The Piano Teacher: A Novel (26 page)

Klemmer showers kisses upon Erika’s hand, which gives him the letter. He says: Thank you, Erika. He wants to devote the entire weekend to this woman. Horrified that Klemmer wishes to break into her closed sacrosanct weekend, she rejects the idea. She improvises an excuse for why it won’t work this weekend or probably next weekend or the one after that. We can always talk on the telephone, the woman lies impudently. Current flows through her in both directions. Klemmer meaningfully crackles the mysterious letter; he announces the thesis that Erika can’t mean it as nastily as she thoughtlessly babbles. The dictate of the hour is: Don’t string the man along.

Erika shouldn’t forget that, given her age, every year of Klemmer’s life is equal to three years of hers. Erika should
jump at the chance, seize the day, Klemmer advises her kindly. Crumpling the letter in one sweaty hand, he hesitantly holds his other hand out, feeling the teacher like a chicken that he might wish to buy. But he has to check whether the price is right, whether it’s commensurate with the age of the hen. Klemmer doesn’t know how to tell whether a soup chicken or a roaster is old or young. But he can see it in his teacher, very precisely. He’s got eyes in his head, he can tell she’s no spring chicken, though she is relatively well preserved. You might almost call her crisp, if it weren’t for that somewhat mellow look in her eyes. And then the never-waning charm of her being his teacher! It inspires him to turn her into a pupil at least once a week. Erika eludes the student. She pulls away from him, and is so embarrassed that she wipes her nose for a long time. Klemmer depicts nature before her eyes. He describes it just as he got to know it and love it. Soon he and Erika will indulge and delight in nature. The two of them will go to where the forest is densest, they will settle down on moss cushions and have a picnic. There no one will see the young athlete and artist (who has already appeared in several competitions) rolling around with a decrepit old woman (who would have to avoid competing with younger women). Klemmer has a hunch that the most exciting aspect of their future relationship will be its secrecy.

Erika has grown mute, her eyes do not gape, her heart does not swell. Klemmer feels it’s time for his thorough retrospective correction of everything his teacher just said about Franz Schubert. He will barge his way into the discussion. Lovingly he rectifies Erika’s image of Schubert, placing it and himself in the best light. He will win more and more debates. That is what he forecasts to his beloved. One reason he loves this woman is her wealth of experience with the overall repertoire of music. But in the long run, her experience cannot hide the
fact that he knows a lot more about everything. This realization gives him supreme pleasure. He raises a finger to underscore his opinion when Erika tries to disagree. He is the insolent victor, and the woman has taken refuge behind the piano to escape his kisses. Words will falter eventually, and feelings win out by sheer persistence and vehemence.

Erika boasts that she knows no feelings. If ever she has to acknowledge a feeling, she will not let it dominate her intelligence. She inserts the second piano between her and Klemmer. He calls his beloved superior cowardly. Someone who loves someone like Klemmer has to appear before the whole world and proclaim it loudly. Of course, Klemmer doesn’t want it to get around the conservatory, because he normally grazes on younger pastures. And love is fun only when you can be envied for having a beloved. In this case, later marriage is out of the question. Luckily Erika has her mother, who won’t allow her to marry. Klemmer drifts along on his own head waters; he is never in over his head. When it comes to water, he’s in his element. He shreds a final opinion that Erika has about Schubert’s sonatas. Erika coughs and, in her embarrassment, she swings back and forth on hinges that Klemmer, limber and nimble, has never noticed on other people. She buckles at the most impossible places; and Klemmer, surprised, feels his gorge rising slightly, but is unable to integrate his nausea into the scope of his feelings. You could say that it fits. But one shouldn’t spread out like that. Erika cracks her knuckles, which is beneficial to neither her playing nor her health. She stubbornly peers into remote corners, although Klemmer orders her to look at him, freely and openly, not tensely and stealthily. After all, no one’s watching.

