Lea

by Pascal Mercier

  I went to sleep. When I woke up, the church tower was striking seven. It was dark. Leslie had phoned my mobile. I had left my watch in her bathroom.

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘but I actually didn’t miss it.’

  ‘You’re sure you’re OK?’

  ‘No idea,’ I said, ‘no idea how I am.’

  ‘Something’s happened to you or is happening to you.’

  ‘What was it like for you in boarding school? For you, I mean. How was it for you?’

  ‘Mon Dieu, what am I supposed to say about that on the phone right now? I don’t know … Sometimes I think I’m alone with the boy again, because … because … ’

  ‘Because we weren’t a real family? Because you couldn’t learn there? Is that what you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. That doesn’t sound quite right. Oh, Dad, I don’t know. It wasn’t all that bad in the boarding school. You became independent. Only sometimes in the evening … Oh, merde.’

  ‘Would you have liked to play an instrument?’

  ‘You’re asking some questions today! No idea. I don’t think so. We aren’t musical, are we?’

  I laughed. ‘Bye, Les. We’ll talk again.’

  ‘Yes, let’s do that. Bye, Dad.’

  Van Vliet waited in the empty hotel dining room. He had a carafe of red wine in front of him and a bottle of mineral water. He had drunk only water.

  I told him about the conversation with Leslie.

  ‘Boarding school,’ he said. ‘Lea and boarding school. That would … it would have been unthinkable.’ Now he poured himself a glass of red wine and drank. ‘Although … the Maghrebi … Perhaps in that case she wouldn’t have ended up here. What do we really know about these things? Merde, what do we know?’

  Now I ordered red wine as well. He grinned.

  ‘Cécile’s brother is dyslexic and has trouble with calculations. He doesn’t understand the idea of quantity. It sounds crazy, but he just doesn’t get it. It’s called acalculia. Cécile could combat her fear that she might have passed the weakness on to Lea only by teaching her to read and do sums at the age of four. That was how Lea came to read Agatha Christie at six and was ahead of everyone in mental arithmetic. I had my doubts about whether we were doing it right, but I was also proud of my daughter, who learned so easily. The years of primary school were a walk in the park for her, there was never a conflict between homework and practising. I assume that Caroline, who sat next to her, copied down what was in her book when they were doing arithmetic. I also assume her parents knew that and that the glee with which they looked on when Lea stumbled later had its origins in that.

  ‘Lea was soon the star of the school, flattered but also eyed with envy. As she often drove to Marie’s immediately after class, the others saw her with the violin a lot, and that also reminded them of Lea’s second life, of the fact that she refused to do gymnastics, something to do with the fact that it might endanger her hands. She didn’t get on with Erika Zaugg, the teacher, whom she subjected to a devastating comparison with Marie; the woman made no secret of the fact that she thought Lea was petulant and simply hysterical. Things were quite different with the choleric male teacher, who was putty in her hands. I always listened out for alarming undertones when she talked about him or he about her, but he worshipped her from a considerable distance, and it was touching to see him riding roughshod over all the principles of justice and equal treatment when it came to Lea. She was, as I have said, a star, a real vedette.

  ‘With the violin, too, it soon became apparent that she could become a star. In the first years of her work with Marie, Lea succeeded in every respect. From week to week the notes became purer and surer, the vibrato lost its initial jitter and became more regular, more tempered. In her many years of teaching, Marie had never had anyone who was at home with so many positions in such a short time, and Lea laughed till the tears came when I reminded her of how preoccupied she had been with the fact that Loyola de Colón had known exactly where to stop her hand sliding when switching positions. Double-stopping, the nightmare of all beginners, was difficult for Lea, too, of course. But constant practising soon gave her the necessary security, and the more difficult something was, the more of an obsession it became; it was very similar to me and chess.’

  Van Vliet went to the toilet and when he came back we ordered something to eat. He mechanically ordered the same thing as me, his mind wasn’t on it. Like before, when he had been alone by the water, the memory had taken him prisoner in the meantime, a memory that hurt.

