by Colm Toibin
Erika arrived and insisted that she was so pleased to be home that she would not complain even if she were forced to take a daily walk with Monika and listen to all her sister’s woes.
“Monika doesn’t have any woes,” her brother Klaus said. “No one in this house does. Even Golo smiles. And the Magician has taken to wearing brightly colored neckties. This is all because on that island in the North Sea they found a little angel from Düsseldorf and they had him packaged and delivered fresh to our door. He lives in the attic. My mother loves him too. Only Michael scowls when he appears.”
“And I am sure your feelings about this boy are simply indescribable?”
“Yes, that is a good summary of my feelings,” Klaus said.
Over dinner, Erika ignored Klaus Heuser, discussing various theater shows she had seen and talking of the need for an anti-Nazi cabaret that would draw crowds.
“I should do it, but first I want to go on a tour of the world. I want to see every place before civilization falls asunder!”
“Erika,” her mother said, “you are such a fine example to the younger ones that I think we will have your portrait painted and put up in the hall.”
“Klaus Heuser’s father could do it,” Monika said.
Klaus smiled shyly.
“Oh, you are the golden boy,” Erika said, turning to Klaus Heuser. “Oh, I had not noticed you! Well, look at the golden boy!”
“Yes, that is what I am,” Klaus said and lifted his head to gaze at Erika, as though ready to outdo her if she chose to continue being provocative. Thomas had never seen him look so beautiful.
* * *
Klaus Heuser, on one of his afternoon visits, asked Thomas about his early life. As Klaus listened with close attention, Thomas found himself recounting the death of his father. He told Klaus then about the years of rancor between himself and Heinrich. When Klaus asked him about his mother, Thomas became emotional and could not answer. He stood up and went towards the bookcases and remained there, with his back to Klaus. As he waited, he knew that Klaus would have to decide whether to come near. Thomas determined not to turn, not to speak. He held his breath so that he would be able to hear if Klaus was crossing the room.
He sensed him moving, and then he must have stopped. He imagined Klaus asking himself what he should do. Even if he coughed, he thought, or made some whispering sound, even if he shifted his weight from one foot to another, then he would rescue Klaus from having to take a risk.
Later, he wondered if he was being manipulated as Paul Ehrenberg had once manipulated him, but he was sure that Klaus Heuser was not playing with him. Rather, he presumed that the boy was in awe of him and had no idea that this elderly writer’s days were filled with thoughts of him, and his nights too. He believed that Klaus was utterly unaware that a fond glance, or a brushing of the boy’s hand against his, or even the sound of his voice, excited Thomas in ways that he thought would never come to him again.
* * *
Erika proposed that they invite their uncle Klaus Pringsheim to dinner so that they could celebrate the presence of three Klauses among them. It was seen as a joke until it was taken up by Monika and Elisabeth and arranged for some days later.
When Klaus Pringsheim arrived, Katia asked him to sit beside her at the table. Erika, in turn, insisted that she be seated beside her brother Klaus. Monika and Elisabeth wanted Klaus Heuser between them. Thomas smiled as he observed that just as he, Golo and Michael expressed no preference, no one, it seemed, made any special plea to be put near any one of them.
As the food was served and the talk grew animated, Thomas was left out of the conversation. Monika and Elisabeth, he saw, became irritated by the amount of attention Erika and Klaus Mann were paying to Klaus Heuser, asking him questions, telling him jokes, teasing him. All the time, Katia and her brother Klaus spoke to each other quietly. They were amused by each other, Katia shaking her head in wonder at something that Klaus said. And then the talk between them could become serious, Klaus Pringsheim listening intently to something Katia told him.
Watching them, Thomas saw his fictions taking on life. Klaus and Katia were back in the setting he had imagined for them in The Blood of the Walsungs; they were the twins in thrall to each other. He was the dull interloper become magician, the one who had given substance to this amorphous family of his.
His eyes caught the eyes of Klaus Heuser and he realized that he himself had been changed in his turn, transformed into Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice and Klaus into the boy he had observed so intensely on the beach.
All Thomas could do was watch. If he left the table, no one except Klaus Heuser would see him depart. Even Golo and Michael were having a lively conversation. As he shifted his gaze from one face to another, he noticed that Klaus Heuser, while pretending to listen to Monika, was actually regularly glancing in his direction. Since everyone else was so preoccupied, he used this chance to stare openly at Klaus. While Klaus attended to Monika and then to Elisabeth and replied to something that Klaus Mann had said to him, he sometimes lifted his eyes towards Thomas and silently acknowledged that he was fully alert to him, that everything else that was happening at the table was barely impinging on his consciousness.
* * *
The household knew that he could never be disturbed in the mornings but it was understood that this rule did not apply to the afternoons. Despite this, no one ever came near his study during the time Klaus Heuser was with him.
At some point in the conversation, Thomas would stand up and go to the bookshelves. He would not take down a book or change his position. Instead, he would wait for the sound of Klaus approaching.
