The Magician

by Colm Toibin

  Every single thought he had had over the previous few years meant nothing in the light of his sense of impending doom. He, who had visualized the end of the war as represented by imaginative energy and social stability, now could not sleep, he was so worried about his own fate and that of his family.

  The end of the uprising came slowly, with the noise of shooting frightening all of them except Golo, who was delighted by the sound, clapping his hands in joy. Hans told Katia that Thomas should hide somewhere in the attic, as the revolutionaries could do anything now that they were on the point of being defeated. Instead, Thomas remained in his study, having his meals served there, asking Katia to stay with him as much as she could.

  * * *

  Thomas’s only comfort in the aftermath of the Munich Revolution was the baby Elisabeth, who was now learning to crawl. He carried her into his study as soon as breakfast was finished each morning. He followed her with his eyes as she looked around the room, the gaze placid and intelligent, and, having ascertained that there was nothing among the books and the heavy furniture that might entertain her, Elisabeth set about crawling towards the closed door. Only then did she give any sign that she knew her father was in the room. By a turn of her head, she indicated to him that he should open the door for her so that she could depart towards where she thought her siblings might be creating excitement.

  Soon after the revolution had been quelled, Thomas was visited by a pale young poet who said that he had been sent by Heinrich. Thomas, summoned by one of the servants to the hallway, did not invite the visitor into the drawing room or the study.

  “Could Heinrich not come himself?” he asked.

  The young man made a gesture of impatience.

  “We need help. I am a friend of Ernst Toller, who admires you and your work. He is in danger of being executed. I have been sent to ask you to sign a petition in his favor, requesting that the sentence be commuted.”

  “Sent by whom?”

  “Your brother told me that I should come to see you. But Ernst Toller also asked if you would sign.”

  Thomas turned as Katia came down the stairs.

  “This young man is a friend of Heinrich’s,” Thomas said.

  “Then surely we should invite him in,” Katia replied.

  The young man refused to sit down.

  “Because of who you are,” he said, “you have influence.”

  “I did not support the revolution.”

  The man smiled.

  “I think we are aware of that.”

  The tone was almost sarcastic and it created a moment of tension. Thomas felt that his visitor was on the verge of walking out but then thought better of it.

  “You were on the list of those to be detained,” he said. “I was in the room when that list was read out. And two of the leaders insisted that your name be removed. One was Erich Mühsam and the other was Ernst Toller. Toller spoke eloquently about your virtues.”

  Thomas nearly smiled at the mention of “virtues,” wanting to ask what they might be.

  “That was kind of him.”

  “It was brave of him. There were others in the room who did not agree. He held out against them. I can assure you of this. And I can assure you too that your brother’s name was invoked.”

  “In what way?”

  “In a way that saved you.”

  What surprised him, once he agreed to write a letter, was how much the young man knew about protocols, about how the letter should be worded and to whom it should be addressed. He said that a copy should be made of it, but advised that the appeal for clemency should not, for the moment, be made public. If Ernst Toller needed further help, he would return.

  * * *

  One afternoon, ready to take his walk, Thomas could not find Katia in the house or the garden. Eventually, when he heard shouting from upstairs, he located Erika and Klaus.

  “Where is your mother?”

  “She has gone to visit Mimi,” Klaus said.

  “Which Mimi?”

  “There is only one Mimi,” Erika said. “I answered the call. And the minute she put down the phone my mother got her hat and coat and went to visit Mimi.”

  She pronounced the name Mimi as though it had been invented to amuse her.

  When Katia returned, she opened the door of Thomas’s study. She was still wearing her hat and coat.

  “Now I need you to write a note,” she said. “I can tell you what to say or you can compose it yourself. It is to accompany flowers that are being sent from you to your brother in the hospital. He is out of danger, but he had peritonitis and they thought he might not survive. Mimi is still distraught. The flowers and the note will be a big surprise.”

  She handed Thomas a pen.

  “I have a pen,” he said. “I will write a note, but it is not an apology.”

  Once the note was sent with the flowers, Heinrich, despite his frail state, intimated his pleasure at receiving them.

  When Heinrich was home from the hospital, Mimi wrote to Katia to say that her husband would love to receive a visit from his brother.

  Thomas went to Leopoldstrasse, carrying flowers for Mimi and a book of Rilke’s poems for Heinrich. As the door of the apartment was answered, Mimi introduced herself.

  “I am an admirer,” she said, “so it is time we met.”

  Her hair was done in some very current style. Her accent sounded closer to French than Czech. The tone she took was flirtatious, but lightly and elegantly so. She was all presence, all allure, as she escorted him into the sitting room to meet his brother.

  “I have brought an old friend,” she said.

  The apartment was decorated in a way that emphasized its compactness. The rugs were Turkish. The wallpaper was red. There were pictures everywhere, even leaning against the bookcases, and on the many little desks and side tables there were miniature statues and oddly shaped vases. The dark blue curtains were made from rough silk.

