Intermezzo
We fled south for several weeks that Christmas, arriving in Adelaide at the home of my grandparents, my mother’s parents, after a five-day drive.
Of that interminable trip only odd dream images remain: a water sprinkler twinkling on a postage stamp of lawn somewhere in the desert; the sky for miles black with clouds of thirsty budgerigars; a taxi heading south into that same desert, pulling over at some arranged spot and disgorging its passenger—a bearded black tribesman who paid his fare and strode off into the hot dunes, barefoot, carrying nothing but spears.
And then we were through the desert and into the temperate wheat country, passing through the mid-north towns in which I had once lived—centuries ago, in an earlier life, it now seemed. The closer we approached to Adelaide, the slower our journey became, stopping more and more frequently in those small wheat-belt towns, visiting old friends, reliving past Gilbert and Sullivan triumphs …
Until finally, somehow, we reached the City itself.
As a child, growing up in the bush, I was always aware of that distant presence. There was only one City, it seemed then: a far-off magical place always spoken of in hushed tones, and always spelled with a capital. School holidays, then as now, above all else meant a trip to the City, and an extended stay with grandparents of limitless generosity and tolerance and time up their sleeves. The City meant Television, of course—but there were other joys that still remain in my mind in a sort of mental upper-case, and usually preceded by the definite article, as befits magical things. The Zoo, and the Beach. The Glenelg Tram. The Show, and its attendant subdivisions of joy: Show Bags, Ghost Trains, Ferris Wheels. The Museum—especially its crypt-like Egyptian Room, full of mummies, sarcophagi, mysterious inscriptions and other graveyard loot.
Holidays also meant the Pictures—not yet become the Movies—and long afternoons of Batman, Tarzan, Fantales and Jaffas …
Those childhood pleasures had lost some of their joy for me by the age of sixteen, but this took time to discover.
I posted a Christmas card to the Swan between trips to the Beach: a European scene of falling snow and bare birches and candle-lit windows, something I hoped might bring a little coolness into Keller’s steamy room. I was a little surprised to receive a card, and a crude bachelor-wrapped parcel, in return.
Kind Regards to Your Family. Do no Neglect the Czerny: three studies a day.
My mother was highly amused:
‘Feel flattered, Paul. Those words are the nearest he can get to saying he misses you.’
We unwrapped the gift: a battered, yellowing edition of Czerny, the Opus 599 studies.
‘I’ve already got this,’ I said, disappointed.
My father was carefully examining the flyleaf:
‘Not this edition.’
He beckoned my mother:
‘Look at the date. Might even be a first edition.’
They scrutinised the markings, and turned a page:
‘A signed first edition,’ they discovered, together.
‘Must be worth a fortune,’ my father murmured. ‘And he sends it two thousand miles wrapped in a scrap of grocer’s paper.’
‘Perhaps that was the only way he could give it,’ she suggested. ‘At a distance. Carelessly. As if it meant nothing.’
That signed first edition, 150-odd years old, whetted my curiosity. I had been ordered out of the sun for several days, my face and shoulders blistered. Bored—finally—with daytime Television, and my pocket money reserves running too low for further trips to The Pictures, I began visiting libraries, searching for evidence of Keller’s earlier life. My father was always busy—unable to holiday, he spent those weeks at my grandparents’ piano, or at hospital refresher courses, lectures, and ward rounds—but my mother, a former librarian, often accompanied me, guiding me through arcane numbering systems, catalogues, indexes. Finding nothing in any of the nearby suburban libraries, she let me loose into the book-lined labyrinths of the Barr-Smith Library at Adelaide University. I spent much of my remaining school holiday there, the Beach and Television forgotten as I pored through biographies, textbooks, histories of pianism, following a faint, erratic trail of Dewey breadcrumbs through the maze from shelves 786.00—Pianism—to 943.6—History of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—and back again.
