Magnus

by Sylvie Germain

Though the rain it raineth every day.

  William Shakespeare

  King Lear, Act III, scenes (ii) and (iii)

  Fragment 20

  Magnus has told no one of what happened at Peggy’s, and before that on the cliffs of Dover. To Peggy herself he said nothing at the end of that dinner to which Timothy invited himself, like some freakish prompter hidden in his prompt-box supplying the text of a completely different play from the one being staged. When she had finished her impromptu reenactment of the scene forced on her, Peggy sat down and slowly drained her glass. Her features were drawn, there were yellow-tinged rings round her eyes. Then she rose again and began to clear the table. She went to fetch a large plastic bin bag from the kitchen, and threw into it the remains of the meal, the paper plates and crystal glasses. She bundled up the damask cloth and stuffed that into the rubbish bin as well. She seemed to have forgotten her guest, carrying on with tidying the dining room as if she were alone. Magnus dismantled the trestle table and returned the two chairs to the small garden on the other side of the bay window. A very fine rain fell silently, barely wetting the leaves of the bushes. From one of the neighbouring gardens came the plaintive and monotonous hooting of an owl.

  When everything was in order, Peggy lit a cigarette which she smoked pacing the empty room. She continued to ignore Magnus’s presence. Then he asked her where she planned to sleep; she couldn’t spend the night in that empty house. She shrugged her shoulders by way of response. As he persisted in staying on she said, ‘Go away now. I don’t need you. I’m leaving tomorrow morning. Everything’s ready.’ He left but remained for a long time standing in the street, opposite her house. He saw her come out, put the rubbish bin on the doorstep, lock the door, then walk away. He followed her without her noticing. She walked to a main road, where she hailed a taxi. And she disappeared.

  He returned to the house, opened the bin and removed the damask tablecloth stained with wine and sauce. He folded it up and took it away, along with one of the two glasses, the one that was just barely chipped, the other having shattered.

  She has been gone five months now. She sent Magnus a postcard with seasonal greetings at the end of the year but giving no details at all of her life in Vienna. Else does not hear much more from her.

  The Schmalkers’ house has a new resident, Myriam. She has come to live with her grandparents so she can attend a course at an art school in London, and more importantly to escape the family home where she refuses to take on the role of big sister responsible for helping mother with the younger ones. She gets on better with Hannelore and Lothar than with her parents. They treat her like an only daughter and not as the eldest of a large family. She has moved into the bedroom that used to be Magnus’s, and has fixed up a studio in the basement.

  Myriam does not talk much, especially in the presence of strangers. At her first meeting with Magnus she says very little, but she scrutinizes him with an intense gaze. The gaze of a small wild animal, direct and fierce, and at the same time that of some startled creature, keyed with mistrust. Hannelore says of her granddaughter that she is like a ray of sunshine in their house, but a capricious sun that sometimes throws pellets of cold, dark light when her work does not meet with her satisfaction, when it falls short of what she wanted to achieve; then she destroys the work judged to be too feeble, unworthy of the dream that inspired it.

  The light of day, meanwhile, is slowly fading from Lothar’s eyes. For some time he has been suffering spells of dizziness, deteriorating eyesight, easily induced breathlessness in his voice. Magnus offers to read to him when he visits. ‘Now,’ says Lothar, ‘I can’t engage with the author of a book by myself, I always need a reader, so there are three of us. The vocal inflections of the intermediary between the author and me reverberate on the text, and then I hear nuances I might not have discerned reading alone in silence. This sometimes produces unusual surprises…’

  In order to be surprised better still, he sometimes asks each of his intermediaries to read him the same pages of a book – pages he ends up knowing by heart but in a polyphonic way, and this knowing ‘by heart’ thereby becomes tremulous, swells and fills with unexpected echos, questions, murmurs. He applies this procedure to biblical texts as well as literary texts, to poems and daily newspaper articles, and depending on whether the voice is that of Hannelore, Myriam, Magnus, or some other person, the words resonate differently. Hannelore’s voice almost imperceptibly slows and softens when a passage stirs doubts and anxieties in her. That of Myriam suddenly hammers out abruptly the words of sentences that evidently annoy her, against which she rebels. Magnus’s voice punctuates with infinitesimal pauses the sentences that disturb him, or whose meaning thwarts him, as if he were trying to tame them.

