by Colm Toibin
As he went through his days in the melancholy knowledge that living in a house involved a much-reduced chance of casual meetings with handsome waiters, he brought his experiences back to life by making Felix Krull, in one of the many episodes of his picaresque career, a waiter in a grand hotel, proud of his appearance and his uniform, a young man who missed no opportunity to greet the entering guests with every sign of delight, pushing in the ladies’ chairs, handing them menus and filling their glasses. He could even allow his handsome hero to have a tryst with a visiting Scottish lord who was subject to his allure much as Thomas had been to Franzl’s.
* * *
Just as Arnold Schoenberg believed he would die on the thirteenth day of the month, which he did, Thomas believed that he would die at the age of seventy-five. When he did not, he saw what came after as a sort of gift, like being offered the chance to live halfway outside time. In his study, when he turned to look for a book, he could easily be in Poschingerstrasse or in Princeton or in Pacific Palisades.
On afternoons when a lull in the wind darkened the lake water and freshened the blue-gray light on the mountains, he wondered if he might have really died in California and if this was not just an interlude after death when he would, as part of a bargain, see Europe one more time, and have one more house, before he faded and had no more dreams.
He never thought that he would live to be eighty. Heinrich had died shortly before his seventy-ninth birthday; Viktor was fifty-nine when he died, his father fifty-one, his mother seventy-one. But the years slipped by. Erika, for the twelve months before his eightieth birthday, was in a state of excitement over how the celebrations would be conducted.
There were other writers, he knew, who would disdain public celebrations of a birthday, leaving such things to movie stars, but since he had been brutally hounded out of Germany and politely ushered out of America, he welcomed the prospect of being publicly honored in his last place of exile.
On the day, he enjoyed receiving messages of congratulations, including one from the Kilchberg Post Office, which had to handle the mountains of post. If his American publisher Alfred Knopf wanted to fly across the Atlantic for the birthday, that seemed reasonable to him. He was happy too that Bruno Walter, just a year younger than he was, wished to conduct Eine Kleine Nachtmusik at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich in his honor. When he read an encomium from François Mauriac that said: “His life illustrated his work,” he thought of Felix Krull and smiled at how little Mauriac knew.
Since he received greetings from the president of France and the president of the Swiss Confederation, he expected the same from the government of West Germany, but Adenauer left it to a junior minister.
He was on display, he thought, as he had been for much of his life, more as an ambassador for himself than as a person.
In the days after the celebrations, however, when his surviving children were staying at Kilchberg, including Monika, whose skin had become nut-brown in Capri, they were so busy being themselves that they sometimes failed to notice him. One night, it was only when he announced that he had to go to bed early that they paid attention and demanded that he stay with them for longer.
Although Erika had been warned by her mother not to insult her two younger sisters and to let them finish if they began speaking, she could not stop herself telling Monika that incessant swimming and sunbathing could only lead to further foolishness and insisting to Elisabeth that keeping her American-born daughters in Fiesole, as she had done since Borgese’s death, would make them natives of nowhere. She should take them back to America.
“They have to be from somewhere,” she said.
“Unlike us?” Elisabeth asked.
“At least we know we are Germans,” she said, “although it does us no good.”
Golo and Michael spoke quietly to each other about books and music, as they had always done. When Thomas joined them, he observed that no matter what he said, both of his sons were only too eager to contradict him.
His four grandchildren found common ground. He loved how they spoke English to one another in brave American accents and then moved instantly into German as soon as one of the adults asked them something. Frido, now in his teens, was as charming and beguiling as he had been as a baby.
On some of those evenings, all they needed, Thomas thought, was Klaus to arrive, Klaus disheveled, drained from some round of literary parties, needing sleep and then feeling an urge to start an argument about what was happening in Europe, the Iron Curtain and the Cold War replacing fascism to keep him fired up.
* * *
Thomas knew he was dying. When the pains in his legs developed, he went first to the village doctor so that he could be prescribed painkillers. As the doctor was writing the prescription, Thomas asked him if it could be anything more serious than an arthritis that came with old age. He saw the doctor glance up at him and hesitate. The look was dark and ominous and it stayed with him.
