The Piano Teacher: A Novel (33 page)

Erika glides down into the warmth, the body-warm brook of shame, a bath in which one submerges cautiously because the water is rather dirty. Things well up, gush up. Filthy white-caps of shame, the dead rats of failure, scraps of paper, wooden scraps of ugliness, an old mattress caked with sperm stains. Things rise and rise. Higher and higher. Clucking, the woman climbs up the man until she reaches the relentless concrete
crown of his head. His head utters monotonous sentences about even more stench, the cause of which, the student says, is his piano teacher.

Erika feels the gap between the domestic world and the void. She, Erika, supposedly stinks, as the student claims. He is ready to swear it. Erika is ready to go to her death. The student is ready to leave this room in which he has failed. Erika seeks a pain that will end in death. Klemmer closes the door to his trousers and wants to go to the exit. Erika, with breaking eyes, would like to watch him squeeze her throat shut. Her eyes will retain his image even as she rots. He stops telling her she stinks; she no longer exists for him. He wants to leave. Erika wants to feel his lethal hand come down upon her; and shame, a gigantic pillow, settles on her body.

They are walking along the corridor. Side by side. There is a gap between them. Klemmer softly affirms that it is so nice that her former stench isn’t as strong in these more open spaces. In that tiny room, the stench was really unbearable! She can take his word for it. He heartily recommends that she leave town.

After a moment, teacher and student encounter the director in the corridor. Klemmer greets him humbly, as a student should. Erika exchanges greetings as colleagues do, because her superior does not make a point of his superiority. Not only that, but the director heartily greets Herr Klemmer as the soloist in the next annual concert. He also wishes him luck. Erika replies that she has not yet made up her mind about the soloist. This student is slipping, that much is certain. She still has to decide whether it should be him or someone else. She doesn’t know yet. But she’ll announce it in time. Klemmer stands there, wordless. He listens to his teacher talk. The director clicks his tongue over the terrible mistakes that Erika Kohut describes because Klemmer keeps making them over and
over again. Erika articulates unpleasant facts concerning the student; she says them out loud so he won’t accuse her of talking behind his back. He’s been lazy about practicing, she’s got proof. She’s been forced to note that he has been applying himself less and less, he seems less and less eager. He can’t be rewarded for such conduct! The director replies that she obviously knows the student better than he, the director, does, and so, so long. I hope you do better, he tells student K.

The director has gone into his office.

Klemmer repeats that Erika stinks terribly, she ought to leave town immediately. He could talk about other things concerning her, but he doesn’t want to make his mouth dirty. It’s bad enough that
she
stinks. He doesn’t have to stink too! He’s going to wash out his mouth now, he can actually feel her stench in his oral cavity. He can feel her disgusting teacher-stench down in the pit of his stomach. She can’t possibly realize how nauseating her bodily vapors are, and it’s a good thing she can’t imagine that she stinks like hell.

The two of them go off in separate directions without agreeing on a mutual keynote, without even agreeing on a mutual key aside from Erika Kohut’s nauseating stench.

Erika Kohut buckles down with zeal and circumspection. She wanted to jump out of her skin, but couldn’t. She feels pain in many places. Little in her has been chosen. She’s at sixes and sevens. She once saw on TV that you can barricade a door with other things besides a wardrobe. A detective story showed her how. You shove the back of a chair under the doorknob. She doesn’t have to go to all that trouble, for Mother is asleep, sweetly resting in peace as she has done more often in the past few weeks. As she lies there, sweet alcohol evaporates through her pores and polyps.

Erika reaches for her domestic treasure chest and goes through the rich contents. There are heaps of riches that Walter K. has not yet gotten to know because he prematurely destroyed their relationship with his ugly ranting and raving. Yet it was only just starting for her! She had finally gotten somewhere, and then he retreated into his shell. Erika picks out clothespins and, after hesitating, pins, a whole pile of pins from a plastic jar.

Shedding tears, Erika applies the greedy leeches of the cheery, colorful plastic clothespins to her body. To places that she can easily reach and that will be black and blue later on. Weeping, Erika nips and clips her flesh. She knocks the surface of her body off balance. She makes her skin miss a beat. She lards her fat with pins and needles. She peers at herself aghast and looks for free areas. If a blank spot shines in the register of her body, it is instantly tweaked by the greedy claws of a clothespin. The tense interstices become bristling pincushions. The woman is flabbergasted by her actions, which can have terrible consequences. She bawls and blubbers. She is all alone. She sticks needles into herself, pins with brightly colored plastic heads, each pin with its own head in its own color. Most of them tumble out again. Erika doesn’t dare prick herself under her fingernails; it’s too painful. Soon tiny blood bolsters appear on the meadow of her skin. The woman goes on crying. She is all alone. After a while, she stops and then stands in front of the mirror. Her image cuts into her brain with words of scorn and mockery. It is a colorful image. It would be a truly merry image if the causes were not so dismal. Erika is utterly alone. Mother is again sleeping the deep sleep induced by alcohol. If Erika, aided by the mirror, finds an unravaged place on her body, she grabs a clothespin or needle, while weeping and wailing. She drives the instruments hard, drives them into her body. Her tears flow down and she is all alone.

After a long time, Erika’s hand removes the needles and clothespins and neatly places them back in their containers. Pain recedes, tears recede.

Erika Kohut goes to her mother so as to end her loneliness.

