Magnus

by Sylvie Germain

  He shouts sweeten your playing of death, death is a master from Germany

  he shouts darken your strings then as smoke in the air you’ll rise

  a grave in the clouds you’ll have a grave not cramped to lie in…

  death is a master from Germany

  your golden hair Margarete

  your ashen hair Shulamith

  Paul Celan, ‘Todesfuge’

  Fragment 9

  Adam has pieced together one part of the family jigsaw puzzle that is much more like a painting by Otto Dix, George Grosz or Edward Munch than the romantic picture his mother presented to him. But this puzzle still remains very incomplete. There is a gap surrounding his early childhood and Lothar is unable to help him fill it since his uncle left Germany the year he was born.

  He learns English quickly, but without experiencing the same emotion that Spanish affords him. He pursues the study of both languages simultaneously, one out of practical necessity, the other because of an inner need. He has set up Spanish as an absurd talismanic goal: he is determined to gain a perfect command of the language of the fraudulent Felipe Gomez Herrara in order to gain ascendancy over the ghost of that assassin whose crimes remain for ever unpunished, and over the loathsome charm to which he, the deceived abandoned son, above all the son unbearably tainted by this kinship, is still susceptible. It is no longer a tomb for the suicide’s body that he wishes to build with this language but a fortress in which his father will be eternally confined. In fact he wishes he could dissolve his father in the words he aggressively masters, as though in acid.

  As for his mother, he is unable to locate her precisely in the irregular geographies of his heart. He thinks of her in a turmoil of tenderness, resentment, anger and pity. He thinks of her often, so often he cannot accept the idea he will never see her again.

  She had indeed cleaned up his scruffy teddy bear before stuffing him into the suitcase, just as she told him on the eve of their parting, but this cleaning-up turned out to be more a curious kind of mending. Magnus’s golden-yellow buttercup eyes that gleamed with gentleness have been transplanted to the soles of his feet and fixed in their place are two colourless but very sparkling little crystal roses. After a moment’s surprise, then uncertainty, Adam recognized these roses of glittering transparency: they were the diamond earrings Thea used to wear in the days of those splendid dinner parties and musical evenings in the house on the moors. The little boy he once was would marvel at their brilliance, like gleams of moonlight in his mother’s ears, suffusing her face and blonde hair with astral brightness. She brought them with her when they fled, along with all her other jewellery, to raise cash if need be. Since they were forever in need she must have sold off all her bits of treasure but these two perfect diamonds she had kept. Now they shone in Magnus’s face, two faceted beads, devoid of colour and above all of reverie. The eyes of a monstrous fly, blind and blinding.

  Adam had a sudden impulse to tear off those obscene diamonds disfiguring his bear, but just as he was about to act on it his hands dropped: it was if he were about to do violence to his mother, to remove her eyeballs. He contented himself with removing from the bear’s neck the kerchief embroidered with the name Magnus, to blindfold him with it. On examining the buttercups ridiculously pinned to Magnus’s feet, he finally realized they too were a pair of earrings; much more modest pieces of jewellery, of a gold and copper alloy. Did his mother wear these when she was a young girl, before she married Clemens and appropriated jewellery stolen from the women assassinated by her husband in the camps?

  He wrapped Magnus up in a cloth and hid him at the back of the wardrobe in his bedroom.

  As soon as his level of English was sufficient to attend normal classes, his uncle enrolled him in a school as a boarder. So he spent most of the time away from the Schmalker family and his relationship with his two cousins, Erika and Else, five and three years older than him, remained distant. He preferred the younger, a small brunette of mischievous charm with already a lot of admirers. Erika by contrast inspired in him mixed, indeed rather painful, feelings so much did she resemble Thea – the aunt having circumvented the mother to pass on to Erika her fair hair, sharp features, and even the inflections of her voice. But the young girl inherited from Hannelore her taciturn character, solemn gaze, and reserve. This web of similarities even extends to her choice of fiancé: a young man from the emigrant German community in London who is intending to take up the same pastoral duties as his future father-in-law, just as the medical student Clemens Dunkeltal formerly followed in the footsteps of Professor Schmalker, very soon to branch off in a completely different direction, it is true, going so far astray he became totally mired.

