Sophie and the Sibyl Read online

  The Count had invented a political quiz, which caused the most raucous laughter. There were no right answers. The wittiest or sharpest political response gained the most points. Max now realised that he had walked straight into a salon that actually flaunted its liberal inclusiveness. Here was the Count, encouraging subversion – ‘Everything, yes, everything, my dear, can be discussed.’ And Klesmer, a concert pianist and famous modern composer, acclaimed by Liszt and Wagner, made no secret whatever of his Jewishness. He actually declared himself a Jew! The very curtains of the salon shimmered with sedition. Max fingered his handkerchief.

  Lewes danced up again, beckoning him to advance, and now he entered the inner sanctum. Behold the Sibyl, enthroned in elegance, a small table mountained with books at her side, her feet upon a cushioned stool. As he bowed, his smile becoming fixed, Max studied her velvet slippers. Were they too shedding mud? He caught the same whiff of spice and alcohol on her clothes. Was it linseed oil? The smell recalled his brother, aged twelve or thereabouts, lovingly polishing his violin. The Sibyl, flanked by young courtiers, who now withdrew to a safe distance, lifted her giant head, and gazed at him expectantly. Max blushed, feeling a faint, embarrassed tingle behind his ears.

  ‘Thank you for coming to see us, Max. I hope I may call you Max. Wolfgang speaks of you so often. And with such affection. You must stay to hear Herr Klesmer play one of his own compositions. Let me introduce you to him.’

  For there he was, like the catastrophe in an old comedy, conjured up by the ubiquitous Lewes who appeared to follow every conversation in the room, and anticipate every wish, like a successful circus impresario. Klesmer inclined slightly, a man smaller than Max with a mass of white hair, full lips, an unlined face and arresting grey eyes. He surveyed Max with sceptical contempt as they were introduced, then addressed himself entirely to the great lady, whose magnificent eyes held the two men in the same frame, an ominous image of Ugolino and his remaining son. Klesmer certainly took no prisoners. The discussion turned on the several merits of two different sculptures depicting the same subject: the abandoned Ariadne. One of the two had been misnamed Cleopatra and lurked in the Vatican Galleries in Rome, but the other, created by Johann Heinrich Dannecker, representing the unfortunate Ariadne stark naked, life-size, and seated on a panther, proved famous enough to have been viewed by both Duncker brothers, whilst in Frankfurt to attend the trade fair. They had visited both the Goethehaus in Großer Hirschgraben, draped with garlands on the poet’s birthday, and the famous statue. Max simply acknowledged that he had set eyes upon the thing. He remembered prettier girls, just as naked, but with larger breasts and a good deal more friendly, in the closed rooms at Hettie’s Keller, and had some difficulty comprehending this ecstatic appreciation of cold marble when warm flesh was to be had at the right price. The Sibyl and Klesmer, however, debated Nature and Art as if the two were in conflict, but closely related.

  ‘Sculpture, like poetry,’ the Sibyl declared, ‘must generate the elements that engage its audience – tension and emotion. I maintain that Dannecker’s Ariadne possesses both. Her head is lifted towards the horizon; she is gazing after her lost love. But she has been surprised while resting. The moment is clear. She has been unexpectedly awoken, one leg is so casually placed beneath the other, perhaps this is the very moment of her awakening consciousness? He is gone, and she finds herself alone. She knows that she is no longer loved. She has been abandoned.’

  Max wondered how anybody managed to snooze on the back of a panther, but was too discreet to voice his literal-mindedness.

  ‘Madame,’ Herr Klesmer leaned towards the Sibyl and dared to contradict her. ‘You spin a narrative from a gesture and a name. Now, the Ariadne to be found in the Vatican at Rome was originally known as the Cleopatra. Would your interpretation still be valid if the statue were simply to be renamed?’

  ‘But it is not then the same statue. The name alone transforms the meanings of every fold in the marble!’ The Sibyl demonstrated a pedantic streak. ‘Cleopatra was the victim of her own folly. She was a queen who could love whom she chose. And she appears to have invested all her passion in the losing side. She is valued for her Oriental eroticism and her sexual power, not for the pathos of her fidelity to the man who betrayed her trust. Dannecker created his Ariadne in full knowledge of her identity and her fate. She represents the woman abandoned. He is interpreting her story.’

