This Great Escape

by Andrew Steinmetz

  “Do you know what it says?” She asks, and places her hand on my arm.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve had it translated.” I nod. Thank Dr. Giesing for that. “That’s good.”

  Nonetheless Fräulein Asche begins her own translation, reading aloud. She narrates in a soft voice. “He didn’t come to the theatre before the show, and it says here, the play begins late.” I know about this. “In fact, he did not show up the entire time.”

  She sits back and stares forward for a long while, her profile illuminated by screenglow.

  A complete translation reads as follows:

  Play:Report on the performance of

  The Apple Cart (Der Kaiser von Amerika)Friday, January 20, 1967

  Start of performance: 8:15 pm 12th performance

  Intermission from 9:38 pm. to 10:02 pmI. Act 8:15—9:17 pm

  End of performance: 10:48II. Act 9:18—9:38 pm

  Curtains: 27III. Act 10:02—10:45 pm

  Particulars:

  On the last sign (7:55 pm), the stage manager and the evening stage director were informed by some actors that Mr. Paryla (role of Sempronius) had not yet arrived at the theatre. After consultation with Mr. Rappel, the play began 13 minutes late with the entrance of Mr. Kelevenows (Boanerges). Since Mr. Paryla did not show up for the entire performance, Mr. Genke took over his role. Neither the flow, nor the understanding of the play were compromised. Mr. Hasse requested that no announcement be made to the audience.

  Fräulein Asche states, “The play was okay without him. Nothing was lost.” Then she goes quiet. It doesn’t sound right. No. Neither the flow nor understanding of the play was compromised. But what concision. What cruelty and what beauty in cruel concision. Neither the flow nor understanding. Michael’s absence was handled with show-must-go-on professionalism. The actors waited—no announcement was made—and then they started with the second scene of the play. In subsequent performances, Dr. Giesing had remarked in an email, the role of Sempronius was played by the actor Fritz von Friedl.

  Now tell me, what substance is there to the character Sempronius that his absence from the first act (rather disappearance from) has no impact on the rest of the play? What kind of lightweight was he? Michael allegedly suffered from performance anxiety—and from insomnia—but why worry so much when cast in the role of said unimpressive

  Sempronius?

  I shut the laptop. The slope of a raked stage allows for an actor to stand ‘upstage’ or ‘downstage’. The actor who stands further from the audience stands higher on the stage than the actor who is downstage. He might ‘upstage’ the actor below him, who must turn his back to the audience in order to address the more elevated actor. Upstaging another actor, by drawing attention to oneself, is the figurative offspring of the raked stage.

  In reality, on the evening of 20 January 1967, the action ongoing behind the curtain, beyond the raked stage, was halting and less assured than the official report and description in the Vorstellungbuch. The events of that night followed a more ambiguous narrative. When Michael did not show up, there was some frantic calling around to find him. This continued even after the play commenced. Eventually a phone call was made to Michael’s partner Margaret Jahnen in Munich. Instinct told Margaret that something was terribly wrong. The second act of the play had ended, and she instructed the theatre staff to race to his apartment on Mühlendamm Strasse and break down the door if he did not answer. Send the police and firemen. At once!

  While lounging in the bathtub, Stephan Raky-Paryla gently insinuated that something was off, maybe even suspicious, in the manner Margaret had reacted that night:

  The night of his accident, when he had not shown up at the theatre, the stage manager had called Margaret in Munich and she had told them, Please go at once to his apartment and use violence, break down the door to his flat. In the end this was a bit strange, that she knew precisely what must have happened.

  Well, I don’t know, nothing too strange about this. I presume Margaret knew Michael’s habits better than anyone. She was his life-partner, was she not? If anyone knew how he suffered, she must have.