On an afternoon in his second week with them, Klaus told him that he had had a conversation with Katia.
“It was strange,” he said. “It began by her saying that I must stay here as long as I wanted. I was not sure how to reply, so I thanked her. I was going to say that I do not have any urgent need to go home but then she repeated how welcome I would be to stay. She is, I think, a very subtle person.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that by the end of the conversation, without my being sure how this had happened, it was agreed that I would leave at the end of the week.”
Thomas had to swallow hard. They sat in silence for some time until he spoke.
“Would you like me to come to Düsseldorf to see you?”
“Yes.”
Thomas stood up and went to the bookcases. Before he had time to compose himself and listen out for Klaus’s breath, Klaus had moved swiftly across the room, grasping Thomas’s hands for a moment and then edging him around so that they faced each other and started to kiss.
* * *
Since Erika and Klaus were to leave, they had a final dinner with the family and Klaus Heuser. Klaus Mann sat next to him at table. Thomas watched as they made plans to meet in Düsseldorf when Klaus Mann was visiting. Soon it was decided that Erika would come too, and all three of them might go to Berlin together. When it was apparent that Monika and Elisabeth were feeling left out of these arrangements, Klaus Heuser turned away from Klaus and Erika and spoke to the two younger ones for the rest of the evening.
Thomas wrote about Klaus Heuser in his diaries, describing the culmination of their time together in precise detail. He saw no danger in doing that. The danger would be in not noting it down, in letting it fade.
One day, the week after Klaus Heuser had left, when Thomas and Katia were taking a walk through the autumn leaves by the bank of the river, Katia spoke about their visitor.
“I think we live such a sheltered life,” she said. “I liked having six children because I thought they would be company for each other. But I often wonder if it doesn’t mean that we are more enclosed, less open to the outside world. Young Klaus brightened up all our lives, including mine. All our children except Golo think only of themselves, and maybe we do too, but Klaus seemed to consider everybody. It is a remarkable gift.”
Thomas listened c
arefully for a hint of irony, but there was none.
“What did your brother think of him?” he asked.
“The third Klaus? My brother only notices me,” she replied.
“Monika loved Klaus Heuser.”
“We all loved him. We were lucky we chose to go to Sylt. Otherwise, we would never have met him.”
* * *
In the diaries, he remembered, he did not just record what had happened between him and Klaus Heuser. He had, each day, written down what his dreams were, what it meant for him to have the boy in his study, what he thought about in the morning when he woke, knowing that Klaus was in bed in one of the upper rooms. In some office, he thought, men in uniforms could be nudging each other and sniggering as they read of his relationship with someone younger than his two eldest sons. He imagined the moment when they might hand these pages of the diary over to their superiors. And among these superiors there would be someone who would know how to use the diaries. He pictured himself walking the streets of Lugano with Katia, dressed with his usual formality, only to find that people were coming to the doors of shops to peer at him as he walked by.
When he and Katia and Golo had a meeting with Heins, his lawyer, who had traveled from Munich to Switzerland, their main preoccupation was that the Nazis might seize the house on Poschingerstrasse. It was now agreed that Heins would do what he could to prevent that and take what papers were in the study, including letters and the manuscripts of the novels, to keep in his own office.
Finally, Thomas raised the matter of the suitcase. Having questioned Golo closely about the role of the chauffeur, Heins said that he would make inquiries.
One morning a week later, he heard the phone ringing. It was Heins.
“I have the suitcase. It is here. What should I do with it?”
“How did you get it?”
“It was not difficult. Some things work in Munich as they always have. Officials are still official. I simply complained to the post office about the delay. And when they found the case, they were quite penitent and at a loss to explain why it had not been sent.”
“Can it be delivered now?”
“You can rest assured that you will have it, unless you want to keep the contents with the other papers in my office.”
“No, I do not. There are notes for a novel I am working on.”
As he waited for the delivery, he looked forward to reading one more time what he had written about Klaus Heuser.
And then, on a night when he was alone in this rented house, he would put those pages, and perhaps some others, into the fire. In having the diaries delivered to him, he had, he knew, been lucky. He wondered now, in the first year of his exile, if he would ever need to be so lucky again.
Chapter 9 Küsnacht, 1934
Nothing had prepared him for fleeing his own country. He had failed to read the signs. He had misunderstood Germany, the very place that was meant to be inscribed on his soul. The idea that if he were to set foot in Munich he would soon be dragged from the house and taken to a place from which he would not ever return seemed like an event in a dream.
Each morning, as they read the newspapers over breakfast, one of them would share an item, a fresh outrage committed by the Nazis, an arrest or confiscation of property, a threat to the peace of Europe, an outlandish claim against the Jewish population or against writers and artists or against Communists, and they would sigh or grow silent. On some days, while reading out an item of news, Katia would say that this was the worst yet, only to be corrected by Erika, who would have found something even more outrageous.
