The Gustav Sonata

by Rose Tremain

  Gustav stared at his friend. That he could be so dismayed by the success of a former pupil surprised him. But that he could use the words ‘stuck in Matzlingen’ was shocking. Gustav had never questioned the certainty that he and Anton would live out their lives very close to each other in this town which had nurtured them. But now, he saw suddenly that in Anton’s mind Matzlingen was just a place where he was ‘stuck’ and from which (it followed) he might one day be free. Gustav kneaded his chest, to try to calm the turbulence that he felt in his heart.

  ‘Anton,’ he said, ‘surely, you’ve said to me many times in our lives that you made the right decision about your career …’

  ‘I don’t know about right,’ said Anton. ‘I made the only decision I could make, because it was impossible for me to go on trying to succeed at public performance. But you don’t imagine I’ve gone through all these years without regret, do you?’

  ‘You’ve never talked about “regret”.’

  ‘I may not have talked about it. That doesn’t mean I haven’t felt it. You saw for yourself, I had the talent to do it, but my mental and physical make-up just wouldn’t let me go on.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were feeling sad about it, Anton. I never knew. Perhaps that was very unobservant of me.’

  ‘Not sad. That’s too sentimental a word. Just unreconciled. Because think of the life I would have had – in the capitals of the world! And now all this is laid at Zimmerli’s feet. He’ll have a dazzling public career, and I’ll go on with the humdrum life of a teacher in a small town. But I tell you frankly, and without meaning to boast, Gustav, Zimmerli is no more talented than I was at his age. If I could only have conquered my fear …’

  Gustav got up and refilled Anton’s glass with whisky and poured himself some cognac. He knew that this was one of those moments when the course of things in a life’s quotidian existence is suddenly altered. If anybody had asked him what the state of Anton’s mind had been up until that evening, he would have said ‘content’, but now he saw that this contentment had been snatched away from him and might never be found again in quite the same way.

  He sat down with his glass of cognac. He said, ‘I’ve always felt that it’s pointless to try to change the things we can’t change.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘I guess we have to try to change ourselves to fit them. Is it possible that you can get any consolation from the knowledge that you’ve helped this young person in ways which perhaps nobody else could?’

  ‘No,’ said Anton. ‘I’m not generous enough to think like that.’

  Anton fell ill.

  He ran a high fever and refused food. Adriana and Armin took him into their flat and sat for long hours at his bedside. They brought in the family doctor, a medic so old he couldn’t stand straight above the patient, but had to lean at an angle over him, which Anton found irksome. The doctor could make no definitive diagnosis and was sent away.

  Gustav visited Anton every day, bringing soups and broths made by Lunardi. When he began to recover, he tried to start teaching him gin rummy. They played on a bed table which reminded Gustav of the hinged shelf in the kitchen at Unter der Egg. There had never been quite enough room for the plates and dishes and cutlery on the shelf and now there was not quite enough room for the cards on the bed table, and they kept sliding to the floor.

  For a short while – because there was nothing much else for him to do – Anton seemed to take to the game and Gustav let him win as often as he thought he wanted to win. But one evening, he told him what Ashley-Norton had said about the game ‘stilling the heart’ and this seemed to vex him.

  ‘I don’t want my heart stilled,’ he said. ‘I want my heart to overflow with joy.’

  Anton went back to his own apartment and summoned one of the women he’d been going out with. Her name was Hansi, which Anton said he considered a ridiculous name, but he told Gustav that sex might ‘bring back his will to live’. He said Hansi liked to make love ‘sitting on top’ and that this suited him because he felt too lazy to adopt any other position.

  Adriana and Armin and Gustav were now told to leave Anton alone, so they stayed away.

  Adriana took Gustav’s hand in hers, which was wrinkled and bony, but still semaphoring the world with scarlet nails. ‘It’s very unfortunate, this Zimmerli business,’ she said. ‘My heart bleeds for Anton. But what can any of us do?’

  ‘Nothing, Adriana,’ said Gustav.

  Anton stayed away from school for the rest of the summer term and then he announced that he was taking Hansi to Davos.

