Sitting in my cold room in Krems I began writing letters to Vienna in a pidgin German which I laundered through the more obliging of my pupils: letters to vague musical acquaintances, to former competitors, to the musical journals, and finally to institutions: the Staatsakademie, the Conservatoire, the Nationalbibliothek, and the Library at the Old Universität, asking only that my letters be pinned to the bulletin boards for a few days.
Loneliness, linguistic seclusion, and the four grim walls of my bedroom study seemed to find some paranoid core in me, and feed it. For reasons I still don’t fully understand I adopted a mask in those letters, resorted to vague subterfuge—feigning an interest in the piano school of Leschetizky, with a particular interest in writing a brief biography of his student Eduard Keller, and asking for any anecdotes, reminiscences, letters that might prove valuable. I had seen such letters from earnest erstwhile biographers in journals many times.
Various notes trickled back in the following weeks, but only two contained mentions of Keller. The first told me nothing I hadn’t known, quoting back at me the false footnote I had found years before in Adelaide—that Keller had died in 1944.
The other was far more thrilling: a note in an unsteady hand, but in flawless, stylised English, from a cellist, Joseph Henisch, who claimed to have played Trios with Keller before the War. He was most gratified—he wrote—that a biography was planned: Keller was the pianist and teacher he himself had ‘prized above all others of his generation’; and ‘an artist who had suffered more than any man had a right to suffer’.
I read this last passage twice, packed and shouldered my bags and music, and walked out of my room and my job, down half a mile of cobbled streets to the Danube, and floated on the next ferry downstream to Vienna.
I had never carried a camera, despite my parents’ and Rosie’s urgings, arguing—self-importantly—that I wanted nothing to come between me and the ‘pure’ experience.
My precious, priceless experiences.
When pressed, I mailed picture postcards to Australia: standard views of Towers Eiffel or Leaning, Islands Emerald or Aegean, accompanied always by the excuse that these were of far higher quality than anything I could hope to produce.
But Vienna brought out the tourist skulking deep within, set me gaping, muttering inanities to myself, reaching for a non-existent camera …
I had never set foot in the city before, but every street corner brought small shocks of rediscovery, realisations of things I hadn’t known I knew: the familiar features of that dream city of music and dusty history which I had put together in my head, from books, in the Library of the University of Adelaide many years before. I wandered through the Staatsoper, the Rathaus, the maze of the Wiener Hofburg, needing no tour-guide but myself.
I recalled Herr Keller’s words of contempt when trying to dampen my enthusiasm.
‘Old Vienna vanished long ago,’ he often told me, a quote I suspected he had borrowed from somewhere. ‘It was demolished into a Great City.’
And again: ‘A city designed for military pomp and cavalcades.’
I believed him even less now than then.
Henisch, the cellist, lived in a small third-floor apartment in Neubau, on Mariahilfer Strasse. (I write these placenames casually, as if I have lived among them all my life—and in many senses I have lived among them all my life.) We sat in his front room, amid wood panelling and furniture so dark and rich it might have been fashioned from disused cellos. A dark, upright piano in the corner also seemed fashioned from recycled cello-wood. The heavy drapes were drawn; the only light a dull golden-yellow filtered through two lampshades. The apartment smelt as the homes of elderly bachelors smell the world over: a mixture of dust and liniment and yesterday’s cooking odours and—somewhere, always—a bowl of dried potpourri.
‘It is strange,’ Henisch was saying, ‘that we need someone from so far away to teach us about our musicians.’
He was a small man, wearing rimless glasses, his face leather-brown: not so much a smoker’s face as a smoked face, each dark wrinkle carefully pickled, preserved. But no nicotine stained his fingers, nor was the smell of tobacco among those other familiar smells.
‘Australia exports rice to Asia.’ I small talked, remembering an article I had read somewhere at home, years before. ‘We even export spaghetti to Italy.’
He smiled: ‘And now musicologists to Vienna.’
A small, delicate pot of tea steamed on a side-table between us. Henisch leant forward, and filled two fragile blue cups.
‘Lemon?’
‘Please.’
‘I am between lessons,’ he continued. ‘I would be happy to help in any way until then.’
‘It was very good of you to see me,’ I said, still not sure how to begin. ‘You must be very busy.’
‘Did you receive many answers,’ he asked. ‘To your requests?’
‘Not many. But I could think of no other method.’
He smiled again: ‘There are many who would like to forget.’
‘But not you?’
‘Eduard accompanied me many times,’ he said. ‘Of course he was the far greater musician … far greater. A virtuoso. There was no comparison between us. But that was a measure of his generosity.’
I untangled a notepad from my coat pocket, a small stage prop.
‘Do you mind if I take notes?’
‘Of course you must take notes.’
I found a pen deep in another pocket:
‘Why would people want to forget?’
A knock came at the door before he could answer, and a small boy entered half-carrying, half-dragging a large cello case.
‘Sit,’ Henisch murmured. ‘You are early and must wait today.’
‘You knew his wife?’ I asked as he turned back to me.
‘She was much younger. My age.’ He paused and smiled, as if amused by his own small show of vanity. ‘Eduard was in his forties when they met. Between the Wars.’
