by Allan Massie
One of the rent-boys approached this one, sat at his table and said, “Buy me a drink, dearie.”
Without looking up the man took a note from his breast-pocket, handed it over, and said in English, “Now bugger off, will you, Billie. I’m not in the mood.”
“Well, if that’s all you can say,” Billie replied in French, picking up the note and flouncing off with a wiggle of his bottom.
Then, aware perhaps that Klaus had observed this scene, if only in truth with a detached interest and mild amusement, the man looked up, got to his feet and came over to Klaus’s table.
“Mind if I join you? We’ve met before, long time back. In Berlin. I was a friend of Chris and he introduced us.”
“Chris?”
“Isherwood, I mean. Guy Probyn. You won’t remember me, I’m sure, because I was a nobody then. Actually I’m still a nobody.”
He gave a sudden charming smile that took ten years off his face.
“As to that,” Klaus said, “I’m surprised you recognised me.”
“Oh I’ve seen photographs since. Besides, I was excited to meet you then. Thomas Mann’s son, that made a big impression. Later I had other reasons to think about you.”
“Have a drink anyway,” Klaus said, and signalled to the barboy.
“Brandy,” Guy Probyn said, “but they’re on me.”
He took a packet of Chesterfield from his pocket, shook out a cigarette and flicked a gold lighter.
“Do you still see Chris?” he said.
“In LA last year. He’s all right. He’s still into this Vedanta nonsense – at least I suppose it’s nonsense – but he’s all right. The same Chris really.”
The boy brought them two generous cognacs and a soda siphon. Guy squirted a splash into his glass, and said, “Here’s to old times and the boys we knew in Berlin. Strange coincidence meeting you.”
He laid his book on the table open at the title page: Klaus Mann, Mephisto.
Klaus didn’t know what to say. Then he smiled, and lifted his glass, knocking it against Guy’s.
“Cheers, as you say in England. You are English, aren’t you? That’s what I remember, even if your suit is American.”
“Sure, I’m English, but I’m a New Yorker now. You might say I’m mid-Atlantic.”
“Do you know,” Klaus said, “when I was young I used to dream of being in a train and finding myself opposite someone who was reading one of my books and smiling over it. It never happened, and now here you are, the dream come true. If you were smiling, that is.”
“Oh sure, it’s a good novel, may even be more than that. I don’t know yet, I’m only halfway through.”
“Are you a writer yourself? Probably I should know, but… I hope asking isn’t an insult, I rather think I should know the answer.”
“I’m in the theatre. I used to be an actor, but now I’m in management.”
He drew on his cigarette.
“You’re a bit hard on Gustaf, aren’t you?”
“You think so? Did you know him?”
“Pretty well. I don’t say it isn’t a brilliant portrait and I won’t deny it’s ninety per cent true. But there’s the other ten per cent. The bit you leave out. Of course, I don’t know how it ends yet…”
“It hasn’t ended,” Klaus said. “He’s still there.”
“I’m talking about the novel. That’s all. And the missing ten per cent.”
“What do you mean?”
“I stayed on in Berlin till the end of ’35. It was interesting. Hellish in many ways, but for a foreigner, an outsider, compelling viewing. We can’t all be heroes. I’m positively unheroic myself. But for so many it was a question of surviving, of adapting, and Gustaf was one of those.”
“He made a good job of surviving,” Klaus said. “Goering’s pet, Director of the State Theatre, not bad going.”
“Oh sure.”
Guy downed his brandy and called to the barboy for the same again.
“Oh sure, he made a good job of it. But what else was he to do? Like I said, we’re not all built to be heroes. And he’s an actor. He was playing the role the Reichsmarschall offered him.”
“Playing it uncommonly well. Shamefully well.”
“Absolutely, and he’s still at it, has resurrected his career as you doubtless know, is still the idol of the Berlin public. You have to give it to him. Whichever part is assigned to him he carries it off like the star he is.”
“You sound as if you were in love with him.”
“No, never that. Not my type. I prefer soft boys.”
He nodded towards the two in the corner, who were now playing the table-football machine.
“You’re right of course,” he said. “He sold his soul. All I’m saying is that it’s wrong to think he didn’t suffer.”
