The Gustav Sonata (3 page)

Gustav selected a pink crayon and drew a scribble of ice cream on his cornet. Then he looked over to see what Anton was drawing. He was using only a black crayon. He'd laid a small ruler on the sugar paper and drawn a line all the way round it. Inside the perfectly ruled shape was a series of black lines of differing lengths. Gustav knew what the thing was meant to be: it was a piano.

Gustav told Emilie about Anton's laugh. He said, ‘I like hearing it.'

In the night, he began trying to think up funny stories to tell Anton, so that he'd be able to hear his laughter all through the day. And then he had an idea which surprised him – he decided to show Anton the treasure in the cigar box. He would show him because he thought that Anton would see that it was a collection worth hoarding. But Gustav wouldn't risk taking it in to the kindergarten. He said to Emilie, ‘Could we invite Anton Zwiebel for tea?'

‘Zwiebel?' said Emilie. ‘That's a very peculiar name.'

‘He can't help his name,' said Gustav.

‘No. But names are important. When I first met your father and he told me his surname was Perle, I thought how beautiful it was and how I would like to become Frau Perle.'

Gustav looked up at his mother. She was undoing her scraggly hair from the red handkerchief she tied it in for work, letting her hair fall round her face. Then, she smoothed it and patted it, as if, right then and there, she was preparing once again for that first meeting with a man called Erich Perle.

‘On a Wednesday, we could invite him?' said Gustav. ‘On your half-day off.'

‘Anton Zwiebel. Well, I've never heard a name like that before. But yes, we can invite him – if his parents agree. I could make a Nusstorte, assuming I can get the walnuts at this time of year …'

‘He might not like walnuts.'

‘Too bad. If he doesn't like them, he doesn't have to eat the Nusstorte.'

It was late spring by the time the invitation to tea went out. It was agreed that Anton would walk from school to Unter der Egg with Gustav and that his father would collect him from Emilie's apartment at six o'clock. The father, it appeared, was a banker, who'd worked for a large national bank in Bern and now worked for a smaller branch of that bank in Matzlingen. The reasons for the move weren't explained. All Anton said was that everybody in the family missed living in Bern. Herr Zwiebel, the banker, missed his big bank; Frau Zwiebel, who was a housewife, missed the wonderful shops and Anton missed his old friends.

Every May, in the courtyard at the back of the apartment, a white cherry tree bloomed. In this spring of
1948
, perhaps because of the steady rains that had fallen at the end of winter, the flowers on the cherry were so abundant that the branches of the tree hung low towards the stones of the yard.

Gustav's window, where he played with his tin train, overlooked the cherry tree, and he saw how the residents who went in and out of the building by that route, almost invariably paused and stood staring at the tree, with its cargo of beauty, and sometimes reached out to it, as they might have reached out, in yearning, to a lost person. Emilie said that there had once been cherry trees at the front of the building, all along Unter der Egg, but they'd been torn out and now there was just this one tree in the courtyard. She said, ‘The tree is special for people, because it's lasted through all the upheaval – as certain things sometimes seem to do.'

‘What things?' asked Gustav.

‘Well,' said Emilie, ‘like that white dog you pointed out in the rubble of Berlin. It had survived.'

‘You said it might have found a good master or it might have starved to death.'

‘I know I did. But the point was, when everything around it had been destroyed, it was still there for a while. It had hung on.'

So the Wednesday afternoon of the tea arrived. Gustav enjoyed walking home in the sunshine with Anton. He felt proud, in a way that he couldn't explain.

When Anton was introduced to Emilie, Gustav saw that his mother stared at him for longer than she would normally stare at people she met for the first time, and Gustav wondered what was going through her mind. She said, ‘You and Gustav go and play in his room for a little while, then we'll have tea and Nusstorte. I hope you like Nusstorte.'

‘I don't know what it is,' said Anton.

‘Ah,' said Emilie. ‘Well, Gustav will explain to you.'

They went to Gustav's room, where, at this time of the day, the sun was falling in a diagonal across the window, and Gustav said, ‘Nusstorte is a sort of pastry thing, with caramel and walnuts inside.'

But Anton wasn't listening. They were standing at the windowsill, next to the metal train and Anton was staring down at the white cherry tree. He said, ‘Can we go down there?'

‘To play in the courtyard?'

