Lea

by Pascal Mercier

  If only Marie had still been there. But Marie had ceased to exist two years ago. She had frozen when Van Vliet had asked, after the concert in St Moritz, whether she wouldn’t call in; talk, not apologize, just talk.

  From Marie to Lévy: a violent tectonic shift must have taken place inside Lea. He would have loved to understand. Was he simply not the man to understand something like that? Would Cécile have understood, that worldly woman who often laughed at his naiveté?

  He tried to talk to Katharina Walther about it. Marie Pasteur. Yes, yes, Marie Pasteur. He hadn’t forgotten her words, which was why he had hesitated. She immediately switched to Lévy’s side. A natural substitution process. A normalization. And the man was a brilliant teacher!

  A normalization. Van Vliet had to think about that later on, when he was sitting opposite the Maghrebi and had to endure his X-ray gaze.

  Marie had ceased to exist. Should he get over himself and talk to Lévy? ‘Oui?’ Lévy said at the other end of the line. ‘Votre jeu: sublime,’ Van Vliet heard the voice saying. He put down the phone.

  He talked with Lea. Or rather: to her. He sat down in the armchair in her room, as he hadn’t done for ages. He told her about his conversation with the headmaster, about his good intentions and his concern. He admonished, threatened, pleaded. Above all, I think, he pleaded. He pleaded with her to do her school leaving exam. To take a break from the performances and recover. With him, if she wanted.

  It worked, at least temporarily. She spent more time at home, they ate together more often. Van Vliet found himself hoping that he would be close to her once again. Only a few weeks until the exams. A big performance was scheduled in Geneva two days after the last exams. Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Bach’s E major Concerto. Instead of collecting her marks, she would be sitting on the train to Geneva to be in time for the rehearsals.

  While being quizzed about dates and chemical compounds her face suddenly went blank and she said nothing more. Van Vliet was worried about her brain. But she wasn’t having a brainstorm, she was just thinking all of a sudden about Geneva and the famous conductor that she didn’t want to disappoint. He saw the fear in her empty eyes, and again he cursed her fame, and he cursed Joe, the music teacher who had put her forward for St Moritz.

  And then came the day when Van Vliet turned into Jean-Louis Trintignant, whom he had seen, while sitting next to Cécile, driving through the night behind the wheel of his filthy racing car, dashing from the Côte d’Azur to Paris. But Trintignant, in my imagination, had the face of Tom Courtenay. He smoked like a chimney; the smoke obscured his vision; his eyes stung, and he had, I think, a splitting headache, while he rushed from Bern to Ins and on to Neuchâtel, cutting corners, screeching tyres, flashing lights and cursing; and always that time in front of his eyes: 12.00, Lea’s Biology exam. He had to pick her up and bring her back, with any luck he’d just make it. The exam timetable had been on the kitchen table. He had pounced on it, then the white-hot certainty that Lea had got her days mixed up and gone to Neuchâtel, because the violin wasn’t there. At Ins Station he had just missed the train on which she must have been, so on to Neuchâtel. Once he took the wrong fork in the road and had to turn round; no car park at Neuchâtel; taxi drivers cursing when he pulled in alongside them, but not for long, because the train had arrived a few minutes previously; léVY DAVID, frantically flicking through the phone book; he asked the taxi drivers to tell him the way, idiotic grins and shaking of heads; he ran a red light; after a bit of time spent aimlessly driving back and forth, a policeman who was able to tell the way. Shortly afterwards he saw her with her violin case over her shoulder.

  She was confused, stubborn, didn’t believe it, didn’t want to. At least to tell her briefly. She rang the doorbell of the dark house. Lévy in his dressing gown, fully dressed underneath, and still: dressing gown, Je me suis trompée, je suis désolée, he half heard it, half read it on her lips, her apologetic expression, servile, he thought, her hand gestures in his direction. Lévy’s expression, not a sign of recognition, not a greeting. The violin case got caught in the car door, a reproachful look as if it were all his fault. Gregor Mendel, Charles Darwin, DNA, nucleases, nucleoles, nucleotide; she had to hold on in the bends; the clock on the dashboard ticked the minutes away, and then, all of a sudden, she went to pieces and wept, her shoulders twitched, she bent low until her head hung between her knees.

