by Rose Tremain
But he laughs, and Emilie thinks, now that I’m going to be a mother, and hold my boy in my arms, I can bear anything.
She thought that Erich would be cheered by the thought of a son being born. But when they talk about the forthcoming birth, he just smiles a wan smile. He says the name, over and over: ‘Gustav … Gustav …’ It was his father’s name.
There is something wrong with Erich. Some nights, he can’t get out of bed to go to the depot. There is no telephone in the depot, so Emilie has to walk there, through the dark streets, to tell Erlen that her husband is ill. And she feels sorry for Erlen, alone in the vast shed, with his mops and pails of freezing water. Sometimes, she takes him a slice of Nusstorte. He says to her, ‘Tell Herr Perle he’s going to get sacked, if he keeps missing nights. The bosses are hard men.’
When she passes this on to Erich, he just closes his eyes. Emilie reminds him that, without the cheese co-operative and without the job at the tram depot, they would be destitute, but he doesn’t seem to give this his attention. All he wants to do all the time is sleep.
She tries to care for him as best she can, calling on her reserves of compassion to fight off anger. He cries real tears in his sleep. When she asks him what it is that’s tormenting him, he says it’s sorrow for the state of the world. He says he believes the invasion of Switzerland is ‘only a matter of time. And then, everything we’ve known will be destroyed.’
Emilie can’t let herself think about this. She urges Erich to go to work. She tells him – for the third or fourth time – that the arrival of little Gustav will be the thing which helps him to recover his peace of mind. But when she says this, she sees a flash of his old anger in his eyes. ‘You know nothing, Emilie,’ he says. ‘You know nothing.’
The pains begin on the 2nd of June. First, they come in a dream: a dark-faced goblin clawing at Emilie’s womb with his scaly hands. But then she wakes and the pains arrive again, so she knows this is real now: it’s Gustav tearing at her, asking to be born.
It’s four in the morning, and on this night, Erich has gone to work. It will be another two and a half hours before he gets home. Emilie breathes deeply, trying to stay calm. She packs a small suitcase and dresses herself in a loose dress and coat. She washes her face and cleans her teeth. ‘Do everything right,’ she instructs herself, ‘everything in the right order.’
Next, she goes down and bangs on the door of Frau Krams’s apartment, and after a long wait, Frau Krams comes shuffling to the door. Her hair is in curl papers and her gnarled feet bare. Emilie apologises for waking her and asks her to summon an ambulance.
Frau Krams tugs on a robe and lights a cigarette. She sits Emilie down in her parlour and goes to the telephone in the hall. After a moment, Ludwig Krams comes into the parlour, tugging a blanket with him. He sits opposite Emilie and giggles. ‘I thought it would be the other one,’ he says.
‘What?’ says Emilie.
‘I thought it would be the other lady he’d get into trouble. They were always at it in the mornings. I used to go and sit on the stairs and listen.’
Emilie regards Ludwig calmly. She feels sorry for Frau Krams having an imbecile for a son. She says, ‘The other lady, as you call her, was a whore – a prostitute. But even so, I don’t think you should have done that, Ludwig,’ and then turns away from him.
‘Always at it …’ he says again, but his voice tails off as Frau Krams comes back into the room. She puts the kettle on. She finds a plaid rug and places this round Emilie’s narrow shoulders. She sends Ludwig away.
‘What’s he been saying?’ she asks.
‘Nothing,’ says Emilie. ‘Nothing I didn’t know.’
They wait. The pains come and go. Emilie tries not to cry out, but to continue keeping her breathing steady. Her forehead beads with sweat. She digs her nails into her palms. Frau Krams says, ‘I hope for your sake, Frau Perle, that it’s a girl. Boys are nothing but heartbreak.’
‘Well,’ says Emilie, ‘if it’s a girl, we don’t have a name. What’s your name, Frau Krams? We could use that.’
‘Helga,’ says Frau Krams.
‘Helga?’ says Emilie. ‘Well, it’s a bit ordinary, but it would do. I’m not naming any child of mine after my own mother.’
