The Magician

by Colm Toibin

  Soon a more senior doctor appeared.

  “Can you both keep all screams of pain to a minimum?” he asked. There was laughter all around.

  “Would you like to see some of our handiwork?” he asked.

  He flipped a switch to illuminate a set of plates that revealed ghostly body parts—hands, feet, knees, thighs, arms, pelvises, all phantomlike and hazy. The X-ray machine had peeled the flesh and muscle away and, pushing through what was soft, had focused on the core, what the body would look like once the flesh had begun to rot. As Thomas held his breath, letting his eye roam up and down the inner parts of someone whom he must pass regularly on the corridor, he found that he was leaning against the Swede, his shoulder touching the man’s upper arm.

  The doctor determined that the Swede should go first. He was put in a sitting position facing the camera, his chest against a metal plate, his legs wide apart. The assistant pushed his shoulders forward and massaged his back in a series of kneading motions. He told the Swede to take a deep breath and hold it. And then the appropriate switch was turned. The Swede, Thomas could see, kept his eyes closed. The gauges sizzled with blue light and sparks crackled along the wall. A red light blinked. Then everything became calm.

  It was now Thomas’s turn.

  “Hug the panel,” the doctor said. “Imagine it’s someone else, someone you like. And press your chest against the other person and breathe in deeply.”

  When it was over, the doctor told him and the Swede to wait. They would soon be able to see what the camera had captured. First, they would look at the Swede.

  In the image of the Swede held up against the light, Thomas saw the breastbone merged with the spine that was one dark, grisly column. And then his eyes were drawn to something near the breastbone that looked like a sack.

  “Do you see his heart?” the doctor asked.

  When it was Thomas’s turn to see himself, he felt that he had entered an inner sanctum in a holy place. As the screen was illuminated, he thought for a second of his father’s body, now reduced to a skeleton in the graveyard in Lübeck. And then he saw his own body as it would be in the grave. He wondered if, among the photographic plates, they had images of Katia, images that might make her more precious to him once he had seen what she would look like in the great eternity.

  In a flash, he saw what this could do in a book, how dramatic it would be, the first time a novelist described an X-ray, with all the eerie light and uncanny sounds, the result an image that heretofore had been shared with no one. He had been enticed to Davos, he saw, as if by magic. As soon as he freed himself from its atmosphere, he would, he knew, start to work again. He longed to be back in his study now, ready to complain should one of the children make a sound. He listened respectfully to the doctor, who told him that the X-ray had confirmed what they already suspected. He was tubercular and he needed treatment. He nodded politely and meekly, suggesting that he was ready to put himself in the doctor’s hands. But in his mind he was already on the train going down the narrow rails that had been cut into the Alps.

  * * *

  His discussions with the family doctor in Munich released him from the sorcery that had exercised tight control over his dreams and his waking time in Davos.

  “My suggestion,” the doctor said, “is that you remain in the flatlands. If you start coughing up blood, arrange to see me immediately. I have a feeling, however, that it will be some time before we meet again. And tell your wife, if she will listen, that being away from her family will make her even more ill than she is.”

  Thomas returned to ensuring that his two eldest children sat up straight at meals and did not leave the table until their plates were clean. Sometimes, after requests from Erika, he made jokes and did magic tricks for them that he had not done since Katia had left. One of them involved pretending that he could not see Erika, who was sitting in a chair, insisting that she was a cushion put there for his comfort. While it made Erika and Klaus scream with laughter, it caused Golo to cover his face with his hands. When the two eldest asked him to do it over and over, he wished Katia were there to decide when the game should stop.

  He began to plot out his novel The Magic Mountain. The protagonist would be fifteen years younger than he and would be from Hamburg with the mind of a scientist and with a scientist’s innocence. He would travel to Davos merely to visit his cousin who was being treated there and he would notice time losing its meaning once he entered into the routines ordained by the authorities. Such novelties would disconcert him until he became used to them.

  The ordered days in this imagined Davos replaced the shapeless ones in the lowlands. The slow decline of the patients mirrored a sort of moral illness seeping its way into the life of the plain. But this was too simple. He would have to let life, rather than some theory of life, rule his book. He would have to make scenes full of chance and eccentricity. He would explore the sly persistence of the erotic.

  As he dreamed of his book, he was aware of something new happening in Munich. When journalists came to his house, they asked about politics rather than books. They spoke of the Balkans and the Great Powers, presuming that he would have pronounced views on Germany’s role in Europe and on what the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire would mean. He wished sometimes that Katia and Heinrich could witness his efforts to sound as if he had put serious thought into these political questions. But he also found that he enjoyed his role as a novelist who kept a sharp eye on a changing world. Slowly, he began to pay more attention to the newspapers, which reported on the growth of the German military and the need for the Kaiser to be vigilant, as his enemies were in every country that surrounded his own.

  Thomas wrote to Katia about the novel, but she did not react to that. Instead, she told him that someone from the bad Russian table had died and how in the dead of night they had surreptitiously removed the corpse from the sanatorium.

