Magnus (3 page)

‘If you have a friend in this world, don’t trust him at this hour, though with friendly eyes and smiling mouth, he is planning war in perfidious peace.’

Franz listens to him, a little bewildered, and taking his hand asks, ‘Please sing, father …’ As his newly effected transmutation into Helmut Schwalbenkopf has put him in a good mood, his father sings mezza voce a Schubert lied that deliciously thrills the child.

Schwalbenkopf, Helmut: born 1905 at Friedrichshafen, Bade-Wurtemberg. Baker.

Married in 1931 to Gertrud Meckel, born 1911.

Two children: Anna-Luisa, born 1934, and Wolf, born 1937.

Enlisted in 1939, sent to Poland, where he is wounded, and later to Russia, where he is taken prisoner. Freed in 1946, he returns home.

Back in Friedrichshafen, he discovers his wife and two children have died and his bakery was destroyed in the bombardment of the city at the end of the war.

Reduced to vagrancy in his own city, one evening in March 1947 he disappears. No one knows what has become of him. Some people assume he committed suicide, but his body has never been found. Maybe he threw himself into the lake, whose waters are the most secret and inviolable of graves.

His father has gone away again, on a very long journey this time. And the waiting resumes, even more tense than last time. Thea, who retains her pseudonym of Augusta Keller, once again girds herself with patience but under the stress of tiredness and anxiety, increasing as the days go by, she becomes harsh and irritable. She stops coddling her son and begins more and more often to scold him. Suddenly she thinks he is too dreamy, lazy, that he has outgrown childhood and it is high time he put it behind him. She takes over the father’s fault-finding and severity towards the boy.

It is true that Franz is already nine years old but he is in no hurry to join the ranks of adults. As he gets older he begins to have a better understanding of their behaviour, their pleasures and worries, but without any insight yet into their implications. Nor does he attempt to deepen his understanding of the obscurity of grown-ups, for the little he is able to puzzle out does not seem very appealing. He has a sense of something small-minded, wretched even on occasion, about their preoccupations as well as their satisfactions. And besides they are not very reliable. For years they go quietly about their business, then suddenly drop everything, abscond, change their name as readily as they would their shirt, and ultimately flee to the ends of the earth.

That is not the worst of it: adults are capable of destroying everything, burning everything – houses, bridges, churches, roads, entire cities. He has seen this and he still lives in a landscape of ruins. But apparently there is even worse madness than this: the destruction not only of cities but of entire peoples. This is beyond young Franz’s comprehension. He has heard some incredible stories and above all seen photographs at once mesmerizing and blinding to look at: piles of skeletal bodies like bundles of pine wood thrown in a heap, living-dead with enormous haunted eyes sunk in black holes, children so thin and ragged they look like little old men, their bald heads too heavy for necks reduced to the size of a rhubarb stalk. And far from offering any explanation and helping him to confront these revelations that provoke mental combustion and leave his mind prostrate, in shatters, his mother refuses to discuss them. She even persists in denying the evidence, going so far as to denounce the news as lies and the published photographs as fakes. And she declares with as much conviction as rancour that it is precisely because of all these slanderous untruths spread by the victors that her husband was compelled to flee. And she says she cannot wait to go and join him, to leave for ever this country she once so loved but that has lost all greatness since being orphaned of its Führer. Franz does not know how or what to think. It is hard for him to identify the boundaries of reality, to distinguish truth from mystification. He detects a strong whiff of bad faith and dishonesty in his mother’s acrimonious words but he is still under Thea’s influence and what she says carries weight, for better or worse.

