Magnus

by Sylvie Germain

  ‘Der Abend schleiert Flur und Hain/In traulich holde Dämmerung …’1 The man stands very upright in the pale light under the chestnut tree, his mouth opens wide, a dark chasm of mellifluousness. With the stench of death. ‘Die Baüme lispeln Abendsang/Der Wiese Gras umgaukelt lind …’2 He sketches in the air the slow gestures of a seed-sower. A sower of bloodletting, terror, ashes. Magnus can see again the purple velvet drawing-room curtains in the house by the heath. And in the folds of the curtains appears the spectre of a little boy. ‘Der Geist der Liebe wirkt and strebt …’3 The mouth of darkness ringed with an oval of white modulates the incantation to ‘the spirit of love’. Every precisely articulated word falls on Magnus like a drop of acid, he clenches his jaws and fists to suppress a fierce desire to cry out. Having often heard them in the past he knows every one of these words, this tune, so well, –‘Geist der Liebe’, Thea’s favourite lied.

  The curtain grows heavier, its folds deepen into long black and purple trenches with figures in their thousands trembling at the bottom of them. Peggy listens, enraptured, to this improvised concert under the chestnut trees in the tavern garden. The evening of her unexpected engagement is a joy of utter charm and delight, a feast for all the senses. She raises her glass and unobtrusively clinks it against Magnus’s before bringing it to her lips. She smiles as she sets it down again, her left cheek dimpling, her lime-green eyes sparkling. Peggy: first body he desired, first mouth he kissed, a body lost and found, embraced at last, and penetrated, caressed, explored, and still desired. Peggy, song of the flesh, love incarnate.

  ‘Ein Minneblick der Trauten hellt/Mit Himmelsglanz die Erdenwelt.’4 The mouth of darkness closes slowly, almost regretfully, in a sensual sigh. The elderly gentleman with the white goatee beard and coronet of white hair has certainly sung with talent, with a suave passion whose warmth delicately diffuses through the garden, enchanting all the customers in the tavern, and a spate of applause punctuated with a few enthusiastic bravos hails his performance.

  This end-of-concert commotion suddenly brings Magnus back to reality – the curtain disappears, his memories recede, his emotion subsides, and everything inside him falls silent. He was surely mistaken, his misapprehension giving rise to a delusion. Despite a few admittedly very disturbing similarities, this dapper seventy-year-old amateur lieder-singer is not, could not possibly be, former SS Obersturmführer Clemens Dunkeltal. The fugitive Dunkeltal died ignominiously in the port of Veracruz more than thirty years ago. Magnus reassures himself, dispels his suspicions, and finally relaxes.

  ‘It was for you he sang that song,’ he tells Peggy, and explains how he approached the waiter. But he does not admit the real reason for his initiative, and when a radiant Peggy laughs at this supposed subterfuge, he feels a bit of a heel.

  The success scored by the elderly bass baritone rekindles the liveliness at the table where he is sitting: the hero, in his element, is toasted by all around it. Suddenly Magnus, who is no longer paying him the febrile attention he directed at him all the time he was singing, notices a man who has come up behind Walter Döhrlich. A clean-shaven man of about forty with brown hair and a crew cut. He has placed one hand on the singer’s shoulder, a gesture conveying as much pride as affection. The pride and affection a son feels for his father. Which, judging by what they say to each other, is what they are. The resemblance between this man, named Klaus, and Walter Döhrlich, is not obvious; however, the resemblance between him and Clemens Dunkeltal at the same age is glaring. Apart from the hair – Clemens Dunkeltal’s was lighter and rather fine whereas this man’s is thick and brown – everything else tallies: the same stockiness, even the same bearing, the same aquiline nose and thin-lipped mouth, the same oblique line between arched eyebrows, the same square chin. Though old Dunkeltal, now balding, with his nose fixed and his chin cleverly rounded with a cleverly-trimmed goatee beard, has made zealous attempts to disguise himself, the job is only half done: he has neglected to change the inflections of his voice when he sings and his German accent when he speaks, and he has not noticed that his son has become the mirror image of him at a younger age. So here he is, betrayed by what he is most proud of, his beguiling voice and his beloved bastard son, Klautschke of the Berlin Zoo.

