Magnus (8 page)

Magnus in fact has no inkling of how hard May is battling against the passion he has aroused in her, and he himself is not allowing full freedom to his own amorous feelings for he cannot envisage a lasting relationship. The Gleanerstones seem to form too close a couple to leave room for anyone else. But these fears of delusion and heartbreak are groundless since Terence is May’s husband in name only. He is a very chaste spouse, she explains with laughter, and very accommodating, because he prefers men, and has affairs only with male lovers. Their marriage is a contract that has satisfied both of them since the outset. A very flexible contract, based on respect and affection, strengthened over the years by a deep mutual understanding. Terence and May are cousins. This marriage offered one of them the cloak of respectability required by his social class, and the other an escape from the family yoke and a freedom she had dreamed of since childhood. While they remain discreet about their short-lived affairs, any new lover who becomes at all important to them is always introduced to the other spouse. If a friendship develops between those two, nothing better; otherwise, the liaison is conducted in private and ends in its own good time without compromising the couple’s relationship with each other. For the past two years Terence has had a companion, Scott, with whom he is very much in love, and for whom May has a very high regard. She explains all this straightforwardly, as if this kind of married relationship were a matter of course. And, at first a little disconcerted, Magnus soon finds that he has a place of complete integrity within this couple at once united and independent of each other.

He returns to London and May goes with him. It is an opportunity for her to renew her acquaintance with this city and visit friends there. Most of all, she is determined to remain close to Magnus, anxious to know how things will go when he gets back to the uncle and aunt he now knows not to be his relatives, what explanations they will give, and finally what he will decide to do after this encounter. She has suggested he come and live in San Francisco, but without daring to be too insistent.

The evening of his return to the Schmalkers, Magnus questions Lothar.

‘Why did you convince me I was your nephew, and so the son of those people who inflicted themselves on me? Why keep me deceived? Why lie to me all that time?’

Lothar could deny everything. He could feign incomprehension in the face of the accusatory questions of the young man who insists on being called Magnus from now on. He could hide behind the fact he had broken off all contact with his sister at the time the child must have been born, that he was living in exile when she adopted him, if indeed this were the case. He could pretend to know nothing, or put his accuser in the dock instead, by asking him where he gets this sudden conviction he is not the son of Thea and Clemens Dunkeltal? Who has told him this alleged secret? What proof does he have? But Lothar does not do this. He does not want to. The moment he had been expecting, but was constantly putting off as he so dreaded it, all of a sudden has arrived. The moment to admit finally to a lie perpetuated by inordinate discretion.

Yes, he knew. He had known for a long time his sister was barren, and no fertility treatment had been able to reverse this. Her younger brothers had taken the place of sons. It was after their death that the idea of adopting a child had developed, become an obsession with her. When the opportunity presented itself she seized it, for the first time ever defying her husband, who had no desire whatsoever to take in any foundling, and felt all the more reluctant to do so having just fathered a son, illegitimate admittedly but nonetheless his. To what extent Thea was aware of Clemens’ infidelity, Lothar could not tell. She had always expended so much energy in denying anything that might upset her, interfere with her exalted vision of the world, she might have deliberately closed her eyes to that as well.

But the story of this adoption, explains Lothar, he only heard about later when his sister after some fifteen years’ silence wrote asking him to come to Friedrichshafen. She knew she had not much longer to live, and she was concerned about her son. For despite everything, she thought of him as her son and she had loved him. But she had no one to whom she could entrust this child; her close family were dead, her friends had gone their separate ways, and she had managed to isolate herself completely. Then she remembered her elder brother, the brother she had insulted when he opposed the regime, whom she had despised when he married a young woman of Jewish origin, then regarded as a traitor when he emigrated to an enemy country. But it was not only because she had no one else to turn to that she appealed to him, but because she had no doubt he would respond to her appeal. That he would respond immediately, and would undertake without fail the mission she wanted him to accomplish. Her animosity towards Lothar notwithstanding, her trust in him remained intact, and as death neared, it came to the fore again. Whether or not the child should be told the truth, she left it up to Lothar to decide. Even this lie, which after all she had meticulously and doggedly constructed, a lie she had jealously protected, was something she no longer cared about. She no longer cared about anything, had lost the will to fight, the desire to live, the strength to love or hate. She had no expectations, of either forgiveness or pity from anyone, no hopes whatsoever, she believed in nothing. She had plumbed the depths of despair and was preparing to die in a state of total indifference towards herself. Passing into nothingness, that was all. Only the future of this adoptive son, of whose origins she knew nothing except that he had survived the bombing of a city, still mattered to her, and only the brother she had violently rejected seemed worthy of trust. Thea had lived her life from beginning to end ruled by a mixture of paradoxes and convictions as unshakeable as they were arbitrary, without ever questioning her position.