  Police and firemen were dispatched (unlike me, they at least had learned his address), but no doctor. Next Michael was lifted from his bed and taken by ambulance to Asklepios Klinik St Georg, where he received a firm heart massage, but never regained consciousness. And whatever you might say about that—that it was finally in everyone’s best interest that he did not survive, because if he had he would have been reduced to some kind of intellectual vegetable (the opinion of his half-brother); that, in retrospect, neither the flow nor understanding of the play was comprised (according to the note in the Vorstellungbuch); that it was a big mistake that no doctor was sent with the police and firemen (the opinion of his father); that there is something odd in Margaret Jahnen’s heartsick reaction, in that she seemed to know precisely what must have happened (again his half-brother)—whether or not you stand upstage or downstage, live in the past or come from the future, Michael was no more.

  Behold, he died last night in the city of Hamburg.

  In the sunlit and white stucco mezzanine, Sandra Asche and I intersect paths with the current artistic director of Thalia Theatre.

  “This is a wonderful place,” I tell him. Not a wonderful theatre, which it might be, but a wonderful, magical place, which it is for me.

  “Aha.” He steals a glance at Sandra, puts a finger to his cheek. And directly, without further ado, shares a memory of his about Michael’s father. He did not know Michael Paryla. But once, long ago, he had the privilege of doing a show with Karl Paryla. Here in Hamburg. Which was terrific. Am I surprised?

  Not at all. The sins of the father, or something like that.

  “That’s my only connection to your project,” he tells me. “Good luck with your project.”

  With my little project, my schoolboy fascination. “Thank you.”

  Though in the press there is no evidence of it, Michael did in fact show up for eleven performances of Der Kaiser von Amerika before missing the twelfth. In Act One again, Pamphilius (played by Horst Gentzner) sits opposite Sempronius (Michael). Pamphilius probes Sempronius for more information about his father:

  Pamphilius: By the way, is he alive? I should like to know him.

  Sempronius answers, No, his father is not alive. His father, he says, died in 1962 “of solitude.” Solitude is an odd thing to die of, but we are in a play. This is the fucking theatre. Where you can actually die from a lot of things like loneliness and solitude. Where you can go out of mind watching pretentious nonsense. Sempronius provides some context, which makes it all the more credible: shipwrecked, his father swam to an uninhabited island where he went “melancholy mad”.

  Pamphilius asks Sempronius to clarify.

  Sempronius: He couldn’t bear to be alone for a moment: it was death to him. Somebody had to be with him always.

  In the scheme of art influencing life and life reflecting art, seen through the conundrum of fathers and sons, the above sounds much more like a description of Michael’s tendencies, such that we know of them, than of his father’s. It was Michael who allegedly could not stand solitude. In the evenings he was pulled out the door of his apartment by the lure of company, and merged into the night. Michael we might imagine dying of solitude. But not in 1962, which by the way was his Gestapo year. And for the record Karl Paryla died in 1996.

  Getting back to Der Kaiser von Amerika, when Sempronius describes his father’s occupation, saying he was a “Ritualist,” Pamphilius is confused:

  Pamphilius: Do you mean that he was a parson?

  Sempronius: Not at all. He was a sort of spectacular artist. He got up pageants and Lord Mayors’ Shows and military tattoos and big public ceremonies and things like that. He arranged the last two coronations. That was how I got my job here in the palace. All our royal people knew him q
uite well: he was behind the scenes with them.

  All our royal people knew him. He was behind the scenes. That was how I got my job here at the palace. Was Michael granted his place in this palace of make-believe called a theatre through the reputation of his father, the celebrated Karl Paryla? Thalia Theatre’s artistic director had involuntarily insinuated this within seconds of our meeting, with his little story about having worked with the father. Karl Paryla was terrific; Michael remains a project. Secretary to the King in Der Kaiser from Amerika, Michael, The Son Of. The Lost Son of Karl Paryla.

  The Son Of.

  Behold, the lost son of Karl Paryla.

  Was the realization—That was how I got my job here in the palace: words put in his mouth—deflating, heart-sickening, a kind of death to him? Picture Michael, in rehearsal, day after day. Punctured. He once had promise, could have played any part, any number of roles, but is picked for a role which keeps him down. Not, this time, opposite Herbert Steinmetz from Stuttgart. Opposite his own father, a sort of spectacular artist, who lurked behind every scene.