It is evening again. The arterial roads fill up with traffic that races home unreasonably. Walter Klemmer, too, secretes a sticky thread of hectic activity in order to avoid leisure. He’s not planning anything very exciting, but he keeps moving just the same. He’s not straining himself all that much, but time whizzes around his urge to move. He’s taking the trolley, then the subway, on a long, complicated trip, which he senses will end in the city park. But he still has to decide on a destination and on a route to that destination. He strolls energetically, delaying the start. He’s killing time. He’s willing to go, that much is certain. He will avenge himself unbelievably on the defenseless animals in the park. They’ve got flamingos and other exotic spawn, creatures that have never been seen here. And these creatures demand to be ripped apart. Walter Klemmer is an animal lover, but too much is too much, and an innocent party must be forced to believe him. The woman insulted him, so he injured her. The score has been evened, but a living creature must be sacrificed. An animal will have to die. Klemmer got the idea from the newspapers, which describe the bizarre habits of these unsuspecting exotics as well as attempts to harm and murder them.

The young man takes an escalator up into the open. The park is still and stiff, the hotel in front of it light and loud. No amorous couples are unnerved by Herr Klemmer, for he has come here not to gawk, but to commit brutalities without being seen. His unused drives are turning malevolent, all because of that woman. Klemmer wanders about, looking for a bird, but
finding none. He goes off-limits, stepping on the lawn, pushing his way through foreign bushes; he is anything but considerate of them. He deliberately tramples neatly planted flowerbeds. His heels bend harbingers of spring. He offered something to that repulsive woman, but she didn’t accept it. Now he has to live with the charge that he did not discharge. The load isn’t all that heavy, but its consequences will prove devastating to animal life. Klemmer’s drive could not punch a hole in its shell and shoot out. That finicky woman merely dug a few musical responses from his mind. She pulled the best out of him, checked it, and then chucked it away! Walter K. grinds pansies underfoot because he was so grossly frustrated in his courtship. It’s not his fault he failed. If Erika continues along that road, she’s going to suffer a lot more than she ever dreamed. Klemmer is scratched by the giant thorns of a bush; elastic branches bounce into his face when he violently breaks through because he has smelled water beyond the bushes. He is a wounded prey. The hunter, flouting all rules of sportsmanship, let it go after wounding it. The dilettantish hunter did not hit the heart. Hence, Klemmer is a potential danger for everybody, simply everybody!

A venomous love-dwarf, he wanders through this nocturnal scape of diurnal relaxation, seeking to vent his spleen on innocent animals. He looks for a stone to throw, but finds none. He picks up a short branch that has fallen from a tree, but the wood is soft and light. He offered his love to a woman, but she demanded cruelty from him. So he has to stoop to conquer, hoping to find a better weapon than rotten wood. Since he could not master his mistress, he now has to bend his back and tirelessly gather wood. This stick is so small, the flamingo will laugh in his face. It’s no cudgel, just a dry little branch. Klemmer, who is inexperienced but would like to experience something new, cannot imagine where the birds go at night to escape
their tormentors. Perhaps they’ve got their own little cabin! Klemmer does not care to be outdone by the vandals who have killed so many birds. He now smells water more keenly—his familiar element. There, according to the guidebooks, is where the pink prey lingers. Various things rustle in the wind. Bright trails wind in and out. Since he’s advanced this far, Klemmer would even make do with a swan, a creatun at is more easily replaced. This thought tells Klemmer how badly he needs an outlet for his boiling anger. If the birds are resting inactively on the water, he’ll lure them over. If they’re resting on the banks, he won’t have to get wet.

Instead of birdcalls, only distant cars can be heard, humming in a steady stream. Out so late? The city noise pursues people all the way out here, where they seek relaxation, all the way out to these urban green zones, these lungs of Vienna. Klemmer, in the gray zone of his immense anger, is looking for someone who won’t contradict him—in other words, someone who won’t understand him. The bird may flee, but it won’t talk back. Klemmer leaves his own nocturnal trail in the grass. He feels a rapport with the night prowlers who are also roaming about. Klemmer feels superior to other night people, who are wandering along, holding some lady’s hands. He feels superior to them because his anger is a lot hotter than the fire of love. The young man has fled this far to escape women. Shrieks circle out from a small source of noise. They are as unmelodic as sounds produced by a bird’s beak or a beginner on a musical instrument. There’s the bird! Soon, vandalism will be reported, and Klemmer can get the newspaper hot off the press and show it to his obstructed beloved: He will have destroyed life. He can then likewise destroy his beloved’s life. Threads of life can be cut. Frau Kohut made fun of his feelings. His love rained down upon her for months on end—but she didn’t deserve it! His passion poured out on her from the cornucopia of his heart,
and she stuffed that sweet rain right back into his horn. Now she’ll get her just deserts in a gruesome act of annihilation.

All this time, time which Klemmer lavishes on tracking down a specific bird, the woman, who went to bed very early today, is sleeping away in her home. Unsuspectingly, she works her way through sleep as Klemmer works his way across the nocturnal meadows of the city. Klemmer seeks but does not find. He’s following a different call, but cannot locate the caller. He is leery of advancing; he doesn’t want to be felled by a wooden club. The streetcars, which, only a short while ago, were orienting him by jingling along the edge of the park, have taken a different name: Leading an underground existence, they cannot be heard. Klemmer cannot orient himself, he doesn’t know where he’s going. Perhaps he is heading deeper into the wilderness, where it’s eat or be eaten. Instead of finding food, Klemmer himself would become prey! Klemmer is looking for a flamingo, and someone with a briefcase may be looking for a bullfinch. The man crashes through the bushes and into the open meadows. He looks left and right, waiting only for something trivial, a stroller like himself; and he makes fun of him in advance. He knows that a wanderer thinks about nothing but food and family, or about the external forms of the surrounding flora and fauna, which cause him great concern. After all, irreplaceable natural reserves are being diminished daily by pollution. The stroller will explain why Nature is dying, and Klemmer will make sure that a small part of Nature will go first as a good example. That is his threat into the darkness. Klemmer’s one hand clings to his briefcase, his other hand clutches a cudgel. He can understand why a stroller has anxieties.