The Piano Teacher: A Novel (2 page)

But that vanity of hers, that wretched vanity. Erika’s vanity is a major problem for her mother, driving thorns into her flesh. Erika’s vanity is the only thing Erika should learn to do without. Better now than later. For in old age, which is just around the corner, vanity is a heavy load to bear. And old age is enough of a burden as it is. Oh, that Erika! Were the great musicians vain? They weren’t. The only thing Erika should give up is her vanity. If necessary, Mother can smooth out the rough edges, so there won’t be anything abrasive in Erika’s character.

That’s why Mother tries to twist the new dress out of Erika’s convulsed fingers. But these fingers are too well trained. Let go, Mother snaps, hand it over! You’ve got to be punished for caring so much about trivial things. Life has punished you by ignoring you, and now your mother will punish you in the same way, ignoring you, even though you dress up and paint your face like a clown. Hand it over!

Erika dashes to the closet. Her dark suspicion has been confirmed several times in the past. Today, something else is missing: the dark-gray autumn ensemble. What’s happened?
Whenever Erika realizes something is missing, she instantly knows whom to blame: the only possible culprit. You bitch, you bitch! Erika furiously yells at the superior authority. She grabs her mother’s dark-blond hair with its gray roots. A beautician is expensive. So once a month, Erika colors her mother’s hair with a brush and dye. Now, Erika yanks at the hair that she herself beautified. She pulls it furiously. Her mother weeps. When Erika stops pulling, her hands are filled with tufts of hair. She gazes at them, dumbfounded. Chemicals have already broken the resistance of this hair, which nature did not make all that strong in the first place. Erika doesn’t know what to do with the discolored dark-blond tufts. She goes into the kitchen and throws them into the garbage can.

Mother, with less hair on her head, stands crying in the living room, where her Erika often gives private concerts. She is the very best performer ever to play in the living room, because no one else ever performs here. Mother’s trembling hands still clutch the new dress. If she wants to resell it, she’ll have to hurry. This design, with poppies as big as cabbages, can be worn for only one year—then never again. Mother’s head hurts in the places where hair is now missing.

The daughter comes back, upset, weeping. She curses her mother, calls her a vicious bitch, but hopes Mother will make up with her right away. Kiss and make up. Mother swears that Erika’s hand will drop off because she hit her mother and tore out her hair. Erika sobs louder and louder. She’s sorry. After all, her mama works her fingers to the bone for her. As a rule, Erika instantly regrets anything she does to her, for she loves her, Mama’s known her since infancy. Eventually Erika relents, as expected; she bawls bitterly. Mama is willing, all too willing, to give in; she cannot be truly angry at her daughter. Let me
fix some coffee and well drink it together. During the coffee break, Erika feels even sorrier for her mother, and the final vestiges of her anger vanish in the cake. She examines the bare spots on her mother’s head. But she doesn’t know what to say, just as she didn’t know what to do with the tufts of hair. She sheds a few more tears, for good measure, because Mother is old and won’t live forever; and because Erika’s youth is gone. Or, more generally, because all things pass and few ever return.

Mother now explains why a pretty girl never has to get gussied up. Erika confirms it. She has so many things hanging in her closet. But why bother? She never wears any of them. Her clothes hang there uselessly, decorating the closet. Mother can’t always prevent Erika from buying something, but she can dictate what Erika puts on. Mother is an absolute ruler. She decides what Erika will wear outside the house. You are not going out in that getup, Mother dictates, fearing what will happen if Erika enters strange homes with strange men in them. Erika has resolved never to wear her clothes. It is a mother’s duty to help a child make up her mind and to prevent wrong decisions. By not encouraging injuries, a mother avoids having to close wounds later on. Erika’s mother prefers inflicting injuries herself, then supervising the therapy.

Their conversation becomes more and more vitriolic: Mother and daughter spray acid at students who do better than Erika or threaten to do so. You shouldn’t give them free rein, you don’t need to. You should stop them. But you let them get away with murder! You’re not smart enough, Erika. If a teacher puts her mind to it, none of her students will succeed. No young woman will emerge from her classroom and pursue a career against Erika’s wishes. You didn’t make it—why should others reach the top? And from
your
musical stable to boot?

Erika, still sniveling, takes the poor dress into her arms. Mute and miserable, she hangs it in the closet, among the other
dresses, pantsuits, skirts, coats, and ensembles. She never wears any of them. They are merely supposed to wait here until she comes home in the evening. Then, after laying them out, she drapes them in front of her body and gazes at herself in the mirror. For these clothes belong to her! Mother can take them away and sell them, but she cannot wear them herself, for Mother, alas, is too fat for these narrow sheaths. They do not fit her. These things are all Erika’s. They are hers. Hers. The dress does not yet realize that its career has just been interrupted. It has been put away unused, and it will never be put on. Erika only wants to own it and look at it. Look at it from afar. She doesn’t even want to try it on. It’s enough for her to hold up this poem of cloth and colors and move it gracefully. As if a spring breeze were wafting it. Erika tried the dress on in the boutique, and now she will never slip into it again. Erika has already forgotten the brief, fleeting spell it cast on her in the shop. Now she has one more corpse in her wardrobe, but it is
her
property.

