by Colm Toibin
As the conversation went on, Thomas turned to Paul, who was two places away from him.
“My novel has been accepted,” he said.
Paul smiled remotely and then turned to the young man on the other side of him. For the next hour, Thomas sought to get his full attention, but Paul did further imitations of people or made jokes about colleagues. He even did his imitation of a farmer selling a field to another farmer. He would not catch Thomas’s eye. When Thomas finally decided to leave, he imagined that Paul might follow him. But he found himself alone in the street, and walked back on his own to his apartment.
* * *
When his novel came out, it was clear to some what he had achieved. But word came from Lübeck that it was an insult to the city. His aunt Elisabeth expressed her dislike of the book in a curt note to his mother.
“I am recognized in the street, and not as myself, but that terrible woman in the book. And this was all done without anyone’s permission. It would kill my mother if she were still alive. He is a little pup, that son of yours.”
Thomas heard nothing from Heinrich, who was living in Berlin, and even wondered if a letter from him might have gone astray. His mother showed Buddenbrooks to all her visitors, insisting that she loved the portrait her son had painted of her.
“I am so musical in the book. Now, I am musical, of course, but in the book, I am much more talented and dedicated than I really am. I will have to practice my scales to get to be as good as Gerda. But I think I am more intelligent than she is, or so I have been told.”
In the cafés, some of the writers and painters suggested that the last thing Munich needed was another two-volume novel about a declining family. Complaining to Paul, who professed to admire the novel, Thomas insisted that he would be more celebrated had he written a short book of confused poems about the dark side of his soul.
His sisters wanted to know why they had been excluded.
“People will think we didn’t exist,” Carla said.
“And I hope no one associates us with that ghastly little Hanno,” Lula added. “Mother says that he is exactly like you when you were that age.”
Thomas understood that while the book was based on the Manns in Lübeck, there was some source for it that was outside of himself, beyond his control. It was like something in magic, something that would not come again so easily. The praise he received also made him realize how much the success of the book masked his failure in other areas.
He remained secretive. Indeed, he had never confessed to Paul what he actually wanted from him. But, as his time in Munich went on, he grew increasingly sure that what was between them would have to change. Were Paul to visit him, it would just take an hour, maybe two, on one of those winter evenings for everything to be transformed.
One evening, in a fit of impatience, losing all the guardedness that usually protected him, he wrote to Paul, saying that he longed for someone who would say yes to him. Sending the letter made him feel elated, but that did not last long. When they met the next time, Paul did not refer to the letter. Instead, he smiled at him, touched his hand, talked to him about painting and music. At the end of the evening he put his arms around him and held him close, whispering some words of endearment as though they were already lovers. Thomas wondered if he were not being mocked.
In the light of morning, he could ask himself what he wanted from Paul. Did he want a night of love, each of them yielding to the other? He recoiled from the thought of sleeping with another man, waking in his arms, feeling their legs touch.
Instead, he wanted Paul to appear in lamplight in his study. He wanted to touch his hands, his lips; he wanted to help him undress.
More than anything, he wished to live intensely in the voracious moments before this, in the sure knowledge that it would happen.
* * *
Thomas awaited a visit to Munich from Heinrich. At first, he was determined not to ask his mother if she had heard from his elder brother about the book. When his resolve failed him, he immediately regretted it.
“I have had several letters from Heinrich,” his mother said, “and he seems very busy. He did not mention the book at all. He will visit soon, and then we will hear all about his opinion of it.”
Thomas presumed that Heinrich, as the family had supper together after his arrival, was waiting to discuss the novel with him once the others had gone to bed. Later, in the living room as Heinrich and Carla talked, he was tempted to raise the matter, but because of the intimate way they spoke, it was impossible for him to intervene. Eventually, Thomas left, feeling relieved to be on the street, away from his family.
He became resigned to the idea that Heinrich was not going to make any comment on Buddenbrooks. One Sunday morning, however, when he called, he found that Heinrich was alone in the apartment, the others having gone to church. After discussing the habits of a number of magazine editors for a while, they fell silent. Heinrich began to flick through a magazine.
“It struck me that you never received my book,” Thomas said.
“I read it, and will read it again. Perhaps we can discuss it when I have read it the second time?”
“Or perhaps not?”
“It changes everything about the family, how people will see our mother and father. How they see you. People will feel they know us everywhere we go.”
“Would you like one of your books to do that?”
“I think novels should not deal so obsessively with private life.”
“Madame Bovary?”
“I see that as a book about changing mores, a changing society.”
“And my book?”
“It may be about that. Yes, it may. But readers will feel more that they are peering in through a window.”
“That might be the perfect description of what a novel is.”
“In that case, you have written a masterpiece. I should not be surprised that you are already so famous.”
* * *
The novel went into a second edition, so Thomas had more money to spend. As Carla grew more interested in becoming an actress, Thomas often bought tickets for plays and the opera. One evening, as they sat in the front seats of a box at the opera, she drew his attention to a family that was arriving, with much fuss and animation, in a box across from them.
