The Gustav Sonata Read online

  It’s late afternoon on the day of their arrival and they’re both hungry. They stroll down a quiet street and hear the sound of a little orchestra. It comes from a café where, in a small space behind the tables, elderly couples are dancing. They go in. Emilie stares at the dancers and is touched by their grace. All are in their seventies or eighties and yet they keep perfect time to the steady beat of the music. They hold their elbows high and keep their backs straight.

  Erich and Emilie sit at a table and order lemonade and apfelstrüdel. They don’t talk, but eat and drink and watch the dancers. The music holds them in a fragile spell. And Emilie finds herself thinking, I don’t want to grow old – as old as these people – without having lived a proper life. She raises her head and looks at her husband. She’s almost surprised to find him still there. She’s become so used to wanting to be alone, it’s as though she expected, every day, to look up and find him gone. But he hasn’t gone. He’s sitting calmly by her side, finishing his lemonade and lighting a cigarette. Sunlight from the café window touches his cheek and puts glints of chestnut into his brown hair.

  After a while, she says, ‘Can we dance now?’

  Erich says nothing. He puts out his cigarette. Then he gets up and bows to her formally and holds out his hand and she takes it and they move onto the dance floor. The other dancers nod to them and say ‘Grüezi’ and they reply ‘Grüezi, grüezi to you all’, and the dance band mellow their sound into a slow sweet number for the young strangers who have joined the throng.

  They hold themselves as upright and as correct as the others. Erich leads Emilie with a firm hand round her waist. And Emilie thinks, if we could just go on like this, in this slow, formal dance, go on and on like this, without the need to speak, without the need to pause, then in the end – if an end had to come – all might be well.

  She lets her head move forward, closer and closer to Erich, until her cheek is resting against his.

  Davos.

  Emilie knows it’s where people still come to be healed of a disease that is killing them. She knows also that many of them die. There’s a big graveyard lower down the valley, which she would like to visit.

  She lies awake in the large bed, while Erich sleeps. She looks at his face, half seen in the shadowy room, and understands, in a way she has not understood before, how tired he is, how sorrowful, how damaged by what happened to them, but also by the work he’s trying to do, to help people who have been driven from their country and from almost everything that was beloved to them.

  She whispers to herself, ‘He is a good man.’ She wants to go and tell the Jewish refugees who throng Police Headquarters, ‘This man will help you. You’re lucky to have found him. He will help you, where hundreds of others might turn you away.’

  Then she wakes him. She knows this is unkind; he needs a sound sleep. But she has to tell him, then and there, that she does understand what’s happening in the world, she’s not really an ignorant girl, she knows about suffering – other people’s suffering, far worse than her own. She wants to say that she’s sorry.

  Erich holds her close to him. He strokes her hair. He begins to weep, and he weeps for a long time.

  Liebermann

  Matzlingen, 1938

  ON AUGUST 18TH a directive comes from the Swiss Justice Ministry in Bern that all German, Austrian and French Jews attempting to get to the safety of Switzerland after this date are to be sent back.

  Roger Erdman says to Erich, ‘This probably means an end to these people arriving in Matzlingen. They’ll be picked up and turned around long before they get this far.’

  Erich says, ‘I don’t think it necessarily means an end. The IF here is very active and well supported and word of this will have gone out to the border crossings. Some may get through, Roger. Then, what are we supposed to do?’

  Roger Erdman picks up a pencil and holds it between his hands, as though measuring something in the opposite corner of the room. ‘Speaking as a policeman,’ he says, ‘I will have to follow the Justice Ministry directive. Speaking as a man, I can’t follow it. Resolve my dilemma if you can.’

  The arrival of Jewish refugees (those who crossed into Switzerland before August 18th) continues for a while, then slows, then stops. Every day, Roger and Erich look out into the foyer where the men and women used to wait and sees only empty benches. They imagine a convoy of exhausted people, carrying flimsy bags and bundles, cradling their children, being escorted back over the border into Austria, and from there being sent to camps, or – rumour has it – taken away to be killed. Roger says one morning, ‘Thank God we’re not at St Gallen, or in Basel, for that matter. We’d be turning these people away. We’d be responsible for their deaths.’

