‘And that wasn’t enough. I staged a coup within the industry and acquired research money in the tens of millions. When I left the committee meeting I had to hold on to something in the elevator. My insouciance had stung, I had seen it in their faces, and she had raised the stakes again. It wasn’t a scam, but the whole thing was risky, to put it mildly.
‘I was summoned to see the vice chancellor. He congratulated me on the acquisition. “Child’s play,” I said, “and entirely without significance. My research, I mean. No use to anyone. It might just as well be forgotten about.” He got over the shock very quickly, I must give him that, and laughed loudly. “I didn’t know you were such a joker!” My face was deadly serious. “It’s not a joke, I’m perfectly serious.” And then I tried something I’d once seen a comedian do: I suddenly started roaring with laughter, so that my deadly serious face looked like an elaborate prelude to that laughter, it just burst out of me, and then the vice chancellor started laughing, too. I cranked myself up and roared, until he roared too; the roaring sounded as if it must be audible all over the university. I cranked it up still further, because now I thought the roaring was completely hilarious. I laughed till the tears came and in the end the vice chancellor took out his handkerchief as well. “Van Vliet,” he said, “you’re a marvel. All Dutchmen are marvels.” It was so silly, so completely idiotic, that I burst out laughing all over again, and now our roaring competition went into the third round. By way of farewell, he enquired after Mademoiselle Mozart. “Bach,” I said. “Johann Sebastian Bach.” “That’s what I said,” he said and clapped me on the shoulder.
‘How very different our next meeting would be!’
21
ON 5 JANUARY Lea turned twenty. Three days later Lévy told her he would shortly get married and go travelling with his wife for some time. That was the beginning of the disaster.
There had been harbingers of what was to come. Normally, he had worked with Lea even between Christmas and the New Year, and after New Year things continued as before. This time there was a break between the years. Van Vliet didn’t ask; he was just gratefully aware of it. There were Christmas decorations in the apartment once more, and Lea helped. But her mind wasn’t on it. And what alarmed her father: she didn’t play her instrument, not a note. Slept till midday, sat around. He gave her the book about the Cremona school of violin-making, which he had bought on his way to Milan. It lay unopened on the table for a few days, then she began to flick through it. First she read everything about Nicola Amati, whose hands had made her violin. The colour returned to her face. Van Vliet sensed it: she was constantly thinking about Lévy, Nicola Amati was only a substitute. ‘He was the one who changed the pointed gamba shape to the shape it has today,’ she said. Her father sat down beside her at the kitchen table and together they read everything about the measurements of a violin body, the lacquer, the strength of the wood used for the individual parts, the shape of the f-holes and the scroll. The instrument over in the music room was a large Amati model, she hadn’t known the term before. Neither had she known that such violins were known, because of their sound, as Mozart violins. Her cheeks began to glow, a few red patches appeared on her throat. With every new detail Neuchâtel edged closer. It pained her father, but he sat where he was, and then they went through the Amati dynasty’s family tree together.
GUARNERI DEL GESÙ. There at the kitchen table, during the last days of the year, Van Vliet didn’t guess what misfortune awaited her behind that name. What doom it would lead to for both of them. At first it was just the name that gripped Lea and distracted her attention from Amati and Lévy. Suddenly in her eyes and her voice there appeared a fresh and innocent curiosity which was not darting sidelong glances at Neuchâtel. They got to know that family tree as well. Andrea, the grandfather; Giuseppe Giovanni, who would later be nicknamed filius Andreae; and his son Bartolomeo Giuseppe, who identified himself on his violin labels as Joseph Guarnerius. He added a cross as well as the letters HIS, which might have meant IN HOC SIGNO or IESUS HOMINUM SALVATOR. That was why he was later known as Guarneri del Gesù. Lea liked that nickname; she liked it so much that Van Vliet thought of the cross that Marie used to draw on her forehead. For one brief, dangerous moment he was tempted to ask her about it. Luckily, Lea had just read something that put her in a state of cheerful excitement.
‘Look, Dad, Niccolò had a Guarneri del Gesù as well! It’s called Il Cannone. He left it to the city of Genoa. You can see it in the city hall there. Couldn’t we go?’
Van Vliet bought the airline tickets that day, and booked the hotel. They would spend Lea’s birthday in Genoa, in front of the case containing Paganini’s violin. What could be more appropriate? It was the perfect present for that birthday. And much more importantly: it was the first journey in many years that he would take with his daughter, just with her. The last one had been interrupted, because Lea wanted to get back to Marie. This one, her father swore, would not be interrupted; if necessary Lea’s phone would get lost on the way. He was delighted, he was so delighted, that he bought Lea a luxury suitcase, the most expensive one in the shop, and he also brought along an enormous book full of pictures of Genoa and a map of the city. Starting the New Year in Genoa with his daughter: really, it was bound to be a year in which things would take a turn for the better in other respects as well. He hadn’t felt so confident in years.
