Maestro

by Peter Goldsworthy

  LISZT, I read on the tattered title-page. TRANSCENDENTAL STUDIES.

  As I left the room, homework-bound, he was already picking his way slowly through the first bars. At midnight, as I lay in bed, thumbing through my war comics, I could still hear him, faster now, more certain, banging at the keyboard—if not with transcendence, at least with fervour.

  ‘I think I’ll come to your next lesson,’ he announced in the morning, over breakfast. ‘I want to know more about this Eduard Keller.’

  Outside the rains were still falling, the air thick and steamy. But from that morning his mood seemed altered, lifted into some zone of clearer, fresher mental weather.

  This was not just my imagination: soon there was concrete evidence. His collar and tie vanished on the following Thursday; and on the Friday, after a late-afternoon shopping safari, he adopted local costume completely: shorts, open-necked shirt. Phrases such as We Territorians would shortly begin flecking his conversation, especially conversation with visiting Southerners. In the Top End we do it this way …

  He sat in on the next lesson. And the next, clutching his notebook in a corner, jotting down every snippet of advice, every muttered aside, every wandering reverie that Keller produced.

  As for the maestro, I doubt he noticed. The lessons continued unchanged: in his own world, in his own time. The prescribed hour might contract into half an hour, or stretch into three—depending on what he wanted to get off his chest.

  ‘When do we finish?’ I would ask.

  ‘When I am emptied.’

  Also, I suspected, when he was thirsty. As my father and I descended the stairs from his room afterwards, he would often be following close on our heels, heading for the beer garden below.

  With the beginning of the school term I began riding my pushbike to school. The shortest route led past the Swan, behind the beer garden. I would often pass my former War Criminal, seated at a small table on his balcony, his white Panama somehow remaining stuck to his bent head as he sipped coffee and schnapps and smudged the elbows of his white coat on the morning headlines.

  The Southern papers were always days old, and DIE ZEIT at least a month. But the Wet season humidity somehow rendered their newsprint moist, as if straight off the press—and this seemed to render the news itself somehow fresher, as if the world were closer than it was.

  A pair of scissors and scrapbook were always at his side when he read: from time to time he would snip out some odd geometry of newsprint, a square or oblong or thick T or L, and slip it between the pages of the book.

  I always pedalled quickly, smoothly by. If he caught me glancing up, I might acknowledge his wave curtly: a minimal response, the flick of a finger, the tug of an earlobe, as if bidding at some discreet auction …

  If a friend was cycling with me I ignored his greeting altogether, riding head-down, engrossing myself in a discussion of last night’s homework, or Saturday’s football.

  The friend in those first weeks of school was Bennie Reid, another new arrival in town—in his case from England.

  ‘Look at that pisspot,’ Bennie would say, trying out the local slang, pointing to Keller. ‘Already into the turps.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Up there, in the white hat and bowls outfit. Look—he’s waving. You know him?’

  We had met, Bennie and I, on the first day of school: marooned alongside each other in a sea of hostile stares. In memory Bennie always remains middle-aged—paunchy, puffy-faced, balding—although I knew him only as an adolescent, and he could not have been balding at fifteen. Oddly accented, gentle, fussy, bespectacled—a violinist, and collector of butterflies—like me he learnt quickly to ride his bike to school rather than risk the terrors of the school-bus.

  ‘That’s my seat, Four Eyes. Move.’

  ‘Hey, Four Eyes. Lend me a dollar.’

  ‘Why don’t you leave him alone?’

  ‘Fine. You lend me the dollar, Big Mouth!’

  If I left early enough I could beat both Four Eyes and the bus to school. If I were late he would catch me coasting down Mindil Beach Road, his body shape—more spherical, perhaps, with a higher specific gravity—carrying him further and faster. Then the bus would catch both of us as we crawled in low gear up Bullocky Point, and a monsoon of sandwiches and fruit would rain down from every window.

  ‘Yaah, Four Eyes!’

  ‘Be waiting for you in the bike shed, Big Mouth!’

