The Magician

by Colm Toibin

  In Erika’s room, as they opened their parcels they began to laugh again.

  “We thought of that poor woman who lost all of her clothes,” Katia said, “and is walking the world now with no change of underwear. The thought of her made us laugh so that one very serious woman behind a counter selling handkerchiefs thought we were laughing at her.”

  “I would not be surprised,” Erika said, “if she reports us to the police as undesirable aliens.”

  She produced a wooden tea towel rack with a picture of the royal family engraved on it.

  “I bought this for Auden,” she said. “To let him see what he is missing.”

  “But look what else we bought!” Katia said.

  She held up a woolen vest with sleeves and a pair of long johns. The wool was almost yellow.

  “We have never seen anything like this,” Erika said. “And we started laughing again when I said that it would be perfect for Klaus.”

  “Oh, and English women’s underwear!” Katia said.

  “It is even worse than German underwear,” Erika added. “Some of the inner garments are open invitations to lice. I don’t know how the English tolerate this!”

  * * *

  After lunch all three of them walked down to the port to find out if there was any news of the SS Washington. They were told that it would arrive in two days, but that it was vastly overbooked. The company would try to fit everyone on, but there would be no such thing as private cabins, and men and women would have to be segregated. When Katia asked if, by paying more money, they could secure two first-class berths, one for her husband and the other for herself and Erika, she was told that such requests would not even be considered.

  “There would be a riot on the ship. This is an evacuation, madam. We will try to get every person who has a ticket to America on board. It will be over in five or six days. You can get all the first-class accommodation you want once you arrive in New York.”

  On the day the boat was scheduled to set out there was a long line and there was much confusion, with passengers pushing ahead and rumors that the boat might not even sail that day, and other rumors that not everyone in the line would be allowed on. As people looked around at them when they spoke German, they attempted to speak English to one another until Thomas wondered if their foreign accents and errors in grammar might cause even more suspicion. The morning was hot and there was nowhere to sit. When Erika, in exasperation, pushed her way through the crowd, hoping to find someone from the authorities who would help her parents jump the queue, Thomas turned to Katia.

  “This is not how we thought we were going to live, is it?”

  “We are the lucky ones,” she said. “This is what good fortune looks like.”

  Erika came bustling back with two members of the crew in uniform.

  “This is my father. He is ill,” she said. “And he has been standing for two hours now. This could kill him.”

  The two men examined Thomas, who tried to appear fragile. All around there were murmurs from the crowd that they too were accompanying elderly people to the ship.

  “My mother and I can wait,” Erika said loudly. “But if you could take my father onto the ship now.”

  Thomas looked distracted, as though he could not quite fathom what was happening. He could see that the two crew members had expected someone much older. They were hesitating.

  “Come with us, sir,” one of them eventually said, and gently they took him through the crowd and then made him wait for a pilot boat. He carried his briefcase with him.

  “He has a bad heart, his daughter says,” one of them shouted. They gave instructions that he should be ferried out to the ship. After much difficulty and to shouts of advice and encouragement, he managed to get from the boat to the ship. With as much dignity as he could muster, he sat in the first public space he could find, noting that many others had already been allowed on.

  He rummaged through his briefcase and found a notebook. Slowly, as he waited, he took out his pen and began to add some paragraphs to his Goethe novel, letting his mind move far away from where he was, picking up the rhythm of the sentences he had been working on the day before, imagining that a novel about the poet’s love in old age for a young girl might comfort a reader in a time when his books would be read in Germany again.

  He kept working even as announcements through loudspeakers were made and crowds that had been kept in line were finally being let onto the ship. He realized that, if he stayed where he was, Katia and Erika would be bound to find him.

  * * *

  They gave him a first-class berth that he had to share with four other men. Since Thomas had the bed, and the others merely cots and mattresses, there was muffled animosity towards him, exacerbated when they discovered that he was German. Two of the men were English and spoke as though he could not understand them.

  “Who knows who these Germans are?” one asked.

  “In flight from Hitler,” his companion said, “given a bed, and, before we know where we are, he’ll be cabling code messages home.”

  “They will sing a different tune in short order. I was there when they surrendered the last time, and it was a sight to behold. I told one of them that he was now free to kick the Kaiser, and I repeated it several times, but I was wasting my breath. He hadn’t a word of English, or so he said. You can never tell with them.”

  All Thomas wanted to do was work. Each morning, once Katia and Erika found a place for him to sit, they walked around the deck, checking on him each time they passed. When, one sunny afternoon, he offered his seat to Katia, she was almost indignant, saying that she had put all that energy into securing a seat for him so that he could write, not so that she could lie about in the sun.

  The idea of his own life merging with the life of Goethe had not occurred to him before, but it must have been there as an undercurrent. It must have been why the book had become longer and he had put so much care into it. It was a story of impossible love, desire in old age. As he lifted his head and looked out at the vast expanse of water, names came to him, and then faces—Armin Martens blushing, Willri Timpe standing naked, Paul Ehrenberg leaning towards him earnestly, Klaus Heuser’s soft lips.

