Maestro

by Peter Goldsworthy

  ‘I never hear you practise.’

  He smiled: ‘Only those who are dirty need to wash.’

  Suffering such humiliations might have been worthwhile if my part in the opera that year was larger. But once again I found myself lost in the chorus: a Marine hidden deep inside a platoon of older, larger Marines.

  ‘Your voice hasn’t broken properly,’ my father claimed.

  ‘Has so!’ I growled, deeply.

  ‘You don’t even shave every day.’

  ‘I do so!’

  But here my anger betrayed me, control lapsed, my voice reverting to a high furious mouse-squeak.

  I juggled my commitments over the next two months, cutting corners, cycling desperately back and forth across town after school, frequently managing to be in two places at once. Or so it seems now: the weeks telescoped into one long frantic blur of days and events that ended suddenly, abruptly, on the morning of Opening Night when I awoke into a Saturday of immense, anxious emptiness.

  ‘Never practise on the day of a performance,’ my father was already telling my mother over breakfast, his chair placed physically between her and the piano, blocking access, the lid of the instrument locked, the key hidden away.

  ‘But the Overture … the left hand needs work.’

  ‘The left hand will be fine.’

  ‘Please, John. Just a few mintues.’

  They played this familiar game all day; a game of ritual fun at first, but as the hours passed becoming more serious, more tense. We left home absurdly early that evening: my mother fidgeting, agitated, already wiping her sweating palms on a piece of towelling, wanting at least to be at the hall, doing something, even if only selling tickets.

  ‘Sitting in the anxious seat,’ my father teased, using a phrase he had brought home from Keller which had amused them both and entered our family dialect.

  ‘I’m not at all anxious.’

  ‘You’re shaking all over.’

  ‘I must be cold.’

  ‘In this climate?’

  ‘Maybe I am a little bit worried.’

  ‘Relax.’

  ‘What if I lose my place. What if …’

  ‘You won’t. You never do.’

  ‘Look: I’m trembling like a leaf.’

  ‘The adrenalin. It’s good for you. You don’t look at all nervous.’

  Only after the performance did she relax: entering a serene, untouchable trance, a deep satisfaction that lasted till the morning before the next performance.

  My father was more in his element: strutting the stage in a parody uniform and a kilogram of jingling medals, singing absurd songs at breakneck speed, bathing himself in the laughter and applause. At these times—and afterwards, kite-high on excitement—he bore no resemblance remotely to anyone I knew. I suspected I was glimpsing some part of him that had long been repressed: some frivolous, joyous core that hardship, childhood tragedy and the War had buried inside him too long.

  Half-filled with love, half with envy, I knew that I, too, wanted the spotlight. Centre-stage. Up front.

  With the opera over I redoubled my efforts at the keyboard. If Keller asked for two Bach fugues each week, I prepared three. If he required three hours’ practice, I played for four …

  ‘Work makes free,’ he would often tell me, smiling grimly as if at some private joke.

  The champagne cork popped upwards, passed neatly through the blades of the revolving fan, rebounded from the ceiling and passed down through the blades again, unscathed, as if synchronised.

  My parents laughed at this minor miracle. Even Keller managed a small, tight smile.

  ‘Here’s to a wonderful talent,’ my father proposed, pouring out the creamy, foaming liquid.

  ‘Here’s to talent … properly harnessed,’ my mother added as she tilted her glass in the direction of Keller.

  ‘Here’s to a technical hurdle safely negotiated.’ As he limited his toast he sipped primly, his mouth tight and wrinkled, a dried fruit.

  Late August, for my sixteenth birthday, he had finally accepted a dinner invitation. And it was clear he was not going out of his way to secure another.

  The dinner was a double celebration: my Associate results from the Music Board had arrived from the South: A+, a rare and amazing result. Both parents were thrilled—agreed for once in this—but Keller remained unmoved, outwardly at least. His presence that night was the sole evidence of any pride he might share in my—our?—achievement.

  Or had he come for the opposite reason? To douse the festivities with cold water lest they get out of hand?

