The Gustav Sonata

by Rose Tremain

  One day, they decided that Frau Bünden had died. They carried her, wrapped in a torn rug, on a wicker recliner, to the outhouse. Its door was hanging on one hinge and they pushed this and went in. They put Frau Bünden down. The space in which they found themselves was black with coal dust. At the far end of it was a metal door, and when they opened this, they saw that it was the door to an enormous oven, still choked with ash.

  ‘I told you,’ said Anton. ‘This is where they burned the dead. I suppose they had to burn everything, to stop the infection spreading.’

  ‘Are we going to put Frau Bünden in there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anton. ‘And burn her.’

  ‘We haven’t got any matches.’

  ‘We can bring some from the chalet.’

  They came back the following day with matches and newspaper. They fetched logs from an old, rotting woodpile. Before they put Frau Bünden into the oven, Anton said, ‘Wait, Gustav. You know there’s going to be smoke from the chimney if we make a fire? Then, Monsieur or somebody might come and send us away.’

  ‘We can’t leave her to rot,’ said Gustav.

  They stared at the recliner not knowing what they should do. After a few moments, Anton said, ‘Listen! Hans is rattling his tambourine. He needs us. We’ll burn Frau Bünden some other time.’

  ‘I know what,’ suggested Gustav. ‘Let’s burn all the dead ones on our last day. We can light the fire and then just run back to the chalet.’

  ‘How many dead ones are there going to be?’ asked Anton.

  ‘We haven’t decided,’ said Gustav.

  They went out onto the veranda, glad to breathe in the scent of the firs and feel the sunlight on their faces. They stood looking down at the village far below and Gustav thought with dismay of the scant time remaining in Davos, and of his miserable return to the apartment on Unter der Egg. On an impulse – not knowing that he was going to do this – he turned to Anton and said, ‘I don’t want to go home. Something bad happens there.’

  ‘What happens?’

  ‘It’s a secret, right? I’ve never told anyone and you must never tell a single other soul.’

  ‘I won’t. Don’t look so panicked, Gustav.’

  ‘All right. Swear you won’t tell?’

  ‘I swear.’

  ‘OK, it’s this, then. There’s a man in our block, Ludwig, who tries to make me touch him.’

  ‘Tries to make you touch him?’

  ‘Yes. Touch his penis. I hate him. It makes me feel disgusting.’

  Anton looked hard at Gustav. ‘Did you do it?’ he asked. ‘Did you touch his dick?’

  ‘No. I never would. I wish he was dead.’

  ‘All right,’ said Anton. ‘Let’s kill him. What’s his name? Ludwig? We’ll give him TB and let him die and then burn him.’

  ‘Promise you won’t tell, Anton?’

  ‘Of course I won’t. I’ve sworn, haven’t I? But Ludwig’s got to die.’

  They selected another recliner. They put a badly stained mattress onto it and threw down a torn piece of grey fabric, which might once have been part of a curtain.

  ‘There you are,’ said Anton. ‘Ludwig.’

  Anton put the stethoscope in his ears and bent down towards Ludwig, to listen to the murmur of his lungs. ‘Ah,’ he said, after a while, ‘I’m sorry to tell you, Ludwig, there is no improvement. Doctor Perle, is there any of Ludwig’s special medicine left?’

  ‘No,’ said Doctor Perle. ‘None. I can order more from Geneva, but I’m afraid it will arrive too late.’

  ‘Did you hear that, Ludwig?’ said Doctor Zwiebel. ‘What we suggest is that you prepare yourself for death.’

  At this moment, the sun went in. The rag covering Ludwig became a dark shadow, seemingly without form.

  Gustav shivered. ‘If we’re going to kill Ludwig,’ he said, ‘I think Hans should be saved.’

  On their last day, they lit the fire in the oven. They tried to put Frau Bünden into the oven, lying dead on her bamboo recliner, but the recliner wouldn’t fit through the oven door, so they took her off the bed, wrapped in her rug, and threw her in. The wool rug seemed greedy for the flame and hissed and crackled like a firework.

  Then Anton took an axe they’d found near the woodpile and began to break up the recliner.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ asked Gustav.

  ‘You’ll see. It’s clever. The bamboo stalks will look like human bones, then we’ll have proper bodies to burn.’

