by Eva Ibbotson
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 régisseur 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 cafés, 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 Dürers 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 régisseur 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 forever 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 façade … 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.
So now poor Jacob stepped out of the resplendent foyer with its gilded mirrors and corpulent muses, to search among the frangipani, the hibiscus and the voracious orchids in that steam-bath of a city for the flower which alone linked this lovely, deeply weary woman to her youth.
In his ornate gold-leaf and red-plush box next to the stage, a man whose look of extreme distinction even the recent months of strain and agony could not eradicate, waited – entirely without interest – for the curtain to rise.
As usual in these times of slump and mismanagement there had been a muddle about the posters. The company was second-rate, the opera was Carmen — that was all he knew and it was enough to have kept him away but for the need to kill time for an evening before the arrival of the tycoon from Sâo Paulo to whom he was selling ‘The Dragonfly’. Everything else was sold already: the other boats, the carriages, the antique silver and fine furniture he had shipped out from Europe. Only for Roccella itself had he found no purchaser. Soon now the lovely Palladian yellow-stuccoed house with its blue shutters, its flower-wreathed arcades, its fountains and terraces, would vanish in the murderous embrace of the jungle from which he had wrested it.
‘Look, Mother, there’s Mr Varlov! So he can’t be in prison yet,’ said the convent-fresh daughter of a Portuguese customs official, looking raptly at the solitary figure in the box.
‘Don’t stare, dear,’ said her mother, irritably aware that neither disgrace nor bankruptcy would dim the image of this curiously magnetic figure in her daughter’s eyes.
But the girl’s father did stare, and nodded, for it seemed to him that Varlov had had a raw deal. Though he had been among the wealthiest of the planters and hospitable to a fault, Varlov had not indulged in the pranks of so many of the others – washing their carriage horses in champagne, sending their shirts back to Paris to be laundered. Varlov had built houses for the serengueiros who tended his thousands of acres of wild rubber, and schools for their children. It was to save these that he had gone to Rio when the crash came, to raise more money by means which, though he could not have known it at the time, had turned out to be illegal and now left him facing, along with the men he had trusted, a charge of malpractice and fraud.
Leaning back, indifferent to the looks he was attracting, Paul looked round the Opera House that he had helped to bring into being. It was he who had insisted on the best Carrara marble, he who had suggested that de Angelis himself be fetched from Italy to paint the ceilings. He had put thousands of pounds of his own money into this crazy, lovely building and for one reason only. Obsessionally, doggedly, idiotically, Paul had been convinced that one day she would come.
Well, she had not come. He had entertained Charetti and her entire company from La Scala to a seven-course banquet on ‘The Dragonfly’, had taken half a Russian corps de ballet stricken with yellow fever back to Roccella to be nursed …
But she had not come and never would come now. It was over.
Jacob had found a rose. Feuerbach, twisting his idiot moustache into imagined perfection, went to the conductor’s rostrum. Padrocci completed the egg-swallowing and mi-mi-mi-ing routine so beloved of bad tenors all over the world and was eased into the uniform of Don José.
The curtain rose. Soldiers and passers-by, hopelessly sparse on the over-large stage, wandered about. Padrocci made his entrance. He had burst a button on his tunic and was already a quarter-tone flat.
In his box, Paul Varlov yawned.
Carmen appeared on the steps of the cigarette factory, was greeted by the crowd, moved forward, getting into position for her ‘Habañera’. A heavy black wig, a flounced skirt, In her hair a rose …
In the stage box a man stood up, threw out an arm, spoke some unintelligible words. He was glared at, hushed.
Nina looked up. Across the glare of the footlights, at a distance at which normally she could distinguish nothing, she saw him, understood why she had come – and began to sing.
What happened next was a miracle. Jacob Kindinsky said so, anyway, and he should have known. The kind of miracle that enables a mother to leap across a chasm to rescue a child threatened by fire, or enables a mortally-wounded pilot to land his aircraft safely. For Nina now sang as she had sung at the height of her glory. Her illness, the effect of her operation ceased to exist. ‘ Sing with your voice, with your heart, with your life’, St Augustine had begged, and so now sang Nina Berg, forcing from Padrocci as the opera continued a decent, near-musical performance, from Feuerbach a respect for Bizet’s marvellously subtle score.
The first interval found Jacob in tears and Paul Varlov sitting in his box as if carved from stone. ‘I cannot do it again,’ he silently implored the Fates. ‘ I cannot!’
