Klaus (9 page)

I’ll never see him again, he thought. Yet we had a moment of intimacy. If I had met him again without the girl… might he have… pointless to think of it.

Perhaps he might give him to Albert, in the guise of a boy who should have been lost when everything he had been taught in the Hitler Youth crumbled about him, but who had been able, on account of his natural vitality, to shrug it off? And Albert might set himself to destroy him precisely because he found this vitality intolerable? Could I imagine that, he thought, I who long to be swept up in the arms of such vitality?

He remembered the two German prisoners he had interviewed in Italy in May ’44. He’d called them Fritz and Peter in the article he’d written. Peter was a corporal in his thirties. He had been a schoolmaster. He had never joined the Party. “Certainly,” he said, “from ’33 to ’41 things went pretty well. But I always thought it was a fairy-tale that would end badly. Now we can only hope that the regime collapses before Germany is utterly destroyed.”

Then he’d called in Fritz, a lieutenant, aged twentytwo or -three. A handsome blond boy ashamed to have allowed himself to be taken prisoner… Twelve or so when the Nazis came to power, he had joined the Hitler Youth and revelled in it. “It was marvellous,” he said, exhaustion fading from his eyes as he spoke.” But then the Bolshevists and the international Jewish plutocracy forced war on Germany. “You really believe that, do you?” Klaus said.

The boy flushed. “Everyone knows it’s true, everyone who has not been taken in by Jewish lies.”

“And do you still believe Germany can win this war?”

“But of course, we shall win it because we have to. I admit that things are going badly just now, but that will change. There’s word, you know, of a new secret weapon that is being prepared. It will change everything.”

“And have you no regrets?”

“Yes, certainly, I regret that I have been taken prisoner. I would have preferred to die for the Führer…”

Well, that hadn’t been permitted him. He had been sent to a camp in England. And what would have become of him since, five years later? Was he still spouting the same repulsive nonsense?

Klaus hadn’t been able to hate him. Indeed he had felt sorry for the boy who didn’t speak what he recognised as German, only Nazi-German. Could he have been brought to see the foul absurdity of all he had been reared to believe in?

He called for another whisky-soda. It wouldn’t be dark for hours yet.

Hours later in velvet night he found himself at the Zanzi Bar again. He had come there without hope of finding Miki, whose employer had decided they should sail to Corsica; but there was nowhere else and he felt hollow to the pit of his stomach. He ordered a whisky-soda. He didn’t know how many he had had in the other bar after the Swedish boy walked out of his life for the second and surely last time, but it was one of those nights when he couldn’t get drunk, no matter how many whiskies he downed. He had wanted that lieutenant Fritz, all the more keenly because his words were so stupid and horrible and he disgusted him and he knew he couldn’t have him. And of course he had reminded him of Willi, just like the Swedish boy.

The bar was busy, full of smoke and laughter with an undercurrent of despair. There was a nice-looking sailor-boy snuggling up to a fat old Egyptian who was stroking the boy’s neck. No one approached Klaus’s table. I look old and ill and poor, he thought, the Egyptian stinks of money. There were rings on the fingers now pressing on the sailor’s shoulder…

A man in a crumpled linen suit rose from a corner table and made for the lavatory. It was Guy Probyn. The boy at his table lifted his hand and waved towards Klaus, who recognised him as the one from the Villa Mauresque. When he saw he had caught Klaus’s attention, the boy’s mouth opened and his tongue flicked from side to side. Well, why not? Klaus picked up his glass and crossed the room to join him. The boy got up and offered his face for a kiss. Klaus obliged.

“I’m so glad to see you again,” the boy said. “I’m Eddie, remember? I didn’t dare speak to you the other day. I was afraid Willie would be jealous. He’s so possessive, you can’t imagine, even if it gave him pleasure that day to treat me like dirt. And I was so disappointed when you left because I wanted to tell you I really adored your
Alexander
. Willie pretends I can’t read, but really and truly I read lots, and I loved, just loved, that novel. So there…”

“Sweet of you,” Klaus said. “I was very young, like you, when I wrote that.”

