The Magician

by Colm Toibin

  “When all this is over, I don’t know how Klaus is going to live,” Katia said. “Nobody needs a German who cannot stop telling the truth.”

  * * *

  In the weeks after the war Thomas thought of Ernst Bertram. Bertram was somewhere in Germany now. If he did not feel shame, then he must at least know how to display the suitable outward signs of it. Since he would, as a Nazi supporter, be summarily removed from his academic position, his knowledge of Nietzsche and his world would be of no further use. It would be hard for him to defend himself, he who had gloated when the Nazis burned books by famous writers.

  Hitler would still have risen and all the murder and mayhem would still have happened without Bertram, but, Thomas believed, his support and the support of some of his friends offered intellectual ballast for the movement. Fascism became less about greed or hatred or power once Bertram could call down the support of various dead philosophers and use fancy phrases about Germany, its heritage, its culture, its destiny.

  In the years when windows were broken, synagogues burned, when Jewish people were dragged from their houses, when there was no mistaking what was to occur, Thomas wondered how this learned man managed to avert his eyes or assuage his conscience. And what strategies did he use to ingratiate himself with the authorities who were imprisoning other homosexuals? Did he ever imagine how it would all end: the cities in rubble, people starving, committees set up to make sure that no one like Ernst Bertram would ever be allowed to speak again?

  * * *

  When, some months later, Michael and Gret announced that they were to visit Pacific Palisades for a month with their two boys, Katia said how much she was looking forward to their visit as it would lighten the atmosphere in the house, which had been darkened by Thomas’s dedicated work on his novel, the news from a defeated Germany and the calls, growing increasingly shrill, for Thomas Mann and his family to return to their homeland and take part in its reconstruction now that fascism had been defeated.

  As soon as Michael and his family arrived, Thomas began to find ways to amuse Frido. Several times, in the first few days, he left his study to seek out the boy during the hours he normally devoted to work. He even encouraged Frido to visit him as he wrote, stopping his writing to lift him in the air, performing the same magic tricks for him that had delighted his own children when their mother was away, and drawing pictures for him.

  Michael made withering remarks about the book his father was writing. What did he know about the mind of a composer? For the sake of peace, Thomas tolerated his son’s musings on the nature of music that were directed at him with an undertone of resentment. Michael seemed to object to the fact that his father was appropriating the very discipline that Michael had been studying all his life. Thomas tried to distract him by scowling menacingly at Frido, who squealed with laughter, having to be warned by his mother that he must conduct himself properly at the table.

  “How can he conduct himself if his grandfather is behaving like a clown?” Michael asked.

  Since his grandson had no friends who spoke German, the language had come to him from his parents. He used a mixture of baby language and adult speech, never failing to amuse Thomas.

  His own mind, he thought, was heavy with German as he struggled with the stilted tones of his narrator and the parodies of German styles. Hearing the innocent and confident gabble of his grandson charmed him. It did not remind him of his own childhood, when children had not been encouraged to speak at any length, nor indeed of his own time as a father of young children when his brood were more interested in interrupting one another than speaking to him. This stream of words that came from Frido was new and refreshing. When he woke in the morning, he smiled at the thought that he could hear this child talk and find ways to entertain him throughout the day until it was time for Frido to go to bed.

  “When Erika is here,” Michael said, “she will make you stay in your study all day.”

  As they waited for Erika to arrive, Katia heard from her own brother Klaus Pringsheim, who had come to America from Japan with his son, and wished to visit while Erika and Michael were there.

  Katia busied herself preparing for the visitors, rehanging some pictures, moving boxes that had lain under the beds since the house was built. She had lived for more than forty years away from her family. Her parents had died in Switzerland during the war, her father unreconciled to his fate as exile. Her brothers were scattered. The family house in Munich had been demolished to make way for a Nazi Party building. The prospect of a visit by Klaus made her behave as if, in her mind, she had never let her early life in Munich be consigned to the past.

  Thomas regretted coming out to the front of the house when he heard Klaus’s car. Klaus had lost his beauty, he saw, but he had retained his sardonic air. Thomas watched as Klaus took in the shiny, pristine property, the carefully managed gardens, the exquisite view, putting his arms out in mock appreciation and then shrugging to suggest that, for someone like him, it was all pretense, nothing much.

  “So the bird has found her gilded cage,” he said, as he embraced his sister.

  Klaus’s son stood beside him, taller than his father. As he looked around him, he remained serene, detached. He bowed formally as he was introduced, before shaking hands.

  Klaus addressed himself only to his sister, but as Erika forcefully joined the conversation, he included her. He did not even glance at Thomas.

  Soon, at the table, he mocked Thomas’s daily routines. But Thomas still stayed in his study all morning, strolled and napped in the afternoon and read in the evening, avoiding Klaus Pringsheim as much as he could. After a few days, at lunch, Klaus mentioned that he had been told what Thomas was working on.

  “A novel about a composer? Yes, I have known a good number of them, and of course I studied under Mahler. You know, he was a much less haunted figure than his music might suggest. He was possessed by ambition and frightened by his wife, but there were no demons really.”

