Lea

by Pascal Mercier

  Afterwards we sat by the lake again. We would leave today, we both sensed that. But not until he had brought his story into the present. Above the lake there lay a winter light without the brilliance and promise of Provence. A light that contained grey slate, cold white and merciless sobriety. The fog began towards Martigny, light at first, compact and impenetrable further back. It took my breath away to imagine that I was to drive into it.

  By now Van Vliet’s sentences were curt and laconic. Sometimes he lapsed into an analytical, almost academic tone, as if he were talking about someone else. Perhaps, I thought, it was also to allow him to forget the nocturnal dissolution, the loss of all contours. I wasn’t unhappy about it. But there was also something menacing about his self-control, something oppressive that matched the approaching fog.

  Agnetha had driven Lea to Saint-Rémy. He was glad of that, but unhappy about the feeling. Her eyes had been dull and her lids heavy when he had stroked her hair as he said goodbye. When the car pulled up she sat in her seat like a plaster doll, her empty gaze staring straight ahead.

  He collected Nikki from the kennel. The dog was delighted and jumped up at him. But he missed Lea and wouldn’t eat properly. He slowly got used to the new rhythm of life. He was allowed to sleep beside Van Vliet’s bed. Except he couldn’t bear those long hours on his own, so Van Vliet took him into the Institute. Ruth Adamek hated dogs. When they had to discuss something, they spoke on the phone across the corridor. Another colleague, on the other hand, was wild about Nikki. When the dog licked her hand it gave Van Vliet a pang.

  After six months he drove to see Lévy in Neuchâtel and discovered how Lea had tried to smash the Amati when he introduced her to his fiancée.

  Van Vliet spoke curtly and soberly about what had happened in Stockholm.

  ‘Back then it was aimed at me,’ said Lévy, ‘but now …’

  The two very different men were feeling their way towards each other. Van Vliet was reminded of the Oistrakh cadenza.

  ‘I have never had a pupil more gifted than Lea,’ said Lévy. ‘I couldn’t resist the temptation to work with her. The danger – I refused to see it. Do you think …?’

  For days Van Vliet thought about what Lévy had wanted to ask. He still didn’t like the man and felt clodhopping and clumsy when he was around him. But he was no longer the adversary he had once been. ‘Je suis désolé, vraiment désolé,’ he had said in the doorway. Van Vliet had believed him. They had waved to one another, only briefly, almost shamefacedly. On the station platform Van Vliet had had the peculiar feeling: now Neuchâtel is empty too.

  He avoided Krompholz. But then he met Katharina Walther in the street by chance. ‘My God,’ she said again and again. ‘My God.’ He didn’t look at her, instead speaking down at her shoes.

  ‘They had …’ he said at last.

  ‘But no one could have guessed that!’ she interrupted.

  As they hugged goodbye her chignon brushed his nose.

  Much later, when they had learned of the embezzlement, he met her again. She didn’t let him slip by. It was a strange look that she gave him, he would cling to it for a long time.

  ‘When I read about it: My God, I thought, he did everything for her, really everything. I … I too would have liked to have someone who … I can still feel it in my hand, even today, the del Gesù.’

  ‘Me too,’ he had said.

  After that they didn’t meet up again before the cemetery.

  29

  IT STAYED A SECRET for just over a year. Van Vliet postponed projects, sabotaged experiments, dragged out purchases and left bills unpaid. When the sponsors got in touch he lied without restraint. When he talked about it, his face adopted the expression that I knew by now: the gambler, the boy who wanted to be a forger. Deliberate obstruction, planned incompetence – he was dancing over the abyss. The abyss made its appearance at night. He’d liked it, in a way. There was a hint of that pleasure in his voice. When I became aware of it, I thought of the inner layers and plateaux he had spoken of in Lea.

  I wished, Martijn, that the gambler within you could have saved you. Could have built a platform inside you, on which you could have gone on living.

