The Magician

by Colm Toibin

  “I hope they don’t grow up too soon,” Thomas said. “And I have always taken the view that their pleasant appearance takes its bearings from both of their parents.”

  “Do you mean that they look like you?”

  “Would that be a surprise?”

  “I’m sure they have many surprises left, if what I hear is true,” Klaus Pringsheim said.

  Thomas amused himself by telling Katia that he thought her brother, with all his pretentions, was a bad influence on Erika and Klaus.

  “I have begun to believe that it might be the other way around,” Katia said.

  Erika, despite many protests, took her Abitur, but Klaus refused to become involved in any more study. When his mother asked how he planned to live without any formal qualifications, he laughed at her.

  “I am an artist,” he said.

  Thomas asked Katia how these creatures had emerged from such a staid household as theirs.

  “My grandmother was the most outspoken woman in Berlin,” Katia said. “And your mother can hardly be described as reticent. But Erika was like that from the day she was born. She brought Klaus with her. She made him in her own image. We did nothing to stop it. That is all we did. Or perhaps we only pretended to be staid.”

  * * *

  Lula did not tell them that Josef Löhr was dying. She came to the house as though nothing unusual were happening. She had befriended Monika, who was eleven, and took her into her confidence.

  “She is the only one of the children who I can talk to,” she said. “The others are too high and mighty. And I tell Monika things that I would tell no one else, and she lets me in on her secrets.”

  “I hope you are not telling her too much,” Thomas said.

  “More than I would tell you!” Lula replied.

  Heinrich came to tell them that Löhr did not have long to live.

  “The house is filled with these peculiar women. Mimi says that they are morphine addicts. They are certainly acting most strangely.”

  For the funeral, Lula modeled herself on Julia after the death of the senator. She took on, Thomas saw, an otherworldly aura, smiling faintly, speaking softly, wearing powder on her face that made her pale. As she followed the coffin, she wore a black veil and kept her three daughters close to her, but did not speak to them. She looked as if she were posing for a painter or a photographer.

  When he and Katia and Heinrich and Mimi approached her at the graveside, she nodded at them as though she were not quite sure who they were.

  Afterwards, as Katia and Mimi gathered around Lula’s daughters, Thomas and Heinrich lagged behind.

  “She has told me,” Heinrich said, “that the money Löhr has left her is worth almost nothing.”

  * * *

  Thomas was now living, he believed, in three Germanies. The first was the new one that his two eldest children inhabited. It was disorderly and disrespectful, designed to disrupt the peace. It lived as though the world was to be reinvented and laws to be discarded and remade.

  The second Germany was also new. It included a mass of middle-aged people who used the winter nights to read novels and poetry; they would crowd into halls and theaters to witness him lecture or read from his work.

  In the immediate aftermath of the war, he had the impression that he was, for many educated Germans, a kind of pariah. His essays and articles had been in tune with popular opinion as the war began, but they were dangerous and old-fashioned by the time the war was halfway through. When the conflict was over, no one wanted to hear from people like him.

  Slowly, however, what he wrote about Germany and the war faded from public memory, to be replaced by his novels and stories, which Germans started to read in great numbers. His work was seen to represent freedom; he dramatized change. Death in Venice was viewed as a modern book about a complex sexuality. Buddenbrooks was a novel about the decline of an old mercantile Germany. How he portrayed the women in that book increased his popularity among women readers in Germany.

  Thomas liked receiving invitations, showing them to Katia, looking at his diary, and then making the arrangements. He enjoyed being met from trains or having a car sent for him. Having supper before his event with the mayor or some civil leaders, or with literary editors or publishers, gave him satisfaction. He took pleasure in being treated with reverence. He also appreciated the money he was paid.

  He learned that the audiences did not easily tire. He could read for an hour and they were still not satisfied. At Katia’s suggestion, he offered long introductions, relishing the hushed silence that descended on the hall as soon as he began. If he could not be easily heard, then Katia would make a sign to him, and he would raise his voice. It felt at times like a religious service, with him as the priest, and a story or chapter as sacred text.

  And always there were young men in the audience whom he noticed. Some had come with their literary parents; others, often older, had been stirred by Death in Venice. As soon as he stood at the lectern, he would glance at the first rows of seats and always he would find one of them. He would single him out, gaze at him and look away and then gaze more intensely, until the young man was left in no doubt that he was being treated as special. When the reading was over, Thomas would be on the lookout for the young man whom he had observed most directly, but often the object of his attention would have disappeared into the night. Sometimes, however, one of them would approach him shyly, politely, with a book in hand, and they could talk for a few moments before Thomas was asked to direct his attention to the crowd waiting to meet him.

  The third Germany was the village of Polling, where his mother lived. Nothing there had changed. Even though young men had fought in the war and many had been killed or injured, life, once the war was over, resumed as though nothing important had occurred. The same machinery was put to work in the fields at harvesttime. The same barns were used for grain and hay. The same food was eaten. The same prayers were said in the churches. Munich seemed as far away as ever. The times of the trains did not change.

