Magnus

by Sylvie Germain

  They head southwards. But the south seems to keep receding, so long is their journey, continually zigzagging in constant panic. They wander through desolate countryside, through towns and villages in ruins, passing hordes of distraught people. Sometimes they take refuge for several days in a cellar or barn. They are hungry but fear assails them even more.

  They have lost everything, even their names. They have swopped that of Dunkeltal for Keller: the parents are now called Otto and Augusta Keller, and he simply Franz Keller. Only his bear Magnus is entitled to retain his original identity. The child interprets this absurd alteration in his own way. He tells himself that in the bewildering confusion that now prevails, where the least thing, even a crust of bread, a cigarette butt, becomes a tradeable item, a name too can have an exchangeable value. But exchangeable for what, to what advantage – this he does not understand, and his parents do not really explain, merely forbidding him to make any reference to his real name, the house they have left, the region where they used to live, even his father’s profession. The child listens to these instructions whispered to him in a tone of peremptory secrecy, and obeys without argument. He is meek and reserved by nature, accustomed to living on the margins of adult society, with so much of what they say and do remaining a mystery to him. He keeps to himself his bewilderment, his doubts and questions, and lets them gravely mature in his solitude. But the sight of towns laid waste, of terrified crowds fleeing along roads where unbelievable scenes erupt from time to time as panic reaches fever-pitch, and the roar of planes cutting through the sky cast him into a state of stupefaction and nausea that soon translates into dull pains in his belly, as if all these images of collapse were rotten fruit, bits of contaminated meat ingested through his eyes, ravaging his entrails. At night these distorted images stir in his insides with the heavings of muddy waters and he wakes up crying, curled up round Magnus.

  And then his father parts company with them, leaving him and his mother to continue this journey through hell by themselves. He says he will rejoin them as soon as he can but for safety’s sake he still has to hide, and without him they will travel faster. This is true. As soon as his father goes his own way, the endless journey improves, as if they had been relieved of a burden hampering their southward progress. All the same this separation is painful for the child.

  Augusta Keller and her son Franz come to a small town that even a few weeks ago must have been very pretty. Now it is no more than ruins on the edge of a lake. Here, their wandering finally comes to an end and their wait for his father’s arrival begins.

  Note

  Friedrichshafen: a town in south-west Germany, situated on the northern shores of Lake Constance.

  In the 19th century the town served as a summer residence for the Württemberg royal family.

  The town’s history is marked by Ferdinand von Zepplin, who at the end of the 19th century set up production here of airships or dirigible balloons of rigid type.

  Important industrial centre in the early 20th century (construction of aeroplane engines).

  At the end of the Second World War the town was the target of heavy aerial bombing by the Allies; the old town was almost totally destroyed.

  Fragment 5

  Augusta Keller proves to be a dour double of friendly Thea Dunkeltal. She has lost her lovely house, her social status and her circle of acquaintances, every one of whom deferred with great compassion and respect to her deep mourning for her two young brothers, sacrificed so that the Reich might be vastly extended in time and space. Above all she has lost the dream of grandeur that helped her to bear with courage a sister’s grief for the loss of her younger siblings, heroes whose frozen bodies, lying unburied somewhere in the East, in a land of snow and barbarism, must have been devoured by stray dogs or wolves.

  The Führer is dead, the clarion-voiced incarnation of this dream of splendour himself, and with him, after a derisory dozen years, the thousand-year Reich has foundered. Nothing is left of her two combined passions, patriotic and fraternal, nothing but ruins, ashes and bones. She has just seen her nation pass overnight from triumph to catastrophe, the country’s beautiful towns collapse like smoking ant-hills, and her people, once so proud, reduced to bands of fugitives steeped in fear, poverty and shame. She feels outrageously cheated, robbed, and as the days go by her plight is poisoned with bitterness. But she is strong, determined to fight for survival, and she girds herself with patience to await the return of her husband. Thanks to relatives of his in Friedrichshafen, she finds a room where she can stay with her son, in a part of town away from the centre spared by the bombings, and a job as a cook in a hospital. The salary is derisory but the position ideal for scrounging enough to avoid dying of hunger.

