Magnus

by Sylvie Germain

  THE AUTHOR

  Sylvie Germain was born in Chateauroux in Central France in 1954. She read philosophy at the Sorbonne, being awarded a doctorate. From 1987 until the summer of 1993 she taught philosophy at the French School in Prague. She now lives in Pau in the Pyrenees.

  Sylvie Germain is the author of eleven works of fiction, ten of which have been published by Dedalus. Her works of non-fiction include a study of the painter Vermeer, a life of the 20th-century Dutch mystic Elly Hillesum, a portrait of Warsaw, and a religious meditation. Her work has been translated into over twenty languages and has received worldwide acclaim.

  Sylvie Germain’s first novel The Book of Nights, was published to France in 1985. It has won five literary prizes as well as the TLS Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize in England. The novel’s story is continued in Night of Amber, which came out in 1987. Her third novel Days of Anger won the Prix Femina in 1989. It was followed by The Medusa Child in 1991 and The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague in 1992, the beginning of her Prague trilogy, continued with Infinite Possibilities in 1993 and then Invitation to a Journey (Eclats de sel). The Book of Tobias saw a return to rural France and la France profonde, followed in 2002 by The Song of False Lovers (Chanson des Mal-Aimants).

  Magnus, published in 2005, has won several prizes in France including the Goncourt Lycéen Prize, which is selected from the 12 novels on the Goncourt shortlist by 15–18 year old students at French High Schools. It was also shortlisted for the Grand Prix du Roman de L’Académie Française.

  THE TRANSLATOR

  Christine Donougher read English and French at Cambridge and after a career in publishing is now a freelance translator and editor.

  Her translation of The Book of Nights won the 1992 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize.

  Her translations from French for Dedalus are: 7 novels by Sylvie Germain, The Book of Nights, Night of Amber, Days of Anger, The Book of Tobias, Invitation to a Journey, The Song of False Lovers and Magnus, Enigma by Rezvani, The Experience of the Night by Marcel Béalu, Le Calvaire by Octave Mirbeau, Tales from the Saragossa Manuscript by Jan Potocki, The Land of Darkness by Daniel Arsand and Paris Noir by Jacques Yonnet. Her translations from Italian for Dedalus are Senso (and other stories), Sparrow and Temptation (and other stories).

  To Marianne and

  Jean-Pierre Silvéréano

  What has not been said at the proper time is perceived at other times as pure fiction.

  Aharon Appelfeld

  CONTENTS

  Title

  The Author

  The Translator

  Dedication

  Prelude

  Fragment 2

  Note

  Fragment 3

  Sequence

  Fragment 4

  Note

  Fragment 5

  Note

  Fragment 6

  Note

  Fragment 7

  Note

  Fragment 8

  Sequence

  Fragment 9

  Note

  Fragment 10

  Sequence

  Fragment 11

  Note

  Fragment 1

  Notes

  Fragment 12

  Sequence

  Fragment 13

  Echo

  Fragment 14

  Sequence

  Fragment 15

  Sequence

  Fragment 16

  Resonances

  Fragment 17

  Resonances

  Fragment 18

  Sequence

  Fragment 19

  Sequence

  Fragment 20

  Timeline

  Fragment 21

  Sequence

  Fragment 22

  Resonances

  Fragment 23

  Note

  Fragment 24

  Resonances

  Fragment 25

  Echo

  Fragment 26

  Sequence

  Fragment 27

  Litany

  Fragment 28

  Insert

  Fragment O

  Palimpsest

  Fragment 29

  Fragment?

  Translator’s Afterword

  Copyright

  Prelude

  A meteorite explosion may yield a few small secrets about the origins of the universe. From a fragment of bone we can deduce the structure and appearance of a prehistoric animal; from a vegetal fossil, the presence long ago in a now desert region of a luxuriant flora. Infinitesimal and enduring, a plethora of traces survive time out of mind.

  A scrap of papyrus or a shard of pottery can take us back to a civilization that disappeared thousands of years ago. The root of a word can illuminate for us a constellation of derivations and meanings. Remains, pit-stones always retain an indestructible kernel of vitality.

  In every instance, imagination and intuition are needed to help interpret the enigmas.

  Take a man whose memory is defective, long steeped in lies then distorted by time, plagued with uncertainties, and one day all of sudden made incandescent, and what kind of story can you write about him?

  A sketch portrait, a confused narrative, punctuated with blanks, gaps, underscored with echoes, and ultimately fraying at the edges.

  Never mind the confusion. The chronology of a human life is never as linear as is generally believed. As for the blanks, gaps, echoes and frayed edges, these are an integral part of all writing, as they are of all memory. The words of a book are no more monolithic than the days of a human life, however abounding these words and days might be, they just map out an archipelago of phrases, suggestions, unexhausted possibilities against a vast background of silence. And this silence is neither pure nor tranquil; there is an underlying murmur, a continuous whispering. A sound rising from the confines of the past to mingle with the sound gathering from all reaches of the present. A breeze of voices, a polyphony of whisperings.

