The Piano Teacher: A Novel (25 page)

Klemmer seems to have left the building.

Erika Kohut slowly walks down the stairs to the main floor.

During Walter Klemmer’s lesson, Erika Kohut, who no longer understands herself because a certain feeling is starting to control her, senselessly loses her temper. No sooner had she touched him than the student obviously became negligent about practicing. Now Klemmer is making mistakes on the keyboard, he falters, with his nonbeloved in back of him. He doesn’t even know what key he’s in! He modulates senselessly in the air. He keeps getting farther and farther away from A major, where he belongs. Erika Kohut feels an ominous avalanche of jagged refuse rolling toward her. For Klemmer, this refuse is delightful—the beloved weight of the woman, bearing down upon him. His musical desires, which do not keep pace with his abilities, are diverted. Erika, scarcely moving her lips, warns him that he is sinning against Schubert. To remedy this grievance and to rouse the woman’s enthusiasm, Klemmer thinks about the mountains and valleys of Austria, about the charms galore that this country allegedly possesses. Schubert, that homebody, sensed it even if he didn’t investigate it. Klemmer then recommences the great A major sonata by the Biedermeier bourgeois who was head and shoulders above his time. Klemmer plays the piece in the spirit—or rather spirited unspir-itualness—of a German dance by the same master. He soon breaks off because his teacher derides him: He’s probably never seen a very steep cliff, a very deep chasm, a raging creek smashing through a gulch, or Neusiedler Lake in all its majesty. Such violent contrasts are expressed by Schubert, especially in this unique sonata, and not some dreary province in the mild afternoon light of five-o’clock tea, which is more akin to Smetana’s Moldau landscape. And it’s not for her, Erika Kohut, the conqueror
of musical obstacles. It’s for the audience listening to Sunday-morning concerts on the Austrian Radio Network.

Klemmer blusters: If anyone knows what a raging creek is like, then it’s Walter Klemmer, whereas his teacher always huddles in dark rooms, next to her mother’s old age, and her mother does nothing but peer into the distance through a TV screen. Her mother doesn’t care whether she’s above the ground or six feet under. Erika Kohut remembers Schubert’s expression marks, and she is stirred up. Her water seethes and rages. These marks range from screams and whispers, not from loud speech to soft speech! Anarchy is not your forte, Klemmer. The athlete is too strongly rooted in convention.

Walter Klemmer wishes he could kiss her on the throat. He’s never done it, but he’s often heard about it. Erika wishes the student would kiss her on the throat, but she doesn’t give him the cue. She feels surrender rising inside her; and in her mind, surrender collides with old and new hatred, especially of women who have lived less life than she and are therefore younger. Erika’s surrender does not resemble her surrender to her mother in any way. Her hatred resembles her usual normal hatred in every way.

In order to cloak these feelings, the woman hectically contradicts everything she has always publicly advocated about music. She says: In the interpretation of any piece of music, there is a certain point at which precision ends and the imprecision of personal creativity begins. The interpreter no longer serves, he demands! He demands the ultimate from the composer. Perhaps it is not too late for Erika to get a new lease on life. It can’t hurt to advocate new theses. Erika says with subtle irony that Klemmer has now reached a level of ability, a level on which he would have the right to place his heart and soul next to his ability. The woman instantly slaps the student’s face by saying she has no right to tacitly assume he has any
ability. She was mistaken, she adds, although as a teacher she should have known better. Klemmer should go paddle his own canoe, but he should steer clear of Schubert’s spirit if he encounters it in the forest. Hideous Schubert. The student is reviled as handsome and young, while Erika adds yet another disk on each side of her hate-loaded dumbbell. She arduously manages to heave the dumbbell up to her chest. Trapped as you are in your flashy mediocrity of good looks, you don’t recognize an abyss even when you tumble into it, says Erika to Klemmer. You never take a risk! You step across puddles so you won’t get your shoes wet. When you turn upside down while canoeing—I do understand this much—you instantly turn yourself right side up. You’re even scared of the water, that unique submission, in which your head’s been dunked! It’s so obvious you’d rather dabble in the shallows. You scoot around crags gingerly—gingerly for you!—before you really notice them.