So Lothar was free to tell the child the truth, yet he had not done so, having never considered the time was right. And not a word of this truth – in any case an incomplete truth since no one knew the child’s real identity – had he breathed to anybody, not even his wife Hannelore or his daughters, for fear of adding to the deceit by sharing it with others without the knowledge of the person concerned. And indeed, he asks the young man how he discovered this secret. Who could possibly have told him? What happened in Mexico? But Magnus is unable to offer any explanation. How can he say, without being taken for a lunatic, ‘It was the earth that told me. The earth, the insects, the sun’? He says simply, ‘I just know, that’s all.’

And indeed that is all he knows. The disclosure imparted to him remains incomplete, only the lie about his childhood illness and his falsified parentage has been brought out into the open and confirmed, but he is still in the dark, even more than before, about who he is and where he comes from. He retrieves from the cupboard the teddy bear he had wrapped up and put away. He unwraps it and places it on his lap. He notices the handkerchief he had tied over the diamond eyes is wet through. He unties the handkerchief and discovers the diamonds have lost all their brilliance; they are covered with a rough greyish frosting. This frosting is seeping dampness, like a patch of saltpetre that forms on the wall of a cave. He pulls off the eyes clouded with this film of grey tears, stuffs them into his pocket, and replaces them with the little buttercups that he sews back on. The teddy bear is restored to the way it used to look, with its expression of mild bewilderment. But it has no new revelation to offer the person it once protected and for so long accompanied, still providing only the name it wore tied round its neck, the cotton-thread letters now bleached of colour through exposure to the acidity of the diamond tears.

Magnus is twenty years old (but when exactly was he born, and where?) and a quarter of his life is lost in oblivion, all the rest tainted by a long-lasting fraud.

He is twenty years old, and he is a stranger to himself, an anonymous young man overburdened with memory, lacking however in the essential: his ancestry. A young man crazed with memory and forgetting, who juggles with his uncertainties in various languages, none of which, perhaps, is his mother tongue.

He informs Lothar and Hannelore of his decision to leave England and to go and live in the United States. On the eve of his departure he walks along the banks of the Thames and throws the unseeing diamonds into the water. The handkerchief he has washed. It is now no more than a square of cotton thinner than a sheet of paper, translucid, of a yellowed white. He has tied it round the bear’s neck again.

My mother … my mother’s dead … her voice … so weak … had to travel a great distance … distance … distance…

Now I understand … And when …? when …? when …? did that happen, that she died …? she died …? she died…?

Here begins the story of Magnus. Here, somewhere between San Francisco, New York, Montreal, Los Angeles, and Vancouver, and many other cities besides. May Gleanerstones is a dedicated theatre-goer. She works as a drama critic for several magazines and newspapers, and is always ready to travel thousands of kilometres to seek out new works. Magnus often accompanies her on these trips. Terence is an art dealer and also travels frequently.

Together with Scott, they form a family of four, bound by unconventional ties that interweave without tangling, in which love is declined in the mood of desire and friendship.

Magnus soon adapts to this new way of life of being continually on the move. May is the figurehead of a free ship that sets sail whenever the fancy takes it and adapts easily to prevailing conditions. Thanks to her he finally shrugs off his ghosts, leaves his past behind. The horizon now opens before him, no longer gaping behind him like a black hole. But as much averse as May is to being in any way dependent, especially financially, he takes up translation, translating articles for art magazines, technical publications, essays. His work is irregular, but it suits him because it allows him great freedom of movement.

