The Piano Teacher: A Novel (16 page)

Erika, using a foreign language, talks about the sins against the spirit of Schubert: The Koreans should feel, they should not stolidly imitate a recording by Alfred Brendel. For Brendel will always play a good deal better in his style! Unbidden, unsolicited, Klemmer voices his opinion about the soul of a musical work, that soul being very difficult to drive out of it. Yet some people manage to do so! They should stay home if they can’t feel. Klemmer, the honor student, jeeringly points out that the South Korean will not find a soul in the corner of the room. Klemmer calms down slowly and, quoting Nietzsche, with whom he identifies, says he is not happy enough, not healthy enough for all Romantic music (including Beethoven). Klemmer begs his teacher to glean his unhappiness and unhealthiness from his marvelous playing. What we need is a music that makes us forget our sufferings. Animal life (!) should feel deified. People want to dance, triumph. Light, rollicking rhythms, tender, golden harmonies, no more and no less. Such are the wishes of the philosopher whose anger is provoked by so little; and Walter Klemmer concurs. When do
you actually live, Erika? the student asks, pointing out that there is enough time left in the evening to live if one takes the time. Half the time belongs to Walter Klemmer; the other half is for her to dispose of. But she always has to stay with her mother. The two women scream at each other. Klemmer talks about life as if it were a cluster of golden muscatel grapes, which a housewife arranges in a bowl for a guest, so that he can also eat with his eyes. The guest hesitantly takes a grape, then another, until all that’s left is a stem, plucked bald, and a freely improvised pile of seeds underneath.

Random touches threaten this woman, whose mind and art are appreciated. They may threaten her hair, her shoulder under the loose sweater. The teacher’s chair is moved forward. The screwdriver plunges deep, scraping out the final bit of content from
Der Wiener Liederfürst,
which today is heard only on the keyboard. The Korean gawks at his sheet music, which he bought at home, in Korea. These many black dots signify a completely foreign culture, with which he can show off back home.

Klemmer has taken up the banner of sensuality; he has even encountered sensuality in music! The teacher, that female mind-killer, recommends a solid technique. The Korean’s left hand cannot yet keep up with his right hand. There’s a special finger exercise for that problem. She moves his left hand back to his right hand, but teaches the former to be independent of the latter. His hands are always fighting each other, just as Klemmer, a know-it-all, is constantly arguing with other people. The Korean is dismissed for the day.

Erika Kohut feels a human body behind her, and it gives her the creeps. He shouldn’t get so close as to graze her. He goes somewhere behind her and then goes back. This movement demonstrates his aimlessness. As he goes back, he finally emerges in the corner of her eye, wickedly jerking his head
like a pigeon, insidiously holding his young face in the luminous cone emitted by the lamp, which burns brightest here. Erika feels dry and small. The outer shell hovers weightlessly around her compressed centrosphere. Her body is no longer flesh, and something closes in on her, likewise turning into an object. A cylindrical metal tube. A very simple apparatus, applied in order to be thrust in. And the image of this object (Klemmer) is glowingly projected into Erika’s visceral cavity and cast, upside down, on her interior wall. Here the image stands sharp, on its head; and at this very moment, when it has turned into a body for her, a body that can be touched with hands, it has also turned completely abstract, losing its flesh. The very instant that both have become physical for each other, they have broken off any reciprocal human relations. There are no parliamentarians who could be sent with letters, messages, missives. No longer does one body grab the other; instead, each becomes a means for the other, a state of being different, which each would like to penetrate painfully. And the deeper one goes, the more intensely the flesh rots, becoming light as a feather and flying away from these two mutually alien and hostile continents, which crash into each other and then collapse together, turning into a rattling thing with a few canvas tatters that dissolve at the slightest touch, disintegrating into dust.

Klemmer’s face is as smooth as a mirror. Erika’s face is starting to get marked by its later decay. The skin creases, the eyelids arch weakly like heated paper, the delicate texture under the eyes crinkles bluishly. The two sharp notches that run from the nostrils can never be ironed out again. The surface of the face has become too large, and this process will continue for years and years, until the flesh under the skin shrivels and vanishes, and the skin nestles snugly against the skull, which it can no longer keep warm. Single white threads in the hair, fed by stagnant saps, multiply incessantly, until they form ugly
nests, which hatch nothing, enclose nothing, nurture nothing; and Erika, too, has never enclosed anything warmly, not even her own body. But she would like to be enclosed. He should lust for her, he should pursue her, he should lie at her feet, he should be haunted by her, there should be no escape for him. Erika can seldom be seen in public. And her mother, too, usually keeps out of the public eye. They remain inside their four walls, and they don’t like visitors tracking them down. In this way, the two women save on personal wear and tear. Of course, when they do make a very rare public appearance, no one offers them very much.

