by Rose Tremain
Gustav didn’t want to travel alone. He decided he would take Lottie Erdman with him. He knew how much a trip to Paris would mean to her – how, indeed, it was beyond anything she could have dreamed of in what remained of her life. And the idea that Lottie Erdman was owed some gift, for the love that she had given his father, felt correct to Gustav.
And there was another consideration: dreading to find Paris dark and crowded and not much to his liking, he preferred to try to experience it through Lottie’s eyes, to discover in it at least some fleeting wonder. He had the feeling that he would be unmoved by the colossal reach of the Eiffel Tower, by the broken limbs of the Venus de Milo in the Louvre, by the formal grandeur of the Jardins des Tuileries, but that Lottie would not be unmoved by these things. Her delft eyes, peering in rapture at all that he guided her to, would shine with grateful tears. She would clutch his arm or take his hand. She would say, ‘Gustav, you can’t imagine what this means to me. You can never imagine.’
Before leaving, he had to go over plans for bathrooms with his builders. He told them, ‘I want these new bathrooms to be stylish and modern and warm. I want marble tiles on the floor and showers that are spacious and simple to operate. I want the Hotel Perle to become renowned for its luxury in this important area.’
The cost was daunting. Over the years, Gustav had managed to save money, but he now saw that a big slice of this would have to be put towards the refurbishments. And part of him wondered, is the Hotel Perle, of which I’ve been so ridiculously proud for so long (but inhabiting as it does an undistinguished street in a very undistinguished town) really worth all this terrifying expense? Will I ever be able to recuperate it?
He couldn’t know the answer to this. All he knew was that he had to keep moving forwards in his life, not stay still to pine over Anton’s absence, and that moving forwards sometimes entailed spending money. He thought frequently about his grandmother’s store cupboard full of sauerkraut and the notes Emilie and he had found in the ancient jar. And it struck him as sad that Irma Albrecht had never moved forward, but had lived out her entire life in a broken-down house on a wild hill near Basel, amassing a treasure, note by note, in a grimy larder, but taking no pleasure from it, only the pleasure of depriving small tradesmen of what she owed them.
The evening before Gustav left for Paris, with the hotel already emptied of its staff, except for his maître d’hôtel, Leonnard, who had agreed to remain as a caretaker, there was a ring at the door.
There was already a notice on the front door explaining that the hotel was closed for refurbishments, so Gustav was surprised that anybody should ring the bell.
The early-October night was cold, so he came down quickly to see who was outside, and at once recognised a face that was dear to him, peering in through the grille. It was Colonel Ashley-Norton.
He ushered in the elderly man and shook his hand, which was freezing. A battered waterproof hat had been pressed onto his brilliantined white hair. From his nose, an icy droplet threatened to fall onto his nail-brush moustache. Gustav felt wretched that there were no fires in any of the downstairs rooms.
‘Colonel,’ he said, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m closing the hotel for some restoration work. I leave tomorrow for Paris …’
‘Yes,’ said Ashley-Norton, ‘I saw your notice. Bad timing, eh? I wanted to come back here in the summer and take up my marvellous valley walks, but I was trapped in England by illness. Too bad, too bad. I’m recovered now and I was hoping we could resume the rummy games this autumn.’
Gustav led the colonel up to his apartment, the only warm space in the building, and sat him by the fire. He’d eaten no dinner, so Gustav made him up a plate of cold cuts from his own small fridge and poured him a large glass of brandy.
‘Capital,’ he said. ‘First rate.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Gustav said again. ‘I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought about you and the cards and hoped you’d come back. Everything you said about the game being consoling and “stilling the heart” I found to be right. I taught my friend Anton how to play. You remember Anton Zwiebel? He’s gone away now.’
‘Oh, gone away where?’
‘He lives in Geneva.’
‘Geneva, eh? Nice city. Elegant in every particular. But Matzlingen … for some reason, I found this town to be very congenial. Not too smart. And just about the right size for me.’
