The Gustav Sonata

by Rose Tremain

  Fribourgstrasse

  Matzlingen, 1937–38

  IT SEEMS THAT Erich Perle does already have a girlfriend. The girlfriend is a librarian. Sofie has found this out.

  It’s difficult, then, for Emilie to concentrate on her work as a chambermaid. She feels her lowly state, her lack of education and knowledge about the world. She has difficulty eating and sleeping. It’s as if she has been bereaved.

  Then, one evening in September, there is a knock at the door of her room. Emilie is lying on her bed, wearing a white nightdress, reading her magazines. When she opens the door and finds Erich Perle standing in the narrow corridor, she bursts into tears.

  He comes into the room and takes her in his arms. He smoothes away her tears with his wide, tobacco-scented hand. He lays her gently on the bed and begins to kiss her. She doesn’t want him to speak.

  By the time they are married, in December 1937, Emilie is pregnant. They tell no one yet. They plan to name the baby Gustav, after Erich’s father, who worked in a sawmill and severed his own hand in the machinery and died in 1931 before he could reach hospital. In their whispered night-time conversations, ‘baby Gustav’ is held tenderly in their minds; baby Gustav will be born into the world on the tide of their passion, baby Gustav will be a breathing embodiment of their human love.

  Married now, Erich Perle has the right to a larger apartment, under Police Rules. So they move into Fribourgstrasse, number 61, an airy first-floor flat with iron balconies and French windows and a back kitchen large enough for a dining table. There is a second bedroom, which will be baby Gustav’s room and Emilie buys a crib for him and a rocking horse she finds in the Matzlingen Saturday market, and a family of toy penguins. She and Erich stand at the door of the room and sigh with pride. They look forward to the months passing and the arrival of June, when baby Gustav will be born. Erich strokes Emilie’s breasts, now plumped out and sacred to him, both as an object of his continuing desire and as the source of the life-giving milk that will nourish his son.

  So sweet has Emilie Perle’s life now become that she has no wish to think about the things that are happening outside Switzerland. She knows that, sometimes, when a great storm appears on the horizon, it doesn’t break, but gradually moves away and is forgotten. She hopes that all the rumours people are spreading about German aggression will subside – like the storm that never breaks – and everything and everyone will be left in peace. She spends her days knitting baby clothes, planting flowers in tubs on the balconies, learning recipes for meat dishes which will please Erich.

  When Erich comes home one day in March 1938 and tells her that the Germans have annexed Austria and sent in Wehrmacht troops to enforce the Anschluss, she looks confused and asks, ‘Is that going to matter to us?’

  Erich is tired, often irritable. He’s been telling her that ‘political tensions’ are affecting police work. The hours he spends at Police Headquarters have lengthened. Perhaps she hasn’t given this enough attention, because now, to her horror, he turns on her. He asks her why she’s so ignorant, why she never looks beyond her own needs and comforts, why she alone, in Switzerland, seems unaware that a war may be coming. He stands by the fireplace, shouting at her. He – who has always been so gentle to her and only demonstrated his male power, at her urging, in their passionate lovemaking – now attacks her with words she never, ever thought to hear.

  She stands, shivering, by the window. ‘Ignorant?’ she says. ‘Am I?’

  ‘You know you are!’ he says. ‘At least you’ve never tried to hide it. But you’ve got to wake up now, Emilie. Europe is being broken apart. You’ve got to open your eyes! I refuse to be married to a blind woman!’

  A blind woman.

  What does he mean?

  ‘I’m not blind!’ she says.

  ‘Yes, you are. You’ll say that you’re too young to see the world clearly, perhaps, but I won’t accept this as an excuse.’

  ‘I didn’t say that –’

  ‘The work I do is very important, Emilie. It affects many, many lives, and it’s about to get a lot more difficult. But you never try to understand it, never ask me about it. If someone told you to describe my job, I expect you’d say, “Oh, well, I don’t know really … I suppose he stands at a road junction directing traffic.”’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t –’

  ‘Or some such rubbish. Some of my colleagues … their wives understand only too well what their jobs entail, and they offer proper support, but you – you don’t even try to comprehend it. You never look at a newspaper; you just read your stupid magazines. You bind yourself up in your own ignorance!’

