by Colm Toibin
Waiting for her in the lobby, he tried to remember when he realized how much she knew about him. He felt it was during that very first meeting with her in her parents’ house, when she and her brother Klaus spoke to him. It was as though she had used Klaus as a decoy, or as bait. She saw the man who would become her husband watching her brother.
Thomas had been intent on watching Katia too, but there was nothing unusual about that. At that party, he thought, he had dropped his guard for a few moments, under the teasing eyes of Katia and her brother, and maybe he had done so on other occasions. What was strange, he thought, was how little it seemed to bother her.
In the years of their marriage, under her careful supervision, they had come to an arrangement. It had begun casually, lightly, when Katia found that a particular Riesling from Domaine Weinbach animated Thomas, made him loquacious and attentive. After the wine, Thomas would enjoy a cognac, perhaps even two. And then, having wished him good night, Katia would go upstairs in the knowledge that Thomas would soon appear at the door of her room.
Written into their set of tacit agreements was a clause stating that just as Thomas would do nothing to put their domestic happiness in jeopardy, Katia would recognize the nature of his desires without any complaint, note with tolerance and good humor the figures on whom his eyes most readily rested, and make clear her willingness, when appropriate, to appreciate him in all of his different guises.
* * *
When he had the story written, he gave it to Katia to read. He waited a few days for some response, and, in the end, he had to ask her if she had read it.
“Well, you captured the whole thing. It was like being there, except I was in your mind.”
“Do you think there will be any objection to it?”
“You are the most respectable man anyone has ever met. But the story will change things. It will change how the world sees Venice. And I presume it will change how the world sees you.”
“Do you think I should withhold it?”
“I don’t think you wrote it to withhold it.”
When the story was published over two issues of a magazine and then in volume form, he thought it would be a chance for his enemies to round on him. He worried about articles that would imply that the author seemed to know a great deal about the subject of his story, more than was perhaps healthy, especially for a father of four.
In fact, the critics read the relationship between the artist and the boy as standing for what the lure of death and the seductive charm of timeless beauty looked like in an age of estrangement. The only forceful objection came from an uncle-by-marriage of Katia, who was outraged by the story, seeing no metaphors in it at all, writing to Katia’s father: “What a story! And a married man with a family!”
On the other hand, Katia’s grandmother, now in her early eighties, praised the story in a Berlin newspaper and wrote to Katia to say that she had finally overcome all her previous objections to Katia’s husband. Instead of being stiff and unfriendly, she now thought that Thomas Mann represented the new Germany, the one she had been hoping for all her life.
* * *
Before the book was published, Thomas and Katia had a more ominous matter to consider. An old tubercular spot on one of Katia’s lungs appeared again. It was decided that she should go to Davos in Switzerland for treatment.
Thomas found it strange how little Erika and Klaus, aged six and five, appeared to miss their mother once she had departed for the sanatorium. While Elise, the maid who was now in control of the children, was strict and performed her duties with diligence, she often had to concentrate on the two younger ones, whose needs were more acute. Soon Erika and Klaus had created a relaxed set of rules for themselves that included a theater show every evening before bed, with both of them dressed up in preposterous costumes and noisy enough to disturb their father’s peace as he read by the fire in one of the ground-floor rooms.
In Katia’s absence, Thomas installed his mother in Bad Tölz in the summer months. Julia had no experience of dealing with unruly children. Her own brood had been precocious, but always obedient and easy to control. Erika and Klaus, on the other hand, saw their grandmother’s eccentricity as another reason why they should do as they pleased. They insisted that they were too old to be kept in the garden of the house with Golo and Monika. They had their own friends, their own routines. Their mother, they declared, always let them go to the river with other children of their age as long as they were supervised by their friends’ maid.
When his mother appealed to Thomas, he remonstrated with Erika and Klaus, only to find himself visited later by Erika, who explained to him that they had never been confined in this way before, urging her father to speak to their grandmother and support the case for their freedom.
Golo moved quietly into a world of his own. He made no effort to follow his older siblings, who would, in any case, not have welcomed him. He did not warm to his grandmother or any of the surrogate authority figures put in place during his mother’s absence. He barely glanced at his father. If he was in a room, he found a corner and remained alone there. In the garden, he sat in the shelter of a tree. Thomas marveled at his self-command.
Monika was still a baby. She had always been difficult, crying in the night, becoming upset easily. While he had meals with the three older ones, insisting that Erika and Klaus arrive in time, sit up straight, say please and thank you and not ask to leave the table until it was clear that the meal had ended, he was never quite sure what to do about Monika. In Bad Tölz, he left her exclusively in his mother’s care. Anytime he passed the room where she was, he could hear her crying.
Katia, especially at the beginning, wrote each day from Davos. The letters were cheerful, and funny about her fellow inmates and the regime in the sanatorium. When Thomas replied, he tried to think of amusing stories about the children. It was easy to make the activities of the first two seem fascinating, offer signs of how clever and original they were, and even Golo’s habits could be made into a joke. It was hard to know what to say about Monika.
