‘Solvejg Lindström was third. Again, she surprised me and threw my expectations back at me like shabby prejudices. I had expected disappointment and a thin, courageous smile. But her freckled face beamed; she enjoyed the applause and bowed gracefully, even her dress looking neat and tidy now. She was the least conspicuous of them all and the least presumptuous. But she was also, I thought, the most self-controlled, and when I compared her with my daughter, tensed to the utmost, it gave me a pang.
‘Where the first and second places were concerned, the chairman said, the jury had argued for a long time. Both candidates had impressed with both technical brilliance and depth of interpretation. In the end the decision had been: Alexander Zacharias in first place, Lea van Vliet in second place.
‘And then it happened: while Zacharias leapt to his feet and hurried on stage, Lea sat where she was. I turned to her. I will never forget her empty gaze. Was it just the emptiness of a paralysing disappointment? Or did it contain indignation and fury, which kept her frozen to her chair? Marie rested her hand on her shoulder and gestured to her to get up. Then she rose to her feet at last and went clumsily up to the stage.
‘The applause for Zacharias had already ebbed away, the new applause for Lea was dull, with a hint of disapproval. Perhaps only surprised, perhaps also reluctant, Lea took the hands of the other two contestants and bowed with them. It hurt, it hurt so terribly to see my daughter up there between the other two, forcing her into a bow, which – it was clear to everybody – she didn’t want and which was much more curt and stiff than the bows of the others. She looked so alone up there, alone and exposed, exposed by herself, and I thought about how we had sat in the kitchen on the evening after the purchase of the violin and realized that we had no friends to celebrate with.’
After that Van Vliet had fallen silent and finally gone to sleep. In Geneva I drove straight to a hotel that I knew. He had never cared about a bookshop. He had only ever cared about having to go back to his silent apartment, where Lea’s notes could no longer be heard.
I woke him and pointed to the hotel. ‘I’m too tired to go on driving,’ I said. He looked at me and nodded. He knew I had seen through him.
‘That was my last journey to Saint-Rémy,’ he said over dinner. He gazed out at the lake. ‘Yes, I think that was the last journey.’
It might have meant that he now felt free of the compulsion to return repeatedly to the place where he had seen Lea crouching behind the firewood. It might have meant that the struggle with the Maghrebi was over at last. But it might also have meant something else. I watched the burning tip eat through the paper of his cigarette. From the side it was impossible to tell from his face what meaning the words had. Whether they were the relaxed words of a conclusion or whether they heralded something new.
He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I didn’t see him coming to our table – Lévy, I mean. Suddenly he was just standing there, without a word of greeting, self-confident, a man to whom the world belonged, and addressed his words to Lea. “Une décision injuste,” he said, “j’ai lutté pour vous.” He has a melodious voice that also carries when he’s speaking quietly. Lea swallowed her food and looked up at him: a light grey suit made of fine fabric, perfectly cut, waistcoat with watch chain, full, salt-and-pepper hair, goatee beard, gold-rimmed glasses, a hint of eternal youth in his face. “Your playing: sublime, superb, a miracle.” I saw the gleam in Lea’s eyes, and then I knew: she would go away with him into the French language, Cécile’s language, which for so long she had been unable to speak.
‘Lévy seduced my daughter away into that language. From now on Lea, too, used the word sublime, a word that I had never heard Cécile utter. And it wasn’t just that word, there were others, too, rare, choice words which assembled themselves into a new space in which my daughter began to live.
‘His staccato of verbless admiration – it had struck me as stilted, mannered, vain. That linguistic gesture on its own would have been enough to turn me against him. Much later, during an encounter after which everything suddenly looked very different, I understood that that style was part of him, like the waistcoat, the watch chain, the English shoes. That he was a man from a French chateau, who knew by heart Proust and Apollinaire. That wherever he went he would always be surrounded by a chateau, by Gobelin tapestries, furniture made of the choicest woods, gleaming and impeccable. And that when he knew unhappiness, it would be the unhappiness of the disappointed, lonely owner of a chateau, above whose head the beams in the high ceilings were becoming rotten and unsound, the chandeliers, dull and stained, turning to brass and glass.