  ‘Yet you loved the Roman Ariadne best, did you not?’ Herr Klesmer raised one beautiful hand. His fingers were clean and tapered, the nails unbroken, as if he had never worked. He recited an English text unknown to Max. ‘“The hall where the reclining Ariadne, then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease and tenderness.”’

  The Sibyl’s eyes widened and glowed as if he had handed her a vast bouquet of roses. Max gazed at the illuminated lady, baffled. Klesmer suddenly poked him with one of his gorgeous fingers. Max lurched on his heels, a marionette whose strings vibrated into motion.

  ‘And will you be publishing the English version in Berlin, sir? Or merely the translation?’

  The unknown text clearly sprang from the Great Work, which the Count’s wife and daughters were even then wolfing down in English. Max had no idea how far negotiations had progressed with the frisky husband. He hastily straightened his back and flattered the Sibyl, praying that the Ariadne – or was it the Cleopatra? – played a minor role in the Great Work.

  ‘We are honoured and proud to publish any work by Mrs. Lewes, whether in English or in German,’ declared Max. ‘She is admired throughout Europe.’

  Klesmer snorted. The lady smiled slightly, then put her unfortunate publisher on the spot.

  ‘But, Max, you have not yet given us your opinion of the Ariadne. And we have been discussing her without reference to your views. Do tell us what you think about the two sculptures. Do you have a preference?’

  This time, Max, no longer mesmerised by the peculiar company and the noise around him, let fly with his opinion. The girls at Hettie’s Keller were the better sort of prostitute, not overeducated, but anxious to please and to enjoy themselves. When other men sneered at them, he often rose to their defence. And now, oddly enough, he felt moved to defend each and every Ariadne.

  ‘The woman abandoned is traditionally regarded as the fallen woman, is she not? I have never understood what justice is to be found in that line of reasoning which serves only the desires and prejudices of men. She deserves our compassion. She is not to be blamed. Theseus is the villain of the piece.’

  ‘Bravo, sir! Well said!’ thundered the Graf von Hahn, appearing behind him. ‘Klesmer old chap, aren’t you going to play for us? I must get home to my girls and I don’t want to miss a minute of you torturing that piano.’

  The circle around the Sibyl parted. Max held out his arm to her and she accompanied him into the great salon where the piano loomed, menacing the roaring discussions, still orchestrated by the assiduous Lewes who buzzed from group to group. Max felt her small firm grasp and caught the rising scent of mixed spices from the appalling lace cap which covered her hair. This thick, heavy mane, now streaked with grey, emerged around the edges of her unsuitable headdress. He looked down upon her great forehead and the protruding nose and wondered if she could ever have been beautiful. But the hypnotic grey-blue eyes turned gratefully towards him as he arranged the cushions at her back in an upright chair. She became the centrepiece of the salon, with a clear view of Klesmer at the piano.

  Was she beautiful or not beautiful? He never decided the question, for then he had his answer. The musician twirled the stool upwards, thus becoming master of the keys, and faced the Sibyl before settling himself to play. His gesture was clear. He intended to play for one person alone. The rest of the company merely counted as incidental spectators. And now she gave the composer her entire attention. It was not just the generous freedom in her manners, nor her lack of affectation and the clarity of her
gestures that formed the basis of her charisma, it was the passion of her attention that made her beautiful still. No man is impervious to the flattering power of a woman’s concentration upon him, however ugly she might be, and Max felt the drama of her listening, as if he could hear her soul breathe. He stood behind her like a soldier on duty, taking first watch.

  Klesmer leaned over the keys. The rooms rustled, fluttered, then grew silent. Everybody waited.

  Max rarely listened to a concert or an opera all the way through. Even famous singers in drawing rooms paused to water their vocal cords and adjust their robes. Max took advantage of the intervals. He slipped outside on to balconies, into gardens, or took a turn around the lily pads decorating fishponds, where he always found a quiet place to loiter, smoke and scratch his testicles. But now, pinned behind the Sibyl’s luminous presence, he quailed within, displayed like a collected specimen, his wings skewered with pins to the green velvet of her open curtains. The expectant hush, prolonged by Klesmer’s predatory pause over the black and white keys, pressed down upon Max’s spirit. The only door to the salon, far away on the long side of the room, with two unknown young men leaning against it, remained firmly closed and out of reach. There was no escape.

