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The speciality of the Matzlingen Co-operative was Emmental, made from the milk of the Emme valleys. Sounding like a tour guide, Emilie announced to Gustav, 'There are many fine inventions in Switzerland and Emmental cheese is one of them.' But in spite of its fineness, the sales of Emmental – both within Switzerland and to all those countries outside it, still struggling to rebuild themselves after the war – were unreliable. And if sales were down, the bonuses paid to the cheese workers at Christmas and on National Day could be disappointing.
Waiting to see what her bonus was going to be would put Emilie Perle into a trance of anxiety. She would sit at the kitchen shelf (it wasn't a table, just a shelf on a hinge, where she and Gustav sat to eat their meals) doing her sums on the grey edges of the Matzlingerzeitung, the local newspaper. The newsprint always blurred her arithmetic. Nor did her figures keep to their columns, but wandered over the réportage of Schwingen Competitions and the sightings of wolves in the nearby forests. Sometimes, the hectic scribblings were blurred a second time by Emilie's tears. She'd told Gustav never to cry. But it seemed that this rule didn't apply to her, because there were times, late at night, when Gustav would creep out of his room to find Emilie weeping over the pages of the Matzlingerzeitung.
At these moments, her breath often smelled of aniseed and she would be clutching a glass clouded with yellow liquid, and Gustav felt afraid of these things – of her aniseed breath and the dirty glass and his mother's tears. He would climb onto a stool beside her and watch her out of the corner of his grey eyes, and soon, Emilie would blow her nose and reach out to him and say she was sorry. He would kiss her moist, burning cheek and then she would lift him up, staggering a little under the weight of him, and carry him back to his room.
But in the year that Gustav turned five, no Christmas bonuses were paid at all and Emilie was forced to take a second job on Saturday mornings, as a cleaner in the Protestant Church of Sankt Johann.
She said to Gustav, 'This is work you can help me with.' So they went out together very early, before the town was properly awake, before any light showed in the sky. They walked through the snow, following two frail torchlight beams, their breath condensing inside their woollen mufflers. When they arrived at the church, this, too, was dark and cold. Emilie turned on the two greenish strip lights on either side of the nave and they began their tasks, tidying the hymn books, dusting the pews, sweeping the stone floor, polishing the brass candlesticks. They could hear owls calling outside in the waning dark.
As the daylight grew stronger, Gustav always returned to his favourite task. Kneeling on a hassock, pushing the hassock along as he went, he'd clean the iron grating that ran down the length of the aisle. He pretended to Emilie that he had to do this job very carefully, because the ironwork had ornate patterns in it and his rag had to go round these and in and out of them, and she said, 'All right, Gustav, that's good. Doing your job carefully is good.'
But what she didn't know was that Gustav was searching for objects which had fallen through the grating and which lay there in the dust. He thought of this strange collection as his 'treasure'. Only hands as small as his could retrieve them. Now and again, he did find money, but it was always the kind of low-value money with which nothing could be bought. More usual items were hairpins, withered flower petals, cigarette stubs, sweet wrappings, paper clips and nails made of iron. He knew that these things were of no account, but he didn't mind. One day, he found a brand-new lipstick in a golden case. He designated this his 'chief treasure'.
Excerpted from The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain. Copyright © 2016 by Rose Tremain. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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