  A great calm settles on Magnus, as if all his rage and emotion were consumed during the song. The shock of this revelation has lessened, and his suspicions, momentarily allayed, return in force, verging on certainty. But to be absolutely sure he needs one last incontrovertible piece of evidence. Magnus asks Peggy if she could find a piece of paper in her handbag. She tears a page out of a little notebook and hands it to him, along with a pen. He writes a few lines on this piece of paper, folds it in four, then suggests to Peggy they go home. He orders a taxi which they wait for in front of the tavern. As soon as he sees the car arriving, on the feigned pretext of having left the pen on the table he tells Peggy to wait for him in the taxi and hurries back into the garden. He gives the waiter a tip and asks him to convey another message to Walter Döhrlich. He positions himself not far from the Döhrlichs’ table, by a chestnut tree whose lower branches make his presence more discreet, in order to observe the scene about to occur.

  The waiter hands the note to its intended recipient, who takes it from him, laughing. He waves the message about, hinting it must be a billet-doux from the lovely lady charmed by his singing. The old poseur sees himself as Orpheus, and the whole table takes up this bantering. He unfolds the note and reads the contents. His smile freezes, his face pales, his features turn leaden. His table companions observe this and their bantering abruptly ceases. He abruptly raises his head, his chin jutting forward. He scrunches up the paper in his fist, then whips off his glasses and scans the area around him, his eyes creased in fury. But there is also terror in his gaze. The gaze of an unmasked imposter. The gaze of Clemens Dunkletal at the time of his flight when the war ended. Like the voice, a gaze is an unfalsifiable signature.

  Magnus has the proof he was looking for. He slips away and hurries back to rejoin Peggy in the taxi, returning the pen he had stuffed into his pocket. He is careful to direct the driver to a neighbourhood far from where they live, explaining to Peggy that he wants to take a ride round the centre of town.

  He says nothing of what has just happened, he is too staggered – at having seen not a ghost but a scum-bag, very much alive and well, a solid lump of flesh owing its self-preservation to the inexhaustible greed and cynicism of the timeserver. A scum-bag, but no less a member of the ordinary human race. He does not yet know what he is going to do, his mind dwelling on the words he hastily scribbled on that piece of paper, trying to work out what he meant by the vague threat he had formulated.

  Throughout the journey he squeezes Peggy’s hand in his, to keep in contact with that aspect of the human race that is light and beauty.

  Notes

  1 Evening veils meadow and grove/ with fair intimate dusk

  2 The trees whisper evensong/the meadow grass gently sways…

  3 The spirit of love acts zealously…

  4 A loving glance from the beloved casts/heavenly light on this earthly world.

  Note

  ‘For a man who has been dead for more than thirty years you still sing very well, Dr Clemens Dunkeltal. It’s true, you’ve had several changes of voice: the voices of Otto Keller, Helmut Schwalbenkopf, Felipe Gomez Herrara. And perhaps a few others besides. Not to mention, of course, the voices stolen from your thousands of “patients” at Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Gross-Rosen, and Bergen-Belsen.

  All those voices, Dr Clemens Dunkeltal, would have a lot to say about your “spirit of love”. Rest assured, they will have their say. Very soon.

  For it would be a pity if a talent as great as yours were to remain unknown. Don’t you agree?

  Until we meet again, then, in the very near future.’

  Fragment 24

  Clemens Dunkeltal has vowed that the author of the message delivered to him, which he immediately reduced to a little ball of pape
r, will be made to swallow it. And, not knowing the name of this author, he wastes no time in finding out. He does not reveal to his table companions the contents of the note, which he passes off as a disparaging comment from a fellow diner obviously allergic to his singing, but he makes enquiries of the waiter, who does not understand what has happened.

  ‘But it was the same man who requested ‘Geist der Liebe’ to please his wife,’ he says, ‘and he seemed very happy about it…’

  Then a young girl sitting at the end of the table intervenes. ‘The wife – wasn’t she the red-head in a blue and black polka dot dress, sitting over there?’

  The waiter nodded.

  ‘I know her,’ the young girl continues. ‘She’s an English teacher, I was in her class two years ago.’