  But Roger Erdman is ill. He’s taken into hospital for tests on his liver. The tests are ‘inconclusive’ and Roger tells Lottie that he’s just suffering from strain and exhaustion. He goes home, but he has difficulty keeping food down and is ordered to stay away from work. He tells Erich that he’s sorry to be ‘shirking my duty’, but adds, ‘At least the problems of helping the Jews seems to be over, for now.’

  But it’s not over.

  One morning, when Erich gets into Police Headquarters, he sees a man waiting on the benches. As Erich passes through the foyer on the way to his office, the man gets up and says, ‘Herr Chief of Police, may I see you urgently? The IF have sent me. I must tell you my story, please.’

  Erich calls the man into his office. He asks for a glass of water to be brought to him. He notes the man’s worn boots and the exhaustion in his face. He tells him gently that he is not the Chief of Police, merely his Assistant.

  ‘But have you got authority?’ asks the man. ‘I cannot tell my story more than once, sir. I am too tired.’

  ‘I have authority,’ says Erich. ‘Herr Chief of Police Erdman is ill at the present time so I am acting on his behalf.’

  The man gulps the water. He stammers out that the IF didn’t treat him very well, offering him nothing. He’d been told the IF people would be his saviours, that he would be safe once he reached them, but he was wrong. ‘They offered me nothing,’ he says, ‘because they’re afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘Of the Bern directive about dates. My name is Liebermann. Jakob Liebermann. But I beg you, Herr Assistant Police Chief, don’t send me away. My wife and my son are already here in Switzerland. My son is only four. They need me. I sent them on ahead. I thought there would be time enough for me to obtain some money and then follow them. And then the diktat of the 18th of August came out of the blue. I am here to beg you not to send me back.’

  Erich examines Liebermann’s passport. He notes that he is thirty-six, the same age as himself. His profession is written down as ‘Doctor’. He looks up and says, ‘Will you tell me the date that you entered Switzerland, please, Herr Liebermann?’

  Liebermann gets up and leans towards Erich, over the cluttered surface of the desk. ‘I could tell you anything, anything,’ he says, ‘and you wouldn’t know! But the mistake I made was to tell the IF that I crossed on the 26th of August. I came over the border at Diepoldsau – that marshy crossing. I have no visa. I thought the IF would turn a blind eye. Why do they exist, if not to help us? But they escorted me here. They told me my entry must be registered with the police, or I can have no future, no work in Switzerland, nothing, not even IF charity, that’s what they said. They say I am a “Police Problem”.’

  Erich feels his own heart beating very fast. He wishes he could get up and walk into Roger’s office and give the ‘Police Problem’ to him. But Roger Erdman isn’t there.

  He asks Jakob Liebermann to sit down. He hears a tremble in his own voice as he speaks. He reaches into his desk drawer and brings out the registration form that he must complete. He sets it in front of him, next to Liebermann’s passport, but doesn’t pick up his pen. He says, ‘Tell me what kind of doctor you are.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Liebermann, ‘well, I was in general practice. In Bludenz
. I had hopes of becoming a surgeon. I would like to save lives.’

  ‘Perhaps you will still do that – become a surgeon?’

  ‘Sir, I will become nothing if you send me back! I will be dead. My boy will have no father! Look at me! I’m an honest man, a man who wants to do good in the world. I’ve committed no crime: only the “crime” of being Jewish. My son’s name is Daniel. If you send me back, you’re throwing me and my boy to the lions.’

  Erich folds his hands together. He remembers that he himself might have been a father by now, the father of little Gustav, who would have been four months old. Supposing he, Erich, had died and not Gustav? Supposing Emilie were all alone with her child, driven from her home, driven from her country …

  He picks up his pen. He says quietly, ‘I am going to put down that your arrival date in Switzerland was the 16th of August. Tell the IF that you were confused about dates – between the 16th and the 26th. And there may even have been some confusions of language, as you speak High German and the IF people would have talked to you in Swiss German. Did they?’