“Well, I adored it. I’m delighted to have the chance to tell you so.”

Klaus was reminded of the famous critic who made a point of telling authors how much he had enjoyed and admired the first novel they had published, with the implication that they had never done anything half as good again. But this boy Eddie wasn’t like that; he wanted to please Klaus and it was probable that
Alexander
was the only book of his he had read. So he didn’t say, as he might have in other circumstances, “I’ve written better since.”

Guy Probyn loomed over them.

“So you two know each other.”

“We met at the Villa Mauresque,” Klaus said.

“Ah yes. The old lady said you’d been to lunch, he thought you looked distressed. Talented, he said, but will he ever make anything of it? You shouldn’t worry. I’ve heard him express the same doubts about every writer half his age. We’ve been banished this evening, Eddie and I. Important guests we’re not grand enough to be allowed to meet. The ex-King of England and Her Royal Highness, as he insists she must be called, no less… Of course Willie has to keep up appearances in such company. It’s ridiculous because it’s not even as if it makes him happy. So I thought Eddie might benefit from a spot of louche life. Not that there’s much in evidence here tonight…”

The boy fluttered his long dark eyelashes and looked sideways at Klaus…

“I don’t mind,” he said. “Willie snubs me in company, and at these grand dinners I never know which piece of cutlery to use next.”

He smiled, modestly, to suggest he was an
ingénu
, perhaps. Actually he’s a nice kid and a pretty boy and I think I could detach him from Guy and have him without much trouble, but he’s not the Swedish boy whom I can’t have.

“We could all do with another drink.”

Later Guy Probyn said, “I finished
Mephisto
and I haven’t changed my mind. It’s very good, I grant you, even brilliant, but, speaking as a friend of Gustaf, I can’t but conclude that the way you treat him stinks.”

Klaus felt unutterably weary. He picked up his glass.

“Perhaps because I’m no longer his friend, I can’t agree with you. And perhaps also because I remain in some way German and can’t forgive those who collaborated with the regime and, in Gustaf’s case, licked the Fat Man’s well-polished boots.”

“You’re harsh, Klaus, very harsh. That’s why you will never be more than second-rate. You lack sympathy. Your father would have understood him as you don’t. ‘Brother Hitler’, you know. But you divide your characters into those you like and those you don’t and you can’t be fair to the second lot. Princess Tebab, for instance, she’s absurd, you don’t begin to understand a woman like that. You can’t. Ah, there’s Billie. Excuse me while I have a word with the slut.”

He clapped Klaus on the shoulder as if he was a comrade to whom he was entitled to speak sharply…

“He doesn’t like you, does he?” the boy said.

“Not a lot, it seems.”

“I don’t much like him myself.”

He took hold of Klaus’s hand and pressed it on his own thigh.

“Yes?” he said.

“No,” he said, “no, not tonight anyway. I’m old and tired and a little drunk.”

“But you like me? Another time? You know where to find me.”

“That might be difficult.”

“Don’t worry, I’d find a way.”

He leaned over and kissed Klaus on the lips, very softly.

“See?” he said. “We could have fun. We would have fun. That book he was running down, I’d like to read it. Mr Maugham pretends I can’t read, but I read a lot.”

Klaus felt tears prick his eyes, but he mustn’t weep, not here, where Guy Probyn might think he was the cause. And it wasn’t like that. It was like he didn’t know what. You can’t go home again, and this boy… who, aware that Guy was coming back, had gently returned him his hand.

“Time we were off, young fellow. The curfew tolls the knell of parting day. I promised Alan I’d get you back for beddy-byes. The old lady’s a stickler for punctuality, as you know, and their Royal Highnesses will have bored him silly, so he’ll be in a vile temper if you’re late. Good seeing you, Klaus. Hope the present work’s going well.”

He swept the boy away, but, as they reached the door, Eddie turned and smiled and again flicked his tongue from side to side. Klaus beckoned to the barboy, and asked for another whisky-soda.

“A very very large one.”

Billie shimmied to his table, pulled out a chair and sat down.

