The Gustav Sonata (22 page)

At fifty now, Anton had become head of the Music Department in the much expanded Protestant Academy of Sankt Johann, where once he and Gustav had studied. He was a handsome man with thick, curly hair, greying at the temple, a wounding smile and an infectious laugh which Gustav never tired of hearing.

Gustav knew that women were seduced by Anton and that he enjoyed, to some extent, his power over them. But Anton told Gustav that he never let himself fall in love. He said the idea of living with a woman was ‘inimical' to him. He said that making music on the piano would always be the most important thing in his life and the idea that there would be ‘this wife-person, this stranger' eavesdropping on his piano practice filled him with horror. Gustav reminded Anton that he always played for him and for his parents, not minding if he made mistakes in front of them, but he replied simply, ‘You're not strangers.'

‘But your wife would be?'

‘Yes. In certain ways, I think she'd remain one.'

Gustav watched with attention Anton's repeated refusal to let any of the women in his life believe she
belonged
to him. They might stay a night or two at his apartment, which was near to that of Adriana and Armin on Fribourgstrasse, but seldom talked about them or let them visit the school. Sometimes, he couldn't remember the name of the woman he was currently sleeping with. He said to Gustav, ‘Perhaps one day it will be different, but for the moment, it isn't like that, any more than it is for you, eh, Gustav?'

‘No,' said Gustav. ‘I've got no time for it. My heart and mind are taken up entirely by the Hotel Perle.'

THE HOTEL PERLE
was a place where guests mainly stayed a very short time – one night or two – on their way to somewhere else. For what was there to see in Matzlingen? A few elegant shops. A tile factory. The Protestant Church of Sankt Johann. Long ago, visitors had been shown around the cheese co-operative, to the fury of Emilie Perle, who didn't like being gawped at as she went about her arduous work. But now the cheese co-operative was gone. Matzlingen had become little more than a stopover place on the road to Bern.

Yet, just occasionally, guests booked in for a longer stay, attracted by the gentle walks in the surrounding valleys and by the undemanding insignificance of the town itself. And in the cold spring of
1993
, one such client arrived.

He was English. His name was Colonel Ashley-Norton. He was in his late sixties and spoke good German, which, he told Gustav, he had learned ‘at school and then in the war, when I was nineteen'. He appeared to Gustav like a caricature of a reserved English gentleman, with brilliantined white hair, a rosy complexion and a ridiculous little moustache, trimmed so close to his top lip, it resembled a worn-out nail brush.

When Gustav began talking to Ashley-Norton, he saw at once that this reserve concealed an emotional personality. The elderly man said, with a little choke in his voice, that he wanted to be in Matzlingen, ‘in the middle of nowhere, with nothing much to see, so that I can be very quiet and solve the puzzle of what to do with the rest of my life'. He added that all he asked of this nowhere was that it be clean and with a fragrant valley nearby, where he could walk. He said that he knew, in Switzerland, he could rely on this.

It emerged that Colonel Ashley-Norton has been married for forty years to a woman he referred to as Bee, but Bee had let him down. He put his hand against his heart as he said, ‘She let me down by dying.'

Colonel Ashley-Norton went on. ‘She died on Christmas Day. In the interval between eating our Christmas pudding and going into the drawing room to watch the Queen's broadcast. She just sat in her chair and closed her eyes and died. Her heart stopped. And now I'm alone.'

Gustav was tempted to say that, having witnessed the long-drawn-out death of his mother, he thought this was a good way to complete a life – just closing your eyes and never moving again – but he didn't. He could tell that Ashley-Norton was still afflicted by talking about Bee. His bottom lip began to tremble. He snatched out of his breast pocket a paisley handkerchief and wiped his eyes. He asked Gustav for a tot of whisky.

When the colonel had downed the whisky, he said, ‘You're going to find this very foolish, Herr Perle, but the thing which upsets me most, on a day-to-day basis, is that I've lost my gin rummy partner.'

Gustav asked, ‘What is gin rummy, Colonel?'

