The Gustav Sonata

by Rose Tremain

  When Frau Krams came back with the ambulance men, Emilie was lifted into a wheelchair and manoeuvred into the tiny elevator. Gustav helped Frau Krams to pack a suitcase with clean nightdresses and shampoo and a toothbrush and Emilie’s broken handbag and the photograph of Erich Perle. Frau Krams told Gustav that she would go to the hospital with Emilie and be back at Unter der Egg by supper time. She told him to come down to her flat and stay there with Ludwig until she returned.

  Ludwig was drinking.

  He said, ‘Vodka is cool. But don’t say a word, eh, Gustavus?’

  Gustav sat on a hard sofa in Frau Krams’s parlour. He took off his shoes and swung his legs onto the sofa and lay down and in moments had fallen asleep, to the sound of a little gas fire popping and sighing as the dusk came on.

  When he woke, it was morning.

  A soft blanket was covering him, red and white, like the Swiss flag, and he pulled this blanket tightly round himself, remembering that he needed protection.

  He could hear Ludwig’s humming, coming from the kitchen. The gas fire was out and there was sunshine at the small window. He knew now that his mother was in the hospital and that he was in the Krams’s apartment. He wondered if it was time to go to school.

  Ludwig came in and bent over Gustav and began tickling him and laughing and with the gusts of laughter came the smell of stale vodka.

  ‘Get up, terrible boy!’ said Ludwig. He reminded Gustav of some punishing character out of Struwwelpeter.

  ‘I’m not terrible,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you are. I’m going to tickle you until you scream!’

  ‘I never scream.’

  ‘I can make you scream.’

  ‘No, you can’t.’

  ‘All right then. Take that blanket off. It’s my blanket anyway, my favourite one, but I let you have it. Wasn’t that kind of me? Now, we’re going to have hot chocolate and bread and pickles.’

  Ludwig and Gustav sat in the parlour at a table covered with a yellow oilcloth. Ludwig had boiled milk for the hot chocolate and set out a plate of bread, with butter and pickled onions. Gustav began gulping all this down. He would have liked to eat a huge plate of bratwurst with boiled potatoes. At last, he said to Ludwig, ‘Why isn’t your mother back?’

  Ludwig shivered. ‘Hospitals,’ he said. ‘They kidnap you. I was kidnapped. I was strapped down to a bed and they gave me electric shocks to my head.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Gustav.

  ‘Who knows? That’s the thing about the world, Gustavus: you just don’t know why the things that happen happen.’

  Gustav drained the dregs of the hot chocolate. ‘Your mother said she’d be back by supper time, but now it’s breakfast.’

  ‘Yes. I hope she’s not having electric shocks to her head. Shall we go to my room? I can show you some of my toys.’

  ‘Toys?’

  ‘Yes. The things I play with.’

  ‘I think I’d better go to school.’

  ‘If you do that, I’ll be lonely, little man.’

  The room was almost as small as Gustav’s and it was choked with some of the things the tenants of the building had thrown out, but which Ludwig had decided to save: faded deckchairs, pictures of Jesus, a broken rocking horse, rusted garden shears, plant pot holders, a Moses basket, a picnic hamper, a sweet jar, magazines, two watering cans, a kiddy car, a set of brocade cushions …

  Gustav stared at all this. There was barely room for Ludwig to get in and out of his narrow bed, so closely did the tide of found objects nudge against its side.

  ‘What would you like to play with?’ asked Ludwig. ‘The rocking horse?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Ludwig clambered over the deckchairs and the picnic hamper to get to the horse. As he lifted it up, something fell out from a wedge of cushions: it was Gustav’s broken tin train.

  The sight of it filled him with wonder. ‘That’s my train! That’s my train!’ he cried. ‘Give it to me, Ludwig.’

  Ludwig picked up the train. ‘It’s mine now,’ he said. ‘I found it in the rubbish bin.’

  ‘Mutti threw it away, not me. I didn’t mean to break it. I was just angry about something. Please let me have it back.’

  ‘No. You can’t have it.’

  ‘Please! Please, Ludwig!’

  Ludwig held the train upside down in the air. If the people in the carriages had been loose and not painted on, they would have fallen out. Then Ludwig stared hard at Gustav. His thin white face seemed suddenly to curdle with a blotchy blush. He put the train down slowly, out of Gustav’s reach.

  ‘I’ve got a cool idea,’ he said.

  ‘Give me back my train!’

  ‘I will if you go along with my idea,’ he said. ‘OK?’

  ‘No. I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘Well, it’s cool. You’ll see. Lots of people do it. We did it at the hospital, where they gave me electric shocks. People are doing it all the time.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Here,’ said Ludwig. ‘Feast your eyes on this, little man.’ Then he opened his fly and brought out his penis, which he began stroking.

  ‘You can have the train if …’ he said.

  Gustav gaped. ‘If what?’

  ‘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?’

  Solo

  Matzlingen, 1951

  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 po
lish 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.