The Gustav Sonata (16 page)

‘Well,' she says, ‘I hope the Jewish people are satisfied. It was for them that little Gustav died and now it is for them that you've sacrificed what remained of our lives.'

She sees Erich open his mouth to argue with her and then change his mind, and she thinks, good, it's correct that he doesn't try to refute this, because that is the plain truth of it: he put Jewish lives before mine. He cared more about helping strangers than he cares about me.

She wants to walk out of the apartment, walk out into some other life and never return. Yet she thinks, why should I be driven out? Erich should be the one to go. I will stay here and tend my scarlet geraniums and read my magazines and buy French patisseries from the Café Emilie. I will go on as though nothing has happened …

But when Erich tells her that they will lose the apartment, she lets all her pent-up anger spill out. She tears at her hair. She falls to her knees and beats with her fists on the hearthrug. She grabs a cushion and rips open its seam and hurls feathers all over herself. She begins scratching her face.

Emilie travels to Basel, to the house of her mother, the house with the water pump in the yard, where the grass grows too long in summer and where wolves can sometimes be heard howling in the woods nearby.

Nothing is said about when she will be coming back.

She leaves a few clothes in the wardrobe and an old silver hairbrush on her dressing table. When the taxi arrives to take her to the station, Erich is not there to say goodbye.

Erich finds a small apartment on Unter der Egg. A flower stall just setting up on this road cheers his spirits. The rent is low, but a high deposit is demanded, a sum of money that will take almost everything that remains to Erich.

Though he's uncomfortable about this, he feels he has no choice but to borrow money. He believes that Roger Erdman will lend him the sum required. For Roger feels guilty about what has happened. He's admitted this. He has told Erich that, had he not been in hospital, but there in the office, seated in front of Liebermann, he might have done exactly the same thing. ‘We can't know,' he has said to Erich, ‘until the moment arrives what choice we are going to make.'

On a Sunday afternoon, Erich walks to Roger's apartment on Grünewaldstrasse. The door is opened by Lottie, whose hair looks wild and who is dressed in a silk peignoir.

‘I'm sorry,' says Erich. ‘I'm disturbing you.'

‘Oh no,' says Lottie, yawning, ‘I was just taking a nap, after eating too much chocolate. Roger is in Zurich. It's ridiculous how decadent I become when he's away!'

‘I'll leave you in peace – to your decadence! I only came to ask a favour of Roger.'

‘No. Come in, Erich. I'm glad you're here. I want to tell you how angry I am about what's happened to you. Come in and I'll make coffee.'

She doesn't dress, but only brushes her hair. She sits beside Erich on a small sofa to pour the coffee and he can smell sweat on her body and chocolate on her breath.

‘You must tell us what we can do for you, Erich,' Lottie says. ‘Really, we would do anything.'

A clock with a silvery chime strikes four. In the silence that falls after the chimes have ended, Erich remembers the night of his ‘confession' and how he'd felt desire for Lottie Erdman. And now, he knows that he's troubled by her again – her abundant blonde hair, her over-large bosom, the wholesomeness she exudes, the delight she seems to take in showing off her body.

He drinks the coffee, but it's too hot. He knows he must hurry it and leave before he does or says anything that he will regret. Lottie yawns again. One side of the silk peignoir falls off her thigh. She makes no attempt to adjust it, and Erich, unable to resist glancing down, realises that she's wearing no panties.

‘I heard,' says Lottie, ‘that Emilie has gone to stay with her mother.'

‘Yes,' says Erich.

‘Never a very good sign – going back to the mother,' says Lottie. ‘Does it mean your marriage is over?'

‘I don't know,' says Erich.

Lottie turns and looks at him. The silky peignoir falls further off her lap.

‘Well,' she says, ‘given that I'm in such a decadent frame of mind, and given that both Roger and Emilie are so very far away, would it be very wicked to have a little fun? Nothing serious, you know. Just something to take our minds off the world and its ton of sorrows. You're a very handsome man, Erich. I've always thought it. I have dreams about you sometimes, extremely sexy dreams, but of course I never tell Roger. I wait till he's gone to work, then go back to bed and masturbate. Isn't that a hilariously wicked thing to confess?'

