Lea

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘And there was another prison cell: the lessons with Marie were cancelled. In a choking voice, in which fury and tears mixed together, Lea told me that someone else – someone else! – was with Marie in the music room at her times – her times! At last, when I dropped her off at Marie’s, I saw that her hands, with their unnaturally red fingertips, were drenched in sweat and her throat was covered with red patches of agitation.

  ‘The Maghrebi wanted to know if anything else had happened to Lea’s hands. The question caught my attention, I can’t deny it. No, I said. For a while he said nothing and the noise of the fan became really insistent. No, I said again, against my will. I didn’t mention the business with the merry-go-round and the gold ring either.

  ‘My colleagues were angry with me for not going to the conference because of Lea’s eczema – because of eczema! – to present our latest research results. And above all the fact that I had cancelled without sending Ruth Adamek in my place. “Could it be that you’ve forgotten again?” she asked, and there was a harshness in her voice that showed me that I was losing more and more ground.

  ‘The senior echelons of the university were disappointed, too. But there was no real apparent danger. As long as I didn’t steal the silver spoons they couldn’t touch me. And at the time I couldn’t have known about the disturbing events that would lead me to steal them.’

  9

  ‘LEA’S FIRST PUBLIC PERFORMANCE took place on the day when the Year Four primary school children left school. The headmaster, a curmudgeonly, feared man, had invited her into his office, the secretary had offered her tea and biscuits, and then he had asked her if she would play something that day. She must have been so flattered that she agreed on the spot. Excited, almost feverish, she burst in on a meeting in my office. I walked up and down with her in the corridor until her flickering panic had settled. Then I sent her to Marie and by the time she came home she knew what she was going to play.

  ‘I had barely known stage fright until then. Before my own lectures I had been psyched up rather than jittery, and the first time I found myself standing in an auditorium and found the spatial arrangement, which I had experienced from the other side over many years as a student, more ridiculous than frightening. But now that it was no longer about me, I was to become acquainted with stage fright.

  ‘I learned to hate and fear it, and I also learned to love it and to miss it when it was over. It united Lea and me, and it also divided us. Her moist hands became my moist hands, her distractedness and agitation filled me too. There were moments when our nerves vibrated like those of a single creature. Indeed, it couldn’t have been otherwise; Lea fell into an abyss of abandonment if she thought I didn’t share her feverish excitement. And yet she also insisted that she was the one who had reasons to be afraid, not me. She didn’t insist with words; we barely spoke about the omnipresent, feverish delusion that enveloped us. But she immediately left the room again when she encountered me smoking one of my rare cigarettes at the balcony window. In spite of everything, she’s still a little girl, I would say to myself, what do you expect?

  ‘At such moments I felt the loneliness that Cécile had left in me. I felt it like an inner frost.

  ‘When Lea came out of the bathroom on the evening of the concert, it took my breath away. This wasn’t a little girl of eleven. This was a young lady waiting for the spotlights to come on. We had chosen the plain black dress together. But where had she learned to powder and comb herself like that? Where had she got that lipstick? She enjoyed my perplexity. I took a photograph of her, which I put in my briefcase and never again swapped for another one.

  ‘Why isn’t it possible to stop time? Why couldn’t things have stayed as they were one sultry stormy evening in high summer, an hour before Lea was carried away by all those eyes on her and those clapping hands, stolen right in front of my eyes, while I was unable to do the slightest thing about it?

  ‘But I have no coherent memory of that evening. It’s as if the violence of emotions had torn it into pieces, leaving only scattered fragments. We took a taxi to school; this evening the traffic must not get in our way. As we drove past the station I thought: It’s been less than three years and now she’s giving her first concert. I don’t know if that was Lea’s thought as well, but she put her hand in mine. It was damp and didn’t feel like a hand that would soon be playing Bach and Mozart with confident fingers. When I felt her head on my shoulder, I thought for a moment that she was about to turn round. It was a redeeming thought that flashed into my mind in the restless sleep of the coming night, accompanied by a feeling of impotence and futility.