‘I want to see that tree.'

‘It's just a cherry tree,' said Gustav.

‘Can't we go down there?'

‘We'll have to ask Mutti.'

Emilie said, ‘All right, but I'll come with you. I don't want you making a noise on the stairs. You remember Herr Nieder is very ill, Gustav?'

‘Herr Nieder is our neighbour,' said Gustav to Anton. ‘He's dying.'

‘Oh,' said Anton. ‘Has he got a piano?'

‘I don't know. Has he, Mutti?'

‘A piano?' said Emilie. ‘Why do you ask?'

‘Well,' said Anton, ‘if he does, I could play “Für Elise” for him.'

‘He might not want you to play “Für Elise”,' said Gustav.

‘He would. Everybody likes me to play that.'

‘Well, not now,' said Emilie. ‘Let's go down very quietly, shall we?'

So they arrived in the courtyard and Anton stared at the cherry tree and his dark eyes widened. He ran to the tree and began to hop from one foot to the other and then to jump up and down, uttering little cries of joy.

Gustav stood very still, watching Anton. He decided that there was something connecting Anton's joy at the sight of the cherry blossom to his early-morning weeping at the kindergarten, but he couldn't say what. He went towards his friend and took his hand and together they began to skip round and round the tree, laughing until they were out of breath. Gustav had no idea exactly
why
he was skipping, but he knew that Anton knew and that seemed to be enough.

One or two of the apartment residents arrived in the courtyard and stopped to smile at the two boys dancing round the old cherry. Later, when Anton had gone home, Emilie said, ‘I suppose there may not be any cherry trees in Bern. It's unlikely, but one can't say for sure. Perhaps he had never seen one before?'

‘I don't know,' said Gustav.

‘I think he is a nice boy,' said Emilie, ‘but of course he is a Jew.'

‘What's a Jew?' asked Gustav.

‘Ah,' said Emilie. ‘The Jews are the people your father died trying to save.'

AT THE END
of the year, Gustav and Anton left the kindergarten. They were both six years old.

They were sent to the same school in Matzlingen, very near to the church Gustav and Emilie cleaned on Saturdays. The school was called the Sankt Johann Protestant Academy and it was in an old echoey building – stucco plastered over ancient stone – with shutters painted dark red and a heavy door, embellished with black ironwork. It had a steep roof, where doves sometimes roosted.

Gustav missed the kindergarten; the Nature Table, the sandbox, the children's pictures covering the walls. There had been a
lightness
about the place, a feeling of freedom in the classrooms, as though outside the windows there had been pastures and woods and wide rivers, instead of an ordinary street. In contrast, the Sankt Johann Protestant School was dark and the classrooms bare. Gustav felt cold there. Other buildings crowded in upon it. It was full of strange, lingering noise.

‘In time,' Emilie said, ‘you'll get used to it. That is the only option you have.'

He looked forward to Saturdays, when they went to clean the church and he could be with Emilie all day. Instead of reading her magazines, she would help Gustav with his homework. But this seldom went very well. She told him his work was
lamentable
– ‘that's all I can say, Gustav. Lamentable.'

His maths was not too bad. There was something about numbers which he found reassuring. But he knew his reading was poor, his writing unsteady. Sometimes, she slapped his knuckles with a ruler. She said, ‘If your father were here, he would have done far worse.'

He worked as hard as he could – for the sake of Emilie, for the sake of the ‘high standards' expected of children in Switzerland – but he could see that his efforts fell short of what was required of him. He thought that already he mourned his early childhood, when all he'd had to do was
care for things
: feed silkworms with mulberry leaves and talk to the painted people on his train.

Several times, Gustav had asked Emilie if Anton could come to tea again and Emilie had said yes, but whenever he'd suggested a specific day, she had straight away decided that it wasn't convenient. ‘The truth is,' she said eventually, ‘this apartment is too small for two children.'

‘It's not,' said Gustav. ‘It wasn't too small last time.'

‘Yes, well, why don't we invite some other boy? You have more friends than just this Zwiebel, don't you?'

Gustav stared at his mother. She was folding her apron after doing the washing-up, and she kept folding and folding until the cotton apron was a hard wedge in her hands.

‘Anton is the only friend I really like,' said Gustav.