  In the middle of all this pattern and color, in a bank of cushions with covers that looked Arabic, sat Heinrich in a suit and tie and crisp-looking white shirt. His shoes, Thomas thought, were Italian. He could have been a businessman or a conservative politician.

  Mimi soon came with coffee. The cups were delicate. The coffeepot was modern. Mimi took in the scene between the two brothers, smiling in a way that was knowing and satisfied before she left the room, which was separated from the study by a partition made up of hanging lines of glass beads.

  Katia and Thomas had agreed that, even if provoked by Heinrich, Thomas would not discuss politics. But Heinrich, he saw, had developed a steely, patrician charm. He said that he wished he had married years before, that there was nothing like family life. His eyes lit up with laughter as he spoke.

  They discussed the failing health of their mother and the drop in her income as a result of the inflation. They wondered how long she might survive. In a lighter mode, they wondered at their brother Viktor, who had come unscathed through the war, and how ordinary he was and dull and unbookish.

  “If only all of us could have been like Viktor!” Heinrich said. “He has not had his mind darkened by books.”

  As they chatted and sipped their coffee, a little girl came into the room. She was shy and uneasy when she saw the stranger, moving quietly towards her father and burying her face in his lap. When she finally looked up, Thomas did the little trick with his hands that he had done over the years at home, making it seem that his thumb had disappeared. She buried her face in her father’s lap again.

  “This is Goschi,” Heinrich said.

  Her mother joined them and encouraged Goschi to say hello to her uncle. Thomas saw, as she stood up and glanced at him, two generations of his father’s family in the girl’s dark eyes and her square jaw. His aunt, his grandmother, his father, all of them were gathered together in one small face.

  He turned to Heinrich.

  “I know,” Heinrich said.

  “She is a Hanseatic princess,” Mimi said. “Aren’t you
, my darling?”

  Goschi shook her head.

  “How did your thumb get back to your hand?” she asked Thomas.

  “Magic,” he said. “I am a magician.”

  “Can you do it again?” she asked.

  * * *

  He told Katia that he needed to see Ernst Bertram, that too much time had passed.

  “It was a mistake to make him Elisabeth’s godfather,” she said. “If he asks for her, best say that she is with her grandparents.”

  As soon as they were settled in the study, Thomas let Bertram know that he had been in touch with his brother, adding that he had no illusions about the fragility and difficulty of any revived relationship with him. His own views had not changed, he assured Bertram, but he believed more and more in the idea of humanity and in working out what this idea might mean in the real world, a defeated Germany.

  He was irritated when Bertram responded to this with a cold silence.

  “We are living in a defeated Germany,” Thomas said. “The old ideas will not hold.”

  “It only seems like defeat,” Bertram said. “It is actually a first step towards victory.”

  “It is defeat,” Thomas said. “Go to the railway station and look at the men who were injured who are searching for shelter. The legless ones, the blind, the ones who have lost their reason. Ask them if it was victory or defeat!”

  “You sound like your brother,” Bertram said.

  * * *

  When Katia had become pregnant again the previous year, her mother advised her to have an abortion and set about making arrangements for this. The official Pringsheim view was that Katia had become exhausted running a house, dealing with troublesome children and managing a husband who had been locked into some dream about Germany while writing an unreadable book.

  Thomas went with Katia to the doctor’s surgery to discuss the abortion. He noticed how calm she was as she asked detailed questions about the procedure. Having made an appointment and left the building, Katia said quietly: “I am going to have the baby.” He linked arms with her as they walked to the car without saying another word.

  The birth was difficult. Katia was ordered to stay in bed for some weeks after Michael was born. Thomas, overseeing the children during this period, observed that both Erika and Klaus, in the absence of their mother, had begun to dress differently and to put on the air of adults. Erika, he saw, had budding breasts, and Klaus’s voice had deepened. When he asked Katia if she had spotted this, she laughed and said that it had happened some months before.

  The family and the servants did everything to encourage Elisabeth, who was a year old, to come with her father to visit her mother and see her new brother. Once she saw the baby in the bed with her mother, however, she recoiled and demanded to be taken from the room. The next time Thomas tried to carry her to Katia’s room, she shook her head at the top of the stairs and pointed imperiously to the floor below.

  Erika and Klaus as young children had been happy in each other’s company. And Golo, as soon as he could read, would find Monika, take her to a quiet part of the house and read to her. Elisabeth, however, decided to ignore Michael. When he cried, she made a fuss as though her day were being destroyed. She sought out Golo, who was the easiest to boss around, and had him accompany her and keep her safe from her baby brother. In the first years of Michael’s life, Elisabeth, as far as Thomas could make out, never once looked at him if she could help it. While Katia and her mother, and even Erika, thought that this showed early signs of bad character, Thomas found Elisabeth’s determination not to be paired with a baby impressive and fascinating.

  Once she could walk, Elisabeth would appear of her own accord in his study in the morning. As soon as she opened the door, she would put a finger to her own lips to make clear that she, as much as he, required total silence. Once she could talk, the others used her to send him messages.

  Erika and Klaus had come of age in war and revolution and could speak of little besides politics. They rushed to get the newspapers before their father. Both of them still enjoyed exacerbating the differences between their parents on the future of Germany.

