The Magician

by Colm Toibin

  “I have been asked to speak to you,” Eugene began and then paused like someone waiting for a reply.

  “Who asked you?” Thomas inquired.

  “I am not at liberty to say.”

  For a moment, Thomas wished that Agnes Meyer were here to encourage her husband to be less cautious.

  “You can take it that I am referring to very powerful people,” he added.

  They sat silently as a waiter came with tea.

  “They need you to know that the United States will eventually enter the war. But public opinion is against it and Congress is against it. The loudest voices are declaring that we should stay out of the war. This means that public opinion cannot be aroused too much nor Congress made too suspicious, and so the plan to close the country, for the most part, to refugees is not merely a response to a single crisis. It is part of a larger strategy. And this strategy is to enter the war when the time is right and win over public opinion that will only harden if the country fills up with war refugees. The expectation is that the United States, at some point, will be provoked to enter the war. It may not work out like that, but that is the plan. What we don’t want, in the meantime, is any serious protest against the refugee policy or any strident calls either for us to join the war.”

  As Eugene spoke, Thomas saw the newspaperman using plain language directly, without shyness or reserve. He wondered if Eugene dictated the Washington Post editorials in the same monotone as he used now.

  “You want me to keep silent as events unfold?” Thomas asked.

  “They want you to become part of the strategy.”

  “Why should I do this?”

  “They take you seriously. You speak in public and do interviews, and people pay attention. I have not myself attended any of your public speeches, but my wife says that you are making two things very clear. One, that we have to defeat Hitler. And two, that German democracy will have to be restored. You have been inspiring American audiences. That is why we need you to know what our strategy is.”

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  “You could be the head of state in a new Germany. I can’t be the first to tell you this.”

  “I am merely a poor writer.”

  “That is not true. You have become a public figure. You must be aware of that. You stand for the future as no one else does. We can hardly consider Brecht or your brother in the same light. And I don’t think your son could be thought about in this way either.”

  Thomas smiled.

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “Your silence is not required, merely that you are alert to the broader plan. No one asks you not to oppose policy, and no one wants you not to speak in favor of American entry into the war. All that is asked is that you are aware that there is a strategy.”

  “Does this message come from the president?”

  “Mr. Roosevelt would like to see you and your wife again. A stay in the White House is being discussed. He will know that you have been spoken to so that he will not need to repeat to you anything that I have said. In the meantime, as you know, any personal requests you have made through my wife were considered and, if at all possible, granted.”

  “The German émigrés, including my brother, are having trouble in Hollywood. There is talk of contracts not being renewed. Could anything be done about this?”

  “We control Washington only with difficulty. We have little influence in Hollywood.”

  “None?”

  “Yes, some. My wife was able to secure the contract for your brother with Warner Brothers, it had a sort of novelty value and it was patriotic, but she cannot demand that a contract be renewed. She had to exert extraordinary pressure the first time. She cannot come back a year later to do the same. They are running a business.”

  “Could you mention it? Perhaps see—”

  “No, I could not. It would not do at all.”

  For the first time, Thomas saw a toughness in Eugene Meyer that had been kept carefully hidden until now. He almost enjoyed the look of worldly control and canniness that had come over the newspaper owner’s face. He wondered if it would have been wiser not to have mentioned Warner Brothers and have asked him instead about helping Mimi and Goschi. But it was too late now.

  As they stood up to depart, Eugene moved close to him.

  “Blanche Knopf was in D.C. recently and we had her to supper. She told us that your books are selling remarkably well, bringing in a tidy income. And there is a lecture tour planned, she says, that will pull in a year’s salary. We were pleased to hear you are doing so well.”

  Thomas did not respond.

  He parted from Eugene feeling ever more certain that the move to California was essential. If power was in Washington, then the farther he was away from it, and from all the machinations and half-said things associated with it, the better for him and his family.

  Without saying so, Eugene Meyer had let him know that he was being watched, his speeches listened to, his interviews studied. He liked Roosevelt, what he knew of him, but he liked him less when he thought that he had asked Eugene Meyer to speak to him without actually using Roosevelt’s name.

  The idea of being a temporary head of state would serve only as a story to tell Erika when he saw her; perhaps her old father was not as unreliable and dreamy as he seemed, at least not in the eyes of some. He smiled at the thought that anyone who believed that he could become a useful head of state must have some other ideas too; not all of them could be wise.

  * * *

  Thomas was surprised at how brisk the furniture removers were, how carefully they handled each object, and how they worked out a system for packing his books so that they would be in order when he got to California. As they edged his desk out of his study, he was tempted to tell them that it had come from the house in Munich. And as they wrapped the candelabra, he could have added the story of how they had been brought from Lübeck. But removers did not want to listen to stories. The furniture was going to be driven across America. Within a few hours, the house was hollowed out, as though they had never lived in it.