  Max and Katharina Schweighardt, from whom his mother rented her living quarters, had grown older, but their manners were intact. Katharina’s concern about Julia’s health was conveyed to Thomas in a tone that was kind and tactful. Even the Schweighardt children spoke with the accent of the village, having inherited their parents’ intelligence and shrewdness.

  To come from the company of Erika and Klaus to the village of Polling was to move from a place of chaos, where nothing was settled, to a Germany that felt timeless, secure.

  But nothing was timeless or secure. As Lula and his mother complained about their incomes slowly becoming worthless, he saw that the inflation was being blamed on the winners of the war, who had introduced a set of crippling taxes on German exports. Like all Germans, Thomas deplored these, seeing them as vindictive. But it took him time to understand how inflation would not just create misery but foment resentments that could not easily be quelled.

  Since income from sales of Thomas’s books abroad began to soar as the dollar rose in value, he and Katia had no difficulty paying the wages of their servants, bailing Erika and Klaus out, and helping his mother and sister. They could afford two cars and a chauffeur.

  Their wealth was quickly noticed. One day, when there had been several callers, he asked Katia who they were.

  “They are people selling things, people who’ve heard that we have money. They’re selling paintings and musical instruments and fur coats. The last woman to call had a statue that she thought was valuable. I didn’t know what to say to her.”

  A few times, coming back from Polling, or from some public event, Thomas saw demonstrations in the streets, and he read in the newspapers about unrest coming this time from anti-Communist groups, but he was working each day on the novel he had abandoned before the war, and he was grateful for the stability in Munich, the sense that things had quietened down. He did not pay any attention to the demonstrations.

  * * *

  His mother came to sta
y in Poschingerstrasse and saw Lula every day until Lula tired of her.

  “She repeats herself, and then she thinks I am Carla, or pretends she does in order to annoy me. I think she might benefit from a return to her lodgings in Polling.”

  His mother must have known, Thomas thought, when she handed him some banknotes to cover her expenses, that the notes had no value.

  “I’m too old to know what is worth what. I think I have lost the ability to add and subtract. So I am lucky I have you and Katia to work all this out for me. Lula is no use at all and Heinrich made a long speech when I showed him the banknotes. He sounds like your father sometimes.”

  In Polling, he paid her rent and employed a housekeeper who made sure that the house was warm and that there was enough food. But he could find no way to buy clothes for his mother. She wore slippers, she said, because her feet were hurting her, but Thomas knew it was because she could not afford shoes. When Katia suggested that they go shopping, Julia feigned tiredness.

  Sometimes, he saw, his mother was actually tired. After lunch, she often found a place in the sitting room and fell asleep. Like Lula, she warmed most to Monika, and said that she was her only grandchild who was out of old Lübeck.

  “Why am I out of old Lübeck?” Monika asked.

  “She means that you have good manners,” Thomas said.

  “Unlike Erika?”

  “Yes,” Katia said. “Unlike Erika.”

  Soon after Julia went back to Polling, news came that she had taken to her bed.

  Katharina Schweighardt was waiting for Thomas when he arrived.

  “I don’t believe that there is anything wrong with her,” she said, “but there are cases like this in every village around here, especially among women who live on their savings. It started last year. They get into bed and take no more food and then wait to die. And that is what your mother is doing.”

  “But she is well looked after,” Thomas said.

  “She cannot get used to having no money. We all love her here. Everyone is ready to help her. But she has run out of money. No one who has been used to money can live with that. That is how the world is.”

  “Has a doctor seen her?”

  “He has, but there is nothing he can do. And she gave him one of those old banknotes.”

  Julia managed to get through most of the winter, being fed soup and dry bread. Some days she wanted Carla or Lula, and other days she called out for her sons. When Thomas spent an evening by her bed, thinking that she might not last the night, she thought he was someone in Brazil.

  “Am I your father?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Someone you remember?”

  She stared at him and began to whisper words that he believed were Portuguese.

  “Did you love Brazil?”

  “That was what I loved,” she said.

  A week later, she was still alive. She looked thinner. When she saw him, she asked to be put sitting up. Since Heinrich and Viktor were downstairs, he asked if she wanted to see them too, but she shook her head. She searched his eyes as though puzzled. He told her who he was.

  “I know who you are,” she whispered.

  He held her hand, but she slowly withdrew it. A few times, she made to speak, but there were no more words. She yawned and shut her eyes. When Katharina appeared, she told his mother how well she looked and how she would soon be her old self again, walking in the village. Julia gave her a withering smile.

  Outside, Katharina told Thomas that Julia would not last the night.

  “How do you know?”

  “I nursed my mother and my grandmother. She will fade in the night. It will be very gentle.”

  Thomas, Heinrich, Lula and Viktor sat by her bed. Julia often indicated that she wanted water. Katharina and her daughter came to change the bedclothes and make her more comfortable. Once midnight had passed, Julia closed her eyes. Her breathing became deep and shallow, then back to normal.

