Maestro

by Peter Goldsworthy

  I would shrug.

  ‘Not much,’ he would murmur, and a small smile might be permitted to play momentarily around his dry lips. ‘Just a little.’

  That last ‘littleness’ was impossible to bridge: a tiny gulf that was the sum of a thousand infinitesimal differences.

  ‘Always the most difficult part of a race,’ he paraphrased himself, ‘is the last step.’

  I would play a page, a phrase, a single bar again and again-following where he led, on his own keyboard, until he finally shrugged:

  ‘Perhaps there can be no perfection. Only levels of imperfection. Only … differences. Each time we move closer and closer—but can never be satisfied. A piece is never complete, only at some stage abandoned.’

  I would return again the next week, ignoring his advice, determinedly seeking something final, inviolate, satisfying. I would play till my hands ached and he lifted them from the keyboard and chided me gently:

  ‘We must know when to move on. To search too long for perfection can also paralyse.’

  I wondered then if he was telling me not to bother—not to try too hard. I wondered if he had set some lower level for me, without telling me: some lower step on the dais that would be … sufficient.

  The idea infuriated me. At home, and at school during lunchhours, I redoubled my efforts to defy the theory of limits and approach ever more closely—and finally grasp—the ideal I was sure he felt me incapable of reaching.

  At school I was falling in love.

  Megan’s desk stood in front of mine, and perhaps it was her back that I first loved: the furred nape of her neck, her smooth bare shoulders, the thick cumulus of pale hair. The late afternoon light streamed through the western windows, diffracting softly through the edges of that hair and around the downy edges of her skin. By Home Time each day she became a haloed vision.

  That vision lodged deeply inside me, especially the glowing hair. It was the feel of her soft, thick hair that woke me one late May morning, hard and pulsing below the waist, the bedsheets sticky with a strange pale honey, the first I’d seen.

  The glow of that first coming stayed with me all morning, carrying me through long hours of Maths and Physics and Modern History. I was lost to the world of ideas—lifted to some high hormonal plateau, feeling manly, invulnerable, immensely content.

  At lunch, filled with love, or lust, remembering the feel of that dream hair, I abandoned the Music Room to seek out Megan in a corner of the covered area, interrupting her lunch with a rambling, foot-shuffling monologue that wound in ever-narrowing circles to one final, awkward sentence: Will You Come To The Pictures With Me On Saturday Night?

  She smiled. She might have been opening a piano: a wide keyboard of white, perfect teeth.

  ‘I’m already going, Paul.’

  ‘Next week, then?’

  She shook her head, still smiling. ‘It was sweet of you to ask.’

  The Sweet of the world, I knew instinctively, did not make lovers. The Sweet could aim no higher than a kind of honorary girlishness that carried the label just Good Friends.

  ‘I dreamt about you last night,’ I blurted out, unable to look her in the eyes, but wanting to shock, wanting to be anything but sweet.

  She laughed: ‘How was I?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Was I good?’

  ‘I didn’t mean …’

  She slipped her arm behind my neck, stood tiptoe and kissed me briefly on the lips.

  ‘You can have me in dreams anytime,’ she murmured. ‘But that’s the only place.’

  This blunt talk so thrilled me that I failed for some minutes to hear the message. Those various demure girlfriends whose sweaty palms I’d clutched in the South, or Queen’s Waltzed cheek-to-cheek at School Socials, could never have spoken like this.

  ‘I already have a man,’ she said. The sophisticated sound of the word—completely foreign to the schoolyard lexicon of Boyfriends and Steadies—excited me further.

  ‘Who is it?’ I called; but she was already walking away.

  Jimmy Papas, a school tough in the class ahead of me, was waiting in the bike shed after school that night. Short, thickset, wire-haired, he did not look happy. He had been waiting a long time: in a fury of rejection I had hammered away at Czerny in the Music Room for an hour, punishing myself for being myself.

  ‘You been bothering Megan Murray?’

  ‘Who told you that? Megan?’

