The Gustav Sonata

by Rose Tremain

  ‘I told you,’ says Erich. ‘I’m tired of my actions being criminalised. I did what any man – any man who has an ounce of compassion in his heart – would do. If you’d been there, Roger, you would have done it. But you didn’t see Liebermann. You didn’t see his sorrow. Why should he be made to abandon his family?’

  ‘Who is Liebermann?’

  ‘A doctor. A Jew. With a wife and child already in Switzerland. He missed the entry deadline by eight days. Eight days! And the IF thought I would send him back into Austria – send him back to die. I expect they could hear his bones crunching! But they reckoned without me. They reckoned without Erich Perle, the criminal!’

  There is silence in the room. Steam from the plates of rich food still rises. And Erich then realises abruptly that he is going to be sick. He stands up and lurches out of the room, but doesn’t reach the lavatory and vomits in the hallway.

  Lottie goes very white. Emilie gets up to go to help Erich. As she reaches the door, Roger says quietly to her, ‘I understand what he’s done. I understand.’

  Theft

  Matzlingen, 1939

  FOR SEVERAL MONTHS, he seems to be safe, but then in May 1939 two security officers from the Justice Ministry in Bern arrive at Matzlingen Police Headquarters.

  Why two? Erich wants to ask. Did somebody tell Bern that this man, this loyal Assistant Police Chief, might be violent, might need restraint?

  He is taken to the Interrogation Room, walking past the benches where the Jews sat and waited to learn their fate. It is hot and airless in the room. Erich wipes sweat off his brow and asks for a window to be opened, but one of the Justice Ministry men says, ‘There’s no need. This won’t take long.’

  Heat seems to exacerbate the too-fast oscillation of Erich’s heart. Sometimes, there is an accompaniment to the blood-beat and this is an aureole of pain, spreading across Erich’s chest and up into his throat, threatening to choke him. Now, he wants to loosen his tie, but he knows that he must remain ‘correct’ in front of these officials.

  He waits. Then, he sees arrive in front of him, on the scarred wooden table, a stack of refugee registration forms, bearing the falsified August dates and his signature beneath.

  ‘There you are,’ says the older of the officers. ‘Will you confirm, please, that it is your signature on these forms?’

  Erich stares at the forms. He can remember how his hand always shook as he signed them. Images of the people begging him to help them filter through his mind: women with huge, terrified eyes, girls on the threshold of beauty, grandfathers cradling young children to their chests, men weeping with joy and disbelief when the false dates were written in …

  Erich clears his throat. Sweat runs down his back.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘This is my signature.’

  ‘Good,’ says the younger man. ‘We told you this wouldn’t take long. We are here to inform you that, as from this moment, you are suspended from the Police Service. Your crime is the falsification of entry dates into Switzerland of Jewish refugees, to which these forms bear testimony. You may take your personal belongings from your desk, but no police property, of course. We can only add that you may eventually be prosecuted, for Criminal Infringement of a Justice Ministry Directive. This prosecution is currently under consideration. Meanwhile, your pay and your police pension are forfeited, and the minister himself wishes us to convey to you his extreme displeasure.’

  Erich thinks of Jakob Liebermann opening wide his arms and saying, ‘God will bless you, Herr Assistant Police Chief! God will give you a long and happy life!’ and how he, Erich, knew, as he signed Liebermann’s form, that this was exactly what he had just signed away – the blessing of God, the long and carefree life …

  ‘Please may I ask you one question?’ says Erich quietly.

  ‘Certainly. Go ahead.’

  ‘How do you know that these dates are false? Who told you that I falsified them?’

  The security officers exchange glances.

  ‘That information is classified,’ says the older man. ‘All you need to realise is that you have put your country in danger by deliberately flouting its laws.’

  ‘I did not intend to put my country in danger. I was concerned with saving human life.’

  ‘Admirable, in most circumstances. We all have kind hearts, do we not? But Germany will no longer tolerate an open policy in Switzerland towards Jewish refugees. We risk being punished for it by a German invasion. This would be the end for our unique and beautiful land. And people like you will be held responsible. Oh, and by the way, at the end of the month you and your wife will have to vacate your police apartment on Fribourgstrasse.’

