Klaus

by Allan Massie

  Another Luminal. Better take two.

  There was still Tomski then, but in America Tomski was more complicated than in Europe. Meeting his parents again and not being understood, living a lie to them. The sun had gone out of his smile. Klaus still loved him but they were no longer easy together. “Why should I be faithful,” he asked, “when you aren’t?” Klaus had no answer except tears. Political divisions too: Tomski railed against Roosevelt and conscription. In a moment of passion he would exclaim that America had nothing to do with Europe, should steer clear of its corruption. When Klaus explained patiently that… oh, he couldn’t now be bothered to rehearse the arguments he had made so often and so vehemently, and which utterly failed to convince. But even in their worst quarrels, of which there were too many, something of tenderness remained.

  Tenderness too with the little Russian, Ury, who looked like a faun, but was ultimately boring…

  Bombs were falling on London and Erika, armed with her British passport, went there to report. Klaus feared for her safety, admired her work, knew it pulled them further apart, for while she grew stronger, he felt himself to be more and more feeble, useless indeed.

  What was the fate of exiles? To write things that invited the reply, “What’s that got to do with us?”

  You can’t go home anymore. A hotel is a parody of home. Even the Bedford.

  Sleep impossible. He was shaking again. When he poured himself a whisky the bottle rattled like a prisoner’s chains against the glass, which he held in both hands, for security, as he leant on the windowsill looking out on the rain with the smell of wet leaves rising towards him. Had the Swedish boy taken a train? Was he lying with his girl or trawling the bars? Absurd thoughts, he would never see him again.

  He had scarcely ever even in New York or in California – where last year he had indeed yielded to the temptation of suicide but failed in that too – been so bad as he was now. He had had enough of life as never before. He longed for death as a parched man for a glass of water.

  But not yet, perhaps not yet.

  The failure of Decision had killed something in him: the superfluous Klaus.

  His hopes had been so high. This time he would make a difference. It hadn’t blown up in his face, more simply and humiliatingly it had expired like a pricked balloon.

  He swallowed a mouthful of whisky, which tore at his throat and made him retch. Was another old friend abandoning him?

  Somewhere in the distance a dog howled. Poor dog, shut out from the hearth where it would have slumbered in peace!

  As a child he had dreamed often of a pale man who invaded his room. Sometimes he carried his head under his arm as if it had been a flowerpot. The disconnected head grinned at him, horribly, as if to say, “This is me, someday it will be you.” It got to the stage that Klaus was afraid to sleep and it was then that his father was informed of the horror.

  “Just don’t look at him next time he comes,” he said, “and tell him a child’s bedroom is no place for a ghost. If he still hangs about, say that your father has a sharp temper and doesn’t care to have ghosts in his house. That’ll make him disappear, for it’s well known in ghostly circles that I can make myself exceedingly unpleasant…”

  Amazingly this worked. The ghost departed, never to return. It was on account of this incident that they began to call Father the Magician.

  Klaus thought: as long as there remains something that makes you smile…

  He had been happy as a child. He was sure of that. And he had been happy, or at least contented, in the army where in a sense he was a child again. But what an effort it had been to be accepted! He was, it seemed, an object of suspicion, subject to investigation by the FBI: as suspected leftist and homosexual. He rebutted the first allegation and, to his shame, denied the second. Flatly. Eventually his lies were, it seemed, convincing. He was called up and later received his American citizenship; it felt like a birthday present…

  His comrades in the barracks found him strange. No wonder. He couldn’t blame them. He was ten or a dozen years older than most, spoke with a German accent, and, in short, made no sense to them. He wrote a story about it, entitled “The Monk”. Eventually, he wrote to their childhood friend Lotte Walter asking for a photograph. Because he would like to impress his comrades with a beautiful girlfriend. So send a truly seductive one with bare shoulders and bedroom eyes. She obliged and he told her that it was very peculiar to be a soldier and he couldn’t explain it. He put the photograph by his bed and kissed it before going to sleep. Not that it fooled anyone, though he never touched any of his mates in the barracks, however much in a couple of cases he longed to do so.

  Another whisky, another pill, even though there were hints of dawn. The poor dog still howling. It’s me.