“Buy me a drink, will you, please. You’re a friend of Miki, aren’t you? He’s a good friend of mine too. That Monsieur Probyn, he’s a piece of shit. The things he said to me. He’s no right to speak to me like that, just because he has rented me a couple of times.”

The barboy brought Klaus his whisky-soda in a large tumbler and looked enquiringly at Billie.

“Please buy me a drink,” he said, “I really need it and I’m skint.”

“Why not?” Klaus said. “The same for this gentleman.”

Billie giggled.

“Gentleman?” he said, “you’re a sport, you really are. Gentleman, that’s not the description I usually get. Take me home with you later?”

Klaus shook his head.

“I’m not in the mood. So drink your whisky. You’re quite right about Monsieur Probyn, though, you’ve got him nicely summed up.”

Klaus woke with words in his head. What do men want from me? Why do they pursue me? Why are they so hard on me? All I am is a perfectly ordinary actor…

A perfectly ordinary actor… They were the final words he had given to Hendrik who was Gustaf, the last sentence of
Mephisto
. Didn’t this howl of puzzled indignation do him justice, whatever Guy Probyn thought? And wouldn’t Gustaf, if he had truly read the novel, have realised that, despite everything, Klaus understood that his ambition and egotism had driven him into a wasteland of despair? Wasn’t there sympathy in these last words?

In a sense he had written them despite himself, despite his resentment and the contempt he had felt. Brother Hendrik, Brother Gustaf…

He was curiously serene, as if he found himself on dry land after danger of drowning and experiencing the most violent sea-sickness. Washed out, but serene. Yes it was indeed strange, “prodigious really”.

The sun was shining, as if it too was surprised to be free of clouds.

“Albert,” he wrote, “knew a moment of lucidity: you didn’t have to believe in the future to endure the present. He turned over another card. It was just possible that this time his game of Patience would work out. Black two on Red three.”

Strange: he hadn’t thought that Albert would have a moment of something that felt almost like hope. Well, how would he feel when Klaus returned to him next?

It was time to dress. He had a lunch engagement. Doris, a friend since their youth, was one of the few people, not counting family and boys, with whom he could still bear to spend time. He didn’t have to wear a mask for her. She always knew how bad things were with him.

“OK, Klaus,” she would say, “the avalanche is descending, the floor’s about to give way, nevertheless, we’ve survived worse.”

And she would make him laugh: extraordinary.

He ran a comb through his hair, what was left of it. How miserable he had been when the first signs of baldness appeared. And now it didn’t matter.

In the streets people exchanged smiles with each other, all on account of the sun, there might still be something of even this miserable spring to be salvaged. A ginger cat basking on a wall allowed him to scratch it behind the ear, and purred warmly. In the middle of a little square half a dozen small boys were kicking a football and crowing with what must be happiness, animal pleasure in simply being. From an open window came the sound of music he paused to listen. A song he knew. Charles Trenet, “Bonsoir, jolie madame.” The effortless line of the melody. Even the policemen looked happy.

Doris was late. She was always late. It was her one selfishness. It was, he knew, because she hated to be kept waiting herself. It frayed her nerves, she had said, often. “I can’t help it, it’s stronger than I am,” she would excuse herself.

He took a seat at a corner table on the terrace by an oleander bush. The waiter, old enough to be his father, his waistcoat spotted with stains no cleaning could remove, brushed invisible crumbs from the pink tablecloth. Klaus asked for a gin-and-Dubonnet. He didn’t know why. It was something he hadn’t drunk for years. But it was all right. It was – almost – as if everything was all right.

Here she was, only ten minutes late. They embraced.

“What’s that you’re drinking, darling?”

“Gin-and-Dubonnet.”

“What a good idea!”

“How was Paris?”

“Wet.”

“It’s been wet here, raining for days. Now you’re back, the sun’s come out.”

“Flatterer. How have you been?”

Klaus gestured vaguely, as if shrugging his shoulders would be too much trouble.

“You look better,” she said. “In fact, you look good. The clinic obviously worked.”

“I suppose so – if it’s obvious, it must have.”

