Sophie and the Sibyl (2 page)

Max had never made so long a speech while still suffering from a hangover. The Sibyl’s magnificent eyes widened in sympathy and surprise. His brother immediately intervened.

‘Heavens, Max, I had no idea your studies involved such disturbing reading. The
Fragment
isn’t on my shelves here, is it?’ He gazed accusingly at his father’s noble collection of classics. The great lady inclined towards her publisher, acknowledging his intervention, but never taking her eyes off Max.

‘Your brother, sir, has just proved himself to be a man who reads with all his faculties attentive and alert. Such passion and engagement are rare in men of letters. For he is prepared to recognise, in his own flesh and blood, that Lucian is no abstract voice, lost in antiquity, but a man as full of faith and doubt as we are ourselves.’

She bowed her massive head. The veil was attached to a black cap, which covered her hair and, barren of trimmings, resembled an executioner’s headwear. Wolfgang assumed a pious expression. Max shook himself, desperate to escape from his brother’s airless rooms, the boxes of translations still in manuscript, the roll-top desk stuffed with invoices and account books, the classical library that loomed in menacing towers above him. The office suddenly smelled like a mausoleum. The lady stood up, her back very straight. Max then realised that the more arresting smell of freshly turned earth arose from her boots; the lady’s footwear had left a little trail of muddy prints, from door to chair, and several clods, now drying in the firelight, had fallen from her heels. She had been traversing not streets, but fields. Max bent over her crisped hands, now encased in embroidered lace mittens.

‘We are at home on Sunday afternoons, sir. And we will be delighted to welcome you then.’ He did not mistake her tone. He was not being invited, but ordered to attend. ‘Your brother knows the way to my door. He and Mr. Lewes are in constant touch.’

Her smile, faint, gracious, frightening in that the uneven teeth appeared once more, revealed in a theatrical lifting of the upper lip, stunned both brothers into silence. When the outer door thumped shut behind her Wolfgang gripped Max by the shoulders.

‘Well done! Magnificent. She liked you. It’s usually Lewes who hands out the invitations. If all goes well we shall have her new work at the price of the last. Sunday afternoon, my dear – mark – Sunday. You must be there. We shall go together!’

END OF CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

takes place in the Sibyl’s lodgings. Max encounters the Extraordinary Herr Klesmer.

Be there by five. Max pummelled his way from his brother’s apartments in the Jägerstraße, through the afternoon crowds, to the Sibyl’s lodgings in the Dorotheenstraße, near the Neues Museum. Unter den Linden shimmered yellow and orange in the warm autumn sun. Babel towers of midges dithered in the milky air. The cobbles had blown dry, generating little puffs of dust beneath his boots. Did he look too funereal? Dark cravat, starched white shirt, coat brushed this morning before the early service, now becoming dusty. He paused at the corner to flick himself over with his new suede gloves. Elegance, sobriety and serious scholarship, this was the intended effect. He began to wonder if he did indeed look like an undertaker. Max harboured a satanic vision of the Sibyl’s salon, a Last Judgement overflowing with fiery radicals and lady poets. He saw himself reflected in the café windows, pressed, trimmed, inappropriate, and fairly menaced with social disaster. Could he avoid the occasion altogether? But his brother, haring off to be seen again at church, where he was conducting one or two business deals, had descended upon him. Be there by five.

The double windows of the first-floor apartment, thrown wide open to greet the sunshine, swung gently back against the shutters. He could hear an animated roar of voices, expectant and ferocious, billowing to and fro within. The street door also stood open; a nervous young man, the appointed porter, bobbed his head, clutching the heavy right wing of the main doors, and pointed helplessly up the staircase. Max bowed slightly as he stepped over the threshold and removed his hat. A small hairy creature, with an eager, buoyant step, that had been heading up the stairs, turned back and bounded down to shake his hand.

‘You must be Max! The Duncker brothers clearly duplicate each other right down to the moustache! You are most welcome, sir! Polly has been asking for you and your brother is already here.’

A huge bellow of shared laughter shook the building. This energetic ageing monkey must be the man himself, George Henry Lewes, the biographer of Goethe.

