Lea Page 3

  ‘I sensed what was happening, and it hit me like an electric shock: while she had been immersed in herself a new will had formed, a new independence had come into being, one of which she was still unaware.

  ‘I drew my hand back with a start, fearfully waiting for what would happen next. Since coming to, Lea had not yet looked at me. When our eyes met now, it was for a moment which I experienced with unnatural alertness, like the encounter between two adults with matching wills. The person standing here was no longer a little daughter in need of protection, facing her tall, protective father, but a young woman filled with a will and a future for which she demanded unconditional respect.

  ‘At that moment I sensed that a new calendar was beginning between us.

  ‘But new and clear though that sensation was – I plainly understood it neither then nor later. C’est de votre fille qu’il s’agit. What could those terrible words of the Maghrebi mean other than the accusation that in the thirteen years since Loyola’s appearance at Bern Station it had never really been about Lea, but only ever about me? In the first days and weeks I refused – I grimly, bitterly refused – to consider the accusation seriously for so much as a moment. But the doctor’s words circled and circled, they poisoned my sleeping and my waking, until I grew tired of resisting and tried with all the sobriety of my intellect to approach myself entirely from outside, as if approaching a stranger. Had I perhaps really been incapable of acknowledging that Lea had a will of her own, which might be a will other than the one I dreamed of for her?

  ‘It never occurred to me that I might be trapped in such fatal impotence; because if it had taken control of me, it was with a sly discretion, a treacherous mutability, which eluded the discerning gaze and concealed itself behind the deceptive façade of solicitude. To the casual observer, in fact, it didn’t look as if I was ignoring what Lea wished for herself. Quite the contrary: from outside it must have looked as if – from month to month, year to year – I was increasingly becoming the servant, indeed the slave, of her wishes. The occasional glance from my colleagues and co-workers told me that they were concerned about the degree to which I allowed the form of my life to be dictated by the rhythm of Lea’s life, her artistic advances and setbacks, her highs and her lows, her euphoria and her depression, her moods and her illnesses. And how could anyone deny a father his capacity, even if he sometimes found himself on the wrong track for the sake of his daughter, to acknowledge her will? I eagerly fell in with the tyranny of her gift. So how could the Maghrebi question my readiness to acknowledge Lea as a person in her own right? And how could he give me to understand, with his gently dictatorial manner, that it was this incapacity of mine that had made her his patient? You aren’t moving to Saint-Rémy. Good God!’

  4

  VAN VLIET HAD got to his feet and was preparing to go to the water again. His clenched fists could be seen in his jacket pocket. I went along. He took out his hip flask, hesitated and glanced at me. I caught his eye and held it. His thumb rubbed on the flask.

  ‘But I’d like to hear more of the story,’ I said.

  A skewed smile appeared on his face. Tom Courtenay wouldn’t have had cause for such a smile, but it would also have been impossible on Courtenay’s face.

  ‘OK,’ said Van Vliet, and put the flask back in his pocket.

  A man with a Newfoundland dog came towards us. The dog ran ahead and stopped, panting, in front of us. Van Vliet stroked its head and let it lick his hand. We didn’t look at each other, but we both knew that we were thinking about Lea and the animals. The way our thoughts interlocked: had I ever experienced that with Joanne or with Leslie? And I had known Martijn van Vliet for less than half a day.

  The dog ran away and Van Vliet wiped his hand on his trousers. We walked over to the water. The wind had subsided, the waves just lapped quietly now.

  ‘Lea loved it when the sea was as smooth as a mirror. It reminded her of the ringing of the bell in a Japanese monastery, early in the morning. She liked films like that. And comparisons like that. Once, during the Olympic Games in Seoul, I turned on the television late at night. The Koreans call their country The Land of Morning Silence, the reporter said. Lea had stepped up behind me, silently, on bare feet, sleepless after so much practising. ‘How lovely,’ she said. We looked at the rowing boats cutting through the smooth water. That was a few months after Loyola’s performance in the station.’

  He took a quick slug from the flask.

  His movements were mechanical, without his intervention, behind them he had already yielded once more to the flow of memory.

  ‘Lea looked over at the escalator on which the violinist had disappeared, started walking and her foot buckled. It was as if she had started walking before her body was entirely back in her possession after her dreamy absence. She hobbled and her face was distorted with pain, but it was not defiant and stubborn as it had been recently when something had hurt her; it was more of a distracted expression which made the pain seem more like something mildly troublesome than something that deserved attention. I have dreamed of that buckled foot. I held Lea’s leg like a doctor, but one who was also partly responsible for the accident. The dream lasted much longer than the harmless twisted ankle, which healed quickly. But in the end, when Lea blossomed, it disappeared. With my stolen visits to the hospice gardens of Saint-Rémy it came back. I do nothing in the dream, I just see Lea hobbling past some distance away, her age is vague, her face is strange, and I awaken with the feeling of having been witness to some deep damage to her life. Elle est brisée dans son âme, said the Maghrebi.

