The Gustav Sonata

by Rose Tremain

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Gustav. ‘But your train’s better than mine, isn’t it?’

  ‘I like yours,’ said Anton. ‘I like those people painted on the windows. Mine’s got nobody in it – just coal.’

  Ice

  Matzlingen, 1949

  THIS WAS THE new, wonderful thing: skating.

  Frau Zwiebel, whose first name was Adriana, had once been a ‘hopeful’ in the skating world. At fifteen she’d won a competition in Bern. She told Gustav that this had been one of the happiest moments of her life. She’d expected to go on and win more prizes, but at sixteen she moved into ‘a different category’ and the girls she was competing against were what she called ‘full-blown professionals, with dragons for mothers and steel for sinews’. And so no more prizes came her way, but she still loved skating, for its own sake, and when she heard about the new rink opening in Matzlingen – a covered rink with smooth, manufactured ice and a huge gramophone which played Swiss folk music and American jazz, and a café counter which sold drinks and pretzels – she said to Anton, ‘Let’s go on Sunday afternoons. We can take Gustav. I’ll pay for us all.’

  She had a beautiful glide. And she could still gather momentum for a perfect lutz and land with grace. Adriana Zwiebel dressed herself in woollen leggings, a short tartan skirt and a green leather jacket. The eyes of the men at the rink followed her as she made her elegant turns, with her arms held out like a dancer’s and her dark hair tied in a ponytail flicking and flouncing as she moved.

  Seven-year-old Anton and seven-year-old Gustav watched her, too, not so much because she was beautiful, but because they knew they could learn from her. Anton was naturally good at skating and Gustav was not, but Gustav set himself to master everything Anton could do and, in time, everything that Adriana could do – however distant this goal might be. He fell over frequently, but he never cried, though the ice was hard, the hardest surface his bones had ever met. He taught himself to laugh instead. Laughing was a bit like crying. It was a strange convulsion; it just came from a different bit of your mind. The trick was to move the crying out of that bit and let the laughter in. And so he’d pick himself up and carry on, laughing.

  At the end of the afternoon, he and Anton would do one circuit of what they called their ‘mad dash’. They would hold hands and skate in synchronisation as fast as they could round the rink’s outer edge. They came to be known by the rink regulars as ‘the laughing boys’. At this time, Gustav was one inch shorter than Anton.

  It was at the skating rink, where Anton and Gustav were allowed to buy hot chocolate, that Gustav learned about something ‘nobody ever mentions’.

  Anton told him that he had once had a baby sister, named Romola. He said, ‘I can’t remember her very well. She just stayed being a baby and then she died.’

  ‘Why did she?’ asked Gustav.

  ‘That’s what nobody talks about.’

  ‘Was she killed by some robbers?’

  ‘I can’t remember any robbers.’

  ‘They could have come with a hatchet, or something?’

  ‘I don’t think they did. I was three. I would have remembered robbers, wouldn’t I? I think my sister just died in her cot and then she was buried, and some time after that my father got ill and was put into a hospital. My mother told me he was ill because Romola had died and he had to be left in peace, to recover.’

  Gustav and Anton looked out at Adriana, still on the ice, still turning and leaping, as if she would never weary of her own wonderful grace.

  ‘What about her?’ asked Gustav. ‘Wasn’t your mother ill, too, after the death of baby Romola?’

  ‘No,’ said Anton. ‘My mother is never ill. She’s never even tired. Except when we had to leave Bern. She said she was tired then. I expect it was the thought of moving all the furniture. We couldn’t leave it behind, because my parents are very fond of furniture.’

  ‘So why did you leave Bern?’

  ‘Something to do with my father’s job. I think the bank in Bern thought – after he’d been ill for a long time because of my sister dying – that he’d be happier in a smaller bank, and so we came to Matzlingen.’

  ‘And you cried at the kindergarten.’

  ‘And you drew your Mutti as an ice cream!’

  They laughed then, but Anton stopped laughing suddenly and said, ‘You must never, ever tell anybody about Romola, Gustav. Swear in blood.’