  Among Else’s girlfriends, who all excite his curiosity, one in particular captures his attention, a very curly redhead called Peggy Bell. What attracts him about this mercurial young lady are the little physical oddities of which she feels ashamed and that he finds enchanting, such as the sprinkling of freckles on her cheekbones and upturned nose, the dimple that appears in her left cheek whenever she smiles, the slight cast that imparts a look of perpetual surprise to her lime-green eyes, and her hands and feet, as small and plump as those of a little girl.

  But this little girl is seventeen, and she is impudent. One summer afternoon when visiting the Schmalkers, finding herself momentarily alone with Adam in the drawing room, she leaps up from the chair in which she was sitting, and comes and stands right in front of him, an adolescent boy of nearly fifteen and all the more gauche for being in a confusion of desire, and asks him point blank, ‘Am I pretty? Tell me honestly, do you think I’m pretty or not?’ He is left speechless. She pretends to be offended, and he, incapable of responding with a compliment, of uttering the slightest word, or of smiling, grabs her in his arms and kisses her on the mouth. At the touch of her warm lips, her soft breasts against his chest, her body, all curves and youthfulness, he suddenly feels welling up inside him a rush as powerful as that he experienced with euphoria and amazement one day already long ago on the banks of Lake Constance, at the sight of the dual conflagration of sky and water during a storm. His kiss and his embrace are as fleeting as the gigantic flash of lightning was that day, and their effect just as intense. Then with the same abruptness with which he drew her close to him, he pushes her away and flees the room, red with shame, leaving Peggy dumbfounded.

  This stolen kiss is to release in him over the coming months a succession of dreams that sometimes waken him with a start in the middle of the night, his belly wet with a milky whiteness. In each of his dreams he sees Peggy Bell coming towards him, sometimes laughing, sometimes looking cross, playing with her skirt, whose folds swing, dip and twirl, then drop down, all starched and well-behaved, only to start up again, twirling round. This game goes on for some time until Peggy catches her skirt by the hem and all of a sudden lifts it up. Lifts it up very high, baring her knees, thighs, belly. She is not wearing any knickers, she has just a little russet sun whose rays ripple over her extremely white skin. Sometimes the sun revolves, sometimes it turns into an orange-coloured thistle, or a chestnut-burr. But what exactly is inside the burr?

  Erika gets married, and the following year it is Else’s turn, then Peggy Bell’s. So someone other than Adam has assumed the right to penetrate the secret of Peggy’s body, a certain Timothy McLane. Someone else, and not he, is going lay hold of her belly and her breasts, the little russet sun blazing between her thighs. Another. An interloper. Not he.

  On the night of the wedding, overcome with suppressed fury and resentment, knowing he has been robbed of his dream, Adam does what he has never yet dared, and thought himself incapable of daring to do – he seeks out a prostitute. So, while Peggy takes off her white dress in some honeymoon suite and prepares to yield her virgin body to her husband, Adam in a short-stay hotel room watches some unknown woman with dyed hair undress with routine gestures and present to him her already faded body. She lies on the bed and spreads her legs. And there he has done with h
is virginity, with his dream of a sun of silk-soft warmth. He has done with his false innocence and his batch of naive images, but not with the strength of his desire that on the contrary becomes still more ardent.

