The Piano Teacher Read online

  Mother points out that Erika is not just a face in the crowd: She’s one in a million. Mother never stops making that point. Erika says that she, Erika, is an individualist. She claims she cannot submit to anyone or anything. She has a hard time just fitting in. Someone like Erika comes along only once, and then never again. If something is especially irreplaceable, it is called Erika. If there’s one thing she hates, it’s standardization in any shape, for example a school reform that ignores individual qualities. Erika will not be lumped with other people, no matter how congenial they may be. She would instantly stick out. She is simply who she is. She is herself, and there’s nothing she can do about it. If Mother can’t see bad influences, she can at least sense them. More than anything, she wants to prevent Erika from being thoroughly reshaped by a man. For Erika is an individual, although full of contradictions. These contradictions force Erika to protest vigorously against any kind of standardization. Erika is a sharply defined individual, a personality. She stands alone against the broad mass of her students, one against all, and she turns the wheel of the ship of art. No thumbnail sketch could do her justice. When a student asks her what her goal is, she says, “Humanity,” thus summing up Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament for her pupils—and squeezing in next to the hero of music, on his pedestal.

  Erika gets to the heart of artistic and individual considerations: She could never submit to a man after submitting to her mother for so many years. Mother is against Erika’s marrying later on, because “my daughter could never fit in or submit anywhere.” That’s the way she is. She’s no sapling anymore. She’s unyielding. So she shouldn’t marry. If neither spouse can yield, then a marriage is doomed. Just be yourself, Mother tells Erika. After all, Mother made Erika what she is. You still aren’t married, Fräulein Erika? the dairy woman asks, and so does the butcher. You know I can never find a man I like, Erika replies.

  Erika comes from a family of signposts that stand all alone in the countryside. There are few of them. The members of her family breed sparingly and sluggishly, which is how they deal with life in general. Erika did not see the light of day until the twentieth year of her parents’ marriage—a marriage that drove her father up the wall and behind the walls of an asylum, where he posed no danger to the world.

  Maintaining noble silence, Erika buys a stick of butter. She’s still got her mom, she don’t need no Tom. No sooner does this family get a new member than he is rejected and ejected. They make a clean break with him as soon as he proves useless and worthless. Mother taps the family members with a mallet, separating them, each in turn. She sorts and rejects. She tests and ejects. In this way, there’ll be no parasites, who always want to take things that you want to keep. We’ll just keep to ourselves, won’t we, Erika? We don’t need anyone else.

  Time passes, and we pass the time. They are enclosed together in a bell jar: Erika, her fine protective hulls, her mama. The jar can be lifted only if an outsider grabs the glass knob on top and pulls it up. Erika is an insect encased in amber, timeless, ageless. She has no history, and she doesn’t make a fuss. This insect has long since lost its ability to creep and crawl. Erika is baked inside the cake pan of eternity. She joyfully shares this eternity with her beloved composers, but she certainly can’t hold a candle to them when it comes to being loved. Erika struggles for a tiny place within eyeshot of the great musical creators. This place is fought for tooth and nail; all Vienna would like to put up a tiny shack here. Erika stakes off her lot, a reward for her competence, and begins digging the foundation pit. She has earned her place fair and square, by studying and interpreting! After all, performance is form, too. The performer always spices the soup of his playing with something of his own, something personal. He drips his heart’s blood into it. The interpreter has his modest goal: to play well. He must, however, submit to the creator of the work, says Erika. She willingly admits that this is a problem for her. She simply cannot submit. Still, Erika has one goal in common with all the other interpreters: to be better than the rest!

  SHE is pulled into streetcars by the weight of musical instruments, which dangle from her body, in front and behind, along with the stuffed briefcases. An encumbered butterfly. The creature feels it has dormant strength for which music does not suffice. The creature clenches its fist around the handles of violins, violas, flutes. It likes to make negative use of its energy, although it does have a choice. Mother offers the selection: a broad spectrum of teats on the udder of the cow known as music.