  For a while Lothar keeps coming back to the Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in St Matthew’s gospel, and to the many commentaries on it, including that of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book The Cost of Discipleship, published in Germany shortly before the Schmalkers were forced into exile and ended up in London. When Magnus reads out pages written by this author he knows Lothar is listening not merely to a text but to the words of a man he knew, respected and admired, a living being who paid with his life the non-negotiable price of ‘costly grace’. In his prime, at the peak of his intellectual powers, in the full vigour of love, he paid the uncompromising price of that grace with his life, on the end of a rope, on a gallows erected at dawn in a concentration camp, by order of the Führer holed up in the bunker where he was to kill himself three weeks later. Magnus imposes a neutral tone on his voice, effacing himself before the voice of the deceased writer, allowing Lothar to engage in a dialogue with his friend and master. And while concentrating on his reading, Magnus listens to the old man’s breathing, whose sound gradually alters in the course of listening, is punctuated with discreet sighs, revealing not so much an emotion, agreement or disagreement, as a mind keeping pace with that of the other, from time to time halting on the fringe of a word, an idea, a desire, an illumination. Or a dizzying insight, such as Bonhoeffer’s comment echoing the call not to set oneself up as judge: ‘If, in judging, what truly mattered to me were the destruction of evil, I would seek evil where it truly threatens me: within myself.’

  Timeline

  DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

  • Born 4/2/1906 in Breslau. Sixth child (one of eight siblings) of Karl Bonhoeffer, professor of psychiatry and neurology, and of Paula, née von Hase.

  • 1923–27: theological studies at Tubingen, then in Berlin.

  • 1927: presents his doctoral thesis in Berlin, entitled Sanctorum Communio: A dogmatic investigation into the sociology of the Church.

  • 1928–29: curate in Barcelona of the German-speaking Protestant community.

  • 1930: presents his Habilitationsschrift, allowing him to become a university teacher, entitled Act and Being.

  • September 1930–June 1931: scholarship for post-graduate study in the United States (at Union Theological Seminary in New York).

  • 1931: chaplain to the students at the Technical School of Charlottenburg. In September, takes part in the ecumenical conference in Cambridge (elected youth secretary of the World Alliance for Promoting Friendship through the Churches). On 15 November is ordained at St Matthaus church in Berlin.

  • 1933: Hitler comes to power. D. Bonhoeffer immediately recognizes the fundamental evil of this Führer that Germany welcomes as a saviour, and publicly warns of the danger that ‘the image of the leader might slip into the image of the misleader … The leader and his office will be deified in a caricature of God’. He also condemns racial hatred and persecution of the Jews, extended to Christians of Jewish ancestry. ‘The exclusion of Jewish Christians from the community destroys the substance of Christ’s Church … The Church is not the community of those who are kindred, but the community of strangers who have been called by the Word. The people of God is a order that supersedes all others … “The Aryan Paragraph” [proclaimed 7 April 1933] is a heresy and destroys
the substance of the Church.’ (Tract written in August 1933)

  • October 1933–April 1935: serves as minister to a parish in London.

  • 1935–37: runs one of the pastoral seminaries set up by the Confessing Church (separated from the German Church, which is completely compromised by its collaboration with the Nazi regime) at Zingst, then at Finkenwalde in Pomerania. Authorization to teach in university is withdrawn from him in 1936.

  • 1937: publication of his work Nachfolge (The Cost of Discipleship). In October the Gestapo close down the pastoral seminaries; arrest of several former seminarists at Finkenwalde.

