Eva Ibbotson - A Glove Shop In Vienna

One night from a deserted garden in Grinzig, Paul pilfered for her an early, perfect, snow-white rose. They were the first roses, he told her, the white ones, sprung from the tears of the angel who had been compelled to lead Eve from Paradise. He would find them for her always, he said, and when she laughed and spoke of winter he said there could be no winter while they loved. That night she stayed with him. She was a Catholic — it was mortal sin. For the rest of her life, when she heard the word ‘joy’, it was to the memory of that sin that she returned.

If Paul had one characteristic above all others, it was a high intelligence. There was no moment when he did not understand that what was between him and Nina was a God-given gift, entire, enduring and sublime. And young as he was he began, without a second’s hesitation, to undergo the paperwork and practicalities which would make possible their marriage. It was now that the Academy began to sit up and take notice. Nina was sent for and informed of her potentially glorious future as an opera singer. She was surprised and pleased that her voice was good and told them, with her gentle smile, that she was going to marry Paul Varlov and go abroad with him. The Principal, horrified, sent for Sternhardt, the opera’s famous regisseur who had earmarked both the voice and, when the time was ripe, the woman.

Nina, serene as a golden lotus, stayed firm.

So they turned on Paul. He had not known of the future that awaited her. To be a singer in Vienna is to be a little bit divine. Aware of this, wanting only what was right for her, Paul listened.

And so, into the Eden that those two had created, their elders introduced the poison-apple of self-sacrifice. Benign, experienced, twice his age, they bore down on the boy, keeping their visits secret from Nina — emphasising again and again her promise, her glittering future, the life of an acclaimed and dedicated artist which awaited her and which marriage and childbearing and poverty would put for ever out of reach.

Paul was only twenty-three. The call they made was one to which youth has always rallied: the sacrifice of happiness, of life itself, for a high ideal. After weeks of sleeplessness, he lost his fine perception of the truth and reached out, blind and despairing, for their poisoned fruit.

One day Nina, going to his room, found the friends grouped like figures in a pieta — and on the pillow, his last gift to her: a single, long-stemmed, snow-white rose.

She never saw him again.

The clanging of the ship’s bell made Nina turn. They had come to one of the sights of Amazonia: the ‘Wedding of the Waters’ where, at the confluence of the two rivers, the leaf-brown waters of the Amazon flowed, distinct and separate, beside the acid, jet-black waters of the Negro to within sight of Manaus.

Responding to the bell, there now emerged Padrocci, the tenor, in crumpled mauve pyjamas, the ludicrous Feuerbach with his moustache cups, the dishevelled members of the chorus, all to peer over the rails and exclaim.

‘Oh, God,’ thought Jacob Kindinsky, indifferent as always to the marvels of nature. ‘What scum is this that I have brought to sing with Nina?’

But as they steamed up the Negro, past the neglected and once-splendid planters’ houses, past sheds where ocelot and jaguar pelts hung out to dry, he heard her draw in her breath.

‘Look, Jacob! There it is!’

He looked. A dazzling, soaring dome of blue and green and gold surmounted by the Eagle of Brazil… a glimpse of marble pillars, a glittering pink and white facade… The Teatro Amazonas would have been lovely anywhere — here in the midst of the steamy, dusky jungle it was staggering.

And the fading opera star, the little Jew who loved her, turned and smiled at each other, for after all there was no disgrace here. This place would make a fitting ending to their pilgrimage.

A few hours before curtain-up, the thing happened which Jacob had known would happen. Nina, unpacking in her sumptuous but already mildewed dressing-room, asked for a white rose.

‘Nina, we are in the Amazon ? he cried. ‘You have seen the flowers! They are probably full of dead birds they have eaten for their dinner.’

‘Please, Jacob.’

So it ended as it always ended… As it had done in Berlin in a blizzard which had cut off all supplies to the city; in Paris with the streets sealed for some visiting dignitary so that Jacob, with an hour to spare, found himself begging for a single bud from a bad-tempered gardener in the Tuileries; in Bucharest where every available rose had been pounded into attar for the tourist trade.

‘You cannot wear a white rose for Carmen,’ Sternhardt had yelled at her years and years ago, when he had at last persuaded her to try the mezzo role. ‘Carmen wears red flowers always — scarlet, crimson — she is a gypsy !”

But Nina, who stood so patiently while they fitted her costumes, who would put herself out for the most insignificant member of the chorus, only said very quietly that if they wanted her to sing Carmen they would have to find her a white rose. And as with Carmen, so with Violetta (whether or not she was the Dame aux Camellias) , with Mimi and Gilda and Butterfly.

So now poor Jacob stepped out of the resplendent foyer with its gilded mirrors and corpulent muses, to search among the frangipani, the hibiscus and the voracious orchids in that steam-bath of a city for the flower which alone linked this lovely, deeply weary woman to her youth.

In his ornate gold-leaf and red-plush box next to the stage, a man whose look of extreme distinction even the recent months of strain and agony could not eradicate, waited — entirely without interest — for the curtain to rise.

As usual in these times of slump and mismanagement there had been a muddle about the posters. The company was second-rate, the opera was Carmen — that was all he knew and it was enough to have kept him away but for the need to kill time for an evening before the arrival of the tycoon from Sao Paulo to whom he was selling ‘The Dragonfly’. Everything else was sold already: the other boats, the carriages, the antique silver and fine furniture he had shipped out from Europe. Only for Roccella itself had he found no purchaser. Soon now the lovely Palladian yellow-stuccoed house with its blue shutters, its flower-wreathed arcades, its fountains and terraces, would vanish in the murderous embrace of the jungle from which he had wrested it.

‘Look, Mother, there’s Mr Varlov! So he can’t be in prison yet,’ said the convent-fresh daughter of a Portuguese customs official, looking raptly at the solitary figure in the box.

‘Don’t stare, dear,’ said her mother, irritably aware that neither disgrace nor bankruptcy would dim the image of this curiously magnetic figure in her daughter’s eyes.

But the girl’s father did stare, and nodded, for it seemed to him that Varlov had had a raw deal. Though he had been among the wealthiest of the planters and hospitable to a fault, Varlov had not indulged in the pranks of so many of the others — washing their carriage horses in champagne, sending their shirts back to Paris to be laundered. Varlov had built houses for the serengueiros who tended his thousands of acres of wild rubber, and schools for their children. It was to save these that he had gone to Rio when the crash came, to raise more money by means which, though he could not have known it at the time, had turned out to be illegal and now left him facing, along with the men he had trusted, a charge of malpractice and fraud.

Leaning back, indifferent to the looks he was attracting, Paul looked round the Opera House that he had helped to bring into being. It was he who had insisted on the best Carrara marble, he who had suggested that de Angelis himself be fetched from Italy to paint the ceilings. He had put thousands of pounds of his own money into this crazy, lovely building and for one reason only. Obsessionally, doggedly, idiotically, Paul had been convinced that one day she would come.