  ‘Such an exam means nothing,’ he shrugged. ‘Who was the examiner?’

  ‘But an A plus?’

  ‘The boy is too given to self-satisfaction. The self-satisfied go no further.’

  My mother tried to tease him. ‘But surely you must be just a little bit pleased?’

  ‘Am I pleased,’ Keller asked, ‘because it is Friday? Because it is eight o’clock? Exams are a technical hurdle only. A chronological hurdle: a ticking of the clock. A sign that time is passing.’

  My parents exchanged the first of many winks I was to witness behind his back that night—winks augmented by a sign language of ever-increasing sophistication: raised eyebrows, discreetly rolled eyes, fingers pressed to hushing lips.

  ‘Well we’re in the mood for celebrating,’ my father pronounced. ‘And I propose a toast to you maestro, for all the hard work you have put in.’

  After the second bottle Keller began—just a little—to loosen up.

  ‘Fine wine,’ he murmured. ‘Imported?’

  ‘Barossa Valley,’ my father told him, grateful for the cue, able to launch into his usual wine monologue: part South Australian pride, part Trivial Pursuit, part travelogue.

  ‘You should visit,’ he recommended as he finished his winding, verbal tour of the Barossa vineyards. ‘Many of the older folk still speak German. The culture is very strong.’

  ‘I am Austrian,’ Keller said.

  More eye and sign language passed between my parents—pitched at some frequency they seemed to believe beyond his range of hearing.

  ‘Of course,’ my mother said. ‘But you speak German. It’s part of the same culture.’

  ‘Someone else thought that,’ Keller murmured. ‘Thirty years ago.’

  Silence followed. Small talk was impossible with this man. We watched him watching his wine: his weather-beaten face had taken on a regular, corrugated appearance, as if concentrating, deep in thought.

  ‘Terrible things happened here during the War too,’ my mother eventually resumed, trying to correct her mistake but only adding to it. ‘German placenames were changed. Composers were banned: even Beethoven. German speakers were interned …’

  ‘One presumes they were not gassed,’ Keller murmured. ‘And then burnt, after the removal of gold amalgam.’

  He spoke so mildly, so matter-of-factly, that it was impossible to tell if he were rebuking her or making some sort of horrific joke.

  ‘You don’t play in public,’ she said, changing the subject after another short, deep silence. ‘Anymore.’

  ‘I am too lazy, dear lady.’

  ‘But such a talent.’

  He laughed, mockingly: ‘You have perhaps heard me?’

  ‘You learnt from Theodore Leschetizky,’ my father prompted.

  Keller glanced at him curiously, then shrugged.

  ‘Very briefly,’ he said. ‘I was not a good student.’

  The wall was up again.

  ‘Is it your finger?’ I put in, trying to crudely lever the bricks from that wall—and able, I knew, to hide my brashness behind the excuse of youth and innocence.

  He waggled the stump of his finger in front of me.

  ‘There are concert pianists with one whole hand missing,’ he smiled. ‘What is one little finger?’

  ‘I just thought …’

  ‘The ear-finger, we call it at home.’

  He jammed the stump into the socket of his
ear and agitated furiously.

  ‘This is my problem: I can no longer clean my ear.’

  And he laughed for the first time that night—uproariously, harshly.

  ‘Shall we eat?’ my mother rose from the couch. ‘We’re having Wiener Schnitzel tonight, Herr Keller. In your honour. And sauerkraut—I had awful trouble finding a recipe. I hope it doesn’t make you homesick …’

  ‘Nothing, dear lady, could make me homesick.’

  ‘You must miss the musical life. The orchestras.’

  He snorted: ‘So many ponderous orchestras and so much ponderous music. I miss nothing.’

  ‘Vienna,’ she continued, determined, ‘is my favourite foreign city. I only know it from photographs, of course. The Spanish Riding School. The Ringstrasse …’

  ‘The Ringstrasse,’ he snorted again. ‘Of course. An excellent city for military pomp and processions.’

  ‘But such beautiful architecture.’

