by Rose Tremain
Two Women
Matzlingen, 1999
AFTER ANTON’S REVELATION that he was the lover of Hans Hirsch, Gustav tried – by an act of will, by a desperate attempt at his old childhood self-mastery – to put him out of his mind. He never made contact with Geneva and Anton never made contact with him. Only in dreams, sometimes, did he see his friend’s beloved face, and feel his old yearning for love return.
Yet Gustav’s life went on in its calm, unvarying way. When he asked himself if he was unhappy, he discovered that he could find no deeper unhappiness in his own soul than he perceived in other people’s. He refused to see himself as Aschenbach. He did not particularly want to die at fifty-seven. Yet there were times when he thought that two women, Adriana and Lottie – by their kindness and by their need of him – made him cling to existence only because they willed him to.
He decided to teach Adriana gin rummy. She came up to his apartment twice a week, after he had given her dinner in the hotel, and she was soon an adept at the game, falling under its consoling spell.
They played with a set of expensive but well-thumbed cards, which had been sent to Gustav from England. In the package with the playing cards had been a letter from a firm of solicitors named Montague and Lewis, located in Devon. This letter said:
Dear Herr Perle,
It is with regret that we are obliged to inform you of the death of Colonel Reginald Llewellyn Ashley-Norton, DSC, at his home in Sidmouth on the thirteenth of January 1999.
Colonel Ashley-Norton put these cards into my hands before he died, with the express wish that I should forward them to you, in the event of his death. He wishes me to say that it was with this same pack that he used to play the game of gin rummy, with his late wife, Bee.
I remain, Herr Perle,
Yours very sincerely,
Jeremy Montague
Adriana was interested to hear about Ashley-Norton, and Gustav realised that talking about him – about the details he knew about the colonel’s tranquil life in the south of England with his wife, Bee – had almost the same effect on him as playing rummy; it stilled his heart.
Gustav avoided telling Adriana that, at the age of nineteen, Ashley-Norton had taken photographs at Bergen-Belsen. He knew that both she and Armin had always disliked talking about the war, as if they, as Jews safe in Switzerland, felt guilty about the millions who had perished. Armin had once told him that he had a recurring dream about the camps. ‘The terrible thing,’ Armin said to him, ‘is that I’m not an inmate in the dream. I’m one of the guards. I herd naked people to their deaths.’
Gustav and Adriana talked about Armin very frequently and this seldom upset Adriana, because, she said, ‘I had a wonderful marriage. We both knew how lucky we were – in a world where couples have such difficulty staying together. We never had that difficulty. There was always harmony between us, and when I think about Armin, it’s this that I hear deep inside me, a kind of melody, like a lullaby.’
And it was agreed between her and Gustav: they seldom discussed Anton. Adriana knew nothing about her son’s relationship with Hans Hirsch; she believed Hirsch was just ‘an arrogant impresario’ who had now brought out two more CDs of Beethoven sonatas on the CavalliSound label ‘but who doesn’t bother promoting them’. This she and Gustav had talked about: the seeming failure of these recordings to sell widely and the lack of invitations to play in any important concert halls. Gustav suggested that this might be a good thing, given Anton’s struggles with live performance, but Adriana once said wistfully, ‘I remember being taken to the Grand Théâtre de Genève when I was a teenager. To see Anton giving a recital there would make my life complete.’
Gustav wanted to say, that day will never come, but this felt cruel, so he kept silent. He also told himself that he didn’t know for certain that Anton, in his ‘slavery’, might not discover the ability to conquer his nerves and play in front of what he called ‘the snarling tiger’, but speculating about this was too painful to be endured for long.
They talked also about Gustav’s life and Adriana often congratulated him on the refurbished hotel – its welcoming atmosphere, its warmth and beauty. But, aside from the hotel, there was very little to speak of in the present existence of Gustav Perle, so they drifted, sometimes, towards memories of the past. One evening, Adriana said, ‘Anton was very lucky that he found you on the first day of kindergarten. You’ve shown him such loyalty, Gustav, and I don’t know whether he has ever really paid you back.’