  He stopped on the corner outside the school and took her in his arms. For precious minutes he held his child, who sobbed out her fear in hard, irregular bursts, her fear of the exam, of Geneva, of the damp hands, of Lévy’s judgement and of being lonely in the hotel room. Van Vliet wiped his eyes as he told me about it.

  She had slowly calmed down. He had wiped away her tears, stroked her hair smooth and kissed her on the forehead. ‘You’re Lea Van Vliet,’ he had said. She had smiled like a castaway. On the corner she had waved.

  A few streets on, in a quiet car park, Van Vliet himself had gone to pieces. He closed the window so that no one could hear him sobbing. With a loud, animal groan everything had collapsed around him: his fear for Lea, his homesickness for former times, his own loneliness, his jealousy and hatred of the man in the dressing gown who had bound her to him with a violin by Nicola Amati. He opened the violin case and for one crazed, insane moment he considered putting the instrument down in front of the wheels and driving over it. Before driving to the Oberland and lying down under the snow.

  After that there was no time to drive home. He washed his face in a fountain and collected Lea. She had passed, although without distinction. She threw her arms around his neck. She must have felt what was left of the damp from the fountain and looked at him. ‘You’ve been crying,’ she said.

  They drove to the Rosengarten to eat. He had hoped it would be a meal over which they could talk about her emotions, which had spilled from beneath her tears. But when they had ordered, Lea picked up the phone and called Lévy. ‘Just very quickly,’ she said, apologetically. ‘Je suis désolée, je me suis trompée de jour … Non, l’oral … Oui, réussi … Non, pas très bien … Oui, à trés bientôt.’ À bientôt hadn’t been enough, it had had to be à très bientôt. That ugly little word had destroyed everything. When Van Vliet talked about it, it was as if he were hearing the wretched syllable at that very moment. He had left his dinner half-eaten and they had driven home in silence. The hard shell had closed over their feelings once more, for both of them.

  Once again he braced himself, picked her up after the last exam and drove her to Geneva. He drove to the concert as well. He walked through the city and saw the posters: LEA VAN VLIET. He had learned to love and hate such posters. Sometimes he had run his hand over the smooth, shiny paper. Then again, when he thought he was unobserved, he had torn it into tiny pieces, vandalism against his daughter’s fame. Once a policeman had seen him do it and apprehended him. ‘I’m the father,’ he had said and shown him his ID. The policeman had looked at him in admiration. ‘What’s it like to have such a famous daughter?’ ‘Difficult,’ Van Vliet had replied. The policeman had laughed. As he walked on Van Vliet had been annoyed that the matter had turned into a joke like that and had spat on the ground. The policeman, who had stopped, had seen it. For a moment their eyes locked like the eyes of enemies. At least that was how it had seemed to Van Vliet.

  He hadn’t been to one of Lea’s concerts for a long time. Seeing Lévy’s salt-and-pepper mane in the auditorium was unbearable. Even now it was unbearable. But then he managed to forget it. Because his daughter was playing as he had never heard her play before. St Moritz was nothing in comparison. But then he had thought: A cathedral of notes. But that had been a little church compared with the cathedral that she built with her Amati notes over the whole city of Geneva and all the water. For her father nothing existed but this cathedral of clarity and night-black blue, translated into sound. And there was also the source of that monumental sacred architecture: Lea’s hands which, as sure as Marie’s hands, drew sounds fro
m that incomparable instrument that Nicola Amati had made in 1653. And her face above the chin-rest, her eyes mostly closed. Since that evening in St Moritz when David Lévy had come to their table as if out of nowhere, she had never again used a white cloth for her chin. The colour was now mauve, as Lea called it. He had investigated the cloths and found what he was looking for: LUC BLANC, NEUCHTEL, the company name in tiny black letters. Now, once again, Lea pressed her chin to such a cloth. The muscles of her face followed the music, both the line of the melody and the curve of the technical difficulties. He thought of how that face had dissolved a few days before and had been pressed wetly against his cheek. À très bientôt. Lévy sat motionlessly on his seat in the front row.

