A Glove Shop In Vienna

A Rose in Amazonia

She had not expected it to be so beautiful.

In Vienna, in her luxurious villa in Schonbrunn, she had read about the ‘Green Hell’ of the Amazon. Now, standing by the rails of the steamer on the last day of her thousand-mile voyage up the ‘River Sea’, she was in a shimmering world in which trees grew from the dusky water only to find themselves in turn embraced by ferns and fronds and brilliantly coloured orchids. An alligator slid from a gleaming sandbar into the leaf-stained shallows; the grey skeleton of a deodar, its roots asphyxiated by the water, was aflame with scarlet ibis.

She was bound for a city which even in the few decades of its existence had become a legend: fabled Manaus with its rococo mansions, its mosaic sidewalks and exquisite shops… A city of unbelievable luxury and sophistication thrown up by the wealthy rubber barons in the mazed and watery jungle to rival the capitals of Europe which they had left behind. And in particular — since she was a singer — for the prime jewel in the exotic city’s heart: the Opera House, the Teatro Amazonas, the loveliest, they said, in all the Americas.

Only a few years ago her journey would have been a fitting one. Lured by unimaginable fees, Sarah Bernhardt had acted there and Caruso sung before an audience whose jewels would have put Paris and London to shame. But now, in the autumn of 1912, the good times were over. Faced by competition from the East, the ‘black gold’ that was rubber had crashed as spectacularly as before it had risen. Fortunes were lost overnight; the spoiled and pampered women who had lived like princesses in their riverside fazendas returned to the countries from which they came; the men, according to temperament, shot themselves or prepared to begin again. And to the Opera

House there came now only second-rate companies — people who were glad to get an engagement anywhere.

Yet the woman who stood by the rails, her blonde head under the lacy parasol bent in attention to the river, was not — and never could be — second-rate. Nina Berg was an opera singer of distinction and quality who in her native Vienna had been accorded the homage which the Russians reserve for their dancers, the British for their sportsmen and the Austrians for those who sing. ‘Is she beautiful?’ an eager student had once asked Sternhardt, the famous regisseur who directed her. ‘At second sight,’ the great man had answered, paying tribute to her stillness and the gentle reflection in her blue eyes.

From this hard-working and intelligent woman, youth had stealthily crept away. At first she did not heed its passing: venerable divas abound in the opera houses of the world. But now, far too soon, hastened by an unexpected illness and an operation that had gone awry, her voice was going too. And with her voice would go all the rest: the villa, the money, the adulation and protection of men… She would become a singing teacher in a little dark courtyard somewhere, one of the tens of thousands of musicians who had never achieved their goal, or passed it, and now watched young girls scrape fiddles or sing arpeggios.

Well, so be it! But why, having accepted her fate, had she decided to come on this trip? Why, when she had been warned of the danger if she sang again, had she decided to appear in this doomed wraith of an opera house? And why, oh why, had Kindinsky chosen Carmen — one of the few operas she did not like — for her farewell?

Jacob Kindinsky, sitting sad-eyed and perspiring in a deck-chair, watching her, could have told her why: because Carmen was a part that suited neither her temperament nor her voice and he did not choose to be dismembered by seeing her bring to her last Violetta or Mimi her unique quality of bewilderment at the loss, the inexplicable passing of happiness. It was bad enough, thought Jacob, to have to come to this unspeakable place — seemingly full of boa constrictors and electric eels, not to mention a fish that he dared not even contemplate which entered one’s orifices when one was bathing and became, by means of backward-pointing spines, impossible to dislodge… Bad enough to be broiled alive and in the end, in all probability, not even paid, without having to submit to Nina’s devastating empathy with those doomed and great-hearted girls. Whereas in the role of Carmen, singing opposite that Milanese bullock, Padrocci, who was now snoring under the fan in his cabin; keeping abreast of the ludicrious tempi which that clown Feuerbach would imagine to be ‘South American’, she would be compelled into the routine, heel-tapping, fan-clicking performance — and Feuerbach’s imbecile crescendos would drown those heartrending breaks in her top notes.

And Jacob, who could hardly bear what was happening to Nina, found himself wondering for the first time in years if they had done right — he, Sternhardt who had become her regisseur and Fallheim, the director of the Academy, when they had sent that boy away. Jacob had been with Fallheim at that last interview when they had finally persuaded him that he was harming Nina and standing in her way. He had never forgotten the look in the boy’s eyes, but he had forgotten his name. Stefan? Georg? Karl?