  * * *

  Once they were installed in Los Angeles, he and Katia agreed to look at a site that was for sale in Pacific Palisades, close to Santa Monica. They had been renting a house, but now decided that they would build. They chose Julius Davidson to be the architect because they saw a conversion he had done of a house in Bel Air, but, more than that, because they liked his aura of cool competence. He had a habit of looking away when they spoke, as though what they had said required consideration, and then staring soulfully into the distance while they waited for a response.

  “Our architect has a mysterious inner life,” Katia said, “and that can only be good.”

  Thomas and Katia walked around the foundations with Davidson, imagining the house that would soon rise here. Thomas dreamed of his study, where the desk would be and the bookcases.

  He noticed how beautifully dressed Davidson was, and was tempted to have Katia ask him where he had bought his suits. Instead, he reminded him that he did not want floor-to-ceiling windows in his study.

  “I want shadows,” he said. “I don’t want to look out.”

  He did an imitation of a man writing at a desk.

  “I need to talk to you also about that built-in record player you mentioned,” Thomas said. “In the high summer, I thought, I would like to have sad chamber music on loud and clear, thus evoking the winter.”

  Although they did all their business with him in German, Davidson seemed American. Even his way of walking around the site had nothing of German hesitancy and watchfulness about it. He behaved like a man who had spent his childhood on the prairie. He had become an American. He knew the planning laws and those who implemented them as if Los Angeles were a kind of village. He also had a way of speaking freely and easily about money that no German would risk.

  It struck Thomas that maybe one of his own children would soak in America like this, although, as he pictured them one by one,
each of them seemed stubbornly in possession of a Teutonic spirit and Teutonic virtues, if any still existed.

  * * *

  “It all seems too small until I measure it with my steps,” Katia said. “And then it is big.”

  “It will be a modest house,” Davidson said. “But comfortable and bright. Big enough for the family.”

  As they walked around the site, which had views of the sierra and Santa Catalina, Thomas noticed a small bare tree in a corner with dark rotting fruit hanging from the upper branches. He asked Davidson what it was.

  “It’s a pomegranate tree. What you can see is the high fruit that the birds hollowed out. The tree will flower in the late spring with the help of hummingbirds and then in the early winter you will have pomegranates.”

  Thomas moved away from Davidson and Katia and made as though to inspect the back of the house. In Lübeck, pomegranates came from the cargo ships that normally carried sugar; they were in wooden boxes, individually wrapped in rice paper. For months on end, his mother would find a way to incorporate the fruit in every meal, in salads or in sauces or as dessert. And then they would disappear. She would ask their father to make inquiries, but no one could ever predict when the pomegranates would come again to Lübeck.

  He knew how to open a pomegranate and fill a bowl with the rich, red seeds. If that was all he had learned from his mother, it would be enough, he thought. She, in turn, had learned it from the women in the kitchen in Paraty in Brazil. The trick was not to scoop the seeds out, but to nudge the skin backwards and push the seeds up gently but firmly, removing the white fleshy mass that surrounded them.

  He loved the dry edge that mingled with the sweet taste of the pomegranate, and he loved the color. But now it was his mother’s gaiety that he recalled, her voice, her pleasure at the news that a fresh consignment had arrived from Brazil, her assertion that a small piece of home, perhaps the best piece, had reached out to her across the ocean and would delight her days.

  In moving to California, he thought, he had unwittingly chosen to live close to the weather that had made Julia Mann. He imagined for a second that he could tell Heinrich about the tree and see whether he too might remember the bowls full of red seeds. But he had refrained from saying too much about this new house he was building, afraid that he would further depress his brother, who had finally been informed that his contract as a screenwriter would not be renewed.

  Walking across the lawn to where Davidson and Katia stood by a single tall palm tree, he remembered that somewhere in Greek mythology the pomegranate had significance. It had to do with death, he thought, the underworld, but he was not sure. As soon as his books were unpacked and on the shelves of his study here, he would find a volume that had come from Munich, a dictionary of Greek mythology. He would wait until the house was built and they were living there, enjoying the thought, in the meantime, that by the end of the year he would be eating the fruit that he had almost forgotten about.

  * * *

  One day after lunch, he had his customary short nap and then he read for a while. At four, Katia was ready with the car. They drove to Santa Monica and walked on the path overlooking the beach and then down to the pier.

  “I find it strange,” Katia said, “that our youngest child, who is still a boy as far as I am concerned, is the first to have his own baby. But I was around Michael’s age when I had Erika, so I should think it’s normal. But I don’t. I wonder if Michael will be the only one to have children.”

  “Elisabeth will,” Thomas said.

  “Borgese is too old to have children,” Katia said.

  They stopped and looked at the high curling waves and, farther out, the blue water under the clear sky. Thomas’s eye was captured by a scene closer to them. There were two young men in shorts doing gymnastics on the beach. They were facing the water, so Thomas could study their muscular backs and legs. He could happily have stayed there until darkness fell.

