Maestro Read online

  He lifted his elbows upwards and outwards.

  ‘Those are the pupils. This is the teacher. The elbow …’

  I noticed that his elbows—the elbows of that pressed white suit—were always smudged with grime. In the months to come—as I rode past the Swan to school each morning—I would often pass him, seated at a table on his balcony, sipping coffee, leaning his elbows on a pile of newspapers.

  It became a game for me during the lessons, during the endless drill of scales and arpeggios, to try to decipher the smudged headlines, reversed, on the elbows and sleeves of his coat. SHOCK, I imagined I could make out from time to time. HORROR. PROBE. Plus, once, clearly: DIE ZEIT, the words this time not only reversed but foreign.

  ‘… and this,’ he continued, tapping me on the forehead, ‘is the headmaster. Now, you and your ten pupils may play for me.’

  ‘Chopin?’

  He grimaced. ‘If you must.’

  I was incredulous: ‘You don’t like Chopin?’

  ‘On the contrary. I like Chopin very much. That is the point.’

  I said nothing, infuriated. I, too, would let my hands do the talking. I dropped them to the keyboard.

  But before a single note had been played he reached over and seized my wrists.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No more. I do not like your Chopin.’

  ‘But I haven’t started!’

  ‘You have of course started. Your hands are in the wrong position. Also your fingertips. Your elbows. I do not have to listen. I know how your Chopin would sound.’

  ‘My mother said it was excellent.’

  ‘Your mother is a fine woman, but she does not fully understand Chopin. Fortunately—unlike you—she understands that she does not understand.’

  He was still squeezing my wrists. I struggled to free them, but his grip was too strong.

  ‘I want to play!’ I blurted out. ‘My parents are paying you to teach me to play.’

  ‘You are spoilt,’ he said. ‘First you must learn to listen.’

  He released me, plucked my copy of the Nocturnes from the piano, and shook his head sadly.

  ‘Also,’ he said. ‘This edition … a joke. Unplayable.’

  He dropped the book into a wastebin at his feet.

  The injustice of it all overwhelmed me. Tears seeped from my eyes, a lump clogged my throat.

  ‘I want to go home,’ I said.

  ‘You are free to leave my home,’ he answered. ‘At any time. But you are not free to play in my home without my permission.’

  I retrieved my Nocturnes from the bin and ran from his room, ran down the stairs past the beer garden in full bloom below, through the front bar crowded with those who believed Bach was the noise that cattle dogs made, and Chopin the function of an axe, and pushed out into the street, vowing never to return, weeping tears of rage.

  Sitting here, setting down these first memories of Keller—and checking them through, believing them accurate—I find it hard to understand how much I came to love the man, to depend on him. At the time (and again now, reliving that time) it seemed—seems—impossible.

  ‘I’m not going to any more lessons,’ I announced over dinner.

  ‘You will do as you are told,’ my father said.

  ‘He won’t even let me play.’

  ‘We must give him time,’ my mother bargained.

  ‘He’s a Nazi.’

  Without warning, my father reached across and seized me violently by the shirt-front. Buttons popped. A wineglass cartwheeled across the table.

  ‘Go,’ he said, but quietly, already regretting the violence, ‘to your room.’

  My mother came gently knocking on my door a little later. I slid the comic I was reading into a drawer of my desk and reached for Intermediate Latin.

  ‘Your father’s been under a lot of pressure,’ she said. ‘At the hospital. And the climate doesn’t help.’

  She stood behind me, resting her hands on my shoulders. The sound of Mozart began to flow from the front room: K. 283, the Adagio, a tranquil river.

  ‘Do you understand why he was so angry?’

  I leant back into her: ‘Swearing?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not swearing. It was because you called Herr Keller a Nazi.’

  ‘If the jackboot fits …’

  I could sense her shaking her head, the movement transmitted, faintly, through her chest pressed against me. I knew she was smiling, despite herself.

  ‘You know so much for your age,’ she said. ‘And so little.’

  She often spoke in riddles when things got serious.

  ‘It’s important to your father,’ she said, ‘that you continue the lessons.’