  There was more fear than pleasure involved when Van Vliet noticed that Ruth Adamek was on his heels. Once when he surprised her by stepping into her room, he saw that she was trying out passwords on his research account. IRENRAUG it said on the screen. As a schoolboy he had broken all records when it came to reading words backwards. Sooner or later she would plainly be trying DELGESÚ. That wouldn’t be enough. But once she had started, she would go on switching the letters round and round. That was what they had done in the first year of their collaboration, when they needed to reconstruct a forgotten password for which they knew only the starting point. It had been summer and she had sat in her short skirt on the edge of his desk. The letters game had become a competition which she had won. From the corner of his eye he had seen her slowly running her tongue along her lips. Now or never. He had stared fixedly at the screen until the moment had passed. ‘By the way,’ she had said to him the next day, ‘you’re a lousy loser.’

  He changed the password to ANOMERC, later that turned into CRANEMO, but that sounded too much like CREMONA, so it turned into OANMERC.

  ‘Why did I stick to that subject? Why didn’t I choose something less obvious? Or at least BUIO or OIUB or something that she would never have been able to guess.’

  ‘What we know about compulsive actions,’ Agnetha said, ‘is that they are based on a hidden desire that the very thing that is feared might happen.’

  He thought that was incredibly clever. But what surprised him was that he had remained with the topic of betrayal, as if he stuck to it.

  Then, three years ago, the letter arrived in which the sponsors demanded detailed accounts or else they would not be in a position to allow the promised money to go on flowing. ‘I opened it by accident,’ said Ruth Adamek, when she handed him the letter. He looked at the sender’s name. Time for the showdown. ‘Put it somewhere, anywhere,’ he said nonchalantly and left.

  In the station he stood for a while on the spot from which they had listened to Loyola de Colón. Fifteen years had passed since then. He took the train to the Oberland. It looked like snow, but none was falling. On the way back he wondered what he would have done. She was with the Maghrebi, behind the woodpile, what difference did it make? The doctor had looked at him in silence when he asked if Lea had asked after him. That black, sealed gaze, that medical complacency. He wanted to thump him.

  He took sick leave and didn’t go to the institute for a week. Let them all read the letter. It didn’t matter any more.

  During those days he cleared the apartment, picked up every object. He took out the photograph that showed Cécile’s room before they had turned it into la chambre de musique. The past that came towards him then caught him with unexpected force. For the first time he wondered what Cécile would have thought about his fraud. Martijn, the romantic cynic! I didn’t think there really was such a thing! And now he had driven across half of Europe, not to his beloved wife, but with his sick daughter beside him. In the motel they had acted as if he were her lover. When he woke up next to her, even more dejected than before, she had been breathing calmly, but her eyelids were twitching uneasily. ‘Where are we?’ she had said. ‘Why didn’t the agency book me a better room? Normally I have a suite.’

  Lea’s room was the last one he cleared. He had avoided doing it. Now here, too, he took everything in hand, as he had done last time. Layers of a life story. Cuddly toys, the first drawings, school reports. A diary with a lock. He found the key. He decided against it and pushed the book right to the back of the drawer. The Maghrebi had asked about such things. ‘Absolument pas,’ he had said.

  LEA LÉVY. He threw the notebook away. Mountains of portraits. She had had her photograph taken many times recently. He sat down with the pictures at the kitchen table. LEA VAN VLIET. Something behind the façade had starte
d to crumble, silently and inexorably. He fetched pictures from former times and gauged the distance. One he had taken shortly after Loyola’s performance at the railway station. In it Lea looked as she had done when she dragged him through the city, impelled by that new will that later led to the question: Is a violin expensive? Most of the pictures of Lea, the glamorous violinist, he threw away. He didn’t know why, but he locked Lea’s room and put the key in the kitchen cupboard, behind the crockery that he seldom used.

  When he had made up his mind what he was going to do, he invited Caroline along. Her breathing was heavy and she sometimes closed her eyes as he told his story. Someone would have to look after the apartment, he said. She nodded and stroked Nikki. ‘You’re coming with me,’ she said. There were tears in her eyes. ‘She must never find out,’ she said. He nodded.

