by Colm Toibin
“Once I wash my hands, perhaps you can join me for a glass of wine while your mother is getting ready?” Thomas whispered to Elisabeth.
“The wine is already open,” she whispered in reply.
“I can hear you both,” Katia said, and laughed. “As I get older, I really believe that I hear whispers more clearly than I hear shouting. So have a drink, the two of you, and I’ll join you as soon as I am ready.”
Thomas sat on the sofa with his daughter as she asked him in detail about his trip to New York. She was ready to be amused at the slightest thing.
After supper, as Katia poured more wine for him, Thomas noticed her glancing knowingly at Elisabeth and felt a sense of strain or unease between them. For a second, it struck him that there could be news about Golo or Monika or Michael or even Klaus and Erika.
He looked up again and saw Katia nodding to Elisabeth. They were, it seemed, involved in some private communication.
He sipped his wine and pushed his chair back.
“Can I be included?” he asked.
“The plan was that you would go to your study and I would call you when we wanted to give you the news,” Elisabeth said. “But my mother appears to have forgotten that is what we arranged.”
“My worry is that your father won’t go to his study this evening,” Katia said. “That he will go straight to bed.”
“So, there is news?” Thomas asked.
“Well, Elisabeth has news.”
If the news were merely about Elisabeth, he thought, then there was nothing significant to worry about.
“News concerning my favorite child?” he asked.
When Elisabeth lifted her eyes and took in her mother mischievously, it was, for a split second, as if his own sister Carla, long dead now, were sitting at the table.
“Perhaps your mother can tell me if you won’t do so,” he said in mock severity.
“Elisabeth is to be married,” Katia said.
“To the president of Princeton University,” Thomas replied. “Or to President Roosevelt.”
“As far as I am aware, both of them already have a wife,” Elisabeth said.
Her tone had become dignified suddenly, almost sad. She put a hand over her mouth and gazed into the distance. She seemed older than her twenty years.
Thomas tried to recall if any young man had been visiting the house, but all he could remember was Elisabeth’s encounter in a colleague’s house with some Princeton students who had not appreciated her diffidence nor she their sense of entitlement. A young man had asked her if it would be safe for him and his family to go hiking in Germany over the summer as they had planned. When she had told him that it would be perfectly safe unless he and his family were Jewish, he had replied: “Hell no, we are not Jewish!” The atmosphere had not been helped when Elisabeth followed this by asking the young man if he and his family were by any chance Communists. When he had denied this vehemently, she had then suggested that he and his family might have a very pleasant time in Germany if they made sure to keep away from places where people were being dragged from their houses and beaten up on the street by thugs in uniforms.
Elisabeth had insisted that she had said all this calmly, but she had to agree that her conversation with the young man may have been the cause of the evening ending early. No further invitations had been issued to her to spend time with Princeton students.
When neither Katia nor Elisabeth spoke, and both remained gravely at the table, Thomas asked his daughter if she had changed her mind and become fond of that very student, who wished to visit Germany with his family, the “Hell no” boy.
“She is marrying Borgese,” Katia said.
Thomas caught Katia’s eye and knew immediately that this was not a joke. Giuseppe Borgese, a professor of Romance languages in Chicago, a leading anti-fascist, had recently come to the house to discuss politics, having also visited when the Manns moved to Princeton first.
“Borgese? Where did she meet him?”
“Here. Where we all met him.”
“He has only been here twice.”
“She has only met him twice.”
“ ‘She’ is sitting at the table, if you both don’t mind,” Elisabeth said.
“This has happened with great speed,” Thomas said to her.
“And with great decorum,” she replied.
“Whose idea was it?”
“I think that is a private matter.”
“Is that why Borgese came here again? To see you?”
“I am sure it must have been part of the reason.”
She smiled coyly, self-mockingly.
“I thought he came to see me!”
“He managed to see both of us,” she replied.
Thomas was about to say that although Giuseppe Borgese was slightly younger than he was, he looked much older, but then he stopped himself, saying instead: “I thought he devoted himself entirely to literature and the cause of anti-fascism.”
“He does.”
“Perhaps not as single-mindedly as he liked us all to think!”
“I am engaged to him. And if you seek single-mindedness, you can take it that I am the one in possession of that precise quality.”
Elisabeth’s acerbic tone, often kept in reserve, had appeared now in a flash.
“Have you been writing to him?” he asked.
“We are in regular communication.”
“So, Erika married Auden and you marry Borgese.”
“Yes,” Elisabeth said, “and Monika will marry her Hungarian, and Michael, who is even younger than I am, will marry Gret. That is what people often do, they grow up and they marry.”
“You are twenty and he is… what?”
“Fifty-six,” Katia interjected.
“Just seven years younger than your poor old father,” he went on.