  When Gustav heard him say the word ‘Davos’, he felt inflamed by jealousy and sadness, and his heart once again began its horrible fast beating. To imagine his friend lying in some airy room, lit with the white light of the derelict sanatorium, with Hansi bouncing up and down on him, trying to bring him to an ‘overflow of joy’, made him feel sick and afraid.

  He said to him, ‘Anton, don’t take her to Davos. Take her somewhere else.’

  ‘No,’ said Anton. ‘Tell me why.’

  Frau Erdman

  Matzlingen, 1993

  THE SUMMER SEASON at the Hotel Perle was busy. After complaints from Lunardi that his overload of work was putting his health in danger, Gustav hired a sous-chef to help him.

  The sous-chef, Vincenzo, was twenty years old, a wild boy from Torino, and Gustav had to concentrate on calming him, without taming his talent as a cook. When he suggested to Vincenzo that he should try to master himself and cultivate a more robust outside shell, ‘like a coconut’, Vincenzo laughed and said, ‘That’s a stupid idea, boss! Coconuts are hairy, but I’m as smooth as a gladiator.’

  Though the boy was hard work, Gustav felt glad of this distraction – any distraction – which prevented him from imagining Anton sitting in the sunshine of Davos, or walking the secret pathway into the forest above. He’d told himself that the sanatorium would long ago have been demolished, to be replaced by hotels or apartments in this now fashionable ski resort, and yet so vivid was it, still, in his mind, he couldn’t imagine it ever being dismantled. In his dreams, he saw Anton and Hansi walking hand in hand up the steep road under the pines and finding wild strawberries at the verge. Their lips became red. They passed the wild strawberries from mouth to mouth …

  There were times when Gustav half hoped that Colonel Ashley-Norton might return to the Hotel Perle. He knew that he would even be willing to endure the old man’s further memories of Bergen-Belsen, in return for his consoling company and the games of gin rummy. But he never appeared.

  What returned to Gustav, however, was the remark Ashley-Norton had made about his own need to discover the truth about his father’s life. But where did that truth lie? If his father really had been a hero, then why had Emilie kept none of his possessions, only the empty cigar box which had once contained Gustav’s ‘treasure’? If she had revered him for an act of bravery, why had she acted towards him just as she had acted towards Irma, seemingly burning or giving away every last item that had belonged to him?

  It came to Gustav now, that perhaps there had been a secret surrounding his last years, one which Emilie Perle wished no one to uncover. He lay in his narrow bed, content with the feeling of the great substance and weight of his precious hotel beneath him, quiet and still in the night-time, but poised to move and come alive again in the morning. And he thought how secrets of great importance may slumber in this way, but one day be woken and brought into the light.

  Gustav went down to the Matzlingen Police Headquarters, gave his name and occupation, and asked whether he could consult police records for the years 1938 to 1942. The duty officer looked at him suspiciously and said, ‘Why do you want these, sir?’

  ‘Very well, I’ll tell you,’ said Gustav. ‘My father was Assistant Police Chief here in 1938 and he was dismissed from the force in May 1939. I need to know why this came about and how. My father died soon after I was born. Before I grow old, I need to know what happened to him.’


  The duty officer said, ‘What was his name?’

  ‘Perle,’ said Gustav. ‘My hotel is named after him.’

  Gustav was then told to put his request ‘for sight of confidential records’ in writing and was informed that he would be contacted, if authorisation came through.

  ‘I’m his son,’ said Gustav.

  ‘I know that, sir. You’ve just told me.’

  ‘I have a right to know.’

  ‘Well, we will have to see.’

  While Gustav filled in his request form, he glanced up at a display of framed black-and-white portraits of police personnel hanging above the reception desk.

  One of these was a man he thought he recognised from years past, someone who had come once or twice to the apartment on Unter der Egg. Gustav now asked the duty officer who this person was and the policeman replied, ‘That is Police Chief Roger Erdman. A very good wartime Chief, by all accounts. A man everybody respected.’

  ‘Is he still alive?’ asked Gustav.

  ‘I doubt that he is,’ said the duty officer. ‘This is 1993. But look in the telephone directory, Herr Perle. You might find him.’