  • 1938: first contacts with the Abwehr resistance circle that forms round Ludwig Beck, which is joined by Hans Oster, Wilhelm Canaris, Karl Sack … His brother Klaus Bonhoeffer, his brothers-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher and Hans von Dohnanyi also join the German resistance. ‘There is a satanic truth. Its nature consists in denying, under the guise of truth, everything that is real. It lives on hatred of reality and of the world created and loved by God. If we call one who is obliged by war to deceive a liar, the lie acquires a moral sanction and justification totally contradictory to its nature.’

  • 1939: publication of the book inspired by his experience in the seminary at Finkenwalde – Life Together. Travels to London, then to the United States, but cuts short his stay and returns to Germany on the last ship to make the crossing, just before the declaration of war.

  • 1940: banned from expressing himself in public and obliged to inform the police of all his movements. He works on his magnum opus Ethics, not to be published until after his death, by his friend Eberhard Bethge. Plays an active role in the political resistance movement.

  • 1941–42: banned from publishing. As part of his resistance activities he makes several trips to Switzerland, Norway, and Sweden (within the context of ecumenical relations). In November 1942 he becomes engaged to be married to Maria von Wedemeyer.

  • 1943–45: on 5 April 1943 is arrested by the Gestapo, along with his sister Christine and brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, and incarcerated at Tegel military prison. Until August 1944 he continues to read, study, write – letters, notes, outlines for projects … ‘Now I pray simply for freedom. There is moreover a false resignation, which is not at all Christian. We need not as Christians be ashamed of some impatience, yearning, opposition to what goes against nature, and of a strong craving for freedom and earthly happiness and the power to act.’ (Letter from prison, 18 November 1943)

  • After the failure of the Von Stauffenberg plot against Hitler on 20 July 1944, the Gestapo find documents proving his involvement in the conspiracy. His brother Klaus and his brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher are also arrested. On 8 October 1944 he is transferred to the Gestapo’s underground prison on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. On 7 February 1945 he is sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, then to Regensburg, and finally to Flossenburg

  • 9 April 1945: he is executed along with General Hans Oster, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, lawyer Theodor Strünk, Judge Karl Sack and Captain Ludwig Gehre. Hans von Dohnanyi is killed at Sachsenhausen; Klaus Bonhoeffer, Rüdiger Schleicher and another accomplice, F.J. Perels, in Berlin.

  ‘The idea of death has become increasingly familiar to us in recent years … It would not be true to say we wish to die – although there is no one who has not experienced a certain weariness, to which on no account must we give way – we are too curious to give up or, to put it more seriously, we would like to have longer to see what meaning our broken life has. Nor do we sublimate death, life being too important and precious to us … We still love life, but I believe that death can no longer surprise us very much. After the experiences of war, we hardly dare confess our desire that it should not strike us down casually, suddenly, on the periphery of reality, but in the fullness of life and in the thick of the action. It is not outward circumstances but we ourselves who will make our death what it can be, a death that is freely accepted.’

  Fragment 21

  One day he finally decides to take to the laundry the damask tablecloth he extracted from the dustbin that Peggy left outside her empty house. When he gets it home, he opens it out to see whether the cleaning has restored its satin-like smoothness and ivory colour. The wine- and sauce-stains have been washed out, but not completely; they have faded into faint rings of pale pink and amber superimposed on the patterns in the cloth. They are suggestive of some inchoate bloom, like faded flowers emerging from the morning mist.

  Having studied at length these floral designs and traced their indistinct outline with his fingertip, he re-encounters them in his dreams the following night.

  He sees Peggy as she was when they were last together: wearing her light flowing dress, spangled with tiny flowers and butterflies. And suddenly, as in his adolescent dreams when he burned with desire for Peggy, he sees her start to sway, to twirl round in circles – not increasing fast, but more widely expanding – and her dress begins to ripple gently, to rise and open up in a big corolla. And now this dress, dotted with little flowers and insects, is floating round the middle of her body, encompassing that white belly, those slender hips and bare buttocks with a halo of softly radiating light. Her sex is no longer the shape of a sun-like thistle, as in the past, but of a peony with its countless petals closed.

