Magnus

by Sylvie Germain

  Echo

  You hear rustlings. Laughter … after … Time-worn laughter, as though weary of laughing … weary of laughing … And voices wasted … wasted …

  All this you hear … you hear …

  The trees whisper evensong, the meadow grass gently sways…

  You hear rustlings…

  The spirit of love … heavenly light on this earthly world … earthly world …

  The day will come when these sounds … you hear these sounds will die …

  will die you hear … die

  You hear the silence you hear

  nothing … hear nothing …

  Fragment 26

  Magnus’s hibernation lasts a long time, several seasons, but generates no torpor, no passivity. It is totally taken up with doing a job no less slow than intangible: allowing time to decant, day after day, hour by hour. This is a process similar to erosion, or the formation of stalactites in a cave; a process that demands fantastic patience, concentration, scouring of the mind. A laying bare of oneself.

  He walks a great deal – a step-by-step decanting. He rises early and goes out into the countryside. He has a slightly lurching gait, and always carries a wooden staff for a walking stick. The area over which he rambles describes a kind of huge star shape, with points extending in a zigzag. The local people are used to seeing his limping figure go by, along the paths, down the streets, through the villages. No one knows where he comes from, who he is exactly, or what he is doing in this remote part of the world. He is no talker, and does not give anything away. But he is no bother to anyone, polite to all. Not knowing what this foreigner’s country of origin is, people deduce from his accent and taciturn nature that he must come from northern Europe, and that is how he is referred to: ‘the guy from the North’. Or sometimes, ‘the guy with a limp’.

  One day he penetrated deep into a forest on the other side of the river that winds through the Massif, and emerged into an abandoned clearing. Lined up around the edge of it were bell-shaped constructions of straw intertwined with slender branches, set on planks: old-fashioned beehives, such as Magnus had never seen before. It was cold that day, a dry frosty cold that silvered the dormant hives. In the centre of the clearing stood a small stone structure covered with moss: a niche built to house a small statue – but the statue was gone. Inside the empty niche a long brown-red slug slowly crept forward. Magnus sat on this mound to rest a while. He was soon wondering at the sounds around him. They were different from those he had grown used to hearing deep in the forest. These sounds were more nuanced, more modulated, as though someone were trying to play a wind instrument, inexpertly and yet with a certain grace. He peered into the undergrowth, strained his ears, but detected no human presence. Yet this somewhat hushed melody was coming from very close by. He rose to examine the place, and finally discovered the source of this music: some beech trees with strangely carved trunks, hollowed out in places, through which the wind whistled as it blew through them. He thought he could make out in the trunk of one of these carved trees the outline of a body, an indistinct face with a faint smile on it, and a rough-hewn pair of joined hands. In another, the figure of a man holding a trumpet. And in yet another, a relief carving of a heart; and there, the horns of a ram. But these beeches were dead, some still standing, others lying on the ground, all overgrown with ivy and brambles. He would have returned to this wood but he could never find his way back again.

  He also spends long hours motionless – a drop-by-drop decanting. He has cleared out the barn but does not furnish this vast space with an earthen floor. The only function he assigns to it is to serve absolutely no purpose. An extravagant uselessness, gratuitousness, a sanctuary dedicated to emptiness.

  There is a chair by the door. Holding the back of it, Magnus picks it up when he enters the barn and places it sometimes in the middle of that emptiness, sometimes against a wall, or in a corner, and there he sits, with his stick planted between his knees, and his hands folded over it. He is capable of remaining like that for hours, appreciating the silence, enjoying the effects of the gloom and the light filtering through the ill-fitting slatted walls, observing the barely perceptible swirl of dust in the rays of light, the work of a spider spinning its web in a nook. Occasionally a field mouse comes scampering by, sniffs around, turns away and scurries off. Birds too venture into his vacant sanctuary, some have built their nests here. When he leaves, he always puts the chair back by the door.

  In the church at Bazoches is the tomb of a certain Vauban. Magnus finds out who this man was, learns about the extent of his achievements, the multiplicity of his interests, his genius, his courage – a remarkable man, who fell into disgrace on account of his exceptional intelligence, boldness, generosity of mind, having been thoroughly exploited by his king, whose only greatness and connection with the sun lay in the epithets he usurped.

  The body buried here has had its heart cut out – Napoleon had it entombed in Les Invalides a century later. Magnus thinks back to the crypt of the church of the Augustinian Friars, which he visited with Peggy at the beginning of his stay in Vienna, to those Hapsburg hearts also wrested from the breasts in which they had formed, in which they had beaten. Hearts in exile, sealed in urns. This carving-up of the corpses of noblemen, heroes, and saints, and distributing of their limbs, bones, hair, viscera in various places seems to him a curious mixture of barbarism, obscenity, and infantile magic. What use would he have for the hearts of May, Peggy, and Lothar preserved in reliquaries?

