‘But I can only see that today. Back then it was quite different. It made me ill that she was driving to Neuchâtel every other day. He isn’t that kind of man. I think Marie was right. I was on the lookout. Searching for signs. She was buying clothes and didn’t want me to be there. Lipstick that she wiped away before she came into the house. I saw that. She grew a little more, her body filled out. Every time she came back from seeing him she seemed to bring back more of the courtly aura, the castellan glamour which had, in the meantime, settled over the whole town of Neuchâtel in my mind. It was as if she were acquiring a kind of patina, a sheen produced by playing the violin with Lévy. I hated it, that pretentious, stinking, money-stinking patina. I hated the evident progress that Lea was making. I hated it when she said, “Right, then, I’m off,” in a tone in which I could already hear the French that she would shortly be speaking with him. I hated her railway season ticket, her small, crumpled timetable and – yes, I hated Lévy, David Lévy, whom she called David. Once, when I could no longer control myself and rummaged around in her things, I found a notebook with a page on which she had written over and over again, LEA LÉVY.
‘Still, the thing that I had feared didn’t happen. I would have noticed it. I don’t know why, but I would have noticed it. Instead, she adopted an attitude that reassured me and, indeed, made me glad: a quiet, a very quiet irritability of the kind that one feels when a hope and expectation whose fulfilment one had been waiting for so patiently for so long have still not come about, even though one has done everything in one’s power to remove any obstacles, whether possible or impossible.
‘“I’m not going today,” she said one day, and there was irritation in her voice.
‘I’m ashamed to say so, and I was ashamed of myself when I went to the cinema to celebrate.
‘Two days later she went again and said Bonsoir when she came home.
‘I felt awkward, and not like a clumsy citizen of Bern but – it was strange, very strange – like an awkward and heavy-handed Dutchman who has somehow, by mistake and undeservedly, had a gleaming daughter from the glittering world of French chateaux, an oversight that has been revealed by Lévy’s appearance on the scene. Awkwardly, slowly, I dragged myself through the rooms of the university and made one mistake after another. Secretly, I pronounced my first name in a French accent, and for a while I left out the j in my name so that it might pass for a French one.
‘Until the tide within me turned. I began to fasten on to the wooden, heavy-handed Dutchman that Lévy’s glamour, Lévy’s notional glamour, had created within me like a very real counter-fiction. My parents, with their curious, but entirely inconsequential affection for Holland, had given me a second Christian name: Gerrit. My full name is Martijn Gerrit van Vliet. I have always despised it, this pointed, divided name, a name like a whirring saw crunching its way through bursting paint. But now I dredged it out. I signed myself with it and received astonished, questioning glances, which I met with a menacing frown so that no one asked any further questions.
‘I dressed as inelegantly as possible, bulging trousers, rumpled jackets, wrinkled shirts, worn-out shoes. And that still wasn’t enough. I drove to Amsterdam and played the Dutchman with a few pitiful scraps of Dutch, making a fool of myself more than once. I lay there sleeplessly on the bed, having become alien to Lea and also to myself. I thought of my great-grandfather, the fraudulent banker who had driven hordes of people in this city to their ruin. And I thought often about how I had wanted to become a forger. Often I stood by the bridges over the canals and looked down at the water. But there was no point, they were far too low.
‘Lea said nothing, even though I secretly hoped she was able to interpret the signs. Because what was the point of the masquerade if she of all people didn’t recognize it for what it was: the attempt to conquer my pain through self-destruction? What was the point if she didn’t understand that in my helplessness I had to respond to the imagined affront with self-destructive actions – because a spiritual pain to which one makes one’s own contribution is easier to bear than one by which one is simply afflicted?
