Klaus (8 page)

He had slept for a bit, without dreams, and when he woke, the rain had cleared, the sky was cornflowerblue, and the sun lay on his work-table. It’s possible to go on, he thought, what I wrote last night was perhaps not so bad. If I can work, really and truly work, then I can continue.

Gide had shown him two years ago a letter from an unknown young man who thanked him for having “liberated him from his upbringing in a home full of bourgeois material comfort.” But he had then found himself posing the question, which he called frightening, “Free for what?” He had, as he put it, then detached himself from Gide, but had found no new masters and trembled in uncertainty. “The terrifying absurdity,” he wrote, “of the Sartres and the Camuses has solved nothing and merely opens horizons of suicide…”

Immediately Klaus had wanted to meet this young man and speak with him and find a brother in him.

On the second page of the letter the young man spoke of “the confusion of all our youth” and begged for Gide to offer him “a glimmer which might indicate the direction to take… If there is a direction…”

If indeed!

“Did you reply?”

“Naturally I did. But what could I say except to urge him to submit to no creed or master, and, I said, ‘Be yourself’. I haven’t heard from him again. Doubtless he was disappointed by my message. After all, it’s not easy to be yourself and go your own way. It’s a lonely path, as you well know, Klaus. But what other is worth taking?”

Gide understood him – there was comfort there. And yet Klaus knew that Gide could never inhabit him, for he was quite certain that the old man had never wrestled with the temptation to end it all. His curiosity was insatiable. “Prodigious, really.” All the same, Gide had never let him down. He was an anchor, even if the anchor’s hold was loosening.

Perhaps even Julian and Albert might yet be brought to life. He wasn’t finished, he told himself, drinking a
café crème
sitting outside a bar. He could do it because he was both of them. It was, sadly, a long time since he had been able to make other people seem real enough to matter. He no longer experienced the urgent need to know what others were knowing, to see, hear, feel what for a brief moment they saw, heard and felt. Time had sated his curiosity about others. Still, if he was both Julian and Albert, there were really no others in his novel, except as they encountered or remembered them, and knew alienation. And if news came – as it might any day – that
Mephisto
was at last to be published in Germany, and the German version of his autobiography also, well then…

Besides, his curiosity wasn’t stone dead. That Swedish boy – he could imagine his day, even days. Perhaps he was still in Cannes. Perhaps he was on the beach. He pictured him there like Willi, stretched out on a towel, inviting admiration. He walked a little in that direction, stopping only twice for a glass of white wine; and felt better.

But of course there was no sign of the Swedish boy. He hadn’t really expected him, only hoped, but hoped vaguely, without urgency, as you might elaborate in your mind the details and pleasures of a journey you would never take.

He settled himself at a café table, under a parasol, ordered a beer, to be drunk slowly, to pass the time, kill time. Relaxed, yes, truly, relaxed. Things could be worse.

Nevertheless, all my life I have been essentially second-rate… In the shade of this parasol, in the shadow of the Magician. And my alcoholism and drug addiction… True cause, that I cannot accept life as sold to me. It was the little rat and the brown plague gave it meaning. Now, Othello’s occupation’s gone… Still, for the moment it’s bearable. Who was it said once, no one who’s met you, Klaus, ever forgets you? If only, if only… You should eat. He gestured to the waiter, ordered a sandwich, but when it came, took one mouthful and pushed it aside.

Albert… What to do with Albert? The direction was plain, but details of his daily life – how to supply them when the effort of imagination was too much for him? He consulted his notebook. Yes, he had left him in a café, drinking weak, ersatz, chicoryflavoured coffee and casting back in time, over his broken marriage. The first loss of faith when a relationship in which you have invested what seemed at the time the best of yourself simply withers. The day had arrived when Albert and his wife – what had he called her? – Hildegarde, yes, Hildegarde – she was so unreal to Klaus that he had had to leaf back thirty pages to find the name – when Albert and Hildegarde had faced each other over the suppertable and found that their dialogue had expired. And this wasn’t – or wasn’t entirely – because Klaus could find no words for them to speak to each other. It was also because it was the way it had to be. Albert clung to what remained of his faith in Communism and the Party because it was all that was left to him. His marriage was bare as the branches of a winter tree. And then he is summoned before one of the Party secretaries and accused of bourgeois deviationism because his last newspaper columns have been devoid of optimism. “They show no faith in the future,” he is told, “and this is not permitted.” Which is why Albert is now drinking this substitute for coffee and struggling to supply the Party with what is demanded of him. “You must correct your thinking,” he has been told. “What use is thought if it doesn’t lead to right action?” So he would have to oblige. It was his duty. But he couldn’t find the words for the sentiments that were required. All his life he had been able to find words, and now he couldn’t.

