Salesianergasse, the flakes fine and dry as ash, forming brilliant silver aureoles around the street lamps. Approaching the theater they began to pass mounted hussars at the street corners, the soldiers magnificent in their blue capes with sable trim, their crested helmets and gold-edged riding boots. Soon the streets were filled with carriages all moving in a thick yet peaceable flow toward the theater. As the pan-Germans had vowed, the virtuoso experienced difficulty in reaching her destination, but it was this mass of coaches, rather than virile nationalism, which proved to be her sole hindrance-Anna was delayed by her own traffic jam, in effect.
Frau von Schonerer received her at an obscure side entrance to the theater, along with a captain of the hussars, six uniformed police, the theater superintendent and three muscular assistants, as well as two plainclothes agents from the emperor's secret police. Anna was escorted first to her dressing room to remove her cloak, then to a basement rehearsal space where a Bosendorfer grand stood waiting for her final warm-up. Puchel entered with Anna and shut the door, leaving the others to endure the chilly hall while Anna ran through fragments of her repertoire, the glorious bursts of notes and supple noodlings followed by Puchel's muffled voice as he delivered last-minute instructions.
“So small,” the hussar captain later remarked, describing Anna as she left the rehearsal room. “So frail and small, it seemed impossible that this delicate girl could be the cause of so much furor.” With the theater superintendent and police in the lead, Puchel and Frau von Schonerer on either side, Anna walked amid a vast entourage back to her dressing room, thirty or more people snaking with her through the backstage labyrinth. The captain was close at her heels, then her parents, her uncles, Hugo and several other cousins, Kornblau and his mistress, then a trailing flotsam of stagehands and well-connected journalists. For twenty minutes Anna sat in a corner of the dressing room while this crowd was allowed to mingle about, sampling the sumptuous buffet of meats and cheeses and admiring the flowers and telegrams sent by well-wishers. Hermine and Kornblau, still in mortal dread of a phase, sought to distract the young pianist with trivial chatter. Hugo positioned himself nearby, saying nothing, while Frau von Schonerer furnished periodic updates on the size and eminence of the audience.
“She seemed to withdraw into herself,” Hugo wrote later, “to seek some deep, unfathomable place within her soul, a refuge from this ridiculous melee.” Finally, at ten minutes to eight, Anna announced that she wished to be alone. Her parents and managers protested, fearing a collapse, but the girl was firm.
“I must have these last few minutes to myself.”
“But at least Herr Puchel-” Hermine began.
“No one.”
“Then Hugo, dear Hugo-”
“No one,” Anna insisted. “I won’t set foot on that stage unless I have this time alone.” With difficulty, amid pleas and anxious protestations, the room was cleared and the door shut. For several minutes the entourage was forced to stare at itself out in the hall; presently the stage manager arrived to inform Frau von Schonerer that the audience was seated, the scheduled hour had come. Kornblau relayed this information through the closed door. Some said that what followed came within moments, others, that at least a minute had passed-in any event everyone heard it, a crack, a sharp report within the dressing room.
“Like a small-caliber pistol,” one of the policemen said later; the captain compared it to the bark of a smartly snapped whip, while Hugo described it as the sound of a block of ice spontaneously splitting in two. For a moment no one moved, then several of the men leaped for the door, piling into an absurd heap when it refused to yield. The superintendent was pushing forward with his ball of keys when Anna spoke from within.
“I’m fine,” she called in a flat, faintly disgusted voice. “I just fell, that's all. I’m fine.”
The superintendent hesitated. He was still standing there, frozen, when Anna unlocked the door and stepped into the hall, her eyes firm, her carriage irreproachably straight, her face pale and fixed as a carnival mask. She proceeded down the hall with the measured walk of a bride; Hugo, who happened to be standing near the superintendent, fell into step beside her, taking her arm and guiding her through the crowd, which closed ranks behind them in a flurry of whispers. He later recounted how he spoke to her several times as they made their way to the backstage area, asking if she was well, if she’d injured herself; so great was her concentration that she seemed not to hear. He stood with her in the wings as Frau von Schonerer, with all the force of her dramatic training, gave a prolonged and eloquent introduction in which the significance of the performance was justly noted. When she concluded, as previously agreed, Anna did not appear at once; rather, she waited until Frau von Schonerer had left the stage, then stepped onto a platform empty of all save the piano and bench.
To those standing in the wings, the ovation which greeted Anna swept over the stage like a shock wave. The audience rose to its feet as if physically impelled, the thunder of hands rippling with cries of “Brave girl! Beautiful girl!” Anna walked toward the piano, then unaccountably veered toward the front of the stage, proceeding to the apron's far edge as if to acknowledge, even encourage the volcanic applause. Slowly, almost shyly, she removed the kerchief with which her right hand was concealed, then extended her hand toward the audience. Witnesses said later that the effect was one of indescribable horror, how the applause of those who failed to understand mixed with the gasps and shrieks of those who did, until, at the very last, a kind of groan, a mass, despairing sigh seemed to rise from the audience.
For, in the end, they all saw and understood. A glistening rose of blood had taken root on Anna's hand, shining from the stump of her severed extra finger. This was, in effect, her final performance, the last instance on record in which she appeared in public; indeed, from that point forward Anna Kuhl disappears so thoroughly from history that she might have been plucked from the face of the earth. No explanation for her self-mutilation was ever forthcoming, neither from Anna, nor her family, nor the concert-making industry which had so stringently run the better part of her life. Some have surmised that heartbreak was the primary cause; others, the strain of performing in such a charged and poisonous atmosphere, of finding herself the prey of a new, peculiarly intoxicating politics of hate. Or perhaps she sensed, through the harrowing susceptivity of her art, where these forces would lead us in the new century? But we remain as pitifully ignorant as her audience, which for many moments could do no more than stare at her ruined hand. They were in shock; many sank as if numbed to their chairs, while others staggered in a daze toward the exits, and only later, much later, would it occur to them that the
Charles D’Ambrosio
The High Divide
from The New Yorker
AT THE Home I’d get up early, when the Sisters were still asleep, and head to the ancient Chinese man's store. The ancient Chinese man was a brown, knotted, shriveled man who looked like a chunk of ginger-root and ran one of those tiny stores that sell grapefruits, wine, and toilet paper, and no one can ever figure out how they survive. But he survived, he figured it out. His ancient Chinese wife was a little twig of a woman who sat in a chair and never said a word. He spoke only enough English to conduct business, to say hello and good-bye, to make change, although every morning, when I came for my grapefruit, I tried to teach him some useful vocabulary.
I came out of the gray drizzle through the glass door with the old Fish-back Appliance Repair sign still stenciled on it, a copper cowbell clanging above me, and the store was cold, the lights weren’t even on. I went to the bin and picked through the grapefruits and found one that wasn’t bad, a yellow ball, soft and square from sitting too long in the box, and then I went to the counter. The Chinese man wasn’t there. His tiny branchlike wife was sitting in her chair, all bent up. I searched my pockets for show, knowing all along that I’d be a little short. I came up with twenty-seven cents, half a paper clip, a pen cap, and a ball of blue lint. I put the money in her hand and she stared at it. By the lonesome sound my nickels and pennies made when she sorted them into their slots I also knew that the till was empty.
I looked behind her through the beaded curtain to the small apartment behind the shop. Next to the kitchen sink was an apple with a bite out of it, the bite turned brown like an old laugh.
I held my grapefruit, tossed it up in the air, caught it.