  ‘The next thing I see in front of me is Marie Pasteur pressing the cross on Lea’s forehead with her thumb. I couldn’t believe my eyes and lost my composure completely when Lea crossed herself. Lea had never been baptized and had, as far as I knew, never held a Bible in her hand. And now she was crossing herself, with a natural grace that suggested she had been doing it all her life. It took a long time before I understood that it wasn’t what it had seemed at first, Marie’s attempt to turn Lea into a Catholic. It was simply a ritual that connected them, a gesture with which they reassured each other of their affection and their bond, which seemed greater than they themselves were. And even when I had understood at last, I was left with a quiet sensation of alienation and betrayal. That evening the vision flickered into my mind again and again, before being overlaid by events on the stage of the hall.

  ‘Lea climbed the few steps, her hand on her dress so as not to trip over the hem. In the middle of the stage, a few steps away from the grand piano, she stopped and bowed several times to the applauding audience. I had never seen that before. I watched her dainty movements with fascination. Had Marie shown her that? Or did she simply have it within her?

  ‘Marie gave her time. It was to be Lea and Lea alone who was standing in the spotlight. She was wearing a midnight-blue dress with a high neck, and because she had also worn batik at our first meeting, for a moment I felt as if they had both brought the music room from Marie’s apartment with them. It was a beautiful feeling, because it meant that Lea was protected by Marie on stage just as much as she was when she practised in her apartment. But it was fleeting, that feeling, and soon it was wiped away by another: that up there, in spite of Marie, Lea was all alone with her violin and her gift – a girl who, for all her ladylike appearance and behaviour, had been in the world only for eleven years, and whom nobody would be able to help if she stumbled.

  ‘I have spoken at many conferences in front of many very important people, and at chess tournaments I have sat on a stage and had to fend entirely for myself. But that was nothing in comparison with the task of enduring Lea’s loneliness up on that stage. Particularly in the seconds before she started playing. Marie gave the chamber pitch, Lea tuned to it, a small pause, then she corrected the tension of her bow, another pause to wipe her hand on her dress, the glance at Marie, the lifting of the bow, and then at last she started playing Bach’s music.

  ‘At that very moment I wondered whether her memory was adequate to the task at hand. There was nothing, not the slightest point of reference to argue against it. Memory had never been an issue. I had seen it as the most natural thing in the world that Lea knew certain pieces by heart. It had seemed as natural to me as my ability to keep whole games of chess in my head and play them blind. So where did this sudden doubt come from?

  ‘I no longer remember the music, the memory is mute and filled entirely with the fearful admiration with which I followed the energetic movements of Lea’s arm and her sure, nimble fingering, copied from Marie’s fingering, as I remembered it from the first evening. I had seen it all a thousand times, and yet now it seemed, as all those strange eyes watched, different, more admirable and mysterious than usual. It was Lea, my daughter, playing up there!

  ‘Noisy applause. Delicate Markus Gerber clapped for longest. His face glowed. He had dressed as if he were the one who had to go on stage. Sometimes Lea was indulge
nt, sometimes irritated, when he wanted to walk her to school. I felt for him; soon she would drop him.

  ‘Marie stayed seated at the grand piano. Lea bowed. Later, when I was lying awake, I was troubled by something that was hard to grasp. She had bowed as if she agreed with this applause. As if the world simply had to cheer her. That had bothered – or rather – disturbed me more than I was able to admit. It wasn’t (as I thought at first) because it contained vanity and presumption. No, it was the reverse: her posture, her movements and her expression expressed a message of which she knew nothing as yet, and in a certain sense would never know anything until the end: that she must never be left alone with the thing that she was able to do, the thing she worked on with such boundless devotion; that others must on no account be allowed to encounter her playing heedlessly; that it would a disaster if the listeners withdrew their love and admiration. In retrospect, I know: what I saw there on the stage and what I felt to be something ominous was a harbinger, a harbinger of all the dramas that were yet to come, once she had taken the first step into the public view that evening.