  Before leaving the theatre, I ask my host if I may take her photograph.

  “Sure, why not?” Sandra is flattered. She crosses her arms, leans heavily on the wall.

  The better to serve my memory of Michael.

  *

  Michael (left) in rehearsal for Der Kaiser von Amerika (Thalia Theatre, 1966).

  There is something else, before I leave Hamburg: grey Hamburg of the ashen canal water, melancholy Hamburg, pale sky Hamburg, colours weak as my knowledge of Veronal, which was or was not his barbiturate of choice. Maybe it was Luminal. Maybe Lethe. Let’s decide it was Veronal. Let’s have that decided. Little Verona in a pill bottle. Veronal, and Verona for Shakespeare, the setting of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the setting of Romeo and Juliet. Verona like Venice like Hamburg, city of canals.

  There is something else. I forget who told me, it may have been The Filmfuehrer. Whether a person looks good on camera or not is unpredictable. I must say I’m intrigued by this. It must be important enough, whether a person looks good on camera or not is unpredictable has a certain ring.

  Another thing. In each scene that you appear, you should ask yourself, ‘What does my character want?’ Here, if it’s not already obvious, the answer is: I want to become Michael. His Doppelgänger. His double-goer and paranormal twin. I’m learning a few tricks and finally know what it is like when artifice eats at the face. What is at the source of our fierce resistance to become the other? Is there some innate inability to be untrue? I see that the struggle to become an actor is in us all. I first sensed it in the garde robe at the Thalia Theatre, seated before the mirror.

  I see that what went through you, Michael, was a flaming arrow of indignity lit by ambition. Acting is an annihilation and a gift. There is danger in it. Of this I am sure. I have no doubt.

  Deutsche Bahn ICE 164

  THE TRAIN LEAVES THE STATION, breaks from the platform like a long ship, and the oft-dazzling Michael Paryla is quiet. His crossed-arms to chest, an outline without core, Michael is transported in a casket along these rails, upon this straight line, to his resting place south of Munich. A bizarre attraction, an impressive plaything, exaggerated excess—no longer. No more the sparkling fool, Junker Bleichenwang. No more Sempronius. Final moments, on stage, in character, a fool and a royal secretary.

  Underling, underling.

  He died three days after the Hamburger Abendblatt notice appeared, and only a week before the ensemble for Der Kaiser von Amerika was scheduled to shift locations and ready themselves for a guest appearance at Wiener Burgtheatre. Art Nouveau Vienna. Red Vienna. Anschluss Vienna. Wien Judenrein Vienna. Waltzing Vienna. Mozarthaus Vienna. The City of Dreams. Old Freud Vienna.

  Then was Vienna the trigger?

  Vienna belonged to his father. Karl Paryla was born in Vienna at the turn of the century—Austro-Hungarian Empire Vienna, Habsburg Vienna. His father made his home in the Austrian capital with his second wife. More to the point, Karl Paryla owned the stage. But then Vienna was also Michael’s city. Michael was born in Vienna in 1935. In Vienna, his mother and father had grown apart, but on the eve of the Anschluss and on the edge of a precipice known as Wien Judenrein Vienna, they struck a deal and decided they would stick it out, for Michi’s sake, and separate only after the escape, if they made it safely to Switzerland.

  There were many reasons for Michael to avoid going to Vienna in 1967. Every one of them had to do with his father.

  Perhaps this is the moment to tell the tale I alluded to earlier, concerning the family’s flight from Vienna.

  “He wore the black,” Eva described one of her brothers-in-laws, Hrolf Kramm, this way when I spoke to her in 1994. She implied Hrolf Kramm was a member of the SS. We were stuck in Vienna in 1938 and needed to find a way out. Hrolf came to Vienna and made contact with me. He knew we were trapped.

  “Oh yes, he wore the black.” Eva swore to it. He came to me, alone, and Karl never knew anything about that. Karl and I, we had no money for a bribe. So Hrolf came in secret and took me to an apartment and afterwards he said, Good, the directions are simple. Go to such and such a place. There is a barn, hide inside. Wait there. Someone will come. Someone will come and guide you across the mountains.

