by John Gardner
“Was shot, in some hideous error. I heard this also from one of the musicians. She was walking back to her hut and got mixed up with a handful of women, herded together by the SS. She was taken to the firing range and shot.” Tears streamed from his eyes. “You know, Herb? You know how it all ended? Everyone left in that orchestra was to be shot, with others also. They knew it. Three o’clock in the afternoon, April 15, 1945. The British arrived at eleven in the morning, but that was too late to save any of my relatives. All gone, for nothing, and I had become a traitor for twelve unmarked graves. … I never saw them, Herb.”
“Really?” Kruger thought. Aloud, he said, “Lou, you hadn’t seen them since you were a small child. …”
“It made no difference, Herbie. No difference. I never saw them, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. You’re not Jewish; maybe you don’t understand. They were my link with my past. All that was left of true family. No day passes without me remembering them. Who they were. They were always children. I never saw them.”
“You gave a concert at Bergen-Belsen, Lou?” In his head, Herb clung to Louis’ words “I never saw them.”
Passau nodded, but said nothing.
“It’s a famous concert. It’s been written about.”
“Yes. You can read of the concert in Bergen-Belsen but you can never live through it, Herb. Never. You can never know what it was like.”
Kruger told him of his own visit to the place, one week after the concert, but the old man took no notice. “It was in June,” he said. “I asked the authorities if we could go and play music in the American and British zones. Strange, things moved so slowly at that time, yet permission came through overnight. Within three days of asking, we were on our way. We played at a lot of places, yet I remember only one concert. We played for the dead as well as the living. I can still hear it: we played Berlioz. Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale, because that music transcends religious beliefs, a celebration of triumph over death. Herb, Mahler was not yet in vogue, otherwise it would have been the Second Symphony. We also did the English composer, Gustav Hoist’s The Planets. That seemed right, and we finished, the wrong way round, with the overture to The Barber of Seville—Rossini, because it is light and full of fun. You know, Herb, that the military, at funerals, always march away from the graveside playing something happy, buoyant? That was our happy music. But with the Berlioz I think we touched the dead. I held hands with my cousins for the last time.”
He gave another heavy sigh, expelling every ounce of breath from his lungs, then swallowing new air. Outside, the pelting rain had stopped and a thin sun had broken through, staining the wet sand and the water, over which two pelicans struggled to maintain height.
“Why the Berlioz, Lou? Why not the Verdi Requiem? That also goes far above religion and beliefs?”
“The Berlioz? It has military aspects. Written in memory of dead heroes. The victims of the Holocaust are heroes. I think it was right.” Suddenly he was plunged into deep thought, worrying, Herbie felt, about possibly having made the wrong choice of music all those years ago. Then the old man’s amazing powers of memory linked past and present. “You know, there was something else that made me choose the Berlioz. When Berlioz was a young man in Paris, his father sent him to train as a doctor. The first time he went to a class on dissection he was so revolted that he ran away. It’s all in his autobiography. I can still quote the passage by heart. I think I had been reading it at the time.”
“You can still quote from it?”
“I think I was reading the book at the time,” he mused. “Yes, it was the book that made up my mind. Some find the passage funny. I found it prophetic in a way.”
“Quote.” Herbie did not believe Passau still had the power to recall a whole passage from Hector Berlioz’s memoirs.
The aged Maestro looked at him, seeing the challenge full in his eyes. Slowly, as if in a trance, he spoke—
“‘When I entered that fearful human charnel house, littered with fragments of limbs, and saw the ghastly faces and cloven heads, the bloody cesspool in which we stood, with its reeking atmosphere, the swarms of sparrows fighting for scraps, and the rats in corners, gnawing bleeding vertebrae, such a feeling of horror possessed me that I leaped out of the window and fled home as though Death and all his hideous crew were at my heels.’” He gave a thin smile, which matched the sun outside. “It went something like that. Fitting. Could be even a description of Bergen-Belsen. When we played the Rossini some of them tried to dance, can you believe that?”