“All the same, Paris was, well, Paris. I walked in the Luxembourg, went to exhibitions, not that the new painters are much good. Oh, and I did as you asked, went to the Tournon and had a drink for Roth.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I think of him often, you know.”

“Yes, poor man.”

On another day he might have replied, “Poor both of us,” but now he smiled and took hold of her hand.

The waiter brought the menu. They ordered an omelette, to be followed by red mullet, grilled with tarragon.

“And frites,” Doris said. “I know I’m too fat. Nevertheless…”

“Frites it is then,” Klaus said.

It was extraordinary. He was hungry. He had an appetite.

“And a bottle of Tavel,” he said.

Because the sun was shining? Because he had drunk it with the Swedish boy?

“Have you met anyone nice?” she said. “That’s what you really need, Klaus. Someone nice to be in love with. Then you could forget all the nonsense.”

The dribble of soup which had escaped the boy’s mouth and glistened gold between his lower lip and chin.

“You read my thoughts,” he said. “But there’s no one.”

“Never mind,” she said, “we’ve got each other.”

“So you’re not in love either?”

“I’m always in love,” she said, “and it’s always hopeless. This one says she truly loves her husband. Imagine that,” she laughed.

“What a pair of failures we are!”

“But we’ve got each other.”

“So we have.”

After the fish, they had a salad, and then a flan. They drank coffee and Doris had a Cointreau and Klaus an Armagnac. Then they strolled to the public garden and sat on a bench and Doris put her arm around him and said, “Let’s play at journeys. Where shall we go?”

“North Africa,” he said, “Marrakesh.”

“That’s good. We can get a boat from Marseilles.”

When, later, they parted, Doris saying, “She’s agreed to meet me this afternoon because her husband’s away on business,” Klaus remained on the bench, smoking. He sat there for a long time as afternoon turned to evening, at peace with himself, remembering the sweetness of youth, walks by the Isar or the Neckar, picnics in the park, the unfolding of innumerable possible futures. He smiled to think of the curiously innocent corruptions of Berlin in the Weimar years when even wickedness was a sort of play-acting – innocent corruptions, certainly, in view of the dank corruption of the spirit which succeeded them. The sweetness of south German life – he could almost taste it again.

Yet innocence is always dangerous, he thought now. There was a story he had written when he was very young, it was about that attractive mystery boy called Kaspar Hauser, a tale more than a hundred years old. He was dumb and timid and utterly ignorant and guileless, for he had spent the first sixteen years of his life imprisoned in a dark cave, and learned to speak, but then only haltingly, in the year after his release. All sorts of stories were told to account for him. According to one he was a prince who had been buried alive by jealous relatives. But others said he was an impostor, and others a halfwit. No one knew. Then, within only a few years of his release, he was found murdered, which, Klaus thought when he wrote the story, seemed to support the theory that he was indeed of royal blood. His cruel fate appealed to poets, who made him a symbol or rather the incarnation of melancholy and innocence… Klaus’s story had been a poor one. He couldn’t rise to the theme. But the thought of poor speechless Kaspar accompanied him for years, and now he seemed to symbolise for him that “other Germany” of which he and Erika had dreamed and written. Like Kaspar it had been thrust into a dark cave in the Brown Years and left to rot; now, set free, would it recover speech? Or would it be murdered, crushed between the Red East and a renascent Fascism, supported by the USA? And wasn’t the reception given to Gustaf on his return to the Berlin stage proof that this Kaspar, the “other Germany”, had not recovered the power of speech?

Perhaps he might write his story again; better this time. But no: you can’t go home again. You may revisit the past in memory, but you can’t live there.

There was mail for him at the hotel. Three letters. The proprietor handed them over with what was almost a smile, Klaus being more or less in credit.

“Good news, I trust,” he said.

He means money, Klaus thought, thanked him, mounted the stairs, slowly on account of a dull pain in his left calf, and unlocked the door of his room. It was cool and dark, and when he switched on the light it flickered two or three times before glowing dully. He dropped the letters on the table, and took his reserve bottle of Johnnie Walker from the clothes cupboard. He poured himself a big drink and added only a brief splash of soda.

