The Piano Teacher: A Novel (14 page)

Soon the ladies enter their slightly emptier apartment. In this cavern, which closes protectively, they now have more room for their hobbies. The apartment doesn’t welcome just anyone, only people who belong here!

A new squall—the supernaturally huge, soft hand of a giant—arose and pressed Fräulein Kohut against an optician’s display window, which was chock full of glittering glasses. Mammoth eyeglasses containing violet lenses hung broadly over the store, trembling under the lashes of the gusts, a danger to passersby. Then all at once, the air grew very still, as if catching its breath and being frightened in the process. At this very moment, Mother must be cozily burrowing into their kitchen, frying something in fat for the evening, when it will be served cold. Afterward, some needlework will be waiting for her, a white lace doily.

In the sky, there are clouds with hard, rosy outlines. They don’t seem to know where they’re heading, so they race headlong, now here, now there. Erika always knows several days in advance what will be awaiting her several days hence; she’ll be serving art at the conservatory. If not, then she’ll be doing something else with music, that bloodsucker, which Erika serves to herself in various states and conditions: canned or freshly roasted, as gruel or as a gourmet delight, on her own or in charge of other people.

Several blocks away from the conservatory, Erika begins searching and sniffing around, as is her wont. An experienced hound, she picks up the scent. Will she catch a student without an assignment, with too much time on his hands, leading his
own private life? Erika wants to enter, she wants to squeeze her way into these vast domains, which, although beyond her supervision, nevertheless stretch out far and wide, divided into farms. Bloody mountains, meadows of life, into which she has to clamp her teeth. The teacher has every right to do so because a teacher acts
in loco parentis.
She absolutely has to know what is going on in other lives. No sooner has a student retreated from her, no sooner has he poured himself into his portable leisure container, where he believes he is not observed, than K. is there, trembling, ready to join him secretly, without being asked. She leaps around corners, she pops up unexpectedly from corridors, she materializes in elevators—an energy-charged genie swirling up from a bottle. In order to expand her taste in music and force it on her students, she occasionally attends concerts. She weighs one interpreter against the other, annihilating the students with her yardstick, to which only the greatest musicians can measure up. She pursues, always out of the eyeshot of students, but always within her own eyeshot; she observes herself in the display windows, watches herself hot on the trail. Most people would call her a good observer. But Erika herself is not most people. She is one of those people who lead and guide most people. Sucked into the vacuum of the absolute inertia of her body, she shoots out of the bottle when it opens, and she is then flung into a previously selected or unexpected alien existence. No one can prove that her spying is deliberate. And yet suspicions seem to develop against her in various places. She pops up at a time when one doesn’t care to have witnesses. Every new hairdo sported by a female student triggers thirty minutes of violent discussion at home. Erika then accuses her mother of always spitefully keeping her in the house, so she won’t go somewhere and experience something. After all, she, the daughter, is long overdue for a new hairdo. But Mother, who doesn’t dare do what she’d like to
do, sticks to Erika infectiously, like a burr or a leech. Mother is sucking the marrow from Erika’s bones. What Erika knows from her secret observations, Mama knows; and what Erika is in reality, a genius—why, no one knows that better than her mama, who knows the child inside and out. Seek and you shall find the repulsive things you secretly hope to find.

Outside the Metro Film Theater, Erika has been finding hidden treasures for three merry spring days, ever since they changed the program; for the student, obsessed with himself and his mental obscenities, buried his distrust long ago. His senses are concentrated on new focal points: film stills. The movie house is featuring a soft-core porno flick, even though children pass by closely on the way to their music. One of the students standing outside the theater judges every photograph by the acts it depicts. Another is more interested in the beauty of the women. A third student stubbornly yearns for what is not visible: the insides of female bodies. Two future young men are engaged in a fruitful argument about the size of the female breasts. Then all at once, hurled by the squall, the piano teacher explodes in their midst—like a hand grenade. Her face has assumed a quietly punitive, slightly pitying look. One would never believe that she and the women in the photos belong to one and the same sex, namely the beautiful sex. Indeed, a less sophisticated person might even conclude, just from her outer appearance, that the piano teacher belongs to an entirely different subcategory of the human species. However, a photo does not show the inner life; so any comparisons would be unfair to Fräulein Kohut, whose inner life is actually in blossom and in sap. Without saying a word, she walks on. No ideas are exchanged, but the student knows that he has once again not practiced enough because his mind was on something other than the piano.

In glass showcases, men and women keep their noses to one
another’s grindstones; they are hooked into everlasting lust—an arduous ballet. Their work makes them sweat. The man is working on various parts of the woman’s flesh, and he can publicly display the fruit of his labor: when the juice shoots out and drops on her body. In real life, a man must usually support and feed a woman; he is judged by his ability to do so. And here too, he offers the woman warm food, which his innards have cooked on his front burner. The woman moans—figuratively. But one can almost see the shriek. She is delighted with the gift, she is delighted with the giver, and her screams continue. The photos are silent, of course, but a sound track is waiting inside the theater, where the woman will shriek out her gratitude for the man’s effort once the spectator has bought his ticket.