  It was hard work. They took it in turns to heft the axe. Then they arranged the bamboo pieces, still joined here and there to the wickerwork threads, into skeletal patterns. They looked strangely real, with their sad sinews of wicker hanging off them, representing all that remained of their emaciated flesh.

  ‘They’re good,’ said Gustav. ‘Very good, Anton. Except they’ve got no heads.’

  It was at this moment that they heard, still some distance away, the sound of a fire engine’s siren.

  ‘Scheisse!’ said Anton. ‘They’ll find us and cart us off to prison. Never mind about the heads. Let’s call this one Ludwig and put him in, and then we’ll run.’

  They took up the bamboo skeleton and hurled it in, piece by piece.

  ‘Die, Ludwig!’ cried Anton.

  ‘Die, Ludwig!’ repeated Gustav.

  The siren sound was very near now. Anton and Gustav ran out of the Sanatorium of Sankt Alban and down the forest path, then catapulted themselves into the undergrowth of the woods and hid there, waiting for the fire engine to pass. They clung together, afraid, yet filled with exaltation. They could hear each other’s hearts beating.

  It was only after a while that Gustav remembered Hans, still lying on the veranda. ‘What about Hans?’ he whispered.

  ‘We can’t go back,’ said Anton. ‘We have to pretend Hans just walked out of there.’

  ‘Without his tambourine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Gustav was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘We didn’t say goodbye to him, Anton. And I know I’m going to think about the tambourine. Aren’t you? I’m just going to imagine it being there for evermore.’

  Part Two

  Schwingfest

  Matzlingen, 1937

  EUROPE IS MOVING, slowly, almost blindly, like a sleepwalker, towards catastrophe. But in the villages of Mittelland, the calendar of feast days and festivals unrolls through a fine untroubled summer. The valleys, with their plainchant of cowbells, lie half sleeping in the sun. The rivers, fed by snowmelt and spring rain, bubble innocently along, in their eternal, gossipy conversations.

  Emilie Albrecht, twenty years old – not yet Emilie Perle – goes with her friend Sofie Moritz to a Schwingfest, held on National Day, outside Matzlingen. A great crowd has gathered here. Tables are set out with jugs of beer and sausages are grilled over wood fires. A band plays, the musicians already sweating in their smart uniforms. Some of the crowd, wearing their National Dress with pride, dance in little preordained circles, to soft applause. But it is the Schwingers, men of strength and substance wrestling in a makeshift arena, surrounded by gentle grass slopes, who are the main attraction, the heroes of the day.

  Emilie and Sofie wear long, full skirts with embroidered aprons and gauzy blouses. Their smooth skin is tanned and freckled by the August sun. Their blue eyes shine with laughter as they watch the Schwingers slugging it out in the sawdust, shoulder to shoulder, thigh pressing against thigh, faces and arms streaked with sand and sweat. They cry out with delight as one of the Schwingers pounces on his opponent and lifts him by his linen shorts and swings him up into the air, with the seeming power of a prehistoric beast, and lets him fall sideways, pinning him to the ground with all his magnificent weight.

  A cheer goes up. Emilie and Sofie clap and laugh. How sweetly foolish and yet how strong, how determined, how male the Schwingers are! And how magnificent it might be to be enveloped by their arms, to breathe their sweat, to discover an animal lust in their faces. The young women look at each othe
r and nod, yes, we would like this one day, to be lifted out of our virgin lives, to be carried off as a giant might carry off a princess in the old fairy tales, and then to know, at last, the unspeakable thing.

  Another bout begins. The scores are marked up by the judges. The two wrestlers writhe and lunge in the dust, each with his crowd of supporters to cheer him on. The August sun is so high in the sky, there are almost no shadows; the scene is pure colour and movement and unquantifiable human joy.

  It’s well known in Switzerland that a Schwingfest clutches at the heart, that it invariably sends everybody a little crazy for a brief afternoon. Who invented this sport? Nobody cares. It’s older than time, and time has packed it with patriotic significance and sexual charge. Its excitement is a contagion that will grow throughout the day and explode at dusk with fireworks. Only a few will resist.

