Magnus (11 page)

A taste of fruit on her lips, and hair the colour of oranges.

‘Am I pretty?’

One boy kissed her, another married her.

You hear … laughter. Time-worn laughter, as though weary of laughing…

One boy married her – did he die of that love?

‘Peggy, pretty Peggy Bell, what’s become of her? Did she remain in Comala?’

Black milk of first light…

We dig in the air a grave…

Magnus leads the same kind of existence in London as he did in San Francisco after May’s death. He frequents libraries and works on translations. He also give private lessons in Spanish. The Schmalkers offered to put him up – Hannelore displays much more warmth towards him than in the past when she thought he was the Dunkeltal’s son – but he prefers to visit them often rather than stay with them. He has rented a studio in an area to the north of the city.

There is no house he has ever become attached to, that he might regard as home. He has always left the places where he lived in a hurry. He feels no nostalgia even for the house on the moor where as a small boy he thought he was happy, and from which he had to flee in panic. Especially not for that one, standing there like a mirage of peace and affection on the brink of one of the mouths of hell. The memory of the wretched lodgings where he subsequently lived in Friedrichshafen inspire him with less disgust, for at least that place had not been an unspeakable sham. It was in keeping with the ambient squalor, whose extent became every day more apparent. Vainglorious Thea had slowly shrivelled there, then burnt out like an acrid fire. The Schmalkers’ house was a kind of safety chamber between two contrasting environments, two countries, two worlds, a rather uncomfortable and gloomy halfway house but turning out to be very secure as he approached adulthood. With May he led such a nomadic existence that in essence she was his only landmark and place of anchorage. May, his ever-drifting mistress-island.

But what lies beyond all these places of transit? What comes before the cellar in Hamburg, the night of Gomorrah? Sometimes he thinks he has a fleeting memory of a room bathed in milky light. He sees this light spilling over the pale wooden blocks of a parquet floor, shimmering on the walls, and an impression of delightful tranquillity emanates from this image as subdued in colour as a faded print, illuminated with emptiness and silence; a very uncluttered image that quivers slightly in its fixity.

It is a long time since flash floods of crude blinding colour entered under his eyelids, sending stridencies no less disturbing than voluptuous coursing through his body. Now, only this opal-hued vision steals unexpectedly into his eyes, leaving in its wake a poignant sense of peace – a peace beyond compare, enjoyed by his entire being in days long gone by, days still not resigned to their passing.

Some mornings, when first light filters through the window blind in his bedroom, he experiences the fleeting and benevolent caress of this sense of peace, and feels on his eyelids the luminous shadow of a face bent towards his own, a breath that gaily sings words in an undertone. A dawn mirage, a mirage of drowsiness, which dissipates as soon as Magnus wakens and regains consciousness. Then he recalls that evening at the restaurant in San Francisco, when Terence and May thought they recognized the language in which he had uttered a few phrases in his delirium at the hospital in Veracruz. But weary of investigating his lost past, wanting to put behind him his harrowing amnesia, he had refused to follow up this lead. May’s death brought with it the collapse of the defences he had erected against the haunting lacunae in his powers of recollection, and once again from his desolate memory rises an urgent call, like a siren song. It is possible, he now says to himself, that these ripples of silky light stealing over his skin as he emerges from sleep derive from reverberations of his childhood – his childhood somewhere in Iceland. However, while he does finally entertain this possibility, he leaves it in abeyance, fearful of destroying the sweetness of his dream by launching himself into an investigation he would not even know how to conduct.

He contents himself with questioning the bear with the buttercup eyes that patiently keeps vigil on a shelf in the darkness of his wardrobe: a silent questioning, suited to the teddy bear with the slightly squashed nose and crinkled ears.

Magnus talks to Magnus, wordlessly, soundlessly, senselessly.