Similarly, he asks himself questions about his father, whose name, like those of his friends Julius Schlack and Horst Witzel, has been extensively cited in the course of trials being held since the end of the war, but so monstrous are these questions they are checked by a wall of amazement. His father is declared a ‘war criminal’. The enormity of the term makes it inconceivable; Franz is unable to grasp exactly what it means. He is all the more unable to do so because in his heart of hearts he does not really want to understand, so frightened is he of having to deal with a truth he suspects is ghastly. Is Dr Dunkeltal’s crime his failure to overcome the typhus that killed thousands of the patients in the camp where he worked? This seems unfair to the child, incapable of daring to imagine any offence other than incompetence. In the face of everything, he retains a prestigious image of his father and wants to see him again, to hear once more the deep soothing sound of his singing. No, Franz certainly has no desire to emerge from the state of ignorance natural to childhood, is in no hurry to throw himself into the cruel fray of the adult world. Besides, he has not had his full share of childhood. Illness robbed him of a very great part of it, war and the exodus spoilt the rest. And this lost part distresses him, causes him pain, like an amputated limb that continues to send twinges through the amputee’s body. So rather than upset himself by probing the accusations against his father, he prefers to look towards the eclipse of his own past and peer into the strange black hole that swallowed up his early childhood.

By concentrating on this mystery lying dormant in the depths of his being, he reinforces it. Sometimes he can feel it quivering in his flesh, then diffusing fleeting sensations under his skin such that he could not say whether they were painful or pleasurable. This always happens unexpectedly, but he soon notices that these inner frissons – like needles of fire inside his body, discharging in volleys and racing through his nerves, veins, backbone – occur on particular occasions: whenever there is a blaze of intense brash colour, such as the bright red and yellow of a fire suddenly gathering strength with a roar in the stove, a blinding midday sun, a pyrotechnic sunset of vivid orange and reds, the gigantic fissure of a saffron streak of lightning against the dark blue of the sky. Once, before such an explosion of incandescent brilliance, he felt a crescendo of excitement culminating in a seismic tremor in the most intimate depths of his body, a kind of upheaval no less violent than voluptuous from which he emerged exhausted and jubilant, dazed. He had just experienced his first orgasm without understanding what it was.

That is when he develops an obsession with colours and dreams of becoming a painter, though he has nothing but a few pathetic chalks and crayons with which he scribbles on bits of cardboard, for want of better materials. The results are so disappointing he soon abandons these attempts at drawing and contents himself with waiting for the eruption, here or there, of those splashes of virulent colour that throw him into a state of turmoil he dreads as much as he longs for.

Dunkeltal, Clemens (born 13/04/1904): Obersturmführer in the SS.

Doctor of medicine. Served as camp doctor successively at KL Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, and Bergen-Belsen.

He made the selections of the deportees, sending the sick and the weakest to the gas chambers; personally took direct part in the extermination of numerous prisoners by administering phenol through an injection to the heart.

Sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment, he is being sought in Central America, where he is suspected of having managed to escape thanks to the support of the clandestine Nazi organization ODESSA.

The days drag by, slowly, tediously. Augusta Keller counts them off in silence, counts them and recounts them, the way savers keep calculating the amount they have saved towards a better life. The more time passes, the greater her impatience to put her present meagre existence behind her. She awaits the signal that will allow her to rejoin her husband.

What finally comes is not a signal for departure but rather notification of a permanent standstill: she receives news that her husband is dead. After being on the run for nearly three years, moving on from one country to another and ending up in Mexico, he tried to settle down in the state of Veracruz. But there too he felt pursued, watched and in danger, and so, his strength and hope exhausted, he apparently committed suicide. The last name he adopted, the one he was hiding behind at the time of his death, was Felipe Gomez Herrara.

Augusta Keller has nothing to look forward to any more. Now in smithereens, her dream of getting away has come to nothing. The widow resumes her own name, that of Thea Dunkeltal. Since the worst has happened she has nothing more to fear, so nothing more to hide. Nor does she have anywhere to go, her parents died in the bombing of Berlin, and what family she has left, in Zwickau, is imprisoned on the other side of the border that now cuts through Germany like a suppurating scar. In the wilderness where she is now captive, Widow Dunkeltal starts turning round and round in circles. Ever tighter circles that soon become suffocating. She suffers from asthma but neglects to take care of herself. She just keeps plodding on towards her own extinction.

