‘“Would you like to play me something?” Lea asked into the silence, using the familiar du. I forgot to breathe. Admittedly she was still at an age when children call everyone du. But Lea was different. She had learned the difference between du and Sie at a very young age, she caused a great stir by doing so, and enjoyed it. But if she was angry with Cécile or with me, she addressed us as vous, and then it sounded as if we were in eighteenth-century French society. For example, if she happened not to like a dog, she would address it as Sie, and the bus would rock with laughter. So it was not a matter of chance, heedlessness or childish habit that Lea had addressed Marie as du.
‘But even more than that familiar form of address, it was the question itself that alarmed me. It sounded, in fact, as if Lea were the teacher and Marie had to pass an exam. Of course, it could simply have been a clumsy choice of words and a lack of feel for nuance. But my mounting tension, which concerned both my feelings for Marie and my feelings for Lea, made me, it would turn out, clairvoyant. It made me sense something in Lea that would emerge more and more clearly over the coming years, without my ever finding the right word for it. It wasn’t arrogance, it lacked the overbearing quality for that. Nor was it boastfulness or snootiness, Lea was too inconspicuous for that. Perhaps one might say that she exuded a terrible demandingness that seemed almost physical in its intensity, a demand that she made above all on herself, but which also cast a shadow on the others, who became smaller when it fell upon them.
‘Above all that demand was made upon violin-playing, the holy mass of the bowed tones that she knew how to celebrate like a high priestess. It grew cooler when this priestess – as her competitors called her behind her back – entered a room. But the self-flagellating demand that gave her this aura of unapproachability and overload flourished beyond the music and poisoned so much else, above all the things on which Lea pounced in breathless, exalted eagerness, when she needed something new to fill the few breaks between practising and homework. She rapidly became an expert in tea, in porcelain, in old coins, and anyone who dared to step within the magic circle of her current theme became the victim of her lethal impatience, which was never expressed in harsh words, nor in words at all, but in the fact that her features, normally so vital, became angular and vague, until all that remained there was a smile of stony politeness.
‘Eventually Marie would stand up against Lea’s usurpation of her, which began that evening and knew no boundaries, none whatsoever. But at first she, who had no children, found the tyranny of an eight-year-old amusing, so she walked over to the grand piano on which lay her violin. From the pocket of her batik dress she took a black velvet ribbon and tied up her hair with it so that it didn’t get in her way when she was playing. With a few brief strokes of the bow she checked that nothing needed tuning, and then Marie Pasteur, who had once set the Bern Conservatoire in uproar with her appearance and her sound, began to play a movement from a Bach sonata. Johann Sebastian Bach: she spoke the name as if it were the name of a saint.
‘In the years that followed I heard a great deal of violin music. But nothing – or so says my memory, although I have learned to mistrust it more and more, with every year, with every pain – came close to what I heard that day. I’m sure Cécile would have said: hallucinant. And it would have been the right word, because Marie’s playing had a clarity and precision, an intensity and depth that made everything, whatever else might have existed in the world of sounds, seem completely unreal. Loyola de Colón – how far in the past that was, and how imperfect it had been!
‘Lea listened motionlessly, but her stillness now was something different from the trance in the railway station. She listened to the woman who would be her teacher, and she did it with the over-alert concentration with which for many years she would absorb every word that Marie said. I had no trouble copying that exclusive, consuming attention within myself. Not only was Marie Pasteur a beauty who could throw everything into total chaos; not only did she have that non-violent strength in her playing and her decisions; she could also play herself into a sacred passion that took your breath away. That was a reach for the stars, I thought, as my eye slid along the lines of her face. And those words flickered through my sleep: reach for the stars.
‘When Marie had finished, Lea went to her and touched the violin as if it were a magical, metaphysical object. Marie ran her hand over her hair. “When does school finish on Monday?” she asked, and the time of her first lesson was established.
‘And so began, soberly and unspectacularly, what would become a real explosion of talent, devotion and passionate will.