‘Oh yes,' said the colonel, ‘I stupidly forget that this isn't universal, because it's always seemed so universal to me. It's a card game. Fairly simple, yet with a little skill attached to it, but without the need for perpetual vigilance, as in bridge. Bee and I used to play three or four times a week for years and years. It's a game that calms your nerves. I would even go so far as to suggest that it may help to regulate a human life, and make what is unbearable easier to be borne. And now I have no one to play with.'

‘We play an obscure card game in Switzerland called Jass,' said Gustav. ‘The cards are decorated and complex. The scoring is difficult. Perhaps, while you're here, you could teach me gin rummy, Colonel? Once the service of dinner is complete, I have very little to do, except make the rounds of the hotel before I go to bed. I would be delighted to learn.'

‘Would you really?' said Ashley-Norton. ‘That's very decent of you. None of my friends in England wanted to stand in. They thought gin rummy was an infernal waste of time. I said to them, “That's the whole point of it. Wasting time changes the nature of time. And the heart is stilled.” But nobody paid me any bloody attention.'

They played in a quiet corner of the lounge, after dinner. Lunardi sometimes came through from the kitchen and stared at them and shook his head, no doubt thinking that cards were ‘an infernal waste of time', but perhaps recognising that Gustav was enjoying himself, because he took to making chocolate truffles for the two men to eat with their coffee and cognac. Ashley-Norton declared that the texture of Lunardi's truffles was ‘beyond perfect'.

Gustav liked being in the lounge – a place where he'd seldom sat for long. The room was at the very centre of the hotel and, from his comfortable chair, he could listen quietly to the life of the establishment going gently on, then readying itself for the night. This attention he gave to his surroundings only distracted him very marginally from learning the card game and Ashley-Norton was a patient teacher.

On the first evening, the colonel won every single game, but he said to Gustav, ‘This will change. Once you've learned the knack of placing cards strategically in the discard pile, for later picking up, you will start to win. It may take you a few goes at it, but what is exceptionally consoling about gin rummy – if the players are each moderately good or moderately bad at it – is that the scores have a reliable tendency to ebb and flow like tides. No player ever gets so far ahead in the arithmetic that disharmony occurs. You will soon see.'

And so this proved to be. Ashley-Norton had booked into the hotel for two weeks, but now he extended his stay into ‘unknown time'. He asked only to keep the same room, of which he had become fond, and that the supply of chocolate truffles might not diminish. In the cool spring weather, he spent his days walking around the town and going into the valley beyond, carrying an alpenstock, looking for wild narcissi. His cheeks became even more rosy than they'd been at his arrival. He praised the cherry trees of Mittelland, now coming into flower.

One night, after once again talking about the cherry blossom he'd encountered on his walks, he laid down his cards, took a swig of his cognac and said, ‘The only trouble about the trees is that they remind me of the road to Bergen-Belsen.'

Gustav paused in the game.

Ashley-Norton once again took out the paisley handkerchief that was always reliably there in his top pocket, and blew his nose. Then he said, ‘Once you've witnessed that, it's like a film inside your head. You don't want to press the “play” button. But then something happens – like me seeing the beauty of those trees in your valleys around here, and smelling their scent – and it gets pressed. And now I'm having trouble sleeping again.'

Gustav asked him gently if he wanted to talk about what he'd seen. The colonel said, ‘Talking about it helps the nightmares to go away, but I can't do it for long.'

He said it was a perfumed road, the road to the camp. All the cherries were in flower and the scent of the air was beautiful. And as the British soldiers passed through the villages, they saw children playing happily in the orchards. They saw animals and birds seeming to thrive on the farms, and ponds full of fresh water and windmills turning in the spring breeze. He said, ‘We didn't believe we were going to see what we saw.'

Gustav refilled the colonel's glass with cognac, and when Lunardi came through to say goodnight, he sent him quickly away.

