The Magician

by Colm Toibin

  “I happened to be lying on the bed,” Erika said. “I could have been on a walk.”

  “The phone call was for you?” Katia asked.

  “I don’t know who it was for. It was put through to my room.”

  “Are you certain? Were they certain?” Katia asked.

  “Yes. They wanted to know what arrangements to make.”

  As Thomas listened, he wondered if it were possible that she had misunderstood.

  “Arrangements?” he asked.

  “The funeral,” Erika said.

  “We have just heard the news,” Katia said. “Do they really want us to decide about the funeral?”

  “They want to know what to do,” Erika said.

  Katia kept fiddling with the rings on her fingers. When she had difficulty pulling one of them off completely, her hands began to shake.

  “Why do you need to take that ring off?” Thomas asked.

  “What ring?” she asked.

  Thomas glanced at Erika. This was the news they had dreaded, but now that it had come, it seemed untrue.

  “Did they give you a number to call?” Thomas asked.

  “Yes,” Erika said, “I have it here.”

  “Can we phone them back and make sure that it is Klaus, that he has been identified?”

  Katia spoke as though she had not been listening.

  “I don’t want to see his coffin lowered into the ground,” she said. “I don’t want to witness it.”

  “I asked them over and over if they were sure,” Erika said.

  “And they asked you about arrangements?”

  “I can go alone,” Erika said. “And then I can make arrangements when I arrive.”

  “You cannot go alone,” Katia replied.

  When Thomas sought to comfort Katia, she turned away.

  “Klaus has been leaving us for a long time,” she said. “We have already said our farewells to him. Or I thought we had. Now I cannot believe this has happened.”

  “Michael’s orchestra is close by,” Erika said. “I think he is in Nice.”

  “Call him,” Katia said. “And get word to Golo, and we will try to find a way to contact Monika. I will phone Elisabeth. For a second just now, I wondered which of us would get in touch with Klaus, but he is the one who is dead. It is hard to think that we won’t ever see him again. Even now, his voice, for me, is alive. He is alive.”

  She stopped for a moment.

  “He is still alive for me. I am too old for this. I will never believe it.”

  “We are only a few hours away from Cannes,” Erika said. “We can easily change our plans.”

  She looked at Thomas, indicating that he should say something.

  “His mother must decide,” Thomas said.

  “But what do you think?” Erika asked.

  “I think he should not have done this to Katia, or to you.”

  Neither of them responded and he could sense their disapproval of what he had just said. In the silence that followed, he tried to bring the conversation back to practical matters. He realized that no one had mentioned Heinrich.

  “One of us should call Heinrich?”

  “I don’t want to call anybody,” Katia said, “and I don’t want to talk about arrangements and I don’t want to hear what Klaus should or shouldn’t have done.”

  For the next hour, they waited in the room. Erika lit cigarette after cigarette, going to the balcony when the air was too full of smoke. Katia ordered tea, but then ignored the tray when it came. When the phone rang, it was Golo. Katia signaled to Erika that she should speak to him.

  “They think it was an overdose, but how can they say? He always took sleeping pills. Yes, yesterday. He died yesterday. They have been trying to find us. Yes, he left a note with my mother’s name and my name and, no, nothing else. He was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, but it was too late. I always knew one day it was going to be too late. We are all shocked but none of us should be surprised—”

  “Erika, don’t say that!” Katia interrupted.

  “The Magician is due to speak in two or three days,” Erika said to Golo, ignoring her. “I don’t know if we are going or not.”

  Thomas could hear a very loud “What?” from Golo.

  Erika handed the receiver to her mother. Katia listened for a while.

  “Don’t tell me how I feel, Golo!” she said eventually. “No one must tell me how I feel.”

  She handed the receiver back to Erika, who gestured to Thomas, asking if he wanted to talk to Golo. Thomas shook his head.

  “I will call you soon when we know more,” Erika said.

  * * *

  Thomas knew that they were waiting for him to speak. All he had to do was ask Erika to let the organizers in Sweden and Denmark know that he was leaving for France as soon as they could find a flight. And, in the coming days, she could cancel his trip to Germany. They would go to Cannes and see where Klaus died and then follow the coffin to the place of burial. And then they would go to somewhere quiet in Switzerland or return to California.

  He caught Katia’s eye. It was obvious that she was not going to say anything.

  All Thomas could think about was how Klaus might have been rescued one more time.

  When they met later, Erika urged him to make a decision about what to do. He was hoping that Katia would make her wishes clear. He had no idea how to talk to her and no idea what she wanted. It was odd, he thought, being with someone for almost half a century and not being able to read their mind.

  Over dinner, Erika told them that she had checked at the desk and there were flights to Paris in the morning. Katia, who had not touched her food, sipped from her water glass and pretended that she had not heard.

  In the lobby, Katia said: “I don’t want to be disturbed until the morning.”

  “What about the funeral arrangements?” Erika asked.

  “Will funeral arrangements bring him back?” Katia asked.

  Erika called Thomas’s room early in the morning to say that her mother was already in the dining room having breakfast. When he joined them, he saw that Katia was wearing her best clothes.