  ‘What d’you mean, swear in blood?’

  ‘You have to. We have to cut our arms with our skate blades and mix the blood together and then you have to swear.’

  ‘All right.’

  All his life, Gustav would recall that it’s difficult to make a cut in your arm with an ice skate. The blades look sharp, but they’re not sharp enough for easy cutting. ‘We made a hash of it,’ he would tell people. ‘We couldn’t get the blood to come. But then it did because we made the cuts too deep and we were both in pain, but we had to cover this up.’

  Then, one day after school, Gustav was summoned to see the headmaster. Laid out on the headmaster’s desk were some of Gustav’s work books. There, for anyone to see, was how poor Gustav’s writing still was. Even his attempts at drawing and map-making were weak.

  ‘Well?’ said the headmaster. ‘What are we to make of these?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Gustav.

  ‘No. Precisely. And nor does your mother. She’s in despair. Aren’t you, Frau Perle?’

  Gustav turned and saw Emilie, sitting very still in a green chair. He hadn’t noticed her when he came in. He didn’t know how she’d got into the headmaster’s study so silently. He thought she looked like someone in a painting.

  Emilie said, ‘The thing is, Headmaster, I really want Gustav to succeed in his life. I want him to do something his father would have been proud of, and if his education amounts to nothing –’

  ‘No, no,’ said the headmaster, ‘his education will not amount to nothing. Gustav is not yet eight. We have time. But what I am going to suggest is some extra coaching, so that he can catch up in certain subjects. His maths are satisfactory, quite good, even, but the rest is poor. I have a young teacher in the school, Herr Hodler, who would be willing to come and tutor him, for a small consideration, on Sunday afternoons.’

  ‘No!’ Gustav burst out. ‘Not Sunday afternoons! I go skating then.’

  ‘Be quiet, Gustav,’ said Emilie.

  ‘The only time Herr Hodler has available is Sunday afternoons,’ said the headmaster. ‘It’s up to you, but personally I feel this would be of great benefit. Otherwise, we may have to keep Gustav down a class, to repeat the year’s work.’

  Gustav turned imploringly to his mother, but she was looking past him at the headmaster.

  ‘What will the tuition cost?’ she asked.

  ‘Not more than a few francs an hour. I don’t know what entry fees you pay at the ice rink, but I’ve heard they’re expensive. It may come to little more than that.’

  Gustav wanted to tell the headmaster that it was Adriana Zwiebel who paid for the rink, and for the skate hire and the hot chocolate and pretzels, but Emilie had her finger pressed to her lips, warning him to say nothing.

  They walked home in silence.

  By the time they got to Unter der Egg, it was raining. Gustav went straight to his room, hoping to be left alone, but Emilie followed him there. She sat on the bed and he stood at the window, holding on to his tin train. He was praying she wouldn’t speak. Because he knew that if Emilie told him he was going to have to give up his skating with Anton and Adriana, he was probably going to cry.

  Coconut

  Matzlingen, 1949–50

  THAT WAS IT, then: no more skating. No more ‘laughing boys’.

  Gustav hit the walls of his room. He smashed his train. He screamed at Emilie. She cuffed his head to silence him. She picked up the broken train and threw it into the rubbish bin.

  Herr Hodler was a thin, pale young man, with eyes that were pink-rimmed, like the eyes o
f a white rabbit. At the apartment on Unter der Egg, these rabbit eyes looked about, in vain, for a table on which the required work might be done.

  ‘There is no table,’ said Emilie Perle.

  She showed Herr Hodler the hinged kitchen shelf. He stared at it. He wasn’t being paid well for this tuition and the sight of this inadequate space made him sigh with frustration. He told Emilie he would do his best, but that he didn’t think Gustav’s concentration would be helped by these ‘cramped work conditions’.

  He hadn’t been told that Gustav had had to sacrifice his skating, so he was further dismayed by the boy’s anger and resentment at being there with him. When Gustav deliberately knocked to the floor the storybooks and history books which had been placed on the shelf, Herr Hodler swore.

