by Allan Massie
Klaus turned over a couple of pages. What was this?
“After supper she twiddled perfunctorily the knobs of the wireless beside Cousin Francis’s chair – it had pleased him to have the war at his elbow; she was pleased to have only one more and more significant degree of silence added to the library; evidently the battery was dead…”
This wasn’t part of his novel, and it took him a few minutes to remember that it was a passage he had copied out from an English novel by Elizabeth Bowen which he had been reading a few weeks ago. It was the “more and more significant degree of silence” that had appealed to him; also, “evidently the battery was dead…”
Terrible phrase: evidently the battery was dead.
But of course in Germany it hadn’t been long before the post-war battery was recharged. That was the extraordinary thing! It was beyond satire!
A blue-and-white ball was kicked across the roadway and came to rest under his table. A small boy scurried after it and dived on it, knocking against Klaus’s legs. He looked up, beamed a smile and a “Pardon, m’sieu…” and was off to rejoin his friends. He climbed on to the railing overlooking the beach, and sat there with the ball held in both hands. Aware of Klaus’s gaze following him, he waved a hand, and then leaned forward to speak to one of his friends and they both laughed, and jumped off the railing back down to the beach. Klaus watched them run, jostling each other, to the water’s edge and splash each other in the sunshine.
Yes, his life had been like that once.
It was too much. He paid for his beer and the sandwich he hadn’t eaten, and turned away from the sea, back into the town, to another café in an alley which was in shadow. He took a seat at the back of the room, ordered a whisky-and-soda, and lit a cigarette.
It was astonishing how quickly the battery had been recharged. Beyond satire, certainly, though he had attempted that, when speculating how long it would be before Goering’s second wife, the actress Emmy Sonnemann, was back on the Berlin stage.
“Perhaps,” he’d written, “one of those gassed in Auschwitz has left a play in which this fine lady could make her comeback? For of course she will have known nothing about Auschwitz, will she? And besides, what has Art to do with Politics?” He had written these sentences with relish.
What had provoked the essay was news of Gustaf’s return to the Berlin stage. He had spent some months as a prisoner of the Russians, had apparently won the favour of the camp commandant by staging a theatrical production and been released. Now he was about to test the loyalty of his public. The performance was a sell-out, well before the first night. It was with difficulty that Klaus, who had flown in fascinated curiosity to Berlin, managed to get hold of a black market ticket. It was a comedy by Carl Sternheim, set in Wilhelmine Germany. Gustaf produced it and played the lead – of course he did – what else would have been tolerable? The curtain rose to show him alone on stage, sitting at a desk, and this was met with thunderous applause that lasted at least five minutes before he was able to speak. He sat there smiling the while, and there was a comparable manifestation of enthusiasm at the final curtain, even though, Klaus thought, Gustaf hadn’t actually been right for the part. What did it signify? he had wondered then and asked in the piece he wrote about the evening. He still wondered, could come to no conclusion even now, except this: no matter what he had done, who he had betrayed, how he had prostrated himself before Goering and Goebbels and the little rat, Gustaf remained the darling of Berlin, pre-Nazi, Nazi and now post-Nazi Berlin. Klaus was not only puzzled by it; he felt defeated.
But he knew what Gide would say. “Prodigieux, n’est-ce pas?” And it was indeed; truly prodigious.
He called for another whisky. It was a nice bar, a safe one, dingy, quiet, only one table occupied by blue-overalled workers playing cards and drinking red wine. He closed his eyes, content to listen to their muttered comments on the game and the occasional cry of triumph as a trick was taken. Perhaps he dozed off for a little. Then he heard the click-clack of table football and opened his eyes.
It was the Swedish boy, still in the washed-out blue shorts but now wearing a red shirt. There was a girl with him, also blonde. They were intent on the game and laughed often. Klaus watched them, wondering for a moment if they were really there or belonged to a dream. Then the boy turned and caught sight of him.
“Hey, Klaus,” he cried and took the girl by the arm and brought her over to the table, saying something to her in Swedish as he did so.
“This is Ingrid,” he said. “We met again and made up. Is that right? Made up?”
“It’s right.”
Without waiting to be asked he pulled out a chair for her and himself leaned over and shook Klaus by the hand. Then he sat down and crossed his legs, resting his right ankle on his left knee. He smiled broadly.
“It’s great to see you again.”
His shirt was unbuttoned to the waist and his chest was smooth and hairless, his belly flat.
Klaus beckoned to the barman and Stefan said he would have a beer and Ingrid a lemonade.
“And another whisky-soda for me,” Klaus said.
The boy explained how he’d gone to the station intending to take a train to Italy because if you come south and don’t go on to Italy then everyone in Sweden thinks you’re crazy, really crazy, and he’d found Ingrid there sitting on her rucksack and weeping.
“So I felt a heel, like they say in the movies – that’s where I get my American expressions, you know – because she was unhappy and maybe I’d been in the wrong when we quarrelled. So we made up and we’re together again, and it’s great. Isn’t it great, honey?”