The boy’s name had been Paul — Paul Varlov — and Nina, now watching with her customary quiet attention, a flock of green and orange parakeets had not forgotten it. It was, she could have said (without hysteria, without hyperbole) stamped into the marrow of her bones.

He had been twenty-three — a Russian father, a Hungarian mother, educated by some whim in an English public school and when Nina met him, a student at the University of Vienna. In him, nations and causes bubbled and boiled; just to touch him was to risk burning, he was so terribly alive. With his too large, too dark eyes, his high cheekbones and olive skin, he was an outlandish figure among his phlegmatic classmates, yet everywhere he went he was surrounded by friends who clung to him like puppies, lapping at his obsessions: the novels of Dostoyevsky, the Brotherhood of Man, the fate of the pigeons on the Stefan’s Dom… He made speeches on Freedom for Hungary, waving his searingly beautiful hands; swam the Danube; discovered the Secessionists, made yoghurt in his landlady’s button boots…

Then, standing at a Mahler Concert, he found himself next to a girl, golden-haired and gentle, with a sweet wide mouth and tender eyes.

Nina was twenty, studying piano and singing at the

Academy. Paul’s friends parted to let her through and closed again behind her. She was home.

Her innocence, at that time, was total. She believed herself to be an indifferent student — seeing in the extra work, the harsher criticism that her professors handed out to her, only evidence of her own inadequacy. Everyone else in the Academy knew of her promise, but not she.

Now, in any case, she forgot her studies; forgot everything except the glory of being alive and loved by Paul. The selflessness and modesty that were her hallmark enabled her to respond completely to his passion. Uniquely, for someone so young, she never got in the way of her own happiness.

So it was spring in Vienna… In the Prater, the violets; on the slopes of the Wienerwald, the greening larches. And everywhere, in the cafes, the parks, floating from the windows of the grey, stone-garlanded houses — music. Sometimes the friends came, unexacting and affectionate as spaniels; sometimes they were alone. Their love was so immense it spilled over to embrace the children bowling their hoops in the Tiergarten, the waiters in restaurants who paused, leaning on their brass trays, to tell them the stories of their lives. They stood, marvelling, their fingers interlaced, before the quiet Durers in the Albertina, adopted an ageing llama in the Kaiser’s zoo, danced to the open-air bands under the linden trees…

One night from a deserted garden in Grinzig, Paul pilfered for her an early, perfect, snow-white rose. They were the first roses, he told her, the white ones, sprung from the tears of the angel who had been compelled to lead Eve from Paradise. He would find them for her always, he said, and when she laughed and spoke of winter he said there could be no winter while they loved. That night she stayed with him. She was a Catholic — it was mortal sin. For the rest of her life, when she heard the word ‘joy’, it was to the memory of that sin that she returned.

If Paul had one characteristic above all others, it was a high intelligence. There was no moment when he did not understand that what was between him and Nina was a God-given gift, entire, enduring and sublime. And young as he was he began, without a second’s hesitation, to undergo the paperwork and practicalities which would make possible their marriage. It was now that the Academy began to sit up and take notice. Nina was sent for and informed of her potentially glorious future as an opera singer. She was surprised and pleased that her voice was good and told them, with her gentle smile, that she was going to marry Paul Varlov and go abroad with him. The Principal, horrified, sent for Sternhardt, the opera’s famous regisseur who had earmarked both the voice and, when the time was ripe, the woman.

Nina, serene as a golden lotus, stayed firm.

So they turned on Paul. He had not known of the future that awaited her. To be a singer in Vienna is to be a little bit divine. Aware of this, wanting only what was right for her, Paul listened.

And so, into the Eden that those two had created, their elders introduced the poison-apple of self-sacrifice. Benign, experienced, twice his age, they bore down on the boy, keeping their visits secret from Nina — emphasising again and again her promise, her glittering future, the life of an acclaimed and dedicated artist which awaited her and which marriage and childbearing and poverty would put for ever out of reach.

Paul was only twenty-three. The call they made was one to which youth has always rallied: the sacrifice of happiness, of life itself, for a high ideal. After weeks of sleeplessness, he lost his fine perception of the truth and reached out, blind and despairing, for their poisoned fruit.

One day Nina, going to his room, found the friends grouped like figures in a pieta — and on the pillow, his last gift to her: a single, long-stemmed, snow-white rose.

She never saw him again.

