by Colm Toibin
A year before, Thomas might have been careful not to feed her rage, but for the first time in his life he had nothing to lose. He was old and had no one to impress and no one to compete with. When he wrote a letter to a friend who had returned to live in Germany, he stated that he had no desire to rest his bones in this soulless soil of America to which he owed nothing and which knew nothing of him, and he did not mind when this letter was shown to a German newspaper. It was the truth. He smiled at the idea that it had taken him seven and a half decades on earth before he could freely speak the truth.
But the truth now was that he was no longer welcome in America and there was no cause that America espoused that he supported. Speaking out against America’s paranoid way of turning inwards could, he thought, make him feel morally worthy, but it was a pose as much as any of the others he had taken on in his life. He wondered if speaking out had ever made Klaus or Heinrich wake in the night feeling like a fraud, someone who would soon be found out, as he did?
He had managed to explore this idea of the duplicitous most fruitfully, he felt, in a story called “Felix Krull,” written forty years earlier. As he sought a theme now, his mind went back to the figure of Krull from his story, who was a crook, a confidence man, someone with an extravagant, licentious disposition.
If he were to be offered a chance to say a final word about the human spirit, he would like to do so comically, he thought; he would dramatize the idea that humans could not ever be trusted, that they could reverse their own story as the wind changed, that their lives were a continuous, enervating and amusing effort to appear plausible. And in that lay, he felt, the pure genius of humanity, and all the pathos.
* * *
It was decided that he and Katia and Erika would leave America and settle once more in Switzerland.
There was a time, he was aware, when this decision would have been front-page news in America, with reporters flocking to the house so that he could pontificate about his reasons. There might even have been appeals for him to stay, or articles outlining his contribution to the war effort. Once, he realized, he had possessed gravity. His prominence lasted a decade and then it wore off.
The candelabra that had come from Lübeck to Munich to Switzerland to Princeton to California would now be put into a crate once more and shipped back to Switzerland, Katia having written to Georges Motschan to let him know that they were in search of a house near Zürich, preferably with a view of a lake.
Erika was relieved at the news of their determination to leave, and did not even respond when Katia suggested that her failure to satisfy the FBI might be responsible for this latest upheaval.
“We are doing this for you,” Katia said. “But I don’t see any gratitude.”
“Oh, stay here, then,” Erika replied, “but the FBI will come for you next. Asking you questions about your marriage, like they asked me.”
“I did not marry Auden,” Katia said.
Katia looked at Thomas, unafraid, it seemed, at where this conversation might lead.
“It will be marvelous to have you with us in Switzerland,” he said to Erika.
Since Golo decided that he wanted to leave America too, only Elisabeth and Michael would be left in that country. When Katia wrote to Elisabeth to let her know of their plans, Elisabeth replied saying that she would make one last visit with her daughters to Pacific Palisades.
At the end of dinner on her first evening, Elisabeth told them that Borgese was in Italy because he was dying. Soon they would travel to be with him. He did not want to die in America.
“And what will you do?” Katia asked her when the girls had gone to bed.
“I will start my life,” she said. “That is what Borgese says. But I don’t know how I will live.”
“Will you stay in Chicago?” Thomas asked.
“I might stay in Italy. The girls are Americans, but they are Italians too.”
“And what will you do there?” Katia asked again.
“I really can’t imagine life without Borgese. I am in shock. We all are. The diagnosis is very clear. He has been brave. I am not sure that I will be brave when I have to raise the girls without him.”
Katia moved to embrace her. Even Erika had tears in her eyes.
“What about our phone calls?” Thomas asked.
“I could never get through the week without them,” she replied, smiling. “They will have to continue. Who else will tell you about my sister Erika and her doings?”
She looked at Erika, daring her to comment.
* * *
The house and the garden seemed more beautiful once he knew he would lose them. When he and Katia saw Elisabeth and her daughters off at Union Station, it struck him that every detail in the station, from the signage, to the goods on display in the shops, to the open, relaxed manners of the staff, to the waves of heat that hit them when they went back towards the car, was going to become a past that could not be retrieved.
A few times, he was inclined to suggest to Erika and Golo that they should go back to Europe alone and have their lives, that he and Katia would remain here to the end under a blue sky, as their pomegranate tree came into bloom and then bore fruit.
He moved from room to room until his own private staircase was a ghost stair and his own study the room where a ghost had worked. And Doctor Faustus became a text that would forever haunt this house, no matter who lived here. And the aftersound of the music played in the light-filled drawing room would grow closer to pure silence each year, until time ended.
It did not matter that he would remember these rooms, the lawn, the single high palm tree at the back of the house, the American hydrangea at the driveway entrance. He would not witness them again. The high heat of summer or the dramatic sunsets or the luminous mornings would be seen in the future by others, but not by him. He had lost Lübeck and Munich. And now he would lose this, Pacific Palisades. He had come here only because the Nazis drove him out of Germany, but the atmosphere was not tainted by that, as it was not tainted by the lapse in American hospitality that now caused him to depart.
