We had walked for a while and now we were standing again on the shores of Lake Geneva. The brutal word was like a knife with which he cut himself, once, twice, three times. I thought about his words, when he told me about Amsterdam, about the bridges over the canals, the bridges that were too low, and the disguise with the old clothes that he put on to ward off, to defend himself, as clodhopping Dutchman Martijn Gerrit van Vliet, against the glittering David Lévy: because a spiritual pain to which we ourselves contribute is easier to bear than pain merely inflicted on us.
‘I’m not putting Lea in a madhouse.’ He was speaking in the present tense. A terrible present tense. Not just because it denied Lea’s death, but also because a helpless, icy fury vibrated in it, a rage against the Maghrebi who had refused him access to his daughter, and whose existence he was able to bear only because it was simply erased by the tense he had used. No, white coats, keys and sealed asylum doors were out of the question.
Not even when Lea had a complete collapse after visiting Marie. Van Vliet had seen her in the distance, her old violin hanging over her shoulder, Nikki on the leash. His stomach tightened. Marie. It became a certainty when she boarded the tram. Van Vliet ran to the taxi rank and followed her. The way one follows a sleepwalker to protect her and keep her from falling.
He was hiding in a house doorway on the other side of the street when Lea walked, hesitantly and with her head lowered, towards Marie’s house. It was starting to get dark and he saw straight away: there was no light behind Marie’s windows. Lea paused, seemed for a moment to want to turn around, and then rang, after all. Nothing. She stroked the dog, waited, rang again. Van Vliet sighed with relief: it had gone well once again. But even though the dog tugged on the lead, Lea didn’t go away, but took the violin off her shoulder and sat down on the steps in front of the door. Now father and daughter waited in the falling darkness, speechless and separated by the evening traffic, in which Marie would eventually have to appear.
Should he have gone to her and brought her home? Reminded her that Marie was scared of dogs? If she hadn’t had the violin with her, yes, he might have done. But the violin meant: she didn’t just want to talk to Marie, she wanted a lesson, and that meant: she wanted to turn back time, she wanted everything to be as it had been before. No trip to St Moritz, no break-up, no David Lévy, no Neuchâtel, she wanted to get back to Mari’s batik dresses and all the chintz she had once wanted to bathe in. Van Vliet sensed: over there, on the steps, Lea was suspended above an abyss. She was staggering through time, or rather she no longer knew time, there was no time in her any more – there was just that one desire: for things with Marie to be good again, with the woman she had given the gold ring to, had sent all those cards to from Rome, the woman who had drawn a cross on her forehead before every performance.
And her father didn’t want to be the one to trample that hope and that longing, and whom she would hate afterwards.
It was already after nine o’clock and black night when Marie parked outside the house. Van Vliet stared across until tears came to his eyes. The dog humped up and tugged on the leash. Marie recoiled, bridled, froze. Now Lea was standing facing her. Van Vliet was glad it was too dark to make out the expression on her face. But perhaps it was even worse having to imagine that expression: a pleading, begging expression on the face of his daughter, for whom Marie might be the only salvation.
Van Vliet was tempted to walk over, run over, to his daughter’s aid. But it would only have made everything more chaotic, so he went on staring into the darkness and tried to hear what Marie was saying. She must have been saying something, after three years of complete silence she couldn’t simply walk without a word past Lea into the house and close the door behind her. Or could she?
Marie was at the door, she seemed to be putting the key in the lock. Lea had stepped aside, she had had to press up against a bush and hold Nikki by the collar to let Marie past. It had stung her father when he saw her retreating like a slave who had no right to be there. Now he heard her saying something to Marie. In the half-open door, behind which the light had been turned on, Marie turned around and looked at Lea. A car drove past. ‘… late … sorry …’ was all he could hear. Lea let go of the dog, stumbled over the leash, spread her arms out, it must have torn her father apart when he saw the pleading, yearning movement of his daughter, who didn’t know what to do with herself and was making a foolish attempt simply to step outside of time and everything she did with people, and go on living where it hurt least.
