The Gustav Sonata (28 page)

‘Madame looks wonderful!' they would chorus, as yet another shimmering confection made Lottie want to dance about the shop like a child. ‘Madame has a very special style!'

Then, Lottie would turn to Gustav and say, ‘It's very expensive, Gustav. I don't need it.' And he would say, ‘I think you do need it. I want you to need it.' And the salesgirls would let tumble forth a waterfall of giggles, assuming ‘Madame' had a lover enslaved to her every desire.

But where was Madame to wear these astonishing clothes?

She saw an advertisement for a concert at the Salle Pleyel, and asked him to buy tickets. The programme was the Rachmaninov Concerto Number
4
and Mahler's Fifth Symphony, played by an orchestra from Jerusalem.

Gustav hesitated. It had become his habit to acquiesce with most things that Lottie wanted, but the thought of being inside a concert hall made him feel afraid. He'd decided he would live his life without ever going near one again. The beautiful Mahler symphony he thought he could endure, but he knew that, in the Rachmaninov concerto, terror for the soloist and memories of Anton's struggles with a piece for which his pupil, Mathias Zimmerli, had become renowned, would make him feel physically sick.

‘Lottie,' he said, ‘let me buy you a ticket and I'll meet you for supper afterwards. We can go to that nice restaurant we found in the Places des Ternes.'

‘Go to a concert on my own, Gustav?'

‘Yes, why not?'

‘Well, I don't think that's very nice of you.'

‘I don't like concerts,' Gustav said. ‘I find them hard to endure. I'm sorry.'

She let the subject go, but that night, feeling the weight of Gustav's melancholy on her, spoiling the mood of elation she'd been feeling, she dressed herself in a shimmering blouse and a velvet skirt and announced that she was going out on her own.

Gustav stared at her. Her lipstick was a fiery red. Her lilac hair fell in cascades around her shoulders.

‘Going where?' said Gustav.

‘I'm going to the Paris Bar on the boulevard,' she said. ‘I'm going to see what happens.'

Gustav knew what she meant: she was going to see if she could pick up a man. Very often she talked about her continuing need for sex. She termed it a need, not a desire. Perhaps she'd hoped that she could recapture something of her lost love, Erich, if she could have taken Gustav to her bed. One evening, she'd attempted to kiss him, but when he pulled away, she said gently, ‘Oh, I see. It's not like that with you. That's a shame, considering we're living together in Paris, but I understand.'

Now, she went out into the Paris night.

Gustav sat in the apartment, imagining all the dangers that could come her way. He felt he was to blame, for not being able to be her lover. He wanted to go to the bar and bring her back to safety, but who was he to decide what was safe and what wasn't? Who was he to spoil her chance of rapture?

The hours passed and Gustav didn't move, but only listened, with an agitated heart, to the bright sounds of the city, caught in its own enchantment, in its own overflow of beauty and desire. He fell asleep in his armchair and had a dream of the boy, Anton, bending over him in bright sunlight, in Davos, and kissing his lips. When he woke, it was early morning and he could hear Lottie snoring in her room.

She never spoke about what had happened to her and never went to the Paris Bar again. Though Gustav pressed her to tell him, she refused, saying he had no right to ask. And he found himself wondering whether, after all, there had been no man, no hungry stranger in the bar, and whether Lottie had only sat there on her own, sipping her new, favourite drink, Campari and soda, until the bar closed. And this image of her, wearing her dazzling clothes and with her lilac tresses curled, waiting and waiting but never being approached by anyone, made Gustav feel that he wanted to cry.

To banish this night from his mind, to resume his role of Lottie's benefactor, he agreed, after all, to get tickets for the concert at the Salle Pleyel.

Lottie took a long time to get ready for the evening. She at last appeared in a black, strapless dress with a white fake-fur jacket. People in the concert audience stared at her with frank Parisian disbelief. Most of them were dressed in drab winter coats or anoraks and scarves. November was beginning. Wearing a thin suit, Gustav shivered in the cold hall.

The young soloist was from Israel and held himself away from the piano in exactly the same position that Anton always adopted. Gustav was unable to look at him. He reached for Lottie's hand, but held it too tightly, only realising he was bruising her when she tugged her hand free. She stared at Gustav in the darkness. He was so cold that he was trembling.