For the first few moments, following the ecstasy and shock of seeing her, hope had soared. Even with the heavy make-up he could see how she had aged. That she was appearing with this appalling company at all seemed to indicate that her career was over. In which case, surely he had a right, even disgraced and bankrupt as he was … ? But as she began to sing he knew it was not so. She was exactly what they had foretold: a great and glorious artist. If she was here it was for some chivalrous reason of her own.
The curtain rose again. Padrocci, pawing the white rose with his hot, fat hands, managed the ‘Flower Song’ and Paul, watching him, smiled crookedly. There was one gift and one gift only that he grudged the encroaching jungle. The greenhouse at Follina with its latticed screens, its fan and ice-machine where, to the puzzlement of his gardeners, he had coaxed and bullied from the black soil of Amazonia a sweetly-scented, snow-white rose.
Carmen read her doom in the cards, sent José away, went forward to her death… Right at the end the strain began to tell and Jacob, cowering, waited for the first tell-tale crack in her voice but Feuerbach, scenting the stable, was rampant again and no one noticed.
The curtain fell on an ovation. The audience rose, stamped, roared. Flowers rained on the stage. Nina took curtain call upon curtain call, leading forward the stunned Padrocci, the simpering Feuerbach. She was not at all impatient and hardly glanced at Paul’s box. There was all time, all eternity now for them to be together. Even she could not imagine a God so wrathful that he would separate them twice.
The delay before she could escape from the theatre gave Paul his chance. He sent a note round to the stage door and made his way quickly down to the docks. He was selling ‘The Dragonfly’ fully equipped and his Indian crew had been persuaded to stay on and work for the new owner. If he worked fast it could be done – her own devastating humility would aid him – but he thought it might be the last thing he would do.
Hurriedly he gave his instructions: a perfect intimate dinner for two on deck; the Venetian candlesticks, the best champagne – and no word to Madame, no single word to indicate that ‘The Dragonfly’ was no longer his.
They nodded, pleased to serve him once again. They would not betray him and spoke, in any case, only their own language and a smattering of Portuguese.
Time, now, to go to the riverside café he had appointed for their rendezvous.
She came as he had asked, alone, in a hansom, telling no one where she was going. As she stepped out and the lamplight shone on her well-remembered face, he felt a moment of rage that time had dared so patently to lay hands on her. Then it was over, for this was Nina. She, in her turn, experienced no such moment, for he was handsomer than ever, the skin taut over those incredible bones, the streaks of silver highlighting his jet-black hair.
‘Come,’ he said, allowing himself once and once only to touch her hand. ‘We’re going to have dinner on my yacht.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
She followed him like a child. She wanted to go on saying ‘yes’ to everything: ‘yes’ to the lapping of the river, ‘ yes’ to the hot night and the cry of the frogs; ‘yes’ to the future – ‘yes’ even to the lonely and agonising past because it had led her to this place. So totally, shiveringly happy was she that she made a characteristic gestur
e, laying a finger sideways across her lips so as not to cry out and Paul, remembering it, stumbled for a moment as he led her aboard.
‘What a beautiful yacht, Paul!’
‘Yes: she’s the fastest on the river. I have four others: a schooner, a motor launch…’ He began to show off, boring her with tonnages and the luxurious fittings he had installed. Useless. She seemed enchanted at his success; to regard it as absolutely natural that he should boast like silly boy.
‘Oh, I knew you’d do well! Tell me everything! Start with now. Where do you live?’
A servant had taken her cloak, drawn out a chair at the snowy candlelit table on the front deck. She took a roll, began to crumble it – then looked up at him to see if he remembered.
Yes, he remembered … That they had always kept a handful of crumbs from every meal they ate together and gone afterwards to find a one-legged pigeon who roosted between the feet of a particularly Gothic saint above the west door of the Stefan’s Dom.
A good life they had given that pigeon, who had abandoned thereafter any efforts to support himself.
Deliberately he looked away, refusing the shared intimacy, and began to describe his house. ‘ It was built by an Italian over a hundred years ago – it’s an exact copy of the palazzo in his native village. Roccella, it’s called. He didn’t live long to enjoy it, poor devil. I got it for a song and I’ve made a water garden, an arboretum…’
Yes, he would do that, thought Nina. She remembered how he had bought a packet of seeds once, mignonette they were, and they had wandered through the courtyards of the Hofburg scattering them in the cracks between the paving stones. She had been surprised and enchanted that someone so wild and masculine should care so much for flowers.
‘I’ve brought in trees from all over Amazonia – there must be five hundred species. And I’ve made the house into a real show place. The furniture’s mostly Louis Quinze shipped out from France, the chandeliers are Bohemian…’
