The Gustav Sonata (29 page)

Gustav listened carefully to all this. It was a subject much discussed by guests at the hotel and it seemed to make all Swiss citizens feel queasy, as though there was a new epidemic of some contagious illness to which they had already fallen victim.

He told Adriana that he had always believed absolutely that sorrows in one's life could weaken the body's ability to fight off disease. He said that his own father might not have died when he did had he not suffered the loss of his job and his self-esteem. ‘Who knows,' he said, ‘whether he might not still be alive now, and married to Lottie Erdman?'

‘Lottie Erdman,' said Adriana. ‘You took her to Paris. Why did you do that?'

‘Because I wanted a companion. And because I feel that I owe her quite a lot. She loved my father far more than my mother ever did.'

‘You know she has a bad reputation in Matzlingen. Even at her age. As a courtesan.'

Gustav smiled at the old-fashioned word. ‘I didn't know that,' he said, ‘or perhaps I did? Let her be a courtesan. It makes no difference to me.'

One afternoon, Gustav went round to Fribourgstrasse for tea. Armin was sitting in front of the fire, and he appeared shrunken to a man half the size he once was. When he saw Gustav's mouth gape, he said, ‘Don't be alarmed, Gustav. We all have to die. I'll fit in my coffin better now that I'm a bit reduced.'

Adriana was in the kitchen making tea. Gustav sat opposite Armin and said, ‘You can't die, Armin. It's not in my scheme of things.'

Armin laughed and said, ‘I didn't think it was in mine. I thought people who died gave up too easily. But you know, Gustav, I've honestly had a very good life. I started poor, but everything came round. I know banking is now considered a corrupt occupation, but it never was when I worked in it and I always took pleasure in my job. What more could I have wanted? I married the woman I've always loved. It doesn't matter if I leave now.'

‘It matters to us, the ones you leave behind.'

‘I know. But what can I do? And, à propos, I was going to ask you a favour, Gustav. Will you look after Adriana when I'm gone? Give her some nice meals at the hotel? Come and visit her as often as you can. Make sure her finances aren't in a muddle. Can you do this?'

‘Yes,' said Gustav. ‘Of course I can. Willingly. But what about Anton? Surely he should be here with you now?'

Armin looked into the fire. After a moment, he said, ‘Anton has gone elsewhere. I have to respect that.'

‘Elsewhere?'

‘He doesn't communicate much with us. He doesn't know how ill I am. His mother wants to tell him and beg him to come, and of course he would come. But I'm against it. I think Anton may be in rather a fragile place. We're not sure how well he is in his mind. I don't want to suggest anything that would bring about a crisis.'

Adriana came in with the tea. On the tray was a plate of small meringues and she gave one of these to Armin. ‘The only thing I can eat,' he said, smiling, ‘egg white and sugar. Where did the roast lamb go, and the cakes soaked with rum?'

They sat in silence and ate the meringues. Suddenly, Adriana said, ‘Anton is composing now. I didn't tell you that, Armin. It was in his last message. He says Hirsch is encouraging him.'

‘Composing?' said Armin. ‘Isn't that fifty times harder than playing? Why's he gone down that road?'

‘I don't know,' said Adriana. ‘He only tells me half the story of his life. Perhaps he'll be good at composition.'

‘Only with untold struggle,' said Armin. ‘It could be the thing that kills him.'

‘You don't know that.'

‘I know Anton. He's taking a wrong turning there. I'm sure Gustav agrees.'

Gustav looked from Armin to Adriana, at a loss to know what to say. It hurt him to imagine Anton bent over sheets of composition paper, sowing lines of quavers and semiquavers, searching for illusive new musical forms and idioms, believing that the genius of Beethoven was lying like an undiscovered malady in him and trying to get it out.

‘I can't judge,' Gustav said. ‘I've never been able to predict what Anton was capable of.'

‘Well, I have,' said Armin. ‘And you'll see that I'm right, one day. Anton was capable of being a very good music teacher and that's as far as his gift went. I could have told you that years and years ago. In fact, I did tell you, didn't I? But you've all forgotten.'

Armin Zwiebel died in December. Gustav asked himself whether – strangely – it was this death that he had been waiting for.

