The Piano Teacher: A Novel (23 page)

Erika orders Klemmer not to look at her like that. But Klemmer is as open as ever about his desires. The two of them are wrapped up like twin pupae in a cocoon. Their hulls, delicate as cobwebs, are made of ambition, ambition, ambition, and ambition, resting weightless, fragile, on the two skeletons of their bodily wishes and dreams. It is these wishes that make each person real to the other. It is the wish to penetrate thoroughly and be penetrated thoroughly that makes them Klemmer-person and Kohut-person. Two pieces of meat in the well-cooled window of a tenement butcher, the rosiness of the cut surface turned toward the public. After long deliberation, the housewife asks for a pound of this and then two pounds of that. The two pieces are wrapped in parchment that is impermeable to fat. The customer places them unhygienically in a shopping bag lined with plastic that is never cleaned. And the two chunks of meat, the fillet and the pork cutlet, snuggle together, one dark red, the other pale pink.

In me you see the barrier on which your will shall break, for you will never get across me, Herr Klemmer! And Klemmer contradicts her sharply, setting his own limits and standards.

Meanwhile, a chaos of trampling feet and grabbing hands has broken out in the locker room. Voices yammer that they can’t find this or that, which they left here or there. Others squawk that someone owes them money. A violin case crashes
crackingly under the foot of a young man, who didn’t buy the case; otherwise he’d be more careful with it, as his parents have pleaded. Two American girls twitter in falsetto about an overall musical impression that was impeded by something, they can’t put their finger on it, maybe it was the acoustics. But they did hear some interference.

Then a shriek slices the air in half, and a slashed, bloody hand is pulled out of a coat pocket. The blood drips on the new coat. It leaves deep stains. The girl to whom the hand belongs screams in terror and blubbers in pain, after a moment of shock in which she feels nothing. The flutist’s shredded tool, which will have to be sewn up, the hand that presses and releases keys, has shards and shivers stuck in it. The adolescent gapes aghast at her dripping hand. Mascara and eye shadow, in carefully nuanced harmony, are already running down her cheeks. The public is dumbstruck, then it cataracts toward the center with double strength, like iron filings when a magnetic field is switched on. Clinging to the victim doesn’t help them much. It doesn’t make them perpetrators, they do not enter a mysterious relationship with the victim. They are sent packing. Herr Nemeth picks up the baton of authority and demands a physician. Three model students rush off to the telephone. The others remain spectators, unaware that this incident was brought about by certain yearnings that were manifested so disagreeably. They just can’t understand who could
do
such a thing. They would never be capable of something so awful.

A helpful group concentrates into a hard core that will soon spit itself out. No one moves away, everyone wants to have a close look.

The victim has to sit down, she feels sick. Maybe that’ll put an end to her awful flutiness.

Erika pretends that she’s feeling sick from being so close to blood.

Something happens that’s humanly possible only after an injury. A few people telephone because others are telephoning too. Lots of people yell at everyone else to pipe down, few people actually do pipe down. They jostle into one another’s lines of vision. They accuse completely innocent people. They act contrary to calls for order. They prove utterly indifferent to renewed entreaties to keep quiet, keep back, keep away from this terrible incident. Two or three students are already opposing the most primitive rules of decency. From, various corners, to which the better-bred and the indifferent have retreated, one hears questions about who the culprit might be. Someone speculates that the girl inflicted the injury upon herself in order to attract attention. A second one vehemently protests and circulates the rumor that the deed was done by a jealous boyfriend. A third party says that the motive
was
probably jealousy, but a jealous girl’s.

An unfairly accused boy blows up. An unfairly accused girl begins to blubber. A group of students resist measures dictated by reason. Someone emphatically rebuffs a rebuke, the way he sees politicians do it on TV. Herr Nemeth asks for quiet, which is soon disrupted by an ambulance siren.

Erika Kohut observes everything carefully and then leaves. Walter Klemmer observes Erika Kohut like a freshly hatched chick that recognizes its food source; he then almost dogs her heels as she leaves.

The steps of the staircase, hollowed by angry footfalls of children, bounce away under Erika’s sneakers, vanishing underfoot. Erika gyrates aloft. Meanwhile, makeshift councils have formed in the gym, conjecturing and speculating. And recommending. They focus on possible hiding areas and form chains to beat through these fields with noisemakers. This tangle
of people will not dissolve all that soon. Eventually it
will
disintegrate, bit by bit, because the young musicians have to get home. But now they throng around the misfortune, which, fortunately, has not struck them. Still, one or two people believe they’ll be next. Erika hurries up the stairs. Everyone who sees her flee thinks she feels sick—her musical universe knows no injuries. But, she has only been seized with her old familiar urge to pass water at the untimeliest moments. She feels a downward tug between her legs; that’s why she has to run upward. She looks for a toilet on the top floor, because no one would surprise the teacher there during a banal physical chore.

She yanks open a door at random; she doesn’t know her way around. But she’s had experience with toilet doors, since she is often forced to track them down in impossible places. In unfamiliar buildings or offices. The door looks so worn that its very appearance pleads its case. This must be the door to one of the facilities in this school. Its case is backed by the stench of children’s urine.

The faculty toilets can be unlocked only with special keys; these facilities have exquisite hygienic gadgets plus special state-of-the-art equipment. Erika has the unmusical feeling that she is about to burst. All she wants to do is pour herself out in a long, hot stream. This urge often overcomes her at the more awkward moment of a concert, when the pianist is playing pianissimo as well as working the soft pedal.

Erika fulminates inaudibly against that wretched habit of many pianists who are of the opinion—an opinion they advocate publicly—that the soft pedal is to be employed only for pianissimo passages. Yet Beethoven’s personal instructions speak loud and clear in favor of the soft pedal. Thus, Erika’s logic chats with her expertise, both of which hobnob with Beethoven. Erika secretly regrets that she could not fully savor her crime against the unsuspecting student.

