CONTENTS
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Rose Tremain
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Part One
Mutti
Anton
Nusstorte
Linden Tree
Ice
Coconut
Views of Davos
Ludwig
Solo
Pharma
Magic Mountain
Part Two
Schwingfest
Fribourgstrasse
Tea Dance
Liebermann
Theft
Pearl
Folly
Two Sundays
Heartbeat
Beginning and End
Part Three
Hotel Perle
Anton
Pastime
The Zimmerli Moment
Frau Erdman
Hans Hirsch
Three Movements
Never Knowing for Sure
Absence
Interlude
Father and Son
Two Women
The Wrong Place
Allegro Vivace
Acknowledgements
Copyright
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473520349
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Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Vintage,
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Chatto & Windus is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Rose Tremain 2016
Rose Tremain has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Chatto and Windus in 2016
www.penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784740030
To the memory of Richard Simon
1932–2013
AT THE AGE of five, Gustav Perle was certain of only one thing: he loved his mother.
Her name was Emilie, but everybody addressed her as Frau Perle. (In Switzerland, at that time, after the war, people were formal. You might pass a lifetime without knowing the first name of your nearest neighbour.) Gustav called Emilie Perle ‘Mutti’. She would be ‘Mutti’ all his life, even when the name began to sound babyish to him: his Mutti, his alone, a thin woman with a reedy voice and straggly hair and a hesitant way of moving from room to room in the small apartment, as if afraid of discovering, between one space and the next, objects – or even people – she had not prepared herself to encounter.
The second-floor apartment, reached by a stone staircase too grand for the building, overlooked the River Emme in the town of Matzlingen, in an area of Switzerland known as Mittelland, between the Jura and the Alps. On the wall of Gustav’s tiny room was a map of Mittelland, which displayed itself as hilly and green and populated by cattle and waterwheels and little shingled churches. Sometimes, Emilie would take Gustav’s hand and guide it to the north bank of the river where Matzlingen was marked in. The symbol for Matzlingen was a wheel of cheese with one slice cut out of it. Gustav could remember asking Emilie who had eaten the slice that had been cut out. But Emilie had told him not to waste her time with silly questions.
On an oak sideboard in the living room, stood a photograph of Erich Perle, Gustav’s father, who had died before Gustav was old enough to remember him.
Every year, on August 1st, Swiss National Day, Emilie set posies of gentian flowers round the photograph and made Gustav kneel down in front of it and pray for his father’s soul. Gustav didn’t understand what a soul was. He could see only that Erich was a good-looking man with a confident smile, wearing a police uniform with shiny buttons. So Gustav decided to pray for the buttons – that they would keep their shine, and that his father’s proud smile wouldn’t fade as the years passed.
‘He was a hero,’ Emilie would remind her son every year. ‘I didn’t understand it at first, but he was. He was a good man in a rotten world. If anybody tells you otherwise, they’re wrong.’
Sometimes, with her eyes closed and her hands pressed together, she would mumble other things she remembered about Erich. One day, she said, ‘It was so unfair. Justice was never done. And it never will be done.’
Wearing a smock, with his short hair neatly combed, Gustav was taken each morning to the local kindergarten. At the door of the schoolhouse, he would stand absolutely still, watching Emilie walk away down the path. He never cried. He could often feel a cry trying to come up from his heart, but he always forced it down. Because this was how Emilie had told him to behave in the world. He had to master himself. The world was alive with wrongdoing, she said, but Gustav had to emulate his father who, when wronged, had behaved like an honourable man; he had mastered himself. In this way, Gustav would be prepared for the uncertainties to come. Because even in Switzerland, where the war hadn’t trespassed, nobody yet knew how the future would unfold.
‘So you see,’ she said, ‘you have to be like Switzerland. Do you understand me? You have to hold yourself together and be courageous, stay separate and strong. Then, you will have the right kind of life.’
Gustav had no idea what ‘the right kind of life’ was. All he knew was the life he had, the one with Emilie in the second-floor apartment, with the map of Mittelland on his bedroom wall and Emilie’s stockings drying on a string above the iron bath. He wanted them always to be there, those stockings. He wanted the taste and texture of the knödel they ate for supper never to change. Even the smell of cheese in Emilie’s hair, which he didn’t particularly like – he knew this had to linger there because Emilie’s job at the Matzlingen Cheese Co-operative was the thing that kept them alive.
