Maestro

by Peter Goldsworthy

  He laughed, quickly, harshly: ‘You cannot know. But that is no matter.’

  Here was the first sign of passion in his measured words.

  ‘Nothing changed at first,’ he continued. ‘Not in my world. But later, yes. People began disappearing. My friends began disappearing. But slowly. Many had left of course. Jewish friends.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said, my back up, still wounded by his earlier remarks. ‘I’ve read books. I’d rather know why you stayed. I asked you once—you refused to answer.’

  He looked up, the jelly of his eyes moist and red: ‘I was not Jewish.’

  ‘You wife was Jewish.’

  He shrugged, but I knew that I had touched—with the insensitivity of the hurt—the heart of the matter:

  ‘Who would harm the wife of Eduard Keller?’ he said.

  Half of me wanted to remain, to quiz him further, to fit these various bits and pieces of wartime biography together; but half of me wanted to be out of there, now. I felt ‘affection’ for him certainly—I loved him, in many ways—but I loved Rosie more.

  ‘Did she wish to leave?’ I pressed, and heard a slow exhalation from him, a sigh of relaxation, or release. I had the feeling that he had wanted me to ask him this question, to interrogate him further.

  ‘There was no future for her. No engagements. No invitations. Snubbed by former friends, music directors …’

  ‘So you did finally leave?’

  ‘The evil would pass, I told her. All things pass.’

  He was gazing at the portrait on the piano, but I was listening to a car tooting in the street: a sound of enormous sexual gravity.

  Only now can I recognise the scene for what it was: a confessional, a privilege that I, through selfishness and sensual addiction, failed to accept. Nothing had yet been explained. What had happened to his wife? And their son? And what of his—Keller’s—tattooed serial number? And why, after all these years, had he decided to entrust me with this immense secret, this weight he wanted to heave from his soul?

  ‘Besides,’ he continued. Things improved. Briefly. In … 1938.’

  I should have stayed, listened, poured out his schnapps, lubricated his tongue. But there wasn’t enough time. The aroused, sexual present overwhelmed the past.

  ‘Eichmann arrived back in Vienna. You have also perhaps heard of Eichmann?’

  ‘Of course,’ I repeated. ‘The murderer.’

  ‘A most charming man.’ Keller wasn’t listening to me. ‘And most efficient. The head of the Centre for Emigration of Austrian Jews. He released many prominent people from prison. He organised concerts: fundraising for the emigrés.’

  ‘So you could have left?’

  ‘I was assured,’ he stumbled on. ‘Jewish members of German families would not be harmed. And the child—our mongrel, our mischling—he was safe. Privileged …’

  I was on my feet.

  ‘I have to be off,’ I lied. ‘My plane. But I’ll write soon. Let you know how I’m going.’

  He rose unsteadily, and clutched my proffered hand between both his small, manicured paws.

  ‘You must understand,’ he said. ‘I knew these people. These murderers. I had signed their concert programmes.’

  I moved a step back, tugging slightly, but he failed to release me, and our clasped hands swung up awkwardly between us, a straining hawser.

  ‘There were rumours, of course,’ he stumbled on. ‘Death squads in Poland. But I couldn’t believe them.’

  ‘I’ll never forget you,’ I blustered. ‘You’ll be the first I invite to hear me play at the Sydney Opera House. I’ll fly you down.’

  ‘You will understand,’ he said. ‘Perhaps not now, but soon. Vienna was my home. It is more difficult to see evil in your own home. So much is familiar, reassuring—what can happen? The Nazis arrived, and what was different? Ninety nine per cent of our lives remained the same.’

  ‘It was the other one per cent that mattered,’ I said, knowing that if I hadn’t, he would have.

  The car tooted again, more insistently, in the street outside. I shook myself suddenly free and walked down the wooden steps, a little dizzy with schnapps, filing away the horrific fragments of story he had told me for later, trying to focus at the time only on Rosie, and the party.

  I turned at the base and I looked back at him, standing at the top of the stairs above the beer garden. A grim smile had returned to his face.

