The Magician

by Colm Toibin

  He saw no reason why he should make his departure formal. He indicated to Motschan that he and Katia would slip out. As they stood up to go, however, he saw Alan Bird, flanked by two other men in American-style suits, moving as though to waylay them.

  “I don’t want to see that man again,” he said to Motschan.

  “Double back now,” Motschan whispered. “Walk quickly towards that door that leads to the bathroom. There is a side exit there. Do not stop.”

  As the Americans approached, Thomas turned away from them. He tried to look like a man going to the bathroom. Once he was out of the hall, Katia and Motschan followed, and Motschan led them into the open air.

  “It will be easier if we walk to the hotel. They are too conscious of bad publicity to harass you any further.”

  It was arranged in the morning that their luggage be taken without ceremony to the Buick, which would then drive around to the back and collect them there. They would spend the night in Bayreuth and then go into the Eastern Zone.

  In Bayreuth, at the Goldener Anker, the manager, once Motschan had demanded that he treat his guests with all due deference, started to grovel, coming to their table again and again to inquire if they wanted anything more. In the morning, Thomas hoped that they could leave before this fellow reappeared, but he was waiting at the bottom of the stairs for them, accompanied them to the breakfast room and then stood in the lobby as their luggage was taken down.

  “I have one request,” he said. “It would mean so much to us if you signed the Golden Guest Book. It would be such a privilege.”

  He had the book on a stand in the lobby.

  “We don’t often display it,” he said. “But this is a very special day for us.”

  The manager held the page open and gave Thomas a pen. When he had signed his name and put in the date, he flicked through the previous pages to find that they were blank.

  “We have left sixteen pages empty,” the manager said, “one for each year of your exile.”

  Thomas turned back more pages until he came to the names of people who had previously signed the book, each person with his own page. He saw pages signed by Himmler, and Göring, and also Goebbels.

  “Distinguished company,” he said to the manager, who, with his hands joined, succeeded in looking both pleased and concerned at the same time.

  In the car, Georges was indignant.

  “They should be made to burn that book. It is one of their skills. They know how to burn books.”

  “Please get me out of this country as soon as you possibly can,” Thomas said.

  Motschan explained that he had been given instructions about which border crossing he should take.

  “If I have been given these instructions, so has the press,” he said. “But there is another way to cross where we will not be noticed.”

  “Do you think we should come and live in Switzerland?” Thomas asked Motschan.

  “Why do you imagine I am looking after you both with such care?” Motschan asked, laughing. “This is a sample of what Switzerland would do for you if you should return. I represent the nation, but we don’t use that word. I represent the Swiss spirit, but we don’t talk about that either. Maybe I can say that I represent a literary canton of Switzerland and we would be honored to have you both among us.”

  At the border, they were stopped by a group of young Russian soldiers who seemed to be alarmed at the appearance of the Buick. While some of them stood blocking the path of the car, a few went running to a nearby shed. A large and older Russian soldier peered out of the shed and then came towards the car. Motschan got out. Thomas pulled down the window so they could hear their friend speaking Russian.

  He did so with a supreme confidence. The Russian officer was apparently demanding that Georges turn back and take a border crossing farther to the north. Motschan was shaking his head and pointing straight ahead, indicating that he intended to drive across the border towards Weimar using this crossing.

  “This is what Russia must have been like when they had serfs,” Thomas said when a few of the younger soldiers, mere boys, began to examine them unceremoniously through the other window.

  “This is why they shot all the aristocrats,” Katia replied as Motschan made a terse sign to the soldiers that they should step out of the way. When one of the soldiers approached him and spoke aggressively, Georges poked him in the chest with his finger. And then he returned to the car and started the engine.

  After they had traveled some distance, they were stopped by soldiers again, but this time to let them know that five minutes ahead there would be an official welcome, and from there they would be accompanied by a cavalcade to their destination.

  It occurred to Thomas that if they had decided not to travel to Europe at all, Klaus might not have attempted suicide. Perhaps it was the very prospect of them coming close to him that made him desperate. Thomas was sure that Katia had already thought of this, and perhaps Erika too, and maybe even the others. He could not understand why it had taken him so long to see it.

  He heard cheering and then he saw that people, including children, had lined the streets and were waving at the car.

  In Weimar, an entire floor of the hotel had been reserved for them; they were guarded by uniformed police and a few burly men in suits. At the first lunch, he found himself seated beside a General Tiulpanov, who was the commander of East Berlin. The general was fluent in German. Into his face, Thomas saw, a thousand years of Russian history had been poured. It was clever of the general, he thought, to confine the conversation to Russian and German literature, talking to him about Pushkin and Goethe.

  The further back they went, Thomas believed, the safer they would be.

  He wanted to ask the general if he knew about Goethe’s presence here, and how strange it was that the poet had been inspired by the very landscape on which the Buchenwald concentration camp was created.

  But the general’s mind was elsewhere for the moment. As he smiled suddenly, looking around the room, he exuded an astonishing charm, like a man who wished only joy to his fellow mortals. When he stood up, the room became hushed. The general closed his eyes and began to recite:

  “For the doctrines we are teaching

  Do not censure us unduly:

  Seek the answers deep within you

  If you’d understand them truly.”