It is only several months after his return to London that he sees Peggy Bell again. She has finally found a way to put some distance on a long-term basis between herself and her homeland, where she continues to feel trapped in the widowhood that came on her too suddenly, too devastatingly: by accepting a job as an English teacher at a school in Vienna. And before moving to Austria she wants to learn a little German. Else has suggested she get in touch with Magnus. This proposal takes him by surprise and above all raises misgivings, for he has never taught his mother tongue, which in any case he still suspects might not actually be his first language, and which he only uses with the Schmalkers, Lothar preferring to talk with him in German. But his relationship with the language remains so ambiguous that an equally tortuous idea occurs to him: he tells himself that by teaching it to someone else, who herself is anxious to evade a too painful memory, he will succeed in smashing the matrix of gloom and chilliness rigidifying the words, and give them a new sound.

They are both on time to meet as arranged in a café, and are waiting, seated at different tables. Neither has recognized the other. They eventually identify each other by the way they both keep looking towards the door every time it opens to admit a new customer – they are the only ones to behave in this way. First taking surreptitious glances, they then observe each other more carefully. The young woman he has noticed finally gets up and makes her way towards him. She is wearing a grey gabardine, belted at the waist, and a dark lilac-coloured felt cloche hat.

He smiles, and inviting her to sit at his table says, ‘Peggy Bell?’

She immediately corrects him, comprehensively sweeping aside both her nickname and her maiden name to avert all familiarity: ‘Magaret MacLane. So you must be Adam Schmalker?’

But he too has changed his name and in turn corrects her. ‘Magnus.’

‘Ah, yes,’ she says. ‘Else told me…’

She does not complete the sentence. Magnus soon discovers she has a habit of suddenly falling silent in the middle of a sentence, leaving her words suspended.

She smokes a lot, stubbing out each cigarette after a few puffs. She smokes in the same way she speaks, in fits and starts, nervously, suddenly breaking off as if changing her mind. The flighty young girl Magnus knew of old would switch without transition from laughter to slight melancholy. Now she switches from a staccato delivery of words to abrupt silence. Her lime-green eyes have acquired a cold glitter, with no gaiety or reverie to lend them any golden reflections, and she so rarely smiles that the dimple in her left cheek remains almost imperceptible. Even her freckles have faded, and her girlish hands have lost their fleshiness, and are now thin and fragile. Finally, when she removes her hat, Magnus recognizes her lovely tawny-coloured hair, but cut short. And is she examining him just as closely, he wonders, comparing his present appearance with that of the adolescent she had fun one day in seducing? But does she even remember him? Has she ever attributed the least importance to him?

Their first encounter does not last long. It is a meeting without warmth, pretty heavy-going in fact, so tense and aggressive is Peggy in asserting her identity as Margaret MacLane. She has come only to discuss terms and arrangements for the lessons she wants to take. Any other topic of conversation is brushed aside. She asks Magnus no personal questions and is no more prepared to allow him to question her about her own past or about her present life and what her plans are. At the end of this strictly professional interview, it is decided that she will come to her teacher twice a week for two one-and-a-half hour lessons, and that she will pay him at the end of each lesson. With a decisive gesture she puts her cloche hat on again, gets to her feet, says goodbye, and quickly walks away without a backward glance.

Loneliness whose big heart is clogged with ice

How could you lend me the warmth

You lack and we feel embarrassed

And scared to regret?

Go away, we couldn’t do anything for each other,

At most exchange our ice

And for a moment watch it melt

Under the dark heat that burns our brow.

Jules Supervielle, ‘Sun’,
The Innocent Convict

His student is not particularly gifted for languages, but so eager is she to learn, determined even in her impatience, that she makes fairly rapid progress. As soon as she feels well enough equipped to express herself in German, she uses only that language to communicate with her teacher. And gradually her behaviour relaxes. She becomes less defensive, no longer talks in curt snatches. Finally, she agrees to resume her old nickname, Peggy, as if this linguistic migration made her feel young again, liberated her.

Magnus notices this gradual transformation, and at first his explanation for it is the effort Peggy has to make to construct her sentences correctly, this concentration monopolizing her attention and thereby distracting her from the pathological guardedness she otherwise imposes on herself when speaking to anybody. But he soon suspects some other reason remains hidden behind this rather simplistic analysis, a more complex, obscure reason, related to the tragedy in Peggy’s life, as if Tim’s death had cast a pall over the mother tongue they had in common, the intimate and everyday language of their relationship as a couple, of their love; as if it had blighted that language. In fact she never speaks of this tragedy, and has never mentioned her husband’s name or made the slightest reference to him. Her assiduousness in shrouding in total silence everything about her life with Timothy MacLane makes this silence weirdly penetrating and disturbing. Magnus detects in it the constant cry of inconsolable love.

