The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [66]
She had also acquired a husband. Gunther Loebner was a respected journalist, a boulevardier, a coffeehouse habitué, a man of immense courtly charm and elegant manners. He was also a Social Democrat, and a vocal one. The day the Anschluss was signed he put his wife in a first-class compartment of a train bound for Paris. He would not be persuaded to share the ride with her.
“I have work,” he told her. “It will not take long “but it is essential that it be done. Perhaps a week, hardly more. In less than ten days I shall be with you in Montparnasse.”
“In less than ten days you will be in prison,” she said, but she did not speak the words until the train had pulled out of the station, and no tears showed in her eyes while she waved good-bye.
She was wrong. Loebner was never in prison. Two days after her arrival in Paris he was shot dead by two flint-eyed young Berliners. The official announcement had it that he had died while resisting arrest. In forty-two years Gunther Loebner had resisted any number of things, but arrest had never been among and his sole weapons of resistance had been his pen aad his tongue.
In the years immediately following, the international audience for Wagnerian opera declined dramatically. Its popularity remained at peak within the Third Reich—indeed, little else was ever aired on German radio—but opera buffs in other countries seemed curiously to have lost their taste for it.
For a time Gunther Loebner’s widow lost her taste for singing in general. She canceled her engagements and spent most of her time by herself. Two months after her arrival in Paris, she was approached by a young man attached to the German embassy. He explained that he brought condolences for the death of her husband and that it was hoped she would return soon to the Fatherland. The Führer owned all her records and had several times watched her perform, both in Vienna and in Munich. It was hoped a Berlin performance could be arranged.
She said only that she had ceased to sing. But this was impossible, he told her. One could appreciate that she was bereaved, but time would end her bereavement, and she would perform better than ever.
“If I sing again,” she said icily, “I shall sing in Paris.”
He flashed a superior smile. “They sing little Wagner in Paris, Fraulein Hofmeister. Return to Berlin. In two years’ time you shall sing Wagner in Paris and it would not do to be out of practice.”
She walked into the kitchen and he followed her, talking persuasively. There was a wedge-shaped chef’s knife on the kitchen counter. For a moment she was very near to using that knife to open up his corset-flattened belly. She saw it all in her mind, the mechanics of the act, even the story of attempted rape which would satisfy the sympathetic French police.
But no. There were too many of them and they were all like this one. If one stroke of the knife would do for all of them—but it would not.
For the next few months she remembered his prediction. In two years’ time the German Army would be in Paris. She tried to forget the words but every sign and portent assured her they were true. In the spring she sailed to New York, and that September Hitler’s tanks crossed into Poland.
She spent the war in New York. She sang, but never opera. She sang Kurt Weill, and her most successful number was “Pirate Jenny” from Three-Penny Opera. There was a room in Hitler’s Museum of Decadent Arts where Der Dreigroschenoper was played continually from morning to night. It was the most popular room in the museum; it was the only place in Germany where you could hear the music.
She gave up singing professionally shortly after the war, married a wealthy German Jew who had left the country early enough to get much of his wealth out with him. He was a widower with grown children and he told her she made him alive again. He was also a great fan of Wagnerian opera; neither its political implications nor the racial theories of its creator, he insisted, had any influence