But all of a sudden Lea didn’t want to go. Instead she wanted to see that exhibition in Neuchâtel that she’d read about in the paper. Van Vliet looked at the new suitcase. The whole thing was like a dream that vanishes in the morning light. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed,’ he said. ‘It was as if I’d run into invisible armoured glass, my whole face hurt.’ He cancelled the hotel room and tore up the plane tickets. On Lea’s birthday he went to the institute early and stayed at his computer until the small hours. For the first time he thought of moving to a different apartment.
Three days later she came back from Neuchâtel without her violin. She had been caught in the rain, her hair hung in her face in rat’s tails. But that wasn’t what made him shudder. It was the look on her face.
‘A crazed look. Yes, that’s the only word for it: crazed. A look that testified to a terrible inner disorder. It told me she had lost her mental equilibrium completely, and was drifting along on a flood of injury. The worst moment was when that look brushed against me. “Oh, you’re here, too,” it seemed to say. “Why, in fact, you can’t help me, not you, you’re the last one who could.” She crept under the covers in her wet clothes. She didn’t even take off her shoes. When I opened the door a crack she was sobbing into her pillow.’
Van Vliet sat down at the kitchen table and waited. He tried to prepare himself, to get his feelings in order. A break so intense that she had given him back the violin. He tried to be honest with himself. The relief was undeniable. So that was over. But what now? Was that also the end of her career, of her life as a musician? People would see and above all hear that she was no longer playing the Amati. The violin from St Gallen no longer filled concert halls. And apart from that: who would organize the concerts for her now?
He forgot to hide the sleeping pills. Lea found them, but there weren’t many left in the pack. When he noticed, he woke her, made coffee and walked up and down with her all through the apartment. The medication had broken down the barriers of censorship, and now it came exploding out of her, crude, raw and incoherent. Lévy had introduced her to his bride. ‘Tits and ass!’ Lea yelled thickly. It was hard for Van Vliet to repeat the words to me. He had hesitated and clearly much else besides had exploded out of Lea. The father, who had grown up in the alleys, was disturbed to hear how vulgar his divine daughter could be. He realized: he had imagined her as a fairy, a fairy by nature, to whom everything foul and ordinary was entirely alien. And something else disturbed him, something that had already bothered him at the concert in Geneva when she had shaken hands with the leader: that she was doing things that were so precise
ly predictable. Because her coarse insults, with the ever-recurring word putain, were as schematic and predictable as the orgies of jealousy in a soap opera. After the high-speed drive from Neuchâtel to Bern he had enjoyed holding his weeping daughter in his arms. Now, when he had to drag her through the apartment, for the first time since she was born he felt a revulsion at the touch of her sleepy body, from which all these scurrilous and predictable things were spilling.
I thought about the time when I first heard Leslie saying shit and bitch. We were watching television and even I flinched. ‘Growing up,’ said Joanne and smiled.
‘Most of the things we say are predictable,’ I said.
Van Vliet took a drag on his cigarette and looked out at the lake. ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s inevitable. That they should say things that some drunk scriptwriter could have put in their mouths – it was terrible, absolutely revolting. It was as if I were dragging some random young girl through the apartment, not Lea at all. There had already been so much strangeness between us. So why not that, too?’
Years later, when Lea was already in the hospice at Saint-Rémy and in the care of the Maghrebi, Van Vliet rang Lévy and asked for a meeting. He flinched when he heard the ‘Oui?’ of the melodious voice, just as he had the first time he had called him. But this time he went on, and then he drove to Neuchâtel. Lévy and his beautiful young wife, whose paintings hung on the walls and who didn’t resemble his wife in the slightest, that wife of whom Lea had spoken in her pill-drunk voice, talked about the dramatic moment when Lea had almost destroyed a million dollars. She had been holding the Amati violin when Lévy introduced his fiancée to her.
‘Her eyes … I must have sensed it,’ Lévy said, ‘because I took a few steps towards her. And I was just able to grab her wrist before she could hurl the violin away. It was the last, the very last moment. She let go of the violin and I managed to take hold of the instrument with my other hand. It’s worth more than all of this,’ and his hand gesture took in the whole of the house.
On the way back Van Vliet thought about how his little Lea had wanted to sling the violin into the audience after that mistake. He also thought about the CD by Dinu Lipatti that she had thrown out of the window, and whose cover had made such an appalling clatter on the tarmac. But for now his task was to take each day as it came. The important thing was to administer the millions that he had freed up with his coup. Right now he couldn’t afford to stay away. Ruth Adamek would use every opportunity to take her revenge. Several times a day he phoned home to check that Lea wasn’t doing anything stupid. His headaches at work became more intense.
One early morning he waited outside Krompholz to talk to Katharina Walther before the first customers arrived. Much time had passed. He had been cross with her for a long time for talking about Lea’s switch from Marie to Lévy as if something morbid were coming to an end. She had followed Mademoiselle Bach’s career in the press and had also attended her concerts. She had seen the Geneva concert on television. It came out of the blue when Van Vliet told her about Lea’s breakdown.
‘She’s twenty,’ she said after a while. ‘She’ll get over it. And concerts: there won’t be any for a while. The rest will do her good. Other concert agents will get in touch.’
Van Vliet was disappointed. What had he expected? What could he expect when he said nothing about the most important thing?