  This was another of her speech habits when things got serious. Your Father. Never My Husband. Or Dad. Or John.

  ‘Your Father,’ I murmured, inaudibly. ‘Which Art …’

  ‘Your Father never had your opportunities,’ she continued, the words still upper-case and reverential. ‘He always regretted it. You must understand: we lost so much time in the War. And after the War there was no time for music. If he seems hard on you, it’s because of that.’

  ‘But why Keller?’

  ‘Must we go through this again?’

  ‘If Dad is so impressed with Keller let him learn from him.’

  She paused before continuing, as if making some sort of decision.

  ‘He asked,’ she finally admitted. ‘Keller said he was too old. Fixed habits.’

  As always, my father checked my room after Lights Out. I feigned sleep, but felt the approaching footsteps, the floor vibrating gently beneath my bed, and the quick kiss on the temple …

  And heard the squeak of the louvred walls opening, and the sudden thunder of the frogs down in the gully outside—a choir of a million voices, revelling after the latest deluge. Filling the room, deafeningly.

  To describe the world is always to simplify its texture, to coarsen the weave: to lose the particular in the general. But as I sit here writing, the events of my childhood seem to fall naturally into patterns, to want to fit themselves into simple, easily remembered categories. The past forms up into neat lines, assembles itself as if in a school quadrangle, or in a child’s exercise book, under the simplest of headings: My First Piano Lesson. Our House In Darwin. What I Did During The Holidays. My Parents …

  But perhaps this last heading should be teased apart, split in two: Mum, and Dad. Nancy, and John.

  Apart from the piano they had little in common. When I think of my parents I see only polarities. Hard, and soft. Fair, and dark. Thin, and thick.

  They might have belonged to different species. Which would make me … what? Some sort of mule?

  The list of their differences is inexhaustible. Tall, and short. Stoic, emotional. Quiet, talkative. Does it matter which was which? Perhaps not, but in those pairing of opposites I have always put my father first.

  ‘They disagreed on everything—but frivolously, teasingly. It was a kind of game, played endlessly throughout my childhood: a choosing up of sides.

  ‘The Haydn?’ from my short, dark mother.

  ‘I would prefer the Mozart,’ from my tall, fair father.

  ‘The D flat major?’

  ‘The G minor.’

  ‘The Allegro?’

  ‘The Adagio.’

  And so on through Bach and Handel; Schubert, Schumann; Chopin, Liszt—their opinions as black and white as the notes on any keyboard. Beyond the world of music this gentle war continued; favourite colours: blue, green; favourite cities: Sydney, Melbourne; even, once, I remember, favourite Big Cats!

  ‘Tigers,’ my mother tugged gently at one hand as we entered the wrought iron gates of the Adelaide Zoo, ‘This way.’

  ‘Lions,’ my father tugged more firmly at the other, ‘Real cats over here.’

  No issue was too trivial to prevent some half-teasing, half-serious disagreement. I remember once reading of a lost valley where the men and women spoke a different tongue. My parents might have
belonged to that tribe. The two languages they spoke sounded the same, but the words held different meanings. Take the most ordinary noun, any ordinary noun: ‘dog’, for instance. To my mother it meant licks and games and companionship. To my father it meant cleaning shit off his shoes. Even their senses of time were different—as if they lived in different time zones, at different longitudes. ‘Noon’ to my mother was a vague, elastic region located somewhere between breakfast and dusk. To my father it was 12 sharp, Central Standard Time—give or take a handful of seconds, depending on mood.

  I could list their entire separate vocabularies like this: every meaning completely opposed. And yet how happy they always seemed, in spite, or perhaps because of it. Something bound them together—some deeper language held in common. The sweet, sticky glue of sex perhaps …

  But that is guesswork. I was still a child then, innocent of things sweet and sticky. At night their bedroom door was always closed.

  Music was another glue. To both my parents, music was their true career. There was never much money in the house: my father was always more interested in making music than money. He practised medicine more as an intellectual hobby than as a livelihood. A Government Medical Officer, the effort of setting up a private practice seemed beyond him. My mother likewise: a librarian before marriage, she had preferred the role of Housewife and Mother since; but worked only part-time at that, spending less time each day on housework than sitting at the piano.