  Then Klesmer began to play.

  Surely music should soothe, reassure, inspire, entrance, or at the very least uplift the weary spirit from its bed of pain? Music should not be experienced as a personal, visceral attack on the stomach and the genitals. No piano, in Max’s hearing, had ever released such an unpleasant onslaught of violent sound. The power of Klesmer’s passionate surge across the keys stunned and hypnotised the assembled company. An imperious magic in his fingers seemed to send a nerve-thrill through ivory key and wooden hammer, and compel the strings to make a quivering, lingering speech for him. Melodies strutted forth like maidens in stiff new dresses, only to be crushed and shunted away before the iron march of more subversive masculine themes. A scherzo of such tearful, ripening tenderness, surely, did not deserve to be followed by such outbursts of brash rage? Max could not hear the structure. Yet he still felt the power of Klesmer’s playing. For long moments he was lifted into a desperate indifference about his own doings, or at least a determination to laugh at them, as if they belonged to somebody else. He gazed at the Sibyl’s pendulous, protracted jaw, which loomed beneath him in profile. She sat with her head raised, her vast concentration fixed upon the shuddering form of Herr Klesmer. Her eyes had become brighter, her cheeks slightly flushed. Max sensed that he had been utterly forgotten.

  Irritated and eclipsed, he retreated to a safe place in his own mind where scepticism and good manners provided him with an impenetrable cocoon. The explosion of applause as Klesmer flung back his white head and hurled his beautiful hands into the air, high above the piano, took Max entirely by surprise. Could anyone have derived any pleasure at all from this extraordinary performance? The Sibyl passed a handkerchief across her moist eyes. Max gazed intently at the door. Klesmer rose up, mobbed at once by enthusiasts clustering round him, and acknowledged the cheering acclamations, his forehead curtained with a sheen of sweat. The full lips trembled.

  ‘Thank you, thank you. Gnädige Frau Lewes?’ He pushed his way to the Sibyl’s feet. ‘Madame, I beg to be released. You alone will understand me. You alone.’

  He bowed to the great lady, garlanded with deafening shouts of ‘Bravo’ and ‘Encore’. The Sibyl returned his bow from her throne, her emotion undisguised, and away swept the extraordinary Herr Klesmer, cutting a path to the door, as if armed with a scythe. The uproar in the salon continued undiminished as he stormed down the stairs, through the hallway and out into the street. The Graf von Hahn pounded in pursuit, braying his praises, jubilant. As the musician’s powerful strides carried him away down the Dorotheenstraße he collected an improvised following, young men from the salon, who could not bear to quit his presence, and a Bacchic train of street children, shouting in excitement. One of them pranced beside him, blowing a tin whistle. And so, magical as the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the pianist completed his fabulous departure.

  Max leaned against the wallpaper, uncomfortable, obscurely upstaged and tingling with alarm. His brother appeared beside him.

  ‘Remarkable, most remarkable,’ breathed Wolfgang, as if they had just witnessed a convincing miracle. He paused, allowing a moment for intense reverence. Then his business persona returned in force.

  ‘Max, listen to me carefully. I have had some conversation this evening with the Graf von Hahn, and we are contemplating an extended third edition. He has invited you to visit them this week. They are still at their summer house by the lake. I will organise a carriage for you. You are to complete the negotiations, but don’t give too much away. Insist upon the political risks that we are taking, but remain positive and convinced. I am sending you because he has also mentioned his eldest daughter as a possible match. Now consider this seriously, Max. It would be a most advantageous connection. I must be father and mother to you now in these matters. No obligations on either side of course, not at this stage, but bear it in mind.’

  A new vista opened up before the unfortunate Max, now obliged to take in too many ideas at once. He saw a long line of clipped yews, pointed at the top and filling out towards the base, neat as chessmen on either side of a weeded gravel path. He smelled the odour of hot green in the shadowless summer heat, and at the end of this avenue, a child dressed in white and blue, her fair curls shining in the spray, danced in the fountains.

