Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
Aviva pushed to her feet unsteadily. "That's terrible, teasing a sweet dog."
We watched her struggle with the compartment latch and then catch her low heel on the threshold of the doorway. She freed it, regained her balance, and stepped into the hallway, en route to the ladies' room.
Al-Cerraz reached out a hand to pull the door shut again. He leaned toward me, holding my attention with a meaningful look. "The silly dog didn't know he was hungry unless he thought
you
were."
"Yes, you said that."
"He was kind of a runt. I guess he was lucky we 'd taken him in because he didn't have much of a survivor's instinct. We had to teach him to fight for what he wanted."
I lifted Aviva's flask off the seat where she'd left it, shook it, and confirmed, gratefully, that it was empty. "You seem to think this anecdote is an excellent metaphor for something. But I'm a little more interested in our friend's welfare. For someone who was eager to start her new job in Berlin, she seems nervous."
He clenched his eyes shut, exasperated, but he didn't pursue his topic. "Well, a new job can make a person nervous."
We stared out the train windows, waiting for Aviva to return. "There is someone waiting for her in Germany," I said after a while. "Someone besides Weill and the school-opera people."
"Yes?" I had his full attention now.
"There must be a good reason why she turned back from America, a reason she's never told us completely."
"Completely?"
"Something she doesn't want to talk about."
"I think you might be right," he said slowly.
"We shouldn't be waiting for some tabloid magazine to tell us all her secrets."
"Right again."
"So why haven't you asked her? You're not afraid to say anything."
"Because she trusts you, Feliu."
I was about to protest, but he interrupted. "She adores me. But my dearest, thick-skulled partner, she trusts
you.
Find out who she is and what she's hiding, before we lose her again."
I'd traveled to Berlin a number of times in the last decade. Even as the Great War receded into history, the city retained its ravaged appearance. Postwar development meant more smokestacks and blocky tenements, iron railings and chain-link fences, sober flat-topped buildings meant to inspire city dwellers toward modernity. When I called it ugly, Aviva disagreed. She said she found it refreshing to be somewhere so clearly on the way to becoming something else.
"But what is it becoming?" I asked, looking out the window at the gray city outskirts.
Aviva had been told to come to the apartment of a woman named Frau Zemmler, who was involved with the school-opera project. Al-Cerraz and I checked into a guesthouse on a residential street in the Bayerische Viertel, or Bavarian Quarter. We agreed to rendezvous the next day at the theater where Aviva would be meeting Weill, Brecht, and their young students.
When we showed up late the next morning, the rehearsal was already under way. A man with round wire-rimmed eyeglasses and a polka-dotted tie—that would be Weill—sat in the front row. He called out lines and directions toward the stage, where a dozen adolescent musicians stood or sat, most of them in shorts or knee-high skirts and identical white school blouses, instruments on their laps, thin legs swinging, restless hands scratching scalps or twisting braids around fingers.
Three seats down from Weill, Aviva studied the score in her hands, pointing out a line to Bertolt Brecht, instantly recognizable in his slouchy leather jacket.
Aviva was the first violinist and concertmaster, and I understood why Weill had chosen her for that position. She was as talented as any young touring soloist, but without a soloist's pretensions. She would inspire the other musicians and set a high standard without becoming a prima donna. She was only a few years older than the youngest company musician, but could discuss everything from orchestration to adolescent discipline with Brecht, Weill, and Frau Zemmler, the brown-suited chaperone in charge of feeding and tending the troupe.
Aviva saw us enter the theater and lifted a hand to indicate Weill, who turned and nodded curtly. Brecht touched his hatless forehead, taking advantage of the gesture to scratch discreetly at the edge of his crew cut. Visitors to the theater made them nervous. The Brown Shirts had made a mess of their last collaboration,
Mahoganny,
at its premiere in Leipzig, and again the previous month, when Party members in the opening night audience of a new production at the Frankfurt Opera made so much noise that one could barely hear the singers onstage. The Nazis called all of Weill's work "degenerate," but they hadn't yet made a move to disrupt
Der Jasager.