  She runs to him, a sob rising in her throat. ‘Erich!’ she cries. ‘Erich! Don’t say these things!’

  She throws herself into his arms, but instead of catching her and holding her, he casts her away from him. He, who, in the dawn sometimes, needs her so badly that he pushes into her from behind, before she is scarcely awake, now hurls her aside so violently that she staggers and falls backwards onto a low table, then collapses, screaming in pain, onto the floor.

  In the hospital, the labour cramps begin.

  But it’s only March. Baby Gustav isn’t ready to be born into the world on a tide of passion. He’s a half-formed thing. His little head, with its bright arteries and veins, is no larger than an orange. The ends of his tiny fingers are still blunt.

  They take the foetus away – to be burned in the hospital incinerator. Emilie is sedated and arrives back in the ward with a foolish smile on her face and her eyes swollen with weeping.

  Erich sits in a chair by the bed, his hands folded, like a penitent. Emilie doesn’t look at him, but up at the ceiling, as though she believes that something lies hidden there, within the fluorescent light. A nurse hands Erich a folded piece of paper. On the paper are written four words: It was a boy.

  Erich knows that a moment’s loss of control, a fearful moment’s loss of self-mastery, has brought tragedy on his household and that his life will never be the same.

  He has gone down on his knees to Emilie, begging forgiveness. But she will not forgive him. She asks him, ‘How can such a thing ever be forgiven?’

  He buys her presents: a soft shawl, a silk bedjacket, a blouse like the one she wore to the long-ago Schwingfest. She thanks him politely and puts them away in a drawer. Then she asks him to take the rocking horse and the toy penguins to the bric-à-brac market and sell them.

  He does this obediently. He offers to take Emilie out, to a picture gallery or a tea room, but she doesn’t want to go. She knows that, somewhere inside her, is a residue (this is the word she finds – a residue) of love for him. But it’s as if the people they were only last week – the people who clung together at the door to their baby’s room – belonged in a different life and can’t be brought back.

  In bed, they lie apart. When Erich thinks about the passion they shared such a short time ago, he wants to cry.

  Sometimes, he gets up in the middle of the night and dresses himself in his police uniform, then drinks tea and goes out into the dark and walks to Police Headquarters, where the lights are still burning.

  Police Chief Roger Erdman is sometimes to be found there at this hour also, poring over stacks of paperwork. Matzlingen is far from the Austrian border, but, since the Anschluss, more and more Jewish refugees are arriving, fleeing west, fleeing a persecution which they believe could follow them deep into Switzerland. The Jewish Refugee Assistance Organisation (the Israelitische Flüchtlingshilfe, or ‘IF’) is trying to work with police departments all over Switzerland, to ensure that these people, who have often escaped across the Austrian-Swiss border with almost nothing, are supported.

  But how are they to be supported? The IF (funded in its turn by well-off Jews living in Switzerland) will pay for their subsistence and the police will try to find families to take them in. Without visas, they’re not allowed to work, yet work is sometimes found for them. Men, who may have been engineers or doctors in Austria, find themselves d
igging roadside ditches; women, who once had maids and cooks to order about their comfortable homes, are given public toilets to clean, or matches to sell at street corners.

  Police Chief Roger Erdman and Assistant Police Chief Erich Perle toil at their administrative tasks, smoking, pacing the lino floor, trying to keep tiredness at bay, until the dawn comes up. Coffee is brought to them. As the door to their offices opens for the secretary carrying in the coffee tray, they can see beyond the door to the dingy foyer where, on hard benches, the Jews sit and wait. They’re not in rags. They’re mostly dressed in clothes that were once stylish and of good quality and the women have done their best to comb and pin up their hair, but there is such fear and exhaustion in their eyes that Erich says to Roger Erdman one morning, ‘I find it difficult to look at them.’

  ‘I agree,’ says Roger. ‘Because it could be us on those hard benches. And that’s what we’re most afraid of – to look out there and see ourselves.’

