Orsola was displeased by Johannes’s taking me to the house of a murderer. I try to tell her that it had been a very interesting encounter. He has your father to thank, she said, if he spent such a short time in prison. Johannes speaks to the murderer with benevolence. It seemed that he knew him profoundly. And understood him. “You know,” I say to Johannes, “that man wants to escape. Escape from freedom.” Johannes smiles. Sorrowful. Orsola forbade Johannes to come to visit me. So I ask Johannes what would happen to me, at seven years of age, if I killed Orsola. Nothing. Would I go to prison? No.

  Orsola and I are alone in the big house. She does not want me to play with the other children in the street. She says I must not speak to strangers. They can be dangerous. Near the church there is a hedge, beyond the hedge brushwood and darkness. There, not far from home, they found a little girl who had been killed. Orsola keeps repeating that they have found a girl, killed. Of my age. One morning someone rang the doorbell. The corridor was flooded with light. On the glass of the door the extremely tall shadow of a man. The man wanted to sell religious pamphlets. I screamed. Orsola scolds me. “Isn’t he a stranger, then?” I ask. Who would have grabbed me in order to deposit me beyond the hedge. Orsola is ashamed of me. She thinks I see murderers everywhere. It is the influence of Johannes, who took me to a murderer’s house. I dare to ask her if after serving the sentence you are still a murderer. She makes no reply. It seemed to me that the subject irritated her. Or that it was not the right moment. There are times when you can say what you think or ask questions, and others when you can’t. These are the so-called wrong moments. And since the wrong moments fill up the hours, you end up not asking any more. She did not forgive if one made a mistake. In not forgiving she was magnanimous, tolerant, equable.

  In the happy land, Johannes’s daughter begins to fall ill. Johannes wants to go to visit her. Orsola says she must have no excitement. At school I am doing badly. I avoid the portraits in the turret. Orsola does not want Johannes to give me presents. I must have no excitement. I am in bed. Orsola’s periwinkle-blue eyes look at me from on high. I am fine, I tell Orsola. I tell her to switch off the light. I must close all the shutters. The windows and the rooms have to sleep. Johannes’s album records his daughter’s illness. It is not stated what illness it is. “Another crisis.” No comment. Perhaps he thought it was a nausea typical of difficult children. Visitors forbidden. Even my schoolmates. Who never came. I am served boiled rice. I get used to the attacks of nausea. They emulate my thoughts. I was deferring the moment. By then I was sure. Orsola would invite me to leave. When she comes into the room, it is authority manifesting itself. My reputation, like my marks in school, is low. I had become weak. I needed to live in advance what was going to happen. The garden smothers the house. The vegetation is luxuriant in its impassiveness. For months, the room and I savor the mephitic air of a suffering that has still to come to pass. Orsola, elegant in her silk dress, says: “The windows need opening.” Certainly, I think, amid the docility of the embroidered sheets between which I seem to have been pressed too, suffering does not have a good smell.

  All the rooms know. Likewise the portraits. Ancestors who do not favor a better lot for their successors. For the children. Perhaps Johannes’s twin in his wheelchair went from garden to garden trampling over the fate of Johannes’s daughter. Objects and predecessors, names no longer uttered, a genealogy of images was against me. I stand listening to the news, the decision of my departure. Orsola’s voice comes from a chair behind the desk. “It is for your own good.” “And Johannes?” “Your father will do as we decide.” It is for my own good. A venomous expression. But it sounds good. I know that that expression has never boded any good. Since then it has worsened my condition as a minor. You ought to watch your back when listening to diktats of this kind. When you are a hostage to good. A prisoner of good. The good of the people. Expressions typical of dictatorships. I leave the house with a suitcase and my schoolbag. I have been consigned to others.

  For my own good.