  Yet even here there was an enormous gulf between them. To my father, music was a species of time: the piano was an interesting kind of clock mechanism—a measuring instrument. My mother was sloppier, allowing herself more mistakes, but in the end she had more fun. Duke Ellington would stroll down the keyboard between Debussy and Schumann. A Beethoven sonata might be interrupted, mid-allegro, by I’m Getting Married in the Morning.

  All of which left me—their crossbreed, their mulatto—where? One thing is certain: I grew up in a sense bilingually, always able to see both sides of an argument.

  Which is, as my father often told me, a polite way of saying I’m unable to make up my mind.

  That I’m a fence-sitter.

  No memoir would be possible without this further heading: The Swan. So much that was crucial in those years took place in Herr Keller’s crowded weatherboard room above the front bar of the Swan.

  Outside in Darwin the rains came and went, but it was always Wet season in the front bar of the Swan: a monsoon of beer and sweat and smoke and noise. I pushed through the storm each Tuesday on my way to piano lessons, and out again afterwards. Overhead the big fans turned—slowly, slowly—stirring it all into one thick, exhausted atmosphere, seemingly unbreathable, uninhabitable …

  And yet its inhabitants somehow survived. And only grew noisier, and thirstier, the longer they stayed. In the muggy heat of the evening the chinking of cold glasses drew them from every corner of the town, like tiny glass bells tolling for Mass, tolling for a communion of beer and tobacco.

  A Mass taken in remembrance of nothing more than the previous night’s beer and tobacco.

  They sought forgetfulness, not remembrance. Who could blame them? Over dinner each night, my father recounted the day’s horror stories from his work at the hospital. He spared us nothing: stories of wife-beaters, fugitivies from justice, alcoholics and maintenance dodgers. Darwin was the terminus, he liked to say: the Top End of the road. A town populated by men who had run as far as they could flee. From here there was only one further escape. And each day on his rounds he saw any number of those hell bent on taking it.

  As I pushed my way through the drinkers each Tuesday, clutching my music satchel, I found it easy to place Keller among these fugitives.

  A Nazi, I had called him after that first piano lesson, using the word then in some loose generic sense—but more and more now I really began to wonder. The word stuck in my mind—a particle of impurity around which further pieces of evidence began wrapping themselves … a crystal of suspicion, growing in layers …

  As he talked or played his way through the lessons my eyes often strayed to a poster tacked to the wall above his bed: an idyllic European scene of church spires, stone bridges, pool-blue river—and the letters WIEN.

  I knew almost nothing about him. Austrian, German … what was the difference?

  I had read my share of war comics, and was reading them still. I had even read my share of headlines: Adolf Eichmann, kidnapped not so long ago from South America and hanged for war crimes in Israel, had been Austrian, I knew. Adolf Hitler had been Austrian …

  And so lying in bed at night, tossing sleeplessly beneath the overhead fan, rewinding and replaying to myself each Tuesday afternoon’s humiliations, I became determined to expose Eduard Keller as the War Criminal I suspected he was …

  Eduard Keller? It was Adolf Keller, surely—or so I found it amusing to think of him.

  Played anything yet?’

  My father’s weekly joke was uttered over dinner every Tuesday evening, after my latest ‘consultation’ with Adolf.

  ‘Nothing yet.’

  ‘A quaver?’

  I isolated a single pea on my plate and sliced it carefully, absurdly in half, and then into quarters, irritated by his questions.

  ‘A semiquaver?’ my mother added, joining in the joking, perhaps even sending herself up, her own usual role of mediator.

  ‘I’m not allowed to play for another month. Not even scales.’

  ‘Surely you can practise at home.’

  ‘Especially not at home, unsupervised. He wants me to forget everything I’ve been taught.’

  My mother worried: ‘You don’t think that’s going a little too far, John?’

  He snorted. ‘Farmers are paid not to grow crops. We pay Keller to stop Paul making music. Possibly it will increase the value of the product.’