  Inside every person the voice of a prompter murmurs in an undertone. Incognito. An apocryphal voice that if you only lend an ear may bring unsuspected news – of the world, of others, of yourself.

  To write is to descend into the prompter’s box and learn to listen to the breathing of language in its silences, between words, around words, sometimes at the heart of words.

  Fragment 2

  On every object, every person, including his parents, he poses a gaze full of candour and amazement, studying everything with close attention. The gaze of a convalescent who has come close to death and is relearning to see, to speak, to name things and people. To live. At five years of age he fell seriously ill and the fever consumed all the words inside him, all his recently acquired knowledge. He is left with not a single recollection. His memory is as blank as the day he was born. However, it is sometimes traversed by shadows that come from he knows not where.

  His mother, Thea Dunkeltal, devotes her entire time to reeducating her amnesiac and unspeaking child. She teaches him his language once again and gradually restores to him his lost past, recounting it episode by episode, like a story told in instalments of which he is the central character and she the good queen looking after him. She delivers him into the world for the second time by the sole magic of the spoken word.

  In this fairy-tale by instalments, like all fairy-tales a spellbinding blend of the fearsome and the marvellous, every member of his family has the stature of a hero: he as the victim of a galloping fever that he has nevertheless managed to overcome; his mother in the role of the good fairy; his father that of a great doctor. In addition to this trio are two other characters, even braver and more admirable, who are his mother’s younger brothers, killed in the war. It is his duty to acknowledge them with pride and gratitude for evermore. Because it was for him they sacrificed themselves by goi
ng off to fight in a distant land where the men are as cruel as the climate, so that he might grow up in a country of power and glory. And the child, who confuses the words ‘enemy’ and ‘illness’, imagines that his warrior uncles died battling against his illness, died of cold and exhaustion driving back the fever-foe into an icy waste so as to extinguish its burning heat. Bearing their first names, he meekly allows himself to be transformed into the living mausoleum of these two heroes.

  Seductive as this family epic full of nobility and sadness might be, it nevertheless suffers from one defect that, although apparently small, greatly upsets the child: his mother grants no place in it to Magnus, whom she treats in fact with scorn, even revulsion. However, Magnus and he, Franz-Georg, are inseparable. So he secretly introduces his companion into the legend, inventing scenes for him murmured at length into his ear (the one that bears traces of burning, to soothe it) when they are alone together. Scenes in which Magnus has a role equal to his own.

  Note

  Magnus is a medium-sized teddy bear with a rather worn coat of light-brown fur turned slightly orange in places. A faint smell of scorching emanates from him.

  His ears are made of two large circles cut out of a piece of soft leather. They have the reddish-brown colour and smooth shiny appearance of chestnuts. One is intact, the other half burned away. An oval cut out of the same piece of leather trims the end of each of his paws. His nose consists of strands of black wool closely stitched in the shape of a ball.

  His eyes are unusual, with the same shape and of the same gleaming gold as the buttercup flower, giving him an expression of gentleness and amazement.

  He wears a square of cotton rolled up round his neck, embroidered with his name in large multi-coloured letters. Crimson M, pink A, violet G, orange N, midnight-blue U, saffron-yellow S. But these letters have lost their brilliance, the threads are grubby and the cotton has yellowed.

  Fragment 3

  He spends most of his time observing his surroundings. They say he is too dreamy, inactive. But no, it is very serious work he is doing, studying at length the landscape, the sky, objects, animals and people, striving to engrave it all on his memory. A memory that has been as amorphous and unstable as sand. He is now endeavouring to give it a mineral-like solidity.

  He likes the land that extends round his village, the pink mist of gorse, the ponds and juniper copses, and above all the forests of silky-white birch trees, gleaming in the twilight when the blue of the sky darkens. The contrasts of colours and of luminosity fascinate him. In skies heavy with dark clouds he seeks for the breaches of sunlight, the glimpses of periwinkle blue, and on the greenish water of the marshes, for patches of brilliance, on mossy rocks, the fleeting glint of the stone’s texture, like a flash of silver ore. But he is afraid of the dark, which swallows up shapes and colours, and casts him into a state of anguish. It is then that he hugs Magnus to his breast, like some ridiculous cloth shield, and whispers fragments of incoherent stories into his ear, preferably the left ear, the one that has been injured and therefore needs special care. Just as his mother cajoles him by lulling him with stories, he comforts Magnus by caressing him with words. In words there are so much power and gentleness combined.

  Adults disconcert him. He does not understand their anxieties or their pleasures, and still less the bizarre things they sometimes say. There are times when they bray with joy or anger. When he hears this too loud, crude laughter, or these angry cries, he retreats into himself. He is overly sensitive to voices, to their texture, pitch, volume. His own voice sometimes sounds strange, as if his throat were left raw by the wheezing and tears that racked him when too severely afflicted by the fever during his illness.

  He loves his parents with all his heart but he observes them too with perplexity from his deep loneliness as an only child, especially his father, who intimidates him and of whom he never dares ask any question.