  ‘I do not tell you this for me,’ he called down, shouting above the noise of the drinkers. ‘But for you.’

  He raised his right hand, more a gesture of dismissal than a farewell wave. His gold ring caught the light, glinting.

  ‘You never told me,’ I called back up. ‘What happened to your finger?’

  ‘It offended me,’ he said.

  He paused, examining his hand as if it were some odd, distasteful object, turning it this way and that.

  ‘But I could not—how do you say?—finish the job,’ he added, and turned away, back towards his room and his schnapps.

  1974

  The years that followed in Adelaide, at the Conservatorium, passed so slowly, so monotonously, that the retelling of them can only pass quickly. My Law studies soon fell by the wayside—early successes encouraged me to concentrate on Music instead. I left a trail of prizes behind me … and also a trail of teachers. Keller had spoiled me, I soon began to realise. I quickly tired of the second-rate, and the first-rate tired equally quickly of me and my rigid second-hand opinions.

  Everything he had taught me—every opinion, every phrasing, every note—had hardened into dogma. Things I had thought laughable when he first uttered them now seemed profound, part of a musical Bible whose texts I knew by heart and quoted freely, especially when speaking through my hands. The gospel of Czerny and Liszt had been handed on to me personally; I hectored my fellow students and teachers with its texts cruelly.

  ‘How do you know Liszt meant the piece to be played like that?’

  ‘Liszt told Leschetizky. Who told Eduard Keller. Who told me.’

  I was smug, insufferable—and far better at playing the piano than anyone else.

  My parents moved South in my second year of study, finally tiring of life in the tropics: the Wet season too hot for my mother; the Dry too parched for my father’s small grove of withered rambutan and mangosteen seedlings.

  Perhaps also—I liked to think—they missed their son, or wanted to bask in his performances, share in the eisteddfod prizes, the exam results.

  My father left the Government Medical Service, buying a cheap general practice in the leafy suburbs. His hobby farm, he called it: a once-busy practice whose patients had grown old and were rapidly dying off, preceded by their former doctor. My mother found part-time library work to supplement their dwindling income.

  Both of them, as always, were far more interested in music. Together they joined, and soon commandeered, the local suburban Gilbert and Sullivan Society.

  ‘The Mikado this year?’

  ‘I think The Gondoliers.’

  ‘I must insist …’

  ‘Please. It’s my turn to choose.’

  ‘Let me choose the opera, and you can choose your part …’

  I remember those years, like all the years of my childhood, as a kind of Gilbert and Sullivan version of the Chinese calendar: the Year of the Mikado, the Year of the Pirate, the Year of the Gondolier, the Year of the Pinafore—and the cycle would start all over again.

  And Keller? Although I quoted him tirelessly through those years in Adelaide I wrote to him infrequently. I knew enough, I’d decided. I’d learnt all the lessons that were in his power to teach me. On the few occasions I did write, his answer always came promptly; but now his advice seemed irrelevant, long behind me, useful only for those snippets I could repeat, loudly, in lessons and Master Classes.

  No advance in art is possible for the self-satisfied … A step back is often as useful as a step forward …

  At the end of 1972—a Year of the
Gondolier—I sent him a tape of my Honours performance in Elder Hall, a Christmas gift which I expected him to treasure: Bach, Mozart, Debussy—and Grandfather Liszt. I was stunned to receive the tape back in the post the following week, together with a thick wodge—no, a book—of notes, a critique that tore my performance apart phrase by phrase.

  That first morning I could read only the first page before tossing it aside, overcome by anger …

  ‘Did he like the cassette, dear?’ My mother poked her head through my bedroom door.

  ‘Very much,’ I lied.

  ‘It was a thick parcel. Did he send you a Christmas gift?’

  ‘Um … yes,’ I improvised. ‘Some sheet music.’

  ‘Could I see the letter? I always like to read his letters. So does your father.’

  I wanted to turn and scream at her, to loosen my hatred on the nearest meddling scapegoat.

  ‘If I can find it,’ I managed to limit myself. ‘I know I left it around here somewhere.’