  When he stopped, Thomas, without standing, raised his voice and took over:

  “There you’ll find the ancient message:

  Man, that self-contented wonder,

  Seeks his own self-preservation

  Whether here on earth or yonder.”

  They took turns, each of them, until Goethe’s poem had ended. There was rapturous applause. Even the waiters, Thomas saw, joined in the ovation.

  * * *

  That night, when he had spoken of Goethe and human freedom, he was unsure what the cheering and ovation signified. For a few moments, he wondered if it meant that the audience was happy that someone from outside had come into the Eastern Zone, thus lessening their sense of a looming isolation. Or, he wondered, were they under instructions to cheer? Then he was taken up by the force of the applause, the smiling faces, the loud words of praise.

  Later, in the hotel, he saw that Katia and Motschan had not shared his elation.

  “That general,” Motschan said, “will rule the world, or he will be recalled and shot.”

  The next day, as Georges and Katia followed his official car in Motschan’s Buick, with the crowds cheering once more along the route, Thomas almost took pleasure in picturing the wryness of his companions’ response to all this warmth. And he supposed that Georges and Katia thought he was a fool for waving so enthusiastically at those who lined the streets and for accepting the offer of an official car for this leg of the journey.

  He knew, as they knew, that Weimar was Buchenwald now and that the general, so friendly and cultured, was, as Alan Bird had told him, holding prisoners in the very camp where the Nazis had
murdered so many. And they knew that Goethe had dreamed of many things, but he had never imagined Buchenwald. No poems about love, or nature, or man would ever serve to rescue this place from the curse that had descended on it.

  Chapter 18 Los Angeles, 1950

  In the offices of the FBI, there were files on him and his brother and on Erika and Klaus. Those files, replete with suspicions and rumors and innuendoes, would be the record of their time in America. Perhaps there was one on Golo too, if reading too many books could be viewed as anti-American. And maybe even Monika, if shouting loudly outside a writer’s study might be considered a possible federal offense.

  In Europe, he believed, as well as files, they had memories. They remembered the stance Heinrich had taken during the First World War, and during the Munich Revolution, and his speeches and articles that sought to prevent the rise of Hitler, and the work he did for left-wing causes in exile.

  During his short time in East Germany, Thomas had noted things that he might recount to Heinrich on his return, the feeling, for example, that the crowds waving flags on the streets might have been there under duress. But Heinrich did not want to hear about his brother’s trip to Germany. If Thomas so much as mentioned it, Heinrich changed the subject.

  The East Germans awarded Heinrich the German National Prize for Art and Literature, and invited him once more to live in East Berlin. He would be given a secretary, a driver and a comfortable apartment along with a generous stipend. His books were already selling well in the new state.

  In America, Heinrich’s books were out of print. If he were known at all, it was as the author of the novel that had been filmed as The Blue Angel, and also as the brother of Thomas Mann. In his new apartment, there was an eating nook instead of a dining room. Heinrich referred to this regularly as a sign of how bad things were. Despite his left-wing opinions, he was ever the son of the senator in Lübeck.

  Heinrich decided that he would accept the invitation to East Germany and leave California for good, pointing out to Thomas that he would not have much baggage, as many of the things they owned had been pawned by Nelly and he had not bothered to retrieve them.

  In those late winter days, as he planned his departure, Heinrich spoke of the possibility of writing a play about Frederick the Great, but then worried that, since he was in his late seventies, it might be too much. Some of the old excitement returned, however, as he reread the writers whom he had most enjoyed—Flaubert, Stendhal, Goethe, Fontane. When he spoke to Thomas about scenes in books by these writers, he sounded as enthusiastic as when they were both young and in Palestrina.

  “Can you ask those Communists to have Effi Briest and Emma Bovary there for me when I arrive in Berlin?” he asked Thomas. “I will need good company.”

  Mimi had died in Prague after the war. She never recovered from her incarceration in Terezín. Sometimes, Heinrich went over his years of happiness with her and how he believed, in coming to America, he had let her down. Katia understood how to relieve the gloom that would enter Heinrich’s spirit at the thought of poor Mimi by asking him something about Nelly. Just hearing Nelly’s name could make him more animated.

  Heinrich could also become animated at the mention of his brother Viktor, who had died the year before. Viktor’s wife had been a low-grade Nazi and Viktor had followed the party line. Heinrich could not contain his contempt.

  “It proves something I have known all my life,” he said. “Where there is brightness, there is also an idiot. When you have two writers like us, and two splendid sisters, both filled with life, you will always have a little runt and he will always marry a Nazi.”

  As usual, Heinrich was beautifully dressed when he came to see Thomas and Katia. He moved more slowly than before and often became silent, bowing his head as though he had fallen asleep, and then making some wry or astute comment.

  “I have a feeling,” he said, “that anyone who goes back to Germany won’t be as welcome as we imagine. It will be a hard place for all of us. They think we were sunbathing as the bombs rained on them. They will like us more when we are dead.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at Thomas and smiled.

