Voice of Destiny

by JH Fletcher

  The woman answered only with her eyes, which remained cold and hard and contemptuous. She stared at them in turn, then turned her back, went into the house and closed the door. After her initial greeting, she had not spoken a word.

  Lucia was devastated. ‘I can’t leave her like this. I must try to make her understand.’

  Reinhardt stopped her. ‘There’s no point.’

  She tried to argue, half-heartedly, but he was right. The woman would not listen to her now, no matter what she said. They got on their bicycles. By now the best of the day was over and they headed back to the city through a misty dusk that rose out of the woods on either side of the road. The episode had spoiled the outing and she felt angry with him, and herself, for letting things turn out the way they had. ‘I doubt she’ll welcome me another time.’

  ‘I hope for her sake she doesn’t welcome anybody.’

  The uncomfortable moment passed and before they were back in town they were once again easy together, riding side by side through the fading light as though there were no such things as Germans or Italians or war.

  They parted where they had met, on the outskirts of the city. She asked him about the mushrooms.

  ‘Keep them; we get more food than you do. Besides, you wouldn’t feel right, cycling back from the country without some food in your basket.’

  They laughed. They might have been old friends who understood each other. He touched her hand. ‘I’ll be in contact.’

  ‘Good.’

  And she meant it.

  5

  They had seen no-one, yet somehow Teresa Sciotto found out; the next day Marta said: ‘She’s telling everyone you’re out riding with a German soldier.’

  ‘You don’t want to take any notice of that; she’d say anything.’

  Marta had come to know her pupil too well to be put off so easily. ‘Is she right?’

  ‘Would you mind if she was?’

  ‘I believe I would.’

  ‘And if I said it was none of your business?’

  ‘You’d be wrong. You’re my pupil; you have a huge talent. I feel responsible both for you and your talent. It’s a duty, not only to you and me, but to the world. You mustn’t do anything to endanger it. As for your German friend, you know as well as I do that some people won’t like it. It could even be dangerous, if the wrong people got to hear about it. You should be more careful.’

  Music was one thing; when it came to her private life, Lucia would not be told. ‘I’m already singing for them, for heaven’s sake! What’s the difference?’

  ‘All the difference in the world, and you know it.’

  ‘We picked mushrooms. I suppose that’s a crime!’

  ‘Don’t be stupid! Whether you like it or not, there’s a war on. It won’t last for ever and already people are saying the Germans will lose. If they do, life could be difficult for anyone seen to be on their side.’

  ‘I’m not on anybody’s side! I’m not interested in the war or in politics at all!’

  ‘The war exists, whether you like it or not. And some people have long memories.’

  As far as Lucia was concerned, people could think what they liked. She said: ‘Would you like some mushrooms? Or will that make you a collaborator, too?’

  But Marta was not so easily mollified. ‘You have a great career ahead of you. Don’t ruin it.’

  Defiant to the last, Lucia gave her a hard smile. ‘Maybe you should say that to Colonel Strasser.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  1

  The rehearsals came together, the disparate elements of sound and characterisation forming a seamless whole. There were costume fittings, chorus rehearsals, orchestral rehearsals, rehearsals for the male principals. Lucia attended all of them, sitting silently in the auditorium, soaking herself in the music, feeling it permeate every part of her consciousness so that she became one with the notes.

  Colonel Strasser continued to pay occasional visits to the theatre. It was not in his nature to be jovial but he unbent to the point of smiling from time to time; within the limits of a personality that matched his axe-blade face, he was even, or almost, friendly. Yet Lucia knew there was something in him of ice and the frozen wastes of the eastern front where, it seemed, he had spent much of his service before coming to Parma, and she sensed how much he despised the softness of this southern land and the people who lived here.

  It was completely in character for him to have chosen this opera because it was German, oblivious to the irony of such a choice. Yet he had claimed to Lucia that music had always been his passion. She could not understand him, and for that reason he frightened her.

