The Gustav Sonata (24 page)

There were nine people called Erdman listed in the Matzlingen Directory, none with the initial R beside the surname. One evening, Gustav sat down and began to telephone them, starting with Erdman, A.

When he got to Erdman, L, a woman's voice answered. Gustav asked to talk to Roger Erdman, and the woman said, ‘Who are you?'

When he told her his name was Gustav Perle there was a breathless silence on the telephone line. Then the woman said, ‘Gustav. Emilie's child. I saw you when you were a baby. Before and after your father died.'

‘Oh,' said Gustav, ‘you saw me? So are you Roger Erdman's wife?'

‘Yes. Roger has been dead for a long time now. The war made him ill and he never truly recovered. But let me tell you something. Your father was a wonderful man.'

‘That's what my mother used to say …'

‘He was. Oh my God, I'm moved to hear your voice, Gustav. But why are you telephoning me?'

It was now Gustav's turn to be silent. It was difficult to admit that he was trying to ferret around for secrets, but he stammered that he had now passed his fiftieth birthday, but still knew next to nothing about his father's life and that he was now going to try to talk to anyone in the town who could remember him.

‘Well,' said Frau Erdman, ‘I can remember him. Come to tea with me on Sunday afternoon. I live on Grünewaldstrasse. I will tell you whatever you want to know.'

The apartment was large and lightless. Although this was a summer afternoon, heavy drapes were drawn across the windows. At first, Gustav was puzzled by this, but when he sat down with Frau Erdman and allowed himself to look at her carefully, the reason she'd chosen to live in this strange penumbra became clear to him. It was obvious that she'd once been a beauty. Adriana Zwiebel had said to him one day that beautiful women, as they age, ‘become afraid of harsh light', and he felt certain that Frau Erdman preferred the darkened room, lit kindly with soft, yellow lamplight, to the glare of the summer day, so that those vestiges of her beauty which remained could still be seen.

At his arrival, she'd greeted him with a kiss on his cheek. ‘Gustav!' she exclaimed. ‘You can't imagine how happy I am that you found me! You don't look like your father, but your voice is very similar. When I heard your voice on the telephone, my heart skipped a beat. For a moment, I imagined Erich alive again.'

‘Well,' said Gustav, ‘I'm very happy to have found
you
, Frau Erdman …'

‘Call me Lottie. Will you? I don't want to be “Frau Erdman” to you. Please call me Lottie.'

Lottie Erdman's hair was piled up in a grey tangle on her head and secured with a tortoiseshell comb. Despite her age, it was still thick and Gustav could imagine that it had once been blonde and shiny and worn long, perhaps, or else in the plaits which would have been the fashion of her youth. Her blue eyes were puffy, but still shone brightly inside their pouches of flesh. Her breasts and stomach were large and her movement was slow.

She had made tea and bought
millefeuilles
from the French patisserie at the end of her road. As she lifted one of these fragrant concoctions to her mouth, she said, ‘Gluttony is the last indulgence of most people's lives, Gustav. In my opinion, it is a much better vice than drink. Don't you agree?'

Gustav found her laughter infectious, almost like the laughter of a young girl. They sat and laughed together and ate the
millefeuilles
, and then Gustav said, ‘I don't want to take up too much of your time, Frau Erdman …'

‘Lottie. I have to insist on “Lottie”. I want to hear you say it.'

‘Lottie. I don't want to take up your time or pester you with questions, but I've lately begun to understand how little I know about my father's life, and –'

‘I knew your mother. If she hadn't lost her first baby … then, I think, everything might have been different between her and your father. I think that she never forgave him for that.'

Gustav gaped at Lottie. He put down his half-eaten
millefeuille
on its china plate. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

‘You didn't know about the other baby? Emilie never told you?'

‘No.'

‘Well, she never liked talking about it. I think she tried to put it out of her mind. But there was an accident in the apartment, the one they had on Fribourgstrasse. Erich was mortified at what happened. He struck out at Emilie – because he thought she didn't try hard enough to understand the work he was doing in the war.'