He reached again for his dainty cup, and sipped.
‘They were wonderful days. The Empire was gone, broken. We sat in the cafés planning the new world. Eduard was in great demand—the marriage had found something new in him, some … fountain.’
He closed his eyes, his cup still pressed to his lips. His glasses fogged over with steam.
I guessed that his eyes had remained closed beneath, not noticing. Then he gave a small start, set down the cup, removed the glasses and began polishing.
‘Too soon things became difficult. The old hypocrisies. Sweetness and light. And then the horror.’
‘The Nazis?’
‘Of course. Orchestras shrank. Many emigrated, many were serving in the Army, many … disappeared. Europe was killing its musicians.’
‘You remained?’
He shrugged. ‘No money. The Nazis had to be paid. But worse: no country would take us without money, vorzeigegeld.’
‘Bribes at both ends?’
‘And suddenly it was too late to leave,’ he continued. ‘There were safe places—for a time. A city within a city. False rooms. Cellars. Locked doors.’
‘Herr Keller hid his wife?’
He laughed, a soft harshness: ‘If only he had. But Eduard would have none of it. He had played for Hitler … so who would harm his wife and child?’
The information came suddenly, a disconcerting switch from the general to the particular.
‘He played for Hitler? How could he do that?’
‘How could he not do that?’
Henisch paused, allowing me time to think, to relocate my imagination from the gentle suburbs of Australia.
‘A private performance was arranged,’ he continued. ‘Adolf Eichmann was in Vienna at the time. 1938 … You have perhaps heard of Eichmann?’
I remembered the same question from Keller, years before.
‘A little.’
‘He was very involved in musical circles—when he wasn’t killing people. Eduard was flown to Berlin several times in his pers
onal plane. Perhaps Eduard thought it would help save Mathilde.’
‘She was a singer, wasn’t she?’
‘A Wagner specialist. And now the heirs of Wagner came and dragged her away.’
I had known, but was still horrified: ‘Herr Keller let them take her?’
‘He was in Berlin at the time. His last performance for Hitler … He blamed himself entirely.’
He sipped again at his tea. I reached for my cup also, not knowing what else to say.
‘Do you blame him?’ I eventually broke the silence.
Henisch shrugged: ‘It is easy to blame now. He had two choices: to become invisible, or to become so visible that nothing could touch him.’
‘And the son, Eric?’
He glanced to a corner of the room where his young student was fiddling with his cello, tightening strings, preoccupied. He lowered his voice:
‘He refused to be parted from his mother.’
‘They both died?’
‘Died?’ He laughed again, the same soft harshness. ‘I do not like the word. It is too … acquiescent. They did not die. They were murdered.’
‘And Herr Keller?’
‘You are not taking notes,’ he noticed.
I was frozen, hanging on every word. ‘I do not need pen and paper. Tell me of Keller.’
His eyes met mine, and remained locked there, as if he wanted no misunderstanding: ‘He died.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘He sewed the yellow star to his clothing on his return to Vienna. He registered as a Jew.’
I seemed to be learning too much too quickly. As he spoke each astonishing sentence I was still grappling with some previous astonishing sentence.
‘But Keller was not Jewish,’ I tried to keep up.
‘He no longer wished to be Austrian. He was transported in 1942.’
‘I don’t understand. He pretended to be Jewish? He wanted to be transported?’
Henisch sipped silently at his lemon-scented tea in its frail, exquisite cup.
‘Some form of penance?’ I guessed, trying to wrap my mind around it. ‘Self-punishment?’
Henisch shrugged: ‘Perhaps he felt he might find Mathilde and Eric—but he must have known. We all must have known. Rumours were everywhere that year.’
He paused, silent for a time: two minutes silence perhaps.
‘Somehow he avoided the gas chambers. He was over fifty—but strong. Pianist’s hands, shoulders. In early 1945 the Russians were closing on the camps. Transfers of the survivors began; removal of the evidence. Long marches: Auschwitz to Buchenwald. Buchenwald to Bergen-Belsen. Keller died on the last journey.’
For the moment I bit my tongue. If Keller wished to remain dead even to his friends, who was I to expose him?
‘How do you know all this? That he died? How can you be sure?’
Henisch removed a stud from his shirt sleeve and jerked back the sleeve; on the outside of the leather-brown forearm I could see a tattoo, six digits, of which I remember only the first, a faded B.
I rose, my mind filled with a strange warfare of emotions, and paced restlessly.
I finally blurted it out. I had to blurt it out. ‘What if I told you he survived? That he was my teacher in Australia?’
‘Impossible, my young friend.’
‘You saw his body?’
‘A friend saw him fall. No-one who fell by the side lived.’
‘But if I told you I knew him? That he lived in a hotel, in a town called Darwin? In the tropics. Teaching piano. You must have read about it—the hurricane. He’s staying with my parents now, in the South. Have you a phone? I could ring him …’
A shrug answered me, then a smile: ‘Keller is a common name.’
‘How can I convince you? He always wears white. He has a finger missing from the right hand.’
He glanced up at me curiously, and I pressed on:
‘I’m right, aren’t I? He had no little finger?’