Klaus turned over a couple of pages. What was this?

“After supper she twiddled perfunctorily the knobs of the wireless beside Cousin Francis’s chair – it had pleased him to have the war at his elbow; she was pleased to have only one more and more significant degree of silence added to the library; evidently the battery was dead…”

This wasn’t part of his novel, and it took him a few minutes to remember that it was a passage he had copied out from an English novel by Elizabeth Bowen which he had been reading a few weeks ago. It was the “more and more significant degree of silence” that had appealed to him; also, “evidently the battery was dead…”

Terrible phrase: evidently the battery was dead.

But of course in Germany it hadn’t been long before the post-war battery was recharged. That was the extraordinary thing! It was beyond satire!

A blue-and-white ball was kicked across the roadway and came to rest under his table. A small boy scurried after it and dived on it, knocking against Klaus’s legs. He looked up, beamed a smile and a “Pardon, m’sieu…” and was off to rejoin his friends. He climbed on to the railing overlooking the beach, and sat there with the ball held in both hands. Aware of Klaus’s gaze following him, he waved a hand, and then leaned forward to speak to one of his friends and they both laughed, and jumped off the railing back down to the beach. Klaus watched them run, jostling each other, to the water’s edge and splash each other in the sunshine.

Yes, his life had been like that once.

It was too much. He paid for his beer and the sandwich he hadn’t eaten, and turned away from the sea, back into the town, to another café in an alley which was in shadow. He took a seat at the back of the room, ordered a whisky-and-soda, and lit a cigarette.

It was astonishing how quickly the battery had been recharged. Beyond satire, certainly, though he had attempted that, when speculating how long it would be before Goering’s second wife, the actress Emmy Sonnemann, was back on the Berlin stage.

“Perhaps,” he’d written, “one of those gassed in Auschwitz has left a play in which this fine lady could make her comeback? For of course she will have known nothing about Auschwitz, will she? And besides, what has Art to do with Politics?” He had written these sentences with relish.

What had provoked the essay was news of Gustaf’s return to the Berlin stage. He had spent some months as a prisoner of the Russians, had apparently won the favour of the camp commandant by staging a theatrical production and been released. Now he was about to test the loyalty of his public. The performance was a sell-out, well before the first night. It was with difficulty that Klaus, who had flown in fascinated curiosity to Berlin, managed to get hold of a black market ticket. It was a comedy by Carl Sternheim, set in Wilhelmine Germany. Gustaf produced it and played the lead – of course he did – what else would have been tolerable? The curtain rose to show him alone on stage, sitting at a desk, and this was met with thunderous applause that lasted at least five minutes before he was able to speak. He sat there smiling the while, and there was a comparable manifestation of enthusiasm at the final curtain, even though, Klaus thought, Gustaf hadn’t actually been right for the part. What did it signify? he had wondered then and asked in the piece he wrote about the evening. He still wondered, could come to no conclusion even now, except this: no matter what he had done, who he had betrayed, how he had prostrated himself before Goering and Goebbels and the little rat, Gustaf remained the darling of Berlin, pre-Nazi, Nazi and now post-Nazi Berlin. Klaus was not only puzzled by it; he felt defeated.

But he knew what Gide would say. “Prodigieux, n’est-ce pas?” And it was indeed; truly prodigious.

He called for another whisky. It was a nice bar, a safe one, dingy, quiet, only one table occupied by blue-overalled workers playing cards and drinking red wine. He closed his eyes, content to listen to their muttered comments on the game and the occasional cry of triumph as a trick was taken. Perhaps he dozed off for a little. Then he heard the click-clack of table football and opened his eyes.