We had the library to ourselves; no-one seemed to visit those dark, dusty corners. And perhaps no-one ever had: certain back stacks of the library seemed unvisited, left off the maps, accidentally omitted, perhaps, from updated catalogues. Whole shelves of books could be found which had not been borrowed for twenty years. Whole days could pass without sighting another living being between shelves 943.6 and 944.
For a few brief weeks that summer the two of us must have known more about the history of music in Vienna than anyone else on the face of the planet. It formed the raw material for an informal quiz game we played endlessly in the tram home, or en route to the concerts that my parents were determined to cram into their holiday every night.
‘How many of his pupils did Theodore Leschetizky marry?’
‘Four?’
‘Incorrect. He was married four times, yes—but only three times to pupils. My turn to ask again. In what month of what year was Stefan Askenaze’s debut in Vienna?’
We did not learn a great deal about the history of Eduard Keller. Small gleanings came to light occasionally, transcribed instantly into a notebook to share with my father that night—but we discovered little more than we already knew. Three books gave his birthdate: a year we had not known, but guessed at, 1887. One book also gave the date of his death: 1944. A strange chill passed through me on reading this.
My mother gave it no significance, a simple error.
‘I think we may safely assume that Herr Keller is still alive.’
On the possibility that his wife had been a well-known singer, this lead we also followed—but no Mathilde Keller could be found. I assumed my mother’s guess to be correct—Mathilde had used her maiden name professionally.
The breakthrough came one late summer afternoon: a footnote buried in a biography of Richard Strauss, the great Bavarian composer. I was alone: towards the end of the holidays my mother had grown increasingly tired of the search and found better things to do. My own interest had only grown, my scope of inquiry slowly widening, a ripple of curiosity spreading from Vienna to engulf Salzburg, and then finally crossing the border into Germany itself. Knowledge was a kind of drug, I had discovered: it could as easily be pursued for its own sake as for tracking down the elusive Keller. One bibliography led to another, and another …
Strauss’s Jewish daughter-in-law, I idly read, was able to remain in his household, in Germany, ungassed and uncremated, throughout the War. But it was the small footnote to this passage which electrified me, lifted me straight out of a lazy summer afternoon torpor and carried me to the nearest public phone and my mother’s ear:
Strauss’s daughter-in-law was more fortunate than some. Marriage to the Austrian pianist Eduard Keller could not save the celebrated Jewish contralto and Wagner specialist, Mathilde Rosenthal, who died in Auschwitz, probably in 1942.
There was no mention of the child—Eric—in that tiny, enormously charged footnote. And no mention of Keller himself.
We discussed this find endlessly that night, and I tossed restlessly in bed for much of the night thinking it through.
In the morning, however, at the library, I was to learn things far more urgent and exciting … and all thought of Keller vanished from my head.
Engrossed in tracking further footnotes I failed to hear the footsteps tiptoeing in the next aisle: the two pairs of footsteps.
Other, more insistent noises soon alerted me.
A male voice, a hissed whisper: ‘God—I’ve been waiting for that.’
And a female: ‘You’ve no idea. Sitting there all day. Wanting to touch you.’
Various odd sound effects followed; wet noises, muffled drowning noises.
‘Yes, touc
h me there.’
‘You like?’
‘Please.’
A violent movement rocked the shelves momentarily, and ejected a book onto the floor next to me with a thud.
I held my breath, listening to the sound of two people listening. And then the noise of sexual passion resuming, unstoppable.
‘Give me it.’
‘Here? Now?’
‘Now! I’m going crazy …’
I knew what was happening, recognised these simple, stylised sentences from the movies. I bent—stealthily—and retrieved the book from the floor: The Unconscious Beethoven. About to slide it back into place I was halted, transfixed, by the view that presented itself through the narrow gap: a wet tongue nudging frantically at an ear, a pink fish trying to find its way back into some white, coral hole.
I bent a little lower and removed, silently, smoothly, the thickest book I could find: Memoirs of Hector Berlioz. The names of those books remain deeply branded in my memory, important not so much for what was in them as for what was behind them. I put my eye to the peephole.
