Lea

by Pascal Mercier

  ‘In the hotel dining room all ten competitors sat under chandeliers and pretended to take no notice of one another. There were big gaps between the ten tables, and the ones who would be trying to trump one another with their violins the following day spoke to the people in charge with exaggerated liveliness and enthusiasm, it seemed to me, as if to demonstrate that they weren’t even slightly concerned about the presence of their rivals.

  ‘Lea said nothing and darted occasional glances at the other tables. She was wearing the high-necked black dress that she had bought with Marie while I was out in the snow. It was the dress that she would also wear at her performance. The high collar would hide the red patches of agitation on her throat. Suddenly, Lea couldn’t bear those patches and they had hung up the shoulderless dress she had planned to wear and gone in search of another. The new dress gave her head, with its pinned-up hair, a certain nun-like severity that reminded me of Marie Curie.

  ‘We were the first to leave the dining room. When Lea had closed the door of her room behind her, I was standing in the corridor with Marie. It was the first time I’d seen her smoking.

  ‘“You don’t want Lea to win,” she said.

  ‘I gave a start, as if I’d been caught stealing.

  ‘“Am I so easy to read?”

  ‘“Only where Lea is concerned,” she said with a smile.

  ‘I would have liked to ask her what she hoped for, and what she thought of Lea’s chances. There were lots of things I should have asked her. She must have seen it on my face, because she raised her eyebrows.

  ‘“Till tomorrow, then,” I said and left.

  ‘From the window of my room I looked out over snow-covered St Moritz at night. Light still came from Lea’s room. I repeated the words I had said to Cécile about responsibility. I had no idea what was right. Dawn was already breaking by the time I finally fell asleep.’

  15

  AS WE GOT CLOSER to Geneva, dusk began to fall beneath dark clouds. Van Vliet had gone to sleep with his head turned towards me. He smelled of alcohol and tobacco. While telling me about Lea’s performance in St Moritz, he had taken out his hip flask and lit one cigarette from the glowing tip of the last. No one’s allowed to smoke in my own car, I can’t bear it. And it’s particularly bad when I haven’t had much sleep. Already I could hardly breathe and I could smell the smoke in my clothes. But it didn’t matter now. Somehow it didn’t matter.

  I looked at him. He hadn’t shaved this morning, and he was wearing the same shirt whose collar he had tugged on the previous day when he was swearing at the tourists who wanted to see Van Gogh’s room in the hospice. An un-ironed shirt of unidentifiable colour, washed a thousand times, the three top buttons open at the top. A battered black jacket. He was breathing through his mouth and nose at the same time and a quiet rattle accompanied the breaths that he seemed to be struggling to make.

  With his eyes closed he looked as if he were in need of protection. Not like someone who had wanted to be a forger and who had destroyed a chess opponent on the Bundesterrasse because he dared to stare at him. More like someone who had feared Ruth Adamek, even though he would never have admitted it. And above all like someone who hadn’t wanted to assume responsibility for a child, because he had the feeling that he didn’t want to assume responsibility for himself. And like someone who had felt so lashed by the words of Dr Meridjen that he could speak of him only as the Maghrebi.

  I tried to imagine Tom Courtenay asleep and wondered what it would be like if he lived with a daughter consumed by a threatening passion for violin-playing. Van Vliet had lost all certainties about that. ‘I no longer even seemed to know my way around the lab,’ he had said.

  The candidates in the competition had played in alphabetical order. That meant that Lea was second to last.

  ‘She was pale and her smile was uneasy as she sat down with us at the breakfast table. No one was forced to listen to the other competitors, but when I suggested taking a walk instead, Lea grumpily dismissed the idea. She wouldn’t listen to a word I said that day and once I caught myself thinking about leaving the hotel without an explanation, driving to Kloten and boarding the nearest plane. In fact, I sat beside her every minute when the lights dimmed over the audience. We didn’t exchange a single word and didn’t look at each other, and yet at every second I knew what Lea was thinking. I heard it in her breathing and sensed it in the way she sat there, shifting on her chair. They were hours of torment and at the same time hours in which I was happy about the proximity created by that wordless deciphering of her innermost being.

