The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online

disobedient children brought doom upon themselves in a variety of ways. A little girl, who loved playing with matches, set fire to her dress and was burned to a pile of ash. A boy called Konrad who sucked his thumb had the thumb cut off by a great red-legged scissor-man.
    Weh! Jetzt geht es klipp und klapp
    mit der Scher die Daumen ab,
    mit der grossen scharfen Scher!
    Hei! Da schreit der Konrad sehr.
*
    These stories thrilled Gustav. Partly, they were able to thrill him and not frighten him too badly because the children in the drawings wore old-fashioned clothes, so he assumed that everything that happened to them was safely in the past and couldn’t happen now, when it was almost 1950 . He asked Max if he could borrow
Struwwelpeter
and read it in bed at night. Max hesitated. He warned Gustav that the stories might give him nightmares.
    ‘No, they won’t,’ said Gustav. ‘I’ll just learn to read better, if I read them over and over.’
    He took Max to see his little room, with its map of Mittelland, but with no toys and no books in it, and when Max saw this room he relented and said Gustav could keep
Struwwelpeter
, provided he took care of it. When he asked Gustav why he had no toys, Gustav said, ‘I had a train. But I smashed it and Mutti threw it away.’
    Drawing was something else Max Hodler was gifted at. He drew – very fast, with swift, bold pen-strokes – a picture for Gustav of three men standing in a field of flowers, wearing robes and carrying swords. He explained that these men, from the forest cantons of Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden had lived a long, long time ago at the end of the thirteenth century. It was they who were the true founders of Switzerland. They had defied their powerful Habsburg masters to swear an allegiance and, from this allegiance, the country slowly came into being. Every year, on August 1 st, this historic moment, in what was known as the Rütli Meadow, was remembered as Swiss National Day.
    He told Gustav that not many people ‘in the wider world’ had any knowledge about the history of Switzerland. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is because Switzerland is just an
idea
to them – clocks and chalets and banks and mountains. But we – you and I, Gustav – who are part of it, know that we are not just an idea. And we also know about neutrality,
about the concept of the coconut
, so we must learn our history and be proud of it.’
    He wanted Gustav to try to copy his drawing, or even one small part of it, like a sword or a flower, but Gustav broke in to tell him about the posies of gentians Emilie arranged round the photograph of Erich Perle on Swiss National Day and how Emilie said that he had been a hero.
    Max put down the fine pen he had used for his drawing and turned to Gustav.
    ‘Tell me about that,’ he said. ‘Who was your father?’
    ‘He was a policeman. Assistant Police Chief at Matzlingen Police Headquarters. He died when I was very little.’
    ‘How did he die?’
    ‘I don’t know exactly. Mutti says it was the Jews.’
    Silence fell in the small kitchen. Max Hodler shook his head and sighed, then got down from his chair. ‘I’m going out for a short breath of air,’ he said. ‘See if you can copy something from the Rütli Meadow drawing, Gustav. Anything you like. A face. A hand. The stones among the grass. Don’t hurry. Just work slowly and carefully.’
    It was winter again, just past the new year, 1950 . Gustav had been working with Max Hodler every Sunday for three months.
    Alone in his cold room, Gustav missed his train. He’d given names to the painted people and used to whisper to them as they journeyed up and down the windowsill. The thought that he’d crushed them and killed them made him feel ashamed.
    When he told Anton about this, Anton said, ‘Sometimes, you have to break things. I broke a metronome. I was trying to play a Chopin waltz and it kept going wrong, so I broke the stupid metronome. My father hit me on the bottom with his belt. He