  “What is wrong with democracy?” Klaus asked one day.

  “Nothing,” Katia said.

  “We don’t want systems imposed from outside,” Thomas said. “Let the Germans decide what the Germans want.”

  “So you are against democracy?” Erika asked.

  “I believe in humanity,” he replied.

  “We all believe in that,” Klaus said. “But we also believe in democracy. I do, Erika does, our friends do, my mother does, Uncle Klaus does, Uncle Heinrich does.”

  “How do you know Uncle Heinrich does?”

  “Everyone knows that!” Golo interjected.

  “Democracy will come,” Thomas said. “And my hope is that it comes from a German belief in humanity. And I am sure my brother thinks that too.”

  Katia looked at him, nodding her head.

  * * *

  Some months later, as they were taking a walk, she reminded him of what he had said about democracy.

  “Your readers would love to know your views on a German Republic,” she said.

  “They will have to wait for the novel before they hear from me again. My last effort to communicate with them was not universally welcomed.”

  “I think you should write an essay or an article or give a lecture. You need not say that you have changed your mind, merely that your support for a German Republic is a direct continuation of your thought as we move into contemporary times. You can say that no one’s opinions are stable, especially not now, and that yours have always been dynamic.”

  “Dynamic?”

  “Well, that would be a word you could use. You could also talk about German humanity and that your belief in it has always been fundamental to your thought.”

  He nodded and thought that he might find a way to do what she suggested. He smiled to himself as he realized that Katia would say nothing more on this subject, having concluded that she might have prevailed. They turned and walked back slowly to the house, relieved that Munich had become quiet again.

  Chapter 7 Munich, 1922

  “I want to make a new rule!”

  Erika looked at her parents defiantly.

  “Is it one that you yourself might obey?” Katia asked her.

  “I accept,” Erika said, “the rule that everyone should wash their hands before they come to the table, especially Monika, who often has very dirty hands.”

  “I do not have dirty hands,” Monika said.

  “And I also agree that we should be on time for meals, especially Golo, who is too busy reading to eat.”

  Golo shrugged.

  “But I want a new rule saying that anyone at the table can interrupt anyone else, and that no one has the right to finish what they are saying. If I don’t agree with you, I want to interrupt you. And if what you are saying is boring, then I want to stop you speaking.”

  “Will we have the right to interrupt you?” Katia asked. “Or do you wish to be the exception as usual?”

  “My new rule applies to everyone.”

  “Even the Magician?” Monika asked.

  “Especially the Magician,” Klaus said.

  Sometimes, Thomas’s two eldest children intrigued him. They behaved more boisterously than the two youngest in the family. At other times, however, they spoke with seriousness and insight about books and politics. They seemed to have read widely in German and French and English literature. They had buried themselves in all the latest novels, Klaus constantly brandishing copies of the works of André Gide and the novels of E. M. Forster. But Thomas wondered when they actually sat down and read the books they claimed to admire so much, since they devoted all their spare time, as far as he could see, to meeting with their social circle, dressing up before going out and planning elaborate theatrical events with their friends, including Ricki Hallgarten, a handsome and brilliantly clever young man who lived nearby, and Pamela
Wedekind, daughter of a fashionable playwright.

  While Thomas was often irritated by the shrieks of his two children and their friends, the noisy arrivals and departures, he was also impressed by them. Hallgarten suggested that little in German literature met his exacting standards. He had a way of dismissing entire bodies of work that made Klaus follow his every word. He insisted, for example, that Shakespeare’s comedies were better than his tragedies. When Thomas, who thought he was bluffing, asked him which comedies he had in mind, he listed them off.

  “Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I love the shape of them, the pattern they form,” he said. “But of all the plays, I love The Winter’s Tale most, even though it is not a comedy, although I would cut the middle part with all the shepherds.”

  Thomas was not sure that he had ever read the play. But Ricki Hallgarten did not notice, too busy now distinguishing between the Greek plays that he loved and the ones he admired but did not quite love. As he spoke, he reminded Thomas of Katia’s brother Klaus Pringsheim when he was the same age and filled with opinions about culture. He had the same dark good looks.

  Since Erika and Klaus could not fit into the discipline of any ordinary school and were the subjects of constant complaint, Katia convinced Thomas to allow them to go to a more liberal center of education. Once installed, Erika and Klaus made no secret of the freedoms they enjoyed until an edict had to be issued that they could not discuss the details of their untrammeled life at the table in front of the younger children, or if their aunt Lula or any of their grandparents were present.

  Thomas was indignant when he discovered that Klaus Pringsheim, on a short visit to the family, had encouraged Erika to confide in him and had found out that at her school she regularly had love affairs with girls, and Klaus, her brother, with boys.

  “My niece and nephew have come a long way from their ancestors in Lübeck,” Klaus Pringsheim said to Thomas, pronouncing the name of the city as though it were the name of some deformity in nature. “With their lack of inhibitions and the good looks that they have inherited from their mother, I am sure that they will be very popular when they grow up.”