  ‘Scores,’ he said. ‘Lea read them as if they were the innate symbols of her spirit. I found it unbearable, no longer having access to this part of her, which was proving increasingly to be the most important. I needed to be able to read them as well. I asked if I could look over her shoulder when she was playing. She didn’t say anything and started to play. After a few bars she stopped. “It’s … it’s not working, Dad,” she said. There was a helpless testiness in the words. She was cross with me for putting her in the position of having to say that. I bought a second copy of the score and asked if I could sit on a chair in the corner while she played. She said nothing and looked at the ground. At Marie’s there’s also someone in the room when she plays, I thought. But exactly: Marie – and being with Marie was different from being with me; and with Marie everything was different from the way it was with me.

  ‘I left the room and closed the door. It took quite a while before Lea started playing. I left the house and went to Krompholz, the music shop, where I bought a book about reading music for beginners. Katharina Walther looked at me with her intelligent, secretive expression. “There’s nothing magical about it,” she said, as I started flicking the pages. “Read it through and then read the notes along when she plays. In the next room, perhaps. She doesn’t need to see.” Incredible. She seemed to be able to read me – us – like a book.’

  Van Vliet filled his glass and drained it in one gulp as if it were water. ‘My God, why didn’t I talk to her more often? And why didn’t I listen to her later on when she warned me?’

  He took out a ballpoint pen, opened his paper napkin, drew five lines and put some notes on them. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘that’s the beginning of Bach’s Partita in E major. The notes that Loyola de Colón played in the station back then.’ He gulped. ‘And the last notes that Lea played before she sank into … her disturbed state.’

  His fist closed slowly on the napkin and crushed those fateful notes. I topped up his glass. He drank and after a while he started talking again, calmly and clearly.

  ‘I did as Katharina Walther suggested: I followed the score in the next room when Lea was playing. But it remained curiously strange to me, and it was a while before I understood why: I couldn’t produce the related sounds. The notes remained without consequences for me. They were symbols that I could do nothing with and which, therefore, had nothing to do with me. So this part of Lea’s mind remained closed to me, however hard I tried.

  ‘One day when she was in school I went to her room, took the violin from its case, wedged it between shoulder and chin, put my fingers in position, as I had observed, and made the first stroke with the bow. Of course what came out was a lamentable sound, barely more than a scratch. But that wasn’t what made me flinch. It was something I hadn’t expected: a violent attack of guilty conscience, a kind of invisible spasm, and at the same time paralysing, accompanied by a feeling of impotence. Quickly and distractedly I put the violin back in its case and checked that everything was as it had been before. Then I sat down in the armchair in my room and waited for the thumping of my heart to subside. Outside dusk was beginning. It was dark when I understood at last: it had not been the usual guilty conscience that you get when you poke your nose into other people’s affairs. It had been about something much more important and dangerous: by trying to imitate violin playing with my own body, I had crossed an invisible line that separated Lea’s life from mine, and had to separate it so that it could be entirely hers
. There had also been a hint of that feeling, I thought now, in the testiness with which Lea explained to me that she didn’t want me looking over her shoulder when she played. And now I remembered how the eight-year-old girl had resisted me after Loyola’s playing, in the station back then, when I wanted to pull her to me as usual.

  ‘And Marie? I thought. With her that line didn’t exist. On the contrary, in her playing and otherwise Lea was trying to be like Marie. Was there another line that I just couldn’t see?’

  Van Vliet looked at me. It wasn’t clear whether he was hoping for an answer – the insight of an outsider, perhaps – or whether he was only seeing my view as someone who wanted his hardship and insecurity to be recognized and accepted. I touched his arm – who knows why? Who knows if it was a suitable gesture, a gesture corresponding to his fragility. He had left his burning cigarette in the ashtray and was lighting a new one. I looked past him at the big mirror on the wall that showed us both. Two illiterates in the field of proximity and distance, I thought, two illiterates in the field of familiarity and strangeness.

