by Colm Toibin
“It gets worse. Listen to this!”
He read aloud in an imitation of a pompous voice.
“ ‘Towards all the children, my wife should be firm, and keep them all dependent on her. If she should become dubious, she should read King Lear.’ ”
“I knew my father was petty-minded,” Heinrich said, “but I did not know that he was vindictive.”
In a stern and official voice, Heinrich then told his brother the provisions of their father’s will. The senator had left instructions that the family firm was to be sold forthwith, and the houses also. Julia was to inherit everything, but two of the most officious men in the public life of Lübeck, men whom she had always viewed as unworthy of her full attention, were designated to make financial decisions for her. Two guardians were also appointed to supervise the upbringing of the children. And the will stipulated that Julia was to report to the thin-lipped Judge August Leverkühn four times a year on how the children were progressing.
* * *
When Elisabeth came to visit the next time, she was not invited to sit down.
“Did you know about my husband’s will?” Julia asked her.
“I was not consulted,” Elisabeth replied.
“That was not the question. Did you know about it?”
“Julia, not in front of the children!”
“There is something I have always wanted to say,” Julia said, “and I can say it now that I am free. And I will say it in front of the children. I have never liked you. And it’s a pity your mother is no longer alive, because I would say the same to her.”
Heinrich made to stop her but Julia brushed him aside.
“The senator made that will to humiliate me.”
“You could hardly have run the business yourself,” Elisabeth said.
“I could have decided. My sons and I could have decided.”
* * *
For the citizens of Lübeck, for those whom Julia had teased or spoken of lightly at parties in her husband’s house, men such as Herr Kellinghusen or Herr Cadovius, women such as young Frau Stavenhitter or Frau Mackenthun, or for women who watched her carefully and deplored what they saw, such as Frau Overbeck and her daughter, Julia’s decision, made public soon after the reading of the will, to move to Munich with her three youngest children and set up home there, leaving Thomas behind to complete his final year at school while boarding in the house of Dr. Timpe, and encouraging Heinrich to travel to improve his chances in the literary world, could not have been more perverse.
If the widow of Senator Mann had decided to move to Lüneburg or Hamburg, the good people of Lübeck might have seen this as a mere aspect of her unreliability, but in those years, Thomas knew, for these Hanseatic burghers, Munich represented the south, and they disliked the south and did not trust it. The city was Catholic; it was bohemian. It had no solid virtues. None of them had ever been there for longer than was necessary.
Lübeck’s attention was on his mother, especially when Aunt Elisabeth told people in confidence how rude Julia had been to her and how she had sullied the memory of her mother.
For a while, in their world, the talk was of nothing except the lack of placidity displayed by the senator’s widow and her unwise plans. It struck no one, not even Heinrich, how wounded Thomas was that the family firm had not been left to him, even if it were to be supervised by others until he came of age.
Thomas lived with the shock of the knowledge that he was destined to have taken away from him what he had believed, in some of his dreams, would be his. He knew that running the family business was merely one of the many ways he had imagined his future, but he felt anger at his father for the presumption in his decision. He disliked the idea that his father had seen through his illusions without realizing how real they often appeared to him. He wished he had had the opportunity to give his father evidence enough to have left a more generous will.
Instead, his father had cut the family adrift. Since the senator could not live, he had set about vitiating the lives of others. Thomas felt a persistent and gnawing sorrow that all the effort of the Manns in Lübeck would come to nothing now. The time of his family was over.
No matter where they went in the world, the Manns of Lübeck would never be known as they had been known when the senator was alive. This did not seem to bother Heinrich or his sisters, or indeed his mother; they had other, more practical concerns. He knew that his aunt Elisabeth felt that the status of the family had been fatally undermined, but he could hardly discuss this with her. Instead, he was alone with these thoughts. The family would now be uprooted from Lübeck. No matter where he went, he would never be important again.
Chapter 2 Lübeck, 1892
The orchestra was playing the Prelude to Lohengrin. As Thomas listened, the string section seemed to be holding back, offering hints of what the melody might eventually become. Then the sound began to rise and fall naturally until a single plaintive note on the violin lifted and lingered; the playing then became louder and more luscious, more intense.
The sound almost comforted him, but then as it increased in volume, grew more piercing, and the dark undertone of the cellos came in, forcing the violins and violas to rise further above them, what the orchestra gave him was only a sense of his own smallness.
And then all the instruments, the conductor with his arms spread out wide to encourage them, began to play; once the drums had been beaten and the cymbals had clashed, he noticed the gradual slowing down, the move towards conclusion.
When the audience applauded, he did not join them. He sat and watched the stage and the lights and the musicians, as they prepared for the Beethoven symphony that would end the evening. When the concert was over, he did not want to go out into the night. He wanted to remain enfolded by the music. He wondered if there were other people among this crowd who shared how he felt, but he did not think so.
This was Lübeck, after all, and people were not given to such emotions. Those around him, he thought, would easily be able to forget, or brush off, the memory of the music they had heard.
