The Gustav Sonata (20 page)

When she runs into Lottie Erdman in the street one day, she says, ‘It's not what we think it is, having babies, Lottie. It's more hell than heaven.'

Lottie looks at her with sadness. ‘I envy you, nonetheless,' she says. ‘Roger and I are trying for a baby, but it doesn't seem to happen.'

Emilie looks at Lottie, whose prettiness she has always admired and envied. And she notices that Lottie's hair has lost its shine and that her face looks pinched.

‘I thought it would be different,' Emilie says. ‘I can tell you, Lottie, because I can trust you. I thought I would feel an overpowering love for the child, but I don't.'

Lottie hesitates a moment before asking, ‘Does Erich feel love for him?'

‘Yes,' Emilie says. ‘He seems very fond of him. When he comes home at six thirty, he feeds him a bottle and changes his nappy, then takes him into bed with him. I go and stand in there and watch them sleeping a perfect sleep – and this just makes me feel inadequate and sad.'

Lottie nods. Then, she reaches down into the pram and touches Gustav's face. ‘He looks more like you than Erich,' she says.

All night, at the tram depot, Erich worries about his son. He sees how, between mother and baby, there's a peculiar chemistry of alienation. Emilie seldom kisses Gustav, or holds him close to her heart. When she changes his nappy, she's rough with him, pulling his little body this way and that, sometimes cursing as she cleans him up.

He tells himself that childbirth is an ordeal he gets nowhere near to comprehending, so women are bound to take time to recover from it and, in this slow recovery, their behaviour might be erratic or strange. He just has to pray that Emilie will grow closer to Gustav as the weeks and months go on. But the feeling that his baby is
in danger
when he's alone with Emilie won't quite leave him. It's as though, one morning when his shift at the tram depot ends, he will rush back to Unter der Egg to find Gustav dead.

In the midst of this unease, he gets the one thing he wasn't expecting: a summons from Lottie. He's sitting on a bench in the depot, reading it by cold strip light, but, as he reads, it's as though a golden luminescence suddenly envelops his whole being. His heart begins to beat so wildly, he feels it might break apart inside him, killed by astonishment.

Erich,

Often – so often in my dreams – you and I are in that café and I am telling you that I never loved you. But what I said was not true. I just said that thing about ‘pigs' to make our separation more bearable – to enable you to walk away from me.

Erich, I do love you – so much. The thought that we will never make love again is too unendurable to be borne. I keep hoping that I will be cured of my need for you, but every day, it gets stronger.

I know I have no right to ask this of you, especially now that you have your son and must stay at Emilie's side, but I want you to come to me. Roger is in Geneva. Will you be my lover again? And will you … God, I hardly dare ask this of you … I am so shameless … but will you give me a child? I am thirty-two years old. Roger and I cannot make a child, it seems. The love we make together is too weak. But I know that you and I, in that delirium we share – if we took no precautions now – could make one with perfect ease. I would look to you for nothing afterwards – no hint of parental responsibility, I swear. It would be ‘Roger's child'. And only you and I in all the world would know that it was the angel of our desire …

It is deep night in the depot, a scent of autumn on the winds. Erich reads Lottie's letter over and over until he knows it by heart. He understands that what she's asking is audacious, the kind of grand deception that only a woman as wanton as Lottie Erdman would think up, yet he also knows that he's immediately on fire for her scheme and that he would go to her this very minute, if he could. And now that she's summoned him, he can't delay. His need of her returns as a terrible compulsion that he must satisfy at once, or die.

As soon as the six o'clock light begins to show, Erich walks to a telephone kiosk and calls Frau Krams, asking her to give a message to Emilie, to tell her he has been summoned to a meeting by the bosses of the tram company at eight o'clock and will not be home until later in the morning. ‘Remind her,' he adds, ‘to give Gustav his milk.'

When the shops open in Matzlingen, Erich goes into a cheap clothier's and buys new trousers, shirt, shoes and jacket. Then he goes to the public baths and washes and steams all the stink of the tram depot off his body. After this, he puts on his new clothes and visits a barber's, to demand a shave and a haircut. When he catches sight of himself in the barber's mirror, he sees that he's smiling.