‘During that time there was only Lévy. She lived only in Neuchâtel, in Bern she was merely present, always waiting to run to the station. Suddenly – or at least that was how I imagined it – she uttered the name Bümpliz so that it sounded utterly ridiculous, no longer lovingly ridiculous as it had on Cécile’s lips, but ridiculous through contempt, contemptible: how could one live in a part of the city with a name like that? Quite impossible. Places worth taking seriously had French names, and above all those names there gleamed a royal name: NEUCHTEL. Sometimes I even imagined her on the station platform, waiting for the train to Bern and unhappily calculating how many hours it would be before she could alight from the train here again. Then she seemed to me to be full of the reluctance that was demonstrated by her foot beating an ugly, irregular rhythm on the concrete, the rhythm of longing and annoyance, of impatient waiting and repulsive insignificance assumed by everything on which David’s light did not fall.
‘Then one day, a good year after St Moritz, a new sound came from her room when I came home.
‘My body reacted faster than my mind and I locked myself in the lavatory. He had bought her another violin – it was the only possible interpretation. The instrument that we had bought together in St Gallen was no longer good enough for a pupil of David Lévy. I struggled to work out how the tone differed from the old one, but one hears too little through two doors. I waited until my breath had calmed down, then waited again outside Lea’s door, and finally I knocked. That was how we had done things for a long time, and it was fine. Except that Lévy had made the knocking different: I was now asking permission to enter a strange world. And now that the familiar door closed me off from new notes, which came rich and weighty through the wood, I had palpitations, because I felt that something had begun again, something that would drive Lea still further from me.
‘Red patches were scattered over Lea’s throat, her eyes gleamed feverishly. The violin she was holding was made of surprisingly dark wood. That’s all I know. I didn’t look any closer, not even secretly; the idea that the traces of his fingers were on it, and that his grease and his sweat were now being transferred to Lea’s fingers, too, filled me with nausea. Just his hands. Once when I saw him walking by in an alley in Bern, I dreamed afterwards that he was limping and walking with a stick whose silver handle looked dull, worn and faded from the sour sweat of his wrinkled, old man’s hand.
‘Lea looked at me uneasily. “It’s David’s violin. He gave it to me. Nicola Amati made it, in Cremona, in 1653.”’
18
THE NEXT THING I remember is Van Vliet’s hands on the bed covers. Big, strong hands with fine hairs on the back and strikingly ridged nails. The hands he used to do his experiments, to move his chess pieces. The hands that had once, just once, pressed down on the strings of Lea’s violin. The hands which had done something that destroyed his career, so that he now lived in two rooms. The hands he no longer trusted when he saw a truck approaching.
Between our rooms in the Geneva hotel there was a connecting door to which I paid no attention. Until I heard the sound of the door handle. It must have been a double door, because nothing on my side changed. I waited, and from time to time put my ear to the wood, until I heard Van Vliet’s snoring. When it was loud and regular, I quietly opened my side of the door. His was wide open. His clothes were scattered carelessly on the chairs, his shirt was on the floor. He had drunk and told his stories, told his stories and drunk. I was amazed that he had managed to maintain his concentration after all that wine, and then very suddenly he had collapsed and fallen silent. I didn’t need to support him, but it took a long time before we were back in our rooms.
Eventually, he had produced the photograph of Lea that he had taken the evening before her first performance at school, when she had made a mistake in Mozart’s Rondo. If it had been my daughter – I would have left the picture in my wallet.
A slender girl in a simple black dress, with long, dark hair that looked in the coarse resolution of the photograph as if it were run through with gold dust. A bit of lipstick on her full, even lips, which made her look a little like a child-woman. A look that came from grey, perhaps even greenish eyes, mocking, flirtatious and astonishingly confident for an eleven-year-old girl. A lady waiting for the spotlights to come on.
One could have fallen in love even with this girl. But how much more violent were the emotions provoked by Lea at eighteen! Van Vliet had hesitated to show me this photograph. He had put the wallet back in his pocket and then taken it back out again. ‘That was just before he gave her the violin, that damned Amati.’
