The Piano Teacher

by Elfriede Jelinek

  The foliage in the Vienna Woods, ignited by the sunshine, blazes on the slope.

  Here and there, spring flowers peek out; mother and daughter pick them and pack them away. Serves the flowers right. Insolence has to be punished, Frau Kohut puts her foot down. The flowers are just right for the round light-green vase from Gmunden, isn’t that so, Erika?

  The adolescent girl lives in a sanctuary, where no one is allowed to bother her. She is shielded from influences, and never exposed to temptations. This hands-off policy applies only to pleasure, not work. Mother and grandmother, the female brigade, stand guard, rifle in hand, to protect Erika against the male hunter lurking outside. They may even have to give the intruder a physical warning. The two elderly women, with their dried, sealed vaginas, throw themselves in front of every man, to keep him away from their fawn. The young female should not be bothered by love or pleasure. The vaginal lips of the two old women have turned into siliceous stone. Rattling dryly, their snatches snap like the jaws of a dying stag beetle, but catch nothing. So the two women hold on to the young flesh of their daughter and granddaughter, slowly mangling it, while their shells keep watch to make sure no one else comes along and poisons the young blood. They’ve got spies for miles around to keep an eye on the girl outside the house; these spies come for a cup of coffee and cheerfully reveal everything to the women in charge of bringing up the child. Their tongues loosened by the homemade cake, the spies report what they saw the precious child doing with a student down by the dam. The child will not be released from her domestic precinct until she turns over a new leaf and swears off that man.

  Their farmhouse overlooks a valley, where the spies live, and the spies are in the habit of gazing up at the house through binoculars. They have no intention of putting their own house in order first. Indeed, they completely neglect their house when the vacationers finally come from the city, because it is summer now. A brook trickles through a meadow. A large hazelnut bush abruptly slices off any further view of the brook, which flows invisibly into the meadow belonging to the next farmer. To the left of the house, a mountain meadow climbs high, ending in a forest, part of which is private property, and the rest national. All around, dense pine forests hem in the view; but you can still see what your neighbor is doing, and he can see what you’re doing. Cows trudge along the trail to the pastures. In back, to the left, an open pile of charcoal; and to the right a clearing, and a strawberry patch. Overhead, clouds, birds, including hawks and buzzards.

  The hawk mother and the buzzard grandmother order the child, their charge, not to leave the eyrie. They cut off HER life in thick slices, and the neighbors are already snipping away at HER character. Every stratum in which life still stirs, if only slightly, is declared rotten and slashed away. Too much strolling is bad for your studies. Down there, at the weir, young men are splashing around. SHE feels drawn to them. They laugh loudly and duck under. SHE could shine there, among the country bumpkins. She has been trained to shine. She has been drilled, she has been taught that she is the sun, the center of all orbits. She only has to stand still, and the satellites will come and worship her. She knows she is better because that is what she is always told. But it’s better not to examine her assumption.

  Reluctantly, the violin finally moves under her chin, heaved up by an unwilling arm. Outdoors, the sun is smiling, the water beckoning. The sun lures you into undressing in front of others, something the old ladies in the house have ordered her not to do. Her fingers press the painful steel strings down the fingerboard. Mozart’s tormented spirit, moaning and choking, is forced out of the resonator. Mozart’s spirit shrieks from an infernal abode because the violinist feels nothing, but she has to keep enticing the notes. Shrieking and groaning, the notes squirm out of the instrument. SHE does not need to fear criticism, so long as something can be heard, for the sounds indicate that the child has ascended the scale, to reach loftier spheres, while leaving her body down below as a dead frame. The daughter’s physical remains, sloughed off in her ascent, are combed for any traces of male use and then thoroughly shaken. After completing the music, she can slip back into her mortal coils, which have been nicely dried and starched crisp and stiff. Her frame is now unfeeling, and no one has the right to feel it.