I took a seat a few rows behind them. Al-Cerraz scuttled to the side of the stage and returned with a score and a program explaining the opera.
The program informed us that
Der Jasager
was based on the fourteenth-century Japanese Noh play,
Taniko.
In Brecht's version, a group of students undertakes a perilous mountain trek in order to visit an esteemed scholar. A younger student begs to go with them, in order to obtain medicine for his sick mother. The teacher-guide acquiesces, but not before warning the boy of an ancient custom: Anyone who can't keep up—who endangers the group by faltering—must be sacrificed.
Al-Cerraz snorted under his breath. "Am I reading this correctly?" He pointed to a line in the program.
I translated for him, from German into Spanish. "Yes—'hurled into the valley.' Now, please."
He whispered, a touch too loudly: "Where are the costumes? I hope they have some marvelous Japanese costumes."
"I don't see any."
"At least makeup. What do you call that white-faced look?
Geishas
— that would spice things up."
"
Tranquilo, por favor.
"
"Sorry."
To one side of the stage, some hastily written signs leaned against the wall. One of them read, simply: "Mountain."
He stage-whispered again, "These Berliners are very literal."
"I imagine they'll add set design later."
"I hope so. Take away the costumes and the sets from most operas, and all you have left is screaming."
"No wonder you had so much trouble writing
Don Quixote,
" I whispered back. "You don't even
like
opera."
I jabbed at the program, and continued reading. The students proceed up the mountain. The younger boy becomes ill. The opera—only slightly more than half an hour long—ends with the boy consenting to the ancient custom and sacrificing himself for the societal good. He is
Der Jasager,
the Yea-sayer, and the school audiences would be prompted, as the theater curtain closed, to reflect and discuss: Should he have said yes?
Al-Cerraz followed my finger to the end of the description. He snorted again, loud enough that Brecht turned and glowered at us over his shoulder.
Three more children entered the stage, wearing signs around their necks. The signs read: "Boy." "Mother." "Teacher." Al-Cerraz burst out laughing.
Aviva appeared suddenly next to us. She reached a hand toward Al-Cerraz, touched his neck, and gave him a sly, warning smile. "Quiet, please. We are rehearsing."
The smile she directed at me was less warm and far less secure. "Please don't make any judgments until you've heard and seen the whole thing. Tell me you won't."
"Of course I won't." I scowled at Al-Cerraz.
He
had been the one laughing, not me. Why did she always expect me to judge her harshly?
The musicians played well for a school ensemble, and the orchestration provided no cause for snickering. I knew little about Weill's work, but this was spare and haunting, a Germanic interpretation of lyrical Orientalism. I detected nothing trite in it, nothing overblown or kitschy.
Al-Cerraz wasn't equally impressed. From the corner of my eye, I could see his head shaking, subtly at first, and then with vigor, animated by barely suppressed critical urges. I watched him puzzling over the roundlike lyrics from the score, overlapping strains of a simple sentiment: "
It is important to know when to be in agreement. Many say yes, and there is no agreement. There are many who are not asked, and many agree with what is wrong. Therefore: it is important to know when to be in agreement.
"
He muttered into my neck. "Is this a speech, or is it a riddle? It isn't a song, I'm sure of that."
After they'd made it through the work, with much pausing for direction from Weill, he invited the students to take seats on the stage's lip and accepted a cigar from Brecht. "Your reactions, please?"
Silence.
Weill smiled and tilted his head back, peering through the bottom half of his glasses. "Don't be shy. Speak up."
I felt Al-Cerraz move forward in his chair, balancing on its padded edge. I put a steadying hand on his leg and whispered, "Not you."
Finally one of the students spoke. I recognized him as the alto sax player. "The story, sir. It's horrible," he said, querulous voice breaking.
Another thin young voice added, "Yes, murderous!"
Brecht, smiling, puffed on his stubby cigar and Weill nodded with satisfaction, tapping his pen against the notebook in his lap. They leaned their heads together for a minute.
A student clarinetist cleared his throat and called out from the stage, "I think the boy's suicide was an honorable action, actually—I mean, if you'd like another opinion, sir."
