Maestro

by Peter Goldsworthy

  ‘Wie gehts, Maestro,’ I whispered, the word for the first time sounding upper-case in my mouth, respectful.

  He smiled with difficulty: ‘You have been practising.’

  ‘My German a little rusty,’ I managed, still in German.

  ‘A Bavarian accent?’

  ‘Too much time in München. Too little in Wien.’

  I gripped his pale claw—a handful of frail bird-bones, so light it might have been fashioned from papier-mâché—and turned again to the sister:

  ‘The muzak, Sister. For pity’s sake …’

  ‘It is nothing,’ Keller murmured. ‘Leave the music.’

  ‘I could bring something else,’ I suggested. ‘Cassettes.’

  An absurd list half-formed in my mind: Music to Die By. I remembered that precious 78 from Vienna, at home, wrapped in cottonwool. But no—he probably would have denied all knowledge of that. Mozart would be better: the Requiem, perhaps. The Lacrimosa. Or was that too obvious?

  ‘Mozart?’ I suggested. ‘Something choral?’

  His eyes had closed—beyond music, it seemed. Once he had valued Mozart above all others: Mozart shines like the sun, he would murmur, his face tilting upwards, slightly, as if towards some imagined source of light and warmth, his eyes shining.

  I leant closer to his translucent, bluish ear:

  ‘I remember you often used to say: silence is the purest music.’

  There was no flicker of comprehension. His breathing had slowed: short sequences of shallow breaths interspersed by lengthy silences.

  ‘He comes and goes,’ the Sister whispered. ‘The medication. He’s usually at his best early in the morning.’

  I sat by his bed listening to his faulty breathing till it seemed pointless to listen any longer, then collected my bag, and headed for the nearest hotel.

  In the morning, at the hospice, nothing had changed; nor the morning after that. He died for another week in that public ward, in his private room of pain. I visited him before breakfast each day—usually with a book, or newspapers, to fill in the time. My role was unclear. He was aware of my presence from time to time; he might even accept the odd spoonful of soft, mashed food. I wanted to ask him many things, wanted even to tell him of Henisch, of what I had heard in Vienna … but any conversation beyond a description of his immediate needs was impossible. More often I read to him, even when he appeared to be sleeping: items from the papers of the type that had always interested him; poems from a book of German poetry I had found in a second-hand bookshop …

  Where, when tired of wandering,

  my last resting place will I find?

  Under palm trees in the South?

  Under lime trees on the Rhine?

  Will I be buried somewhere

  in a desert, by strange hands?

  Or shall I rest beside

  an ocean coast, in the sands?

  No matter! Here, there, wherever,

  God’s heaven will surround me,

  and all the stars of night

  like funeral lamps hang over me.

  Perhaps he would have sneered at such poetry, given full consciousness—suspicious, as always, of beauty, of the rhetoric of beauty. I wondered what had happened to his precious scrapbooks, and the thousands of stories of human foolishness and greed and cruelty that he had tried to patch together into some kind of understanding of his fellow beings. That, too, was a kind of poetry, he often claimed, but of a very different kind: an ugly, trustworthy poetry.

  I could only presume the clippings had blown out to sea with the rest of his possessions, scattered back across the realm in which they belonged: randomness, chaos.

  In the afternoons I re-explored the town, trying to find some trace of the past, some ancient layer or deposit beneath this new city rebuilt of suburbs and supermarkets, shopping malls and overpasses. The shoebox houses on their stork-stilts had largely gone: stout, squat homes hugged the ground everywhere, built out of bricks that no amount of monsoonal huffing and puffing would bring down.

  Each evening I visited the hospice ward again, but communication was impossible in the evenings, and I rarely stayed at his side more than half an hour. He slept too deeply, refusing even to acknowledge the touch of cup or spoon to his lips.

  His doctor was of no help. Each time I rang his rooms I received the same answer: Nothing Could Be Done.

  The end came simply, suddenly: I was woken on my sixth morning, in the larger small hours, by a voice on the phone announcing that he had ‘gone’. Is it always as undramatic as this? Nothing seemed altered at the hospice: Keller lay in the same position; even looked much the same colour as when I’d left the night before. But somewhere inside that frail, papiermâché body, some last border had been crossed, something had gone missing, finally.

  I slipped my arm beneath his head—almost weightless, emptied of life and mind and thought—and kissed him.

  And then signed some papers, and walked out of the hospice into the new, unfamiliar Darwin.