  Thomas saw no reason to reply. When he looked at Katia, he noticed that she was gazing admiringly at her twin brother.

  The following day, Klaus raised the subject of Death in Venice.

  “My grandmother loved it and could not stop admiring it until my mother ordered her to cease and desist praising it inordinately. My father was convinced that once the book had appeared, people were leering at him when he went to the opera. I made many friends because of the book, pederasts all. I didn’t have to pay for my own champagne for about a year.”

  Thomas observed Erika stiffen in her seat.

  “It is much admired, that story,” Erika said. “All my father’s work is much admired.”

  The earnestness of Erika’s tone, the simplicity, seemed to catch Klaus Pringsheim unawares. He listened patiently to Erika’s account of the Nuremberg trials and how the English prosecutor had believed that he was quoting from Goethe when the quotes were, in fact, from her father’s novel about Goethe. Klaus did not speak again for the rest of the meal.

  “I am told that you read each chapter aloud when it is completed,” Klaus said over dinner the next day. “I would love to be part of the audience for that.”

  He appeared chastened and looked as though he meant what he was saying. But then he turned to his sister.

  “Now that my looks have gone, in order to impress people I must be able to talk about my brother-in-law’s home habits.”

  When Thomas caught Erika’s eye, he felt that she was as inclined as he was to throw a glass of wine at Klaus.

  “Perhaps we could talk about Japan,” Katia said. “I believe the emperor thinks he is God. Did he ever attend one of your concerts?”

  * * *

  On Friday of that week it was arranged that Thomas would read from his novel. Thomas would read two chapters, the first about the arrival of a boy called Little Echo to brighten the life of his uncle, the solitary composer, and the second about the death of the same little boy.

  As the time approached, he dreaded the rea
ding. It would be easy to read the factual opening, and not difficult to read the descriptions of the small boy and how welcome he was with all his charm and beauty. Katia, he felt, would know instantly that he had used Frido for this creation. He almost wished that he had chosen something more obscure, whose origins would not be recognized by his listeners.

  They all gathered around, including Golo who had recently arrived, as though for a happy family occasion. As he had worked on these scenes, he had been aware how dark and personal they were. He had given his German composer the very thing that he himself loved: a young, innocent boy. But since Leverkühn, his composer, could only damage those who came close to him, the boy was destined for death. This would be the most human part of the book as he registered the pain of that loss. It would show the cost Leverkühn had paid for his overarching ambition. The pact he had made with the devil would move from the realms of folktale and fantasy into a space that was sharply real.

  He began, glancing at Katia a few times; she was smiling in approval. When he came to the death of the boy, he read slowly, not looking up at any one of his listeners. He wondered if he had not included too much detail of each phase of the illness in all its shivering, frightful drama. The boy was in pain, calling out “Echo will be good, Echo will be good.” The boy’s sweet face changed beyond recognition, horribly, and when the gnashing of the teeth started, Little Echo looked as though he were possessed.

  Thomas, once the little boy was dead, had done what he needed to do. He put the pages aside. No one in the room spoke. Eventually, Golo switched on a lamp close to him and stretched, making a low, groaning sound. Klaus Pringsheim had his hands clasped and his eyes fixed on the floor. His son sat palely beside him. Erika stared into the distance. Katia sat silently.

  Eventually, Erika moved to turn on the main light. Thomas stood up. He pretended to be studying the pages he had been reading from; he knew that Katia was approaching him.

  “Is that why you befriended the boy?” she asked.

  “Frido?”

  “Yes, who else?”

  “I love Frido.”

  “Enough to use him in a book?” she asked and walked quietly across the room to join her brother and his son.

  Chapter 16 Los Angeles, 1948

  Elisabeth cast her quizzical eye on him.

  “My daughters don’t like being laughed at, either of them.”

  “I thought it was just Angelica,” Katia said.

  “It is also Dominica,” Elisabeth said. “So please don’t upset them.”

  Since Dominica was barely four years old, Thomas thought it strange that his granddaughter was being discussed as though she were an adult.

  Elisabeth, with her two serious daughters, had come to stay, her husband, Borgese, having gone to Italy on some mission that was deemed too delicate to be described. During the first lunch, Thomas, on finding that Angelica did not want ice in her water, had said that every good little girl of his acquaintance generally longed for ice.

  “Little girls who don’t like ice are often not very nice,” he said in English.

  Angelica, who was eight, became instantly upset and turned to her mother to express her unhappiness. Elisabeth suggested that she go to the kitchen and ask that her lunch be served to her in the garden at a place of her choosing.

  “I will come in a while and make sure you are all right.”

  She glanced stonily at her father.

  “It was a joke,” Thomas said.

  “She does not like to be referred to as a little girl,” Elisabeth said. “Or as not very nice.”

  “How clever of her,” Erika said. “I never liked that either.”

  “I am sure I never called you a little girl,” Thomas said.

  “Or not very nice,” Katia added.