The speciality of the Matzlingen Co-operative was Emmental, made from the milk of the Emme valleys. Sounding like a tour guide, Emilie announced to Gustav, ‘There are many fine inventions in Switzerland and Emmental cheese is one of them.’ But in spite of its fineness, the sales of Emmental – both within Switzerland and to all those countries outside it, still struggling to rebuild themselves after the war – were unreliable. And if sales were down, the bonuses paid to the cheese workers at Christmas and on National Day could be disappointing.
Waiting to see what her bonus was going to be would put Emilie Perle into a trance of anxiety. She would sit at the kitchen shelf (it wasn’t a table, just a shelf on a hinge, where she and Gustav sat to eat their meals) doing her sums on the grey edges of the Matzlingerzeitung, the local newspaper. The newsprint always blurred her arithmetic. Nor did her figures keep to their columns, but wandered over the réportage of Schwingen Competitions and the sightings of wolves in the nearby forests. Sometimes, the hectic scribblings were blurred a second time by Emilie’s tears. She’d told Gustav never to cry. But it seemed that this rule didn’t apply to her, because there were times, late at night, when Gustav would creep out of his room to find Emilie weeping over the pages of the Matzlingerzeitung.
At these moments, her breath often smelled of aniseed and she would be clutching a glass clouded with yellow liquid, and Gustav felt afraid of these things – of her aniseed breath and the dirty glass and his mother’s tears. He would climb onto a stool beside her and watch her out of the corner of his grey eyes, and soon, Emilie would blow her nose and reach out to him and say she was sorry. He would kiss her moist, burning cheek and then she would lift him up, staggering a little under the weight of him, and carry him back to his room.
But in the year that Gustav turned five, no Christmas bonuses were paid at all and Emilie was forced to take a second job on Saturday mornings, as a cleaner in the Protestant Church of Sankt Johann.
She said to Gustav, ‘This is work you can help me with.’
So they went out together very early, before the town was properly awake, before any light showed in the sky. They walked through the snow, following two frail torchlight beams, their breath condensing inside their woollen mufflers. When they arrived at the church, this, too, was dark and cold. Emilie turned on the two greenish strip lights on either side of the nave and they began their tasks, tidying the hymn books, dusting the pews, sweeping the stone floor, polishing the brass candlesticks. They could hear owls calling outside in the waning dark.
As the daylight grew stronger, Gustav always returned to his favourite task. Kneeling on a hassock, pushing the hassock along as he went, he’d clean the iron grating that ran down the length of the aisle. He pretended to Emilie that he had to do this job very carefully, because the ironwork had ornate patterns in it and his rag had to go round these and in and out of them, and she said, ‘All right, Gustav, that’s good. Doing your job carefully is good.’
But what she didn’t know was that Gustav was searching for objects which had fallen through the grating and which lay there in the dust. He thought of this strange collection as his ‘treasure’. Only hands as small as his could retrieve them. Now and again, he did find money, but it was always the kind of low-value money with which nothing could be bought. More usual items were hairpins, withered flower petals, cigarette stubs, sweet wrappings, paper clips and nails made of iron. He knew that these things were of no account, but he didn’t mind. One day, he found a brand-new lipstick in a golden case. He designated this his ‘chief treasure’.
He took everything home in the pockets of his coat and hid the objects in a wooden box that had once contained the cigars his father used to smoke. He smoothed out the sweet wrappers, liking the vibrant colours, and shook out the tobacco from the cigarette ends into a little tin.
When he was alone in his room, he would stare at the treasure. Sometimes, he touched it and smelled it. Keeping it hidden from Emilie – as though perhaps it was a present for her which he would one day surprise her with – was what excited him about it. The lipstick was a dark purple colour, almost black, like a boiled damson, and he found it beautiful.
He and Emilie had to spend two hours at the church, to get everything shipshape for the weekend services. During this time, a few people would come in, bundled up against the cold, and enter the pews and pray, or else go to the altar rail and stare at the amber-coloured stained-glass pietà in the west window.
Gustav saw that Emilie crept round them, as if trying to make herself invisible. Seldom did these people say ‘Grüezi’, or say Frau Perle’s name. He watched them from his hassock. He noticed that almost all of them were old. They appeared to him as unfortunate beings, who had no secret treasure. He thought that, perhaps, they hadn’t got ‘the right kind of life’. He wondered whether the ‘right life’ might lie in the things which he alone could see – the things underneath some grating or other, over which most people heedlessly trod.
