by Colm Toibin
The more he pondered on that news, the more the idea came to him for a longer, more passionate letter, one that could be reprinted in newspapers all over the world. If Erika could be angry, then he would show her what anger really looked like. If she could be eloquent, then he would outdo her. He did not tell Katia what he was preparing. He would do this on his own.
Often, readers had complained about the length of his sentences, the high tone of his style. This time, he determined, he would make his style even more exalted. He would speak to the Nazis using all the systems at his command; he would speak to them from a commanding German place, using tones that had served writers before the Nazis were ever imagined. He would shower clause and subclause upon them, those who were regarded with fear and cold aversion by anyone who believed in liberty and progress. He would ask, as though he had the right to a reply, how the state to which these so-called leaders had reduced Germany, in less than four years, could ever be accurately described. He would ask, as though no reply would ever be good enough, how a writer, accustomed to a responsibility to the word, could be silent in the face of the frightful danger to the whole continent presented by this soul-destroying regime.
And he would underline, because he knew that his letter would be read in Paris and London and Washington, that the only reason for the repression and the elimination of every stirring of opposition was to prepare the German people for war.
He was well aware, as he worked, that this performance had been enacted too late, and that its very tone, so haughty and certain of itself, appeared to come from a pen that had written many other denunciations of Hitler. Thomas realized that he was moving too fast from silence to speech, but writing the sentences themselves gave him confidence, and reading the piece over gave him relief. He should have written this on the night that Hitler came to power.
While Heinrich’s response to Thomas’s first letter had been polite, it had also been mild. This time, he wrote with patent enthusiasm, delighting in how his brother had said everything there was to say in one fell swoop and with the greatest effect. He assured him that the world had lost nothing by his long silence because what he had said now was the final word.
Erika wrote to her mother to express her delight. Now the Magician has put everything right, she said. Klaus also wrote to praise his father’s proud provocation of the Nazis.
“It might help,” Katia said, “if you wrote to Klaus.”
“To say what?”
“I’m sure you will know what to say. Perhaps you could write that you’re looking forward to reading his next book. Erika says he is writing a modern version of the Faust story.”
* * *
Their visit to the United States had made them conscious of how much more work they needed to do to become fluent English-speakers. Katia found a woman who could help her to translate sentences and phrases from German to English that she learned by heart. She knew every tense by now, and every rule, and had learned five hundred words, but she was still not confident speaking. The English poet did an hour of conversation with them every day and then, noting errors they had made, he did an hour of grammar.
“This ‘did,’ ” Thomas said, “will be the end of me. You can actually say ‘he did do’ and then the opposite is ‘he didn’t do.’ No wonder the English are so warlike.”
“What about ‘does’?” Katia asked.
“Should it not be ‘do’?” he asked.
“It’s both. And then there are phrasal verbs,” Katia said. “I have ordered a book on them.”
* * *
Thomas noticed that fewer people were taking a walk by the lake. If the Nazis really wanted to repatriate him, he thought, it would not take much to snatch him from this sylvan pastoral. Once the thought struck him, it preoccupied him. The border between Switzerland and Germany was porous. It would be easy to drag him towards a car, bundle him into the trunk and inject him with some sleep-inducing serum. As he wondered if he should share these worries with Katia, it occurred to him that she must already have thought of them too. They would have to start taking the invitations they received from America more seriously.
On approaching the house late one afternoon, they spotted a man standing beside a car that was almost blocking their driveway. Thomas motioned to Katia that they should turn back.
“I have a bad feeling about him,” he said.
“I have that feeling every time someone comes to deliver something, or even when the postman comes,” she said.
They took a more circuitous route to the house. When it was in full view, they saw that the man had gone.
The next morning, Katia came into his study.
“He is outside our house again,” she said.
Thomas went to one of the upper windows and peered down. The man was in his thirties. He was standing casually, with his hands in his pockets, directly in front of their drive.
“If we call the police,” Katia said, “it will be hard to know what to say to them. And we will be drawing attention to ourselves.”
If Erika were here, Thomas thought, she would be able to drive this outsider away, whoever he was.
After lunch, he decided to go out and see who it was, with Katia watching from the window, ready to phone the police if necessary.
When he confronted him, the man took his hands out of his pockets and smiled.
“I have orders not to disturb you, so I thought I would wait for you to come in or out of the house.”
“Who are you?”
“I am a friend of Ernst Toller’s. We met once in a café in Sanary. I am a colleague of the fellow who told you that he used to watch over your house. But it was Toller who sent me.”
“What does he want?”
The man appeared taken aback by his tone. Thomas tried to smile to soften the tension.
“He has asked me to pass on a message to you.”
“Would you like to come in?”
In the house, he introduced himself to Katia, saying that he had seen her the previous year on the street in Sanary.