It struck him, as he remained in his seat, that this might have mattered to his father in the last days of his life, when he knew death was coming, this idea of a soaring, shifting sound, overwhelming, suggesting a power beyond earthly power, opening a door to some other realm where the spirit would survive and prevail, where there might be rest once death itself in its sheer indignity had been endured.
He thought of his father’s dead body laid out like a spectacle, dressed in his formal clothes like a parody of a sleeping public man, ready for inspection. The senator lay there, cold, contained, the mouth downturned and closed tight, the face changing as the light changed, the hands drained of all color. He remembered people watching his mother turning away from the coffin with her hand over her face, their looks of disapproval.
* * *
Thomas walked to the house where his mother, who wished him to concentrate more formally on his studies, had found him lodgings with Dr. Timpe, one of his schoolmasters. Tomorrow, once more, he would face the drudgery of the Katharineum; he would write out equations and study the rules of grammar and learn poetry by rote. Throughout the day he would pretend, as the others did, that all this was somehow natural, preordained. It was easier to let his mind wander over how much he dreaded the classroom than to think about his own bedroom, the one where he had slept before his mother and Lula and Carla and Viktor had moved to Munich, that was now lost to him. He was conscious that if he thought about how warm and comfortable he had been there he would become too sad. He would have to try to force his mind to linger on something else.
He would think about girls. He knew that his fellow students’ efforts to look diligent were often a way of concealing their constant thinking about girls. When they made jokes and stray remarks, however, these were usually suffused with shyness or embarrassment or self-conscious bravado. But sometimes as he watched them jostling one another on the street, or walking in twos or threes laughing
coarsely, he saw the hidden energies.
Despite the boredom of the lessons, a sense of heady expectation filled the air as the afternoon wore on and the chance of them all moving together into the open air grew closer. And even though his fellow students might meet no one special on the way home, they were excited, he understood, by the possibility that they could encounter a young woman on the street or a girl could become visible through a window.
As, after the concert, he neared his own destination, he thought about the upstairs rooms of these houses where, even now as he walked along, a girl might be getting ready for bed, shedding some of her outer garments, lifting her arms high to take off a blouse, or bending to remove what she was wearing below.
He looked up and saw a flickering light in an uncurtained window; he wondered what scene might be enacted in the room. He tried to imagine a couple coming into that space, the man closing the door; he pondered on the image of the girl undressing, her white underclothes and her soft flesh. But when it came to contemplating then how it might feel if he himself were the man, he held back, his thoughts retreated. He found himself unwilling to pursue what had been so graphic just a moment before.
He supposed that his schoolmates, as they imagined such a scene, must also become less than certain about what would, in any case, live only in their most private dreams.
He would wait until he was in his small bedroom at the back of the top floor of Dr. Timpe’s house before he would entertain his own dreams. Sometimes, before he turned off the lamp, he began a poem or added a stanza to one that he had been working on. As he sought suitable metaphors for the complex workings of love, he did not think of girls in shadowy rooms; he did not conjure up the intimacy between couples.
There was a boy in his class with whom he had a different sort of intimacy. This boy’s name was Armin Martens. Like Thomas, he was sixteen, although he looked younger. His father, who was a mill owner, had known Thomas’s father, even though the Martens family was less prominent than the Manns had been.
When Armin noticed Thomas’s interest in him, he did not appear surprised. He started to take walks with Thomas, making sure that they were not joined by any of their classmates. Thomas was both disturbed and impressed by Armin’s ability to talk to him about the soul, about the real nature of love, about the enduring importance of poetry and music, and with the same facility discuss girls or gymnastics with other classmates.
Armin could be completely at ease with anyone, Thomas saw, his smile warm and open, his aura filled with sweetness and innocence.
When Thomas wrote a poem about wanting to rest his head on his lover’s breast, or walk with his lover in the deepening twilight to a place of beauty where they would be fully alone, when he spoke of the urge he felt to intertwine with the soul of his loved one, the figure he imagined, the object of his desire, was Armin Martens.
He wondered if Armin would show him some sign, or would, on one of their walks, allow the conversation to move away from poems and music to focus on their feelings for each other.
In time, he realized that he set more store by these walks than Armin did. On waking, he knew that he should temper his behavior accordingly, permit Armin to become distant from him if that was what his friend desired. As he ruminated sadly on how little he could really expect from Armin, the possibility of rejection caused a surge in his blood, something sharply painful and then almost satisfying.
Such thoughts came as fleetingly as a change in the light or a sudden coldness in the air. He could not easily manage them or entertain them. And as the day went on in all its dullness and ordinariness, they faded from his mind. In his desk, he kept his own poems and some love poems by the great German masters that he had copied out on single pages. During lessons, if the teacher were at the blackboard, he would take one of these sheets out and surreptitiously read a poem, glancing often at Armin Martens, who sat one row ahead of him across the narrow passageway.
He wondered how Armin would react if he were to show him these poems as a way of explaining how he felt.