‘He hit her?'

‘No. He just … I don't know exactly … she was rushed to hospital, but they couldn't save the baby. Poor Emilie. She was distraught. She blamed Erich for her terrible loss. She left him for a while and stayed with her mother in some mountain house.'

‘The house near Basel?'

‘Yes. I think so.'

‘I know that house. I went there. It was a terrible place.'

‘Was it? Well, she stayed away a long time. Erich was certain she was never going to return. But she did – perhaps because that Basel house was so bad. But I think she had decided to try again with Erich. And in time, you were born.'

‘I never knew. I never knew about the lost baby.'

‘No? Well, that was how your mother was. She kept things to herself. Not like me. I spill everything out. Do you keep things to yourself, Gustav?'

‘Yes. My mother was never really interested in what I felt or thought. So it's become a habit, to keep things hidden inside me.'

Lottie reached out and poured more tea into the fine china cups. Then she lit a cigarette.

‘The baby was a boy. They were going to name him Gustav.'

Gustav put his hand to the area of his heart and massaged his chest. Then he said, ‘That's odd. I used to … when my mother was alive … sometimes get the feeling that I wasn't completely
there
for her, that she was looking around for someone else and then disappointed when she discovered that all she had was me. I guess she would have loved that first little Gustav better.'

Lottie's puffy eyes began to shimmer with tears she was trying to choke back. She reached across the tea table and took Gustav's hand in hers.

‘Gustav,' she said. ‘Your father loved you. I know he did, because he was such a loving man. And nobody knows this better than me, you see. Now, I don't know what you came here to ask me, but let me tell you the one thing I am just not able to keep from you. Your father and I were lovers. It began when Emilie went away and he thought she wasn't coming back. Nobody knew. Nobody was hurt by what we did. And when your mother came back, I broke it off. I told your father I didn't love him, but that was a lie. I worshipped him. He was my world. He was the love of my life.'

The tears began to fall. Lottie let go of Gustav's hand and picked up a little linen table napkin and wept into that.

Gustav felt moved by the sight of her. He didn't feel angry with her, or with anyone. He knew that instead he felt
glad
for his father, irrepressibly glad that he had been the lover of this once-beautiful woman. And then he remembered something. He remembered Emilie telling him that Erich had died in Grünewaldstrasse. And this was where he was sitting, in the Erdmans' apartment on Grünewaldstrasse – perhaps on the very sofa where his father had sat and gazed at Lottie, or taken her in his arms.

‘The day he died,' he said. ‘It was here, on the steps of your apartment building. He was coming to see you, wasn't he? He was coming back to you?'

Lottie looked up at Gustav, her eyes brimming, her hand still clutching the table napkin.

‘I will never know,' she said. ‘I tried to imagine that was the case, because I'd written to him not long before. I was finding it impossible to live without him. But was he coming back to me that day he died? Or was he coming to tell me that he could never see me again? I would give anything to know, but I never will.'

It was night now, but Gustav couldn't sleep.

What he'd learned on this day had awoken complicated feelings, but the most intense of these was a feeling of relief. He knew that Lottie Erdman's revelations had helped him to make sense of Emilie's failure to love him. It had made him see that, for all her protestations about Erich's heroism, she'd been unable to love him either.

GUSTAV HAD NOTICED
that, in many people's lives, the ‘crisis' which came in time to everyone, usually arrived in the fifth decade. But in his life and in Anton's it arrived later, in
1994
, when they were both aged fifty-two.

What he thought of as ‘the Zimmerli moment' was a kind of precursor to it, waking in Anton all his old longing for singularity and adulation. From that moment, he'd had dreams about Mathias Zimmerli. He was also forced to read in the
Matzlingerzeitung
that the young man was giving concerts in Geneva and Amsterdam. There were days, he admitted to Gustav, when all he could think about was Zimmerli's mounting fame and his own insignificance.

And then, something else happened.