‘I am honoured to make your acquaintance, sir,’ said Max in English. Lewes burst out laughing, and with the brio of a much younger man, dragged him up the stairs.

Max feared the worst, murmured a little politeness and began planning his escape. Bow to the great lady, press her hand, drink one cup of tea or whatever is on offer, avoid all conversations with sculptors, musicians, actors and poets, and do a bunk as rapidly as decently possible. Don’t, don’t, don’t get drawn into political discussions or religious debates. Avoid bluestockings. Pray that, apart from Wolfgang, you don’t meet anyone you know.

The room bristled with joyous argument and knowing chuckles. Very few ladies, and two that he spotted, who announced that they were going on to a prestigious lecture followed by a concert, were of an age where their bare shoulders looked bulbous, wizened and unsuitable. The stove was lit; he could smell the coals beneath the mixed perfumes and heated bodies. Someone had pushed all the furniture back against the pale green-and-yellow-painted walls. A piano dominated the rug in the centre of the salon, and through the double doors, now folded back like an accordion, he saw yet another high-ceilinged space, and an untidy bookshelf, eight storeys high, packed with volumes, boxes and papers.

‘Dr. Puhlmann offered us the apartment,’ shouted Lewes, tugging Max’s sleeve as if they had known one another for years, and making himself heard above the excited surrounding discussions. The little man sank immediately into the midst of a disputatious circle where he was called upon to adjudicate on a point of philology. Max felt someone helping him off with his coat, snatching his hat, and then found himself besieged by a booming pair of genial grey whiskers.

‘Well, young man, here you are at last! Your brother’s already here, you know, deep in talk with the great lady. She has not yet finished that marvellous book my girls have been reading in English. She intends to retire to the country to write the Finale. It’s marvellous, quite marvellous. Haven’t read it myself yet. I’m waiting for you Dunckers to bring out a decent translation.’

Max bowed, weakening at the knees, for here, full of jovial good humour, stood Graf August Wilhelm von Hahn, now something of a minor celebrity in Berlin and one of their authors. His military memoir, incorporating his own father’s heroic participation in the Battle of Jena, caused something of a sensation when published by their house earlier in the year. The Count’s critical stance towards the Prussian state apparatus transformed the gossip and general bravado into a distinctly chilly frisson when his publishers were visited by the intelligence services, who descended upon them, in plain clothes, unannounced, to inspect their autumn catalogue and boxes of stock. The Count, sanguine, optimistic and utterly fearless, pounded up the stairs to reassure them that he had visited everyone who matters, absolutely everyone, and there is no question of reprisals. We can contemplate a second edition with perfect equanimity. Wolfgang kept his nerve and
Erinnerungen und Erlebnisse: Lebensweg eines Liberalen
, 2 vols. (Berlin: Duncker und Duncker, 1872) went straight into a second, sell-out edition. According to Wolfgang, even the Sibyl – formidably well read in history, my dear, and remember the lady has met Mommsen himself, over dinner with the American Ambassador – well, she perused the work with astonishment.

The Count rattled on.

‘You must pop round to see the girls, you know. Remember little Sophie, who chased you round the garden? We haven’t seen you since the early summer and she was out at our old Jagdschloss then, bolstering herself up with fresh air and taking dreadful risks with those horses. Ready to jump anything! Goes straight at it! I think you’ll find her quite grown-up. Herr Klesmer is going to play for us later on. I must finish my quiz. There’s a good chap –’

The Count had invented a political quiz, which caused the most raucous laughter. There were no right answers. The wittiest or sharpest political response gained the most points. Max now realised that he had walked straight into a salon that actually flaunted its liberal inclusiveness. Here was the Count, encouraging subversion – ‘Everything, yes, everything, my dear, can be discussed.’ And Klesmer, a concert pianist and famous modern composer, acclaimed by Liszt and Wagner, made no secret whatever of his Jewishness. He actually declared himself a Jew! The very curtains of the salon shimmered with sedition. Max fingered his handkerchief.