  ‘How different things looked that evening after Loyola’s concert! We walked together through the city. We had never walked through Bern like that before. It was as if we were walking outside of town, separated from the stone of the arcades and the rest of reality by a gap, a tiny hiatus that made it look as if the thousand familiar things had nothing to do with us in the slightest. The only thing that counted was that Lea was walking as she had not walked for ages, liberated and resolute, and that by doing so she kindled within me the hope that her soul might be reawakened and made to flow by the music.

  ‘She hobbled, but she seemed to pay it no heed. Her constant disregard for the pain made her walk assertively, in a way that left no doubt that she was the one deciding where we went. For a long time we didn’t say a word. She led me mutely down streets and alleys that I had not walked down for years. A mysterious, inexhaustible power seemed to impel her onwards, and her gaze, fixed on the cobbles, kept me from asking her what her goal might be. Only once did I ask: “Where are we going?” She didn’t look at me, but said as if out of the deepest concentration, “Viens!” It sounded like the order of someone who has over her fellow the knowledge of something great, without wishing to explain it.

  ‘Flooding through my head came those many occasions when Cécile, too, had said such a “Viens!” to me, with gentle, compelling impatience. How I had enjoyed it at first when she did it! Someone taking me by the hand and leading me along – how unfamiliar and liberating it had been for someone who, as a latchkey child, had been forced far too early to make his way alone to school and in the street, dogged in his devious intelligence, the only thing he trusted.

  ‘Our ghostly walk, which Lea’s impatient energy sometimes turned into almost a march, lasted over an hour, and when my eye caught a church clock I was hotly aware of the session that I was supposed to have been leading. It was a crucial meeting with donors and the university management – the future of my lab depended on it; so it was unthinkable that I should not be there. The thought of the staff members who would helplessly have to endure questioning glances made me start from my oblivious present, which had consisted entirely of being Lea’s companion. I saw a telephone box and looked in my jacket pocket for coins. But then again I sensed Lea’s mysterious energy beside me, and now I made a decision of a kind that I would make again and again in the coming years: I gave my daughter precedence over my professional duties and shut my
eyes to the consequences that became more threatening every time. Her will, wherever it might drive us both, meant more to me than anything else. Her life was more important than mine. The Maghrebi knows nothing of that. Nothing.

  ‘I had dropped back behind Lea, and now caught up with her. We started to walk in a circle, and gradually it dawned on me that she didn’t have a goal at all, or rather that her goal was not one that you could walk to. She walked along beside me as if she actually wished she were walking to somewhere quite different, but didn’t know where, and more than that: as if she would rather have been moving in a quite different, more significant space than the one that Bern old town made available.

  ‘Now we were walking past Krompholz, the music shop. Lea – and this surprises me even today – didn’t glance once at the window, where a number of violins were always displayed. She walked heedlessly past, even though, as I would learn shortly, something was stirring in her soul that would give such instruments a life-defining significance. My own eyes ran over the violins and connected them with the woman from the station – in the way that one’s ideas normally connect. As yet I had no idea what violins would mean for both our lives. That they would change everything.

  ‘Then, all of a sudden, all the energy seemed to drain from Lea. The pain in her ankle must have become greater and greater, and where before she had impelled me onwards with mute, dictatorial resolution, now she was only a tired little girl whose foot hurt and who wanted to go home.

  ‘Arriving at our apartment seemed different. I felt a little as if we had just been on a long journey: I was surprised at all the furniture there, its practicality seemed dubious to me, the cunningly calculated light from the many lamps suddenly didn’t match my expectations, and it smelled of dust and stale air. The many things that recalled Cécile seemed to have been pushed further into the past, as if by an imperceptible shove. I put a compression dressing on Lea’s swollen joint. She didn’t eat anything, poked around absently in the saffron rice, her favourite meal. Then, suddenly, she raised her eyes and looked at me the way you look at someone you’re about to ask a vitally important question.

  ‘“Is a violin expensive?”

  ‘These four words, spoken in the childish tone of her bright voice – I will hear them until the end of my life. All at once it was clear to me what had happened in her, and what had provoked the unease of our strange and opaque walk through the city: she had sensed that she, too, wanted to be able to do what the violinist in the fairy-tale costume could do. The aimlessness that had accompanied her grief over her dead mother had come to an end. She had a will again! And what made me overjoyed: I could do something. The time of being a helpless onlooker was over.

  ‘“There are very expensive violins, which only rich people can afford,” I said, “but there are others, too. Would you like to have one?”

  ‘I stayed in my chair in the sitting room until I heard Lea’s calm breathing. And while I sat there, something happened that later slipped from my memory for a long time, to turn up again the day when Lea was collected and taken to the hospital in Saint-Rémy, to the Maghrebi, far from Switzerland and its intrusive press. The sensation that suddenly spread through that sitting room at night was the feeling of losing Cécile. As cruel as it might sound: it had been Lea’s leaden grief that had helped me to keep her with me. The mother had become more emphatically present in the daughter’s grief than she had sometimes been in life. Now, this evening, after only a few hours during which Lea’s grief had begun to make way for a new state of mind, one that was open to the future, Cécile’s present also began to fade. I was startled. Had my wife had a present in the end only as Lea’s mother?