  His face was set in a sneer that I always thought reserved for me. Later I realised it was a fixture. His best friends received that same look. His dog received it. His breakfast received it.

  ‘Scotty told me. And Megan belongs to Scotty. You keep away.’

  He grabbed me by the shirt-front. Buttons popped.

  ‘Hope you’ve got a needle and thread,’ I tried recklessly to joke. Or perhaps I felt I needed further punishment.

  ‘Fucking poofter,’ he shoved me backwards into an empty bike rack. ‘Not worth a punch. You want to play with yourself do it in private. Just keep away from Megan.’

  He began to walk away; but once again my mouth, always a dangerous weapon, autonomous to some extent, got the better of me:

  ‘I thought I was doing you a favour.’

  He turned, puzzled: ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘With Megan out of the way you’d have Scotty all to yourself.’

  ‘You don’t learn, do you?’ he shouted, enraged.

  The ride home that afternoon was the longest I ever made. My torn shirt flapped in the slipstream, my nose bled, I ached, nauseous with pain. The dreamy high of the morning had gone.

  ‘What happened?’ my mother demanded.

  If Darwin High School was a prison, quarantined on its headland, then the Law of the prison yard applied. This I knew by some ancient instinct.

  ‘Fell off,’ I lied.

  ‘I want the truth, Paul. If you are being victimised …’

  ‘That is the truth.’

  My father was not so concerned.

  ‘A few fights won’t do him any harm,’ he laughed. ‘I was always fighting at school. Boys like to fight.’

  ‘But what about his hands?’ my mother persisted.

  ‘Mine survived,’ he said, seating himself at the piano.

  ‘But look at him. He’s covered in bruises. His nose might be broken.’

  My father turned to me, smiling. ‘What does the other bloke look like?’

  ‘Worse,’ I lied again, surprised to find that the idea of me fighting impressed him, and deciding to take this easy way out. Perhaps he was merely being his usual contrary self-putting the other side of the argument.

  ‘Good,’ he siad. ‘You stand up for your rights.’

  I woke the next morning sticky again, and warm and wetly contented in the groin, and Megan—at least—forgiven. I was sure she had not meant me to be beaten. And even if she had I could have forgiven her: the glow of those moist, throbbing dreams surrounded and protected her—a glow as real and warm as the nimbus of golden sunlight that enveloped her each afternoon as she stood between me and the window to pack her bag …

  ‘Sweet dreams,’ she often teased as she left, tossing her bag across one shoulder and walking out, skirt twitching.

  I liked to think that it excited her, just a little, the knowledge that someone was dreaming of her, sexually. I liked to imagine that home in her bed she could sense in her dreams what was happening in mine.

  Which was plenty: at the end of the week my bedsheets were stiff enough to stand against the wall. And my mother, who changed those sheets, looked at me differently: with a kind of worried amusement, or concerned pride, although nothing was ever said.

  ‘Isn’t He Talented,’ my parents never tired of hearing their friends remark.

  I played a small piece or two most Friday nights, basking afterwards in the murmurs of appreciation.

  ‘Isn’t He Coming On Nicely.’

  ‘You Must Be So Proud.’

  One voice was always missing fr
om this chorus of praise: my teacher’s. For this I blamed the instrument he allowed me to play: the Wertheim upright, its ivory keys chipped and yellowed and peeling, its action stiff and unpredictable, corroded by the humidity. His piano—the Bösendorfer ‘supine’—contained some sort of heat lamp suspended among the strings to dispel moisture, lending an eerie violet glow to the instrument, and at times also to his face as he sat above it. Apparently he felt the upright to be beyond such tendernesses.

  ‘Make music on that,’ he told me. ‘And you can make music on anything.’

  ‘It gets worse every week.’

  ‘Far worse to learn on a perfect instrument,’ he answered. ‘And then adjust to this.’

  ‘But I played this piece much better at home,’ I tried to persuade him. ‘Yesterday.’

  The keyboard was uneven, and the mechanisms had a life of their own—but at least the upright was always in tune. He possessed his own set of tools—a small black doctor’s bag of oddly shaped spanners and tuning forks, and he kept both instruments harmonised. Even the slightest discordance would have been unthinkable: every phrase I played on my piano was echoed on his.