“I’ve never denied the suffering,” Klaus said, “as you’ll find if you read to the end. Nevertheless…”
He would have left it there, but Guy persisted.
“And the Princess Tebab stuff. Was that fair?”
“Fair?” Klaus said. “I wrote that novel in thirtyfive, six. It’s never been published in Germany, you know, though there are plans to do so now. But, as for Gustaf, would you have expected me to be fair?”
“Perhaps not, but, speaking as a man of the theatre, these passages don’t ring true. Nor from what I knew of Gustaf.”
“You think he wasn’t a masochist, that he didn’t seek humiliation as well as triumph, that both weren’t necessary to him? Perhaps I knew him better than you?”
“At least you don’t fall back on the pretence that Hendrik, as you call him in the novel, is only to be regarded as an imaginary character. I admire you for that, Klaus, but I still say these passages strike a false note. Sorry and all that.”
“An imaginary character?” Klaus said. “You’re a man of the theatre. You must know that all a writer’s characters are imaginary, no matter whether they are based on real people or not. They are people as one imagines them to be.”
“That’s sophistry. All the more so when, like your portrait of Gustaf, they are immediately recognisable and yet false.”
Klaus knew there was nothing to say. “What I have written, I have written” – that was Jehovah, wasn’t it? The unforgiving God of his and Mielein’s ancestors. And it was indeed in that spirit that he had pinned Gustaf to the wall of literature. Pretentious thought – this Guy Probyn would laugh if he uttered it. And what, he wondered, had he done in the war?
“Gustaf was never a Nazi,” Probyn said now. “You must know that. Surely you know that. Just an actor, always an actor, and you can hardly blame him if he played all his parts well, like the great actor he is.”
“I haven’t denied that,” Klaus said, “but he rented himself to the regime and I can’t forgive. That’s all there is to it.”
“You hurt him, you know, wounded him badly, because he always retained an affection for you. I’ve heard him speak about you, with tenderness, and also with a sort of envy. Indeed even then I wondered if what he really wanted was to be Klaus Mann, not Gustaf Gründgens. It’s a mixed-up world.”
Klaus picked up his glass.
“Have you seen him since the war?”
“Oh yes, in Berlin last year. He spoke about you.”
“Bitterly?”
“Bitter, yes, puzzled too. ‘Why did he do this to me?’ he said. I hadn’t read this then –” he tapped the book on the table before him. “Thought I should. And, as I say, it’s good, so far as I’ve got, but cruel. He said you sent him a copy when it was first published.”
“I saw he got one, yes. It wasn’t easy, on account of the censorship.”
“He was awfully hurt, I think you should know that. He just couldn’t understand how you could write about him as you did. And I’m puzzled too.”
He picked up the book, downed his brandy, and gestured to the boy whom he had addressed as Billie.
“My sort,” he said to Klaus. “Soft boy. Well, I’m glad to
have met you again.”
He put his arm round the boy’s shoulders and whispered something in his ear. The boy giggled, and they passed through the beaded curtain and went into the night.
Klaus looked at his watch. Miki was late. Perhaps he wasn’t coming. Probably he wasn’t coming. What to do? He couldn’t face returning to the loneliness of his hotel room. Not yet. He called for another brandy, took out his notebook.