Herbie remembered the emaciated figure, with its death head, capering and falling to the ground. “I believe it.”
They both looked out onto the now more pleasant view, and Herbie gave a sharp intake of breath, grabbing Passau and dragging his chair back from the window as a sleek motor launch moved across the water, leaving its plume of foam behind. Then he relaxed. String-bikini-clad girls waved, and one clung to the pilot’s arm, blonde hair, like a scarf flying behind her, the young man at the wheel smiling. They were all tan and. teeth, health and fitness. He thought of their innocence. Of the obscenity Germany had become under Hitler, the crimes and sheer horror of the Holocaust. For a moment it was all boiled down to this one old man, weeping for his ancestors. He had been right. The words of the choir in Berlioz’s work came, halting into his mind—
Glory! Glory and triumph for these heroes!
Glory and triumph!
Come, elect of the other life!
Exchange, brave warriors, your laurel wreaths for palms of immortality! …
Glory and triumph for the heroes.
“Is enough for today, Lou. What you got next? Big wheel conceits, recordings and triumph?”
Passau shook his head, and the tears welled up again. “I got the worst,” he said. “The very best and the very worst of my life. I got the Magnificat and the De profundis.”
“YOU MOVED HIM on quite a way, Herb.” Art had come over, late, after they had eaten. He did not even try to hide the fact that he had people listening. “Keep him going and you’ll eventually hit pay dirt. Really push tomorrow, eh?”
“Sure.” Herbie gave him the daft smile. “I knock his socks off, Art. Make him bleed a little, huh?”
Oddly, Herbie’s bitterness did not sink in. Art Railton gave a little gesture, cocking his head. “Thus is the poor agent despised. O traitors and bawds, how earnestly are you set a-work, and how ill requited!”
“Shakespeare,” Kruger explained to Pucky, or anyone else who might be listening.
“All things, to all men, through all time. William had the last word, eh, Herb?”
“He did good exit lines, Art. You going so soon?” Art had risen, striding towards the door. “Good night,” he called happily, “Good night, sweet Prince.”
Kruger took a pace towards him and quoted back—
“So shall thou feed on Death, that feeds on man,
And Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.”
They went into the bedroom where Pucky had set up the computer and connected the modem. They worked until two in the morning, hacking into files within one of the State Department’s mainframes in D.C. It was a good night’s work, and they had printout results to show for it. After everything was tidied away, they went to bed and gave each other pleasure, so that Herbie thought his heart would break with happiness.
The old order of the camps, the terror and brute bestiality of that time, slid away in the gentle massage of love, though it returned to him in dreams. A skeleton dressed in ragged concentration-camp pajamas danced the tango across a room where ruby glasses stood on a shelf, and the Avenging Angel detached itself from the Dürer, leaping into the arms of the prancing specter. Off they went, down a long corridor at the end of which a fire burned and black smoke reeked from the ovens.
He woke in a cold sweat—the night terrors—clung to Pucky for comfort, and wondered what awful dreams beset old Passau.
(13)
THE SUN SHONE, AS THOUGH th
ere was no such thing as rain, and as if clouds could never again threaten or spoil a day. Small craft skittered back and forth, half a mile off the beach; occasionally a wannabe waterskier clung desperately in the wake of a speedboat. In the apartment, they turned the air-conditioning on low and were relieved that it made only a discreet hum. There would be no problems with recording the day’s interrogation.
Herbie Kruger moved Louis Passau way back from the windows so that nobody could see them, and he began to talk as they sipped their second cup of coffee. Pucky played at being a dutiful hausfrau and cleared away the debris of breakfast.
Herbie pushed down the desire to spread last night’s print out in front of Louis Passau and ask what it meant, but he knew that had to be saved for a moment when they were alone and nobody but Pucky could hear the answers. In any case, he still wanted to double-check with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) mainframe. This was all very old history, and he was surprised, even a little amazed, at the efficiency of the State.
From outside, far away, came the sound of Elton John singing about somebody called Razor Face. Big Herbie ran a large hand across his jowls in a kind of Pavlovian reflex. “So you went through this great sense of loss, Lou? The grief began, yes?”