  Despite her tiredness she still finds time in the evenings to tell her son stories. She knows that everything he has seen in the course of their journey through scenes of devastation has traumatized him. Every night he wakes with a start, cries out, wails. Then she takes him in her arms, cradles him to her body, and recounts in a quiet voice the much-repeated yet sadly belied family saga. She embroiders, illumines the past, blotting out as much as she can the memories of recent weeks and promising a radiant future. As soon as his father returns, everything will get better. Life will resume as before, elsewhere and different of course, but as before, yes, even better than before. She thrills as much as the child to the tales she weaves in the darkness of their wretched room.

  And the days go by, at once dreary and fraught, oppressive days of waiting, of feeling bereft and anxious. But sustained with hope. One autumn evening his father finally reappears – or rather the shadow of his father. Otto Keller is not even an enfeebled double of powerful Clemens Dunkeltal but a pathetic imitation. He has shrunk into a grimy fugitive, grown very thin, ill-shaven, the look in his eyes that of a hunted animal, a vicious beast. Franz observes with dismay his king of darkness overthrown, drained of his power, shorn of all magic. Can he even sing any more with his poor lanky stooped body? What has become of the night sun that resounded voluptuously in his chest? Has he swopped that too, like his name, his watch and so many other things, for food or false papers? But the joy of seeing him again, still alive, outweighs the mortification of finding him so reduced. The child stays with him as much as he can, expressing with his eyes what his lips dare not articulate: not to worry about any of this, that most of all he still loves him, perhaps even more than before. Yes, more, because pity for his father now outweighs the fear Dunkeltal used to inspire in his son in his days of glory. And at least now his father does not go away any more as he did when he had important responsibilities. He remains most of the time locked in their room, only rarely venturing out and always after nightfall.

  Such are the thoughts of the child who, beguiled by the masterfully constructed conceit of his mother, still has no understanding of events and innocently lives his life cut off from reality, despite all the brutality this reality brings to bear and he has to suffer. But hunger and destitution seem almost easy to endure with his parents reunited. And then there is a great project in the making: the plan is to go to a distant country across the seas. The name of this country, which he often hears mentioned by his parents in the evenings, has the brightness of a promise, the beauty of a dream, the magic spell of a secret: Mexico.

  Mexico – this for all three of them is their secret, their hope, their future.

  One night his father returns very happy from one of his discreet outings. He has procured the money and papers necessary for his journey. He is at last equipped to set off for Mexico ahead of his wife and son who will rejoin him as soon as he can bring them over without danger. He proudly shows Augusta-Thea his new papers in the name of Helmut Schwalbenkopf, and this avian surname amuses him. ‘Schwalbenkopf, swallow’s head, now that’s a good omen for undertaking this perilous migration!’ Then he adds with a peculiar smile, ‘Ah, good old Helmut …’ and he goes on to recite in a playful tone a verse from a poem by Eichendorff:

  ‘
If you have a friend in this world, don’t trust him at this hour, though with friendly eyes and smiling mouth, he is planning war in perfidious peace.’

  Franz listens to him, a little bewildered, and taking his hand asks, ‘Please sing, father …’ As his newly effected transmutation into Helmut Schwalbenkopf has put him in a good mood, his father sings mezza voce a Schubert lied that deliciously thrills the child.

  Note

  Schwalbenkopf, Helmut: born 1905 at Friedrichshafen, Bade-Wurtemberg. Baker.

  Married in 1931 to Gertrud Meckel, born 1911.

  Two children: Anna-Luisa, born 1934, and Wolf, born 1937.

  Enlisted in 1939, sent to Poland, where he is wounded, and later to Russia, where he is taken prisoner. Freed in 1946, he returns home.