  There were nine people called Erdman listed in the Matzlingen Directory, none with the initial R beside the surname. One evening, Gustav sat down and began to telephone them, starting with Erdman, A.

  When he got to Erdman, L, a woman’s voice answered. Gustav asked to talk to Roger Erdman, and the woman said, ‘Who are you?’

  When he told her his name was Gustav Perle there was a breathless silence on the telephone line. Then the woman said, ‘Gustav. Emilie’s child. I saw you when you were a baby. Before and after your father died.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Gustav, ‘you saw me? So are you Roger Erdman’s wife?’

  ‘Yes. Roger has been dead for a long time now. The war made him ill and he never truly recovered. But let me tell you something. Your father was a wonderful man.’

  ‘That’s what my mother used to say …’

  ‘He was. Oh my God, I’m moved to hear your voice, Gustav. But why are you telephoning me?’

  It was now Gustav’s turn to be silent. It was difficult to admit that he was trying to ferret around for secrets, but he stammered that he had now passed his fiftieth birthday, but still knew next to nothing about his father’s life and that he was now going to try to talk to anyone in the town who could remember him.

  ‘Well,’ said Frau Erdman, ‘I can remember him. Come to tea with me on Sunday afternoon. I live on Grünewaldstrasse. I will tell you whatever you want to know.’

  The apartment was large and lightless. Although this was a summer afternoon, heavy drapes were drawn across the windows. At first, Gustav was puzzled by this, but when he sat down with Frau Erdman and allowed himself to look at her carefully, the reason she’d chosen to live in this strange penumbra became clear to him. It was obvious that she’d once been a beauty. Adriana Zwiebel had said to him one day that beautiful women, as they age, ‘become afraid of harsh light’, and he felt certain that Frau Erdman preferred the darkened room, lit kindly with soft, yellow lamplight, to the glare of the summer day, so that those vestiges of her beauty which remained could still be seen.

  At his arrival, she’d greeted him with a kiss on his cheek. ‘Gustav!’ she exclaimed. ‘You can’t imagine how happy I am that you found me! You don’t look like your father, but your voice is very similar. When I heard your voice on the telephone, my heart skipped a beat. For a moment, I imagined Erich alive again.’

  ‘Well,’ said Gustav, ‘I’m very happy to have found you, Frau Erdman …’

  ‘Call me Lottie. Will you? I don’t want to be “Frau Erdman” to you. Please call me Lottie.’

  Lottie Erdman’s hair was piled up in a grey tangle on her head and secured with a tortoiseshell comb. Despite her age, it was still thick and Gustav could imagine that it had once been blonde and shiny and worn long, perhaps, or else in the plaits which would have been the fashion of her youth. Her blue eyes were puffy, but still shone brightly inside their pouches of flesh. Her breasts and stomach were large and her movement was slow.

  She had made tea and bought millefeuilles from the French patisserie at the end of her road. As she lifted one of these fragrant concoctions to her mouth, she said, ‘Gluttony is the last indulgence of most people’s lives, Gustav. In my opinion, it is a much better vice than drink. Don’t you agree?’

  Gustav found her laughter infectious, almost like the laughter of a young girl. They sat and laughed together and ate the millefeuilles, and then Gustav said, ‘I don’t want to take up too much of your time, Frau Erdman …’

  ‘Lottie. I have to insist on “Lottie”. I want to hear you say it.’

  ‘Lottie. I don’t want to take up your time or pester you with questions, but I’ve lately begun to understand how little I know about my father’s life, and –’

  ‘I knew your mother. If she hadn’t lost her first baby … then, I think, everything might have been different between her and your father. I think that she never forgave him for that.’

  Gustav gaped at Lottie. He put down his half-eaten millefeuille on its china plate. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  ‘You didn’t know about the other baby? Emilie never told you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, she never liked talking about it. I think she tried to put it out of her mind. But there was an accident in the apartment, the one they had on Fribourgstrasse. Erich was mortified at what happened. He struck out at Emilie – because he thought she didn’t try hard enough to understand the work he was doing in the war.’

