not
affected, and simply nodded indifferently from time to time. Despite that,
Leisenbohg's anxiety reached new heights. To his sharpened eye the
signs of coming danger were ever more clear. Most of all Sigurd. like all
of Clara's former lovers, conceived a noticeable liking for him at supper.
invited him to his property on the Fjord of Molde, and finally offered
him the intimate form of "you." Furthermore, Fanny Ringeiser's entire
body trembled whenever Sigurd addressed a word to her; she alternately
paled and blushed when he looked at her with his large, steel-grey eyes;
and when he began to talk about his coming departure, she began to cry
out loud. But Clara remained calm and serious even now. She scarcely
responded to the flaming looks that Sigurd directed at her, she did not
speak to him more animatedly than to the others; and when he finally
kissed her hand and looked up at her with eyes that seemed to beg, to
promise, to despair, her own remained veiled and her features impassive.
Leisenbohg watched all this with mistrust and fear. But as the party was
nearing its end and everyone took his leave, the baron experienced something totally unexpected. As the last one to leave, he gave his hand to
Clara in farewell, like the others, and turned to go. But she held his hand
tightly and whispered to him, "Please return." He believed he hadn't
heard correctly. But she pressed his hand once again, and, with her lips
right next to his ear, repeated, "Please return; I'll expect you in an hour."