  He guessed that she had something else that she wanted to say to him. Something that only friends say to each other. He was afraid of it.

  There had been that boy, two classes above her, in spite of his smoking the best athlete of his year, a poser, a pocket James Dean but a heart-throb to many of the girls.

  Van Vliet felt panic rising up in him. Might he, her father, have stood in her way? He hung on Caroline’s lips.

  Then she, more than thirty years his junior, took his hand.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, not at all. Not you. It was her unapproachability, if you like. The aura of her talent and her success. Whether in the classroom or the playground. There was always that cool halo around her. A bit of envy, a bit of fear, a bit of incomprehension, everything all together. She didn’t know how to step out of that halo, out to Simon, for example. Her halo followed her like a shadow. And Simon – he never looked at her, but he gazed after her, there was giggling. But even for him, the cock of the walk, she was out of range, simply too far away. “You know,” she said, “sometimes I wish all the glitter and glamour would vanish overnight, so that the others would be normal towards me, quite normal.”’

  Van Vliet hesitated. And Lévy? he asked at last.

  ‘David – he was something different, something completely different. I don’t know. He was reaching for the stars.’

  Simon and Lévy?

  ‘As far as she was concerned they had nothing to do with each other. They were two different worlds, I would say.’

  There was something else that Van Vliet wanted to know, something he had been wondering for a long time.

  ‘First music was connected with Marie, then with Lévy. It always had to do … with love.’ Did Lea simply love music – I mean, for its own sake?

  Caroline had never asked herself that question. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘No, I really don’t know. Sometimes … No, no idea.’

  Once again she gazed into the distance as if she wanted to tell him something about Lea that he couldn’t know. But then she looked at him and said something which I think spared Van Vliet a great deal: ‘I’ll ask Dad to take on your defence. He’s good on cases like yours, very good.’

  He hugged her as they said goodbye and held her for a moment too long, as if she were Lea. Caroline wiped the tears from her eyes as she left.

  The next morning he went to the Prosecutors’ Office.

  30

  HE DIDN’T TELL ME much about the investigation and the trial. Between his sparse sentences he threw bits of bread to the swans. A man like him in the dock: there wasn’t much to explain. As he threw the bread, I had the feeling he was taking care not to be sucked into the maelstrom of memory; to glide away over it unharmed.

  The investigating magistrate, whose job it was to test the credibility of his statement, focused on two things: the motive and the circumstance that neither the violin nor a receipt for its purchase could be presented. ‘There were moments when he looked at me with an expression that suggested I was a lunatic or a hardened liar.’ For a long time Van Vliet refused to dig out the remains of the violin. What he didn’t reveal – not even to the court – was the true story of its destruction. He himself had trodden on it in the dark – nothing more could be enticed from him.

  I see you sitting in the courtroom, Martijn – a man who could stay silent like a great stone wall.

  The investigating magistrate wanted to question Lea. Van Vliet must have lost his composure at that point. Dr Meridjen wrote an assessment. Van Vliet dreamed that the doctor told her about it. After that he sat on the edge of his bed and hammered his head with his fists, dinning into himself the insight that no doctor would do such a thing, ever.

  Caroline’s father managed to get him a lenient sentence, not least because Van Vliet had confessed. Eighteen months on probation. The judge must have found it easier to understand the motive. Part of her task – she must have said – was judging how difficult it would have been for him not to do what he had done. Van Vliet said only one word: Impossible.

  Eventually someone must have dropped the phrase ‘psychiatric assessment’. The two words sounded hoarse when Van Vliet spoke about it. A dangerous hoarseness. Then he mutely pursed and unpursed his lips, pursed and unpursed. For a while he forgot to throw the bits of bread to the swans and crumbled them between his fingers.

  Of course he lost his professorship. The sponsors saw to it that his remaining funds were impounded. What he was left with was enough for the two-room apartment in which he now lived, and he was also able to keep his car. Caroline’s father helped him in his battle with medical insurance. At the end he persuaded them to shoulder the cost of Lea’s stay in Saint-Rémy.

