Mephisto Aria by Justine Saracen

Author:Justine Saracen [Saracen, Justine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781602821392
Amazon: 1602821399
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2010-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

XXI

Decrescendo

It was well past midnight but Katherina lay awake, staring into the darkness. She replayed every moment of the embrace through her mind, ending always with Anastasia’s words, “Forgive me.” Katherina kept seeing the fear on her face. Or was it regret?

She had taken a huge risk kissing her, and it had proved a mistake. The embarrassment, then the humiliation, of surrendering Anastasia to her husband had drained away the pleasure of the evening’s stage success.

Finally she dozed, her father’s voice sounding at the back of her troubled mind. “Nothing is given. Everything is paid for.”

She slept fitfully, fragments of nightmares keeping her from rest. A line of phantoms formed before her dreaming eyes. Her mother, then her father, then Detlev; all wandered off one by one into the fog, abandoning her. She shivered, until, at the sound of her name, she pivoted and saw another figure on the opposite horizon. Gregory Raspin.

She awoke with a start. As if fleeing the dismal landscape of her unconscious, she got up. To clear her head, she opened one panel of the window. Snow still fell silently on the empty pre-dawn street below. The cold air roused her, and she closed the window again, fully awake. There was no way she could return to sleep now. She might as well continue reading the journal.

She was nearly at the end, and the later entries were more widely spaced. But now that she had begun to digest the fact of her father’s “disposition,” as she decided to call it, she wanted to know more about it. What was life like for a homosexual in 1960s Germany? What did her father think about it all? Katerina thumbed through the journal with curiosity that she realized bordered on the prurient.

But the remainder of the journal was devoid of introspection and was simply a series of accounts of meetings with men at the Insel: Germans, Italians, Turks. He went there more or less twice a month and almost every time he was with a different man. Finally, he no longer noted their names or appearances, and his accounts of the meetings with them became dreary. It seemed that he had begun to find them dreary too. No longer shocked, Katherina read quickly, superficially. Then, the final brief entry that ended the journal brought her up short.

August 25, 1965

I am where fate and my own nature have brought me. It’s senseless to speak at this late date of regret. I had the gift of Lucy and then Katya. I only hope I haven’t failed them. Still, a question always burns at the back of my mind. What might life have been like if we could have stayed together, my precious Florian?

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