  ‘The playing of the first two candidates was stiff and uncommunicative. I sensed Lea relaxing. I was happy to sense it. But in retrospect I was startled by the cruelty hidden behind her relaxation. From now on I was filled with contradictory feelings of that kind. Other people’s weaknesses meant hope, and the relief that was audible in Lea’s deep breaths meant cruelty.

  ‘What was it like when I played a game of chess that really mattered? I saw my father in front of me, moving the pieces with his liver-spotted hand. “How do you do that?” he sighed with feigned resignation when he saw that defeat could no longer be averted. Once, when I saw my own defeat coming and resigned, leaving the king on his side, he reached quickly and violently for the piece and put it back up again. He wasn’t the man who could explain something like that. But his face suddenly looked white and angular, as if carved in marble, and I understood that behind his fatigue and weariness there was an unbending pride. In his silent, exhausted way he had taught me what it’s like to want to win, without that will including a readiness to be cruel. More than twenty years had passed since he had last given me his hand in the ward and pressed it more firmly than usual, as if he had sensed that he was going to die in the night.

  ‘I had wordlessly – wordlessly even deep within – resented him for never being there; now I had never missed him as much as I did in that moment, when I sat beside my daughter, hoping tensely for the others to fail. How do you pass on experiences to a child? What do you do when you discover a cruelty in that child, a cruelty that frightens you?

  ‘Two of the five candidates who had played in the morning hadn’t appeared for lunch. The three others bent shyly and silently over their plates. They must have noticed that their playing had been far from brilliant, and now they had to endure the looks of the others who had heard it as well. I looked from one to the other. Children who had played like adults and were now eating their soup like children. My God, I thought, how cruel.

  ‘The parents also knew that it hadn’t been enough. A mother stroked her daughter’s hair, a father rested his hand on his son’s shoulder. And then, very suddenly, it became clear to me that it is always cruel when other people’s eyes rest on us; even if those looks are benevolent. They turn us into actors. We can no longer be ourselves, we have to be there for others who want to lead us away from ourselves. And the worst is: we must pretend to be someone quite particular. The others expect it. But at the same time we are perhaps not that person. Perhaps what we want is not to be someone particular and hide ourselves in a reassuring vagueness.’

  I thought of Paul’s uncomprehending look above the face mask, which had made me shrink back into myself. And the face of the nurse who had cast her eyes down. The fact that she hadn’t been able to bear seeing me in a moment of weakness had been even worse than Paul’s horror.

  ‘The afternoon began with a surprise. A girl with the fairy-tale name of Solvejg stepped on stage. Her freckled face seemed never to have known a smile. Her dress hung down her body like a sack and her arms were pitifully thin. I involuntarily expected a feeble stroke and a thin tone that would make us all cringe.

  ‘And then that explosion! A Russian composer, I didn’t know the name. A firework display with breath-taking switches of level, glissandi and double-stopping. The girl’s hair, which had looked unwashed and stringy, suddenly flew, her eyes flashed and her frail body supply followed the musical tension. There was complet
e silence in the room. The applause exceeded everything we had heard in the morning. It was clear to everyone: the competition had just begun.

  ‘Lea had sat there motionless. I hadn’t heard her breathing. I looked at Marie. Yes, her expression seemed to say, this was what she would be measured against. Lea had closed her eyes. She slowly rubbed her thumbs against one another. I felt an impulse to stroke her hair and put my arm around her shoulder. When had I begun to suppress such impulses? When, in fact, had I last hugged her, my daughter?

  ‘Another two candidates until it was her turn. The girl tripped over the hem of her dress, the boy kept wiping his hands on his trousers; on his pale face you could see the fear that his damp fingers might slip on the strings. When the boy started playing I went outside.