Since the pains persisted, Motschan arranged for Thomas to see better-known doctors. While no one told him that his complaint was life-threatening, their reassuring manner did not convince him. Once Katia and Erika joined forces in trying to get him to refuse any further invitations that involved travel, Thomas knew that something had to be wrong.
* * *
The birthday celebrations and the time afterwards with the family were overshadowed by an event that had taken place in Lübeck a month earlier. This had affected him in ways that, even as the birthday gatherings went on, he could not fully understand. He felt shaken by it, his journey to Lübeck to receive the Freedom of the City.
When he received the invitation, he had imagined that accepting might be a private reckoning with the city and with his father’s legacy. Even now, after all the years, he still let his mind linger over his father’s last will and testament and the implication that Heinrich and Thomas had disappointed the senator and would proceed, in the future, to disappoint their mother. Two world wars had been waged since the will had been made, but the injustice still bothered him. He looked at the shelves where he kept the books he had published, in the original German and in translation, and he wondered how much of the effort put into them came from an impulse to impress his father.
He wanted to see the city, although it had been disfigured by the bombing. And he had intimated to Katia that he would prefer it if Erika did not accompany them, that perhaps his daughter could do battles on his behalf from home with more effect.
Erika let him know that the mayor of Lübeck had suggested that he and Katia stay first at the Kurhof in Travemünde, with a car at their disposal. Thomas smiled at the mention of Travemünde. It would be May, before the season started. But the weather would be warm enough to walk on the beach.
He could not remember the name of the woman who was his mother’s companion all those years ago, but he recalled the badly tuned piano in the hotel and the orchestra that played in the evening. What came to him then, as he conjured up these things, was a change in the air, as though he were waking on one of those very mornings, the days ahead appearing infinitely long, each moment to be relished and lived in without any worry or hesitation, a dampness in the room and even a coldness in the early morning sunlight, and the sea breathing in and out just a short walk away.
“The Magician has fallen asleep,” Erika said.
“Tell them I want to go to Travemünde,” he said.
On the journey between Zürich and Lübeck they made stops so that he could exercise, but the getting on and off the trains and into cars and then into hotel rooms had exhausted him more than he wanted Katia to know.
The mayor was almost embarrassed that more had not been done to restore the churches and civic buildings that had been bombed. As Thomas and Katia walked towards Mengstrasse, he saw that weeds were growing over wasteland where there had been houses. In that moment, he had a sudden sense of what the bombing must have been like, the terror in this place. And then, with total clarity, he remembered an argument with Klaus ab
out the bombing of Lübeck. If Klaus were alive, he might have come with them and witnessed the center of the city still in ruins.
At the ceremony he looked into the crowd as though figures from the past all had come to be here with him—his father, his grandmother, his aunt, his mother, Heinrich, his sisters, Viktor, Willri Timpe and Armin Martens, the mathematics teacher Herr Immerthal.
In his speech, he spoke about coming full circle, mentioning the city’s disapproval of his first novel, asking how his teachers at the Katharineum might feel if they saw him now. They would have wondered how the dim-witted boy could have learned so much. As he spoke, the audience seemed remote from him, as he must seem from them. He was in pain but he did everything he could not to show it. When the sustained applause came, he was finding it hard to stay on his feet.
Later, back in the hotel in Travemünde, he was almost disappointed, depressed. He had wanted to feel more than he felt. He had not come full circle at all, he saw, but had merely stumbled along. He was the piece of crooked timber they had been told about in school. What a fool he had been to think that this offer of the Freedom of the City would give him anything more than a reason to regret not having stayed at home, not having been content to imagine Lübeck from the comfort of Kilchberg!
His father was dead. There was no purpose now in trying to find him to tell him that one more honor had come his son’s way. No one had asked him if he wanted to visit the family graves and he was relieved about that. But someone had told him that the bombs had gone deep into the bowels of Lübeck, deep enough to smash open the grave of the composer Buxtehude, who had been organist at the Marienkirche for forty years.