  “Has anything been arranged?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Erika said. “We are waiting for you.”

  A porter brought a note for Erika; she left the table. Thomas and Katia did not speak when she was away. When she returned, she sat down on the chair between them.

  “That was Michael. He will go to Cannes.”

  “In time for the funeral?” Thomas asked.

  “We have not fixed a date for the funeral,” she replied.

  * * *

  Later, when he did not find Erika in her room, he went down to the lobby. As he sat in one of the old armchairs watching the guests, he remembered the hotel lobby in Saltsjöbaden years before, harassing the manager about their luggage, their desperation to get out of Sweden before they were trapped by the war. He had already made sure, by then, that Erika and Klaus were protected. And once he returned to Princeton, he had set about rescuing the other children one by one. Well, he had failed to rescue Klaus. He would give anything to put back time, to be on that journey home to America. He longed to be anywhere in the past, to be able to stop what had just happened, to have insisted that Klaus travel to Sweden and accompany them to Germany. If his mother had implored him, surely he would have eventually accepted.

  Just then, he saw Katia come out of the elevator and cross the lobby towards the small café. She walked slowly, like someone in pain. She moved towards him, but she did not see him. It struck him that he was perhaps the last person in the world she wished now to see.

  When Carla killed herself, he had his mother to console. When Lula died, he had his own family to be with. Now, despite the presence of Katia and Erika, he was alone. There was no one he could turn to. Katia and Erika were alone too. None of them wanted to talk to one another, and neither he nor Katia wanted to make the arrangements for Klaus’s funeral, nor did they want Erika to take on
that task.

  Back in his room, Thomas looked at the sheaf of papers he had on his desk. He reread the last sentence he had written. It seemed natural for him to see what might be added. He began to work.

  Erika did not knock. She was in the middle of the room before he realized that she was there. She gasped when she saw him working.

  “I have arranged for him to be buried in three days’ time,” she said. “The funeral will be on Friday.”

  “Have you informed your mother?”

  “I told her, but she did not acknowledge that she had heard.”

  He still had time, he knew, to ask Erika to organize flights for them.

  “What do you think we should do?” he asked.

  “My mother is in no condition to travel.”

  He wanted to tell Erika that he did not believe her, that this was the sort of thing she had started to say about her mother so that she could exercise more and more control.

  “I will speak to her.”

  It would be late morning in Chicago. When Erika left him, he called Elisabeth, knowing that her mother had already broken the news of Klaus’s death to her.

  He told Elisabeth that they were not going to Cannes.

  “Was that Erika’s decision?”

  “No.”

  “Does my mother not want to go?”

  “I am not sure.”

  “So, you decided?”

  “I decided nothing.”

  “Someone decided.”

  When the call was over, he wished he had told Elisabeth that he could not face seeing the coffin and following it through the streets of Cannes, knowing that Klaus lay lifeless inside. But, more than that, he could not face the prospect of Katia making that journey, walking away from the cemetery with Klaus buried in the ground, when none of them could offer her any comfort. He knew it was wrong not to go. If he had stayed talking for longer, Elisabeth would have emphatically told him so. He almost wished that she had. He wished something else had been decided, and then he found himself wishing that none of it had happened at all, that no message had come that Klaus was dead.

  By evening, Erika told him that she had spoken to Monika and also, once again, to Michael.

  “What did Monika say?”

  “You do not need to know. She is in Naples and is coming to Zürich to meet us. She takes the view that we cannot do without her.”

  “And Michael?”

  “He will be at the funeral.”

  “I am sorry for prevaricating so much,” he said.

  “Do you want to cancel the lectures? I can explain what has happened.”

  “No, I will go ahead. If I don’t give the lectures, I don’t know what else I might do.”

  “Go home, maybe?”

  “That is one possibility.”

  “Shall I speak to the organizers?”

  “No, I will go ahead as agreed.”

  That night, as he was preparing for bed, Katia came to his room and stood in the doorway.

  “Someone connected Heinrich to my room,” she said. “He just got a message to call but he didn’t know why, and so I told him.”

  “I am sorry. I should have spoken to him.”

  “He told me that he has come to see death as soft. The dead are at peace, he said. He stayed on the line for a while and we didn’t say much more. We didn’t need to. And then we said goodbye. I could hear him crying as he put down the receiver.”

  * * *

  A week later, in Copenhagen, Thomas received a letter from Michael. It was delivered to his room. He was relieved that it had not been handed to him in the dining room. He did not want Katia and Erika to see it.

  “My dear Father,” Michael wrote, “I was there when they lowered Klaus’s coffin into the ground and I played a largo for his generous soul as they covered him with earth. The beauty of the place where he is buried made his death unbearable. Nothing was comforting, not the blue sky, not the glittering sea, not the music. Nothing.

  “You may never have noticed this, but Klaus, even though he was so much older than me, did not try to be a surrogate father to me, but, instead, always succeeded in being my older brother, a brother who listened to me and looked out for me when no one else did. He lived much of the time unnoticed in his own house. I remember how brusquely his views were dismissed by you at the table and I remember his hurt at seeing that you did not think his views were important.