  Even though he asked Katia a number of times how long she thought she might remain at Davos, she did not respond. He saw that she was still bewitched by life there. His visit, his joining in the routine, instead of waking her to reality, had reinforced the illusion.

  To break the spell, he wrote to her to say that they would need to build a house in Munich. He was already looking at sites, he said, and thinking about plans. He remembered Katia’s involvement in the smallest detail of the house they had built at Bad Tölz. The builder had even jokingly called her the architect. Often, she would wake in the night to make some adjustment to the plans.

  He wrote her several letters about what sort of house he was thinking of, drawing a plan to show where his study might be, and how the kitchen would be in the basement. He hoped that this might wake her from her slumber. He imagined, however, it would take time, with more detail about plans for building, to lure her back to them. He was surprised when, having received a number of anodyne letters from her, a brief one came in which she stated that since the doctors had told her that there was no further benefit to be derived from a stay in the mountains, then she would be with them soon.

  He did not know whether to tell the children immediately or let her homecoming be a surprise for them. As he waited, he understood that it would not be long before Katia would fill their lives as though she had never been away. He, on the other hand, would, in his imagination, inhabit the life of the very place she was leaving.

  Chapter 6 Munich, 1914

  Klaus Pringsheim was at the piano, with Erika, who was nine, and Klaus Mann, a year younger, one on each side of him. Katia, sitting on a sofa, was wearing a black brocade dress. Monika had found a spoon and, despite everyone’s entreaties, was banging it against a saucepan that she had taken from the kitchen. Golo was watching the scene with mild distaste.

  “Klaus,” his uncle said, “when Erika does harmony, don’t follow her, hold the melody. Sing loud, if you have to.”

  The song was a music hall number.

  Katia, in the presence of her brother, could still change in an instant. Since her
return from Davos, she had put energy into dealing with the children’s needs and overseeing the building on a site they had bought on Poschingerstrasse, close to the river. In the evening, when the house was quiet, Thomas would find her sitting at the dining room table going over plans. But once her twin came to visit, she became again the girl who had beguiled him at a party in her parents’ house. She and Klaus took up their old sardonic poses. They made him feel that they were laughing at him.

  “What we want,” Klaus said, as he turned to face Thomas, “is an independent Munich that will side with France against the Prussians. That would be a war to win!”

  “Would you fight in that war, my pet?” Katia asked.

  “In the day, I would be the most fearsome soldier,” Klaus said. “And in the evenings, I would be in great demand to make stirring music for the troops.”

  He played the opening of the Marseillaise.

  “We have neighbors,” Thomas said, “and these are tense times.”

  “Some of our neighbors are longing for war,” Katia said.

  Erika and her brother Klaus began to sing.

  We hate Johnny Russia with his big smelly farts.

  We hate the French for being sly.

  We hate the English with their cold, cold hearts.

  The Huns will fight them all until they die.

  Die, die, die. Until they all die.

  They marched around the room, with Monika following, banging her spoon against the pan. Soon Golo joined them, marching with solemnity.

  “Where did they learn that?” Thomas asked.

  “There are thousands of songs like that,” his brother-in-law said. “You should get out more.”

  “Tommy likes the world to come to him,” Katia said.

  “Wait until Marienplatz is renamed Place de Marie,” Klaus said. “Then there will be songs. Or when it has a Russian name.”

  Thomas noticed that some of the servants had congregated on the stairwell. He wished he and Katia had called their elder son some name other than Klaus. One Klaus was enough. He hoped that Klaus Mann might model himself on someone other than his uncle.

  * * *

  In January, they moved into the new house. For some time, out of superstition, Thomas had avoided even passing the site. And when Katia had tried to consult him about details, he told her that all he wanted was a study where he would have peace and a balcony, if not two, from which he might contemplate the world.

  “I would like my own bathroom, but I will not take up arms on the question.”

  “We must keep my father away until it is done. He would take up arms about the smallest item of furniture.”

  “I will want the bookcases from Lübeck, and not the ones your father designed, and perhaps a door into the garden from my study so that I can disappear.”

  “I showed you that. It is in the plans.”

  He smiled and lifted his arms in a gesture of helplessness.

  “All I saw when you showed me the plans was the money it will cost.”

  “My father—” Katia began.

  “I would rather borrow the money from the bank,” Thomas said.

  The house was too imposing. It looked, he thought, like a rich man’s house, a man who had traveled in Holland and in England and taken in the styles, someone who was not shy at his wealth being so obviously displayed. He realized that he was both proud that he owned this house and worried what others might feel, such as Heinrich. Also, he was concerned that it would set the children apart. While they might find friends nearby, they would be the children of parents who took wealth for granted. He did not want his children to have that attitude to privilege. But there was hardly anything he could do about that now. He was careful not to complain to Katia, who delighted in showing the house to her family.

  “How grand our little writer has made you,” Klaus said to her, winking conspiratorially at Thomas. “From foggy Lübeck to shiny luxury. Don’t tell me how much the mortgage is! No writer has that amount of cash.”

