Lea E-Book

Pascal Mercier

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 359

Beschreibung

From the author of the giant bestseller, Night Train to Lisbon, comes a finely calibrated heartbreaker of a novel about fathers and daughters, great rises and sudden falls. It all starts with the death of Martijn van Vliet's wife. His grief-stricken young daughter, Lea, cuts herself off from the world, right up until the day that she hears a snatch of Bach being played on a violin by a busker. Transfixed by the sweet melody, she emerges from her mourning, vowing to learn the instrument. Lea's all-consuming passion is matched by talent, and she becomes one of the finest players in the country - but as her fame blossoms, her relationship with her father only withers. Desperate to hold on to Lea, Martijn is driven to commit an act that threatens to destroy both him and his daughter.

Leseprobe

LEA

PASCAL MERCIER was born in 1944 in Switzerland. He is the author of several novels, including the international bestseller, Night Train to Lisbon. He currently lives in Berlin, where he is a professor of philosophy.

LEA

PASCAL MERCIER

Translated from the German bySHAUN WHITESIDE

First published as Lea in Germany in 2007 by Carl Hanser Verlag.

First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2017 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Pascal Mercier, 2007

Translation copyright © Shaun Whiteside, 2017

The moral right of Pascal Mercier to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The moral right of Shaun Whiteside to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 341 4

OME ISBN: 978 1 78649 072 8

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 982 7

Text designed and set in Plantin by Tetragon, London.

Printed in Great Britain.

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

LEA

WE CAST THE SHADOWS OF OUR EMOTIONS

ON OTHERS AND THEY THEIRS ON US

SOMETIMES WE THREATEN

TO CHOKE ON THEM

BUT WITHOUT THEM THERE WOULD

BE NO LIGHT IN OUR LIVES

Ancient Armenian grave inscription

1

WE FIRST MET one bright, windy morning in Provence. I was sitting outside a café in Saint-Rémy, studying the branches of the bare plane trees in the pale light. The waiter who had brought me my coffee was standing in the doorway. In his worn-out, red waistcoat he looked as if he had been a waiter his whole life. Every now and again he took a drag on his cigarette. Once he waved to a girl who was sitting side-saddle on the back of a rattling Vespa, like in an old film from my schooldays. After the Vespa had disappeared, the smile stayed on his lips for a while. I thought about the clinic where things were carrying on without me for the third week. Then I looked across at the waiter again. His face was closed now and his expression blank. I wondered what it would have been like to live his life instead of mine.

At first Martijn van Vliet was a shock of grey hair in a red Peugeot with Bern plates. He was trying to park, and even though there was plenty of room he was making a poor job of it. This uncertainty about parking didn’t match the tall man who now got out and strode confidently through the traffic towards the café. He glanced at me sceptically with his dark eyes and walked inside.

Tom Courtenay, I thought. Tom Courtenay in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. That was who the man reminded me of. But he didn’t look like him at all. The two men resembled one another in their gait and their expression – the way they seemed to be in the world and within themselves. The headmaster of the college hates Tom Courtenay, the gangly boy with the sly smile, but he needs him to win against the other college with its star runner. So he is allowed to run during class time. He runs and runs through the colourful autumn foliage, the camera on his happy, smiling face. The day comes, Tom Courtenay runs far ahead of the rest, his rival looks as if he has been paralysed, Courtenay turns into the home straight, close-up of the headmaster’s fat face, beaming with anticipated triumph, only another hundred yards to victory, another fifty, then Courtenay becomes infuriatingly slow, puts the brakes on and stops, incredulity on the headmaster’s face, now he recognizes the intention, the boy has him in the palm of his hand, this is his revenge for all the bullying, he sits down on the ground, shakes out his legs, which could have gone on running for ages, his rival runs across the finishing line and Courtenay’s face twists into a triumphant grin. I had to see that grin over and over again in the lunchtime showing, in the afternoon and evening and in the late show on Saturday.

A grin like that could appear on the face of this man too, I thought, when Van Vliet came out and sat down at the next table. He put a cigarette between his lips and shielded the flame of the lighter against the wind with his hand. He held the smoke in his lungs for a long time. As he exhaled he glanced at me, and I was at amazed at how gentle those eyes could be.

‘Froid,’ he said and pulled his jacket tighter. ‘Le vent.’ He said it with the same accent as I would use.