Marie, a silhouette against the light coming from the door, seemed to straighten and become quite tall. Van Vliet had come to know and fear that straightening movement. ‘No,’ she said, and again: ‘No.’ Then she turned around, walked through the door and let it fall shut behind her.
For a long time Lea simply stood there, gazing at the door behind which the light went out. The fact that it went out – her father felt as if at that moment his daughter’s every hope and future were destroyed. Now the light went on in the music room and Marie’s outline became visible. Van Vliet recalled how a long time, a very long time ago, he had watched the shadow play that Marie and Lea performed in that room, and how he had felt excluded and envied them both the intimacy that spoke from their gestures. Now Lea, too, was standing outside, excluded by a light going out, a rejected little girl who could stagger and fall at any moment, both inside and out.
She set off in the wrong direction. It couldn’t possibly get her home, neither could it take her to another comprehensible destination. Again Van Vliet’s stomach tightened. The picture of his real daughter was overlaid with an imagined picture in which she walked further and further along that road, further and further, the street was an endless straight line, Lea walked and walked, the dog had disappeared, now his daughter’s form slowly bleached away, became paler and paler, transparent, ethereal like the figure of a fairy, and then she was gone.
When he was finally able to shake off the picture, which had become more and more powerful, he felt as if he were waking up after a brief but intense illness.
‘Later, when I lay awake,’ he said, ‘I thought about how my own mind was beginning to distort. It was very strange: I had expected panic at the thought – the fear of going insane. Instead I felt good about it. It wasn’t exactly a feeling of happiness, more a kind of contentment, and I think it was the feeling that I was becoming similar to Lea – as preposterous as that might sound. Or perhaps I shouldn’t say becoming similar, but rather corresponding to. Yes, that was it. It was the feeling of responding to my idea of Lea’s infinite, fading path towards unreality that was spreading inexorably within my daughter. It was dangerous, I sensed that clearly. But that happens: that one willingly, devotedly and somehow contentedly faces the abyss.’
And then he talked about Thelma and Louise, the film in which two women, pursued by the police, hurtle towards the end of a canyon. They have communicated with few words, glances of complicity, they take each other by the hand and drive in inner harmony into deadly freedom.
‘The image of those two hands,’ he said, ‘is one of the finest cinematic images that I know. It looks so easy and graceful, the way those two hands touch, it doesn’t look at all like despair, more like happiness, a happiness that one can only acquire once one stakes everything, including one’s life. A tremendous, foolhardy gambit with which the two women rise above all the power in the world, albeit only for the last seconds of their lives.’
Yes, Martijn, that is an image that must have touched your very depths. I see your hands in front of me, gripping the wheel when the lorries came, big, noisy and crushing.
Then Van Vliet had hailed a taxi, got the driver to drive it around the block and stop beside Lea. ‘Oh, Dad,’ was all she said, and got into the back seat with Nikki. She wasn’t even slightly suspicious and apparently thought it was a chance meeting. They drove home in silence. He cooked, but she sat over her food with a glassy expression and left it at the end.
When he wok
e up towards morning, he heard a sound in the hall. In a corner, Lea was sitting on the floor beside Nikki, her arms wrapped around the dog, weeping. He carried her to bed and waited in the armchair until she had gone to sleep. It had been impossible to talk to her. ‘She was unreachable now, unreachable by anyone,’ he said.
22
IT WAS DURING those morning hours that the fatal thought came to him: he would buy Lea a violin made by Guarneri del Gesù – whatever the price.
