The Piano Teacher: A Novel (20 page)

The Turk, a child of nature, is rooted more solidly here, with the grass, the flowers, and the trees, than with the machine that he normally tends. He breaks off whatever he’s doing. He
breaks with the woman first. The woman doesn’t realize it right away, she keeps yelping for another second or two, even though the Turkish guest has gone into neutral. He now remains motionless, which is fine and dandy. He’s finished—what a coincidence—and he’s resting. He’s tired. He listens to the wind. The woman now listens, too, but only after the Bosporus dweller hisses at her to stop screaming. He bellows a terse question, or is it an order? The woman tries halfheartedly to soothe him; perhaps she wants something more from her love neighbor. The Turk doesn’t understand her. Perhaps he has to hit her for pleading in descant: Stay here. Or something similar that Erika didn’t quite catch. She was distracted, for she fled some thirty feet when the shaking, jerking Turk was still utterly devoted to the woman. Luckily, the woman didn’t notice it, and now the Turk belongs to himself once again. And he’s all man. The woman nags him for money or love. She sobs and cries loudly. The man from the Golden Horn barks at her, then unplugs himself from her and from his wireless communication with her. During her retreat, Erika sounded like a herd of Cape buffaloes at the approach of a lioness. Perhaps her noise was deliberate, or unconsciously deliberate, which boils down to the same thing.

The Turk bounces up and down on his feet and is about to spurt off—but tumbles down; his pants and his white, shimmering shorts blaze around his knees in the darkness. Unleashing a flood of curses, he yanks up his clothes and gesticulates ominously. His hands make an earnest threat to the left and one to the right-—toward the nearby bushes, where Fräulein Kohut is bating her breath, pulling everything in, and biting into one of her ten small piano hammers.

The Turk is sack-hopping now between cloth paths. He misses one path, then the other. He doesn’t take time for basic necessities. The spectator observes all this, and a thought flashes
through her mind: Some people don’t think, they just act, no matter what. The Turk belongs to this group. The frustrated lower portion of the loving couple shrieks at him: It was probably just a dog or a rat that wanted to gorge itself on the condoms. There’s a lot of yummy garbage around here. Her honeybunch should come back to her. He should please not leave her alone. The foreigner’s pretty, curly head pays no attention. It rises to its normal level—he seems to be a relatively large Turk. At last his pants are up. He breaks into the undergrowth. Luckily, perhaps intentionally, he stomps in the wrong direction, toward the denser section of bushes. Erika, not giving it much thought, has chosen a sparser area, where he wouldn’t suspect her of hiding. His woman croons and swoons for him from afar. She’s getting it together again. Stuffing something between her thighs, she vigorously wipes herself. Then she tosses away some crumpled tissues. She curses in a newly devised gruesome scale that seems to be her natural vocal range. She shouts and shouts. Erika shudders. The man bleats terse replies at his woman as he seeks and seeks. He keeps groping along from the same place to the next place, which is once again the same place. Then he stereotypically returns to the first place. Maybe he’s scared and doesn’t really want to find the peeper. For he merely keeps wandering from the one birch to the bushes, and then from the bushes to the one birch. He never goes over to the other bushes. The woman’s voice, rising a fire-engine fourth, shrieks that nobody’s there anyway. Come back, she demands. The man doesn’t want to. He tells her in German to shut her trap. The woman now prophylactically wedges a second heap of tissues between her thighs, just in case anything is still left inside. She hoists up her panties. Then she smoothes her skirt. Focusing on her open blouse, she pulls her coat out from underneath her body. She built herself a little nest, just like a woman.
She didn’t want to soil her skirt, but now her coat is smeared and squashed. The Turk shouts something new: C’mon! The Turk’s girlfriend rebels, insisting on a quick retreat. Now Erika sees her in her full glory. The woman’s no spring chicken, but for a Turk she’s still a downy chick. She cautiously stays in the background, handicapped by all those tissues in her panties. They’re so easily lost! Sexually, she didn’t get her money’s worth, and now she wants to make sure she doesn’t get killed in the bargain. Next time, she’ll make sure she can enjoy herself in peace and quiet until the end. The woman visibly becomes an Austrian, and the Turk turns back into the Turk he always was. The woman commands respect, the Turk automatically watches out for enemies and adversaries.

Erika doesn’t allow a single leaf to whirr or whisper on her body. She remains still and dead, like a rotten branch that has broken off the tree and is uselessly perishing in the grass.

The woman threatens to walk out on the guest worker. The guest worker wants to make a nasty retort, but changes his mind and just keeps searching mutely. He has to put up a bold front to keep the respect of the woman, who has abruptly reawakened into an Austrian. Encouraged by the fact that nothing is stirring, he moves in an ever-widening circle, thereby becoming more ominous for Fräulein Kohut. His woman gives him one last warning and picks her handbag off the ground. She arranges the last things in and of themselves. She buttons, she tucks, she shakes something out. She starts walking back slowly, in the direction of the restaurants, gazing at her Turkish friend one last time, but quickening her step. She howls some unintelligible nastiness by way of farewell.