They just have time to sip a cup of hot tea, then Emilie is taken away in the ambulance. She wishes Erich were with her. She asks the ambulance men if they can get a message to the tram depot and they say they will try. They give her oxygen to breathe and the feeling of the pure oxygen going into her lungs is as beautiful as breathing the air of Davos.
And it feels cosy and safe in the ambulance, with the sweet oxygen and the two medics to care for her. She wishes the ambulance could stop somewhere quiet and that Gustav could be born here and put gently into her arms by these men she already trusts with her life.
But they arrive – too soon – at the hospital. She says goodbye to the ambulance men. She’s wheeled into an elevator, then out again and into a room blazing with white light. A midwife peers at her over a mask. Emilie’s legs are hoisted up and her feet hung into stirrups. Now, suddenly, she is anxious, frightened of the pain, frightened that her body is too narrow to push the baby out. Tears start at her eyes. She calls Erich’s name.
She looks round the small, floodlit room. There is a cluster of people at the end of her bed. Emilie was unaware of them coming into the room, but there they are. They pass quiet instructions to each other. She is told to push and push again. The pain is so severe, she thinks she may pass out and she thinks, do children ever understand what we go through to bring them into the world?
Perhaps she does pass out. She’s not sure. Time seems to stop and then start up again. And when it restarts, there is her baby, her boy Gustav, alive and screaming, wrapped in a green rag and laid on her breast.
Beginning and End
Matzlingen, 1942
THE BABY IS very small. His little limbs are thin. He seems to cry all the time from hunger. He even cries at the breast.
Erich sits on the bed, watching Emilie trying to feed his son. Even in her maternal state, her breasts, which had grown large during her first pregnancy, are meagre. It’s clear to Erich that Gustav is slowly dying from lack of sustenance. He snatches him off Emilie’s breast, and carries him round to the pharmacy, where he lays him down on the counter and takes off his clothes.
‘Look!’ says Erich. ‘Look how thin and weak he is! He needs milk.’
The young woman pharmacist examines Gustav, while other customers, who have come into the pharmacy for headache pills or stomach settlers, wait in bemusement and mild irritation.
‘My wife,’ says Erich, ‘she’s trying to breastfeed him, but I don’t think there’s anything in her breasts!’
Without commenting on this, the pharmacist takes baby Gustav away and puts him on a pair of scales. She moves weights around, then picks him up again and wraps him in his shawl. She hands him back to Erich. ‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘He is underweight.’
She gives Erich a large carton of powdered milk and a glass bottle with a rubber teat.
‘Lovely Swiss milk,’ she says. ‘Give him two-thirds of the bottle every four hours. Bring him back in one week, or take him to your doctor.’
As he goes out, one of the female customers, waiting in line for some simple medication, says to him, ‘You know he must have the breast as well. Or else your wife will get depressed.’
She is depressed.
When Erich gives Gustav the bottle, she sees on the infant’s face an expression of bliss, whereas, on the breast, he’s restless and agitated. And she knows she’s clumsy with him. She can’t seem to get him entirely comfortable in her arms. He kicks and screams. But when Erich picks him up, he goes quiet.
Her nights are purgatory. Erich is at the depot and she’s alone with her child, who wakes her every hour with his screams. Sometimes, she lets him scream. She’s so tired, she can doze through the horrible noise. She tells herself that nothing bad is happening
to him; he’s just a bit hungry, or wet, or just plain bad-tempered. And she needs her sleep. How will she get through the day of constant feeding and nappy changing unless she can get her rest?
She expected to feel joy. She remembers how much she longed for this baby. She imagined motherhood would cure the sorrows of the past and make her contented and proud. But it isn’t like that. She nurtures the terrible thought that this Gustav is the wrong Gustav; the baby she lost was the rightful son, with whom she would have found a thrilling maternal bond.
When she runs into Lottie Erdman in the street one day, she says, ‘It’s not what we think it is, having babies, Lottie. It’s more hell than heaven.’
Lottie looks at her with sadness. ‘I envy you, nonetheless,’ she says. ‘Roger and I are trying for a baby, but it doesn’t seem to happen.’
Emilie looks at Lottie, whose prettiness she has always admired and envied. And she notices that Lottie’s hair has lost its shine and that her face looks pinched.