  He was the one on whom she bestowed her first glance before she bowed. The glance of the grateful, proud and, yes, loving student. The conductor mimed a kiss of her hand. She shook the lead violinist’s hand. Only in the car did Van Vliet know what had disturbed him about it: the gesture had been unpredictable, terribly unpredictable. He had felt as if Lea had been caught up in an enormous clockwork mechanism, the gigantic, grinding wheels of the concert business, and now she was performing all the movements that the predetermined ballistic curves dictated. The father thought of the way she had bowed at her first performance in the school. Although graceful, there had been something shy about it, a shyness that was missing now; it had made way for the glamour of the star.

  Lévy got to Lea before her father did. They both walked up to him. ‘David, je vous présente mon père,’ Lea said to the man who had turned Neuchâtel into a hated fortress. Lévy’s face was at ease, detached. The two unequal men shook hands. Lévy’s hand was cold, anaemic.

  ‘Sublime, n’est-ce pas?’ he said.

  ‘Divin, celeste,’ Van Vliet said.

  He had looked up the words long ago to be ready if he met his daughter’s sublime, heavenly teacher. When he asked a French school friend for advice, she had laughed. ‘It drips with irony,’ she had said, ‘especially céleste. My God, céleste in an exchange like that! Sublime!’

  Every now and again he had dreamed of that encounter, and then the words hadn’t come to mind. Now they came. In Lea’s face rage about her father’s irony mingled with pride at his quickness of mind, and a linguistic knowledge she hadn’t known he possessed. ‘There’s a party now,’ she said hesitantly. ‘David is taking me in his car. He has to go to Bern anyway.’

  David, but still vous, Van Vliet had thought in the car. He felt Lévy’s cold hand, which he had had to touch once more when saying goodbye. Lea hadn’t asked if he wanted to come to the party as well. Of course, he wouldn’t have gone. But he didn’t want to be excluded, either, not even by Lea, particularly not by her. He thought of the Roe garden and the movement with which she had picked up the telephone. It had been a movement like a wall, and the wall had grown with each passing second in which she had waited with anticipation for Lévy to speak in a melodious voice. Now he had lost again and she would be sitting beside Lévy in the green Jaguar in the middle of the night.

  Van Vliet didn’t say it, but we both knew that he had been thinking of Marie’s hand slicing open the whole length of a green Jaguar with the pointed key.

  I see you dashing to Ins and Neuchâtel, Martijn, your daughter and one goal in front of your eyes. And I see you driving at night from Geneva to Bern, without a wife, without a speed, without a goal. A little like Tom Courtenay when he had to return to the treadmill of harassment, a victor for a matter of minutes, a loser for years.

  20

  WHEN HE GOT HOME, Van Vliet had taken a sleeping pill. He didn’t want to hear Lea coming home. The next morning she laid the breakfast table for two. It was the first time he had refused a peace offering from his daughter. He drank a cup of coffee standing up.

  ‘I’m going away for a few days,’ he said.

  Lea looked anxious. As if her indifference over the previous few months had not existed.

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘No idea.’

  Her eyes wavered. ‘Alone?’

  Van Vliet refused to answer. First time for that, too. Her expression had said: Marie. She must have sensed it. She had never said anything. But she must have sensed it. Marie had become taboo, a crystallization point of woundedness, guilt and embarrassment. He would never have thought that there could be a taboo between him and his daughter. When she had, back then, in the railway station, after Loyola’s playing, resisted his protective movement – that had been the awakening of a will of her own; it had hurt, but he had learned to understand, accept and in the end encourage it. Like the other kinds of independence that had developed since then. But that forbidden zone around Marie, that ice age of silence and denial: it tore him apart that things had come to this between them.

  ‘So, I’m off,’ he said in parting. He was sure, quite sure, that she knew: he was quoting the ritual words she uttered when she set off for Neuchâtel. She looked lost, standing there in the corridor: a girl who would shortly find her school leaving certificate in the letter box; a star whose name was on every wall and in all the newspapers; a violin student who loved her teacher, even if she was never allowed to stay overnight. Van Vliet froze when he saw how lost she was. He was inches away from closing the door again and sitting down at the breakfast table. But that thing about the party the previous evening had been one thing too many. He left.

