‘I took the public elevator up to the university and went to the institute, which was still empty and silent at that early hour. I went through the post and called up my emails. It was all meant for someone that I was, and yet also no longer was. I gave brief answers to two hasty requests, then closed up the office. The titles in front of my name on the office door struck me as particularly ridiculous today, almost vain. Outside the city was waking up. Confused, I realized that I was being drawn towards Monbijou, the district where I had grown up in a rented block. The forgotten life I was in search of seemed not to be my professional life, but the life before and behind it.
‘The block still looked exactly the same. It was up there, on the third floor, that my first professional desire had matured: I wanted to be a counterfeiter. I lay on the bed and imagined all the things one would need to be able to do. It had nothing to do with the fact that my great-grandfather had been a dishonest Dutch banker who fled to Switzerland. I only found that out much later. Banknotes had fascinated me even when I was a little boy. I found it incredible that you could get chocolates in return for a piece of coloured paper. I was surprised beyond measure that no one came running after us and locked us up when we went outside with the chocolates. I found it so incredible that I constantly had to try it out again. I started stealing banknotes from my mother’s money box. It was perplexingly easy and risk-free, because she travelled the country with her fashionable swatches and was rarely at home, just as rarely as my father, who did the rounds of doctors with pharmaceutical products. Later I went to see every film about forgery, including the forgery of paintings. I was disappointed and rancorous when the methods of payment I saw every day became increasingly incomprehensible. As soon as I had become acquainted with computers, I took my revenge with plans for an electronic bank robbery. It was incredible that it was now only a matter of using a click to transfer numbers that didn’t really exist. I found that even more incredible than the business with the chocolates.
‘When my father came back from his trips as a sales rep he was exhausted and irritable. He had no strength and no desire to engage with his boy, a child who had not been planned. But I did find a way to reach him: chess. It meant that you could sit together and didn’t have to talk. My father was an impulsive player with brilliant ideas, but without the staying power to employ them against quickly calculating opponents like myself. He lost more and more often. What I will never forget about him is that he was not annoyed about his defeats, but proud of my victories.
‘We played in the hospital, too. I think he was glad that the mad rush of his life as a salesman was over when his heart was no longer in it. He lived to experience my early doctorate. He grinned. “Dr Martijn van Vliet. Sounds good. Sounds very good. I wouldn’t have thought you would do it, when you’re always hanging around in chess clubs.” My mother, whose swatches had fallen out of fashion, moved to a smaller apartment. Before I said goodbye after my weekly visit, I went into her bedroom on some excuse or other and put a few banknotes in her money box. “But you need the money yourself,” she said every now and again. “I print it,” I said. “Martijn!” She lived to experience Lea’s birth. “The idea that you’re now a father!” she said. “When you were always such a terrible loner.”
‘On the Bundesterrasse in Bern two men were playing chess with enormous figures that came up to their knees. They were close to endgame. The old man would lose if he did the obvious thing and took the pawn that was on offer. He looked at me uncertainly. I shook my head. He moved past the pawn. The young man, who had observed our mute exchange, stared at me. It’s better not to do that with me; you can only lose.
‘He lost the game after five moves, which I dictated to the old man. The old man would have liked to go for a drink with me, but I was in search of my life and walked on across the Kirchenfeld Bridge to my old secondary school. The pupils, who were a quarter of a century younger than me, were streaming into class. Confused, I realized that I felt excluded when the classroom doors closed. When I used to hold the record for bunking off.
‘I stepped into the empty hall, which still smelled of the same floor wax as before. How many simultaneous tournaments had I played in here? I couldn’t remember. I had lost only three games in all. “Always against girls,” they said with a grin, “and always with short skirts.”
