She shook her head, as though to clear memory, struck a major chord, and the pictures in her mind shifted and she saw the strong and compassionate face of Cardinal von Stromberg, known in Munich—and Rome—as Gotte’s Wolf. The Great Grey Wolf, as Katherine and Justin had called him.
The cardinal had said to her, holding her face between his strong hands as they stood in his gracious and spacious library, one of the few undamaged rooms in his bombed palace, ‘Katherine, my child, I could give you a series of exercises which would control your extreme sensitivity, so that never again would you be afraid of crying when you did not want to.’
And the tears were streaming down her face as she begged, ‘Oh, could you, please?’
‘I could. But I think I won’t, because it might kill your talent, and I will not risk that.’
Wolfi, taller than Justin, with a beak of a nose and steel-grey eyes under powerful brows. Tall, strong, with lustrous hair and clear, unmarred skin, a sign of hope in a devastated city.
She had not been prepared for the destruction of Munich, for the aftermath of the bombings, bombings by American planes, flown by American flyers. She had not wanted to go to Munich, so soon after the war, so soon after their return to Europe, so early in her professional career. There had been concerts during the war, many of them benefits; her name was beginning to be mentioned in musical circles; but she did not feel ready to give a major concert in Munich, for an audience of people many of whom may well have been Nazis, may possibly have been involved in concentration camps … But she had been asked to go by the State Department. It was not quite emotional blackmail, but something was murmured about her early release from prison, about Justin’s ultimate release from Auschwitz.
Someone had said, with a show of reason, ‘After all, you will not be playing for Nazis. The war is over. The Nazi Party is dead. You cannot go on blaming the people of Germany forever.’
It was still playing for the enemy. The war might technically be over, but Justin was an ever-present reminder of the wounds of war which never heal. She protested hotly. She had refused to play for the Nazis during the Occupation. Why should she play for the Germans now?
It was Justin who finally said, wearily, ‘Stop talking and go. These people who are planning all this helped get you out of prison. You owe them that much. I’ll go with you.’
They were flown over on a Military Air Transport plane, her first flight, met by an army car. She looked out the window at the rubble of a town where the scars of war were not yet beginning to heal. Beside her, Justin sat, quiet, too quiet, his hands clamped, his face stern and unmoving. This might be the city of the enemy, but it was an enemy beaten. She thought that he was as horrified by the city as she.
Their hotel was on the one side of a square which had not been demolished by bombs. They were registered and taken to their room, a clean white room, with white bedspreads, white curtains at the windows, and left to rest. Katherine went to one of the long windows which opened out onto a small stone balcony. The square was filled with rubble, with barbed wire, with gaping holes. She saw children on crutches, a leg or a foot gone, children without hands, without arms. Children still playing in that devastated square, still laughing. She was cold with horror.
She turned to Justin, who was sitting in an upholstered chair that faced an empty fireplace. ‘I didn’t realize—’ she said.
‘What?’ His voice was harsh.
‘What we’d done—Americans. Oh, God, Justin, I wanted to kill, personally and with my bare hands, the people at Auschwitz. I’d have done it gladly—but not this—this random maiming of children and old people and—’
His voice was low and cold. ‘Why not? It is only justice.’
‘There’s a little boy out in the square; he’s bouncing a ball with his foot because he doesn’t have any arms. He didn’t have anything to do with Auschwitz.’
Justin continued to stare into the empty fireplace. ‘Children suffer for the sins of their parents.’
‘But this—we did this, my people did this—’
Justin’s voice continued, low; emotionless. ‘Don’t be naïve. You should have learned something about war by now. The innocent always suffer. What did you want your country to do? Sit back and let the Nazis take over the world so that we’d all be in a series of concentration camps from Alaska to Africa? That’s the alternative. Is that what you want?’
If he had shouted at her, it would have been more bearable. She could not turn from the window.