  “Can she hear us?” Thomas asked Katharina.

  “She might be able to hear until the very end. Who can say?”

  In the candlelight, her face was alive. She moved her lips and her eyes opened and closed. When any of them tried to hold her hand, she made clear that she did not want that. An hour went by, and then another.

  “It is often the hardest thing to do,” Katharina said.

  “What?”

  “To die.”

  Thomas was sitting beside her bed when death came. He had never witnessed it before, this sudden change. In one second his mother was alive, and in the next she was no one. He did not know that it could be as quick and decisive as that.

  Alone among Thomas’s children, Erika came to her grandmother’s funeral.

  “I have never seen you crying before,” she said to Thomas.

  “I will stop crying soon,” he said.

  Heinrich was crying too, as was Viktor, but Lula, paler than ever, stared ahead of her, fully composed. Only when the time came for them to stand in the church did Thomas see how drained and weak she was. Her daughters had to help her walk behind the coffin.

  * * *

  In the aftermath of his mother’s death, all Thomas could do was write. When Katia suggested that they go to Italy, he said that he would go anywhere once The Magic Mountain was finished.

  In the meantime, he did some readings and lectures in nearby cities. Public appearances gave him energy. He found the hours before and after a reading fruitful, times when new ideas came to him, new scenes to animate the novel.

  He let Erika know about the book, but he was careful not to talk too much to Katia about it. She knew it dealt with a sanatorium in Davos, but that was all. He wrote some episodes with only Katia in mind. He dreamed of her as the sole reader of the book, aware that it contained much that was private between them, including scenes and characters that he adapted from her letters. Sometimes, as he read over pages he had been working on, he worried that no reader except Katia would appreciate what he was doing. He was concerned also about the amount of detail, the large cast of characters, the long arguments about philosophy and the future of mankind.

  But more than anything, he did not know if his plan to dramatize the passing of time itself, or time slowing down, as if time itself were a character, would mean anything to the readers of the book. He smiled to himself at the thought that this was a volume that came from the most private obsessions and might thrive best in the private realm.

  * * *

  When The Magic Mountain was typed and ready, Thomas told Katia that there was a parcel for her. When she expressed surprise, he produced a box with the pages of the book inside.

  He studied her as they sat down to meals, but she would only smile at him enigmatically and smile again as she left the table, saying that she was very busy and must return to her work.

  Golo had developed an insatiable curiosity about his parents and his older siblings. When no one seemed to know where Erika and Klaus were, Golo would always have the information.

  Thomas often found him hovering outside his study. One day, he waylaid Thomas and asked if he knew what his mother was reading.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “She is laughing all the time. I understood that it was your new book she was reading, but your books are never funny.”

  “Some people find them funny.”

  “No, I think you have been misled on that particular point,” Golo said, furrowing his brow like a professor.

  Since he and Katia went for a walk together in the afternoon, he wished she would give him some response to the book, but she spoke of the usual matters that worried them, such as Lula’s financial state and the antics of Erika and Klaus.

  When she appeared one morning at the door of his study, carrying a tray with coffee and biscuits, he knew she had finished the book.

  “I will have a lot to say,” she began. “I love that you turned me into a man in the book, and such a sweet man. But that is a small thing. More important is
the fact that you have changed everything for us.”

  “With the book?”

  “Your seriousness has now come to the fore. The book is filled with seriousness. It will be read by every German who cares about books and it will be read all over the world.”

  “Is it not our private book?”

  “It is that as well. But no one cares about that except me. It has taken years for you to be able to do this. And now is the right moment for everyone to read it. It is a book that has found its moment.”

  In the following weeks, they went through the book. Katia suggested changes and erasures, but she spent most of the time selecting passages that she admired, reading out bits and marveling at details.

  “The way time is handled and then how slow the book becomes! And when they play ‘Valentin’s Prayer’ on the gramophone and the figure who is me comes back into the room, back from the dead! And then the good Russian table and the bad Russian table!”

  “What are you and my mother doing?” Golo asked.

  “We are reading my novel.”

  “You mean the funny novel?”

  The publishers were wary of the book’s length but then decided to make a virtue of it. Quickly, foreign publishers bought the rights. Within a few months of publication, when Thomas and Katia went to the opera or the theater, people came up to them to praise the book. Invitations came from all over Germany for Thomas to give readings. In one magazine, readers were invited to submit their favorite passage.

  And a rumor came from Sweden that The Magic Mountain was being taken most seriously by the Academy, the group that decided on the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  * * *

  When Erika was eighteen and Klaus seventeen, they moved to Berlin, where Erika began to work as an actress and Klaus started to compose essays and stories. They were soon written about widely in the press, becoming famous for their flamboyance. They were spoken about as the voices of a new generation, but also as the children of Thomas Mann. They traded on their father’s name, but they wished, they told interviewers, to create a distance between the patriarch’s world and theirs; they demanded to be known for their own achievements.