  His echoes were always an immense improvement, and this also—in my youthful arrogance—I decided was mechanical. Of course he sounded better: he had the better piano.

  The chance to prove my theory, if only to myself, came one June afternoon. I arrived at the Swan to find no sign of Keller, either in his room or in the bar below. His door had been left ajar, presumably for me. Entering, I sat myself for the first time at the grand, breaking his strict rule. Keeping a sharp ear cocked for the approach of footsteps, I played for some time, enjoying the freedom of a keyboard that not so much resisted the hands as allowed the music to shine through, a keyboard that might have been made of clear water or transparent glass.

  As I played, the hinged frame of photographs—an ornamental silver clamshell—that Keller kept propped on his piano caught my eye. Often I had seen his gaze stray there during lessons, but never had I been close enough to follow the direction of that gaze.

  One wing of the clam held a faded, grainy family portrait: a young plumpish woman, seated, a child standing next to her, and behind both what could only be a much younger version of Keller, his firm, proprietorial arm resting on the shoulder of the woman.

  All three subjects stared into the camera with an awed, awkward seriousness—photography always seemed a Serious Business in those early days.

  Which made me curious: how early was it? I’d seen such serious group photographs before in the albums of my grandparents—photographs from the first couple of decades of the century. The clothing here seemed to come from an even earlier age, however. Sunday Best, perhaps—Sunday Best always harks nostalgically to earlier, more formal times—but there was something even older, something almost historical in the woman’s white blouse, throat-brooch, full-length dark skirt. The child—gender uncertain, probably a girlish boy—was dressed in a stylised sailor costume. And Keller? Dark suit, wing collar, his serious eyes staring over the pince-nez sitting affectedly on his nose.

  The other wing of the frame contained a different photograph: an even younger Keller, in a lighter suit and less formal collar, seated at a piano; the same woman—plump, full-bosomed—this time standing behind him, her arms resting on his shoulders, her face half-turned to the camera, her mouth a perfect O of song.

  The music spread on the piano stand in that grainy photograph was of course impossible to decipher. I slipped the photograph from the frame and found a handful of faded words scribbled on the back: Habe Dank, and a placename and date, later than I expected: Salzburg, Oktober, ’27.

  And then I jumped, startled, as the door opened behind me. The hinged frame of the photographs almost slipped from my hand. Why is it always at the exact moment of slaking curiosity that we are caught, stickybeaked?

  ‘Good afternoon,’ the familiar voice came from the open door.

  ‘Good afternoon, maestro.’

  I had never called him Adolf to his face. Now, even behind his back, the title ‘maestro’ seemed somehow natural.

  ‘You have been playing without permission?’ he asked.

  ‘Just looking. I didn’t know what to do.’

  I carefully placed the photographs back on the piano and returned to my rightful place at the upright.

  ‘Your family?’ I ventured.

  ‘Those are my family,’ he murmured, gesturing at the shelves of sheet music.

  And that was that: after a brief apology for his lateness—a doctor’s appointment—the lesson proceeded as normally as any lesson was capable of proceeding.

  As I left, however, he turned and called after me:

  ‘My son’s name was Eric. My wife, Mathilde.’

  I slunk down the stairs, half-shamed but half-excited by my discoveries. He had never before talked of himself during lessons. Nor, it seemed, did he talk of himself out of lessons: my parents had learnt nothing from their multiple enquiries. Even the letters my father had written to various acquaintances in the South—musicians, librarians—had drawn minimal returns.

  ‘Perhaps his wife and child died in the War,’ my mother suggested when I told her about the photographs.

  My own theory appealed more:

  ‘Perhaps they left him. After a piano lesson.’

  She laughed: ‘Let’s be serious.’

