by Colm Toibin
Thomas, as he examined the twins, one of whom he was to marry, realized that he would never be completely included in the little world they created.
* * *
Neither he nor Katia complained when Alfred Pringsheim set about furnishing their apartment without consulting them. On the third floor of a building on Franz-Joseph-Strasse, it had seven rooms and two water closets and a view over the park of the Prince Leopold Palace. Alfred installed a telephone for them and a baby grand piano.
It did not occur to Thomas that Alfred would decide also on the decoration for his study. Since he had thought of this as a private domain, he was surprised to find that a desk had been chosen for him and bookcases made, designed by Alfred himself. He thanked his father-in-law profusely, pleased at the thought that Alfred did not detect his determination not to be beholden to the Pringsheims ever again, nor sit at their table more than was entirely necessary.
His mother was aghast that the wedding was not to be held in a church.
“What are they?” she asked. “If they are Jewish, why don’t they come out and say so?”
“Katia’s mother’s family became Protestants.”
“And her father?”
“He has no religion.”
“He does not have much respect for marriage either, I believe. Your brother-in-law says that he has actually entertained his mistress, an actress, in his own drawing room. I trust we will be spared her at the wedding.”
The meal after the civil ceremony was, Thomas thought, such a desultory affair that it would have been much improved by the presence of an actress. Katia’s family could not conceal their sorrow at losing their daughter. Klaus paid too much attention to Julia, Thomas thought, giving her an opportunity to air her resentments and her memories of grand events in Lübeck, glancing regularly at Katia to register his amusement at her new mother-in-law. Only Viktor, Thomas’s younger brother, now fourteen, seemed to enjoy the day.
Katia and Thomas went by train to Zürich. The Pringsheims had reserved them the finest quarters in the Hotel Baur au Lac. In the dining room, having dressed for dinner, Thomas was aware what a picture they made, the famous writer not yet thirty and his young bride from a rich family, one of the few women ever to go to university in Munich, her tone self-assured and sardonic, her clothes understated and expensive.
Throughout the meal, he imagined Katia naked, her white skin, her full lips, her small breasts, her strong legs. As she spoke, her voice low, he saw that she could easily be a boy.
That night, he was excited as soon as Katia came close to him. He could not believe that he was allowed to touch her, that he could put his hand wherever he liked on her body. She kissed him with her tongue, opening her mouth wide. She was fearless. But, when he heard her breathing with greater intensity and he realized what she wanted from him, he became hesitant, almost afraid. But he continued to explore her, nudged her to turn on her side so that he could lie facing her, her nipples touching his chest, his hands on her buttocks, his tongue in her mouth.
* * *
He was intrigued by Katia’s way of speaking, her response to the books she read and the music she heard and the galleries they visited. In conversation, she had a way of finding the very center of an argument and following a logic that she established from the beginning. Opinions did not interest her. Rather, she was concerned with the shape of a discussion and on what basis conclusions were drawn.
She applied her mind to small matters, such as whether there should be art books on the low table in the main sitting room in the apartment, or if an extra lamp were needed, setting out reasons for and against. In the same spirit, she examined his contracts and his bank accounts, and got to know about his finances. She began to manage his affairs in a way that appeared effortless.
She was unlike his sisters and his mother in every possible way. He wished that Heinrich would return from Italy and could know her, since Heinrich was the only one with whom he could share his fascination by what seemed to him to be her Jewishness. A few times, when he tried to encourage her to talk about her heritage, she made it clear that she did not want to discuss it.
“Even in the wildest arguments we have had in our family, we never talked about that,” she said. “You see, it does not interest us. My parents love music and books and paintings and witty, intelligent company, as do my brothers, as do I. You can hardly put this down to a religion that we do not even practice. Such a thought is absurd.”
When they were a few months married, they went to Berlin to stay with Katia’s aunt Else Rosenberg and her husband. Thomas loved the grandeur of their house in Tiergarten and was flattered at how well the Rosenbergs knew Buddenbrooks. What surprised him was how nonchalantly and casually they spoke about their Jewishness, and how relaxed Katia was when this matter was alluded to. The Rosenbergs did not go to the synagogue, he discovered, and did not even recognize High Holy Days, but they referred to themselves, often jokingly and self-deprecatingly, as Jewish. It appeared to amuse them.
Like the Pringsheims, the Rosenbergs loved Wagner. One evening as they sat in the large drawing room after dinner, Katia’s uncle found the sheet music for piano for some of Die Walküre. When Else asked him if he would locate the scene between Brünnhilde and Siegmund and Sieglinde, he searched and found it, then studied it for a while, but said it was too difficult to play. Instead, he began to sing Brünnhilde’s lines in a light tenor voice and then, deepening his voice, he sang Siegmund’s lines as Siegmund asked Brünnhilde if his twin sister, the woman whom he loved, could come to Valhalla with them.
He faltered a few times, but he knew the words by heart.
Eventually, he stopped and put down the sheet music.
