The Gustav Sonata
Authors: Rose Tremain
CONTENTS
What is the difference between friendship and love? Or between neutrality and commitment? Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in âneutral' Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem a distant echo. But Gustav's father has mysteriously died, and his adored mother Emilie is strangely cold and indifferent to him. Gustav's childhood is spent in lonely isolation, his only toy a tin train with painted passengers staring blankly from the carriage windows.
As time goes on, an intense friendship with a boy of his own age, Anton Zwiebel, begins to define Gustav's life. Jewish and mercurial, a talented pianist tortured by nerves when he has to play in public, Anton fails to understand how deeply and irrevocably his life and Gustav's are entwined.
Fierce, astringent, profoundly tender, Rose Tremain's beautifully orchestrated novel asks the question, what does it do to a person, or to a country, to pursue an eternal quest for neutrality, and self-mastery, while all life's hopes and passions continually press upon the borders and beat upon the gate.
Rose Tremain's bestselling novels have been published in thirty countries and have won many awards, including the Orange Prize (
The Road Home
), the Whitbread Novel of the Year (
Music & Silence
) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (
Sacred Country
);
Restoration
was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Rose Tremain was made a CBE in 2007 and was appointed Chancellor of the University of East Anglia in 2013. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes.
Novels
Sadler's Birthday
Letter to Sister Benedicta
The Cupboard
The Swimming Pool Season
Restoration
Sacred Country
The Way I Found Her
Music and Silence
The Colour
The Road Home
Trespass
Merivel
Short Story Collections
The Colonel's Daughter
The Garden of the Villa Mollini
Evangelista's Fan
The Darkness of Wallis Simpson
The American Lover
For Children
Journey to the Volcano
To the memory of Richard Simon
1932â2013
Rose Tremain
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âIf anyone should importune me to give a reason
why I loved him, I feel it could not otherwise be expressed
than by making the answer, “Because it was he, because it
 was I”.'
â Michel de Montaigne,
On Friendship
Mutti
Matzlingen, Switzerland,
1947
AT THE AGE
of five, Gustav Perle was certain of only one thing: he loved his mother.
Her name was Emilie, but everybody addressed her as Frau Perle. (In Switzerland, at that time, after the war, people were formal. You might pass a lifetime without
knowing
the first name of your nearest neighbour.) Gustav called Emilie Perle âMutti'. She would be âMutti' all his life, even when the name began to sound babyish to him: his Mutti, his alone, a thin woman with a reedy voice and straggly hair and a hesitant way of moving from room to room in the small apartment, as if afraid of discovering, between one space and the next, objects â or even people â she had not prepared herself to encounter.
The second-floor apartment, reached by a stone staircase too grand for the building, overlooked the River Emme in the town of Matzlingen, in an area of Switzerland known as Mittelland, between the Jura and the Alps. On the wall of Gustav's tiny room was a map of Mittelland, which displayed itself as hilly and green and populated by cattle and waterwheels and little shingled churches. Sometimes, Emilie would take Gustav's hand and guide it to the north bank of the river where Matzlingen was marked in. The symbol for Matzlingen was a wheel of cheese with one slice cut out of it. Gustav could remember asking Emilie who had eaten the slice that had been cut out. But Emilie had told him not to waste her time with silly questions.
On an oak sideboard in the living room, stood a photograph of Erich Perle, Gustav's father, who had died before Gustav was old enough to remember him.
Every year, on August
1
st, Swiss National Day, Emilie set posies of gentian flowers round the photograph and made Gustav kneel down in front of it and pray for his father's soul. Gustav didn't understand what a soul was. He could see only that Erich was a good-looking man with a confident smile, wearing a police uniform with shiny buttons. So Gustav decided to pray for the buttons â that they would keep their shine, and that his father's proud smile wouldn't fade as the years passed.
âHe was a hero,' Emilie would remind her son every year. âI didn't understand it at first, but he was. He was a good man in a rotten world. If anybody tells you otherwise, they're wrong.'
Sometimes, with her eyes closed and her hands pressed together, she would mumble other things she remembered about Erich. One day, she said, âIt was so unfair. Justice was never done. And it never will be done.'
Wearing a smock, with his short hair neatly combed, Gustav was taken each morning to the local kindergarten. At the door of the schoolhouse, he would stand absolutely still, watching Emilie walk away down the path. He never cried. He could often feel a cry trying to come up from his heart, but he always forced it down. Because this was how Emilie had told him to behave in the world. He had to
master himself.