  ‌

  Auf Hoher See. Another two days of sailing on the high seas. The ship will not put in at Malta. I do not mind if, on account of the forces of nature, I shall not see something. A day lost. We ought to have docked in Malta at seven in the morning: at seven thirty a visit to the city, on foot. The visit would have lasted until twelve. At one o’clock all aboard ship, in the dining room. The ladies and gentlemen of the Guild in the dining room without having seen Malta. They are silent. Impatient. Doggedly they read the menu. Johannes reads the menu. It is written in French. Langouste en bellevue. The extras are paid for in Yugoslavian dinars. From the corner table, I observe the langoustines of the Guild. Their ruddy complexions. Johannes greets his friends. If people want to be reached by telegram, they must give the address of the ship: Proleterka. Johannes’s wife, no longer a wife, sends a telegram to the command of the Proleterka. Text: “Je vous prie de bien vouloir surveiller votre fille.” Please be so good as to look after your daughter. They wrote to each other in French, like the menu. They use the polite form of address. Perhaps when they lived together they spoke in German too. She was the one who gave permission for the voyage. After many refusals. I am grateful to her for that. Johannes is refused everything. He is allowed only what the law has established. The only favor granted is the trip to Greece. And it is thanks to this extraordinary concession that for fourteen days Johannes’s daughter has been able to frequent her closest relative, her father. By virtue of this wholly unexpected permission she found herself in the midst of a crew. There was little time to get to know Johannes. Then everything has to finish. In fourteen days. It is not known why his former wife agreed to that voyage. Perhaps she wanted to do him a good turn, for the first and last time. They have told her that Johannes would not live much longer. Orsola was against it. Not living much longer doesn’t cut any ice with her.

  For the friends of the Guild, Johannes’s wife was “the Italian woman.” They had met thanks to Johannes’s mother, when once she chanced to pass by a villa with a garden. She rang the doorbell. The woman was wearing a Tracht, the costume of her area, the Aargau. The skirt was full, dark red, soot and silk. The bodice in black damask. She introduced herself in a low, almost hoarse voice. She took the liberty of asking who was playing the piano. Standing there at the door, she listened to a Chopin nocturne as if she were listening to the Landhelmi, the sound of the alpenhorn. They introduced her to the pianist. The stranger’s gaze alighted attentive and unwavering on the young woman. When she went back home, she told her husband: “I have found a wife for our son Johannes.” A few months later she contracted the marriage.

  That visit aroused the resentment of one of Johannes’s fiancée’s sisters on account of the good fortune that had fallen to the other. For the family was wealthy, and the future husband pandered to his fiancée’s every whim. And she had had no need to look for a husband, they had come to take her, to beg her to agree to the marriage. By the will of the Heavenly Father. Merely because that day she had been playing the piano. Without the will of the Heavenly Father, that vestige of the Aargau would never have entered the house, the sister had thought to console herself. But she could not manage to resign herself to the idea that the Heavenly Father dispensed gifts and not grief. She looked idly out of the window. The lake is calm. Flecked with pink. Her thoughts are calm. In her hands she clutches a little china cup as if it were a little skull. She had painted it herself. Tiny pink and sky-blue flowers on a white background. She had painted twelve teacups and twelve coffee cups. They were her wedding present to her sister. She gave her only six of them. She detested her, and to amuse herself she painted the leaves too. To amuse herself she added some gold. And in gold her name.

  Johannes’s wife, my mother, used to play the piano. When I was invited to stay with her, I would listen to her for hours. Perhaps this is why I am attracted to the sound of the piano. Like the unknown woman in the Tracht, if I hear the sound of a piano, I follow it. The sound of the piano represents all that I have not had. I used to hear it playing when I was very small, when she was still married to Johannes. Then that sound ceased. The rooms fell silent. I hated that silence, without realizing it. The silence received from a man and a woman who were leaving each other and who had disposed of their daughter’s life absolutely. To this day, when I listen to the piano, I am seized by a violent emotion. I do not know what it is, but my mind goes back toward something beautiful, distant, destroyed. Simply because Johannes’s wife, my mother, deceived me. By playing the piano, she spoiled my feeling for music.

