The Gustav Sonata (8 page)

‘Come here. Touch my prick. Stroke it like this, like I'm doing.'

‘I don't want to.'

‘You won't get your train, then. Come on, put your hand here. I've told you, it's the cool thing. We could have fun with it. Nobody would know. And I'm a sex superman! That's what they called me in the hospital. Just touch me a bit and I'll come.'

Gustav felt himself go very cold. He looked away from Ludwig to his train, lying on top of the upturned Moses basket. Ludwig, whose face was getting redder, reached out and tugged Gustav roughly towards him. Gustav fell over the rocking horse, bruising his shin. Ludwig had gripped his hand now and was guiding it towards his penis, which had grown longer and larger, but at this moment, Gustav heard the sound of a key in the outer door and he knew that this must be Frau Krams returning at last.

‘
Scheisse!
' muttered Ludwig, and turned away from Gustav to rub himself more violently. ‘Get out of here! Go to my mother,' he hissed. ‘Close the door!'

Gustav wanted to grab the train, but he didn't dare. He left Ludwig's room and came into the parlour, where the remains of the breakfast were still on the table. Frau Krams had straight away begun clearing these away, but when she saw Gustav, she sat down.

‘Why aren't you at school?' she said.

Gustav found that he couldn't speak. He was shivering. The bruise on his shin sent waves of pain down his leg. ‘How's Mutti?' he managed to ask at last.

Frau Krams reached for her handbag, found a cigarette and lit it. Her eyes looked bruised with tiredness. She sighed as she said, ‘It
is
pneumonia, Gustav. As I feared. I stayed all night because it seemed to be touch and go with her, touch and go for a long while. I wanted her to feel that someone was there.'

‘That was very kind of you, Frau Krams. Is she going to come home?'

‘No, pet. Not for a good while. She has to get much stronger before she can come back. So, listen to me. We have to make a plan for you. Do you have a grandma or an auntie you could go and stay with?'

‘No,' said Gustav.

Frau Krams rubbed her eyes. ‘I suppose I can look after you for a bit,' she said. ‘We could try to clear Ludwig's room of some of that junk and put a mattress in there with him.'

Gustav shook his head, no.

‘I don't blame you,' said Frau Krams. ‘You don't want to share a room with watering cans and deckchairs. So tell me, what's to become of you?'

GUSTAV SAT BESIDE
the bathtub, staring at the disinfected water and the soiled sheets. Frau Krams had told him to take them down to the cellar, where the communal washing machine stood in a small concrete space, but he knew that the damp bedlinen would be too heavy for him to carry. He wondered how strong – at almost ten years old – he was supposed to be.

He left the bathroom and went to the kitchen and found the remains of the vegetable stew on the hob, but it didn't look like anything he might want to eat. The floating white leeks reminded him of the horrible long penis he'd seen in Ludwig's hand. He poured the stew down the drain, trying not to gag when he saw a large leek blocking the run-off. He thought that if he'd been some other boy, he would have begun crying or at least whimpering by now, but he wasn't: he was Gustav Perle. He was going to
master himself –
for the sake of his Mutti, for the sake of his dead father, for the sake of Anton, who cried too often, for the sake of a few beautiful things in the world, like the sun on a balcony in Davos. He took the slimy leek in his hands and threw it into the bin.

He washed his face and hands and changed his clothes and set out to walk to school. He didn't know what time it was, so he asked Frau Teller at the flower stall to tell him the time, and she said, ‘All I know, Gustav, is that it's Wednesday.'

When he got to school, he found that lessons were only just beginning. He went into his classroom and sat down at his desk and the feel of the familiar wooden desk was comforting. It was as if it were the one thing in what Ludwig called ‘the universe' which hadn't altered in the last twenty-four hours. Holding onto the desk, he decided that after school he would borrow money for the tram fare and go to see Emilie at the hospital. He hoped he would find her in a clean bed, with her hair washed and combed.

He whispered to Anton, ‘Mutti's got pneumonia.'

‘What's pneumonia?'

‘It's like TB. She almost died in the night.'

‘Do you really mean “died”?'