  When at last he received the order for overseas, the Magician and Mielein and Erika came by train to Kansas City to see him off. The Magician embraced him, as never before. Mielein wept. Erika’s mouth twitched as she said, “We’ll meet on the other side.” The other side: after the war is over.

  In Naples, the second day, he came under fire and was glad of it. Now I am like the others.

  He lay down on the bed. He had again been almost happy in Naples where he was assigned to the newspaper the Stars and Stripes, and spent off-duty hours in the Galleria, cruising with his eyes only, determined to do nothing which might be a blot on his army record. “We’ll meet on the other side.”

  I don’t want to survive this year. I am nearly on that other side. He closed his eyes, and this time, the whisky and the pills combined to invite sleep.

  XIII

  He woke sweating and afraid: a horrible dream. Gustaf in SS uniform and highly waxed gleaming boots. He brandished a riding-crop. “This time it is I who plays the role of Princess Tebab with which you insulted me and made me appear ridiculous,” he yelled, and lashed out at Klaus. The first blow caught him across the face and he fell to his knees. Shrieking obscenities, Gustaf struck out again and again. The whip bit into Klaus’s flesh. He smelled his own blood. “Admit you deserve it,” Gustaf cried. “Confess you have wronged me.” But Klaus found no words, only sobs. Then Gustaf was on his knees beside him, thrusting his face, with sulphurous breath into his. “Judas,” he muttered. “Judas. I came close to loving you and you betrayed me,” and began to howl.

  It was still dark. Klaus felt his face wet with tears. If he had remained asleep, would they have consoled each other? “I came close to loving you” – closer perhaps than ever before or since. The thought was insupportable. How ugly, unlike Willi, Gustaf had been in that uniform!

  Klaus began to weep freely, tears of exhaustion and despair. They flowed unstoppable as the river of time. “I’m at the end of everything.” A shadowy shape hovered above him. He knew what it was: the ghost of an earlier night horror. He was lying on a deserted Baltic beach, stretched out on the cold wet sand while the beating of vultures’ wings filled the air. “But there are no vultures in Germany,” he cried out, vainly.

  A cramp seized the back of his thigh. He hopped out of bed, naked, pressed his hands against his leg, stood on tiptoe to ease it. There was still some whisky in the bottle. He lifted it in both hands and swallowed. René’s last words: “I am disgusted with everything.”

  The whisky steadied him. He tilted the bottle, this time into the glass. Why not do it now? I am being devoured by loneliness and misery. Why not escape? “But that the fear of something after death” – yet I have no fear of that. Only of life. And it’s not fear, but wretchedness, boredom. He put on a dressinggown. To die naked would be an embarrassment. The thought was amusing. He nursed the glass as a friend who had never betrayed him.

  I can wait. I can still wait. I have not yet arrived at the irreversible moment. I am almost in credit here at the hotel, and the money Mielein sent me is not exhausted.

  Her photograph stood in its frame on the table before him. The tenderness of her gaze without a hint even of reproach. Yes, my death would certainly hurt her
. Can I be so cruel? And I still have work to do.

  “Julian had thought so deeply, so often and so longingly of death that he felt it had become the shadow that accompanied him wherever he walked. Yet now, lying on the beach, listening to the murmur of the waves and smoking a cigar, he said to himself, ‘Not yet, there’s no urgency, I don’t need anything now and that’s a sort of freedom. There’s only the seashore and the north breeze and the gulls crying out in the upper air, and the smoke from my cigar rising blue towards them to lose itself in the sunshine. I’m almost at ease with life. For the moment. So no need yet.’ But then it came to him that this was precisely the occasion to depart. Was it possible that in the afterlife your condition might depend on the mood in which you had taken your leave of the earth and your own body? But then, was there any afterlife? Could he even conceive of such a thing? And if there was, wasn’t it possible that it would be no better? That you might only exchange one form of misery and pain for another, and indeed for one from which there wasn’t even the dream-possibility of release? To pass through that door and find that you have only entered another cell, with a palet bed and barred windows, and would hear the gaoler turn the key behind you?”

  It was some days since he had written that and it rang horrifyingly true. What was it Erika had said? “If you can’t write as you wish to, it’s because by your own actions you have made it impossible to do so.” But perhaps she was wrong; he was wrong too and he still could. And if so, then it was what he had made of himself, even his degeneration, that would make this novel what he intended it to be, even if for so much of the time the prose advanced haltingly like a man with his feet shackled by chains.

