The Piano Teacher: A Novel (8 page)

The clients take along their worries, but leave their precious semen. Cleaning women make sure the seeds don’t sprout—even though each customer, if asked, would assure you how
fertile he is. Usually, all the booths are occupied. This business is a treasure trove, a gold mine. The foreign workers patiently line up in little groups. They kill time by cracking jokes about women. The small space of the booth is directly proportional to the small space of their living quarters, which are sometimes only quarters of a room. They are used to cramped rooms, and they can even find privacy here between partitions. Only one man to a booth. Here, he is all alone with himself. The beautiful woman appears in the peephole as soon as he inserts his coin. The two one-room apartments with individual service for more demanding gentlemen are almost always empty. Few clients here are in a position to make special requests.

Erika, thoroughly a professor, enters the premises.

A hand hesitantly reaches out for her, but then shoots back. She does not walk into the employee section, she steps into the section for paying guests—the more important section. This woman wants to look at something that she could see far more cheaply in her mirror at home. The men voice their amazement: They have to pinch every penny they secretly spend here hunting women. The hunters peer through the peepholes, and their housekeeping money goes down the drain. Nothing can elude these men when they peer.

All Erika wants to do is watch. Here, in this booth, she becomes nothing. Nothing fits into Erika, but she, she fits exactly into this cell. Erika is a compact tool in human form. Nature seems to have left no apertures in her. Erika feels solid wood in the place where the carpenter made a hole in any genuine female. Erika’s wood is spongy, decaying, lonesome wood in the timber forest, and the rot is spreading. Still, Erika struts around like a queen. Inside, she is decaying, but she glares discouragingly at the Turks. The Turks would like to arouse her to life, but they bounce off her haughtiness. Erika, every inch a queen, strides into the Venus grotto. The Turks
utter no cordialities, and also no uncordialities. They simply let Erika go in with her briefcase full of scores. She can even pass to the head of the line, and no one protests. She’s also wearing gloves. The man at the entrance bravely addresses her as “Ma’am.” Please come in, he says, welcoming her into his parlor, where the small lamps glow tranquilly over boobs and cunts, chiseling out bushy triangles, for that’s the first thing a man looks at, it’s the law. A man looks at nothing, he looks at pure lack. After looking at this nothing, he looks at everything else.

Erika is personally assigned a deluxe booth. She doesn’t have to wait, she’s a lady. The others have to wait longer. She holds her money ready the way her left hand clutches a violin. In the daytime, she sometimes calculates how much peeping she can do for her saved coins. She saves them by eating less at her coffee breaks. Now, a blue spotlight sweeps across flesh. Even the colors are handpicked. Erika lifts up a tissue from the floor; it is encrusted with sperm. She holds it to her nose. She deeply inhales the aroma, the fruits of someone else’s hard labor. She breathes and looks, using up a wee bit of her life. There are clubs where you can shoot pictures. Each client selects his model himself, according to his mood and taste. But Erika doesn’t want to act, she only wants to look. She simply wants to sit there and look. Look hard. Erika, watching but not touching. Erika feels nothing, and has no chance to caress herself. Her mother sleeps next to her and guards Erika’s hands. These hands are supposed to practice, not scoot under the blanket like ants and scurry over to the jam jar. Even when Erika cuts or pricks herself, she feels almost nothing. But when it comes to her eyes, she has reached an acme of sensitivity.

The booth smells of disinfectant. The cleaning women
are
women, but they don’t look like women. They heedlessly dump the splashed sperm of these hunters into a filthy garbage can.
And now concrete-hard squooshed tissue is lying there again. As far as Erika is concerned, the cleaning women can take a break and relax their harried bones. They have to bend an infinite number of times. Erika simply sits and peers. She doesn’t even remove her gloves, so she won’t have to touch anything in this smelly cell. Perhaps she keeps her gloves on so no one can see her handcuffs. Curtain up for Erika, she can be seen in the wings, pulling the wires. The whole show is put on purely for her benefit! No deformed woman is ever hired here. Good looks and a good figure are the basic requirements. Each applicant has to undergo a thorough physical investigation: No proprietor buys a pig without poking her. Erika never made it on the concert stage, and so other women make it in her stead. They are evaluated according to the size of their female curves. Erika keeps watching. A single sidelong glance—and a couple of coins have gone the way of all flesh.