  Later, Thomas and Katia, in hushed voices in his study, asked what had happened to Elisabeth in her decade away from them. Thomas’s relationship with his two grandsons was based entirely on jokes and banter, on thinking of new names to call them or playing tricks on them, and he could not imagine why his granddaughters would not also enjoy such lighthearted attention. They must have inherited their humorlessness and sensitivity from a long line of dreary Borgeses.

  Angelica arrived at lunch the next day pale-faced and aggrieved, like some princess whose dignity had been threatened. Thomas noticed that Erika moved into the place beside her.

  “What are you reading at the moment?” Erika asked her.

  “In our family, it is difficult,” the child answered, “since we speak Italian to our father and German to our mother and my sister and I speak English to each other. So we have such a range of books to choose from. But at the moment I am reading Lewis Carroll. He is having quite an influence on me.”

  On their walk, Thomas and Katia agreed that in their childhoods such a tone would have been greeted with derision by both parents and siblings.

  “Do you think,” Katia asked, “that this is how other American children behave? Or is it something that has been specially created in Chicago by Elisabeth and Borgese?”

  The following morning, in the living room, Erika had a map of Europe on the floor and she was showing Angelica all the places where she had been, with Angelica asking considered questions. In the corner, Dominica was playing with dolls, while Elisabeth sat reading.

  “Aunt Erika is going to take us to the pier at Marina del Rey,” Angelica said to them in a German that Thomas thought bore traces of an Italian accent.

  “Both of you?” Katia asked.

  “Yes, for ice cream and hot dogs.”

  “But mind, no mustard on the ice cream,” Thomas said and then realized that the remark might be seen to mock their outing, suggesting that they did not really know how to eat their food. He retreated.

  “They make excellent hot dogs in Santa Monica,” he said.

  “So we have heard,” Angelica said, looking up from the map.

  Over lunch, in the absence of Erika and the two girls, Thomas was surprised by Elisabeth’s vehemence against Germany.

  “I will have nothing to do with that country,” she said. “I have no interest in what it does or doesn’t do. I don’t want to set foot in it or think about it.”

  Thomas wondered if Elisabeth regretted marrying Borgese and tried to find a question that might elicit some clue about this.

  “Do you blame Germany for destroying your youth?” he asked.

  “I don’t blame my parents and I don’t blame my former country. I don’t blame anyone.”

  “Blame your parents for what?” he asked.

  “One, that I have no proper education. Two, that love always came to me as a kind of reward.”

  “A reward for what?” Katia asked.

  “For being quiet, for being charming, for being a good little girl.”

  “You were not charming to your younger brother,” Katia said.

  “What a nuisance Michael has always been!” Elisabeth said.

  She began to laugh.

  “Have you had many affairs since your marriage?” Thomas asked.

  He heard Katia holding her breath. He himself was almost shocked that he had dared ask the question.

  “One or two,” Elisabeth replied and laughed again.

  “Did you have an affair with Hermann Broch?” he asked.

  “We fumbled once, maybe twice. I wouldn’t call it an affair. But that was before my marriage. He was very funny when I knew him.”

  “And he was known for being very rude,” Thomas said.

  “Not to me,” she replied.

  She had become, Thomas thought, formidable and edgy. He wished she would stay longer.

  He had not noticed a moleskin-covered notebook beside her on the table until she opened it.

  “I have some questions for both of you written out,” she said.

  “I’m sure you do,” Katia replied.

  “First question. Why is Erika here?”

  “She has nowhere else to go,” Katia said. “Nowh
ere. Before, she could lecture. But now no one wants to hear about Germany and the war.”

  “What about her husband?”

  “Auden? He was never really her husband. She hasn’t seen him for years.”

  “Why is she not with Bruno Walter? I thought she might marry him once his wife died.”

  “He has other plans,” Katia said.

  “What is she doing here?”

  “She is going to work as her father’s secretary. And, as much as I will let her, she is going to help run the household and make all the decisions.”

  “Why don’t you encourage her to find a life of her own?”

  “Your father needs her.”

  “She intends to stay here with you forever?”

  “It seems so,” Katia said.

  “And where is Monika?”

  “She is in New York,” Katia said. “Have you not heard from her? I get a letter a day sometimes.”

  Thomas looked at her, surprised. He had not been told this before.

  “She says her dream would be to find a place where there are no books,” Katia said. “So she is not eager to visit us just now. But I’m sure that will change. It always does.”

  Elisabeth ran her finger down her list of questions.

  “Why did you marry him?” she asked her mother, pointing casually at her father.

  Katia did not even hesitate. She spoke as though she had prepared her reply.

  “Of all the possibilities, present, past and future, your father was the least preposterous,” she said.

  “Was that the only reason?”

  “Well, there was another, but these are sensitive and private matters.”

  “I won’t ask again.”

  Katia sipped her coffee and appeared to be gathering her thoughts.

  “My father was a philanderer. He could not stop himself. He wanted any woman he saw. I have not had that problem with your father.”