The instrument – he must have thought – would restore his daughter and give her back the proud form and constitution that made up her true being. It would re-anchor her drifting, unmoored will. She would be back up at the top, building her incomparable cathedrals out of sacred notes. LEA VAN VLIET – he must have seen the proud, bright letters in front of him. David Lévy wouldn’t be in the audience, and neither would Marie Pasteur, but he, her father, would. He still had no clear plan about how he might get hold of the money to buy one of the most expensive violins in the world. But he would do it. With a daring chess move he would keep his daughter from sliding into the darkness and bring her back to the world of the healthy.
There are ruses you can concoct, explanations you can recite to yourself in advance: the book about the Cremona violin-makers that he and Lea had read together at the kitchen table; Guarneri as a substitute for Armati; trumping Lévy; the ambition to see her on stage again; the desire to see her eyes gleaming again; the inexorable, even heinous will to eliminate all competitors and from now on to have her all to himself.
All these things ran through my mind. And yet: to be able to understand, really understand what Van Vliet did after that, you would have to have seen, heard and – however peculiar it sounds – smelled him. One might also say: you would have to have sensed him. You need to have seen him, the big, heavy man, defiantly clutching his hip flask, a gambler on the outside, and even more on the inside. You would have to have heard the vibration in his voice when he spoke the beloved, the sanctified name LEA, and the quite different vibration when he talked about Marie and Lévy. You would have to have seen his big hands on the bed covers and smelled his breath, sour with alcohol, which filled the nocturnal room, into which the protecting light fell from the bathroom. What, damn it, do we know? – you would also have to have heard the sound of those words, which come up more often in my memory than they do in reality. You would have to have experienced all that, in view of what happened next, to have the impression, the compelling impression that yes, this was precisely the thing that he had to do now.
I close my eyes, I summon him up in my mind and I think: yes, Martijn, that was how you had to feel and act, exactly like that. Because that is the rhythm of your soul. There were many other violins – they, too, noble instruments, which would have sounded good in Lea’s hands, and they wouldn’t have forced you to play that reckless, nonsensical game of poker. But no, it had to be a GUARNERI DEL GESÙ, because that was the name that had caught Lea’s imagination at the kitchen table and distracted her attention from Amati and Lévy. Whatever the cost, it had to be a violin like Paganini’s, the one displayed in Genoa City Hall. And I’m not surprised that the first thing you imagined, in the light of dawn beside Lea’s bed, was how you would steal that violin from the display case. A Guarneri del Gesù. I’ve been with you for less than three days and it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that you saw this as your only option.
23
IN THE PALE MORNING LIGHT Van Vliet sat down at his computer. The first few steps were child’s play. A few clicks and the search engine brought him to the pages with the information he was looking for. There were 164 registered violins by Guarneri del Gesù. Only one was for sale, the dealer was in Chicago. To find out the price he had to join the website that collected all the information about old musical instruments. He hesitated. If he entered the number of his credit card, that would be a few dollars, not more. In spite of that, when he did it at last, he had the feeling that he was setting in motion things that would soon be out of his control.
The violin was valued at $1.8 million. Van Vliet sent an email to the dealer and asked what would happen if he wanted to buy the instrument. But it was the middle of the night in Chicago and he couldn’t expect an answer before late afternoon.
When Lea woke up at about midday, it was as if nothing had happened. She seemed not to remember either the visit to Marie or the night-time scene with the dog. Van Vliet was startled. Never before had it been so clear to him that Lea’s mind was falling to pieces, in sequences between which there was no connection. At the same time he was also relieved and delighted when he heard her on the phone, arranging to meet Caroline.
In the office he went through the documents about the millions he had raised. He was startled when he realized: even though he was unaware of it himself, from the very start he had been thinking about paying for the violin from his research money. He studied the sums on the screen: he would have to divert more than half the first tranche for the violin. That would mean delaying some of the projects and paying for them out of the second tranche. He stepped to the window and thought. When a colleague came in and glanced at the screen, Van Vliet flinched, even though there had been nothing suspicious on view. When he was alone again, he locked the whole folder with a password. Then he drove to a small private bank in Thun which he knew by name and opened a numbered account.