  Now, Emilie and Sofie hold their breath, waiting for the next lift, the next swing, the next annihilating fall. They want it never to end. They’ve bought beer and sausages, wrapped in red-and-white-chequered paper. They are drunk on the beer, on the August sunlight, on the thrill of Swiss National Day, on the knowledge of their own youth and prettiness. They don’t care if their lips are oily with sausage grease. They don’t care, either, if their underwear, in that place between their legs – a place they have been told never to speak of – is damp. They lean in together and whisper. They speak, shockingly, of that forbidden place, and this excites them further. They have to mask their wickedness with laughter.

  So she is ready, then. She is ready when, as the sun tilts, Erich Perle, crowned Schwinger Champion of the afternoon, comes towards her, carrying a jug of beer. He’s a well-built, good-looking man with thick brown hair and kind eyes. She is ready, exactly where she sits now, on a grassy bank, a little drowsy, but still full of her dreams. She is ready for all that is going to happen.

  She tells him her name is Emilie Albrecht and he tells her his name is Erich Perle and that he is Assistant Police Chief in Matzlingen. For some reason – and this moves her more than she can express – he tells her his age: thirty-four.

  Erich Perle.

  She looks up at him. She wants to be his wife. She wants to be Frau Perle. She wants to lie on a white bed with him. She wants his children. All this she knows, almost before he has sat down beside her and poured beer for her and Sofie.

  But then, it seems – and this is surely wrong and wasn’t meant to happen? – it is Sofie he keeps looking at. Sofie and Emilie both work at the Gasthaus Helvetia in Matzlingen and Erich says to Sofie, ‘Oh, what a coincidence. We have our annual Police Department lunch at the Gasthaus Helvetia. I think I may have seen you there.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ smiles Sofie. ‘Emilie and I are only maids.’

  ‘Ah, maids …’ he says with a twinkle in his eye. ‘And are you maidens, too?’

  ‘I don’t know how you can dare to ask us that!’ says Sofie. ‘It’s very impertinent, you know.’

  ‘Of course it is. But – didn’t you hear – the Schwingfest Champion is allowed to do anything he likes on this day, just until dusk.’

  ‘Do anything he likes? We didn’t know that, did we, Emilie?’

  ‘No. Does that mean you could kill someone, if you wanted to?’

  ‘I suppose I could. But then I would have to arrest myself.’

  They laugh. Sofie is gazing at his laughing mouth. She asks him to tell them what it’s like, wrestling in sawdust, lifting another man into the air and hurling him down.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘it’s enthralling. Ninety per cent of police business is very dull. We all long to lift other men into the air and hurl them down!’

  ‘Don’t you like being a policeman, then?’ asks Sofie.

  He swigs beer. A faint line of white foam remains on his lips. Emilie lies back on the grass and closes her eyes. She imagines Erich Perle leaning down to kiss her, the scent of him becoming stronger and stronger until at last his mouth is on hers.

  But he doesn’t lean down. He starts talking to Sofie about his work. He says, ‘The task of a police officer in Switzerland isn’t really very onerous.’

  ‘What’s “onerous”?’ asks Sofie.

  ‘Burdensome or difficult. The reason police work isn’t very onerous is because the Swiss enjoy obeying the law. On the whole, unless a law is felt to be unjust, they prefer to obey it. When I joined the force, I was told in one of the lectures that Switzerland is a country where people have mastery over themselves. In many other countries, this mastery doesn’t obtain.’

  Emilie opens her eyes. Squinting against the bright sunlight, she can see Erich’s profile and Sofie’s beyond it. It makes her smile to think that she has no mastery over herself when it comes to this man. Virgin though she is, she would go with him to the woods, now, this moment, and let him do the act, the act complete that she has been warned never, never to do until she is married. She knows it would hurt, but that the pain of it, with him, would be a beautiful kind of pain.

  But then she sees something dismaying: Erich Perle has put his arm around Sofie. Emilie knows that Sofie is prettier than she is. And Sofie’s voice has a little crack in it that men find irresistible. The manager at the Gasthaus Helvetia is ridiculously smitten with her, and it seems that Erich Perle might be going to fall for her, too.

  Mastery, Emilie thinks. That was the word he used. I must master the situation. I must save it. On the next few minutes depends the rest of my life.