  Mother makes a cutting remark: If SHE were left to her own devices, SHE would show more enthusiasm for some young man than for her piano-playing. The piano has to be tuned every year, for this raw Alpine climate quickly thwarts the finest tuning. The piano tuner arrives on the train from Vienna. He pants his way up the mountain, where some lunatics claim they’ve got a grand piano, three thousand feet above sea level! The tuner prophesizes that this instrument can be worked for another year or two; by then, rust and rot and mildew will have gobbled it up in unison. Mother makes sure the piano is kept properly tuned; and she also keeps twisting her daughter’s vertebrae, unconcerned about the child’s mood, worrying solely about her own influence on this stubborn, easily deformable, living instrument.

  Mother insists on keeping the windows wide open when the child “plays a recital” (that sweet reward for practicing nicely). This way, the neighbors too can delight in the dulcet melodies. Mother and Grandmother, armed with binoculars, stand on their lofty vantage point, checking whether the nearby farmer’s wife and all her kith and kin are sitting, quiet and disciplined, in front of the cottage, listening respectfully. The farmer’s wife wants to sell milk, cottage cheese, butter, eggs, and vegetables, and so she has to sit and listen in front of her home. Grandmother finds it commendable that the old neighbor finally has time to fold her hands in her lap and listen to music. The farmer’s wife has been waiting for this opportunity all her life. And the opportunity has come in her old age. How beautiful it is again! The summer vacationers likewise seem to be sitting there, listening to Brahms. Mother cheerily crows that they are getting genuinely fresh grade-A music, delivered along with their genuinely fresh grade-A milk, still warm from the cow. Today, Chopin, freshly implanted in the child, will be performed for the farmer’s wife and her guests. Mother cautions the child to play nice and loud, for the neighbor is gradually going deaf. So the neighbors hear a new melody, which they have never heard before. They will get to hear it over and over, until they could recognize it in the dark. Let’s open the door too, so they can hear better. The wave of classical music breaks through all the openings of the house and then pours down the slopes and into the valley. The neighbors will feel as if they were standing right next to the piano. All they have to do is open their mouths, and Chopin’s warm milk will gush into their throats. And then later, Brahms, that musician of frustrated people, especially women.

  She gathers all her energy, spreads her wings, and then plunges forward, toward the keys, which zoom up to her like the earth toward a crashing plane. If she can’t reach a note at first swoop, she simply leaves it out. Skipping notes, a subtle vendetta against her musically untrained torturers, gives her a tiny thrill of satisfaction. An omission is never noticed by a layman, but a wrong note will yank the vacationers out of their deck chairs. What’s that coming down from up there? Every year they pay the farmer’s wife high prices for rustic stillness, and now loud music is booming down from the hill.

  The two venomous women, a pair of spiders, listen to their victim, whom they have sucked almost dry. In their dirndls with flowery aprons, they are more considerate of their clothes than of their prisoner’s feelings. They bask in their own hubris: How modest the child will remain, even though she’ll be enjoying international fame and fortune. For now they are holding back the child and grandchild, keeping her away from the world, so that someday she won’t belong to Mama and Grandma anymore, she’ll belong to the whole world. They tell the world to be patient, it will get the child eventually.

  You’ve got a big audience again today! Just look: at least seven people in colorful lounge chairs. This is a test. But when Brahms is finally over, what are they forced to hear? It resounds, virtually an unrefined echo: a fit of roaring l
aughter from the gullets of the vacationers down there. What are they laughing at so mindlessly? How can they be so disrespectful? Mother and daughter, armed with milk cans, stride down into the valley on behalf of Brahms: a retaliatory raid for the laughter. The summer guests complain about the noise, the disruption of nature. Mother venomously retorts that Schubert’s sonatas contain more forest hush than the forest itself. They simply don’t understand. With country butter and the fruit of her womb, Mother, nose in air, sniffishly climbs back up the lonesome mountain. Her daughter walks proudly, holding the milk can. The two of them won’t show up in public again until the next evening. The vacationers talk on and on about their hobby: country boozing.

