Magnus

by Sylvie Germain

  Terence does not try to prevent Scott from leaving, he quietly surrenders to that very state of abandonment in which May left him. He becomes strangely indifferent, to everything, to everyone, to himself, while at the same time displaying great courtesy in his detachment, perhaps to temper its excess, not to give way to it too soon. He is as discreet in his self-effacement as he had previously been in charming people.

  He eventually disappears completely, without telling anyone where his place of retreat is.

  And loneliness closes in on Magnus, or rather opens up and deepens around him. She who had the gift of propelling dreams into reality and making the days magical is gone, taking with her all dreams, all desires, and the days have no sparkle or zest any more. He ceases to travel, to have any enthusiasm for going to plays, concerts, exhibitions. His interests as a translator shift, turning away from art and to history. This is a vast area of study, but Magnus slowly comes back to the very thing he had tried to escape by leaving Europe, and soon he is wrapped up in it: the recent past, still very much alive, of Europe and its wars, the last one especially.

  It is as if the old demons of his childhood and adolescence had stealthily followed him across the Atlantic and gone into hibernation during the long decade he has been living in this continent on the far side of the globe, indulging to excess a thirst for wandering, trying to anaesthetize himself with new experiences, with freedom; as if they had bided their time for the moment to awaken and surreptitiously resume their attack.

  He transfers the energy he had expended in discovering museums and art galleries, theatres, cabarets, and underground art venues across America, and now devotes it to searching through archives and documents in the silence of libraries, and attempting to establish a dialogue with the many testimonies of both victims and perpetrators of the enormous barbarities of his century, in particular that which originated in the country of his early childhood. The translator becomes himself a historian, or rather an amateur detective accountable solely to his conscience, still tormented with questions.

  But the detective becomes lost in the labyrinths of human madness so easily allied with wickedness, he teeters on the brink of the abyss of human folly and its capacity for confusing good and evil, evil and duty, and then carrying out the most shameful deeds with meekness and diligence, untroubled, in all good conscience.

  Slowly the memory of his years in London resurface in his mind. He had set aside this painful memory all the time his relationship with May and his friendship with Terence and Scott had lasted. With the Gleanerstones he had learned to relish life, something he never experienced in the Schmalkers’ austere house, where he felt like an intruder. But his relish has suddenly faded, or rather life has acquired an extremely acid flavour, and he senses he will have to live for a long time with this sharp taste of grief that erodes all desire and turns all joy to sourness. And he also senses this bitterness will be all the more enduring because he will have to keep chewing on it in isolation and silence. This is why his thoughts revert to Lothar and Hannelore, who after all gave him the first chance of a new life after his fradulent parents came to grief, fleeing their crimes in ignominious deaths.

  With the passage of time he can understand better Hannelore’s distant attitude towards him, and above all he finally understands the reasons for Lothar’s long-lasting lie, and appreciates how much it must have cost him to remain silent, to tell no one what he knew, about the child who had survived Gomorrah and was then seized on and manipulated by his sister. Lothar had fought his battle of conscience alone. Alone before the God who was at the centre of his life. God: like a silent abyss, though one from which a wind blew, causing flurries of words, unheard-of and inaudible, to sigh in an undertone.

  With May he had never broached the question of God. On this subject there was no question in her mind, only a negation, the bald fact of Nothingness. In her eyes any religion was no more than frills and furbelows, of greater or lesser crudeness or sophistication, arranged round this vacuum to conceal the sickening enormity of it. The earth, the universe, human life were simply the results of a bizarre accident. Results as pernicious as they were glorious. And the only ‘divine voice’ she recognized was the muffled heartbeat of the living when it becomes fabulously resonant in the joyful hours of existence, the nocturnal hours of distress, and the sun-bright moments of sensual pleasure.

  Was it in order to leave Magnus with only the memory of these sun-bright moments that she expelled him from her bedroom as death neared? Or was it because Terence’s love was more intimate, more precious to her than any other? The doubt that arose in him on that day of farewell, up there in the cold blueness of the sky, continues to nag at him. Was their relationship as strong, as free and bright as he thought? Was he able to love her well enough to meet her expectations? Was he able to love anybody in fact? And supposing that in the ravishment of his childhood, on the night of Gomorrah, he had also lost all capacity for love? Supposing he was left with only a heart half-charred in the flames that had enveloped his mother, crystallized in the salt of his amazement, tears and terror? Doubt gathers, spreads through his entire being, gnaws away at him.