  The newspapers wrote in big letters, they came at him from every corner, bold and brutal. He walked absently through the city and bought up all the copies so that Lea wouldn’t get to see them.

  ‘During that time I played against the old man in Cremona, again and again. At last I found a solution. The problem was: I don’t accept sacrifices. I assume from the outset that every gambit is a trap that you mustn’t think about any further. That was how it was back then. I should have taken the damned bishop. The old man had miscalculated and I also discovered why. I should have taken him with my pawn. Now I moved my pawn over and thought: That one movement, an inch, an inch and a half – and I wouldn’t be here in court.

  ‘Mother used to laugh when Father, violently reproaching himself, said that he could disencrypt himself; she found the expression hysterical. Now it occurred to me too: sometimes I was so furious with myself that I felt as if I were almost losing my mind. The worst thing was when I said to myself: You basically didn’t do it for Lea, you did it for yourself. You travelled to see the old man because you fell into the trap of the gambler, out of self-infatuation.’

  He said he wanted to go for a short walk on his own and looked at me apologetically. I knew: the worst was yet to come.

  31

  ‘AS A LITTLE CHILD Lea was impressed by the brown glass containers with the handwritten labels that stood on the shelves in the chemist’s shop. She even drew the jars. They must have had a mysterious power of attraction for her; perhaps because behind the dark glass you could see the bright powder that looked as if it was hidden, promising or even dangerous. Later she once saw Cécile locking the special medicine cabinet in the hospital. “That’s the poison cupboard,” Cécile explained. Lea must have been very impressed with the phrase, because over dinner she asked: “Why would they need poison in hospital?”

  ‘I thought about that when I learned of her death. She did it during the night shift.’

  A year ago she had come back from Saint-Rémy. She had called not him, but Agnetha. It had hurt; on the other hand, he was glad that she didn’t see his shabby apartment. He had come up with various explanations as he lay awake in bed. None of them sounded believable. But he would never reach the truth all by himself. He realized to his horror that he was afraid of bumping into his daughter.

  She started training as a nurse and lived in the nurses’ home. It was at the other end of the city. He lived in the same city as his daughter and he still hadn’t seen h
er. Agnetha gave him the number. ‘I’d wait until she calls,’ she said.

  For fear of meeting her he didn’t dare go into the centre for the first few weeks. ‘I lived as if something inside me were pressing hard on me. I think my breathing was very shallow. Like someone ashamed of his very existence. It only dawned on me very slowly: behind my back the shame of fraud and condemnation had turned into a feeling of guilt towards Lea. But there was no such guilt!

  ‘I became furious: with the Maghrebi, who had persuaded her of God alone knows what; with Agnetha, because of her remark; even with Caroline, who thought it was better not to give back the dog. And I became furious with Lea, more and more each day. Why – damn it all to hell – didn’t she call? Why was she behaving as if I had done something to her?’

  It was last autumn when they finally met. A warm day, people were lightly clad. That was why the first thing he noticed was her stiff, modest suit and her severe hairdo. He didn’t recognize her immediately. He caught his breath: less than two years had passed since he last saw her through his binoculars in Saint-Rémy, and she looked as if at least twice as much time had gone by. Clear eyes behind rimless glasses, the whole appearance not without elegance, but unapproachable, terribly unapproachable.

  Slowly they took the last steps towards one another. They shook hands. ‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Lea,’ he said.

  Van Vliet stepped to the shore, scooped a handful of water and let it run down his face.

  I felt myself slumping. I didn’t want to hear anything more of this sorry tale. I didn’t have the strength.

  They had stepped out together on to the Minster Terrace and stood side by side in silence for a while.

  ‘I can never make up for it,’ she said suddenly.

  A great weight fell from him. For the first time in months he was able to take a deep breath. That was why, only that was why she had been avoiding him. And she didn’t know anything about fraud and the guilty verdict, she talked only about the violin. He wanted to hug her, but paused before he could. Her voice had sounded as it always did. But otherwise she felt strange to him; not forbidding and not cold, but rather limp; like someone just ticking over.