  SHE feels left out of everything because she is left out of everything. Others go farther, even climbing over her. She looks like such a minor obstruction. The hiker strides on, but she remains on the road, like a greasy sandwich wrapper, perhaps fluttering slightly in the breeze. The paper can’t get very far, it rots away right there. The rotting takes years, monotonous years.

  For a change of pace, her cousin comes for a visit, and he fills the house with his hustling, bustling life. Not only his life. He also brings along other lives, which he attracts the way light seduces flying insects. The cousin, a medical student, draws the young people here with his boastful vitality and athletic prowess. When he feels like it, he tells a medical joke; and he’s known as quite a guy because he has a sense of humor. He looms like a rock from the foaming surge of country bumpkins, who want to imitate him in every way. Suddenly, life has entered the house, for a man always brings life into a house. Smiling indulgently but proudly, the women of the house gaze at the young man, who has to let off steam. They warn him only about female adders, who might try to trick him into marriage. This young man prefers letting off steam in public, he needs an audience, and he gets one. Even HER strict mother smiles. Eventually, the young man will have to go out into the hostile world, but the daughter must strive and strain with music.

  The boy prefers wearing very skimpy bathing briefs, and he likes a girl to wear a teeny-weeny bikini, which has just come into fashion. With his friends, he uses a slide rule to measure what a girl has to offer him, and he makes fun of what she doesn’t have to offer. He plays badminton with the country girls. He makes an effort to initiate them into this sport, which requires concentration more than anything else. He holds the girl’s hand when she holds the racket, and she is embarrassed in her teeny-weeny bikini. She’s a salesgirl, and she’s saved up to buy her bikini. She’d like to marry a doctor, and she shows off her figure so the future physician knows what he’s getting. He doesn’t have to buy a pig in a poke. The boy’s genitals are just barely squeezed into a pouch, which is attached to two strings; these strings run over his hips, and are knotted on each side, left and right. They’re bound sloppily, he’s not such a stickler. Sometimes the knots unravel, and the boy has to tie them again. It’s a mini-swimsuit.

  More than anything else, the young man enjoys showing off his latest wrestling moves, right here, on the mountain, where he can still reap admiration. He also knows a few complicated judo tricks. He often performs a new stunt. If a layman knows nothing about this sport, he won’t be able to resist the move, he won’t get out of the hold. Howling mirth pours from the mouths of the onlookers, and the loser cheerily joins in the laughter, trying to show that he’s a good loser. The girls bounce around the boy like ripe fruits falling from a tree. The young athlete only has to pick them up and gulp them down. The girls screech and squeal, while observing themselves from the corners of their eyes as they try to get close to him. They slide down hills and giggle, they fly into gravel or thistles and screech. The young man stands over them, triumphant. He grabs a girl’s wrists and squeezes and crushes. He uses a secret grip. It’s hard to make out exactly what he’s doing, but the guinea pig, overcome by his superior strength and a dirty trick, sinks to her knees, down to the guy’s feet. Who could resist the young student? If he’s in a really good mood, he allows the girl, who’s crawling on the ground, to kiss his feet; otherwise, the guy won’t let her up. His feet are kissed, and the willing victim hopes for more kisses, which will be sweeter, because they’ll be given and gotten in secret.

  The sunlight plays with their heads; water hurtles up from the small wading pools and flashes in the sun. SHE practices on her piano, ignoring the salvos of laughter that shoot up in fits and starts. HER mother has urgently told her to pay no attention. Mother stands on the steps of the porch, laughing. She laughs and holds a plate of cookies in her hand. Mother says you’re only young once, but no one can hear her amid all the screeching.

  SHE always has one ear attuned to the noise outside, the noise created by her cousin and the girls. SHE listens as he digs his healthy teeth into time, devouring it with gusto. SHE becomes more painfully aware of time with every passing second. Like clockwork, her fingers tick the seconds into the keys. The windows of her practice room are barred. The bars form a cross, which is held up to the wild rumpus outside, as if it were a vampire looking for blood to suck.