  Back to basics for Bach. I sank deeper into the letter that night. Six months of The Children’s Bach, Small Preludes, Inventions. Then, perhaps, the 48. But you must learn all over again the separation of the voices. Separate and together …

  The Children’s Bach? Still? I was now a well-known pianist in a medium-large city—playing the Tchaikovsky Concerto with the Youth Orchestra the following week—and some small-town drunk has-been wanted me to play kindergarten pieces. I lay in bed reading restlessly, twitching and thrashing about, winding myself in my bedsheets in my fury. Do not play Debussy again for several months. Listen to Gieseking, then start over again. I do not mean you to play like Gieseking, but from him you have much to learn …

  I crumpled the letter into a tight ball, and tossed it into the bin. Let Gieseking listen to me—if he was still alive. I was the only pianist I had time to listen to.

  I retrieved the crumpled letter from the bin the following morning, unpeeled the ball of paper carefully, like a mandarin, then read through to the end, as if it were some thriller, repulsive, but unable to be left alone.

  It would be so much easier to play for you than to explain. A few seconds on the piano speaks so much more than pages of writing …

  An invitation, certainly—but one I chose not to find between the lines at the time. Christmas was closing fast; two months of vacation lay ahead. I could—I should—have travelled North, but I travelled east instead, to Rosie and Melbourne. All my holidays were spent in her shared students’ house there: making love, concert-going, socialising with her small circle of medical student friends, practising on the cheap Korean piano wedged into a corner of her bedroom while she worked at her various part-time waitressing jobs.

  I loved her—which, at a time when most of my love was wasted on myself, was no small achievement. Those nights of deepest, first-discovered joy in Darwin had never left us; each term’s separation only magnified our memory, and desire.

  And so the choice that Christmas was simple: two months with The Children’s Bach in Darwin, or two months with Rosie in Melbourne.

  I chose Rosie: her bedroom full of thick textbooks and fragments of human bones and candle-lit love was my favourite hiding-hole, and her house—full of friends, part-time musicians mostly, quiet intellectual types who gathered in the bedroom each night to hear me play, listening with serious rapture, and believing me the new Horowitz, or Rubinstein—was my favourite home.

  I was overseas through Christmas, 1974, performing. Or so I liked to tell people. Overseas, performing: the two words still slide easily from my tongue, affecting a glamour far greater than I deserved.

  I was not so much performing as competing: leapfrogging across the planet from Piano Competition to Piano Competition, part of a travelling circus of would-be concert artists who chased fame and prize money from San Francisco to New York to Warsaw to Munich to Tokyo, hoping for the Main Chance …

  A Two Year Plan. I had bargained for it with my parents—who finally agreed, impressed by my performances and exam results. They even put up the larger share of the money, mortgaging their new home. One year to learn the ropes, I argued: one year to become a familiar face, a fixture, and a second year to see how far I could go. It was a gamble, of course—a musical lottery, Keller had often called it—but a lottery whose odds could be shortened, and whose First Prizes meant Instant Career. I realised even then that I would have regretted all my life not taking that gamble. As also—despite their doubts—would my parents. They had wanted a concert pianist in the family for years. The Dream would have itched away at them, lingering, nagging, still possible. Could he have? What if?

  Full of myself at first, my enthusiasm slowly faded. The months lengthened, the excuses multiplied: injured hands, insufficient practice time, junk pianos, unqualified juries. And the name Eduard Keller opened no doors to me: after the disaster of my first competition in Paris, I quickly dropped any mention of Keller from my curriculum vitae.

  The juries had either not heard of him, or thought me some sort of confidence man or impostor.

  ‘You learnt piano through a medium, perhaps, Monsieur Crabbe? In a seance? You can communicate with the dead?’

  To explain myself proved impossible: it seemed I could translate anything into French except the truth, at least in the brief time I was allowed to offer an explanation.

  ‘A misprint,’ I quickly surrendered. ‘I belonged to Keller’s school, in the broad sense. My teacher learnt from Keller.’

