THE PIANO TEACHER
THE PIANO TEACHER
ELFRIEDE JELINEK
Translated by Joachim Neugroschel
Copyright © 1983 by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH
Translation copyright © 1988 by Wheatland Corporation
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Originally published in German as Die Klavierspielerin by Rowholt Verlag, Reinbek
First published in English by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, 1988
This reissued edition is published by special arrangement with Serpent’s Tail, London.
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-010782
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9883-9
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
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I
THE PIANO TEACHER, Erika Kohut, bursts like a whirlwind into the apartment she shares with her mother. Mama likes calling Erika her little whirlwind, for the child can be an absolute speed demon. She is trying to escape her mother. Erika is in her late thirties. Her mother is old enough to be her grandmother. The baby was born after long and difficult years of marriage. Her father promptly left, passing the torch to his daughter. Erika entered, her father exited. Eventually, Erika learned how to move swiftly. She had to. Now she bursts into the apartment like a swarm of autumn leaves, hoping to get to her room without being seen. But her mother looms before her, confronts her. She puts Erika against the wall, under interrogation—inquisitor and executioner in one, unanimously recognized as Mother by the State and by the Family. She investigates: Why has Erika come home so late? Erika dismissed her last student three hours ago, after heaping him with scorn. You must think I won’t find out where you’ve been, Erika. A child should own up to her mother without being asked. But Mother never believes her because Erika tends to lie. Mother is waiting. She starts counting to three.
By the count of two, Erika offers an answer that deviates sharply from the truth. Her briefcase, filled with musical scores, is wrenched from her hands—and Mother instantly finds the bitter answer to all questions. Four volumes of Beethoven sonatas indignantly share cramped quarters with an obviously brand-new dress. Mother rails against the purchase. The dress, pierced by a hook, was so seductive at the shop, so soft and colorful. Now it lies there, a droopy rag, pierced by Mother’s glare. The money was earmarked for their savings account. Now it’s been spent prematurely. The dress could have been visible at any time as an entry in the bank book—if you didn’t mind going to the linen closet, where the bank book peeks out from behind a pile of sheets. But today, the bank book went on an outing, a sum was withdrawn, and the result can now be seen. Erika should put this dress on whenever they wonder where the nice money went. Mother screams: You’ve squandered your future! We could have had a new apartment someday, but you couldn’t wait. All you’ve got now is a rag, and it’ll soon be out of fashion. Mother wants everything “someday.” She wants nothing right now—except the child. And she always wants to know where she can reach the child in an emergency, in case Mama is about to have a heart attack. Mother wants to save now in order to enjoy someday. And then Erika goes and buys a dress, of all things! Something more fleeting than a dab of mayonnaise on a sardine sandwich. This dress will soon be totally out of fashion—not even next year, but next month. Money never goes out of fashion.
They are saving to buy a large condominium. The cramped apartment they now rent is so ancient, you might as well just abandon it. When they decide on the condominium, they will be allowed to specify where to put the closets and partitions. You see, an entirely new construction system is being used. Every aspect is custom-designed, according to your precise wishes. You pay your money and you get your choice. Mother, who has only a tiny pension, gets her choice and Erika pays. In the brand-new, state-of-the-art condominium, mother and daughter will each have her own realm, Erika here, Mother there, both realms neatly divided. However, they will have a common living room to meet in. If they wish. But of course they do, because they belong together. Even here, in this dump, which is slowly falling to pieces, Erika already has her own realm, her own roost, which she rules and is ruled in. It is only a provisional realm; Mother can walk in at any time. There is no lock on Erika’s door. A child has no secrets from her mother.
Erika’s living space consists of her own small room, where she can do as she pleases. No one may interfere; this room is her property. Mother’s realm is the rest of the apartment: the housewife, being in charge of everything, keeps house everywhere, and Erika enjoys the fruits of her mother’s labor. Erika has never had to do housework, because dustrags and cleansers ruin a pianist’s hands. During Mother’s rare breathers, she occasionally worries about her vast and varied holdings. You can’t always tell where everything is. Just where is Erika, that fidgety property? Where is she wandering? Is she alone or with someone else? Erika is such a live wire, such a mercurial thing. Why, she may be running around at this very moment, up to no good. Yet every day, the daughter punctually shows up where she belongs: at home. Mother worries a lot, for the first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better. Her greatest anxiety is to keep her property immovable, tie it down so it won’t run away. That’s why they have the TV set, which prefabricates, packages, and home-delivers lovely images, lovely actions. So Erika is almost always at home. If not, her mother knows where she’s flitting about. Now and then, Erika may attend an evening concert, but she does so less and less. Instead, she sits at her piano, pounding away at her long-discarded career as a concert pianist. Or else she’s an evil spirit, haunting some rehearsal with her students. Her mother can ring her up there in an emergency. Or else Erika enjoys performing with congenial colleagues, exuberantly playing chamber music. Her mother can telephone her at such times too. Erika pulls against apron strings, she repeatedly begs her mother not to telephone. But Mother ignores her pleas, for she alone dictates the shalts and shalt-nots. Mother also controls the general demand for her daughter, so that ultimately fewer and fewer people wish to see Erika, or even speak to her. Erika’s vocation is her avocation: the celestial power known as music. Music fills her time completely. Her time has no room for anything else. Nothing offers so much pleasure as a magnificent performance by the finest virtuosi.
