CHAPTER 17

November 2, 1909

Frank is tense these mornings. He has much invested in making this trip profitable. He wants to be relaxed, but he can’t be. He is most happy doing his work, not negotiating. Besides the big monograph of perspective drawings of all the buildings he has designed, Wasmuth will be printing a photo book of Frank’s completed work. This Sonderheft is small in scale but many pages long, 110 or more. So Frank is doing two projects, and worried as he tries to get the money together still.

Yesterday I went with him to Wasmuth’s office. Huge, and a little awe-inspiring. I had no idea the man had 150 people working for him. Frank feels important when he goes to that office, but I didn’t enjoy it. Too much pretense.

         

The hour just after Frank left each day was the difficult time. Dressing to go out that first week in Berlin, voices—Mattie’s, Edwin’s—filled her mind, arguing with her as she pulled on her stockings. She would rush outside onto the streets, where the words in her head dissolved into German conversations all around her.

Mamah fell in step with other people bustling through the Tiergarten. Once before, she had visited Berlin, on her honeymoon with Edwin. When she arrived this time, she had braced herself for something, some pang. But Berlin was devoid of Edwin’s ghost. She could recall little of their honeymoon except that they had ventured out from their hotel in a small radius, always returning for a nap after a couple of hours of museums and dining.

Now, with her little red Baedeker guide in hand, she set out each day to explore a new piece of Berlin. It was a big sprawling city that reminded her of Chicago, for it was teeming with Poles, Hungarians, Russians, Scandinavians, Austrians, Italians, French, and Japanese. She used the Stadtbahn when she had to, but preferred walking, poking through shops and art galleries between the official destinations—the royal palace, the Arsenal, the Reichstag.

She quickly tired of warriors on muscled bronze horses. Mamah didn’t know what she was after, but she was hungry for something authentic. Wading into crowds as they shopped, she eavesdropped on the conversations and little dramas of the Berliners around her. She was astonished by the potpourri of languages at every turn. She heard an Italian tossing off English slang to a German butcher, and a Russian in high dudgeon hurling French curses at a German taxi driver.

She would walk until her feet were screaming, then rest in cafés where artists buzzed about Modernism at the tables around her. Or she might fall into a bookstore that could be counted on to appear just around the next corner. There she would rest her feet and read the free newspapers.

It was in such a bookstore that she looked up one afternoon and spotted a small volume with “Goethe” printed on its spine. She stretched to retrieve it, then sank down on a bench. Inside the battered leather cover, the pages were edged in black mildew spots, but the text was visible throughout. Hymn to Nature, the title page read. She had studied Goethe in college and pursued his works later, on her own. Yet she was unfamiliar with this piece, which appeared to be a long poem. The date on the cover was 1783.

“Is this an original edition?” Mamah asked when she approached the shopkeeper.

“I don’t believe so.”

“Will you take three marks?”

The man frowned. “You may have something important there.” He took the volume in his hamlike hands and studied it. “Twelve,” he said.

She lifted the book again and examined it. Then he did. They parried back and forth. In the end, she handed over ten marks.

         

WITH THE BOOK wrapped in brown paper and tucked in her bag, Mamah hurried back to the Adlon. The moment Frank walked in, she raced to show him her prize.

“It’s very old,” she said breathlessly. “Over a hundred years.”

“It smells that old.” He peeled apart pages that were stuck together.

“I’m quite sure it hasn’t been translated into English.” She glanced into his eyes. “Don’t laugh, but I feel as if I was meant to find it.”

“Perhaps you were.”

“Let’s translate it together,” she said. “We could actually bring this into English for the first time.”

Frank looked skeptical. “But my entire vocabulary is nein and ja.”

“That’s not true. You know guten morgen!”

“Ja.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you the literal words, and we’ll figure out together how to say it best. It’s more important that you’re a good writer in your own language. You happen to be a great writer. And the poem happens to be about nature.”

“Is that how it works, translating?”

“Well, it’s a little bit of alchemy, I think. It helps enormously to understand the culture you’re translating from, and then the one you’re taking it into.”

“And this is a poem.”

