The Gustav Sonata (23 page)

But then, drawn back to the terrible road to Bergen-Belsen, he found himself suddenly veering away from his own past and saying, ‘My father was a policeman. He rose to quite a high rank: Assistant Police Chief, here in Matzlingen. I think he liked his work, but he lost his job during the war, for falsifying documents that allowed Jews into Switzerland, but I've never really known the full story of why he dared to do this – or even if he did it at all and,
if
he did it, how he was found out. My mother often implied that he'd been betrayed. She always talked about my father as a “hero”, but I don't know if he was one or not.'

Ashley-Norton was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘Are you really saying that you
don't know
, or just that you haven't made up your mind about it?'

‘I'm saying that I don't know.'

‘I see. Well, in this case, you must find out, Herr Perle. You must find out! One should not go through life not knowing the history of such a matter. How old are you? Forty-eight? Fifty? Isn't it time you got the truth out of somebody, before everyone's dead and gone?'

THE CLAIMS WHICH
Ashley-Norton had made for the card game – that it slowed down time and allowed the heart a rest from its perpetual agitation – Gustav had considered to be the exaggerations of a person with a somewhat protected life. But after the colonel left Matzlingen, Gustav found himself dismayed by how much he missed the nightly gin rummy sessions.

The idea came to him to persuade Anton to learn the game. He wondered if Anton's restless nature would allow him to settle down to it, but he also knew that Anton was frequently bored by the evenings he arranged for himself. He'd said to Gustav, ‘I'm quite weary of taking women out to dinner in restaurants and picking up the bill for the ridiculous desserts they like ordering – in return for baleful sex.'

But no sooner had Gustav decided to broach the subject of the card game with Anton than he came flying round, one early evening, with an agitated look in his eyes, clutching a copy of the
Matzlingerzeitung
and saying he had to speak to Gustav immediately ‘about something which has disorientated me completely'.

Gustav was in the dining room, checking, as he always did before dinner service, that the
couverts
had been laid out correctly, that the glasses were clean and the tablecloths spotless and freshly ironed. Disregarding for a moment Anton's evident anxiety, he continued his task without hurrying. (Anything which prevented him from performing his role as the meticulous overseer of the hotel's strivings after perfection created in him a feeling of dismay and mild irritation. He also believed that, in a life where he had so often played servant to Anton's whims and desires, he should, from time to time, keep his friend waiting.)

‘Hurry up, Gustav,' said Anton. ‘There's something in the paper I need to talk to you about. I'll go up to your apartment.'

Gustav found him sitting in his own habitual chair, pouring himself a glass of whisky.

‘Look at this,' Anton said, holding out the newspaper.

Gustav took the paper and sat down opposite Anton. The headline he pointed to read:
FAME BECKONS FOR MATZLINGEN BOY
. The short article underneath it recounted the
astonishing success of former pupil of the Matzlingen Sankt Johann Academy, Mathias Zimmerli, at the prestigious Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Geneva. Zimmerli took first prize and is now expected to be offered concert opportunities worldwide.

‘Read the last sentence,' said Anton. ‘Make sure you read that because that's the one which really kills me.'

Gustav put on his glasses. He coasted through praise of Zimmerli's
clarity of sound in the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto Number
4
, a highly difficult piece for a young musician to master
, and arrived eventually at the statement Zimmerli made when accepting the winner's prize. After thanking his parents, Zimmerli said:
I also want to thank my piano teacher at Sankt Johann, Herr Anton Zwiebel. Without the patience and inspiration of Herr Zwiebel, I know that I would not be standing on this podium now.

Anton had his face in his hands. Through the closed hands, he said in a choked voice, ‘He did it, Gustav! The thing I couldn't do. Zimmerli did it. How old is he now? Twenty? Twenty-one? But he goes on to fame and I'm stuck in Matzlingen for all time.'

