Klaus (3 page)

He had always been happier in France than anywhere, which was why he was now in Cannes, where however he was miserable and knew that the tether which held him to life was fraying. He borrowed an umbrella from the hotel proprietor and with the rain splashing the bottom of his trousers made his way to the station to enquire about trains to Paris. For Paris, throughout his wandering years, was the city to which he always returned: Hôtel Jacob, Hôtel Le Royal, Hôtel des Saints-Pères, Hôtel Chambord, Hôtel Madison, Hôtel St-André, Hôtel Pont-Royal, Hôtel Recamier, Hôtel d’Alsace, Hôtel je-ne-sais-quoi…

But he did no more than enquire. His Paris was pre-war. Now, on his last visit, he had been conscious of a sourness in the air. Hard to account for. Those who had been in the real Resistance were disappointed. There had been no renewal. The Fourth Republic was turning out to be as petty and corrupt as the Third. Then there were the ghosts of Vichy, some of whom had been his friends, anti-Fascists in the last years of what had passed for peace, who had nevertheless accepted the reality of the debacle of 1940 and turned to the aged Marshal, whom Klaus had thought “as hideous as Hindenburg”, perhaps even more dangerous, and the promise of a National Revolution, turned in a mixture of nervous fear and wary hope. Which was of course disappointed. And there were others, among them also men and women he had liked, who had collaborated with the occupying power from apprehension or indifference. They too now lived in shame. Klaus could feel for them, as he always felt for the weak and the defeated, but he couldn’t endure their company. The thought that they had attended parties at the German embassy and fawned on the men in uniform they met there disgusted him.

But so too did the new lords of the intellect, with their Pope, Sartre, who preached a diluted version of the philosophy of the Nazi-sympathiser Heidegger, and who fawned on Stalin: intellectuals for whom the barbarity and persecutions of the Soviet Union were of no account, because they still believed, or affected to believe, that a new earthly Paradise was being created there.

Klaus had gone to Moscow for a Congress in 1934 and found much to disturb him: the militarism and the subservience expressed by the man who said, “I do whatever the Party decides I should do”: it was no different from Fascism, he had decided. And then there was the essential triviality of orthodox Marxism, its denial of so much that he valued in life; its denial of the metaphysical and its distortion of literature, reduced to being a propaganda instrument for the Faith. Besides, how could he associate himself with a regime which had once again made homosexual acts a criminal offence?

It was, he believed, Communism’s reduction of life to a brutal materialism which had driven his friend and lover, the poet René Crevel, to kill himself, the night before the opening of the anti-Fascist Congress of Intellectuals in Paris which he had helped to organise.

Sitting now in the Café de la Gare Klaus leafed through his notebook till he came on the words sent him by the Communist writer Johannes Becher, who had been with René that evening in a café on the Boul’ Mich’: “I don’t understand it. He seemed entirely normal, not in any way depressed. Only sometimes he had such a strange way of looking beyond us, into space, as if searching for something. But he couldn’t find it, whatever it was…”

Whatever it was… How often Klaus had envied René, even while aggrieved because he had deserted him…

So many had taken that way out. Klaus had ventured to the gate more than once, been pulled back before he passed through it. Next time, perhaps…

Some had done it slowly, choosing to invite Death to call on them, without themselves consciously or deliberately taking the irrevocable step. There was Joseph Roth, with whom Klaus had so often sat drinking late into the night in the Café Tournon, while Roth passed from drunken ramblings to a sudden and terrifying lucidity in which this man with the capacity to enrich life for everyone but himself spoke of his immense fatigue and longing for the moment when “we step into the dark.” And Klaus had then seen, in a phrase from one of Roth’s own stories, “a sunny glimmer in his kind eyes”, as he envisaged the moment of release, which had come by means of brandy, whisky, pernod and red wine as the beating of the war-drums sounded loud all over Europe.

The Magician had once stood at his bedroom window in the house in Poschingerstrasse and called out to Klaus about to board a taxi that would take him to the station and then… where? He couldn’t remember, but the Magician’s words still sounded in his mind: “Come home, son, whenever you are miserable and forlorn.” But there was no home to return to, and the Magician was living on the other side of the Atlantic, with the two people who had given Klaus unconditional love: Erika and Mielein.