“Julian,” he wrote, “remembered an evening in a Brasserie near the Gare de l’Est – Brasserie de Strasbourg? It was his first visit to Paris since the war, and he knew himself to be more alone than he had ever been in that city which was now haunted by ghosts. There was a woman he had loved in 1938 and urged to accompany him to America. But she had refused. “Europe’s too interesting,” she said, and laughed. In his memory there was mockery, self mockery, in that laugh. Why hadn’t she come with him? She was Jewish, a refugee from Vienna. He feared then what awaited her, though not precisely, for who, even in the weeks around Munich, had envisioned the death camps? He had made enquiries since, and learned nothing. She had made no mark in Paris, where she had lived in a tiny room on the top floor of a cheap hotel with a notice saying that cooking in rooms was forbidden. Perhaps nobody in the city now remembered her, except himself. Hers was only one of millions of lives obliterated, and when he had opened his own door to Death, it would be as if she had never lived. The waiter brought him his choucroute and a bottle of Sylvaner, said the perfunctory, “bon appétit, m’sieur”. Julian poured himself a glass of wine, and found he had no desire for food. A family of six people at the table across the way broke out, all, simultaneously, in laughter, catching his attention. It was held longer by the boy at the end of the table nearest him. Aware of his gaze, the boy glanced across and smiled. He had brown eyes and long lashes, a soft unformed face, stocky build, like a footballer, Julian thought. Then the boy looked away, allowing Julian to take note of an exquisite profile. He was perhaps seventeen. His right leg trembled. Then his mother leaned forward and presented him with a morsel from her plate, held out on a fork. A spoilt child, the darling of the family, Julian said to himself. Later, when the party rose to go, they all embraced the boy…”
Klaus laid his pen aside. It was no good, dead as mutton. Did he believe in Julian’s Jewish girl? As for the boy and his family, that was real enough, a memory drawn from his own last visit to Paris and a meal in the same Alsatian brasserie. And, as they left, the boy had turned to Klaus again and smiled, as if saying, “Yes, I know I’ve made an impression on you, and perhaps if things were different, who knows? But now we’re going home en famille and we’ll never see each other again.” It was ridiculous and the memory was one he couldn’t plausibly give to Julian, not with that suggestion of desire… And of course he himself had only imagined the boy’s thoughts, which might have been quite different, as, for instance, “I know what you want, you sad old pervert…”
VIII
He wouldn’t drug tonight. He could do without. It was ten days since he had left the clinic where he had endured what he called ‘a clear-out’ and he had only flirted with H since then. No need tonight. Three fingers of whisky and a couple of Luminal would see him through. Good, better… but best? Best was far away.
Best was in the past, when they were young and the drugs were no more than naughtiness, to give them a lift. They had all played with them, Gustaf too, despite his inherent timidity, fear that he might surrender something of himself. They called heroin “H” or “tuna”, the fish that swims in the body. Erika had turned away from it. She was always the strong one. One of her letters from a long time back ran through his memory. “Don’t take anymore – if you promise, I’ll give it up too. It’s unhealthy! It’s expensive – and you can’t afford it! It’s dangerous, a killer – don’t you realise that, my love? I embrace you from across mountains. We are too far apart from each other.”
That letter gave him courage, or at least resolution. He would take a cure. He went to see Dr Katzenstein in Zurich, who frowned as he prodded him, and sighed, as if to say “Why are you young people so bent on self-destruction. Look outside, at the blue sky and the mountains. Isn’t life beautiful? Isn’t it good?” Perhaps he actually spoke these words, didn’t merely look them. Klaus couldn’t remember if he himself had put them in the mouth of the good doctor who, however, recommended that he go to a sanatorium in Hungary, in a town called – delicious irony – Siesta.
Klaus assented. The truth was that for the first time in his life he was frightened, really afraid. This was absurd. After all, didn’t he often dream of death, and wasn’t he, by agreeing to go to the sanatorium, running away from what he deep down most desired? Yet there was sufficient reason. It was 1937, and to will death now would be a sort of desertion. Two things gave meaning to his life: writing and the struggle against the Brown Plague, a struggle which, admittedly, he carried on only in words. So, yes, he would check in (as the Americans said) to the sanatorium and force himself to go on living.
But first he had gone to Prague because the Czech President Benes had had the courage to defy the Nazis and offer passports to the entire Mann family, stateless since their German ones had been withdrawn. (Well, not to Erika, who was in no need of one, on account of her mariage blanc to Wystan Auden which made her British. Klaus had first proposed on her behalf to Chris, but he had said no because he saw marriage as a prop of what he called “the heterosexual dictatorship” and in any case his boy-friend Heinz would be hurt and wouldn’t understand. So he “passed the buck” to Wystan who, like the English gentleman he was, consented, even though, unlike Chris, he had never met Erika. Years later, in America, someone asked the Magician who Chris was. “Family pimp,” he replied).
It was in recognition of the Magician’s status that the Czech offer was made. Well, this was one time when Klaus wasn’t in the least reluctant to cling to his father’s coat-tails! He went to Prague and had an interview with the President himself, whom he found to be lively, intelligent and professorial. Their conversation had been almost entirely political, and therefore bleak. They both knew that while times were bad, worse lay ahead.