“Is there anything more beautiful than that?” he asked. “I do it a grave disservice.”
“Theirs is a great love,” his wife said. “It always brings tears to my eyes.”
For a second, Thomas thought of his parents, imagined them hearing the story of the twins, the brother and sister, who realize that they are desperately in love. Since he knew that Julia and the senator had attended performances of these operas, he wondered about his father’s response to the image of a brother and sister being in love with each other.
The Rosenbergs and Katia were discussing various singers who had taken on these Wagner roles. As Thomas listened, he felt like someone who had come to visit a cosmopolitan household from somewhere deep in the German provinces. He could not identify any of the singers of whom they spoke.
His eye was caught by the tapestry on the walls, the faded colors. At first, he could not make it out, but soon he detected the outline of Narcissus staring into the water, savoring his own reflection. As the conversation went on around him, he imagined what could be done in a story with twins who had to separate because one of them was to marry. It would be like Narcissus being separated from his own reflection.
He could call them Siegmund and Sieglinde, but have them live in the contemporary world. When he and Katia went back to Munich, Thomas began to see the story more clearly and immediately understood the dangers. He wanted to set his story in the Rosenbergs’ house, or in a wealthy household in Berlin like theirs, but the family sitting around the table would be Katia’s family. The interloper, the man who had come to take Sieglinde in marriage, would be a version of himself. His character would not be a writer, rather some sort of government official, a dull man out of place in the glamorous company of Sieglinde’s family.
He called the story The Blood of the Walsungs. It excited him that he wrote most of it while Katia was in the next room. Sometimes, if he needed to concentrate, he closed the door of his study, but often he kept the door open. He enjoyed hearing Katia move around the apartment as he created a fictional version of her, a girl who always held hands with her twin brother. They were, he wrote, very like each other, with the same slightly drooping nose, the same full lips, the same prominent cheekbones and black, bright eyes.
His own double was to be calle
d Beckerath. He was short, with a pointed beard and a yellow complexion. His manners were punctilious. He began every sentence by drawing his breath in quickly through his mouth, a detail he took from Josef Löhr.
Frau Aarenhold, the mother of the twins, he wrote, was small, prematurely aged. She spoke in dialect. Her husband had made his money in coal. It was clear in the story that while Beckerath, the man who had come to marry the daughter, was a Protestant, the Aarenholds were Jewish.
The lunch at the center of the story showed Beckerath being made more and more uncomfortable by the family. When Siegmund, the son, scoffed at an acquaintance who did not know the difference between dress clothes and a dinner jacket, Beckerath realized, to his mortification, that he did not know this either.
Soon, as the conversation turned to art, Beckerath felt even less assured.
As they were sprinkling sugar on their slices of pineapple, Siegmund announced that he and his sister wished to ask Beckerath’s permission to go to a production of Die Walküre that very evening. When Beckerath assented, he added that he too would be free to attend, only to be told that no, the twins wished to be alone one more time before the wedding.
In the story, after the opera, knowing the house was empty, Siegmund returned to his room certain that his sister would follow him. When she entered his bedroom, he told her that because she was just like him, her experiences with the man she was to marry would be his too. She kissed him on his closed eyelids; he kissed her on her throat. They kissed each other’s hands. They forgot themselves in caresses, passing into a tumult of passion.
Thomas composed the last pages of the story at speed, knowing that if he stopped to think, he would become worried about Katia and her family. He had not told Katia what he was writing, and when the last sentence was completed he left the piece aside, without looking at it for some days. Aware that the Pringsheims did not like being categorized, he knew they would disapprove of the open way in which the family was described as Jewish.
Eventually, having made some corrections, he showed it to Katia and was surprised at her calm response.
“I enjoyed it. I do love how you write about music.”
“But the topic?”
“It served Wagner well. Who can complain if you use it?”
She smiled. Surely, he thought, she must have noticed the connections between the Aarenhold family and her own! But she seemed not to see anything strange in the story.
A few days later she told him that she had informed her mother and Klaus that he had written a new story and they had asked for him to come to the house and read it to them after supper.
He wondered if this were Katia’s way of warning him, or if she were hoping that, faced with the prospect of having to read it to her mother and brother, he might put the story aside. But since he planned to send it to a magazine, it would be better to read it to them first.
As he perused the pages in the sitting room in the house on Arcisstrasse, Klaus and Katia, who had been out of the room, joined him and found chairs close to each other while their mother sat apart.
He cleared his throat, took a sip of water, and began. Klaus, he felt, despite his talk about kissing boys, was an innocent soul. He would be less innocent, Thomas thought with some satisfaction, when the reading was over. However, he foresaw the mother running out of the room shrieking in disgust, calling for her husband or her maid or her mother.
Since all three listeners were familiar with Die Walküre, they made sounds of satisfaction when the names of the twins were mentioned and further sounds of approval when it became clear that the twins were to attend the actual opera.