It was the Swedish boy, still in the washed-out blue shorts but now wearing a red shirt. There was a girl with him, also blonde. They were intent on the game and laughed often. Klaus watched them, wondering for a moment if they were really there or belonged to a dream. Then the boy turned and caught sight of him.

“Hey, Klaus,” he cried and took the girl by the arm and brought her over to the table, saying something to her in Swedish as he did so.

“This is Ingrid,” he said. “We met again and made up. Is that right? Made up?”

“It’s right.”

Without waiting to be asked he pulled out a chair for her and himself leaned over and shook Klaus by the hand. Then he sat down and crossed his legs, resting his right ankle on his left knee. He smiled broadly.

“It’s great to see you again.”

His shirt was unbuttoned to the waist and his chest was smooth and hairless, his belly flat.

Klaus beckoned to the barman and Stefan said he would have a beer and Ingrid a lemonade.

“And another whisky-soda for me,” Klaus said.

The boy explained how he’d gone to the station intending to take a train to Italy because if you come south and don’t go on to Italy then everyone in Sweden thinks you’re crazy, really crazy, and he’d found Ingrid there sitting on her rucksack and weeping.

“So I felt a heel, like they say in the movies – that’s where I get my American expressions, you know – because she was unhappy and maybe I’d been in the wrong when we quarrelled. So we made up and we’re together again, and it’s great. Isn’t it great, honey?”

“It’s OK,” the girl said, “but you’re right, you really were a heel.”

“Ingrid reads books. She’s educated, not like me. She’s a student of literature. Maybe she’s read some of yours, Klaus. Have you been translated into Swedish?”

“Once or twice.”

“What’s your name?” she said. “Stefan has just called you ‘Klaus’, nothing more.”

“That’s all I told him. We were only on first-name terms, nothing more. But it’s ‘Mann’.”

“Mann? Did you write
Dr Faustus
?”

“No. That was my father.”

“Your father? He’s famous, isn’t he? Won the Nobel, yes? I started reading it in German, but I got stuck. It was too difficult. Stefan said you’re American. How come?”

“I used to be German,” he said, and gave her a smile, “but now I’m American…”

As much as I’m anything, he thought.

The boy tried to keep the conversation going, as if he really wanted them to like each other, and also as if he was showing each off to the other. Klaus did what he could to help him. He watched the boy’s mouth and the faint dampness on his cheekbones. The girl looked sulky.

“So you ran away from Germany,” she said, “and didn’t fight in the war?”

“Klaus was in the American army,” the boy said.

“Didn’t you feel some kind of a traitor when German cities were being bombed and destroyed? I’ve seen some of the destruction. My parents took me to Germany in ’46. My mother’s mother was German. She was homeless, her house in Stuttgart bombed, and we brought her home to Sweden. She was a nervous wreck. She never recovered and we had to put her in a home. It was awful.”

“Yes,” Klaus said, “I can see it must have been. But the Germans brought it on themselves.”

“Not my grandmother,” she said.

“So she was one of Hitler’s victims too,” he said, hoping to conciliate her, but wondering, as he always did on such occasions, how the grandmother had voted in ’33.

Conversation languished. Then she said she had to go freshen up.

Klaus touched the boy’s arm.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve offended her.”

“That’s all right. She’s easily offended. She’s difficult. I’m not sure we’ve really made up. She says she doesn’t know if she can really trust me again.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know, do I? She’s like that. Girls are, in my experience. The grandmother was a rabid Nazi, by the way. I’ve heard her speak with my father… The pair of them just the same. It disgusted me.”

“It was easy to be a Nazi then,” Klaus said. “I always knew that, though I never understood why.”

When the girl came back she made it clear she wanted to be off. This time it was Stefan who leaned over and kissed Klaus on the cheek. Perhaps he did so to irritate the girl. Klaus didn’t know, but the little gesture pleased him.

“Look after yourselves,” he said. “Be happy. I think it’s perhaps possible again to be happy.”

For others anyway, he thought.

As they stepped out into the late afternoon, the boy turned and raised his hand and smiled. Klaus lifted his hand in reply.
Moriturus, te saluo
.