  ‘Yes, sir, they did.’

  ‘Well, there you are. Confusions can sometimes arise. But go back to them and explain that we have sorted it out in this office. All right?’

  For a moment, Jakob Liebermann looks dumbfounded. Then, he opens wide his arms. ‘God will bless you, Herr Assistant Police Chief!’ he says. ‘God will give you a long and happy life!’

  He leans over the desk and pulls Erich to him in an awkward embrace and Erich can smell the sweat of travel on him and feel the roughness of his unshaved cheek against his ear.

  Erich tells nobody what he’s done. Certainly not Emilie, who, since Davos, has let Erich resume their lovemaking, whispering to him that she wants to try again for a child, and Erich doesn’t want to risk upsetting her. If, sometimes, he’s afraid that he could be punished for disobeying a national directive, he tries to set this worry aside. He reasons that he disobeyed it in only one case.

  He visits Roger Erdman, who is back in hospital. Roger looks very thin. His skin is waxy and white. He tells Erich that there is going to be an operation on his colon, and after that, the doctors tell him that he’ll be well again. Then, he asks, ‘How is everything at HQ?’

  ‘All right,’ says Erich.

  ‘What about the … erm … August dilemma?’

  ‘As you predicted, Roger, Jews no longer get as far as Matzlingen. St Gallen has to decide what to do.’

  ‘What do they decide? Have you heard?’

  ‘I’ve heard that the directive has been obeyed.’

  Roger closes his eyes. ‘I’m still not sure,’ he says, ‘what we would have done. But thank goodness the thing has gone away.’

  But of course it hasn’t gone away.

  Through Jakob Liebermann, word has been passed to other Jews who have slipped into Switzerland after August 18th: ‘Try to make it to Matzlingen. There’s an Assistant Police Chief there who will falsify the registration form. He’ll do it even without a bribe – because he is a good man. Go to him first, not to the IF. His name is Erich Perle.’

  The registration forms that Erich has falsified pile up. Date of entry: August 14th. Date of entry: August 12th. Date of entry: August 9th … But as August becomes September and a date is set for Roger Erdman’s return to work, Erich has to whisper to the Jews who come to him, ‘I’ll do it for you. Just this once. But pass the word, when my Chief of Police returns on the 30th of September, it will have to end. He will not sanction it.’

  Roger has lost so much weight that his police uniform no longer fits him. He says to Erich, ‘I look ridiculous. I look like an idiot in fancy dress.’

  Erich tells him he must begin to eat well again and invites him and Lottie to dinner. Emilie says she will cook roast pork and knödel with red cabbage, followed by Nusstorte, her speciality dessert. They will serve a strong French red wine, which Erich can buy cheaply and in quantity from a former colleague at the Police Academy, who opines to Erich that ‘wine smells of the earth and police work smells of the sewer’.

  The table in the sitting room of the apartment at Fribourgstrasse 61 is set with a lace cloth. It’s a warm autumn evening – too warm to light a fire in the grate – and the French windows are open.

  In recent days, Erich Perle’s heart has started to beat faster. He can’t seem to control it. He’s aware of it all the time – the thump of blood in his ears, an agitated ticking in his wrist – and he knows it’s because he’s afraid. He finds himself seeking out the familiar and the ordinary, to soothe this frantic heart. The gentle sound of traffic passing down Fribourgstrasse is reassuring, and he tells himself that nothing has changed in Matzlingen if the cars and scooters are going by at their usual, obedient pace. All that has changed is within himself. He is no longer the man he thought he was, the kind of man who reveres the laws of his country – his beloved Switzerland, whose moral code is unimpeachably high – and who would never break them. He’s now a criminal.

  He keeps telling himself that it all happened because of Liebermann, because of Erich’s compassion for a man who only longed to join his little family, who – if he had been sent back into Austria – would have faced death. Wouldn’t other men – even other policemen – have been moved to falsify documents, to break the law, to save a man who had done nothing wrong? Surely Erich’s crime is rendered neutral by the saving of souls? Isn’t it?

