The Gustav Sonata (7 page)

Gustav returned to thumbing through the ‘views of Davos', looking for another picture of Erich. And here he was now, smiling, sitting at a café table, with a flagon of beer in front of him and a waiter in a long white apron standing behind him.

‘You see the kind of places we were able to go to?' said Emilie. ‘You see the waiter, very correctly attired? We felt so spoiled and happy. Your father didn't want to leave Davos. He rebooked our train tickets, to stay an extra two days. And on our very last night, I said to him, “Don't worry, I'm sure we will come back.” Davos was the most perfect place we'd ever known. The sun shone every day, every single day. But we never went back.'

‘Why not?' asked Gustav.

‘Time,' said Emilie. ‘When you're young, you think you're always going to have lots of time ahead of you, in which to do the things you planned. You don't notice time passing, that's the trouble. But it passes just the same.'

At the end of the year, the cheese co-operative closed its doors for good. The milk from the valleys around Matzlingen was shipped elsewhere, to Burgdorf or Lyss, or even as far as Bern. The great vats and churns, over which Emilie and her colleagues had sweated, were dismantled and moved outside to a rickety shelter, where the wind and rain began to rust them and where goats sometimes clambered, smelling the dregs of the curds in the corroding metal.

Emilie went to see the pastor of the Church of Sankt Johann to ask for more work and was given a job on Monday mornings, cleaning up after the Sunday services. But she hated it. She told Gustav, ‘You'd be surprised what a mess people make in church. Sometimes I find communion wafers, half chewed and spat out onto the floor. And piles of confetti in a mush, like vomit.'

It was then that Gustav dared to mention the possibility of the job in Valeria's flower shop.

‘How d'you know about it?' asked Emilie.

‘From Frau Zwiebel.'

‘Oh,' said Emilie, ‘I suppose she buys her geraniums there?'

‘Yes, I think she does.'

‘Well, you can tell her, I'm not looking for charity.'

‘What's charity? This is just a job. Someone else may have got it by now.'

At this, Emilie softened. She said, ‘Well, beggars can't be choosers, I suppose. Perhaps you can ask Frau Zwiebel about it – if you ever see her.'

Gustav said he would ask. He liked to imagine his mother among scented greenery and roses and lilies. He thought that, when August
1
st came round again, Valeria might let her have her posies of gentian flowers for nothing and how, when Emilie set these out beside the photograph of Erich Perle, she would be able to say to him, ‘I'm working in a nice place now. My clothes don't smell of cheese any more.'

But Emilie Perle never took the job in the flower shop. She fell ill.

FOR DAYS, EMILIE
remained in bed in the apartment on Unter der Egg, sweating, shivering and coughing. Gustav had to tell her that there was no food left in the larder, so she sent him out with a few francs to buy cheap vegetables. She said, ‘Just peel them, Gustav, and put them in the pot of water and boil them. Then bring me a cup of the broth.'

He was quite proud to be able to do all this – shop for leeks and carrots and onions and then peel and chop them and light the gas and set the heavy pot on the stove. He tied one of Emilie's aprons round himself. He turned on the radio and found a jazz programme, and attempted to beat time to the riffs of the saxophone with a wooden spoon.

‘What's that awful noise?' cried Emilie from her bed. ‘Turn it off!'

He sat by her, trying to spoon broth into her mouth. He saw that her lips were dry and cracked. She told him the broth was too hot, and closed her eyes. He stared at her, perplexed. A familiar, acrid smell, which Gustav didn't want to think about, filled the room. He didn't know whether he should try again with the broth, or tiptoe away, to let his mother sleep. He knew that, more and more in her life, sleeping was the thing she liked best.

He stirred the broth, round and round. He saw a wasp crawling up and down the window glass and hoped that it wouldn't come over to the bed and sting Emilie, trying to drink the moisture that was beading on her face. He touched her shoulder gently, to wake her and she gulped in a little more of the broth. Then she waved it away and said, ‘I can't. I'm too ill. Go and find Frau Krams, Gustav. Tell her to call an ambulance.'