  ‘He hit her?’

  ‘No. He just … I don’t know exactly … she was rushed to hospital, but they couldn’t save the baby. Poor Emilie. She was distraught. She blamed Erich for her terrible loss. She left him for a while and stayed with her mother in some mountain house.’

  ‘The house near Basel?’

  ‘Yes. I think so.’

  ‘I know that house. I went there. It was a terrible place.’

  ‘Was it? Well, she stayed away a long time. Erich was certain she was never going to return. But she did – perhaps because that Basel house was so bad. But I think she had decided to try again with Erich. And in time, you were born.’

  ‘I never knew. I never knew about the lost baby.’

  ‘No? Well, that was how your mother was. She kept things to herself. Not like me. I spill everything out. Do you keep things to yourself, Gustav?’

  ‘Yes. My mother was never really interested in what I felt or thought. So it’s become a habit, to keep things hidden inside me.’

  Lottie reached out and poured more tea into the fine china cups. Then she lit a cigarette.

  ‘The baby was a boy. They were going to name him Gustav.’

  Gustav put his hand to the area of his heart and massaged his chest. Then he said, ‘That’s odd. I used to … when my mother was alive … sometimes get the feeling that I wasn’t completely there for her, that she was looking around for someone else and then disappointed when she discovered that all she had was me. I guess she would have loved that first little Gustav better.’

  Lottie’s puffy eyes began to shimmer with tears she was trying to choke back. She reached across the tea table and took Gustav’s hand in hers.

  ‘Gustav,’ she said. ‘Your father loved you. I know he did, because he was such a loving man. And nobody knows this better than me, you see. Now, I don’t know what you came here to ask me, but let me tell you the one thing I am just not able to keep from you. Your father and I were lovers. It began when Emilie went away and he thought she wasn’t coming back. Nobody knew. Nobody was hurt by what we did. And when your mother came back, I broke it off. I told your father I didn’t love him, but that was a lie. I worshipped him. He was my world. He was the love of my life.’

  The tears began to fall. Lottie let go of Gustav’s hand and picked up a little linen table napkin and wept into that.

  Gustav fe
lt moved by the sight of her. He didn’t feel angry with her, or with anyone. He knew that instead he felt glad for his father, irrepressibly glad that he had been the lover of this once-beautiful woman. And then he remembered something. He remembered Emilie telling him that Erich had died in Grünewaldstrasse. And this was where he was sitting, in the Erdmans’ apartment on Grünewaldstrasse – perhaps on the very sofa where his father had sat and gazed at Lottie, or taken her in his arms.

  ‘The day he died,’ he said. ‘It was here, on the steps of your apartment building. He was coming to see you, wasn’t he? He was coming back to you?’

  Lottie looked up at Gustav, her eyes brimming, her hand still clutching the table napkin.

  ‘I will never know,’ she said. ‘I tried to imagine that was the case, because I’d written to him not long before. I was finding it impossible to live without him. But was he coming back to me that day he died? Or was he coming to tell me that he could never see me again? I would give anything to know, but I never will.’

  It was night now, but Gustav couldn’t sleep.

  What he’d learned on this day had awoken complicated feelings, but the most intense of these was a feeling of relief. He knew that Lottie Erdman’s revelations had helped him to make sense of Emilie’s failure to love him. It had made him see that, for all her protestations about Erich’s heroism, she’d been unable to love him either.

  Hans Hirsch

  Matzlingen, 1994

  GUSTAV HAD NOTICED that, in many people’s lives, the ‘crisis’ which came in time to everyone, usually arrived in the fifth decade. But in his life and in Anton’s it arrived later, in 1994, when they were both aged fifty-two.

  What he thought of as ‘the Zimmerli moment’ was a kind of precursor to it, waking in Anton all his old longing for singularity and adulation. From that moment, he’d had dreams about Mathias Zimmerli. He was also forced to read in the Matzlingerzeitung that the young man was giving concerts in Geneva and Amsterdam. There were days, he admitted to Gustav, when all he could think about was Zimmerli’s mounting fame and his own insignificance.