‘Stupid,’ Justin said, still not looking at her. ‘Lie down and rest. You have a concert to give tonight. That is all the sanity there is in an insane world, filled with people who like to maim and kill. You don’t understand anything. You weren’t at Auschwitz. You didn’t see what I saw.’
Now she turned to him. ‘I was beaten—’
A small harsh sound came from his throat, more a snarl than a laugh. ‘Did you smell a little blood then? That is nothing. You never knew the smell of roasting flesh. You never heard the screams. You never saw the piles of bodies, useful for nothing but the gold which had been taken from their teeth. I am glad for every bomb the Americans or the British or anybody else dropped on the Germans. There was no other way to stop them. You cannot call them animals, because animals do not behave in such a way.’
She moved slowly to the bed and lay down on the clean, white spread.
Finally Justin turned toward her. ‘You are a child. I am not sure that I want you to grow up, because in the adult the human heart is evil.’
‘Not everyone—’
‘Evil, or stupid. There is nothing else.’
‘Father, and Aunt Manya—’
‘Stupid, you know they were stupid. They sent you to France into the war.’
‘But they didn’t know—’
‘As I said, stupid. Well-meaning and stupid. To send a teenager alone to France with Hitler already—’ He rose slowly, and closed the white shutters. ‘You have a concert to give this evening. Rest.’
She closed her eyes. She wanted him to lie beside her, but he did not. She moved her fingers as though over a keyboard, her fingers which moved to her bidding as Justin’s broken ones did not.
They took a taxi to the concert hall, the great Herkulessaal, and the assistant manager, waiting to greet them, pointed out the old tapestries which depicted the labors of Hercules, but she scarcely saw them.
Then, when she went into her dressing room, the first thing to meet her eye was a crystal bowl of yellow roses waiting for her, the bowl exquisitely etched with ferns, the roses tiny and fragrant. It was, against the background of the nearly destroyed city, a tangible icon of love. The card tucked in among the roses read, ‘With the compliments of the manager.’ When she asked for him, she was told that he was away, at a theatre in another city, and that the assistant manager would care for her needs.
She played that evening feeling that her hands had been broken and miraculously healed, that she was playing with Justin’s hands as well as her own. She played, she realized after the fact, better than she knew how to play. The silence at the end of the concert was profound, and then followed great ocean waves of applause, and demands for encores and yet one more encore …
When she was finally permitted to leave the stage and go to her dressing room, Cardinal von Stromberg was waiting. And although she knew that it was not he who had sent the roses and the vase he, too, was a gift of healing. She had played one of Justin’s early compositions, and it was to Justin the cardinal spoke first, understanding more in the music than Justin himself had heard. It was knowledgeable appreciation, not facile praise, and Justin could not help responding to it. The cardinal was not a German, an enemy, while he was speaking, but someone who understood music and saw in Justin a potential he hardly dared perceive in himself.
Then the cardinal turned to Katherine and took her hands in his enveloping strong ones.
8
Justin accepted the cardinal’s invitation to supper,
murmuring to Katherine, ‘We can hardly blame him for the entire war.’ The stone house by the cathedral was half destroyed, but the great library had been untouched and they sat there, with wine and cheese and bread and pickles and whatever the cardinal could find in the larder, talking, talking as though they had known each other forever, as they talked first about music, and then about the war and its horrors, its scars which would never disappear. And then the cardinal turned to Justin, knelt on the marble floor and confessed, for confession was what it was, all the sins of omission of the Church during the years just past, during twenty centuries of sins of omission and commission. He wept over Justin’s hands, and there was a strange power of healing in the tears. The broken hands would never be able to express the intricacies of a fugue, but they would be hands which; in their turn, held healing.
Justin, too, had wept, all politeness gone, tears of rage, of hatred, hatred for the Nazis, hatred for the cardinal whose food he had just eaten.