When Lunardi had gone, Ashley-Norton said, ‘It's when I get to this bit that I can't go on. The thing is, Herr Perle, I was only nineteen. I'd been called up just a few months before. Some of the other chaps in the regiment, they coped with it better than I did, because they'd seen other terrible things. Shocking things. But nothing as bad as what we came across at Belsen, mind you. I'm not sure there can, on earth, be anything more terrible than that.'

He told Gustav he had been given a camera and told to take pictures, because rumours had reached the British Army of an extermination camp at Bergen-Belsen, and it needed to be documented for the courts – for all the reckoning to come after the war. He said the commanding officer gave the camera to him because he was reputed to be ‘an arty type'. The officer instructed him to take as many pictures as he could and to leave nothing out.

‘I began on the road,' he said, ‘taking pictures of the trees and the geese and the children. Then, the first sign we had that something terrible was approaching was that the air was vitiated with an appalling stench. It grew and grew. All the chaps, even the senior officers, started to slow down. We honestly wanted to turn back. Some of the boys were sick in the ditch, before we even got there. I tied a handkerchief round my nose and mouth. I knew that we had to go on. I took a picture of my best buddy, Ralph Thompson, puking on a grassy bank.'

Ashley-Norton drank more brandy. He said he was unable to describe, any more, the horrors that he saw. He said they were really beyond words. What he wanted to talk about was the camera – ‘the bloody camera!' – and how much he began to hate it round his neck and to hate pointing it at the stacked-up piles of bodies and then at the suffering inmates of Belsen, ‘as if I were at some wretched seaside holiday, as if I were a stupid adolescent who takes up photography as a pastime!' He said that some of the prisoners even smiled for him and the women tried to rearrange their hair, but that half the time he could hardly see what he was photographing, he felt so sick and blinded by misery.

‘The thing was, Herr Perle, if I hadn't had the blasted camera and the heavy pack of film on my back, I could have done more to help people. But I was instructed never to let any of this “equipment” be separated from my body, and this was an order I had to follow. You see why I hated it so? I felt that camera and that bag of film were dragging me down into the earth. We had feeding teams and delousing teams, and chaps sorting and washing clothing, and I could have helped with some of that. Not with the medical stuff perhaps, because I had no training. But I could have been of some bloody use, couldn't I, instead of taking bloody pictures?'

The colonel wiped his eyes. After a moment or two, Gustav said, ‘In fact, you were probably doing the most important job that any of you could have done – bearing witness. Somebody had to do it.'

‘I know. Somebody had to do it. And yet, you see, not really. Because the Americans arrived with cine-film. They took moving pictures. It's all there in the archives. They didn't need my photographs. But all the same, I had to sleep with the wretched camera round my neck. I said to Ralph Thompson, “I'm near to hanging myself with the strap.”'

Gustav sat with Ashley-Norton far into the night.

When he told him he couldn't manage to speak any more about Belsen, he offered to accompany him to his room, because he knew the colonel would be unsteady from all the cognac he'd put down, and he dreaded the idea that he might fall and injure himself in the Hotel Perle. But he said he didn't want to go to bed and ‘risk the nightmares'.

They sat in silence for a while. Gustav banked up the log fire that he liked to keep burning in the lounge every evening until the summer came round. He knew they were both too tired to begin another game of gin rummy, or even finish the one that was incomplete on the table in front of them, but he left the cards spread about where they were – as if they
might
begin it again any moment. And Gustav wondered, was that what some of the Jewish families had done when they were rounded up – let things remain just as they were in the apartments they were leaving, as though, by nightfall, they would be home again, in time to switch on the lamps and make supper?

Ashley-Norton lit a cigarette. This seemed to soothe him a little and he was strong enough to start a new conversation, asking Gustav to tell him about his life and how he'd come into the hotel business.

Gustav embarked on this. He knew that his own voice was shaking a little, but he pressed on, describing his time at catering school and telling the colonel how caring for people and objects had always counted very strongly with him, ever since, in childhood, he'd been part of a little team caring for silkworms in the kindergarten. This made Ashley-Norton smile and he knew there was much more that he could have told him about how he'd become the owner of the hotel and why the place was so important to him.