The Turk shilly-shallies. Once this woman’s gone, he might not find a replacement for weeks on end. The woman shouts: She can find another jerk like him very easily. The Turk stands and jerks his head, once toward the woman, once toward the
invisible bushman. The Turk is unsure of himself, he wavers between one instinct and the other; both instincts have often brought him misery. He barks—a dog who doesn’t know which prey to follow.

Erika Kohut can’t stand it anymore. Her need is stronger. She gingerly lets down her panties and pisses on the ground. A warm stream patters down between her thighs to the meadow ground. It ripples upon the soft mattress of twigs, foliage, refuse, filth, and humus. She still doesn’t know whether she wants to be discovered or not. Rigidly furrowing her brow, she simply lets the stream run out. She grows emptier and emptier on the inside, and the ground soaks up the fluid. She ponders nothing—no cause and no consequence. She relaxes her muscles, and the initial patter turns into a gentle, steady running. She has stretched the image of the upright, motionless foreigner in the micrometer spindles of her pupils, fixing it there while urinating vigorously upon the earth. She is ready for either solution, they’re both fine with her. She leaves it to fate, in the form of chance, whether the Turk is good-natured or not. She carefully holds her plaid skirt together over her bent knees to keep it from getting wet. It’s not the skirt’s fault. The itching finally stops; soon she’ll be able to turn off the faucet.

The Turk still looms statuesque in the meadow. His companion, however, is hurrying away, shrilly yelling across the vast meadow. Now and then she looks back and makes a dirty gesture that’s known worldwide. She thus overcomes a language barrier.

The man is drawn now here, now there. A tame animal between two masters. He can’t tell what the swishing and whispering mean, he didn’t notice any water around here. But there’s one thing he knows for sure: The companion of his senses is slipping away from him.

At this point, Erika Kohut is certain he will manage to take
the two giant steps separating him from her; at this point, Erika Kohut shakes out the last few drops while awaiting a human hammer to thud down upon her from the sky: this mockup of a man, fashioned out of a thick oak board by a skillful carpenter, will crush Erika like an insect. But then he about-faces and, while constantly looking around, walks hesitantly, then more rapidly and resolutely, pursuing the prey he pulled down at the outset of this merry evening. A bird in the hand. After all, you can’t tell whether a bird in the bush will measure up to your demands. The Turk flees from the uncertainty that has so often reared its painful head for him in this country. He dogs the woman’s heels. He has to hurry, for she has dwindled into a distant dot. And soon he too becomes but a flyspeck on the horizon.

She’s gone, he’s gone too, and in the darkness, heaven and earth again hold hands, the hands that loosened for a moment.

Erika Kohut’s one hand has been playing the keyboard of reason, the other the keyboard of passion. First, passion had its say; now, reason has its way, quickly driving Erika home through dark avenues. However, others have reaped the fruits of passion in Erika’s place. The teacher observed them and graded them on her curve. She very nearly became involved in one of these passions, and only barely escaped detection.

Erika dashes along rows of trees that are endangered by many varieties of mistletoe. Many branches have had to bid farewell to their boles, and they bite the dust. Erika scurries away from her observation post in order to settle in her nest. She betrays no outward signs of inner disturbance. But a whirlwind sweeps up in her the instant she sees young men with young bodies strolling along the edge of the Prater, for she is practically old enough to be their mother! Everything that occurred before
this age is irrevocably gone and can never come again. But who knows what lies ahead? Given the lofty achievements of modern medicine, a woman can perform her female functions even when she reaches a ripe old age. Erika pulls up her panties. This isolates her from contact. Even chance contact. But in her bruised interior, the tempest rages over her succulent pastures.

She knows exactly where the taxis are; she gets into the one at the head of the line. Nothing is left of the vast Prater meadows aside from a wee bit of dampness on her shoes and between her legs. A slightly sour odor rises from under her skirt, but the cabby probably doesn’t notice, his deodorant covers everything. He doesn’t want to force his hack sweat on his fares, and he doesn’t have to perceive the grossness of his passengers. The cab is warm and dry; the heater operates silently, struggling against the cool night. Outside, the lights race past: the endless dark chunks of slums in numb, lightless sleep; the bridge across the Danube Canal; small, unfriendly, debt-ridden bars, from which drunks come tumbling, only to jump up and start punching one another; old women in kerchiefs, walking their dogs one last time for the day, hoping that just once they’ll run into a lonely old man, a widower with a dog. Erika flashes by—a rubber mouse on a string, with a gigantic cat playfully leaping after it.