“It will make everyone happy,” Elisabeth said, “if you refuse to play the role of the poor, upset old father.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that,” he replied. For a second, he was close to tears.
“Then what?”
“I was worried about losing you. I was thinking entirely of myself and your mother. Now we will have no one to talk to.”
“You have five other children.”
“That is what I mean. You are the one…”
He wanted to say that she was the one who had such good sense and good humor and such a sardonic distance from things that he had imagined she would never meet a match but would remain with them throughout their lives.
“My mother and I have decided that you will behave impeccably when my fiancé comes to visit,” Elisabeth said.
He almost laughed.
“Did it take you both long to decide this?”
“We walked as far as Witherspoon Street and then back while you were busy writing.”
“You do actually intend to marry him?”
“Yes, here in Princeton, in the university church, and soon.”
“I wish my mother were alive,” he said.
“Your mother?”
“She loved weddings. She always did. I think that is the only pleasure she ever got from marrying my father.”
Elisabeth ignored what he had just said.
“I asked Borgese if he was nervous about visiting now,” she said. “And he replied that, strangely, he was not nervous at all.”
“Then it is simple. Everything is settled.”
“We don’t have the date yet.”
“Who else knows?”
“Michael knows,” Katia said. “We wrote to him, and we will tell Klaus and Erika when they arrive and then write to Golo and Monika.”
“Tell me something,” Thomas asked. “Has Borgese been married before? Or will this be his first venture into the holy state of matrimony?”
“I don’t,” Elisabeth said, arching her eyebrows, “detect a note of sarcasm in your tone. Although some lesser creature would. And that pleases me. But Giuseppe will ask me if you congratulated me when you heard
the good news. And I will say yes. Since I have not yet told him anything that is not true, then…”
“I offer you, my beloved child, my heartiest congratulations.”
“As I do,” Katia said.
“You both planned all of this,” Thomas said. “Not telling me before now.”
“Of course we did,” Katia said. “You had enough to think about in New York.”
“And this is usually the moment,” Elisabeth said, “when you stand up from the table with a preoccupied look and go to your study.”
“Yes, my child,” Thomas replied.
“So, I will clear the table and we can discuss this further in the morning.”
“What a new sort of daughter you are becoming now that you are engaged,” Thomas said, smiling. “I thought Erika was the bossy one.”
“We all have our moments. I am sure Monika will have hers too when we see her.”
“I was hoping that you would protect me from all of them,” he said and sighed.
Elisabeth stood and bowed ironically to him.
“Was that to be my purpose in life?” she asked, stepping away from the table and leaving the room before he could respond.
* * *
“What an old goat!” Thomas said when he was sure his daughter was out of earshot.
“When I went for a walk with the two of them, Borgese barely spoke,” Katia replied.
“That is often a sign.”
“He gave no sign. He just muttered and complained of the cold.”
“That, too, is often a sign.”
Katia smiled.
“I intend to glower at him, even if just briefly, when he comes to see us again,” she said.
“He will find me in my study if he is looking for me,” Thomas said.
He stood up.
“It has been hard for Elisabeth,” Katia said. “We have moved around so much. She has lost those years.”
“She would not be marrying an old man had things been different and we had stayed in Munich,” Thomas replied. “She would have found someone her own age.”
He was almost hoping that Katia would question his description of Borgese as an old man, but she accepted it as a melancholy fact.
“There is nothing we can do, I suppose?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
* * *
While he was preparing for bed, Katia came into his room.
“There was something I didn’t say,” she began.
“Something else?”
“No. About Elisabeth. I do really believe that she will be content in her new state.”
“Perhaps we should have told her how warm the welcome would be, were she to change her mind at any point and come back to us.”
“She won’t come back,” Katia said.
He smiled at her and sighed.
“And I had a letter from Klaus,” Katia said.
“From where?”
“I think it was sent before he set sail. It was confused. Even some of the handwriting was hard to read. It must have been written in a hurry. But I’m concerned about him.”
“When I was his age, I wrote four hours in the morning and then had a light lunch and afterwards went for a walk.”
“He has lost his country.”
“We have all lost our country.”
“We must be careful when he comes.”
“Did Erika write too?”
“No, she just sent her love.”
“She will look after him.”
Katia closed her mouth and fixed her jaw firmly. It was a look that she had learned, he knew, from her father.
“We must be careful with him when he comes,” Katia repeated.
And then she gently kissed him and wished him good night and returned to her own room.
* * *
In the morning after breakfast, they went through phrasal verbs in English. Katia had written each one out on a piece of paper with a sample sentence in which it might appear on the other side. She began to examine Thomas by randomly selecting one.
“Put up with,” she said.
“I cannot put up with Agnes Meyer.”
“Put on.”
“I will put on my new coat.”