  My mother decided to change the subject. ‘What do you do?’ she asked, ‘during these … consultations?’

  ‘We talk,’ I said. ‘No: he talks. I listen.’

  ‘What did you talk about today?’ She tried to be interested.

  ‘The lengths of fingers.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘He explained that the fingers on our hands are not all the same length.’

  Concerned glances were exchanged between my parents.

  I held up my hand, and mimicked, falsetto: ‘Ze middle finger is longer zan ze forefinger. Ze forefinger …’

  ‘Very profound.’ My father shook his head, bemused. His initial enthusiasm for Keller was beginning to wane.

  ‘There’s more,’ I said. ‘He then told me that the keys on a piano are all the same length.’

  They sat holding their knives and forks above their food, becalmed by curiosity.

  ‘Is there a moral in this?’ my mother eventually asked.

  ‘He asked me what we could do to remedy this … mismatching.’

  ‘Even up our fingers with a hacksaw?’ my father suggested.

  I laughed, wishing I had used the same answer. Then—remembering Keller’s stumpy little finger—I was glad that I hadn’t.

  ‘He also talked about his ancestors.’

  ‘His family?’

  ‘His musical ancestors.’

  ‘Tell us,’ my mother urged.

  ‘Beethoven begat Czerny,’ I recited as best I could. ‘Czerny begat Liszt. Liszt begat Lecherovsky—or someone. And Lecherovsky begat … Keller.’

  My father’s fork again halted mid-air.

  ‘His teacher learnt from Liszt?’

  ‘Apparently.’ I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘Impossible.’ My father shook his head. ‘He must be pulling your leg.’

  My mother rose from the table and tugged the music dictionary, a much-bruised and battered tome, from a nearby bookshelf.

  ‘Liszt died in … 1886,’ she found, flipping rapidly through. ‘What did you say was the name of his teacher?’

  ‘Liszt was taught by Czerny.’

  ‘No
—Herr Keller’s teacher.’

  ‘Lecher something.’

  ‘Leschetizky?’

  ‘Sounds right.’

  She flipped back a few pages.

  ‘Leschetizky. Theodore. 1830-1915 … um … Professor of pianoforte, St Petersburg Conservatorium, 1852-78. Later settled in Vienna where he established his own school.’

  ‘1915.’ My father pursed his lips. ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘He has a poster of Vienna.’ I volunteered. ‘Stuck on the wall.’

  ‘Among his pupils,’ my mother was reading on. ‘Paderewski … Annette Essipoff.’

  Here she paused, then murmured: ‘Good Lord!’

  ‘Let me see.’ My father reached for the book, but she retained a firm grip with both hands and read on:

  ‘Schnabel … Gabrilowitsch … Eduard Keller.’

  A kind of suppressed excitement filled them: they clutched at the dictionary together, shoulders pressing. My father finally rose from the table, and began pacing restlessly.

  ‘Must be a common name, Keller,’ he said. ‘The Smiths of Austria.’

  He paced a little more, not fully convincing himself: ‘What on earth would a man like that be doing in this place?’

  Finding no separate entry under Keller, my mother began plucking other thick books from the nearby shelves—Great Pianists, My Life in Music, Lives of the Virtuosi—searching for clues. Indexes were scrutinised, fruitlessly. Eventually even the record jackets were being pulled from the gramophone cabinet and inspected: the precious Schnabel 78s, the single scratched Paderewski … Then my father:

  ‘I’d heard he was a good teacher. No wonder they call him the maestro. I’d always thought it was a joke. Something to do with his temperament.’

  It might not be the same man,’ my mother reminded him, her own excitement waning a little as if in counterweight to his. ‘Leschetizky probably had any number of students called Keller.’

  But my father wanted to believe.

  ‘Eduard Keller?’ he said. ‘The coincidence is too great.’

  There was no Mozart after tea that night. Instead my father rummaged in the piano stool for some time, emerging finally with a wodge of torn, yellowing scraps of sheet music which he jigsawed together on the tabletop, bandaging the fissures with sticky tape.