  Now the young man jumps into the pond, he deserves to cool off a little. Fresh water has been let in, ice-cold well water. Only the valiant, who sit on top of the world, have the courage to jump in. Snorting and wheezing merrily like a whale, the guy surfaces again. SHE notices it without seeing it. Amid loud cheers, the freshly baked girlfriends of the future doctor quickly dive, squeezing into the tiny pond. What a splashing and thronging! They imitate everything he does, laughs Mother. She is lenient. The old grandmother, whom SHE shares with the cousin, comes hurrying over to watch the monkey shines. The ancient grandma is also splashed, because the guy considers nothing sacrosanct, not even old age. But they laugh at the virile, lively grandson. Mother throws in a sensible comment: The boy should have first cooled the pit of his stomach very slowly. But in the end, she laughs louder than the others, in spite of herself. Her body shakes and jolts with laughter when the guy imitates a seal, so real, so lifelike. Mother shakes and jolts as if glass marbles were hurtling around inside her. Now the guy goes so far as to toss an old ball into the air and catch it on his nose. But even juggling has to be practiced. Everyone is twisting with laughter, bodies are quaking with laughter, tears are running. Someone yodels loudly, shouting with joy, the way people do in the mountains. It’s almost lunchtime. Cool off now, rather than after lunch, when it would be dangerous.

  The final note dies out, fades away. HER tendons relax. The alarm clock, which Mother set herself, has rung. SHE jumps up in the middle of the musical phrase and dashes out, full of complicated adolescent emotions, just to catch a final bit of the singing and prancing. SHE, his cousin, is duly welcomed. Did you have to practice so long again? Her mother should leave her alone, they’re on vacation. Mother tells him not to be a bad influence on her child. The guy, who never smokes or drinks, digs his teeth into a sandwich. Even though lunch is almost ready, the women of the house cannot refuse their darling a bite to eat. Then the guy generously pours raspberry syrup (they picked the berries themselves) into a tall glass, fills the glass up with well water, and pours the drink down his throat. He has drawn new strength. Now he sensually smacks his flat hand on his muscular belly. He smacks other muscles too. Mother and Grandmother can talk about the guy’s marvelous appetite for hours on end. They outdo one another with inventive culinary details, they argue all day long about what the guy would rather eat, veal cutlets or pork chops. Mother asks her nephew how his studies are going, and he replies that he’d like to forget about school for a while. He wants to be young, he wants to live it up. Someday he’ll be able to say that his youth is long past.

  The guy looks HER in the eye and tells her she ought to laugh a bit. Why is SHE so serious? He tells her to try exercise, that’ll get HER to laugh, and generally it’ll do her good. The cousin enjoys sports so much that he laughs out loud, and bits of the sandwich fly from his gaping mouth. He moans blissfully. He stretches pleasurably. He spins around lik
e a top and throws himself into the grass, as if he were dead. But then he leaps up again, don’t worry. Now it’s time to cheer his little cousin up by showing her the patented wrestling hold. His cousin is delighted, his aunt annoyed.

  SHE zooms downhill, so long. A one-way trip. She collapses along her longitudinal axis. Off we go, down we go. The trees, the small staircase with the wild rose hedge, the people shoot past her, vanishing from her field of vision. They’re yanked upward. Her ribs are crushed, the guy’s chest hair disappears over her head, the edge of his bathing suit shifts by, the strings on which his testicles are suspended come into view. Relentlessly, the small, red Mount Everest crops up, and underneath. A close-up: the long, fair, downy hairs on the upper thighs. Suddenly, the descent halts. Main floor. Somewhere in her back, her bones crack crudely, hinges grind: they were squeezed together too hard. And she’s already kneeling. Hurray! The guy has once again succeeded in catching a girl unawares. She kneels before her vacationing cousin, one holiday child in front of the other. A thin varnish of tears shines on HER face as she peeks up into a mask of mirth, which is bursting at the seams. This good-for-nothing has really done it to her, and he’s happy about his victory. She is pushed into the Alpine earth. Mother is shocked at how badly her child is treated by the local adolescents—this gifted daughter, who is usually admired by one and all.