  “And sure enough there was an escape chain over the mountains to Switzerland. Sure enough, I paid the price.”

  Vienna is where Michael’s story meets Hrolf’s shadow and the words mostly die away except for some bare phrases. He wore the black. Eva told me, Karl never knew anything about that. That. Safe transit in return for a sexual favour, blackmail perpetuated by her brother-in-law. Karl never knew? That’s hard to believe. He did not want to know? Less kind but more credible. And what about Michael? He was only three years old at the time. But was it something he learned about in due time without ever having been told? Did he know it in his heart in the way we know all about the pain of the people we love? Karl never knew about that. I don’t know. There are not two sides to this story unfortunately. What remains are Eva’s words.

  Not all of what I know about my family history is rooted in fact. Lots of it I invented as a child growing up in Canada. For years, when I played army in the yard with neighbourhood boys, I squinted and saw myself as my great uncle Abelard Kramm, fighting in a trench on the Russian Front. Abelard and Hrolf are brothers, my grandmother’s siblings. When my grandparents fled Germany to South America in 1935, the brothers Kramm stayed put. Abelard died in 1941 of sniper fire on the Eastern Front; Hrolf Kramm not until 2003, in Switzerland, of septicaemia––or blood poisoning, which sounds about right.

  In my early adolescence, after reading about the Battle of Stalingrad, I would transport Abelard in my mind to this battle, famous for its number of casualties. It became part of my own private legend that Abelard had died fighting in Stalingrad, when in reality, as I know today, he died thirty kilometres south of Luga. Dorfes etwa 30 km südlich von Luga, stipulated the letter from his field officer.

  Stalingrad seemed important, though. The city’s name struck a chord in me. Saying ‘Stalingrad’ provoked an eerie sense of the inevitable meeting the systematic; to my ears, the battle was engineered to end as many human lives as possible. And so it was in Stalingrad that I placed Abelard at dusk: first lighting a cigarette—hands cupped around the orange flame: stupid, stupid—then standing to remove his wool sweater.

  The sniper aims. He fires and the bullet passes into my heart.

  This is how I died for Abelard, when I was in my early teens. Abelard’s death story—dark, unsung, dangerous—might excite a young boy, and it did me. Even now, in my late forties, I cannot remove my sweater in winter without getting trapped in a weave of obscure emotions. In the middle of the afternoon, alone, anywhere, I’ll think directly of Abelard. He cannot see out when he is shot. He falls face down in mud, wet clothes soon swollen. Sometimes, I let myse
lf go a little further; I imagine myself kneeling beside him and take his hand in my own and slide his gold ring with the family emblem off his finger. At such moments I feel very alive, full of thanks not to be a soldier; especially not one of their soldiers, buried kilometres south of Luga.

  The photograph I remember best of Abelard—it survives as a kind of shadowy family icon—portrays him in his Wehrmacht uniform. Abelard is striking: clear-eyed, full lips, strong jaw, but he is hardly masculine-looking. Instead, he gives a feline impression. There is a rumour that Abelard was gay, and that his anxious father used his societal connections to expedite Abelard’s path to the Eastern Front. The first time I saw Abelard in pictures I thought of David Bowie from Heroes.

  But that’s enough romantic invention. What is real and what is hard fact is that Abelard and his brother Hrolf fought for them. The fact that great uncle Abelard was killed fighting for ‘the Germans’ definitely was ominous. More than ominous, this fact seemed wrong, plain backwards. But was I ever really ashamed of him? No. What did it have to do with me picking off the twins who lived next door to us in Dorval, using my sleek and just-bought carbon copy of an Enfield Rifle Musket? And anyway, what was there to fuss about since Abelard was deceased? In the natural history of my feelings toward him, the latter fact is key: Abelard was good and dead before I’d even heard his name mentioned in family conversation, killed on a day when no other soldier in Battalion 48 had lost his life. The original notification of death, dispatched from the office of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, contained a private letter from Abelard’s field officer to his next of kin.