‘The most fun was to be had playing against Beat Käser, my geography teacher and Hans Lüthi’s arch-enemy. Käser was an unimaginative individual with an enormous lower jaw stretched tight with gleaming sin, and emotionally he was one thing above all: a general chief of staff. He would ideally have taught in uniform with a dagger. For him, geography consisted in learning all of the Swiss mountain passes off by heart. He called on me more often than he did the others: “Vliet!” I didn’t react, as a matter of principle. Of course, if you’re called Käser it leaves a bitter taste to have to call your adversary Van Vliet. When he did so at last, I replied that the Susten led beneath the Aare or the Simplon connected Kandersteg with Kandersteg. He too lost every staring contest, and every time it happened it was enormous fun to watch the way he simply couldn’t believe that he had lost again. That man hated me, and he hated me, I think, particularly because of my reputation for being the cheekiest beggar and the slyest bastard in the school, who had sadly to be acknowledged as being brighter than many of the teachers. When I passed Käser’s board at the tournament I didn’t look at him, just theatrically raised my eyebrows and moved on particularly quickly. He tried to contest the doctor’s certificate that excused me from military service. He thought the symptoms were simulated. Which, in fact, they were.
‘Later that morning I drove to Lea’s school. It was break time when I arrived. Rather than going to her as I had planned and explaining why I had left the house so early, I stood some distance away and watched her. She was standing by the bicycles, absently running her hand along a metal pole. Today it seems to me as if that aimless rubbing was an inconspicuous harbinger of the aimless movement that I saw her making when I discovered her behind the firewood at the Saint-Rémy hospice.
‘Now she turned round and walked over to a group of pupils listening to a girl with a raven-black ponytail. The girl looked as if she loved horses, campfires and loud guitar music. A Joan of Arc in the body of a Californian college girl. Klara Kalbermatten from Saas Fee. She could have lifted her mountain bike with one finger, and in other respects she looked as if she was a match for anything. But she had one weak point: her name. Or rather: her hatred of her name. She wanted to be called Lilli, Lilli and nothing else, and if someone neglected to comply, she took it as a declaration of war.
‘There was a harsh, irreconcilable contrast between the two growing girls, which found expression in different ways: here, Lilli’s sun-tanned skin, bursting with health; there, Lea’s alabaster complexion, which made her look slightly sickly. Here, Lilli’s athletic way of moving, which suggested a swing of the hips at any moment; there, Lea’s clumsy way of standing and walking, which might have created the impression that she had forgotten where she had left her limbs. Here, Lilli’s direct, steely blue gaze, with unmoving eyelids and the implacability of a straight line; there, Lea’s dark, veiled eyes, peeping from the shadow of her long lids. Here, the robust, bronze, ordinary beauty of a surfing mountain queen; there, the pale, aristocratic beauty of a porcelain fairy balancing on the abyss. Lilli would always come out fighting as if it were high noon on a dusty, sun-drenched Main Street; Lea would pretend not even to pick up the gauntlet, before finishing everything off with a sly, lightning-fast manoeuvre from a shadowy ambush. Or was that my own underhand way of doing things? Would she not be more likely to fight Klara Kalbermatten with Cécile’s elegance than with my deviousness? With jabs from an invisible foil?
‘Over the next few hours I passed by the addresses where I had lived as a student, and stood for a long time outside the rooms of an old chess club that no longer exists. I had paid for part of my studies in there. Martijn the bat, they c
alled me, Martijn the blind worm, because I often played blind against several opponents at once and won half the takings.
‘Once, just once, I had a fatal collapse of memory and lost all the games of the evening. After that I didn’t play again for six months. More often than usual I called in on my parents in the evening. They were so terribly, so touchingly proud to have a son who studied and who mastered life with such bravura independence. And I wished most devoutly that they would forget all that and be strong, protecting parents to a weak son in a tailspin, for one evening, just one evening. I’d intercepted the warning letters from school, as a latchkey child you have power of the mailbox. How could they have known that everything was not as it seemed?
‘By now it was early afternoon. Lea would soon be coming home and I should have been there. But I wanted to go to the cinema. I wanted that repeat of the past as well: to sit down in early afternoon with radiant weather outside for the first showing in the dark cinema and enjoy the feeling of doing something that no one else was doing.’