  With her eyes still closed, she says, ‘Herr Perle, you said that you, as the Schwinger Champion, could do anything you liked this afternoon, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I did.’

  ‘Could that anything include kissing me?’

  She hears Sofie’s shocked intake of breath. Silence from Erich Perle. Emilie opens her eyes. Erich has turned away from Sofie and is looking down at her.

  Troubled, Emilie thought afterwards. That was how he looked after she’d said these brazen words.

  She waits.

  ‘It could include it,’ he says in a soft voice.

  ‘Or,’ says Emilie, ‘perhaps you don’t want to?’

  ‘On the contrary …’

  ‘Emilie,’ says Sofie, ‘you’ve had quite a lot of beer …’

  ‘I know,’ says Emilie. ‘I have. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to say what I feel, but what I feel is that I would like Herr Perle to kiss me. Men say what they feel; why can’t women?’

  She knows that the kiss will be fleeting, just a courteous touch of Erich’s lips on hers. But what she does, when she feels him come near, is to reach up and pull him towards her and when his mouth reaches hers, she opens it. So then she feels him respond, excited, perhaps, by her shocking, unmaidenly behaviour. The kiss becomes long and deep and hard. She holds him to her, never wanting to let him go.

  Later in the evening, there are fireworks. A little drunk, tired now by the thrills of the day, some staggering about, some huddled together in maudlin embraces, the crowds tilt their faces and send gasps of wonder into the air. Children who have fallen asleep are woken for the spectacle. Schwingfests in Matzlingen seldom happen except on Swiss National Day. A year will pass before all this joy can be shared again. The children are being asked to remember it.

  The fireworks are impressive. Proper money has been raised. This is a small town showing the people its coffers and its civic pride. And how much, how violently, Emilie would like to have Erich Perle, Assistant Police Chief, by her side as the starbursts of violet and yellow explode across the fading sky. But Erich has had to leave. It may be Swiss National Day, he has told her, but the police rota has to be kept and he is on evening duty.

  As he left, taking her hand and kissing it very formally, he said to Emilie, ‘Perhaps I will see you again, Fräulein?’

  She didn’t like ‘perhaps’. And she wanted him to say her name, not call her ‘Fräulein’, like the thoughtless and condescending guests, whose rooms she cleans at the Gasthaus Helvetia. She turn
ed to Sofie and clutched at her arm as Erich walked away from her into the dusk. ‘I know this sounds far-fetched,’ she said, ‘but I know I’m going to die if I can’t have Erich Perle.’

  ‘Have him how?’

  ‘As my husband.’

  Sofie faced her friend. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Emilie. He’s thirty-four. Do you think he doesn’t have a girlfriend already? He might even be married.’

  ‘No,’ said Emilie. ‘If he was married, he wouldn’t have said he’d see me again.’

  ‘He said he might see you again.’

  ‘And I could feel it in his kiss. Passion.’

  ‘He was just fired up by winning the Schwinger Competition. Men love winning things. But also, he had no option, the way you tugged him down. I thought that was quite shocking, if you want my opinion.’

  ‘I don’t want your opinion. All I want is a future with Erich Perle.’

  Emilie knows the Police Headquarters in Matzlingen, an old stuccoed building in the centre of the town, its windows in need of painting, its entrance door heavily reinforced with ornamental metalwork, a huge Swiss flag above the portal. And she decides now that, if Erich doesn’t turn up at the Gasthaus Helvetia in the coming week, she will go to the police building to find him.

  Go to find him? Go brazenly in and call this man, this stranger, to her? And then what? Take him back to her tiny maid’s room in the attic of the Gasthaus Helvetia? Open her body to all that he might wish to do?

  Emilie doesn’t recognise these schemes as belonging to the person she has been for twenty years – obedient, virginal, an innocent with soft blonde hair and the small breasts of a girl – a maiden. She knows that she has been transfigured.

  Is this transfiguration visible? Emilie takes off her clothes and looks at herself in the narrow mirror, in front of which she puts on her maid’s uniform each morning. She touches her pubis and is in an instant aroused by the sight of her hand there. Surely, she thinks, if she can arouse herself so easily, she can become an object of desire?