  When I return to the places where she used to play the piano, buried places by now, I still hear the sound. I accord her a presence that is there no longer. With precision, the sound of the piano, a mental and visual sound, utters words of death and condemnation. Now the Steinway is locked up in a room. It is a prisoner. Only I can have it released. Or let someone play it. The portrait of Johannes’s mother is in the room with the Steinway. The canvas has a vertical tear in the middle of her forehead. His mother had chanced to hear the young lady playing the piano. Sometimes objects meet again.

  I am almost convinced that she, Johannes’s wife, plays the piano in the closed room. That she comes to visit me, that the dead do exactly the same things they did when alive. Just as Johannes waited for permission to see me, waited for permission to meet his daughter. And today Johannes is waiting for me. Once I happened to see him in a chalet (he had been dead for some time). Outside one window it was snowing and outside the opposite window it was not snowing. Johannes is standing. He has been waiting for hours while it snows at one side of the room but not at the other. I ask him: “Why didn’t you call me?” He replies that he did not know that he had to call me, he was waiting. And as he waits, he vanishes. He and I are in waiting rooms. Not like Johannes’s wife, who had passion and kindness, impatience. Johannes likes the vivacity, the occasionally darkling joy of his wife. Who acts out her temperament with that cold and polite man. His wife managed to make him laugh, later only to regret having made him laugh. There are women who have a tendency, almost a vocation, to punish men. They have an ecumenical capacity for doing so. Pleasure and punishment combined. It is not out of any reasoning, it is out of a pure impulse to be spiteful. It goes back for generations in the women of Johannes’s wife’s family.

  They were women who ruled households and persons. Long-lived. After having raised their children, flowers and cards took first place. Flowers would become an obsession. Likewise diseases and parasites. Which eat into leaves and petals. But their flowers and leaves were almost always healthy, unlike the gardens of others, which were diseased.

  There might have been a war on somewhere else, and there was. They were concerned most of all about the flowers. I am suspicious of anyone who grows flowers, the way the women of Johannes’s wife’s family did. The only one who was not totally devoted to flowers was Johannes’s wife. More to cards. And far more, because it was a true, immensely grand passion, to the piano. I suppose because it took her mind off the world. She used to play for seven hours a day. Then silence. The women of that family had an autistic passion for camellias, roses, and nothing else. Scant liking for human beings. We found this reprehensible. I do not know why I say “we.”

  Perhaps simply because I think of Johannes’s twin brother. There is no one at my side who can judge or merely observe women who think exclusively of their flowers. Fanatical in their care for them. A passion like that is voracious, secret. It only seems like a nice thing. Taking an interest in nature. But instead they harbor a profound resentment, a visceral resentment toward the world, toward existence. Toward men. Toward the male gender. Toward Johannes. They have tried everything in order to transmit that predisposition to Johannes’s daughter as well. The women of her family, of Johannes’s wife’s family, are no more. They too continue doing the same things they did in life. I think they send me bags of the finest quality earth to promote the growth of any shoot. To promote the growth of any feelings of hatred for the male gender. For Johannes.

  Sometimes I sit down beside the piano. “Play.” I look at the keys, some of them yellowed. “Play, I beg you.” I close the window because I do not want the sound to go out. Other times, in previous years, suddenly someone would play the piano. But this did not happen in one room only. It happened in the open too. Thus, for no reason, in the countryside, the sound would come coiling out. Then, suddenly, it would cease. As if the keys had fallen out. Far more difficult when I found myself in the room with the piano. The Steinway & Sons and I. She had bought it in New York. And it had traveled on an ocean liner. She too traveled on the Andrea Doria together with the piano. I remained ashore. To imagine a sea voyage, a vegetation I would never see. To look at all the things my mother, the pianist, had left me or sent me. A frock. Another frock. Another frock again. To go where? She sent the frocks to a girl who did not wear frocks, because she wore a uniform. A school uniform.

  Many years have passed, now the Steinway is in my possession. I can do what I wish with it. I sit beside it and I say: “I can burn you.” Then I look at it. No one dusts my Steinway. The pedals remain shiny. It lives in a small frescoed room. A room that was waiting unbeknownst to me for the piano that arrived from New York. I should like to keep it open. Perhaps, when I call her to tell her to play it, she prefers it to be open.