Encouraged by the dreadful sight, Walter Klemmer investigates: May I ask something unheard-of from you, something you’ve never done? And then he instantly demands this test
of love. For her first step into a new love life, she is to do something incomprehensible, namely come with him and cancel her lesson with her last student this evening. Of course, Erika should, by way of precaution, plead illness or a headache, so the student won’t get suspicious and tell tales out of school. Erika balks at this easy task: she is a wild mustang that has finally managed to smash the stable door with its hooves, but nevertheless remains inside because it has changed its mind. Klemmer tells his beloved how others have shaken off the yoke of contracts and common laws. He cites Wagner’s
Ring
as one of the countless examples. He hands Erika art as an example of everything and nothing. One need only hunt through art—that pitfall lined with scythes and sickles mounted in concrete—and one will find examples enough of anarchistic behavior. Mozart, that examplar of
everything,
who, for example, shakes off the yoke of the prince bishop. If that ubiquitously popular Mozart—whom neither of us particularly appreciates—could do it, then we can manage it too, Erika. How often have we agreed that neither the creator nor the performer can endure rigidity. The artist prefers to avoid the bitter pressures applied by truth or by rules. I’m amazed—please don’t be offended—that you’ve been able to endure having your mother around all these years. Either you’re simply not an artist, or else you do not feel that a yoke is a yoke even when you’re choking in it. Klemmer, now taking a familiar tone with his teacher, is glad her mother is looming up as a buffer, a scapegoat, between them. Her mother will make sure he doesn’t suffocate under this elderly woman!

Mother provides incessant topics of conversation—as a thicket, a hindrance for all kinds of fulfillments. On the other hand, she holds her daughter fast in one place, so her daughter cannot follow Klemmer everywhere. How can we meet regularly for our irregularities, without anyone finding out, Erika?
Klemmer relishes the idea of a secret room for the two of them, furnished with an old record player and records he’s got duplicates of. After all, he knows Erika’s taste in music; it’s duplicated too, because he’s got exactly the same taste in music! He’s got duplicates of a few Chopin LPs and an album of some eccentric pieces by Paderewski, who was overshadowed by Chopin—unjustly, according to Klemmer and to Erika, who gave him the record, which he had already bought for himself.

Klemmer is bursting to read the letter. If you can’t say something out loud, then you ought to write it down. If you can’t stand something, then don’t do it. I am so much looking forward to reading and understanding your letter of 4/24, dear Erika. And if I deliberately misunderstand your letter—something I am also looking forward to—then we’ll kiss and make up again after the fight. Klemmer promptly starts talking about himself, about himself, and about himself. She’s written him this long letter, so he’s got the right to let it all hang out. He’ll have to spend some time reading the letter, and he can already use that time now, for talking, so Erika won’t get the upper hand in their relationship. Klemmer explains to Erika that two extremes are struggling within him: sports (competitively) and art (regularly).

As the student’s hands move toward the letter, Erika orders him not to touch it. Klemmer, clamp yourself down to researching Schubert, Erika puns, taking Klemmer’s precious name in vain.

Klemmer rears up. For a whole second, he toys with the idea of yelling out the secret about him and his teacher, shouting it out in the face of the world. It happened in a toilet! But since the deed did not work out to his greater glory, he holds his tongue. Later on, he can twist the facts, informing posterity that he won the fight. Klemmer suspects that if he were forced to choose between the woman, art, and sports, he would not
choose art or sports. He still conceals these foolish things from the woman. He now senses what it means to introduce the uncertainty factor of someone else’s self into his own intricate game. After all, sports involve certain risks too; for example, your form can vary considerably on any given day. This woman is so old, and yet she still doesn’t know what she wants. I’m so young, but I always know what I like.

The letter is scrunched up in Klemmer’s shirt pocket. Klemmer’s fingers twitch. He can’t stand it anymore, and so he, fickle hedonist that he is, decides to read the letter in peace, in some peaceful spot out in the country. And he’ll take notes right away. For an answer that might be longer than the letter. Maybe in the castle garden? He’ll seat himself in the Palm House Café and order a cappuccino and an apple strudel. The two diverging elements, art and Erika, will increase the charm of the letter ad infinitum. Between them, Klemmer, the referee, who always rings the gong to indicate who’s won the round: Nature outside or Erika inside him. Klemmer blows hot, then cold.

No sooner has Klemmer disappeared from the piano classroom, no sooner has the next pupil, a girl, begun the bumpy contrary motion of her scale, than the teacher tells her we’ll have to stop for today, alas, because I’ve got an awful headache. The pupil soars aloft like a lark and flies away.