On three occasions, however, those ghosts reintrude on his life: the first time shortly after moving to San Francisco, at dinner in a restaurant one evening with the Gleanerstones and Scott, when Terence suddenly interrupts the conversation and says to May and Magnus in a low voice, ‘Listen to the people at the table behind us. Listen carefully …’ They pay attention, Scott too. The guests at the table behind them are speaking in a harsh-sounding language. Magnus shrugs his shoulders slightly as a sign of incomprehension. May frowns, concentrating hard. ‘It reminds me of something, but what?’

Terence helps her out by suggesting, ‘Comala?’

May immediately concurs. ‘Comala! You’re right!’

Then, turning to Magnus, she says, ‘It sounds like the language you spoke at times in your delirium at the hospital in Veracruz … those words that weren’t German, that no one could identify…’

Magnus has no recollection of these words he apparently uttered, only the vision of that fateful night in Hamburg has engraved itself on his memory – an explosive image that has cast a new light on his life, but also a blinding image, an obstacle blocking off all his most distant past.

Scott, who feels left out of this memory game, finds a way of joining in: he gets up and goes and asks the tourists what country they are from. He returns to the table, sits downs, and turns it into a guessing game. None of the guesses his friends make is correct, so he finally tells them the answer: ‘Iceland. Magnus must be a clandestine Icelander!’ he announces, and proud of the word he has just elicited from the Icelanders, he raises his glass to Magnus, addressing him with a deep-toned ‘
Skal
!’

But to the surprise of the Gleanerstones and of Scott, Magnus displays no emotion or curiosity in the face of this revelation he regards as fanciful, and he is eager to change the topic of conversation. For the time being he has no desire to look back, to start rummaging through the rubble once more, to wear himself out ferreting around in obscure labyrinths. He is happy where he is and now wants to live only in the present.

On the subsequent occasions, his ghosts return by less fortuitous routes, evoked by current events: these occur in quick succession, in 1961 with the opening in Jerusalem of the trial of Lieutenant-Colonel Eichmann, which gets extensive world-wide coverage, then with the construction of the wall dividing Berlin in two.

A report on the trial of the Nazi criminal, written by the philosopher Hannah Arendt for the
New Yorker
weekly magazine, causes a sensation. She is criticized for her tone, felt to be casual, arrogant, and above all for her analysis and judgment. Magnus reads the indicted report and far from taking exception to it embraces the idea of the ‘banality of evil’. For him, it is no ill-considered concept but rather a finger placed unerringly on a wound so ugly and shameful everyone would rather not see it. Reading Hannah Arendt’s text, he cannot help hearing in the background the voices of those other perpetrators of death and destruction he knew, with whom he came into close contact: the resounding laughter of the humorist Julius Schlack, the perfect elocution of that fine connoisseur of poetry Horst Witzel, and the deep baritone of Clemens Dunkeltal. Voices that would surely have responded, like Eichmann, in a curt monotone devoid of any remorse, ‘Not guilty’ to each charge made against them by a tribunal, had they been captured and brought to trial.

As for Berlin, he tries to recall the memories he has of the rare visits he made to that city when he was about seven, and he can only recollect a visit to the zoo, where Clemens took him one day. It was so unusual for his so-called father to spend time with him, that day left a deep impression on him, especially as his joy at finding himself alone at last with his ‘master of the night’ was immediately trampled over. At the foot of a huge statue of an iguanadon standing near the entrance to the zoo there was a young woman waiting, with a little boy of about three at her side. This visitor and his father had feigned surprise on seeing each other, as if their meeting was entirely due to chance. And this chance encounter so greatly pleased them they remained together for the rest of the outing. However, it was not the unwelcome presence of this talkative woman that spoilt his childish joy, but that of the youngster, a chubby-cheeked kid named Klaus, for whom the ‘master of the night’ showed a lot more concern and affection than he had ever shown for his own son.