The Piano Teacher: A Novel (10 page)

Herr Klemmer would love to be friends with Erika. After all, this shapeless cadaver, this piano teacher, whose profession is as plain as the nose on her face, could still develop; for this flabby bag of tissue isn’t too old at all. Why, she’s relatively young, compared with her mother. This pathologically twisted joke of a creature, this rapturous idiot, clutching her ideals, living only spiritually, will be spun around by this young man: from otherworldly to worldly. She’ll enjoy the delights of love, just wait! In the summer, and even in the spring, Walter Klemmer goes white-water canoeing. He even loops around gates.
He conquers his element. And he will likewise subjugate his teacher, Erika Kohut. One fine day, he’ll even show her the structure of a canoe. Next, she’ll have to learn how to keep it afloat. By then he’ll be calling her by her first name: Erika! This bird will feel her wings growing; the man will see to it.

Some men like one thing; Herr Klemmer likes this.

Bach has come to rest. His run is finished. Both performers, the master and the mistress, rise from their stools and bow their heads. They are patient horses sticking their noses into the feedbags of everyday life, which has reawakened. They say they are bowing their heads to Bach’s genius rather than to this meagerly applauding crowd, which understands nothing and is too stupid even to ask questions. Only Erika’s mother claps till her hands hurt. She shouts, Bravo! Bravo! Her appreciation is supported by the smiling hostess.

The crowd, shanghaied from a dung heap and sporting such ugly colors, now scrutinizes Erika. They blink into the light. Someone has removed the cushion from the lamp, and the lamp can shine unhindered. So this is Erika’s audience. If you didn’t know that these are supposed to be human beings, you could scarcely believe your eyes. Erika is far superior to any of them, but they are already thronging about her, brushing against her, talking nonsense. She has bred this young audience in her own incubator. Using dishonest methods, such as coercion, extortion, intimidation, she ordered these youngsters to come here. The only one who isn’t here under duress is probably Herr Klemmer, the hardworking student. The rest would rather be watching TV, playing Ping-Pong, reading a book, or doing something equally stupid. They all had to come. They seem to delight in their mediocrity! Yet they dare to tackle Mozart, Schubert! They take up room: fat islands floating in the amniotic fluid of the notes. They imbibe temporarily, but do not understand what they are drinking. After all, people with a
herd instinct hold mediocrity in high esteem. They praise it as having great value. They believe they are strong because they are the majority. The middling level has no terrors, no anxieties. They huddle together, indulging in the illusion of warmth. If you’re in the middle, then you’re alone with nothing, and certainly not yourself. And how content they are with that state of affairs! Nothing in their existence offers them any reproaches and no one could reproach them for their existence. And even Erika’s reproaches that an interpretation is unsuccessful would simply bounce off this soft, patient wall. For Erika, you see, is all alone on the other side, and instead of being proud of her situation, she wreaks vengeance. Every three months, she forces the others to pass through the gate, which she holds open, so that these sheep can listen to her perform. Running a gamut from self-complacency to boredom, they now dash off, baaing, jostling, falling all over one another when some unreasonable individual holds them up because he hung his coat underneath, and now he can’t find it. First, all of them want to get in; then they all want to get out as fast as possible. And always in unison. They imagine that the sooner they can get to the other pasture, the pasture of music, the sooner they can leave it. But now all of Brahms is coming, after a brief intermission, ladies and gentlemen. Dear students. Today, Erika’s exceptional status is not a failing, but an asset. For they are all gaping and gawking at her even though they secretly hate her.

