We were standing in the hotel corridor, by the elevator. ‘Good night,’ I had said, and Van Vliet had nodded. The elevator door opened. Van Vliet went and stood by the light barrier. I waited as he searched for words.
‘There I sat in that hall back then, listening to the thing that had become the most important thing in my life: Lea’s playing. The first performance, upon which, I sensed, so much depended. And just then my imagination breaks out and seeks a world without Lea, a world with only Marie. Do you know that one too: the imagination wandering off at the crucial moment and going its own uncontrollable ways, which reveal that you are still quite a different person from the one you thought you were? Precisely then, when anything can happen in the soul except that one thing: betrayal by one’s own wayward imagination?’
11
SOMERSET MAUGHAM couldn’t hold my attention. I set the book down, opened the window and listened to the darkness of the night. I hadn’t had an answer to Van Vliet’s question. He had tilted his head to one side and looked at me from half-closed eyes, ironic, complicit and sad. Then he had stepped out of the light barrier and the elevator door had closed. Was it just that the question was so unexpected? Or was it the startling intimacy that had taken my language away, an intimacy that went far beyond my having become his audience?
Liliane. Liliane, who had dabbed the sweat from my brow when I was operating. Liliane, who always knew which intervention I was going to make next, which instrument I was going to need. Liliane, whose thoughts hurried so far ahead that words were not necessary and we worked together in mute harmony. Two, three months had passed like that. Her bright, blue gaze above the mask, her swift, calm hands, grand, her Irish accent, nods in the corridor, the clatter of her clogs, my unnecessary glance into the nurses’ room, the cigarette between her full lips, her ironic gaze in response, longer than necessary, one single visit to the boss’s room, that always surprising word grand, as I had heard it in Dublin, a moment too long by the door as she left, that movement of her hips, unconscious, unnoticeable, a gentle, silent closing of the door, which was like a hope and a promise.
And then the emergency operation on the night of Leslie’s birth. First the exhausted face of Joanne, the sweat-slicked hair, Leslie’s first cry. Afterwards at home by the open window, the snowy air of Boston, uncertain sensations, now things were irreversible. Dozing instead of proper sleep. Then the call from casualty. Five hours with Liliane’s blue eyes above the mask. I don’t know if it was by chance that she was standing by the exit when I left, I never asked her. I can’t walk through the early morning light without remembering how we went together to her apartment, which to my surprise was only two streets away from ours. We walked in silence, swapping glances every now and again. I hoped she would take my arm, instead her childish skipping, up on to the pavement, down from the pavement, her apologetic, challenging smile, one tooth slightly paler than the others in the lamplight. When we sat on the steps in front of her house, she edged closer and rested her head on my shoulder. It might have been shared exhaustion and shared contentment about the successful outcome of the operation. It could also have been more. Our white, melting breath. ‘I make good shakes,’ she said quietly. ‘In fact I make the best shakes in town. My strawberry shakes are particularly legendary.’ The shared laugh, the common shaking of our bodies. I stopped on the stairs and closed my eyes, my hands clenched in my coat pockets. Her voice came from above: ‘My shakes are particularly good.’
There was something of the stray cat about her, sitting there on the sofa, her legs underneath her, her bright hair loose, the huge mug with the straw at her lips. She emanated something free and inconstant, something very different from Joanne’s determination and diligence, which would later make her a successful businesswoman. What lay in her unimaginably concentrated blue eyes? Was it devotion? Yes, that was the word: Devotion. From that devotion flowed her concentrated movements at work, her anticipation of the things that I would need next, and I also saw devotion when our eyes met above the mask. 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. She knew a lot of Walt Whitman off by heart, and I forgot space and time when she recited it with eyes closed, smoke in her voice, melancholy and, yes, devotion. I longed for that devotion as it grew light behind the curtains and trucks thundered past more and more frequently on the nearby motorway. In the middle of that longing, bright panic exploded in me. I saw Joanne’s sticky hair, Thank God it’s over, and I heard Leslie’s cry.