  I soon learnt to avoid the bike shed and the schoolyard as much as possible, to maintain the most minimal profile.

  The designated Music Room—a second-floor classroom containing an ageing piano—became my refuge. It seemed safest to practise there each lunchtime, and again after school until the bike shed was clear. If I became tired of practising, there was always the view from the window: the white sands and shallow breaking waves that stretched away like ruled, parallel chalk lines each side of the point.

  The High School, isolated on its headland like some kind of quarantine station, or detention centre, seemed miles from the nearest human habitation—but it was probably no more than half a mile.

  It was three hundred miles from the next school.

  And two thousand miles from the nearest university: an immense advantage, some might argue.

  At first glance it might have been any Southern school: glass boxes squatting in a sea of asphalt, form matched to function. The one concession to latitude was a vast, covered playing area—protection against the tropical rains. On overcast days during the deep Wet, that roofed area entered a kind of steamy twilight. In its dimly lit corners anything became possible. Patterns of experimental behaviour were pioneered that later became widespread: knife-fights, drunkenness, unspeakable acts beneath ping-pong tables. Small beer now, perhaps, accepted as part of the school curriculum everywhere, but at the cutting edge then. State of the Art delinquency …

  A thousand students climbed to Bullocky Point by foot, bus, or bike each morning: seven packed First Year classes, seven Second Year classes, and seven Third Year classes—the last year of compulsory education.

  There were also two small Fourth Year classes.

  And one tiny Matriculation class.

  This pyramid of statistics offered no comfort to my parents. The Schooling Debate had begun six months before, while still in the South, with news of my father’s posting. It raged well into the first term.

  Should I be kept South, in a Good School? All possible pro and con arguments were rostered between the two of them: the first to speak usually proposing the idea, knowing that there was no risk of reaching agreement, relying on the certainty that the other would veto it.

  Of course they wanted their only son to remain near for a few years longer. If my mother—say—began to vacillate, to agree with my father that yes, perhaps there was merit in sending me South to board, then he also could be relied on to change his mind, and cross the floor in the other direction the moment she was crossing to his side.

  Which was fine with me. I had no desire for boarding school, a world I had begun to imagine all too well with the help of various English weekly comics that Bennie Reid subscribed to. Ruthless Latin Masters, muddy Rugger Fifteens, and chaps with names like craters in the moon—Spofforth Minor, Bromwich Major—filled those pages.

  I preferred Darwin High, if not immediately.

  Skinny, unathletic, irredeemably smug, my pen slamming loudly onto my desk at the end of each maths problem to let the plodders know I had finished, the place could—should—have been hell on earth. And was, for much of my first year, even if I hid myself whenever possible in the Music Room, and shunned any public association with Bennie Reid.

  Weekends this was not so easy. Our parents, church-going acquaintances, often forced us together, concerned about our isolation.

  ‘He’s such a nice boy,’ my mother gently nagged. ‘And he plays the violin.’

  ‘He does something to the violin. But I don’t think it could be described as playing.’

&nb
sp; Away from the rigid schoolyard hierarchy, I was happy enough in Bennie’s company—or not unhappy. I refused to play duets with him, to accompany his inept fiddle-scrapings, but often found myself wandering in his wake through some mangrove swamp or tract of bush, spare butterfly net in hand.

  Briefly, episodically, his enthusiasm infected me. A constant flickering confetti of butterflies showered the town of Darwin. Designer insects, I think of them now: there was something enormously wasteful, extravagant even, about the profusion of patterns and shapes and brilliant colours. What point such an oversupply of beauty, except for the pleasure of collectors such as Bennie?

  Hunting, he was transformed: no bush was too thorny, no tree too tall, no cliff edge too sheer to risk in the thrill of the chase. His puffy face, his tubby legs and arms were never without scratches, bruises, welts: marks of the hunt.