The clanging of the ship’s bell made Nina turn. They had come to one of the sights of Amazonia: the ‘Wedding of the Waters’ where, at the confluence of the two rivers, the leaf-brown waters of the Amazon flowed, distinct and separate, beside the acid, jet-black waters of the Negro to within sight of Manaus.

Responding to the bell, there now emerged Padrocci, the tenor, in crumpled mauve pyjamas, the ludicrous Feuerbach with his moustache cups, the dishevelled members of the chorus, all to peer over the rails and exclaim.

‘Oh, God,’ thought Jacob Kindinsky, indifferent as always to the marvels of nature. ‘What scum is this that I have brought to sing with Nina?’

But as they steamed up the Negro, past the neglected and once-splendid planters’ houses, past sheds where ocelot and jaguar pelts hung out to dry, he heard her draw in her breath.

‘Look, Jacob! There it is!’

He looked. A dazzling, soaring dome of blue and green and gold surmounted by the Eagle of Brazil… a glimpse of marble pillars, a glittering pink and white facade… The Teatro Amazonas would have been lovely anywhere — here in the midst of the steamy, dusky jungle it was staggering.

And the fading opera star, the little Jew who loved her, turned and smiled at each other, for after all there was no disgrace here. This place would make a fitting ending to their pilgrimage.

A few hours before curtain-up, the thing happened which Jacob had known would happen. Nina, unpacking in her sumptuous but already mildewed dressing-room, asked for a white rose.

‘Nina, we are in the Amazon? he cried. ‘You have seen the flowers! They are probably full of dead birds they have eaten for their dinner.’

‘Please, Jacob.’

So it ended as it always ended… As it had done in Berlin in a blizzard which had cut off all supplies to the city; in Paris with the streets sealed for some visiting dignitary so that Jacob, with an hour to spare, found himself begging for a single bud from a bad-tempered gardener in the Tuileries; in Bucharest where every available rose had been pounded into attar for the tourist trade.

‘You cannot wear a white rose for Carmen,’ Sternhardt had yelled at her years and years ago, when he had at last persuaded her to try the mezzo role. ‘Carmen wears red flowers always — scarlet, crimson — she is a gypsy!”

But Nina, who stood so patiently while they fitted her costumes, who would put herself out for the most insignificant member of the chorus, only said very quietly that if they wanted her to sing Carmen they would have to find her a white rose. And as with Carmen, so with Violetta (whether or not she was the Dame aux Camellias), with Mimi and Gilda and Butterfly.

So now poor Jacob stepped out of the resplendent foyer with its gilded mirrors and corpulent muses, to search among the frangipani, the hibiscus and the voracious orchids in that steam-bath of a city for the flower which alone linked this lovely, deeply weary woman to her youth.

In his ornate gold-leaf and red-plush box next to the stage, a man whose look of extreme distinction even the recent months of strain and agony could not eradicate, waited — entirely without interest — for the curtain to rise.

As usual in these times of slump and mismanagement there had been a muddle about the posters. The company was second-rate, the opera was Carmen — that was all he knew and it was enough to have kept him away but for the need to kill time for an evening before the arrival of the tycoon from Sao Paulo to whom he was selling ‘The Dragonfly’. Everything else was sold already: the other boats, the carriages, the antique silver and fine furniture he had shipped out from Europe. Only for Roccella itself had he found no purchaser. Soon now the lovely Palladian yellow-stuccoed house with its blue shutters, its flower-wreathed arcades, its fountains and terraces, would vanish in the murderous embrace of the jungle from which he had wrested it.

‘Look, Mother, there’s Mr Varlov! So he can’t be in prison yet,’ said the convent-fresh daughter of a Portuguese customs official, looking raptly at the solitary figure in the box.

‘Don’t stare, dear,’ said her mother, irritably aware that neither disgrace nor bankruptcy would dim the image of this curiously magnetic figure in her daughter’s eyes.

But the girl’s father did stare, and nodded, for it seemed to him that Varlov had had a raw deal. Though he had been among the wealthiest of the planters and hospitable to a fault, Varlov had not indulged in the pranks of so many of the others — washing their carriage horses in champagne, sending their shirts back to Paris to be laundered. Varlov had built houses for the serengueiros who tended his thousands of acres of wild rubber, and schools for their children. It was to save these that he had gone to Rio when the crash came, to raise more money by means which, though he could not have known it at the time, had turned out to be illegal and now left him facing, along with the men he had trusted, a charge of malpractice and fraud.