  END OF CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  steps out for a stroll in the autumn sunshine. Sophie von Hahn bewitches the Assembled Company.

  The Jagdschloss stood on the edge of a forest, bordering a lake well stocked with carp. This handsome little hunting lodge, owned by the von Hahn family for over two hundred years, extended and modernised in the eighteenth century by ancestors in enormous wigs, now gave off the perfumes of a gentleman’s residence. The alterations, transforming the building, had been completed in an era when the masculine décor of antlers, stuffed boars’ heads and huge fireplaces had given way to paintings, vases and curtains. Flowers and soft sofas took the place of wooden settles, marble hallways replaced the dark passages cluttered with muddy boots and guns. Yet the family still referred to the house as the Jagdschloss, and this improbable title hung over the long two-storey building, whose yellow walls and white-slatted shutters suggested a Mediterranean villa, transported from a hilltop in sunshine to the dark edges of the North. After a rainy August harvest the September days shimmered with dry roads, sweetening grapes in the conservatory, and reddening apples tumbled into rough orchard grass. Max arrived in a fine cloud of dust, discomfited and irritable, harassed by the mid-morning sun. He had dressed up in the early cool, and now wore too many clothes.

  The first thing he saw was the young lady herself, the eldest daughter of the household, the goods he had come to inspect, Sophie Anna Elizabeth Constanza, Countess von Hahn. As the carriage swung round the half-circle of gravel in front of the Jagdschloss, he glimpsed a tall, fine girl, all green stripes and bare arms, her hair mounted in plaits, held in place with a black Japanese comb. The comb flashed through the front door, the last thing certain and in focus, for the apparition squinted at him through the carriage windows, then fled back into the house. In the moment of jingling, creaking silence as the horses stopped, stamped and snorted flecks of foam, he heard a thrilling scream shear through the Chinese boxes of one room after another, opening out into long corridors, where hessian runners muffled the thunder of her boots.

  ‘Maman! Maman! C’est lui! C’est lui! He’s here!’

  Max smiled, flattered, touched, and began to dust himself off. The moment of personal welcome from the young Countess, who had clearly been spying on the approaching roads, now vanished in the rush of family overflowing into the hallway. The Count’s hunting dogs, long-eared piebald hounds and two well-brushed English black spaniels, surrounded Max and snuffled at his heels. A gaggle of
young girls pounced upon him and tugged at his sleeves. The Count had three daughters in fairy-tale succession and a household of accompanying cousins, all of whom caused the Jagdschloss to bulge at the corners. The entire house heaved with expectant energy, like an encampment before a battle. And here they all were, babbling, calling out, thronging the steps. The Count boomed greetings and gathered up the flood of little children.

  ‘Let the poor chap inside, my dears! Sophie? Where have you got to? It’s your old playmate Max. Come to chase you into the fountains. Do you remember Karin? My youngest. And this is Lotte. Here she is. Lottie! Say hello to Max.’

  He pulled a long blonde plait to identify his third daughter and Max kissed a slightly grimy cheek.

  ‘Will you play hide and seek with us in the gardens?’ demanded Karin. Lotte chewed the plait, unable to speak.

  ‘Nonsense, dearest! He needs a cold drink first. Come on. Let him in.’

  Sophie von Hahn hovered just inside the doorway. She knows, thought Max, watching her cautious hesitation. She knows that her father has asked me to choose her, and she doesn’t know whether to court me or treat me as if I was of no consequence whatever. The embarrassed hesitation infected both parties, for Max, usually self-confident with loose women, who fawned on his full purse and good looks, quailed before the feral glance of this young virgin. Who knows what forces of desire will govern a young girl? Obedience to her father? Submission to her own contradictory passions, or vanity wedded to ambition? Sophie von Hahn’s dark green eyes, flecked with hazel, scanned Max with animal intensity. Max took the initiative. He mounted the last step and bowed, never taking his eyes from her still face.

  ‘Countess?’ Everyone else tumbled into the house, shrieking.

  She hesitated again. ‘Do you remember me?’