The Magician

by Colm Toibin

  “Would you like me to leave the room so you can say more?” Thomas asked, smiling.

  “No, my love. I have nothing to add.”

  “Why do you still see Alma Mahler?” Elisabeth asked.

  “Ah, that is an interesting one,” Katia said. “She is atrocious. And since Werfel’s death, she has become more so. She drinks and she speaks her mind. I have nothing good to say about her.”

  “And yet you see her?”

  “I do. She has something of old Vienna about her. I don’t mean the old cultured Vienna and all that. I mean a sort of joy that they took from life then. I loved it when I saw it and it is gone. It will not come back. Perhaps Alma is the last.”

  “Finally, Klaus wrote to me to say that you have been sharp with him.”

  “He doesn’t know where to go,” Katia said.

  “You don’t want him here?”

  “We cannot finance him indefinitely,” Katia said.

  “But you can Erika?”

  “Erika will work for her father. Can you imagine Klaus doing that?”

  “So that’s the criterion?”

  “Stop!” Katia said. “I don’t know what to do about Klaus. Can we leave it at that?”

  “I don’t want to upset you,” Elisabeth said.

  “Can we leave it at that?” her mother repeated.

  * * *

  When Klaus returned to Pacific Palisades, he was, at the beginning, so thin and haggard, so withdrawn, so broken, that even Erika judged it unwise to have an argument with him. When Thomas asked her if he was taking morphine, she shrugged as if to say that much was obvious. Perhaps, Thomas thought, something in Klaus’s personal life had further unmoored him. But Klaus had a way of letting private wounds drift by while worrying instead about his literary reputation or getting into a state of fury over public events. He was obsessed by Gustaf Gründgens, Erika’s first husband, who had become Goering’s favorite actor during the war. Gründgens, having been released from captivity by the Russians, had quickly gone back on the stage in triumph. His appearance on his first opening night after the war garnered a standing ovation. When Klaus attended, Gründgens was greeted with cheers by a packed house.

  Several times, Thomas heard his son recount the scene for anyone who would listen. While his German compatriots, he said, would not offer open support for the doomed Nazi leaders and their slogans, they could display their real lack of repentance by lauding an actor who had been a favorite of the Nazi leaders.

  “What cannot be done in daylight,” Klaus said, “can be done in the dark.”

  Klaus was indignant at the very idea that he himself might return to live in Germany.

  “I left in 1933 not for something I did but for something they did, and my unwillingness to go back to live there is not because of who I am but because of who they are.”

  He would have made an excellent speechwriter, Thomas thought, or a culture minister.

  Two months earlier, Klaus, who could not drive, had written to Katia to say that he wished to live in Los Angeles, perhaps in a cottage close to his parents’ house. He asked his mother to look out for such quarters and inquire about the price. Also, he added, he would like to employ a young driver who must be able to cook and also have a pleasant appearance. He would like to stay for six months, he said, and take meals sometimes with his parents.

  Katia was indignant. Thomas could not tell what she was most offended by, whether it was Klaus’s sure, casual view that his parents would pay his rent, or the mention of the young good-looking driver, or the idea that he would merely stay six months. Katia replied to Klaus, letting him know that he would not be supported in this way and that his proposal was quite outrageous. It was, Thomas thought, the first time she had written to him so sternly.

  Now, as Klaus stayed with them, they could hear him moving around in the night and were aware, as he veered from being sleepy and silent to talking nonstop at the table, that he was consuming a variety of drugs. Most days, he did not bother to shave and, despite his mother’s insistence that there was plenty in his wardrobe, he did not often change his clothes.

  Klaus was now in his early forties. He had a different idea every day for a book he might write or an article a magazine might commission. One moment it was a biography of Baudelaire and the next a novel to be published under a pseudonym about homosexual life in prewar New York, and then it was an article about his own experience of Germany after the war and then a long piece about train travel in America. He did not ever join them for breakfast and sometimes had to be woken when lunch was ready. He avoided the sunlight in the garden.