  SHE bangs into people’s backs and fronts with her stringed instruments and wind instruments and her heavy musical scores. Her weapons bounce off these people, whose fat is like a rubber buffer. Sometimes, if the whim strikes her, she holds an instrument and a briefcase in one hand while insidiously thrusting her other fist into someone’s winter coat, rain cape, or loden jacket. She is blaspheming the Austrian national costume, which tries to ingratiate itself with her, grinning from all its staghorn buttons. Emulating a kamikaze pilot, she uses herself as a weapon. Then again, with the narrow end of the instrument (sometimes the violin, sometimes the heavier viola), she beats into a cluster of work-smeared people. If the trolley is mobbed, say around six in the evening, she can injure a lot of people just by swinging around. There’s no room to take a real swing. SHE is the exception to the norm that surrounds her so repulsively. And her mother likes explaining to her very meticulously that she is an exception, for she is Mother’s only child, and has to stick to the straight and narrow. Every day, the streetcar shows her the people she never wants to become. SHE plows through the gray flood of passengers with or without tickets, those who have just gotten in and those who are about to leave, those who have gotten nothing where they were and who have nothing to expect where they are going. They are anything but chic. Some get out before they have even sat down properly.

  If mass anger orders her to get out, even if she is still far from home, her own anger, concentrated in her fist, yields obediently, and she actually gets out—but only to wait patiently for the next trolley, which is as certain to come as the amen at the end of a prayer. These are chains that never break. Then, all fueled up, she mounts a new assault. Bristling with instruments, she arduously staggers into the mobs of homebound workers, detonating among them like a fragmentation bomb. If need be, she hides her true feelings and says, “Pardon me, I’m getting off here.” The approval is unanimous. She should leave the clean public vehicle at once! It’s not meant for people like her! Paying passengers shouldn’t let people get away with things like this.

  They look at the music student and imagine that music has raised her spirits; but the only thing that’s raised is her fist. Sometimes a gray young man with repulsive things in a threadbare haversack is unjustly accused, for he is a more likely culprit. He’d better get out and go back to his friends before he catches it from a powerful loden-sheathed arm.

  The mass anger, which has, after all, paid its fare, is always in the right for its three schillings and can prove it in case the tickets are inspected. During a surprise inspection the mass anger proudly shows its marked ticket and has the trolley car all to itself. In this way, it saves itself weeks of unpleasant, fearful purgatory, wondering whether an inspector might come.

  A lady, who feels pain as deeply as you do, suddenly shrieks. Somebody’s kicked her shin, that vital part on which her weight partially rests. In this dangerous shoving and pushing, the culprit, true to the principle of guilt, cannot be determined. The crowd is battered with a barrage of oaths, curses, insults, complaints, entreaties, accusations. The laments pour out of mouths that vent their spleen over their owners’ lives, the charges are discharged upon other people. The passengers are squeezed together like sardines, but they are not packed in oil. They won’t be anointed until later.

  SHE furiously kicks a hard bone, which belongs to a man. One day, SHE is with a fellow student, a girl, who has two wonderful high heels that blaze as two eternal flames, and a new fur-lined coat in the latest style. The
girl amiably asks Erika: What are you dragging around, what’s it called? I meant this case here, and not your head up there. It’s called a viola, SHE replies politely. A viooola? What a weird word, I’ve never heard it, lipstick-coated lips say in amusement. Someone carries something called a viooola, which doesn’t serve any noticeable purpose. And everyone has to get out of the way because this viooola takes up so much space. SHE walks around with it in public, and no one catches her in flagrante delicto.