  And the young girl gaily babbles on in English, diverting attention from the incident, in the end of no great interest. But Dunkeltal junior, who has guessed that the incident was of some importance, asks for the name of this charming English teacher with the moody husband. Margaret MacLane. No sooner has he been given the name than he offers to take his father home, pleading tiredness.

  A taxi drops off a couple in a little street close to the Oberlaa baths, and drives away. The street is deserted at this late hour, the air has just begun to cool. Magnus halts for a moment on the edge of the pavement, searching his pocket for his keys. He has his back turned to the road, while Peggy stands beside him, facing it. It is then that she sees a car that was lying in wait nearby come hurtling towards them. She cries out and gives Magnus, still rummaging in his pockets, such a hefty shove that he is pushed aside just far enough so that the oncoming vehicle only strikes his hip. He falls backwards into the dust-bins lined up there. As he falls he hears a dual sound, a thud and a shriek of equal intensity – the sound of a body run over and thrown into the air, the shrill cry emanating from that body. Lying on his back, stunned by the impact, he beholds a bewildering, absurd image: Peggy falling from the sky and hitting the asphalt three metres away from him. The car does not stop, does not even slow down. But a dustbin has rolled into the road. The car swerves. One of its wheels bumps against the edge of the pavement. It drives on regardless. It is going so fast the driver loses control just as it turns the corner of the street. And that is where it skids and goes crashing into a lamp post.

  Magnus wants to get up, but is unable to. He feels pinned to the ground by a burning pain in his hip. He calls out to Peggy, lying curled up in the gutter. He drags himself over to her. People emerge from the building and come running over to them. All he can see around him are feet. There is the sound of a police siren in the distance, or of an ambulance. He reaches his hand out towards Peggy, touches her hair. It feels wet and reddens his fingertips. There are voices talking above him, but he does not understand what they are saying. He is listening only to Peggy’s laboured breathing. Their faces are right up close to each other. He can see Peggy’s lips moving feebly. ‘Tim?’ she murmurs. Her voice sounds both plaintive and questioning.

  Two men are pulled out of the car that smashed into the lamp post. The driver is dead, killed instantaneously, his chest staved in by the steering wheel, his face lacerated by the shattered windscreen. His passenger is seriously injured. In the hollow of one of his hands, now limp and inert, a ball of paper is found. No one gives it any attention. The crumpled note falls among the shattered glass, metal, pools of blood.

  Peggy MacLane and Klaus Döhrlich are buried the same day, in two different cemeteries in town. Neither Magnus nor old Döhrlich attend their burials, both are in hospital. Magnus has a fractured hip and femur, the other a shattered spine.

  In the apartment left unoccupied, near the Oberlaa baths, dust gathers on the packing-cases, unwashed glasses and damask tablecloth. The Schneewittchen stem stands stark in the emptiness, its dried leaves and petals forming a delicate scree on top of Magnus the teddy bear’s head and round the champagne cork lying between his paws.

  Resonances

  ‘Magnus? Who is Magnus?’ May had asked.

  Magnus is a teddy bear with worn fur, covered with dry shrivelled rose petals. A stale smell of dust emanates from him. Schneewittchen, the rose was called.

  Magnus is a man of about forty, broad-shouldered, with an angular face. He walks with a limp. He gives an impression of solidity and despondency, of extreme solitude. Iceberg is the other name for that rose.

  Loneliness whose big heart is clogged with ice…

  ‘Have you ever experienced the slow distortion of love?’ Peggy asked him in a letter.

  No, not the distortion. All Magnus knows of love is the crazed waiting, doubts and anguish, and the bliss. A great deal of bliss. And the chasm of grief, the devastation of loss, twice over. But the second time, it was he who opened up the chasm.

  ‘I hope it’s something you’ve never had to live through, and never will,’ she added.

  He has done something worse than let love turn to revulsion – he has offered it up, live, for slaughter, by mistake, and through anger, in the name of a cold hatred suddenly turned furious, incandescent. A hatred stronger than his love.

  My wits begin to turn.

  Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?

  I am cold myself.

  ‘What about May, what’s become of her? And Peggy? Did they stay behind in Comala?’