“Exactly, which makes it harder. Ideally, you’re Dryden, sitting there translating Greek poems into perfect English verse. But that’s not going to happen here. We’ll go for the soul of it.”

“I would love that.”

“There’s a caveat,” she teased. “You have to be humble, because no one ever regards it as yours, of course. The translator is merely the filter.” She looked at him over her spectacles. “Can you be a filter?”

“Now you’re throwing a wrench into the deal.”

“Let’s start on it over dinner.”

“Mmmm,” he said, “can’t do it tonight.” His voice was playful. “I have something even you would prefer to do.”

“What? Tell me right now. What is it?”

“Wasmuth and his wife have two extra tickets for the opera. They’ve invited us to go with them, then to Kempinski’s afterward. We’re due at the state opera house in about forty-five minutes.”

“You are willing to go to the opera?”

“Business.” He rolled his eyes.

Mamah whooped, swirling around the room in a little dance. “Which opera?” she called to him as she changed quickly into her dark blue evening dress. She couldn’t hear what he said. She positioned a jet-studded band around her neck.

“Stunning,” Frank said when she emerged.

Out in the hallway, a bald man in a mink-lapeled greatcoat waited for the elevator. When it arrived, he pulled back the folding gate and bowed slightly as Mamah and Frank stepped in. She could smell the man’s cologne and felt him studying them.

What picture do we make? she wondered. Do we look like a married couple, two parts of one machine? Or can he see the truth?

In the lobby, heads turned to stare. She knew she looked beautiful. But the Adlon was full of beautiful women. It was Frank people thought they should somehow recognize. He was not a tall man, but he was elegant in his black cape, his gray temples and bearing setting him apart and above the other men. The high-heeled leather boots and broad felt hat looked dashing.

They stepped outside just as a cold drizzle ended. Mamah’s skin tingled in the charged evening air of Pariser Platz.

“Which opera did you say?” she asked.

“Boito’s Mefistofele. Chaliapin is singing the lead.”

They walked silently for a block. What can he be thinking? she wondered.

“Does Wasmuth know?” she asked.

“About our circumstances? No. We’ve only talked about business.”

Mamah composed her face. I can manage this, she thought.

“I won’t make any more social commitments for us.” Frank sensed her disappointment. “I just thought it would be a chance for you to make some sense of what the man has been telling me. He has a fellow who translates, but I think I’m missing a lot.”

At the Opera House, an attendant led them to their seats at the front of the first balcony. Ernst Wasmuth, a smiling, well-fed fellow with an upturned brown mustache, leaped to his feet and kissed Mamah’s hand. He introduced them to his wife, a sober little mouse next to her fat Cheshire cat. Mamah settled in the seat at the end of the row, with Frank next to Wasmuth.

As the house lights began to dim, she glanced back at the audience behind her. The shoulders and necks of the women, dressed in velvet, silk, and feathers, glowed softly white in the dark. Some women waved fans like small wings in front of their breasts. The men leaned forward, their crisp shirts gleaming against black coats.

She hadn’t seen Mefistofele but knew it was a version of the Faust tale, a story she had seen in opera and play form and translated in college. She had wanted to turn around on the street when Frank told her. It had been a bad idea to come.

When the curtain finally rose, the huge chorus—a hundred people, at least—was already onstage. The white-robed heavenly choir sang “Ave Signor!”—Hail Thee, Lord! Angels and penitents and small cherubim wearing white feathers on their shoulders, arms, and fingertips crowded the stage, their voices swelling in one resounding “Ave!”

Mamah felt as if she were in a great cathedral, her very soul borne up by the achingly sweet voices of the children.

Then, without warning, Mefistofele strode into their midst. Half draped in a red cape and towering above all the others, Chaliapin was bare-chested and menacing, the muscles in his arms flexing with power.

“Do you know of Faust?” the Mystic Chorus sang.

“The strangest lunatic I’ve ever known!” Mefistofele thundered. “His thirst for knowledge makes him miserable.” The devil threw back his head and laughed contemptuously. “Such a feeble creature! I scarcely have the heart to tempt him.”