  Back in Fribourgstrasse, Emilie wakes and finds the bed empty. She doesn’t care. She hopes Erich has gone out so that she can be alone. She is happiest when alone – if ‘happy’ can describe her condition. It can’t; it is just less exhausting to be by herself.

  She lies in a hot bath, looking down at her stomach, once grown large with baby Gustav, now shrunken and flat, and at her breasts, still sometimes leaking milk, and sore and aching. She thinks of things she might do with her day: read her magazines, listen to dance music on the radio, eat some rich cake, lie down again to sleep.

  Sometimes, she wonders whether she won’t leave Fribourgstrasse, leave Erich, leave Matzlingen and go to live with her mother in her old, isolated chalet in a valley near Basel. But she remembers what life was like there – with no running water, only a handpump in the yard – and how she longed to escape it. She longed, too, to escape her mother’s furious devotion to the Church – her widow’s black clothes, her silver crosses, her print of Holbein’s Christ in the Tomb above the fireplace, her fasts and sorrows, her excoriating bad temper. To go there would be to travel backwards in her life, even to become infantile again, when what she is – the wife of an Assistant Police Chief – still makes her marvel. And yet there is something about this marvellous present tense which no longer feels truthful. The present is gone. She is no one again. She’s an ignorant girl. She might as well be making beds and cleaning washbasins in the Gasthaus Helvetia.

  Even now, she seldom thinks about the war. Erich – on that terrible day when baby Gustav was lost – shouted at her to ‘wake up’, but she doesn’t want to wake up. Why should she confront more sadness than she already has to endure, hour after hour, day after day? Hasn’t she already lost everything that was dear to her? When the news comes on the wireless, she always switches it off.

  She thinks about forgiveness.

  Somewhere, buried deep inside her, must lie the power to relent, a willingness to take the man she thought she loved so much back into her heart. But she can’t find it. She doesn’t even know how or where to begin to search.

  On the dresser is a photograph of Erich in his police uniform, taken just before she met him. Next to it is a photograph of their wedding. In both pictures, Erich Perle still strikes her as a handsome man. She traces his features with her slender hand. His son, little Gustav, would have inherited this fine and noble face, but Gustav is dead. His limp, half-formed body was burned in the hospital incinerator. How can that ever be forgiven?

  Tea Dance

  Matzlingen and Davos, 1938

  AT THE FAR end of Fribourgstrasse, a new café is about to open. It is called the Café Emilie.

  Emilie notices it on her way to the magazine kiosk and she stops for a moment to stare at it. A truck is parked outside it. Men are carrying in bentwood chairs. She tells them her name is Emilie.

  ‘That’s nice, Fräulein,’ they say. ‘Got your own little place, then!’

  She peers in. She can see signs that read: French and Swiss Patisserie. Käseschnitte. Cheese fondue. Ice Cream. Best coffee and hot chocolate. Tea Dancing Saturdays, 15.00h–18.00h.

  ‘We thought Matzlingen was a backwater,’ says one of the men, resting for a moment from his task with the chairs. ‘That’s what we’d been told in Bern – a town where nothing ever happened. But look at this: tea dancing! Very à la mode, as they say in Geneva.’

  ‘Is it?’ says Emilie.

  ‘So I heard. I expect you’ll be coming along, won’t you? D’you think you drink your tea with one hand and hold your partner with the other?’

  ‘I suppose you do.’

  ‘Might be fun, eh? Lots of spilt tea! You could find yourself a nice husband in a smart little café like this.’

  Emilie is about to say that she’s got a husband, that she seduced him with a kiss at a Schwingfest and they were married five months later, but she doesn’t want to think about Erich. She nods to the man and walks on.

  Erich has seen the Café Emilie, too. He wonders if his salvation might reside in this place.

  One Saturday afternoon, he comes to Emilie and says, ‘Put on that new blouse I gave you. We’re going out. We’re going dancing in the new café.’

  Emilie says she doesn’t want to go dancing.

  ‘No,’ says Erich, ‘I know you think you don’t. What I promise is that if, after half an hour, you’re unhappy and want to come home, we’ll come home.’