‘I gave Marie my hand. “Merci” was all I could utter. “Yes,” she replied, and her smile revealed that with that single word she was parodying my own taciturnity. Years later, shortly before the end, it was a few words more: “Thank you for bringing me Lea.”’
These last words were swamped by tears. Van Vliet threw the cigarette away and clapped his hands in front of his face. His shoulders twitched.
‘Come on, let’s walk to the water,’ he said then. I like to think about that sentence, and when in my thoughts I speak to the man in the photograph, raising his flask against the light, I call him du as well. Martijn, I say then, why didn’t you phone me at least? If it really was the way I think it was.
But at the time I think we both thought the same thing. We were opening ourselves up to each other in a way which, as far as forms of address were concerned, called for a solid structure or at least some struts that would support whatever life had in store. Lest we fell into each other. So I addressed him by the formal Sie. Only once, much later, did he say you. And then it was like the last cry for help of a drowning man.
‘That evening we forgot to eat,’ Van Vliet continued by the water. ‘We barely spoke, either. Lea scratched the strings with her bow and I sat at my desk and studied the photograph of Marie Curie.
‘It bothered me that she looked bourgeois, compared with the elegance of Marie Pasteur. I didn’t blame her. It was as if she were dumping me. Only her eyes survived the comparison. Admittedly, Madame Curie’s eyes didn’t have the gleam and the mercurial roguishness that made Marie Pasteur’s green gaze so irresistible. On the other hand an unimaginable gentleness and kindness lay in the eyes of the only woman to have won two Nobel prizes for science. I had cut her photograph out of the book with which Hans Lüthi had ambushed and rescued me. Those eyes, which could have been the eyes of a nun, had long been my refuge when I was a student and didn’t know how to go on, and was about to chuck it all in and flee to Alekhine, to Capablanca and Emanuel Lasker.
‘The sole secret of my success was my obstinacy. This sentence doesn’t come from Madame Curie, but from Louis Pasteur, although I attributed it to the great, nun-like researcher, because they were one and the same person in any case. Cécile had always been a bit jealous of her, and twice during our marriage the picture had fallen down and had to be reframed. Madame Curie had been allowed to study and Cécile hadn’t. Admittedly, she was now in charge of training the nurses, and many young doctors sought her advice. But that did little to combat the bitter conviction that she, too, could have been a good doctor and researcher if her father hadn’t gambled and drunk all the money away, so that she had to learn a profession as quickly as possible, and one that helped her to tend to her bedridden mother. In the darker times of our life together her bitterness also turned against me. “Fine, your parents were never there,” she would say then, “but you have no idea how lucky that makes you.”
‘Lea was desperate because she couldn’t hold the bow correctly, and stamped her foot with impatience. We tried together to remember the names of the violinists whose portraits hung in Marie’s music room. Before I went to sleep I saw my daughter in front of me again, when Marie had challenged her to play something. I saw her demanding gaze and the way she had straightened with a pride that she had yet to earn. Then I thought back to the leaden gait and lowered eyes with which she had come out of school beside Ca
roline. Only two days had passed since then.’
7
VAN VLIET WAS sleeping when we drove back to Saint-Rémy. I was glad of that, since lots of trucks were coming towards us. Just before we drove into the town, when I had to brake sharply, he gave a start and rubbed his eyes. ‘There’s something I’d like to show you,’ he said, and directed me to the clinic that had once been a monastery.
‘Here,’ he said, after we had walked through the park. ‘This is where I stood with my binoculars, back then, and waited until she came out, into the garden, at about two or three. I simply couldn’t bear it any more. I knew I couldn’t visit her – the Maghrebi – but I needed at least to see her from a distance, so I got into the car in Bern and set off, often at night. I know the road by heart. I listened to Bach and …’ He sobbed. ‘In the hotel they now greeted me like an old acquaintance. The first time I had made the mistake of saying something about Lea, and now they always welcomed me with, “Ah, Léonie’s father …” It was torture.
