The Piano Teacher: A Novel (12 page)

Obstacles lurk in the smelly classrooms. Every morning, they fill up with the sweat of each simple normal student who just manages to get by, while his parents hectically work their
fingers to the bone, fiddling around on the switchboard of his mind, trying to make him at least pass his courses. In the afternoon, the classroom is given a new lease on life by special, musically gifted students attending the music school which is temporarily housed here. Noisy contraptions pounce like locusts upon the silent spaces of thought. And throughout the day, the school is inundated by lasting values, by knowledge and music. These music pupils come in every size, shape, and form, even high school graduates and university students! They are all concerted in their efforts to produce sounds, alone or in groups.

SHE snaps her teeth more and more fiercely at the air bubbles of an inner life, of which the others have no inkling. At the core of her being, she is as beautiful as something ethereal, and this core has concentrated in her mind all by itself. The others do not see this beauty. SHE thinks she is beautiful and gives herself a fashion-model face, all in her mind. Her mother would order her to stop. She can change these faces at will; sometimes they are blondes, sometimes brunettes—gentlemen prefer either. And she goes along with such preferences, because she’d like those gentlemen to like her. She is everything but beautiful. She’s talented—lovely to listen to, but not lovely to look at. She is homely, and that’s what her mother keeps telling her, so the child won’t think she’s beautiful. Mother threatens her in the meanest way: The only way she’ll ever captivate anybody is with HER knowledge and HER ability. Mother threatens to kill the child if she ever so much as sees her with a man. Mother keeps her eyes peeled, she checks, hunts, calculates, concludes, punishes.

SHE is swathed in her daily duties like an Egyptian mummy, but no one is dying to look at her. For three long years, she tenaciously longs for her first pair of high-heeled shoes. She never forgoes and forgets. She needs tenacity for her wish.
Until she gets her wish and her shoes, she can apply her tenacity to Bach’s solo sonatas, because Mother craftily promises her the shoes in exchange for mastering the Bach. She’ll never get the shoes. She can buy them herself someday when she earns her own money. The shoes are constantly held out to her as bait. In this way, Mother keeps luring another bit and yet another bit of Hindemith out of the child. Mother loves the child more than the child could ever love the shoes.

SHE is superior to everyone else. Her mother puts her high above them. SHE leaves the others far behind and far below.

HER innocent wishes change over the years into a destructive greed, a desire to annihilate. If others have something, then she wants it too. If she can’t have it, she’ll destroy it. She begins stealing things. In the garret studio, where drawing classes are held, things vanish: armies of watercolors, pencils, brushes, rulers. A pair of plastic sunglasses with iridescent lenses (a stylish innovation!) also vanishes. She is so scared that she throws her loot, which will never do her any good, into the first garbage can, so it won’t be found in her possession. Mother seeks and always finds any evidence of a secretly purchased chocolate bar or ice-cream cone for which she secretly saved her trolley money.

Instead of the sunglasses, she’d much rather have the new gray-flannel ensemble that one of the girls is wearing. But it’s hard to steal clothes if the wearer wears them all the time. To make up for it, SHE does some masterful sleuthing and finds out that the ensemble was earned by child prostitution. SHE shadows the wearer’s gray silhouette for days on end; the music conservatory and the Bristol Bar—together with middle-aged businessmen, so lonely—are in the same district. The schoolmate, only sweet sixteen, is reported for her misdemeanor (law and order!). SHE tells her mother which ensemble she wants and where she can earn the money herself. The words flow
over her lips in feigned childhood innocence, so her mother can delight in the child’s blissful ignorance and praise her for it. Mother instantly attaches the spurs to her hunting boots. Snorting and foaming, tossing her head, she stomps off to the school and gets the culprit kicked out but good! The gray ensemble leaves with its wearer; it is now out of sight, but not out of the mind that it haunted for such a long time, cutting bloody furrows and fissures. The ensemble wearer is punished by becoming a salesgirl in a cosmetics store. She will have to suffer through the rest of her life without the benefit of general education. She will never be what she could have been.

