He said: But that’s sad, because you’re not my, how should I say, I mean, your name’s not Lyalka! What’s the basis of our relationship? I mean, frankly, you really haven’t been very, you know. Moreover, it’s not your world.
Where is my world then, Herr Schostakowitsch?
Build one, my dear friend…
I don’t know how.
So much energy, so much, how should I say, aggression, so much talent! No doubt you could make something look good. You’ve worked hard—
But that’s the kiss of death, Herr Schostakowitsch!
I’m sorry; this is all very…
I filled his glass with West German schnapps and he cried: Oh, thank you, thank you!
Then I implored him again, so he said: You can get in, but you can’t get out.
Whatever do you mean, Herr Schostakowitsch?
Where were you in this war? How can you not understand? Never mind. Listen to this chord!
And he closed his hands around the air. I heard a bell-like sound.
Oh, my God! It was the most beautiful sound that I ever did or ever will hear—and the saddest.
I would have done anything for him then; I would even have stuttered like him.
But there remained what Goethe would have called the eternal Elena-question, because, well, how should I say…?
The eternal note! Love Elena or die! Love Elena and die! It must be one of the two. Oh, if only I could, well, you know.
The next thing I knew, I had fallen for Elena Konstantinovskaya. To hell with Shostakovich! I wanted her for myself. Oh, don’t tell me I don’t know what Aryan beauty is; I’ve seen Lisca Malbran posing in a peasant dress. But so what if I never saw another film with Lisca Malbran in it? Elena was the one I loved.
At the office, they most definitely weren’t happy. They’d nearly lost their faith in me. I don’t dare tell you what HAVEMANN said…
They declined to offer me a chair in the outer office where two men sat diagonally at each oak desk, one of them by the telephone, the other at the typewriter; oak filing cabinets rose all the way up to ceiling, and I longed to know which drawer contained me; probably HAVEMANN knew, but HAVEMANN, after administering his reproof, left me alone, after which no one would look at me. I could scarcely stand myself now—oh, how I longed not to exist!
Finally the buzzer rang. GRAENER and NEY escorted me down the corridor of white steel filing cabinets, turned right at the hall of black steel filing cabinets where an operative stood whistling, pretending to study a certain fingerprint record when all the while he was glaring at me over the top of the document, and then GRAENER and NEY abandoned me on the threshold of the inner office.
Stroking the cradle of his black telephone, which curved down as freakishly as the secretary’s spectacles—he’d send her away for the duration of our little chat—the pale man demanded to know whether I’d really swallowed that very first pill. I insisted that I had; I, how should I say, stuck to my guns, you know.
You’re grimacing, he reproved me. You look as if wild horses are pulling you apart!
It’s the times, sir, I said.
Sit down, he said.
I did.
Clearing his throat, he began: The mystery of why Siegfried stole Brunhild’s ring and girdle, which laid him open to being proved her deflowerer and therefore hated by her kinsmen, the matter of why he told Kriemhild of his vulnerable spot so that she herself could foolishly reveal it to Hagen, these point at a will to self-destruction. And where does that come from?
I replied (and I was proud of my answer, too): Firstly, vanity. Secondly, inability to keep a secret. Isn’t all this in the case file, sir? There’s every reason to suspect Kriemhild of being a “Juliette” spy. As for Siegfried, he refused to be colorless or self-protective; he was simply himself, and he paid the price.
My friend, that’s true as far as it goes, but don’t you see that it’s beauty which causes all evil? Do you remember Hoffmann’s tale “Madame de Scuderi”? The demonic goldsmith makes bracelets, necklaces, rings so perfectly that he can’t bear to let them go. What can he do but creep out by night, murder his clients, and get his treasures back again? And isn’t your Elena also like that?
No. With all due respect, she isn’t.
She’s warping your reason.
By your command, sir!
Whose hair did you tie to that covert operations ring we issued you?
I don’t know.
You didn’t lose the ring. We took it to get the hair.
Didn’t you plant the hair in the first place?
He chuckled.—Perhaps we did that, too. If so, what would that prove?
I don’t know.
Coward! Take this tablet! No, wait. Your responses are extremely revealing. What really happened before between Siegfried and Brunhild—I mean, before the legend begins?
I agree that she somehow knows him, since—
You do agree? Good. That’s why I need you to tell me the origin of that single dark hair you found on your pillow.
A succubus? I theorized.
Don’t be sarcastic with me. I order you to consider your prior, unconscious relationship with Elena Konstantinovskaya, who by your own interpretation of pattern-events is undoubtedly a “Juliette” spy. Prepare a written report by tomorrow. Name every name.
By your command, sir, I said. But Elena was still the one I loved. Knowing that I loved her, I knew who I was.
What about Shostakovich? By this question I don’t mean, who is he? Opus 110 answers that. I mean, what shall I do about him? One of the Gehlen Organization’s own “Juliette” spies, perhaps NEY if not a high-class torch singer at the Wintergarten, might lure him away from her. I’d certainly given up on silver bullets. Oh, but how could I do even that to him? Well, for Elena, of course. (She would have her own secret world; I could hide there.)
My desire was to bring her under the Iron Curtain and buy her whatever she wanted at the KaDeWe department store. What would make anyone happier than that? If she wouldn’t go with me, I wanted to lay at her feet a steel box of contraband! Next dream: Our child would resemble the little East German girl who chalks a sun on the sidewalk and smiles up into the lens for Roman Karmen’s “Comrade Berlin” as the sun shines on her pressed-together knees. You see, I was already beginning to think like one of them!
That night I did nothing but float around Berlin-East in a trance, seeing Elena in every window.
I was happy even at dawn when I came home to the West. I nearly kissed the wide, sharp-angled and strangely delicate wings of the stone eagle on the Chancellery’s facade.
But when I stopped by the office, I was compelled to turn in my report, an uncompromising one, I’m afraid; and the time after that, they kept me waiting a long while and finally claimed that the pale man was busy. What about HAVEMANN? He was also busy. And PFITZNER? We don’t mention him at the office anymore. What if I were on another list now, a worse one? An operative I’d never met (in retrospect I half-believe him to have been the ex-
-Captain KHANNI, who sold himself to the East, then bored into the Gehlen Organization, recruiting KURT in the process) informed me, not without sympathy, that Operation ELENKA had been downgraded, important as it definitely remained to the ultimate future of Germany, because in preparation for the imminent Cold War, the Amis were now demanding that we devote more manpower to unearthing the final Luftwaffe blueprints of V-weapons, which had been hidden in a coffin in a village graveyard just before the surrender; this was henceforth to constitute our Priority Apple. I said: When Priority Apple has been achieved, I wonder if we’ll be told? Everyone still had faith in me, the operative replied, but I’d need to assassinate ELENKA without logistical support.