‘Paid me back?’ said Gustav. ‘Well, I don’t think of it in those terms. I love Anton. I have always loved him and that’s just how it is.’
Lunardi teased Gustav that he only dined ‘with old women now’ because his other regular guest in the dining room was Lottie Erdman. Lottie had just passed her eighty-third birthday.
Adriana ate very sparingly, but Lottie was always ravenously hungry and stuffed herself with food. She’d also taken to drinking more wine than in the past and this sometimes made her say things which both annoyed Gustav and broke his heart. One night, she declared that if she and Gustav had stayed on in Paris together, she would have been ‘reborn’. She said that Erich understood what she was, a person of ‘exceptionally perfected sexual skill’, ‘and who knows,’ she went on, ‘I might even have been able to work my magic on you, Gustav, and then we both would have been happy. But you wouldn’t let me try. And now nobody in the world wants to fuck me any more, so what am I to do but kill myself?’
Gustav picked up her hand, where it lay upturned on the white tablecloth, waiting impatiently for dessert to be served, and brought it to his lips. He said that he thought the idea of suicide travelled with very many people through their lives, a companion who leaves only to return. But he reminded Lottie that if people do that companion’s bidding, then, sadly, all hope of another mousse au chocolat, of a baba au rhum with whipped cream was gone …
Lottie hit Gustav’s shoulder. She said she was weary of his teasing, that life was a serious business and that he should not forget this.
‘I haven’t forgotten it,’ he replied, ‘I’m just tired of being reminded about it.’
One autumn evening, when Lottie was due to dine with Gustav, she called him near six o’clock to say she wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t move out of her bed. In recent times, because she ate and drank so much, she’d become very fat and her legs had such difficulty carrying around this heavy load that they sometimes buckled underneath her. She now walked with the aid of a cane, and when she was with Gustav, he always took her arm, to guide her safely into her chair in the hotel dining room.
Gustav drove round to Grünewaldstrasse. He rang Lottie’s bell, but there was no answer. He waited for a moment, then he called the concierge, Frau Richter, who had keys to all the apartments, and together they walked up to Lottie’s floor. Gustav tapped on her door and called out, but there was only silence from the flat.
‘I can open the door, Herr Perle,’ said Frau Richter, ‘but only if she hasn’t put the safety chain on. Shall I do that?’
Gustav called out to Lottie again. He knew, from the Paris interlude, that she stuffed earplugs into her ears before she went to sleep. He told Frau Richter to open the door. The chain wasn’t on, so he went inside. He asked Frau Richter to wait, ‘in case there’s some help needed’.
The autumn evening was cold, but Lottie kept the apartment very warm, and there was a fusty smell in it, as though nobody had lived there for a long time.
Gustav walked towards her bedroom and, not wanting to make her afraid that an intruder had broken in, called out loudly, ‘It’s Gustav. I’m coming in, Lottie, if that’s all right?’
Her room was hot, with an old-fashioned electric fire switched on and all the radiators turned to full heat. Gustav approached the bed, where Lottie lay with her grey hair spread in a tangle across the pillow. He touched her hand, where it clutched the billows of the duvet, and she opened her eyes. Gustav always marvelled that, in the folds of Lottie’s f
leshy face, these eyes were still a glimmering, watery blue.
‘Gustav,’ she said, ‘what are you doing?’
‘I won’t disturb you. I just came to see if there’s anything you need.’
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Stay with me.’
‘Shall I fetch a doctor?’
‘No. You be my doctor. I wanted to come for supper at the hotel, but I can’t move, that’s all.’
‘Have you tried to move?’
‘Yes, I went to the bathroom, but I fell over. I had to get there on hands and knees. And getting back into bed was a comedy.’
‘Are you in pain?’
‘Yes, Gustav. I’m in pain. I’ve been in pain ever since we left Paris.’