‘“Vous voulez faire un petit tour ensemble?” He could see that Lea was in the middle of dinner, that we all were. He could see. “Avec plaisir,” Lea said and got to her feet.
‘I knew straight away that that was how it would always be from now on: that she would get to her feet in the middle of dinner and in the middle of everything else. He took her hand and made to kiss it. I froze. His lips were at least ten centimetres way from touching her hand. Ten centimetres, at least. And it was only a ritual, a pale memory of a kiss. Pure convention. Still.
‘He turned to us, a brief glance, the hint of a bow. “Marie. Monsieur.”
‘Marie and I set aside our knives and forks and pushed away our plates. It was as if our time had been cut off, right in front of our noses. Lea had turned around to us before she left, a hint of guilt in her eyes. Then she had gone out with Lévy, out from the life that she had led with me and Marie, into a life with a man she had known nothing about five minutes ago, a man who would lead her to dizzying heights and later to the edge of the abyss. My stomach felt like a lump of lead and my head was filled with dull, thoughtless silence.
‘Through the glass door of the dining room we saw Lévy waiting for Lea in the foyer. When she walked up to him she was wearing her coat. Her hair, which had always been pinned up until now, was loose. Her pinned-up hair had been like a restrained, tamed energy, and like a renunciation: all her strength, all her love was to flow into the notes. Now, along with her wavy hair, her body, too, was flowing into the world, not just her talent. I thought her playing might now lose its power. But the opposite happened: her tone itself acquired a physical quality, a sensual weight that was new. I often yearned for her cool, sacred brittleness. It had been such a good, such a perfect match for Lea’s nun-like beauty, which was washed away by the surge of her flowing hair.
‘She walked through the foyer with Lévy and out into the night.
‘Nothing would be as it had been before. I felt slightly dizzy. It was as if the dining room, the hotel and the whole town were losing their ordinary, compact reality and turning into the backdrop of a bad dream.
‘Only now did I notice how much Marie’s face had changed. It was red, almost feverish, and there was something harsh and implacable about her features. Marie. They knew each other. The look he had given her had been a look without warmth, unsmiling, a look that greeted her over a big distance in time. It had expressed a memory of something dark and bitter, but also a willingness to let things lie.
‘“Is he a violinist too?” I asked. She threw her hands over her face. Her breath was halting. Now she looked at me. It was a strange look and only retrospectively did I manage to decipher it: it contained pain and bitterness, but also a spark of admiration and – I don’t know – even more than that.
‘“The violinist,” she said. “The violinist of Switzerland. Above all of French Switzerland. There was no one better, back then, twenty years ago. That was what most people thought, and he showed no doubt that he thought it too. Rich father, who bought him an Amati violin. But it wasn’t just the instrument. It was his hands. The organizers would have been able to sell out any concert he played five, ten times over. DAVID LÉVY – back then the name had an unsurpassed glamour.”
‘She lit a cigarette and then rubbed her lighter with her thumb for a long time, without saying anything.
‘“Then came Geneva, a memory
lapse in the Oistrakh cadenza of the Beethoven Concerto, he flees the hall, the papers are full of it. After that he never appeared in public again. Nothing more was heard of him for years. Rumours about psychiatric treatment. Then, about ten years ago, he started teaching. He developed into a phenomenal teacher, all of his charisma now flowed into teaching, and he was given a masterclass in Bern. He stopped all of a sudden, no one could work out why. He retreated into his house in Neuchâtel. Every now and again I heard of someone taking lessons from him, but they must have been exceptions. Over the last two or three years I’ve never heard anything more about him. I had no idea that he was sitting on the jury here.”