  Lost in my private world of ambition and keyboards and excuses, my tunnel vision limited to the next hotel booking, the next deadline for audition tapes, the next connecting flight, that year I lost all contact with newspapers. A letter from my father tracked me down poste restante in Salzburg in the early New Year, bringing news of the cyclone, Tracy, and the terrible total destruction of the town of Darwin on Christmas Eve.

  Keller had survived the storm, my father wrote, and was now their house guest in Adelaide, temporarily: an evacuee awaiting return to Darwin. If and when …

  He sent his warm regards, my father relayed. Also a little familiar-sounding advice, penned at the end of the letter: Don’t put too much store on winning—you never win by much.

  I found this irritating—and also contradictory. I remembered well his earlier question: what is the difference between good and great? His repertoire of advice resembled the Bible especially in this: one text could always be quoted to annul another if it proved inconvenient.

  The letter reached me at lowest ebb—trying to convalesce after yet another Honourable Mention in a minor competition. Honourable Mention had become the story of my life, no matter how much I practised. I had found my level, my performances frozen into a recurring pattern of Also Rans.

  You don’t win by much? I scribbled angrily on a sheet of hotel notepaper. You win by three years of solid bookings and engagements. You win by a fat contract with Deustsche Grammophon, or EMI. You win by …

  I didn’t send this note. Rosie’s weekly letter from Melbourne arrived the following day: and those letters always possessed powers of healing. I liked to think of them as a kind of prescription, written as part of her medical training. She followed my travels keenly, collecting the results and programme notes and clippings that I mailed to her in a thick scrapbook—her ‘Form Guide’—and sending by return mail her hopes and prayers and promises. She always seemed able to tell me exactly what I wanted to hear.

  The other competitors were so much older and more experienced … Of course the Russian won. Two of the judges were Russian …

  More details of the cyclone followed from my father in his next letter. Our old house had gone, someone who knew someone who had a friend who was there had told him: blown down into the gully and across the tidal mudflats out to sea. Rumours were rife of mass beach graves containing far more than the official death toll. But the letter finished with an image I would never forget, an image of such strangeness and poetry that I spent weeks thinking about it, picturing it, s
earching it for significance.

  Eduard Keller had survived the worst of the storm, my father wrote, by sheltering beneath the supine, beneath his grand piano, his beloved Bösendorfer, wet and shivering and lacerated by flying glass as the roof lifted off the Swan, and the walls of his room disintegrated about him, but safe beneath that grand piano …

  I could imagine him snorting with amusement as he was pulled clear: ‘So the piano is finally useful for something …’

  Vienna, 1975

  I was beached in Europe at the time, stranded between one competition and the next. On Rosie’s advice I had visited Salzburg; trekked through the winter snows from various Birthplaces to Performances to Gravestones, more out of obligation to her and to my parents—who were still footing the bill, and who used me as a surrogate tourist—than for myself. I heard Brendel at the Mozarteum, Badura-Skoda in the New Festspielhaus, listening to both through the usual fog of envy and technical quibbling that made any enjoyment of their music impossible.

  From there I railroaded myself to Krems, on the Danube: taking a short-term piano tutoring position at some kind of holiday finishing school, after answering an advertisement stuck on a noticeboard in the Mozarteum. The first year of travelling had taught me where to look for such things; there was always a little extra pocket-money to be found between competitions. The work was lonely: a succession of bored, untalented students entered and left my small room all day on the half-hour; and three times each day meals were taken in a cold dining room at a Head Table, lost among the sounds of a foreign language and a staff who had all known each other for years.

  At nights my thoughts in this crowded monastery kept returning to Keller. That vision of him sheltering from the hurricane beneath his grand piano returned to me, pricked at me—and always at the back of my mind was the knowledge that Vienna was no more than an hour’s distance. I had asked the occasional question about him during my travels, had visited the odd library—but my mind was always elsewhere. Now for the first time my self-preoccupations had diminished enough. I decided to try to begin piecing together the various fragments of his life, beginning with what he’d told me during our last conversation together.