* * *
Switzerland, to Thomas, survived on a myth of high Protestant morality even though it kept money safe for scoundrels. Just as its banks were open to the opulent, its borders were usually closed to those in need. The country had mountains and lakes, some cities and a large number of storybook villages, but that was hardly enough for seriousness. Its citizens, Thomas believed, spent most of their time keeping themselves clean. They did this with such zeal that their rage for hygiene spread to their lakes and mountains, their railway carriages and hotel rooms, their chocolate and their cheese, and indeed their banknotes.
He admitted to Katia that he got nothing but pleasure contemplating Switzerland. This new country of their exile would, he insisted, become a perfect place to write a novel about a man who could not be trusted and who, after each escapade, lived to see another day, like Switzerland itself. Just as he could only have written Doctor Faustus in America, a country that did not have the Faustian bargain as one of its myths of foundation, now he would create Felix Krull in Switzerland, a country that preached sermons, with many references to Calvin and Zwingli, precisely against swindlers and con men like Krull.
When they arrived in the lobby of the Dolder Grand Hotel outside Zürich, having left Golo to travel to Munich, Georges Motschan was waiting for them once more. He had the staff assembled, with the manager stepping forward to greet Thomas, Katia and Erika.
As they were being served tea in the English manner, Thomas saw his wife and daughter whispering with Motschan until Erika began to giggle.
“So he has left? He isn’t here?”
“I have asked,” Motschan said. “I called a week ago and I inquired again today.”
“He has fled,” Katia said.
“What are you talking about?” Thomas asked.
“Franzl Westermeier,” Erika said. She had become serious.
“He isn’t here anymore,” Motschan said.
Thomas wished all three would stop observing him. He did not know what to say. He could hardly tell them that he had been thinking about Franzl for the past two years and had managed to intercept the irregular letters that came from him. He knew that Franzl was in Geneva. He had written to him to say that, since he was returning to the hotel where they had met, he was thinking of Franzl even more than usual.
“He was very kind,” Thomas said. “We will miss him on this trip.”
He tried then to change the subject. But in the days that followed, the image of Franzl stayed in his mind.
* * *
He had caught sight of Franzl first when the waiter was crossing the lobby with a tray. As he passed him, he acknowledged Thomas with easy charm. Later, he asked for his autograph when Thomas was having tea in the afternoon. He was well-built with brown, wavy hair, soft, blue eyes and impeccably white teeth. When he had signed his name, Thomas let his hand linger for a few seconds on the hand of the waiter, who seemed pleased by this.
The next day when Thomas encountered the waiter in the lobby, he stopped him and asked his name. He introduced himself as Franzl Westermeier and said that he was from Tegernsee, near Munich.
“I knew you were Bavarian,” Thomas said and asked him if he intended to stay in Switzerland. The waiter had a sweetness in his smile combined with a directness in his gaze. He became serious as he told Thomas that he would like to move to South America, but before that he planned to get a job in Geneva. When Erika appeared and pulled at his sleeve, Thomas bowed to the waiter, who continued on his way.
“You cannot flirt with a waiter in the lobby of a hotel with the whole world watching,” she said.
“I barely spoke to him,” he replied.
“I am sure I am not alone in thinking otherwise.”
Later, when Katia came to his room, she asked him if something had happened.
He told her that it was nothing really, just that he had noticed a waiter who reminded him of old Bavaria.
“Yes, I saw him too. Georges remarked that you did not look well when we arrived. But now you look much better.”
That evening, as they had dinner with Motschan, there was no sign of Franzl. He tried to imagine what the waiter might do on his evening off, what clothes he would wear, what company he would keep.
On their next encounter, he knew that he detained the waiter for too long, having quickly waylaid him as he was crossing the lobby. Erika was not there to see, nor Katia either, but some other members of the staff, who had been told by Motschan to look after the famous writer, were bound to have observed it. That same afternoon, he was hurt, on entering the lift and finding Franzl there, that Franzl nodded brusquely and then ignored him.
He wondered if it would make sense to call room service in the hope that Franzl would be the one to attend on him. When he rang for tea, however, another waiter appeared. He tried to be polite to him, but it was hard not to feel unlucky that it had not been Franzl.
Each morning, he woke with an erection.
There was a shaded place at the very end of the hotel garden with a single table and a few chairs. Katia and he had often had their lunch served there. The day before their departure, she suggested that he eat there alone, insisting that she had an appointment with a dressmaker, and Erika one with a dentist.
As he sat at the table, the silence was interrupted only by the sharp chirping of birds. It occurred to Thomas that this would be a good moment to be found slumped over. He smiled when it struck him that, in his best suit and tie and his newest shoes, he was perfectly dressed for this, and would look distinguished if he had to be taken away by stretcher.
He closed his eyes for a moment, but opened them when he heard someone approaching. When he saw that it was Franzl, who wore his most beaming smile and carried a menu, he realized what Katia and Erika had done. Motschan must have intervened. He wondered who he had paid and hoped that the waiter who stood in front of him had benefited from Motschan’s munificence.