  Despite his poverty and his need for support, Heinrich had never lost his ability to be arrogant, insisting on the importance of his own work and the value of the causes he had espoused. He spoke as though his own opinions were beyond dispute. He appeared to enjoy quoting from letters he had received from Klaus Mann over the years, remarking how much he missed his nephew and what a stalwart figure he had been in the battle for democracy. No matter how kindly Thomas tried to interpret this, it sounded to him like a rebuke.

  In his house in Santa Monica, on the night before he died, Heinrich had been listening to a Puccini opera. The brain hemorrhage he suffered in his sleep meant that he did not wake again.

  Heinrich was laid to rest beside Nelly in the cemetery in Santa Monica, a small crowd of family and friends in attendance. A string quartet played the slow movement from Debussy’s quartet in G minor.

  As they walked away from the grave, Thomas, the music still in his mind, was aware that he was now the last; the other four had gone. With Heinrich dead, he would have only ghosts against whom to measure himself.

  * * *

  For years now, he understood, he had been living in some strange opposition to Klaus and Heinrich. Klaus had been unsettled, not knowing where to live; Thomas, on the other hand, remained in Pacific Palisades. While Heinrich lived in poverty, Thomas continued to make money. While the other two had strong opinions, Thomas wavered politically. They were fiery, he was circumspect. But now that they were gone, he had no one to argue with, except Erika. And he found her so irascible that it was hardly worth disagreeing with her.

  When he took his afternoon walk with Katia by the beach in Santa Monica, he continued to be aware of the young men in swimming trunks. However, instead of feigning tiredness so he could stop and study one of them, he stopped because he was genuinely tired. Still, he carried the images of them home with him and nurtured them as night fell. He was fascinated when Katia discovered among Heinrich’s papers many sheets with drawings by Heinrich of fat, naked women, just like those Thomas had found more than half a century earlier in Palestrina when he had stealthily examined the papers on his brother’s desk.

  It was easier to concentrate on essays than on a novel or stories, writing a few paragraphs a day and reading to refresh his memory. But he knew that soon he would have to find a subject for a novel that would intrigue him enough to make him want to get up in the morning.

  After his visit to Weimar, he began to receive petitions from citizens of East Germany asking him to intercede with the authorities on their behalf. Usually, he forwarded these letters to the writer Johannes R. Becher, who was close to power in East Germany, whom he had known in the 1920s. He wondered what Heinrich would have done were he alive and in the pay of the East German government. He liked to think that his brother’s uncompromising stance would have continued in East Germany.

  When an anti-Communist magazine, in an article called “The Moral Eclipse of Thomas Mann,” referred to him as “America’s Fellow Traveler No. 1,” his attention was drawn to it by Agnes Meyer.

  “All of us who are associated with you are being asked to defend you,” she said.

  “I am not a fellow traveler. I do not support communism.”

  “Saying that is not enough. This is not a time for prevarication in America. There is a new war and it is against communism.”

  “I am against communism.”

  “Is that why you went to East Germany and were fêted there?”

  When Thomas was named as a Communist by a hotel in Beverly Hills that did not want to host an event at which he might speak, he could not blame Heinrich or Klaus for tarnishing his reputation as an imperturbable man of reason. Nor could he blame Brecht, who was living in East Berlin. It was beneath his dignity, he thought, to write to the newspapers to announce that he was not a Communist. What was even more d
isturbing was the realization that not only his moral authority but his status as a great man had dissolved in America.

  This left him free. If Klaus and Heinrich had been alive, they would have attacked the infantilism that had become widespread in American life. Now he himself could do so, becoming braver as the attacks on him grew more strident, attending a birthday dinner for W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, and later joining the appeal in support of the Rosenbergs. He could also send birthday greetings if he wanted to Johannes R. Becher and be denounced for his action in the House of Representatives, being told that ingrates were seldom invited back to dine.

  Katia insisted that she always knew, from the shrill sound of the ringing tone, when the caller was Agnes Meyer. If she believed it was Mrs. Meyer on the line, she then demanded that Erika answer the phone. Erika began by imitating her father’s voice, letting Agnes complain at length about some political stance that Thomas had adopted or failed to adopt, and then, with a laugh, telling her that she was, in fact, speaking to Erika Mann, a person whom Mrs. Meyer openly despised.

  The last time this had occurred, Agnes had said to her: “Why don’t you go back to Germany?”

  That evening, Erika had performed a most scurrilous monologue in the voice of Agnes Meyer, mixing her political views and her sexual dreams, emphasizing how much she wanted to be held firmly in the arms of the Magician and pleasured with his wand.

  But the idea of going back to Germany had to be treated seriously. When the FBI came again to interview Erika, she lost patience with her interrogators.

  “Yes, I told them I am lesbian. Of course I am lesbian! What did they think I am? And Queen Victoria was lesbian, I informed them, and Eleanor Roosevelt was one too, and so was Mae West, and so was Doris Day. They listened calmly until I said Doris Day and one of them said, ‘Hey, ma’am, I think Miss Day is a normal American woman,’ and I laughed so much that the one who thinks Doris Day is normal had to go and get me water. While he was away, his colleague told me that they would not be recommending me for American citizenship, and if I left the country, I might not get back in.”