Now, it's half past nine and Erich is walking down Grünewaldstrasse – his old, beloved walk to Lottie's door. Only now does he realise that he no longer has Lottie's letter; he must have left it in the baths or in the telephone kiosk or in the clothier's changing cubicle, but he can't go back to search for it, his longing to reach Lottie is too urgent. He prays she will be waiting, hoping he would act just as he has acted, and come to her at once, out of breath, even, from the haste with which he has run to her. He tries to imagine which dress she will be wearing.

Tired from her night, after being woken by Gustav five times, then by Frau Krams with her message, Emilie sits by the gas fire, still wearing her nightdress, and drinks coffee and smokes. Gustav is at last asleep in his cot and Emilie thinks she may go back to bed for a while. The apartment needs cleaning, but she will do this later. Sleep is what she craves.

She climbs into bed and is gone, almost at once, into a strange dream of Irma and the pearl hatpin. Irma is dancing round her small parlour in the house near Basel, with the pin, stabbing the air, crying out that she will ‘have her revenge on life'. Emilie cowers in a corner, knowing that it's only a matter of time before Irma stabs her with the pin. She was the unwanted child. It's upon her that Irma's ‘revenge' will fall.

There's knocking at the apartment door, loud and insistent. Emilie at first thinks it's part of her dream of Irma, but then she wakes and tugs on a robe.

There's no sound from Gustav's room, but whoever is at the door is calling her name: ‘Frau Perle! Open the door. Police!'

So then Emilie thinks it's come at last, Erich's summons to the long-postponed criminal trial. She goes cold. She opens the door a crack and sees two police officers standing there. They say nothing for a moment, then ask her politely if they can come in.

‘It's the trial, is it?' she says. ‘Is it the trial?'

They say nothing, but shake their heads, no. They come into the untidy parlour that stinks of cigarette ash and ask her gently if she would like to sit down.

‘Sit down?' she says. ‘It's bad news, is it? It's about the trial.'

‘No,' says the older of the two men. ‘It's nothing about a trial. Please sit down, Frau Perle, and we will tell you.'

Emilie sits on the very edge of a frayed brown chair. The policemen also sit. Then, they tell her that her husband, Herr Erich Perle, was found dead in the street at
9
.
35
that morning.

Emilie gapes at the policemen.

Found dead in the street that morning?

Found dead …?

After a moment, she says stupidly, ‘In the street? Erich couldn't have
died
in the street …'

It was a street, they inform her – Grünewaldstrasse. ‘He was,' they say, ‘on the steps of the apartment building inhabited by Police Chief Erdman. This may have been a coincidence, or he may have been intending to visit him. The cause of death seems to have been his heart.'

Emilie finds that she can't speak. She wishes herself back in her dream. Her mother she could overcome, but this – this ‘death in the street' – is quite beyond what she can confront. Perhaps it is not true? Perhaps the policemen are not really there?

She turns her head this way and that, looking round the room for clarification. Is this happening or not happening? The room gives up no clues. So she waits for a sign, for something to occur which is present and real. And eventually that sign comes, in the form of an all-too-familiar sound: in his little cot, Gustav is crying.

BY THE AGE
of forty, Gustav owned a hotel in Matzlingen. He understood that the métier of hotelier was perfectly suited to his fastidious disposition. He took pride in the cleanliness of the place, and in providing the small necessities of human existence which helped to make life bearable: good central heating, beds both soft and wide, hairdryers for the ladies, comfortable chairs in the dining room, an open fire in the lounge …

His one act of vanity was to name the hotel after himself – the Hotel Perle. He understood that this name somehow made the hotel sound grander than it was, when in fact, in the Michelin Guide to Switzerland, it only merited a small house symbol, designating an establishment
assez confortable
, but of no special renown. Yet Gustav felt pride in it. His devoted Italian chef, Lunardi, concocted food that managed to be both interesting and consoling. The two men understood that when people travel, they often also long to be at home again, and so this was what they tried to provide for the guests of the Hotel Perle: a home from home.