Erika’s decay knocks with scurrying fingers. Indistinct physical ailments, vascular deficiencies in the legs, tweaks of rheumatism, twinges of arthritis spread through the body. (These diseases seldom bother children. They never used to assault Erika.) Klemmer, a live brochure for the health benefits of white-water canoeing, scrutinizes his teacher as if he wanted to wrap her up and take her along, or perhaps eat her up, right there in the store. Maybe he’s the last man who’ll ever desire me, Erika thinks furiously, and soon I’ll be dead, only another thirty-five years, Erika thinks angrily. Jump on the train, because once I’m dead, I won’t hear, smell, or taste anything ever again! Her claws scratch at the keys. Her feet scrape pointlessly, embarrassedly; she touches herself vaguely, picks at herself; the man makes the woman nervous, robbing her of her mainstay, music.

Mother waits at home. She looks at the kitchen clock, the relentless pendulum that will tick her daughter into the apartment no sooner than thirty minutes from now. Mother, who has nothing else to acquire, would rather wait here. What if Erika came home earlier than expected because a lesson was canceled? Then Mother wouldn’t have waited. But Erika is impaled on her piano stool, even as she is drawn to the door.
The powerful magnet of domestic silence, interlaced with the sound of the TV (that center of absolute rest and inertia), is turning into physical pain inside her. Klemmer should just shove off! Why does he keep talking and talking here, while the water keeps boiling at home until the kitchen ceiling turns moldy?

The tip of Klemmer’s shoe nervously ruins the inlaid floor as he blows out the small, superimportant realities of keyboard technique like smoke rings into the air. Meanwhile, the woman longs to go home. Klemmer asks what constitutes sound, and then answers his own question: the touch, the approach. His mouth discharges a torrent of words: that shadowy, intangible remnant made up of sound, color, light. No, no, the things on your list do not constitute music as I know it, chirps Erika, the cricket, who wants to get back to her warm hearth. You’re wrong, that and that alone is music, the young man erupts. For me, the criteria of art are the imponderables, the immeasurables. Klemmer’s dictum contradicts the teacher. Erika closes the piano lid, pushes objects around. The man has chanced upon Schubert on some mental shelf, and he instantly exploits his find. The more Schubert’s spirit dissolves in smoke, scent, color, thought, the more indescribable his value. His value grows to gigantic proportions, beyond understanding. Shadow is far superior to substance, states Klemmer. Why, reality is probably one of the greatest errors in the world. Hence, lies go before truth, the man concludes from his own words. The unreal comes before the real. And that enhances the quality of art.

The domestic delight of dinner, inadvertently delayed, is a black hole for the star known as Erika. She knows that her mother’s embrace will completely devour and digest her, yet she is magically drawn to it. Carmine settles on her cheekbones, consolidating its position. Klemmer should clam up and clamber
away. Erika doesn’t want to remember even a speck of dust on his shoes. She yearns for a long, intimate embrace, so that, once the embrace is over, this marvelous woman can regally push him away. Klemmer has never felt less inclined to leave her. After all, he has to tell her that he can love Beethoven’s sonatas only as of Opus 101. Because, he blabbers on, that’s when they really become soft, flow into one another; the individual movements become flat, washing out at the edges, they don’t clash with one another. That’s what Klemmer comes up with. He squeezes in the final remnant of these ideas, then ties up the end of the sausage, so the insides won’t burst out.

To change the subject, Professor, I must tell you—and I shall explain it in greater detail—that a human being attains his supreme value only when he lets go of reality and enters the realm of the senses, which should apply to you, too. And also to Beethoven and Schubert, my favorite masters, with whom I feel personally involved. I don’t know precisely how. But I feel—and it also applies to me—that we despise reality and regard both art and the senses as our sole reality. It’s over for Beethoven and Schubert. But I, Klemmer, am in the ascendant. He accuses Erika Kohut of lacking all that. He tells her that she clings to superficial things while a man abstracts and separates essentials from nonessentials. Klemmer, a student, has given an impudent answer. He has dared to do so.

In Erika’s mind there is only one source of light, illuminating everything as bright as day, especially the sign that says: Exit. The comfy TV easy chair spreads its arms wide, the lead-in for the evening news plays softly, the anchorman stirs soberly above his tie. The side table sports an exemplary wealth of colorful bowls containing goodies and gumdrops, of which the two ladies partake, alternately or simultaneously. An empty bowl is promptly refilled; this is Never-Never Land, where nothing ends and nothing begins.