She was standing in a spacious corridor that looked like an ample, elegantly decorated apartment, leaning against a chest of drawers with a mirror on top, so that past her shoulder you could see the back of her head, with a chignon above her long, slender neck. That knot of hair – I don’t know how to explain it: it didn’t make her look old or old-fashioned. It had the opposite effect: of making her look like a vulnerable girl, a girl full of order and discipline who wanted to do right by everyone. Not a bluestocking, not just a swot, far from it. This was an elegant young woman in a perfectly cut red dress, and the thin, shining leather belt with the matt gold buckle was the dot on the i. The even, full lips were no longer those of a child-woman, they belonged to a real woman, a countess who seemed to be utterly unaware of her aura. In her eyes, which had a hint of pathos about them, there were two things I never thought I would see merging in a single gaze: touching, childish vulnerability and a piercing challenge that chilled the blood. Van Vliet had been right: it wasn’t arrogance or superiority, it was a challenge, and one that she was making of herself no less than anyone else. Yes, this was the girl who wanted to hurl her violin into the audience when she made a mistake. And yes, this was the woman who was capable of getting to her feet in the middle of dinner and leaving Marie, her great love from her childhood days, sitting where she was when someone like David Lévy appeared on the scene and promised her a brilliant future in aristocratic French.
Van Vliet had become uneasy when I held the photograph close in front of my eyes to examine every detail of that gaze. He looked at me. He had wanted and yet not wanted me to make myself an image, and now that it was going on too long for me he was starting to rue it. A dangerous spark appeared in his eyes. He was still at hers, he was still in their shared apartment, his jealousy could go up at any time like a jet of flame and that was how it would stay.
I handed him the photograph. He gave me a challenging look. Tom Courtenay. I just nodded. Any word could be the wrong one. Now I carefully closed my side of the door. I didn’t want him to feel trapped when he woke up. He had left the light on in the bathroom. It fell through the chink in the door and bathed part of the room in diffuse brightness. I thought of something I hadn’t thought of for many decades: the veilleuse, a night light for children who were afraid of the dark. It was like a light bulb of milky glass, screwed at night into the fixture of the ceiling light by my mother. I saw her hand in front of me, its rotating movement. Trust – that was what that motion meant. Trust that this hand would always be able to take my fear away from me, whatever happened.
I broke that veilleuse with an axe. I rummaged in a toolbox in the basement until I found it. I took it, laid it on the wooden block and struck, a dull blow, a crunch and a tinkle, a thousand fragments. An execution. No, not of my mother, but of my own blind trust; no, not just in my mother, not even especially in her, but in everyone and everything. I don’t know how to explain it any better.
From then on I trusted only myself. Until the morning I handed Paul the scalpel. A few days later I had a dream: Paul’s eyes above the face mask weren’t shocked, just boundlessly amazed and glad that we had suddenly come so far. What could I do about the fact, I thought afterwards, that Helen, his wife followed me into the garden when they had guests and I wanted to be alone for a while? Her coming from Boston wasn’t a good enough excuse, and Paul knew that too.
Had I ever had friends, I wondered, real friends?
And now? Now, in the next room there lay a man who left the door open and the light on to be able to go to sleep. What would it be like the other way round? What would it be like to trust Martijn van Vliet? He still wore the wedding ring that Cécile had put on his finger. Cécile, who must have known that he didn’t want the responsibility of a child.
When Bern and Neuchâtel were covered with snow, he had sometimes driven to the Oberland and rented cross-country skis. He had sought the reassurance that only silence can give. He had wondered who he would be once he was independent of Lea, and how things would continue. Not least professionally. Ruth Adamek had effectively taken over the research project long ago. He just signed the papers. She was standing behind him when he had wanted to know more about what was going on and had started flicking. ‘Sign it!’ she had snapped. Then he tore up the application. She grinned.
After that he had tried for the last time. Pills. Lie down and sleep. Be snowed in. As if he’d never existed. Then at the last moment the thought of Lea. That she needed him, in spite of Lévy. One day perhaps because of Lévy.
I couldn’t get to sleep. I had to prevent it. I felt as if my own life depended on it.
Suddenly I wished I could turn back time to before the morning in Saint-Rémy with the girl on the back seat of the rattling Vespa. It had been lovely, in those rural inns with Somerset Maugham in a dim light.