Frau Krams was the concierge of the building on Unter der Egg. She had a peculiar son called Ludwig, who was old enough to work at a full-time job, or to be sent into the Citizen Army, but who hung around on the stairs and corridors most of the time, humming a little private tune and doing odd jobs for the tenants, in return for small sums put into a palm outstretched like a street beggar's. Emilie Perle said Ludwig Krams was ‘a disgrace to Swiss values'. He liked children, however. Whenever he saw Gustav he would ruffle his hair and say, ‘How's it going, little man? Come and talk to me. Tell me what the world is doing to you.'

Gustav knocked at Frau Krams's door and Ludwig appeared, smoking a skinny cigarette. ‘How's the universe?' he said.

‘Not very good,' said Gustav. ‘My mother is ill. She needs an ambulance.'

‘Oh,' said Ludwig, ‘ambulances, hospitals … let's not mention those. Shall we play a game of jacks?'

‘I haven't got the jacks,' said Gustav.

‘Too bad,' said Ludwig. ‘Too bad, manikin. Can't you fetch them?'

‘Not now. We have to get an ambulance for Mutti.'

Gustav waited. Ludwig sucked on his cigarette. Gustav could see Frau Krams inside their parlour, winding wool from the back of a chair. She got up and came to the door, pushing Ludwig out of the way. ‘Ambulance, Gustav? Did I hear that word? What's happened?'

Gustav described how his mother lay in bed and was too weak to move and perhaps had wet her bed more than once. Frau Krams put her plump hands over her mouth. ‘
Mein Gott!
' she said.

She followed Gustav up the stairs. Ludwig wanted to come with them, but Frau Krams sent him down again.

When they got to the apartment, the largeness of Frau Krams, the way her body seemed to fill up a doorway, was suddenly reassuring to Gustav. As he showed her into Emilie's room, he realised that he was very tired, as though some of Emilie's illness had passed into his blood and made him weak.

He watched as Frau Krams bent over Emilie, and stroked her burning cheek. The stench of urine was very strong. Frau Krams now took the green eiderdown off the bed. Then she threw back the rest of the bedclothes and lifted Emilie, light as a child in her arms, and sat her in the armchair, tucking the eiderdown tightly round her.

‘I'm sorry …' said Emilie.

‘Nothing to be sorry about,' said Frau Krams.

She took the stained sheets off the bed and opened the window. She told Gustav to run a bathful of water, then tip disinfectant in it, and soak the sheets in that. ‘When you've done that, come and sit with your mother. I'm going down to call an ambulance. This could be pneumonia.'

‘Or it might be TB,' said Gustav.

‘What?'

‘I know about TB. Then Mutti would have to go to Davos.'

Frau Krams stared at Gustav, who was now holding the bundle of urine-soaked sheets. She shook her head. ‘No, no,' she said. ‘I don't think so, pet. Now, wait here for me. I'll bring the ambulance people up.'

Gustav ran the hot water and found the disinfectant Emilie used to clean the toilet and poured it all in. The water jumped and bubbled, as if it were acid. Fumes rose from the bath and made Gustav gag. He waited till the bath was full, then he went back to Emilie, who had fallen sideways in the chair, with her head lolling on her chest. Now, she looked very peculiar, trussed up in the green eiderdown. She reminded Gustav of a silkworm. Her face was blank white, but with two hectic spots of red on her cheeks, like the bruises a silkworm might have suffered falling to the kindergarten floor.

There was one other chair in Emilie's room, a hard Biedermeier chair that had come with her to Unter der Egg from her former life on Fribourgstrasse. Gustav tugged this towards Emilie's armchair and sat down on it and stared at his mother. He saw in this moment how thin she had become, and how angry. And he wondered whether he was to blame for these things in some way that he didn't understand. He reached out and touched Emilie's shoulder, just visible, in a pink nightdress, above the rim of the eiderdown. He stroked this gently, feeling the hard collarbone under his hand. He wished she wasn't ill, so that he could climb onto her lap and be held in her arms until he fell asleep.

When Frau Krams came back with the ambulance men, Emilie was lifted into a wheelchair and manoeuvred into the tiny elevator. Gustav helped Frau Krams to pack a suitcase with clean nightdresses and shampoo and a toothbrush and Emilie's broken handbag and the photograph of Erich Perle. Frau Krams told Gustav that she would go to the hospital with Emilie and be back at Unter der Egg by supper time. She told him to come down to her flat and stay there with Ludwig until she returned.