Gustav stared at his friend. That he could be so dismayed by the success of a former pupil surprised him. But that he could use the words ‘stuck in Matzlingen' was shocking. Gustav had never questioned the certainty that he and Anton would live out their lives very close to each other in this town which had nurtured them. But now, he saw suddenly that in Anton's mind Matzlingen was just a place where he was ‘stuck' and from which (it followed) he might one day be free. Gustav kneaded his chest, to try to calm the turbulence that he felt in his heart.

‘Anton,' he said, ‘surely, you've said to me many times in our lives that you made the right decision about your career …'

‘I don't know about
right,
' said Anton. ‘I made the
only
decision I could make, because it was impossible for me to go on trying to succeed at public performance. But you don't imagine I've gone through all these years without regret, do you?'

‘You've never talked about “regret”.'

‘I may not have talked about it. That doesn't mean I haven't felt it. You saw for yourself, I had the talent to do it, but my mental and physical make-up just wouldn't let me go on.'

‘I didn't know you were feeling sad about it, Anton. I never knew. Perhaps that was very unobservant of me.'

‘Not sad. That's too sentimental a word. Just
unreconciled.
Because think of the life I would have had – in the capitals of the world! And now all this is laid at Zimmerli's feet. He'll have a dazzling public career, and I'll go on with the humdrum life of a teacher in a small town. But I tell you frankly, and without meaning to boast, Gustav, Zimmerli is no more talented than I was at his age. If I could only have conquered my fear …'

Gustav got up and refilled Anton's glass with whisky and poured himself some cognac. He knew that this was one of those moments when the course of things in a life's quotidian existence is suddenly altered. If anybody had asked him what the state of Anton's mind had been up until that evening, he would have said ‘content', but now he saw that this contentment had been snatched away from him and might never be found again in quite the same way.

He sat down with his glass of cognac. He said, ‘I've always felt that it's pointless to try to change the things we can't change.'

‘I know that.'

‘I guess we have to try to change ourselves to fit them. Is it possible that you can get any consolation from the knowledge that you've helped this young person in ways which perhaps nobody else could?'

‘No,' said Anton. ‘I'm not generous enough to think like that.'

Anton fell ill.

He ran a high fever and refused food. Adriana and Armin took him into their flat and sat for long hours at his bedside. They brought in the family doctor, a medic so old he couldn't stand straight above the patient, but had to lean at an angle over him, which Anton found irksome. The doctor could make no definitive diagnosis and was sent away.

Gustav visited Anton every day, bringing soups and broths made by Lunardi. When he began to recover, he tried to start teaching him gin rummy. They played on a bed table which reminded Gustav of the hinged shelf in the kitchen at Unter der Egg. There had never been quite enough room for the plates and dishes and cutlery on the shelf and now there was not quite enough room for the cards on the bed table, and they kept sliding to the floor.

For a short while – because there was nothing much else for him to do – Anton seemed to take to the game and Gustav let him win as often as he thought he wanted to win. But one evening, he told him what Ashley-Norton had said about the game ‘stilling the heart' and this seemed to vex him.

‘I don't want my heart stilled,' he said. ‘I want my heart to overflow with joy.'

Anton went back to his own apartment and summoned one of the women he'd been going out with. Her name was Hansi, which Anton said he considered a ridiculous name, but he told Gustav that sex might ‘bring back his will to live'. He said Hansi liked to make love ‘sitting on top' and that this suited him because he felt too lazy to adopt any other position.

Adriana and Armin and Gustav were now told to leave Anton alone, so they stayed away.

Adriana took Gustav's hand in hers, which was wrinkled and bony, but still semaphoring the world with scarlet nails. ‘It's very unfortunate, this Zimmerli business,' she said. ‘My heart bleeds for Anton. But what can any of us do?'

‘Nothing, Adriana,' said Gustav.

Anton stayed away from school for the rest of the summer term and then he announced that he was taking Hansi to Davos.

