The Gustav Sonata (19 page)

When Lottie opens her apartment door and sees Emilie there, resplendent now, in her sixth month of pregnancy, her face pales and she has to sit down on the nearest chair.

‘Are you all right, Lottie?' asks Emilie.

‘Yes,' says Lottie. ‘Sorry. I get dizzy spells sometimes. I don't know why.'

LOTTIE SENDS A
note to the tram depot. She asks Erich to meet her at an out-of-the-way café, where no one will recognise them. There is snow on the ground.

In the café, Erich still feels chilled after his night at the depot, and orders hot chocolate.

Lottie says, ‘I'm not going to have anything comforting. Today is going to be hard, but we just have to bear it.'

She's dressed in a black coat with a fur collar. Her blonde hair is partly concealed by a black fur hat. He thinks, this is how Anna Karenina looked to Vronsky – before he tired of her, before the spell was broken. He wants to reach under the table and put his hand on her cunt.

She begins to talk, but he's not really listening; Lottie is just too perfect in the early-morning light, her skin so fine and soft, her blue eyes strangely glittering with tears. He could take her now, right there on the hard bench, not caring about anything in the world except being inside her and hearing her cry out his name.

But now she's telling him that he
has
to listen to her. She tells him that the love affair is over. She's made up her mind. With Emilie pregnant, she's decided that she wants to have a child, too – Roger's child. She wants to commit to Roger and to a family. ‘The rest,' she says, ‘is folly. We've always known this. And it has to end.'

Erich stares at her. Her beauty is like a weight on him, suffocating him, pinning him down to the earth.

‘Why did you put on lipstick?' he asks.

‘What?'

‘Why did you paint yourself up, to tell me that you don't love me any more?'

Lottie takes off her fur hat and shakes her golden tresses loose.

‘I never did love you,' she says. ‘I never said that. I just liked what we did.'

‘
Liked
? Is that the right word? You just
liked it
?'

‘Yes. It was just animal sex, Erich. Animals don't even have the words to say if they're “liking it” or not: they just do it. They meet and the moment comes and they have to do it. And we were like them. We didn't think of anything but satisfying ourselves. Over and over again. Like pigs. We were pigs.'

Erich's hand trembles as he lights a cigarette. The waiter brings his hot chocolate and a glass of water for Lottie. The smell of the chocolate now sickens him. He can't look at Lottie any more, it's too painful. He looks down at the wooden floor, where the butts of cigarettes from last night's drinkers still lie, and he thinks how shabby the world is and how tired and old and full of discarded things.

‘Listen,' says Lottie gently, ‘I don't mean to imply that I'll ever forget us, Erich. The things we did! When I'm ancient, I'll probably remember them and wonder if it was true. And it's not like that with Roger. It's much more ordinary and quiet. But the thing is, I do love Roger. I've never stopped loving him. You've always known that. I've never lied to you about that. And when I saw Emilie, pregnant, I knew that this was what I wanted, to have children with Roger, lots of children. I don't want my breasts to be sex objects any more; I want to suckle my babies.'

Her breasts. Why did she have to mention them? He used to lie on her and suck like a child, loving the way the nipples hardened as she became aroused, even imagining that some beautiful dewy substance came out of these pert nipples, to nourish him and bind him to her – bind her forever, because he knew he would always need her. Lottie Erdman. His only love.

He gets up and stubs out his cigarette. He casts a last look at her in the harsh morning light of the poor café, to etch her there in his mind: her smooth cheeks, her scarlet lips, her pale hand clutching the fur on her coat collar. Then, he turns and walks out into the street, where a light snow is falling.

In the seventh month of her pregnancy, Emilie gives up her job at the cheese co-operative. The manager, Herr Studer, is courteous and says he will take her back whenever she feels ready to work again. She is given a large slice of Emmental in what Herr Studer calls a ‘presentation box'. As she leaves, he kisses her cheek.

Emilie begins to count the days remaining before the birth: sixty days, forty days, thirty days …

She sees the doctor as regularly as she can and the doctor lets her put his stethoscope in her ears, to hear the baby's heartbeat. And this moves Emilie to say, ‘I know it's a boy. We're going to call him Gustav. Like the one I lost.'