  But this splitting-up of sacred remains into separate pieces corresponds perhaps to that other phenomenon of disintegration that takes place in the living bodies of the bereft: every loved one in passing away steals a little flesh, a little blood from those who remain on earth, shivering with cold and pointlessness in the continuous drizzle of absence. Magnus’s body was diminished in this way at a very young age, when his mother, the unknown woman in Hamburg, was consumed by fire before his eyes, charring a section of his heart and transfixing his memory. And May too stole her share of his flesh, her share of his heart, mingling them with her ashes scattered in the silent blueness of the sky. Then Peggy – the great sensual abduction, and the burial of desire, of all joy, all pleasure in the black chill dampness of the earth.

  Of his father he has nothing, not even an image – except maybe that first name found round the little bear’s neck, which he adopted as his own? This fragile ‘maybe’ is the only link between them. His austere guardian Lothar, who became his protective friend, has left him with a plaster mask. A lifeless mask with closed eyelids, sealed lips, robbed of that smile of wonderful goodness that quietly illuminated the world. Lothar took with him that brightness he was capable of raising at the boundaries of thought. Magnus can no longer perceive the slightest glimmer on the horizon, whether of days past or days to come.

  The decanting of time is still producing only billowing mist in the distance, and a few gaps in it that have the harsh brilliance of frost.

  Such is the life Magnus leads in his Morvan solitude, forming posthumous friendships at the graveside; silent friendships with this or that tree, with an ox or a ewe encountered at the edge of a field; fleeting friendships with clouds, babbling springs, smells of earth and wind. Friendships of the here and now.

  Sequence

  My thought

  and not a caress

  And yet

  I touched you

  with my thought

  my thought

  and not a caress

  like your memory

  or words not spoken

  or your closed eyes

  and yet your memory

  those words and looks

  are the caress of a bygone day

  on my thoughts.

  Matthias Johannessen, ‘To touching’

  Fragment 27

  Returning from one of his walks one August afternoon, Magnus notices an old woman sitting by the barn door. She is wearing a shapeless straw hat, a shift so faded it is of an i
ndeterminate colour, and muddy overshoes. She is quietly sunning herself, with her arms folded on her chest. When she sees him approaching, she waves as if she were sitting in front of her own house and greeting a neighbour.

  ‘Goodday to you, son!’ she calls out in a reedy voice. Magnus thinks she must surely be some mentally confused old lady who has lost her way and sat down here thinking she is at her own house. Her face is very wrinkled, covered with wisps of hair, and her undoubtedly toothless mouth is all awry.

  Just like the good witch in a fairy tale, Magnus says to himself. He returns her greeting, practically shouting, suspecting her of being deaf. ‘Goodday, ma’am.’

  The ‘old lady’ corrects him, laughing. ‘No, son, a mere man!’ And he removes his hat, uncovering a bald spotted pate. Bees that must have been dozing on his straw hat begin to flit round his head, some settling on his forehead, his face.

  ‘But a sensible and happy man,’ the little fellow adds, ‘for I’ve made the best choice in the world, you see, the company of bees and the kind of freedom that is the sweetest madness, the madness of supreme love. That’s why I’m something of a woman as well. And therefore a charmed man.’ With this explanation, he nimbly gets to his feet.

  He is small, very slight, with a stoop, but his body still seems as agile as that of a child. He puts his hat back on, and opens up his hands. The bees come and gather on them. He extends his bee-covered palms towards Magnus and says, ‘In the hive their queen is constantly surrounded by a very busy court of servants and workers. But for me they’re all queens, especially the workers, the foragers, the fanners, the sweepers, and the guardians of the threshold. Each has its own task, which it unfailingly fulfils, from beginning to end of its brief existence. Look at them, my little queens, my bright flares! The sun’s maids of honour…’

  Magnus has not understood a great deal of what the little fellow in his muddy-coloured homespun shift has been babbling on about. His voice is thin and his rustic accent very strong. Magnus has the impression of being confronted with a clown, juggling with both tamed insects and odd utterances, or rather a scarecrow suddenly endowed with movement and the power of speech, and he wonders where the fellow comes from and what he wants. The clown flaps his hands and his insects take flight, starting to circle round him again.

  ‘I’m Brother Jean. Who are you?’

  Magnus is taken aback by this question, simple though it is, and he gives an answer that comes as a surprise to himself. ‘I’ve forgotten.’

  The clownish monk does not seem to find this reply in the least unexpected. ‘That can happen. And it’s a good a sign.’ With this serenely delivered comment he goes toddling off, a golden flurry swarming round his hat.

  No matter how much thought he gives it, he cannot recall his name. This lasting forgetfulness dismays him. He does not see any good sign in it. On the contrary, he feels stricken with anonymity, as though felled by a blow, an ailment. The sickness of loss, combining in this latest attack the stealthy attrition of wastage with the anguish of despoliation. Is this the only result of that long labour of decanting conducted in the solitude of footpaths and forests, in the silence of the barn?

  Nevertheless he eventually returns to the barn. Planting himself against the back wall, he summons to his aid all those people he has known and loved, but their names come to him in a jumble, overwhelmed by those of people who have been an affliction to him. He does not want to hear the detested names of Thea and Clemens Dunkeltal, along with all their pseudonyms stinking of lies and wickedness, nor those of Horst Witzel, Julius Schlack, Klaus Döhrlich, But these names grow shrill, they cling, sticking to his tongue.