Erika shrilly struggles for breath. Klemmer wrings his hands in order to prevent his beloved—who is not yet his beloved—from taking this path. Do not block the way to me forever, he tells her for her own good. And he seems strangely fortified, emerging from the athletic struggle as if from a war between the sexes. An aging woman writhes and wriggles on the ground, the foam of fury on her chin. This woman can peer into music the way one peers into the wrong side of a telescope, making music look very distant and very tiny. You can’t slam on her brakes when she feels she has to say something that is inspired by this music. Then she talks a blue streak. Erika feels eaten up by the injustice: Nobody loved that fat little boozer Franz Schubert. When she looks at Klemmer, she very keenly feels that incompatibility: between Schubert and women. A dark chapter in the porno mag of art. Schubert did not live up to the popular image of the genius, either as a creator or as a
virtuoso. Klemmer is a crowd-pleaser. The crowd creates images and is not satisfied until it encounters its images in the wild. Schubert didn’t even own a piano—how well off you are by contrast, Herr Klemmer! How unfair that Klemmer lives but doesn’t practice enough, while Schubert is dead. Erika Kohut insults a man from whom she nevertheless desires love. She unwisely thrashes away at him, nasty words booming under the membrane of her palate, on the hide of her tongue. At night, her face swells shut while Mother snores next to her, not suspecting a thing. In the morning, Erika peers into a mirror, but can’t see her eyes because of the fall of the folds. She gapes and gawks at her reflection, but the image doesn’t improve. Man and woman once again face each other, paralyzed in a struggle.

In Erika’s briefcase, a letter to the student rustles among the music scores. She will hand him the letter after scornfully telling him the score. Her angry nausea is still rising up the column of her body in regular cramps. Klemmer disgorges a freshly stuffed thought-sausage through his teeth: Schubert may have been highly talented, since he managed to get on without a teacher comparable to a Leopold Mozart, but Schubert was definitely no genius. Klemmer hands his teacher the thought-sausage on a paper plate, with a dab of mustard. A man who dies that early can’t be a genius! I’ll never see twenty again, and I still know so little, I keep realizing it again every single day, says Klemmer. So how much could Franz Schubert have known at the age of thirty! That enigmatic, enticing little schoolmaster’s child from Vienna! Women killed him with syphilis.

Women will drive you to the grave, the young man moodily jokes, scherzando; then he talks a little about the moodiness of the female. Women waver in one direction, then another, and you can’t glimpse any pattern in their wavering. Erika tells
Klemmer he doesn’t have the foggiest inkling of tragedy. She tells him he’s a good-looking young man. His teacher tosses him a thighbone, and he crunches it with his healthy teeth. She has told him he doesn’t have a clue about the way Schubert places accents. Beware of mannerisms: That is Erika Kohut’s opinion. The student goes with the flow at a brisk pace.

It’s not always appropriate to be so generous with instrumental signals—say, brasses—in Schubert’s piano works. However, before you, Klemmer, learn it all by heart, you ought to beware of wrong notes and too much pedaling. As well as too little! Don’t hold every note as long as the score tells you to; on the other hand, not every note is marked the way it ought to sound.

For a bonus, Erika shows him a special exercise for the left hand, which he needs. She wants to calm her own nerves. She wants her own left hand to atone for what the man forces her to suffer. Klemmer does not wish to calm his passions by way of piano technique; he seeks the struggle of bodies and pain, a struggle that does not stop with Erika Kohut. Klemmer is convinced that ultimately his art will profit, once he has endured the struggle, icy and victorious. When they go their separate ways after the final bell, the distribution of points will be as follows: He’ll have more, Erika less. And he’s already looking forward to it. Erika will be one year older, he will be one year ahead of everyone else in his development. Klemmer digs his claws into the topic of Schubert. He bickers: His teacher has suddenly and confusingly spun around 180 degrees. She is expressing as her own opinion something that he has always advocated. Namely, that the imponderable, the unnamable, the ineffable, the unplayable, the unassailable, the incomprehensible are more important than any tangibles: technique, technique, and more technique. Have I caught you napping, Frau Professor?