  ‘When I got up I had looked at neither Lea nor Marie. There was nothing to explain. It was flight. A flight from the trepidation of these children, who had been told by someone important to travel here and expose themselves to the eyes and ears of the competitors and the judges. The oldest was twenty, the youngest sixteen. JEUNESSE MUSICALE – the town was full of those letters, which looked lovely and peaceful, golden varnish washing over a lowering anxiety, suffocating ambition and damp hands. Off the road, I stamped through the thick snow. When I saw a line of waiting taxis I thought again of Kloten Airport. Lea would see my empty seat from the stage. I cooled my face with snow. When I stepped into the room half an hour later with wet trousers, Lea was already in the waiting room. Marie said nothing when I sat down.’

  16

  ‘IT WAS SIX YEARS since I first sat in the school hall and first saw Lea on stage. Is it like that for everyone, that a great anxiety never dissolves, it just disappears behind the backdrop before emerging again later on, its power unbroken? Is it like that for you? And why is it different where joy, hope and happiness are concerned? Why are the shadows so much more powerful than the light? Can you explain that to me, damn it all?’

  His expression, I think, was supposed to be full of irony – the expression of someone who could still distance himself from his grief and despair. An expression like the one I saw outside the open elevator yesterday. An expression like Tom Courtenay’s when he was the only one no one visited on visiting days. But Van Vliet wasn’t strong enough, and it turned into an expression filled with pain and incomprehension, the expression of a boy looking for a place to linger in his father’s eyes. As if I were the kind of person who would give such an expression a good reception.

  ‘You’re so strong in your white coat,’ Leslie had once said, ‘and yet it’s still impossible to cling to you.’

  I was glad when a motorway toll gate came and I had to look for money. When we drove on, Van Vliet’s voice sounded firmer again.

  ‘When the lights went out and Lea stepped on stage, Marie crossed herself with her thumb in the dark. Perhaps it was only my imagination, but the silence seemed to be even more complete than it had been before the others played. It was the silence of a cloister, I thought, an invisibly besieged cloister. Perhaps I thought it partly because in her high-necked black dress and with her hair pinned up Lea looked like a novice, a girl who had left everything behind her and dedicated herself entirely to the holy Mass of notes.

  ‘More slowly than I had seen her do it before, she put the white cloth over the violin’s chin-rest, checked it, corrected it and checked it again. The seconds stretched out. I thought of the Rondo and of Lea saying that she wanted to hurl the violin into the audience. Now she checked the tension of the bow again, then she closed her eyes, adjusted her fingering and put the bow to the strings. The spotlights seemed to become very slightly brighter. What happened now would determine Lea’s future. I forgot to breathe.

  ‘That my daughter could play such music! Music of such purity, warmth and depth! I tried to find a word and after a while it came to me: sacred. She played the Bach sonata as if she were building a sacred object with each individual note. The notes were appropriately immaculate: certain, pure and unshakeable, they cut the silence, which, the longer the playing lasted, seemed to become even bigger and deeper. I thought of the sounds of Loyola de Colón in the station, of Lea’s first, scratchy notes in our apartment, of the confidence that Marie’s notes had had at their first meeting. Marie wiped the sweat from her forehead with a handkerchief. I smelled her perfume and felt the warmth of her body. She was the one who had turned my little daughter into a woman, who knew how to fill the hotel ballroom with that overwhelming beauty. For a moment I took her hand and she returned my pressure.’

  Van Vliet was drinking. A few drops ran down his chin. It may sound strange, but those drops, that sign of lost control, allowed me to guess how terrible it must have been, the fall that led from that glorious moment in the ballroom in St Moritz to Lea’s stay in the hospice of Saint-Rémy, where Van Vliet had seen his daughter behind the stack of firewood, absently running her thumb along the tip of her index finger. Elle est brisée dans son âme, the doctor had said. The Maghrebi.

