Dissonance (25 page)

‘And the Con is full of Nazis. Hermann, the cello teacher, is the worst; always listening at doors. Then there's that Bruno fellow, and Hennesy. No, there's only one way to be sure.' He tapped his head. ‘Keep it to yourself.'

Erwin looked at the wall and could almost hear the rim of the glass moving.

‘I wouldn't want to see you get into trouble,' Schaedel explained.

‘Because I played some Gershwin?'

‘Look what happened to Knorr.'

Knorr, whose name was always whispered
in memoriam
, as a warning. The teacher who wouldn't stop praising Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, Schoenberg and Berg, and all of the other degenerates, most of them Jewish, of course.

He'd been warned – but he just kept on. So in the end the university had no choice. An academic standards committee was formed, headed by Hans Hermann, and a letter drafted to the professor. Knorr was given forty-eight hours to submit a new teaching plan, including the names of all composers he intended using as models.

But it didn't take forty-eight hours. A few minutes after he'd read the letter, Knorr placed his few things in a box and left the conservatorium, never to return. He took his busts of Wagner and Chopin (who, he guessed, would eventually become suspect) and his collection of South American tea towels. He arranged for his books, scores and personal manuscripts to be packed, sprinkled with naphthalene flakes and stored in the basement of the Physics building, the place most likely to survive a bombing.

His job was given to a man named Haeckel who'd had some fame in northern Germany in the teens and twenties for composing folk operas set in villages, ski lodges and bath houses cast in the acceptable Bavarian style. There were postmasters with handlebar moustaches and red noses, mayors with tractor-tyre bellies and landladies with strudel, ponytails and just a hint of the town slut.

Schaedel was still holding Erwin's hand. ‘They'd know all about you,' he said.

‘Who would?'

He indicated the cold, solid wall. ‘And then you start playing Gershwin.'

‘They're not interested in me.'

‘We're at war with you.'

‘I'm here to study music.'

‘Listen to me …'

Schaedel let go of Erwin's hands. He placed his own hands on the boy's legs, firmly, pressing on his thighs. ‘I don't want to see you locked up.'

‘Professor …'

‘Ivan.' He stared at his student. ‘You've got spirit, Erwin. You remind me of my own boys.'

There was silence for a moment, and then Schaedel slowly slid his hands further up Erwin's legs. Erwin sat silent, still. ‘She shouldn't keep them from you.'

‘No. That's what I mean.'

Erwin stood up, pretending to look for something in his satchel on top of the piano. Schaedel reclaimed his hands.

‘I've got to go,' Erwin said.

‘What about your lesson?'

‘I don't feel well.'

Erwin closed his satchel, hugged it against his body and took a few steps back. Schaedel stepped towards him, confused, as if Erwin was the professor of music and he was the undergraduate. ‘Don't go,' he said, tripping over the stool and steadying himself on the piano.

‘It's something I ate,' Erwin explained. ‘Mother was sick with it too.'

He headed for the door and Schaedel followed him.

‘The Con is full of gossip,' Schaedel said.

Erwin looked at him. ‘I feel sick.'

‘Play for me … take your mind off it.'

Erwin sighed. ‘I should … since I'm here.'

Erwin could hear his mother slamming the back door on Jo, coming inside and saying to him, ‘Your father threatened to hurt me, if I didn't let him back in. Do you think I should let him back in, Erwin? Someone like that?'

Erwin was six, in shorts, and perplexed. ‘No.'

‘Of course not. We may have to get the police, and have him removed. Has he ever threatened you?'

‘No.'

‘From now on we need to lock the doors and windows at night.'

‘What did he say to you?'

‘He said he'd use a hammer on me. But he has axes and all sorts out there.'

‘A hammer?'

‘Yes.'

But Erwin had heard the conversation – Jo asking if she could wash some clothes for him, seeing how the Menzies boy was off sick and he had to work a double shift at the shop.

‘They'll work it out for themselves,' Erwin said to Schaedel. ‘People can see, and hear, and make up their own minds.'

Erwin sat on the stool, and Schaedel sat beside him, saying, ‘You're right.'