  ‘Movie-set architecture,’ he murmured. ‘Ornamental facades. Hiding the hypocrisy within …’

  He seemed more talkative after his ear-finger joke, but there were no further self-revelations. The conversation stumbled fitfully, awkwardly from Vienna to wine to music, to music written about wine, to the climate, to the food, and lastly to me.

  ‘Perhaps you could play one of the exam pieces, Paul,’ my father suggested. ‘A private concert for the three of us.’

  ‘The Brahms?’

  ‘The Beethoven,’ Keller interjected, ‘might be preferable.’

  I played Beethoven that night as well as I had ever played, and turned afterwards, smiling, ready for praise.

  ‘Beautiful,’ my mother breathed. ‘Don’t you agree, Herr Keller?’

  ‘An excellent forgery,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Technically perfect,’ he said.

  He drained his wineglass before continuing. It was to be his longest monologue of the evening:

  ‘At such moments I always remember a forged painting I once saw. In a museum in Amsterdam: Van Gogh. A fascinating art work. Each violent brushstroke was reproduced with painstaking, non-violent care. The forgery must have taken many many times longer than the original to complete. It was technically better than the original.’

  He rose from his chair and walked a little unsteadily towards the door: ‘And yet something was missing. Not much—but something.’

  At the door he paused, and turned: ‘And that small something may as well have been everything.’

  He bowed slightly: ‘Thankyou, dear lady, for your hospitality.’

  His mouth uttered the conventional words, but his face remained dead, unsmiling. That was the forgery, I decided, not my Beethoven: a forgery of good manners.

  Or perhaps all manners were a kind of forgery.

  ‘Please,’ he continued. ‘Do not rise from your stools. I can walk. The boy may consult me again on Tuesday.’

  Throughout October the sky slowly thickened and bloated, the atmosphere grew weighty, super-saturated with moisture and trapped heat. The transparent air of the Dry—a cool absence—became a presence: something that resisted movement and breath, that rubbed against the skin like hot liniment, that could be touched and felt and always, endlessly, discussed.

  ‘The town beneath remained dry and dusty, its earth somehow growing even drier as its inhabitants grew damp: thin, wet claddings of dust sticking to each sweating patch of skin.

  ‘The season of raised voices and heat rashes,’ my father pronounced.’ The season of tropical sores and family disputes.’

  Once again he began bringing home horror stories every night from work: anecdotes from the life of a busy doctor in Darwin, forced to work harder than he wished. I was never quite sure if this was due to the effect of the Wet on his patients, or on him. Always a connoisseur of the human comedy, those humid months deepened his amusement into morbid obsession.

  Mostly the stories were classified Adults Only, for Restricted Listening: but as my parents lay in bed, talking behind a shut door, their voices often carried out through the open louvres and through the humid stillness outside the house, re-entering again through my windows.

  ‘He’d tied some sort of rubber band around the base, then couldn’t get it off. Wanted a permanent erection. The tip was already gangrenous.’

  ‘How terrible.’

  ‘We managed to save two-thirds.’

  ‘Well, you know what I always say,’ my mother murmured. ‘It isn’t how much you’ve got …’

  They laughed softly together, perhaps the best defence they had been able to develop over the years, but I was not yet so immune to human stupidity. Squirming in bed, trying not to listen but unable not to hear, I found it hard to place these squalid stories in the same world as the Mozart K. 576 or 332 my father might have played only minutes before, or the limpid, watery Debussy that my mother liked to splash into the air as if to cool us in the heat of the evening.

  ‘Her lover died on top of her. Heart attack. She came in the ambulance with the body.’

  ‘She must have been very upset.’

  He snorted: ‘More angry than upset.’

  ‘With him?’

  ‘All she could talk about was his car keys. Where the hell were they? His car was still parked in her drive—and she wanted it moved before her husband got home.’

  ‘Pretty cool customer.’

  ‘Said she didn’t realise he was having a heart attack. He always made a lot of noise coming.’

  ‘And going.’