‘I destroyed my daughter’s life with a violin. That was what I thought each time I drove away again. How often have I seen her sitting motionless on the wall over there, her arms wrapped around her knees; or running a hoe, hesitantly and aimlessly, along a furrow; once, too, standing still by the window of her room and looking out into the countryside, as if she were not of this world.
‘But the worst picture was the one in which she ran the tip of her right index finger, bent slightly backwards, with her left thumb, it was a gentle, circling motion that she interrupted now and again to bring her finger to her lips and moisten it with the tip of her tongue. How often had I seen her make that motion when she was working on a piece with a lot of pizzicato! Her gaze had always been very concentrated, and even when she closed her eyes to moisten her finger, one sensed the attentiveness behind the closed lids, the attentiveness of a girl who was entirely focused on her task and completely absorbed in her craft. How different, how terribly different it was now! I had had to look for her for a long time and finally found her on a bench behind a woodpile. She was sitting there with her back bent, stroking her fingertip as she used to. Her gaze was lost. It came from nowhere and it went nowhere. She looked as if she were remembering the movement, perhaps even a spot that was sore from pressing down on the strings, but had forgotten what the reason for it was, and so, after a period of mechanical repetition, the movement became slower and more aimless, before finally ebbing away completely.
‘After that the image of Lea’s absent movement pursued me in everything I did. I couldn’t help thinking about this scrap from her broken life. I thought: Where did your pride go, my child? Your confidence, which sometimes bordered on the blasé? The self-glorification of your merciless practising, which hardly allowed me to sleep? The insane longing to take the third step before the first and second? The crazy intention – hidden even from Marie – to play Paganini’s capriccios before your twentieth birthday? Where did all that go? Why? Why don’t you straighten up behind your bit of firewood, stretch your back, arch your eyebrows in critical amazement at the unsatisfactory achievements of other people and show them what a note is, a real note? Back then, on your first evening at Marie’s, I was startled by the presumptuous undertone in your request – demand, in fact – to have something played for you, and even later a shiver sometimes ran down my spine when you allowed others to sense your superiority, your cool sublimity, which was nothing but exhaustion after the achievement of your self-defined, unreachable goals. I never told you: it sometimes wounded me, too, your impatience with imperfection, your over-hasty shake of the head, your boredom when you had to wait for the others, who were so much slower. When it got particularly bad, in my dreams afterwards I sat opposite you playing chess and ruthlessly allowed you to fall into a trap, only to wake up with a guilty conscience. It is good, and down to the wise prescience of our emotions, that you never really touched a chess piece. And none the less: I wish nothing more than that your features should reassemble into the face of my confident, impatient, frighteningly demanding daughter. I would a thousand times prefer even the most wounding expression to the lost gaze behind that damned stack of firewood.
‘Elle n’a pas pu avoir de jeunesse, said the Maghrebi, and from his black gaze there emanated a reproach no less sombre than an accusation of murder. What is that supposed to mean? What does this man in the white coat know about you? Has he ever seen you coming back from Marie’s, your cheeks feverishly hot? Or eating in the kitchen standing up so that you could get back to practising as soon as possible? Was he there in Geneva when the people stamped and whistled with enthusiasm? You were happy, I swear to you, even Caroline and her parents looked more and more concerned with each passing year when the topic of your success came up.
‘She wasn’t allowed to be young. It was pelting with rain the day he uttered that sentence, and afterwards I was drenched to the skin because I had spent hours on the beach kicking the same tin can in front of me so as not to choke on the words. Year after year I had tried in vain to persuade you at least to go on the merry-go-round on the day of Bern’s Onion Market. “I’d rather practise,” you said. I’d rather practise. Even today I hear you saying those words, and even today I hear the impatience and the quiet reproach in the voice that were supposed to indicate to me that I ought to know my unusual daughter and really should know better. Word for word, I would like to push that sentence into the dark gaze of the Maghrebi, to drive the accusation, the terrible accusation, that I had stolen your youth and thus preordained the path of your illness, back as far as possible into his eyes, further and further, until – right at the back, where thoughts are formed – it found itself in difficulties and, under the weight of the facts known to me alone, finally expired.