Afterwards, as they calculated the damage, Thomas was told, nothing of the composer’s grave remained. He had asked several times if this had happened to many graves in the old city to be informed of course, yes, parts of the city had been incinerated.
The day after the ceremony was Sunday. He woke early and, on finding that the car and driver were waiting outside, left a note for Katia to say that he had gone into Lübeck for a stroll. The morning was warm, but he was glad he was wearing his heavier suit since he thought he might go to the first service at the Dom in Lübeck and it would not do to be casually dressed.
When he arrived, the organ had just begun. The church had been restored, he saw, or perhaps had not suffered as badly as the Marienkirche in the bombing. As he stood at the edge of a pew, an elderly woman made space for him, smiling at him solemnly and graciously in a way that women from Lübeck did from as long back as he could remember. This was the smile, he thought, that his mother could never fully learn. She smiled too broadly, and women in Lübeck noticed and disapproved.
From the sheet provided, he saw that all the music was by Buxtehude, both the organ music and the choral music. For a second, he remembered that shop in New York where he bought records, lamenting that only Buxtehude’s organ music was available and none of the music for voices.
The pastor, a young bald man wearing a ruff, stood on a high podium during a break in the service. In his sermon, to the apparent satisfaction of all, he reminded them that they would soon be dust. Thomas wished Katia were with him so they could talk later about the sort of Sunday lunch the congregation could look forward to, closer to their hearts, perhaps, than the prospect of becoming dust. When the pastor had finished, a young woman, accompanied by a small string ensemble, sang an aria from a Buxtehude cantata. Her voice was thin and she seemed nervous at the beginning, but as the melody itself grew stronger so did her singing until the notes seemed to linger and echo in the higher reaches of the old vaulted building.
He asked the driver to wait for him while he had hot chocolate and a marzipan tart in one of the nearby cafés.
It was strange, he thought, what he remembered. Willri Timpe. Herr Immerthal. And then how many other names escaped him, no matter what he did. He knew that he had not played any record by Buxtehude since Princeton, nor heard anyone mention his name.
He was pleased he had taken a corner table since the café was filling up, and he was happy too that no one among the Sunday morning crowd recognized him. A story came to him, it must have been told by his mother often when they were children. It was never referred to again, certainly not in Munich. It was a story about Buxtehude’s daughter. Each year, the story went, when young organists came, including Handel himself, to learn the secrets of his trade from Buxtehude, Buxtehude promised each one that he would tell him enough to make him the greatest composer in the world, if he agreed to marry his youngest daughter Anna Margareta.
But even though his daughter was beautiful and accomplished, all the visitors refused, since all of them had romantic commitments at home, and therefore they left without learning the secret.
And then, as a suitor was finally found for his daughter, a suitor who had no interest in music, Buxtehude was afraid that he would die and the secret would be lost to the world. Little did he know that a very young composer in Arnstadt had heard about him and had decided to walk all the way to Lübeck to see if he could discover the secret.
Thomas paid his bill and walked towards his grandmother’s house. He could see his two sisters now, waiting for the rest of the story, both of them in their night attire, and he could see Heinrich sitting apart from them. And always in a story their mother would sigh and say that she had work to do and would continue the story tomorrow. And they would appeal to her, beg her to finish the story. And she always would.
The young composer’s name was Johann Sebastian Bach, she said, and he walked to Lübeck through wind and rain. Often, he could find no boardinghouse and had to sleep in haystacks or in fields. Often, he was hungry. Very often, he was cold. But he was always sure of his purpose. If he could get to Lübeck, he would meet a man who would help him to become a great composer.
Buxtehude was almost in despair. Some days he really believed that his sacred knowledge would be buried with him. On other days, in his heart, he knew that someone would come and he dreamed that he would recognize the man immediately and he would take him to the church and he would share his secrets with him.
“How would he recognize the man?” Carla asked.
“The man would have a light in his eyes, or something special in his voice,” her mother said.
“How could he be sure?” Heinrich asked.
“Wait! He is still on his journey and worried,” she went on.