Herr Klemmer, winding his way over to her, beams at her with festive blue eyes. His two hands reach for her pianist hand, and he says, Congratulations, adding that words fail him, Professor. Erika’s mama cuts in, emphatically prohibiting any handshake. There is to be no sign of friendship because it could twist the tendons and interfere with her playing. The hand should remain in its natural position, if you please. Well, we
don’t have to be all that particular for this third-class audience, do we, Herr Klemmer? One has to tyrannize them, one has to suppress them and oppress them, just to get through to them. One should use clubs on them! They want thrashings and a pile of passions that each composer should experience vicariously for them and carefully set down. They want shouts and shrieks, otherwise they would have to shout and shriek all the time. Out of boredom. The gray tones, the fine nuances, the delicate distinctions are beyond their grasp anyway. Yet in music, as in any realm of art, it is much easier juxtaposing harsh contrasts, brutal antitheses. But that’s trash, nothing more! These lambs don’t know it. They don’t know anything. Erika takes hold of Klemmer’s arm; this intimate gesture makes him tremble.. He can’t be cold amid these healthy teenagers with their excellent circulation; these barbarians who have eaten their fill, in a country whose culture is ruled by barbarians. Just look at the newspapers: They’re more barbaric than the things they report on. A man who meticulously slices up his wife and children and then stores them in the refrigerator in order to eat them later on is no more barbaric than the newspaper that runs the item. And then the papers call each other names. Klemmer, just imagine! And now I’ve got to say hello to Professor Vyoral, if you don’t mind. I’ll see you later, Herr Klemmer!

Mother grabs a light-blue angora jacket that she crocheted herself and drapes it over Erika’s shoulders. The lubricant mustn’t suddenly freeze in these joints, raising the frictional resistance. The little jacket is like a cozy over a teapot. Sometimes useful things like toilet-paper rollers have such homemade caskets on them, with colorful pom-poms. They decorate the rear windows of cars. Right in the center. Erika’s pom-pom is her head, which looms proudly. She trips along on her high heels across the smooth ice of the inlaid floor (areas subject to
great stress are protected today by cheap runners). Erika heads toward an older colleague in order to receive congratulations from expert lips. Mother gently pushes her forward. Mother has a hand on Erika’s back, on her right shoulder blade, on the angora jacket.

Walter Klemmer still doesn’t drink or smoke; nevertheless, he has astonishing amounts of energy. As if attached to her with suction cups, he trails behind his teacher, plowing his way through the clucking horde. He sticks to her. If she needs him, he’ll be at hand. If she needs male protection. She only has to turn around and she’ll bump right into him. He actually seeks this body check. The brief intermission is almost over. He inhales Erika’s presence with flaring nostrils as if he were on a high Alpine meadow that one seldom visits, so one must therefore breathe deeply. In order to bring a lot of oxygen back to the city. He removes a stray hair from the sleeve of the light-blue jacket, reaping thanks, oh, my. Erika’s mother nebulously senses something, but she cannot help appreciating his good manners and sense of duty. His behavior contrasts sharply with everything that is customary and necessary nowadays between the sexes. Herr Klemmer is a young man for Erika’s mother but a man of the old stamp.

Now for a small chat before we come to the final round. Klemmer wants to know why, and regrets that, such cultivated home recitals are gradually dying out. First the masters died, now their music is dying, because people only want to listen to pop, rock, and punk. Families like our host and hostess no longer exist. In earlier times, there were so many like them. Generations of laryngologists would satiate themselves on, if not wear themselves out with, Beethoven’s late quartets. During the day, they painted sore throats; in the evening, they got their reward when they hobnobbed with Beethoven. Today, the academics do nothing but stamp their feet to the beat of
Bruckner’s elephant trumpets and heap praises on that provincial tunesmith. Scorning Bruckner is a youthful peccadillo to which many people have succumbed, Herr Klemmer. One does not understand him until much later, believe me. Avoid fashionable judgments until you have a wider grasp, my dear colleague. Klemmer is happy to hear the word “colleague” from competent lips. He then launches into poignant jargon about Schubert’s and Schumann’s darkening descent into madness. He talks about their subtle shades and nuances, while using mothlike tints of gray in gray.

Next comes a Kohut/Klemmer duet, in venomous lemon-yellow, about the local concert business. Molto vivace. Their duet is well rehearsed. Neither musician has any part in this business. They are allowed to participate only as consumers, yet their qualifications are vastly superior! Still, they are nothing but listeners, deluding themselves about their knowledge. One part of this duet could have taken part: Erika. But it didn’t come about.