  But would he be so susceptible to doubt, he wonders when his perplexity reaches a peak of intensity, if a second ravishment had not taken place in the wake of the first, not violent this time but soothing, effected day after day, painstakingly, by Thea and Clemens Dunkeltal, the mad woman and the assassin? How could you not suspect everything, even yourself, when so many lies have been distilled inside you?

  So his old demons beset him again. They become ever more pressing as the months go by and in the end so thoroughly regain possession of him that he decides to return to Europe after a dozen years’ absence if not abjuration.

  Resonances

  ‘Magnus? Who is Magnus?’ May had asked.

  Magnus is an average-sized teddy bear with a very worn light-brown coat, slightly orange-coloured in places. A faint smell of scorching and of tears emanates from him.

  His eyes are peculiar, of the same shape and golden yellow – slightly faded – as a buttercup, which gives him a gentle gaze, clouded with amazement.

  Magnus is a man of about thirty years of age, of average build, with broad shoulders, a rough-hewn face. An impression of strength and lassitude emanates from him.

  His eyes, of brown with bronze reflections sometimes turning to yellow amber, are deep-set, which gives him a peculiar gaze – that of a watchful dreamer.

  Here I and you

  Stand each in our degree:

  What do you mean to do, –

  Mean to do?

  ‘And what’s become of May? Did she stay behind in Comala?’

  Black milk of first light…

  We dig in the air a grave…

  Fragment 17

  ‘I was sure you would come back one day, and in just this way, without warning, like the prodigal son,’ says Lothar. ‘All these years, without any news of you at all … I imagined various lives you might be leading, I hoped you’d found peace. And forgiveness.’ Lothar speaks in German, and this language which Magnus has not spoken for years sounds strange to his ears. The words reach him from a distance, as though fogged and frosted, embedded in a rough matrix, and suddenly he remembers the diamonds with which Thea had tricked out his teddy bear, diamonds encrusted with grey tears.

  The words of the language that used to be his begin to stir at the back of his throat, quiet faltering words, but they gather in a lump. A coagulation of speech sounds whose beauty is clouded, crackled. He cannot dissolve it to free the words; his throat is sore, his mouth dry. He responds to Lothar in English, but his reply is evasive for it was not so much peace he found over there, far away from Europe, as fresh and intense joy, a joy all of a sudden reduced to dust, leaving him bereft, inwardly adrift, ringing hollow. As for forgiveness, while he can envisage perhaps one day being capable of it with regard to the damage done to his childhood by Thea’s stealing and deception, he does not in the sl
ightest extend this possibility to Clemens Dunkeltal for whose crimes there can be no excuse, no indulgence. And besides, he adds, not having been the victim of the crimes perpetrated in the camps where the exterminating doctor held sway, he has no right to forgive on behalf of those martyred.

  Lothar is at home by himself. Hannelore has gone to Liverpool, where Erika and her husband live, to help her daughter who has just given birth to her fifth child, a little boy after all this time, the first in the family, named Jonas. Else lives in London with her husband and their twin daughters, Doris and Clara. Portraits of Erika and Else taken on their wedding day hang on a dining-room wall; there is also a recent photograph of Hannelore and Lothar’s six grand-daughters, ranging in age from three to about fifteen. All of them are plump, blonde and laughing, except one, Myriam, a slim dark-haired adolescent who stands stiffly, her arms held tensed on either side of her body and her fists clenched. She is Erika’s oldest child, the one he knew in the cradle. She was the first new-born baby he had ever seen at close quarters, and he had been deeply disturbed by her at the time. He remembers her tiny fists already then tightly closed, her frog-like grimaces, her resemblance to a very old sage to whom he attributed a knowledge as far-reaching as it was vague, a knowledge of the mystery of life, and he remembers how in the presence of this little baby girl he dreamed of his own early childhood that was lost in oblivion.