  Trophies from these expeditions filled his bedroom: obsessively mounted, neatly labelled, under glass, in a dozen drawers and framed boxes. I soon learnt to spell the names and speak the vocabulary, learnt by heart the subtle differences between the Lesser and Greater Fritillary, the Common Yellow and the Lemon Migrant, Papilio canopus and P. fuscus. Specimens Bennie thought redundant, or flawed in some small way, he would pass on to me. At first I felt an occasional pleasure in capturing—in owning—such beauty, but that pleasure soon wore off. And my own efforts at mounting were seldom successful: my bedroom soon became littered with dry, brittle butterfly husks and the broken, powdery wings of moths, crunching underfoot.

  Much of the time Bennie also had one limb or another—sometimes two—encased in plaster. He had been born to suffer: a favourite victim of school bullies, certainly, but also of all known natural laws and forces. Camped out with him on weekends, I never failed to be amazed as the campfire smoke followed him from compass point to compass point, enveloping him instantly no matter how he tried to elude it.

  And slowly I began to find more and more reasons to avoid Bennie, even at weekends.

  ‘You want to sign my plaster?’

  ‘I have to practise.’

  ‘Please. No-one wants to sign it.’

  ‘That’s not true. Whose signature is that?’

  ‘Mum’s.’

  ‘And that?’

  ‘Dad.’

  He stood whining in the door of the Music Room, leaning on crutches, his ankle encased in the usual smooth white mass, his glasses so highly polished they seemed—as always—to be empty frames, containing no lenses. I felt an increasing urge to put this to the test, to poke my fingers through …

  Not till the last drop of rain had been wrung from the last shred of cloud that Wet season was I permitted to play for Keller: the eighth or ninth time I had climbed to his dark room at the Swan. The fresher, clearer mornings had softened his heart, perhaps—but only a little.

  ‘Chopin?’ I begged.

  ‘We must play Bach before we play Chopin.’

  ‘Which Bach?’

  ‘All of Bach.’

  I pulled the Italian Concerto from my shoulder-bag and placed it on the piano, but he laughed. He fossicked among his own music for a few moments, finally emerging with a copy of The Children’s Bach.

  ‘I played that years ago,’ I protested.

  ‘You are too proud to play it again?’

  ‘It’s easy.’

  The moist, red eyes managed to look stern: ‘Bach is never easy.’

  My father, still attending the occasional lesson, sat scribbling silently in his armchair. Bach is never easy. Keller placed the Bach on his piano and began to play. He played the entire book through—a half hour or so—then handed it back.

  ‘No-one can be too proud for this. You will learn each note by next week. Then I will teach you to fit them together. I will teach you the music.’

  ‘Things are happening,’ I informed my mother over dinner that night.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ve been re-enrolled in kindergarten.’

  My father laughed. Nothing seemed able to dent his mood of late. After tea he unearthed his own copy of The Children’s Bach and began to play—slowly, taking infinite pains, repeating the simplest of phrases again and again.

  ‘The things he does,’ I could hear him saying. ‘Listen to this, Nance. And this. The voices. The nuances.’

  ‘You don’t think they are a bit easy?’

  I smiled at his answer: ‘Bach is never easy.’

  ‘Of course. But technically …’

  ‘He has this ability—finds something new in the most ordinary passage. It’s astonishing. You should come to the lessons.’

  ‘I’d melt if I spent another minute in that room.’

  ‘I thought I might perform some of these pieces for the group on Friday night. What do you think?’

  ‘I think they might expect something more difficult.’

  ‘You mean more … flashy.’

  My parents had eased slowly into the town’s social life. With the coming of the Dry—seven months of clear, enamel-blue days—this accelerated. Each weekend brought barbecues, tennis afternoons, gatherings to share drinks, conversation, music …

  Friday night was ‘soirée’ night. A circle of amateur musicians, church acquaintances mostly, choir members, began gathering at our house, each taking turns to prepare and perform some piece on piano or flute or vocal chord.

  Keller never attended. My father pressed him after each lesson, and at first the maestro made an effort to offer various more or less plausible excuses. Later he merely grunted. Still later, when work commitments prevented my father from attending lessons, I grew weary of inviting him. When asked at home if he would come, I always declined on his behalf.