Von Stromberg, head bowed, murmured, ‘So slow I am to learn some of the meaning which infuses the psalms. You show me, for the first time, what it meant to cry out:
Du Tochter Babels, du Verwüsterin,
Heil dem, der dir vergilt,
Was du uns angetan hast!
Heil dem, der deine kleinen Kinder nimmt,
und sie zerschmettert an dem Felsen!
But although your music makes that cry of hate, what ultimately it gives is healing and joy.’
Katherine had looked at the two men, von Stromberg still on his knees, being helped up by Justin, so that the two of them stood together. She knew just enough German to understand that the cardinal had been quoting something about a daughter of Babylon, in misery, and something terrible about blessing those who took her children and threw them against the stones. What was there in those angry and anguished words to turn Justin’s vengefulness into forgiveness? For, as the cardinal had confessed to Justin, so, then, Justin in turn confessed, telling Cardinal von Stromberg what they had vowed never to tell anybody, Justin’s mutilation. Somehow Wolfi—and it was as though they had been calling him Wolfi forever—by dawn was able to bring healing to Justin, to—somehow—man him again.
He was a healer, the Grey Wolf.
They were in Munich for nearly a week and they saw the cardinal daily, for counseling, for pleasure. Their friendship was his greatest privilege, he told them, and it blossomed swiftly, a beautiful, spontaneous flowering. ‘We have nothing to give each other except friendship,’ he assured them. ‘You can’t ask any favors of me, nor I of you.’ But he had already given them more than friendship, his warm lovingness thawing the splinter of ice still lodged in Justin’s heart.
How hilarious, they thought, that they, of all people, who had not darkened the doorway of a church since their wedding day, should be friends with a cardinal!
(So why was she surprised by her friendship with Felix all these years later?)
He knew music, the Grey Wolf. As he was driven by God, so he understood the music which drove them. Mozart, he said, was of course his favorite, since he was in a way a namesake of the great composer. But he loved Bach, too, and he encouraged Justin to move more deeply into his own composing, to continue to work with Katherine, but to redirect his own talent as well. Would Justin have gone as far as he did without the Grey Wolf?
They left Munich, to continue the tour, with promises of return visits. Never had Katherine felt so swiftly secure in a friendship, so certain that this time there would be no rejection; and he seemed to love them equally, so that they were like an equilateral triangle. There was never any sense of imbalance; never did his love for one in any way exclude the other. He was, of course, older, older even than Justin. What no one else, what none of the doctors had been able to do, he had accomplished in one intense week. Katherine perhaps fell into the trap of feeling that he was a father to her, as her own father had not been. When they were back in Paris, when she was on the road, with or without Justin, she would often call him for the reassurance of his voice, and no matter when she called, it was as though he had been waiting for her, as though she was the one person in the world he wanted to hear from.
And she adored him. Did she feel, back then, about the cardinal the way Dorcas appeared to feel about Katherine?
The thought of Dorcas brought her back to the present. She was not sure whether or not anything she had said to Dorcas was right. Once again she had been plunged into a situation where she did not know what was right and what was wrong, and this had happened so often during her lifetime that surely she should be used to it. ‘You do not have to be right,’ Wolfi had said. ‘Only to care.’ And, she added to herself, now,—never to play God.
With an effort of will she started the Goldberg Variations. Perhaps they would calm her enough so that she could sleep.
9
Calm, but not calm enough. She repeated her bedtime routine, warm bath, slow drying, a book—not the mystery she was currently enjoying, but philosophy; Kant; she never got very far with Kant; the long Germanic sentences bored her, so that her lids began to droop. It was Wolfi who had first suggested using Kant as a soporific, ‘or almost any German theologian. It is said that we German theologians are the deepest-down-divingest, longest-staying-underest, most-with-mud-coming-uppest, thinkers who ever lived.’
More mud was the last thing she needed. Theology was not helping her now. Once again she was caught in old pain, long resolved, but nevertheless occasionally surfacing when she least expected it. Perhaps now it was Dorcas and her problems which had triggered the memory.