  There was another dream he had often in which he took a cleaver and with one blow cut off his right hand. And was left with a dilemma. How then to strike off the other one?

  He had come close once in New York at the Bedford. (“After all, this is your home now, Mr Mann?”) He had had a quarrel with a boy called Johnny, a deserter from the American army, who had yelled reproaches and banged out in a temper. Then Tomski had telephoned to fix a rendezvous for the next morning, and Klaus said, “Swell idea, but goodnight for now.” He ran a bath, hot enough to fill the room with steam, and lay in it with a little knife in his hand. He tried to open the artery on his right wrist, but the slash wasn’t deep enough, there was blood but it didn’t gush out, and then the knife seemed dirty as well as blunt and the enterprise the same, even stupid. He was bleeding but couldn’t bring himself to cut again for a moment – afraid perhaps, shamefully afraid. He was nerving himself to make a second attempt when the telephone rang again and this time it was Chris saying, “Come out for a drink, Klaus, I’ll come and fetch you.” So he dried himself and tied a handkerchief round his wrist till it was red through, and then another till the bleeding stopped. In a bar off Times Square, Chris remarked the wound and said, “You mustn’t be stupid, Klaus. You and me, we’re not made for this sort of nonsense. We’ve a long time to live and suffer and besides we have work to do.” So they got drunk together and Chris paid for everything. Klaus lifted the glass of whisky to him now, across the ocean and the Great Plains and in comfort in California. And the next afternoon he and Tomski had indulged in wild laughter and they hadn’t quarrelled and Tomski had been affectionate as in their first days.

  In bleak years of exile the Magician had called work, the Joseph novels, “his rod and his staff”. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil…”

  “Julian knew himself to be diminished when he thought of Anna in the concentration camp, for he was certain that she had never, even in das Arschloch des Welt, surrendered the will to live. And it was all the more remarkable because in the ordinary events of daily existence she had been inclined to melancholy, subject indeed to a profound depression, in which, as she had once said to him, I sit and stare at the wall and feel rats chewing at my heart. That was the way she talked, exaggeratedly, in a way which had embarrassed him, as an American, he now thought. For he had been reared with his gaze fixed on a Promised Land flowing with milk and honey. That was the American way, the future theirs to command, the Frontier with all its possibilities open to him. So how could he be so certain that Anna had defied death, refusing to hearken to its siren call, that she had willed herself simply to go on and never surrendered that will until the moment when life was torn from her? He didn’t know. Nevertheless he was certain and the thought shamed him. But you can live with shame, he told himself, indeed you may have to. That’s inescapable until you break through the veil yourself. His thoughts were muddled, he knew that. Indeed to anyone else, should he ever utter them, they would make no sense. They would be the ramblings of a madman. How can you believe in her constancy, and admire it, people might say, and yet long for death yourself? It’s pitiful, ridiculous. You should be ashamed of yourself. And indeed he was ashamed, ashamed because he had never been what he intended to be, perhaps what he was even intended to be. It was failure he couldn’t live with, his own failure and that of the society in which he was condemned to live where everything good and noble was being tossed aside, discarded like garbage, as things that were no longer of use. So it was precisely because everything that didn’t horrify him now seemed ridiculous that he was eager to be off. He wasn’t proud of this feeling. It would be absurd to be proud of it. But there it was. That’s how it was, how matters stood.”

  Klaus put his notebook down and emptied his glass. I’m obliged perhaps to go on till I can release Julian. But then there’s Albert to think of too and deal with. His struggle against temptation is even more acute, more terrible, because he still seeks to believe, longs to believe, believes, despite all the evidence that is so remorselessly stacking up, in belief itself.

  He looked up. To his surprise it was now day. They had got through another night.

  XIV

  He had slept for a bit, without dreams, and when he woke, the rain had cleared, the sky was cornflowerblue, and the sun lay on his work-table. It’s possible to go on, he thought, what I wrote last night was perhaps not so bad. If I can work, really and truly work, then I can continue.