“Go over.”
“I will go over my new novel one more time.”
“Get over.”
“I cannot get over the news that Elisabeth is marrying Borgese.”
“Give up.”
“I will soon give up to be pleasant to anyone in Princeton.”
“Give up being, not to be!”
“Are you certain?”
Since he was scheduled to present himself at the office in Princeton that dealt with visas and foreigners, Katia had drawn him a map so he could locate the building. She had offered to go with him, but he assured her that he could best deal with these matters on his own. He had the impression that a German writer coming with his wife, both of them speaking heavily accented English, would be treated with less warmth than the writer coming alone, a writer who had just a decade earlier received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Also, Katia’s valiant efforts to comprehend the regulations might antagonize the Princeton authorities, who would, he felt, be more sympathetic to someone who knew nothing at all about them.
Although he was sure that he had followed Katia’s directions, he found himself at the very center of the campus walking toward Nassau Street when he realized he should, in fact, be heading in the other direction. He would now be late for his appointment. He asked a student for assistance, and was told to walk down a sloping path that passed close to the university gymnasium and swimming pool.
When he heard through an open window a sudden shout and an echoing whoop of pleasure as someone dived into the water, he remembered that Klaus had once told him that the students actually swam naked in this pool. And now, as he hurried along, he thought of the scene, the young men gathering in groups, each one tensing his back, lifting his arms, opening out his legs slightly as he got ready to dive. And others edging themselves out of the water, all the muscles of their legs and buttocks on display.
It would not do for an elderly German professor to be seen among them, or even to think too much about this scene. As he moved along, nonetheless, he saw himself in the water, doing a lap and then turning to find a group of students freshly naked preparing themselves for the plunge.
In his study, he had Hofmann’s painting Die Quelle hanging opposite his desk, having managed to rescue it from the house in Munich and taken it with him to Switzerland and then to America. The painted image of the three naked youths on the rocks, two of the young men bending, so that the full heft and curve of their lower bodies could be seen, the slim beauty of their legs, gave him energy in the mornings, even more than coffee did, and offered him some stimulus as he tried to fill pages with sentences.
Should he find the meeting about his visa status irritating, he resolved, he would summon up the image of that painting to soothe himself and then, if that were not enough, he would imagine the very students he was passing now—tall young Americans fully dressed—and have them appearing naked from the doorway of the dressing room into the enclosed space of the swimming pool.
He found the visa office and pushed open the door. There was no one at the reception desk. After a while, he took a seat. When, eventually, a woman came, she looked at him for a moment and then made a phone call. Once she was finished on the phone, he stood up and approached the desk.
“I have an appointment with Mrs. Finley,” he said.
“For what time?”
“I am afraid that I am fifteen minutes late. I lost my way.”
“I’ll see if she is still available.”
She left him standing at the desk while she went to an inner room. Having returned, she led him into another waiting area and motioned him to sit.
He watched people coming and going, none of them paying any attention to him, until a middle-aged woman appeared with a file in her hand, calling out his name loudly,
even though he was the only one waiting. When he identified himself, she indicated that he should follow her into an office where she looked through the file. Then without a word she stood up and walked out of the room, leaving him alone.
Through the open door he could see this woman, whom he supposed to be Mrs. Finley, chatting to a colleague of hers. He wondered if Katia should not have accompanied him. Katia would have a way of letting Mrs. Finley know that she should attend to her work rather than engage in idle talk. All he could do was stare into the distance, checking now and then that Mrs. Finley was still out there, laughing and talking.
For a second, he thought that he might just slip out, make his way home unnoticed and wait to see what the authorities in Princeton would do in response. But since the president’s office had phoned the house several times insisting that he would have to deal with his visa status or he could no longer be paid and his very position in the United States would be in danger, then such an action would be merely petulant and foolhardy. He would have to wait while Mrs. Finley enjoyed her morning.
Finally, she returned and sat at the desk opposite him. She brusquely began to go through the file.
“No, no,” she said. “This makes no sense. I have here that you are a German citizen, but then I am looking at your passport details and they say that are you a Czech citizen. The problem is that both forms are signed by you, and this could have serious legal implications. I will have to send this file to another department.”
“I have a Czech passport,” he said.
“So it says here.”
“But I was born in Germany.”
“But no one asked you where you were born. It is only your citizenship that matters.”
“I lost my German citizenship.”
“We have so many people,” she said, looking through the file again, “coming here from those countries, and all I get is confusion.”
He stared at her coldly.
“And, yes, here it is, your wife, she has created the same confusion. I suppose she is Czech too.”
“Like me—”
“I know,” she interrupted, “you don’t need to explain about the German thing. And I’m not sure what the regulations are for Czech citizens. This letter says that you and your wife are both Germans.”