  The people hanging heavily from the straps and those few lucky devils who can sit—they all crane their necks high out of their used-up torsos, but it’s no use, they spot no one. There’s no one they can gang up on for maltreating their legs with a hard object. “Someone stepped on my toes,” and a deluge of foul language gushes from a mouth. Who did it? The First Viennese Trolley Court, infamous throughout the world, is in session in order to issue a warning and pass a sentence. In every war movie, there’s always at least one person who volunteers, even if it’s for a suicide mission. But this cowardly dog is hiding behind our patient backs. A whole batch of ratty workers, on the verge of retirement, with tool bags on their shoulders, shove and kick their way out of the trolley. They’re deliberately walking to the next stop! When a ram disturbs the peace and quiet among all the sheep in the car, then you desperately need fresh air, and you find it outside. If you’re going to chew out your wife at home, you have to have oxygen; otherwise you may not be up to chewing her out. Something with a vague color and shape starts swaying, slips along; someone screams as if stabbed. A thick, steamy mist of Viennese venom rolls across this public meadow. Someone even calls for an executioner because his evening has been ruined prematurely. My, but they’re furious. Their evening relaxation, which should have begun twenty minutes ago, has not set in. Or else it has been abruptly cut off, like the colorfully printed package of the victim’s life (with instructions), which he cannot put back on the shelf. (He cannot simply reach inconspicuously for a new, intact package; otherwise the salesgirl would have him arrested for shoplifting. Follow me quietly! But the door that leads, or seems to lead, into the manager’s office is a phony door, and there are no announcements of weekly specials on the windows of the brand-new supermarket. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, only darkness. And the customer plunges into a bottomless pit.) Someone says in the officialese that is customary in public vehicles here: You are to vacate this trolley car without futher delay. A tuft of chamois hair grows rankly from a cranium; the man is disguised as a hunter.

  SHE, however, bends in time, planning to try a new, nasty trick. First, SHE has to put down the bulky refuse of her instruments. They form a fence around her. She pretends to tie her shoelaces in order to prepare a noose for the next passenger. Almost casually, she viciously pinches the female calf to her left or her right (these women all look alike). A bruise awaits the victim. The disfigured passenger, a widow, shoots up, a bright, radiant, illuminated fountain at night—the fountain can at last be the focus of attention. The widow outlines her family connections tersely and precisely, and she ominously predicts that these connections (especially her dead husband) will wreak horrifying vengeance on her tormentor. She demands a policeman; but the police will not come, they cannot worry about everything.

  The harmless expression of a musician is slipped over her face. SHE acts as if she were yielding to those mysterious powers of musical romanticism, powers moving to ever higher emotional peaks—she acts as if she could not be thinking about anything else in the world. The populace then speaks as if with one voice: It couldn’t have been the girl with the machine gun. The populace is wrong again, as it is so often.

  Occasionally, someone thinks harder and then eventually points to the true culprit: “You’re the one!” SHE is asked what in the name of all that’s holy she has to say for herself. SHE does not speak. The lead plug that her trainers have surgically inserted behind her soft palate prevents her from speaking, from unwittingly accusing herself. She does not defend herself. A few people pounce on a few others for accusing a deaf mute. But the voice of reason maintains that someone who plays the violin couldn’t possibly be deaf. Perhaps she is only mute or perhaps she is taking the violin to someone else. Failing to reach an agreement, they give up their plan. Their minds are haunted by the thought of a glass of wine, which wipes out several pounds of other thoughts. The actual wine will demolish any remaining thoughts. This is the land of wines. This is the city of music. The girl peers into distant worlds of profound emotions, and her accuser can at best drown his sorrow in a glass of wine. So he falls silent under her gaze.

  Shoving is beneath her dignity: The mob shoves, but not the violinist and violist. For the sake of these little trolley joys, she even puts up with coming home late—to find her mother standing there with a stopwatch and a warning. SHE endures such agonies, even though she has played all afternoon, focusing her mind, wielding her bow, and laughing at pupils who played worse than she. She wants to teach people how to be afraid, how to shudder. Such feelings run rampant through the playbills of Philharmonic Concerts.