When the cleaning was done, Gustav and Emilie walked home, side by side. The trams would be running by then, and a bell chiming somewhere, and a scatter of pigeons fluttering from roof to roof, and the flower stallholder setting out her vases and buckets on the corner of Unter der Egg. The flower seller, whose name was Frau Teller, would always greet them and smile, even if snow was falling.
Unter der Egg was the name of the street in which their apartment block stood. Before these blocks had been built, Unter der Egg (Under the Harrow) had been a rural strip, where the residents of Matzlingen had been able to rent allotments and grow vegetables, but these were long gone. Now, there was just a wide pavement and a metal drinking fountain and Frau Teller’s stall, which was the last reminder of green things growing in this place. Emilie sometimes said that she would have liked to grow vegetables – red cabbages, she said, and snow peas and marrows. ‘But at least,’ she would sigh, ‘the place wasn’t destroyed by the war.’
She had shown Gustav some magazine pictures of destroyed places. She said they were all outside Switzerland. Dresden. Berlin. Caen. There were no people in any of these photographs, but in one of these pictures there had been a white dog, sitting alone in a mound of rubble. Gustav asked what had happened to that dog and Emilie said, ‘It’s no use asking what happened, Gustav. Perhaps the dog found a good master, or perhaps it died of hunger. How can I possibly know? Everything, in the war, depended on who you were and where you were. And then destiny took over.’
Gustav stared at his mother. ‘Where were we?’ he said.
She closed the magazine and folded it away, like a soft garment she planned to wear again in the near future. She took Gustav’s face in her hands. ‘We were here,’ she said, ‘safe in Matzlingen. For a while, when your father was Assistant Police Chief, we even had a beautiful apartment on Fribourgstrasse. It had a balcony, where I grew geraniums. I can’t see a geranium plant without thinking of the ones I grew.’
‘Then we came to Unter der Egg?’ asked Gustav.
‘Yes. Then we came to Unter der Egg.’
‘Just you and me?’
‘No. At first there were the three of us. But not for long.’
After the cleaning of the church, Gustav and Emilie would sit at the folding shelf in the tiny kitchen and drink hot chocolate and eat black bread with butter. The long winter day stretched ahead of them, cold and empty. Sometimes Emilie would go back to bed and read her magazines. She made no apology for this. She said children had to learn to play on their own. She said if they didn’t learn to do this, they would never cultivate an imagination.
Gustav would stare out of the window of his room at the white sky. The only toy he owned was a little metal train, so he’d set the train on the windowsill and shunt it backwards and forwards. Often, it was so cold by the window that Gustav’s breath made realistic steam, which he puffed over the engine. At the carriage windows, people’s faces had been painted on, all of them given expressions of blank surprise. To these startled people, Gustav would occasionally whisper, ‘You have to master yourselves.’
The strangest place in the apartment building was the bunker underneath it. This had been built as a nuclear shelter, more usually referred to as an ‘air protection cellar’. Soon, every building in Switzerland would be required to have one of these.
Once a year, the janitor summoned the residents of the building, including the children, and they descended all together into the shelter. Behind them, as they went down the stairs, heavy iron doors were closed.
Gustav clung to Emilie’s hand. Lights were turned on, but all they showed were more stairs going down and down. The janitor always reminded everybody that they should ‘breathe normally’, that the air filtration system was tested frequently for its absolutely perfect functioning. It wasn’t, he said, called an ‘air protection cellar’ for nothing. But there was a strange smell about it, an animal smell, as though foxes or rats had nested here, living off dust or off grey paint licked from the walls.
Beneath the countless stairs, the shelter opened into a large storeroom, stacked from floor to ceiling with sealed cardboard boxes. ‘You’ll remember what we keep in the boxes,’ the janitor said, ‘enough food for all of us for approximately two months. And the water supply will be in the tanks over there. Clean drinking water. Rationed of course, because the mains supply – even if it was functioning – would be disconnected, in case of radiation contamination, but sufficient for all.’
He led them on. He was a heavy man. He spoke loudly and emphatically, as though he assumed he was with a party of deaf people. The sound of his voice echoed round the concrete walls. Gustav noticed that the residents always fell silent during the nuclear shelter tours. Their expressions reminded him of the painted people on his train. Husbands and wives huddled together. Old people clutched at each other to steady themselves. Gustav always hoped that his mother wouldn’t let go of his hand.