‘And then, when it comes down to it, who do you think they'll want to be with?'

Just don't go and die of cancer in the meantime, he wanted to say.

A little later they were walking down Bramweg, and a few minutes after that, standing in a line in front of a small cinema. ‘I would pick my boys up from school,' Schaedel explained, taking money from his wallet, standing on the footpath dressed in stale-smelling clothes: an unironed jacket and pants, a shirt with drops of beetroot juice down the front, a cracked Panama hat with the top nearly lifted like a hard-boiled egg, and slippers. ‘I'd take them to see a film. Of course, when I got home there'd be hell to pay.'

Erwin looked at a poster of ossified soldiers and their adoring wives and girlfriends. ‘
Shoulder Arms
?' he shrugged. ‘Will this do?'

‘My shout,' Schaedel smiled.

As trumpets blared, drums growled and the newsreel began they slipped back in their seats and fell silent. The cinema was full, crowded with bald heads, perms and crew-cut soldiers in grey tunics with their rank and regiment proudly displayed:
Horst Wessel
and
Grenz-Polizei
. There was a ruffling of coats and a slipping off of shoes, the occasional pop of a purse opening as someone's aunt searched for her mints.

The newsreel recapped the Wehrmacht's recent achievements. Images of battle – of soldiers running through fields of French oats, shelling buildings full of Dutch resistance fighters, of tanks rolling along quiet country lanes in Belgium – cut with the faces of the soldiers themselves: laughing, grinning, making small talk with Norwegian cow-herders.

Schaedel was watching a pair of soldiers take cover behind a pile of rubble in a French town. They ran across a street, crouching, talking and laughing. Schaedel saw them as his sons, although his sons were just boys and still at home with their mother, eating cake and wearing party hats, celebrating with his wife's side of the family.

One of the soldiers stopped, leaning against a wall, and fired his rifle. Then he turned into an alleyway.

There were images of dead French soldiers, and these were his sons too. One lay face down, another on his side, still clutching a grenade.

In the grainy, black-and-white images, Schaedel couldn't see anything good at all. He turned to Erwin and said, ‘You should've gone.'

‘It's too late now.'

‘Well … I'll look out for you,' his teacher said, extending an arm and putting it around his student.

Erwin could feel his father's strong arm protecting him, guiding him through a landscape of possibilities, of mending things, of fixing the past. It was a love full of syncopation and accidentals, a deep ostinato sustained through the wooden rafters of the Alster Kino.

Schaedel took him home for coffee, and a stale torte that passed as a birthday cake. Then he searched the floor, bookshelves, tables and chairs for the score to Liszt's
Requiem
. He found it towards the bottom of the last pile, sat at the piano and started to play and sing the ‘Requiem aeternam', ‘Pie Jesu', ‘Sanctus' and ‘Lux aeterna'. For an hour or more he warbled an approximate melody, stopping to drink cold coffee and stuff torte into his mouth, spitting crumbs as he continued.

‘How do you know it so well?' Erwin asked.

‘I sang it as a child, at St Michael's.'

‘You were in a choir?'

‘My mother made me …
I heard a voice from Heaven saying unto me, Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.
'

It was nearly ten when Erwin started home.

‘My mother made me,' he intoned, as he walked, wondering what Madge would say when he got home. He hadn't called her. Hadn't thought of it. She was sure to ask why he was spending so much time with his teacher.

‘My mother made me,' he sang.

At ten thirty he stood across the road from his apartment building. He looked up at the windows to 2E. The only light on was Luise's and he could see her pale grey body moving around behind the curtains. She seemed to stop, shake her head and then disappear from view. Erwin imagined her getting changed; he could see her dress slip to the ground, and he noticed how the skin lightened on her calves. He watched her lie on the bed, gather her knees tight to her body and stare up at the small globe on the ceiling.

Once the thought had occurred to him he couldn't resist it. He started shaking his arms, tensing his fists, jogging on the spot and taking deep breaths. He knew he could climb the tall plane tree that stretched its branches out to the single lighted window. Studying the tree, he planned his path.

It was all too simple.