Liliane’s devotion: I feared it as one can only fear oneself. I sensed that she would be something quite unlike anything I had experienced before, with Susan, Joanne and a few other fleeting acquaintances. That I would sink into her and disappear, waking up again somewhere else, far from Joanne and Leslie and, yes, far from myself – or far from the me that I had known until now.
I have never sensed so precisely what it is: the strength of will, as I opened my eyes, looked at Liliane and said: I have to leave. It’s … I just have to. Her gaze faltered; the twitch in her mouth was that of someone who knew that she was about to lose, and who, now that it was clearly happening, was torn in two even so.
We stood in the corridor and rested our foreheads together, our eyes closed, hands clasped behind each other’s necks. I felt as if we could each gaze through each other’s forehead as if into a tunnel of thoughts, fantasies and expectations, a long tunnel of our possible impossible future; we looked into the tunnel as we imagined it; it was the tunnel of the other and at the same time our own, the two conjoined and merged; we went all the way down that tunnel to the back, where it was lost in vagueness, our breath harmonized, the temptation of lips, we experienced, penetrated, burned our life together, which wasn’t possible because it wasn’t possible for me.
For another week Liliane went on wiping the sweat from my brow. Then, one Monday morning, my secretary brought me an envelope, hesitantly, because she knew that it was from Liliane. A little sheet of paper, actually just a note, bright yellow: Adrian – I tried, I tried hard, but I can’t, I just can’t. Love. Liliane.
I don’t have a photograph of her and the three decades have blurred her features. But two precise memories have remained, less in their sensual contours and in their emanation: at the table in the nurses’ room, smoking, and on the sofa, her legs beneath her, the straw between her lips. And I took a photograph of the steps on which we sat back then, in the early morning light, outside her house. Before we left Boston I went there and took the picture. It had snowed all night, and snow was piled up on the railings and the steps. A picture from a fairy tale. I think of it on Leslie’s birthday, always. The fact that I was a hair’s breadth away from betraying her that day.
A year later Liliane rang me at the clinic. She had fled Boston and gone to Paris, to Médecins sans Frontières. Missions in Africa and India. It gave me a pang. I could have imagined doing the same thing. On the night after the call, I claimed I was on night shift and stayed in the clinic. It suited her so well, so incredibly well, and I envied her the consistency of her inconstant life, the consistency with which I imagined her. Faces along the bar / Cling to their average day: / The lights must never go out, / The music must always play … She had also recited those lines from W. H. Auden back then, on the sofa. They had sounded like something merely atmospheric, something private, like a tune accompanying a painting by Edward Hopper. Only later did I discover that they were part of an eminently political poem about the German invasion of Poland. And that had suited her, too: in her blue gaze, apart from devotion there had also been fury, fury about the cowards and evil-doers in this world, and so she had put her quick, calm hands and the speed of her thought at the service of their victims.
Other calls came at irregular intervals, they were strange conversations, quick and intense, grand, she spoke about hunger and other sufferings, then again she described her mood to me, as if in that corridor back then we had touched not
just foreheads but lips. I told her the name of the clinic where I would be working in Switzerland, and calls arrived there as well. When she told me about Médecins sans Frontières, afterwards I had had the feeling of living on the wrong continent. And when we landed at Kloten Airport I thought: Now I’m closer to her. It was nonsense, because she could have been anywhere; but I thought it anyway. I was startled and darted a furtive glance at Leslie beside me. When the calls stopped years later, I called Paris one day and asked for her. She had died in an accident on one of her missions. At that point it became clear to me that I had been leading a life with her all that time. The months in which we had heard nothing from each other, and in which I hadn’t thought expressly about her, changed nothing about that. Our life together went on, silent, uninterrupted and secret.
