Mephisto Aria Read Free

chamber music that she had heard over and over as a child. Some of the jackets were torn and taped together. She wondered which ones he had listened to on his last day. Which of them had inspired such melancholy that he had taken his own life?
    Then it struck her, and she shook her head at her own obtuseness. A disk was still on the turntable and the empty record jacket still leaned against the cabinet wall beside it. She recognized it immediately. It was the new Munich recording, in the original French, with Joachim von Hausen conducting. Berlioz’ Damnation of Faust.
    She tapped the On switch and the turntable arm lifted, pivoted a few degrees, and dropped gently onto the outermost groove. Choral parts played first, and Katherina sat down to study the handsome record jacket in her hand. Faust and Marguerite stood shoulder to shoulder. But Faust’s face was twisted in terror as he looked into Hell while next to him, gazing upward, Marguerite was radiant. More than radiant. It was Anastasia Ivanova, the stunning Russian singer who had defected from the Soviet Union five years before. Katherina remembered the rather sensational news and realized she had never seen Ivanova’s face up close. She studied it while she listened to the dark mezzo-soprano voice that poured from the speakers.
    “Autre fois, un roi de Thule…”
    Under the penitent’s shawl, the face was slightly Slavic except for the slender nose. Soft lines curved from the nostrils around the mouth that was wide and expressive. But most fascinating were the mist-gray eyes: full of expression and intelligence. At the corners, both eyes had faint lines, as if at the very moment of redemption, Marguerite squinted with a hint of skepticism. Worse perhaps, while she gazed upward toward divine grace, she emanated an unrepentant allure, a sensuality that belied the chaste remorse.
    Yet her voice contained a powerful poignancy. Katherina could imagine her father, already despondent, being urged by the plangent melody into the abyss. It gripped her too, exacerbating her guilt and regret.
    Brooding, she reached for the paper sleeve that had held the disk. As she grasped it, an envelope fell out.
    The letter inside was on official government stationery, with letterhead: Liaison Committee for the Commemoration of Stalingrad. But most baffling of all, it was addressed to “Sergei Marovsky.” The postmark was recent, she noted breathlessly; he could even have received it on the day of his death.
    But “Marovsky”? How could that be?
    Mephistopheles was singing now, in a robust bass voice. “Esprits de flames inconstantes…”
    She frowned at “inconstant” and focused again on the letter. It was in detached official language, but it did refer to him as a hero, a survivor of the gargantuan battle on the eastern front. She dropped the letter onto the desk again. It was simply too much for her to absorb, too much to learn about a man she had thought she knew. The ground beneath her seemed to have opened up.
    Sergei Marow had once been Sergei Marovsky and he had fought at Stalingrad.
    He had survived the most brutal battle of World War II, the battle that had seen the fall of an entire German army and reversed the direction of the war. Why had he not told his family?
    Several scenarios offered themselves. Had he been in captivity and released among the few lucky ones in the first year? Maybe he had been one of the tiny number of wounded soldiers who were taken out by air before the final defeat. Was it even possible he had been among the pathetic handful that survived years of captivity in Russia?
    She read the letter to the end, but it gave no more information about the man, only the commemorative event to which he was invited in the coming February.
    Her mind spinning, she laid her head in her hands. That he had never talked about his war experiences had not seemed odd. Few people spoke of them. As a child, she had grown used to hearing adults reminisce about the hunger