Ludwig was drinking.

He said, ‘Vodka is cool. But don't say a word, eh, Gustavus?'

Gustav sat on a hard sofa in Frau Krams's parlour. He took off his shoes and swung his legs onto the sofa and lay down and in moments had fallen asleep, to the sound of a little gas fire popping and sighing as the dusk came on.

When he woke, it was morning.

A soft blanket was covering him, red and white, like the Swiss flag, and he pulled this blanket tightly round himself, remembering that he needed protection.

He could hear Ludwig's humming, coming from the kitchen. The gas fire was out and there was sunshine at the small window. He knew now that his mother was in the hospital and that he was in the Krams's apartment. He wondered if it was time to go to school.

Ludwig came in and bent over Gustav and began tickling him and laughing and with the gusts of laughter came the smell of stale vodka.

‘Get up, terrible boy!' said Ludwig. He reminded Gustav of some punishing character out of
Struwwelpeter.

‘I'm not terrible,' he said.

‘Yes, you are. I'm going to tickle you until you scream!'

‘I never scream.'

‘I can make you scream.'

‘No, you can't.'

‘All right then. Take that blanket off. It's my blanket anyway, my favourite one, but I let you have it. Wasn't that kind of me? Now, we're going to have hot chocolate and bread and pickles.'

Ludwig and Gustav sat in the parlour at a table covered with a yellow oilcloth. Ludwig had boiled milk for the hot chocolate and set out a plate of bread, with butter and pickled onions. Gustav began gulping all this down. He would have liked to eat a huge plate of bratwurst with boiled potatoes. At last, he said to Ludwig, ‘Why isn't your mother back?'

Ludwig shivered. ‘Hospitals,' he said. ‘They kidnap you. I was kidnapped. I was strapped down to a bed and they gave me electric shocks to my head.'

‘Why?' asked Gustav.

‘Who knows? That's the thing about the world, Gustavus: you just don't know why the things that happen happen.'

Gustav drained the dregs of the hot chocolate. ‘Your mother said she'd be back by supper time, but now it's breakfast.'

‘Yes. I hope she's not having electric shocks to her head. Shall we go to my room? I can show you some of my toys.'

‘Toys?'

‘Yes. The things I play with.'

‘I think I'd better go to school.'

‘If you do that, I'll be lonely, little man.'

The room was almost as small as Gustav's and it was choked with some of the things the tenants of the building had thrown out, but which Ludwig had decided to save: faded deckchairs, pictures of Jesus, a broken rocking horse, rusted garden shears, plant pot holders, a Moses basket, a picnic hamper, a sweet jar, magazines, two watering cans, a kiddy car, a set of brocade cushions …

Gustav stared at all this. There was barely room for Ludwig to get in and out of his narrow bed, so closely did the tide of found objects nudge against its side.

‘What would you like to play with?' asked Ludwig. ‘The rocking horse?'

‘Yes.'

Ludwig clambered over the deckchairs and the picnic hamper to get to the horse. As he lifted it up, something fell out from a wedge of cushions: it was Gustav's broken tin train.

The sight of it filled him with wonder. ‘That's my train! That's my train!' he cried. ‘Give it to me, Ludwig.'

Ludwig picked up the train. ‘It's mine now,' he said. ‘I found it in the rubbish bin.'

‘Mutti threw it away, not me. I didn't mean to break it. I was just angry about something. Please let me have it back.'

‘No. You can't have it.'

‘Please!
Please
, Ludwig!'

Ludwig held the train upside down in the air. If the people in the carriages had been loose and not painted on, they would have fallen out. Then Ludwig stared hard at Gustav. His thin white face seemed suddenly to curdle with a blotchy blush. He put the train down slowly, out of Gustav's reach.

‘I've got a cool idea,' he said.

‘Give me back my train!'

‘I will if you go along with my idea,' he said. ‘OK?'

‘No. I don't know what it is.'

‘Well, it's cool. You'll see. Lots of people do it. We did it at the hospital, where they gave me electric shocks. People are doing it all the time.'

‘What?'

‘Here,' said Ludwig. ‘Feast your eyes on this, little man.' Then he opened his fly and brought out his penis, which he began stroking.

‘You can have the train
if …
' he said.

Gustav gaped. ‘If what?'