More lonely and bewildered than ever, Franz-Georg closes in on himself. This is a closing-in on a breeze, for he lives with an acute sense of irrationality and insecurity. As during his convalescence in the Lüneburg countryside, near Celle, he seeks comfort in nature, earth and sky. He relishes being in the open, gratifying his senses, musing at length on everything. His musings consist of a kind of slow and reverent mastication of the visible, of sounds and smells. He loves the lake just as much as he loved the heath. That expanse of unruffled blue, constantly varying, going from milky azure to almost black violet or from opalescent lime to dark green, depending on the time of day. He never tires of studying the life of colours, their perpetual transformations, their quiverings, their slow effusions followed by abrupt changes.

And he always watches out feverishly for an explosion of ardent red, acid yellow, garish orange.

He ruminates on the world and more than ever on the accusations levelled against his father, as well as the circumstances of his death, which have remained obscure. But a mist always overlays his thinking, impedes his questioning, affection and abhorrence towards this man and now it is constantly warring inside him.

He summons up all the memories of his father he has hoarded. And having trained his memory since recovering from his illness to register the smallest details and keep them fresh in his mind, he manages to visualize the departed’s figure, face, gait and gestures. This exercise in visualization demands a great deal of concentration and is carried out with his eyes shut. Behind the boy’s eyelids, his father appears the way he was before his downfall. Franz-Georg avoids calling to mind the hunted outcast he subsequently became. That memory, his son relegates to the shadows. It is too painful, it heralds too cruelly the process of decline from fugitive to phantom. Indeed, his father is no more than a wandering phantom across the ocean.

He not only tries to resuscitate the deceased visually, he strives even harder to bring back to life his voice. That massive voice with the capacity to envelop him in a mantle of breeze-filled darkness more ample and more tender than the night. ‘
Yours is a language of whispering breezes,/Your path interwoven shafts of light,/Whatever your mouth but quiets with a kiss/ Grows heavy-eyed and sinks into a slumber …
’ How could that same voice be a voice of terror that shouted at hundreds and thousands of prisoners, that exterminated them?

He decides to learn Spanish, the language of the country where his father spent his last days, and he studies the geography of Mexico. The name of Veracruz stands out like the mainmast of a sailing vessel shipwrecked on the horizon, against a pale sky. He weaves a shroud round his father’s lost body out of the words he gathers looking through books, consulting an atlas and a dictionary; out of a foreign vocabulary he constructs a tomb for that voice forever silenced.

His mother’s voice sounds shrill and breathless. It no longer has the warm inflections of the past when she used to relate to him their family legend, nor those crystalline notes that once tinkled in her laughter. The legend is discarded and all happiness ended.

Coming home from school one afternoon, he finds his mother sitting at the table opposite a visitor he has never seen before. Indeed, visits have become increasingly rare in recent months. Thea says, ‘This is Franz-Georg.’ Then pointing to the stranger, ‘And this is my brother Lothar.’ Lothar stands up but the boy remains motionless on the threshold. He is completely baffled. What brother? His mother has never mentioned him in the family epic. He has only ever heard – and heard plenty at that – of the two young soldiers whose first names form his own.

The man is tall, fairly heavily built, dressed with sober elegance. Franz-Georg sees no resemblance in him to his mother, grown so slight and wilted. But when the man smiles at him, he detects a family likeness. In the days when his mother was cheerful and affectionate she had the same smile.

‘Lothar has come back from England, where he’s been living for twelve years, to meet you,’ says Thea. And she adds, ‘You’re going back with him to London. Your case is packed. It’s all arranged.’

She makes this astonishing announcement in a detached tone of voice, her gaze fixed on the grey wall where a portrait of Clemens hangs.

‘What about you?’ asks Franz-Georg, emerging from his stupor.

‘Me? I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here. The journey would be too tiring for me. I’ll join you later, when I’m feeling better.’

But the rasp of death already detectable in her weary voice betrays her pathetic lie. No one is fooled. Her brother and son watch in silence as she absents herself in contemplation of her husband’s photograph, or rather the greyness of the dirty wall, the emptiness of her life.