‘Yes,’ I said with a Bernese inflection, ‘I wouldn’t have expected that here. Not even in January.’

Something in his face changed. It wasn’t a pleasant surprise for him to meet a Swiss person here. I felt intrusive.

‘No, in fact,’ he said now, also in dialect, ‘it’s often like this.’ His eyes drifted across the street. ‘I can’t see a Swiss registration number.’

‘I’m here in a hire car,’ I said. ‘I’m taking the train back to Bern tomorrow.’

The waiter brought him a Pernod. For a while neither of us said anything. The rattling Vespa with the girl on the back seat drove past. The waiter waved.

I set the money for the coffee on the table and started to go.

‘I’m driving back tomorrow too,’ Van Vliet said now. ‘We could go together.’

That was the last thing I had expected. He could see that.

‘Just an idea,’ he said, and a strangely sad smile, asking for forgiveness, darted across his features; now, once again, he was the man who had parked so maladroitly. Before going to sleep I thought that Tom Courtenay could smile like that too, and in the dream that’s exactly what he did. He brought his lips close to the mouth of a girl who recoiled in horror. ‘Just an idea, you know,’ said Courtenay, ‘and not much of an idea, either.’

‘Yes, why not?’ I said now.

Van Vliet called the waiter and ordered two Pernods. I gestured that I didn’t want one. A surgeon doesn’t drink in the morning; not even after he’s stopped work. I sat down at his table.

‘Van Vliet,’ he said. ‘Martijn van Vliet.’

I held out my hand. ‘Herzog, Adrian Herzog.’

He’d been staying here only for a few days, he said, and after a pause during which his face seemed to become older and darker, he added: ‘In memory of . . . before.’

At some point on our journey he would tell me the story. It would be a sad story, a story that hurt. I had the feeling I wouldn’t be up to it. I had enough on my plate dealing with myself.

I gazed along the avenue of plane trees that led out of the town and looked at the mild, muted colours of Provence in winter. I had come here to visit my daughter, who was working at the hospital in Avignon. My daughter who no longer needed me, hadn’t done for ages. ‘Taken early retirement? You?’ she had said. I had hoped she would want to know more. But then the boy had come home from school. Leslie was annoyed that the nanny was late, because she was on the night-shift, and then we were standing in the street like two people who had encountered one another without really meeting.

She saw that I was disappointed. ‘I’ll visit you,’ she said. ‘You’ve got time now!’ We both knew she wouldn’t. She hasn’t been to Bern for many years and doesn’t know how I live. We know very little about each other generally, my daughter and I.

I’d hired a car at Avignon Station and had driven off at random, three days on small roads, spending the night in rural inns, half a day by the Gulf of Aigues-Mortes, sandwiches and coffee, time and time again, Somerset Maugham in the evening by dim light. Sometimes I was able to forget the boy who had suddenly appeared in front of the car back then, but never for longer than half a day. I started from my sleep, because anxious sweat was pouring over my eyes and I was nearly choking behind my surgical mask.

‘You do it, Paul,’ I had said to the senior doctor and handed him the scalpel.

Now, as I drove through the villages at a walking pace and was glad when I was on the open road again, I sometimes saw Paul’s bright eyes above the surgical mask, his expression one of shock and disbelief.

I didn’t want to hear Martijn van Vliet’s story.

‘I want to go to the Camargue today, to the Saintes Maries de la Mer,’ he said now.

I looked at him. If I hesitated any longer, his expression would harden like Tom Courtenay’s when he was standing in front of the headmaster.

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

When we set off the wind had stopped and it was warm behind the windscreen. ‘La Camargue, c’est le bout du monde,’ said Van Vliet, when we turned south after Arles. ‘That’s what Cécile, my wife, used to say.’

2

THE FIRST TIME I didn’t give it a thought. The second time Van Vliet took his hands off the wheel and held them a few inches away, I thought it was curious, because once again he was doing it while a truck came towards us. But it was only by the third time that I was certain: it was a security measure. He had to keep his hands from doing the wrong thing.