  Not that fear affected her performance. On stage the world itself fell away. There remained only the drama living within her, the character and her varying passions expressed not only in each movement of her body but in every note and utterance that passed her lips.

  It was hard to come back from such intense communion, to leave the world of spiritual reality and return to the mundane world that no longer seemed quite real. Somehow she managed it; on her afternoons off she continued to go riding with Reinhardt Hoffmann and, if Marta Bianci knew, she said no more about it.

  2

  Reinhardt never came on to her. Lucia had been wary of advances that she had anticipated would be both inevitable and distasteful; perversely, when nothing happened, she began to wonder if there might be something wrong with him, or herself.

  One day, cycling along a deserted road where the overhanging branches of trees cloaked even the sky in secrecy, he said: ‘The SS have been asking questions.’

  She was two weeks away from playing the lead in an opera ordered by the SS. She could not believe what Reinhardt was telling her.

  ‘About me?’

  ‘Not yet. But they’re going round the farms they think may have been selling to the black market. It could be awkward for us both.’

  ‘Why should it affect you?’

  ‘Because I knew about it and said nothing. Because I let you go.’

  ‘All that time ago?’

  It was too far-fetched; she couldn’t believe it.

  ‘It happened to a friend of mine. Heini Hausser. He got killed in France but later some high-up decided he’d been smuggling stuff home. God knows how; the campaign had hardly started. It made no difference. There were his parents, three sisters. They took them all in for questioning. I never heard what happened to them. Sent to a camp, most likely. These people are serious, Lucia. You don’t mess with them. I warned you, remember?’

  Somehow, despite her disbelief, he had succeeded in frightening her.

  ‘I haven’t been doing anything.’

  ‘Not now, perhaps. But you did.’

  ‘What can I do about it?’

  ‘I think I can help you. If anyone says anything, I’ll say you’re helping us with information. But I’ll have to have something to prove it.’

  She didn’t like the sound of that. ‘I don’t have any information to give you.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be hard information. Gossip’ll do fine.’

  He smiled at her; oh yes, he could be full of charm, when it suited him. It seemed harmless enough, so she told him about Bruno Crespi, the conductor she had once, so foolishly, thought a dolt; about Marta Bianci, to whom she believed — and was happy to say — she owed everything in her career.

  ‘You say you’re singing in an opera. Which one is it?’

  ‘Fidelio.’

  ‘That’s a German opera, by Beethoven.’

  ‘Of course. What would you expect? Colonel Strasser chose it.’

  ‘Colonel Strasser?’ The grey eyes were suddenly still. ‘What do you know about him?’

  ‘He’s always dropping in to rehearsals. He chose me for the part.’

  ‘The Standartenführer? Well, you’re a quiet one, aren’t you?’ He looked sceptical; he obviously found the idea of her knowing the local commandant hard to believe. But was prepared to be indulgent of what might be a
n exaggeration. ‘And what part did he choose you for?’

  ‘Leonora. The lead.’

  ‘The lead?’ He stared. ‘You?’

  She was indignant. ‘Why shouldn’t it be me?’

  She saw he didn’t know what to do with someone he had thought he knew but now discovered he didn’t know at all. Reinhardt clearly disliked surprises; they upset his image of the world and of himself. ‘Tell me about the other people you sing with,’ he said.

  She mentioned a few names — Alfredo Dante who had partnered her in the dramatic presentation, one or two others — but there wasn’t much she could say about them.

  ‘I don’t know them that well. We only meet at work. I probably know more about you!’

  ‘No other women?’

  She made a face. ‘There’s one. Teresa Sciotto. We don’t get along.’

  ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘She’s jealous. Her voice isn’t bad but she can’t act at all. Absolutely hopeless. She’s been down on me since the first time we met.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘I was picked to sing at Redipuglia and she wasn’t. Mussolini was there, you see. He spoke to me. She was furious when she heard about it.’