‘Yes.'

‘What would you do if she died?'

‘I'd be alone,' said Gustav.

At break time, Anton told Gustav that his piano teacher, Herr Edelstein, had entered him for a Children's National Piano Competition, in Bern. He was going to play Debussy's ‘La Cathédrale Engloutie'.

‘When?' asked Gustav.

‘In the summer. Before we go on holiday to the mountains. But there are heats first.'

‘What are “heats”?'

‘It's like a first round and then a second round. You have to go to Bern and play for two of the judges. Then if you're good enough, after two rounds, you get to go in the competition.'

‘And what happens if you're not good enough?'

‘I will be good enough, Gustav. Maybe you can come to Bern and hear me perform?'

Gustav liked to imagine Anton onstage in a huge concert hall, alone with the black grand piano, open like an enormous heart, about to gather him in. He hoped he would be able to persuade Emilie to take him there, so that she, too, could hear Anton playing.

It was cold in the schoolyard. Gustav wanted to tell Anton about the thing that Ludwig had done, so that the repulsion of it could be shared and not just remain burrowing through his brain, like a worm burrowing through the earth. But the thought of trying to describe it made him feel sick. He also wondered whether Anton would
blame
him, in some way, and then shun him. It was easy to imagine Anton walking away from him and telling the other boys that Gustav Perle had done a disgusting thing. So it came to him then that he would have to keep it locked away inside him and tell no one –
ever
.

He listened instead to Anton's excitement as he talked about the piano competition. Anton said, ‘It may be a bit frightening, to play in front of so many people. My mother says there's a pill I could take to stop me getting nervous. She also says I'd better get used to it, because that's probably going to be my career in life, being a concert pianist.'

‘How does she know?'

‘Because I'm a “prodigy”. That means I'm more brilliant at playing than almost everyone else of my age. So by the time I get to eighteen, I could be performing in huge concerts in Paris and Geneva and New York. You see?'

‘Huge concerts?'

‘Sure. Even at our age, my mother says, we have to think about what we're going to do later on in our lives. What are you going to do, Gustav?'

Gustav turned his face away. Into his mind came the image of himself, on his hands and knees, in the Church of Sankt Johann, searching for pitiful ‘treasure' under the metal grating. And it was easy to project this forward into the future – as though there
were
no future for him, but only this: a man crawling along, growing older year by year, searching for things which other people had cast aside.

‘I don't know what I'm going to do,' he said.

He went to see Herr Hodler after school. Max Hodler was wearing spectacles now and these spectacles shaded his pink-rimmed eyes and made him look older and slightly more handsome than he'd been before. When he was told about Emilie Perle's pneumonia, he said, ‘Heavens, Gustav. That's very frightening.'

He gave Gustav a toffee and popped one into his own mouth. They sat in the book-crammed staffroom, chewing the toffees and saying nothing.

At last, Max Hodler said, ‘Who is looking after you?'

‘I'm all right,' said Gustav. ‘If you could just lend me a bit of money for the tram fare, then I can go and see Mutti.'

‘Certainly,' said Max. ‘Are you going now? Let me come with you.'

Gustav shook his head, no. ‘Mutti might not want to see anyone,' he said, remembering the urine-soaked sheets and the oily sweat on Emilie's face.

‘That's all right,' said Max. ‘I can just wait in the corridor.'

‘I can go alone,' said Gustav. ‘It's the number
13
tram.'

It was difficult to find where Emilie was in the big hospital. Gustav wandered from ward to ward, staring at all the sick people. He was beginning to feel tired again, and very hungry. When he saw a food trolley being pushed along, he asked the orderly if he could take a piece of bread. Without waiting for an answer, he reached out for the bread, but the orderly slapped his hand and said, ‘Get away from my patients' rations! What are you doing here, anyway, boy? Are you from the children's ward?'

He was sent back, through all the rooms he'd already visited, to a desk staffed by a matron, wearing a starched white hat, like some kind of weird Swiss National Dress.

‘Well?' she said. ‘What do you want?'

