‘I no longer trusted my hands, my motor memory. What was I supposed to do after the first incision? Where did all the blood go? The nurse silently handed me the scalpel. Seconds passed. I felt the eyes of the others on me. Paul’s perplexed eyes above his surgical mask. The throbbing headache on the way home. On long walks I have often stopped and closed my eyes, and my thoughts have gone back to that operating table. The fear of blood didn’t go away, it flowed and flowed, the patients bled to death.
‘“It’s a wonder they don’t bleed to death on you,” said the schoolmate who had become a psychiatrist. “Why don’t you just stop? Didn’t you want to become a photographer or a cameraman? Eventually we lose the natural self-evidence of life. Age. Take it as a sign.”
‘A week later I took early retirement. On my last journey home I tossed the flowers from my farewell party in the bin. I still wake up as early as a surgeon does.’
What I didn’t tell him: how I took out the photographs of me from Boston, pictures of a man who was a match for things, the videos of my lectures and operations; the way I examined my face in search of my former certainty; how I gazed in envy at my sure, deft hands, unconcerned with blood; how I suddenly had the feeling that my present agitation was bringing all that had gone before crashing down, the dominoes of the past were falling over, one after the other. It had all been deception. Not a lie, but deception. And I also said nothing about this: how after reserving the hotel in Avignon over the telephone I panicked, because I suddenly thought I had forgotten how to check in and out of a hotel; how I tried out sentences that I needed to say; and how I then lay on the bed in disbelief and thought of all the luxury places I’d stayed in at conferences in India and Hong Kong. Self-confidence: why is it so flighty? Why so blind to the facts? For a lifetime we try to build it up, to secure and consolidate it, knowing that it is the most precious possession and indispensable for happiness. Then, suddenly and with insidious silence, a trapdoor opens, we fall into the abyss and everything that was becomes a fata Morgana.
Van Vliet asked what it was like to have a daughter in boarding school. Did you even have the feeling of seeing her grow up? ‘Sorry, I’m just trying to imagine.’ How often I had visited her. Whether I had experienced her first love, her first heartache. The chaos of emotions when it came to choosing her career.
I was sitting with Leslie beside the boarding school. ‘André – it’s over,’ she had said, and run her handkerchief over her eyes. ‘I’d thought it would be nicer; the first time, I mean.’ What was it like for you? she wanted to ask, I could see. But there wasn’t enough between us for that. ‘Doctor,’ she said another time and grinned. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she said. I think that was the first time we hugged when we said goodbye, and the last.
I had said nothing. ‘Sorry,’ said Van Vliet. To bring me back, he added a detail from his dream: every time Ruth Adamek picked up a violin, it shrank, so that from that time you could only buy tiny, one-eighth-size violins at Krompholz’s shop. Van Vliet liked it when she was ashamed and nervously tugged at her miniskirt. I knew: he didn’t dream that, he just invented it to make up for asking me about Leslie.
‘The real sales assistant at Krompholz,’ he went on, ‘was quite unlike Ruth Adamek; and while with each passing year Ruth increasingly became my second fiddle in the institute, in Katharina Walther, the second female figure in that dream, I won a kind of friend with whom I often held conversations in my head when thinking about Lea. When I was the first customer to enter the shop on the morning after Loyola’s concert, she came up to me – a woman in her fifties, whose nonchalance struck me most of all in her movements, but was also expressed in a calm, light-grey gaze. An eight-year-old girl, she said, should start with a half-size violin. At around ten she would switch to a three-quarter size and from thirteen or fourteen to a full size. When I showed my puzzlement at the expressions “half-size” and “three-quarter size”, I saw for the first time her reticent smile, so good a match for her grey-streaked hair and her severe hairdo with the bun at the back. Later, I sometimes bought certain records just to see that smile.