  ‘When Lea came through the door that evening,’ Van Vliet continued, ‘she was standing in front of me again: as someone who wasn’t just able to do something that I would never be able to do, but someone who was something that I would never be: a musician whose life consisted increasingly of scores and notes. “What is it? What’s up?” she asked. “Nothing,” I said. “It’s nothing. Shall I cook something?” But she was already at the fridge, bit into a cold sausage and grabbed a piece of bread. “Thanks, but I’d rather do a bit more practising.” She disappeared into her room and closed the door.

  ‘I could only contribute one thing: I explained the physics of recorder notes to her. She was addicted to their glassy tone and her attempt to make it, after touching it for the first time.

  ‘In terms of technical problems there was only one with which she had to struggle until the end: trills. They often didn’t have the silken lightness and above all the metronomic regularity that they should have had. Particularly when they lasted for a long time, fatigue and forced, defiant-sounding thrusts crept in, creating an impression of effort and over-exertion. Lea furiously massaged her cramped fingers, held them in warm water and kneaded a ball to strengthen them while watching television.

  ‘But my daughter was happy. In love with the violin, in love with the music, in love with her talent and, yes, in love with Marie.

  ‘“Amoureuse?” The dark hand of the Maghrebi with the silver pen paused abruptly. “Ouais,” I said and did everything I could to make the word sound as vulgar as it would have sounded, in my imagination, coming from a delinquent who was receiving a ruthless going-over from a police inspector in court. I even crossed my legs like a snotty little gangster who’s enjoying his last scrap of freedom, which consists in not giving the inspector a single word.

  ‘“Vous voulez dire …”

  ‘“Non,” I replied, and it was more a yapping snap than an articulate denial. The doctor darted his nib back and forth, the sound was very loud, louder than the hum and hiss of the fan. It took him some time to get his irritation under control.

  ‘“Alors, c’était quoi, cette rélation?”

  ‘How could I have explained it to him? How could I explain it to anyone?

  ‘Marie, I’m sure, had a description for her relationship with Lea. But I never asked her. And, in fact, I didn’t want to know. I know what I saw and heard, and I don’t know if there’s anything to know beyond that. Marie could not be criticized, I grasped that quickly. It was better not to ask about Marie. It was out of the question not to listen with complete concentration when Marie was being discussed. Disbelief appeared on Lea’s face whenever I forgot something to do with Marie, even something quite trivial. It was annoying for her when someone else had the audacity to be called Marie. It was unimaginable that Marie could become ill. It was out of the question that she should ever take a vacation. Every day I waited for Lea to want a batik dress and chintz cushions. But things between them weren’t actually so simple.

  ‘Generally speaking, it wasn’t as I had imagined. When I sometimes stood in front of Marie’s house on late winter afternoons and watched the shadow play that Marie and Lea put on behind the curtains, I felt excluded and envied them both the cocoon of sounds, words and gestures that they seemed to have spun for themselves, and in which there was none of the friction and irritability that increasingly appeared in the institute, since I had made it clear with very few words that from now on it would be Lea first of all, then Lea again, and only then the lab.

  ‘At the very beginning I made the mistake of ringing on Marie’s door. It was the last five minutes of the lesson, which I sat and listened to. I have never been so much in the way as I was then. Marie and Lea left the music room, not furious, not reproachful, only very determined, completely preoccupied with one another and without a backward glance; as if there was only empty space there. There must have been a perfect harmony between the two of them, I thought for almost two years, and there were moments of fierce jealousy in which I didn’t know which hurt more: Marie taking Lea away from me or Lea erecting a boundary in front of Marie which I would never be able to overcome.

  ‘That was how it was until the day when Lea was supposed to seek out the three-quarter size violin from Krompholz. Katharina Walther wasn’t exactly over the moon that Marie was there too. “Marie Pasteur. Yes, yes, Marie Pasteur,” she said when I next visited the shop. Apart from that I was never able to entice a word out of her. I didn’t like those words. There was something omniscient and almost papal about them, and that day I was no longer sure if I liked her severe hairdo with the bun at the back. Now, however, she was acting correctly, too correctly, in fact, with her glances as well as with her words. No meddling, no complicity, nothing.