He gave Emilie's name: Frau Perle – never Emilie to strangers. A young nurse was called by the matron and Gustav followed the nurse, retracing his steps through the crowded wards, past the food trolley, till they reached a dark and silent corridor and the nurse opened the door to a tiny room, lit with a shaded blue lamp.

Gustav went in. In the blue light, he could hardly make out Emilie's form on the metal bed. Tubes were attached to her arms, joined up to a bag upside down on a pole. Another tube had been pushed up her nose. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was very loud, like snoring.

There was a chair by the bed and Gustav sat down on this. He wanted to take hold of Emilie's hand, but he was afraid to dislodge the tubes, so he sat with his hands in his lap. He said, ‘Mutti, can you hear me?'

She couldn't. She was in that place, like a dark and silent lake, where people go when they're asleep. Now and again, Gustav could hear footsteps going by in the corridor, but nobody came into the room. He sat very still, bathed in the blue light. The blueness of everything made him feel lonely. Heavy on his mind weighed the thought of the sheets in the disinfected bath and the task of dragging them down to the washing machine in the cellar.

He wondered how many other tasks Mutti performed in the space of a day to ensure that they lived a properly mastered life, where floors were cleaned and mice kept away and pillows were soft and dry. And he decided that was his mission now, to learn what to do to keep the apartment in a state of readiness for Emilie's return. He'd understood how to help clean the Church of Sankt Johann. So perhaps it was just as simple as that? He'd clean the apartment like the church nave and pews, with a mop and wood polish and a carpet beater. He'd ransack his treasure box for the low-denomination coins he'd amassed in it, and hope to buy food with these, and a bunch of violets to put in Emilie's room when she returned.

Of Ludwig he refused to think. But then he remembered, with a lurch of his heart, that Frau Krams had a key to the apartment. Ludwig could just take the key and come up in the middle of the night, holding his penis in his hand. Gustav wished he was the owner of a fierce dog, which would bite the penis off – like the red-legged scissor-man had snipped off Konrad's thumbs (
klipp und klapp!
) leaving Ludwig screaming like a bat and leaching gouts of blood onto the lino.

Before he left the blue hospital room, he found a chart with a pencil hanging from it on the end of Mutti's bed. On this he wrote:

DEAR Mutti, Dont worry about me. The Zwiebels will take care of me. Gustav x

When he got back to the apartment, he began searching for food. He found a tin of tomato soup – the last tin in Emilie's cupboards – and heated this up. He knew he should save some for breakfast or supper tomorrow, but he was so hungry that he drank it all.

He counted the money in his treasure box. It came to three francs and twenty centimes. He wondered if anyone sold a bratwurst for less than this. Then, he wondered if he could survive on just one meal a day, his school dinner, which was usually dumplings with a little meat and gravy. He remembered how Max Hodler had told him that the country of Switzerland had come into being
by an act of will.
Switzerland was a
Willensnation
, and Max had said that all Swiss children should remember this and try to be as strong and as persevering as the men in the Rütli Meadow and then – hundreds of years later – the generals at the time of the war, who had defended Swiss neutrality. But Gustav had already learned that his will, when it came to hunger, was weak. He didn't understand how it could be any other way.

He had promised himself that, before he went to sleep, he would try to drag the disinfected sheets down to the basement. He let the water out of the bath, then climbed into it and stamped on the sheets to get more dampness out of them. He felt a burning in his feet.

In Emilie's broom cupboard, he found a folding metal pushchair in which she used to wheel him about when he was small. He manoeuvred this into the bathroom and tugged the sheets out of the bath and dumped them in the chair and wheeled the chair to the elevator. All the way along the tiled floor, the sheets left little drips and puddles.

When he got to the basement, it was dark. The light switch was too high for him to reach. He stood in the blackness, smelling the dank of the place and the acrid smell of the sheets. He knew that, if it hadn't been for Ludwig, he would have gone and knocked on Frau Krams's door and asked for her help, but he was afraid to do this.

He stood there a long time. Then he became worried that Ludwig might come and close the cellar door, with both of them locked inside. He didn't know what more to do except to wheel the sheets near to the washing machine and leave them there till morning.