He made up a room for Colonel Ashley-Norton. He told him that the water was still hot so he could take a bath or a shower before bed, if he liked. He then telephoned the only other hotel in Matzlingen, the Hotel Friedrich, and booked him in for the following night.
‘The Hotel Friedrich,’ said the colonel, shaking his white head. ‘Am I going to be all right there?’
‘I hope so. It’s the best I can do.’
‘I bet their chef doesn’t make chocolate truffles, eh?’
‘I fear he may not.’
‘Most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted, those truffles. And the other thing that happened here, Herr Perle,’ he said. ‘I always slept well. Always slept as though I was an innocent – almost as though I had no past I had to be ashamed of. Why? you will ask. Comfortable beds, I suppose, and that gentle clink-clank of the trams, but most importantly, the childish feeling that you were watching over me.’
Interlude
Paris, 1996
LONG BEFORE GUSTAV and Lottie Erdman reached Paris, Lottie began to comment on the marvellousness of things.
Walking along the concourse at Bern airport, wearing a smart white woollen travelling coat and suede ankle boots, she kept pausing to wonder at the shops selling chocolate bears, Emmental cheese, Swiss sausage and aprons imprinted with the national flag. Then, on the plane, when Gustav ordered her a drink, she laughed with pleasure at the miniature bottle of whisky she was given. When she looked out of the window and saw the shadow of the plane borne across the clouds, she said, ‘Look, Gustav! We’re a cargo of angels!’
Gustav glanced at her profile, lit by the sunlight coming through the plane’s window. She had had lilac streaks put into her grey hair, which she had swept into a neat chignon, and set off with gold earrings, and these things gave to her the shine of a rich woman. Gustav felt suddenly proud to be with her. He imagined how moved and amazed his father would have been if he had been able to take his beloved Lottie to Paris. He would have bought her new dresses and new French underwear. He would have spent hours in cafés, holding her hand.
Soon after arriving in Paris, Gustav saw clearly that the best time to visit an unknown city was in the autumn. He understood that everything which gives to a foreign metropolis its outward expression of hostility – the grey contours of buildings from which you feel you might be forever excluded, the pavements with their freight of hurrying strangers – was softened and made human by leaves falling and dancing in the wind. He felt that there was a sweet melancholy in an October rain, and on fine days, the cries of children kicking their way along the strewn sidewalks or across the gravelled walkways of the parks, searching for conkers and sweet chestnuts, sounded pure and lovely in the clear air.
He’d expected to feel lost in Paris, to experience the feelings of shame and stupidity of those who haven’t worked out how to negotiate a place for themselves in a world they don’t understand. But walking there with Lottie, both of them surprised at every turn by the great vistas the city suddenly revealed, gazing up like babies at the Arc de Triomphe on its hill of light, dawdling along the banks of the grey-green river, what gradually stole upon him was a feeling of lightness, as though he had been imprisoned in a tiny cell for a long while and was now suddenly released.
The flat he’d rented was in the rue Washington, about one hundred paces from the crowded sweep of the Champs-Elysées. The apartment was on the second floor. To reach it, you went up a wide staircase which at first reminded him of the staircase in Emilie’s old apartment, except that that stone was carpeted – so that no melancholy echo sounded as you ascended or descended.
The rue Washington itself was undistinguished: a bar, a pharmacy, an optometrist’s tiny shop. But the back of the apartment looked out over a cobbled courtyard, sun-filled in the afternoons, and in their first week, Lottie and Gustav spent long, spellbound moments gazing down in wonder at this. The courtyard, planted up with bay trees and box and tubs of geraniums going brown in the sharp winds of October, didn’t belong to them, but nobody stopped them looking at it; it was there for all the residents of the building to enjoy.
‘What I feel,’ said Lottie one evening, as they watched the courtyard fill with shadow and the light in the sky turn an electric blue, ‘is that we’re outside time, Gustav. This bit of our lives is an interlude; it doesn’t count in the measurement of days or hours. When we leave we’ll be exactly the age we were when we arrived.’