Gustav was now fifty. He lived by himself in an apartment on the top floor. From its windows, he could see the River Emme and an ugly block of apartments built on the site where once the old cheese co-operative had stood. He felt glad that the cheese co-operative had gone, so that he didn't have to think of his mother coming home, smelling of Emmental and using this smell as a reason for never hugging or kissing her son.

Yet he thought about his childhood very often. It always brought on a feeling of sadness which seemed absolute and complete – as though no future sorrow would ever touch him again in this way. The sadness gathered like a grey twilight around the idea of his own invisibility: the way the boy Gustav had kept on trying to push himself into the light so that his Mutti would see him better. But she had never seen him better. She'd remained half blind to who he was.

He'd believed, when he bought the old Gasthaus Helvetia and transformed it into the Hotel Perle, that Emilie, who, in a life deprived of luxury, had never ceased to yearn for it, would be proud of him. But this didn't seem to be the case. She'd admired the Biedermeier furniture he'd chosen for the lounge and she could occasionally become pink and breathless over some rich dessert Lunardi had made, ‘especially for your mother, boss'. But she had never congratulated Gustav on starting up the hotel. In fact, she had told him that she didn't like coming there. It reminded her of her lowly job as a chambermaid at the Gasthaus Helvetia. She said, ‘Your father rescued me from all that, and I'm sorry, Gustav, but I really have no wish to return to it.'

Gustav wanted to say that it was ridiculous for his mother to conjoin in her mind the comfortable new hotel, on which he'd lavished such infinite care, and the old gasthaus. There was no resemblance between the two – only that the roof and the outer walls still existed, but even these had been repaired and cleaned. He wanted to remind his mother that the rooms of the gasthaus had had narrow beds and linoleum floors and thin curtains which let in the light. The breakfasts of stale bread, weak coffee and rubbery Emmental had been a disgrace to Swiss cuisine. The public rooms had been dingy, the toilets smelly and stained. Whereas, in the Hotel Perle, wherever the guests might walk, they would find things to please them: flower arrangements in the hall, soft rugs beside the beds, bathrooms brought to a scented shine … But it was pointless to go on. If he ever began listing these things, Emilie would turn away from him, as though she couldn't hear a word he was saying. At these moments, with her pointy nose in the air, she would remind him of some terrified creature – a bat clinging to the wall of its cave – distressed by his human noise.

Yet he hadn't been able to give up on her. He knew that, in spite of everything, he still loved her. In some part of himself, he'd always believed that his mother couldn't die before she'd learned to love him. As he'd got older, he'd tried to teach her how to do this, before it was too late, but he hadn't succeeded.

When Emilie became frail, he asked her if she would like to come and live in the hotel, so that he and his staff could look after her. But the question appeared to wound her.

‘I suppose,' she said, ‘you're ashamed of me because I never had a kitchen table. Is that it?'

Gustav stared. He worried that his mother's mind was becoming as fragile as her body.

‘I don't know what you mean, Mutti,' he said.

‘I mean that you stop at nothing.'

‘I still don't know what you're trying to say.'

‘You stop at nothing in your shaming of me. With your Michelin-starred hotel! You would have preferred to have had Adriana Zwiebel as your mother, I know. With her money and her designer handbags. And instead you got me, and you've been ashamed of me all your life.'

Gustav stood very still. He found himself wondering whether there was any truth in what she'd just said.

‘You don't deny it. You see?' said Emilie, and her thin hands were bunched like a boxer's, ready to hit out.

‘I do deny it,' said Gustav. ‘And the hotel has no Michelin star.'

‘It's got a Michelin something or other. And twelve bedrooms! And I have no table to eat off, and that's a cause for shame in your eyes.'

Gustav went to her and put his arms around her, trapping her boxer's hands. He kissed the top of her grey head. But immediately, she pulled away from him, as he knew she would – as she always did.