The world was alive with wrongdoing, she said, but Gustav had to emulate his father who, when wronged, had behaved like an honourable man; he had
mastered himself.
In this way, Gustav would be prepared for the uncertainties to come. Because even in Switzerland, where the war hadn't trespassed, nobody yet knew how the future would unfold.
âSo you see,' she said, âyou have to be
like Switzerland
. Do you understand me? You have to hold yourself together and be courageous, stay separate and strong. Then, you will have the right kind of life.'
Gustav had no idea what âthe right kind of life' was. All he knew was the life he had, the one with Emilie in the second-floor apartment, with the map of Mittelland on his bedroom wall and Emilie's stockings drying on a string above the iron bath. He wanted them always to be there, those stockings. He wanted the taste and texture of the knödel they ate for supper never to change. Even the smell of cheese in Emilie's hair, which he didn't particularly like â he knew this had to linger there because Emilie's job at the Matzlingen Cheese Co-operative was the thing that kept them alive.
The speciality of the Matzlingen Co-operative was Emmental, made from the milk of the Emme valleys. Sounding like a tour guide, Emilie announced to Gustav, âThere are many fine inventions in Switzerland and Emmental cheese is one of them.' But in spite of its fineness, the sales of Emmental â both within Switzerland and to all those countries outside it, still struggling to rebuild themselves after the war â were unreliable. And if sales were down, the bonuses paid to the cheese workers at Christmas and on National Day could be disappointing.
Waiting to see what her bonus was going to be would put Emilie Perle into a trance of anxiety. She would sit at the kitchen shelf (it wasn't a table, just a shelf on a hinge, where she and Gustav sat to eat their meals) doing her sums on the grey edges of the
Matzlingerzeitung
, the local newspaper. The newsprint always blurred her arithmetic. Nor did her figures keep to their columns, but wandered over the réportage of Schwingen Competitions and the sightings of wolves in the nearby forests. Sometimes, the hectic scribblings were blurred a second time by Emilie's tears. She'd told Gustav never to cry. But it seemed that this rule didn't apply to her, because there were times, late at night, when Gustav would creep out of his room to find Emilie weeping over the pages of the
Matzlingerzeitung
.
At these moments, her breath often smelled of aniseed and she would be clutching a glass clouded with yellow liquid, and Gustav felt afraid of these things â of her aniseed breath and the dirty glass and his mother's tears. He would climb onto a stool beside her and watch her out of the corner of his grey eyes, and soon, Emilie would blow her nose and reach out to him and say she was sorry. He would kiss her moist, burning cheek and then she would lift him up, staggering a little under the weight of him, and carry him back to his room.
But in the year that Gustav turned five, no Christmas bonuses were paid at all and Emilie was forced to take a second job on Saturday mornings, as a cleaner in the Protestant Church of Sankt Johann.
She said to Gustav, âThis is work you can help me with.'
So they went out together very early, before the town was properly awake, before any light showed in the sky. They walked through the snow, following two frail torchlight beams, their breath condensing inside their woollen mufflers. When they arrived at the church, this, too, was dark and cold. Emilie turned on the two greenish strip lights on either side of the nave and they began their tasks, tidying the hymn books, dusting the pews, sweeping the stone floor, polishing the brass candlesticks. They could hear owls calling outside in the waning dark.
As the daylight grew stronger, Gustav always returned to his favourite task. Kneeling on a hassock, pushing the hassock along as he went, he'd clean the iron grating that ran down the length of the aisle. He pretended to Emilie that he had to do this job very carefully, because the ironwork had ornate patterns in it and his rag had to go round these and in and out of them, and she said, âAll right, Gustav, that's good. Doing your job carefully is good.'
But what she didn't know was that Gustav was searching for objects which had fallen
through
the grating and which lay there in the dust. He thought of this strange collection as his âtreasure'. Only hands as small as his could retrieve them. Now and again, he did find money, but it was always the kind of low-value money with which nothing could be bought. More usual items were hairpins, withered flower petals, cigarette stubs, sweet wrappings, paper clips and nails made of iron. He knew that these things were of no account, but he didn't mind. One day, he found a brand-new lipstick in a golden case. He designated this his âchief treasure'.
He took everything home in the pockets of his coat and hid the objects in a wooden box that had once contained the cigars his father used to smoke. He smoothed out the sweet wrappers, liking the vibrant colours, and shook out the tobacco from the cigarette ends into a little tin.