Sometimes they walked together in silence, Thomas relishing their closeness. If they met anyone they knew, Armin had a firm but friendly way of establishing that they did not want company on their stroll.
Most days, especially at the beginning of their walk, Thomas allowed Armin to lead the conversation. He noted that his companion never spoke badly of their fellow students or their teachers. His view of the world was tolerant and relaxed. A mention of the name of their mathematics teacher Herr Immerthal, for example, a man for whom Thomas felt a profound loathing, merely caused Armin to smile.
When Thomas wanted to discuss poetry and music, his friend often had more mundane concerns such as the riding lessons that he took, or some game in which he had been involved. Once Thomas managed to shift to loftier themes, however, Armin’s way of approaching the subject did not change, it had the same lightness and lack of intensity.
It was his naturalness, his evenness, his acceptance of the world, his lack of nervousness, self-consciousness or pretense, that made Thomas want to have him as his special friend.
Thomas noticed as the year went on that Armin was beginning to change, becoming taller and broader in the shoulders, starting to shave. His friend, he thought, was half-boy, half-man. This made Thomas feel more tenderly towards him. Late at night, certain that the time had come to declare what his feelings were, he was determined that he would show him his new love poem, a poem that did not disguise the fact that the loved one was Armin himself.
In the first stanza of his poem, Thomas wrote of how his loved one spoke eloquently of music. And in the next stanza he described how his loved one spoke of poetry. In the final stanza he wrote that the object of his affection combined the beauty of both music and poetry in his voice and in his eyes.
* * *
One day in winter, as they walked, they held their caps and bent their heads before the strong, damp wind that rattled and groaned in the leafless trees. Although Thomas had the new poem in his jacket pocket, he knew that despite his previous determination it would be impossible to share it with his friend. Armin was talking about the pleasure to be had, once he was home, sliding down the banisters of the stairs. He sounded like a child. Thomas thought it might be better were he to burn the poem.
On other days, especially if there had been a concert in Lübeck, or if Thomas had pointed him towards one of Goethe’s love poems, Armin’s response could be more serious and thoughtful. When Thomas tried to describe how he had felt as the Lohengrin Prelude was played, Armin studied him with curiosity, nodding his head, letting him know that he was in full sympathy with the emotions Thomas described. As they walked on, Thomas was content that they were both contemplating the power of music. He was with the companion he had dreamed about.
He wrote a poem about the lover and the loved one walking in silence, each thinking the same thoughts, with only the noise of the wind keeping them separate, only the bareness of the trees reminding them that nothing lasts, nothing except their love. In the last stanza, the poet called on his lover to live with him forever, thus resisting time, moving together into eternity.
Thomas was aware that Armin was often taunted by their classmates about their friendship. He was viewed as lacking the finer masculine qualities, being too conceited and too interested in poetry, too proud of his family’s former importance in Lübeck. He knew that Armin just laughed this off and saw no reason why he should not keep Thomas as a close companion. It was obvious that Armin felt a real affection for him. Surely then it would not surprise him were Thomas to show him the poems, or let him know his feelings in some other way?
One day at school, when the teacher’s back was turned, Armin looked around and smiled at him. His hair was freshly washed, his skin clear and luminous; his eyes were bright. Thomas could see how beautiful he was becoming. It occurred to him that Armin was possibly as alert to him now as he was to Armin. He did not smile at anyone else in the same way.
They had planned a walk the following day. The wind was mild and the sun appeared intermittently as they strolled down towards the docks. Armin was in high good humor, talking excitedly about a trip to Hamburg he and his father were making.
They moved along, avoiding horses and carts and men loading wood, then paused to watch as several logs fell from a small cart, forcing the driver to stop and ask those around to help him reload the cart. The more the driver appealed to his fellow dockworkers, the more playful was the abuse they directed at him, using dialect that amused both Thomas and Armin.
“I wish I knew how to talk like they do,” Armin said.
When one man began to help the driver, more logs rolled from the cart. Armin became more and more engaged by the scene. He laughed, putting his arm around Thomas’s shoulder and then around his waist. As the men set about rearranging the logs but managed instead to displace some more, causing hoots of derision, Armin hugged Thomas.
“This is what I love about Lübeck,” he said. “In Hamburg everything is more orderly and modern and governed by rules. I would like never to leave Lübeck.”
It struck Thomas as they watched the two men piling the logs more securely that he should respond in some way to Armin’s embraces. He wondered if he might turn and hug him, but he did not think he could make it seem natural.
They walked towards a cluster of old warehouses, veering into a side street where there was no traffic, no sign of life. Armin said they could get to the waterfront by this route and inspect what ships had come into port.
“I have something to show you,” Thomas said.
He took the two poems from his jacket pocket and handed them to Armin, who began quietly to read them, concentrating hard, as though some words or lines presented him with difficulty.
“Who wrote this?” he asked when he had finished reading the poem that compared the loved one to music and to poetry.