  When one of them turned, he appeared sensitive, serious. As Thomas stood for a while and watched, Katia silent beside him, the young man started to glance regularly in his direction. Thomas observed him—the smooth chest, the light hair on the legs, the short blond hair, the blue eyes. But also a sense in the face of thoughtfulness, perhaps even of someone whose sensibility had not been brightened too much or made too blank by California.

  Over the days and nights that followed, he imagined this young man coming into his study as Klaus Heuser had done, maybe to talk about books, or the conflict, or the German heritage. He would tell him what he could, try to talk about how tentative his own beginnings as a writer were, and how long it took to complete some of the books. He would lend the visitor some volumes by himself and others, knowing that this would ensure that the boy would return. Thomas would accompany him to the door and watch him walking away, down the path through the garden.

  * * *

  Life in their rented house was more peaceful once Monika had left for northern California to stay with Michael and Gret, who was pregnant again. But then Michael wrote to Katia to say that Monika was too much of a burden. The smallest thing would set her off talking and then she could not be stopped. She did not want to talk about her ordeal at sea, he wrote, but about something as inconsequential as a delivery boy who had dropped some of the groceries or a dog that trespassed on their lawn. He hoped his mother would understand if Monika returned to the family house.

  As he went from his study to the living room one day, Thomas found Katia and Monika and Golo passing around a set of photographs that Monika had taken of Frido, now a year old. Katia, he knew, was upset at not being asked to spend time with Michael and Gret and Frido.

  When they passed him the freshly developed photos, he had expected to see nondescript images of the baby he remembered from Princeton. Instead, the child emerged as fully alive, amused by the attention of the camera, unafraid, nearly defiant. Thomas saw the same square jaw that Elisabeth and Golo and Goschi had, the same strong face that he associated with his father’s family, as well as an ironic, quizzical gaze that was solely Katia’s. What surprised him was how much Frido was formed, ready for the world, demanding close attention.

  “Why don’t we invite them to stay?” he asked.

  “This house doesn’t have enough room,” Katia said.

  “Why don’t we write to say that we would like young Frido to be the first guest in the new house? Or maybe use our charm and see if they would invite us to stay with them?”

  “My mother has already used hers,” Monika said, “but it didn’t work. No invitation to visit Frido was forthcoming.”

  “That, I am afraid, is true,” Katia said. “But I did ask Monika not to share the news with anyone.”

  “I don’t like secrets or lies,” Monika said.

  “Maybe the less you reveal them or spread them, the less you will dislike them,” Thomas replied.

  “Do you want us to be quiet while you write your books?” Golo asked. His tone was sarcastic, bordering on aggressive.

  “Hunger is not improving the atmosphere,” Thomas said. “I think we might all benefit from lunch.”

  * * *

  The painters were working on the new house and the furniture was beginning to arrive, including an elaborate Thermador range for the kitchen. Erika, having flown back from London to New York, took a train across America to visit them in the house they were renting. She ignored any talk about blinds and color schemes for the new house, and instead was filled with excitement about the war.

  “I know I am prejudiced, but the English women are so splendid now, so efficient. With the men gone to fight, it is an ideal society. Visiting a munitions factory, with the young women concentrating on their work, is such an inspiration. I wish the Americans could witness it.”

  When Katia asked her if she had seen Klaus during the few days she had spent in New York, she shrugged.

  “He is planning to visit,” she said.

  “For how long?” Katia asked.

  “He
has nowhere else to go, and no money.”

  “I sent him money.”

  “He spent it.”

  Thomas spotted Katia indicating to Erika that she should not discuss this further in front of him and Golo and Monika.

  Later, when he was reading in his study, Katia and Erika appeared and closed the door behind them.

  “Klaus has been visited by the police,” Katia said.

  “Arrested?” Thomas asked.

  “It’s not exactly that,” Erika interjected. “He wants to join the United States Army and he has to be investigated because he is German-born. And, of course, they found that he is a morphine addict and a homosexual. He has denied everything. He will ask you to intercede for him.”

  “Intercede with whom?”

  “Don’t ask me. And there is also something I didn’t tell you, Mother. One of the other questions that they asked him was about incest.”

  “Incest?” Katia asked and started to laugh. “And who do they think his lucky partner is or was?”

  “Klaus told them that they are mixing him up with characters in his father’s fiction.”

  “Yes, I remember your father’s story about incest,” Katia said.

  “And they think,” Erika added, “that Klaus and I are twins.”

  “Surely he can just tell them that you are not,” Katia said.

  “You see,” Erika said, standing up and looking directly at her father, “Klaus is broken. I couldn’t wait to get away from him.”

  “But he wants to come here?” Katia asked.

  “There are other matters we have to keep in mind when he comes,” Erika said. “It would be best not to mention the possibility of your further visit to the White House.”

  “Why not?” Thomas asked.

  “Because he feels that he should be included in any party to advise the president about Germany. And also he is sensitive, to say the least, at the idea that you are planning a Faust novel.”