  ‘Fan of his, is she?’

  She laughed. ‘Hardly. She can’t stand him.’ Why was he asking these questions? A warning bell chimed in her head but it was too late; the words were out.

  3

  Day after day, the tension mounted. A week to the performance, with everything going well. Four days and all thoughts came into needle focus in Lucia’s head. Panic shrugged itself awake. It grew; it was out of control. Three days to go and all was chaos. She was blind to reason or hope. This was wrong, and that. A day later and nothing was right at all. The orchestra was incompetent; Bruno Crespi — once again — was a mindless dolt. The theatre was hopeless. The singers couldn’t sing. No-one — herself, most of all — could act. She was losing her voice. The Allies would bomb the city, the theatre. The SS would find out about the food she’d bought. She would be arrested, deported to a labour camp. She would be tortured; she would be shot.

  The worst nightmare of all: she would stand on the stage before a jeering audience, struck dumb, with every word and note blown out of existence. There was one day to go when Reinhardt arrived at the theatre, demanding that the doorkeeper fetch her at once. She came out to him, incoherent with rage.

  ‘How dare you trouble me at a time like this!’

  He was in uniform, and in a panic. ‘I had no choice.’ He told her the SS had been carrying out raids all over the countryside. They’d taken in dozens of people for questioning. One of them was the farmer’s wife who’d sold Lucia the food. ‘If she tells them about us …’

  By rights she should have been alarmed, yet was not. The opera’s reality — freedom against tyranny, herself against the monstrous Pizzaro — protected her against what Reinhardt was telling her. She knew how serious his news was, yet for the moment could not take it in. She stared at him as though barely understanding why he was there at all, or what he’d been telling her.

  ‘I must go.’

  His eyes were popping in his head.

  ‘Is that all you’ve got to say? You must know someone who’s been talking against the government. Even if you don’t … Give me a name. I’ve got to have a name.’

  His agitation beat ineffectually against her. Her mental processes as well as her voice were paralysed; she could neither speak nor think.

  Reinhardt bared his teeth. ‘We both saw that woman. We knew what she was doing. I’ve got to have something in case they start asking why I didn’t report her.’

  ‘I don’t have any names.’

  Which made him even more frantic. ‘I’m not going down because of you.’

  Lucia made her decision. The distance she had created between herself and the real world also protected her from the temptation to give this man the names he was demanding. Do that and she would never be free of him. She would have delivered herself to him for ever. ‘I have no names for you.’

  ‘What about that woman you said didn’t like you? Give me her name and you’ll be rid of her.’

  She remembered Teresa’s comments, as sharp as knives, the word TRAITOR scrawled in yellow chalk upon her cupboard. She hated how Teresa conspired constantly against her.

  She did not hesitate. ‘I don’t know who you mean.’

  A beast glared out of his eyes. At that moment he would gladly have killed her. ‘You’ve made up your mind, haven’t you? You’re not going to help me. Well, don’t blame me when things start getting difficult. Because they will. I guarantee it.’

  His shoulders squared menacingly. He turned and hurried away down the steps and across the piazza. Darkness clung so closely about him that Lucia could almost see it. He had stalked her step by step over the months, never hurrying or alarming her. Now she had rejected him and the furies were loose. For the first time she understood what she should have known all along, that Reinhardt Hoffmann had never been a friend. With the SS asking questions and fearful for his own survival, he might point the finger at her. She had to stop him. Desire filled her: no longer desire for the man — only now could she admit it — but for the security she needed to develop her art. Nothing else mattered. Leonora’s defiance rang like a peal of bells.

  Töt’ erst sein Weib! You’ll have to kill me first. Reinhardt had threatened her. Now she would defend herself. Yet even that had to wait. The opera demanded her total concentration. Afterwards, she would see.

  She went back into the theatre.