‘The small violin that she brought from the storeroom and set down in front of me was made of pale wood with a delicate, irregular grain. I picked it up as carefully as if any energetic movement might make it crumble to dust. “Wouldn’t you like to bring your daughter in, so that we can be sure the size is right?” The woman had known me for just half an hour and already she had hit the bullseye. Certainly, it was a good, natural practical question. But in retrospect it seems to me that she sensed I was making a mistake that went far beyond anything practical. Even today I can see how she raised her eyebrows when I hesitated. It would all have been different if I had understood the lesson that this worldly woman gave me that morning in the empty shop. Instead I said, and it must have sounded like a hasty decision: “I want to surprise Lea.” Then I paid the first instalment on the violin. “If there’s anything else, just drop in with Lea,” the woman said and gave me her card.
‘The fact that she had mentioned Lea by name echoed inside me. When I stepped out of the shop with the little violin case, I had the feeling that I had never held anything so precious in my hands. I gave a start when a passer-by bumped into the case and for the rest of the journey I held it anxiously in front of my chest.
‘In that posture I entered the institute. No one paid the violin the slightest attention. How were my colleagues supposed to know that it was the symbol of Lea’s reawakening into life? None the less – I took it amiss of them for not asking a single question or making a single remark about this precious object, but sitting there in silence and waiting for an explanation for my inexcusable absence. That silence made them my enemies.
‘They would hear no voluntary explanation or apology from me. That was what I decided when I was sitting in my office and looking across the city at the Alps. The snow-covered, majestic mountains loomed into the evenly deep-blue sky like the bright green meadows that I had been watching yesterday outside Lea’s school. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since then, and yet the world had changed.
‘In front of me was a note from my secretary about a call from the rector, summoning me in to see him. A short time later, in a gleaming chrome university office full of electronics I turned myself back into the unruly schoolboy I had once been, who refused to be intimidated by any threats, who took out his pocket chess during lessons in spite of every kind of warning, because he caught up in a flash on the backlog created by his truancy, to be top once again in the crucial tests. Back then I lied right, left and centre, and it was like a chess game: you always had to be one step ahead of the others. I would do the same thing today if it was a matter of defending Lea against the rest. She could rely on that.
‘The rector couldn’t have known that he was sitting opposite a colleague in whom the cold-bloodedly lying ragamuffin of former times had just reawakened. I think he was surprised by the shortness and abruptness of my invented story about Lea’s accident, and how little it sounded like an apology. But he had no other choice but to believe me, and in the end we fixed a date for a new meeting with the donors.
‘My dereliction was forgotten. What was left was a certain coolness between my colleagues and me. Every now and again Ruth tried to find fault with me; but I was on my guard, and always one step ahead of her rancour. As I say: you can rely on it.’
6
‘LEA’S TRANSFORMATION was like a silent explosion. That evening, when she stood staring at the violin case that I had laid open on her bed, there were no exclamations of surprise, no expressions of ecstasy, no jumping in the air, no transport of joy. In fact, nothing happened at all. Lea picked up the violin and started to play.
‘Of course, it wasn’t really like that. But if I am to describe the breathtaking self-evidence with which she did anything to do with the instrument, I can find no better words than these: she picked it up and started to play. Just as if she had been waiting all that time for someone to b
ring her, at long last, the instrument for which she was born. “The girl emanates such authority,” said Katharina Walther, when she saw her giving her first public performance at school. And that was exactly what Lea emanated when she picked up the violin: authority. Authority and grace.
‘Where did it go, that natural authority that spoke out of all her playing movements? Where was it extinguished?’
Van Vliet choked on the smoke, his Adam’s apple moved frantically. I looked at his face against the white wall: behind the healthy, sporty brown, a ruin came into view. With his sleeve he wiped the tears provoked by his coughing out of his eyes before going on.
‘Something else happened to Lea: almost overnight a girl who had until now been so compliant turned into a little adult full of self-will. I experienced that transformation for the first time when we went in search of a violin teacher.