“They are the children from that painting,” she said. “Look at them!”
Thomas did not know what she meant.
“They were dressed as Pierrots,” she said, “in that magazine, and you cut it out and pinned it to the wall of your bedroom in Lübeck. They are the Pringsheims. No one can get an invitation to their house. You have to be Gustav Mahler to be invited.”
He remembered a painting of several children, including one sole girl, reproduced in a magazine his mother had brought home. He remembered their black hair, the girl’s large, expressive eyes, and the placid beauty of her brothers. More than anything he remembered the glamour of these young people, and a sort of youthful arrogance and insouciance in the way they gazed out from the picture. No one in Lübeck, except his mother, had ever looked like that.
Since his mother had often made clear her longing, when their father was still alive, to visit Munich and enjoy its easy bohemian mores, he had pinned this picture to the wall as a way of offering her solidarity. These were the sort of people with whom he wanted to associate when he was older; but more than that, these were the sort of people he wanted to be.
He studied the Pringsheim family as they made themselves comfortable in the box. The sister and her brother sat at the front, their parents behind. That, in itself, was unusual. The impression the girl gave was dignified, withdrawn, almost sad. When her brother whispered to her, she did not respond. Her haircut was noticeably short. She had grown up since the portrait was painted, but she still had something childlike about her. When her brother whispered to her again, laughing this time, she shook her head as if to let him know that she did not find him amusing. When she turned to look at her parents, she seemed s
elf-contained, preoccupied. As the lights went down, Thomas looked forward to the first interval, when he could observe her again.
“They are fabulously rich,” Carla said. “The father is a professor but they have other money.”
“Are they Jewish?” Thomas asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But they must be. Their house is like a museum. Not that I have ever been invited there.”
In the months that followed, if any Wagner were playing, the Pringsheims were in the audience; they were also to be seen at concerts of modern or experimental music. Thomas did not worry about staring at the daughter. Since he thought he would never actually meet her, her reaction to him hardly mattered.
As more people read his book, it occurred to him that he himself was being observed at concerts and plays, in cafés and in the street. Also, the Pringsheim girl, when she was at a concert, let him know that she knew he was watching her. Her gaze in response to his was open and fearless. Her brother, he saw, had noticed him too.
One evening as he sat with some literary young men at the table nearest the window in a café, he found himself conversing with a poet whom he did not know well. The fellow appeared frail and shy. He hesitated before he spoke and had to squint to read the menu in the café.
“There are friends of mine who talk all the time about you,” he said.
“They have read my book?” Thomas asked.
“They like how you watch them at concerts. They call you Hanno, after the boy in your novel who dies.”
Thomas realized that the poet was speaking of the girl, the Pringsheim girl, and her brother.
“What is her name?”
“Katia.”
“And her brother’s?”
“Klaus. He is her twin. They have three older brothers.”
“What does the twin do?”
“Music. He has a great talent. He has studied with Mahler. But so does Katia have a great talent.”
“For music?”
“She studies science. Her father is a mathematician. And a fanatical Wagnerian. She is very cultivated.”
“Could I meet them?”
“She and her brother admire your book. And they think you are too much alone.”
“Why do they think that?”
“Because they watch you as much as you watch them. Maybe more. You are one of their subjects.”
“Should I be proud?”
“I would be.”
“Are you one of their subjects too?”
“No. I am merely a poet. My aunt goes to their house on Arcisstrasse. It is very splendid. That is how I know them. Because of my aunt who is a painter. They collect her work.”
“Do you think I could meet them?”
“Perhaps they could invite you to one of their evenings at home. They don’t go to cafés.”
“When?”
“Soon. They will have an evening soon.”
* * *
When Thomas called on his mother, he often found gentlemen who would previously have been deemed unsuitable making themselves comfortable in the small living room. Heinrich had expressed concern for the reputation of his sisters and Thomas shared his unease. They thus had the disintegration of standards in their mother’s apartment as a topic to discuss, a topic that allowed them both to present themselves as wise men of the world, worried about appearances, as though their father’s ghost had wandered into the space between them to encourage them to pay homage to the gods of respectability.
Among the gentlemen who called at his mother’s was a banker called Josef Löhr. Thomas, when he was introduced to him, presumed that he had come to court his mother, who was becoming more vague and ethereal. Some of her teeth, Thomas saw, were loosening. If she wanted to become Frau Löhr she had better be quick about it.
He was surprised when it became clear that Löhr was coming to the apartment to seek the hand not of the mother but of his sister Lula, who was almost twenty years his junior. Lula had nothing at all in common with the banker, who was banal and unashamedly bourgeois. Löhr was the sort of man, Paul Ehrenberg said, who, if money were to pour from heaven, would advise those around him to think carefully before spending it. Lula, on the other hand, liked spending money; she enjoyed outings and laughter. Thomas wondered what she and Löhr might ever talk about during the long nights of marriage.