  Back in Friedrichshafen, he discovers his wife and two children have died and his bakery was destroyed in the bombardment of the city at the end of the war.

  Reduced to vagrancy in his own city, one evening in March 1947 he disappears. No one knows what has become of him. Some people assume he committed suicide, but his body has never been found. Maybe he threw himself into the lake, whose waters are the most secret and inviolable of graves.

  Fragment 6

  His father has gone away again, on a very long journey this time. And the waiting resumes, even more tense than last time. Thea, who retains her pseudonym of Augusta Keller, once again girds herself with patience but under the stress of tiredness and anxiety, increasing as the days go by, she becomes harsh and irritable. She stops coddling her son and begins more and more often to scold him. Suddenly she thinks he is too dreamy, lazy, that he has outgrown childhood and it is high time he put it behind him. She takes over the father’s fault-finding and severity towards the boy.

  It is true that Franz is already nine years old but he is in no hurry to join the ranks of adults. As he gets older he begins to have a better understanding of their behaviour, their pleasures and worries, but without any insight yet into their implications. Nor does he attempt to deepen his understanding of the obscurity of grown-ups, for the little he is able to puzzle out does not seem very appealing. He has a sense of something small-minded, wretched even on occasion, about their preoccupations as well as their satisfactions. And besides they are not very reliable. For years they go quietly about their business, then suddenly drop everything, abscond, change their name as readily as they would their shirt, and ultimately flee to the ends of the earth.

  That is not the worst of it: adults are capable of destroying everything, burning everything – houses, bridges, churches, roads, entire cities. He has seen this and he still lives in a landscape of ruins. But apparently there is even worse madness than this: the destruction not only of cities but of entire peoples. This is beyond young Franz’s comprehension. He has heard some incredible stories and above all seen photographs at once mesmerizing and blinding to look at: piles of skeletal bodies like bundles of pine wood thrown in a heap, living-dead with enormous haunted eyes sunk in black holes, children so thin and ragged they look like little old men, their bald heads too heavy for necks reduced to the size of a rhubarb stalk. And far from offering any explanation and helping him to confront these revelations that provoke mental combustion and leave his mind prostrate, in shatters, his mother refuses to discuss them. She even persists in denying the evidence, going so far as to denounce the news as lies and the published photographs as fakes. And she declares with as much conviction as rancour that it is precisely because of all these slanderous untruths spread by the victors that her husband was compelled to flee. And she says she cannot wait to go and join him, to leave for ever this country she once so loved but that has lost all greatness since being orphaned of its Führer. Franz does not know how or what to think. It is hard for him to identify the boundaries of reality, to distinguish truth from mystification. He detects a strong whiff of bad faith and dishonesty in his mother’s acrimonious words but he is still under Thea’s influence and what she says carries weight, for better or worse.

  Similarly, he asks himself questions about his father, whose name, like those of his friends Julius Schlack and Horst Witzel, has been extensively cited in the course of trials being held since the end of the war, but so monstrous are these questions they are checked by a wall of amazement. His father is declared a ‘war criminal’. The enormity of the term makes it inconceivable; Franz is unable to grasp exactly what it means. He is all the more unable to do so because in his heart of hearts he does not really want to understand, so frightened is he of having to deal with a truth he suspects is ghastly. Is Dr Dunkeltal’s crime his failure to overcome the typhus that killed thousands of the patients in the camp where he worked? This seems unfair to the child, incapable of daring to imagine any offence other than incompetence. In the face of everything, he retains a prestigious image of his father and wants to see him again, to hear once more the deep soothing sound of his singing. No, Franz certainly has no desire to emerge from the state of ignorance natural to childhood, is in no hurry to throw himself into the cruel fray of the adult world. Besides, he has not had his full share of childhood. Illness robbed him of a very great part of it, war and the exodus spoilt the rest. And this lost part distresses him, causes him pain, like an amputated limb that continues to send twinges through the amputee’s body. So rather than upset himself by probing the accusations against his father, he prefers to look towards the eclipse of his own past and peer into the strange black hole that swallowed up his early childhood.

