The Piano Teacher: A Novel (15 page)

Mother sits in the kitchen: a percolator, dripping her orders about. Then, once her daughter’s left, she turns on the TV to watch the morning programs. She is calm, for she knows where her daughter is going. What should we watch today? A program on Albrecht Dürer or a talk show?

After the trials and tribulations of the day, the daughter screams at her mother: She should finally let her lead her own life. She’s old enough, the daughter yells. Mother’s daily reply is that Mother knows best because she never stops being a mother.

However, this “life of her own,” which the daughter longs for, will culminate in a zenith of total obedience, until a tiny, narrow alley opens up, with just enough room for one person to be waved through. The policeman signals: All clear. Smooth, carefully polished walls right and left, high walls with no apertures or corridors, no niches or hollows, only this one narrow alley, through which she must squeeze in order to reach the other end. Somewhere, she doesn’t know where, a winter landscape is waiting, stretching far into the distance, a landscape with no path, with no castle to offer refuge. Or else nothing is waiting but a room without a door, a furnished cabinet containing an old-fashioned washstand with a pitcher and a towel, and the landlord’s footfalls keep coming nearer and nearer, but never arrive because there is no door here. In this endless vastness or in this cramped, doorless narrowness, the frightened
animal will confront a larger animal or merely the small wash-stand on wheels, which simply stands there to be used, and that’s all.

Erika keeps exerting self-control until she feels no more drive within her. She puts her body out of commission because no panther leaps at her to grab her body. She waits, lapsing into silence. She assigns difficult tasks to her body, increasing the difficulties by laying hidden traps wherever she likes. She swears that anyone, even a primitive man, can pursue “the drive” if he is not afraid to bag it out in the open.

Erika K. corrects the Bach, mends and patches it. Her student stares down at his entangled hands. She gazes through him, but sees only a wall that bears Schumann’s death mask. For a fleeting instant, she needs to grab the student’s hair and smash his head against the inside of the piano until the bloody bowels of strings and wires screech and spurt. The Bösendorfer will not emit another peep. This desire flits nimbly through the teacher and evaporates without consequences.

The student promises to do better, no matter how long it takes. Erika hopes so and asks for the Beethoven. The student shamelessly strives for praise, although he is not as addicted to it as Herr Klemmer, whose hinges usually creak under the strain of his zealousness.

Meanwhile, in the glass cases of the Metro, pink flesh waits unhindered in various shapes, sizes, and price ranges. The flesh runs wild, runs riot, because Erika cannot stand guard there at this time. The admission prices are standardized, front rows are cheaper than back rows even though you’re closer up front and you have a better view into the bodies. Extra-long blood-red fingernails bore into one woman; a sharp object—a riding crop—bores into another. This object makes an imprint in her flesh, showing the viewer who’s boss and who’s not, and the viewer too feels he’s boss. Erika can feel the crop boring. It
emphatically assigns her a seat on the audience side. One woman’s face is twisted in joy, for only her expression can tell the man how much pleasure he is giving her and how much pleasure has been wasted. Another woman’s face on the screen is twisted in pain, for she has just been whipped, albeit lightly. The woman cannot demonstrate her pleasure in her face. The man is entirely dependent on clues and hints. He reads the pleasure in her face. The woman jerks around to avoid offering a good target. Her eyes are shut, her head is thrown back. If her eyes aren’t shut, then perhaps they’re twisted back. They seldom look at the man. That is why he has to strain himself: Her facial expression won’t improve the results or help him make points. The woman is so absorbed in her pleasure that she doesn’t see the man. She doesn’t see the forest for the trees. She gazes only into herself. The man, a trained mechanic, works on the woman, a damaged car. In porno flicks, people work harder than in movies about the workaday world.

Erika is geared to watching people who work hard because they want results. In this respect, the normally large difference between music and sexual pleasure is quite tiny. Erika is less interested in seeing nature. She never goes to the forest area, where other artists are renovating farmhouses. She never climbs mountains. She never dives into lakes. She never lies on beaches. She never whizzes over snow. The man greedily hoards orgasms until finally, bathed in sweat, he remains lying where he first started out. On the other hand, he has greatly increased his account balance for the day. Erika saw this flick long, long ago in a working-class district, where she is unknown (only the cashier knows her by now and addresses her as “ma’am”). In fact, she saw it twice. She won’t go again, for she prefers a stronger diet when it comes to pornos. These gracefully formed exemplars of the human species in this downtown movie house act without pain and without any possibility
of pain. They are solid rubber. Pain itself is merely a consequence of the desire for pleasure, the desire to destroy, to annihilate; in its supreme form, pain is a variety of pleasure. Erika would gladly cross the border to her own murder. Fucking in a slum contains more hope for shaping pain, decorating pain. These shabby, frazzled amateur actors work a lot harder, and they’re a lot more grateful for the chance to appear in a real movie. They are defective. Their skin has spots, pimples, scars, wrinkles, scabs, cellulite, fat. Poorly dyed hair. Sweat. Dirty feet. In aesthetically demanding films at luxuriously upholstered cinemas, you mostly see the surfaces of men and women. Both genders are squeezed into nylon body stockings dirt-repellent durable, acid-proof, heat-resistant. Furthermore, at a cheap porno house, the man smashes into the woman with more blatant lust. The woman doesn’t talk, although she may squeal, “More! More!” That exhausts the dialogue, but not the man, not by any stretch of the imagination. For he greedily wants to concentrate his climaxes, adding as many as possible.