  The Schmalker house, to which he continues to return for all the holiday periods, seems very empty to him now. With the perfume and laughter of the young girls gone there is a drabness that now prevails. From time to time faint cries and mewlings are to be heard, those of Erika’s daughter, Myriam, when the young woman visits her parents with her baby. This is the first baby Adam has ever seen, for though as a child during the exodus he observed a lot of dead bodies along the way he has never before laid eyes on a newborn infant, and the sight amazes him. Myriam is a tiny creature with brown hair stuck to her head, her frog-like bulging eyes shut, little fists tightly clenched, a mouth greedy for milk and ready to complain. He dare not take her in his arms, her fragility terrifies him, her smell repulses him, her whimpering irritates him. But he bends over her when she is lying in her cradle and studies her at length, disturbed by this strange mixture of purity, daintiness and delicacy, and pathetic toad-like ugliness when the little face screws up and convulses as a result of hunger or some other vexation, the face of a miniature old man with diaphanous satin-like skin concentrating on some ancestral wisdom much too vast for his still unformed mind. He himself, he reflects, was like this baby, like some nacreous-hued ancient sage full of age-old knowledge, quivering with comfort in the maternal arms, with repletion on the maternal breast, with light in the maternal gaze, and imbibing, from his mother now dead, her milk, smiles, and tender words, her caresses and her smell. And he suspects this cannot have totally disappeared, that this original love must be dormant deep in his flesh. In far-off days her milk nourished him, her smiles quieted him. And her softly sung words wakened him to the world; her caresses, to his own body; and the clearness of those maternal eyes, to the beauty of the day. Maybe, in days yet to come, this love lying dormant in the darkness of his heart will raise its auroral face to cast light on him at last, to help him forgive all those crimes with which, out of pride and tragic stupidity, that foolish mother of his colluded. Maybe.

  And he holds his breath on the brink of this maybe, before the infant snuggled in her cradle, before the enigma of that body, so tiny and vulnerable and yet supreme, absorbed in the sound of its own blood in which there yet murmurs the entire memory of the world, the universe.

  Hannelore always behaves towards him as a considerate but distant host; Lothar, as a tutor primarily concerned for the sound academic, moral and religious education of his nephew. But offering no emotional guidance whatsoever. His feelings are unruly, he does not know what he likes, or what he wants. He does not know how to love. From time to time, whenever he can, he goes with a prostitute, but his heart rings hollow.

  This is what it comes down to: the Schmalkers are tutors carrying out their educational duty as best they can. For Adam is well aware he is an outsider grafted on to his uncle’s family, a refugee twice over under the roof of emigrés. He is not their son and never will be. Worse, he remains the offspring of a cowardly killer and through her stupidity and vanity a criminal by association. His powerlessness to wipe out this sickening ancestry, or at least call to account the parents he loved with an innocence he now deems culpable, translates into a violent animus towards himself. This bitterness inwardly chokes him, and as he emerges from adolescence sculpts his features with harshness.

  The puny child he used to be, owing to years of poverty in Friedrichshafen, becomes at eighteen a young man of medium height with burly shoulders and a rough-hewn face. His hair has darkened to a shade of walnut with coppery glints and his once winsome curls are now shaggy and unkempt. His forehead is broad and prominent, his eyebrows are bushy circumflexes, and there is a bronze-tinged smokiness to his deep-set light brown eyes. He has high cheekbones, a flat nose, full lips, the upper one slightly projecting, and a square jaw. None of the prettiness of his mother or the imposing aspect of his father in their younger days. There is something of the bear and ram about him.

  Note

  BEAR: Like all large wild animals, the bear is one of the symbols of the chthonian unconscious – lunar and therefore nocturnal, deriving from the inner landscapes of the earth mother.

  Many peoples regarded the bear as their ancestor. In Siberia until a short time ago there were still graveyards for bears.

  For the Yakut of Siberia the bear knows everything, remembers everything and forgets nothing. The Altaic Tartars believe the bear hears through the medium of the earth, and the Soyot say, the earth is the ear of the bear.

  In Europe the mysterious huffing of the bear emanates from caves. It is therefore an expression of darkness, of gloom; in alchemy it corresponds to the blackness of the primary state of matter. Darkness and the invisible being associated with that which is taboo, the bear’s role as initiator into the arcane is thereby reinforced.

  RAM: The ram is a cosmic representation of the animal force of the fire that erupts dramatically, explosively, at the earliest moment of materialization. This fire is both creative and destructive, blind and rebellious, chaotic and prolonged, prolific and sublime, and from a central point spreads out in every direction. This fiery force relates to the inceptive surge of vitality, the primordial impulse of life, with all that is pure crude urgency in such an inchoate process, all that is ebullient, zestful, indomitable energy, dynamic excess, fervid animation.

  Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant

  Dictionary of Symbols

  Fragment 10

  Since he has a great facility for learning languages and still nurtures an obscure passion for Spanish, he chooses to study Romance languages at university, Portuguese and French as well as Spanish. In fact he is especially gifted with an extraordinary memory, having diligently trained it from the age of six as a defensive reaction to the loss of all his memories of early childhood. He can instantly memorize every new word he reads or hears. This retentiveness also applies to anything visual. But while this excessive memory might be an advantage in his studies, it is also a burden to him. His memory remains active without respite, registering the slightest detail, letting nothing go. It torments him even at night, fomenting in his dreams a riot of images and words with an exactitude that sometimes wakens him with a start, so razor-sharp is it. He then has the impression of a rift in time, of past and present colliding, running into each other, overthrowing the sequence of events. Coexisting inside him, intact, unbearably vivid and enduring, is every moment of his life since the age of six. It is therefore impossible for him to mourn his parents, to distance himself from them, from their lies, their madness, their crimes. And their ill deeds oppress him with shame, sadness, and anger, they contaminate his body, imprison his youth. They hold his heart captive. He is the posthumous hostage of two predators whose death now guarantees them eternal impunity, and therefore a perpetual injustice to him. Whether or not there is any judgement to face in the hereafter does not concern him. It is here and now, before the world, that the mortified son would like to make his parents pay, and particularly his father.

  At the end of his third year of studies, he goes to Mexico for five weeks. This is the first journey he has made since emigrating to England and his first foray outside Europe. He goes off on his own to encounter, by himself, a country and a language that as yet he only knows through books and that torment him with caustic desire.

  When he arrives in this country he has the sense of finally meeting someone in the flesh after years of only hearing their voice. He encounters the vast, rugged, magnificent landmass of the language in which the bogus Felipe Gomez Herrera was entombed. After ten days in Mexico, he sets out for the state of Veracruz. He does not know what exactly he hopes to find there. He has no knowledge of where his father lies, or even if he was buried or cremated. He knows no one who could tell him about the fugitive’s last hours. His mother had announced only the brutal fact: the death of Clemens Dunkeltal by his own
hand, with no other explanation. Then she had immured herself in her despair, so worn down by loneliness that little by little she died of it. So he wanders first of all through the town of Veracruz, its suburbs, port and shipyards. Sometimes he stops in the middle of the pavement, examines the facades of the houses, wondering if his father lived there, perhaps hid there. Or walking on the quayside, he watches the ships, one of which might in the past have carried the absconder. He scans the dark waters glinting with greasy brilliance in the harbour where rather than face justice that bastard, on his last legs and down to his last cent, maybe threw himself in. He juggles all day long with such hypotheses but settles on none of them.

  One evening, while drifting along in this way, he notices a woman walking down an avenue in front of him. Her step is confident, she has black hair plaited in a long thick braid, and terrific legs. Forgetful for a moment of his ruminations, he follows her for the sole pleasure of observing this figure that moves likes a dancer.

  At one point the woman steps off the pavement to cross the road, but hardly has she set foot on the highway than a car she has not seen comes speeding towards her. Adam rushes forward and manages just in time to grab her by the arm and pull her back. The reckless driver goes hurtling by, indifferent to the accident he almost caused. The woman is thoroughly dazed by the shock and the roar of the car, Adam is breathless. Eventually she says to him in English with a strong American accent, ‘Thank you, I think you just saved my life …’ Then, recovering herself, she repeats the same phrase in Spanish, searching for her words.

  The beautiful passer-by is Mary Gleanerstones. She comes from San Francisco and is spending a few days in Veracruz, accompanying her husband on a business trip. She absolutely insists on introducing Adam to Terence, her husband, whom she was on her way to join at their hotel, and she invites him to have dinner with them.