I saw Tom Courtenay running and triumphantly sitting down before the finishing line, at midday, in the afternoon and at the late show.
‘I saw nothing of the film. At first I thought it was because Lea would be coming home to an empty apartment as she had done in the morning. But slowly it dawned on me that there was something bigger at stake: I imagined what it would be like if Lea didn’t exist at all. If I didn’t have to take care of her. Not cook. Not fear a return of her eczema. Not hear her practising. No stage fright. I imagined driving through a night and then standing in front of Marie Pasteur’s door. I ran from the cinema and drove home.’
13
NEAR VALENCE we pulled in to a car park so that I could stretch my legs. An icy mistral was blowing down the Rhône Valley. Talking was out of the question. We stood there with our trousers flapping, the biting wind in our faces, which were beginning to sting from the dry cold. ‘Could we take a break in Geneva?’ Van Vliet had asked before. ‘I’d like to go to a bookshop. Payot in Bern went a long time ago.’
I wanted to postpone the moment when he would have to step into his apartment and hear the silence, the absence of Lea’s notes. ‘The silence has followed me there,’ he had said of the new apartment.
There was, I thought, a practical reason for the move: he now lived alone. Perhaps he had also been trying to escape the past. And yet there had been something in his voice, a kind of resentment, as if someone had forced him to switch to the smaller apartment. As if some authority had exercised power over him. It must have been a powerful authority, I thought. Van Vliet wasn’t the kind of man who would allow himself simply to be driven from his apartment.
‘There was this music teacher,’ he said as we drove on. ‘Josef Valentin. An unremarkable, almost invisible man. Small, mouse-grey suits, waistcoat, colourless ties. Thin hair. Only his eyes were anything special: dark brown, always somehow looking surprised, concentrated. And he wore an excessively large signet ring that everyone laughed at because it didn’t suit him at all. The pupils called him Joe – an impossible name for him, and that was why they called him it. When he stood on the podium and conducted the school orchestra, he always risked looking ridiculous; he was simply too small and too thin; every movement looked as if he were protesting against his inconspicuousness. But when he went to the piano, the giggles made way for respectful silence. Then his hands were so nimble and strong that even the ring seemed justified.
‘He loved Lea. Loved her with all his timid being, which only emerged through music. Old man loves beautiful girl – somehow it was quite natural, but then again not. He never stood too close to her, quite the contrary, he shrank away when she appeared, it was a distance of admiration and untouchability; and I think he might have forgotten himself if he had had to watch anyone pressurizing Lea. “He calls Lilli Fräulein Kalbermatten,” Lea told me. “I have a feeling he does it for me.” After her school leaving exam she sometimes talked about him. Then you could tell that she missed his contact-free affection and admiration.
‘He and Marie didn’t like each other. No hostility. But they avoided greeting one another at school concerts. If they were both in the room you could tell they were thinking: it would be better if the other didn’t exist.
‘Lea outdid herself from one school concert to the next. She never made another mistake as she had with the Rondo. She still had red patches on her throat before performing, and between movements she inevitably wiped her hand on her dress. But her confidence grew. None the less I suffered and trembled at each difficult passage. I knew them all from home.
‘At the age of sixteen she played Bach’s E major Violin Concerto with the school orchestra. She told me about the rehearsals through gritted teeth. The girl who played first violin in the orchestra was two years older than Lea. She talked about herself as the “concert master” and could hardly bear the fact that Lea was the soloist. Her instrument didn’t sound as good as Lea’s. When she stood opposite me after the concert, she looked at me with an expression that said: it’s just because they had the cash to buy her that instrument.
‘There were two small fluffs in Lea’s performance that made Marie flinch. Otherwise it was a brilliant performance with thundering applause and stamping. Marie had tears in her eyes and touched my arm as she had never done before. Someone took a photograph of Lea in the long, red dress that she had chosen with Marie.’ Van Vliet gulped. ‘It’s one of the pictures I don’t know whether to throw away, tear up or just lock away.’