  He had told me all of this over breakfast. He had knocked at the door of my room, not the connecting door. He had to knock for a long time. It had been almost eight when I had fallen asleep with lines from Walt Whitman running through my mind. Breakfast time was over, but we persuaded the waitress. And now we were sitting in our coats by the lake, ready to travel and yet not ready. He didn’t want to go to his two silent rooms, and I was afraid of Bern. How would it be? Would we simply say goodbye outside my house, and he would drive to his place, along the roads of Bern, down which no lorries thundered at this time of night? What would I do with his unhappiness? What would he do with the knowledge that I knew of it? An intimacy of that magnitude, suddenly being parted: wasn’t it something terrible, barbaric? Something simply impossible? But what else?

  And so we sat there, shivering, watching the swans, and Van Vliet told me how he had got back on his feet.

  ‘After that long time I got back on my feet. As I did so I realized how small I had allowed Ruth Adamek to make me. At first I sat in the office with my suitcase and looked at my desk, which was becoming increasingly empty: because I was there so rarely, they simply took my tasks away from me and did them themselves. I no longer had any idea what was happening in my institute.’ He flicked his cigarette butt in the lake. ‘When I finally grasped that, up there, looking at the mountains, I didn’t feel so bad. At any rate I persuaded myself. Forging money, freedom, recklessness, just letting things rush by – why not? But it wasn’t the truth. In fact, I sense that my dignity was in danger. Big word, dramatic word. I would never have thought I’d have to strive for it one day. But it was the right word. Perhaps not least because of the evening in Geneva. I don’t know. The empty desk wasn’t funny any more. I left.’

  He didn’t go to the Oberland. He took the train to Milan.

  ‘I didn’t have suitable clothes for the opera. I don’t have any, in fact. But on the second evening someone showed up and offered me a ticket for La Scala. Idomeneo. I was ripped off, more than that. So two days after Lea’s concert I sat in shabby clothes at the opera house in Milan and studied the violinists in the orchestra pit. I imagined Lea there. And somehow that was the spark: she would study music at the Conservatoire; she was now my grown-up daughter who made her money with concerts and records, and the important thing now was to let her go; eventually Lévy would be a thing of the past as well; an apartment of her own, a responsibility of her own, freedom, freedom for both of us. After that Idomeneo was my opera. I had no idea what happened in it and what it sounded like, but it was a wonderful opera, the opera of my liberation from resp
onsibility, which Cécile had lumbered me with, and which had almost left me in pieces.

  ‘The problem was just: I didn’t believe a word of what I said. But I refused to see it, so I worked on that self-betrayal with all the new energy I persuaded myself I had.

  ‘But first I allowed myself a few days in Northern Italian cities and by Lake Garda. A father who had finally found the correct attitude towards his adult daughter. A man who was at the start of a new phase of his life, full of new freedom. Glances from women, even young ones. A new suitcase.

  ‘And then that book about violin-making in Cremona. Amati, Stradivarius, the Guarneris. I still remember: I didn’t feel quite at ease when I was standing by the till. As if the tide of a menacing, treacherous future were surging towards me. As if the book showed me something, a whirlpool in which I would disappear. But I didn’t want to know anything about that feeling. I would bring the book to Lea: a gesture of reconciliation, a generous gesture, which, through Amati, also included Lévy.

  ‘After I got back I resumed my job, so to speak. I got to the office earlier than anyone else and left later. I asked them to bring me all the documents from the last few months. I asked them to describe the results of the experiments that we had been given money for, and asked about the details of the new projects. I was quiet and concise. They were afraid of my energy and my concentration, which they had almost forgotten. Because mistakes came to light: incorrect calculations, incorrect estimates, the wrong questions. The contracts of two colleagues were to be extended. I refused to sign. When I discovered that Ruth Adamek had signed them in my place, I called HR and cancelled them. I called Ruth in, and read her the riot act. She was about to protest, but that was just the start. “Not now!” I said when someone tried to come in. I must have said it so piercingly that she blanched. I pulled over a stack of papers that I had worked on through the night. She recognized the stack and gasped. I listed her bad decisions, one after another. She tried to blame me, to blame my constant absence. I interrupted her. I looked at her and felt her breath on the back of my neck, the time she had snapped, ‘Sign!’ I saw her grinning after I had torn up the application. I read out the miscalculations, the false premises, the incorrect interpretations of the data. I read them out, one after another. I repeated them. I chanted them. I destroyed Ruth Adamek, who had never forgiven me for not falling for her miniskirt. An icy wind swept down the corridors. I relished it.