No matter how long and detailed their letters to each other were, he found, very soon after Katia’s departure, that he missed her. Until she was gone, he did not realize how close they had become. Indeed, he did not believe that they spoke to each other very much. They had meals together and went for a walk in the afternoon. But his wife did not come into his study when he was working. And in recent years, as his sleep was lighter, they had separate bedrooms. Now, however, the events of the day, the most ordinary things, had no depth or substance since he could not discuss them with her.
When they returned from Bad Tölz to Munich at the start of the school year, he was aware that Katia’s time in the sanatorium could easily be extended. He emphasized, in a few letters, that they longed for her to return. He knew that her mother and grandmother believed that she had had the children too quickly and had been asked to take too much responsibility for the household and her husband’s financial affairs. After the first hints that they blamed him for her illness, he carefully avoided the topic of what had caused it. Since her mother and grandmother, unlike his own mother, did not offer to help with the children, then he saw no reason why he should entertain them.
Katia wrote about how much she was looking forward to a visit from him. He made lists of things he wanted to tell her, but even as he added stories about the children, little things they had said or done that might charm her, he realized that, in those first months of her absence, the four had developed in ways that might be difficult to change. The two older were now a source of complaint both from school and from the parents of their friends. When anyone spoke to Golo, it disturbed his strange inward-looking equilibrium. And Monika, no matter what they did to console her, remained upset.
He knew how stark and alarming this could sound in a letter. It would be softer if it were woven into a long conversation. It would be a relief, he thought, when he finally left the children to go to Davos. He had become someone who made r
ules for them, who attempted to impose order on them. In the past few weeks, he thought, the older three children had come to dislike him. They avoided him when they could and, no matter how eagerly he encouraged them to speak, were often silent at table.
He tasked his mother with informing them that he would be gone for three weeks. On the appointed day, he left the house before dawn and caught an early train to Rorschach, from where he caught a smaller, local train to Landquart in the Alps. From there he waited for the narrow-gauge train whose ascent was steep and dogged and felt as if it would never end. The tracks were squeezed between walls of rock. Even before the train reached its destination, he felt distant from the problems he had faced with the children.
It was not merely that he was a long way from Munich, but in that day of setting off and waiting at stations and traveling again, Munich itself had receded. He was already embedded in this mountain world, over which Katia would preside. It would be dominated by illness.
Katia came to meet him at the station.
“It’s nice to have someone to talk to again,” she said to him as they made their way to the sanatorium. He would have his own room, away from hers, and would have his meals in the sanatorium dining room with her and her fellow patients.
She had written to him about many of the inmates. In his first half-hour at Davos he had met the Spanish woman who moved about crying “Tous les deux,” in reference to her two sons, who were both suffering from tuberculosis. He had had an encounter as well with the man addicted to chocolates and constantly threatening to shoot himself.
He and Katia talked incessantly over those first days. He learned that a number of patients had died during her sojourn, something that she had omitted to mention in her letters. He was surprised at her casual tone when she spoke of the dead. Soon he found himself telling her about the children, including details that he had promised himself he would not reveal to her.
“You mean there has been no change?” she said.
“No change?”
“All four were as you described before I left, the first two theatrical and hard to handle, Golo solitary and silent and self-involved, and Monika a baby. No one has had an accident?”
“No.”
“All that has happened then is that you have begun to notice them.”
His room was cheerful and restful, with white practical furniture. The floor was spotless. The door to the balcony stood open to a glimpse of lights in the valley.
At dinner, they were approached by one of the doctors, who was amused when he heard Thomas insist that he himself was perfectly healthy. He was here only to visit his wife.
“Imagine!” the doctor said. “I have never met a perfectly healthy person before.”
Quietly, Katia drew for him a picture of everyone who came into the dining room. She pointed to the two tables at which Russians sat.
“One is the good Russian table. It is for superior members of that nation. The other table is for people not wanted at the good table. It is, I suppose, the bad Russian table.”
While Katia had warned him that the married couple in the room beside his belonged to the latter table, he put no thought into them and their lowly status until he was woken in the night by the sound of muffled laughter. The walls between the individual rooms, he realized, were thin. He did not need to know Russian to make sense of what was happening. As the sounds they made became unashamedly carnal, he imagined that he would meet these people in the days to come. Surely the intimate knowledge he now had of their love cries would be apparent to them when they were introduced to him. Just at that moment, it did not seem likely that they would care.
When Katia came to take him to breakfast, he decided not to mention to her what he had heard in the night. But, despite his earlier resolve, he found himself describing it to her as though it were urgent information.