  * * *

  When they went to Bad Tölz, Thomas fervently hoped that no one would mention the possibility of war. Once outside the city, he was sure, there would be no jokes about patriotism. In Munich, he had not frequented the cafés since his marriage, and he had no access to political gossip. He thought, however, that war was unlikely. While England, in his opinion, wanted a less powerful and confident Germany, he did not see how France and Russia would join a war from which England, still hungry for spoils in the colonies, would most benefit.

  On the road to Bad Tölz, they made a number of stops for refreshments, but they did not hear any news. They arrived in the late afternoon and were too busy putting the house in order to take a walk. However, they allowed the eldest children to look for their friends, accompanied by a maid, with the strict proviso that they had to be back by seven.

  Thomas was in his study arranging his books when Erika and Klaus came running in.

  “They shot an archduke! They shot an archduke!”

  At first, Thomas thought that it was the opening of a song. He was determined that, from the very beginning of this holiday, his two eldest children would not draw too much attention to themselves.

  He was glad that Katia was upstairs as he grabbed Klaus and pointed threateningly at Erika.

  “I don’t want any more songs! No more songs!”

  “Uncle Klaus said we can sing what we like,” Erika said.

  “He is not your father!”

  “It isn’t a song anyway,” Erika said. “It’s the truth.”

  “They shot an archduke,” Klaus said. “You are the last to know.”

  “What archduke?” he asked.

  “Who is talking about an archduke?” Katia asked when she appeared.

  “They shot him,” Erika repeated.

  “And he is all dead,” Klaus added. “Die, die, die. Until they all die!”

  * * *

  The next morning, there were no newspapers to be had. Thomas placed an order with Hans Gähler, the local newsagent, for several of the daily German newspapers to be kept for him each day over the next two months. Gähler prided himself, as soon as the Manns began their summer sojourn, on putting Thomas’s books on display in the window.

  He accompanied Thomas to the street, looking up and down suspiciously as though some alien army might materialize at any moment.

  “The man who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not just a Serb,” Gähler said slowly and judiciously, “he was a Serb nationalist, which means he was in the pay of the Russians. And if this was done on the orders of the Russians, then the English had to be in on it too. And the French are too weak and too stupid to be able to put a stop to something like this.”

  Thomas wondered if this were something Gähler had read in the newspapers or if he had heard it from one of his customers.

  Every morning, as he came to collect his papers, Thomas found that Gähler combined opinions he had read just hours before with prejudices of his own.

  “A short sharp war is the only solution. We should go in after the French like a thief in the night. And the only way to get the English is through their ships. I understand that we have been working hard on a new torpedo. That torpedo will make our enemies shake.”

  Thomas smiled at the thought of Erika and Klaus singing one of their songs to accompany Gähler’s dire prognostications.

  The more he studied the newspapers, the more it became clear to him that England, France and Russia were spoiling for a war. He felt proud that Germany had increased its military production. That was, he believed, the best message to send to its enemies.

  “I don’t think Germany has any appetite for war,” he said to Gähler one morning. “But I think the English and the Russians believe that if they don’t make one big effort now to crush us, then they never will be equal to us again.”

  “There is plenty of appetite for war around here,” Gähler said. “The men are all ready.”

  Thomas did not tell
Katia about his conversations with Gähler. He knew that she did not want any talk of war in the house.

  Since a new bathroom was being built in Munich in their absence, Thomas was forced to go to the city to pay the builders. He was alone in the house on Poschingerstrasse when Russian mobilization was declared.

  The builder, when he came to be paid, pointed at the men in the bathroom.

  “This is the last day they will be here,” he said. “We are working fast so we can finish tonight. Next week, it will be a different world.”

  “Are you sure?” Thomas asked.

  “Next week, we will be in uniform, all of us. Making bathrooms one day and the next day putting manners on the French. I feel sorry for the French, they are a sad race, but if one Russian shows his face in Munich, I can assure you I will teach him a lesson he will not forget. The Russians should know to keep out of here.”

  That evening, Thomas had an early dinner and went to his study. Every word in every book on these shelves was, he realized, a German word. Unlike Heinrich, he had never learned French or Italian. He could read simple English but his ability to speak the language was rudimentary. He took down books of poems that he had owned since Lübeck by poets such as Goethe, Heine, Hölderlin, Platen, Novalis. He piled the slim volumes on the floor beside his armchair, aware that this might be the last evening he would have such luxury. He looked for poems that were simple in their structure and melancholy in their tone, poems about love and landscape and solitude. He liked the clanging German rhyme words, the lovely sense of completion, perfection.

  It would not be hard to destroy all this. Germany, despite the strength of its military, was, he thought, fragile. It had come into being because of its common language, the language it shared with these poems. In its music and its poetry, it had treasured things of the spirit. It had been ready to explore what was difficult and painful in life. And it was hemmed in now, isolated and vulnerable, by countries with which it had nothing in common.