Van Vliet’s question in front of the open elevator had stripped me of my composure, because it had made it clear to me that I was still living that silent life with Liliane, even though there was no one left for me to keep it secret from. Un accident mortel, the Frenchman had said on the telephone. Something within me must have refused to accept it, so I carried on with her as if she were still living her wayward life, her life and my life and our life.
I thought about Joanne’s farewell, that final farewell at the airport. I will say one thing for you, Adrian. You are a loyal man, a truly loyal man.’ I don’t know why, but it sounded as if she were identifying a character defect that had caused her to suffer. A little as if she had said: a man without imagination, a bore. I had planned to stand on the viewing platform and watch the woman I had been married to for eleven years flying back to her home. But her observation had disturbed me and I decided not to. At home I looked for the photograph of Liliane’s house with the snowy steps.
I had gone to sleep in my clothes and I was freezing. Just before I woke up, I saw Liliane walking down the clinic corridor in her clogs. She was now dressed in batik and bathing in chintz.
I showered, changed my clothes and walked through Saint-Rémy at dawn. I stood outside Van Vliet’s hotel for a while. I took a few photographs and then slept for a little longer until it was time to collect him.
12
THE LANDSCAPE of Provence was bathed in shadowless, chalky winter light as we set off. Each section looked like an enormous watercolour in hues that seemed as if they’d been mixed with white. I saw in front of me the heat-shimmering, endless roads on which I had driven through the American West with Joanne and Leslie. Changing skies, a formulation that I had always liked because it expresses in two words the experience of the vast dimensions that are such a typical American experience. An imperious light filled the high sky, a light that granted validity only to the moment, neither the truth of the past nor of the future, a light that blinded us to the question of where we were coming from and where we were going, a light that suffocated all questions of meaning and context beneath its gleaming force. How different from the discreet light that morning! Pleasant to the eyes, gentle and forgiving, but then merciless, too, because it stripped everything of its fake magic, and mercilessly brought out every detail, even the ugly ones, so that things could show themselves as they really were. A light as if made for the calm, fearless, incorruptible recognition of all things, whether strange or our own.
The waiter in yesterday’s café had his waistcoat open, it hung carelessly down his body, and he had cigarette ash on his shirt. He was coughing. No, I wouldn’t have wanted to swap with him.
I dropped the rental car back in Avignon. Van Vliet held a car key out to me. It wasn’t like yesterday, at the paddock in the Camargue. There he had said he wasn’t feeling great, which made one think of illness. Now he needed no excuse. He needed no explanation at all. He just gave me the key. I was sure: he knew that I knew why. Our thoughts had dovetailed again. Like yesterday, when the Newfoundland had licked his hand and we both knew that we were thinking of Lea’s hands, which had been frightened of everything but animals.
In the car park next to us a young couple were arguing – he spoke German, she French – and insisting on the different languages was like a passage of arms.
‘Lea always spoke German to me, with Cécile mostly French,’ Van Vliet said as we set off, ‘particularly when she was speaking against me to her. In that way my love of Cécile’s French turned into a hatred of Lea’s French.’
Lea had experienced her progress in a fever. Her triumphs came hot on each other’s heels as she overcame technical difficulties. Even her trills got better. Father and daughter were now living in an apartment which the tide of notes had turned into a new apartment, in which Cécile’s absence was discussed increasingly rarely. Lea was less bothered by that than her father was. Then, every now and again, apparently out of the blue, Lea wanted to know all about her mother. Van Vliet sensed that she was comparing her with Marie.
‘I realized that nothing of what I said was true. All wrong. Merde. After these conversations I lay awake and thought of our first meeting in the cinema. It was shortly after my promotion. Un homme et une femme, with Jean-Louis Trintignant, who dashes from the Côte d’Azur to Paris in his car, a whole night long. Cécile’s perfume beside me smelled as if it was the perfume of the woman on the screen. The next day I scoured the city until I had it. A perfume by Dior. In the intermission we both stayed in our seats and complained about the annoying custom of interrupting a film to sell ice cream. In the street we looked at each other for a moment longer than chance acquaintances usually do. When I think that it was that moment that decided everything, Lea, her happiness and the disaster that it led to. The Royal cinema on Laupenstrasse. A warm summer evening. A bit of moisture on our pupils. My God.
