The Gustav Sonata (2 page)

When he was alone in his room, he would stare at the treasure. Sometimes, he touched it and smelled it. Keeping it hidden from Emilie – as though perhaps it was a present for her which he would one day surprise her with – was what excited him about it. The lipstick was a dark purple colour, almost black, like a boiled damson, and he found it beautiful.

He and Emilie had to spend two hours at the church, to get everything shipshape for the weekend services. During this time, a few people would come in, bundled up against the cold, and enter the pews and pray, or else go to the altar rail and stare at the amber-coloured stained-glass pietà in the west window.

Gustav saw that Emilie crept round them, as if trying to make herself invisible. Seldom did these people say ‘Grüezi', or say Frau Perle's name. He watched them from his hassock. He noticed that almost all of them were old. They appeared to him as unfortunate beings, who had no secret treasure. He thought that, perhaps, they hadn't got ‘the right kind of life'. He wondered whether the ‘right life' might lie in the things which he alone could see – the things underneath some grating or other, over which most people heedlessly trod.

When the cleaning was done, Gustav and Emilie walked home, side by side. The trams would be running by then, and a bell chiming somewhere, and a scatter of pigeons fluttering from roof to roof, and the flower stallholder setting out her vases and buckets on the corner of Unter der Egg. The flower seller, whose name was Frau Teller, would always greet them and smile, even if snow was falling.

Unter der Egg was the name of the street in which their apartment block stood. Before these blocks had been built, Unter der Egg (Under the Harrow) had been a rural strip, where the residents of Matzlingen had been able to rent allotments and grow vegetables, but these were long gone. Now, there was just a wide pavement and a metal drinking fountain and Frau Teller's stall, which was the last reminder of green things growing in this place. Emilie sometimes said that she would have liked to grow vegetables – red cabbages, she said, and snow peas and marrows. ‘But at least,' she would sigh, ‘the place wasn't destroyed by the war.'

She had shown Gustav some magazine pictures of destroyed places. She said they were all outside Switzerland. Dresden. Berlin. Caen. There were no people in any of these photographs, but in one of these pictures there had been a white dog, sitting alone in a mound of rubble. Gustav asked what had happened to that dog and Emilie said, ‘It's no use asking what happened, Gustav. Perhaps the dog found a good master, or perhaps it died of hunger. How can I possibly know? Everything, in the war, depended on who you were and
where
you were. And then destiny took over.'

Gustav stared at his mother. ‘Where were we?' he said.

She closed the magazine and folded it away, like a soft garment she planned to wear again in the near future. She took Gustav's face in her hands. ‘We were here,' she said, ‘safe in Matzlingen. For a while, when your father was Assistant Police Chief, we even had a beautiful apartment on Fribourgstrasse. It had a balcony, where I grew geraniums. I can't see a geranium plant without thinking of the ones I grew.'

‘Then we came to Unter der Egg?' asked Gustav.

‘Yes. Then we came to Unter der Egg.'

‘Just you and me?'

‘No. At first there were the three of us. But not for long.'

After the cleaning of the church, Gustav and Emilie would sit at the folding shelf in the tiny kitchen and drink hot chocolate and eat black bread with butter. The long winter day stretched ahead of them, cold and empty. Sometimes Emilie would go back to bed and read her magazines. She made no apology for this. She said children had to learn to play on their own. She said if they didn't learn to do this, they would never cultivate an imagination.

Gustav would stare out of the window of his room at the white sky. The only toy he owned was a little metal train, so he'd set the train on the windowsill and shunt it backwards and forwards. Often, it was so cold by the window that Gustav's breath made realistic steam, which he puffed over the engine. At the carriage windows, people's faces had been painted on, all of them given expressions of blank surprise. To these startled people, Gustav would occasionally whisper, ‘You have to
master yourselves.
'

The strangest place in the apartment building was the bunker underneath it. This had been built as a nuclear shelter, more usually referred to as an ‘air protection cellar'. Soon, every building in Switzerland would be required to have one of these.

Once a year, the janitor summoned the residents of the building, including the children, and they descended all together into the shelter. Behind them, as they went down the stairs, heavy iron doors were closed.