  In New York I even went to see the Steinway & Sons shop. The shop seemed slumbrous in the half-light. A tall, polite gentleman, dressed in dark colors, speaks in a low voice. I had the feeling that the shop was a funeral home for pianos. It made quite an impression on me. It looks like a shop that the have-nots cannot enter. Where only those who belong to a very high social stratum may enter. And elegant people. With a musical culture. I think that she, my mother, must have been elegant when she bought the Steinway. A French outfit, Patou or Givenchy. A shyness that was fairly sure of itself. She could enter that shop. I, on visiting it, or on feigning interest in the pianos, was ill at ease. I asked a price. I should not have done that. My mother certainly did not ask the price of her, and now my, Steinway & Sons. It must have been toward the end of spring when she bought it. And she was certainly wearing a really beautiful silk dress, gauzy and light. Sometimes clothes give an accurate idea of a person’s spiritual traits. The Steinway shop was very large with subdued lighting. My mother’s dress, the customer’s dress, gave off an arcane light, cold and silvery. The assistant, or the proprietor, of the shop must have been captivated by the charme of that customer. Even though the shop was self-important, almost wary of selling or giving explanations of its Steinway & Sons pianos. This was how it struck me when I visited it, the way I would have visited a museum. A museum for a few. More than two people cannot go in to look at those marvelous simulacra. Those pianos that, like mine, in the little room, look as if they might play from one moment to the next.

  The customer must have given her New York address. Of a house that I would not have seen. And at the same time she asked for information about shipping. I do not think that the Steinway suffered on the sea. At that time, it was not yet a sentient being. It became one by living with the pianist. Now the pianist does not show herself. Or perhaps, when she comes, I turn the other way. I did not know that I would live in a house where there is a music room. It was a coincidence. It was the Steinway’s wish to come to stay where it is now. In a little room frescoed with musical motifs. A long time ago. Long before I was born. Time is insignificant. Isn’t it, Steinway? But the bond you share with the pianist is not insignificant. Nor is your wish to stay with someone who has blood ties with the pianist. And who prepared this room for you.

  You do not want me to touch your keys yet. My fingers are unfamiliar to you. That slight hint of carnality. But I am sitting beside you. I watch over you. In the first years I always kept the door closed. I wanted to be sure that no one came in. You alone, locked in. Now no longer. Now I allow you more freedom. And at the same time I allow myself more freedom too. I have become wiser. Before, if I felt resentment, it seeped into my veins, my eyes, my thoughts. An insomniac resentment. You know what insomnia is like. It is unpleasant. It is awful. For all is presence. Nocturnal presences. In the silent hours, when insomnia stalks through the rooms, in your room it is freezing. And so I sit down beside you. Your keys are really cold. Then, dawn at the window. I wonder if the pianist awakes. You are a horse with golden hoofs. What does the dawn bring to you and me? Have you already chosen your next home? You tell me that there is time, that I must not be in a hurry. I am in no hurry, Steinway, I would like to carry on like this, you and I, in the little room with the ceiling in the colors of Pompeii. It is like a gentle blaze, gentle flames, celestial color of fire.

  ‌

  One still, sunny afternoon. Johannes’s daughter visits a squalid room. A green night-light over the door. Like an eye on a perch. Ever vigilant. Day and night. Even more luminous at night. It sheds its light of brute compassion over a bed. It is the room of segregation. It is the room of my mistress, the mistress of the house and of the garden. The shadows are green, as is she, Orsola, and the sheets. She is wrapped in a shroud of mold. She is over a hundred years old, exhausted by not dying. Exhausted by reclusion. Her daughters had deposited her in there, waiting for the end. Which was taking a long time. Now Johannes’s daughter is sitting beside the bed. The hands of the woman, of the woman that Johannes’s daughter had loved, flutter nervously on the sheets. She wants to make knots. To escape. And to return to her garden. To her home. Johannes’s daughter is silent. Like her beloved mistress many years before, she looks at the green night-light that gives no peace. She ought to say something, perhaps something consoling, to the woman who wants nothing else but to die.

 

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