The student, who has been caught unawares, strides behind Professor Kohut, maintaining a respectful distance. He rebukes himself for injuring her female pride by gawking at naked women. Maybe she considers herself a woman and feels lethally wounded. Next time, his inner clock should tick loudly when the teacher comes stalking up. Later, in piano class, the teacher will deliberately avoid looking at the student, that leper of lust. By the time they get to Bach, right after the scales and finger exercises, the student’s insecurity spreads out and takes the upper hand. This intricate musical texture can endure only the secure hand of the master pianist, who draws the reins gently. The main theme was messed up, the other voices were too importunate, and the whole piece was anything but transparent. An oil-smeared car window. Erika jeers at the student’s Bach. It is a muddy creek, faltering over obstacles like small rocks and mounds, stumbling along in its dirty bed. Erika now explains Bach’s work in greater detail. Its passion is a cyclopean structure. It is also a well-tempered foxhole with regard to the other contrapuntal business for keyboard instruments. Deliberately
trying to humiliate the student, Erika praises Bach’s work to the skies. She claims that Bach rebuilds gothic cathedrals whenever his music is played. Erika feels the tingling between her legs, something felt only by those chosen by and for art when they talk about art. And she lies, saying that the Faustian yearning for God produced both the Cathedral of Strasbourg and the introductory chorus of the
St. Matthew Passion.
Then she tells her student: That was not exactly a cathedral he was playing. Erika can’t help pointing out that God also created woman. She adds the stale male joke that he did it because he had nothing better to do. But then she negates her little joke by asking the student in all seriousness whether he knows how one should look at the photo of a woman. Respectfully, for his mom, who carried him and gave birth to him, was a woman, too; no less and no more. The student makes several promises that his professor demands. Erika returns the favor by explaining that Bach’s mastery is the triumph of craft in his extremely diverse contrapuntal forms and techniques. Erika knows all about craft: If practice alone counted, she would have won by points or even by a knockout! But, she triumphs, Bach is more, he is a commitment to God; and the latest edition of the
Encyclopedia of Music,
Vol. I, even trumps Erika by crowing that Bach’s works are a commitment to the special Nordic man struggling for God’s grace.

The student resolves never again to be caught in front of the photograph of a naked woman. Erika’s fingers twitch like the claws of a well-trained falcon. When she teaches, she breaks one will after another. Yet deep inside, she feels an intense desire to obey. That’s why she’s got her mother at home. But the old woman keeps getting older and older. What will happen when she falls apart and becomes a dismal creature in need of care herself, when she has to obey Erika? Erika pines for difficult tasks, which she then carries out badly. She has to be punished
for that. This young man, who is covered with his own blood, is not a worthy opponent; why, he was already defeated by Bach’s miraculous music. Imagine his defeat when he has to play the role of a living human being! He won’t even have the courage to pound away; he’s much too embarrassed by all the notes he’s fluffed. A single phrase from her, a casual glance—and he falls to his knees, ashamed, making all kinds of resolutions, which he will never be able to carry out. Anyone who could get her to obey a command (there must be a commander aside from her mother, who cuts glowing furrows into Erika’s will) could get
anything
and
everything
from Erika. Erika needs to lean against a hard wall that won’t give. Something pulls at her, tugs at her elbow, weighs down the hem of her skirt: a small lead ball, a tiny concentrated weight. She has no idea what damage it could do, once released from its chain. This fierce dog, baring its teeth as it strides up and down the bars, the fur bristling on the back of its neck, is always exactly one centimeter away from its victim, with a dark growling in its throat, a red light in its pupils.

She is waiting for that one command! For that steaming yellow hole in the wide mass of snow, a tiny cup of piss. The urine is still warm; and soon the hole will freeze into a thin yellow pipe in the mountain, a signal for the skier, the coaster, the hiker, revealing that human presence became a brief threat here and then moved on.

She knows about the form of the sonata and the structure of the fugue. That’s her job, she’s a teacher. And yet, her paws ardently grope toward ultimate obedience. The final snowy hills, the heights—landmarks in the wasteland—gradually pull apart, becoming plains, smoothing out in the distance, turning into icy, mirrorlike surfaces, untrodden, untouched. Other people become champion skiers; first prize in the men’s division,
first prize in the women’s division, and always first prize in the Alpine Combined!

No hair stirs on Erika, no sleeve flutters on Erika, no speck of dust rests on Erika. An icy wind has arisen, and she glides across the field, a figure skater in a skimpy dress and white skates. The smoothest surface of all stretches from one horizon to the other and even farther! Whirring across the ice! The organizers have misplaced the cassette, so this time there will be no musical medleys, and the unaccompanied buzzing of the steel runners will turn more and more into a deadly metallic scraping, a brief flashing, an unintelligible Morse code on the edge of time. Gathering speed, the skater is compressed into herself by a gigantic fist: concentrated kinetic energy, hurtling out at exactly the right split second into a microscopically precise double axis, whirling around, landing right on the dot. The impact jolts her through and through, charging her with at least double her own body weight, and she forces that weight into the unyielding ice. Her motion cuts into the diamond-hard mirror, and into the delicate network of her ligaments, straining her bones to the utmost. And now she squats in a sit spin! Under that same momentum! The ice ballerina becomes a cylindrical tube, an oil drill. Air whooshes away, powdered ice screeches in flight, clouds of breath scurry off, a howling and sawing resound. But the surface is indestructible, it shows no trace of damage! The whirl slows down, we can make out the graceful figure again, the unclear, light-blue blur of her skirt begins to sway down, carefully arranging itself in pleats. A final curtsy to the audience on the right, one to the audience on the left, and the skater then skates away, waving with one hand, brandishing flowers in the other. But the audience remains invisible. Perhaps the ice maiden only assumes it exists because she has heard the applause. She skates away in quick
spurts, growing tiny in the distance. Nothing is calmer now than the place where the hem of the light-blue skirt rests on the firm, pink panty-hose thighs, slapping, hopping, waving, swinging, the center of all rest and relaxation: this short skirt, these velvety soft flares and pleats, this snug leotard with its embroidered neckline.