  “If you could only get up early in the morning,” Katia said, “you would write a book that the whole world would read.”

  When Thomas saw Klaus shaved, with his hair tidied, wearing a freshly pressed suit and a white shirt and new shoes, his suitcase beside him as he waited for a car to take him to Union Station, he could see from Katia’s guilty look that she had given him money to go back to New York.

  Thomas was alone for a time with his wife and daughter. As Erika busied herself with his papers, making suggestions on each day’s work and keeping his correspondence up to date, Katia became distant from him. There was a spot in the garden where she took a deck chair and a book, or she got involved helping the gardener.

  Since Erika dealt with the mail and controlled his diary, sometimes at the table all of the conversation was between the two of them, Katia sitting silently. There was seldom open conflict between the two women. However, one day when Golo was present, Erika was displeased that the salad had not been properly dressed and then insisted that the vegetables had once more been overcooked.

  “It is as if we are back in Munich with that awful food,” she said.

  “What awful food?” Katia asked.

  “Oh, thick gravy masking any other taste and overcooked everything. Stodgy! Inedible! Bavaria!”

  “You were grateful for it at the time.”

  “I knew nothing else.”

  “I suppose that is correct. And you knew no manners either and you still don’t,” her mother said. “I often wonder where we got you.”

  “From a night of passion, I am sure,” Erika said.

  “Like one of yours with Bruno Walter!”

  Katia turned pale once she had spoken and looked at Golo. Thomas saw Golo indicating to his mother that she should say nothing more. Thomas’s own aim was to finish his meal as quickly as he could and retreat to his study. He was not surprised when Katia did not knock on his door later asking him if he was ready for their daily walk. She had gone for a drive with Golo.

  Klaus came back from New York looking even more washed-out and disheveled than before. Thomas was aware that Katia and Erika had decided to postpone telling him what had caused Klaus’s return.

  For the first few days, Klaus remained in his room, his meals delivered to him on a tray.

  “I have made him promise not to roam the house at night,” Katia said. “We all need our sleep.”

  “What is wrong with him?” Thomas asked.

  “Erika knows better than I do. He went to some stupid party in New York and there was a police raid, but not before he had taken some concoction. Don’t ask me what it is called but it causes highs and then lows. He is on an extended version of the lows.”

  When Klaus started to join them for supper in the evening, he was voluble and excitable, sometimes unable to finish his sentences, but unwilling to let anyone else speak. He grew animated on the subject of Monika, whom he had seen in New York.

  “She has been evicted from several hotels for hoarding food in her room and for not paying her bills,” he said. “Here we are living in luxury whereas Monika, who suffered more than any of us, walks the streets like a tramp. Something should be done for her. I told her that she needed to keep in touch with us all.”

  As he looked from one to the other at the table, he moved from sounding like a madman to becoming almost calm.

  Soon
someone began to call Klaus incessantly from San Francisco.

  “It’s Harold,” Katia said.

  “I don’t care if it is Winston Churchill,” Thomas replied.

  Harold, it seemed, was a lover of Klaus’s from New York who had come west and, to coincide with Klaus’s arrival, had managed to lose his job in San Francisco. He was on his way to Los Angeles. The phone calls were a due warning.

  At meals, there was talk of Harold being drunk, or Harold having enticed some third person, a young man of low reputation, into a hotel room in downtown Los Angeles with himself and Klaus. And then Harold was arrested and Klaus had to provide bail.

  As Erika and her mother discussed this, Thomas noticed that each of his children appeared to relish the problems or flaws the others had. Klaus sounded sensible once he could talk about Monika. Elisabeth was content that Michael acted petulantly and she almost purred when Erika behaved badly, as did Golo. Erika was now united with her mother in worry about Klaus and Harold. Klaus’s failure to come home each night made the two women, who had been avoiding each other, join forces. At first, they bemoaned how badly Klaus was conducting himself. Then they worried about how it would all end. Finally, they started to propose solutions to the crisis, including the possibility of Erika and Klaus collaborating on a screenplay of The Magic Mountain.