‘“Martijn, the romantic cynic!” she said when I talked about Trintignant’s bleary face on the way to Paris and the fact that while he drove and drove everything had existed, absolutely everything. “I didn’t think that really existed!” She said my name in a French accent, no one had ever done that, and I liked it. But a cynic? I don’t know why I said that and whether she meant it. I never asked her; there were lots of important things that I never asked her. I noticed that when Lea came with her questions.’
Marie was more important than everything else. Even more than her father. It was only if there were disagreements with Marie and she felt hurt that Lea turned back to him, and when she did so it was to see the steaming, dripping spaghetti on the tennis racquet.
‘Lea was growing quickly now, almost by leaps and bounds; she was recognizably the daughter of a tall father. The time came for her first full-size violin. We drove to Zurich, to Lucerne and to a famous violin-maker in St Gallen. Katharina Walther’s nose was out of joint, because the selection at Krompholz wasn’t enough for me. Marie felt she had been bypassed when we came back with an instrument that looked wonderful and sounded even lovelier. It cost a fortune, and as I stood in the bank, selling shares at a loss, I asked myself with a shiver what I was doing. Even today I can feel how I took my first steps in the street with great care, as if the tarmac might crumble away at any moment. Something within me had started sliding, but I refused to be aware of it and instead decided to organize a little party at home.
‘We sat at the kitchen table to draw up the list of invitations. No list came into being. Marie Pasteur at our house? Now, after our upset? Lea pursed her lips and drew patterns on the table top with her finger. I was glad. Caroline? She knew our apartment – but as a party guest? Other fellow-pupils, perhaps? The whole class, along with the music teacher? I snapped the notebook shut. We had no friends.
‘I made saffron rice, and after we had eaten in silence Lea went to her room to practise on the new violin. It had a warm, golden sound, and after a few minutes it no longer mattered that we had no friends.’
Van Vliet experienced Lea’s ambition, her fanaticism and also her coldness when someone got in her way. Markus Gerber had been abandoned long ago. Another boy fell in love with the fourteen-year-old and made the mistake of being given a violin for his
birthday. Lea’s comments were devastating. On such occasions her father was chilled. But then she came home after an unsuccessful lesson at Marie’s, wept, pressed herself against him and was once again the little girl that occasionally said strange, slightly illogical things.
‘Then there was the business with Paganini. The fingering he demands is inhuman. Lea showed me what it’s supposed to be like. Il Diablo, as he was known, had an incredible reach. And he wrote for hands like that. Lea began stretching exercises. Marie forbade them. She went on doing it in secret; she read books about Niccolò. It was only when Marie gave her an ultimatum that she stopped.
‘I knew it couldn’t go well, I knew all along. The fanaticism. The coldness. The strange statements. I should have talked to Marie. You ask if she, too, didn’t notice how dangerous it was getting. But for me … enfin, it was Marie, I didn’t want to … And neither did I want Lea’s notes to disappear from the apartment, the silence would have been terrible. Later I heard it, that terrible silence, that silence of the grave. This evening I will have to hear it again.’
With every passing kilometre we were getting closer to it, that silence in his new and – as he had said – small apartment, which, I don’t know why, I imagined as being shabby, with a staircase full of unpleasant smells. Involuntarily, I reduced my speed.
‘In the time before the first competition that she would take part in, I woke up at dawn and thought: I have forgotten my own life. Since Loyola de Colón I have thought only of Lea’s life. Unshaven, I drove through deserted streets to the station. I slowly went down the still-motionless escalator of that time, and tried to imagine what it had been like to be me, before violin music had taken hold of my life. Can one know what things were like before, in the knowledge of what came later? Can one really know that? Or is it more that one gets – is that what happens later – numbed by the convulsive thought that it is what came before?