Erika squirms because of her unrequited and disquieting fears and anxieties. She is now suspended from the infusion tube of Klemmer’s good graces. Can he really climb over high fences and wade through raging torrents? Is he prepared to risk anything for his love? Erika doesn’t know whether she can rely on Klemmer’s constant protests that he has never shied away from any risk—the bigger, the better. This is the first time in all these years that Erika has dismissed a pupil untaught. Mother always warns Erika about precipitous paths. If Mother is not
beckoning with the ladder of success, which goes upward, then she depicts the horror of the primrose path, which leads downward. Better the peak of art than the slough of sex. Contrary to the popular notion of his wantonness, the artist, Mother believes, must forget about sex. If he can’t, then he’s a mere mortal; but he shouldn’t be a mere mortal. He should be divine! Unfortunately, biographies of artists, which are the most important things about artists, teem all too often with the sexual ruses and abuses of their protagonists. They inveigle the reader into thinking that the cucumber bed of pure harmony grows upon the compost heap of sex.

Whenever they fight, Mother reproaches the child for having once stumbled artistically. But once doesn’t count—you’ll see.

Erika dashes home from the conservatory.

Rot between her legs, an unfeeling soft mass. Decay, putrescent lumps of organic material. No spring breezes awaken anything. It is a dull pile of petty wishes and mediocre desires, afraid of coming true. Her two chosen mates will encompass her like crab claws: Mother and Klemmer. Erika can’t have both, and she can’t have just one, because then she would miss the other dreadfully. She can tell her mother not to let Klemmer in if the doorbell rings. Mother will be delighted to comply. Is this why Erika has always led such a quiet life—for this wretched disquiet? Let’s hope he doesn’t come tonight. He can come tomorrow, but not tonight, because Erika wants to catch an old Lubitsch film. Mother and daughter have been looking forward to it since last Friday when the TV schedule came out. The program listings are awaited more longingly by the Kohut family than True Love, which is not supposed to show up at all!

Erika took a step by writing a letter. Mother had no say in the matter; indeed, Mother mustn’t even find out about this step forward, toward the feeding trough of the forbidden. Erika
has always confessed every infringement to that maternal eye, the eye of the law, which then claimed it knew about each one anyway.

Striding along, Erika hates that porous, rancid fruit that marks the bottom of her abdomen. Only art promises endless sweetness. Soon the decay will progress, encroaching upon larger parts of her body. Then she will die in torment. Dismayed, Erika pictures herself as a numb hole, six feet of space, disintegrating in the earth. The hole that she despised and neglected has now taken full possession of her. She is nothing. And there is nothing left for her.

Erika doesn’t realize that Walter Klemmer is dashing along behind her. He pulled himself together after an initial, powerful urge. He decided not to open the letter for now; he wants to have a serious talk with a warm, live Erika before he reads her lifeless letter. This living woman is dearer to him than a dead scrap of paper for which trees had to die. I can read the letter later on, at home, in peace and quiet, Klemmer thinks, preferring to keep his eye on the ball. The ball rolls, hops, jumps along, stopping at traffic lights, leaving reflections in store windows. This woman is not going to tell him when to read letters and when to make a personal advance. The woman isn’t used to the role of quarry, she doesn’t look around. Yet she’s got to be taught that she is the prey and man the hunter. Start teaching her right now, there’s no time like the present. It never occurs to Erika that her superior willpower might someday not dictate everything, even though she is constantly dictated to by her mother. However, this situation has become so much a part of Erika that she no longer notices. Trust is fine, but control is better.

A delightful home beckons with its entrance. Warm light beams embrace the teacher. Erika surfaces as a swift dot of light on Mother’s radar screen. She flutters along—a butterfly, an
insect, on the pin of the stronger creature. Erika will not want to find out how Klemmer reacted to her letter, for she will not pick up her receiver. She will immediately tell her mother to tell the man that she is not home. Erika actually believes she can tell Mother something that Mother has not already told Erika. Mother wishes Erika good luck for taking the step of closing herself off on the outside and confiding only in her. Mother lies obsessively, with an internal fire that belies her age: My daughter is not at home. I do not know when she will return. Do come again. Thank you. At such moments, the daughter belongs to her more completely than ever. To Mother and no one else. For everyone else, the child is absent.