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  After regaining his composure – and breath – Fuller raised his head and looked down at the town: “Clervaux was like an inferno”, he later reported. “The Panthers roared through the ruins and fired at close range into house after house, where a few scattered and desperate G.I.s were still offering resistance. Above the burning buildings there was a dense cloud of smoke, as if from burning oil, occasionally rent by flares and searchlight beams.”

  With his comrades, Fuller managed to struggle the fifteen kilometres through the forest to Wiltz, while the remnants of his troops barricaded themselves in the old chateau and held out for another twenty-four hours beneath a massive bombardment from all sides (including phosphorus shells), but when that too was over the Germans stormed the building to find only dead and wounded, except for in the chateau’s smouldering ballroom, where a solitary G.I. was playing the piano – jazz.

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  All this happened a long time ago, but jazz and the war and Clervaux have pursued me for twenty-five years; the soldier at the piano was eventually to father one of the main characters in this novel, although the child was conceived under such enigmatic circumstances that it took me quite a few years to identify him as the perpetrator. When the Germans attacked the battered chateau they were so astounded to find a man absorbed in Scott Joplin amidst the hail of bullets that they quite forgot to kill him. Instead they took him prisoner and dumped him in a jeep with two wounded German soldiers, after which the men were sent behind the lines to Germany. But the Dasburg road was blocked by advancing panzer columns, so they had to take forest roads and here they were in unknown territory, both the attackers and those under attack, on top of which, after nightfall, the vehicles broke down in mud and slush.

  The trio had to set off on foot – a musical G.I., a German officer with one arm in a sling and an infantryman with one mangled eye and the other covered by a blood-stained bandage (fortunately with his pockets full of amphetamines, though) – as best they could, and they ended up – literally – following Colonel Fuller’s footsteps to Wiltz, which was now also in Wehrmacht hands; however, it took them more than two days to cover the fifteen kilometres, and by then Fuller and his sorry crew had fallen into the clutches of the Germans out of sheer exhaustion; Cota had had to abandon the town, more or less in a state of panic.

  As a result, the Pianist once again came face to face with his superior officer, Fuller, who demanded a correct military salute before giving him a brief embrace, also in the correct manner, and informing him that: All life has to offer is a deferment of the inevitable, young man. We’re going to die here, since we didn’t do so in Clervaux.

  Wiltz had to be held at all costs (Hitler’s orders), so they had rigged up a kind of prison area, a combination of torture chamber and field hospital, I later learned (possibly from a not entirely reliable source, the mother of one of this novel’s main protagonists), where the prisoners were alternately given beatings and medical treatment behind the thin partitions; the Germans were primarily interested in discovering the location of the Allies’ fuel supplies in the Ardennes; indeed lack of fuel was to prove fatal for Manteuffel.

  As a result of a beating, the Pianist lost his hearing in one ear and the use of his left hand. But five days after his arrival he escaped with the help of a Belgian nurse, one of the civilians in Wiltz who had been ordered to serve the Germans. She was a couple of years older than he was, tall and slim and blonde, like in a fairy tale, intelligent, headstrong and romantic. Her name was Maria and she fell head-over-heels for “this odd American” who with “his crazy good humour” managed to keep up the spirits of his fellow prisoners (“and me”) even here “in the depths of hell”, as she was later to confide to her closely guarded diary.

  And they became a couple.

  He simulated an epileptic fit which was so like the symptoms described in the medical manuals that the “idiot” in charge of the field hospital transferred him to a more humane department where supervision was slacker. Shortly afterwards the guards held an improvised party, thanks to the confiscation of a stash of Letzebuerger Kirsch (it was the fall of St Vith that was being celebrated, somewhat prematurely, it turned out), and the Pianist got up, sneaked out unseen into the latrines, removed the window from a wall using a screwdriver and crept out naked into the snow. The Belgian angel was waiting for him, her eyes filled with love and panic and her arms holding enough underwear to equip an army through a Russian winter; she put several layers on him and draped a German uniform over the top; they strolled out past the guard (who saluted), arm in arm as young lovers do, left the road as soon as they were out of sight, cut across a white field and were swallowed up by the forest.

  So as not to leave a trail behind them they followed the farmers’ footprints, zigzagging back to Clervaux, of all places, where they sought refuge on the outskirts of the ravaged town at an abandoned farm in the valley near Abbaye St Maurice, the childhood home of one of Maria’s student friends, a farm, by the way, which this friend had no desire to see again after the war – she lost several of her nearest and dearest there – and which therefore in due course she would let Maria takeover for a nominal sum. But here, in a deserted farm behind one of the war’s least clearly defined fronts, the Belgian woman and the American pianist spent the next month in total isolation, or “in each other’s arms” as she expresses it in her diary.

  But then peace came, it didn’t arrive as suddenly as the offensive, but came in fits and starts, and the Pianist became more and more restless as the Allied planes droned overhead in thick swarms on their way into the Reich bringing death and destruction together with civilised hopes of creating calm in Europe once and for all. And when, towards the end of January, some passing civilians – on their way home – told the couple that Manteuffel had run out of fuel before Christmas, had suffered bloody defeats at Bastogne and Celles and had not managed to reach Maas or Antwerpen, the Pianist hastened to join an Allied unit rumoured to have established itself in the border town of Vianden, about thirty kilometres south-east of Clervaux, making his way there, once again, on foot.