A black-haired woman assumes a creative pose so the onlooker can look into her. She rotates on a sort of potter’s wheel. But who is spinning it? First she squeezes her thighs together, you see nothing; but mouths fill with the heavy water of anticipation. Then she slowly spreads her legs as she moves past several peepholes. Sometimes, despite all efforts at equal time, one window sees more than the other because the wheel keeps rotating. The peep slits click nervously. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Venture once more, and maybe you’ll gain something more.

The surrounding crowd zealously rubs and massages, and is simultaneously mixed by a gigantic but invisible dough-kneading machine. Ten little pumps are churning away at top capacity. Outside, some customers are secretly pre-milking a bit, so they can spend less. Each man will have a woman to keep him company.

In the neighboring cells, the thrusting, jerking pumps discharge
their precious freight. Soon they fill up again, and a yearning must be satisfied again. If you’re jammed, you’ll be charged quite a bit until you’ve discharged. Especially if you’re so busy looking that you forget to work your pump. That’s why they often bring new women in, as a distraction. The jerk gawks but doesn’t jerk.

Erika looks. The object of her peeping thrusts her hand between her thighs and shows her pleasure by forming a tiny O with her mouth. Delighted at being watched by so many eyes, she closes her own eyes, reopening them and rolling them up very high in her head. She raises her arms and massages her nipples, making them stand up straight. Then she sits down comfortably and splays her legs far apart. Now you can peer into the woman from a worm’s-eye view. She toys playfully with her pubic hair. She licks her lips palpably, while now one sportsman, now another, cocks his rubber worm. Her entire face reveals how wonderful it would be if only she could be with you. But unfortunately, that’s out of the question because of the overwhelming demand. This way, everybody, not just one man, can get something.

Erika watches very closely. Not in order to learn. Nothing stirs or moves within her. But she has to watch all the same. For her own pleasure. Whenever she feels like leaving, something above her energetically presses her well-groomed head back to the pane, and she has to keep looking. The turntable on which the beautiful woman is perched keeps revolving. Erika can’t help it. She has to keep looking. She is off-limits to herself.

To her left and right, she hears joyful moans and howls. I personally can’t go along with that, Erika Kohut replies, I expected more. Something spurts and splashes against the plywood wall. The walls are easy to clean, their surfaces are smooth. On her right, some gentleman has lovingly notched a few words into the wall, “Holy Mary goddamn slut,” in correct
German. The men don’t scrawl that many things here, they have other fish to fry. Anyway, they’re not all that good when it comes to writing. They’ve only got one free hand, and usually not even that. Besides, they have to keep inserting money.

A dragon lady with dyed red hair now thrusts her chubby backside into view. For years now, cheap masseurs have been working their fingers to the bone on her alleged cellulite. However, she shows the viewers more for their money. The right-hand booths have already seen the front of the woman; now, the left-hand booths get a look. Some men like to evaluate a woman from the front, others from the back. The redhead moves muscles that she normally uses to walk or sit. Today, she’s earning her living with them. She massages herself with her right hand, which has blood-red claws. Her left hand scratches around on her breasts. Her sharp artificial nails tug at her nipple as if it were rubber, and then let it bounce back. Her nipple seems alien to her body. The redhead is practiced enough to know that the candidate is about to make it! Any man who can’t do it now will never do it again. Any man who’s alone now has only himself to blame. Like it or not, he’s going to remain alone for a long time.

Erika has reached her limit. You have to know when to stop. That’s really going too far, she says as so often before. She stands up. Erika staked off her own limits long ago, securing them with ironclad treaties. She surveys everything from a high vantage point, which allows her to look far across the countryside. Good visibility is required. But once again, Erika does not care to look any farther. She leaves.