On went the Rachmaninov. At a distance, Gustav could appreciate that the soloist was talented and so he made himself lift his head and look at him, but he tried not to see the young man from Israel, only his hands dancing over the keyboard and his feet in shiny black shoes pressing delicately up and down on the pedals. Lottie took off her fur jacket and handed it to Gustav and he wrapped it round and round his hands and held it close to his body, to warm it.

Memories of being cold began to tumble into his mind: crawling on his hands and knees, cleaning the grating of the Church of Sankt Johann before any winter light was in the sky; going down to the nuclear shelter in the building on Unter der Egg and seeing the beds arranged in high tiers right up to the ceiling; walking in darkness to the hospital when Emilie had pneumonia; standing at his window with his tin train.

And he thought, this used to be my condition in Switzerland: being cold in the freezing air of Mittelland. I bought the hotel first and foremost as a refuge, as a place I could fill with warmth and homely light. And without it I would not have survived.

In the interval, Gustav gulped whisky and this warmed him a little. Lottie asked him if he wanted to leave. He wondered if he could sit through the Mahler symphony, with its heart-clutching fourth movement, which he couldn't listen to without thinking of Visconti's film of Thomas Mann's
Death in Venice.
The sufferings of the protagonist, Aschenbach, had always struck him as being an extreme version of his own. Mann had understood perfectly that a secret passion, unfulfilled, must lead inevitably to physical collapse and so, in time, to death. Gustav only had to wonder where and when that death was lying in wait for him.

He knew that Lottie wanted to hear the Mahler. He looked at her, with her breasts bunched up like bulbous veined orchids by the armoury of the black dress, and the eyes of the concert-goers upon her, and decided that he couldn't desert her. So they returned to the Salle. When the slow movement of the Mahler began, scenes from the Visconti film crowded into Gustav's mind. He couldn't remember the name of the English actor playing Aschenbach, but his sensual face and his marvellous ability to convey the pain in his heart with few words remained very present before his eyes. The moment which affected him the most was when Aschenbach visits a barber's to get his hair dyed black. The barber puts make-up on him and, in his vain attempt to look younger and more acceptable to his boy-love, Tadzio, Aschenbach descends into effeminate clownishness. Later, when the rain falls, the black hair dye begins to run down his face. Gustav had never been able to sit through this film without weeping.

He wanted to weep now, but he kept it down, just as he had kept it down as a boy. He leaned a little towards Lottie, so that he could feel her warmth and breathe in her perfume. She seemed rapt by the music. And Gustav told himself to curtail his self-pity and think only of her. The time in Paris was going quickly by. It had started so well, with such gladness and resolution, but now Gustav was beginning to spoil things with his misery. He knew that he had to try to make amends.

The park nearest to the rue Washington was the Parc Monceau, and on fine days, Lottie and Gustav enjoyed walking there in the late mornings, arm in arm, before deciding where they would like to lunch. This park was a favourite place for joggers, and these people amused Lottie – their expressions of self-satisfied determination, their way of showing off their lean bodies by pausing to do stretching exercises on the sandy paths.

They went to the Parc Monceau the morning after the concert. Lottie's mood was good. She giggled at the joggers. Then she began to admit how her own body had changed a little since arriving in Paris. ‘It must be our walks,' she said, ‘or all the stretching and bending I've done, trying on new clothes!' She told Gustav she had lost a little weight and the pain in her left leg, which had sometimes been acute in Matzlingen, had lessened. ‘What did I do all day in Grünewaldstrasse,' she said, ‘except lie on my sofa and read novels and drink wine and sometimes indulge my old habit of masturbation? I think my bones were seizing up.'

‘It's good that the pain's lessened,' he said. ‘We must hope it stays that way.'

‘It won't stay that way,' said Lottie, ‘unless we can move to Paris. Couldn't we do that, Gustav? As friends – as people who take care of each other. Couldn't we?'

Gustav turned to Lottie. Her face was very close to his, her expression ardent, beseeching.

‘I have to go back to run the hotel,' he said.

‘Why? Couldn't the hotel run itself?'