The lessons turn into increasingly natural and spontaneous conversations that sometimes extend well beyond the time they are supposed to end. They eventually abandon the ritual of the lesson in Magnus’s studio flat, and as soon as the weather is fine they go out for a walk, in town or in the parks, or meet in a museum or café, depending on what they feel like doing that day. But she never suggests meeting at her place.

However, one morning she telephones Magnus to invite him to come to dinner that evening. When she gives him her address, which he did not know, he realizes that she lives close to where he is, although she had led him to believe she lived in another part of town.

A pretty white two-storey house, with tubs of flowers on the door step, and the front door painted dark green. There is no name on the bell, the little nameplate has been removed, which makes Magnus feel suddenly hesitant. He pushes the bell anyway, but it produces no sound. After a few fruitless tries, he knocks on the door. His knocks resonate strangely as if fading away into empty space. Yet the door opens and Peggy, in a pale yellow dress sprinkled with tiny flowers and orange-coloured butterflies, stands in the doorway, smiling.

The house is actually empty, and naked light-bulbs hang from the ceiling. Peggy remarks casually that she has sold her house, the removers have been that very morning, and she is leaving the next day for Vienna. Magnus alternates between amazement and anger at Peggy’s mania for not saying anything and then suddenly presenting a
fait accompli
reaches an infuriating level, but he betrays neither his surprise nor his annoyance. After all, he says to himself, it is better like this: that she should go, that this secretive woman with her bizarre quirks should disappear as suddenly as she had turned up again. Yes, that she should disappear from his life before he became too fond of her presence, before he allowed himself to fall into the trap of disappointed love. He observes her with forced coldness. Certainly, she looks pretty in her floaty dress the colour of a starry dawn, with a halo of red curls round her forehead, her bright green eyes and child-like smile, but he keeps these charms at a distance, as if admiring a lovely statue behind a glass case in a museum, on his way past it.

In the unfurnished living room she has improvised a table by placing a plank of wood on some trestles and set two garden chairs facing each other. She has covered the plank not with a paper tablecloth but a large magnificently woven damask cloth in silky shades of white and yellow. The plates are paper plates, but the glasses are crystal. She has bought some excellent wines, and offers him black olives and cashew nuts served in plastic containers while they await the delivery of a takeaway meal ordered from an Indian restaurant. He has never seen her so relaxed and gaily talkative, except in the old days at the Schmalkers’ house, and it is as though time has shifted, as if the clock has turned back, and he has before him the delightful flighty young girl from whom he stole a kiss. But this evening he has no desire to kiss her, but rather to slap her. And besides, this fraudulent young girl is absurdly chattering on in German, and this irritates him. Everything irritates him, himself first and foremost for taking part in this farce he is at a loss to understand and in which ultimately he is not in the least bit interested.

The meal is delivered and Peggy hastens to serve the dishes while the food is still hot. Magnus eats without appetite and drinks without pleasure, though the wines are superb. He grows increasingly bad-tempered as his hostess, animated by the wine that she takes with little sips of enjoyment, becomes more and more radiant. And suddenly unable to contain his annoyance, he says in English, ‘I’m bored.’

Then driven by a cold rage whose intensity he would be unable to explain, he goes on, still speaking in English: ‘Yes, I’m bored with you. I’m disappointed in you. I taught you my language, even though I’m averse to speaking it, but what have you taught me? Nothing. For nearly five months we’ve seen each other twice a week, sometimes more, but never have you told me anything about yourself, or been bothered about me. Just who are you bothered about? No one but yourself. We were neighbours, so why pretend you were living on the other side of town? It’s a small detail, but why always be evasive and misleading, conceal things, lie? For you lie, you like to lie, to invent secrets, to fabricate a bogus mysteriousness. It’s childish and tedious.’