  ‘The second piece was a Mozart rondo. And that was when it happened: Lea played a phrase too many and the motif that comes up most frequently crept in where it didn’t belong. It was quite a natural mistake that no one would have noticed had it not been for the piano accompaniment replacing the orchestra originally envisaged by Mozart. Marie and Lea’s notes no longer matched, and dissonance and rhythmic chaos ensued. Marie took her hands off the keys and looked over at Lea, her eyes large and dark. Was it dismay that lay in those eyes? Or reproach? The reproach at betraying the perfection she was trying to guide Lea towards, hour for hour, week for week?

  ‘I didn’t like those eyes. Until now my gaze had drifted quite often to Marie. I liked the way she sat there in her dark, mysterious dress, her strong, slender hands on the keys, her face full of concentration on their concerted playing. As so often I imagined what it would be like with her, with her on her own, in a world without Lea – just to return with a lacerating feeling of betrayal to the reality where my little daughter, my big daughter, was having her debut, in a school hall, but still. Now, however, I was repelled by Marie’s eyes, in which I read a nonsensical accusation, an accusation fired at an eleven-year-old girl who had made a mistake in a piece of music. Or perhaps it was not an accusation. Was Marie simply confused and, behind her dark gaze, seeking a possible way of finding her way back into Lea’s playing? Lea herself had – after a fearful and helpless glance at Marie – carried on with the superfluous phrase, yes, that’s the right word: carried on, the way one carries on even though there’s no longer any point – just because stopping would be even worse. During the night I thought: No, I never want to see my daughter carrying on like that. Again and again I thought this thought, the whole night, and it kept coming back later, right to the end, and even today it sometimes ambushes me, a useless, phantom thought from a lost time.

  ‘Suddenly Marie seemed to understand what had happened, there were a few hesitant, still-inappropriate notes and then harmony was re-established and maintained until the end. Lea’s playing of the rest was clean and error-free, but there was a flatness to her notes, as if carrying on without Marie as she had just done had used up all of her strength. Perhaps it was my imagination. Who knows?

  ‘The applause was noisier than it had been after the first piece, some people even stamped and whistled appreciatively. I listened hard: was that forced, dutiful applause? Was it so strong and sustained to console Lea and to say to her: it doesn’t matter, you were good anyway? Or were those little boys and girls so natural and uninhibited in their judgement that Lea’s oversight simply had no meaning for them at all?

  ‘Lea bowed, more hesitantly and stiffly than after the first piece, and then she tried to catch my eye. How do you meet the insecure, apologetic gaze of an eleven-year-old daughter who has just had her first misfortune? I put into my own expression everything I could in terms of confidence, generous trust and pride in her. With eyes that were starting to sting, I probed her face: did she understand what had happened? How was she dealing with it? Did those twitching eyelids mean that she was battling against her disappointment and self-directed rage? Then Marie came and stood next to Lea and put her arm around her shoulder. Now I liked her again.

  ‘Lea had played by heart, even though she had the score. Contrary to her habits, she set the book down on the kitchen table when we came home. On the way she hadn’t said a word. I thought about how stiffly she had stood there when Marie had stroked her hair to say goodbye, so I was careful not to touch her. It was the first time I had encountered my daughter in a state that I would learn to fear: as if at the slightest touch, even if it was only words, she would shatter.’

  Van Vliet paused, his eye sliding diagonally downwards and seeming to penetrate every object with a kind of searing emptiness.

  ‘In the end she really did shatter, she shattered into a thousand pieces.’