A hand—a man’s bristle-furred hand—could be seen kneading bare flesh.
‘Kick them off,’ the male voice commanded, mysteriously. ‘And spread your legs.’
I dropped to my knees, and pressed my head flat to the floor. Peering beneath the bottom shelf I could just make out four feet: one pair shackled together by a pair of denim jeans around their ankles, the other pair in sandals, wider apart, a pair of panties lying some distance away … but wait, how many pairs of feet? Now only the male feet could be seen, straining in their denim shackles. The other pair had mysteriously levitated, even as I watched.
‘That feels so good!’
‘Much better when you have to wait for it.’
The shelves rocked gently again, and more books tumbled down. Still on my hands and knees, trembling with excitement and terror, I crept away down the aisle dog-fashion, an assortment of musicology texts raining down on me.
I remained on all fours until I reached the Mens’, where in the secrecy of a locked cubicle I spent some time trying to fit together that jigsaw of oblong book-shaped peepholes into one whole thrilling picture: a picture I would take back to Darwin fixed in my repertoire of fantasies, ready for use when my own long-awaited First Time arrived, which was not—I desperately hoped—too far away …
In the car that night, on the way to a string quartet performance, my parents continued discussing the awful tragedy of Keller’s life.
‘And to think she was a Wagner specialist,’ my father said. The irony had not escaped him.
‘I can’t believe,’ my mother murmured, ‘that a nation could murder so many of its musicians.’
‘You think the murder of musicians is more serious than the murder of the tone-deaf?’
‘Of course I didn’t mean that. I meant what a waste, what a loss to the world, a squandering of all that training …’
As always, however, he was relentless: ‘You mean: the more training you have, the worse the crime?’
‘It just seems so terrible. We know the numbers of dead, the cold figures. But a particular story—a victim sang opera, a victim played the violin—makes it somehow more … real, able to be imagined. Like seeing those gold fillings in the newsreels.’
‘The human angle. I’m more interested in the fact that she sang Wagner. I wonder if the poor woman ever sang for the Nazis—they loved Wagner.’
‘It’s all too horrible to talk about,’ she said. ‘All those millions of people.’
‘As I understand it,’ he pressed on. ‘Some prominent Jewish musicians were protected. Some were made honorary Germans. Hitler had his own list … First-rate Jews!’
I listened with half an ear only; interested yes, but far more interested in reliving other events from my day in the library.
1968
I returned to school in Darwin a year older and a year taller—but I had not yet grasped the fact. Self-perception lagged timidly behind my growth spurt: my body image refused to grow. Looking down on my classmates, I still seemed to be looking up at them. I walked round-shouldered, hunched, as if trying to make myself smaller …
‘Chest out,’ my mother would urge. ‘Don’t slouch.’
‘It’s the piano,’ I blamed.
And perhaps it was. Much of my life was spent hunched over a keyboard. Even at school the Music Room was still my lunchtime sanctuary …
From the beginning of that second year I often had company. A new arrival from the South—Rosie Zollo, daughter of my new French teacher—began creeping into the Music Room each day to munch her sandwiches and listen to me play, or ask questions about the beginner’s pieces she herself played.
‘Looser,’ I would counsel, repeating the clever phrases I had learned from Keller. ‘The hands must be looser. And quicker. Like sprinkling salt.’
I suppose I disliked her for the usual reason: she was too much like me. Also I was worried; I now had competition. She was the other smart kid in the class. Her eyes would fix on mine with a grim, suffering love throughout lunch. Her voice seemed insistent, high-pitched, like an insect. I felt the urge at times to swat the air near my ears, to drive that voice away.
‘I adore Mozart. It’s like … sunlight, don’t you think? A dream of sunlight.’