  ‘Where are we to go?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. That’s up to you. You will be given two weeks’ pay. This was urged upon us by your superior, Herr Police Chief Erdman, and we did not object. We are reasonable men. We suggest you use the money very wisely. But none of that is our responsibility.’

  Erich is escorted back to his desk. His police badge is removed and immediately he misses the heaviness of it, as if the metal somehow protected his sick heart. He looks towards Roger Erdman’s office, foolishly nurturing some hope that Roger would intervene to save him, but Roger is not in his room.

  Outside his own office, in the Communications Room, he can hear the sound of typewriters and quiet conversation: police work going routinely on, as though nobody has noticed what is happening to Assistant Police Chief Erich Perle – nobody has understood that his life is ending.

  It is not yet 10 a.m. when Erich leaves Police Headquarters. At the bottom of the steps, he pauses and looks back at the heavy door with its decorated ironwork grille and at the flagpole above it, from which the Swiss flag hangs limp in the May sunshine. And he thinks how much he has loved what these things symbolised. That is the word for it: love. Walking in through that ornate door with pride every single morning, as if the door belonged to him. And so comfortable in his profession that he sometimes caught himself boasting about it, just as he had boasted about it to Emilie on the day he met her at the Schwingfest.

  He carries a few possessions in a paper bag: a photograph of Emilie in Davos, a half-full box of cigars, a desk calendar, a tarnished inkstand.

  He begins to walk away from the building. He’s still wearing his police uniform. He smiles bleakly to think that even the men from the Justice Ministry baulked at sending him out into the street wearing only his underpants. And he feels grateful that he has been left with this one substantial relic of all his years of service and thinks how sincerely he has deserved this. Yet he knows the world in which people deserve things or do not deserve them is passing away. Europe is at war. Fairness is now becoming a word without meaning.

  He can’t imagine what words he is going to use to tell Emilie what has happened. He thinks that the right words probably don’t exist. He wonders how long it will take for Emilie to realise that they have fallen into poverty in a single day.

  She stands by the unlit fire and the sunshine of the May morning bathes the room with flat squares of light.

  She wants to say to Erich, ‘The man I married was Assistant Police Chief Perle. He told me his age and his rank on our first meeting. How can I be reconciled to any other man but this?’

  He looks pathetic to her, standing there with his paper bag – large and foolish. She knows that what is expected of her – what she even expects of herself – is sympathy and comfort, yet she can’t bring herself to move from where she stands, facing him, with her fists tightly clenched.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I hope the Jewish people are satisfied. It was for them that little Gustav died and now it is for them that you’ve sacrificed what remained of our lives.’

  She sees Erich open his mouth to argue with her and then change his mind, and she thinks, good, it’s correct that he doesn’t try to refute this, because that is the plain truth of it: he put Jewish lives before mine. He cared more about helping strangers than he cares about me.

&
nbsp; She wants to walk out of the apartment, walk out into some other life and never return. Yet she thinks, why should I be driven out? Erich should be the one to go. I will stay here and tend my scarlet geraniums and read my magazines and buy French patisseries from the Café Emilie. I will go on as though nothing has happened …

  But when Erich tells her that they will lose the apartment, she lets all her pent-up anger spill out. She tears at her hair. She falls to her knees and beats with her fists on the hearthrug. She grabs a cushion and rips open its seam and hurls feathers all over herself. She begins scratching her face.

  Emilie travels to Basel, to the house of her mother, the house with the water pump in the yard, where the grass grows too long in summer and where wolves can sometimes be heard howling in the woods nearby.

  Nothing is said about when she will be coming back.

  She leaves a few clothes in the wardrobe and an old silver hairbrush on her dressing table. When the taxi arrives to take her to the station, Erich is not there to say goodbye.

  Erich finds a small apartment on Unter der Egg. A flower stall just setting up on this road cheers his spirits. The rent is low, but a high deposit is demanded, a sum of money that will take almost everything that remains to Erich.