  When Thomas heard this, he took Katia aside.

  “We should let them have their fantasies, but we must not harbor them ourselves.”

  “Erika is optimistic about the idea.”

  “Let her be optimistic.”

  This was, he knew, the nearest he had come to criticizing Erika to Katia.

  When Harold was released from one jail, he was incarcerated in another for a different offense. Erika had to drive Klaus to visit him.

  “He sounds like a most interesting person,” Thomas said to Katia, “this Harold. I think I prefer him to all my other children-in-law, including Bruno Walter and dear Gret and that noisy Italian whom Elisabeth married and even the librarian in Princeton whom Golo briefly favored.”

  “Klaus tells me that he is very good-looking,” Katia replied.

  They laughed in a way that they had not laughed in a while.

  “All we need now is Monika,” Thomas said.

  “I have sent her the money to go to Italy,” Katia said. “That’s where she wants to go.”

  “To work?”

  “Don’t ask. When she gets safely there, I’ll keep you informed. And I’ve been thinking about Klaus. He should really have his own apartment. He told me that he has found somewhere and the price is reasonable. And he also wants to buy a car and take driving lessons. All the things I told him we would not pay for, I agreed to. The minute I see him, my heart goes out to him. I suppose he knows that. I have become the sort of mother I despise.”

  At the beginning, having been freed from prison, Harold joined Klaus in his new quarters, but soon, having caused further havoc, he disappeared, leaving Klaus alone. When Katia and Erika once more expressed their sympathy for Klaus, Thomas was puzzled.

  “This is what he wanted. An apartment close by and a car. The only thing missing is the chauffeur he demanded. He is alone. Surely it is every writer’s dream to be alone?”

  The phone rang at one o’clock in the morning; he heard Katia answering. She came at once to his room.

  “Klaus has cut his wrists. He’s in Santa Monica Hospital. The doctors say he’s not in any immediate danger. I’ll drive to the hospital. Erika is still asleep. Let her sleep until morning.”

  Not long after Katia had left, Erika knocked on his door.

  “The car is missing,” she said. “Where is my mother?”

  Erika then insisted on following Katia to the hospital in her own car.

  Thomas went to his study. For a second, he thought he should call Golo, or maybe Elisabeth. It would give him some comfort to tell someone else about this, not be left alone in the house waiting for news. But it would be easier to wait, stay here alone, and try to pretend that Klaus was asleep upstairs, or still in New York.

  If Klaus resembled anyone in the family, he thought, it was his aunt Lula. Lula had the same darting imagination and inability to be content. The ordinary day did not interest her, but rather, in the beginning, a day in the future when marriage would solve her problems. Once married, she looked forward to a time when children would make her happy. When her daughters were born, she would plan for a bigger apartment, or a complete redecoration of the main rooms, or a holiday. As a child, he remembered, Lula would skip the middle part of a novel so she could live in the excitement of the end.

  So, too, Klaus wanted publication more than he wanted the dull process of writing. The excitement of injecting himself proved irresistible to Klaus as it had to Lula. And when the thrill could not be maintained, there were not many other choices.

  Thomas waited in his study, letting thoughts about his son come in and out of his mind, hoping that he would hear the sound of cars in the drive and Katia and Erika would be home. He thought of calling the hospital, but knew that someone would surely phone him if there was any news.

  By the time they appeared, Thomas was in his bedroom. When he went downstairs, they told him that the cuts in Klaus’s wrists had not been deep, and that he would survive.

  Someone in the hospital contacted a local newspaper about Klaus’s attempt to kill himself. This, in turn, was taken up by national and international press so that the phone rang regularly with old friends and curious acquaintances seeking news of Klaus’s welfare.