“Are you one of the exiles?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said, “that is one way to describe me. I used to be a Communist and I was even an anarchist, but now I am one of the exiles.”
“You seem young to have been all those things,” Katia said.
“I served under Ernst Toller in the Munich Revolution, but I didn’t get a prison sentence. I worked for him while he was in jail.”
“You must have been a child during the revolution,” Katia said.
“I was.”
In Thomas’s study, once they had been served coffee, he could see a hardness in the man’s expression that was not apparent before. He was amused at the idea that this fellow, despite his initial gentleness, was once a revolutionary. Perhaps, he thought, Lenin had once looked like this too.
“I need to tell you how Erich Mühsam died,” the man began abruptly. “That is what Ernst Toller has asked me to do. I understand that you sent money to Erich’s widow after his death. We have now pieced together all the details of what happened.”
“He was from Lübeck,” Thomas said. “I did not admire his politics, but I was appalled to hear of his death.”
“You need to know how he died, the facts, because what happened to him is now happening to many others, to anarchists and Communists but also to Jews. To anyone the Nazis set their sights on. People are being detained in camps. Mühsam was held at three different camps. He was tortured almost continuously. We have clear evidence of this. It was said that Hitler hated him because of his involvement in the Munich Revolution. But they could have charged him. Or even executed him. But they did neither of those things. Toller asked me to inform you that this is now widespread, this new brutality. In these camps, the guards behave without any restraint, but in Mühsam’s case there was something like a plan. They broke his teeth, and that may have happened on the spur of the moment. But they also stamped a swastika on his scalp with a red-hot brand, and t
hat must have been planned. They made him dig his own grave and they did a mock execution. Finally, they invited him to hang himself in the latrines and when he refused, they killed him and dragged his body across the parade ground so that his skull was shattered and then put him hanging up in the latrines. We have witnesses to this. During Erich’s incarceration, we have evidence that he was beaten every day. All this happened over a period of almost eighteen months.”
“Why have you come to tell me this?”
“Toller thinks that you do not understand what is happening. He spoke to you about Erich before. But no one could save him. Now there are others.”
“What can I do?”
“Be very careful. This is not like anything we have seen before. All of us who were involved in Munich that time are on a list.”
“I did not support the Munich Revolution.”
“I know. I was in the room when Mühsam and Toller prevented the rest of us from detaining you and taking your house. And Mühsam said you would be needed in the new world we were ready to make. But there won’t be any new world, except the one being created in the camps.”
As he stood up, Thomas detected a bearing that was almost military.
“Where will you go now?” Thomas asked.
“Toller plans to go to America, and I will follow him if I can. He believes that we might be safe there, or he does sometimes. There is great despair. No matter what, all of us will have to leave, there is no safe place for any of us. And that includes you.”
Thomas showed him out and stood at the door as he walked down the drive.
“Who is he?” Katia asked.
“Ernst Toller sent him to speak to me,” Thomas said. “He is a man from the past, or maybe from the future. I don’t know.”
Chapter 10 New Jersey, 1938
In the back seat of the car as they left New York Katia was silent and seemed distant from him. When the driver stopped at traffic lights, Thomas heard her muffle a sigh. It must be on her mind, he thought, as it was on his, that even though they were now going home, their destination was a rented house in Princeton.
His study there, even though he had his books and the old desk from the house in Munich, and some items that were tokens of his former life, was a pale replica of his real study. In the mornings when he worked, he could act out the role of himself, write as if he had never left Germany. Since he had taken the language with him and the cast of mind, he could, in theory, write anywhere. But outside his study was a foreign country. America did not belong to him, or to Katia either; they were too old to make the change. Instead of adapting to novelty, or learning to appreciate the virtues of the new country, they were living in a time of loss.
At least they were safe, he thought, and he should be grateful for that. He would breathe easier, however, once all the children and Heinrich and Katia’s parents were away from danger too.
He moved towards Katia for a moment. She squeezed his hand in reassurance but then took it away and hugged herself as though she were cold.
The night was dark and there was little traffic. At first, he could see nothing except stray lights from the few oncoming cars. He was tired. The dinner the previous evening had been exhausting. His speech, delivered in English, about the looming catastrophe had been respectfully received, but his tone, he felt, was at times faltering. It was not merely that he lacked fluency, but rather his delivery masked his uncertainties with too much earnestness.
Each afternoon, the young wife of a graduate student in the German Department at Princeton came for two hours to give him and Katia an English lesson. In the evening, they went through what they had learned, trying to add twenty new words each day to their English vocabulary. They read children’s stories in English that Katia viewed as more instructive than Dante’s Inferno.
He closed his eyes and thought that he might sleep.