Erika pushes things from one end of the music studio to the other and then back again. She looks pointedly at the clock, she emits an invisible signal from her lofty mast, showing how tired she is after her hard day’s work, during which art was dilettantishly abused in order to satisfy parental ambitions.

Klemmer stands there, gazing at her.

Erika doesn’t want a silence to develop, so she utters a platitude. Art is platitudinous for Erika because she lives off art. How much easier it is for the artist, says the woman, to hurl feelings or passions out of himself. When an artist resorts to dramatic devices, which you so greatly esteem, Klemmer, he is simply utilizing bogus methods while neglecting authentic ones. She talks to prevent the eruption of silence. I, as a teacher, favor undramatic art—Schumann, for instance. Drama is always easier! Feelings and passions are always merely a substitute, a surrogate for spirituality. The teacher yearns for an earthquake, for a roaring, raging tempest to pounce upon her. That wild Klemmer is so angry that he almost drills his head into the wall. The clarinet class next door, which he, the owner of a second instrument, has been frequenting twice a week, would certainly be astonished if Klemmer’s angry head suddenly emerged from the wall, next to Beethoven’s death mask. Oh, that Erika, that Erika. She doesn’t sense that he is actually talking about her, and naturally about himself as well! He is connecting Erika and himself in a sensual context, ejecting the spirit, that enemy of the senses, that primal foe of the flesh. She thinks he is referring to Schubert, but he really means himself, just as he always means himself whenever he speaks.

He suddenly ventures to adopt a familiar tone with Erika; using a formal tone, she advises him to remain objective! Her mouth puckers, willy-nilly, into a wrinkly rosette; she cannot control it. She controls what the mouth says, but she cannot
control the way it presents itself to the outside world. She gets goosebumps all over.

Klemmer is frightened; blissfully grunting, he wallows in the warm tub of his words and thoughts. He pounces upon the piano, enjoying himself. In a tempo that exceeds the speed limit, he plays a longer phrase that he happened to learn by heart. He wants to demonstrate something with the phrase; he wonders what. Erika Kohut is happy about this slight diversion; she throws herself against the student, in order to stop the express train before it really gets going. You’re playing much too fast and also much too loud, Herr Klemmer, and you’re merely proving that the absence of the spiritual in an interpretation can cause terrible lacunae.

The man catapults backward into a chair. He stands, steaming, like a racehorse that has brought home a lot of victories. In order to be rewarded for victories and to prevent defeats, he demands expensive treatment and tender loving care, at the very least like a silver service for twelve.

Erika wants to go home. Erika wants to go home. Erika wants to go home. She offers some good advice: Simply walk around Vienna and breathe deeply. Then play Schubert, but this time correctly!

I’m leaving, too. Walter Klemmer violently assembles his compact stack of scores and makes an exit like a stage star, except that not too many people are watching. Still, a star and an audience in one person, he also plays the spectators. And he offers a bonus of thunderous applause.

Outside, Klemmer’s blond hair flutters behind him as he dashes into the men’s room, where he gulps down a pint of water straight from the faucet. However, the liquid can’t wreak much havoc inside his water-weathered body. He then splashes his face, splashes his head: Billows of mountain springwater,
flowing cleanly from the headwaters, end on Klemmer’s face and head. I always drag beautiful things through the mud, he says to himself. Vienna’s famous but now venomous water is wasted. Klemmer scrubs his hands with energy that he cannot use elsewhere. He keeps tapping green liquid soap from the dispenser, over and over again. He sprays and gargles. He keeps repeating his ablutions. He waves his hands around, wetting his hair. His mouth emits artificial sounds, which are arty, but meaningless. Because he’s got love trouble. He snaps his fingers and cracks his joints. Using the tip of one shoe, he maltreats the wall under the small, blind window to the courtyard, but he can’t release what’s locked inside him. A few drops do spurt out, but the rest of the contents remains in its container, slowly growing rancid because it can’t reach the female port-of-call. Yes, indeed, no doubt about it: Walter Klemmer is truly in love. Not for the first time, to be sure, and certainly not for the last time. His love, however, is unrequited. His feelings are unreturned. This turns his stomach, and he proves his disgust by hawking up mucus and noisily placing it in the sink. Klemmer’s love placenta. He closes the faucet so tight that his successor will assuredly not get it open, unless he’s a pianist, too, and has steel wrists and fingers. Since Klemmer doesn’t rinse the sink, his clams linger at the drain hole. Anyone who takes a close look will see them distinctly.