  When Golo came to stay, his mother and sister chided him for lifting the receiver each time the phone rang and placing it back in its cradle. Even as news came of Klaus’s improved state, Golo did not raise his head from whatever book he was reading. When Thomas tried, however, to deplore Klaus’s attempt at suicide with Golo so the two of them could form an alliance in the house, Golo responded coldly.

  “My mother is worried,” he said.

  Thomas went back to his study. Erika soon knocked on the door and told him that Klaus, who was to be released from hospital that day, had expressed a wish to go swimming before being taken home.

  “He switched on the gas, knowing that the neighbors, whose kitchen window is right beside his, would smell it, especially since he had left the kitchen window open. And then, when they banged on the door, he grazed his wrists with a blunt knife. And all that fuss for nothing!”

  Klaus moved into a hotel in Santa Monica so that he could spend more time with a resurfaced Harold, whom Katia had banned from ever coming to Pacific Palisades. Thomas learned that Christopher Isherwood was in the same hotel.

  “Could that be the same Christopher Isherwood who once found you a husband?” he asked.

  Erika nodded.

  “What a cheeky little fellow he was! I often thought a stretch in uniform might do him good. Can we take it that the liberation of the world from tyranny has been achieved without his assistance?”

  “He did not fight in the war,” Erika said.

  “Could we ban him as well as Harold?”

  * * *

  Alma Mahler called.

  “I know how worried you must be. When suicide is in a family, it is like beauty or blue eyes. It never goes away. Both of your sisters! Did anyone in the earlier generation also do away with themselves?”

  Thomas told her that they did not.

  “But, of course, no one spoke about it then. How did your father die?”

  Thomas assured her that the senator had died of natural causes. He tried to think how he might change the subject.

  “My stepfather and my stepsister and her husband took poison when they heard that the Red Army were coming into Vienna,” Alma said.

  Thomas knew that some of her family had been Nazis, but thought that she might have learned not to refer to them.

  * * *

  Now that she was a widow and the war had ended, Alma began to travel, first to New York and then to Europe. When in Lo
s Angeles, she kept in touch with even the most minor figures among the exiles. If someone had published a new poem or written a string quartet or been involved in an accident or a feud, she spread the news or came to visit.

  Since she had tended to respond with enthusiasm to his work, Thomas could not fathom why she sought to cause trouble when his novel Doctor Faustus was published. He had told her about the book as he worked on it, feeling that she, perhaps more than any of the exiles, might understand the pressures on German composers in the years after her husband’s death. While she was often silly and had ridiculous opinions, she knew a great deal about music. She loved the idea of forbidden chords and sounds that could entice the devil into the room. And she was fascinated by late Beethoven. Sometimes, when there was a piano available, if he mentioned some composition, she could play the melody from memory.

  He had made no secret of the book, even giving readings of chapters as they were completed to guests who came to the house. But he had not raised the subject of the novel with Arnold Schoenberg because he found him too learned and distant, too intimidating. He felt that Schoenberg would make it plain to him that Thomas did not know enough about music to write such a book.

  Thomas presumed, since the émigré world was so insular, that someone would have passed the news on to Schoenberg that he was writing a book about a modern composer. When the book was published, however, it was obvious that no one had.

  In retrospect, it was, he knew, unwise to have sent a copy of the novel to Schoenberg with an inscription that said: “For Arnold Schoenberg, the real one, with best wishes.” The phrase “the real one” could be taken as a compliment suggesting that while Mann’s character was fictional, Schoenberg himself was not fictional, he was real. But it could also be taken to mean that Schoenberg was the real one and Mann had created a version of him in his composer who had made a pact with the devil.

  By the time the book came out, Schoenberg’s sight had deteriorated enough for him not to be able to read it. Instead, he pondered on the inscription and on what he heard about the book. At first, it was unclear to Thomas how Schoenberg had started to believe that people in Los Angeles would think that he himself had syphilis, as the fictional composer did. All he knew was that Schoenberg, while wandering in the aisles of Brentwood Country Mart, met one of the German émigrés and informed her out of the blue that he did not have any venereal diseases.