When he woke, he could see lights from houses on a hillside. Perhaps it was a village or a small town. He tried to imagine the interiors of those houses, the American life that was being played out within their walls, what words were spoken, what thoughts entertained. Instead of people, however, he saw well-scrubbed emptiness, silence broken only by the humming of electrical appliances. He simply did not know how people lived here or what thoughts they had, what they did at night.
If this were Germany, there would be a church and a square, some narrow streets and other streets that had been widened. Houses with attic windows. There would be old stoves in the kitchens and tiled stoves in the living rooms. And books in some of the houses, and a sense that these books made a difference, just as legends and songs had, and poems and plays. Maybe even novels.
The past would be evoked by the names of the streets, or by the names of families, and continuity by the bells that rang softly, as they had for centuries, to mark the passing of each quarter-hour.
He would give anything if the car could turn and enter noiselessly into one of those squares, a space enriched by the work of Gutenberg or the writings of Luther or the images made by Dürer. Enriched by a thousand years of trade, a stability broken at times by plagues or wars, by the clattering of cavalry horses and the boom of cannon, until a time of treaties when peace was restored.
It would almost satisfy him if this journey would go on through the night, if he and Katia could be driven in silence down through America and not have to face the unfamiliarity and fragility they would meet on arrival in Princeton, where their house, he believed, could be as easily flattened as it was quickly made, despite its ostensible opulence.
It occurred to him then—and the thought made him shiver—that this new alien space they lived in was actually innocent in a way that the air in the German villages was poisoned now. He shuddered at the thought of what was coming; and then he actually wished the journey to Princeton would end so that he could walk through the brightened rooms of his new house into his study and find comfort there, feel enclosed and safe, and then emerge to have a quiet supper with Katia and Elisabeth, who was waiting for them.
In the settled life he had once known, such sudden swings in his mood would have been unusual. But that was how his mind worked now, even in the daytime, but more often at night.
He saw lights of other houses on a rise in the landscape ahead and thought that he should ask about them.
“Excuse me,” he leaned forward in the car, “what is this place called, where we are now?”
“This is called New Jersey, sir,” the driver said drily. “New Jersey. Yes, that’s what it is called.”
The driver was silent for a moment and then spoke again.
“NEW. JERSEY.” He intoned the words as though he were making an important announcement.
Thomas heard Katia gasp slightly. As he turned, he saw that she was trying to control her laughter. His question and the driver’s response would be a story that Katia would tell Elisabeth, who would force her father to ask the question again and have her mother repeat what the driver had said as accurately as she could. Elisabeth or Katia would then probably write to Erika, who would shortly arrive in New York with Klaus. And Erika would dine out on the story, offering it to anyone who would listen as a typical example of her father, the puzzled magician, his inability to find the right tone in America, despite his constant efforts.
New Jersey. Yes, that was where they were.
The only consolation, Thomas thought, was that Monika was not there; she was in Italy, with plans to marry a Hungarian art historian. When Monika came into possession of any anecdote at all about her father that set him in a comic light, she would repeat it ad nauseam. Eventually, Katia would have to speak crossly to her. But the only person who could exert real control over Monika was her younger sister, Elisabeth, the calm, patient, watchful one, the one whose intelligence seemed to be all-embracing, his daughter who was ready to treat the world on her own measured terms.
Elisabeth reminded him of the old world. She had an aura that had wafted down from three generations before he
r. Thomas looked forward to seeing her now, as the car was nearing Princeton.
It came into his mind that they would soon be visited in Princeton by Erika and Klaus. Klaus had a way of suggesting that he cared more deeply about politics than anyone around him, including his father. All fired up, often with the help of some illegal substance, he would talk uncontrollably about some piece of news, some further act of cruelty committed in Germany or Italy, before asking how novelists could possibly write stories in a time like this. Were they not aware of the tragedy that was unfolding? How could novels matter? Klaus would enunciate all this even in front of guests, eminent people in Princeton, who would of course repeat it to others.
As they arrived into the main street of Princeton, Thomas determined that they would not have guests for dinner during Klaus’s next visit. Klaus would have to relay his views on current affairs and the peripheral nature of fiction solely to the immediate family circle.
He must mention this to Katia, but he must choose the right moment so that she would not be offended at how exasperating and irritating he found his eldest son, who happened also to be his mother’s favorite.
* * *
Elisabeth had laid a small table in a corner of the sitting room. She told them that she had allowed the cook to depart early and had herself prepared for them a cold supper with cheeses and cured meat with a salad and pickled cucumbers and onions.
“I hope you were not expecting a large supper. In that case, I have made a mistake.”
“My dear, you always know what we want,” Thomas said as he kissed her and let her help him remove his coat and scarf.
“At least it is warm here,” Katia said as she fussed in the hallway. “Now it will take me a while to organize myself.”