  ‘Scheisse!’

  The swear word seemed to echo around the silent kitchen. It had always been part of Emilie’s credo of self-mastery that swearing was an unpleasant indulgence, never to be allowed. And now the schoolteacher had transgressed this sacred edict.

  It made Gustav want to laugh. He felt better. He apologised to Herr Hodler and helped him to pick up the books and rearrange them on the shelf. When he saw that one of the books was entitled A Short History of Switzerland, he said to Herr Hodler, ‘I don’t know anything about the history of Switzerland. All I know is the war didn’t come here. It went to Germany and Russia and other places and all the buildings were bombed. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Herr Hodler. ‘More or less. Except millions of people died, too. What we believe in Switzerland is that we should avoid conflict, especially being drawn into the conflicts of others. We call it “neutrality”. Do you know what this means?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It means we believe in ourselves. We protect our own. And you know, this is a good way to be in your life, Gustav. Have you ever eaten a coconut?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know coconuts have a very tough outer shell?’

  ‘I’ve never eaten one.’

  ‘Well, the shell is hard and fibrous, difficult to penetrate. It protects the nourishing coconut flesh and milk inside. And that is how Switzerland is and how Swiss people should be – like coconuts. We protect ourselves – all the good things that we have and that we are – with hard and determined yet rational behaviour – our neutrality. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘That I’ve got to be like a coconut?’

  ‘Yes. Then you will not be hurt, Gustav.’

  ‘I am hurt.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I used to go skating on Sunday afternoons. Skating was my favourite thing in the world. Now, I can’t go any more. I’ve got to do lessons with you.’

  Herr Hodler’s pink, flickering eyes looked anxiously at Gustav.

  ‘I didn’t know this,’ he said.

  ‘I was getting quite good at skating. I could do small jumps. Now it’s all over. That hurts me.’

  ‘I understand. All I can suggest is that we get on with the lessons as quickly as we can. That way, you will make progress, and then perhaps in a few weeks’ time, you can resume your skating?’

  After that, Gustav and Herr Hodler became friends – or at least not enemies.

  Herr Hodler permitted Gustav to address him by his first name, which was Max. Gustav saw that Max Hodler had very beautiful handwriting and he asked him to teach him how to write like this.

  Lines were ruled. Along these lines, Max supervised the slow beat-beat, like distant music, of Gustav’s letter formation: a a a a a a, b b b b b b, c c c c c c.

  He said that Gustav should pretend he had never learned to write, because somehow he had learned all wrong and now he had to start again. Sometimes, Max drew very large letters for Gustav to copy and together they examined the forms and shapes of the letters, how they turned and curved, like patterns on the ice. And so this is what Gustav thought about now, when he was forming letters. He pretended his pencil was a skater.

  ‘Good,’ said Max. ‘There is improvement.’

  Gustav wanted to take the improved letters to show Emilie, but he suspected that Emilie was asleep and, besides, Max said they couldn’t waste time showing anybody half-formed work. There was far too much to do. Gustav’s reading was still poor and to help him concentrate, Max Hodler brought along one of his own favourite books, Struwwelpeter. In this book, disobedient children brought doom upon themselves in a variety of ways. A little girl, who loved playing with matches, set fire to her dress and was burned to a pile of ash. A boy called Konrad who sucked his thumb had the thumb cut off by a great red-legged scissor-man.

  Weh! Jetzt geht es klipp und klapp

  mit der Scher die Daumen ab,

  mit der grossen scharfen Scher!

  Hei! Da schreit der Konrad sehr.*

  These stories thrilled Gustav. Partly, they were able to thrill him and not frighten him too badly because the children in the drawings wore old-fashioned clothes, so he assumed that everything that happened to them was safely in the past and couldn’t happen now, when it was almost 1950. He asked Max if he could borrow Struwwelpeter and read it in bed at night. Max hesitated. He warned Gustav that the stories might give him nightmares.

  ‘No, they won’t,’ said Gustav. ‘I’ll just learn to read better, if I read them over and over.’

