The scent of incense still hung beneath the vaulted ceiling, but it was growing fainter.
The vigil had filled the night. It had steadied everyone in its own way and prevented them all from drifting further along in the same turbulent current of suspicion, shame and physical exhaustion.
After the final ‘Amen’, the group remained scattered around the chapel.
Sun stood before the painting of Mary Magdalene. She did not look at the black cloth. She looked at Magdalene’s face – or, more precisely, at the saint’s gaze, which did not linger on the empty tomb. That painted gaze reached into a distance that did not look Palestinian, nor Greek, nor Australian, but colder and more northerly. A grey sky, a city of water, stone and memory. Riga, perhaps?
Lito was the first to approach her.
Wolfgang followed more slowly. He had handed the censer to a designated hook next to the sideboard.
“You look as if you’ve just taken a train without leaving the chapel. Your face isn’t here anymore, Sun; it’s already somewhere where metal, water and a stage await us.”
Sun turned her head towards him. She wasn’t smiling, but her eyes softened slightly. It felt strange to be having an inner conversation with Lito and Wolfgang in the presence of the others.
“Riga. At the start of the evening, I was thinking of Manama, of polite violence, of people spreading poison in rooms where everything glitters. Now I’m thinking of an invitation I’d almost forgotten: a performance of *The Flying Dutchman* in an old Red Army torpedo test facility by the water. I was told it was a trendy cultural venue, but after this night, even ‘culture’ sounds like another word for a controlled explosion. And I’m not sure whether I want to travel to a communist country after my encounter with Valeria Sebastienne.”
Wolfgang gave her a sharp look.
“I’m from Berlin, a communist Polish city. A torpedo test facility isn’t a place you can pacify with culture just by swapping lighting effects and champagne for lubricating oil and propulsion technology. That’s where they practised destroying things underwater without the surface immediately giving everything away. Unfortunately, that fits with this night, and it makes me feel queasy when architecture dominates people.”
Lito looked back and forth between them. He had the expression of a man who’d just realised that an evening at the opera in Riga suddenly sounded less like a day out and more like a continuation of the tragedy.
“The Flying Dutchman in a former torpedo test facility. Why would anyone stage Wagner in a normal theatre when you can perform it in a place where the sea itself harbours military memories? I don’t know enough about opera to sound clever, but a cursed sailor, a woman meant to redeem him, and a building that has learnt to test violence through technology sound like an invitation one should only accept with very good sails and a very strong stomach.”
Sun looked back at Magdalena.
“We could send Riley. She knows a thing or two about music. I, on the other hand, have been trained my whole life to maintain control. Body control, facial control, corporate control, family control, even prison control, as far as that was possible. But memory cannot be controlled; it seeps like water under doors, and perhaps I must go to Riga because a torpedo test facility speaks more honestly about violence than a dining room with freshly folded napkins.”
Wolfgang spun round once on his own axis before he, too, contemplated the image of Magdalene.
“No one believed her at first, but her love was stronger than people’s threats. Violence is at least honest when it takes the form of a torpedo. My father always passed violence off as justice; my life has often sold violence as survival; and tonight, someone portrayed violence as murder or suicide or an accident. An opera in a military concrete building may not be beautiful, but it lies less than a library that pretends it’s all about books.”
Sun looked at him. This time there was something warmer in her gaze, but it was not a tenderness that could be feigned.
“You understand well how violence disguises itself. A useful trait for a thief. It makes you dangerous, but it also makes you useful for commissioned thefts in foreign museums and theatres, if you don’t want to be lied to by their owners. I don’t want to go to Riga to be healed; I want to see whether a performance can hold onto a memory without immediately transforming it into beauty. And perhaps the BPO is also interested in torpedoes that could harm us.”
Lito raised his hand slightly, as if he had to pause a scene before it became too heavy.
“I’d just like to point out that beauty isn’t always a betrayal. Sometimes beauty is the only form in which people will look long enough without fleeing. But yes, I admit that, as an actor, I’m professionally biased and dangerously often believe that good lighting can teach an abyss manners. I don’t like Adorno’s line that ‘blood clings to all beautiful things’.”
Wolfgang snorted softly. Almost a laugh.
“Good lighting can’t teach an abyss manners. And diamonds are always just stones, whether in the ground, in a safe or in a thief’s handbag. It can only prevent you from realising too late just how deep it is. If you’re sending Riley to Riga, Sun, then send me or Lito with her; he can tell when light is lying, even if he sometimes pretends I’m a blind chicken finding diamonds like grains of sand.”
Lito placed a hand on his chest.
“I’ll ignore the fact that was probably a compliment only understood in Berlin. But I’ll accept the invitation, if it is one, because I’ve learnt today that you don’t accompany dangerous women to save them. You accompany them so that there’s someone there who can say afterwards: ‘She wasn’t old, she just looked that way.’”
Sun looked back at Magdalena. The saint with her hair loose held her alabaster jar as if it were both a memento and a piece of evidence.
“I don’t know if Riley wants to take you both along. Lito makes every hall warmer than it perhaps ought to be, and Wolfgang still hears violence even when it’s long since been set in concrete. Perhaps that’s why you two shouldn’t come along – Capheus and Will instead?”
Wolfgang remained silent.
Lito didn’t.
“Then we’ll come anyway. We’ll listen to Wagner in Riga, in a former torpedo test facility, with people wearing polar bear fur with a red star and pretending they’ve curated the anti-bourgeois apocalypse. We’ll listen to the Dutchman, and if the music claims that salvation is a woman’s business, we’ll watch very closely to see if Riley turns blue.”
Sun looked at him. Now she was smiling after all, if only for a moment.
“She won’t be disarming any production. Rather, she’ll be listening to leitmotifs, which she’ll synthesise at the next concert and transform into dance music.”
Wolfgang nodded.
“Riga, then. Water, concrete, opera, memory. I know worse places to check, after a night of erased traces, what remains.”
Sun lingered a moment longer in front of Magdalena’s altar. “She isn’t looking at the grave. She’s looking beyond it. Perhaps that’s all I can take away with me today: death is not an end, but a duck swimming in circles on the river of time, with or without corpses.”
Lito followed her gaze into the painted distance.“To Riga? Why would Mary Magdalene have been seen in Riga – was she a prophetess?”
Wolfgang raised his left fist, as if it were a small anchor at a workers’ demonstration in Berlin.
“Praise your angel and his commandment: Here I stand, faithful to you, until death – or beyond.”