  ‘He is busy?’

  ‘Feeling unwell,’ I would improvise. ‘He would love to come, but his ulcer …’

  ‘He has an ulcer?’

  ‘I think that’s what he said. It’s hard to tell. The accent …’

  I performed at those Friday night gatherings myself, once or twice, enjoying the fuss and praise of these teachers and doctors and public servants, basking in an older, more adult acceptance that should have more than compensated for my own age group’s rejection.

  But didn’t.

  Discussion on Fridays often turned to the subject of Keller. The First Law of Gossip, my mother liked to call it: always talk about those not present. Various theories, half-truths and slanders were bruited about, often totally contradictory, and always extreme. My own former theory was even aired by others: he was a War Criminal in hiding. More often he was Jewish, an Auschwitz survivor. Or a Russian, a Trotskyite. Sometimes he had a criminal record: postwar black market, forged Deutschmarks. Or he had worked the pearling luggers, made a fortune, filtered it through his kidneys …

  ‘How long has he been here?’ My father was always curious.

  ‘Ten years, at least.’

  ‘Nearer fifteen. Why, I remember …’

  Such approximations added little to the informal dossier my parents had managed to compile. His prewar European fame—an article of faith now with my father—surprised everyone: certainly none of the natives had heard him play in public.

  My father defended him. ‘He was a pupil of Leschetizky,’ he declared, with reverence.

  When this rang no bells, he felt compelled to expand: ‘Who of course was a pupil of Liszt.’

  But even this provided no immunity.

  ‘There are pupils and there are pupils,’ my mother murmured.

  All their conversation ceased. I always marvelled at this power of hers: how she could always gain attention by lowering her voice.

  ‘Remember the story of Mascagni,’ she reminded my father, then turned to the rest of the gathering. ‘The Italian composer?’

  ‘You mean Mascanyi?’ The church organist, a relentless know-all, corrected her pronunciation. ‘Composer of Cavalleria Rusticana?’

  ‘Probably,’ my mother smiled, unruffled. ‘Whoever. The composer passed some organ-grinder in the str
eet, grinding out a tune from his new opera. He stopped briefly to explain to the grinder that it should be played more rapidly.’

  She paused to offer the cheese dip around, maintaining the suspense.

  ‘Next time he passed that way a sign was hung on the barrel of the organ: Pupil of Mascagni.’

  Even my father laughed, before insisting:

  ‘Keller is no organ-grinder.’

  The church organist—I remember she always pronounced it organiste—admitted taking lessons, briefly, from the maestro some years before; but only lasting four weeks:

  ‘He didn’t teach me a thing.’

  Listening to her play in church each Sunday, I suspected that Keller would have echoed those words, if with a slightly different emphasis.

  The Dry season ran its seemingly endless course: a perma-spring of perfect weather, each day a high, blue transparency; each night cloudless and cool, and between the two the narrowest littoral of twilight—the sun high in the sky one minute, the next gone, sucked suddenly, silently below the horizon.

  Our evening meals had moved outside onto the balcony: a nightly cooling ritual before re-entering the warmer house for music and homework.

  Keller also had moved outside. Each Tuesday I would find him sitting in the beer garden, downstairs, as if the Dry had somehow made him more sociable, more democratic. His white suit and Panama could not be missed among the blue singlets and short-sleeved shirts; the clear, heavy fluid of his schnapps bottle likewise, standing high and separate among the amber, lathered beers.

  As I entered he would rise and follow me up the stairs, already talking music. His recall of where we had left off the week before was always total.

  ‘Have you finished the Rondo?’

  ‘Half-finished.’

  ‘That is not possible.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Is water at fifty degrees half-boiling?’

  He was full of such advice, fragments of folk wisdom that had a vaguely oriental flavour to them.

  ‘What is the difference between good and great pianists?’ he often asked, as I came close to whatever musical essence he was seeking—close, but always achingly just out of reach.