‘I thought it would be different,’ Emilie says. ‘I can tell you, Lottie, because I can trust you. I thought I would feel an overpowering love for the child, but I don’t.’
Lottie hesitates a moment before asking, ‘Does Erich feel love for him?’
‘Yes,’ Emilie says. ‘He seems very fond of him. When he comes home at six thirty, he feeds him a bottle and changes his nappy, then takes him into bed with him. I go and stand in there and watch them sleeping a perfect sleep – and this just makes me feel inadequate and sad.’
Lottie nods. Then, she reaches down into the pram and touches Gustav’s face. ‘He looks more like you than Erich,’ she says.
All night, at the tram depot, Erich worries about his son. He sees how, between mother and baby, there’s a peculiar chemistry of alienation. Emilie seldom kisses Gustav, or holds him close to her heart. When she changes his nappy, she’s rough with him, pulling his little body this way and that, sometimes cursing as she cleans him up.
He tells himself that childbirth is an ordeal he gets nowhere near to comprehending, so women are bound to take time to recover from it and, in this slow recovery, their behaviour might be erratic or strange. He just has to pray that Emilie will grow closer to Gustav as the weeks and months go on. But the feeling that his baby is in danger when he’s alone with Emilie won’t quite leave him. It’s as though, one morning when his shift at the tram depot ends, he will rush back to Unter der Egg to find Gustav dead.
In the midst of this unease, he gets the one thing he wasn’t expecting: a summons from Lottie. He’s sitting on a bench in the depot, reading it by cold strip light, but, as he reads, it’s as though a golden luminescence suddenly envelops his whole being. His heart begins to beat so wildly, he feels it might break apart inside him, killed by astonishment.
Erich,
Often – so often in my dreams – you and I are in that café and I am telling you that I never loved you. But what I said was not true. I just said that thing about ‘pigs’ to make our separation more bearable – to enable you to walk away from me.
Erich, I do love you – so much. The thought that we will never make love again is too unendurable to be borne. I keep hoping that I will be cured of my need for you, but every day, it gets stronger.
I know I have no right to ask this of you, especially now that you have your son and must stay at Emilie’s side, but I want you to come to me. Roger is in Geneva. Will you be my lover again? And will you … God, I hardly dare ask this of you … I am so shameless … but will you give me a child? I am thirty-two years old. Roger and I cannot make a child, it seems. The love we make together is too weak. But I know that you and I, in that delirium we share – if we took no precautions now – could make one with perfect ease. I would look to you for nothing afterwards – no hint of parental responsibility, I swear. It would be ‘Roger’s child’. And only you and I in all the world would know that it was the angel of our desire …
It is deep night in the depot, a scent of autumn on the winds. Erich reads Lottie’s letter over and over until he knows it by heart. He understands that what she’s asking is audacious, the kind of grand deception that only a woman as wanton as Lottie Erdman would think up, yet he also knows that he’s immediately on fire for her scheme and that he would go to her this very minute, if he could. And now that she’s summoned him, he can’t delay. His need of her returns as a terrible compulsion that he must satisfy at once, or die.
As soon as the six o’clock light begins to show, Erich walks to a telephone kiosk and calls Frau Krams, asking her to give a message to Emilie, to tell her he has been summoned to a meeting by the bosses of the tram company at eight o’clock and will not be home until later in the morning. ‘Remind her,’ he adds, ‘to give Gustav his milk.’
When the shops open in Matzlingen, Erich goes into a cheap clothier’s and buys new trousers, shirt, shoes and jacket. Then he goes to the public baths and washes and steams all the stink of the tram depot off his body. After this, he puts on his new clothes and visits a barber’s, to demand a shave and a haircut. When he catches sight of himself in the barber’s mirror, he sees that he’s smiling.
Now, it’s half past nine and Erich is walking down Grünewaldstrasse – his old, beloved walk to Lottie’s door. Only now does he realise that he no longer has Lottie’s letter; he must have left it in the baths or in the telephone kiosk or in the clothier’s changing cubicle, but he can’t go back to search for it, his longing to reach Lottie is too urgent. He prays she will be waiting, hoping he would act just as he has acted, and come to her at once, out of breath, even, from the haste with which he has run to her. He tries to imagine which dress she will be wearing.