‘The merry-go-round. Even the episode of the merry-go-round doesn’t give the lie to what I say. No, even that is no burden to me. One day – it was spring and you were already thirteen – they were there again, the people with the merry-go-round, and suddenly you wanted a go. It was all about who could catch the many golden rings when they passed the stand on which the rings waited to slip forward and be pulled off. You were by far the oldest, and for one shameful second I thought it looked a little ridiculous, an already adult-looking young woman, amid fairground music and the shrieks of children, pursuing a childish pleasure from a missed past. Now once again you had red patches on your throat, and your expression was full of the hope and expectation of a five-year-old. And the golden ring came! Like a flash you pulled it off, and when the merry-go-round came to rest a few moments later, you ran to me with your eyes full of tears. I tried to decipher those tears and couldn’t decide whether they were tears of joy over the golden ring or tears of grief over a missed childish happiness. You wiped those ambiguous tears away and set the ring on the palm of your hand. You knew you were supposed to give it back to the man with the cowboy hat. But you didn’t care. “I’m going to give it to Marie,” you said, and dragged me off with you. In the end Marie gave it back to you. It was the cruellest thing she could have done.’
A pack of tourists with cameras was passing as we got back into the car. Van Vliet snorted contemptuously.
‘Van Gogh. You see his room here. Posthumous voyeurism. As if it wasn’t enough that he had to live in this hole and cut off his ear. As if that wasn’t enough!’
He gripped his shirt collar with both hands, pulled it open and drew it closed, so that his neck turned white, open and closed, again and again. I had been sorry that Tom Courtenay didn’t punch the headmaster. Again and again I had been sorry, from the midday screening to the late show. I was really annoyed with him for not pulling that one off, really annoyed.
We stopped outside Van Vliet’s hotel. He just sat there. In his thoughts he was still at the clinic.
‘It started quite inconspicuously. An unsuitable word here, a skewed sentence there, a curious logic. Large gaps in between, so that you forgot it again. I was particularly taken aback by things like “Ma
rie suffered from stage fright, she was so successful”, “Zaugg wants to see the chalk for the high bar on my hands, she doesn’t believe the rosin”, and once I flinched so much that she noticed: “As a musician Niccolò was the best violinist because of that amazing reach.” She always referred to Paganini by his first name, like a good friend.
‘Then nothing particularly striking again for weeks. But I started taking notes. I hid my notebook right at the bottom of my desk, as if hiding it from myself. I was frightened, terribly frightened. But it was only ten years later that I started asking around among Cécile’s circle if they’d also noticed anything skewed. Nothing distinct, all so long ago, they said.’
I said I wanted to go to my hotel to rest.
‘But you’ll come again?’ It was a fearful expression, the expression of a boy who’s afraid of the dark.
Yes, I said, I’d come back for dinner.
8
I LAY ON THE BED. I saw Van Vliet against the light. I saw him laughing. I saw him tugging at his shirt collar. I saw him with his binoculars on the clinic fence. When was the last time someone had moved me like this?
I thought of Cape Cod and Susan, my first wife, before Joanne. ‘Adrian, is there anything that can upset you? Anything at all? Are you ever shaken?’ At the time I was working as a surgeon in A & E, with my hands in wounds and on shattered limbs from morning till night. You couldn’t let it get to you, I said. Otherwise you’d be good for nothing. ‘Yes, but it seems to leave your soul untouched.’ The morning after these words I got up early as if for an operation and at dawn I walked along the beach. The next night I slept on the sofa. You can’t lie next to someone you think is a monster. We left the next morning. ‘Hi,’ we said as we set off. In memory the word sounded bright and cruel, like a sound from a scalpel.
Lea Page 5