For a while there were no more trucks. On either side of the road were rice fields and water in which the drifting clouds were reflected. The level landscape created the feeling of a liberating expanse. It reminded me of my time in America, when I learned to operate from the very best surgeons. They gave me self-reliance and taught me to master my anxiety, which threatened to break out when I had to make the first incision in the intact skin. By my return to Switzerland in my late thirties I had hazardous operations behind me; for the others I was the epitome of medical calm and confidence, a man who never lost his nerve. It was unimaginable that I would one morning cease to trust myself to hold the scalpel.

In the distance I could see an approaching truck. Van Vliet braked sharply and drove down from the road to a compound with a hotel and a paddock with white horses in it. PROMENADE À CHEVAL, it said by the entrance.

He sat there for a while with his eyes closed. His eyelids twitched and there were fine beads of sweat on his forehead. Then he got silently out of the car and walked slowly over to the paddock fence. I joined him and waited.

‘Would you mind taking the wheel?’ he asked hoarsely. ‘I . . . don’t feel that great.’

At the hotel bar he drank two Pernods. Then he said, ‘Let’s get going.’ It was supposed to sound brave, but it was a threadbare courage.

Rather than going to the car he walked back to the paddock. One of the horses was standing by the fence. Van Vliet stroked its head. His hand was trembling.

‘Lea loved animals, and they sensed as much. She simply wasn’t afraid of them. Even the most furious dogs calmed down when she appeared. “Dad, look, he likes me!” she would cry. As if she needed affection from animals because she didn’t experience it otherwise. And she said it to me. To me of all people. She stroked the animals, she let them lick her hands. How frightened I was when I saw that! Her precious, her so terribly precious hands. Later, on my secret journeys to Saint-Rémy, I often stood here and imagined her stroking the horses. It would have done her good. I’m quite sure it would have done. But I couldn’t bring her along. The Maghrebi, the damned Maghrebi, he forbade it. He simply forbade me to do it.’

I was still frightened of the story, even more so now; none the less, I was no longer certain that I didn’t want to hear it. Van Vliet’s trembling hand on the horse’s head had changed things. I wondered whether I should ask questions. But it would have been wrong. I needed to be a listener, nothing more than a listener, quietly making my way into the world of his thoughts.

He mutely handed me the car key. His hand was still trembling.

I drove slowly. When we met a lorry, Van Vliet looked far into the distance on the right-hand side. As we entered the town, he directed me towards the beach. We stopped behind the dune, walked up the embankment and stepped out on to the sand. It was windy here, the glittering waves broke, and for a moment I thought of Cape Cod and Susan, my then girlfriend.

We walked along, side by side, some distance apart. I didn’t know what he was doing here. Or rather I did: now that Lea – about whom he had spoken in the past tense – was no longer alive, he wanted to walk once more along the beach that he had had to walk along alone when the Maghrebi had forbidden him access to his daughter. Now he walked towards the water, and for a moment I had the idea that he was simply going to walk into it, with a straight, solid stride, not to be stopped by anything, further and further, until the waves closed over his head.

He stopped on the damp sand and took a hip flask from his jacket. He unscrewed the top and glanced at me. He hesitated, then threw his head back and poured the spirits down his throat. I got out my camera and took a few photographs. They show him as a silhouette against the light. One of them is here in front of me, leaning against the lamp. I love it. A man drinking defiantly in front of the eyes of another man, who didn’t want a Pernod when he was offered one. Je m’en fous, says the posture of this tall, heavy, tousle-haired man. Like Tom Courtenay marching off to be arrested after refusing to apologize.

Van Vliet walked on along the damp sand for a while. Every now and again he paused, threw his head back, as he had done while drinking a moment before, and held his face into the sun. A man, perhaps in his late fifties, tanned and his eyes baggy from drinking, but otherwise looking healthy and fit, someone you would have expected to do sport, but behind that appearance filled with grief and despair that could turn at any time into rage and hatred, hatred not least for himself, a man who no longer trusted his hands when he saw the high bonnet of a lorry thundering towards him.

Now he came slowly up to me and stopped right in front of me. The way it came pouring out of him proved how much the memory had raged within him when he was standing by the water.