Gustav clung to Emilie's hand. Lights were turned on, but all they showed were more stairs going down and down. The janitor always reminded everybody that they should ‘breathe normally', that the air filtration system was tested frequently for its absolutely perfect functioning. It wasn't, he said, called an ‘air protection cellar' for nothing. But there was a strange smell about it, an animal smell, as though foxes or rats had nested here, living off dust or off grey paint licked from the walls.

Beneath the countless stairs, the shelter opened into a large storeroom, stacked from floor to ceiling with sealed cardboard boxes. ‘You'll remember what we keep in the boxes,' the janitor said, ‘enough food for all of us for approximately two months. And the water supply will be in the tanks over there. Clean drinking water. Rationed of course, because the mains supply – even if it was functioning – would be disconnected, in case of radiation contamination, but sufficient for all.'

He led them on. He was a heavy man. He spoke loudly and emphatically, as though he assumed he was with a party of deaf people. The sound of his voice echoed round the concrete walls. Gustav noticed that the residents always fell silent during the nuclear shelter tours. Their expressions reminded him of the painted people on his train. Husbands and wives huddled together. Old people clutched at each other to steady themselves. Gustav always hoped that his mother wouldn't let go of his hand.

When they got to the ‘dormitory' part of the shelter, Gustav saw that the bunks had been built one above the other in stacks of five. To reach the top bunks, you had to climb a ladder, and he thought that he wouldn't like this, to be so far from the ground. Supposing he woke in the night, in the dark, and couldn't find Mutti? Supposing Mutti was on the very bottom bunk, or in a different row? Supposing he fell out of his bunk and landed on his head and his head exploded? He whispered that he didn't want to live there, in an iron bunk and with cardboard food, and Mutti said, ‘It will probably never happen.'

‘What will never happen?' he asked.

But Emilie didn't wish to say. ‘You don't need to think about it yet,' she told him. ‘The shelter is just a place of safety, in case the Russians – or anybody at all – ever took it into their heads to harm Switzerland.'

Gustav lay in his bed at night and thought about what might happen if Switzerland were harmed. He wondered if Matzlingen would be turned to rubble and whether he would find himself all alone, like the white dog in the picture.

ANTON ARRIVED AT
the kindergarten in the cold spring of the year.

He came into the schoolroom and stood by the door, crying. None of the children had seen this boy before. One of the teachers, Fräulein Frick, went to him and took his hand and knelt down and began talking to him, but he didn't seem to hear her. He just kept on weeping.

Fräulein Frick beckoned to Gustav. Gustav didn't particularly want to be the boy chosen to comfort this weeping child, but Fräulein Frick urged him to come towards her and said to Anton, ‘This is Gustav. Gustav is going to be your friend. He will take you to the sandbox and you can build a castle together before we begin our lessons.'

Anton looked down at Gustav, who was slightly smaller than he was.

Gustav said to him, ‘My mother says it's better not to cry. She says you have to
master yourself
.'

Anton appeared so startled by this that his sobbing stopped abruptly.

‘There,' said Fräulein Frick. ‘That's good. Go with Gustav, then.' She produced a handkerchief and wiped Anton's cheeks. The boy's face was a hectic pink, his eyes big pools of darkness. His body was trembling.

Gustav led him over to the sandbox. Anton's small hand felt burning hot. Gustav said, ‘What kind of castle do you want to build?' But the boy couldn't answer. So Gustav gave him a spade and said, ‘I like castles with moats. Shall we start on the moat?'

Gustav marked out a circle and they began digging. A few other children clustered round them, staring at the new boy.

Before Anton arrived, Gustav had had no close friends at the kindergarten. There was a girl who amused him called Isabel. She liked to climb onto the work tables and jump off again, landing like a gymnast with her feet together and her arms outspread. She always brought her pet mouse to school in a wooden cage and Gustav was one of the few children allowed to stroke the mouse. But Isabel was too exhausting to play with for long. She had to be the Queen of every game.