  From the street a car horn sounded, and then another, pitched slightly higher: a minor third. A soft, temperate rain was falling—slow, blunt, wet pinpricks—and the air seemed cooler than any Wet season I had known. I knew no-one in this rebuilt town, but wanted someone—anyone—to know that a Great Man had died, whatever the crimes he felt he had committed.

  Back at the hotel I rang home—Melbourne, STD—but Rosie was already at work. I rang my father’s surgery in Adelaide, listened politely to his recorded message—measured, pedantic—then left a brief message after the bleep. I rang my mother’s library—engaged.

  I rang the local paper, and asked for the newsdesk. After listening politely the voice referred me to the Classifieds, Death Notices:

  ‘We have obituaries prepared for notable figures, of course. But in this case …’

  I leafed through the phone book, looking for old friends, familiar names. Papas, Lim, Mitchell … The search was pointless—dozens of entries were listed under each. I began to ring at random: telling anyone who would listen. I rang the local doctor who had cared for Keller, listened absurdly to his recorded message, and left my own—an obituary.

  Someone had to know what had happened.

  Finally the futility of it all overcame me, and I left the hotel again: walking the streets restlessly, on edge, wanting to grieve but not quite knowing how to.

  A Thai restaurant in Smith Street provided some sort of comfort. A soup thick with ginger and hot chillis warmed my stomach, and also—the heat spreading to nearby tissues-seemed to cheer my heart. The smile of the waitress—shuffling with tiny stylised steps, incapacitated by some absurd traditional Asian garment—also warmed me, and for an instant I considered asking her what time she finished work …

  Not for sex, of course. Or if for sex only as a replacement for the kinds of physical intimacy that I needed at that moment and that money couldn’t buy: the cuddles of my daughter; Rosie’s leg draped over mine as we watched TV, her hands resting on my shoulders at breakfast as she leant across me, reading the headlines …

  In my hotel room, my stomach swollen, glowing, I dozed on and off through the afternoon. I guess I was trying to avoid the knowledge that grew slowly inside me: that I had reached the end of a deep, last hope. While Keller had lived—no matter how many years since our last consultation—he had been a safety net, offering a faint last hope, a genetic lifeline back to Liszt, Czerny, Leschetizky; there had always been the possibility of returning to his room at the Swan, and preparing myself for a last assault on the world of music.

  Now I was faced with myself for the first time: Paul Crabbe, greying, dissatisfied, fast approaching mid-life, my backside stuck fast to a minor chair in a minor music school. Able to dupe my audiences at the odd concert, and even the critics—no, especially the critics—but never for one moment, even at my most unguarded, deluding myself.

  In this sense Keller was bad for me, the worst possible teacher: revealing perfection to me, and at the same time snatchi
ng it away. Teaching a self-criticism that would never allow me to forget my limits.

  And so I have wasted the years since Darwin sitting at the piano, pressing keys and hearing only notes emerge, obsessed by technique in a way that he would never have approved.

  ‘Only the second-rate never make mistakes,’ he once teased.

  And again, another version: ‘Only those capable of ugliness can be beautiful,’ a phrase I had failed to understand, and thought nonsensical, at the time.

  But a second-rate perfection is all I have any hope of attaining: technical perfection, not musical perfection. Therefore, better second-rate than third.

  I still often think of it in athletic terms—and envy the athletes their clocked goals, their fixed, measurable achievements. If I could leap ten feet in the air or run the hundred in ten seconds flat—that would be achievement. It could be measured, quantified. No-one could argue, quibble …

  Least of all myself.

  As I rose from the bed, the sun broke below the heaving clouds: a rare, golden light drenching, saturating the town. Always these deft, elemental touches move me: light breaking through clouds, rain spattering on roofs, pink sunsets. As I gazed across the town I was overcome by nostalgia … and regret that I had not taken more notice, kept a better record of those beautiful years. Never again will time move as slowly as it did then, and never again would there be so much to be discovered, to be touched and tasted for the first time.

  And now it was too late: once we begin to sense our childhoods, we are no longer children. And decisions have been made—by omission, neglect, inertia—that cannot be unmade.

  A painting I once saw often comes to me: an image that sticks. A grey interior, with one small door, off-centre, slightly ajar. And through that crack, heartbreakingly unreachable: golden light, green grass, a child with a hoop, playing.