He had to wait in Budapest, where he stayed in a palace owned by a friend, the Baron Lazi von Hatvany, twice exiled from his own country for his liberal views, first by Reds, then by the quasi-Fascist dictatorship of Admiral Horthy. Now Lazi, permitted to return, didn’t know how long his reprieve would last. Klaus had interviews with doctors, one of whom, Klopstock, had been a close friend of Kafka and had indeed held him in his arms as he died. Klopstock liked to speak about literature, but then, after giving Klaus a physical examination, asked him: “So why do you drug?”
“Because I wanted to die. I am attracted to death.”
“You said ‘wanted’ – past tense. So you no longer want to die and are ready to undergo the cure – disintoxication. It’s painful, you know.”
“What isn’t?” Klaus might have said, but he only nodded his head.
“You have a reason to live now?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
But in truth there was another reason, beside the political struggle to which he was committed, though he did not dare express it. Did not dare because he couldn’t yet believe in it.
At a restaurant, the Hungaria, with Lazi Hatvany and his wife, Jolan, and son Klari, he was introduced to a young American. No, that wasn’t right. It was a pick-up, though later they argued as to which of them had made the approach. Not that it mattered. The boy was blond, green-eyed, smooth sunburnt face. In his journal that night Klaus wrote, cagily, of “the little Curtis, pretty kid, a bit affected, pleased with himself.” And why not? He had a lot to be pleased with, and even the first exchange of glances showed him willing. He set out to impress. “I’ve just come from the Soviet Union where I was studying under Eisenstein.” Message: I’m not one of your café boys, I’m an artist too.
The next day, or the one after, they made an excursion together to a ruined cas
tle which had belonged to the Kings of Hungary before the Ottoman invasion. Klaus had no thought for its history, only for Curtis whom, as tribute to his Russian connection, he called Tomski. Love, he thought, true love, for the first time in years: happiness and mystery. They went to a hotel: his nervousness, his sadness, his intelligence, his tenderness, his sensuality, his laughter, his sighs, his lips, his eyes, his body, his strong well-shaped legs, his smooth arms, his voice with the intoxicating drawl of the American South.
Klaus stretched out on his bed and recalled those first hours: perfection, sought so long, fleetingly caught.
“But you must,” Tomski said, “go through with this cure. I’ve heard what drugs can do. You must go through with it for our future.”
Our future? When had anyone last spoken of that to him, in those soft and certain tones?
Would he have done it if Tomski hadn’t urged him?
He would never know. It was the sort of question that was by its nature unanswerable. When you came to the crossroads and followed one arm of the signpost, the alternative route, the one not taken, was wiped out. He had known that for years. Yet he also knew that if Tomski had laughed and said, “Don’t bother. Come away with me tomorrow,” he would have abandoned the sanatorium and left with the boy.
They put him in a room with barred windows. He made it his by laying out the photographs of family, friends, lovers he carried with him on his wanderings. Visitors forbidden. Tomski was allowed ten minutes to say goodbye. They kissed and it was like being left on an empty platform watching the train pull away. No visitors, the injunction was repeated. “We can never be certain,” the nurse said, “that out of mistaken kindness they won’t smuggle in drugs.” All the same that first night they gave him a little heroin, the smallest shot, along with pills, to allow him to sleep.
He did so, for a few hours, and woke tired, weak, nervous and afraid. But it could be endured…
Months later in his novel Der Vulkan, he relived the ordeal through his hero, Martin: “All around him, twitching feet and hands jerked themselves into spasms. He threw his tormented head about. He would never have thought he could be simultaneously so exhausted and so tremblingly alive. He was too weak to get out of bed, but his wet, quivering body couldn’t bear to be in the same position for thirty seconds. He had been ill often, as a child especially, but nothing like this. In comparison fever and bodily pain were positive feelings. This was a huge embarrassment. ‘It’s how a fish must feel, when it’s been thrown on land,’ Martin thought. ‘With the hook still in its mouth. I’m wriggling like a fish on dry land. My God, my God, what have I done that I must flap about like a wretched little fish…’ ”