All his life, Gustav would remember vividly that first morning spent with Anton. They didn't talk very much. It was as if Anton was so exhausted by his weeping that he
couldn't
talk. He just followed Gustav around and sat very close to him at the work table and watched what he did and tried to copy him. When Gustav asked him where he'd come from, he said, ‘From Bern. We had a house in Bern, but now we've only got an apartment in Matzlingen.'

Gustav said, ‘The place where I live is very small. We don't even have a kitchen table. Have you got a kitchen table?'

‘Yes,' said Anton, ‘we've got a kitchen table. I was sick all over it at breakfast because I didn't want to come here.'

Later, Anton asked Gustav, ‘Have you got a piano?'

‘No,' said Gustav.

‘We've got a piano and I can play it. I can play “Für Elise”. Not the fast bit, but the first section.'

‘What's “Für Elise”?' asked Gustav.

‘Beethoven,' said Anton.

Perhaps it was the idea of Anton playing the piano with his small hands, or perhaps it was when Anton told him that his surname was Zwiebel, which was identical to the word for ‘onion', and made you feel sorry for him; whatever it was, there was something about Anton which made Gustav feel that he had to protect him.

The following day, Anton was crying again when he arrived. Gustav saw Fräulein Frick coming towards him, but he stood in her way and said that Anton would be all right with him. He led him to the Nature Table and showed him the silkworms that were being reared in a grocery box with a perforated lid. He said, ‘In the box we had before, the holes were too big and the silkworms climbed out of them.'

‘Where did they go?' asked Anton through his tears.

‘They went all over the place,' said Gustav. ‘We tried to find them and put them back, but some of them got trodden on. Treading on a silkworm is disgusting.'

Gustav saw Anton smile, but then his tears welled up again and he put his face in his hands.

Gustav said, ‘What are you crying for?'

Anton stammered that he was crying for the loss of his friends at his old kindergarten in Bern.

‘Are they dead?' asked Gustav.

‘No. But I'll never see them again. I'm in this place now.'

Gustav said, ‘I think it's stupid to cry for them, then. Isn't your mother angry that you keep crying?'

Anton took his hands away from his face and stared at Gustav. ‘No,' he said, ‘she understands that I'm unhappy.'

‘Well,' said Gustav, ‘
I
think it's a bit stupid. You're here now, so you just have to get on with it.'

The bell rang for the beginning of morning lessons. Anton followed Gustav to one of the work tables. Pieces of grey sugar paper were put in front of them and boxes of crayons and they were told to start the day by drawing a picture of anything they liked.

Anton's tears slowly speckled the paper, like fat raindrops, but after five or six minutes, he stopped crying.

‘What are you going to draw?' he asked Gustav.

‘I'm going to draw my mother,' he said.

‘Is your mother beautiful?'

‘I don't know. She's just my mother. She works at the cheese co-operative, making Emmental.'

Fräulein Frick rapped on her desk with a ruler. ‘You know the rules,' she said. ‘When we're drawing pictures, we're silent. We talk silently to our pictures, not to each other.'

Gustav wanted Emilie to be sitting at the kitchen shelf in his picture, so he drew the shelf first, a kind of oblong, resting on air. He coloured it brown. Then he began on Emilie's face, not a round thing, but a narrow kind of shape he didn't know how to make. He saw straight away that what he'd drawn was
too
narrow. He put his hand up and Fräulein Frick came over and Gustav said, ‘This was meant to be a face, but it looks like an ice-cream cone.'

‘Never mind,' said Fräulein Frick. ‘Why don't you make it a cone? Put some nice strawberry ice cream into it.'

There was something amusing about this – that Emilie Perle could suddenly become a cornet. Gustav whispered to Anton, ‘I was going to draw my Mutti but she went wrong. Now she's an ice cream.'

And this was the first time that he heard Anton laugh. And it was the kind of laugh that couldn't be resisted; you had to join in, and suddenly the two boys couldn't stop giggling. Gustav suspected that Fräulein Frick was watching them sternly, but she said nothing and when he looked up at her – mastering his giggling at last – her expression wasn't stern at all, but just rather sweetly amused.