‘Ah. You lost one?'

‘Yes. At five and a half months, but this one is strong, isn't he? He's going to be all right?'

‘As far as anyone can tell.'

‘I think the heartbeat sounds strong. He won't be small and thin, like me, but tall and well made like my husband. I know he will. Or perhaps I just want it? Do you think that wanting things can make them happen?'

The doctor takes the stethoscope away. ‘If I really believed that,' he says, ‘I wouldn't bother being a doctor.'

But he laughs, and Emilie thinks, now that I'm going to be a mother, and hold my boy in my arms, I can bear anything.

She thought that Erich would be cheered by the thought of a son being born. But when they talk about the forthcoming birth, he just smiles a wan smile. He says the name, over and over: ‘Gustav … Gustav …' It was his father's name.

There is something wrong with Erich. Some nights, he can't get out of bed to go to the depot. There is no telephone in the depot, so Emilie has to walk there, through the dark streets, to tell Erlen that her husband is ill. And she feels sorry for Erlen, alone in the vast shed, with his mops and pails of freezing water. Sometimes, she takes him a slice of Nusstorte. He says to her, ‘Tell Herr Perle he's going to get sacked, if he keeps missing nights. The bosses are hard men.'

When she passes this on to Erich, he just closes his eyes. Emilie reminds him that, without the cheese co-operative and without the job at the tram depot, they would be destitute, but he doesn't seem to give this his attention. All he wants to do all the time is sleep.

She tries to care for him as best she can, calling on her reserves of compassion to fight off anger. He cries real tears in his sleep. When she asks him what it is that's tormenting him, he says it's sorrow for the state of the world. He says he believes the invasion of Switzerland is ‘only a matter of time. And then, everything we've known will be destroyed.'

Emilie can't let herself think about this. She urges Erich to go to work. She tells him – for the third or fourth time – that the arrival of little Gustav will be the thing which helps him to recover his peace of mind. But when she says this, she sees a flash of his old anger in his eyes. ‘You know nothing, Emilie,' he says. ‘You know nothing.'

The pains begin on the
2
nd of June. First, they come in a dream: a dark-faced goblin clawing at Emilie's womb with his scaly hands. But then she wakes and the pains arrive again, so she knows this is real now: it's Gustav tearing at her, asking to be born.

It's four in the morning, and on this night, Erich
has
gone to work. It will be another two and a half hours before he gets home. Emilie breathes deeply, trying to stay calm. She packs a small suitcase and dresses herself in a loose dress and coat. She washes her face and cleans her teeth. ‘Do everything right,' she instructs herself, ‘everything in the right order.'

Next, she goes down and bangs on the door of Frau Krams's apartment, and after a long wait, Frau Krams comes shuffling to the door. Her hair is in curl papers and her gnarled feet bare. Emilie apologises for waking her and asks her to summon an ambulance.

Frau Krams tugs on a robe and lights a cigarette. She sits Emilie down in her parlour and goes to the telephone in the hall. After a moment, Ludwig Krams comes into the parlour, tugging a blanket with him. He sits opposite Emilie and giggles. ‘I thought it would be the other one,' he says.

‘What?' says Emilie.

‘I thought it would be the other lady he'd get into trouble. They were always at it in the mornings. I used to go and sit on the stairs and listen.'

Emilie regards Ludwig calmly. She feels sorry for Frau Krams having an imbecile for a son. She says, ‘The
other lady
,
as you call her, was a whore – a prostitute. But even so, I don't think you should have done that, Ludwig,' and then turns away from him.

‘Always at it …' he says again, but his voice tails off as Frau Krams comes back into the room. She puts the kettle on. She finds a plaid rug and places this round Emilie's narrow shoulders. She sends Ludwig away.

‘What's he been saying?' she asks.

‘Nothing,' says Emilie. ‘Nothing I didn't know.'

They wait. The pains come and go. Emilie tries not to cry out, but to continue keeping her breathing steady. Her forehead beads with sweat. She digs her nails into her palms. Frau Krams says, ‘I hope for your sake, Frau Perle, that it's a girl. Boys are nothing but heartbreak.'