In Paris there was his second father, Gide. (Or perhaps his third, for wasn’t his uncle Heinrich, who had always encouraged him, the second?) If he took the train and presented himself in the apartment in the rue Vanneau, wouldn’t Gide, so clear-sighted, sceptical and yet moral, so immediately responsive to all around him, offer the reinvigoration he needed?

He remembered a lunch with him on the terrace of a restaurant near the Luxembourg Gardens. Gide had talked mostly of German literature, of the sanity of Goethe who nevertheless understood evil. “Curious that,” he said, “Prodigious really.”

Then a boy, a street urchin with an ugly sallow face and dark dancing eyes, had come by, trying to sell flowers – lilac, Klaus recalled, a bit withered, well past its best. Gide had refused the flowers but given the child money just the same, and Klaus realised that in some way the boy was hurt, even affronted, by the exchange. So, of course, did Gide: “Did you see how he looked at me?” he said. “He was glad of the money but nevertheless felt insulted. Did you ever pay a prostitute but spurn her services? She’ll give you just that look. Interesting, yes? The truth is that boy would far rather have picked my pocket than accepted charity. Curious that, prodigious really…”

But he couldn’t run to Gide as if he himself was a little boy who has fallen over and scarted his knees and trots to Daddy for comfort. Yet the thought of Paris was comfort itself. It might be raining there too, it probably was, for it rains often in Paris, a city that is as much at one with melancholy weather as with summer sunshine. It was the city where he had been happiest, and he thought of the friendly shabbiness of Montmartre with nostalgia and of afternoons in those same Luxembourg Gardens: that one, for instance, when he sat on a bench gazing on the beautiful statue of the “Marchand des Masques” and was joined by a young sailor who nodded appreciatively and then said, “All the same, flesh and blood is better, isn’t it,” and accompanied Klaus back to his room in the Hôtel d’Alsace, two doors along from the one where Oscar Wilde had died.

He remembered how in New York, June 14 1940, he had written in his journal: “The Nazis in Paris, it’s unimaginable. Boulevard St-Germain… Place de la Concorde. The stamp of murderers’ feet. The stuff of nightmare…”

And a couple of weeks later, 26 June… “France is dead… One still can’t believe it. It’s like the death of someone very close to you. What is most frightful is not the defeat, but the treachery, the betrayal…” As in those dark days of 1940 he worried about his friends, he recalled with horror and disgust being told a few days previously that Gide’s name was on a list prepared by the State Department of French men and women who would be refused entry to the USA, as being “too radical”, even though it was years since Gide, after his visit to the USSR, had recanted his expression of approval of Communism, to the fury and indignation of the Party faithful. So, from then on, he was attacked from both Left and Right, which put him, Klaus thought, in the place of honour. But of course he had come through, scepticism unimpaired. He was the most honest man Klaus had known.

What would he say now? What advice would he give? (Klaus ordered a pastis and wondered as he poured water in and watched the liquid turn cloudy…)

“So you really think that you’ve come to the end, dear boy? Aren’t you curious about tomorrow? To see what it will bring? Is your appreciation of life’s comedy quite exhausted? Oh yes, you say it is, but are you sure? Give life another chance. We shall all be a long time in the grave…”

He opened his notebook again: “ ‘Who speaks of victory?’ wrote Rilke. ‘To survive is enough.’ ”

The train for Nice which he should have taken to catch the Paris express pulled out of the station.

The Twenties when every day was an adventure expired, ushering in the brown years. When had they started thinking emigration might be necessary? There was no precise moment. The idea crept up on them like river mist, and as chilling. They were after all Germans, thoroughly German, deep-rooted, despite the Magician’s Brazilian-born mother and Mielein’s Jewish ancestry. But her family, like countless others, were Germans first, Jews second. It was a couple of generations since they had frequented the synagogue. Nevertheless it was Mielein who first aired the question, aired it gently, almost as if she had been proposing that they go for a picnic by the lake.