Thomas saw how the sanatorium enclosed her. She was interested in the outside world, in stories about her children, in accounts of her mother and her mother-in-law, but she always became more animated when Davos itself was under discussion. Although they spoke more intensely than ever before, and he had no study to retreat to, he felt her distance. A few times, when he raised the possibility of her return to Munich, she grew almost dreamy, she let him know that some problems with her lungs remained. Thus, for the moment, leaving Davos was not an option.
That was the great change in her, he thought. She had become a patient. After a day or two, he noticed that he himself was being carried along by the routine. Like Katia, he had no immediate cares. Observing the inmates, learning about them, began to interest him almost to the point of obsession. While he had brought books with him, he found that he was too exhausted at night to read. During the rest periods in the day, the last thing he needed was a book. He wanted to relax, lie still, ponder on what he had learned so far about the sanatorium.
He loved the rest period in the afternoon when he knew that he would soon see Katia and they could immerse themselves in sharing whatever they had felt in the short time that had elapsed since they had last spoken.
He told her that he had always known that time went slowly in an unfamiliar place.
“But when I look back now, it seems as if I have been up here for who knows how long already and it has been an eternity since I first arrived.”
The doctor in charge stopped each time he saw Thomas and Katia on the corridor. He made them understand that, while he had read Thomas’s books, Katia was the main focus of his attention. One day, however, having quickly assured Katia that he was thinking of her case, he turned to Thomas, moving him into the light, looking carefully at the whites of his eyes.
“Have you been examined by one of the doctors?” he asked.
“I am not a patient,” Thomas replied.
“It might be wise to use your time here fruitfully,” he said and, taking Thomas in suspiciously, he departed.
When he made an appointment for Thomas in the clinic, he did not alert him, merely sent two orderlies to his room during the morning rest. Their instructions were, they said, to take him to the clinic. When he intimated that he would need to let his wife know where he was going, they said that his wife’s rest could not be disturbed.
In the clinic, the doctor ordered Thomas to take off his jacket, his shirt and vest. He felt exposed and older than his years. He was left waiting for some time before the doctor returned and, without saying a word, set to examining his back, thumping it with his fist, listening to the sound, placing his other hand tenderly on the small of the back. He kept returning to certain spots, one near the left collarbone and one a little below it.
He called a colleague over and they told Thomas to breathe deeply and then cough. They started to move a stethoscope up and down his back, listening to the pressures within. By the slow, intent way that they examined him, Thomas knew that they would have much to say when they had finished.
“Just as I thought,” one of them said.
Thomas wished that he were back in his room, having convinced the two orderlies that he was too busy to come with them.
“I’m afraid you are not simply a visitor here,” the other one said. “I guessed that as soon as you arrived. It may turn out to be lucky that you came here.”
Thomas fetched his shirt. He wanted to cover himself.
“You have a problem with one of your lungs. If it is not treated now, then I can assure you that you will be back here within a few months.”
“What sort of treatment?”
“The same as the other patients here. It will take time.”
“How long?”
“Ah, that is what they all ask, but soon they tire of asking and they know how difficult it is to answer.”
“Are you sure about your diagnosis? Is it not too much of a coincidence that I was diagnosed here and not elsewhere?”
“The air up here,” the senior doctor said, “is good for fighting off illness. But it is also good for letting illness emerge. It causes la
tent illness to erupt. Now you must go to bed. Soon we will take an interior picture of you.”
It was the X-ray that woke him from the dream that Davos had induced. He was told one morning that he would be taken to the laboratory in the basement that afternoon. When he asked Katia about it, she said it was nothing, it was merely a way for the doctors to get a clearer image of his chest and lungs.
In a small room, as he waited, he was joined by a tall Swede. In the confined space, he found himself paying the Swede more attention than he had paid anyone since he had come here. He thought about the X-ray penetrating the man’s skin, finding areas within him that no one would ever touch or see. When one of the technical assistants came out and instructed them both to strip to the waist, Thomas felt embarrassed and was almost prepared to ask if he could strip to the waist later, when the Swede had already gone into the X-ray room. But instead, hesitantly, he complied.
By the time he had removed his shirt, the Swede, having turned away from him, had already taken off his vest. His skin, in the dim light, was smooth and golden; the muscles on his back were fully developed. It struck Thomas in these few seconds that it would be natural, since the space was so small, to brush up against his companion, let his arm linger casually on the man’s bare back. Before he could dismiss this idea, the Swede turned and, unapologetically, put his thumb and forefinger on the biceps of Thomas’s right arm to measure his strength. He smiled boyishly and shrugged and indicated the muscles in his own upper arms and then slapped himself gently on the stomach to make clear that he had put on too much weight.
In the inner room, the doctor was standing in front of a cabinet. As his eyes gradually got used to the light in the darkened room, Thomas saw a camera-like box on a rolling stand and rows of glass photographic plates set along the walls. He could also make out glassware and switch boxes and tall vertical gauges. This could, he thought, be a photographer’s studio, a darkroom, an inventor’s workshop or a sorcerer’s laboratory.