  The two lovers looked into each other’s eyes, promised eternal fidelity and went their separate ways. “It was something he absolutely had to do, which could not on any account be postponed,” Maria writes bitterly in her diary, in English, in upright handwriting. For that was the last she saw of him. The Pianist deserted her. Or the war took him. He deserted both her love and his redeeming angel. Or the war destroyed everything. But not before he had become father to one of the main characters in this novel – Maria’s son, Robert.

  Later, incidentally, she found out that the Pianist might have been a Canadian, that he had been living in the Luxembourg capital when hostilities broke out, as a kind of bohemian who entertained at cafés and cabarets for tips and other handouts. Thereafter he threw himself into the war against Hitler, like so many others in this courageous little country, which he eventually identified with, seeing himself as much more than a polite guest.

  But there were only very few and very vague indications to support this Canada theory: “something he had said”, she argued without being very specific, “some place name”, and a certain knowledge of French that pointed to Quebec, but with her weakness for tragic heroism and her inability to distinguish her life from others’ she could just as well have exaggerated these details. Earlier that autumn (1944) – before Wiltz, that is – she had, you see, served at a field hospital on the outskirts of Antwerp, when the Canadian First Army, showing almost complete disregard for their own safety, wrested control of Scheldemunningen, opening the port of Antwerp to shipping, in the Battle of the Scheldt, as it is called in her encyclopaedia of World War Two, an engagement that has, incidentally, been described as “the worst ever theatre of war” – albeit in Allied military history – in which both the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force bombed the dykes and submerged the battlefield in water, with the result that those who were not killed in the fighting most likely froze to death in
the icy water. In South Beveland Maria had some family who survived by hiding under a sail in a rotting boat for days. The nightmare lasted an eternity, and Maria may have suffered a spiritual cataclysm as she spent day after day and night after night stooped over Canadian soldiers who were dying in her hands; and this turmoil may have later caused her to risk her life for a total stranger (the Pianist, because she thought he could have been Canadian) and also to confuse the two experiences, at any rate subsequently, when she had to fit the pieces together to find an explanation, the strangest of explanations.

  For a long time after the war she corresponded with several of these “Canadian saviours of ours”, or with their surviving relatives, and contributed in this way to making an interest in Canada, of all countries, one of this tiny family’s many quirks. When her son grew up, hers and the Pianist’s that is – he will soon be introduced – he got to know more about Canada, for example, than her own country, Belgium: the names of towns, climatic conditions, its history and the depth of Lake Huron – 228 metres.

  But none of these theories about the origins of the Pianist could ever be confirmed. Or refuted. So for the son – and presumably for his mother, too – he will forever be “some sort of American” who in all probability made his living as a cabaret artist in various European towns in the years leading up to 1940 – it is at least not wholly impossible, an artist on the run from his own roots – until his conscience and the seriousness of events caught up with him, the war and a Belgian nurse.

  “There was a freedom about the war,” Maria was wont to exclaim at emotional moments, “which I have never experienced either before or since.”

  One might wonder whether the word “freedom” was well chosen, but this was a basic concept in her religiosity, the way other Catholics adhere to Mutter Gottes, Ave Maria and Lourdes. And it is an irrefutable fact that the whole of Maria’s existence (and thereby also her son’s) revolved around this one incomprehensible winter month of 1944–45, the quiet month of conception, peace in the eye of the hurricane, and that everything related to this was collected in photo albums, boxes, voluminous scrapbooks on bookshelves, and was read, studied, checked and scrutinised until, at the beginning of the 1970s, large quantities of the material ended up in the War Museum, founded in the meticulously restored chateau at Clervaux. In addition, the only thing that gave her childhood any meaning was that it led to that same climax, 1944, while the years after (when her son was a child) were a source of shame since they allowed the golden apogee to slip further and further behind her and everyone else. One might well say that time was her bitterest enemy. And the situation did not improve when – some time in her fifties – she began to say:

  “Yes, those were the days.” A sentence she articulated with the same heart-rending valour with which intelligent women throughout history have always contemplated their fading beauty.

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  But she did have one palpable memory, the living proof that the whole thing had not been a dream: a son, whom she bore one beautiful October day in the greatest year of peace ever and whom she immediately named Robert after his absent father; he was his spitting image, he didn’t look like her at all, nor anyone in her family, the boy was a “sort of American” (him, too) and she was not ashamed to admit it, to have borne and raised this war child, there were enough other births in the region with a far more dubious origin.

  The first ten years of peace passed with a receding hope, in the mother (and to a certain degree also in the son), that the Pianist would return – people don’t vanish into thin air, she would often say, not even in a war, at times there are the most incredible family reunions. (She was much mistaken with regard to the former: in the Ardennes Offensive three times as many American soldiers went missing in action as fell in combat). Moreover, the Pianist didn’t only owe her his fragmented life, she insisted, he also loved her, as she loved him, so he wasn’t staying away out of choice; this love was a credo in her and her son’s home, their vespers and catechism.