  “I am sure the world is grateful to you for the undivided attention you have given to your books, but we, your children, do not feel any gratitude to you, or indeed to our mother, who sat by your side. It is hard to credit that you both stayed in your luxury hotel while my brother was being buried. I told no one in Cannes that you were in Europe. They would not have believed me.

  “You are a great man. Your humanity is widely appreciated and applauded. I am sure you are enjoying loud praise in Scandinavia. It hardly bothers you, most likely, that these feelings of adulation are not shared by any of your children. As I walked away from my brother’s grave, I wished you to know how deeply sad I felt for him.”

  Thomas placed the letter under a book on his bedside table. Later, he would read it once more and then he would destroy it. If Katia and Erika found out that it had been sent and asked him about it, he would say that he had not received it.

  * * *

  At the airport in Zürich, they were met by Michael, who gave his father a gruff smile and then hugged his mother and sister. As they were making their way to a car, they saw that Monika had been standing in the shadows all the time. Ignoring Erika and her mother, she went to her father and embraced him tearfully.

  “This is not the time for tears, Monika,” her mother said.

  “When is the time for tears?” Monika asked. “And who decides?”

  “I decide,” Erika said.

  In the hotel that evening, Erika and Michael had assembled for him a selection of German press cuttings on his impending visit to the country and his possible visit to the Eastern Zone. Most of them were vitriolic. Thomas was particularly puzzled by the ones that criticized him for not remaining in Germany, as others had done, in its time of difficulty.

  “I would not be alive if I had stayed in Germany,” he said.

  Soon they were joined by Katia, whose expression was stoical and resigned, and then by a tearful Monika.

  “Now, Monika,” Katia said, “I told you I want no crying.”

  Katia announced that everyone should be on their best behavior because Georges Motschan was about to arrive. Thomas had met Motschan briefly before the war when he had come, on the instructions of his wealthy father, to offer Katia’s parents help if they should seek refuge to Switzerland. Once her parents left Germany, he had become a regular correspondent of Katia, always making clear that he would be ready to look after the Manns if they should decide to live in Switzerland.

  “He is a most civilized person,” Katia said. “My parents adored him.”

  When Georges arrived, the atmosphere changed. The waiters became even more attentive and the hotel manager presented himself at the table to make sure that all the guests were comfortable.

  Georges Motschan was tall and well-dressed, in his early thirties. Thomas wondered if it would be accurate to describe him as polished, like some elegant piece of silver that had elaborate carvings and filigrees. But when Georges spoke, he no longer seemed rarefied or highly wrought; the voice was deep and authoritative and manly. It was evident from his bearing that Georges was rich, but he exuded something else that Thomas had almost forgotten about. Edgar von Uexküll had elements of it, but in him it was broken, whereas in Motschan it shone. Motschan, it was plain to Thomas, had lived with books and paintings and music as natural things, in the same way as he had been cared for by servants and had his meals cooked for him by others. He was discriminating, with a mild whiff of arrogance. Even the way he took in the table and sipped his tea, Thomas observed, arose from generations of slow Swiss comfort. Thomas nearly laughed out loud
when he noticed how much in awe Monika appeared to be of this young man. And then he glanced at Katia and Erika: they were gazing at Georges Motschan.

  When Georges saw the press cuttings on the table, he looked through them and shrugged.

  “We must pay no attention,” he said. “The malice of the Germans is not to be appeased.”

  He then made clear he had not come on a social visit, but to offer his services.

  “The problem you will have in Germany and in the Eastern Zone is how to arrive and depart. You cannot wait in train stations. In the East, you cannot be seen in a state car. My Buick, which serves its purpose on Swiss roads at least, might be the best way to travel, and I am also making myself available as your driver. I am even ready to wear a uniform should that be necessary.”

  “I think you look quite well as you are,” Katia said.

  Thomas saw that she was openly flirting with this young man.

  It was arranged that he would drive Thomas and Katia to Vulpera in the Eglantine, where they could rest, and then he would collect them and drive them to Frankfurt, Munich and, if they should decide, Weimar. Erika would go to Amsterdam, Monika would return to Italy and Michael continue his tour with his orchestra.

  When Motschan drove up to the Schweizer Hof in Vulpera, Thomas was almost tempted to ask him if he would not stay with them at least for a day. He would like to discuss the visit to Germany.

  “I don’t know what kind of reception I will get. I don’t even know why I am going.”

  “What you must realize is that you cannot win,” Motschan said. “If you remain in California, they will hate you. But if you return, they will hate you for having been in California in the first place. If you only visit cities in the West, they will call you an American stooge. But if you visit the East, they will call you a fellow traveler. And everyone will want you to visit some shrine, some prison, some site where an atrocity happened. No one will be pleased except you, and you will be pleased only because, within a short time, you will be able to return to California. The war is over, but it casts a long shadow and there are many resentments, and, during your visit, the resentment will be directed at you.”