  Certainly traces of a maternal love – of smiles, melodious words, caresses and radiant looks – still lie dormant in the depths of his being, but they do not derive from Thea. And these traces buried beneath the rubble of Gomorrah torment him anew, like a name you know that stubbornly remains on the tip of your tongue when you try to recall it, a familiar tune that plays somewhere inside your head without allowing you to catch a single audible note.

  Lothar mentions that Myriam is very gifted at drawing and sculpture, but that she devotes all her energy to this artistic passion to the detriment of her studies, and she is often in conflict with her parents. He shows Magnus two statuettes she has recently modelled: one of a young siren, her upper body held erect, arms raised above her head, hands buried in hair that looks like a tangle of seaweed; the other of a spindle-thin man, with a wader’s beak, and bird’s feet instead of human hands and feet, jumping over an invisible obstacle. Obviously, there is a lot of talent in Myriam’s fingers, and above all an accumulated strength and anger enclosed in her fists.

  In the Schmalkers’ house, time seems to have slipped by, slowly, delicately. The same tidiness, the same spotless cleanliness, and the same deep calm prevail – everything that Magnus, when he still lived here under the name of Adam, found oppressive and was eager to escape. Now he appreciates the quiet and peaceful atmosphere of a house of study, where life itself, events taking place in the world, newspapers and books, the thoughts and feelings of the people who live here are daily topics of reflection, of a sustained effort of comprehension.

  Time has not slipped by Lothar, but steadily, in depth, penetrated his body, which beneath its slightly coarsened and wrinkled skin has lost its vigour and is becoming stooped. His hair has turned white, his voice is a little husky – it purls over a vast underlayer of silence. Time has in particular polished his eyes, which gleam with the brightness of very pale blue-grey quartz in which drops of light appear to be mounted. And when he rests his gaze on the person he is speaking to, that person is embraced within the orb of its brightness.

  Lothar puts to Magnus the question he has been deferring since the start of their conversation. He asks him if he believes in God.

  ‘I find it difficult enough to believe in myself and others.’

  This oblique response is met with a smile, and Lothar says that belief in God is dependent on the same bold and often demanding act of faith as belief in man. With no certainty, no security, and no rest in this act of heart and mind that every day has to be renewed.

  He sees Else again, who comes to visit her father. She is just as vivacious as when she was a young girl. While they talk in the drawing room Magnus is reminded of Peggy Bell, with whom he fell hopelessly in love after stealing a kiss from her in this very room, and he asks after her.

  ‘Ah, Peggy …’ says Else, sounding suddenly upset. ‘I only rarely see her now. She’s so changed since Tim died…’

  ‘Tim? Who’s Tim?’

  ‘Timothy, her husband. He died last year. He fell off the edge of a cliff while out walking, in Kent, where they were on holiday. Peggy wasn’t with him at the time of the accident, and she didn’t see him fall. She only found out what had happened several hours later, when Tim’s body was found on the rocks.’

  ‘And since then?’

  ‘It’s difficult to know what she’s up to. She’s unpredictable in her behaviour. She disappears for weeks on end, turns up again without warning, and when you finally manage to get in touch with her she’s evasive, very uncommunicative, almost mute. And she used to be so warm and talkative! All I know is, she wants to leave England. She says she can’t stand living here any more, as if Tim’s ghost haunted the whole country, and only in a different place could she begin to forget. I don’t really understand her any more…’

  Speaking of the misfortune that has put Peggy to flight suddenly revives Magnus’s own distress in confronting his past, and his grief over May’s death, crises that also made him unsettled and elusive. And he realizes that at heart he does not want to move back to London; he has returned only temporarily, even if he does not yet know when he is going to depart again or what his destination will be. He is incapable of the quiet and settled life of someone like Lothar, but the world too can be made a house of study, however erratic and fragmentary this study might be.

  Resonances

  ‘Am I pretty?’ Peggy Bell had asked.

  She had the prettiness of a seventeen-year-old, with a dimple in her left cheek, a freckled complexion and the merest hint of a cast in her lime-green eyes that gave her a sometimes dreamy, sometimes mutinous look.

  And red-gold hair.

  She had the innocence and anxieties of a seventeenyear-old, a mixture of ingenuousness and guile, and a mad impatience to be independent.

  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…

  Fragment 18

  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.