‘Eduard had ten fingers. Of course. He was a pianist.’
He paused, his eyes becoming glazed, unfocused; or tuning perhaps to some different, internal focal length.
‘But I remember,’ he murmured. ‘In the camps. There was a piano in the SS mess. A guard once asked him to play. Of course he refused—even if they had killed him he wouldn’t play. But afterwards he told me … Do you wish to write this down?’
‘No. Please. Go on.’
‘He told me that if he ever felt the desire to play again he would hack off his fingers, one by one.’
‘Then it is him.’
Henisch continued staring dreamily into space, more interested in the memories of the past I had awakened than in the possibility I was right. I paced back and forth, trying to find some final irrefutable proof of identification.
‘He loves Bach and Mozart. And the later Beethoven. He hates the Romantics. Empty rhetoric, he calls it …’
At this Henisch returned suddenly to the present, shaking his head, smiling patiently, tolerantly: ‘Eduard Keller would never play Mozart if he could play Liszt, or Rachmaninoff. He liked to entertain. He liked a big, strong sound.’
I found myself standing over the piano. I jerked up the lid and seated myself.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I can prove it. Listen …’
Perhaps this was my finest performance ever, for an audience of one: Beethoven, the Arietta from Opus 111, a favourite of Keller’s, a piece of immense complexity out of which, by some miracle, a state of immense simplicity is reached. I could have played far flashier, more athletic pieces—I could have played Liszt, or broken yet again the Minute Waltz—but I chose intellectual difficulty, instead. And spiritual difficulty. I wanted Henisch to understand that I understood. That I knew things that only Keller could have taught me.
He listened attentively at first, and perhaps I almost had him believing. But then I felt his attention wander. He refilled his teacup, and even—towards the end—leafed through a nearby magazine.
‘Very fine,’ he murmured as I slipped my hands from the keyboard, the sound of the last chords lingering there like a pair of forgotten gloves. ‘Technically flawless. You obviously had a very fine teacher. But I am sorry: you did not learn from Eduard Keller. His students played with … with far more …’
Searching for words, he rose and pulled a record jacket from a shelf instead.
‘More rubato,’ he finally came out with, and handed me the record. ‘Here—take this. I must begin my lessons. You are too young to have heard Eduard play. This was his last recording. In Munich, 1934.’
I was hurt, enormously—but that could be postponed till later. At the time I felt only anger. Henisch was a mere fiddler, I told myself—a scraper of catgut. What could he know of the piano?
‘I couldn’t possibly accept,’ I said. ‘You think I am lying …’
He smiled, sympathetically: ‘I think you are mistaken. Take, I insist. I have others.’
I felt the weight of the disc in my hand; a thick, heavy 78. Rapsodie Ongarische No. 3 was printed on one side, and on the other: Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Liebestod, transr. Franz Liszt.
I remembered clearly, instantly, Keller’s words of contempt as he had tormentedly played that very same piece of music, years before: ‘Music that film stars kiss to.’ I couldn’t believe my eyes. Or my ears:
‘Eduard loved the Romantics,’ Henisch was saying, but the words meant nothing to me. ‘He was a passionate virtuoso. Strength, and sonority. He made the instrument sing. Like his teacher before him.’
If we were discussing the same man, how different our two versions.
Or perhaps I was mistaken. Pehaps they were not the same man, in a sense.
1977
In late 1977 I received a letter from the charge sister of the hospice ward of Darwin Hospital, seeking information about the next of kin of Eduard Keller. Through her fog of clumsy assurances and euphemisms—he was In No Pain; he was Suffering a Long Illness—the truth quickly became clear …
As always, he was equally reticent in return: musical anecdotes, epigrammatic advice, news of the rebuilding of Darwin—these were the stuff of his short letters. There had been no mention of illness …
I flew North the following week, and perhaps that letter from the hospital was only a pretext, or catalyst. I had been wanting to return for some time, finding myself in times of depression and frustration dreaming more and more of those years in Darwin, or an idealised version of those years.
But first things first. I caught a taxi direct to the hospital from the airport, leaving my overnight bag dumped in the main entrance foyer.
Eduard Keller was sharing a room with two others in the same predicament: three dying men propped amid massed pillows, wasted even beyond the familiar standards of televised Starvation, staring at each other with a kind of glazed, drugged horror.
Was there meant to be some sort of comfort in Going Down Together: like ancient kings taking their households with them into the afterlife? To me it seemed more like a squalid Death Row: Death Row with flowers, and drugs.
And muzak. Unspeakable sounds oozed from a hidden loudspeaker somewhere, and a huge pressure of revulsion built in me as I listened:
Somewhe-e-re, over the rainbow …
‘Sister,’ I turned. ‘Could we turn that off. Please.’
‘Our clients find it very soothing, Mr Crabbe.’
At this Keller turned his head: ‘Paul?’
His face had changed, lost character and uniqueness, become to some extent the common face of the dying. The incandescent redness had gone, the broken vessels seemed bleached, all colour had drained from the coarse, pitted skin. The eyes had sunken deeply, as if burrowing in.
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