  Though he’s uncomfortable about this, he feels he has no choice but to borrow money. He believes that Roger Erdman will lend him the sum required. For Roger feels guilty about what has happened. He’s admitted this. He has told Erich that, had he not been in hospital, but there in the office, seated in front of Liebermann, he might have done exactly the same thing. ‘We can’t know,’ he has said to Erich, ‘until the moment arrives what choice we are going to make.’

  On a Sunday afternoon, Erich walks to Roger’s apartment on Grünewaldstrasse. The door is opened by Lottie, whose hair looks wild and who is dressed in a silk peignoir.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Erich. ‘I’m disturbing you.’

  ‘Oh no,’ says Lottie, yawning, ‘I was just taking a nap, after eating too much chocolate. Roger is in Zurich. It’s ridiculous how decadent I become when he’s away!’

  ‘I’ll leave you in peace – to your decadence! I only came to ask a favour of Roger.’

  ‘No. Come in, Erich. I’m glad you’re here. I want to tell you how angry I am about what’s happened to you. Come in and I’ll make coffee.’

  She doesn’t dress, but only brushes her hair. She sits beside Erich on a small sofa to pour the coffee and he can smell sweat on her body and chocolate on her breath.

  ‘You must tell us what we can do for you, Erich,’ Lottie says. ‘Really, we would do anything.’

  A clock with a silvery chime strikes four. In the silence that falls after the chimes have ended, Erich remembers the night of his ‘confession’ and how he’d felt desire for Lottie Erdman. And now, he knows that he’s troubled by her again – her abundant blonde hair, her over-large bosom, the wholesomeness she exudes, the delight she seems to take in showing off her body.

  He drinks the coffee, but it’s too hot. He knows he must hurry it and leave before he does or says anything that he will regret. Lottie yawns again. One side of the silk peignoir falls off her thigh. She makes no attempt to adjust it, and Erich, unable to resist glancing down, realises that she’s wearing no panties.

  ‘I heard,’ says Lottie, ‘that Emilie has gone to stay with her mother.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Erich.

  ‘Never a very good sign – going back to the mother,’ says Lottie. ‘Does it mean your marriage is over?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Erich.

  Lottie turns and looks at him. The silky peignoir falls further off her lap.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘given that I’m in such a decadent frame of mind, and given that both Roger and Emilie are so very far away, would it be very wicked to have a little fun? Nothing serious, you know. Just something to take our minds off the world and its ton of sorrows. You’re a very handsome man, Erich. I’ve always thought it. I have dreams about you sometimes, extremely sexy dreams, but of course I never tell Roger. I wait till he’s gone to work, then go back to bed and masturbate. Isn’t that a hilariously wicked thing to confess?’

  Erich can’t speak. He knows he should stand up and say goodbye to Lottie and walk out of the apartment. To fuck Roger Erdman’s wife would be a disgraceful thing for him to do. But it seems that Lottie – in her déshabille, with her chocolate breath, with her face shiny from sleep, with her provocative talk about masturbation – is blithe about everything, as though making love with Erich right now might be the most reasonable, natural and innocent thing in the world.

  She gently lifts Erich’s hand and puts it between her legs and holds it there, and with the very first touch of him she closes her eyes. At this, all resistance to her is lost. Erich is almost immediately on his knees and his mouth is where his hand was and the smell and taste of Lottie Erdman, on this hot Sunday afternoon, feels more overwhelming to him than the smell and taste of any woman he has ever known.

  He stays until dusk. The scent of Lottie is all over his body, but he doesn’t want to wash it off. As he leaves, he says, ‘Now I’ll think about you all the time.’

  Pearl

  Basel, 1939–40

  WINTER COMES TO the house with the water pump in the yard. Wearing fluffy blue slippers and a woolly dressing gown, Emilie works the pump handle, up and down, up and down, till the tin basin underneath it is full of water. All the while she is doing this, she is cursing. Inside the house, her mother, Irma Albrecht, waits for the water to be brought in and heated, so that she can wash herself.

  They are living a sorry life. Basel is a prosperous city, but here, a few kilometres from it, there is poverty. Their nearest neighbour is a pig farmer who feeds his animals almost nothing except food thrown away in household bins. Quite frequently, the animals die of poisoning, or choke to death on a piece of cardboard or the key to a sardine tin.