Anton arrived the day before the funeral, then stayed to sit shiva for his father, with Adriana and Armin's brother, David, from Bern and his wife and daughter, Magda and Leah. During this time, as Jewish custom dictates, the family remained at home, the mirrors in the apartment were covered, candles were kept burning and the Jewish prayer known as Kaddish was said several times a day. The men were forbidden to shave for seven days.

On the last day of the shiva, Adriana called Gustav. He could barely hear her because she was whispering into the telephone. She said, ‘It's breaking my heart, Gustav. Anton says he's going back to Geneva tomorrow. I said to him, you must stay and see Gustav, surely, but he says Hirsch needs him. Needs him for what? I suppose it's work, but he hasn't talked much about it, only about his compositions. So I don't know what to do, except to suggest you come round this evening. Will you come?'

Gustav hesitated. It had been distressing, knowing that Anton was at Fribourgstrasse, but that he, Gustav, had to respect his friend's commitment to the mourning rituals for his father. Though Adriana had often teased him about being ‘one of the family', when it came to the great and final matter of death, he knew that he had no right to intrude.

After a moment, Gustav said, ‘I'll only come round if Anton wants me to.'

Adriana was silent. Then she began crying. ‘I don't know what he wants,' she sobbed, ‘he's so distant with me, so closed down. Please come, Gustav. Something's happened to him, I know, but he won't talk about it. Perhaps he will talk to you.'

‘I can't come, Adriana, unless he wants me to. I can't intrude like that.'

‘I've told you, I don't know what he wants, and I don't think he does. But come for my sake. Our shiva is over. You two could go out to a café … Please, please say you will …'

When Gustav arrived at the apartment door, it was Anton who opened it.

His eyes looked bruised with tiredness. His seven-day beard, here and there flecked with grey, gave him the air of an old prophet of the wilderness. His body was thin, as if, in sympathy with his father's last sufferings, he'd been living on a diet of egg white.

Gustav embraced him, but Anton quickly pulled away. He said, ‘Adriana invited you, I hear.'

They were still standing in the doorway. The light was subdued here and when Gustav looked at Anton, it was as if he was deliberately retreating into shadow, not wanting to be seen. But then he began to move towards the apartment door and said quickly, ‘We won't stay here. We've got the whole Zwiebel family lumping about on sofas. Strangers all. Come on.'

Gustav would have liked to talk to Adriana, but Anton took his arm and hurried him out of the apartment and down the stairs.

The December night was cold and Anton had no coat. Gustav took off his woollen scarf and wrapped it round Anton's thin neck and Anton led the way, pounding very fast, towards Marinplatz, towards a dark beer cellar they used to frequent when they were young.

They went down the familiar steps – always dark and damp and smelling of urine. Gustav saw that the cellar had hardly changed. The walls were stained brick and the lighting dim. The tables were painted black and lit with flicking tea lights. Anton ordered the strong Belgian beer he told Gustav he drank in Geneva. With his first sip, Anton downed a fistful of pills taken out of his pocket. ‘Don't ask,' he said.

He waited, staring blankly at Gustav, as if he didn't want to speak until the pills had taken effect. Then he said suddenly, ‘You've got fat. I never thought I'd see that. You were always so skinny.'

Gustav protested feebly, ‘Not fat, I wouldn't say. That's a bit unfair. Just a bit
fatter
. I told you I had a spell in Paris. I sent you cards from there, but you never replied.'

‘Oh, cards. Well, I never reply to those. They're never serious.'

‘No one decrees that everything has to be “serious”.'

‘I decree it. I'm in a serious life now. Everything has to match up with it, or else I let it go.'

‘What do you mean by “a serious life”?'

‘I'll tell you what I mean, Gustav. You just have to swear never to repeat what I'm telling you to my mother. All right?'

‘Yes.'

‘I know you and Adriana are close. But you mustn't betray me.'

‘You know I would never betray you. You're the last person on this earth I would ever –'

‘I live with Hans now. I make music with him and I make love with him. It's all a very serious business.'

Gustav set down his large beer goblet. He noted how the candlelight, reflecting through the goblet, reminded him of the stained-glass pietà in the Church of Sankt Johann. He fumbled for a cigarette and lit it, hoping Anton wouldn't notice that his hands were shaking.