It had taken a long time, for Katherine and Justin, before their night companionship had become bearable. For both of them desire that could not be fulfilled rose like an incomplete crescendo. If her peak was reached, then it seemed to emphasize for Justin his own never-to-be-completed passion. Sometimes in longing for all the ecstasy he had given her, all that she in return had given him, nevermore to be attained, she would expel her anguish in streams of silent tears. Or a deliberate act of will. Quiet, Katherine. Hush.
She understood that it was mostly more frustration for Justin than he could bear, to respond to her and then go so far and no further. It was a long time, even after Wolfi came into their lives with his healing hands and heart, before Justin could put his arms around her, without anger or tears. When his compositions began to be played, to receive both critical and popular acclaim, he began to regain his amour propre, a sense of his own validity aside from her talent. Then things were better. But still painful, precarious.
At their best they would lie together, arms about each other, quietly, and that was a way of knowing each other. Her childish adulation was long gone (transferred, perhaps, to the cardinal?). They held each other as man and woman on the good nights; despite Auschwitz, they knew each other.
Occasionally the moments of beauty would dissolve into Justin’s slow-burning and then suddenly flaming rage, into accusations. ‘You stay with me only out of duty, out of pity—’
When he was like that, there was no calming him. Sometimes she would leave their bed and spend the rest of the night on the couch in the living room. Usually, then, she woke early, before Justin, and would go to the telephone to call the cardinal, knowing that he, too, would be awake. She envisioned him sitting at the long table in the library, tall, grey-haired, grey-eyed, strong and stern and wise. His love for them seemed to move tangibly along the telephone wire and, sustained by his swift response, by his understanding and compassion even more than by his words, she would go back to the bedroom, slipping into bed without waking Justin. She thought of separate beds, separate bedrooms, and understood that this would be a rejection which would wound him beyond healing.
When she and Justin were working together, there was no separation, no pain. It was, as the cardinal pointed out, a total intercourse for them, something closer to perfection than most people could even dream of. And, he assured her during one early-morning phone conversation, the pain was in
fusing her playing, deepening and strengthening both the music and Katherine.
‘You talk of Justin’s fierce pride,’ he said. ‘You have a good bit of your own, you know.’
She had hardly realized how dependent on the cardinal she was becoming. As a child she had barely known her father; she had never had the experience of a loving ‘daddy.’ All the lacks of her childhood were gathered together and fulfilled in the tender wisdom of the Grey Wolf. And he encouraged her, as perhaps he should not have done.
But without Wolfi she might not have been able to love Justin as much as she did, to move into a joyous companionship which gave them both delight. If she still sometimes wept at night, the days were often filled with laughter. And with work. He was a hard taskmaster, and she throve. Professionally they were both flourishing, and this was joy; joy was work and work was joy.
She and Justin even went occasionally to Mass as a courtesy to the cardinal for being there when they needed him. In the amazement of their friendship, they were startled to discover how well known he was, not so much for being a cardinal as for his writings, books which were read not only in theological circles. He had the ability to translate deep theological thinking into language which the interested layman could understand, and his own interests were wide and varied. As soon as they had learned of von Stromberg’s writings, they had gone to the Librairie Hachard to buy everything available, devoured the books in great gulps, then gone back and sipped at them slowly, and his words had nurtured them, their love.
‘Where have we been all this time?’ Katherine demanded when they first learned of von Stromberg’s writings.
‘Lost in our own insular lives,’ Justin had replied. ‘It’s time we widened our horizons.’
At a party one night, after the premiere of one of Justin’s concerti, the cellist, who had been the soloist and who had never struck them as being well-read, startled them by referring to von Stromberg’s book on Mozart. ‘It’s fabulous. But of course he’s as vain as the rest of us, and it’s natural he’d be interested in a Wolfgang.’
A Severed Wasp Page 19