They were sitting in the garden drinking tea from the Meissen cups that were part of a set she had inherited from an aunt. It was a soft afternoon, the sun still warm but a hint of autumn chill in the air. She drew a wrap around her and said, in what was little more than a sigh, so soft was her voice, “If only this would last, Klauschen… If only.”

Then she was silent and seemed to be listening, her sweet face troubled but alert, as if the horns of the Wild Hunt were sounding in the woods.

“Don’t tell your father, my dear,” she said, “let it be our secret. He still has confidence in the German people.”

Was that before or after he delivered his “Address to the Germans” at the Beethoven-Saal in Berlin – October, 1930, Klaus thought. In that discourse he appealed to the bourgeoisie to make its peace with labour and socialism, with indeed the Social Democratic Party, in order to avoid what he called the Nazi calamity. Hardly had he said this, than a journalist wearing dark glasses leaped to his feet, obedient to Dr Goebbels’ instruction to start “a little something at the Beethoven-Saal”, and denounced Thomas Mann as a “liar, traitor and enemy of the German race…”

Well, the journalist (and pornographer) Arnolt Bronnen, author of a biography of the Nazi martyr, the pimp Horst Wessel, had something to prove, poor wretch.

Klaus found himself smiling at the memory, precisely because it was so disgusting and so typical of the scum that was rising to the top. For someone had put it about that Bronnen was really Bronner – and everyone knows, don’t they? – that Bronner is a Jewish name Indeed, yes, Bronnen accepted that; his name had been Bronner before he changed it and Herr Bronner had indeed been a filthy Jew. However his wife, Frau Bronner, who was not at all Jewish, had cuckolded him and Arnolt was the child of that liaison and his true biological father was one hundred per cent Aryan, an upstanding representative of the Herrenvolk. It was perfect and perfectly shameless. Perhaps, Klaus thought, Goebbels himself had given him these lines.

And then there was Ricki, high-strung, adorable Ricki, with his charming terrier that wore a tinkling bell round its neck.

“It’s Belshazzar’s Feast,” Ricki cried. “The writing is on the wall.
Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin
. Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting. That’s Jehovah’s message to Germany. Everything is lost, we’re done for, doomed, the whole lot of us… The Nazis will come and swallow up my little dog and Erika’s sports car and your books, Klaus – they’ll burn them, don’t doubt it, and my paintings which they will condemn as immoral. Oh yes, we’ve had it. No doubt about that. We might as well cut our throats or gas ourselves.”

And then he would launch into an imitation of Hitler which was so lifelike they all burst out in horrified but irresistible laughter.

“Yes,” he would say, suddenly calm, “it’s not worth killing oneself on account of that little twerp.”

Nevertheless that is what he did, suddenly, after a day when he had appeared unusually cheerful. He still came to Klaus often in dreams.

As for the actual moment, the turning-point in his life, January 30, 1933, Klaus had taken a train from Berlin to Leipzig where he had an appointment with the director of the City Theatre to discuss the production of one of his plays. The director, as arranged, met him at the station, and took him straight to the bar where, without asking, he ordered two large brandies.

“You’re going to need this,” he said.

“What’s wrong? Have you decided not to do the play?” (Oh, the egocentricity of authors!)

“It’s not that. I can’t believe you haven’t heard the news. The old gentleman has appointed him.”

“What?”

“Hitler,” he said. “Hindenburg has made him Chancellor…”

Hindenburg, the senile Junker who boasted he had never read a book since his schooldays before the war of 1870, believed the assurances given him by the Conservative Nationalist Right – von Papen and the other idiots – that they could control Hitler. “He’s our obedient tool,” they whispered.

Some tool!

At the Nuremberg trials, Erika, there as a journalist, had observed all, and written to Klaus to say: “It’s extraordinary. Von Papen still doesn’t feel the burden of guilt he carries.”

He got away with it too, one of the three in the dock there to be acquitted.