Gustav didn’t offer any comment on this. He called out to Frau Richter that she could go downstairs again and then he sat at Lottie’s bedside, stroking her hand. He thought that she’d gone back to sleep, but she suddenly turned her head towards him, her eyes wide open, and said, ‘There’s something I’d better tell you, Gustav. I could have told you years ago, but I didn’t want to. But now I think it doesn’t matter any more, so I’m going to tell you: it’s about what happened to Erich.’
Gustav waited. He wondered whether he wanted to know the thing she was about to tell him, or whether it wasn’t better for certain knowledge to remain hidden, so that the mind could conjure its own stories from out of the past, stories it could bear to live with, stories which, in time, took on their own reality and seemed to become true.
‘Are you listening?’ asked Lottie.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, first of all, the thing you have to remember was that in 1939 everybody was afraid. We believed that the Germans could invade and then our world would end.’
‘I know that, Lottie.’
‘No. You can’t know it – not like we knew it: that terrible fear of what was going to happen. And fear of that extreme kind affects how people behave.’
‘Yes. I know.’
‘You keep saying you know, but you don’t, Gustav. Unless you lived through that, you have no right to say “I know”.’
‘All right.’
‘You asked me once who “betrayed” Erich, but I took objection to that word, because it wasn’t like that: it was just events unfolding in due time, as they had been bound to unfold.’
‘Go on …’
‘Well, when the Justice Ministry in Bern had put out its rule that no more Jews could enter Switzerland after the 18th of August deadline, they assumed that the police and the IF would be vigilant about enforcing this. But they realised, after the deadline had come and gone, that the number of Jews coming in was still going up, so they sent Justice Ministry officials to the various branches of the IF all over Switzerland – to question them. Perhaps they learned of a high concentration of Jews coming into Matzlingen, I don’t know. But those people from Bern came to the IF here and asked them if they’d falsified dates of entry. The IF was apparently threatened with closure and confiscation of its funds. But it wasn’t the IF who had falsified the dates – they hadn’t dared to do it! – so of course they put up their hands in innocence and said, “If anybody has falsified dates, it must have been the police.”’
‘When was that, Lottie? Before or after Roger came back to work?’
Lottie took Gustav’s hand and brought it to her lips. ‘Now listen to me,’ she said. ‘And don’t be tempted to judge anybody too harshly. All right? Promise me that you won’t judge?’
‘I’ll try not to.’
‘Well, it was after Roger was back from the hospital. He knew what your father had done, and he knew where the stack of forms was. And, in time, he got the visit he’d been dreading, from the Justice Ministry. They’d assumed it would be Roger’s signature on the forms. They told him they were ready to strip him of his post there and then, if the dates had been falsified by him. Roger thought about trying to withhold the forms – to say they’d been mislaid, or I don’t know what – but he was terrified, Gustav. Can you see how terrifying that was for Roger? He had to choose between saving himself and telling the truth about Erich. Yet it wasn’t even a choice, because Erich’s signature was on all those documents. Everything would have come out. So this is why you can’t talk about “betrayal”.’
Gustav sat very still. He was finding the heat in the room oppressive. Lottie stared up at him, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears. ‘I’ve got to remind you, Gustav,’ she said after a moment, ‘Roger did not betray Erich. It was we who betrayed Roger – Erich and I. The only real betrayal was our passion. I hope that now you can get all this straight in your mind.’
They began drinking whisky.
Gustav had been hungry when he arrived at Lottie’s apartment, but now his appetite had faded. The whisky tasted good and he liked the feeling of his brain becoming muddled. He thought he understood, at last, in his long sober life, why people drank – so that knowledge and reality would give way to something kinder, to a refashioning of things into a version of themselves in which they performed a dance of sudden grace and beauty. And who would not want to bear witness to this dance?
The only thing which now troubled Gustav was that he was getting an aching back from the hard bedside chair. When Lottie saw him shifting around uncomfortably, she reached out and said, ‘Just get into bed with me, darling, and have done with everything.’
Have done with everything.
It made him smile.
He took off his jacket and shoes and climbed in beside Lottie. The heat of her body was so intense, he was afraid to go near it, but she pulled him to her and kissed his face.