Gustav thought about this for a long time. He saw how his life in Matzlingen – a life he would have said was far from unhappy until Anton left for Geneva – had had about it a low hum of weltschmerz which he had not been inclined to hear. He thus deliberately set about changing certain habits. He let the apartment become untidy and forced himself not to mind when Lottie left her clothes strewn about the rooms. And he quickly became reckless about spending money. He knew that this was ridiculous, a bit infantile, but he wanted to buy for Lottie the things his father would have bought her, if they had only had the time and the means.
They went to beautiful little boutiques in St-Germain-des-Prés and Gustav sat among shoes and rails of brassieres while Lottie disappeared behind curtains to emerge, like an opera diva, dressed in velvet skirts and sparkling low-cut blouses, her large breasts held up and her waist held in by a bit of female armoury she called a bustier. With her lilac hair, with her blue eyes ablaze with joy, Lottie appeared far younger than she’d looked when he’d first met her, and her great curvy body, he saw, was a source of admiration among the thin salesgirls who helped choose her outfits.
‘Madame looks wonderful!’ they would chorus, as yet another shimmering confection made Lottie want to dance about the shop like a child. ‘Madame has a very special style!’
Then, Lottie would turn to Gustav and say, ‘It’s very expensive, Gustav. I don’t need it.’ And he would say, ‘I think you do need it. I want you to need it.’ And the salesgirls would let tumble forth a waterfall of giggles, assuming ‘Madame’ had a lover enslaved to her every desire.
But where was Madame to wear these astonishing clothes?
She saw an advertisement for a concert at the Salle Pleyel, and asked him to buy tickets. The programme was the Rachmaninov Concerto Number 4 and Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, played by an orchestra from Jerusalem.
Gustav hesitated. It had become his habit to acquiesce with most things that Lottie wanted, but the thought of being inside a concert hall made him feel afraid. He’d decided he would live his life without ever going near one again. The beautiful Mahler symphony he thought he could endure, but he knew that, in the Rachmaninov concerto, terror for the soloist and memories of Anton’s struggles with a piece for which his pupil, Mathias Zimmerli, had become renowned, would make him feel physically sick.
‘Lottie,’ he said, ‘let me buy you a ticket and I’ll meet you for supper afterwards. We can go to that nice restaurant we found in the Places des Ternes.’
‘Go to a concert on my own, Gustav?’
‘Yes, why not?’
‘Well, I don’t think that’s very nice of you.’
‘I don’t like concerts,’ Gustav said. ‘I find them hard to endure. I’m sorry.’
She let the subject go, but that night, feeling the weight of Gustav’s melancholy on her, spoiling the mood of elation she’d been feeling, she dressed herself in a shimmering blouse and a velvet skirt and announced that she was going out on her own.
Gustav stared at her. Her lipstick was a fiery red. Her lilac hair fell in cascades around her shoulders.
‘Going where?’ said Gustav.
‘I’m going to the Paris Bar on the boulevard,’ she said. ‘I’m going to see what happens.’
Gustav knew what she meant: she was going to see if she could pick up a man. Very often she talked about her continuing need for sex. She termed it a need, not a desire. Perhaps she’d hoped that she could recapture something of her lost love, Erich, if she could have taken Gustav to her bed. One evening, she’d attempted to kiss him, but when he pulled away, she said gently, ‘Oh, I see. It’s not like that with you. That’s a shame, considering we’re living together in Paris, but I understand.’
Now, she went out into the Paris night.
Gustav sat in the apartment, imagining all the dangers that could come her way. He felt he was to blame, for not being able to be her lover. He wanted to go to the bar and bring her back to safety, but who was he to decide what was safe and what wasn’t? Who was he to spoil her chance of rapture?
The hours passed and Gustav didn’t move, but only listened, with an agitated heart, to the bright sounds of the city, caught in its own enchantment, in its own overflow of beauty and desire. He fell asleep in his armchair and had a dream of the boy, Anton, bending over him in bright sunlight, in Davos, and kissing his lips. When he woke, it was early morning and he could hear Lottie snoring in her room.