Erika visits a café once a month, but her mother knows which café, and she can ring her up there too. Mother makes generous use of this privilege, this homemade structure of security and intimacy.
Time around Erika is slowly turning into a plaster cast. It crumbles the instant her mother strikes it. At such moments, Erika sits there, with remnants of time’s brace around her thin neck. Mother has called her up, making her a laughingstock, and Erika is forced to admit: I have to go home now. Home. If ever you run into Erika on the street, she is usually on her way home.
Mother says: Erika suits me just fine the way she is. Nothing more will come of her. She’s so gifted, she could have easily become a nationally
renowned pianist—if only she’d left everything to me, her mother. But Erika ignored her mother’s wishes, and sometimes yielded to other influences. Self-centered male love threatened to interfere with her studies. Superficial things like makeup and clothes reared their ugly heads. And her career ended before it ever got underway. Still, you need some kind of security: the position of piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory. And she didn’t even have to pay her dues by teaching at one of the neighborhood music schools, where so many people grind away their young lives, turning dusty gray, hunchbacked—a swiftly passing throng, barely noticed by the principal.
But that vanity of hers, that wretched vanity. Erika’s vanity is a major problem for her mother, driving thorns into her flesh. Erika’s vanity is the only thing Erika should learn to do without. Better now than later. For in old age, which is just around the corner, vanity is a heavy load to bear. And old age is enough of a burden as it is. Oh, that Erika! Were the great musicians vain? They weren’t. The only thing Erika should give up is her vanity. If necessary, Mother can smooth out the rough edges, so there won’t be anything abrasive in Erika’s character.
That’s why Mother tries to twist the new dress out of Erika’s convulsed fingers. But these fingers are too well trained. Let go, Mother snaps, hand it over! You’ve got to be punished for caring so much about trivial things. Life has punished you by ignoring you, and now your mother will punish you in the same way, ignoring you, even though you dress up and paint your face like a clown. Hand it over!
Erika dashes to the closet. Her dark suspicion has been confirmed several times in the past. Today, something else is missing: the dark-gray autumn ensemble. What’s happened? Whenever Erika realizes something is missing, she instantly knows whom to blame: the only possible culprit. You bitch, you bitch! Erika furiously yells at the superior authority. She grabs her mother’s dark-blond hair with its gray roots. A beautician is expensive. So once a month, Erika colors her mother’s hair with a brush and dye. Now, Erika yanks at the hair that she herself beautified. She pulls it furiously. Her mother weeps. When Erika stops pulling, her hands are filled with tufts of hair. She gazes at them, dumbfounded. Chemicals have already broken the resistance of this hair, which nature did not make all that strong in the first place. Erika doesn’t know what to do with the discolored dark-blond tufts. She goes into the kitchen and throws them into the garbage can.
Mother, with less hair on her head, stands crying in the living room, where her Erika often gives private concerts. She is the very best performer ever to play in the living room, because no one else ever performs here. Mother’s trembling hands still clutch the new dress. If she wants to resell it, she’ll have to hurry. This design, with poppies as big as cabbages, can be worn for only one year—then never again. Mother’s head hurts in the places where hair is now missing.
The daughter comes back, upset, weeping. She curses her mother, calls her a vicious bitch, but hopes Mother will make up with her right away. Kiss and make up. Mother swears that Erika’s hand will drop off because she hit her mother and tore out her hair. Erika sobs louder and louder. She’s sorry. After all, her mama works her fingers to the bone for her. As a rule, Erika instantly regrets anything she does to her, for she loves her, Mama’s known her since infancy. Eventually Erika relents, as expected; she bawls bitterly. Mama is willing, all too willing, to give in; she cannot be truly angry at her daughter. Let me fix some coffee and well drink it together. During the coffee break, Erika feels even sorrier for her mother, and the final vestiges of her anger vanish in the cake. She examines the bare spots on her mother’s head. But she doesn’t know what to say, just as she didn’t know what to do with the tufts of hair. She sheds a few more tears, for good measure, because Mother is old and won’t live forever; and because Erika’s youth is gone. Or, more generally, because all things pass and few ever return.
Mother now explains why a pretty girl never has to get gussied up. Erika confirms it. She has so many things hanging in her closet. But why bother? She never wears any of them. Her clothes hang there uselessly, decorating the closet. Mother can’t always prevent Erika from buying something, but she can dictate what Erika puts on. Mother is an absolute ruler. She decides what Erika will wear outside the house. You are not going out in that getup, Mother dictates, fearing what will happen if Erika enters strange homes with strange men in them. Erika has resolved never to wear her clothes. It is a mother’s duty to help a child make up her mind and to prevent wrong decisions. By not encouraging injuries, a mother avoids having to close wounds later on. Erika’s mother prefers inflicting injuries herself, then supervising the therapy.