Slipping his satchel into the back of his pants he approached the tree, looked around, grabbed a lower branch and pulled himself up. He moved quickly, hitching his pants, adjusting his belt and almost jumping from trunk to limb. He climbed out to the end of the long branch that almost touched the window. Then he lay down, stretched out and knocked on the glass.

Nothing.

Louder. This time the window opened.

‘What are you doing?' Luise asked, her eyes glowing part fear, part excitement.

‘Can I come in first?'

He got his arms in the window and the rest of his body dropped, dangling fifteen feet above the pavement. The branch flicked up and a navvy, walking home with a lunchbox in his hands, looked up. ‘What's going on?' he asked.

‘He's fixing the blind,' Luise replied, quietly, with her head half out of the window.

‘What blind?'

But she didn't answer. Instead, she grabbed Erwin by the arms and tried to drag him inside. After a struggle she got him in. They sat on the floor together, laughing, and she quietened him. Then she returned to the window and called down, ‘Thanks for your concern,' before sliding it shut.

She sat cross-legged on the floor beside Erwin. ‘Have you gone mad?'

‘Is she asleep?'

‘I think, but she reads in bed.'

Erwin stood up and went to the door. ‘There's no lock.'

‘So?'

He looked at her as if to say, Well?

She smiled, stood up, took a chair and jammed it under the handle.

‘What good's that?' he asked.

She didn't care. She took his face in her hands and kissed it. Then they dropped to the floor, a few feet from the door. Things moved quickly. He unbuttoned her blouse as far as he needed to, and she unlatched his belt and managed to pull his pants down the few inches she needed. She stretched out on the floor with her hands against the door, just in case. He moved on top of her and leaned forward with his arms and hands also providing security.

There was no mucking around; nothing pretty, French or overly dramatic. Just the basics – corned beef, peas and cabbage – enough to get them through to next time: the rehearsal room at the Con, his bedroom, when Madge was off at the fish market, on the mound of dirt behind the maths room at the primary school, and once, in a cheap, rent-by-the-hour room on the Reeperbahn. The riskier the better. The smell of room deodoriser and sin forever in their ­nostrils.

Sometimes the feeling was so strong he guessed he could do it in the middle of Bramweg. He'd imagined the scene, Luise leaning over a fruit cart as she priced lemons and squeezed nectarines to test their freshness. Sometimes he'd just be sitting there drinking coffee when a thought would take him and up it would come – sometimes taking a lot of persuasion to go back down: thinking of electrical circuits, genetic experiments and furniture joinery. Sometimes it would be too late. Yes, he could do that too, simply by thinking about it.

When he was finished he collapsed on top of her. ‘I've just been to the movies,' he said, and she guessed that would have to do.

‘With whom?' she asked.

‘Schaedel.'

‘He's grooming you.'

‘It was his son's birthday. He was depressed.'

She sat up, leaning back against the door with her legs spread wide, leaving him kneeling, sitting barely satisfied in front of her, dripping onto her deep blue rug. She turned towards the door, moving onto all fours and saying, ‘Is that what he calls it?'

An air raid siren started wailing, slow and tired at first, and then loud and solid, filling the night with a waking panic.

‘Don't worry,' Erwin said, ‘it's just another drill.'

‘She always goes down to the basement.'

And here was another drill they'd perfected. Erwin jumped to his feet. He pulled up his underwear and pants and tightened his belt. Then he loosened his shirt, so it hung like the red velvet curtain in the Alster Kino. Luise was dealing with her shirt and blouse, so it was taking longer.

‘Luise!'

Sara tried the handle, but then stopped. ‘Come on, quick.'

‘It's a drill.'

‘Come on.'

Luise pushed Erwin towards the bed. ‘Under,' she said.

She returned to the door, removed the chair and at that instant Sara came in.

‘What's going on?' she asked.

Erwin dropped his head and bit his lip. He prayed to God he wasn't showing.

Sara looked at her daughter, her hands almost, but not quite, having done up her top button.

‘What's going on?'

No reply.

Sara took the four or five steps towards Erwin and grabbed him by the earlobe. Then she led him out of the second bedroom, through her apartment, out the front door and into the hallway.