When they got to the ‘dormitory’ part of the shelter, Gustav saw that the bunks had been built one above the other in stacks of five. To reach the top bunks, you had to climb a ladder, and he thought that he wouldn’t like this, to be so far from the ground. Supposing he woke in the night, in the dark, and couldn’t find Mutti? Supposing Mutti was on the very bottom bunk, or in a different row? Supposing he fell out of his bunk and landed on his head and his head exploded? He whispered that he didn’t want to live there, in an iron bunk and with cardboard food, and Mutti said, ‘It will probably never happen.’
‘What will never happen?’ he asked.
But Emilie didn’t wish to say. ‘You don’t need to think about it yet,’ she told him. ‘The shelter is just a place of safety, in case the Russians – or anybody at all – ever took it into their heads to harm Switzerland.’
Gustav lay in his bed at night and thought about what might happen if Switzerland were harmed. He wondered if Matzlingen would be turned to rubble and whether he would find himself all alone, like the white dog in the picture.
ANTON ARRIVED AT the kindergarten in the cold spring of the year.
He came into the schoolroom and stood by the door, crying. None of the children had seen this boy before. One of the teachers, Fräulein Frick, went to him and took his hand and knelt down and began talking to him, but he didn’t seem to hear her. He just kept on weeping.
Fräulein Frick beckoned to Gustav. Gustav didn’t particularly want to be the boy chosen to comfort this weeping child, but Fräulein Frick urged him to come towards her and said to Anton, ‘This is Gustav. Gustav is going to be your friend. He will take you to the sandbox and you can build a castle together before we begin our lessons.’
Anton looked down at Gustav, who was slightly smaller than he was.
Gustav said to him, ‘My mother says it’s better not to cry. She says you have to master yourself.’
Anton appeared so startled by this that his sobbing stopped abruptly.
‘There,’ said Fräulein Frick. ‘That’s good. Go with Gustav, then.’ She produced a handkerchief and wiped Anton’s cheeks. The boy’s face was a hectic pink, his eyes big pools of darkness. His body was trembling.
Gustav led him over to the sandbox. Anton’s small hand felt burning hot. Gustav said, ‘What kind of castle do you want to build?’ But the boy couldn’t answer. So Gustav gave him a spade and said, ‘I like castles with moats. Shall we start on the moat?’
Gustav marked out a circle and they began digging. A few other children clustered round them, staring at the new boy.
Before Anton arrived, Gustav had had no close friends at the kindergarten. There was a girl who amused him called Isabel. She liked to climb onto the work tables and jump off again, landing like a gymnast with her feet together and her arms outspread. She always brought her pet mouse to school in a wooden cage and Gustav was one of the few children allowed to stroke the mouse. But Isabel was too exhausting to play with for long. She had to be the Queen of every game.
All his life, Gustav would remember vividly that first morning spent with Anton. They didn’t talk very much. It was as if Anton was so exhausted by his weeping that he couldn’t talk. He just followed Gustav around and sat very close to him at the work table and watched what he did and tried to copy him. When Gustav asked him where he’d come from, he said, ‘From Bern. We had a house in Bern, but now we’ve only got an apartment in Matzlingen.’
Gustav said, ‘The place where I live is very small. We don’t even have a kitchen table. Have you got a kitchen table?’
‘Yes,’ said Anton, ‘we’ve got a kitchen table. I was sick all over it at breakfast because I didn’t want to come here.’
Later, Anton asked Gustav, ‘Have you got a piano?’
‘No,’ said Gustav.
‘We’ve got a piano and I can play it. I can play “Für Elise”. Not the fast bit, but the first section.’
‘What’s “Für Elise”?’ asked Gustav.
‘Beethoven,’ said Anton.
Perhaps it was the idea of Anton playing the piano with his small hands, or perhaps it was when Anton told him that his surname was Zwiebel, which was identical to the word for ‘onion’, and made you feel sorry for him; whatever it was, there was something about Anton which made Gustav feel that he had to protect him.
The following day, Anton was crying again when he arrived. Gustav saw Fräulein Frick coming towards him, but he stood in her way and said that Anton would be all right with him. He led him to the Nature Table and showed him the silkworms that were being reared in a grocery box with a perforated lid. He said, ‘In the box we had before, the holes were too big and the silkworms climbed out of them.’
‘Where did they go?’ asked Anton through his tears.
‘They went all over the place,’ said Gustav. ‘We tried to find them and put them back, but some of them got trodden on. Treading on a silkworm is disgusting.’
Gustav saw Anton smile, but then his tears welled up again and he put his face in his hands.
Gustav said, ‘What are you crying for?’
Anton stammered that he was crying for the loss of his friends at his old kindergarten in Bern.