  ‘Lea tried out the three violins in turn. How grown-up and professional she looked in comparison with our first visit here! When the first round was over, the process of negative selection began. The first one went quickly. Lea exchanged a glance with Marie, but it wouldn’t have been necessary, we all heard it. The second one sounded good, but no comparison with the third. “Astonishing for an instrument of this size,” said Marie. It was impossible that Lea didn’t hear it too, and in response to the tone, which was so much better than that of her previous instrument, her face had begun to light up. But now she picked up the second one again and played for a few minutes. Marie leaned against the counter, her arms folded. When I replayed the scene in my mind later on, I was sure that she knew what was going to happen. “I’ll take this one,” Lea said.

  ‘Katharina Walther’s lips parted as if she wanted to protest, but she said nothing. After a few seconds staring at the floor, still holding the violin, Lea raised her head and looked challengingly at Marie. I knew that look, and I didn’t know it. She could be contrary and headstrong, Cécile and I had encountered that often enough. But this was Marie, uncriticizable Marie, standing here. And it hurt Marie Pasteur. It hurt her so much that she mechanically twisted her bracelet and swallowed once too many times.

  ‘The next day Lea went to Krompholz on her own and swapped the second violin for the third. She didn’t say much, Katharina Walther told me. Contrite? No, Lea hadn’t actually seemed that way, she said; more disturbed. She hesitated. “By herself,” she added.

  ‘A few days later eczema broke out and gave us the worst three weeks since Cécile’s death. It started with Lea’s fingertips getting hot. Every few minutes she went to the bathroom and held them under cold water, and that night I didn’t get a wink of sleep because I constantly heard water running. In the morning she sat on the edge of the bed and pointed, wide-eyed, at her skin, which was starting to discolour and harden. She stayed at home and I cancelled my participation at a conference. Afterwards I spent hours on the phone to former fellow-students who had become doctors, until at last I got an appointment with one who knew about skin. He studied and palpated Lea’s skin, which was becoming g
reyer by the hour and was now starting to itch. Eczema, caused by an allergy. Violin? Then it could be the rosin, he told me. Terror flooded my limbs as if I had been diagnosed with cancer. Lea loved the dark brown resin that had a golden sheen when you held it to the light. At first she had even secretly licked it. Was this the end? A violinist with an allergy to rosin? Wasn’t that impossible?

  ‘With a fanaticism that I’m uncomfortable looking back on, I studied the literature on allergies and found out how little is known. Mountains of ointments piled up in the bathroom. My daily phone conversation with the doctor prompted mockery from the assistants, I could tell from their incautious giggling. The pharmacist raised her eyebrows in astonishment when I appeared for the third time. When she talked about stress, psychosomatic illness and homeopathy I switched pharmacies. I believe in cells, mechanisms and chemicals, not in subtle fairy stories delivered with a knowing expression.

  ‘Ruthlessly and in great detail I forced Lea to remember everything she had come into contact with over the past few days, particularly anything unusual. I even wanted her to remember smells. My relentless probing led to tears.

  ‘And then, all of a sudden, she got it: the benches in the classroom suddenly had a different smell. We went to school and talked to the janitor. And, sure enough, he had been using a new cleaning material. I took a sample and the doctor did an allergy test. It was this cleaning material, not the rosin. I noted its chemical composition and stuck the piece of paper to the fridge. It hung there until it turned yellow.

  ‘I wanted to celebrate this redeeming news and we went out to an expensive restaurant. But Lea crouched over her plate and rubbed her raw, unfeeling fingertips over the tablecloth. Even today I think I can hear the quietly abrasive sound.

  ‘For a week it was as if she were wearing gloves made of sandpaper. She picked up the violin several times a day, but it was hopeless. Then the skin crust began to burst and the new skin beneath it appeared, with a red pulse under it, and which could not endure any kind of contact. When the diseased skin finally fell off like a collection of exploded thimbles, Lea ran through the apartment, calming her sensitive fingertips by blowing on them and every hour she tested whether they could now bear contact with a string. For days, it seems to me now, we lived as though in a prison whose invisible walls were formed by fear anticipated for all eternity, and something like that could happen at any time.