Weill looked up. Brecht exhaled and slitted his eyes against the cloud of smoke. There was an awkward silence, until Brecht spoke: "Good. Very good. Just because this is a didactic work doesn't mean it's propaganda, after all. There isn't one correct reaction. A small number of audience members might misunderstand the theatrical intent, and find the Yea-sayer's actions heroic. That's fine. Thank you."
The young baritone who had played the Teacher raised his hand. "Herr Brecht, please—if I may add a word. Personal sacrifice is sometimes necessary, particularly in these troubled times."
"That's your feeling, is it?" Brecht said.
"Yes, sir."
"And by sacrifice, you mean the ultimate sacrifice? You think the boy was right to take his own life, simply because he couldn't keep up with the others?"
"I think so, sir. That was the ancient custom, after all."
Weill wrote in his notebook.
Al-Cerraz whispered to me, "I've heard that anything goes in Berlin—but I didn't know it meant this. They've taken an ironic story and turned it into an idiotic one."
Next the harmonium player added her public comment, along the same lines as the clarinetist, followed by two members of the chorus and the tall girl who had played the lute. The consensus swelled; even one of the violinists reneged on his label of "murderous" and joined the crowd in arguing that the opera's main character had taken the moral high road and deserved our praise.
Brecht nervously worried the brushy edge of his hair with a flat palm. Weill sighed, "Perhaps we'll have to make changes."
Later, at a café, Aviva asked us, "It wasn't an ideal first rehearsal, was it?" She unpinned her hat, crushing it in one hand and leaving the top of her uncovered head a mass of curls.
"They played remarkably well," I started to say. I reached out to smooth her hair but stopped as soon as she turned, my hand hovering for a moment before I tucked it underneath the small round table. Around us lay the refuse of a half-finished meal—dishes of eel in herb sauce, green beans, gherkins, and hard rolls.
Al-Cerraz, his breath foul with the smell of pickled herring, leaned hard into both of our faces. "That's the problem when you use musical theater to send messages. It's like that children's game of telephone: It always comes out wrong by the time it reaches the far end of the room."
"I don't think the original was quite so simplistic," Aviva said. "The Japanese version ended with the boy's spiritual resurrection. Brecht took that out."
Al-Cerraz grumbled, "Well, he would, wouldn't he?"
I asked, "What do you mean?"
"He's a Marxist. He took out religion. He left in all the parts where the mother worries about the boy's food and clothes. It's all about labor and capital now, don't you see?"
Aviva said apologetically, "He took out a lot." I pushed a plate toward her, but she ignored it, draining her glass instead. "His assistant, Elisabeth Hauptmann, talked to me at the rehearsal. She made her own German translation. Hers included a line where the boy's sick mother tells her son..." Aviva faltered.
"Go ahead," I said. "What did it say?"
She laughed at herself. "Never mind."
"No. Go ahead. Just the general idea..."
She sat up straighter on her stool, steeling herself. "It said, 'You were never out of my thoughts and out of my sight longer than it takes a dewdrop to evaporate.'"
Her eyes darkened and seemed to grow larger, trembling under the glassy lens of emotion. I looked around for a clean napkin to hand her.
But Al-Cerraz snorted, "Longer than it takes a dewdrop to evaporate?
Dios mío.
Between that and Brecht, you have your work cut out for you, my dear."
We continued to talk long into the night about
Der Jasager.
Aviva gave Weill and Brecht credit. They had said at the rehearsal that they would keep working on the opera, altering it according to students' suggestions. They would attempt to remove traces of martyrdom and to introduce complications that made the "ancient custom," while no longer called such, more sensible and legitimate. They would try, above all, to make the boy's forced suicide seem less savage, even while they wanted audiences to react to it with some degree of horror. That was the point, after all. They claimed they wanted audiences to think, but they were bothered that the majority of students might think the wrong thing, might agree to mindless "yea-saying" that only reinforced the authoritarian tendencies the opera's creators were hoping to challenge.
Aviva explained, "Brecht's already talked of writing a counter-play, a sort of parallel production—
Der Neinsager
—to make his original intentions more clear."