  My father now took no part in our speculations. He pretended to be no longer interested in solving the great mystery of Eduard Keller. From time to time he would suggest that the man had a right to privacy, to freedom from gossip. But he too wished to know more: that single listing of the name Keller in the Music Dictionary under Leschetizky still teased at him, excited him. When the subject arose on Tuesday nights, after lessons, the paper he was ostensibly reading would dip slightly, or else his book would remain at the same page, unturned for minutes, as he listened to us talk.

  ‘His wife was a singer,’ I told my mother. ‘Mathilde.’

  ‘Famous?’

  ‘I don’t know. Chances are. Shall we look her up?’

  ‘Probably useless. She would have kept her maiden name as a professional singer. But let’s try.’

  ‘They were in a place called Salzburg in 1927,’ I remembered.

  My father laughed from behind the shelter of his headlines:

  ‘So no doubt was every other musician in Europe at some time during the year 1927. You’ll have to do better than that.’

  Nevertheless, I saw another envelope lying on the table amoung the mail to be posted the following morning, marked: AIRMAIL. It was addressed to one of his musical contacts in the South.

  He, too, still burned with curiosity.

  That June an extra evening was added to my parents’ weekly musical calendar: Gilbert and Sullivan night. More musical gipsies than Doctor and Doctor’s Wife, they had left a trail of Gilbert and Sullivan performances across the South—a different operetta in every town in which we lived. From an early age I also was involved, if only in lesser, supporting roles. By early teens I had played a pirate in Penzance, a courtier in The Mikado, a juror in Trial By …

  That simple, stylised music saturates my earliest memories: music first heard from a bassinet beneath my mother’s piano in various small-town Institutes or Church Halls as she rehearsed the chorus, the squeak of her foot on a pedal close to my ear.

  From this my infallible rhythmic sense?

  My first memories of my father are of rhythm too: his figure, nearby, arms raised, slicing the air into bars of music as she played. Medicine was his job, music his life. Or—as he often paraphrased his favourite writer, the Russian Chekhov–medicine was his wife, music his mistress.

  Which was wonderful, and terrible. I still remember Christmas mornings as a child, rising in the half-dark before dawn, my hands fumbling in a stuffed pillowslip, trying to comprehend with excited fingers the rough braille of those wrapped, mysterious gifts.

  A football? An … electric
train?

  As I grew older, guesswork became unnecessary: the bundles were always instantly recognisable by touch. My father’s father had died when he was young. He had no role model. I think he innocently believed that every father gave his ten-year-old son a bound Busoni edition of The Well Tempered Clavier in his Christmas stocking. And, the following Christmas, Schnabel’s eccentric readings of the Beethoven Sonatas.

  But Gilbert and Sullivan came first. Music was only part of it. As Opening Night approached, costumes were endlessly sewn or sequined by my mother after meals at night. Stage sets were assembled in backyards by teams of art teachers and amateur watercolourists every weekend; facsimile Venetian canals or Japanese gardens glued and nailed together out of plywood and cardboard and masonite.

  Certain pungent glue smells still transport me back to the kitchen where I watched, aged four, as various hand-painted half-moons of rice paper were painstakingly stuck by my mother to tiny bird-boned wooden skeletons: folding fans for The Mikado. Her exquisite stage props were often fashioned even more carefully than the objects they represented: Art not so much imitating as improving upon Life.

  That first year in Darwin the choice was HMS Pinafore. Auditions were held, mostly in our lounge around the piano, and roles parcelled out among the members of the Musical Society. My father, after a week of hard lobbying, found himself in the role of Major General; my mother as always was on piano, the engine-room of the production.

  And suddenly it was hard to find practice time at home as she hogged the instrument, endlessly rehearsing her Overture and accompaniment. She was the finest sight-reader I have known—but like many sight-readers her memory was faulty, unpractised. She needed the piano more than me. And there were rehearsals to attend, and costume measurements, and I seemed to arrive at the Swan each Tuesday unprepared, further and further behind …

  ‘You have done nothing this week.’

  ‘I have no time.’

  ‘There is no point in repeating our last consultation.’

  ‘You expect too much.’

  ‘I expect very little. You are free not to practise. Of course. And free also not to attend.’