‘For Lea there was only one woman in the picture, that was already clear the following morning. After school we drove to the three addresses that the conservatoire had given me. Lea roundly rejected the three women, and she always did it in the same way: no sooner had the conversation begun than she stood up without warning and walked silently to the door. I flinched every time, stammered words of apology and gestured ineffectually to express my helplessness. Afterwards, when I asked her in the street, I received no explanation by way of reply, only an obstinate shake of the head, accompanied by a defiant acceleration of her step. That was when I first sensed what it meant to have a daughter with a will of her own.
‘MARIE PASTEUR. The name would become a guiding light for us both, which bathed everything in a brightness we had never known, and finally left ineradicable marks of burning. At the same time, it almost escaped me when, on the way home that day, we drove past the brass plaque on which it was engraved in gleaming black letters. Along with the words VIOLIN LESSONS. The house was at an intersection that I had already driven across when I became aware of what I had seen. I put my foot on the brake so violently that Lea shrieked and I was a hair’s breadth away from causing a pile-up. I drove around the block and parked right in front of the house. The brass plaque hung on the cast-iron gate through which one entered the front garden, and now that the night was breaking, it was illuminated by the two light bulbs that seemed to float just above the gateposts.
‘“Now let’s try this one,” I said to Lea and pointed at the name.
‘As we crossed the front garden and walked towards the black door with the brass fittings, I saw in front of me Hans Lüthi, the biology teacher who was, after all, responsible for me sitting my school leaving exams. We had met in the basement of Francke’s bookshop, where the books on chess were displayed. It was the morning of an ordinary week day, and I had bunked off Lüthi’s class. I had pretended to be cocky and nonchalant, but I really felt awkward.
‘“It’s getting tight, Martijn,” Lüthi had said, and looked at me with a calm, steady gaze. “I don’t know if I can do anything else for you at the teachers’ meeting.”
‘I shrugged casually and turned away.
‘But his words had touched me. Not because they involved the threat of being thrown out of school, which I had seen coming for a long time, but because there had been grief in them, and concern for me, the rebellious, defiant boy who had been beyond school discipline for some time. Really and truly: there had been concern in his words and his expression. It was so long since anyone had been concerned about me that I was now practically distraught.
‘Clutching the collected games of Capablanca, I stood gazing blankly at the shelf when Lüthi had touched me on the shoulder. “These are for you,” he had said, and gave me two books. I don’t think I said a single word of thanks, I was so surprised. Hans Lüthi, the man with the bourgeois name, the baggy corduroy trousers and the unkempt red hair, was already on his way upstairs by the time I understood what I was holding in my hands. It was two biographies, one of Louis Pasteur, the other of Marie Curie.
‘They were to prove the most important books of my life. I devoured them, read them again and again. I didn’t miss a single class in my last year of school and my science tests were flawless. Lüthi had hit the bullseye.
‘I never found the words to tell him what he had done for me. I’m not good at that kind of thing.
‘So now we were going to a woman whose name was Marie Pasteur. I was as excited as if I were on a first date when I rang the bell, the door sprang open and we walked up two flights of red-carpeted stairs.
‘The woman waiting for us on the landing was wearing a flower-patterned apron and holding a wooden spoon, and looked at us with her eyebrows raised. I’m not easily intimidated, but Marie managed it, then and later. And even then I found only one way of dealing with her: I came straight out with it.
‘“My daughter here,’ I said, still on the stairs, “would like to take violin lessons with you.”
‘“You didn’t even ask me,” Lea said later. And Marie said I said it in a tone that said she had to go along with my wish; as if she had no choice but to accept Lea.
‘She wasn’t wild about our unexpected visit. She only let us in hesitantly, led us into the music room and then disappeared into the kitchen for a while. I could tell by the way Lea’s eyes felt their way slowly, almost methodically, around the high, wide room that she liked it here. There was also the way she ran her hand caressingly over the many sofa cushions of smooth, shiny chintz. Then, when she got up and walked to the grand piano in the corner, I was sure that she wasn’t going to disappear in silence again.