‘Gustav,’ she said. ‘Gustav Perle.’
They slept for a while and then Gustav woke, needing to piss away all the whisky he’d drunk. He was sweating all down his body, and wondered whether he’d caught some illness from Lottie.
The room was in darkness. Gustav groped his way to the lavatory and stood there for a long time, trying to cool down. He could hear rain on the frosted window glass. He wanted to get into his car and drive back to the hotel, to be alone to ponder the things Lottie had told him. But deserting Lottie in the middle of the night felt like a shabby thing to do.
He went back into the overheated room. He tiptoed to the window and opened it a little and breathed in the cool, wet air. Then, by the little light coming in from the street he could suddenly see that there was something lying on the floor, a bulky shape, folded almost into a square, like a bale of cotton. And he knew it was Lottie.
Gustav put on one of the bedside lamps. Lottie had fallen onto her knees and her back was bent over her knees and her head was on the hard floor. He knelt beside her and talked to her gently and then tried to lift her up. But as soon as he touched her, he knew that she was dead. Through all her magnificent flesh an unmistakable chill had spread.
Gustav stopped trying to lift Lottie up. He just stayed kneeling beside her, with his arm round her, holding her close to him until the morning arrived. The thought came to him that now he was in roughly the same position that he had had to adopt in the Church of Sankt Johann, cleaning the metal grating. Except that, then, he had had a hassock to kneel on and now there was no hassock, just the thin rug that lay beside Lottie’s bed. And he understood that now, more than ever in his life, there was nothing and no one to cushion him from the hardness of the earth.
The Wrong Place
Geneva, 2000
ADRIANA CALLED GUSTAV from Geneva. She told him that Anton had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital there, in the wake of ‘a complete nervous collapse’.
‘I’m with him now,’ she said, ‘but they won’t let visitors come very often. They think it’s better if he has complete rest, while his medication is sorted out.’
She then began to cry. ‘If you could see him, Gustav … So thin. And he’s torn out great hunks of hair from his head. And he was cutting himself. He’s got scars all up his arms. And the mad things he says …’
Gustav’s first
thought was, I can’t go there, I can’t see this. Anton has to remain the way he was in my mind.
But then Adriana said, ‘The only moment of hope I’ve had is when he asked for you.’
‘He asked for me?’
‘Yes. He said only you would understand that he’s in the wrong place.’
‘The wrong place?’
‘I don’t know what he meant. He wouldn’t explain. Will you come, Gustav? I can get you a room at the hotel where I’m staying.’
Gustav fell silent. He hated the idea of going to Geneva. He didn’t want to be pitched into suffering of this intensity. He didn’t want to see the ways in which Anton had mutilated himself. He felt furious that, after all that had happened, Anton could expect this of him.
He heard Adriana blowing her nose and then she said, ‘I understand how difficult this will be for you. It’s difficult for me, I promise you. But this thing about being in the wrong place; I think only you will be able to make sense of it. We can’t let him die, Gustav! You’ve got to promise me you’ll come. Will you? I beg you.’
Gustav put Leonnard in charge at the hotel. He took a train to Bern, then another to Geneva. On both the trains, he fell asleep. He didn’t want to contemplate how he would get through the next bit of time.
It was an autumn day. There was bright foliage in the grounds of the Marburg Hospital, where crows strutted about on the lawn, under a fine blue sky. Among the crows was a single Canada goose. An elderly hospital resident was feeding the birds, but as they clustered round, she kept sending the goose away. ‘Go away, goose!’ she muttered. ‘Come here, crows! Didn’t you hear me, goose? Goose, go away!’ And Gustav thought, yes, that is how life is always arranged, with one living thing being chosen over another, and the loser sent away to hunger and solitude.
Adriana and Anton were sitting on an iron bench. Adriana was reading to Anton from the Geneva newspaper, Le Temps. She was stylishly dressed, as ever, but Anton was wearing a faded hospital gown, with one of Adriana’s shawls draped over it. His feet and legs were bare.