  Emilie’s mother chides this neglectful man, but Emilie feels as much pity for herself as she does for the pigs. Irma uses her, as she was always used before she escaped to Matzlingen, as a servant. She has to clean the dilapidated house, do the washing, wind it through an ancient mangle and hang it in the yard. She has to make the beds and scour the tin bath. Her food is meagre.

  More and more, as winter comes on, Irma takes to her bed. She orders Emilie to massage her back with a special lavender oil, to ward off muscle fatigue and lung ailments. Emilie’s arms ache as she rubs the white, mole-flecked skin. There is a kind of torture in the task, because the sight of Irma’s body, just on the threshold of being old, repels her. She dreads becoming like her. But Irma makes her keep on and on. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know how to do this properly!’ she says. ‘Rub harder. Do you want your mother to die of winter illnesses?’

  Yes. She does. Emilie would like Irma to die. Then, the neglected old house could be sold and she would have money of her own, enough, perhaps, to start a little business in Basel: a flower shop or a small café, with rooms above it for her to live in. She would buy stylish clothes, meet other men, divorce her disgraced husband and marry again. She would conceive another child. She would have a future.

  All there is now, however, is a succession of days, devoid of all pleasure, devoid of all joy. Irma goes back and forth to church. Emilie reads her magazines. She loves to hear about the lives of film stars. She fantasises about becoming the lover of Charlie Chaplin, caressed by his moustache, seduced by his beautiful eyes. She walks in the woods, listening for the sound of wolves. She digs up carrots and turnips from Irma’s garden to keep them both alive. She bakes bread.

  Sometimes, in the freezing nights, she dreams about the apartment on Fribourgstrasse: the warmth of it, the sunlight at the French windows, the scarlet flowers. Erich isn’t in the dreams, but now and then a pale shadow passes between the window and the door, as though born of sunlight, swiftly fleeing away, and she knows what this is: it is her lost Gustav, her lost son.

  Once
in a while, Irma and Emilie take the bus to Basel. Irma puts on her best burgundy-coloured coat and hat. They walk down Freie Strasse, past the faded façade of the painted Rathaus, and go into a tea room off Marktplatz, where Irma orders chocolate cake and tea. She never pays for it. When the bill comes, she signs it and gives it back. Emilie has no idea how this arrangement was agreed upon, or how it will end. The café owners, Herr and Frau Mollis, seem forever polite and resigned to Irma’s scrawled signatures.

  In the café, Emilie looks out for Jews. She’s been told that a lot of French Jews are now living in the Basel area, but no one is talking French in the tea room. When they go out into the busy town again, she hopes to see some Jews lying in the street, drunk or destitute, perhaps too weak to beg?

  On the corner of Martinsgasse there is a jewellery shop, and when she looks in there one day she sees what she thinks of as a recognisably Jewish face staring back at her, a prosperous-looking man in his fifties, tugging at shirt cuffs secured with heavy gold cufflinks, and she wants to go into the shop and tell him, I lost everything because of you. I want you to know this. I want all of you to know it. I had a beautiful life and now I have a life of poverty and misery – because of you.

  But Irma drags her on past the jewellery shop. ‘It’s time to go home,’ she says. ‘I need my enema.’

  Always, after the cake-eating, there is the ritual of the enema. Irma’s body is so used to a poor diet of bread and vegetables that – even though she gobbles the cake like a greedy infant – she believes that ‘special arrangements’ have to be made to accommodate anything rich or fatty. ‘That,’ she says, ‘is God’s punishment.’

  So then she has to disappear to the outside lavatory with her rubber tubing and her enema pump and wait in there, in the bitter cold, until her bowels are free of everything they now contain, so that they’re ready to ‘process’ the cake. After that, she is so weak, she has to lie down in bed. Emilie is ordered to bring her broth. Emilie dreads that the next thing to be asked of her will be to administer the enema. And refusing Irma’s requests is as impossible now as when she was a girl. The requests are laced with venom. If you refuse, you’re bitten by a snake. You could die a fearful death.