‘No.'

‘Put in a manager. Go back every few months to see how things are going.'

‘I can't do that, Lottie. I wouldn't be happy with an arrangement like that.'

‘Well then, sell the hotel. You'd have a lot of money then. You could buy us an apartment here. We could be happy.'

Gustav looked away from Lottie and around at the wintry park. Last leaves clung to the plane trees. The flower beds contained only a few bright dahlia flowers among damp and dying foliage. In these things, he could see the inevitability of their coming departure.

‘It was you,' he said, ‘who commented that this was an “interlude”. Surely, it's a mistake to think that an interlude can translate itself into a permanent state?'

‘I don't see why.'

‘The hotel is my refuge, Lottie. I'm not ready to give it up. I've worked half my life for that. It's all I've got.'

‘It's just a
place
, Gustav. This is a place, too. Just exchange one for the other.'

‘What would I do here?'

‘Why do you have to
do anything
? Couldn't you just
be
?'

Gustav didn't know what to say to this. He had the feeling that, no matter what he did or said from now on, Lottie would feel that he had failed her. He had failed her because he didn't love her in the way that Erich had loved her.

Tenderly, he took Lottie's arm and they walked towards the little carousel where, even on this November day, a few small children were being loaded into miniature metal cars and fire engines and aeroplanes that would begin to turn as soon as the music started.

They sat down on a bench and Lottie stared sadly at the children. After a while, she said, ‘There's something I've never admitted to you, Gustav. When I wrote to your father, to ask him to come back to me, I told him I wanted to have his child. Roger and I had tried for a baby, but I didn't conceive. And I thought that with your father – if we took no precautions as we'd had to do before – it would probably have happened very quickly, our loving was so deep and potent. So you would have had a little half-brother or half-sister. Does that shock you?'

Gustav took Lottie's hand, encased in a soft suede glove, bought by him chez Chanel. He said that when it came to the question of human love, nothing shocked him and never would.

The carousel music began – an old accordion tune he remembered hearing at a Schwingfest long ago. Round and round went the children, who held out their arms to their parents as they passed, most of them in greeting, but some in fear, as though begging for the ride to stop.

IT WAS MANY
months before Gustav heard from Anton again.

When he went to see Adriana, she admitted that she was worried about him. Anton had apparently told her that he was ‘pursuing things with Hirsch', but that the reviews of the first four Beethoven sonatas had not been ‘what Hans hoped for', so they had postponed making further recordings until Anton had worked harder on his technique.

‘My poor son,' said Adriana. ‘I can't bear him to be disappointed a second time.'

‘Perhaps you should go to Geneva and see how things stand?' Gustav suggested. ‘You and Armin.'

‘Armin can't travel any more,' she said. ‘He has a prostate cancer.'

‘Oh,' said Gustav. ‘Oh …'

It was difficult for Gustav to imagine Armin Zwiebel being struck down by disease. He was a man, who, even as he'd aged, had always appeared strong. His frame, his voice, his appetites – these things had remained expansive and significant. His complexion had always been ruddy, tanned in summer; he had never paled as many old people pale. And that strange antipathy towards the world which often seemed to creep upon elderly people had never deranged Armin Zwiebel. His politeness towards strangers, his courtesy towards Gustav, his love for Adriana, to all of this he had remained true.

But Adriana told Gustav that Armin had been very depressed, in recent months, by the international accusations against certain Swiss banks that, having received gold and other treasure from the Nazis during the war – treasure taken from Jewish families sent to the death camps – these banks had made ‘insufficient effort' to trace the rightful heirs to this vast fortune.

‘The bank that Armin worked for is not one of the accused,' said Adriana, ‘but that the integrity of the Swiss banking system should be weakened in this way is very bad for the country. We always thought the banks behaved with absolute probity, despite their code of secrecy. We, the Jews, trusted them. We believed all that gold had been returned to its rightful owners, wherever they or their descendants could be found, but it seems this is not so. The banks enriched themselves with money that was not theirs. It makes Armin feel very ashamed. Ashamed of the banking system. Ashamed of Switzerland. These are terrible, unpatriotic things to feel. And I wonder if it isn't this shame which has allowed his illness in.'