The fire crackled, servants came in and out of the room and Thomas worked on his enunciation during the sections that might cause least offense. Despite his previous determination, however, he was not brave enough when he came to the parts most likely to disturb them. He left out a few passages and went quickly through the scene where the twins blissfully coupled at the end, dropping a few phrases here and there. By the time he was finished, he believed that they had missed the point of the story.
“It is wonderful and was beautifully delivered,” Katia’s mother said.
“Have you been teaching him about opera?” Klaus asked his sister.
He soon sent the text of The Blood of the Walsungs to the magazine Neue Rundschau, which quickly agreed that the story would be included in its January issue. He then forgot about it as Katia’s time to deliver their first child approached.
* * *
No one had prepared him for the long night of agony that Katia went through while giving birth. When the child came, he felt relief, but also knew that Katia had been marked in some way. This new knowledge that she had gained would, he thought, stay with her.
It was a girl, to be called Erika. Thomas had wanted a boy, but wrote to Heinrich that maybe watching a girl grow up would bring him closer to the “other” sex, of which, even though he was a husband, he had to admit that he knew little.
In the first months of his daughter’s life, Thomas saw a good deal of his wife’s parents, who doted on the child, enough for him to decide to withdraw the story about the twins, even though the type was set, in case it offended them once they saw it in print and realized that it was about their family. He was still worried, however, when he met a young editor who had been shown the story and breathlessly informed him that others had seen it too.
“How brave, we thought, to write a story about twins when you are married to one!” the editor said. “I have a friend who wondered whether you have a great imagination or have married into the most peculiar family in Munich.”
One afternoon, when Katia returned from her parents’ house with the baby, she informed him that her father was in a rage. He wished to see Thomas immediately.
He had not been in his father-in-law’s study before. The shelves on one wall contained art books from floor to ceiling; on the opposite wall were leather-bound volumes. There were ladders for each. The wall behind the desk was filled with examples of Italian majolica. As Thomas inspected the tiles, his father-in-law asked him what he had possibly been thinking of when he wrote that story.
“Rumors are flying around about its content. I believe it is disgusting.”
“It has been withdrawn,” Thomas said.
“That is hardly the point. Some people have seen it. Had we known you entertained such views, you would never have been allowed in this house.”
“What views?”
“Anti-Semitic views.”
“I do not have anti-Semitic views.”
“We don’t actually care whether you do or not. But we do care about our privacy being invaded by someone posing as a son-in-law.”
“I am not posing.”
“You are a low form of life. Klaus is going to punch you as soon as he sees you.”
For a second, Thomas was going to ask Alfred about his mistress.
“Can you assure me that the offending story will never appear in any rag?” Alfred Pringsheim asked him.
Thomas glanced at him and shrugged.
He accompanied Thomas into the drawing room, where they found that Katia, having left the baby with a maid, had returned to the house. She was standing with her twin brother while their mother sat beside him in an armchair. Katia’s eyes were shining. She smiled at him.
“Klaus is rather sorry that the story is not to appear. It would provide him with a reputation. He says he didn’t have one before. Isn’t that right, my little twin? Everyone might start looking at you strangely.”
Klaus started to tickle her.
“I understood you wished to punch me?” Thomas said to Klaus.
“That was just to please Papa.”
“Poor Papa,” Frau Pringsheim said. “He blames me for not telling him what a horrible story it was after you read it for us. I said that I had listened only to the rhythm. It was like poetry. I didn’t really know what it was all about. I actually thought it was quite sweet.”
> “I listened to every word,” Klaus said. “And it was quite sweet. What a great imagination you have! Or maybe you are just a good listener?”
Alfred, who had been standing helplessly at the doorway, now spoke severely.
“My advice to you,” he said, pointing to Thomas, “is to stick to historical subjects, or write about commercial life in Lübeck.”
He said the words “commercial life in Lübeck” as if he were referring to the tawdriest activity in some far-flung region.
* * *
Their most constant visitor in the apartment was Klaus Pringsheim, who wondered if Erika did really need to sleep in the afternoon.
“Surely the whole purpose of a girl child is to amuse her poor uncle,” he said, “when he comes to see her.”
“Leave her sleeping,” Katia said.
“Is your husband going to write more stories about us?” Klaus asked, as though Thomas had not just come into the room.
For a moment, Thomas saw Katia hesitating. Since Erika’s birth, she had become almost serious. Klaus tried to make her join him in frivolity.
“Perhaps a whole book?” Klaus continued. “So we can all become more famous.”
“My husband has more useful things to do,” Katia said.
Klaus sat back, folded his arms and studied her.
“Has my princess grown sad?” he asked. “Is that what marriage and motherhood have done to her?”
Thomas wondered if there were a way of intervening to change the subject.
“I really came here to play with the baby,” Klaus said.
“I am not even sure Erika likes you,” Katia said to Klaus.
“Why ever not?”
“She likes her men less flighty. I think she admires gravity.”
“She likes her father?” Klaus asked. “He has plenty of gravity.”
“Yes, she likes her father,” Thomas said.
“Is she his little darling?” Klaus asked.