  ‘I got up, walked through the rooms and touched the things that reminded me of her. I stayed for longest in her room, which, with all the figures and painted shards, could have belonged to an archaeologist. But that had only been a hobby – her dreamy side, which no one who knew her as a determined nurse would have guessed. Lea and I had touched nothing here since her death. Behind closed doors a timeless year had gone by, in which there had been no future that a present could have forced into the past. Lea’s question about the violin threatened that sanctuary. At least that was how it seemed to me when I was sitting on the sofa again.

  ‘I would be proved right: not long after the apartment began to fill with clumsy, scratching violin sounds, we turned Cécile’s room into the music room, la salle de musique, as Lea said with proudly and coquettishly pursed lips. We decorated it brightly and in an elegantly antiquated manner, to recall the French and Russian salons in which gifted young musicians played their debuts in front of aristocrats whose stiff and pompous clothing – as we said with a laugh – were like Loyola de Colón’s costume. It was wonderful, furnishing Lea’s future like that.

  ‘But sometimes I lay awake, choking with grief over the fact that with every advance that my daughter made in the violin she retreated more and more into the past, and grief was mingled with an unreasonable, invisible resentment against Lea for taking away my wife, without whom I would have gone off the rails much sooner.

  ‘Lea was woken by the pain in her foot. I changed the bandage and then we talked about the concert in the station. I learned what I would be forced to learn again and again over the years that followed, however much it hurt: that I had no idea about many things – and precisely about the most important thing – that were going on inside my daughter. That what I thought I knew was only the shadow that my own ideas cast upon her.

  ‘In fact, while I was inventing an almost mystical absorption for her, Lea had been thinking about quite practical things: how Loyola could know where to stop when her hand slid up and down the neck of the violin, and why the narrow wooden bridge didn’t dent the wood when there was only a hollow space underneath it and the strings were stretched so tight. We didn’t solve either of those mysteries. To the sound of the legendary names of Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri, which I mentioned when we were talking about violins in general, she fell asleep again at last. At the time they were merely radiant, mythical names. If only they had stayed that way. Why did I have to drag them into our life?

  ‘In the uneasy half-sleep of that night I argued with two female figures, superimposed one on the other, distorted and commingled. One of them, who seemed to have threatening power over me and my fate, was Ruth Adamek, my assistant over many years and the deputy director of our laboratory. “You forgot?” she had said in disbelief when I explained to her over the telephone why I had missed the meeting and not even called. “You should understand,” I said, “Lea had an accident and I couldn’t think about anything else.” “Is she in hospital?” No, I answered, she was with me. As if it were a confession of guilt, Ruth fell silent for a while. “Wasn’t there a phone anywhere nearby? Can you imagine what it was like for us? Just sitting there with those big beasts and not being able to say anything about the fact that you weren’t there?” That was how it had been in reality. In my dream she said something else: “Why do you never call? Are you not interested in what I do any more?” Today she is sitting behind my desk, ambitious, competent and with a pair of Cartier glasses on her nose. In my dream, back then, I accused her of selling me a violin whose bridge brought everything crashing down at the first stroke of the bow. My rage was such that I struggled to choke out my furious words. Ruth just left me standing where I was and turned to the next customer. She was working at Krompholz now, and laughed the harsh laugh of the woman who cleaned the lab.’

  5

  OVER DINNER we laughed about the dream. For the first time we laughed together. Van Vliet’s laughter came hesitantly, as if with a preamble of disbelief, and later, when it became more fluid, I was sure: he had had to overcome the feeling of forfeiting the right to laughter. We were sitting outside, in a protected inner courtyard of the restaurant, surrounded by walls whose fresh white gleamed so brightly in the Provençal sun that it hurt. Saintes Maries de la Mer – for that is the place of those bright walls in w
hich I saw Van Vliet laugh.

  Would that laughter also have suited Tom Courtenay? Years after I had seen the film, I saw him on stage in London. A comedy. It was good, but that wasn’t how I wanted to see him and I left at the intermission. It was how I wanted Van Vliet, though, and I wished I could have much more of that laughter. It showed that apart from being Lea’s father and the victim of her misfortune he was also someone else, a man of charm and sparkling intelligence. I wished I could put the photograph showing him drinking with the light behind him next to another of his laughing face.

  He had composed himself and ordered mineral water, although he also ordered a grappa with his coffee. He wanted to know if I had a wife and children. One might almost have taken the detached way in which he asked for formal politeness, and for a moment I was hurt. But then I understood what it was: self-defence in anticipation. He was afraid of an answer that would show him a man who had had greater good fortune, and had done better with his wife and children.

  I said something about my divorce and about the boarding school, but otherwise I didn’t find the words to explain to him how things had been with Joanne and how they were with Leslie. So I told him about the boy who had come shooting out of the driveway and was suddenly standing in front of my car. It had been only a matter of inches. My heart hammered all the way home and didn’t stop, even on the sofa. I ran to the bathroom and threw up. A sleepless night with camomile tea. I had Sunday off, dozed throughout the day, kept the television on, tried to distract myself. A throbbing headache of the kind I remembered from before my state exam. And then Monday morning in the operating room.