  “He loves me,” she would say again and again, always in the present tense and especially after a couple of glasses of wine, like a staccato incantation, with hope and supplication in her faltering voice, though on occasion also with great conviction.

  Thus the two most obvious explanations for the man failing to return were not even touched upon: either he had been killed on the dangerous journey to Vianden (there were mines and unexploded shells everywhere, and Vianden was not liberated until well into February, which meant that he could easily have walked straight into a German foxhole); or else, of course, he had fabricated the whole Vianden story in order to cover his tracks: for the things he “absolutely” had to see to, which “could not be postponed”, might have been something as mundane as a family, wife and children.

  Robert himself – as he gradually began to get these matters clear in his mind – opted for the first explanation, a sudden death in a chaotic war zone, but he couldn’t ignore the fact that the Pianist didn’t actually need any family or any other external reasons as a pretext for staying away; Robert’s mother could be very demanding, especially in terms of love and idealism, and what man in times of peace can live up to a myth he has created in war, show me a man who wants to spend the rest of his life feeling “rescued” in the company of his rescuer, a woman, moreover, to whom he owes an eternal debt of gratitude and so on…?

  The son was never sure which theory gave her the consolation she craved. But from her behaviour he presumed she must have concluded something along the lines that the Pianist was still looking for her, feverishly but blindly, due to memory loss, shell shock or as a consequence of a regular war neurosis. On several occasions she remarked that she had found herself in a coma-like condition from February to late autumn that year, throughout her pregnancy that is, with the consequence that all these months had completely vanished from her memory, the happy and unhappy times as they must have been, all in one tangled mess.

  As Robert Junior grew up, and whenever the subject was not completely taboo (it was at times), he would ask her what the two of them had talked about during the month or so they were holed up, an ocean of time really, if you tot up the hours, the days and weeks that form a whole month for two lonely people – what clues might the Pianist have given her about himself and his background in that period?

  But the pickings must have been lean because she always became vague and guilt-ridden when he broached the subject, and it would have come as no surprise to him if they had just spent the time fooling around and doing all the other things life offers two young people who want nothing more than to shut out the insane world around them. Later she must have regretted this frivolity, but of course she didn’t have the slightest inkling that her man would suddenly be gone, this woman who had now found a meaning in her life here in the midst of war, regained her hold on life after South Beveland, she trusted her love, and his, though neither spoke the other’s language very well – French was his preference while she did not acquire a good command of English until later.

  When eventually she did, however, she made several attempts to contact the Pianist’s superior officers. She wrote letters to Colonel Fuller and Norman D. Cota, who both survived the horrors and returned home as highly decorated war heroes. She didn’t hear a word from Fuller, while Cota wrote semi-psychotic letters in which he asserted that “Europe is now in the midst of a difficult period of reconstruction that will claim further victims among an already hard-tried population, but the cradle of civilisation has survived crises before…” and so on. And only as an afterthought did he mention that unfortunately he had no knowledge of any pianist. Maria should also remember that Fuller was the commanding officer in Clervaux and there were not many survivors…

  She wanted to reply at once and point out that there was no doubt about it, the Pianist had escaped, it was beyond discussion, she described his brief imprisonment in Wiltz, together with Fuller, furthermore, and afterwards the scramble back to Clervaux. But at thi
s point she suddenly broke down, tore up the sheet of paper and scattered the pieces around her with a wail of despair: “Have I dreamt all this up? I can’t remember a thing!!”

  That was the first and only time Robert saw his mother so overwrought. And it didn’t last long. The very next evening she sat down and composed a new letter to Cota, with a detailed description of the whole course of events, almost identical to what the son would later find in her diary. But this letter did not lead anywhere either; she didn’t even have the Pianist’s full name (it was her desperation about this that had caused the anguish the day before); she had just called him Bobby (a name her son refused to let pass his lips and which even today he is reluctant to use), but of course it was a short form for Robert, and there were many Roberts in the Allied ranks in the Ardennes, though no musicians or pianists who had been in Clervaux, or none of his age …for she had noted his date of birth on the G.I. tag he wore around his neck, 12–1–1919, because on that day – his 26th birthday, 12 January, 1945 – she had surprised him with a roasted goose she had managed to purloin from one of the evacuated neighbouring farms.

  This roast dinner, which Robert Junior on one occasion in his adolescent thoughtlessness had called “The Last Supper” (earning himself a stinging slap), was incidentally one of the many war memories that gave rise to rituals in the humble existences of the mother and son which were preserved long into peacetime. Roasted goose was their favourite dish, it was often on the menu, especially in the winter, and always frugally prepared like a kosher meal in the desert. And for Junior to intimate that he wasn’t particularly keen on poultry or that he forced it down so as not to hurt her feelings was not an option – that would only have hurt her more. In this way she was allowed to persist with her misconception that he loved goose as much as the piano lessons she sent him to three times a week, with one of her colleagues at the secondary school in Clervaux, where she taught classical languages – nursing was something she had learned in a hurry when the war broke out.