‘It was no surprise that she liked the room. Furnished sparsely, but with exquisite taste, it was a place of silence. In some inexplicable way, the sounds of the street lost their power and insistence, and listened to each other as if they were only a distant echo of themselves. Ochre, beige and a light, diluted burgundy were the dominant colours, and after a while I noticed that in a vague, gentle way they stirred a memory of Loyola de Colón’s frock coat. Gleaming parquet. An art nouveau candelabra. Big photographs of famous violinists on the walls. And chintz, a lot of chintz, a whole wall was covered with the smooth, seductive fabric. She would love to bathe in chintz, Lea said after her first week’s lesson.
‘And then Marie Pasteur came into the room, the woman who would allow Lea’s talent to unfold at an incredible, breathless, crazy rate; the woman with whom Lea could laugh, cry, rage and bubble over with joy as she could with no one else; the woman to whom my child would cling with a curious, absurd, life-endangering love; the woman I would fall in love with that very evening, without noticing; the woman to whom I brought an impossible love, for in her overflowing, reckless love Lea trusted no one but herself, and it was always completely clear that if I had allowed myself to be swept along in the wake of my own love it would have turned us into adversaries, even enemies, my daughter and I.
‘All of that was still ahead of us when Marie came in. She was wearing an ankle-length batik dress, one of dozens that she owned; in my memory I always see her in one of those dresses, with soft leather slippers that were like a second skin. With her astonishingly small feet she walked in silence through the big rooms, and that was how it was on that evening too, when she walked obliquely across the room to us and sat down on the arm of a chair. One of her hands lay in her lap, with the other she supported herself on the back of the chair. The sight of her hands made me aware of my own hands: mine felt far too big and terribly ungainly in comparison to hers, which, as I would shortly see, combined slender elegance and great strength, a strength without the slightest trace of violence. When her hand rested in mine as we said goodbye, I wished I could hold it for ever, so captivated was I by the strength of her handshake.
‘Because that was what Marie Pasteur also emanated and what seemed to me on that first evening to constitute the whole of her being: an enormous strength without a trace of violence. It could also be discerned in her eyes, that strength, when she now turned her gaze on Lea and in a fleeting act of playful irony pursed her
lips for a moment into a smile before asking a question of startling simplicity: “And why do you think the violin is the right instrument for you?”
‘That was Marie. The woman who always sought clarity. Not the kind of clarity that I knew from science and also not the clarity of chess. A clarity that was harder to grasp and which I found weird in its intangibility. What she wanted to know was why people did what they did. Doesn’t everyone want to know that? Yes, but Marie wanted to know exactly why they did it. And what it felt like. Exactly what it felt like. She wanted to know how it felt for her just as much as how it felt for the others; she was stubborn and unyielding when it came to understanding herself. So I came to know a passion which at first made everything – even the most familiar things – appear richer and more appealing, before at last plunging me into a darkness of incomprehension that I would never have encountered without Marie’s idea of clarity.
‘Lea didn’t hesitate for a moment before answering Marie’s question. “I feel it,” she said simply, and there was something definitive in the few words that she uttered as naturally as breathing.
‘“You feel it,” Marie repeated hesitantly, slipping forward on the arm of the chair and linking her hands in her lap. A lock from her ash-blonde mane fell upon her forehead. She looked down at the shiny parquet floor. Her lips moved as if she were about to reapply her lipstick. At the time I had a sense that she didn’t know how to continue the conversation. Later I discovered that it had been quite different: in a flash, the resolution in Lea’s answer had prompted Marie’s decision to take her on as a pupil. “I knew it was right; but it took me a few minutes to adjust to the idea. It would turn into something big and difficult, I sensed. And it would prove to be an unusually far-sighted decision on my part. I would rather have made it not at the end of a long day but in the morning.” She smiled. “At about half past ten, perhaps?”
Lea Page 4