‘Meridjen is his name, the Maghrebi, Dr Meridjen. Now it’s all about your daughter. You will have to get used to it. Imagine. That’s what the man dared to say to me. To me! C’est de votre fille qu’il s’agit. As if that hadn’t been the guiding principle of my life for twenty-seven years! The words pursued me like an endless echo. He uttered them at the end of our first conversation, before he stood up behind his desk to walk me to the door of his consulting room. He had mostly listened; every now and again the dark hand with the silver pen had flown over the paper. In the ceiling the huge blades of a fan turned wearily; during the pauses in our conversation I heard the quiet humming of the engine. After my long report I felt drained, and when he cast one of his black, Arab looks at me over the lenses of his half-rimmed glasses, I felt as if I were the guilty party sitting before a judge.

‘You aren’t moving to Saint-Rémy, he said to me in the doorway. It was a devastating sentence. Those few words made it sound as if my devotion to what I saw as Lea’s happiness was nothing but an orgy of paternal ambition and a desperate attempt to bind her to me. As if my daughter needed to be protected from me more than anything. When I had only this one desire for Lea, this one desire that swept all others aside: that her grief and despair about Cécile’s death might be over for ever. Of course, that desire also concerned me. Of course it did. But who would reproach me for that? Who?’

There were tears in his eyes. I would have loved to run my hand through his windswept hair. How had it all come about? I asked, after we had sat down in the sand beside the embankment.

3

‘I CAN TELL YOU to the day, indeed the hour, precisely when it all began. It was a Tuesday eighteen years ago, the only weekday when Lea’s school continued into the afternoon. A day in May, deep blue, with trees and shrubs blossoming all around. Lea came out of school, with Caroline beside her, her friend from her earliest schooldays. It hurt to see how sadly and stiffly Lea came down the few steps to the playground next to skipping Caroline. It was the same dragging walk as it had been a year ago, when we had come together out of the hospital where Cécile had lost her battle against leukaemia. That day, saying goodbye to her mother’s unmoving face, Lea had stopped crying. Her tears were used up. In the last weeks leading up to that moment she had talked less and less, and with every day, it seemed to me, her movements had become slower and jerkier. Nothing had been able to loosen that stiffness: nothing that I had done with her; none of the many presents I had bought when it seemed to me that I could read a desire in her face; none of the awkward jokes that I wrested from my own stiffness; not even going to school, with all the new impressions that it brought; and not even the efforts that Caroline had made from the first day onwards to make her laugh.

‘“Adieu,” Caroline said to Lea at the gate and put her arm around her shoulder. For an eight-year-old girl it was an unusual gesture: as if she were the adult sister giving the younger one protection and consolation to take with her on her way. As always, Lea kept her eyes fixed on the floor and didn’t reply. She silently put her hand in mine and walked along beside me as if wading through lead.

‘We had just walked past the Schweizerhof Hotel and were approaching the escalator that leads down to the station hall, when Lea froze in the middle of the stream of people. In my mind I was already in the difficult meeting that I would shortly have to chair, and I tugged impatiently on her hand. She suddenly twisted away, stood there for a few moments with her head lowered, and then ran towards the escalator. Even today I can see her running, slaloming through the hurrying crowd, the wide satchel on her narrow back catching more than once in other people’s clothes. When I caught up with her she was standing with her neck craning at the top of the escalator, heedless of the people whose way she was blocking. “Écoute!” she said as I walked over to her. She said it in the same tone as Cécile, who had always voiced the demand in French, even though we spoke German the rest of the time. To someone like me, whose throat is not made for bright French sounds, the sharp word had a commanding, dictatorial tone that intimidated me, even if it concerned something harmless. So I reined in my impatience and listened obediently to the station hall below. Now I, too, heard what had made Lea pause: the sound of a violin. Hesitantly I let her drag me on to the escalator and now we slid – against my will, in fact – down towards the hall of Bern Station.

‘How often have I wondered what would have become of my daughter if we hadn’t done that! If chance had not played those sounds to us. If I had given in to the strain and impatience of the impending meeting and dragged Lea on with me. Would she have yielded to the fascination of the sound of the violin on another occasion, in another form? What else would one day have freed her from her paralysing grief? Would her talent have come to light in any case? Or would she have become a very ordinary schoolgirl with a very ordinary career aspiration? And what about me? Where would I be now if I hadn’t found myself faced with the monstrous challenge of Lea’s gift, for which I was by no means a match?