  Clemens Dunkeltal is a doctor but he has no private patients, nor does he work in a hospital. The place where he practises his profession is not far from their village though Franz-Georg has never been there. Judging by his majestic demeanour, his air of gravity, Dr Dunkeltal must be an important man – a health wizard. He receives patients by the thousand in his vast country asylum, and all undoubtedly suffer from contagious diseases since they are not allowed out. Franz-Georg wonders where these hordes of sick people can possibly come from. From all over Europe, his mother told him one day with a faint pout of mingled pride and disgust. The child looked in an atlas and was left speechless: Europe is so vast, its peoples so numerous.

  His father is often away, and when at home pays but little attention to his son. He never plays with him or tells him stories, and when he does deign to show any interest in him, it is only in order to criticize him for his passivity. Franz-Georg can find neither the boldness nor the words to explain that observation is not at all laziness but a patient exercise in training his memory. He swallows back tears of impotence at not being able to express what he thinks and feels, and most of all tears of sadness at failing to please his father.

  But there are those magical evening when Clemens turns into a bountiful king, when accompanied at the piano by his wife or one of the friends they have invited to dinner, he takes up a position in the middle of the drawing room, standing very erect in the pale somewhat acid light cast by the chandelier, and in his bass baritone voice gifted with amazing plasticity he sings songs by Bach, Schütz, Buxtehude or Schubert. His mouth opens wide, like a dark abyss where a storm-beset sun trembles and rumbles. The light plays on the metal frame of his spectacles and his eyes disappear, as though they had become one with the glass discs. Then his clean-shaven face, with receding hairline and aquiline nose, looks as if it too is cast in some white metal, or kneaded out of dough. A stark shiny mask, as worn by the chorus in Greek drama. And he sketches in the air the slow movements of a seed thrower. He has beefy hands but his fingernails are perfectly manicured, and they gleam under the ceiling light.

  The child listens, holding his breath to allow more room for his father’s, in all its powerfulness and agility. The voice of a master of darkness whose menacing forces he overcomes just as he managed to defeat the fever-foe. For Franz-Georg is convinced it is by singing in this way that his father must have helped him to get better, and surely this is how he treats the countless patients who have come flocking to him from all over Europe. And the child enfolds himself in this vocal chrysalis, denser and more voluptuous than the drawing room curtain of purple velvet in which he sometimes likes to hide.

  It is for this voice, the voice of enchanted evenings, that Franz-Georg loves his father and has boundless admiration for him. Never mind if his father shows little affection, even though this is hurtful. His singing is enough to console him for this distress, or at least transform it into contented melancholy. His father is distant but his singing is a haven, a pleasure. He harbours a nocturnal sun within his breast.

  Sequence

  Night Song in the Forest

  Hail to you always, O Night!

  But twice hail to you here in the forest,

  where your eye has a more secret smile

  where your footstep falls yet more softly!

  Yours is a language of whispering breezes,

  Your paths, interwoven shafts of light,

  Whatever your mouth but quiets with a kiss

  Grows heavy-eyed and sinks into a slumber!

  And as we cry out in song:

  ‘Night is at home in the forest!’

  So the lingering echo replies:

  ‘She is at home in the forest!’

  So twice hail to you here in the forest,

  O gracious Night,

  Where all the beauty of your array

  Appears yet more beautiful.

  Nachtgesang im Walde

  a choral work by Franz Schubert

  based on a poem by Johann Gabriel Seidl

  Fragment 4

  The father has seemed preoccupied fo
r some time, holding long discussions with the mother, or with some of their friends who seem just as vexed. The child is kept isolated from these conversations, of which he nevertheless catches fragments. Among the words that often recur in these discussions there is one that intrigues and disturbs him: typhus. The patients in Dr Dunkeltal’s care are succumbing to this infection in their thousands. Franz-Georg has tried to find out more but it is harder to find out the meaning of a word in a dictionary than the whereabouts and size of a continent in an atlas, for he cannot yet read very well. But since he hears the words ‘war, enemy, defeat’ spoken more often, he again identifies them with the word ‘illness’, and therefore ‘typhus’.

  There is no such confusion in Clemens Dunkeltal, and it is with bitter lucidity that he realizes the extent of the growing danger. Day by day he and his friends lose their arrogance, becoming increasingly tense and irritable, and looking harassed and aggressive. Even his jovial companion Julius Schlack, who brightened so many evenings at their house, and Clemens’ colleague Horst Witzel, a poet in his spare time, who seizes every opportunity to recite long works by Kleist, Goethe, Herder, Hölderin and Schiller, no longer joke or declaim. Suddenly they all change their way of dressing, of greeting each other, of behaving. They abandon their very impressive uniforms, their noisy and solemn salutes, they lower their tone and adopt a less martial attitude. They end up hugging the walls. And so closely do they hug them, they almost seem to walk through them and turn themselves into currents of air.

  One night in March the Dunkeltals flee from their home with the stealth of thieves. Holding on to his mother with one hand, Franz-Georg clutches his bear in the other to dispel his fear of the dark and of the unknown. In his mind they are fleeing a dreadful enemy called typhus, which has come from every corner of Europe. Is it the same fever as the one that almost killed him two years ago? If so, his uncles must have died in vain, and the family legend be no more than a delusion.