  May, with your long black braid, Peggy, with your red-gold hair.

  She and You both stand there, elsewhere, nowhere, each in our degree:

  ‘What do you mean to do?’

  . . . let Time go by till my change come.

  Black milk of first light …

  We dig in the air a grave …

  Fragment 25

  When Magnus leaves hospital, equipped with a walking stick, it is already well into autumn. His disability is going to qualify him for a pension before long. Thus concludes the dramatic accident of which he was a victim. For so it has been classified – an accident, not a killing.

  There will be no trial. Clemens Dunkeltal will be tried neither for his last murder nor for the innumerable crimes he perpetrated in the past. Seated in the armchair he is confined to as an invalid, he has just committed his last crime by getting one of his faithful friends to administer a poison that will allow him to make a cunning exit behind the mask of the charming Mr Döhrlich. That Walter! The whole affair is suppressed even before it has had time to be picked up, to become known.

  What good will it do to try setting himself up again as the dispenser of justice? Magnus has lost everything by having too impetuously, presumptuously, played at being detective and avenger. He went rushing in like an enraged ram charging an obstacle harder than its own forehead. The obstacle finally gave way, reduced to smithereens, but it brought everything down with it. Magnus is now no more than the witness of his own misdeed, his own insane conduct. Witness for the prosecution, with no mercy for himself.

  Magnus closes the door to the apartment for the last time. Everything is in order. Everything – in this case, nothing.

  The place has been cleaned and emptied: the order of nothing prevails. Moving has turned into clearance. The furniture, household goods, and odds and ends have ended up in a sale room. Peggy’s clothes he has wrapped in the damask cloth, and this shroud weighing as much if it contained her dead body he has thrown into the Danube. A river grave for Peggy’s flowery dresses, striped dresses, polka-dot dresses, butterfly-patterned dresses, cardigans, shawls, shoes and underwear.

  The Dunkeltal affair is laid to rest, buried in the respectable Döhrlich family vault where father and son lie side by side in everlasting complicity.

  Meanwhile the body of love decomposes in silence, in the coldness of the earth, perishing with loneliness. Its grave is modest, very stark. Its outer layers of silk, cotton, satin, Tergal and wool, its smell, its perfumes dissolve in the opaque waters of the river.

  Love’s beautiful body and its fabric outer layers stripping away desire, love’s crazed body and its sensual fle
sh rot in the mud, in the mire.

  Once again Magnus is starting out from zero. As when the Gomorrah hour struck – an ever abysmal moment on the dial of his life. And this zero is not only burdened with very crowded memories, and fraught with loss, it is seared with remorse and helplessness.

  A complete nothing reigns inside him, and this nothing creates neither order nor clarity. It leaves in his spirit only confusion and a taste of dust. Shame and remorse are not so quickly dispelled.

  He leaves Vienna, his only luggage being two bags, containing clothes, a few books, some letters, his teddy bear, and Lothar’s death mask.

  He does not return to London, nor does he move to Rome. He sets off with no particular destination. It is enough for him to know where he does not want to go: Vienna, London, Rome, three cities from which Peggy’s absence banishes him. ‘Magnus, an unidentified Icelander!’ Scott had suggested one evening. Magnus could at last go to the country presumed to be the land of his birth – but to seek whom? To find out what? The enigma of his birth is now less of a torment to him than that endless boundless night when his love came to grief.

  He is looking for a neutral, remote place, a place of a water clock nature, where he can let Time go by till his change come. What change? He does not know, but for him this not knowing is now the only adventure worth while.

  He goes to France, where he avoids the big cities. He flees the crowds, the noise, company of any kind. Passing through Morvan, he finds the part of the country in which to establish his solitude. He moves into a house reduced to two rooms and attached to a barn and a stable more spacious than the house itself, near a small village called Bazoches with a château rising above it. There is a broad view from this place, extending over fields and forest, and opening out in the distance over the hills of Vézelay. These names suggest nothing to him. Magnus is a stranger to this land, and to its history, and this ignorance suits him. He has come to cleanse his gaze, purge it of an excess of images. He is just a bear-man wanting to hibernate.