Lewes danced up again, beckoning him to advance, and now he entered the inner sanctum. Behold the Sibyl, enthroned in elegance, a small table mountained with books at her side, her feet upon a cushioned stool. As he bowed, his smile becoming fixed, Max studied her velvet slippers. Were they too shedding mud? He caught the same whiff of spice and alcohol on her clothes. Was it linseed oil? The smell recalled his brother, aged twelve or thereabouts, lovingly polishing his violin. The Sibyl, flanked by young courtiers, who now withdrew to a safe distance, lifted her giant head, and gazed at him expectantly. Max blushed, feeling a faint, embarrassed tingle behind his ears.

‘Thank you for coming to see us, Max. I hope I may call you Max. Wolfgang speaks of you so often. And with such affection. You must stay to hear Herr Klesmer play one of his own compositions. Let me introduce you to him.’

For there he was, like the catastrophe in an old comedy, conjured up by the ubiquitous Lewes who appeared to follow every conversation in the room, and anticipate every wish, like a successful circus impresario. Klesmer inclined slightly, a man smaller than Max with a mass of white hair, full lips, an unlined face and arresting grey eyes. He surveyed Max with sceptical contempt as they were introduced, then addressed himself entirely to the great lady, whose magnificent eyes held the two men in the same frame, an ominous image of Ugolino and his remaining son. Klesmer certainly took no prisoners. The discussion turned on the several merits of two different sculptures depicting the same subject: the abandoned Ariadne. One of the two had been misnamed Cleopatra and lurked in the Vatican Galleries in Rome, but the other, created by Johann Heinrich Dannecker, representing the unfortunate Ariadne stark naked, life-size, and seated on a panther, proved famous enough to have been viewed by both Duncker brothers, whilst in Frankfurt to attend the trade fair. They had visited both the Goethehaus in Großer Hirschgraben, draped with garlands on the poet’s birthday, and the famous statue. Max simply acknowledged that he had set eyes upon the thing. He remembered prettier girls, just as naked, but with larger breasts and a good deal more friendly, in the closed rooms at Hettie’s Keller, and had some difficulty comprehending this ecstatic appreciation of cold marble when warm flesh was to be had at the right price. The Sibyl and Klesmer, however, debated Nature and Art as if the two were in conflict, but closely related.

‘Sculpture, like poetry,’ the Sibyl declared, ‘must generate the elements that engage its audience – tension and emotion. I maintain that Dannecker’s Ariadne possesses both. Her head is lifted towards the horizon; she is gazing after her lost love. But she has been surprised while resting. The moment is clear. She has been unexpectedly awoken, one leg is so casually placed beneath the other, perhaps this is the very moment of her awakening consciousness? He is gone, and she finds herself alone. She knows that she is no longer loved. She has been abandoned.’

Max wondered how anybody managed to snooze on the back of a panther, but was too discreet to voice his literal-mindedness.

‘Madame,’ Herr Klesmer leaned towards the Sibyl and dared to contradict her. ‘You spin a narrative from a gesture and a name. Now, the Ariadne to be found in the Vatican at Rome was originally known as the Cleopatra. Would your interpretation still be valid if the statue were simply to be renamed?’

‘But it is not then the same statue. The name alone transforms the meanings of every fold in the marble!’ The Sibyl demonstrated a pedantic streak. ‘Cleopatra was the victim of her own folly. She was a queen who could love whom she chose. And she appears to have invested all her passion in the losing side. She is valued for her Oriental eroticism and her sexual power, not for the pathos of her fidelity to the man who betrayed her trust. Dannecker created his Ariadne in full knowledge of her identity and her fate. She represents the woman abandoned. He is interpreting her story.’

‘Yet you loved the Roman Ariadne best, did you not?’ Herr Klesmer raised one beautiful hand. His fingers were clean and tapered, the nails unbroken, as if he had never worked. He recited an English text unknown to Max. ‘“The hall where the reclining Ariadne, then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease and tenderness.”’

The Sibyl’s eyes widened and glowed as if he had handed her a vast bouquet of roses. Max gazed at the illuminated lady, baffled. Klesmer suddenly poked him with one of his gorgeous fingers. Max lurched on his heels, a marionette whose strings vibrated into motion.

‘And will you be publishing the English version in Berlin, sir? Or merely the translation?’