Tired from her night, after being woken by Gustav five times, then by Frau Krams with her message, Emilie sits by the gas fire, still wearing her nightdress, and drinks coffee and smokes. Gustav is at last asleep in his cot and Emilie thinks she may go back to bed for a while. The apartment needs cleaning, but she will do this later. Sleep is what she craves.
She climbs into bed and is gone, almost at once, into a strange dream of Irma and the pearl hatpin. Irma is dancing round her small parlour in the house near Basel, with the pin, stabbing the air, crying out that she will ‘have her revenge on life’. Emilie cowers in a corner, knowing that it’s only a matter of time before Irma stabs her with the pin. She was the unwanted child. It’s upon her that Irma’s ‘revenge’ will fall.
There’s knocking at the apartment door, loud and insistent. Emilie at first thinks it’s part of her dream of Irma, but then she wakes and tugs on a robe.
There’s no sound from Gustav’s room, but whoever is at the door is calling her name: ‘Frau Perle! Open the door. Police!’
So then Emilie thinks it’s come at last, Erich’s summons to the long-postponed criminal trial. She goes cold. She opens the door a crack and sees two police officers standing there. They say nothing for a moment, then ask her politely if they can come in.
‘It’s the trial, is it?’ she says. ‘Is it the trial?’
They say nothing, but shake their heads, no. They come into the untidy parlour that stinks of cigarette ash and ask her gently if she would like to sit down.
‘Sit down?’ she says. ‘It’s bad news, is it? It’s about the trial.’
‘No,’ says the older of the two men. ‘It’s nothing about a trial. Please sit down, Frau Perle, and we will tell you.’
Emilie sits on the very edge of a frayed brown chair. The policemen also sit. Then, they tell her that her husband, Herr Erich Perle, was found dead in the street at 9.35 that morning.
Emilie gapes at the policemen.
Found dead in the street that morning?
Found dead …?
After a moment, she says stupidly, ‘In the street? Erich couldn’t have died in the street …’
It was a street, they inform her – Grünewaldstrasse. ‘He was,’ they say, ‘on the steps of the apartment building inhabited by Police Chief Erdman. This may have be
en a coincidence, or he may have been intending to visit him. The cause of death seems to have been his heart.’
Emilie finds that she can’t speak. She wishes herself back in her dream. Her mother she could overcome, but this – this ‘death in the street’ – is quite beyond what she can confront. Perhaps it is not true? Perhaps the policemen are not really there?
She turns her head this way and that, looking round the room for clarification. Is this happening or not happening? The room gives up no clues. So she waits for a sign, for something to occur which is present and real. And eventually that sign comes, in the form of an all-too-familiar sound: in his little cot, Gustav is crying.
Part Three
Hotel Perle
Matzlingen, 1992
BY THE AGE of forty, Gustav owned a hotel in Matzlingen. He understood that the métier of hotelier was perfectly suited to his fastidious disposition. He took pride in the cleanliness of the place, and in providing the small necessities of human existence which helped to make life bearable: good central heating, beds both soft and wide, hairdryers for the ladies, comfortable chairs in the dining room, an open fire in the lounge …
His one act of vanity was to name the hotel after himself – the Hotel Perle. He understood that this name somehow made the hotel sound grander than it was, when in fact, in the Michelin Guide to Switzerland, it only merited a small house symbol, designating an establishment assez confortable, but of no special renown. Yet Gustav felt pride in it. His devoted Italian chef, Lunardi, concocted food that managed to be both interesting and consoling. The two men understood that when people travel, they often also long to be at home again, and so this was what they tried to provide for the guests of the Hotel Perle: a home from home.
Gustav was now fifty. He lived by himself in an apartment on the top floor. From its windows, he could see the River Emme and an ugly block of apartments built on the site where once the old cheese co-operative had stood. He felt glad that the cheese co-operative had gone, so that he didn’t have to think of his mother coming home, smelling of Emmental and using this smell as a reason for never hugging or kissing her son.