“It’s OK,” the girl said, “but you’re right, you really were a heel.”
“Ingrid reads books. She’s educated, not like me. She’s a student of literature. Maybe she’s read some of yours, Klaus. Have you been translated into Swedish?”
“Once or twice.”
“What’s your name?” she said. “Stefan has just called you ‘Klaus’, nothing more.”
“That’s all I told him. We were only on first-name terms, nothing more. But it’s ‘Mann’.”
“Mann? Did you write Dr Faustus?”
“No. That was my father.”
“Your father? He’s famous, isn’t he? Won the Nobel, yes? I started reading it in German, but I got stuck. It was too difficult. Stefan said you’re American. How come?”
“I used to be German,” he said, and gave her a smile, “but now I’m American…”
As much as I’m anything, he thought.
The boy tried to keep the conversation going, as if he really wanted them to like each other, and also as if he was showing each off to the other. Klaus did what he could to help him. He watched the boy’s mouth and the faint dampness on his cheekbones. The girl looked sulky.
“So you ran away from Germany,” she said, “and didn’t fight in the war?”
“Klaus was in the American army,” the boy said.
“Didn’t you feel some kind of a traitor when German cities were being bombed and destroyed? I’ve seen some of the destruction. My parents took me to Germany in ’46. My mother’s mother was German. She was homeless, her house in Stuttgart bombed, and we brought her home to Sweden. She was a nervous wreck. She never recovered and we had to put her in a home. It was awful.”
“Yes,” Klaus said, “I can see it must have been. But the Germans brought it on themselves.”
“Not my grandmother,” she said.
“So she was one of Hitler’s victims too,” he said, hoping to conciliate her, but wondering, as he always did on such occasions, how the grandmother had voted in ’33.
Conversation languished. Then she said she had to go freshen up.
Klaus touched the boy’s arm.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve offended her.”
“That’s all right. She’s easily offended. She’s difficult. I’m not sure we’ve really made up. She says she doesn’t know if she can re
ally trust me again.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know, do I? She’s like that. Girls are, in my experience. The grandmother was a rabid Nazi, by the way. I’ve heard her speak with my father… The pair of them just the same. It disgusted me.”
“It was easy to be a Nazi then,” Klaus said. “I always knew that, though I never understood why.”
When the girl came back she made it clear she wanted to be off. This time it was Stefan who leaned over and kissed Klaus on the cheek. Perhaps he did so to irritate the girl. Klaus didn’t know, but the little gesture pleased him.
“Look after yourselves,” he said. “Be happy. I think it’s perhaps possible again to be happy.”
For others anyway, he thought.
As they stepped out into the late afternoon, the boy turned and raised his hand and smiled. Klaus lifted his hand in reply. Moriturus, te saluo.
I’ll never see him again, he thought. Yet we had a moment of intimacy. If I had met him again without the girl… might he have… pointless to think of it.
Perhaps he might give him to Albert, in the guise of a boy who should have been lost when everything he had been taught in the Hitler Youth crumbled about him, but who had been able, on account of his natural vitality, to shrug it off? And Albert might set himself to destroy him precisely because he found this vitality intolerable? Could I imagine that, he thought, I who long to be swept up in the arms of such vitality?
He remembered the two German prisoners he had interviewed in Italy in May ’44. He’d called them Fritz and Peter in the article he’d written. Peter was a corporal in his thirties. He had been a schoolmaster. He had never joined the Party. “Certainly,” he said, “from ’33 to ’41 things went pretty well. But I always thought it was a fairy-tale that would end badly. Now we can only hope that the regime collapses before Germany is utterly destroyed.”
Then he’d called in Fritz, a lieutenant, aged twentytwo or -three. A handsome blond boy ashamed to have allowed himself to be taken prisoner… Twelve or so when the Nazis came to power, he had joined the Hitler Youth and revelled in it. “It was marvellous,” he said, exhaustion fading from his eyes as he spoke.” But then the Bolshevists and the international Jewish plutocracy forced war on Germany. “You really believe that, do you?” Klaus said.
The boy flushed. “Everyone knows it’s true, everyone who has not been taken in by Jewish lies.”
“And do you still believe Germany can win this war?”
“But of course, we shall win it because we have to. I admit that things are going badly just now, but that will change. There’s word, you know, of a new secret weapon that is being prepared. It will change everything.”
“And have you no regrets?”
“Yes, certainly, I regret that I have been taken prisoner. I would have preferred to die for the Führer…”
Well, that hadn’t been permitted him. He had been sent to a camp in England. And what would have become of him since, five years later? Was he still spouting the same repulsive nonsense?
Klaus hadn’t been able to hate him. Indeed he had felt sorry for the boy who didn’t speak what he recognised as German, only Nazi-German. Could he have been brought to see the foul absurdity of all he had been reared to believe in?