Erich can't speak. He knows he should stand up and say goodbye to Lottie and walk out of the apartment. To fuck Roger Erdman's wife would be a disgraceful thing for him to do. But it seems that Lottie – in her
déshabille
, with her chocolate breath, with her face shiny from sleep, with her provocative talk about masturbation – is blithe about everything, as though making love with Erich right now might be the most reasonable, natural and innocent thing in the world.

She gently lifts Erich's hand and puts it between her legs and holds it there, and with the very first touch of him she closes her eyes. At this, all resistance to her is lost. Erich is almost immediately on his knees and his mouth is where his hand was and the smell and taste of Lottie Erdman, on this hot Sunday afternoon, feels more overwhelming to him than the smell and taste of any woman he has ever known.

He stays until dusk. The scent of Lottie is all over his body, but he doesn't want to wash it off. As he leaves, he says, ‘Now I'll think about you all the time.'

WINTER COMES TO
the house with the water pump in the yard. Wearing fluffy blue slippers and a woolly dressing gown, Emilie works the pump handle, up and down, up and down, till the tin basin underneath it is full of water. All the while she is doing this, she is cursing. Inside the house, her mother, Irma Albrecht, waits for the water to be brought in and heated, so that she can wash herself.

They are living a sorry life. Basel is a prosperous city, but here, a few kilometres from it, there is poverty. Their nearest neighbour is a pig farmer who feeds his animals almost nothing except food thrown away in household bins. Quite frequently, the animals die of poisoning, or choke to death on a piece of cardboard or the key to a sardine tin.

Emilie's mother chides this neglectful man, but Emilie feels as much pity for herself as she does for the pigs. Irma uses her, as she was always used before she escaped to Matzlingen, as a servant. She has to clean the dilapidated house, do the washing, wind it through an ancient mangle and hang it in the yard. She has to make the beds and scour the tin bath. Her food is meagre.

More and more, as winter comes on, Irma takes to her bed. She orders Emilie to massage her back with a special lavender oil, to ward off muscle fatigue and lung ailments. Emilie's arms ache as she rubs the white, mole-flecked skin. There is a kind of torture in the task, because the sight of Irma's body, just on the threshold of being old, repels her. She dreads becoming like her. But Irma makes her keep on and on. ‘Don't pretend you don't know how to do this properly!' she says. ‘Rub harder. Do you want your mother to die of winter illnesses?'

Yes. She does. Emilie would like Irma to die. Then, the neglected old house could be sold and she would have money of her own, enough, perhaps, to start a little business in Basel: a flower shop or a small café, with rooms above it for her to live in. She would buy stylish clothes, meet other men, divorce her disgraced husband and marry again. She would conceive another child. She would
have a future.

All there is now, however, is a succession of days, devoid of all pleasure, devoid of all joy. Irma goes back and forth to church. Emilie reads her magazines. She loves to hear about the lives of film stars. She fantasises about becoming the lover of Charlie Chaplin, caressed by his moustache, seduced by his beautiful eyes. She walks in the woods, listening for the sound of wolves. She digs up carrots and turnips from Irma's garden to keep them both alive. She bakes bread.

Sometimes, in the freezing nights, she dreams about the apartment on Fribourgstrasse: the warmth of it, the sunlight at the French windows, the scarlet flowers. Erich isn't in the dreams, but now and then a pale shadow passes between the window and the door, as though born of sunlight, swiftly fleeing away, and she knows what this is: it is her lost Gustav, her lost son.

Once in a while, Irma and Emilie take the bus to Basel. Irma puts on her best burgundy-coloured coat and hat. They walk down Freie Strasse, past the faded façade of the painted Rathaus, and go into a tea room off Marktplatz, where Irma orders chocolate cake and tea. She never pays for it. When the bill comes, she signs it and gives it back. Emilie has no idea how this arrangement was agreed upon, or how it will end. The café owners, Herr and Frau Mollis, seem forever polite and resigned to Irma's scrawled signatures.

In the café, Emilie looks out for Jews. She's been told that a lot of French Jews are now living in the Basel area, but no one is talking French in the tea room. When they go out into the busy town again, she hopes to see some Jews lying in the street, drunk or destitute, perhaps too weak to beg?