  But he can’t get his mind off what he’s done. He wonders if he should have saved Liebermann alone, but sent all the others who followed him back to the border, steeling himself not to think about their likely fate. The particularity of Liebermann was what informed his decision. He was moved. He was weakened by his compassion for a man his own age, with a little son named Daniel. And surely one date falsification would never have been detected? But the stack of false dates is going to come to light, one way or another. Erich now understands that he’s put his career – even his life – in jeopardy.

  Before Roger and Lottie arrive for dinner, Erich opens one of the bottles of red wine. Emilie is basting the roast pork, in the kitchen. Erich stands by the French windows, drinking and smoking a cigar. He feels the wine begin to calm his heartbeat, so he pours another glass. By the time Roger and Lottie arrive, he has drunk four glasses very fast and has begun to be unsteady on his feet, as though the salon of the apartment had become a seagoing yacht, headed suddenly out of harbour.

  But the sensation is not unpleasant. It feels to him that this altered Erich, this unsteady person on a drifting boat, has been relieved of the normal obligation to behave with decorum. He then thinks about the word ‘decorum’ and finds it ludicrous.

  He says aloud that everybody’s responsibility to behave well this evening has been nullified. ‘Nullified! Another stupid word! But it will serve.’

  He sees Lottie look anxiously at Roger. He notices, as though for the first time, how very pretty Lottie Erdman is and he says to Roger, ‘I hope that now you’re well again, Roger, you’re not neglecting Lottie.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asks Roger.

  ‘Lottie is a gem. She is a Rhinemaiden! I hope you’re taking care of her.’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘In every way. I mean in bed as well.’

  Lottie blushes, touches her breasts in a flustered gesture, gives Erich a shy smile. Roger shakes his head with exasperation. ‘I’ll forgive you for saying that, Erich, because I think you’ve had quite a lot of wine already, but what Lottie and I do in bed is none of your concern.’

  Erich fumbles to relight his cigar, which has gone out. ‘Concern!’ he says, choking on the first puff. ‘Very far from a stupid word! On the contrary, a thoughtful word. But where does “concern” begin and end? My friends, that is the great question of our times: how far are we to go, in showing concern for our fellow human beings? We strive for indifference. As members of the police we are taught to feel it. But is not indifference a moral crime?’

  At this moment, b
efore Roger or Lottie can attempt any reply to this, Emilie comes in to say that the dinner is ready. The aroma of the roasted pork now perfumes the air. Erich loves pork. The crunch of crisp pork crackling in his mouth, releasing the fatty juices within it, has, he thinks, an almost sexual pleasure about it. But tonight he feels a sudden dismay at the idea of the four of them sitting round their comfortable table, gobbling pork and knödel. He thinks of Liebermann and his little family (who would never have eaten pork in their lives) and wonders where they are and if the IF have helped them, or if they’re starving in the mountains somewhere.

  He follows his guests obediently to the table. Emilie’s cheeks are bright red from the heat of the kitchen and he thinks how this redness doesn’t suit her and how, tonight, he would like to make love to the adorable Lottie Erdman. He gets an erection at the mere idea of it and sits down abruptly, covering his lap with a linen table napkin. He pours wine for Lottie, gazing, as he does so, at her large breasts and inadvertently spilling wine onto the lace cloth.

  ‘Be careful, Erich!’ says Emilie.

  He doesn’t apologise. He thinks wearily how many times he has had to apologise in his recent life and how tired he is of always being in the wrong. As he receives his plate of food, before he’s touched a morsel of it, he blurts out, ‘You should all know that, really and truly, I am fed up with thinking of myself as a criminal!’

  They stare at him. Lottie looks anxiously at Roger. Emilie dabs her hot face with her napkin.

  ‘Please start your supper,’ she says.

  ‘Or not,’ says Erich. ‘Don’t start it! Don’t let yourselves enjoy the crackling. Think of the crunch of it as bones breaking. Human bones …’

  Roger puts down his knife and fork. He says calmly, ‘What is the matter, Erich?’