‘Are they dead?’ asked Gustav.
‘No. But I’ll never see them again. I’m in this place now.’
Gustav said, ‘I think it’s stupid to cry for them, then. Isn’t your mother angry that you keep crying?’
Anton took his hands away from his face and stared at Gustav. ‘No,’ he said, ‘she understands that I’m unhappy.’
‘Well,’ said Gustav, ‘I think it’s a bit stupid. You’re here now, so you just have to get on with it.’
The bell rang for the beginning of morning lessons. Anton followed Gustav to one of the work tables. Pieces of grey sugar paper were put in front of them and boxes of crayons and they were told to start the day by drawing a picture of anything they liked.
Anton’s tears slowly speckled the paper, like fat raindrops, but after five or six minutes, he stopped crying.
‘What are you going to draw?’ he asked Gustav.
‘I’m going to draw my mother,’ he said.
‘Is your mother beautiful?’
‘I don’t know. She’s just my mother. She works at the cheese co-operative, making Emmental.’
Fräulein Frick rapped on her desk with a ruler. ‘You know the rules,’ she said. ‘When we’re drawing pictures, we’re silent. We talk silently to our pictures, not to each other.’
Gustav wanted Emilie to be sitting at the kitchen shelf in his picture, so he drew the shelf first, a kind of oblong, resting on air. He coloured it brown. Then he began on Emilie’s face, not a round thing, but a narrow kind of shape he didn’t know how to make. He saw straight away that what he’d drawn was too narrow. He put his hand up and Fräulein Frick came over and Gustav said, ‘This was meant to be a face, but it looks like an ice-cream cone.’
‘Never mind,’ said Fräulein Frick. ‘Why don’t you make it a cone? Put some nice strawberry ice cream into it.’
There was something amusing about this – that Emilie Perle could suddenly become a cornet. Gustav whispered to Anton, ‘I was going to draw my Mutti but she went wrong. Now she’s an ice cream.’
And this was the first time that he heard Anton laugh. And it was the kind of laugh that couldn’t be resisted; you had to join in, and suddenly the two boys couldn’t stop giggling. Gustav suspected that Fräulein Frick was watching them sternly, but she said nothing and when he looked up at her – mastering his giggling at last – her expression wasn’t stern at all, but just rather sweetly amused.
Gustav selected a pink crayon and drew a scribble of ice cream on his cornet. Then he looked over to see what Anton was drawing. He was using only a black crayon. He’d laid a small ruler on the sugar paper and drawn a line all the way round it. Inside the perfectly ruled shape was a series of black lines of differing lengths. Gustav knew what the thing was meant to be: it was a piano.
Gustav told Emilie about Anton’s laugh. He said, ‘I like hearing it.’
In the night, he began trying to think up funny stories to tell Anton, so that he’d be able to hear his laughter all through the day. And then he had an idea which surprised him – he decided to show Anton the treasure in the cigar box. He would show him because he thought that Anton would see that it was a collection worth hoarding. But Gustav wouldn’t risk taking it in to the kindergarten. He said to Emilie, ‘Could we invite Anton Zwiebel for tea?’
‘Zwiebel?’ said Emilie. ‘That’s a very peculiar name.’
‘He can’t help his name,’ said Gustav.
‘No. But names are important. When I first met your father and he told me his surname was Perle, I thought how beautiful it was and how I would like to become Frau Perle.’
Gustav looked up at his mother. She was undoing her scraggly hair from the red handkerchief she tied it in for work, letting her hair fall round her face. Then, she smoothed it and patted it, as if, right then and there, she was preparing once again for that first meeting with a man called Erich Perle.
‘On a Wednesday, we could invite him?’ said Gustav. ‘On your half-day off.’
‘Anton Zwiebel. Well, I’ve never heard a name like that before. But yes, we can invite him – if his parents agree. I could make a Nusstorte, assuming I can get the walnuts at this time of year …’
‘He might not like walnuts.’
‘Too bad. If he doesn’t like them, he doesn’t have to eat the Nusstorte.’
It was late spring by the time the invitation to tea went out. It was agreed that Anton would walk from school to Unter der Egg with Gustav and that his father would collect him from Emilie’s apartment at six o’clock. The father, it appeared, was a banker, who’d worked for a large national bank in Bern and now worked for a smaller branch of that bank in Matzlingen. The reasons for the move weren’t explained. All Anton said was that everybody in the family missed living in Bern. Herr Zwiebel, the banker, missed his big bank; Frau Zwiebel, who was a housewife, missed the wonderful shops and Anton missed his old friends.