  Knautschke, Klautschke – these nicknames plague him, slosh round in his mouth, turn into seething verminous words, Klasche Klapse Knalle Knaren Knacke Knülche Knauser Kleckse …1 Verbal smacks, verbal expectorations. He sees them as big clots of blood roiling in the pink gaping gob of a yawning hippopotamus. He feels them gurgling in his throat, thickening his saliva. He starts striking the ground with his stick to silence this viscous tumult.

  Shut your trap, Knautschke! He strikes harder and harder, head down, straining his brow like an animal ready to charge, jaws clenched. So cold is he, he breaks into a sweat, chill perspiration running down his back; a stalactite reaching from the nape of his neck to the base of his spine.

  A stalagmite rising from his belly to his throat. The Knautschke orifice closes, swallowing up all those reptilian words. Then out of an undercurrent of sound emerge the familiar names, like so many handshakes, greetings, smiles that pacify him. And caresses too, painful in their lost tenderness.

  They come slowly circling round, all these names, in pairs or singly. Just a murmur each time, a sigh. A sob. May, Peggy…

  A procession of utterances in colourless or grey-blue voices, ocre and violet laughter, ivory and russet whispers. Each name has its own complexion, style, timbre, and a slight tremor. A quavering sometimes. Each has its own intensity, its particular resonance. Sometimes a fleeting brilliance.

  And the procession goes round and round. But his own name is absent.

  He is no longer striking the ground with his stick, he is walking across the barn, pacing the emptiness. He follows after the names in the procession, begging for his own. His mouth is dry, his lips blue with cold. Darkness has long since fallen, but so profuse are the stars that a diffused pale luminescence tempers the darkness.

  He lurches, leaning on his stick, still seeking his name. The starlight has faded. It is close to daybreak. The barn is now steeped in ashen gloom. The procession of beloved names dissolves in the silence. He is left on his own. He collapses with exhaustion, falls to his knees. But in falling, his mind fractures and his name suddenly resurfaces. Magnus.

  Magnus laughs, on his knees in the dust. ‘Magnus!’ he exclaims in a breathless voice, and repeats his name as if calling out to himself. He is so happy to have recovered it he writes it in the dust with the tip of his index finger. At that moment as the sun rises the sky is filled with a milky brightness, and this dawn radiance steals between the slats of the barn, concentrating in an oblique beam that touches his finger.

  A ray of white light. A lactation. And his finger does not write the letters of Magnus but those of another name, totally unknown to him.

  He gazes at this name and quietly lies down beside it. He falls asleep immediately, dazed with tiredness and incomprehension.

  Note

  1 Claps slaps smacks rattles crackles misers blotches

  Litany

  Lothar and Hannelore, call my name.

  Else and Erika, call my name.

  Peggy Bell, call my name.

  Mary and Terence Gleanerstones, call my name.

  Terence and Scott, my brothers, call my name.

  May, my lover of such vitality, call my name.

  Lothar and Hannelore, call my name.

  Else, call my name.

  Peggy, my sister my love, call my name.

  Lothar, my friend my father, call my name.

  Myriam, young girl, call my name.

  Peggy, my most beautiful my sweet, call my name.

  Peggy, my Schneewittchen my lost one, call my name.

  You, who were sacrificed, forgive me.

  From the unknown, deliver me.

  From this silence, deliver me.

  From this oblivion, deliver me.

  From disintegration, deliver me.

  From my absence, deliver me.

  I being nameless, in your mercy, name me!

  From this perdition, in your mercy, save me!

  In your mercy, listen to me!

  Hear me …

  Do you hear me?

  May, do you hear me?

  Lothar, are you listening to me?

  Peggy, do you forgive me?

  And you, my mother consumed by fire and the fire that consumes me, do you hear me?

  Where are you? What do you say ?

  Do you hear me?

  Fragment 28<
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  When he wakes up it is already very late in the morning. Another hot August day. The atmosphere is close, laden with the smells of earth, of flowers. His head is strangely heavy, as if filled with mist, with white dew. He feels giddy. To get to his feet, he uses the ground to support his weight, but in doing so his hands erase the name dictated to him by tiredness, the name he had written in the dust at daybreak in the milky flow of light. By the time that moment resurfaces in his mind it is too late, the writing is illegible. He can only distinguish one letter: an l. So it was not a dream, he had actually written down some other unsuspected name: there is no l in Magnus. But examine the ground as he might, he cannot decipher anything more.

  He pushes open the door. The direct sunlight blinds him. ‘Good morning, my son! Did you sleep well?’ The little old monk wearing his mobile beehive has returned, as buzzingly cheerful as the previous day. Over by the lime tree that shades the yard, he is busying himself round a table he has improvised with a wooden plank resting on some logs taken from the pile in the shed. He acts as if he is at home here, indeed like a host about to welcome a guest. For that is what he is preparing: lunch.