I couldn’t call Leslie at four in the morning. And what would I have said?
I went to the lobby and strolled through the hotel arcade with the shop windows. I knew the hotel, but I’d never been here at the back. Eventually I discovered a library. I turned on the light and stepped in. Metres of Simenon, city guides, Stephen King, a book about Napoleon, a selection of Apollinaire, poems by Robert Frost. Leaves of Grass, the book that had flourished inside Walt Whitman for a lifetime. I cannot be awake, for nothing looks to me as it did before, / Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been / a mean sleep. An intense hunger flowed through me, a hunger for Whitman. I sat down in an armchair until it was light outside. I read with my tongue. I wanted to live, live, live.
19
DAVID LÉVY turned Lea into Mademoiselle Bach. MADEMOISELLE BACH. The papers published those two words again and again, first towards the back of the paper and in small letters, then the letters got bigger and the articles longer; there were pictures, too, and they too got bigger and bigger; in the end her face above the violin appeared on the front pages of the tabloids. For Van Vliet this all felt like a slow-motion, halting zoom; there was something doom-laden about its inexorability. He wanted to know if I’d seen any of that. ‘I don’t read the papers,’ I said. ‘I’m not interested in what journalists think.’ I just want the facts, as dry as agency reports. I know what I’m supposed to think about it. It may sound strange, because he had already told me all these things from his life, but that was the first time I had the feeling that he liked me. Not just his audience. Me.
The first performances came a few weeks after Lévy had given her his violin. He still had some influence in the music world, it turned out. Neuchâtel, Biel, Lausanne. Amazement about the young girl who played the music of Johann Sebastian Bach with a clarity that enchanted everyone and which filled the increasingly packed halls with a sound whose like had not been heard for ages. The journalists wrote about an unheard-of energy in her playing, and once Van Vliet also read the word that had run through his head in St Moritz: sacred.
He read everything; the cardboard box of newspaper cuttings filled up. He looked at every photograph and studied it for a long time. Lea’s bows because more confident, more lady-like, more routine, her smile firmer, more dependable, more keenly etched. His daughter was becoming increasingly alien to him.
‘I was glad when she came out with another of her strange sentences – as a memory of the fact that behind the
façade of Mademoiselle Bach there was still my daughter, the girl I had stood in the station with ten years before, listening to Loyola de Colón.’
But now fear sometimes crept in, real fear, and it became more frequent, more compelling. Because there were days when Lea’s sentences were more off-kilter than usual. ‘I told the technician it was too dark in the hall, much too dark; it would be nicer if I had to make out every individual face in the audience.’ ‘Just imagine, my driving teacher asked me if it was a violin or a viola. He doesn’t even know there’s a difference. And he listens to opera all day, particularly that new bass baritone from Peru.’ ‘Davíd was, as always, right about the recording contract: why does he always forget that I can’t stand smoke? No one in the company is even interested.’ On days like that her father felt as if it wasn’t only his daughter’s language that was off-kilter, it was her mind. He read books about it and took care to ensure that Lea didn’t see them.
It wouldn’t have been necessary. She no longer seemed even slightly interested in what her father did. He was so inconsolable about this that he started smoking in the sitting room in the hope that she would at least protest. Nothing. He stopped again and had the whole apartment cleaned. No word about that from Lea either. He travelled, went to a conference again and stayed a few days, to forget Marie with another woman. ‘You were away for a long time,’ Lea said. Had she spent the night in Neuchâtel? He’s not that kind of man.
Van Vliet was summoned by the headmaster of Lea’s school. The leaving exam was in six months. It didn’t look good for Lea. She was fine in the subjects that called for intelligence most of all. The outlook was catastrophic for the ones that everyone had to cram for. And she was missing a lot, far too much. The headmaster was understanding, generous. Of course he was proud of Mademoiselle Bach, the whole school was proud. But he couldn’t ignore all the rules of the school. Please would her father have a word with her, please?