Leaning back, indifferent to the looks he was attracting, Paul looked round the Opera House that he had helped to bring into being. It was he who had insisted on the best Carrara marble, he who had suggested that de Angelis himself be fetched from Italy to paint the ceilings. He had put thousands of pounds of his own money into this crazy, lovely building and for one reason only. Obsessionally, doggedly, idiotically, Paul had been convinced that one day she would come.

Well, she had not come. He had entertained Charetti and her entire company from La Scala to a seven-course banquet on ‘The Dragonfly’, had taken half a Russian corps de ballet stricken with yellow fever back to Roccella to be nursed…

But she had not come and never would come now. It was over.

Jacob had found a rose. Feuerbach, twisting his idiot moustache into imagined perfection, went to the conductor’s rostrum. Padrocci completed the egg-swallowing and mi-mi-mi-ing routine so beloved of bad tenors all over the world and was eased into the uniform of Don Jose.

The curtain rose. Soldiers and passers-by, hopelessly sparse on the over-large stage, wandered about. Padrocci made his entrance. He had burst a button on his tunic and was already a quarter-tone flat.

In his box, Paul Varlov yawned.

Carmen appeared on the steps of the cigarette factory, was greeted by the crowd, moved forward, getting into position for her ‘Habanera’. A heavy black wig, a flounced skirt, In her hair a rose…

In the stage box a man stood up, threw out an arm, spoke some unintelligible words. He was glared at, hushed.

Nina looked up. Across the glare of the footlights, at a distance at which normally she could distinguish nothing, she saw him, understood why she had come — and began to sing.

What happened next was a miracle. Jacob Kindinsky said so, anyway, and he should have known. The kind of miracle that enables a mother to leap across a chasm to rescue a child threatened by fire, or enables a mortally-wounded pilot to land his aircraft safely. For Nina now sang as she had sung at the height of her glory. Her illness, the effect of her operation ceased to exist. ‘Sing with your voice, with your heart, with your life’, St Augustine had begged, and so now sang Nina Berg, forcing from Padrocci as the opera continued a decent, near-musical performance, from Feuerbach a respect for Bizet’s marvellously subtle score.

The first interval found Jacob in tears and Paul Varlov sitting in his box as if carved from stone. ‘I cannot do it again,’ he silently implored the Fates. ‘I cannot!’

For the first few moments, following the ecstasy and shock of seeing her, hope had soared. Even with the heavy make-up he could see how she had aged. That she was appearing with this appalling company at all seemed to indicate that her career was over. In which case, surely he had a right, even disgraced and bankrupt as he was…? But as she began to sing he knew it was not so. She was exactly what they had foretold: a great and glorious artist. If she was here it was for some chivalrous reason of her own.

The curtain rose again. Padrocci, pawing the white rose with his hot, fat hands, managed the ‘Flower Song’ and Paul, watching him, smiled crookedly. There was one gift and one gift only that he grudged the encroaching jungle. The greenhouse at Follina with its latticed screens, its fan and ice-machine where, to the puzzlement of his gardeners, he had coaxed and bullied from the black soil of Amazonia a sweetly-scented, snow-white rose.

Carmen read her doom in the cards, sent Jose away, went forward to her death… Right at the end the strain began to tell and Jacob, cowering, waited for the first tell-tale crack in her voice but Feuerbach, scenting the stable, was rampant again and no one noticed.

The curtain fell on an ovation. The audience rose, stamped, roared. Flowers rained on the stage. Nina took curtain call upon curtain call, leading forward the stunned Padrocci, the simpering Feuerbach. She was not at all impatient and hardly glanced at Paul’s box. There was all time, all eternity now for them to be together. Even she could not imagine a God so wrathful that he would separate them twice.

The delay before she could escape from the theatre gave Paul his chance. He sent a note round to the stage door and made his way quickly down to the docks. He was selling ‘The Dragonfly’ fully equipped and his Indian crew had been persuaded to stay on and work for the new owner. If he worked fast it could be done — her own devastating humility would aid him — but he thought it might be the last thing he would do.

Hurriedly he gave his instructions: a perfect intimate dinner for two on deck; the Venetian candlesticks, the best champagne — and no word to Madame, no single word to indicate that ‘The Dragonfly’ was no longer his.

They nodded, pleased to serve him once again. They would not betray him and spoke, in any case, only their own language and a smattering of Portuguese.