Her gaze alone suffices to push aside the waiting customers. A man greedily takes her place. A road emerges through the customers; Erika strides across and marches away. She walks and walks quite mechanically, just as she previously looked and looked. Anything Erika does, she does wholeheartedly. Do
nothing halfheartedly, her mother always demanded. Nothing vaguely. No artist tolerates anything incomplete or half-baked in his work. Sometimes a work is incomplete because the artist dies prematurely. Erika walks along. Nothing is torn, nothing is faded. Nothing is bleached out. She’s achieved nothing.

At home, a mild reproach from her mother descends upon the warm incubator that the two of them inhabit. Hopefully, Erika didn’t catch cold during her trip (she fibs about the destination). The daughter slips into a warm bathrobe. She and her mother eat a duck stuffed with chestnuts and other goodies. This is a banquet. The chestnuts are bursting through the seams of the duck; Mother has gilded the lily, as is her wont. The salt and pepper shakers are silver-plated, the silverware is pure silver. The child’s got red cheeks today, Mother is delighted. Hopefully, the red cheeks aren’t due to fever. Mother probes Erika’s forehead with her lips. Erika gets a thermometer along with the dessert. Luckily, fever is crossed off as a possible cause. Erika is in the pink of health—a well-nourished fish in her mother’s amniotic fluid.

Icy streams of neon light roar through ice-cream parlors, through dance halls. Clusters of humming light dangle from whip-shaped lampposts over miniature golf courses. A flickering torrent of coldness. People HER age, enjoying the lovely peace and quiet of habit, loll around kidney-shaped tables. Tall glasses, containing long spoons, look like cool blossoms: brown, yellow, pink; chocolate, vanilla, raspberry. The colorful, steaming scoops are tinted an almost uniform gray by the ceiling lights. Glittering scoopers wait in containers of water, with threads of ice cream floating on the surface. In the casualness of fun, which doesn’t have to keep proving itself, the young
silhouettes relax in front of their ice-cream towers. Tiny, gaudy umbrellas stick out of the glasses, concealing the harsh detritus of maraschino cherries, pineapple chunks, chocolate chips. The loungers incessantly poke pieces of coldness into their own ice caves, cold to cold; or else they heedlessly let the good stuff melt, while telling one another things that are more important than the icy delight.

SHE only has to glance at this scene, and HER face instantly becomes disapproving. SHE considers her feelings unique when she looks at a tree; she sees a wonderful universe in a pinecone. Using a small mallet, she taps reality; she is a zealous dentist of language. The tops of simple spruces turn into lonesome, snowy peaks for her. The horizon is lacquered by a spectrum of colors. Far in the distance, huge, unidentifiable airplanes glide past, their gentle thunder barely audible. They are the giants of music and the giants of poetry, wrapped in enormous camouflage. Hundreds of thousands of bits of data flash through HER well-trained mind. An insane, intoxicated mushroom of smoke shoots up, and then, in an ash-gray act of vomiting, slowly descends to the ground. A fine, gray dust quickly covers all the apparatuses, all the test tubes and capillary tubes, all the flasks and spiral condensers. HER room turns to solid rock. Gray. Neither cold nor warm. In between. A pink nylon curtain crackling at the window, not stirred by any puff of wind. The interior furnished neatly. Untenanted. Unowned.

The piano keys begin to sing under fingers. The gigantic tail of culture-refuse moves forward, softly rustling as it curls around, closing into a tight circle, millimeter by millimeter. Dirty tin cans, greasy plates with leftovers, filthy silverware, moldy remnants of fruit and bread, shattered records, ripped, crumpled paper. In other homes, hot steaming water hisses into bathtubs. A girl mindlessly tries a new hairdo. Another girl
picks the right blouse for the right skirt. There are new, sharply pointed shoes here, to be worn for the first time. A telephone rings. Someone picks up. Someone laughs. Someone says something.