  He took great gulps. A trickle of red wine ran from the corner of his mouth and dripped on his shirt collar. ‘I studied the score of Mozart’s Rondo on the kitchen table, all night. Köchel 373. I will never forget that number; it’s as if it’s etched into me. I found two passages that might be responsible for the mistake, the superfluous phrase. I didn’t dare to ask. I put the score on the chest of drawers in the corridor where Lea sometimes set her scores down when she came home. She left it there. As if it didn’t exist. In the end I discarded it. It was the only score that I threw away when I moved into the little apartment.

  ‘This event represented a first hair crack in Lea’s confidence. It was weeks before we could talk about it. And then she told me: she had had to struggle to resist an impulse to hurl the violin into the audience. I was much more startled by that than by her slip. Wasn’t what was happening to my daughter much too dangerous? Wasn’t the ambition that Marie had unleashed in her like a fire that could no longer be extinguished?’

  10

  ‘WE TOOK the night train to Rome. Lea had always been amazed by trains with sleeping carriages. The idea that there were trains with beds, which you lay down upon only to wake up somewhere entirely different – it seemed to her like some kind of magic. Allowing her to experience that same magic in her own body was the only way I could think of to overcome the paralysis into which she had fallen after her mistake in the Rondo. For the first few days she had stayed in bed and drawn the curtains like a seriously ill patient. She didn’t even want to talk to Marie when she called. The violin case stood banished behind the cupboard.

  ‘I had expected something, but nothing so violent. She had had that noisy applause, after all, even Caroline’s parents had clapped. The headmaster had come out on stage and attempted to kiss her hand, failing grotesquely. But Lea’s face was increasingly frozen and had assumed a mask-like immobility. I stared sleeplessly into the darkness and tried to banish the image of that lifeless, bitter face. In the eleven years since I had known this face, it had not seemed strange to me for a second, and I wouldn’t have considered it possible that it might one day become so. Now that it was happening, for a moment I lost the ground under my feet.

  ‘Her face was back to normal when we sat over breakfast in the dining car. And the deeper we travelled into the flickering Italian high summer, allowing ourselves to be captivated by the buildings, the piazzas and the sea, the more the traces of exhaustion left on her face by tireless practising faded away. Lea already looked quite grown-up, I thought, and there were appreciative whistles for her appearance. We never once talked about music and the Rondo.

  ‘At first I said the occasional sentence about Marie, but my words went unanswered, as if they had not been uttered. If we passed a postcard stand I hoped Lea would buy one for Marie. But nothing happened.

  ‘Sometimes she would forget something. It was just small things that didn’t matter: the name of our hotel, the number of the bus line, the name of a drink. I thought nothing of it. Nothing that stuc
k. It was wonderfully hot and Bern with Ruth Adamek was wonderfully far away.

  ‘The church the sounds were coming from was on a small, idyllic square. The church door was open; people sat outside on the steps, listening. Lea recognized the piece before I did: it was the music by Bach that Marie had played on the evening of our first meeting. It wasn’t a spasm that ran through her body, more a kind of stiffening, a lightning-quick build-up of tension. She left me standing there and disappeared into the church.

  ‘I sat down outside. My thoughts returned to the moment when I had seen the brass plaque with Marie Pasteur’s name as I drove by. I wished I hadn’t seen it. It could have happened so easily, I thought: a car that had distracted me, a blinking neon light, a striking passer-by – and the plaque would never have entered my field of vision. Then Lea wouldn’t have left me standing there.

  ‘As she came back out her face was twitching, and when she sat down next to me it came spilling out of her: the fear of having disappointed Marie; the fear of losing her affection; the fear of her next appearance. I stood up for Marie and slowly the tears ebbed away. She bought a dozen postcards, we went in search of stamps, and that same evening she threw three cards to Marie into the postbox. She tried to call to announce the cards, but there was no one at home. I booked a flight for the next day and after landing in Zurich I rang Marie. At home Lea took her violin out from behind the cupboard and went to her first lesson for three weeks. She played for half the night. The fever had returned.’