When Gustav heard him say the word ‘Davos', he felt inflamed by jealousy and sadness, and his heart once again began its horrible fast beating. To imagine his friend lying in some airy room, lit with the white light of the derelict sanatorium, with Hansi bouncing up and down on him, trying to bring him to an ‘overflow of joy', made him feel sick and afraid.

He said to him, ‘Anton, don't take her to Davos. Take her somewhere else.'

‘No,' said Anton. ‘Tell me why.'

THE SUMMER SEASON
at the Hotel Perle was busy. After complaints from Lunardi that his overload of work was putting his health in danger, Gustav hired a sous-chef to help him.

The sous-chef, Vincenzo, was twenty years old, a wild boy from Torino, and Gustav had to concentrate on calming him, without taming his talent as a cook. When he suggested to Vincenzo that he should try to master himself and cultivate a more robust outside shell, ‘like a coconut', Vincenzo laughed and said, ‘That's a stupid idea, boss! Coconuts are hairy, but I'm as smooth as a gladiator.'

Though the boy was hard work, Gustav felt glad of this distraction – any distraction – which prevented him from imagining Anton sitting in the sunshine of Davos, or walking the secret pathway into the forest above. He'd told himself that the sanatorium would long ago have been demolished, to be replaced by hotels or apartments in this now fashionable ski resort, and yet so vivid was it, still, in his mind, he couldn't imagine it ever being dismantled. In his dreams, he saw Anton and Hansi walking hand in hand up the steep road under the pines and finding wild strawberries at the verge. Their lips became red. They passed the wild strawberries from mouth to mouth …

There were times when Gustav half hoped that Colonel Ashley-Norton might return to the Hotel Perle. He knew that he would even be willing to endure the old man's further memories of Bergen-Belsen, in return for his consoling company and the games of gin rummy. But he never appeared.

What returned to Gustav, however, was the remark Ashley-Norton had made about his own need to discover the truth about his father's life. But where did that truth lie? If his father really had been a hero, then why had Emilie kept none of his possessions, only the empty cigar box which had once contained Gustav's ‘treasure'? If she had revered him for an act of bravery, why had she acted towards him just as she had acted towards Irma, seemingly burning or giving away every last item that had belonged to him?

It came to Gustav now, that perhaps there
had been
a secret surrounding his last years, one which Emilie Perle wished no one to uncover. He lay in his narrow bed, content with the feeling of the great
substance and weight
of his precious hotel beneath him, quiet and still in the night-time, but poised to move and come alive again in the morning. And he thought how secrets of great importance may slumber in this way, but one day be woken and brought into the light.

Gustav went down to the Matzlingen Police Headquarters, gave his name and occupation, and asked whether he could consult police records for the years
1938
to
1942
. The duty officer looked at him suspiciously and said, ‘Why do you want these, sir?'

‘Very well, I'll tell you,' said Gustav. ‘My father was Assistant Police Chief here in
1938
and he was dismissed from the force in May
1939
. I need to know why this came about and how. My father died soon after I was born. Before I grow old, I need to know what happened to him.'

The duty officer said, ‘What was his name?'

‘Perle,' said Gustav. ‘My hotel is named after him.'

Gustav was then told to put his request ‘for sight of confidential records' in writing and was informed that he would be contacted, if authorisation came through.

‘I'm his son,' said Gustav.

‘I know that, sir. You've just told me.'

‘I have a right to know.'

‘Well, we will have to see.'

While Gustav filled in his request form, he glanced up at a display of framed black-and-white portraits of police personnel hanging above the reception desk.

One of these was a man he thought he recognised from years past, someone who had come once or twice to the apartment on Unter der Egg. Gustav now asked the duty officer who this person was and the policeman replied, ‘That is Police Chief Roger Erdman. A very good wartime Chief, by all accounts. A man everybody respected.'

‘Is he still alive?' asked Gustav.

‘I doubt that he is,' said the duty officer. ‘This is
1993
. But look in the telephone directory, Herr Perle. You might find him.'