Here, in the soft-core porno, everything is reduced to outer appearances. They are not enough for Erika, who’s such a picky, choosy woman. They are not enough, because Erika, absorbed in these ensnarled people, would like to get at the bottom of this business, which is supposed to be so hard on the senses that everyone wants to do it or at least watch it. Entering the inside of the body won’t offer a complete explanation, and it allows a certain measure of skepticism. After all, you can’t slice open a human being just to get every last bit out of him. In a cheap flick, you can get a deeper look into the woman. But you can’t advance as far into the man. However, no one sees the light at the end of the tunnel. Even if you cut the woman open, you’d see only bowels and innards. The man, standing actively in life, grows outward physically. Eventually, he produces the awaited result, or else he doesn’t. But if he does, everyone can
look at it, and the producer is delighted with his valuable native product.

The man must often feel (Erika thinks) that the woman must be hiding something crucial in that chaos of her organs. It is those concealments that induce Erika to look at ever newer, ever deeper, ever more prohibited things. She is always on the lookout for a new and incredible insight. Never has her body—even in her standard pose, legs apart in front of the shaving mirror—revealed its silent secrets, even to its owner! And thus the bodies on the screen conceal everything from the man who would like to peruse the selection of females on the open market, the women he doesn’t know; and from Erika, the unrevealing viewer.

Erika’s student is demeaned and thereby chastised. Loosely crossing her legs, Erika sneers at his half-baked Beethoven interpretation. She need say no more; he’s about to cry.

She doesn’t even consider it advisable to play the passage in question. He will get no more from his piano teacher today. If he doesn’t notice his mistakes himself, then she can’t help him.

Does the former wild beast and present-day circus animal love its tamer? Perhaps, but this is not obligatory. Each urgently needs the other. With the help of tricks and feats, each can hog the limelight amid the oompah-oompah of the band and puff himself up like a bullfrog. Each requires the other as a fixed point in the blinding chaos. The animal has to know where up is and where down is. Otherwise it will suddenly find itself upside down. Without its trainer, the animal would plummet helplessly in free fall or drift around in space, biting up, clawing up, eating up any objects that crossed its path. But if the animal has a trainer, there’s always someone to tell it
whether something is edible. Sometimes the edibles are prechewed for the animal or served in pieces. The animal doesn’t have to endure the hardships of hunting for its own food. Or finding adventures in the jungle. For in the jungle, the leopard knows what’s good for it and grabs the prey, whether it’s an antelope or a careless white hunter. Now, during the day, the animal leads a life of introspection, reflecting about the tricks it has to perform in the evening. It will then leap through burning hoops, clamber onto stools, crackingly enclose a head in its jaws without mangling it, do dance steps to a given beat, alone or with other animals, whose throats it would rip if it encountered them in the wild, unless it had to scurry away from them, if it could. The animal wears foppish disguises on its head or back. Some animals have even been known to sport a leather mantle while riding horses! And the animal’s master, his tamer, cracks his whip! Praising or punishing, it all depends. According to what the animal deserves. But not even the most daring tamer would ever dream of sending a leopard or lioness out with a violin case. A bear on a bike is as far as the human imagination can stretch.

II

T
HE LAST BIT
of daylight crumbles like leftover cake in clumsy fingers. Evening is coming, and there are fewer and fewer students in the daily chain. There are more and more intervals, during which the teacher goes to the bathroom and covertly nibbles on a sandwich, which she then carefully rewraps. In the evening, the adults, who have to work hard all day, come to her in order to practice music. The students who want to be professional musicians, mainly as teachers of the discipline in which they are now students, come during the day because they have nothing else but music. They want to master music as thoroughly and completely as possible in order to get their degrees. They generally listen to their colleagues play and then they sharply criticize them together with Professor Kohut. They are unabashed about correcting other people’s mistakes, of which they themselves are guilty. They listen frequently, but they can neither feel nor emulate. After the last student, the chain runs backward all night, until nine in the morning,
when, filled with fresh candidates, it advances again. The gears click, the pistons bang, the fingers move in and out. Sounds are emitted.

Herr Klemmer has sat through three South Koreans and is now cautiously inching toward his teacher. She mustn’t notice, but suddenly he will be inside her. And just a short time ago, he pursued her at a distance. The Koreans have only a sketchy grasp of German and are therefore supplied with judgments, prejudices, and rebukes in English. Herr Klemmer speaks to Fräulein Kohut in the international language of the heart. The Far Easterners play the accompaniment for him; in their tried-and-true equanimity, they are insensitive to the vibrations between the well-tempered teacher and the student who wants the absolute.