Time, now, to go to the riverside cafe he had appointed for their rendezvous.

She came as he had asked, alone, in a hansom, telling no one where she was going. As she stepped out and the lamplight shone on her well-remembered face, he felt a moment of rage that time had dared so patently to lay hands on her. Then it was over, for this was Nina. She, in her turn, experienced no such moment, for he was handsomer than ever, the skin taut over those incredible bones, the streaks of silver highlighting his jet-black hair.

‘Come,’ he said, allowing himself once and once only to touch her hand. ‘We’re going to have dinner on my yacht.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

She followed him like a child. She wanted to go on saying ‘yes’ to everything: ‘yes’ to the lapping of the river, ‘yes’ to the hot night and the cry of the frogs; ‘yes’ to the future — ‘yes’ even to the lonely and agonising past because it had led her to this place. So totally, shiveringly happy was she that she made a characteristic gesture, laying a finger sideways across her lips so as not to cry out and Paul, remembering it, stumbled for a moment as he led her aboard.

‘What a beautiful yacht, Paul!’

‘Yes: she’s the fastest on the river. I have four others: a schooner, a motor launch…’ He began to show off, boring her with tonnages and the luxurious fittings he had installed. Useless. She seemed enchanted at his success; to regard it as absolutely natural that he should boast like a silly boy.

‘Oh, I knew you’d do well! Tell me everything! Start with now. Where do you live?’

A servant had taken her cloak, drawn out a chair at the snowy candlelit table on the front deck. She took a roll, began to crumble it — then looked up at him to see if he remembered.

Yes, he remembered… That they had always kept a handful of crumbs from every meal they ate together and gone afterwards to find a one-legged pigeon who roosted between the feet of a particularly Gothic saint above the west door of the Stefan’s Dom. A good life they had given that pigeon, who had abandoned thereafter any efforts to support himself.

Deliberately he looked away, refusing the shared intimacy, and began to describe his house. ‘It was built by an Italian over a hundred years ago — it’s an exact copy of the palazzo in his native village. Roccella, it’s called. He didn’t live long to enjoy it, poor devil. I got it for a song and I’ve made a water garden, an arboretum…’

Yes, he would do that, thought Nina. She remembered how he had bought a packet of seeds once, mignonette they were, and they had wandered through the courtyards of the Hofburg scattering them in the cracks between the paving stones. She had been surprised and enchanted that someone so wild and masculine should care so much for flowers.

‘I’ve brought in trees from all over Amazonia — there must be five hundred species. And I’ve made the house into a real show place. The furniture’s mostly Louis Quinze shipped out from France, the chandeliers are Bohemian…’

He was getting nowhere. To his infantile showing-off she accorded only the lovely, quiet attention that was her hallmark.

‘I wish you could see it,’ he said.

Ah, that was better. She had made a small movement of the head. Was she not going to see it, then?

‘You are happy in the Amazon, Paul? You like it?’

He was silent. Then, forgetting his role, he began to quote the lines that the great Cervantes had written about the new world that was South America:’… the refuge of all the poor devils of Spain, the sanctuary of the bankrupt, the safeguard of murderers, the promised land for ladies of easy virtue, a lure and disillusionment for the many… and an incomparable remedy for the few.’

Nina had closed her eyes. ‘And you?’ she said softly. ‘Have you found it to be that? An incomparable remedy?’

Paul did not reply. For him there had always been only one ‘incomparable remedy’. This woman to whom he had committed himself wholly at their first meeting and whose absence had left him with a lifelong, ever undiminished sense of loss.

So now on with the slaughter, for he saw that like himself she had kept faith. He had only to reach out and she would give it all up — the fame and adulation, the homage of the students who had pulled her carriage through the Prater after her first Boheme, the bouquets glittering with diamond drops which besotted Habsburg counts threw for her on stage… If he mishandled the next few moments he would doom her to squalor and poverty, waiting for him to come out of prison if the trial went against him, friendless in this vile climate, in danger of every dread disease.

‘You gave an incredible performance tonight.’

She waved a hand. ‘No… no! It was a mistake, Paul. I am —’

He interrupted her. ‘But I wondered why you wore a white rose? One would expect Carmen to wear red flowers, don’t you think?’

There. He had done it. He had also, apparently, crushed the stem of his wine-glass.

Nina looked down at her plate. Not to make a fuss, that was what mattered. Women lost their only sons in battle. Children starved. Paul had not loved her. Blindly she groped for her fork, speared a dark, unfocused object and conveyed it, with infinite care, to her mouth.