Paul disapproved of the engagement when it was announced because he liked to have all of them, even the mother, in thrall to him. He enjoyed playing with them. But Heinrich, who had returned to Berlin, was even more disapproving. He wrote to their mother urging her that she forbid the match and insisting that she close her apartment to all gentlemen, since she could not be trusted to chaperone her daughters with any form of diligence. He did not care how well placed this banker was, he went on. Löhr would not do for Lula. He would bore her to death if he did not smother her with his demands. The thought of his sister organizing the household of Josef Löhr made him ill, he wrote.
His mother handed the letter to Thomas.
“He must think that suitable men grow on trees,” she said.
“I think he loves his sisters.”
“That may be so, it’s just a pity he can’t marry one of them—or indeed both of them.”
As Thomas gave his mother the letter back, he noticed how defeated she looked. It was not merely that she was wearing too much makeup and the color of her hair was unnatural. It was in her voice and in her eyes. The old sparkle had gone from her, now completely extinguished by the news of her daughter’s engagement.
* * *
There were, he guessed, more than a hundred people at the Pringsheims’ supper, the first one he attended, with tables spread over several of the reception rooms. Most of these rooms had carved ceilings and inlaid paintings and murals. No surface was undecorated. He arrived, accompanied by the nervous young poet and the poet’s aunt, the painter, who wore many glittering jewels around her neck and in her hair.
“The Pringsheim boys, especially Klaus and Peter, are a lesson to the youth of Munich,” the aunt said. “They are refined and civilized. They have already achieved such a great deal.”
Thomas wanted to ask her what precisely they had achieved, but as soon as they had handed over their coats, she moved away from them, leaving the two young men to linger in the shadows, watching the scene.
A few times he caught Katia Pringsheim’s eye and, while she seemed amused at his presence, she did not acknowledge him directly. Once supper was over, he asked his friend to introduce him to Katia and Klaus, who were standing in the doorway having an intense conversation. He could see Katia smiling as she interrupted her brother, putting her finger to his lips to stop him speaking. Although they must have been conscious that Thomas and the poet were approaching, they did not turn. The poet reached out and touched Klaus’s shoulder.
As Klaus looked at him, Thomas saw how beautiful he was. He almost understood why Klaus did not frequent the cafés. He would have been singled out and stared at. His politeness, the understatement in his tone, the neatness of his dress, would have stood apart from the abrasiveness and the shabbiness then in vogue.
Thomas, aware that Katia was watching him as he took in her brother, directed his full attention to her. Her eyes were the same deep dark color as her brother’s, her skin was even softer; her gaze was unembarrassed.
“Your book is much admired in this house,” Klaus said. “In fact, we all fell out because one of us hid the second volume.”
Katia stretched lazily. He could see the boyish strength in her body.
“I will not mention the culprit,” Klaus went on.
“My brother is tedious,” Katia said.
“We call you Hanno,” Klaus said.
“Some of us do,” Katia said.
“We all do, even my mother, who hasn’t finished the book yet.”
“She has finished it.”
“As of two p.m. today, she had not finished it.”
“I told her the end,” K
atia said.
“My sister spoils things for people. She told me the end of Die Walküre.”
“My father had already told us and I was worried that he’d find out you hadn’t been listening.”
“Our brother Heinz told us the end of the Bible,” Klaus said. “And it ruined everything.”
“That was, in fact, Peter,” Katia said. “He is horrible. Our father had to ban him from gatherings.”
“My sister spends her life listening to our father,” Klaus said. “She actually studies with him.”
Thomas looked from one to the other. Their conversation, he sensed, was their underhand way of laughing at him, or at least excluding him and his companion. He knew that, on arriving home, he would remember every word they had said. When he had cut out the portrait of the young Pringsheims from that magazine, this was what he had imagined—a world filled with elegant people and rich interiors, with conversations going on that were both clever and oddly inconsequential. He did not mind that the décor was perhaps too rich, and that some of the people were too effusive. He minded nothing as long as these two young people continued to allow him to listen to them and watch them.
“Oh no!” Katia exclaimed. “My mother is being held in a viselike grip by that woman whose husband plays the viola.”
“Why was she invited?” Klaus asked.
“Because you or my father or Mahler or someone admires how her husband plays the viola.”
“My father knows nothing about the viola.”
“My grandmother thinks there should be a ban on any woman marrying,” Katia said. “Imagine how different these rooms would be if people had only listened to her.”
“My grandmother is Hedwig Dohm,” Klaus said to Thomas as though he were confiding in him. “She is very advanced.”
As they left the house, the young poet told Thomas that he had asked his aunt if the Pringsheims were Jewish.
“What did she say?” Thomas asked.
“They used to be. On both sides. But not anymore. They are Protestants now, even though they seem very Jewish. Jewish in a grand way.”