On the corner of Martinsgasse there is a jewellery shop, and when she looks in there one day she sees what she thinks of as a recognisably Jewish face staring back at her, a prosperous-looking man in his fifties, tugging at shirt cuffs secured with heavy gold cufflinks, and she wants to go into the shop and tell him, I lost everything because of you. I want you to know this. I want all of you to know it. I had a beautiful life and now I have a life of poverty and misery – because of you.

But Irma drags her on past the jewellery shop. ‘It's time to go home,' she says. ‘I need my enema.'

Always, after the cake-eating, there is the ritual of the enema. Irma's body is so used to a poor diet of bread and vegetables that – even though she gobbles the cake like a greedy infant – she believes that ‘special arrangements' have to be made to accommodate anything rich or fatty. ‘That,' she says, ‘is God's punishment.'

So then she has to disappear to the outside lavatory with her rubber tubing and her enema pump and wait in there, in the bitter cold, until her bowels are free of everything they now contain, so that they're ready to ‘process' the cake. After that, she is so weak, she has to lie down in bed. Emilie is ordered to bring her broth. Emilie dreads that the next thing to be asked of her will be to administer the enema. And refusing Irma's requests is as impossible now as when she was a girl. The requests are laced with venom. If you refuse, you're bitten by a snake. You could die a fearful death.

Snow falls in the new year,
1940
, and Switzerland grows silent, as though listening, in terror, for the sound of advancing armies. The pump in the yard has to be bound with sacking, to stop it freezing. Round the sacking, Irma ties an ancient fox tippet, ragged and scarred. Now, when Emilie looks out at the pump, she imagines a wild animal in the yard, rearing up in terror at finding itself there.

More and more, Emilie dreams of Charlie Chaplin and the palm-lined boulevards of Hollywood, far away, where the war could never, ever reach. She dances with Charlie beside a floodlit swimming pool. He says to her, ‘Ah, Emilie, you are just the right height for me. Let's fly over the rainbow together.'

But how long can it be endured, this life with Irma? Emilie tries not to think about this. For what's the point in thinking about an end to your present sorrows, when you're a prisoner of events, a prisoner of time?

Sometimes, far down the valley, Emilie can hear the voices of children, building snowmen, playing on luges, and she thinks what a joyous sound this is, and how, by this year,
1940
, her little Gustav would have been talking and laughing and how she would have had his own small sleigh made for him and how she might have borrowed a docile pony, to pull the sleigh along.

Once again, Emilie and Irma are heading for the town. Irma is wearing her burgundy coat and hat. Emilie suggests going to a different café – just to see if Irma is prepared to pay for their tea, but Irma says crossly, ‘Certainly not. That is the only cake God will permit me to eat.'

So they take their usual table by the window. Irma and Emilie eat the chocolate cake and drink the milky tea. Irma cuts her wedge of cake into slices larger than usual and crams these into her mouth. Her thin cheeks bulge out. And Emilie recognises how, in some sad way, her mother
lives
for this, for these five or ten minutes of filling herself with chocolate. A moment of compassion for Irma slides into her heart. She wants to touch her shoulder or stroke her hand, but she holds back from these gestures.

When the cake is finished and Irma asks for the bill, what arrives is a stack of bills, perhaps thirty, or more, signed by Irma, but never paid. They are brought to the table by the café owner, Frau Mollis, who pulls out a chair and sits down.

‘I'm sorry, Frau Albrecht,' Frau Mollis says, ‘I think we have been very patient with these bills. But you see how many there are now. I am going to ask you to settle them today. That way, you will be free to enjoy your tea and chocolate cake again in the future. I will accept a cheque, if you do not have the ready money.'

‘Oh,' says Irma. ‘Well, of course I don't have the ready money. How much is owing?'

‘Ninety-two francs and ten centimes.'

‘So you're pernickety about centimes?'

‘I'm just telling you what you owe.'

‘I think it's far too much. All that for cake! Ridiculous.'

‘You can examine the bills if you want to. My husband and I have added them up very carefully. That is the sum owing.'