“What do you think? For over thirty years I had tried to get all of them into America. Letters—constantly writing, urging them. But they wouldn’t come. I had even betrayed my country. Now it was too late. I was devastated with grief, and I carried guilt on my conscience like a shroud.”
Herbie nodded. Somehow he did not believe in the shroud of guilt. Louis Passau was not one to allow such a small item like culpability to slow him down. Grief? Possibly.
Over the years, the old man most certainly had led another private life, a secret stream of consciousness running parallel to the real world, even parallel to his arcane world as an agent for the Nazis: a life recalled from long past, sometimes a daily retreat into how it had been. So he had nurtured a desire to bring his cousins over to America and relative safety, but the mind plays indescribable tricks.
“So, Lou, what then?”
He gave a small shrug. “Work.” He said it firmly, as though his work, the music, the orchestra, had been salvation for him.
“You found consolation in work. Sure, why not? And your wife? Your child?”
“For a time, they were my sanity. My little girl was so wonderful. When I saw her it was like hearing a new, and outrageously beautiful, melody in my head. She danced me through the next few years, and Veronica was a pillar for me. Strength. Love. We all made music in our different ways.” He gave a little, half-self-conscious chuckle. “You know, I believe that time was the only sustained period when I was never unfaithful to a wife.”
“What, never?” Herbie gave a Gilbertian twinkle.
Passau shrugged, with a smile and a rolling of the eyes. “Well, hardly ever.”
“Not Shakespeare,” Herbie grunted. “Gilbert and Sullivan. Pirates of Pen’s Aunts.”
“Penzance, Herb,” Passau began, then snorted, realizing that Big Herbie had taken him for a ride. After a moment he spoke again—“That was the time when the orchestra just got better and better. We opened the Opera at the Center. Life was very full. You know how it is with orchestra and conductors. Rehearse, perform. Work more. Rehearse more. Up half the night and back in rehearsal at ten in the morning. Perform, perform, perform. The applause became music also—I will never deny that. Applause, acceptance, success is a heady business.”
“So, Lou, what really? What really was next in the grand scheme of your life. You said it was good and bad. Magnificat and De Profundis.”
“Sure.”
“Well, tell me.”
The familiar long silence followed, as though Passau were marshalling his memories, trying to find the starting point in the grand history’s next turbulent chapter. Eventually, he spoke, very quietly. “Herb, this is the most difficult. This is my crown of thorns, and it is the worst thing in my entire life, actually. Forgive me if I go slow; if I stumble—even if I fall. Because this part of my life is the greatest disaster, and you have to hear it all.”
The way he spoke, the tone of voice, and the manner in which he gave equal weight to each word, was a striking contrast to anything that had gone before. Never, from that first day in Virginia until the previous evening, when he had spun out the moving measure of his grief, had Louis Passau conveyed such a sense of doom.
“So tell me, Lou.” His own voice altered to match the subject, laced with compassion, shot through with comprehension.
“Nineteen hundred forty-eight,” Passau began. “September twenty-four is when it began. An exciting day. I found treasure any orchestra director would give his soul to discover. …”
Once every three months, the Passau Center gave auditions. Sometimes they were for a mixed and jumbled group—instrumentalists and singers. In 1948 Passau was looking mainly for singers. The Opera at the Center was starting to rival even the Met. He needed new, unknown, blood, and to get it he wrote, or personally contacted, practically every major music school in the world. He trawled both shallow and deep in the postwar traumatic shoals of Rome and Milan, Paris, the schools and colleges of his own country, even the Royal School of Music in London.
During that particular year, the auditions had netted him three sopranos whom he had put into the chorus of both orchestra and opera company, and one tenor, Luciano Peccatti, who was being watched and worked with, to determine whether he had that elusive quality that might eventually make him one of the operatic greats. The prognosis was not good, though Michael Dresden, the chorus master, had far from given up hope.