‘When we stepped on to the escalator that afternoon, I was a forty-year-old biocyberneticist, the youngest member of the faculty and, as people said, a rising star in the firmament of this new discipline. Cécile’s last days and her early death had shocked me, more profoundly than I was willing to admit. But outwardly I had withstood that shock, and through meticulous planning had succeeded in linking my job with my role as a father who now held sole responsibility. At night, when I sat at my computer, I heard Lea tossing and turning in the next room, and I myself didn’t go to sleep until she had come to rest, regardless of how late it got. I fought the fatigue, which grew like a creeping poison, with coffee, and sometimes I was on the brink of taking up smoking again. But I didn’t want Lea growing up in a smoky flat with an addicted father.’

Van Vliet took the cigarettes out of his jacket and lit one. As he had done that morning in the café, he screened the flame against the wind with his big hand. Now, from closer up, I saw the nicotine on his fingers.

‘All in all I had the situation under control, or so it seemed to me; only the rings under my eyes were growing bigger and darker. I think everything could have turned out all right if the two of us hadn’t stepped on to the escalator. But Lea already had one foot on the sliding metal – when she was so afraid of escalators, a fear she inherited from Cécile; so much had entered her from her idolized mother, as if by osmosis. At that moment the music was stronger than her fear, that was why she had taken the first step, and now I couldn’t leave her alone and ran my hand soothingly over her hair until we had reached the bottom and plunged into the crowd of breathless people listening, enchanted, to the violinist.’

Van Vliet threw the half-smoked cigarette into the sand and hid his face in his hands. He was standing beside his little daughter in the station. It cut me to the quick. I thought of my visit to Leslie in Avignon. Leslie had never been to me what Lea had been to Martijn van Vliet. We had had a more sober relationship. Not unloving, but more brittle. Was it because in the years after she was born I had done almost nothing but work, and often not emerged from the hospital in Boston for days at a time?

That was how Joanne put it. As a father you’re a failure.

We hadn’t had a single proper holiday; if I travelled, it was to conferences where new surgical techniques were being presented. Leslie was nine when we came back to Switzerland. She spoke a mixture of Joanne’s American and my Bern German. The tensions between her parents closed her off from us. She looked for friends that we didn’t know, and when Joanne went back to America for ever, Leslie went to boarding school – a good one, but still a boarding school. I don’t think she was unhappy, but she was slipping further and further away from me, and when I saw her it was more of a meeting between two good acquaintances than between father and daughter.

Van Vliet’s story would be the story of a misfortune, that much was clear; but that misfortune had grown out of a happiness that I had never known, whatever the reason.

‘She wasn’t a tall woman,’ he said, interrupting my thoughts, ‘but she was standing on a pedestal and her torso loomed over the crowd. And, my God, you would have fallen in love with her on the spot! The way you can fall in love with an overwhelmingly beautiful statue, but more easily, more quickly and much, much more intensely. The first thing that had caught my eye was a torrent of gleaming black hair that seemed to flow once more from her pale, three-cornered hat and down on to the padded shoulders of her frock coat. And what a fairy-tale frock coat it was! Faded pink and washed-out yellow, the colours of a decaying palazzo. Against it there stood out many twisting dragon figures, red-gold threads and red glass splinters that shimmered like priceless rubies. There was much of the mysterious East in that jacket, which reached almost to the woman’s knees. She wore it open; you could see a pair of beige knee britches, which were held at the top by an ochre-coloured scarf, with white silk stockings in black patent shoes. Above the scarf she wore a ruched blouse of white satin that filled the wide stand-up collar with a collar of its own. She had drawn a piece of the soft white fabric over the stand-up collar, and on it her energetic chin pressed down on the violin. And to top it all, the broad hat with the three corners, its material similar to the frock coat, but heavier in effect because the edges were lined with black velvet. We made countless drawings of her together, Lea and I, and could never agree about some of the details.’ Van Vliet gulped. ‘That was in the kitchen, at the big table that Cécile had brought to our marriage.’

He got to his feet, without an explanation, and went to the water. A wave washed over his shoes and he didn’t seem to notice.