  And now the flowers detach themselves from the fabric, the butterflies take flight and dance in slow motion; the dress evaporates, leaving only a milky nimbus, veined with streaks of orange-yellow, round the naked woman’s waist. Her breasts are beautiful, small and perfectly rounded, their areola the colour of fresh hazelnuts and the nipples themselves like the hazelnut kernel. Her skin is sprinkled with little freckles, unless they are the ocelli of butterfly wings. With a quivering of petals the peony opens up, a mere fraction. And there the dream ends, unfulfilled.

  No, the dream does not end, it takes another turn, becomes transformed. Peggy has disappeared, or rather her body has faded to the verge of invisibility, rather as the washed-out stains on the damask have become misty hints of colour, floral intimations. Only the peony remains, like a clenched fist relaxing, then closing again. No, like a beating heart.

  He cannot see Peggy any more, all he can make out is a heart palpitating in the emptiness, just surfacing out of the milky fog. And he can hear the dull monotonous pounding of this suspended heart. The more visually spare his dream becomes, the more it gains in resonance.

  Is it enough to dream of someone for that person then to remember you and make contact after a long silence? The fact is that a week later Magnus receives a letter from Peggy. For all these months, she writes, she has remained devastated by what happened during that dinner at her house, already then no longer a home to her. But devastated by what exactly, she wonders. Her twofold shame, redoubled by having to confess to the shame she had felt since Tim’s death? Remorse for her own culpability for that death? Her inability to provide any explanation whatsoever for the tragedy? Or bewilderment at the strange phenomenon that occurred that evening in Magnus’s presence, which she still does not understand? She does not believe in ghosts or haunted houses, but she does believe in the strength of feelings, good or bad, when they rise to a pitch of intensity; in the power of emotions, especially if forcibly concealed; in the energy of certain ideas, especially if brutally silenced. The flesh then saturated with all this contained energy, and the heart too sore from things unspoken, from lies, fears, and regrets, gasping for breath eventually cry out all that could not, would not be said. Yes, for months she has lived in a daze of stupefaction, struggling to keep up appearances in front of her colleagues and students at the institute where she teaches. But three days ago all of a sudden the weight bearing down on her was lifted, she was released from the permanent grip of anxiety. She does not know how or why, and is not attempting to explain it. She is simply noting the change, the relief; this first step towards deliverance. But, for all that, without forgetting or denying or refusing to acknowledge anything of what happened – her
responsibility for Tim’s death, her gradual aversion towards him that turned to repulsion, then cold deadly hatred. Have you ever experienced that slow distortion of love, she asks Magnus, and adds that it is something she hopes he has never had to live through, and never will.

  And in these last three days, she continues in her letter, she has the impression of having covered more ground than in several decades. The impression of picking up again, moving forward, without trying to hide her guilt behind her back any more, but bearing it in her arms like some small animal certainly mortally wounded but that she does not despair of saving.

  It is in order to tell him all this that she is writing to him today, and to thank him for having, knowingly or not, stoked the madness that was smouldering inside her, making it burst into flame, burn itself out. And never mind, she adds, if all this seems confused, it was something she had to tell him.

  Finally, she writes, if he should ever have the desire to visit Vienna one day, she would be delighted to see him again. She even goes so far as to say she is renting an apartment big enough to accommodate guests.

  Her letter ends with this invitation, both warm and vague. Magnus soon makes it definite: he decides to go to Vienna the following month.

  Sequence

  ‘A grey ox in China

  lying in the stable

  stretches its backbone

  and at the same moment

  an ox in Uruguay

  looks round to see

  if someone has stirred.

  Flying over both of them

  through day and night

  is the bird that silently

  circles the planet

  and never touches it

  and never comes to rest.’