‘She was sure that he would offer Lea lessons. “The way he looked at her,” she said. And she was sure that Lea would do it. “I know her. Then it will be the second time that I’ve lost to him.”
‘For the next little while I was constantly about to ask her what the first defeat had been. And whether that was why she didn’t perform as a soloist or in an orchestra. But at the last moment something warned me against it. Then eventually it was too late, so I never found out.
‘When we were standing outside her room she looked at me. “It won’t happen the way you may be thinking,” she said. “With him and Lea, I mean. I’m sure of it. He isn’t that kind of man.”
‘He isn’t that kind of man. How often would I say those words over the next few years!
‘The following day Lévy took her to Neuchâtel in his green Jaguar.
‘“It means we can get to work straight away,” Lea said. She was sitting in my room, after coming back from her walk with him, her hair damp with snow. I hadn’t known that staying calm could be such an effort. She saw that. “It’s … it’s OK, isn’t it?”
‘I looked at her and felt as if I were seeing her family face for the first time. The face that had developed out of the face of my little daughter, who had listened breathlessly to Loyola de Colón in the railway station. The face of a little girl, a teenager, and a young, ambitious woman who had just met a man whom she hoped would give her a brilliant future. All in one. Should I have forbidden it? Could I have forbidden it? What would it have done to the two of us? And I’m not even sure if she wouldn’t have done it anyway, there was that flush to her face, that energy, that hope. I can’t remember what I said. When she kissed me on the cheek I stood there as if I was made of wood. She hesitated at the door for a moment and turned her head. Then she was outside.
‘I spent most of that night sitting by the window, looking out into the snow. At first I wondered how she would tell Marie. And then, all of a sudden, I guessed: she wouldn’t tell her at all. Not out of cold-bloodedness. Out of insecurity and anxiety and guilt. And because she simply didn’t know how to express such a thing, certainly not to the woman who had replaced her mother and who had been her guiding star for eight years. The longer I thought about it, the greater my certainty became: she would set off without having talked to Marie.
‘I had a feeling in my gut. I saw Lea writing postcards to Marie in Rome and trying to phone her to tell her the cards were on the way. Doing what she was about to do was the coward’s way out. I ran through a series of excuses in my head, but the feeling remained. It took years for it to fade. “A Dutchman doesn’t run away from anything,” my father used to say when he saw cowardice. It was kitsch and nonsense, particularly since he himself was a total wimp often enough, and on top of everything we hadn’t been Dutchmen for an eternity. During that night I thought of his silly saying and I liked it, even though, in fact, it only made everything worse.
‘It happened as I had expected. I saw it when I joined Marie at the breakfast table, where only two places had been set. “She’s only seventeen,” I said. She nodded. But it hurt her, my God how it hurt her.
‘When Lea received a package containing the golden ring from the merry-go-round a few days later – only the ring, not a single word – I saw Marie’s face at the breakfast table in front of me, a weary, disappointed, lifeless face.
‘Lea stared at the ring without touching it. She stared and stared, her face filled with horror and disbelief. Then she got to her feet, the chair fell over, she ran to her room and wept like a little child.
‘I felt: I should go to her and comfort her. But it was out of the question. Completely out of the question. And I was so disturbed by it that I left my weeping child alone in the apartment and walked through the city to Monbijou, where I had lain in bed as a boy and dreamed of being a forger. I don’t want this responsibility. I don’t know how it works: assuming responsibility for someone. Why didn’t you respect that? I said to Cécile. I wasn’t just talking off the top of my head. You must have sensed that too, so why?
‘I saw just how wounded Marie really was as we walked to my car in the car park in St Moritz. As we passed a green Jaguar, Marie took out her bunch of keys, chose the most pointed one and with a swift motion scratched a scar in the paint of the car. After taking a few steps she went back, and this time she drew the key the full length of the car, from the back to the front bumper. I couldn’t believe my eyes, and looked around to see if anyone had seen. An elderly couple were looking over at us. Marie put the keys away. Go on, arrest me, her face said, I don’t care now anyway.