“I have missed you,” he said.
He kept his voice quiet, and hoped that the tenderness was apparent.
“I would like to keep in touch with you,” he added.
“That would make me happy,” the waiter said. “I hope it would not be an imposition.”
“Meeting you has been the best part of my stay here.”
“You have been a most welcome guest.”
For a moment, they locked eyes tenderly.
“I am sure you are hungry,” Franzl said, blushing. “We have excellent pasta today. It is made here in the hotel by an Italian chef. And there is a white wine, a special Riesling from the Domaine Weinbach. Your wife told me you like it. And perhaps some cold soup to start?”
“I will have whatever you recommend,” Thomas said.
For the next two hours, the waiter came and went, staying for a while each time, talking about his parents and shivering at the mention of the winter in the Bavarian Alps.
“I miss the skiing,” he said. “But I don’t miss the cold. It can be cold here, but not like home.”
Thomas told him about California.
“I would love to see the sea,” Franzl said. “And walk on a beach. Maybe someday I will see California.”
Thomas, in that moment, felt a sudden dart of sadness that he was soon to leave the hotel.
“Is there anything more you want, sir?”
Thomas glanced up at him. While the question sounded as if it had been asked in all innocence, Franzl surely must have some inkling of what he was feeling. He hesitated, not because he thought for a moment that they could repair to his room together, but because he knew that this would be all he would get, this short, fabricated intimacy.
He was an old man being served. For days, he would go over what Franzl’s body had looked like when he turned, imagining the sleek, white skin of the muscled back, the fleshy buttocks, the strong, smooth legs.
“No, I do not need anything more, but I am grateful to you for all your attention,” he said, making his tone elaborately formal.
“You must remember that I am at your service,” Franzl said, echoing Thomas’s tone.
He bowed and walked out of their secluded place as Thomas watched him in the dappled afternoon light. He would wait here for a while, he thought, knowing that the scene in which he had just taken part was something that might not, in his lifetime, come again.
* * *
Now, two years later, he spent more energy going over that encounter than working on his novel about the trickster Felix Krull. He still savored every moment of it, thinking back over each thing that had been said, trying to reconstruct the connection that arose between them for that short time. It was almost magical, he thought, that a man of his age could have longings that were so intense. He flicked through the pages of his diary again and read an entry from that previous visit. “At lunch the enchanter was nearby at times. Gave him 5 francs because yesterday he served so nicely. Indescribable the charm of the smile in his eyes when saying thank you. Too heavy neck. K.’s friendliness to him for my sake.”
He would have little cause in the future, he believed, for such diary entries. His mornings would be spent, as they had been for more than half a century, working on his novel, with Franzl many miles away, the memory of him already starting to crumble, even if the act of conjuring up his way of walking across the lobby of the hotel, his grace, his smile, still gave Thomas pleasure.
* * *
As soon as he saw the house that Motschan had found for them at Kilchberg, south of Zürich, he knew that it would be his last one. If they secured it, his wanderings would come to an end. He had been worried for some time about where Katia might live after his death. Now the problem was solved. The house was above the road, with views over a lake to the mountains.
In the new house, the routine was as always. He regretted the unpleasant thoughts he had harbored about Switzerland because he took pleasure in the sense of order and civility in the village, an
d in the way the light changed on the lake and how the gathering twilight seemed to swim gently towards them from the mountains.
He had grown to love his protagonist Felix Krull, in the same way as he had once loved Adrian Leverkühn, as he also had loved Tony Buddenbrook and young Hanno. While readers might guess that Hanno was a self-portrait and see the elements in common between the author and the composer in Doctor Faustus, no one would guess how close he felt to Felix Krull. The elaborate tricks Krull played on the world were not just taken from novels about tricksters but were ways for Thomas to harness his own experiences and self-inventions, turn them into a joke. Krull was the dodger, the one who got away with things, the one at the edge of the action picking the pockets of those who were inattentive.
When he was buying the house in Kilchberg, as he and Katia walked from the car to the office of the lawyer in Zürich, he had been aware of his own status. Anyone who noticed him would have seen a man in his seventies, impeccably dressed, moving in a way that was purposeful and dignified. He had with him a money order that equaled the price of the house. He was the father of six children, married to a woman who had proved herself formidable in the detailed negotiations with the owners over fixtures that were being left and the garage arrangements; he was the author of many books written in an elaborate style, unafraid of long sentences and many asides, at ease in evoking the famous names in the German pantheon. By any standards, he was a great man. His own father would even have been intimidated by him.
No one, however, would have been intimidated by the sight of him as he was confronted with his own aging face alone in the lavatory at the lawyer’s office. They would have been puzzled by the semi-mocking glances he gave himself in the mirror, the brief, sly, knowing smirk that came on his face as if he were happy that, once more, like his own Felix Krull, he had not been found out.