‘You're shocked, I see. That's odd. I thought you of all people –'

‘I'm not shocked.'

‘Why are you trembling, then?'

‘Surprise. Not shock. I thought you liked women.'

‘No, you didn't. Not really. You knew I
tried
to like them – Hansi and those other poor slags. But when I met Hans, something else happened.'

‘You love him?'

‘Trust you to mention love, Gustav. But the word has no meaning for me any more. I'm
enslaved
to Hans Hirsch, that's all I know – because he's beautiful and because he has power over me. Thank goodness my father died. Armin always saw right through me. He would have known that what I've got is slavery, nothing more nor less.'

‘How can you be happy with that?'

‘I'm not happy. Or only as a slave knows no other happiness except the benign touch of his master. One day in ten, I feel it, and then it overwhelms me – when I make music that Hans admires, when we fuck all night. But he's not faithful to me. He's got lovers all over Geneva, because nobody can resist him. But what I figure is, we're grown up now, eh, Gustav? In fact we're almost
old.
We need to follow our desires before it's too late. Don't you think?'

Gustav looked at Anton. In the dim, trembling light, his features had taken on a haunted look, as though he'd stepped out of a painting by Goya. His eyes were huge and wild. He leaned close to Gustav and said, ‘Don't let me down, Gustav. I'm counting on you to understand.'

Gustav took another pull on his cigarette, but suddenly realised, with terror, that he was going to be sick. He threw the cigarette into the ashtray, stumbled out from his seat and hurried towards the place where he remembered the toilet to be. There were two lavatory stalls, but both were occupied, so Gustav threw up in one of the urinals. He held onto the white porcelain. An elderly man came in and stared at him in disgust.

Gustav looked up at his own face in a stained mirror and saw that it was yellow, the very colour of the fat on an uncooked joint of beef. He reached for some paper towels and wiped his mouth. Then he tried to flush the vomit down the urinal, but it choked at the outlet. He stared, growing dizzy and confused, at this horrible sight. Then everything began to cloud and grow dark.

AFTER ANTON'S REVELATION
that he was the lover of Hans Hirsch, Gustav tried – by an act of will, by a desperate attempt at his old childhood self-mastery – to put him out of his mind. He never made contact with Geneva and Anton never made contact with him. Only in dreams, sometimes, did he see his friend's beloved face, and feel his old yearning for love return.

Yet Gustav's life went on in its calm, unvarying way. When he asked himself if he was unhappy, he discovered that he could find no deeper unhappiness in his own soul than he perceived in other people's. He refused to see himself as Aschenbach. He did not particularly want to die at fifty-seven. Yet there were times when he thought that two women, Adriana and Lottie – by their kindness and by their need of him – made him cling to existence only because they willed him to.

He decided to teach Adriana gin rummy. She came up to his apartment twice a week, after he had given her dinner in the hotel, and she was soon an adept at the game, falling under its consoling spell.

They played with a set of expensive but well-thumbed cards, which had been sent to Gustav from England. In the package with the playing cards had been a letter from a firm of solicitors named Montague and Lewis, located in Devon. This letter said:

Dear Herr Perle,

It is with regret that we are obliged to inform you of the death of Colonel Reginald Llewellyn Ashley-Norton, DSC, at his home in Sidmouth on the thirteenth of January
1999
.

Colonel Ashley-Norton put these cards into my hands before he died, with the express wish that I should forward them to you, in the event of his death. He wishes me to say that it was with this same pack that he used to play the game of gin rummy, with his late wife, Bee.

I remain, Herr Perle,

Yours very sincerely,

Jeremy Montague

Adriana was interested to hear about Ashley-Norton, and Gustav realised that talking about him – about the details he knew about the colonel's tranquil life in the south of England with his wife, Bee – had almost the same effect on him as playing rummy; it stilled his heart.

Gustav avoided telling Adriana that, at the age of nineteen, Ashley-Norton had taken photographs at Bergen-Belsen. He knew that both she and Armin had always disliked talking about the war, as if they, as Jews safe in Switzerland, felt guilty about the millions who had perished. Armin had once told him that he had a recurring dream about the camps. ‘The terrible thing,' Armin said to him, ‘is that I'm not an inmate in the dream. I'm one of the guards. I herd naked people to their deaths.'