At first, he had found his Italian English teacher’s poverty and neediness so apparent that he could not concentrate on the lessons. The study of grammar and the constant repetitions were also tedious. The bespectacled teacher, clearly irritated, produced an English translation of Dante’s Inferno and offered to take Thomas through the poem line by line, making him note down all the new words and remember their meaning for the next class. When Thomas mentioned at dinner that he was studying Dante in the original English, both Erika and Michael rushed to correct him.
“I won the Nobel Prize in Literature,” Thomas said. “I know what language Dante wrote in!”
Katia decided to join the class; but she was more a teacher than a pupil, Thomas thought. She had already studied an English grammar book and demanded to be taken slowly and methodically through the rules, starting with the present tense. Each morning, she handed Thomas a list of twenty words in English with the German meaning opposite and said he had to learn them by evening. In the class, she tried to be better than the teacher, often becoming exasperated and breaking into German, a language the Italian did not speak.
After some months, Katia found a young English poet living nearby and invited him to come for conversation classes, with no grammar, announcing that she was more comfortable in the past tense and would like to talk about history.
“History is all in the past tense,” she said, “so that will help us. He was. It was. She was. They were. There was. There were.”
* * *
From the safety of outside, Thomas knew he would, at some stage, have to denounce what was happening in Germany. But for the moment, despite the pressure on him, he did not want to put Katia’s parents in any more danger, nor did he want his own books to be taken from the shelves. Also, his publisher Gottfried Bermann remained in Germany. If Thomas’s books could not be distributed there, Bermann would go out of business and all the effort he had put into keeping Thomas’s work in print would serve only to make his position more precarious. Ignoring Katia’s and Erika’s arguments to the contrary, Thomas still believed that Hitler would be removed by his generals, or that there would be a massive uprising against him. Each morning, as he opened the papers, it was in the expectation that there would be some news that the power of the Nazis was waning.
When he saw that his passport and that of Katia were shortly to expire, the efforts he made to renew them were rebuffed by the German authorities at first and then ignored. It was foolish, he saw, to have believed that the Swiss would step in and grant him and his family citizenship. The country that had taken him in, he understood, was as much a fortress as a sanctuary. In the end, Switzerland offered him provisional leave to stay and provisional papers with which he could travel.
By this time, the Swiss newspapers were calling Hitler the Führer without any irony. Thomas began to lose hope that the regime might fail in Germany. The Nazis, he realized, were not like the poets of the Munich Revolution. They were street fighters who had taken power without losing their sway over the streets. They managed to be both government and opposition. They thrived on the idea of enemies, including enemies within. They did not fear bad publicity—rather, they actually wanted the worst of their actions to become widely known, all the better to make everyone, even those loyal to them, afraid.
At first, he had been so surprised at being uprooted from the stately house he had built in Munich, with its air of solidity and permanence, that he believed he needed to find just one secure spot and stay there. But once his Swiss papers came through, he felt restless, as though Lugano had merely been a first stop, a provisional refuge. Being away from home frightened him. There were days when he thought of a book and could see where it might be found in his study. Not being able to take it down and open it came to him with sadness but also, at times, with panic. On the other hand, living in Switzerland, listening to the amusing dialect the locals used, reading local newspapers, offered him a lightness, a sense that he had embarked on an adventure.
Thus, the decision to move to the south of France was made on what seemed like a whim. Once it was decided, however, neither he nor Katia tried to justify the change by listing the reasons. There had been no reasons. He smiled at the thought that, since they felt they needed to do something, they had determined to do this. He told anyone who asked that he believed he might feel more comfortable in the south of France, where many other German exiles were. The
family traveled first to Bandol and then, following other writers, they went to Sanary-sur-Mer, where they rented a large house.
In Lugano and Arosa, Thomas had had access to the German newspapers. In Sanary, all was rumor and there were many factions and feuds. Most of the German exiles went to the cafés each morning. The Jewish ones, he saw, were interested in the fate of the Jewish population that had remained in Germany and was under more intense threat as each day went by. The Social Democrats busied themselves hating the Communists, who, in turn, hated the Social Democrats. Bertolt Brecht, he saw, was a great troublemaker, moving from one café to another spreading dissent. It amazed him that Ernst Toller had also turned up in Sanary and was being listened to as though his opinion mattered. Others came and went, including Heinrich, who was based mainly in Nice and wrote a regular column in French for one of the local newspapers in which he excoriated Hitler and his regime.
It was easy for Thomas to follow his usual morning routine, but in the afternoon it was tempting to take a walk into the town center, check at the newsstand to see what foreign newspapers had come in and have a late coffee in one of the cafés. Thomas was quite happy to find himself at a Jewish table or a Social Democrat table but he tended to avoid the Communist table.
One afternoon, when he was sitting alone, he became aware that he was being closely observed by a number of young men nearby who were speaking German. When one of them approached and invited him to join them, he smiled and stood up and greeted each young man. His arrival, he saw, caused suspicion among a couple of thin-faced fellows in the company. Whatever they had been talking about, his appearance had put an end to their conversation. He noticed that the one who had invited him to join them was on the point of saying something and then demurred.