  4

  The echoes — of Reinhardt Hoffmann and Rocco the jailer, Colonel Strasser and Don Pizzaro — became one with the music and the knowledge that the imprisonment of Florestan and all the captives called for a release that she alone, through her courage and will, could bring about. She alone.

  Lucia knew that she was crying out, not only to the audience or the characters whom Leonora dominated by the unfailing strength of her purpose, but to all the peoples of the earth, offering them the truth that, by love and determination, they could make themselves free.

  The lights came up. The audience was standing. There was applause, cheering. None of it had anything to do with her; Leonora had gone into the shadows yet remained, displacing the woman of blood and bone who was no more than the vessel of the glory and the pain, who no longer knew even who she was.

  First she saw the black uniform and silver facings. She looked up and saw Colonel Strasser smiling at her. Still she had not fully returned to the world of flesh and laughter, but she heard him say in his harshly accented Italian: ‘We are in your debt.’

  She smiled. Teresa Sciotto was not in the crowd that packed the dressing room but everywhere she turned she saw her rival’s face amid the crush of bodies, the chink of glass and blue fumes of cigars.

  To stand by and do nothing in the face of evil …

  What if Reinhardt Hoffmann remembered Teresa’s name?

  Yet to seek the aid of this SS officer, this German, to complain to him about another German soldier …

  Madness.

  We are in your debt …

  It wouldn’t stop him destroying her, if he chose.

  ‘This performance will have proved very useful to us. Everyone who’s here tonight will understand how serious we are in our determination to win this war.’

  ‘And the rest? The ones who aren’t here?’

  ‘They will hear about it.’

  He beckoned to an aide standing a few paces behind him. The man handed him something that, hidden behind Strasser’s lean body, Lucia could not see. People began to applaud. The colonel turned back to her. His heels clicked punctiliously: a true representative of the master race, with lightning flashes on his collar and the death’s head emblem on his cap.

  Lucia’s sense of unreality was compounded. He was offering her a display of roses, disciplined as guardsmen, red as blood. A message was attached to them, the printing la
rge enough to be visible to everyone in the room.

  From the officers and personnel of the SS Division Adolf Hitler. With appreciation and thanks.

  At the bottom, in letters larger than the rest: HEIL HITLER! Ramrod-stiff, Strasser offered her the roses. He smiled as he repeated the words written on the card.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’

  She stared back at him. The bird and the snake. He was waiting. She could see no way out. She answered him dutifully. She was too proud to mumble; instead spoke out clearly and defiantly.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’ She accepted the roses from his outstretched hands. She held them as though they were a nest of vipers, while Leonora wept.

  She thought of Reinhardt laying charges against her; impulse moved her.

  ‘Colonel Strasser, a word please.’ She spoke softly, so that he had to lean forward to hear her. ‘Colonel, I appeal to your chivalry. Something has happened, very serious and upsetting. I am sorry to tell you that it involves a German soldier. Now is not the time to discuss it but perhaps, if I could come to your headquarters tomorrow …?’

  He frowned, watching her closely, then consulted briefly with his aide before turning back to her. ‘I shall be free tomorrow morning at ten, if that suits you. And you may rest assured, Signorina Visconti, I shall assist you in any way I can.’

  She felt relief, terror, resignation. Foolishly or not, she had spoken out. From now on, events would take their course.

  Her performance had been a wonderful triumph, everyone assured her of that. The world outside the theatre might be starving but here there was lots to eat and drink; all the guests were laughing and talking at the tops of their voices. As for the war … What war was that?

  Marta Bianci found her. She wept that a pupil of hers should have performed so gloriously, but Lucia remained dry-eyed, conscious of a void between herself and the celebrations going on around her. She had obtained her appointment with Colonel Strasser. It was her best chance to protect both Teresa and herself from any accusations that Reinhardt, desperate to exonerate himself, might make against them. To that extent it was good, but the prospect of the morning’s meeting did not encourage a party mood.