Erika feels boiling hot because he has spoken of the incomprehensible, by which he can only mean his love for her. She feels bright, warm, luminous. The sun of amorous passion, which she has not, unfortunately, felt all the while, is now shining again. He stills feels for her, the very same feeling he felt yesterday and the day before yesterday! Obviously Klemmer loves and respects her ineffably, as he tenderly told her. Erika lowers her eyes for a split second and murmurs meaningfully that she only meant that Schubert likes to express orchestral effects purely on the keyboard. One must be able to recognize and play these effects and the instruments they symbolize. But as she said before, without mannerisms. Erika offers friendly female solace: Don’t worry, you’ll get it!

Teacher and student face each other, woman and man. Between them: heat, an insurmountable wall. The wall prevents them from climbing across and sucking out the other’s blood. Teacher and student are seething with love and a comprehensible desire for more love.

Meanwhile, under their feet, they can feel the seething gruel of culture, which never finishes cooking; they assimilate it in small bites, their daily diet, without which they could not exist. The gruel throws off iridescent gas bubbles.

Erika Kohut is in the dreary, callous skin of her years. No one can or wants to remove it. This skin cannot be worn out. So many things have been missed out on, especially Erika’s youth, including the eighteenth year of her life, which Aus-trians call “sweet eighteen,” It lasts for only one year, and then it’s gone. Now others are enjoying this famous eighteenth year in lieu of Erika. Today, Erika is more than twice as old as an eighteen-year-old girl! Erika keeps checking the figure, but the gap between her and the eighteen-year-old will never lessen—although, granted, it will never widen either. The repugnance that Erika feels toward any girl of that age increases
the gap unnecessarily. At night, Erika sweatily turns on the spit of anger over the blazing fire: maternal love. She is regularly basted with the pungent gravy of musical art. Nothing alters this immovable difference: old/young. Nor can anything be altered in the notation of music by dead masters. What you see is what you get. Erika has been harnessed in this notation system since earliest childhood. Those five lines have been controlling her ever since she first began to think. She musn’t think of anything but those five black lines. This grid system, together with her mother, has hamstrung her in an untearable net of directions, directives, precise commandments, like a rosy ham on a butcher’s hook. This provides security, and security creates fear of uncertainty. Erika is afraid that everything will remain as it is, and she is afraid that someday something could change. She struggles for air, experiencing something like an asthma attack—then she doesn’t know what to do with all this air. Her throat rattles, she can’t drive a peep out of it. Klemmer is terrified down to the very foundations of his indestructible health. He asks what’s wrong with his beloved. Should I get you a glass of water? he asks carefully. He is so amorously attentive—this representative of the firm of Knight Errant & Co. The teacher coughs convulsively. She coughs herself free from something far worse than a tickle in her throat. She cannot express her feelings vocally, only pianistically.

Reaching into her briefcase, Erika produces a letter that is hermetically sealed for safety’s sake. She hands it to Klemmer, just as she has pictured it at home a thousand times. The letter indicates the progress a certain kind of love should take. Erika has written down everything she does not wish to say out loud. Klemmer thinks that this is something ineffably wonderful that can only be written down, and he shines bright like the moon on mountain peaks. How terribly he missed this sort of thing! Today, he, Klemmer, by dint of steady labor on his feelings
and their expressive potential, is finally in the fortunate position of being able to say aloud anything at any time! Indeed, he has learned that he makes a fine, fresh impression on everyone when he pushes ahead in order to be the first to say something out loud. Don’t be shy, it won’t help. As far as he’s concerned, he would, if necessary, shout out his love. Luckily, it is not necessary, because no one is supposed to hear it. Klemmer leans back in his movie seat, munching his popcorn and delighting in his image on the screen, where, larger than life, the delicate theme of a young man and an aging woman is being played out. Also starring a ridiculous old mother, who wants all of Europe, England, and America to be fascinated by the sweet sounds that her child has been producing for so many years. The mother expressly wants her child to stay tied to the maternal apron strings rather than to stew in the juice of sensual love and passion. Feelings cook faster in a pressure cooker, and more of the vitamins are preserved. That good advice is Klemmer’s response to the mother. Within six months at the latest, he will have greedily guzzled Erika up and can then turn to the next delight.