‘“She got into one of those with him this morning,” she said as I drove off. “Not a word. Not a single word.”
‘We drove in silence, and every now and again she wiped quiet tears from her eyes.
‘We clung to one another. Yes, I think that’s the right word: we clung to one another. We did so with a kind of stubborn violence that might be seen as uninhibited passion; in fact, at first, that was what we thought it was. Until the despair in it could no longer be denied. On the evening of the drive home from St Moritz I sat at Marie’s on the sofa with all the cushions and the gleaming chintz. She was wearing a pale, faded pink batik dress scattered with fine Asian characters, as if painted with a brush and, as on the evening of our first visit, soft leather slippers which were like a second skin. She had come in, set down the suitcase and, still in her coat, walked to the grand piano on which Lea’s sheet music lay. She sorted Lea’s scores out from the rest, shuffled them with meticulous care into a clean pile and carried them from the room. She had hesitated for a moment and I had thought she was going to hand them to me so that I could take them home, since they would never again be played in this apartment. But then she had carried them outside and I had heard the sound of a drawer.’
Van Vliet paused and turned his face towards the lake, his eyes closed. He must have seen the image he now had before his eyes thousands of times before. It was an image that carried enormous weight, and it still caused him so much pain that he hesitated to speak of it.
‘Lea always laid a cloth, a white cloth, over the chin-rest of the violin. She had many such cloths; we found the shop where they could be bought together. One of those cloths lay on the window sill. When Marie came back in she looked around the room and found it. She carried it outside. I’m sure she didn’t want me to see it, but her desire was too strong, so it happened in the doorway, still within my field of vision: she smelled the cloth. She pressed her nose firmly into it, raised her other hand as well and pressed the whole cloth into her face. She tottered a bit, standing there, blindly devoted to Lea’s smell.’
He never showed me a picture of Marie. And yet I can see her in front of me, her face pressed into the cloth. I just need to close my eyes and already I can see her. She has bright eyes filled with devotion, wherever she looks.
‘We puzzled over whether the characters on her dress were Japanese or Korean. Marie turned out the light. We sensed the emptiness that Lea left in the room that she had filled with her notes. And then we clung to one another, suddenly, violently, and only let go again when it was light outside.’
He smiled the way Tom Courtenay could smile, in the midst of his unhappiness. ‘Love for the sake of a third party. Love arising out of entangled abandonment. As a bulwark agai
nst the pain of parting. Love, which is not actually meant for the other. A love which, as far as I’m concerned, was lived at a nine-year delay, in the shadow of the knowledge of that delay, a shadow which meant that feelings gradually faded away. And what about her? Was I just the bond that linked her to a lost Lea? A guarantee that Lea wasn’t quite out of the world? For both of us it was a long time since we had hugged somebody. Did she want, with my longing, to suffocate her own longing for Lea? I don’t know. Do we know anything?
‘Six months ago I saw her in the distance. She’s fifty-three now, not an old woman, but she looked tired and wiped out. “Thank you for bringing me Lea,” she said the last time we saw each other. The words caught in my throat. I dreamed of them. Even today I sometimes wake up and think I heard them in my sleep.
‘Did she understand what had happened? To Lea and then to me? It was Marie, after all. The woman who always looked for clarity. The woman with the passion of understanding. The woman who always wanted to know why people did what they did, and wanted to know very precisely. But perhaps this time she didn’t want to know. Perhaps she needed not to understand, as a bulwark against pain and abandonment. Apart from those words of farewell we never spoke of Lea again, not once. At first she was present between us through her numbing absence. Then, gradually, that absence faded too. In Marie’s rooms Lea became a spectre.’
Van Vliet came back from the toilet. We ordered the third bottle of wine. He had drunk most of it.
‘I don’t want to blame Lévy. He was just a misfortune for Lea, a great misfortune. The way it can be a misfortune for one person to meet another.