There was no more talk of the play, and Klaus took the next train to Munich where, for the moment, sanity still reigned. There was no Gestapo yet in Bavaria. Life still seemed close to normal. People who would have been arrested if they had remained in Berlin – Klaus himself among them – were free to amuse themselves. They flocked to Erika’s cabaret show, The Peppermill, and laughed at its sharp and bitter mockery of the Nazis. Some said that if Hitler appointed a Gauleiter for Bavaria he would be arrested when he crossed the frontier. Clerical Conservative politicians and aristocrats talked of restoring the Wittelsbach monarchy and proclaiming that Bavaria had resumed its independence. They were in discussions with Prince Rupprecht, the heir to the throne. It came to nothing. He had fought bravely, they said, in the war, but now he preferred to remain on his estates, shooting game.

What a farce!

The Reichstag burned in Berlin, but in Munich they danced at the Regina Palast Hotel and the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. There were rumours of arrests in Berlin, of Social Democrats and Communists being hauled off to torture chambers, but tea was still drunk and strawberry tarts and apfelstrudel eaten at the Carlton. Erika arranged to transfer her cabaret to a bigger theatre, and she and Klaus slipped over the border to Switzerland for a few days’ holiday.

Even when you hear the first cracks in the ice, Klaus thought, you still persuade yourself it will bear your weight. Yet every time they turned on the radio, the news was worse, more frightening and scarcely believable.

Nevertheless they went back to Munich. Erika had rehearsals to arrange, Klaus was eager to resume discussions about his new play.

The family chauffeur Hans met them at the station, as usual. But he wasn’t himself.

“Don’t go out,” he said, “don’t let anyone know you’re here. Don’t even telephone. The Nazis are out to get you. Especially you, Fraulein Erika.”

He was sweating as he spoke.

(It was not long before Klaus understood the reason for his agitation. Hans, a nice friendly fellow, always respectful, devoted apparently to Mielein, had been a Nazi spy for years, a stoolie appointed by the Brown House to report everything that went on in the Mann family. Now he was divided between his natural decent feelings and his duty to the Party – his fear of the Party too, Klaus supposed.)

Despite the warning, Klaus went by Arcistrasse to call on his grandparents, urging them to make ready to leave Germany.

“We’ve lived through worse times,” they said, “and we’re too old, Klauschen, to uproot ourselves. Nobody will trouble themselves with relics like us. Besides what would become of our good servants if we did so?”

Fortunately the parents were already abroad in Arosa in Switzerland, the Magician having been on a lecture tour. It was necessary to call them, but, thinking it likely that the telephone was tapped, their conversation was guarded. You shouldn’t come home just now. The weather’s frightful in Munich. It can’t be worse than it is here in Arosa, the Magician said. There’s spring-cleaning going on. The house is uninhabitable for the moment. And so on. Klaus was never sure that they had grasped the full import. But Erika left to join them in Switzerland that evening.

Klaus lingered for a couple of days, making arrangements but unable to settle. He corrected a set of proofs, listened to the gramophone (
Salome
,
Kinder-totenlieder
), even ventured into the city, saw a great crowd gathered in front of a villa; they were admiring Hitler’s Mercedes.

Hans drove him to the station.

“Well,” he said, “look after yourself. I suppose this is the last time I’ll drive a member of the family. Tomorrow your car will be confiscated. It’s just the thing for the Party. Don’t think badly of me, Herr Klaus. Try to understand my position. A fellow must live, after all. No ill feelings, I hope.”

“No ill feelings, Hans…”

He took the night train for Paris. He travelled light, only a couple of suitcases, books and magazines. He’d soon be back. The Nazi farce couldn’t last. Even if the Germans didn’t soon throw them out, the democracies of France and Britain would see to it: break off trade and diplomatic relations. That would be enough, surely, to bring the German people to their senses.

He shared the sleeping compartment with a young American, a nice boy on his way home who seemed unaware of anything untoward happening in Germany.

In Paris he checked into the Hôtel Jacob, discovered he had left his reading-glasses in the train and wrote to the station authorities in Munich asking them to forward them (which they did, a couple of weeks later). It didn’t occur to him that it would be years before he set foot in Germany again, not even the next morning when a friend told him of another friend who had been badly beaten up in Berlin as a Jew, a foreigner and a homosexual. He went to bed and dreamed of his death and of Erika: I feel alone whenever I’m not with her.

And that was that.

He looked at his watch. Almost time to go to the Zanzi Bar.