“Every day, the walk seems longer. He has told the man he works for that he will be away only a short time. He does not realize how far Lübeck is. But he does not turn back. He walks on and on, asking all the time how far Lübeck is. But it is so far that some people he meets have never even heard of Lübeck and they advise him to turn back. But he is determined not to, and eventually when he reaches Lüneberg, he is told that he is not far from Lübeck. And the fame of Buxtehude has spread to there. But, because of all his time on the road, poor Bach, normally so handsome, looks like a tramp. He knows that Buxtehude will never receive a man as badly dressed as he is. But he is lucky. A woman in Lüneberg, when she learns of Bach’s plight, offers to lend him the clothes. She has seen the light in him.
“And so Bach arrives in Lübeck. And when he asks for Buxtehude, he is told that he will be in the Marienkirche practicing the organ. And as soon as Bach steps into the church, Buxtehude senses that he is no longer alone. He stops playing and looks down from the gallery and sees Bach and behind him he sees the light, the light Bach has carried with him all the way, something glowing in his spirit. And he knows that this is the man to whom he can tell the secret.”
“But what is the secret?” Thomas asked.
“If I tell you, will you promise to go to bed?”
“Yes.”
“It is called Beauty,” his mother said. “The secret is called Beauty. He told him not to be afraid to put Beauty into his music. And then for weeks and weeks and weeks, Buxtehude showed him how to do that.”
“Did Bach ever give the woman back
the clothes?” Thomas asked.
“Yes, he did. On his way home. And on her piano, he played music for her that she thought came from heaven.”
Some windows, Thomas saw, in the old family house, the house of Buddenbrooks, were boarded up. The mayor had promised that the whole building would soon be restored. Lübeck, it appeared, was proud of it now, the house that had given life to a book. Thomas, as he stood in front of it, wished he could ask one of the others—Heinrich, Lula, Carla, Viktor—if they too remembered that story about Buxtehude and Bach. It had not come into his mind for years.
Maybe there were other stories that he would remember, long-forgotten ones that he had heard in the company of the others who had also lived in this house, and who now had moved out of time towards a realm whose boundaries were still unclear to him.
He glanced at the house again and walked through the city towards the car that would take him back to Travemünde, where Katia would be waiting for him.
Acknowledgments
This novel has been inspired by the writing of Thomas Mann and his family. A number of other books have also been helpful. They include: Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature, Anthony Heilbut; Thomas Mann: A Biography, Ronald Hayman; Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art, Hermann Kurzke; Thomas Mann: A Life, Donald Prater; Thomas Mann: The Making of an Artist, 1875–1911, Richard Winston; The Brothers Mann, Nigel Hamilton; Thomas Mann and His Family, Marcel Reich-Ranicki; In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, Andrea Weiss; Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann, Frederic Spotts; House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann, Evelyn Juers; Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters, Tobias Boes; Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Jew, Alexander L. Ringer; The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930–1951, ed. E. Randol Schoenberg; Hitler’s Exiles: Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi Germany to America, ed. Mark M. Anderson; Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life, Robert Dallek; Malevolent Muse: The Life of Alma Mahler, Oliver Hilmes; Alma Mahler: Muse to Genius, Karen Monson; Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler, Cate Haste; Dreamers: When the Writers Took Power, Germany 1918, Volker Weidermann; Munich 1919: Diary of a Revolution, Victor Klemperer; Exiled in Paradise, Anthony Heilbut; The Second Generation, Esther McCoy; Bluebeard’s Chamber: Guilt and Confession in Thomas Mann, Michael Maar; Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere, Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky; The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love, and Art in the Ruins of the Reich, Lara Feigel; The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Donna Rifkind; Seven Palms: The Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, Francis Nenik; Down a Path of Wonder: Memoirs of Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Other Cultural Figures, Robert Craft; Adorno in America, David Jenemann; Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck, Kerala J. Snyder; German Autumn, Stig Dagerman. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Sources and Structure of the Novel, Gunilla Bergsten; Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, Jean-Michel Palmier; A Hero of Our Time: The Story of Varian Fry, Sheila Isenberg.