  He took Max to see his little room, with its map of Mittelland, but with no toys and no books in it, and when Max saw this room he relented and said Gustav could keep Struwwelpeter, provided he took care of it. When he asked Gustav why he had no toys, Gustav said, ‘I had a train. But I smashed it and Mutti threw it away.’

  Drawing was something else Max Hodler was gifted at. He drew – very fast, with swift, bold pen-strokes – a picture for Gustav of three men standing in a field of flowers, wearing robes and carrying swords. He explained that these men, from the forest cantons of Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden had lived a long, long time ago at the end of the thirteenth century. It was they who were the true founders of Switzerland. They had defied their powerful Habsburg masters to swear an allegiance and, from this allegiance, the country slowly came into being. Every year, on August 1st, this historic moment, in what was known as the Rütli Meadow, was remembered as Swiss National Day.

  He told Gustav that not many people ‘in the wider world’ had any knowledge about the history of Switzerland. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is because Switzerland is just an idea to them – clocks and chalets and banks and mountains. But we – you and I, Gustav – who are part of it, know that we are not just an idea. And we also know about neutrality, about the concept of the coconut, so we must learn our history and be proud of it.’

  He wanted Gustav to try to copy his drawing, or even one small part of it, like a sword or a flower, but Gustav broke in to tell him about the posies of gentians Emilie arranged round the photograph of Erich Perle on Swiss National Day and how Emilie said that he had been a hero.

  Max put down the fine pen he had used for his drawing and turned to Gustav.

  ‘Tell me about that,’ he said. ‘Who was your father?’

  ‘He was a policeman. Assistant Police Chief at Matzlingen Police Headquarters. He died when I was very little.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Mutti says it was the Jews.’

  Silence fell in the small kitchen. Max Hodler shook his head and sighed, then got down from his chair. ‘I’m going out for a short breath of air,’ he said. ‘See if you can copy something from the Rütli Meadow drawing, Gustav. Anything you like. A face. A hand. The stones among the grass. Don’t hurry. Just work slowly and carefully.’

  It was winter again, just past the new year, 1950. Gustav had been working with Max Hodler every Sunday for three months.

  Alone in his cold room, Gustav missed his train. He’d given names to the painted people and used to whisper to them as they journeyed up and down the windowsill. The thought that he’d crushed them and killed them made him feel ashamed.

&n
bsp; When he told Anton about this, Anton said, ‘Sometimes, you have to break things. I broke a metronome. I was trying to play a Chopin waltz and it kept going wrong, so I broke the stupid metronome. My father hit me on the bottom with his belt. He asked me if I wanted to make him ill again.’

  ‘How could you make him ill again?’

  ‘By breaking the metronome; I told you. So, anyway, get your Mutti to buy you another train.’

  But Emilie had no money.

  More and more, in the late evenings, she drank her aniseed drinks and fretted over her sums on the edges of the Matzlingerzeitung. Late one night, she told Gustav that rumours had begun circulating that the cheese co-operative was failing, that demand for Emmental had fallen now that the French were once again making so many different varieties of cheese, and that it was only a question of time before the Matzlingen Co-operative would close. ‘And then,’ said Emilie, ‘what are we going to do?’

  Gustav went and fetched the work he’d been doing with Max Hodler – pages of nicely formed letters, paragraphs of careful writing, drawings of swords and helmets and flowers and of girls setting their dresses alight with matchfire – and put this down in front of Emilie, covering up her mathematical scribbles on the newspaper.

  She stared down, wide-eyed. She put on her spectacles.

  ‘Is this your work?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gustav, ‘of course it’s my work.’

  ‘Well. It’s not bad.’

  Gustav let his mother take in the pictures of the girls setting themselves on fire, but before she could say anything about them, Gustav said, ‘You can save money now, Mutti. Because I don’t need Herr Hodler any more. My work is better.’

  Emilie took a long swig of her aniseed drink. She fumbled for a cigarette and lit it with shaking hands. Gustav wanted to put his arms round her and lay his head on her shoulder, but he knew she didn’t want this; all she wanted was her drink and her cigarette.