  The town waited, knife edged, for the abscess of the heavens to burst and bring at least partial relief, but the stories continued even more thickly into November: a month the locals like to speak of—with a kind of odd, perverse pride—as the Suicide Month.

  ‘Saw a strange one today. Shut himself in his garage with two cars, with both motors running.’

  ‘Both? Why both?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps one car could be an accident. Two is a statement. A kind of suicide note.’

  ‘He had two cars?’

  ‘Borrowed his girlfriend’s.’

  As the world grew hotter, and the louvred walls of the houses were cranked open to maximum aperture, all privacy vanished. To walk the streets at night was to walk among rows of lined, illuminated screens, as if at some vast drive-in—a supermarket of drive-ins. A constant soundtrack of country and western music filled the air: plangent ballads of love, jealousy, murder and jail spilling out of the high, opened houses and pubs. Across each screen—raised on stilts above the shrubbery, louvres wide open—even the most fantastic stories my father related suddenly seemed possible, and visible.

  In the entire town perhaps only the wooden slats of Eduard Keller’s bedroom remained closed. Climbing the stairs to his shuttered room each Tuesday, I was able to tell myself I was finally beginning to gain some sort of understanding of the man. The Swan was a monastery, of a kind: a place of retreat, of renunciation of the world. A place for atonement—against all the evidence, I still thought him guilty of war crimes—a place for examination of the heart.

  And examination of the liver, also, certainly. A place of partial renunciation. His bottle of schnapps was never more than arm’s length distance.

  The November humidity seemed to draw out his worst, exaggerate his faults, and render him a caricature of himself. His face reddened further, his moist lids drooped—there was even the occasional crease in his starched white suit. I would find him each steamy Tuesday hunched in his dark room, brooding, the schnapps bottle always at his elbow, his fat scrapbook of newspaper clippings once again before him …

  In this, he resembled my father: the Wet brought out a morbid, brooding curiosity in the doings of his fellow humans. Those scrapbooks would be in his hands as I arrived, and he would be reaching for them again as I left. I could only presume he spent the entire time between lessons gazing at clippings. I remembered those movies I often saw as a child in the South, on holidays in the city:
movies which screened continuously, beginning again as soon as they ended …

  So Keller in his humid room stared endlessly at his clippings, turning back to the first page as he reached the last, as if trying to fit them together into some new version of events, perhaps even hoping for some variation, some change, some different ending. I began to plan how I could get my hands on them, discover exactly what was so fascinating.

  His teaching methods also changed with the coming of the Wet: suddenly he seemed to find the music of certain composers unbearable, no matter how well I played.

  ‘Leave it for now.’

  ‘But I practised especially …’

  ‘It is insincere. So much … showing off.’

  ‘My playing?’

  ‘The music.’

  As the humidity climbed, his musical taste narrowed sharply, his choice of pieces retreated further into the past—to Beethoven first, then back to Mozart and deeper still to Bach, Scarlatti, and finally just scales and more scales, as if seeking some kind of ultimate discipline, some perfect control to set against the treacheries of emotion.

  ‘But the Rachmaninoff is so beautiful.’

  His hackles rose: ‘We must be on our guard against beauty always. Never trust the beautiful.’

  ‘But beauty is what music is for.’

  I could never follow this strange line of argument. I sat, twitching restlessly on my stool, hands fidgeting, longing to play as he tried, stumbling, to explain.

  ‘Beauty simplifies,’ he said. ‘The best music is neither beautiful nor ugly. Like the world, it is infinitely complex. Full of nuance. Rich beyond any reduction. We must not make the mistake of confusing music with emotion.’

  Throughout the hot, wet month of November any kind of emotional expression was forbidden, verboten: Mozart was played in the manner of Bach, and Bach in the manner of scales, according to strict metronomic markings.

  ‘Music is a kind of arithmetic,’ he told me.

  And again, as I pressed him to allow me to return to my then favourites—to Liszt and Rachmaninoff, to noise and speed and blurred hands and lyric flashiness.

  ‘If you want people to believe your lies,’ he grunted, ‘set them to music.’