Even now perhaps she could do it. If she admitted to him that her voice was finished. He was so chivalrous, so kind.

Oh, God, no!

Paul’s glass had been replaced; the next course brought. His bleeding hand, wrapped in a napkin, was concealed beneath the table. Now to finish it off.

‘Have some more wine, Nina. It will give me an excuse to have some. Steffi always fusses when I get drunk.’

‘Steffi? Your… wife?’

He shrugged. ‘We’re not actually married — one doesn’t bother out here. But she’s been with me for a long time.’

‘What is she like?’ said Nina. She was speaking with great care now, like a small child reciting poetry.

Paul’s mind juddered to a halt. What indeed was she like? Had he ever, among the string of girls with whom he had tried to forget Nina, even known a Steffi?

‘Well, she’s French… dark curls… a real minx but…’

He rambled on, creating an ‘ooh-la-la’ soubrette from a fifth-rate operetta. (‘You cannot believe me, Nina. You cannot. Tell me I’m lying; see through this idiot game.’)

But she believed him. The modesty and selflessness he’d so much loved in her finished the job he had begun. It was over.

What followed was the worst. Nina lifted her chin and took up, almost visibly, the mantle of prima donna and woman of the world. For exactly the time that politeness demanded she made conversation, speaking amusingly of her travels, telling him bizarre and interesting stories of the stage. Then she rose, gave him her hand to kiss, sent her regards to Steffi.

‘Steffi?’ said Paul wildly, nearly ruining it all.

But the pain was beginning to take over now; she noticed nothing and holding herself very erect she walked down the gangway to where the hansom cab still waited — and was gone.

The next day, Nina fell ill. Jacob, who knew nothing of what had passed, was convinced that she was dying. He had read about swans who sing gloriously before dying and Nina, lying mute in her hotel room, managing to shiver although the temperature was 95° in the shade, seemed a good candidate for death. He found an understudy, placated the manager of the Opera House, brought a Portuguese doctor who offered him a choice of lethal tropical diseases and suggested he cut the diva’s waist-length, still golden hair.

Jacob refused, sat with her for three days and nights and remembered for the first time in ages that he had a wife in Linz who ran his leather goods business and made the best blintzies in Lower Austria.

Nina, however, did not die. On the fourth day she got up, apologised, kissed Jacob and prepared for the journey home. Neither of them mentioned her voice, for both knew that she would never sing again.

So now she stood again by the rail of the steamer, erect and careful but with a new gesture, her arms folded across the bodice of her dress as if to stop the pain escaping and troubling others with its unmannerly intensity. They reached the ‘Wedding of the Waters’, began to steam down the ‘River Sea’

After a while Jacob came over to stand beside her. He must make her speak, listen, anything.

‘You never asked where I found your white rose,’ he said.

She flinched, but as always answered gently. ‘No. Where did you get it?’

‘It was quite an adventure,’ said Jacob proudly. ‘I think perhaps it was the only white rose in Amazonia. I tried everywhere and then I met an Indian who had been employed as a gardener on one of the great estates. The man who owned it had left — he’s gone bankrupt and faces a prison charge too, poor devil. But the Indian swore there was a special place there, where the owner used to grow a white rose. Apparently he made a great fuss about doing it — it’s very difficult to grow roses here.’

Nina’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. ‘What was it called, this place?’

‘Roccella. An Italian built it after some palazzo in —’

He broke off for Nina had clasped his shoulders. She was looking at him as if he were wreathed in unutterable majesty and her eyes were the eyes of a young girl.

‘Again, Jacob, please. Tell me again what happened there. Everything.’

Not all great loves, faithfully kept, end in tragedy. Nina returned, found Paul hunched and despairing by the riverside, saw his face as he watched her come towards him… and knew why she had been born. His prison sentence was minimal. She waited. They returned to Roccella to begin again. Nor had they been in any way mistaken: each found in the other, and was to do so always, the ‘incomparable remedy’ they had sought.

No, if there was a tragedy, it was that of Jacob Kindinsky who had adored Nina and now returned to Linz. But a passerby, seeing him on his verandah above the Danube, spooning sour cream on to his blintzies and listening to the clink of the till as his wife chatted to the customers in the shop below, might think that as a tragedy it was… well, endurable. Soon, too, he is going to write a book that will take the operatic world by storm. He has the title ready: The Diva with a Rose.