A pack of mopeds. Girls in skin-tight jeans with would-be punk hairdos. However, their hair doesn’t quite manage to stand on end, it keeps falling. Grease alone won’t do the trick. The hair keeps collapsing despondently on the scalp. And the girls hop on behind the moped pilots and zoom away.

A lecture hall releases a crowd of knowledge-seekers, who throng and jostle around the lecturer. They’d like to find out more about the Milky Way even though they’ve heard everything that can be said about it. Erika recalls that she once lectured here on Franz Liszt and his misunderstood work. She
spoke in loosely crocheted air stitches. And two or three times, she lectured in a regular knit-two/purl-two on Beethoven’s early sonatas. She explained that Beethoven’s sonatas, whether late or, as in this case, early, show so much variety that one has to ask oneself the fundamental question of what the much-vilified word “sonata” really means. Perhaps Beethoven applied the word to entities that are not even sonatas in the strict sense of the term. One has to perceive new laws in this highly dramatic musical form. Often in the sonata, feeling eludes form. In Beethoven, that is not the case, for here the two go hand in hand; feeling makes form aware of a hole in the ground and vice versa.

The night is growing brighter: The center of Vienna is approaching. Light is used more generously here, so that tourists can easily find their way home. The opera is over for the night. This generally means that it is already so late that Frau Kohut, senior, will rage and roar in her domestic precinct, where she does not go to bed until her daughter has come home safe and sound. Mother will scream in jealous rage, she will create a dreadful scene. It will take Mother a long time to make up with Erika. The daughter will have to court her with a dozen highly specialized services. Tonight has finally made it clear that Mother gives her all, while the child won’t even give up one second of her leisure! How can Mother fall asleep knowing she’ll wake up the instant her daughter climbs into her half of the double bed? Looking daggers at the clock, Mother stalks through the apartment like a wolf. She pauses in her daughter’s room, which has neither its own bed nor its own key. She opens the closet and angrily throws senselessly purchased clothing through the air, an action contrasting with the delicate materials and recommended handling. Tomorrow morning, before leaving for the conservatory, her daughter will have to put everything away. For Mother, these clothes are evidence
of egotism and obstinacy. And the child’s selfishness is made even more evident by the late hour. It’s already past midnight, and Mother is still all alone. It’s outrageous! After the movie on TV, there’s no one for her to talk to. The movie is followed by a late-night talk show. She doesn’t want to watch because she’d doze off, which she mustn’t do before her child is scrunched up into a shapeless wet blob. Mother wants to stay wide awake. She digs her teeth into an old concert gown, which, in its pleats, still hopes that someday it will belong to an international piano star. They once saved up for it, Mother and crazy Father, pinching and scraping, gritting their teeth. Now, Mother’s nasty teeth bite into the gown. At the time, Erika, that vain hussy, would rather have died than perform in a white blouse and taffeta skirt like the others. Mother and Erika figured it would be a good investment if the pianist looked nice. So much for that. Mother tramples the gown under her slippers, which are as clean as the floor and therefore unable to violate the gown. Besides, her soles are soft. Ultimately, the gown just looks a bit crumpled. So, grabbing some kitchen shears, Mother charges onto the field of dishonor to put the finishing touches on this creation by a squinting tenement seamstress, who hadn’t looked into a fashion journal for at least ten years when she got to work on the gown. Mother doesn’t improve on it. The frock might cut a better figure if Erika had the guts to wear this innovative striped creation with air between the narrow ribbons of material. Mother slashes her own dreams along with the dress. Why make Mother’s dreams come true if Erika can’t even take care of her own dreams? Erika doesn’t dare follow her own dreams through, she always just stupidly gazes up at them. Mother resolutely slashes away at the neckline trimming and the graceful puff sleeves, which Erika rebelled against. Mother then slices away remnants of the gathered skirt on the top. She toils. First she had to scrimp and scrape to pay for the
dress. She pinched pennies from the housekeeping money. And now she has the drudgery of destroying it. The various parts lie before her; they ought to go into a meat grinder, which she doesn’t have. The child still hasn’t come home. Soon the phase of fear will replace the state of fury. It’s hard not to worry. Terrible things can happen to a woman at night, where she doesn’t belong. Mother calls up the police. They know nothing, they haven’t even heard rumors. The police explain to Mother that if anything happened she’d be the first to know. Since no one has heard anything about anyone fitting Erika’s age and height, there is nothing to report. Besides, no body has been unearthed. Nevertheless, Mother rings up one or two hospitals, and they don’t know anything either. They explain that such calls are completely useless, ma’am. But perhaps at this very moment, gory packages containing pieces of her daughter are being dumped into garbage cans all around the city. Mother will then be all alone, destined for an old-age home, where she can never be all alone! On the other hand, no one will sleep with her in a double bed, as is her wont.