She is now in the front room of the latrine and can only feel astonishment at the rich imagination of a school architect or interior decorator. To the right, a dwarf door leads to the boys’ pissoir. The stench is pestilential. An easily accessible enamel gutter runs along the floor next to the oily wall. The drain contains a neat arrangement of waste pipes, some of them clogged. Here the little men hiss out their yellow streams into the toilets or else paint patterns on the wall. Their handwriting is on the wall.

Things that do not belong here are also stuck in the gutter: scraps of paper, banana peels, orange rinds, even a notebook. Erika pulls open the window and notices an artistic frieze on the facing wall, somewhat off to the side. The exterior decoration, from Erika’s bird’s-eye view, shows something like a seated naked man and a seated naked woman. The woman’s arm is around a small dressed girl, who is doing some kind of work with her hands. The man is peering up with obvious goodwill at a dressed son, who is vigilantly holding an open compass and seems to be solving scientific problems. Erika recognizes a stony admonition of Social Democratic educational policies in the frieze, and she makes sure not to lean too far out the window, so she won’t fall. Erika prefers closing the window, even though the stench has been only spurred on by the opening. Erika cannot waste her time looking at art, she must forge ahead.

The little schoolgirls relieve themselves behind a false front, something like a stage set. The set depicts, not very convincingly, something like a row of stalls. As at a beach. Countless holes of the most diverse shapes and sizes are bored into the wooden partitions. Erika wonders what they were bored with. These walls are brutally sawed off at the level of the teacher’s shoulders. Her head looms out. An elementary-school pupil can just conceal herself behind this screen, but not a full-grown
faculty member. The pupils have to peek through the holes to gain a side view of the toilet bowl and the user. If Erika stands up behind the wall, her head towers over it like a giraffe munching away at a high branch. One reason for these partitions may be that an adult can always check what the child is taking such a long time to do behind the door or whether she has locked herself in.

Erika hurriedly settles on the grimy bowl after pushing up the concomitant seat. Others before her have had the same flash of wisdom, so the bowl is probably covered with bacilli. Something is floating in the bowl, but Erika hasn’t looked, she’s in too much of a hurry. In her state, she’d even squat over a snakepit. But there has to be a closable door! If she can’t bolt herself in, then she can’t drop anything at any price. The bolt functions, releasing a sluice in Erika. Erika, heaving a sigh of relief, pushes the small lever so that a red segment on the other side indicates: Occupied.

Someone opens a door and comes in. He is not intimidated by these surroundings. The approaching footsteps are unmistakably masculine, and, as it turns out, they belong to Walter Klemmer, who dashed after Erika a few minutes ago. Klemmer gropes along from one loathsomeness to the next, which is unavoidable if he wants to track down his beloved. She’s been rejecting him for months, even though she must know what a Casanova Klemmer is. He wishes she would finally free herself of her inhibitions. She ought to discard her teacher personality and turn herself into an object that she can then offer to him. He’ll take care of everything. Klemmer is now a concordat made up of bureaucracy and lust. A lust that knows no limits, or if it does know them, does not respect them. Such is Klemmer’s assignment for his teacher. Walter Klemmer shakes off a hull named inhibition, a hull named timidity, and a hull named restraint. Erika can flee no farther; behind her there is nothing
but massive brickwork. He’ll make her forget everything but him; she’ll be seeing stars. He’ll throw away the instruction brochure; no one else will be able to utilize Erika in this way. The time has come: So much for Erika’s vagueness and dimness. She will no longer be hedged in like Sleeping Beauty. She should be a free person, presenting herself to Klemmer, who is fully informed about her secret desires.

That is why Klemmer now asks: “Erika, are you there?” There is no answer, only a diminishing splash resounds from a stall, an increasingly decreasing noise. A half-suppressed throat-clearing. It indicates the direction. No answer is offered Klemmer—which could be interpreted as scorn. He was able to identify precisely whose throat was cleared. You’re not going to repeat that answer to a man, says Klemmer, talking into a forest of stalls. Erika is a teacher, but also a child. Klemmer may be a student, but he is the adult here. He has realized that he, not the teacher, is setting the standard. Klemmer applies this newly acquired qualification by looking for something to climb up on. Quick-witted, he finds a dirty tin pail on which a rag is drying. Klemmer shakes off the rag, transports the pail to the stall in question, turns the pail upside down, gets up on it, and reaches across the partition, behind which the final drops have dripped. Only a deathly hush emerges. The woman behind the partition puts down her skirt, so Klemmer won’t see her at a disadvantage. Klemmer’s upper portion appears over the door and leans forward defiantly. Erika’s face is beet-red. She is silent. From up there, Klemmer, a long-stemmed flower capable of doing anything, unbolts the door. Klemmer pulls the teacher out because he loves her, and she is probably in fullest agreement. She will grant him the concession immediately. These two lead performers intend to put on a love scene, completely private, no extras, no walk-ons, only one lead under the leaden heaviness of the other lead.

In accordance with the occasion, Erika instantly gives herself up as a person. A present wrapped in slightly dusty tissue paper, on a white tablecloth. As long as the guest is present, his present is lovingly turned and twisted; but as soon as he leaves, the present is shoved aside, heedlessly and confusedly, and everyone hurries to supper. The present cannot go away by itself, but for a while it is comforted by the fact that it is not alone. Plates and cups clatter, silverware scrapes on porcelain. But then the package notices that these noises are produced by a cassette player on the table. Applause and the clinking of glasses—everything on tape! Someone comes and takes the package. Erika can relax in this new security: She is being taken care of. She waits for instructions or orders. She has been studying for years—not toward her concert, but toward this day.