  By concentrating on this mystery lying dormant in the depths of his being, he reinforces it. Sometimes he can feel it quivering in his flesh, then diffusing fleeting sensations under his skin such that he could not say whether they were painful or pleasurable. This always happens unexpectedly, but he soon notices that these inner frissons – like needles of fire inside his body, discharging in volleys and racing through his nerves, veins, backbone – occur on particular occasions: whenever there is a blaze of intense brash colour, such as the bright red and yellow of a fire suddenly gathering strength with a roar in the stove, a blinding midday sun, a pyrotechnic sunset of vivid orange and reds, the gigantic fissure of a saffron streak of lightning against the dark blue of the sky. Once, before such an explosion of incandescent brilliance, he felt a crescendo of excitement culminating in a seismic tremor in the most intimate depths of his body, a kind of upheaval no less violent than voluptuous from which he emerged exhausted and jubilant, dazed. He had just experienced his first orgasm without understanding what it was.

  That is when he develops an obsession with colours and dreams of becoming a painter, though he has nothing but a few pathetic chalks and crayons with which he scribbles on bits of cardboard, for want of better materials. The results are so disappointing he soon abandons these attempts at drawing and contents himself with waiting for the eruption, here or there, of those splashes of virulent colour that throw him into a state of turmoil he dreads as much as he longs for.

  Note

  Dunkeltal, Clemens (born 13/04/1904): Obersturmführer in the SS.

  Doctor of medicine. Served as camp doctor successively at KL Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, and Bergen-Belsen.

  He made the selections of the deportees, sending the sick and the weakest to the gas chambers; personally took direct part in the extermination of numerous prisoners by administering phenol through an injection to the heart.

  Sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment, he is being sought in Central America, where he is suspected of having managed to escape thanks to the support of the clandestine Nazi organization ODESSA.

  Fragment 7

  The days drag by, slowly, tediously. Augusta Keller counts them off in silence, counts them and recounts them, the way savers keep calculating the amount they have saved towards a better life. The more time passes, the greater her impatience to put her present meagre existence behind her. She awaits the signal that will allow her to rejoin her husband.

  What finally comes is not a signal
for departure but rather notification of a permanent standstill: she receives news that her husband is dead. After being on the run for nearly three years, moving on from one country to another and ending up in Mexico, he tried to settle down in the state of Veracruz. But there too he felt pursued, watched and in danger, and so, his strength and hope exhausted, he apparently committed suicide. The last name he adopted, the one he was hiding behind at the time of his death, was Felipe Gomez Herrara.

  Augusta Keller has nothing to look forward to any more. Now in smithereens, her dream of getting away has come to nothing. The widow resumes her own name, that of Thea Dunkeltal. Since the worst has happened she has nothing more to fear, so nothing more to hide. Nor does she have anywhere to go, her parents died in the bombing of Berlin, and what family she has left, in Zwickau, is imprisoned on the other side of the border that now cuts through Germany like a suppurating scar. In the wilderness where she is now captive, Widow Dunkeltal starts turning round and round in circles. Ever tighter circles that soon become suffocating. She suffers from asthma but neglects to take care of herself. She just keeps plodding on towards her own extinction.

  More lonely and bewildered than ever, Franz-Georg closes in on himself. This is a closing-in on a breeze, for he lives with an acute sense of irrationality and insecurity. As during his convalescence in the Lüneburg countryside, near Celle, he seeks comfort in nature, earth and sky. He relishes being in the open, gratifying his senses, musing at length on everything. His musings consist of a kind of slow and reverent mastication of the visible, of sounds and smells. He loves the lake just as much as he loved the heath. That expanse of unruffled blue, constantly varying, going from milky azure to almost black violet or from opalescent lime to dark green, depending on the time of day. He never tires of studying the life of colours, their perpetual transformations, their quiverings, their slow effusions followed by abrupt changes.