Every May, in the courtyard at the back of the apartment, a white cherry tree bloomed. In this spring of 1948, perhaps because of the steady rains that had fallen at the end of winter, the flowers on the cherry were so abundant that the branches of the tree hung low towards the stones of the yard.
Gustav’s window, where he played with his tin train, overlooked the cherry tree, and he saw how the residents who went in and out of the building by that route, almost invariably paused and stood staring at the tree, with its cargo of beauty, and sometimes reached out to it, as they might have reached out, in yearning, to a lost person. Emilie said that there had once been cherry trees at the front of the building, all along Unter der Egg, but they’d been torn out and now there was just this one tree in the courtyard. She said, ‘The tree is special for people, because it’s lasted through all the upheaval – as certain things sometimes seem to do.’
‘What things?’ asked Gustav.
‘Well,’ said Emilie, ‘like that white dog you pointed out in the rubble of Berlin. It had survived.’
‘You said it might have found a good master or it might have starved to death.’
‘I know I did. But the point was, when everything around it had been destroyed, it was still there for a while. It had hung on.’
So the Wednesday afternoon of the tea arrived. Gustav enjoyed walking home in the sunshine with Anton. He felt proud, in a way that he couldn’t explain.
When Anton was introduced to Emilie, Gustav saw that his mother stared at him for longer than she would normally stare at people she met for the first time, and Gustav wondered what was going through her mind. She said, ‘You and Gustav go and play in his room for a little while, then we’ll have tea and Nusstorte. I hope you like Nusstorte.’
‘I don’t know what it is,’ said Anton.
‘Ah,’ said Emilie. ‘Well, Gustav will explain to you.’
They went to Gustav’s room, where, at this time of the day, the sun was falling in a diagonal across the window, and Gustav said, ‘Nusstorte is a sort of pastry thing, with caramel and walnuts inside.’
But Anton wasn’t listening. They were standing at the windowsill, next to the metal train and Anton was staring down at the white cherry tree. He said, ‘Can we go down there?’
‘To play in the courtyard?’
‘I want to see that tree.’
‘It’s just a cherry tree,’ said Gustav.
‘Can’t we go down there?’
‘We’ll have to ask Mutti.’
Emilie said, ‘All right, but I’ll come with you. I don’t want you making a noise on the stairs. You remember Herr Nieder is very ill, Gustav?’
‘Herr Nieder is our neighbour,’ said Gustav to Anton. ‘He’s dying.’
‘Oh,’ said Anton. ‘Has he got a piano?’
‘I don’t know. Has he, Mutti?’
‘A piano?’ said Emilie. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Well,’ said Anton, ‘if he does, I could play “Für Elise” for him.’
‘He might not want you to play “Für Elise”,’ said Gustav.
‘He would. Everybody likes me to play that.’
‘Well, not now,’ said Emilie. ‘Let’s go down very quietly, shall we?’
So they arrived in the courtyard and Anton stared at the cherry tree and his dark eyes widened. He ran to the tree and began to hop from one foot to the other and then to jump up and down, uttering little cries of joy.
Gustav stood very still, watching Anton. He decided that there was something connecting Anton’s joy at the sight of the cherry blossom to his early-morning weeping at the kindergarten, but he couldn’t say what. He went towards his friend and took his hand and together they began to skip round and round the tree, laughing until they were out of breath. Gustav had no idea exactly why he was skipping, but he knew that Anton knew and that seemed to be enough.
One or two of the apartment residents arrived in the courtyard and stopped to smile at the two boys dancing round the old cherry. Later, when Anton had gone home, Emilie said, ‘I suppose there may not be any cherry trees in Bern. It’s unlikely, but one can’t say for sure. Perhaps he had never seen one before?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Gustav.
‘I think he is a nice boy,’ said Emilie, ‘but of course he is a Jew.’
‘What’s a Jew?’ asked Gustav.
‘Ah,’ said Emilie. ‘The Jews are the people your father died trying to save.’
AT THE END of the year, Gustav and Anton left the kindergarten. They were both six years old.
They were sent to the same school in Matzlingen, very near to the church Gustav and Emilie cleaned on Saturdays. The school was called the Sankt Johann Protestant Academy and it was in an old echoey building – stucco plastered over ancient stone – with shutters painted dark red and a heavy door, embellished with black ironwork. It had a steep roof, where doves sometimes roosted.