Now, on Friday, September 24, 1948, they were to hear four further hopefuls. A quartet of sopranos, all of whom came highly recommended: two from the Julliard—founded only two years earlier by an amalgamation of the Institute of Musical Art and the Julliard Graduate School; one all the way from the chorus of the Royal Opera House, in London, England; and a twenty-two-year-old who came highly praised, from the Cincinnati College Conservatory. The latter had not arrived by the time the auditions were due to start.
In designing the Opera House, Louis had instructed the architects to follow the spirit of the great houses of Europe, but on a smaller scale. This they had done, and the interior was a miniature of La Scala, with touches of Covent Garden and Paris: gilt, red plush, marble, sweeping staircases, rich velvets and golden tassels.
They were mounting, and rehearsing, a production of Aida that fall, so during the days when there was no performance, two rows of the orchestra center seats were removed to make way for a director’s table and all the paraphernalia associated with onstage rehearsals. There was also a ramp linking the stage with the auditorium.
Just before ten thirty that morning, Passau came down to join his Stage Director, Don Birch; the Assistant Musical Director, Adrian Helpenmann; Chorus Master, Michael Dresden; and the Center’s Manager, Peter de Souza. To one side, sat Kerry Arlow—all six foot three of him. Arlow, the distinguished theater director, was doing Aida for them, and Passau had come to trust both the experience and intuition of this polished and brilliant giant of the theater.
The stage was bare but for the piano, a couple of stand chairs, and Helen Comfort, one of their three rehearsal pianists. Two solitary bare light bulbs dangled from the gantry, while one small shaded lamp burned on the director’s desk. The shadows were stark, angular, in some ways sinister. The opulence of velvets and gold had dissolved into darkness.
“So are we ready?” Passau asked loudly as the Assistant Chorus Master, Freddie Edwards, came bustling onto the stage. He was a short, pugnacious, somewhat aggressive man. One of his legs was a fraction shorter than the other, a small deformity which had kept him from active service during the war. For this he had never forgiven either God or man.
“No, Maestro, we are not ready! I’m sorry, only three of them are here, and they’ve all chosen ‘Un bel dì vedremo’ as their party piece.
Why do these would-be divas always want to give us Butterfly?” Each applicant had been told to prepare two arias which they would have to sing, in character.
(In the present, Passau said, “‘Un bel dì vedremo.’ Madama Butterfly. ‘One Fine Day.’”
“Sure, I know it’s One Fine Day,’ Maestro. English Summer.”
“What?”
“One Fine Day. English Summer. Bad English joke.”
“So what’s funny about it?”
“Live in England for a year and you might smile.”)
Back in September 1948 Passau sounded edgy. “So what’re you doing about it?”
“They’re drawing straws to see who gets to sing Butterfly. The losers will choose something else. I’m sorry, Maestro. Not out of the chorus yet, and already they’ve got monster egos.”
“Okay, Freddie. Get them moving. We haven’t all day. Kerry has a call at three.”
“I’m doing what I can, Maestro, but you always say treat them with kid gloves in case one has potential.”
“Get them moving with the kid gloves then, Freddie.”
It was an almost disastrous morning. The two sopranos from the Julliard lost out on “One Fine Day,” so the first girl did “Tu, tu, piccolo Iddio,” from the same opera—Butterfly’s death. What should have been moving, revealing Butterfly’s true self, became banal in this young woman. The voice was reasonable, but not a hundred percent accurate. Nor did she have the imagination it takes to breathe life into the character during her last moments in the opera. Passau did not even ask for exercises afterwards. Usually, if the voice was not half bad, he would at least give the singer scales, then particular notes to hit, his ear cocked to see if he or she had anything near perfect pitch.
The second Julliard girl did a pedestrian “Cara nome,” and Passau felt sickened by her. He still remembered the wonder of hearing Galli-Curci singing that aria, as he accompanied her at the party given for the great diva by Al Capone. As this girl sang, his mind slid back, almost slyly, to a time which seemed a million years ago; a life that he would now rather forget.