Mamah translated the first few lines in whispers to Frank. She leaned forward as Mefistofele wagered with God to win the soul of the professor.

“E sia.” So be it, sang the Mystic Chorus.

In the middle of a village celebration, bookish old Faust appeared used up, as he did in every version of the story, standing amid the beautiful young revelers. A big-bellied tenor sang Faust’s role. And what a Faust! His voice was a thrilling counterpoint to the booming basso profundo of Mefistofele.

Yes, he could be tempted, quite easily. Without much protest. Mamah knew well what would tempt Faust, and the tenor sang it poignantly.

If you could offer me

One hour of repose

In which my soul might find peace;

If you could reveal to the darkest recesses of my mind

My true self and the truth of the world.

Were it to come to pass, I would say

To the fleeting moment:

Stay, for thou art beautiful!

Then might I die

And let fearsome hell engulf me.

Mamah glanced at Frank. His face, so handsome, was lit, like those behind them; his forehead glowed.

“Arrestati, sei bello.” Stay. For you are so beautiful.

Mamah began to cry. She dabbed tears from her cheeks and blew her nose. She knew what was coming. Knew that Faust, made young in his bargain with the devil, would love and seduce a peasant girl, Marguerita, then desert her to go off on another adventure with Mefistofele. She knew Faust would return to find the girl in prison for poisoning her mother with a potion he himself had supplied to Marguerita. Only three drops, he had assured her, will plunge your mother into a deep sleep, so that we can be alone. But her mother dies from the potion. In the absence of her lover, Marguerita goes insane, drowning her baby—Faust’s baby.

What on earth made me think I could manage it? Mamah thought. She was angry that she had allowed herself to be drawn into attending. Marguerita’s madness chilled her, and the familiar old story line hit her like a blow to the sternum. For the past few days, left alone to ruminate, she’d feared that a kind of madness brewed only a step outside the golden circle she and Frank had drawn around themselves.

And yet…and yet. How could she, how could anyone, condemn Faust, so desperate for a piece of happiness that he would sell his soul in order to say, Yes, for a brief moment, I was truly alive.

Mamah slid down in her seat, trying to stop the tears.

Near the end of the opera, Faust fell in love again, this time with the beautiful Helen of Troy, when Mefistofele transported him back in time to ancient Greece. Mamah dabbed her eyes as the tenor sang “Ogni mia fibra, E’posseduta dall’amor.” My every fiber is possessed by love.

She placed her hand on Frank’s. His eyes were closed, and his head swayed with the music. It wasn’t his fault. The program was in Italian and German. What could he know? She was the one who had been obsessed with Goethe, after all.

Frank rested his head for a moment on her shoulder. He was humming, unaware of the emotional wreckage in the seat next to him.

         

KEMPINKSI’S WAS FULL of operagoers drinking champagne and throwing back oysters. There was euphoria in the room as the people around them talked about Boito and Chaliapin. Brilliant. Magnificent. A night to remember. The ache in Mamah’s head began to ease.

Wasmuth’s wife appeared emboldened by the success of the evening.

“Your eyes are swollen,” she said, taking Mamah’s hand. “I was moved, too, my dear.” Her voice was uncomfortably intimate. “Would you tell your husband, Mrs. Wright, that my husband considers it a privilege to work with a man of his genius?”

The anger Mamah had felt in the theater surged up inexplicably into her throat. Her temples pounded as she translated.

Frank bowed graciously toward the woman, then leaned back, considering the matter before he spoke. “Tell her a genius is merely the man who sees nature, and has the boldness to follow it.”

Mamah turned back to Frau Wasmuth and spoke softly to her. The woman’s neck began to redden from the collar up, until her face was nearly the hue of the port in her glass. She stood up and spoke privately with her husband. Wasmuth made a quick apology for his wife.

“Is she ill?” Frank asked.

“Yes,” said Wasmuth, calling for the check. “Yes. We must go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Strange,” Frank said when they were gone. “Did I say the wrong thing? I suppose I should have returned the compliment…some malarkey.”

“No, my love,” Mamah said, leaning over to kiss his brow. “It’s my fault. I told her I am not Mrs. Wright.”