‘It isn’t quite right,’ he went on as he sat down beside me again, with seaweed on his shoes, ‘to say that the long wavy hair was what first thrilled me about that violinist. Even more than that it was her eyes – or rather not her eyes but the white mask that merged almost seamlessly with her white powdered face. The longer I stood there, the more I fell under the spell of the masked face. At first it was the stillness and the sheer materiality of the mask that struck me, because they contrasted so starkly with the soulful music. How could a stiff mask produce something like that? Gradually I began to sense the eyes behind the little slits, and then to see them. Usually they were closed, and then the powdered face looked sealed-off and dead. Then the sounds seemed to come almost from another world and to use her sightless body like a medium. Particularly in slow, lyrical passages, when the instrument barely moved and the arm with the bow slipped only slowly through space. It was a little as if God’s wordless voice were speaking to the breathlessly listening travellers who had set their suitcases, backpacks and bags on the floor beside them, and were absorbing the overwhelming music as a revelation. The other sounds of the station seemed to lack reality compared to the music. The sounds coming out of the darkly gleaming violin had a reality of their own, which, it occurred to me, could not have been shaken even by an explosion.

‘Now and again the woman opened her eyes. When she did that I was reminded of films featuring masked bank robbers, which always filled me with a burning desire to know what the face belonging to the eyes might look like. Throughout all that time, in my mind I was taking off the violinist’s mask and imagining expressions and whole faces for her. I wondered what it would be like to sit facing such eyes and such a face over dinner or engage in conversation. I only learned that she was mute, this mysterious princess of the violin, from reading the newspaper. I didn’t tell Lea. Nor did she learn anything about the rumour that the woman wore a mask because her face was disfigured by burns. I only told her of the woman’s supposed name: LOYOLA DE COLÓN. After that I had to tell her all about Ignatius of Loyola and Christopher Columbus. She soon forgot it; she was only concerned with the name. Later I bought her a beautiful edition of the Complete Works of Saint Ignatius. She placed it in such a way that she could see the book from her bed. She never read it.

‘Loyola – that was what we called her later, as if she were an old friend – was playing Bach’s Partita in E major. I didn’t know that at the time – until then music hadn’t been something with which I had seriously engaged. Now and again Cécile had dragged me to a concert, but I behaved like the caricature of a blinkered science geek and artistic philistine. It was my little daughter who introduced me to the universe of music, and with my methodically ticking intelligence, my scientist’s intelligence, I learned all about it, without knowing whether I loved the music that she played because I liked it or whether it was just because it seemed to belong to Lea’s happiness. Today I know the Bach Partita, which she would later play with more depth and brilliance than anyone else – to my ears, at least – as well as if I had written it myself. If only I could wipe it from my memory!

‘I can’t remember how good Loyola’s violin was. At the time I had no idea, I became an expert in violin tones only on my insane journey to Cremona, many years later. But in my memory, which would soon be overlaid and transformed by the imagination, that fateful instrument had a warm, voluminous, intoxicating, addictive sound. That sound, which suited the aura of the masked woman so well, and her eyes, as I imagined them, had made me forget Lea for a moment, even though her hand had been in mine as always when she was surrounded by lots of people. Now I sensed her hand twisting away from mine and I was amazed at how damp it was.

‘Her damp hands and her concern for her hands: how they would determine the future – and for a time darken it!

‘I still had no idea that this would come about, when I looked down at her and saw her eyes, to which something incredible had happened. Lea held her hand tilted to one side to get a better view of the violinist through a narrow gap in the crowd. The sinews in her neck were tested to breaking point. She had become her gaze. And her eyes shone!

‘In the long period of our hospital visits to Cécile, they had gone out and lost the gleam that we had loved so much. With eyes lowered and shoulders drooping she had stood in silence by the grave as the coffin was lowered into the ground. Back then, when I felt my breath catching and my eyes starting to sting, I couldn’t have said whether it was more because of Cécile or more because of the horribly mute grief and abandonment that spoke from Lea’s dull eyes. And now, more than a year later, their gleam had returned.

‘I looked again in disbelief, and again. But the new gleam was actually there, it was real, and it made it look as if the heavens had suddenly opened up for my daughter. Her body, her whole body, was tense to bursting, and her clenched knuckles stood out like little white hills against the rest of her skin. It was as if she had to summon all of her strength to resist the enchanting power of the music. In retrospect, it seems to me as if with that tension she had been preparing for her new life, which was beginning during those minutes – as if she had been tensed like a runner before a sprint, the run of her life.