At night, when everyone else is asleep, Erika remains awake and alone, while the other half of this twosome (they are chained together by ties of blood) sleeps like a baby, dreaming up new methods of torture. Sometimes, very seldom, Erika gets up, opens the closet door, and caresses the witnesses to her secret desires. Actually, these desires are not all that secret; they shriek out their prices, they yell: Why did Erika go to all that trouble anyway? The colors shriek along, in a chorus of mixed voices. Where can you wear something like that without being hauled off by the police? (Normally, Erika wears only a skirt and a sweater or, in summer, a blouse.) Sometimes Mother wakes with a start, and she instinctively knows: Erika’s looking at her clothes again. That vain piece of baggage! Mother is certain, for the closet doors do not squeak just to amuse the closet.

Worst of all, these purchases keep the new apartment beyond reach forever, and Erika is always in danger of falling, tumbling, into love. Suddenly they would have a cuckoo egg, a male in their nest. Tomorrow, at breakfast, Erika can expect a severe dressing-down for her frivolity, Why, Mother could have died yesterday from injuries done to her hair, from the shock. Erika will be given a deadline for the next installment on the apartment; she’ll simply have to give more private lessons.

The only item missing from her dismal wardrobe is, fortunately, a wedding gown. Mother does not wish to become a mother-in-law. She prefers remaining a normal mother; she is quite content with her status.

But today is today. Time to sleep! That’s what Mother, in her matrimonial bed, demands. But Erika is still rotating in front of her mirror. Mother’s orders smash into her back like hatchets. Erika quickly touches a fetchingly flowery cocktail dress, barely grazing its hem. These flowers have never breathed fresh air, nor have they ever experienced water. The dress, as Erika assures her mother, comes from a first-class fashion house in the heart of Vienna. Its quality and work manship will make it a joy forever. It fits Erika like a glove (not too much junk food!). The instant she saw the dress, Erika had a vision: I can wear it for years, and it will always be at the height of fashion. It will never sink from that height by even a hair’s breadth. This argument is wasted on her mother. Mama should do some careful soul-searching. Didn’t she wear a similar dress when she was young? But she denies it on principle. Nonetheless, Erika concludes that this purchase makes sense. The dress will never be out of date; Erika will still be able to wear it in twenty years.

Fashions change quickly. The dress remains unworn, although in perfect shape. But no one asks to see it. Its prime is
past, ignored, and it will never come again—or at best in twenty years.

Some students rebel against their piano teacher. But their parents force them to practice art, and so Professor Kohut can likewise use force. Most of the keyboard pounders, however, are well-behaved and interested in the art they are supposedly mastering. They care about it even when it is performed by others, whether at a music society or in a concert hall. The students compare, weigh, measure, count. Many foreigners come to Erika, more and more each year. Vienna, the city of music! Only the things that have proven their worth will continue to do so in this city. Its buttons are bursting from the fat white paunch of culture, which, like any drowned corpse that is not fished from the water, bloats up more and more.

The closet receives the new dress. One more! Mother doesn’t like seeing Erika leave the apartment. Her dress is too flashy, it doesn’t suit the child. Mother says there has to be a limit. Erika doesn’t know what she means. There’s a time and a place for everything, that’s what Mother means.

Mother points out that Erika is not just a face in the crowd: She’s one in a million. Mother never stops making that point. Erika says that she, Erika, is an individualist. She claims she cannot submit to anyone or anything. She has a hard time just fitting in. Someone like Erika comes along only once, and then never again. If something is especially irreplaceable, it is called Erika. If there’s one thing she hates, it’s standardization in any shape, for example a school reform that ignores individual qualities. Erika will not be lumped with other people, no matter how congenial they may be. She would instantly stick out. She is simply who she is. She is herself, and there’s nothing she can do about it. If Mother can’t see bad influences, she can at
least sense them. More than anything, she wants to prevent Erika from being thoroughly reshaped by a man. For Erika is an individual, although full of contradictions. These contradictions force Erika to protest vigorously against any kind of standardization. Erika is a sharply defined individual, a personality. She stands alone against the broad mass of her students, one against all, and she turns the wheel of the ship of art. No thumbnail sketch could do her justice. When a student asks her what her goal is, she says, “Humanity,” thus summing up Beethoven’s
Heiligenstadt Testament
for her pupils—and squeezing in next to the hero of music, on his pedestal.

Erika gets to the heart of artistic and individual considerations: She could never submit to a man after submitting to her mother for so many years. Mother is against Erika’s marrying later on, because “my daughter could never fit in or submit anywhere.” That’s the way she is. She’s no sapling anymore. She’s unyielding. So she shouldn’t marry. If neither spouse can yield, then a marriage is doomed. Just be yourself, Mother tells Erika. After all, Mother made Erika what she is. You still aren’t married, Fräulein Erika? the dairy woman asks, and so does the butcher. You know I can never find a man I like, Erika replies.