Gustav missed the kindergarten; the Nature Table, the sandbox, the children’s pictures covering the walls. There had been a lightness about the place, a feeling of freedom in the classrooms, as though outside the windows there had been pastures and woods and wide rivers, instead of an ordinary street. In contrast, the Sankt Johann Protestant School was dark and the classrooms bare. Gustav felt cold there. Other buildings crowded in upon it. It was full of strange, lingering noise.
‘In time,’ Emilie said, ‘you’ll get used to it. That is the only option you have.’
He looked forward to Saturdays, when they went to clean the church and he could be with Emilie all day. Instead of reading her magazines, she would help Gustav with his homework. But this seldom went very well. She told him his work was lamentable – ‘that’s all I can say, Gustav. Lamentable.’
His maths was not too bad. There was something about numbers which he found reassuring. But he knew his reading was poor, his writing unsteady. Sometimes, she slapped his knuckles with a ruler. She said, ‘If your father were here, he would have done far worse.’
He worked as hard as he could – for the sake of Emilie, for the sake of the ‘high standards’ expected of children in Switzerland – but he could see that his efforts fell short of what was required of him. He thought that already he mourned his early childhood, when all he’d had to do was care for things: feed silkworms with mulberry leaves and talk to the painted people on his train.
Several times, Gustav had asked Emilie if Anton could come to tea again and Emilie had said yes, but whenever he’d suggested a specific day, she had straight away decided that it wasn’t convenient. ‘The truth is,’ she said eventually, ‘this apartment is too small for two children.’
‘It’s not,’ said Gustav. ‘It wasn’t too small last time.’
‘Yes, well, why don’t we invite some other boy? You have more friends than just this Zwiebel, don’t you?’
Gustav stared at his mother. She was folding her apron after doing the washing-up, and she kept folding and folding until the cotton apron was a hard wedge in her hands.
‘Anton is the only friend I really like,’ said Gustav.
Emilie unfolded the apron and hung it up on a peg behind the door. She sighed and said, ‘Very well. Did he appreciate the Nusstorte?’
‘I think he did.’
‘All right. Invite him next Wednesday. I’ll make that again.’
Anton seemed pleased about the invitation. Then, on the day that Anton came to tea, the Nusstorte went wrong.
This was a delicacy which Emilie boasted she could cook ‘blindfold’. But on that afternoon, the pastry was burnt at the edges and the caramel was too thick, like toffee.
Emilie didn’t apologise. She just plonked the dish of Nusstorte down on the cramped kitchen shelf, beside the teapot, angrily cut a few slices, then lit a cigarette and turned her face away from Gustav and Anton to smoke it.
When she’d finished the cigarette, she looked directly at Anton and said, ‘You didn’t tell us anything about yourself last time. What does your father do?’
Anton was trying to eat his slice of Nusstorte, but was finding it difficult. He reached into his mouth and took out the lump of sticky pastry and stuck it onto his plate. ‘He’s a banker,’ he said.
‘That is very bad manners, you know,’ said Emilie Perle, grimacing at the gob of Nusstorte. ‘How long have you been in Switzerland?’
‘What did you say, Frau Perle?’ said Anton.
‘I’m asking, how long has your family been in Switzerland?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Zwiebel is a name more German than Swiss. Perhaps you came over from Germany during the war?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’
‘Or from Austria? With the help of others, perhaps? I expect you know that a lot of people, like Gustav’s father, enabled persecuted families from Germany to make a new life in Switzerland. Perhaps your family was helped in this way?’
Anton stared at Emilie. She was puffing on another cigarette, blowing the smoke towards the open window. Anton looked away from her and turned to Gustav. ‘Can we go and play now?’ he said.
‘Do you remember Germany?’ persisted Emilie.
Anton shook his head. Gustav saw that his face had turned red, like it did whenever he was about to cry. He knew, somehow, that this peculiar conversation about Germany had come about because of the failed Nusstorte.
In Gustav’s room, Anton sat down on the narrow bed and looked at the wooden chest of drawers, the Biedermeier chair, the rag rug, the metal wastepaper bin and the map of Mittelland – the only objects the small space contained. He said nothing.
Gustav stood at the window, pushing his train back and forth. There was silence in the room for several minutes and this silence felt like a kind of suffering to Gustav. He opened the window, hoping to hear – as he sometimes could – the murmuring of the city doves on the roof. The sound of animals or birds could sometimes be consoling. But there was no sound of doves. Gustav went to the chest of drawers and took out the cigar box which contained his ‘treasure’. He brought the box over to the bed and set it down beside Anton.
‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘I was going to show you last time. It’s my treasure.’
Anton turned his attention to the contents of the box. His face was still red and Gustav saw a tear slide down his cheek. He knew that something should be said, but he had no idea what.
Anton ran his hands through the collection of paper clips, flower petals and nails. Then he picked up the golden lipstick and swivelled it open and stared at it. He wiped his tear away with his hand, looked for a moment at the lipstick, and then slowly painted his lips the deep damson colour. The sight of Anton with these damson lips was so strange that all Gustav could do was laugh. It was a hectic laugh, high-pitched and afraid.
Anton smiled. ‘Have you got a mirror?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘I want to see what I look like.’
‘You look peculiar.’
‘I want to see.’
‘We can go into the bathroom.’
They ran across the landing. Both of them were laughing now and the fear in Gustav’s laughter had diminished. The laughter propelled them into the bathroom, which they were suddenly aware was full of steam, and visible through the steam was Emilie lying in the bath. Her eyes had been closed, her damp head resting on the rim of the bath. When Emilie was tired or angry, she liked to do this, run a bath so hot it filled the room with steam and lie there, naked in the warm mist. Now, when she saw Gustav and Anton come charging in, she screamed. She picked up the soap and threw it at the boys and it hit Gustav on the arm. He knew the pain of this wasn’t very bad, yet it seemed, for a moment, like the worst pain he’d ever endured. Anton was staring at Emilie, at her thin arms resting along the rim of the bath and at her scant breasts, and Gustav knew that this was a terrible thing for his friend to be doing. He pushed him out and quickly followed, slamming the door behind them and rushing back to what felt like the safety of his room.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Anton. ‘I didn’t hear her running the bath.’
Anton was wiping off the lipstick with the back of his hand. Then he went to the window and gazed down at the cherry tree in the courtyard. Gustav rubbed his arm, where the soap had hit him. He thought of the soap slithering around on the bathroom lino and his mother captive in her bath, with no soap to wash herself with.
‘What happened to the cherry tree?’ asked Anton after a moment.
‘What? What happened?’
‘It’s not white any more.’
‘No,’ said Gustav. ‘Things are only white for a bit.’
Emilie didn’t say goodbye to Anton at six o’clock, nor come out to greet his father when he came to collect him. She’d gone to her room and remained there, with the door locked.
‘How is your mother, Gustav?’ enquired the banker father politely.
‘All right, sir, thank you,’ said Gustav.
‘She’s not ill, I trust?’
‘No. I think she’s sleeping.’
‘Oh, well, we must be quiet then. What’s that all over your face, Anton?’
‘Nothing, Father.’
‘Well, it’s a very colourful nothing!’
‘It’s my fault,’ said Gustav. ‘Shall I fetch a flannel to wash it off?’
‘Yes. I think that would be a good idea. He can’t go home looking like that.’
Gustav went into the bathroom and turned on the hot tap. The steam from Emilie’s bath had evaporated, but there was a damp, unpleasant smell in the cramped space which made Gustav feel embarrassed to be there. He moistened a flannel and quickly returned to Anton and his father. The father took the flannel and scrubbed roughly at Anton’s face. Gustav noticed for the first time the size of the gold signet ring Herr Zwiebel wore on his broad fourth finger.
‘My wife and I were wondering,’ Herr Zwiebel said after a moment, ‘whether you might like to come to tea with us one day?’
Gustav felt a stab of joy, mixed with something else, which seemed like fear, but which he didn’t want to admit was fear. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘Will you ask your mother? You can walk from school with Anton and my wife will bring you back in the car.’
‘Thank you,’ said Gustav again.
‘You can listen to me play,’ said Anton. ‘I can almost do the fast bit of “Für Elise” now. And I’m learning a Schubert lied. Schubert is difficult, isn’t he, Father?’
‘Yes, he is. But so are many things. Eh, Gustav?’
‘Yes. But my mother says you have to go on until you master them.’
‘Quite right,’ said Herr Zwiebel. ‘Absolutely right.’
Later that night, Emilie, with newly washed hair framing her serious face, said to Gustav that the whole afternoon – and not just the episode in the bathroom – had been very difficult for her.
‘I’m sorry, Mutti. We didn’t know you were in the bath,’ said Gustav.
‘I said not only that!’ snapped Emilie. ‘The thing is that the presence of that child here in this wretched little apartment is quite painful to me.’
‘Why?’ said Gustav.