Emilie unfolded the apron and hung it up on a peg behind the door. She sighed and said, ‘Very well. Did he appreciate the Nusstorte?'

‘I think he did.'

‘All right. Invite him next Wednesday. I'll make that again.'

Anton seemed pleased about the invitation. Then, on the day that Anton came to tea, the Nusstorte went wrong.

This was a delicacy which Emilie boasted she could cook ‘blindfold'. But on that afternoon, the pastry was burnt at the edges and the caramel was too thick, like toffee.

Emilie didn't apologise. She just plonked the dish of Nusstorte down on the cramped kitchen shelf, beside the teapot, angrily cut a few slices, then lit a cigarette and turned her face away from Gustav and Anton to smoke it.

When she'd finished the cigarette, she looked directly at Anton and said, ‘You didn't tell us anything about yourself last time. What does your father do?'

Anton was trying to eat his slice of Nusstorte, but was finding it difficult. He reached into his mouth and took out the lump of sticky pastry and stuck it onto his plate. ‘He's a banker,' he said.

‘That is very bad manners, you know,' said Emilie Perle, grimacing at the gob of Nusstorte. ‘How long have you been in Switzerland?'

‘What did you say, Frau Perle?' said Anton.

‘I'm asking, how long has your family been in Switzerland?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Zwiebel is a name more German than Swiss. Perhaps you came over from Germany during the war?'

‘I don't know. I don't think so.'

‘Or from Austria? With the help of others, perhaps? I expect you know that a lot of people, like Gustav's father, enabled persecuted families from Germany to make a new life in Switzerland. Perhaps your family was helped in this way?'

Anton stared at Emilie. She was puffing on another cigarette, blowing the smoke towards the open window. Anton looked away from her and turned to Gustav. ‘Can we go and play now?' he said.

‘Do you remember Germany?' persisted Emilie.

Anton shook his head. Gustav saw that his face had turned red, like it did whenever he was about to cry. He knew, somehow, that this peculiar conversation about Germany had come about because of the failed Nusstorte.

In Gustav's room, Anton sat down on the narrow bed and looked at the wooden chest of drawers, the Biedermeier chair, the rag rug, the metal wastepaper bin and the map of Mittelland – the only objects the small space contained. He said nothing.

Gustav stood at the window, pushing his train back and forth. There was silence in the room for several minutes and this silence felt like a kind of suffering to Gustav. He opened the window, hoping to hear – as he sometimes could – the murmuring of the city doves on the roof. The sound of animals or birds could sometimes be consoling. But there was no sound of doves. Gustav went to the chest of drawers and took out the cigar box which contained his ‘treasure'. He brought the box over to the bed and set it down beside Anton.

‘Look at this,' he said. ‘I was going to show you last time. It's my treasure.'

Anton turned his attention to the contents of the box. His face was still red and Gustav saw a tear slide down his cheek. He knew that something should be said, but he had no idea what.

Anton ran his hands through the collection of paper clips, flower petals and nails. Then he picked up the golden lipstick and swivelled it open and stared at it. He wiped his tear away with his hand, looked for a moment at the lipstick, and then slowly painted his lips the deep damson colour. The sight of Anton with these damson lips was so strange that all Gustav could do was laugh. It was a hectic laugh, high-pitched and afraid.

Anton smiled. ‘Have you got a mirror?' he said.

‘No.'

‘I want to see what I look like.'

‘You look peculiar.'

‘I want to see.'

‘We can go into the bathroom.'

They ran across the landing. Both of them were laughing now and the fear in Gustav's laughter had diminished. The laughter propelled them into the bathroom, which they were suddenly aware was full of steam, and visible through the steam was Emilie lying in the bath. Her eyes had been closed, her damp head resting on the rim of the bath. When Emilie was tired or angry, she liked to do this, run a bath so hot it filled the room with steam and lie there, naked in the warm mist. Now, when she saw Gustav and Anton come charging in, she screamed. She picked up the soap and threw it at the boys and it hit Gustav on the arm. He knew the pain of this wasn't very bad, yet it seemed, for a moment, like the worst pain he'd ever endured. Anton was staring at Emilie, at her thin arms resting along the rim of the bath and at her scant breasts, and Gustav knew that this was a terrible thing for his friend to be doing. He pushed him out and quickly followed, slamming the door behind them and rushing back to what felt like the safety of his room.