Meanwhile, SHE is rewarded for reporting the delinquent so promptly. SHE is permitted to make an extravagant school-bag out of cheap leather remnants. In this way, Mother makes sure SHE does something useful with her leisure, which she really doesn’t have. It takes HER a long time to complete the schoolbag. But now, something has been created that no one else can or would call her own. SHE is the only one to have such an extraordinary bag, and she actually has the nerve to carry it outdoors!

The future men and present music pupils with whom she performs chamber music and is forced to play in orchestras arouse an ache in her, a yearning, which has always seemed to lurk in her. That is why she flaunts tremendous pride, but what is she so proud of? Mother begs and beseeches her never to forget anything, for she will never forgive herself. SHE cannot overlook the tiniest mistakes; they sting and stab her for months on end. Often she stubbornly broods about what she might have done, but it’s too late now! The small would-be orchestra is conducted personally by the violin teacher. The first violin embodies absolute power here. She wants to side with the powerful, so they’ll pull her up. She has always sided with power, even since she first laid eyes on her mother. During
breaks, the young man, on whom the other violins orient themselves like the wind on a weather vane, reads important books for his upcoming degree examination. He says that soon life will become serious for him, by which he means that he will begin attending the university. He is making plans and courageously talking about them. Sometimes, he absentmindedly gazes through HER in order to repeat a perhaps mathematical, perhaps cosmopolitan formula. He can never catch her eye since she has been majestically eyeing the ceiling for a long time now. She does not see the person in him, she sees only the musician; she does not look at him, and he is to realize that he means nothing to her. But on the inside, she almost burns up. Her wick burns brighter than a thousand suns, focusing on the rancid rat known as her genital. One day, in order to make the young man look at her, she violently shuts the lid of her wooden violin case, slams it on her left hand, which she needs for fingering. The pain makes her scream. Maybe he’ll cast an eye at her. Maybe he’ll act gallant toward her. But no, he would like to join the army, just to get it over with. He would like to teach natural science, German, and music in a high school. Of the three, music is the only subject he has already mastered to any extent. In order to have him recognize her as a woman and register her as “female” in his mental notebook, she plays the piano for him alone during breaks. She is very skillful on the keyboard, but he judges her purely by her terrible ungainliness in daily practical life-—the clumsiness with which she cannot trample into his heart.

She makes up her mind: She will not entrust the utmost and ultimate edge of her being, the very last bit of herself, to anyone! She wants to keep everything and, if possible, add to it. You are what you have. SHE piles up steep mountains, her knowledge and abilities form a smooth, snowy peak. Only the most courageous skier will reach the top. The young man can
slip on her slopes at any time, he can slide through a crack in the ice, plunge into a bottomless pit. SHE has given someone the key to her precious heart, to her finely polished icicle mind; so she can take the key back at any time.

SHE waits impatiently for her value as a future star to rise on the stock exchange of life. She waits silently, more and more silently, for someone to choose her, and she will then promptly choose him. He will be an exceptional man, musically gifted, but not conceited. However, this man has already made his choice: He’ll be majoring in English or German. His pride is justified.

Outside, something beckons, but she deliberately refuses to take part, so she can boast about not taking part. She desires medals, badges for successful completion of nonparticipation, so she won’t have to be measured, weighed. A clumsily swimming animal with porous webs between its dull claws, she paddles along in fits and starts through the warm maternal discharges. Her head looms out anxiously. Just where is the shore, where has it vanished to? It’s so difficult to scramble up to the foggy shore, she has slid back down the smooth embankment far too often.

She yearns for a man who knows a lot and can play the violin. Once she bags him, he’ll caress her. That mountain goat, ready to flee, is already clambering through the detritus, but he doesn’t have the strength to track down her femininity, which lies buried in the debris. He is of the opinion that a woman is a woman. Then he makes a little joke about the female sex, which is known for its fickleness: oh, women! Whenever he cues HER to play, he looks at her without really perceiving her. He does not decide against HER, he simply decides without HER.