He called for another whisky-soda. It wouldn’t be dark for hours yet.
Hours later in velvet night he found himself at the Zanzi Bar again. He had come there without hope of finding Miki, whose employer had decided they should sail to Corsica; but there was nowhere else and he felt hollow to the pit of his stomach. He ordered a whisky-soda. He didn’t know how many he had had in the other bar after the Swedish boy walked out of his life for the second and surely last time, but it was one of those nights when he couldn’t get drunk, no matter how many whiskies he downed. He had wanted that lieutenant Fritz, all the more keenly because his words were so stupid and horrible and he disgusted him and he knew he couldn’t have him. And of course he had reminded him of Willi, just like the Swedish boy.
The bar was busy, full of smoke and laughter with an undercurrent of despair. There was a nice-looking sailor-boy snuggling up to a fat old Egyptian who was stroking the boy’s neck. No one approached Klaus’s table. I look old and ill and poor, he thought, the Egyptian stinks of money. There were rings on the fingers now pressing on the sailor’s shoulder…
A man in a crumpled linen suit rose from a corner table and made for the lavatory. It was Guy Probyn. The boy at his table lifted his hand and waved towards Klaus, who recognised him as the one from the Villa Mauresque. When he saw he had caught Klaus’s attention, the boy’s mouth opened and his tongue flicked from side to side. Well, why not? Klaus picked up his glass and crossed the room to join him. The boy got up and offered his face for a kiss. Klaus obliged.
“I’m so glad to see you again,” the boy said. “I’m Eddie, remember? I didn’t dare speak to you the other day. I was afraid Willie would be jealous. He’s so possessive, you can’t imagine, even if it gave him pleasure that day to treat me like dirt. And I was so disappointed when you left because I wanted to tell you I really adored your Alexander. Willie pretends I can’t read, but really and truly I read lots, and I loved, just loved, that novel. So there…”
“Sweet of you,” Klaus said. “I was very young, like you, when I wrote that.”
“Well, I adored it. I’m delighted to have the chance to tell you so.”
Klaus was reminded of the famous critic who made a point of telling authors how much he had enjoyed and admired the first novel they had published, with the implication that they had never done anything half as good again. But this boy Eddie wasn’t like that; he wanted to please Klaus and it was probable that Alexander was the only book of his he had read. So he didn’t say, as he might have in other circumstances, “I’ve written better since.”
Guy Probyn loomed over them.
“So you two know each other.”
“We met at the Villa Mauresque,” Klaus said.
“Ah yes. The old lady said you’d been to lunch, he thought you looked distressed. Talented, he said, but will he ever make anything of it? You shouldn’t worry. I’ve heard him express the same doubts about every writer half his age. We’ve been banished this evening, Eddie and I. Important guests we’re not grand enough to be allowed to meet. The ex-King of England and Her Royal Highness, as he insists she must be called, no less… Of course Willie has to keep up appearances in such company. It’s ridiculous because it’s not even as if it makes him happy. So I thought Eddie might benefit from a spot of louche life. Not that there’s much in evidence here tonight…”
The boy fluttered his long dark eyelashes and looked sideways at Klaus…
“I don’t mind,” he said. “Willie snubs me in company, and at these grand dinners I never know which piece of cutlery to use next.”
He smiled, modestly, to suggest he was an ingénu, perhaps. Actually he’s a nice kid and a pretty boy and I think I could detach him from Guy and have him without much trouble, but he’s not the Swedish boy whom I can’t have.
“We could all do with another drink.”
Later Guy Probyn said, “I finished Mephisto and I haven’t changed my mind. It’s very good, I grant you, even brilliant, but, speaking as a friend of Gustaf, I can’t but conclude that the way you treat him stinks.”
Klaus felt unutterably weary. He picked up his glass.
“Perhaps because I’m no longer his friend, I can’t agree with you. And perhaps also because I remain in some way German and can’t forgive those who collaborated with the regime and, in Gustaf’s case, licked the Fat Man’s well-polished boots.”
“You’re harsh, Klaus, very harsh. That’s why you will never be more than second-rate. You lack sympathy. Your father would have understood him as you don’t. ‘Brother Hitler’, you know. But you divide your characters into those you like and those you don’t and you can’t be fair to the second lot. Princess Tebab, for instance, she’s absurd, you
don’t begin to understand a woman like that. You can’t. Ah, there’s Billie. Excuse me while I have a word with the slut.”
He clapped Klaus on the shoulder as if he was a comrade to whom he was entitled to speak sharply…
“He doesn’t like you, does he?” the boy said.
“Not a lot, it seems.”
“I don’t much like him myself.”
He took hold of Klaus’s hand and pressed it on his own thigh.
“Yes?” he said.
“No,” he said, “no, not tonight anyway. I’m old and tired and a little drunk.”
“But you like me? Another time? You know where to find me.”
“That might be difficult.”
“Don’t worry, I’d find a way.”