  If Paul were in front of him now, or even if Klaus Heuser were to be on this boat as a passenger, what would he say to them? If they stood in the darkness of the deck after dinner, with so many other passengers around, what would be the message in their eyes? He sighed and thought about holding Klaus Heuser, feeling his heart beating and his breath coming faster.

  Katia and Erika approached; Katia asked him what he was thinking about.

  “The book,” he said. “If I could get this section right.”

  * * *

  On the last few days of the voyage, the congestion on the ship grew more and more unbearable, and water for washing grew scarce. The two Englishmen in his berth became more loquacious.

  “Have you seen the way the German is mollycoddled by that wife and daughter?”

  “I wasn’t sure if that girl was a man or a woman. I’d be surprised if they let her into America.”

  Thomas wrote the word “mollycoddled” in his notebook, but neither Erika nor Katia could tell him what it meant.

  Erika had demanded that they be given precedence as the boat docked. As they walked from the ship to the customs shed, watched by the exhausted passengers who were being held back so that Thomas, his wife and his daughter could get ahead, Thomas felt their hostile gaze. It reminded him of those nights in Munich in the years after the revolution when he and Katia had descended the stairs of the opera house to find their chauffeur waiting, Katia’s mink stole and Thomas’s greatcoat on his arm. As they emerged, the crowd outside, impoverished by galloping inflation, watched them with a smoldering resentment.

  It had occurred to him more than once that Adolf Hitler could have easily been among that Munich crowd. He might not have been able to afford an opera ticket, but perhaps he was waiting to see if there were tickets that someone
could not use. In the Munich winter, he would have been cold standing on the street. And then he would, Thomas imagined, have seen the Manns coming with their chauffeur, both of them stately, distant, dignified, alert to their status in the city, nodding to some, greeting others, as their position dictated. On the nights when Wagner was playing, Hitler would have been desperate to hear Lohengrin or Die Meistersinger or Parsifal. And he would watch as the people who had paid for their tickets well in advance, or who had their own box in the theater, alighted from their cars dressed perfectly for the occasion, while he was turned away into the night.

  As he thought about this, Thomas followed Katia and Erika towards passport control, their luggage carried behind them by a porter. Once their passports and visas had been checked, their suitcases were not even inspected. A car was waiting, as arranged by the Knopfs. When they had put their cases in the trunk, Erika told them that she was going to stay in New York. She needed to see Klaus, she said. Now that Britain was at war with Germany, they would have to make plans.

  “Do you know where Klaus is?” Katia asked.

  “Auden is in Brooklyn. He will know where Klaus is.”

  Erika had already packed a small case for her stay in New York; the rest of the luggage could go with them to Princeton. Thomas realized that she was going to miss battling on his behalf. Instead of Erika, so busy and brittle, Elisabeth would be at home calmly waiting for them. Tears came into Thomas’s eyes at the thought that this would be the last time they would find Elisabeth at home.

  “Don’t cry,” Erika said. “We have arrived safely. I did not enjoy that flight over Germany.”

  “Can you tell Klaus that he should call?” Katia asked. “Or better, come to stay. If he has time.”

  “I have that funny yellow underwear for him. I will tell him that it is a present from us all.”

  * * *

  A few days later, Thomas took the slow train to Trenton in order to catch the express going south from Boston that stopped there en route to Washington. The car Agnes Meyer had sent for him was waiting outside the station. The day before, Mrs. Meyer had wavered between demanding that he and Katia come to her country house for a lengthy stay and insisting that Thomas travel alone to Washington and lodge with her and her husband for just one night. In the end, she had decided on the latter option.

  “Agnes Meyer is the sort of person who emerges when there is a war or threat of a war,” Katia said. “But they usually work as matrons or snipers.”

  Thomas knew that, on this visit, he would need to ask Agnes how visas could be secured for Golo and for Heinrich and his wife, and how the visas for Monika and her husband could be expedited. He wanted to talk to Agnes too about his own position and how it might be improved were he to receive American citizenship. He had a list in his pocket of writers in Europe who desperately needed help, sometimes just financial help, but also assistance in getting to the United States if Germany were to invade Holland or France. When he had returned to Princeton, he had found many heartbreaking letters from frantic German artists, many of them Jewish, all of them appealing for help. Some had been sent to him at Princeton, others redirected from Knopf. All the senders believed that he had the power to rescue them.

  No one knew that he was, in fact, mostly powerless. His vague association with Roosevelt and his job in Princeton could not be used to get visas for anyone. But his friendship with Agnes Meyer might make a difference. He could at least ask her to help, which he did not feel he could do with Roosevelt. If he had to flatter this woman, he would do so, as he would willingly spend time with her, allow her to translate his speeches, listen to her as she told him what he should write. He would even entertain the idea that she might write a book about his work.

