Come Dance With Me

31 Anneliese Newman

26 January 2003. Here am I, not yet dead. There are no productions of Traviata with Violetta and Alfredo in their nineties. Who would pay money to see and hear it? Especially the ending. ‘Die already!’ the audience would shout. One only cares about Violetta because she is young and beautiful. And Schubert, he wrote ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ but he did not follow this with ‘Der Tod und die Greisin,’ Death and the Old Woman’. Der Tod himself is bored with old women, how could he not be?

I still have my teeth, my eyes, my hearing and my mind. In me is the pretty girl I was, das Mädchen Anneliese Linde. If I close my eyes I see the sky reflected in the Weser and I hear the wind in the birches and smell the grasses warm from the sun. I am ready to go back there for ever. ‘Here am I,’ I say. But der Tod sees not the pretty girl and passes me by.