‘Well,' says Emilie, ‘if it's a girl, we don't have a name. What's your name, Frau Krams? We could use that.'

‘Helga,' says Frau Krams.

‘Helga?' says Emilie. ‘Well, it's a bit ordinary, but it would do. I'm not naming any child of mine after my own mother.'

They just have time to sip a cup of hot tea, then Emilie is taken away in the ambulance. She wishes Erich were with her. She asks the ambulance men if they can get a message to the tram depot and they say they will try. They give her oxygen to breathe and the feeling of the pure oxygen going into her lungs is as beautiful as breathing the air of Davos.

And it feels cosy and safe in the ambulance, with the sweet oxygen and the two medics to care for her. She wishes the ambulance could stop somewhere quiet and that Gustav could be born here and put gently into her arms by these men she already trusts with her life.

But they arrive – too soon – at the hospital. She says goodbye to the ambulance men. She's wheeled into an elevator, then out again and into a room blazing with white light. A midwife peers at her over a mask. Emilie's legs are hoisted up and her feet hung into stirrups. Now, suddenly, she is anxious, frightened of the pain, frightened that her body is too narrow to push the baby out. Tears start at her eyes. She calls Erich's name.

She looks round the small, floodlit room. There is a cluster of people at the end of her bed. Emilie was unaware of them coming into the room, but there they are. They pass quiet instructions to each other. She is told to push and push again. The pain is so severe, she thinks she may pass out and she thinks, do children ever understand what we go through to bring them into the world?

Perhaps she does pass out. She's not sure. Time seems to stop and then start up again. And when it restarts, there is her baby, her boy Gustav, alive and screaming, wrapped in a green rag and laid on her breast.

THE BABY IS
very small. His little limbs are thin. He seems to cry all the time from hunger. He even cries at the breast.

Erich sits on the bed, watching Emilie trying to feed his son. Even in her maternal state, her breasts, which had grown large during her first pregnancy, are meagre. It's clear to Erich that Gustav is slowly dying from lack of sustenance. He snatches him off Emilie's breast, and carries him round to the pharmacy, where he lays him down on the counter and takes off his clothes.

‘Look!' says Erich. ‘Look how thin and weak he is! He needs milk.'

The young woman pharmacist examines Gustav, while other customers, who have come into the pharmacy for headache pills or stomach settlers, wait in bemusement and mild irritation.

‘My wife,' says Erich, ‘she's trying to breastfeed him, but I don't think there's anything
in her breasts
!'

Without commenting on this, the pharmacist takes baby Gustav away and puts him on a pair of scales. She moves weights around, then picks him up again and wraps him in his shawl. She hands him back to Erich. ‘You're right,' she says. ‘He is underweight.'

She gives Erich a large carton of powdered milk and a glass bottle with a rubber teat.

‘Lovely Swiss milk,' she says. ‘Give him two-thirds of the bottle every four hours. Bring him back in one week, or take him to your doctor.'

As he goes out, one of the female customers, waiting in line for some simple medication, says to him, ‘You know he must have the breast as well. Or else your wife will get depressed.'

She is depressed.

When Erich gives Gustav the bottle, she sees on the infant's face an expression of bliss, whereas, on the breast, he's restless and agitated. And she knows she's clumsy with him. She can't seem to get him entirely comfortable in her arms. He kicks and screams. But when Erich picks him up, he goes quiet.

Her nights are purgatory. Erich is at the depot and she's alone with her child, who wakes her every hour with his screams. Sometimes, she lets him scream. She's so tired, she can doze through the horrible noise. She tells herself that nothing bad is happening to him; he's just a bit hungry, or wet, or just plain bad-tempered. And she needs her sleep. How will she get through the day of constant feeding and nappy changing unless she can get her rest?

She expected to feel joy. She remembers how much she longed for this baby. She imagined motherhood would cure the sorrows of the past and make her contented and proud. But it isn't like that. She nurtures the terrible thought that this Gustav is the
wrong
Gustav; the baby she lost was the rightful son, with whom she would have found a thrilling maternal bond.