Their conversation becomes more and more vitriolic: Mother and daughter spray acid at students who do better than Erika or threaten to do so. You shouldn’t give them free rein, you don’t need to. You should stop them. But you let them get away with murder! You’re not smart enough, Erika. If a teacher puts her mind to it, none of her students will succeed. No young woman will emerge from her classroom and pursue a career against Erika’s wishes. You didn’t make it—why should others reach the top? And from your musical stable to boot?
Erika, still sniveling, takes the poor dress into her arms. Mute and miserable, she hangs it in the closet, among the other dresses, pantsuits, skirts, coats, and ensembles. She never wears any of them. They are merely supposed to wait here until she comes home in the evening. Then, after laying them out, she drapes them in front of her body and gazes at herself in the mirror. For these clothes belong to her! Mother can take them away and sell them, but she cannot wear them herself, for Mother, alas, is too fat for these narrow sheaths. They do not fit her. These things are all Erika’s. They are hers. Hers. The dress does not yet realize that its career has just been interrupted. It has been put away unused, and it will never be put on. Erika only wants to own it and look at it. Look at it from afar. She doesn’t even want to try it on. It’s enough for her to hold up this poem of cloth and colors and move it gracefully. As if a spring breeze were wafting it. Erika tried the dress on in the boutique, and now she will never slip into it again. Erika has already forgotten the brief, fleeting spell it cast on her in the shop. Now she has one more corpse in her wardrobe, but it is her property.
At night, when everyone else is asleep, Erika remains awake and alone, while the other half of this twosome (they are chained together by ties of blood) sleeps like a baby, dreaming up new methods of torture. Sometimes, very seldom, Erika gets up, opens the closet door, and caresses the witnesses to her secret desires. Actually, these desires are not all that secret; they shriek out their prices, they yell: Why did Erika go to all that trouble anyway? The colors shriek along, in a chorus of mixed voices. Where can you wear something like that without being hauled off by the police? (Normally, Erika wears only a skirt and a sweater or, in summer, a blouse.) Sometimes Mother wakes with a start, and she instinctively knows: Erika’s looking at her clothes again. That vain piece of baggage! Mother is certain, for the closet doors do not squeak just to amuse the closet.
Worst of all, these purchases keep the new apartment beyond reach forever, and Erika is always in danger of falling, tumbling, into love. Suddenly they would have a cuckoo egg, a male in their nest. Tomorrow, at breakfast, Erika can expect a severe dressing-down for her frivolity, Why, Mother could have died yesterday from injuries done to her hair, from the shock. Erika will be given a deadline for the next installment on the apartment; she’ll simply have to give more private lessons.
The only item missing from her dismal wardrobe is, fortunately, a wedding gown. Mother does not wish to become a mother-in-law. She prefers remaining a normal mother; she is quite content with her status.
But today is today. Time to sleep! That’s what Mother, in her matrimonial bed, demands. But Erika is still rotating in front of her mirror. Mother’s orders smash into her back like hatchets. Erika quickly touches a fetchingly flowery cocktail dress, barely grazing its hem. These flowers have never breathed fresh air, nor
have they ever experienced water. The dress, as Erika assures her mother, comes from a first-class fashion house in the heart of Vienna. Its quality and work manship will make it a joy forever. It fits Erika like a glove (not too much junk food!). The instant she saw the dress, Erika had a vision: I can wear it for years, and it will always be at the height of fashion. It will never sink from that height by even a hair’s breadth. This argument is wasted on her mother. Mama should do some careful soul-searching. Didn’t she wear a similar dress when she was young? But she denies it on principle. Nonetheless, Erika concludes that this purchase makes sense. The dress will never be out of date; Erika will still be able to wear it in twenty years.
Fashions change quickly. The dress remains unworn, although in perfect shape. But no one asks to see it. Its prime is past, ignored, and it will never come again—or at best in twenty years.
Some students rebel against their piano teacher. But their parents force them to practice art, and so Professor Kohut can likewise use force. Most of the keyboard pounders, however, are well-behaved and interested in the art they are supposedly mastering. They care about it even when it is performed by others, whether at a music society or in a concert hall. The students compare, weigh, measure, count. Many foreigners come to Erika, more and more each year. Vienna, the city of music! Only the things that have proven their worth will continue to do so in this city. Its buttons are bursting from the fat white paunch of culture, which, like any drowned corpse that is not fished from the water, bloats up more and more.
The closet receives the new dress. One more! Mother doesn’t like seeing Erika leave the apartment. Her dress is too flashy, it doesn’t suit the child. Mother says there has to be a limit. Erika doesn’t know what she means. There’s a time and a place for everything, that’s what Mother means.