  But, in return, he determined that she would have to listen to him today and provide the requisite assistance. Since Agnes did not ever listen to anyone, making her pay attention would be no simple matter.

  Agnes was waiting for him in her large drawing room. As she started to speak, it was clear to Thomas that she had spent the morning preparing what she was going to say. He was placed opposite her, he felt, as audience rather than as visitor.

  “Now, you must be careful not to speak about America entering the war. It is something no one wants to hear about, least of all from someone who is not American. And I hope you will convey this also to your eldest daughter and your eldest son. America will decide itself what course of action to follow. For the moment, it has decided to watch and wait, and that therefore is what we all must do. In the meantime, I think a novel about Goethe will be welcomed here. Not by everyone, of course. I do long to see it myself, but I hope the translation is not going to be marred as usual by that woman, that Mrs. Lowe-Porter, your so-called translator. I wish she would devote herself to some lesser writer, Hermann Broch, for example, or Hermann Hesse, or Hermann Brecht.”

  “I don’t think Brecht is called Hermann.”

  “Nor do I. It was a joke.”

  “My wife and I and Erika are very grateful for your help in getting us back to America.”

  “Don’t eat too much now, as there will be lunch. Although I know you like marzipan. Well, who doesn’t? But not before lunch. Perhaps just one, and some tea.”

  “I know that you must be tired of me asking you for favors,” he began.

  “Fundraising is now the new American industry,” she said. “I said that to my husband just last week. This museum, that museum, this committee, that committee, this refugee, that refugee. All worthy, of course.”

  Thomas would have preferred if Agnes’s husband had joined them for lunch. Despite the fact that he was obtuse, having Eugene Meyer in the room distracted Agnes, making it slightly more difficult for her to interrupt so quickly or to change the subject so precipitously.

  He was disappointed when Agnes told him that her husband was out of town and they would be dining alone, as well as just having lunch à deux.

  He could not face spending all afternoon with Agnes, or near her. He told her that he would need to work for several hours in his room, as his novel was very near completion.

  “Well, this house is perfect for you. No one will disturb you. I will issue strict instructions, and silence will be imposed. The servants know already that a famous writer is staying here. I assembled them all this morning and told them. You should always consider coming here when you need to get work done. I should send a note to your wife and let her know that. The modern luxuries are here, as you can see, and you will be in complete seclusion. My husband often works late.”

  Over lunch, Thomas made no progress with her. She wanted to talk about the book she might write setting his work in the context of German history and culture.

  “So few people here know anything about European culture in any form, so imagine how little they must know about Faust or Goethe, or the Hanseatic League indeed.”

  All he could do was nod and agree and make brisk, solemn interjections. He started to long for the solitude she had promised him. When he stood up while Agnes was still in mid-sentence, he hoped she would not take offense, but he could not bear it any longer. And he decided now that just as she had prepared every word she spoke at lunch, he would do the same at dinner.

  Walking down the great staircase for dinner, he realized that he rather appreciated the opulence of this house, the rich fabrics and the heavy furniture, the early American paintings that Agnes had so carefully collected, the rugs, the polished wood. And it struck him for a moment that he almost liked Agnes. In her bossiness, she reminded him of an old Germany, of his aunt and grandmother, of gatherings in Lübeck in the house where his father had been raised. Because they controlled so little, the women there exercised a fierce grip on what was within their reach. Servants lived in fear of them and they kept a close watch on the cook.

  In the future, he thought, perhaps when this war was over, women like Agnes would have more power. Erika, it occurred to him, would be a good companion for her as they set about some
noble task. He smiled at the idea of Agnes and his daughter in each other’s orbit. Together they could run the world.

  Over dinner, he saw once more just how formidable Agnes Meyer was, as she directed the conversation towards topics that interested her and her alone, allowing no deviation. She spoke about her parents, who had emigrated from Germany, how conservative her father was and how difficult life had been for them in a cramped apartment in the Bronx with German as the only language used among them. Her father took the view, she said, that she should remain at home honing her domestic skills until she married. He had opposed her going to Barnard College to study. So she had applied for a scholarship and taken part-time jobs to pay for her own education. She had not asked him for any help.

  “I owed them nothing,” she said, “and this meant I could do what I liked. I could go to Paris. I could work for a newspaper. I could get married without consulting them. Anything I wanted.”

  Thomas understood that interrupting Agnes, attempting to move the subject onto the question of visas, would simply not succeed. He wondered if he should write her a note and have it delivered to her room when she had retired and then try to talk to her in the morning before he left for Princeton.

  Once the meal had ended, she said that perhaps she had spoken enough.

  “I do not usually have the company of the most distinguished man of letters in the world,” she said. “Generally, it’s Eugene’s friends, and they are dull men with even duller wives. Recently, when I was left with a group of the wives, I wanted to ask the servants to send out for mustard gas.”

  Thomas smiled.

  Agnes stood up and went to a desk in the corner of the room and returned with a pen and a folder.

  “Now, you think I don’t listen. I do listen. Today when you came you mentioned favors.”