He opened the one with an Italian stamp first. It was from Rossellini. Sorry, regrets, good of you to have put the proposition to me, but it’s not for me. A nice idea, nice outline, the pages of script offered possibilities, but for some other director. He was, cordially, his friend.

No surprise. He hadn’t really expected anything of Rossellini, who in any case had deprived him of a credit for the film for which he had written the first draft in the year after the war. He had liked him, but hadn’t enjoyed the experience of working with him, and in any case he had never believed, only hoped, that this idea for a film based on these two German prisoners-of-war was his sort of thing.

So he laid the letter aside and picked up the one with a Dutch stamp. Hirsch, his support for years, was also sorry. There were no royalty payments due, and, as for a loan in the form of another advance, what could be offered was almost contemptible, he was ashamed to write. Nobody valued Klaus more highly than he, or set a greater store on his friendship, but times were tough, his own business was in trouble, Klaus would understand how it was. Meanwhile, dear friend, finish your novel which I look forward to with eagerness and a lively curiosity…

Finish the novel? It was going nowhere. Every sentence he wrote led him further into a morass from which he could see no way out. That too was how it was, even when, as this morning, the sentences seemed good. He gave himself another whisky and hesitated before opening the last letter from the publisher in Berlin who had been enthusiastic about bringing out new German editions of
Mephisto
and his autobiography.

Did he dare? Should he thrust it into Kaspar’s dark cave?

The laughter of children in the street rose to him, happily. Hs slid his thumb under the flap.

It couldn’t have been worse. The books were marvellous, as Klaus himself knew. It would have been an honour to publish them. But it was impossible. A letter from Gustaf Gründgens’ lawyers threatened legal action if the publication went ahead. Their client had been slandered and would demand substantial damages. Meanwhile they were in any case considering whether there were grounds for an injunction prohibiting publication. I can’t afford to fight such an action, Klaus, and neither can you, can you? Klaus must realise that Gustaf’s popularity was enormous, and his power consequently great. It would do me great harm to be seen to slander him. So, with many regrets, he must abandon the intention to publish. Fortunately no contract had been signed. Perhaps some other publisher would be prepared to bear the costs and endure the obloquy. But for him it was impossible. Klaus would understand. He remained of course his friend and admirer.

There was a postscript, hand-written.

“Write something else, Klaus, and let me have it. A light novel now, about your youth in Munich perhaps. There’s already a nostalgia for those days. People look for diversion in these difficult times. Give me a comedy and I shall be delighted to publish it. But, please, no hint of Gustaf Gründgens… It’s simply impossible.”

Impossible. Everything was impossible, absurd. The children’s laughter still rose to him, but when dark fell that poor dog would howl again.

Klaus opened his notebook. On the First of January he had written, “I don’t wish to survive this year.” Now the door out was open to him. “Mielein,” he scribbled, “Erika”, and had nothing to add.

That was it.

He had nothing, truly nothing.

He must leave Julian and Albert to their fate, No one was interested, nobody.

The ultimate absurdity would be to go on.

A light novel… He unscrewed a pill bottle, poured a handful and thrust them into his mouth. A swig of whisky, Johnnie to the rescue, but rescue was escape.

The bottle was not yet half-empty. Help me on my way, Johnnie. He lay down on the bed, stretched out his hand for another drink. And another. More pills to be sure of passing from the absurd into… what? Nothingness, please, nothingness… The image of the Swedish boy floated before him. But he was already on the other side of the frontier, and a Border guard examined Klaus’s passport and said, “This is out of order.” He carried it off – “Confiscated, mein Herr” – and beyond the barbed wire the Swedish boy lifted his hand in farewell and turned away towards the light.

He opened his eyes. “Evidently the battery is dead.”

Another drink, and another, and he began to drift away.

Mielein, Erika, forgive me. I can’t go on… You can’t go home again, not to the little Princess and the boy in the sailor suit, not anymore. There is no home to return to… This time, please, let me go…