Now the two of them delicately pass across the loose dust of intermediary tones, intermediary worlds, intermediary realms, for this is where the middle stratum feels at home. Schubert’s descent into madness opens the dance—like the darkening, as Adorno describes it, in Schumann’s Fantasy in C Major. It flows into the far distance, into nothingness, yet without wearing the apotheosis of conscious fading! It darkens without realizing it, indeed without referring to itself! The duettists grow silent for a moment in order to enjoy the things they have articulated in an inappropriate place. Each of them thinks he understands more than the other; one thinks so because of his youth, the other because of her maturity. They take turns outdoing each other’s fury at the ignorant, the uncomprehending—many of whom are gathered right here. Just look at them, Professor! Just take a good look at them, Herr
Klemmer! The bond of scorn links the trainer and the trainee. The fading of Schubert’s, of Schumann’s, life-light is the extreme opposite of what the healthy masses mean when they call a tradition healthy and wallow in it luxuriantly. Health—how disgusting. Health is the transfiguration of status quo. The hacks who fill up the playbills for the Philharmonic Concerts are the most repulsive conformists. Just imagine: They make something like health the chief criterion of important music. Well, health always sides with the victors; the weak fall away. Yet these sauna-users and happy pissers deserve to fail. Beethoven, the master whom they consider so healthy—yet he was deaf, alas. And that profoundly healthy Brahms. Klemmer precariously tosses something in (and gets his ball into the basket): He has always thought of Bruckner as being very healthy. Klemmer is sharply rebuked. Erika modestly displays the wound inflicted on her by her personal experiences with the music business in Vienna and the provinces. Until she resigned herself. A sensitive person gets burned, like a delicate moth. And that, says Erika Kohut, is why these two extremely sick composers, Schumann and Schubert (they share the first syllable), are closest to my bruised heart. Not the Schumann whose thoughts have all fled him, but the Schumann just before that! A hair’s breadth before that! He already has an inkling that his mind will flee, he suffers from his inkling, down to his finest veins, he takes leave of his conscious life as he enters the choirs of angels and demons, yet he clutches that conscious life one final time, even though he is no longer fully conscious of himself. He yearningly tries to catch the fading echoes, he mourns the loss of the most precious thing: himself. This is the phase in which one knows how great the loss of oneself is before one is utterly abandoned.

Erika, in gentle music, tells Klemmer that her father lost his mind and died in the Steinhof Asylum. That is why people
have to be considerate of Erika, she has gone through so much. Amid all this splendid and resplendent health, Erika does not want to say any more, but she does drop a few hints. Hoping to flay some feelings out of Klemmer, she ruthlessly applies the chisel. Because of her suffering, this woman deserves every ounce of male interest she can squeeze out. The young man’s interest is then harshly reawakened.

The intermission is over. Please be seated. Now come Brahms lieder, sung by a young soprano, a student. And then the recital ends. The Kohut/Haberkorn duo couldn’t have been topped anyway. The applause is louder than before the intermission because everyone is relieved that the soirée is over. Even more bravos, not only from Erika’s mama, but also from Erika’s best pupil. The mother and the best pupil scrutinize each other from the corners of their eyes, both shout energetically and grow terribly suspicious. One wants something; the other does not care to give it up. The light is turned up full blast, so are the chandeliers, nothing is spared in this beautiful moment. The host has tears in his eyes. Erika has played Chopin as an encore, and the host thinks of Poland in the night, the land of his ancestors. The soprano and Erika, her charming accompanist, receive gigantic bouquets of flowers. Two mothers and a father appear, and they likewise present bouquets to the professor, who is helping their children. The gifted young vocalist gets only one bouquet. Erika’s mother affably helps mummify the bouquets in tissue paper for the trip home. We only have to carry these gorgeous flowers to the trolley stop and then the trolley will take us comfortably almost to our door. You start by saving on a cab, and you end up with an apartment. Indispensable friends and helpers offer rides in their own cars, but Mother calls them all dispensable. Thanks but no thanks. We accept no favors, and we offer none.

Walter Klemmer strides over and helps his piano teacher
into her winter coat with the fox collar; he is quite familiar with her coat from all their lessons. It’s got a belt and it’s also got that sumptuous fur collar. He covers the mother in her black Persian-lamb-paw coat. He wants to continue the conversation, which had to be interrupted. He instantly says something about art and literature, in case Fräulein Kohut has bled out all her music after the triumph she has just celebrated. He latches on to her, digging his dentition into her. He helps her into her sleeves, he is even so bold as to pull her shoulder-length hair out of the collar and arrange it neatly upon the fur. He offers to accompany the two ladies to the trolley stop.