‘And then, all of a sudden, the tension relaxed, her shoulders sank and her arms dangled at her side – forgotten, unfeeling appendages. For a moment I thought it was the extinction of her interest that was expressed in this sudden slackening, and feared that she had fallen out of her enchantment, back into the desperate jadedness of the past year. But then I saw an expression in her eyes that didn’t match it, but pointed in the other direction. It was still a gleam, but there was something mixed in with it, something that startled me even though I didn’t understand it: something in Lea’s soul had decided to take over the governance of her life. And I felt, with a mixture of apprehension and happiness, that my own life would also be drawn into the spell of that mysterious control, and would never again be as it was before.

‘If Lea had previously breathed, during times of tension, in irregular bursts that made one think of a fever, for which the red patches on her cheeks were a match, now she no longer seemed to be breathing at all, and her slack face was covered with an alabaster, corpse-like pallor. If her eyelids had previously twitched frantically, now they seemed paralysed. At the same time there was also concentrated intention in her motionlessness – as if Lea were reluctant to let them interrupt her gaze upon the playing goddess, even if those interruptions had lasted only a few hundredths of a second, and she wouldn’t have noticed them in any case.

‘In the light of what happened later, and what I know now, I would say: I lost my daughter in that station hall.

‘I would say it, even though over the next few years it looked as if precisely the opposite had happened: as if at that moment she had unwittingly started on a journey towards herself, and with a devotion, a fervour and energy that very few can manage. Exhaustion lay on the pale features of her childish face, and when I sometimes dreamed of that exhaustion, it was the exhaustion that lay before her on her self-sacrificing journey through the world of sounds, which she would walk along in a consuming fever.

‘The woman’s playing came to an end with a spirited, rather dramatic stroke of the bow. A silence that swallowed up all the noise of the station. Then thunderous applause. Her bows were deep and lasted for an unusually long time. She held her violin and bow far from her body, as if to protect it from her own impetuous movements. The hat must have been fastened on, because it stayed where it was while the surge of black hair poured forwards, burying her face beneath it. When she straightened, her hair flew back as if in a storm, the hand holding the bow brushed the strands of hair from her face, and now the white face with the mask was a real shock, even though we had had it in front of our eyes all along. We wanted to see joy on the face, or exhaustion, or at least some kind of emotional reaction; instead our gaze bounced back off the ghostly mask and the powder. Still, it seemed as if the applause would never end. Very slowly the crowd began moving and divided into those who were in a hurry and the others who were queuing up to throw something into the violin case beside the podium. Some looked in astonishment at their watches and seemed to be wondering where the time had gone.

‘Lea stayed where she was. Nothing about her had changed, her trance continued, and it was still as if her eyelids had ceased to function, so overwhelmed were they by what her eyes had seen. There was something infinitely touching in her refusal to believe that it was over. The desire for it to continue, to continue for ever, was so strong that she didn’t even snap out of it when jostled by a commuter in a hurry. She stayed in her new position with the unconscious certainty of a sleepwalker, her gaze still fixed on Loyola, as if she were a marionette that she could force to move simply by looking at her. This unwavering gaze of Lea’s heralded her unique and finally destructive firmness of will, which would come to light more and more clearly over the next few years.

‘Loyola, it turned out now, was not alone. A tall, darkskinned man suddenly moved in. He took her violin and bow away, held out his hand as she stepped down from the podium, then cleared everything away with a skill and swiftness that surprised others besides myself. Barely more than two or three minutes seemed to have passed since the last coin had fallen in the case, and Loyola was already making for the escalator with her companion. Now that she was no longer standing on a podium, she looked small, the magical violinist, and not only small, but stripped of her enchantment, almost a little shabby. She dragged one leg, and I was ashamed of my disappointment at discovering that she was real and imperfect, rather than moving through the world with the same lustre, the same fairy-tale perfection that her playing had possessed. I was glad and unhappy at once when the escalator carried them up and out of our field of vision.

‘I walked over to Lea and drew her gently to me, the same movement as ever when I needed to console and protect her. Then she would press her cheek to my hip, and if things were particularly bad she would bury her face in me. Now, however, it was different, and even though it was only a small movement, a mere nuance in her reaction, it still changed the world. Under the gentle pressure of my hand Lea slowly returned to reality. At first she yielded, as she normally did, to my protective gesture. But then, for a tiny moment, she paused abruptly and began to resist me.

‘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!’