SHE would never get into a situation in which she might appear weak, much less inferior. That is why she stays where
she is. She only goes through the familiar stages of learning and obeying, she never looks for new areas. The gears squeal in the press that squeezes the blood out from under her fingernails. Learning requires her to be sensible: No pain, no gain, she’s told. Her mother demands obedience. If you take a risk, you perish. That advice comes from Mother too. When SHE’s home alone, she cuts herself, slicing off her nose to spite other people’s faces. She always waits and waits for the moment when she can cut herself unobserved. No sooner does the sound of the closing door die down than she takes out her little talisman, the paternal all-purpose razor. SHE peels the blade out of its Sunday coat of five layers of virginal plastic. She is very skilled in the use of blades; after all, she has to shave her father, shave that soft paternal cheek under the completely empty paternal brow, which is now undimmed by any thought, unwrinkled by any will. This blade is destined for HER flesh. This thin, elegant foil of bluish steel, pliable, elastic. SHE sits down in front of the magnifying side of the shaving mirror; spreading her legs, she makes a cut, magnifying the aperture that is the doorway into her body. She knows from experience that such a razor cut doesn’t hurt, for her arms, hands, and legs have often served as guinea pigs. Her hobby is cutting her own body.

Like the mouth cavity, this opening cannot exactly be called beautiful, but it is necessary. She is entirely at her own mercy, which is still better than being at someone else’s mercy. It’s still in her hands, and a hand has feelings too. She knows precisely how often and how deep. The opening is caught in the retaining screw of the mirror, an opportunity for cutting is seized. Quick, before someone comes. With little information about anatomy and with even less luck, she applies the cold steel to and into her body, where she believes there ought to be a hole. The aperture gapes, terrified by the change, and blood pours out. This blood is not an unusual sight, but presence
doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. As usual, there is no pain. SHE, however, cuts the wrong place, separating what the Good Lord and Mother Nature have brought together in unusual unity. Man must not sunder, and revenge is quick. She feels nothing. For an instant, the two flesh halves, sliced apart, stare at each other, taken aback at this sudden gap, which wasn’t there before. They’ve shared joy and sorrow for many years, and now they’re being separated! In the mirror, the two halves also look at themselves, laterally inverted, so that neither knows which half it is. Then the blood shoots out resolutely. The drops ooze, run, blend with their comrades, turning into a red trickle, then a soothingly steady red stream when the individual trickles unite. The blood prevents HER from seeing what she has sliced open. It was her own body, but it is dreadfully alien to her. She hadn’t realized that one cannot control the path of the cut, unlike a cut in a dress, where you can roll a tiny wheel along the individual dotted, broken, or alternately dotted and broken lines, thus maintaining control. First SHE’ll have to stop the bleeding. She’s scared. Her nether region and her fear are two allies of hers, they usually appear together. If one of these two friends drops into her head without knocking, then she can rest assured: The other cannot be far behind. Mother can check whether or not SHE keeps her hands outside the covers at night; but if Mother wanted to gain control of HER fear, she would have to pry her child’s skull open and personally scrape out the fear.

In order to stem the flow of blood, SHE pulls out the popular cellulose package whose merits are known to and appreciated by every woman, especially in sports and for any kind of movement. The package quickly replaces the golden cardboard crown worn by the little girl when she is sent as a princess to a children’s costume party. SHE, however, never went to a children’s party, she never got to know the crown. The queen’s
crown suddenly slips into her panties, and the woman knows her place in life. The thing that once shone forth on the head in childlike pride has now landed where the female wood has to wait for an ax. The princess is grown up now, and this is a matter of opinion on which opinions diverge. One man wants a nicely veneered, not-too-showy piece of furniture; the second wants a complete set in genuine Caucasian walnut. But the third man, alas, only wants to pile up huge heaps of firewood. Yet he, too, can excel: he can arrange his woodpile functionally and efficiently to save space. More fuel can fit into a neat cellar than one in which the wood is dumped helter-skelter. One fire burns longer than the other, because there is more wood.