  Emilie tries on the new blouse. But it’s too tight. She’s been stuffing herself on cake. Her breasts are larger than they were when she was carrying baby Gustav. Her hair is dirty. At twenty-one, she reminds herself of her fifty-year-old mother. She takes off the blouse and throws it on the floor. She locks the door of the bedroom and climbs into bed and closes her eyes. When Erich calls to her, she shouts at him to go away and leave her alone.

  Erich asks Roger Erdman, who also has a wife, Lottie, much younger than he is, what can be done to mend Emilie’s broken heart.

  They are in Roger’s office, on their twentieth or twenty-first cigarette of the morning. Outside, more Austrian Jews are waiting to be ‘processed’ and Roger Erdman wants to say that, really, they haven’t got time to discuss Emilie at the moment. There is a meeting scheduled with an IF representative in one hour. Word has come from the Chief of Foreign Policy at the Justice Ministry that the flow of Jewish refugees has got to be ‘stemmed by some means’ or Switzerland will be over-run. Fear of what is known as Überjudung (an over-concentration of Jews, for whom Swiss society has little use) is growing throughout the country. ‘But what can we do in Matzlingen?’ Roger Erdman has asked. ‘We’re at the end of a long string. It’s up to the Border Police to stop people coming over. But people forget that policemen have human feelings and sympathies. We’re not counting machines.’

  And now, Roger Erdman’s sympathies are touched by how weary and how sad his colleague appears. He knows the story of how Emilie fell and how the baby was lost. He puts down his pen and looks at Erich. He tugs a diary towards him and turns to the month of June. He says quietly, ‘Erich, I think I am going to let you have some leave next month. What you must do is take Emilie to the mountains. If anything can help her recover, that will be it.’

  Erich thinks for a moment. Then he says, ‘How can I take leave now, Roger, when we have all these new responsibilities? I’ll be letting you down.’

  ‘Well,’ says Roger, ‘have you looked at yourself recently? If you don’t take some leave, you’re going to be ill – and then you really will be letting me down.’

  Once, as a young child of about five years old, Emilie went to the mountains with her mother, Irma. Emilie can’t remember where it was or how they arrived there. It was winter. The place where they stayed belonged to some relation or other. She remembers a man’s clothes and hats, hanging on large iron hooks.

  Every day, before breakfast, she and Irma had to bank up a huge pot-bellied stove. Its fire tore into wood like a famished animal tears into a bone. When you opened its little door, it would roar at you like a tige
r.

  On the ice-blue mornings, Emilie and Irma climbed onto a luge they’d found in the woodshed and went flying down a steep slope, and came to a stop in a silent grove of trees, where the only sound was the soft drip-drip of the snowmelt from the pine branches. Emilie remembers some inquisitive little creature – a roe deer or a chamois? – arriving in the grove and staring at her and she stared back. Then, they would tug the luge up the hill once more, in preparation for another flying descent.

  What else did they do? Emilie can’t remember. So when Erich comes and asks her if she’d like to go to the mountains, this is all she can recall – the famished stove, the man’s clothes and hats, the luge, the silent creature on its delicate feet. ‘I don’t know,’ she says.

  He produces a picture of a large hotel, the Hotel Alpenrose. He tells her it’s in Davos, and they are going to stay there for five days.

  She stares at the hotel, with a view of the mountains behind. She wants to say that it looks too grand for them, but Erich has anticipated some protest from her and cuts her off. ‘Roger Erdman has been to Davos,’ he says, ‘and he’s stayed in this very hotel. He tells me that if we’re ever going to try to be happy again, this is a good place to start.’

  It feels to Emilie like a different world – one to which only the rich could belong.

  In their hotel room, net curtains move gracefully at the windows. There is a jug of peonies on the dressing table. The bedcover is silk damask. Emilie hangs up her few summer dresses in a grand wardrobe which smells of camphor.

  They go out onto an ironwork balcony, decorated with pots of red geraniums, and stare up at the mountains and breathe in the sunshine and the scented air. They see a huge bird, which might be an eagle, turning in the empty sky. Erich has brought along a camera, borrowed from Roger Erdman, and he takes a picture of the view. He wants to include the eagle in the photograph. He turns the viewfinder this way and that, but can’t manage to capture the bird.