  ‘As I said: sacred,’ Van Vliet went on now, and then fell silent again for a while. ‘Later, when I knew more, I sometimes thought: She had played as if she were building an imaginary cathedral of notes, in which she could sometimes seek refuge when life became too much for her. I thought that above all on the trip to Cremona. And then I sat in the Duomo there, as if it were that imaginary cathedral.’ He swallowed. ‘It was lovely, thinking that crazed thought again and again, morning, afternoon and evening. It was as if I were able to establish a connection with the aberrant way in which Lea was now thinking and feeling. Sometimes, in fact, in a hidden, sealed chamber deep within me, I envied Lea the stubbornness that led her away from everything ordinary and reasonable. In my dream I was with her behind the firewood in Saint-Rémy. The contours of all things, including our own, blurred and dissolved as if in a watercolour of pallid, over-diluted colours. It was a precious dream that I managed to cling to into the next day.’

  And this was the man, I reflected, who had been saved by books about Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur, the man whose scientific, algorithmic intelligence had made him the youngest professor at Bern University.

  ‘Lea bowed. I thought back to her first bow, way back then, after the Rondo. I told you what had worried me about it: she had bowed as if the world had no other choice but to cheer her; as if she could demand applause. The young woman who had taken the place of the little girl demanded the same thing. But now it seemed much more dangerous than before: it would somehow have been possible to explain to the little girl that listeners had their own judgement; no one could have explained that to the seventeen-year-old Lea standing there on the ballroom stage. No one at all.

  ‘Was the applause louder and longer than it had been for Solvejg? I knew that Lea, while she made her curt, almost imperious bows, which still had something clumsy about them, would be able to think only of that one question. That she lived through each individual second in the apprehensive hope that the applause might reach undiminished into the next second and continue even after that, second after second, until it became quite clear that it had outdone the long, enthusiastic clapping after Solvejg’s performance.

  ‘That was what I would have liked to keep from my daughter: that breathless listening into the audience, that feverish need for applause and appreciation, that addiction to admiration and the poison of disappointment if the applause was weaker and briefer than it had been in the imagination.

  ‘Her face was covered with a film of sweat when she came to us afterwards. She didn’t want to hear Alexander Zacharias, the last candidate, she said with a resolution behind which one sensed fear and vulnerability. So we left the hotel and stepped outside into a thick snowstorm. Neither Marie nor I dared to ask how her performance had gone. One word out of place and she would shatter. While our shoes crunched on the snow, I thought back once again to the moment in Bern railway station, when little Lea had suddenly resisted my attempt to draw her to me.

  ‘“I would like to
be like Dinu Lipatti,” she said after a while. Later Marie told me about this Romanian pianist and we wondered what Lea might have meant. Had she mixed him up with George Enescu, the Romanian violinist? I bought a CD of Dinu Lipatti. When I heard her in the empty apartment, I tried to imagine how Lipatti would have sounded as a violinist. Yes, I thought, yes, exactly. But I was pursuing a phantom, one of the many phantoms who determined my actions, a whole army of phantoms. Lea really had mixed up Lipatti with Enescu. She refused to admit it and stamped her feet. I showed her the CD. She threw open the window and hurled it outside. Simply threw it out of the window. The crash that came as the plastic cover hit the tarmac was terrible.’

  Van Vliet fell silent for a moment. There was a distant echo of his former horror in that silence. ‘That was after David Lévy had entered her life and destroyed everything.’

  17

  WITH DAVID LÉVY a new calendar began in the life of father and daughter. And with the mention of his name a new chapter began in Van Vliet’s narrative, or rather in his narration. Because what was new was above all the violence and disorder with which he now spoke of all the things that had been raging in him for years. Hitherto there had been a sequence of narration that revealed an ordering hand, a director of memory. From this moment on, it seemed to me, there was only a rushing stream of images, scraps of thoughts and feelings, which broke its banks and tore away with it everything else that he still was. He had even forgotten to tell me the outcome of the competition, and I had to remind him.

  ‘There was complete silence in the hall as the chair of the jury came on stage to announce the result of their deliberations. His movements were hesitant and it was clear that he felt sorry for the candidates that he would have to disappoint. He put on his glasses and awkwardly unfolded the sheet of paper bearing the names of the first three candidates. He would start with third place. Lea’s fingers were convulsively intertwined and she seemed to be barely breathing.