  Gide had shown him two years ago a letter from an unknown young man who thanked him for having “liberated him from his upbringing in a home full of bourgeois material comfort.” But he had then found himself posing the question, which he called frightening, “Free for what?” He had, as he put it, then detached himself from Gide, but had found no new masters and trembled in uncertainty. “The terrifying absurdity,” he wrote, “of the Sartres and the Camuses has solved nothing and merely opens horizons of suicide…”

  Immediately Klaus had wanted to meet this young man and speak with him and find a brother in him.

  On the second page of the letter the young man spoke of “the confusion of all our youth” and begged for Gide to offer him “a glimmer which might indicate the direction to take… If there is a direction…”

  If indeed!

  “Did you reply?”

  “Naturally I did. But what could I say except to urge him to submit to no creed or master, and, I said, ‘Be yourself’. I haven’t heard from him again. Doubtless he was disappointed by my message. After all, it’s not easy to be yourself and go your own way. It’s a lonely path, as you well know, Klaus. But what other is worth taking?”

  Gide understood him – there was comfort there. And yet Klaus knew that Gide could never inhabit him, for he was quite certain that the old man had never wrestled with the temptation to end it all. His curiosity was insatiable. “Prodigious, really.” All the same, Gide had never let him down. He was an anchor, even if the anchor’s hold was loosening.

  Perhaps even Julian and Albert might yet be brought to life. He wasn’t finished, he told himself, drinking a café crème sitting outside a bar. He could do it because he was both of them. It was, sadly, a long time since he had been able to make other people seem real enough to matter. He no longer experienced the urgent need to know what
others were knowing, to see, hear, feel what for a brief moment they saw, heard and felt. Time had sated his curiosity about others. Still, if he was both Julian and Albert, there were really no others in his novel, except as they encountered or remembered them, and knew alienation. And if news came – as it might any day – that Mephisto was at last to be published in Germany, and the German version of his autobiography also, well then…

  Besides, his curiosity wasn’t stone dead. That Swedish boy – he could imagine his day, even days. Perhaps he was still in Cannes. Perhaps he was on the beach. He pictured him there like Willi, stretched out on a towel, inviting admiration. He walked a little in that direction, stopping only twice for a glass of white wine; and felt better.

  But of course there was no sign of the Swedish boy. He hadn’t really expected him, only hoped, but hoped vaguely, without urgency, as you might elaborate in your mind the details and pleasures of a journey you would never take.

  He settled himself at a café table, under a parasol, ordered a beer, to be drunk slowly, to pass the time, kill time. Relaxed, yes, truly, relaxed. Things could be worse.

  Nevertheless, all my life I have been essentially second-rate… In the shade of this parasol, in the shadow of the Magician. And my alcoholism and drug addiction… True cause, that I cannot accept life as sold to me. It was the little rat and the brown plague gave it meaning. Now, Othello’s occupation’s gone… Still, for the moment it’s bearable. Who was it said once, no one who’s met you, Klaus, ever forgets you? If only, if only… You should eat. He gestured to the waiter, ordered a sandwich, but when it came, took one mouthful and pushed it aside.

  Albert… What to do with Albert? The direction was plain, but details of his daily life – how to supply them when the effort of imagination was too much for him? He consulted his notebook. Yes, he had left him in a café, drinking weak, ersatz, chicoryflavoured coffee and casting back in time, over his broken marriage. The first loss of faith when a relationship in which you have invested what seemed at the time the best of yourself simply withers. The day had arrived when Albert and his wife – what had he called her? – Hildegarde, yes, Hildegarde – she was so unreal to Klaus that he had had to leaf back thirty pages to find the name – when Albert and Hildegarde had faced each other over the suppertable and found that their dialogue had expired. And this wasn’t – or wasn’t entirely – because Klaus could find no words for them to speak to each other. It was also because it was the way it had to be. Albert clung to what remained of his faith in Communism and the Party because it was all that was left to him. His marriage was bare as the branches of a winter tree. And then he is summoned before one of the Party secretaries and accused of bourgeois deviationism because his last newspaper columns have been devoid of optimism. “They show no faith in the future,” he is told, “and this is not permitted.” Which is why Albert is now drinking this substitute for coffee and struggling to supply the Party with what is demanded of him. “You must correct your thinking,” he has been told. “What use is thought if it doesn’t lead to right action?” So he would have to oblige. It was his duty. But he couldn’t find the words for the sentiments that were required. All his life he had been able to find words, and now he couldn’t.