She never spoke about what had happened to her and never went to the Paris Bar again. Though Gustav pressed her to tell him, she refused, saying he had no right to ask. And he found himself wondering whether, after all, there had been no man, no hungry stranger in the bar, and whether Lottie had only sat there on her own, sipping her new, favourite drink, Campari and soda, until the bar closed. And this image of her, wearing her dazzling clothes and with her lilac tresses curled, waiting and waiting but never being approached by anyone, made Gustav feel that he wanted to cry.
To banish this night from his mind, to resume his role of Lottie’s benefactor, he agreed, after all, to get tickets for the concert at the Salle Pleyel.
Lottie took a long time to get ready for the evening. She at last appeared in a black, strapless dress with a white fake-fur jacket. People in the concert audience stared at her with frank Parisian disbelief. Most of them were dressed in drab winter coats or anoraks and scarves. November was beginning. Wearing a thin suit, Gustav shivered in the cold hall.
The young soloist was from Israel and held himself away from the piano in exactly the same position that Anton always adopted. Gustav was unable to look at him. He reached for Lottie’s hand, but held it too tightly, only realising he was bruising her when she tugged her hand free. She stared at Gustav in the darkness. He was so cold that he was trembling.
On went the Rachmaninov. At a distance, Gustav could appreciate that the soloist was talented and so he made himself lift his head and look at him, but he tried not to see the young man from Israel, only his hands dancing over the keyboard and his feet in shiny black shoes pressing delicately up and down on the pedals. Lottie took off her fur jacket and handed it to Gustav and he wrapped it round and round his hands and held it close to his body, to warm it.
Memories of being cold began to tumble into his mind: crawling on his hands and knees, cleaning the grating of the Church of Sankt Johann before any winter light was in the sky; going down to the nuclear shelter in the building on Unter der Egg and seeing the beds arranged in high tiers right up to the ceiling; walking in darkness to the hospital when Emilie had pneumonia; standing at his window with his tin train.
And he thought, this used to be my condition in Switzerland: being cold in the freezing air of Mittelland. I bought the hotel first and foremost as a refuge, as a place I could fill with warmth and homely light. And without it I would not have survived.
In the interval, Gustav gulped whisky and this warmed him a little. Lottie asked him if he wanted to leave. He wondered if he could sit through the Mahler symphony, with its heart-clutching fourth movement, which he couldn’t listen to without thinking of Visconti’s film of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. The sufferings of the protagon
ist, Aschenbach, had always struck him as being an extreme version of his own. Mann had understood perfectly that a secret passion, unfulfilled, must lead inevitably to physical collapse and so, in time, to death. Gustav only had to wonder where and when that death was lying in wait for him.
He knew that Lottie wanted to hear the Mahler. He looked at her, with her breasts bunched up like bulbous veined orchids by the armoury of the black dress, and the eyes of the concert-goers upon her, and decided that he couldn’t desert her. So they returned to the Salle. When the slow movement of the Mahler began, scenes from the Visconti film crowded into Gustav’s mind. He couldn’t remember the name of the English actor playing Aschenbach, but his sensual face and his marvellous ability to convey the pain in his heart with few words remained very present before his eyes. The moment which affected him the most was when Aschenbach visits a barber’s to get his hair dyed black. The barber puts make-up on him and, in his vain attempt to look younger and more acceptable to his boy-love, Tadzio, Aschenbach descends into effeminate clownishness. Later, when the rain falls, the black hair dye begins to run down his face. Gustav had never been able to sit through this film without weeping.
He wanted to weep now, but he kept it down, just as he had kept it down as a boy. He leaned a little towards Lottie, so that he could feel her warmth and breathe in her perfume. She seemed rapt by the music. And Gustav told himself to curtail his self-pity and think only of her. The time in Paris was going quickly by. It had started so well, with such gladness and resolution, but now Gustav was beginning to spoil things with his misery. He knew that he had to try to make amends.