Before we turned off towards Geneva, near Lyon, Van Vliet said into the silence: ‘Joe put Lea forward for the competition in St Moritz. If only he hadn’t done that. If only he hadn’t done that!’
14
LEA WAS LET OFF school for the last two weeks before the competition, he told me. She spent most of her time with Marie, who had cancelled all her other lessons. They were rehearsing a Bach sonata. Again and again they listened to the way Itzhak Perlman played it. Sometimes they worked until late into the night, and then Lea stayed at Marie’s. ‘His Stradivariuses – no one else has a chance,’ she is supposed to have said of Perlman’s violin. Those words must have echoed through Van Vliet.
He dreamed the eczema had come back, and sometimes he woke, drenched in sweat, because he saw Lea on stage in front of him, vainly trying to remember the next few bars.
‘We met two days before the start of the competition in St Moritz. It was late January and the snow was incessant. Lea’s room lay between Marie’s and mine. In the hotel ballroom they had just finished setting up the technical side of things. We gave a start when we saw the television cameras. Lea went on stage and stayed there for a long time. Every now and again she wiped her hands on her dress. She would like to practise now, she said after that, and then she and Marie went upstairs.
‘I can still feel the snow from that time on my face. It helped me to survive those days. I rented cross-country skis and was out for hours. Cécile and I had often done that. Silently, side by side, we had followed our trail through the thick snow, far from the usual routes. It was on one of those trips that we first talked about children.
‘Children were out of the question for me, I said. Cécile stopped. “But why?”
‘I had prepared for this question for a long time. Hands resting on my poles, head lowered, I uttered the words that I had prepared.
‘“I don’t want the responsibility. I don’t know how it works: taking responsibility for other people. I don’t even know how to do it for myself.”
‘I didn’t progress beyond such phrases. Even today I don’t know what Cécile did with them. Whether she understood them; whether she took them seriously. When she told me, a good year after our wedding, that Lea was on the way, I was scared stiff. But she had become my anchor and I didn’t want to lose her.
‘It was nine years since I had last closed the door to her sickroom, quietly, as if she could still hear. “You must promise me that you’ll look after …” she
had said the day before. “Yes,” I had cut in, “yes, of course.” After that I was sorry that I hadn’t let her finish. Even now, as the rising wind drove the snowflakes into my face, I choked on it. I slid back to the hotel at a rate of knots.
‘At her first performance, stage fright had been something that had afflicted Lea like an illness that you can’t do anything about. In the six years that had passed in the meantime, she had learned to outwit it by undertaking lots of other things that kept her busy when a performance approached. And if she was playing at school, to my surprise it helped if Klara Kalbermatten and her disciples were sitting in the audience. Lilli was furious about the glamour that Lea could lend to a party. Admittedly, she won all the races on the running track and in the pool; but she sensed that that wasn’t enough as a counterweight. Lea knew that, and when Lilli flopped down in the front row in scruffy clothing, she lost all dread, enjoyed the situation and mastered all technical difficulties as if they simply didn’t exist.
‘In St Moritz it was all different. If she won this competition, she could think of a career as a soloist. I was against such a career. I didn’t want to have to watch Lea being devoured by stage fright, by annoyance over press reports and by fear of having damp hands. Above all, however, I didn’t want to tremble every time I remembered her. And there were reasons to tremble. Nothing serious had happened since the mistake in the Rondo, nothing that could have been compared with my collapse in chess. The notes had never been engulfed by sudden forgetfulness, the fingers had never stiffened because they didn’t know where to slide to next. But once, when she was playing a Mozart sonata, she started playing the third movement before the second, and once it seemed as if she thought she’d finished after the second. Joe at the grand piano had excellent self-control and stripped the mistake of its embarrassment with a warm, paternal smile. “Sorry,” Lea had said. I had dreamed of it and I never wanted to hear that “sorry” again. Never again.