  A member of the Philharmonic audience reads the program notes and is prompted to tell someone else how profoundly his innermost being throbs with the pain of this music. He’s read all about it. Beethoven’s pain, Mozart’s pain, Schumann’s pain, Bruckner’s pain, Wagner’s pain. These pains are now his sole property, and he himself is the owner of the Pöschl Shoe Factory or Kotzler Construction Material Wholesalers. Beethoven manipulates the levers of fear, and these owners make their workers jump fearfully. There’s also a Ph.D. here who’s been intimate with pain for a long time. For the past ten years, she has been trying to fathom the ultimate secret of Mozart’s Requiem. So far, she’s gotten nowhere, for his opus is unfathomable. It is beyond our comprehension: The woman calls it the most brilliant work ever commissioned in the history of music. That is indisputable for her and for few other people. The Ph.D. is one of the chosen few who know that some things can never be fathomed, no matter how hard you try. What good are explanations? There is no possibility of explaining how such a work could ever have come into being. (The same holds true for certain poems, which should not be analyzed either.) A mysterious stranger in a coachman’s black coat turned up and made the down payment for the Requiem. The Ph.D., and the others who have seen the Mozart movie, know that the mysterious stranger was—Death himself! By thinking this thought, she bites a hole in the flesh of one of the great geniuses and pushes her way inside. In rare cases, one grows along with the genius.

  Ugly masses of people throng about HER uninterruptedly. People are always pushing their way into HER field of perception. The mob not only grabs hold of art without being entitled to do so, but it also enters the artist. It takes up residence inside the artist and smashes a few holes in the wall, windows to the outer world: The mob wants to see and be seen. With sweaty fingers, that cloddish mob is tapping out something that rightfully belongs to HER alone. Unasked, unbidden, they sing along with the cantilenas. Moistening their forefingers, they pursue a theme, looking for the secondary theme, but failing to find it. And so, nodding their heads, they are content to rediscover and repeat the main theme. Recognizing it, they wag their tails. For most of them, the principal charm of art is to recognize something that they think they recognize. A wealth of sensations overwhelms a butcher. He can’t help it, even though he is used to his bloody profession. He is paralyzed with astonishment. He sows not, he reaps not, he doesn’t hear so well. But if he goes to a public concert, people can see him. Next to him, his better half; she wanted to come along.

  SHE kicks the right heel of an old woman. SHE is able to assign every phrase its preordained location. SHE alone can take every sound and insert it in the right place, in its proper niche. SHE packs the ignorance of these bleating lambs into her own scorn, using it to punish them. Her body is one big refrigerator, where Art is well stored.

  HER instinct for cleanliness is astonishingly sensitive. Dirty bodies form a resinous forest
all around her. Not only the dirt of bodies, but the grossest kinds of filth struggling out of armpits and groins, the subtle urine stench of the old woman, the nicotine gushing from the network of the old man’s veins and pores, those innumerable piles of lowest-quality food stewing in the stomachs. Not only the faint wax stench of scurf and scab, not only the stink of shit microtomes under the fingernails—a very, very faint odor, but the expert can sniff them so easily, those residues left from burning colorless food, gray, leathery delights (if they can be called delights). They torment HER sense of smell, HER tastebuds. What upsets HER most of all is the way these people dwell in one another, the way they shamelessly take possession of one another. Each pushes his way into other minds, into their innermost attention.

  They have to be punished. By HER. And yet she can never get rid of them. She shakes them, shreds them, like a dog mauling its prey. And yet, unbidden, they rummage around in her, they observe HER innermost thoughts, and then they dare to say that they can’t do anything with these thoughts, that they don’t even like them. Why, they actually go so far as to say they don’t like Webern or Schönberg.

  Mother, without prior notice, unscrews the top of HER head, sticks her hand inside, self-assured, and then grubs and rummages about. Mother messes everything up and puts nothing back where it belongs. Making a quick choice, she plucks out a few things, scrutinizes them closely, and tosses them away. Then she rearranges a few others and scrubs them thoroughly with a brush, a sponge, and a dustrag. Next, she vigorously dries them off and screws them in again. The way you twist a knife into a meatgrinder.

  An old woman has just gotten into the trolley, but she doesn’t notify the conductor. She thinks she can keep her presence a secret. Actually, she got out of everything long ago, and she knows she did. Paying is too much trouble. She’s already got her ticket to eternity in her handbag. The ticket must be valid in a streetcar, too.