It began near to Christmas, when, as tradition dictated, the Sankt Johann Academy staged a pupils' concert, organised by Anton. At the end of these events, Anton always entranced the parents with a short recital of his own. He'd discovered over the years that Beethoven's late sonatas, particularly Sonata
26
, ‘Les Adieux', and Sonata
29
, ‘Hammerklavier', were the ones which spoke to him most passionately, so it was often one of these which he played as the finale.

He practised these two sonatas over and over. He frequently invited Gustav to listen to them and to answer questions about technique and clarity, which Gustav wasn't equipped to understand. But this didn't bother Anton. ‘I like you as an audience,' he said. ‘I always have. You make me feel calm.'

Gustav was there, then, on the cold December night when Anton played the ‘Les Adieux' Sonata. And he was able to recognise that this performance was exceptionally good, as if something extraordinary had inspired Anton on that one occasion.

The school always put on a buffet supper after the concert, but Gustav wasn't able to stay for this. The central-heating boiler at the Hotel Perle was giving problems and he had to return to make sure the plumber he'd managed to find at short notice had been able to fix it.

The night was very cold. Keeping the hotel warm at all times had always been high on Gustav's list of priorities. His memories of his freezing room at Unter der Egg, and the touch of his tin train, like ice under his fingers, still lingered in his mind. He couldn't bear the idea that his guests would suddenly discover that they were shivering. So he was relieved to find the boiler working when he got back from the concert. He paid the plumber and wished him a merry Christmas and New Year and then went up to his apartment to enjoy the cold meats and cheese he'd asked Lunardi to set out for him.

Near to eleven o'clock, Anton appeared. He was carrying a bottle of champagne. His eyes were bright and his cheeks were very red, as though he'd been dancing on ice.

‘Indescribable news!' he said as he took off his coat and threw it on a chair. ‘News I thought I'd never live to hear!'

Gustav waited. His worries about the boiler, together with the emotion of Anton's playing at the concert, had tired him. He didn't want to drink champagne at this time of night, he wanted to go to bed, but he let Anton pour out two glasses and hand one of them to him. Anton raised his own glass and said, ‘To fame! That's what we're going to drink to. To fame!'

They clinked glasses and Gustav said, ‘To fame, that fickle whore?'

‘Yes,' said Anton. ‘I'm fifty-two years old, but now I'm going to tame the whore at last. You don't believe me, I can see from your face. And it is really a bit extraordinary. I'm going to drink fast, to calm my overexcitement. And then I'll tell you …'

A man called Hans Hirsch had attended the concert. Hans Hirsch was the uncle of one of the pupils taught by Anton. Gustav had never heard this name, but it was apparently well known in music circles. Anton described him as ‘a ridiculously handsome impresario', working in Geneva, the owner of a classical recording label, CavalliSound.

During the school buffet, Hans Hirsch had approached Anton. He'd clutched his hands and congratulated him on his playing of Sonata
26
. He then explained who he was.

‘I didn't know at first why he was telling me all this,' said Anton, ‘but then he suddenly said that the thing which excited him most about his career was making musical discoveries – of people nobody had heard of and bringing them to prominence. He looked at me very intently and then he said, “I won't beat about the bush. I believe I've discovered in you a talent quite overlooked. If you're willing, I would like you to come and play for me in Geneva, with a view to making some recordings of Beethoven sonatas. We could begin with one or two, but, if you're as good as I think you are, I see the possibility of eventually doing the whole cycle, all thirty-two of them.” I couldn't believe I'd heard correctly, Gustav. I had to ask him stupidly to repeat everything he'd said. I thought I was in a dream and would wake up any minute. I'm sure you can imagine that?'

Gustav stared at Anton. The bright blood in his cheeks made him look young again.

Before Gustav could say anything, Anton went on. ‘It wasn't a dream, Gustav! Hans Hirsch believes in me. He really thinks I can master all thirty-two sonatas. Isn't that the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me?'

Gustav closed his mouth, which he realised had fallen open, like the mouth of an old man confronting some long-buried terror. He took a gulp of the champagne and forced himself to say, ‘I think it's extraordinary, Anton. That it should come like this, out of nowhere. It's quite extraordinary …'