  Nostalgia is always as simple, as stylised as that: a child’s game, a single glowing memory. Soon I would be flying back to the South: to the woman and child that I loved, within the confines of a life that I hated. But for a time I sat there, at the mercy of my own memories, my throat congested, tears seeping; mourning a great man, yes, but also mourning for myself—for the times and possibilities that would never come again. The roast meat, the kisses. The music around the piano. The light that always seemed to shine behind my mother. My father, rushing through the door holding high his first plump-fleshed, red-furred rambutan …

  And Keller, sitting on his balcony in a shaft of sun, the smudged elbows of his white coat resting on a month old copy of DIE PRESSE, the gold ring on the mysterious stump of his finger, his ear-finger, glinting off and on, catching the light, the schnapps bottle beside him.

  ‘Guten tag, Paul. Have you finished the Mozart?’

  ‘Half-finished, maestro.’

  ‘Is water at fifty degrees half-boiling?’

  Can I know that mine was a foolish, innocent world, a world of delusion and feeling and ridiculous dreams—a world of music—and still love it?

  Endlessly, effortlessly.

  Angus&Robertson

  Twenty-seven-year-old Scotsman David Mackenzie Angus stepped ashore in Australia in 1882, hoping that the climate would improve his health. While working for a Sydney bookseller, he managed to save the grand sum of £50 – enough to open his very own second-hand bookshop. He hired fellow-Scot George Robertson and in 1886 Angus & Robertson was born.

  They ventured into publishing in 1888 with a collection of poetry by H. Peden Steele, and by 1895 had a bestseller on their hands with A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses. A&R confirmed the existence of Australian talent – and an audience hungry for Australian content. The company went on to add some of the most famous names in Australian literature to its list, including Henry Lawson, Norman Lindsay, C.J. Dennis and May Gibbs. Throughout the twentieth century, authors such as Xavier Herbert, Ruth Park, George Johnston and Peter Goldsworthy continued this tradition.

  The A&R Australian Classics series is a celebration of the many authors who have contributed to this rich catalogue of Australian literature and to the cultural identity of a nation.

  These classics are our indispensable voices. At a time when our culture was still noisy with foreign chatter and clouded by foreign visions, these writers told us our own stories and allowed us to examine and evaluate both our homeplace and our place in the world. – GERALDINE BROOKS

  About the Author

  Peter Goldsworthy grew up in various Australian country towns, finishing his schooling at Darwin High School.

  After graduating in medicine from the University of Adelaide he worked in alcohol and drug rehabilitation for five years; since then he has divided his working time equally between general practice and writing.

  His numerous awards, across a wide range of genres, include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize; the 1988 Australian Bicentennial Poetry prize; the FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction; and a Helpmann Award, with composer Richard Mills, for the opera Batavia.

  His novels have been widely translated and four, including Maestro, have been adapted for the stage, as has the celebrated short story ‘The Kiss’. In 2013 he published a memoir of childhood, His Stupid Boyhood.

  Other Books by Peter Goldsworthy

  POETRY

  Readings from Ecclesiastes

  This Goes With This

  This Goes With That: Selected Poems 1970–1990

  After the Ball

  If, Then (includes songs from Summer of the Seventeenth Doll)

  New Selected Poems

  LIBRETTI

  Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

  Batavia

  Mass for the Middle-Aged

  The Ringtone Cycle

  SHORT FICTION

  Archipelagoes

  Zooing

  Bleak Rooms

  Little Deaths

  The List of All Answers: Collected Stories

  Gravel

  NOVELS

  Maestro

  Honk If You Are Jesus

  Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam (first published in

  Little Deaths)

  Magpie (with Brian Matthews)

  Wish

  Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS)

  Three Dog Night

  Everything I Knew

  NON-FICTION

  Navel Gazing: Essays, Half-Truths and Mystery Flights

  His Stupid Boyhood

  Copyright

  A&R Classics

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  First published in Australia by Angus & Robertson Publishers in 1981

  Paperback edition published by Sirius Books in 1984

  This A&R Classics edition published in 2014

  by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Ltd

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  harpercollins.com.au

  Copyright © Peter Goldsworthy 1981

  The right of Peter Goldsworthy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  10 East 53rd Street, New York NY 10022, USA

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Goldsworthy, Peter, 1951– author.

  Maestro / Peter Goldsworthy.

  5th edition.

  ISBN: 978 0 7322 9735 0 (pbk)

  ISBN: 97
8 0 7304 9381 5 (epub)

  Pianists – Fiction.

  Holocaust survivors – Australia – Fiction.

  Darwin (N.T.) – Fiction.

  A823.3

  Cover design by Hazel Lam, HarperCollins Design Studio, based on original design by Darren Holt, HarperCollins Design Studio

  Cover image by shutterstock.com