Sketch: The Berlin Coloratura

This happened several years ago, on one of my stays in Berlin while I was there on adjunct work, attached to the University of __ on research that had me from morning to night in the library with only enough recovery time to scrub the dust from my fingertips, which is to say I needed my sleep on this particular stay, in fact I was sorely despondent when I did not get my sleep and in fact would not get my sleep throughout the majority of the trip because, from the first day, there cracked above the car noise the sound of a caloratura, that is it was a soprano’s voice, I know that, her notes like acrid darts disrupting through the night my needed sleep, she sang only during the after hours, Die Zauberflöte or maybe as Cunegonde—my American palate, retarded as it was with the preference for musicals, could still tell she was not Wagnerian—these notes would sway from pitch to pitch, sweetly at first, within a week they had stopped being sweetly, as the first Saturday hit they had switched from being a sweet bird call to a more panicked piercing, as it was always the same song, with no variation the song came through the same, day and night, finely defined notes like layers of rich perfume and just as saturating, in my boarder’s room I had first pulled the blinds then the shades then erected a wall of books to damper the sonority, but of course it didn’t hold, and instead I’d been enraged moreso than inconvenienced so that by the time it stopped, I was delirious, by the time the nights returned to the lapping of the passing cars and discharging bus doors, my rage had settled to a shallow lowing; I became more rested, my research on Language and Destiny had at last cohered, and I thought no more of this woman as the sunlight stopped its daily ridicule, I thought no more of her until I found out she had died mid-aria, in fact she had spent her 80-year-old frame on the very last run and then slumped over, and exhausted, parted, this 80-year-old woman and former vocal teacher had died in a whisper, and although I didn’t recall it I suspected my own ill thoughts had been the culprit, that is I had wished her dead and now she was dead and if thoughts could sharpen into return salvo, then the peculiar vitriol that my thoughts had taken would have been cause, but it didn’t cause it, because of the absurdity of such a notion, no matter how much I wished it I couldn’t have caused it, thoughts don’t load into slings, I would remind myself, it was only an old woman, I would say, in her waning years this old woman was simply looking for solace, I would repeat, it was just another action I'd come to hate, I would confess.