‘When I stepped back into the street I had a feeling like the one I had when I sold shares to buy Lea’s first full-size violin,’ he said. ‘Except that the feeling was much stronger, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, and everything could be revoked with a stroke of the pen.’
When he got back to the institute, Ruth Adamek complained that she no longer had access to the data because of the password. He coolly said something about security and shook his head when she asked him to tell her what it was. Afterwards he went over her words and glances in his mind. No, she couldn’t possibly have been suspicious. She couldn’t have known what he was thinking.
Towards evening the answer came from Chicago: the violin had been sold a few days before. On the way home Van Vliet felt disappointed and relieved in turn. He hid the bank documents from Thun in his bedroom. The danger seemed to have fled.
Caroline came round more often now, and Lea went off with her. Van Vliet became calmer. Perhaps he had read too much drama into Lea’s visit to Marie. And wasn’t it quite natural for her to seek consolation in her dog?
But then he met Caroline in town. She asked shyly whether they could go and have a coffee together. And then she talked about her fears for Lea. He gave a start, because he thought at first that she might have noticed something of the cracks and flaws in Lea’s mind. But it wasn’t that. It was Lea’s memories of the concerts, the brilliance, the stage fright and the applause that worried Caroline. When they were together, it was all she talked about, for hours on end. She forgot everything that was going on around her and travelled back in time and blossomed as she did so; her eyes gleamed; she looked out of the café window into an imaginary future and drew up concert programmes, one after the other. When the time came to pay, it all vanished, she barely seemed to know where she was, and suddenly she seemed to Caroline like an old woman whose whole life was behind her. ‘Caro,’ she had said the last time they had parted, ‘you’ll help me, won’t you?’
Van Vliet and Caroline were standing in the street. She saw what he was wondering. ‘She thinks you’re pleased. That the concerts are all done with, I mean. That you never liked all that. Because of David, David Lévy.’
Van Vliet spent the whole night in the institute. For the first few hours he battled with his rage against Lea. That you’re pleased. How could she think something like that? Was it because he had missed a lot of concerts so that he wouldn’t have to look at Lévy’s salt-and-pepper mane? He paced up and down in his office, gazed out over the night-time city and talked to Lea. He talked and debated with her until his rage had subsided and he was left only with the
horrible feeling that he had become quite a stranger to her. Her father, who had stood beside her in the station when Loyola de Colón had freed her from her torpor. Her father, whom she had asked at the kitchen table: ‘Is a violin expensive?’
I think it was this feeling more than anything, this unbearable feeling of strangeness between them, that made Van Vliet set off again in the early hours of the morning in search of a violin that would bring his daughter back to life and prove to her that she had been mistaken, that she had misunderstood him. That violin was supposed to be the living, material proof that he really was willing to do everything to give her back her joy in music, her concert fever. And when he told me about the foolhardy, feverish resolution with which he sat down at the computer, for the first time I understood the weight of his hatred, which had flared up when the Maghrebi had said that sentence to him in his piercing voice: C’est de votre fille qu’il s’agit.
He found out that there was an internet forum for people who wanted to swap information and questions about the violins of the Guarneri family. With his eyes burning, he read the entire exchange.
‘It was as if I were plunging into a hot, seething witch’s cauldron,’ he said. ‘At the same time the language in the messages was cool and detached. There were rare, refined words in it. The whole thing reminded me of a secret lodge whose members followed special rules in their choice of words, which revealed them as initiates.’
And it was here that he encountered Signor Buio. ‘Have you heard that Sig. Buio wants to sell his Guarneris at auction?’ it said. ‘Incredible, after all those years. There must be at least a dozen of them. All Del Gesùs. It’s going to take place at his house, I’ve heard, and he only accepts cash. The whole thing seems to me as if he’s planning a game of chess against the rest of the world, perhaps the last game of his life.’
Lea Page 15