My dreams—my sweet, sticky dreams, usually taking place in a library, standing between shelves—were only of Megan. And the fact that this intense, dark-haired girl worshipped me? That only disqualified her even further. The old quandary: anyone that desperate …
And yet I accepted her, even took pains to instruct her. Some miserly part of me refused to give anything away, to close off even the remote possibility of Rosie Zollo.
‘Each finger has its own identity, Rosie. Take the thumb …’
I had no shortage of such advice: my repertoire was growing longer each lesson. It seemed that Keller was determined to punish me—or himself—for his excesses of Christmas gift-giving: lessons now lasted up to three hours, filled with scales, arpeggios, and the inevitable studies.
‘Czerny without end,’ he smiled grimly, always fond of attempting awkward puns in his second language.
And yet his attitude had changed, subtly. That Christmas card and priceless gift had opened a door, a narrow emotional chink. However gruffly he tried to slam it shut I was determined to keep my foot wedged in the crack.
‘Tell me about Vienna.’
‘Vienna was many places. And many times.’
‘When you were my age. What was it like?’
‘The Ballroom of Europe,’ he said, mockingly.
‘It must have been wonderful.’
He shrugged: ‘I was busy.’
‘But all the music. The famous musicians.’
‘One day I looked up from my keyboard,’ he said. ‘And Vienna had gone. Finished. Become a wine garden filled with civil servants.’
I pursued the same theme for weeks, trying to draw him out.
‘Gemütlichkeit,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Versuchstation für die Weltuntergang,’ he added.
I watched him blankly, waiting for a translation.
‘The Experimental Laboratory for the End of the World,’ he obliged.
I tried again, the following week: ‘There must have been concerts. Theatre. So much to see and hear.’
‘I sat in wine gardens and played skat,’ he said. ‘With civil servants. While the world ended.’
‘But the beautiful opera houses. The concert halls. One day I’m going to play in those halls …’
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But who will listen? In Vienna the best boxes face away from the stage, towards the rest of the audience. People come to watch each other, to be seen, not to listen. Vienna is the city of show, of … veneer.’
I was to be allowed no dreams, it seemed.
‘You wish so much to know Wien? To understand those Great Times?’
I heard the bitter emphasis
in his tone, but ignored it.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Bring a pack of cards. I will teach you the game of skat. You must be prepared for the end of the world.’
If Vienna remained a closed book, Keller seemed more willing to share other thoughts. What he read in his newspapers, for instance. I had burned with curiosity about these; now I was given ample opportunity to slake it.
49 Arrested at Carols by Candelight Riot
‘It is a kind of music, no?’ he said, reaching for his scissors.
‘It’s funny.’
‘It might be funny if so much did not depend on it.’
A vast collection of these much-thumbed scrapbooks was squeezed into the bottom shelves in his room. Waiting for him—he often had doctors’ appointments during the first months of that year, and sometimes even seemed in pain, although he never mentioned it—I would sometimes leaf through the nearest book.
At times I would laugh out loud, at times I would avert my eyes in horror, unable to read further. There were clippings from days before and clippings dated back before my birth, all shades of newsprint from fresh, recent white back through various time-strata of faded grey and dirty yellow. Many were in German—DIE ZIET, DIE PRESSE from Vienna—but the accompanying photographs looked much the same whatever the language, a bleak human landscape located somewhere between Tragedy and Dumb Stupidity. I guessed that the content of the German and English stories was much the same. Many reminded me of the stories my father brought home from his work.
A medium, 53, no longer able to communicate with the dead after removal of a brain tumour, has successfully sued his neurosurgeon for malpractice. A Californian jury awarded the man $US 1.2 million damages for loss of paranormal powers.
‘May I take this clipping home?’ I said, wanting to show my father.
He watched me for a time, deciding: ‘Take the whole textbook.’
‘Scrapbook,’ I corrected.
‘You may return the textbook,’ he insisted, meaning exactly what he said. ‘Next week.’
I spent hours lying on my bed that night poring over the ‘textbook’. LIBRETTO, he had scrawled violently across the front cover—some sort of fierce personal joke, obviously.
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