The most important thing was that Lea’s thoughts were slipping. It wasn’t just her feelings that were in uproar. It was as if an undertow were coming from the depths of her confused emotions to drag her thinking into the darkness.
There were days when things seemed to have settled down again. But the price of that was the denial of time. Then Lea talked about Neuchâtel and Lévy as if everything was as it had been before. Without noticing that it didn’t match the fact that she didn’t go there any more and Amati wasn’t there. She came home with new clothes that she had bought for imaginary concerts. They were clothes covered with glitter that made her look sluttish and would have been completely out of place in a concert hall. Then she walked around the apartment in a little blouse that made her father blush, with blotches of lipstick that made her mouth look swollen. She read the newspaper from the day before yesterday and didn’t notice. She rarely knew what day of the week it was. She muddled Idomeneo with Fidelio, Chechnya and the Czech Republic. She took up smoking even in the apartment, but couldn’t take the smoke and coughed all the time. ‘I saw Caroline in town today. You can’t forget everything,’ she said. ‘Joe has retired, now he’s reached his goal. He always liked teaching so much.’ And ‘Mozart was always very strict with his tempi. It wasn’t all that important to him. The notes just came too strictly for him to pay attention to their speed.’
Van Vliet often stayed at the institute until the small hours. There he could rest his head on the table and let the tears come pouring out.
I asked if he had ever thought of a psychiatrist. Of course. But he hadn’t known how to broach the idea without her going through the roof. And he had been too ashamed, I thought.
Ashamed? Was that the right expression? He couldn’t bear anyone learning of the misfortune that connected him with his daughter. Someone sticking his nose into it. Even if it was a doctor. And besides: how could a stranger have understood something about his daughter that he, her father, didn’t understand? He, who knew her off by heart, like the back of his hand, because he had seen her every day for twenty years and knew every fork in the road, every junction, every bend in her life story?
But basically it was this one thing: he didn’t want the alien gaze, the revealing gaze of another. He would have found it utterly destructive, destructive for Lea and for himself. Yes, not least for himself. The way he experienced the gaze of the Maghrebi, the black, Arab gaze, which, in his hatred, he wished he could push back into those dark eyes, right to the back, until it was extinguished.
There was also the fact that he managed to do something that reinforced his conviction that he and Lea could overcome the crisis all by themselves. One day he saw a little girl having her hand and face licked by a dog. Then he remembered the affection that Lea had experienced from animals in the past. He went with her to the animal home. By that evening they were feeding the new dog.
She immediately clung to the animal, a black giant schnauzer, and it calmed her down; sometimes she seemed almost relaxed. She was tender towards the creature, and when her father saw her like that, he could almost forget the violence and cruelty that were also within her. It was only if a stranger came too close to the dog that it flared up. Then her gaze had a piercing sharpness.
She loved the dog and protected it. Her father became calmer; the danger of pills was past; the dog wouldn’t leave her in the lurch. But slowly and imperceptibly a new danger arose: the protector became a child who sought refuge in the dog as she might have done in a human being. Rather than bending down to him or squatting to stroke him, Lea sat beside him on the floor, heedless of the dirt, pressed her head to his and wrapped her arms around him. Van Vliet didn’t at first think anything of it; the relief of knowing she was safe took precedence. Although there was sometimes a sad kind of comedy about it when the dog wriggled away because it couldn’t breathe or simply because it felt oppressed.
‘Nikki,’ she would say with a mixture of disappointment and irritation, ‘why won’t you stay with me?’
It was the name the dog was familiar with from before. In her father’s presence she never called it anything else. But one day when Van Vliet was passing by her door he heard her through the open crack calling him Nicola or Niccolò, the two names flowed into one another. It was like a power surge. Back in his office he tried to calm himself down, to think clearly. Why not see it simply as harmless, funny word play? But in that case why was it secret? What was secret? And even if it were a bit more than that and she was somehow connecting the dog – out of some vague and confused feeling – with Amati and Paganini: was that really cause for conce
rn? She was a little wound up and flustered, but not insane.
Van Vliet concentrated on his work. Until suddenly the fear welled up in him like a fountain. ‘What if she was? What if her apparently harmless way of playing around with names heralded an impulse of mental confusion which shifted everything within her like a tectonic tremor?
In one of those moments when he was inundated with panic, Ruth Adamek must have come into his office. She must have been wearing her white lab coat and holding a bunch of keys. Then something must have happened to Van Vliet, something that I read more in his feverish gaze and his rough voice than in his words, which were bare and halting: his assistant, whom he had recently – as he put it – destroyed, appeared to him like the ruthless, peremptory warder in a closed psychiatric unit. And when I say appeared, I mean that she was like an apparition, a diabolical epiphany who planned to put him and his daughter behind the hollow, gloomy walls of an institution.
Van Vliet threw her out and became almost violent. The slam of the office door was audible all over the building. If there had been, somewhere within him, in some hidden room that no one knew about, a willingness to seek advice from a psychiatrist: from now on that room was sealed for ever.
‘A madhouse. A madhouse. I’m not putting Lea in a madhouse.’